The Last Summer of the World

by Emily Mitchell

  LATER THAT DAY he took prints of it to the colonel. Van Horn was sitting at his desk, looking over a newly arrived memo when Edward entered his office.

  “Steichen, good. Take a look at this.” He pushed the memo across his desk. It was from Barnes in Chaumont. De Ram Automatic Magazine Camera, four. To be sent to Observation Group 1, Épernay.

  “Are you familiar with how the De Ram works?” van Horn asked. Edward shook his head. “It has a magazine like the one on a machine gun. Loads the plates automatically. All the observer has to do is point the camera downward and start it going. It will do the rest by itself. They have only just been released for use. These were all that I could get for us. Your men will have to learn how to use them quickly.”

  “When will they arrive?”

  “They’re here, and we’ll have them fitted tomorrow. You can practice and then start using them to shoot in the evening. These should solve the problem of plates getting damaged when one of your men is killed.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll also arrange for a couple of scouts to go out with you, too.”

  “If you think that is prudent, sir,” Edward said.

  “I do. We’ve can’t afford to lose any more planes, especially not the ones fitted with the new cameras.”

  So this, Edward thought, is the truth of it: men are inexpensive and replaceable; machines are expensive and rare and must be protected. The escort isn’t for us. It’s for our cameras.

  “Well, sir. I’m pleased that you’ve unexpectedly found you have the planes to spare.” He said it slowly, trying to keep his voice steady. But if van Horn caught the tone of his words, he chose to ignore it.

  “Since we only have four automatics,” he said, “I thought you should decide which of the men gets to try them out.”

  “Well,” Edward said slowly, “Lieutenants Lutz, Deveraux and Dawson should get them; and then, why don’t we give the last one to Gilles Marchand? He’s slated to fly with Tom Cundall tomorrow. His work has been perfectly reliable, but it would be good to give him a break.”

  Van Horn nodded. “Fine,” he said. “That’s settled. Do you have the prints from today?”

  Edward brought up the folder of photographs and set it on the desk. “We saw something new in these,” he said, opening the file and searching through it until he found a picture that showed the imprints they had seen. “Here, and here,” he pointed. “These depressions. I haven’t seen them before. They are like the ghosts of houses. Something was there before. Now it’s gone.”

  Van Horn peered at the pictures Edward handed him. He leafed through them, comparing.

  “Interesting,” he said. “They aren’t shelled buildings. There is no rubble, no debris from explosions or signs of anything burning.” He continued to peer at them for some minutes. “I don’t know what they are,” he said at last. “We’d better get you back up there to find out.”

  ON THE EVENING reconnaissance flight they began photographing just over the lines, making their way north. They had two Spad scouts flying with them, one on either end of their line. They were half the size of the other planes, and when they rose off the ground, they seemed to Edward weightless, slipping into the sky as if they were returning to their element.

  He had been taking pictures for some minutes when suddenly, by the river, he saw them: a cluster of ghosts, those same rectangular imprints in the soil. And then, a little further on, a group of men. They had horses and wagons; there might have been twenty of them, a work detail from the trenches nearby. They were loading something into the wagons, that much he could make out. Ammunition? They were working in teams, three or four of them at a time carrying something large between them.

  He looked again. From this height they appeared to be taking apart the walls of the building itself.

  “We could lose a little height; get a clearer look at them,” Edward shouted to McIntyre. Then he heard the dropping note of a plane diving. He looked toward the sound and saw one of the observation planes break from the others and swoop toward the soldiers on the ground.

  Later it would seem that he had seen, quite clearly, the expressions on the faces of the soldiers on the ground as they looked up and realized that the descending plane was not their own: the shock of terror that held them frozen where they stood, then the burst of frantic energy as they ran for cover. The way they threw themselves facedown on the earth as the plane slid through the lowest point of its parabola, passing close above them, its forward guns going. These memories weren’t real, of course; they came from seeing the photographs afterward, but they persisted, nonetheless, vivid and insistent. He recalled that he had stood up and reached out his hand, as though the plane was as small as it appeared and he could scoop it up and pull it away from the even tinier men below. They looked so helpless that for a minute he didn’t care that they were the enemy. He only wanted them not to be afraid.

  Then, as though in answer to this thought, there was a burst of fire from the closest outcropping of trees. There must be a machine gun hidden beneath the canopy: the men down there were not helpless, after all. The wings of Cundall’s plane shuddered from the impact of bullets, but it held steady and began to climb. Edward felt a flood of relief. It reached the altitude of the rest of the squadron and caught up with them. Edward peered to see if the men inside were all right but couldn’t make them out.

  They flew on, still following the course of the river and then, quite suddenly, there was a group of German planes behind them. There were several different models, one of them a triplane, something Edward had never seen before. Coming toward them, it seemed to rise vertically like a firefly, its triple wings resolved into a single plane by the steep angle of its ascent. The Germans accelerated quickly toward them, and there were five, no six—he couldn’t be sure because they were approaching from the west and the sun blinded him. The Spads swung around and accelerated toward the oncoming enemy, becoming silhouettes against the light. The paths of the planes looped until he couldn’t distinguish which were American and which were German. Then one of the Spads was burning and falling. The Germans turned and began to follow the main squadron again, gaining rapidly.

  He was quicker this time, on his gun the minute he saw them coming, no hesitation, and he was momentarily elated that he had developed these reflexes as he fired a stream of bullets up toward one of the enemy. They passed overhead, and he began to feel like he’d seen this before, his mind dropping into an alertness that focused only on watching for where the next round of fire would come from, a kind of tunnel vision that at once dulled and thrilled him. The noise of the plane climbed on their left, passed overhead and then came down on their right. Looking up, he saw the pilot suspended upside down over the void, for a moment nothing but momentum preventing him from plummeting to earth. Then the plane arched over and came down on them, firing. Edward swung the machine gun around and crouched to brace himself. He could see the pilot’s face, his eyes covered by goggles, but his features clearly distinguishable—nose, mouth, jaw. A human face. He let loose a round of bullets into it.

  Under him he felt the plane begin to fall away. He scrambled to get a foothold, a handhold, something, but he slipped and fell backward against the rim of the cockpit and then forward, his head striking hard against the support of the machine gun. The plane was still descending so rapidly he felt weightless inside it, diving steeply, or falling out of control, he couldn’t tell which. He levered himself back into the seat and managed to get one of the belts around his shoulder. He gripped the rim of the cockpit with both hands. He saw the ground surge up, filling his vision as they plunged toward it. Then he blacked out.

  Incoming Tide. Brittany, 1914. Platinum print.

  FIRST SHE EMPTIES the silverware drawer. Knives, forks, spoons—she pulls from where they are stored, bundled in cloths and newly polished and, with the flourish of a juggler, releases them into empty air. They rise from her hands, sinews of light sliding down their surfaces. For a moment, they seem to hang suspended, a brig
ht, hard, chaos. Then they fall. They crash onto the flagstones and scatter, and the noise rings out, calamitous.

  She does this again and again, watching him all the time, until the drawer lies empty and the floor at her feet glimmers with complicated silver hieroglyphs. Then, since there is no more silverware, she balls up the tablecloth and hurls it at him. He sees it arc through the air toward his head and instinctively puts his arm up to shield himself. The white mass explodes softly against his elbow. It floats down, silently settling into a heap of crumpled linen, and Edward thinks how oblivious the tablecloth remains to its present use as a weapon. Meanwhile, Clara is searching in the dresser behind her for something else to throw, and, looking up, he sees her pause, then open one of the top cupboards and reach inside. She begins to pull something out of it, something heavy that requires her to use both hands to lift it. That cupboard is where they keep the china.

  In a moment he is across the room. He encircles her wrists with his hands—his thumb and forefinger are enough to stretch all the way around—and pulls them away from the cupboard so he is holding her arms in front of her, above her head. This close he can hear her breath coming in bursts. She struggles against him, but he keeps her there, immobile, at arm’s length. His anger rises in his chest, a heavy solid mass that makes it difficult to breathe or speak, so when he opens his mouth, all that comes out is a hiss: “How dare you?” he whispers. She stares back at him, her eyes a defiant blank.

  From behind him comes the sound of the back door creaking open, footsteps of someone entering the kitchen from the garden. Edward turns toward the noise, loosening his grasp on Clara as he does so. She twists away from him, lets out a high, frustrated sound that is somewhere between a scream and a grunt, and runs from the dining room, shoving the door so it slams closed behind her. There is a crash of dissonance from the front parlor as she drops the lid of the piano, then a sound like wings flapping: she’s throwing sheets of music. Her footsteps bite into each stair as she climbs to the second floor. The door of their bedroom opens, then slams shut. Sobbing follows, ragged, just audible.

  Edward stands alone in the dining room, which is suddenly, thickly quiet. He puts both hands on the big wooden table in front of him, leans forward onto them. He wants the table to absorb his anger, to drain it away so that he can face the owner of the footsteps, which are getting steadily louder, coming along the corridor toward him. He breathes. The door creaks open. François, the gardener, peers into the room. He looks at the chaos on the floor, then at Edward.

  “I heard noises,” he says. He waits on the threshold, his arms braced against the doorframe. At that moment, he is the most solid object in the room.

  “It’s nothing,” Edward says.

  The old man nods slowly. “An accident maybe,” he suggests.

  “Yes,” says Edward, gratefully. “That’s it.” François shrugs and goes out. His footsteps recede back down the corridor, as unhurried as before.

  An accident, Edward thinks. Yes. He stoops down and picks up the tablecloth, folds it, puts it away. He begins to gather up the silver. From above him the sound of crying continues to slip between the floorboards, under the doors, surreptitiously filling up the house. After a few minutes he isn’t sure if he hears it at all, or if some other more tactile sense attunes him to her. He can feel her storm in his solar plexus. His nerves are sympathetic strings, he thinks; his skin knows things.

  An accident. It isn’t exactly a lie to describe their fights that way, because that is how they always feel to him: like a collision he could not possibly have anticipated or avoided, a disaster that comes out of nowhere. He quite literally has no idea what he said or did to make her flare up so suddenly, but then there are times when she is like this, when she is volatile. An offhand comment or a casual action will open a trapdoor in her and she will fall through it pulling him after her. At these times there is no talking to her. He could go upstairs and sit down on the bed beside her, touch her hair, he could use the softest words he knows, but all this will do is reignite her. Nothing he says will be any good. She will turn it back on him, twisting it into something he never intended. She will hear only insults, disregard, and selfishness. And in any case he is too angry himself to speak to her now.

  Usually, when she gets this way, he will simply walk out of the house, taking nothing with him but his keys and jacket. He’ll go down to the station in Esbly and get on the next train to Paris. He’ll spend a few days in his studio there, not answering the door, absorbed in the process of developing and printing his photographs, and work will dissolve the argument so he can return to her with his anger gone. This has become a rhythm for him. He withdraws to the city after a fight, and each of them has time to become calm. When they first moved to Voulangis, he planned to get rid of his studio in Montparnasse and take all his equipment up to the house on the Marne, where he was building a darkroom against one wall of the garden. The dark room has been finished for years, and Clara has pointed out more than once the expense of keeping two studios. She even once hinted that he kept his rooms in the city for other, more nefarious reasons, and after that he thought seriously about giving them up just to allay her fears.

  But each time he is about to relinquish his apartment in Paris, he stops. He knows somewhere that he cannot get by without it. He has found he needs this valve in his life.

  He would like to go there now, soothe himself with the sound of the train rocking over the rails, then with work and solitude, perhaps a visit to Meudon to see Rodin. But today that will not be possible. Marion Beckett is driving up from Paris to stay with them for the month of July. She is due to arrive after lunch, and then Arthur and Mercedes will come later in the evening. That Clara should choose this day to relinquish her hold on propriety, when she knows they are expecting visitors—damn her, damn her—it only adds to his annoyance and anger. What on earth is she thinking? It is already half past eleven.

  He stands up. If he cannot have the complete freedom of Paris, at least he can get some work done before the guests arrive. He leaves the rest of the silverware on the floor and goes out into the kitchen yard. Louisa is there, hanging sheets on the line. He comes up beside her and touches her gently on the shoulder.

  “I’m afraid Madame isn’t feeling very well. She dropped some things in the kitchen. When you have a minute, would you pick them up and put them away?”

  Louisa frowns and nods. “Yes,” she says. “Since Madame is indisposed. Again.”

  He lets himself through the gate into the back garden. It is a stunningly clear day. There is a loveliness to the summers here that almost defies belief, each blade of grass seems to be lit from within. Later, he will remember that these days seemed fragile in their beauty, but he will not be able to distinguish whether this is the manufacture of memory because of what came after. On this day, he notices the delphiniums are folded, their stored brightness nearly bloomed; François kneels nearby, transplanting larkspur and irises to the bed under the fruit trees. He glances up as Edward makes his way across the bright lawn but doesn’t pause from his work. Edward raises his hand in greeting, then goes quickly and unlocks his studio door. He feels embarrassed in front of the old man, even though he knows this is foolish. Clara’s temper is not his fault. But still, he wants right now to have walls enclosing him, to vanish into the controlled stillness of his negatives. Their safety.

  His studio smells of the unvarnished timber out of which he built the walls, a dusty, sweet odor that calms him instantly. He stands in the vestibule and inhales the smell of wood, turpentine, paint, then comes in and closes the door behind him. The structure is divided into two rooms, a studio for painting and a darkroom for developing and printing at the far end. He put a skylight into the roof on this side to give himself natural light. He crosses the room, laying his hands on the physical objects it contains as he goes, the workbench, the easel, the shelves where he stores his paints and brushes, reassuring himself that they are really there. He loves their solidity, th
e way they take up space. He loves the balanced weight of the brush or the camera in his hands.

  He goes to the door that leads to the darkroom and ducks inside, latching it behind him. He has hung black curtains about two feet behind the door, and he parts these and steps inside, turning on the overhead safelight so that the room appears around him in scarlet. A month ago he took some pictures on a trip to the Brittany coast and he hasn’t yet had time to print them. The negatives are on a shelf over the sink, boxed and labeled. He brings them down and carries them carefully out to his workbench.

  Against the white surface, he examines them, one by one. They offer him their miniature worlds with the light and darkness reversed. In this first one, taken on the beach, the low tide is just beginning to turn. The sea has gone out, leaving the rocky shore exposed. His daughters have clambered out to find anemones among the tidal pools, crabs in their slow armor, whiskery fish with transparent skins. Mary is lying stretched out on a ledge of rock on her belly peering down into the water. Her black fingers trace its surface, while Kate stands knee deep in it, looking up at him out of white eyes set in her shadow-colored face. The girls’ white mouths smile, their white hair is tangled up with the wind coming off the sea. Above them, a dark sun has blown out of the clouds and is turning the sea’s surface to ribbons of slate.

  This one he will print, he decides. He’ll put it on platinum paper so that he can get the full spectrum of tones. Then maybe he will try gum bichromate, though the picture seems to demand clarity. It is not soft enough for him to bring his brushes to it: the moment should be just as it is, undisturbed.

  That day, he remembers, he’d followed the children out over the rocks, chasing this photograph. He had found himself out of breath as he tried his footing on each new ledge, and his shoes slipped on the barnacles and soft green seaweeds that grew up to the high-water line. When he looked up, the girls were already far ahead of him, waving and beckoning, and he laughed and started after them again. Clara, standing on the shore, called: For God’s sake, be careful! and he had waved to show her that he was fine, that she shouldn’t worry so much. The girls had eluded him for a while before they grew tired from running and climbing, and he could finally catch them. He found them wading and absorbed in the contents of a single pool, as though it were the whole world. He’d lain down on the rock opposite so he could photograph them from their own height.