The Last Summer of the World

by Emily Mitchell

  “Clara, wait,” Edward says. He is still seated beside Marion on the bed.

  “Go after her,” Marion says, pushing him away, so he staggers to his feet. He hesitates, looking at her. “For God’s sake,” she insists, “go on!”

  He leaves without a word and follows his wife down the hall to their bedroom. She has locked the door, and he pounds on it with his fist.

  “Clara, let me in. Please.” He listens but he can hear nothing from within. “Clara. Open the door.” Still there is only silence in reply. He leans against the locked door, listening. He tries one more time: “Whatever you think,” he says, “you are wrong. Nothing happened. I promise.”

  He hears the bolt slide back and the door opens. There is his wife, her eyes hard with anger and her mouth set. She stands in the doorway barring his way. In a low voice, filled with derision, she says, “You promise, do you? What exactly is it that you promise?”

  “Clara, let me come in. Do you want everyone in the house to hear this? Do you want the girls to know?”

  “I would have imagined you could have thought of that before you decided to have your tryst,” she spits the word into his face, “in the house while your daughter is right upstairs.”

  He steps forward, takes hold of her arm and moves it by force so that he can push past her into the room. She spins around and stares after him, outraged.

  “Don’t you touch me,” she says.

  “I’m not going to. Close the door,” he says. “Right now, Clara.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, she shoves the door closed.

  “Now sit down.” She remains standing. He shrugs. “Fine. Stand, if you’d prefer.” She is waiting to hear what he has to say.

  “Clara, I know what you are thinking. But you are wrong. Marion got her telegram from Russia and she felt faint, so I took her inside.”

  “And nothing happened?” she asks, mimicking his words. She is trying to meet his eyes, but he finds himself staring hard at the floorboards. “Nothing at all?” He is silent. “You can’t even look at me, can you?”

  “It isn’t what you think.”

  “What do I think?” she says, advancing toward him. “Tell me: What do I think? That all summer you have watched her and watched her and watched her? That you’ve looked through me ever since she arrived here? Tell me all of that isn’t true. Say it with a straight face.”

  “Clara, Marion is your friend. She came here for you.”

  “Yes, she was. She was my friend. Now you’ve managed to take even that.”

  “Don’t shout,” he says. “Please. You’re being dramatic. I don’t know how to say this more clearly. Marion and I are not having an affair. How could we be? Clara: you are my wife.”

  Clara sits down on their bed. The animating anger drains from her. She looks lost suddenly, sitting there with her shoulders drooped forward, lost and afraid and small. She says, “It is always women who are artists, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean always?”

  “The others, they were artists, too. Kathleen Bruce. And that Isadora Duncan.”

  “What?”

  “Always,” Clara continued, “the ones who had the freedom to do as they wanted. I was never enough for you. You were never contented with me.”

  “Clara, those things happened years ago. I can’t undo them.”

  “Oh, shut up, shut up,” she says, covering her ears with her hands. “I have become a convenience to you. I always was one.” And in a single movement she unlocks the door and goes out before he has a chance to stop her.

  SHE IS FALLING past the surface of the earth. As she runs across the garden and into the field beyond, it is as though the world has been stood on end and she is plummeting across its sheer face, helpless to catch herself. She sees the familiar things of her life, the house, the kitchen yard, the garden with its ordered flower beds and trees, the broken wooden gate that leads to their one field, all flash past her, and, one by one, they are carried away, leaving her. She runs out into the open field, and all of them dwindle and shrink behind her.

  In the center of her mind as she runs, there is a small calm room, like she imagines the eye of a tornado must be. From this place comes a voice that observes the tumbling world with detachment. Well, says the voice, what did you expect? Let them go. It is better to know the truth, the worst of it, the limits of what is possible. That way, you will have no false hopes or expectations and no one will have the power to hurt you anymore.

  The field is planted with sweet peas this year. The snarled green plants catch at her feet as she runs. She keeps going until her lungs are ragged and sore, and then she decides, simply, that she will not run any further. Why don’t you just lie down and rest? suggests the voice in her head. Yes, that is what she will do. She flops onto the ground between the rows of plants, exhausted and dizzy.

  The soil is sun-warm and soft, but when she is still, her mind lurches abruptly back toward the house, to what she’d seen when she pushed open the bedroom door and found them there, leaning together on the bed. Their postures gave them away, but more than that, their eyes: looking at her with a mixture of shame and fear. What else, really, did she need to know? And that he could, even after that, stand in front of her, denying everything, pushing her aside. As though she couldn’t tell the behavior of a guilty man when she saw it. As though she could be taken for a complete fool.

  Everything is gone. The thought rises, wailing, from the middle of her body. I had a friend, and now she is gone. I thought I had a husband, too, but I do not, and now I see I never did. He never loved me as I loved him. I wanted him to look at me and see a reflection but for him love never meant that. He loves women the way that one loves a beautiful landscape or a vase, the way one loves a painting or a photograph.

  Don’t think about it, says the voice from the quiet room inside her. What good will that do? Just lie here and breathe. Above her the sky is an astounding blue. The earth smells dark and metallic, and over it, she inhales the green aroma of the pea plants. Her chest strains, hollowed out, as though things have been removed from its cavity, the heart, and perhaps the lungs as well, to make space for planting. Could she become part of the field, soil filling her in, consuming her? Through the place where her breastbone used to be the spiral tendrils of plants will emerge and twist toward the light.

  Quite suddenly, there is the sound of the gate that leads from the garden creaking open and someone comes through it. Whoever it is walks through the rows of plants, skirts making rasping noises with each step. A woman is coming. Oh, God, she thinks, please let it not be Marion. Then again, she does not want Louisa to see her like this either, does not want to face that girl’s sulky insolence (and wouldn’t she enjoy immensely the spectacle of the mistress of the house collapsed on the bare ground, her garments covered in dirt). Doubtless Edward has sent her out here because he is too much of a coward to come himself. That would be typical of him, would it not?

  “Louisa, you may go back inside,” she calls out. “I am not in need of your help right now.”

  “Well,” says a voice that is neither Louisa’s nor Marion’s, “I would like to help you anyhow, even if there is no need.”

  “Mildred!” Clara sits up, and when she turns around, there is Mildred striding toward her, now only a few yards off.

  “After you left, I thought that you were probably right that we would be better off all together, and so I drove down from Huiry. But it seems that I’ve arrived to find your house in quite a state of confusion. Louisa told me what happened.” Clara begins to cry. “Oh, my dear.” Mildred’s face is full of pity. “I am so sorry.”

  For a few minutes they stay as they are, not speaking, Mildred standing just a few feet from her while Clara cries quietly, tears sliding out of her, rising and subsiding, then rising again.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she says, between waves. “What should I do?”

  Mildred sighs. “You must try to think of what is left,” she says.
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  “What is left?” Clara asks.

  “Your children.”

  Think of what is left. Think of your children. What about them? Well, Mary, even though she appears so grown up, will need help to get through this trying time. And what about Kate? Yes, little Kate. She is the reason to find from somewhere the ability to go on. There is a war coming. This is not the time to go to pieces. Later, when the children are safe, you can decide what to do. For now, there are other, more pressing concerns.

  Clara wipes her eyes with her thumbs. “Yes,” she says. “You are right.” But when she thinks about the prospect of standing up and walking back into that house, of resuming the life that goes on there, the effort seems overwhelming, impossible. She looks up at Mildred, wincing as though burned by the thought. I would rather die right here, she thinks. I would rather disappear. “I can’t,” she says. “I can’t do it.”

  “Yes, you can!” Mildred says. The force of her voice is almost physical, and it catches Clara by surprise. When she looks up, Mildred’s eyes are hard and determined. “You can,” she says. “You must.” She puts her hands on her hips, fists clenched. “Get up, child.” She has never addressed Clara this way before, and not until now could either of them have realized the truth contained in the name, its alloy of love and fierceness. Mildred comes forward and offers Clara her arm, and Clara grasps it and begins to get to her feet. When she is standing, Mildred helps her to shake the dirt from her clothing.

  “All right,” Clara says when she has dusted herself off and taken a deep, steady breath. “I’m ready.” Mildred nods. Very slowly, they make their way back toward the house.

  In the next field, Clara sees, they are bringing in the harvest. A steam thresher, its pistons strumming, moves over the hunched back of the hill and, following it, old men and women reach for the fallen stems, binding them into bales. The children run among them gleaning what the machine leaves. Some of the women have babies bound to their chests. The old people stop every few minutes to rest, and then keep going. The thresher pants along with its blades spinning and its wheels biting into the earth.

  Yes, Clara thinks, it is necessary to go on. One has no alternative. It is necessary to complete the task at hand: that is what war demands, even of those who do not want it.

  TEN

  July 15, 1918

  IN THE EARLY morning the Germans began to shell the French and American lines on the east side of the Aisne salient well before dawn. Edward was woken when McIntyre pushed open the door of his room.

  “It’s started,” he said.

  “I’ll be right there.” And then he was out of bed and on his feet, pulling on his uniform and running with the others to the lab. He passed out the cameras to each of them.

  “We’re looking for the coordinates of their field artillery and mortars,” he told them. “Keep your eyes open. Good luck.” They saluted, and then they were gone.

  As soon as they were in the air, he could see the intensity of the barrage. Fires had broken out up and down the line, and groups of men were struggling to put them out, while around them more shells came down. On a main route out of Épernay, a convoy of motor ambulances had been hit and the scattered remains filled the road, making it impassable. People were clearing the debris out of the way. They moved tires and the twisted metal of the chassis. They carried the wounded and the dead as far from the wreckage as they could.

  Further on, the early morning shelling had crept forward in a solid wall across No Man’s Land and over the Allied lines. The walls of trenches had collapsed inward where shells fell near them, and he saw men shoveling mountains of dislodged earth. He saw them digging, and then stopping to pull things from the pile: there, the body of a man, hauled out arms first, legs dragging under him useless and shattered. Or there, a man threw down his shovel, bent down and came away with something long and mangled, a part of a body. It might have been an arm or a leg, Edward couldn’t tell. The man who found it threw it to one side and kept digging.

  Then the gas attacks began. Edward saw the first gas shells fall, the high-pitched scream of their flight, then the mustard color billowing silently outward from the point of impact as the wind carried it. Where the shells landed close to a trench, the gas poured over the sides, like slow water, until the trench and the men inside it disappeared. One minute they were there, pulling on masks, struggling to get away, and then they were gone. And after it came the German troops, small knots of them, running, diving for cover at the sound of Allied fire, then inching forward again to seize the trenches as the haze cleared.

  In photographs, attacking soldiers are a mottle of darkness, and it isn’t clear whether they are winning or losing the battle. From the air an attack and a retreat look roughly the same. This is what Edward learned watching the Germans climb from their positions north of the Marne and push forward after the retreating French and Americans. In the trenches there were men who hung on bravely until they were cut off and couldn’t escape. Perhaps they didn’t realize that it was too late, or perhaps they did. He couldn’t know that. He could only see them rally and charge forward even after all the units around them had fallen back, and then he glimpsed them only for a second before the speed of the plane snatched them out of view.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING there were two fewer planes to go out. One had made it back to the airfield with the pilot and observer alive but was so badly shot up that it wouldn’t fly for several days. The other had gone down over No Man’s Land and crashed nose-first into the side of a shell crater. Edward had been too far away to see it go. Apparently, the pilot, Shapiro, had struggled free and had been seen running away from the wreck. No one knew what happened to him after that.

  The Germans had come south from Château-Thierry, where they had shelled the Allies from the steep ridge to the north and then managed to cross the river below the town where it was shallow. From the sky above these new lines, Edward could see Voulangis and the rise where his house stood. He could see the descent down toward Huiry, where Mildred had lived. He thought, too, that he could make out the station at Esbly.

  Along the eastern side of the salient and to the north and west near Soissons, the Germans had managed to push the Allies back several miles. If this continued, it would not take them long to capture the railhead at Reims and then press on to Paris.

  On the second morning, the barrage moved forward and some of the towns south of the river were destroyed. Soldiers had taken up positions in the rubble, and in the small ellipses of trees that crowned the low hills. They could be seen, now, only indirectly by the smoke of their gunfire, or when they had to scatter to escape an incoming mortar. He couldn’t tell which direction the fighting was moving. He put his camera up and gathered as much into it as he possibly could.

  Then, during their second run of the day, he saw khaki-uniformed soldiers advancing out of a wood very close to the river. They were pursuing a group of men dressed in slate-gray. The men in brown, he realized, were Americans. One of them threw a grenade toward the retreating Germans: it exploded in their midst, downing all but one, who dove toward the water just in time and lay with his face to the ground while showers of earth fell around him. Then he crawled into the river and began to swim. From the plumes of red that rose behind him, Edward could see he was badly hurt. Midway across he slipped under and didn’t resurface.

  The Americans made their way to the water’s edge. He watched them as they began to dig in where they were, burrowing into the soft soil of the riverbank to wait for night.

  WHEN HE RETURNED to quarters, Edward found McIntyre waiting for him in the officers’ lounge. He was sitting with a book open in front of him, staring past its pages at the wall. He started when Edward came in, then shook his head as though to clear it.

  “Almost drifted off,” he said. He rubbed his eyes and temples with one hand. “Listen,” he said, “some bad news came in. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “What is it?”

  “Knightly. There was an
accident at St-Omer. Engine malfunction. Not his fault.

  “Jesus. That’s terrible,” Edward said. “I can’t believe it.” St-Omer was supposed to be safe, he thought. It was not supposed to be a place from which bad news came.

  “Even training flights,” McIntyre said, echoing his thoughts, “you just never know.” He stood up. “I should turn in.” He put a hand on Edward’s shoulder as he made his way toward the door. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s a hell of a way to say good night.”

  IN THE DAYS that followed, Edward watched as the battle moved back and forth below him. At Château-Thierry, the Germans were pushed back across the river. They came on toward Épernay, though, pushing the line forward on either side of the river where its course turned south and east. The lines move steadily up toward the airfield and toward the village of Voulangis beyond it. They were shelling this country now. He could see the damage to the roads that lead to his house as the fighting made its ragged progress along them.

  At Vaux men from the 26th Division fought in the dense bramble thicket between the trees, inching forward on their bellies until the Germans were within rifle range. The Germans threw grenades in among the trees, blasting away the green canopy, splintering branches, hurling up leaves and dirt, and afterward, there was an emptiness cut from the middle of the woods, where the earth could be seen black and bare. Slowly, the 26th retreated, and the Germans came after them until they reached high, clear ground on the other side. Now there was nothing but open fields ahead of them. They slumped exhausted against an outcropping of rock, with the woods finally at their backs, one of them binding up the bloody fingers of his friend, who had his other sleeve clenched between his teeth to prevent himself from crying out.

  —

  THEN ON THE morning of July 17, the Germans stopped forcing their way forward and began digging in. The turned earth could be seen from above as soon as it was light, the crooked fissures appearing out of nowhere and the men crouching inside them. The trenches were shallow and narrow: there were no fortifications yet surrounding them. They were just thin black lines, spreading and connecting with each other, as though the surface of the earth were cracking open.