The Last Summer of the World

by Emily Mitchell

  “The English officers,” François said. “They must have gone in and opened the window and then left it. Maybe they didn’t know to close it.” He helped himself to what was left of the bread.

  “Yes,” Edward said. “Probably they didn’t.”

  “And then the rain comes in and does the damage.”

  “When did you say the English were here?”

  “In May,” said François, chewing. “But my memory is not so good. Maybe it was April.”

  “I see.”

  It was not enough time for that kind of damage to have occurred. He knew it and François knew it, too. The question that neither of them wished to ask aloud or even acknowledge loomed over them as they sat finishing the meal. Edward changed the subject; he asked François about the people they had known in town; about his family. And François replied: His wife was fine. His son had been wounded at St-Mihiel in March, but thank God, was alive.

  But then, after the old man left and Edward was once again alone in the house, he could no longer push it out of his mind. He tried to make himself go on thinking that it was the English officers who had accidentally left both closet door and window open, as he readied himself for bed. He decided to sleep in his old bedroom. He’d contemplated taking the spare room instead, but no, damn it, the place wasn’t haunted. Why should he act as though it was? He lay down on the bed that he and Clara had shared and closed his eyes.

  English officers were billeted in this house. They took the keys from behind the door and opened all the rooms because they needed to use all the beds. One of them opened the window in the study to let in some air and then wondered what was inside the closet. Though it wasn’t strictly speaking permitted for him to do so, he somehow found the key in the top drawer of the desk, or maybe Clara had left it lying out somewhere. So he, this unknown officer, opened the closet and saw that it contained boxes of photographs. He started looking through them. And then he was called away for some reason, and in his hurry he left the door and the window ajar, and never came back to close them. It was not implausible.

  But something about it troubled him. He lit a lamp and went back into the study. There were the photographs, the ones he had not had time to clear up, still on the floor. There was the window, still open. He had not closed it. And the closet door, too—he had left everything as he found it. It could have been an accident, a mistake. But then something occurred to him. Why on earth would someone leaving in a hurry have bothered to lock the study door?

  He went to the desk and slid open the top drawer. There was the key to the storage cupboard, carefully put back, where only he and Clara knew that it had always been kept.

  HE STARED FOR several minutes at the key, as if he needed to be sure it was really there. Then, numbly, he slid the drawer closed. The sound of it clicking back into place seemed final, set against the quiet of the house. He picked up the lamp from the desk. It flung up slanted shadows from the photographs where they lay piled on the far side of the room. There they were. All his years of work, all the love and care that had gone into the creation of those prints, had come to nothing, wiped away by a single, casual act of malice. They were gone, and he was stranded here, in the present, alone with all the loss that he had been keeping at bay, all the dead, Daniels and Lutz and Marchand, Clark, Cundall wounded, the men whose names he didn’t even know, whom he had only seen from the air, getting shot, blown to pieces, deafened, buried in earth. And the other losses, too, quieter but no less painful, his daughters, his friends, his marriage, even his idea of what his marriage had been—came pouring on him in a rush. The room was swept away, the walls and the floor, all that he’d taken for solid, and he was sinking, vanishing beneath the flood. He thought: I’m going to drown.

  Then, through the darkness, he saw something descend, a long gold filament, very thin but strong. He reached out and grasped it. It began to pull him to his feet. It was a thought, obscure at first but then gradually becoming clear, urgent. Go, it said, to the one person who could understand what this means.

  HE FOUND HER as she was getting off duty, leaving the hospital building for the dormitories just across from it. She was walking beside Helen and two of the other nurses, and when she saw him, she broke away and came to where he was standing, waiting to one side of the steps up to the main entrance.

  “What are you doing here?” she looked alarmed. “You look like you haven’t slept.”

  “I went to my house in Voulangis. I found …” He stopped. She waited for him to go on, but the words stuck in his throat. He thought, I shouldn’t be here. But coming to find her had been his only clear thought since leaving Voulangis. And looking at her face lit with concern, he did not think that he could bear it if she told him to leave.

  “Can I be here? Is it all right for me to be seen talking to you? I’ll go if you think it is best.”

  She took both of his hands in hers. His body flooded with relief.

  “Go into town,” she said. “There is an inn just off the main square, the Vieux Palais. Wait for me there and I’ll come as soon as I can. As soon as it gets dark.”

  “I thought there were rules.”

  “There are, but there are also ways around them.” She turned and ran after the women she had been walking with before. He saw them talking and saw the other nurses squint back at him. He watched until they went inside.

  The inn Marion had mentioned was easy to find. He got a room and told the concierge that his wife would be meeting him later. Then he sat in the nearly empty café downstairs, scanning the pages of a newspaper, trying to read it. It was after nine when she appeared at last.

  From the front hallway, he heard the concierge say, “Mrs. Steichen?” and Marion’s faltering reply: “Er, yes. My … husband, is he here?”

  “He’s in the café.”

  She was wearing her own clothes. She came and sat down opposite him. For a few moments they sat in silence and studied each other’s faces. Then Marion asked, “What was it that you found?”

  “My photographs. They are ruined. Someone took them and …” He made a gesture with his hands as though he were flinging something into the air, his fingers exploding outward. Marion stared at him, horrified.

  “They were left out to rot. I think that Clara—”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Everything is gone,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.” He covered his face with his hands. He heard her chair scrape back and felt her come and sit beside him, felt her arms around his shoulders. She pulled his fingers away from his face and kissed his closed eyes, then his forehead, then his lips. She took his arm at the elbow and got him to his feet.

  “Come on,” she said, and she led him out of the bar and up the stairs to his room. She undressed him, removing first his shoes and then his jacket, then his shirt, putting him to bed the way you would a child. Then she lay down beside him and held him so his head was against her chest, and her voice close to his ear saying “Hush, hush, hush” over and over, until at last he found himself falling piece by piece into sleep.

  THEY WOKE UP inside each other’s warmth, Edward first swimming to the surface of sleep and knowing right away where he was. Marion lay in his arms with her back to him, and he pulled her closer so he could kiss the space on her neck just below her ear, that tiny corner that was almost always hidden by her hair. She stirred when he did this and turned over so she was looking into his face. She put her arms around his neck and began to kiss him.

  They were tentative at first, and then he moved, sliding his arms all the way around her body so he could fold it into the hollow of his own, and they could kiss more deeply. He found his way through the clothes she was still wearing to her body, the smoothness of her skin astonishing him because it had been such a long time since he had touched another person like this. She helped him to pull the last garments off both of them until they were finally naked. Edward drew away from her and took her in with his eyes, her surprising beauty, her skin freckled so that it wa
s golden against his own.

  They made love slowly, and he thought that inside them they were gathering up all the strands of his sadness and hers, the sadness of the world, and transmuting them into something else, something like joy. Her force moving against him, the feeling of her arms around his torso, of her mouth and breasts: all of it felt precious to him, almost too precious and marvelous to bear.

  Later she kissed the skin between his shoulder blades.

  “How astonishing,” he said. He turned over to look at her. “I have a week of leave. I’m going to stay somewhere in Paris. Somewhere quiet, private. Will you come and meet me there?”

  “I think I can,” she stretched, folded her body into his. “I don’t know if I’m terribly happy or terribly sad,” she said.

  “Me neither. No, no, I am happy. What else is there left to be?”

  THEY WENT ON to Paris, Edward first, Marion following a few days later. They stayed in a small hotel near Bastille. When they were alone together, they could elude, temporarily at least, the shadows that fell across their peace. They could forget the threat of Clara’s court case. They could push away the war and its losses. They could almost, it seemed, slow the passing of time, bring the minutes and hours gradually to a stop. When they were alone this was possible: to balance in the present tense.

  “I don’t want to share you, not even with the strangers who look at you in the street.”

  “Well, you can’t keep me prisoner,” Marion said.

  “All right. But let’s see if we can spend the entire week without letting go of one another’s hands. It will be an experiment.”

  They could turn their banishment into a game.

  In the afternoons they walked until they found themselves in places they’d never seen before. They let the city wash over them and through them, the sunlight, the tiny dusty shops of the back streets.

  Edward became absorbed in the process of discovering this woman he had known for so many years and taken so long to notice. He learned things about her now that only a lover could know: what position she slept in, one knee crooked up to the side of her body and her hands tucked under her chest, fists clenched as though for protection. How she liked to press her forehead into his neck when they made love, or how she would glance down at her body and frown slightly whenever she was newly naked. And other more ordinary things, details of her past. She liked to drink tea in bed. She always read the first page of any book twice. She liked Rilke and Blake; disliked Tennyson; loved Jane Eyre.

  “Clara always preferred Wuthering Heights,” she said. “We used to argue about it, but I don’t remember who won.”

  She had wanted to paint ever since she was a little girl and discovered a book showing art from Italy on a shelf in her father’s library.

  “When was the first time you fell in love?” he asked.

  “I was sixteen. That was why my parents sent me to Paris that summer I first met you. They wanted to get me away from New York, away from him.”

  “Who was he?”

  “The son of our housekeeper.”

  “How romantic.”

  “They didn’t think so. He was not what they had in mind for me: penniless and a socialist. They thought it was a disaster. So much so that they found a new position for his mother with a family upstate while I was out of the country. By the time I came back that September, she was gone and he was gone. I never saw him again.”

  “Were you heartbroken?”

  “Of course I was. I told them I’d never speak to them again and that I was going to leave to go after him. But I couldn’t find him.”

  “And did you make love?”

  “Now you are prying.”

  “So you did, then.”

  She stretched and yawned. “What about you? The first time you were in love.”

  “I was sixteen, too. She lived in Milwaukee, near my family’s house. Rosa. After that, Clara. And after that …”

  He picked her up and carried her to bed. Sometimes it seemed that talking was an unnecessary intercession and instead they could just touch and that would be sufficient. How astonishing, Edward thought, after all this time. He spent a long time undoing the buttons at the back of her dress, and watching the pale V of skin emerge at the seam. How miraculous the bones of her back were, especially the shoulder blades, which moved like wings when she shrugged her way out of her sleeves so that her dress slid to her waist. And when she twisted to face him: her clavicle like an ancient musical instrument; her breasts and the soft skin of her belly.

  HE WAS GENTLER than she had imagined he’d be, more patient.

  “What is this from?” He was examining a scar on the inside of her arm, just above the elbow.

  “That’s where I fell when I was a child and cut myself. I was running down the stairs, even though I had been told a million times not to. I tripped and went forward into the parlor door, which was paneled with glass. I put out my arms to stop myself. My mother was so upset when she saw the blood.”

  “And this?”

  “That is where my brother bit me when we were having a fight. I was five and he was three. It’s so faint, I’m surprised you can even see it.”

  “What were you fighting about?”

  “I can’t remember. It must have been important, though, because we didn’t usually hurt each other.”

  “And this?”

  “That is just a birthmark.”

  It was only now, of course, that she could admit to herself she had imagined these things at all: what he looked like without his shirt on, or how he would touch her. In the moments before she slid into sleep, she had thought of him, at certain seasons, although she had always told herself that this was impossible, told herself this for years while he had been Clara’s husband and her friend.

  He was so beautiful that it made her laugh. No one should look like that; it seemed ludicrous to her that someone should appear as he did, not perfectly formed, but with a magnetic immediacy to his movements. Whatever he was doing absorbed him. When they were together, he was curious about her in the way a child is curious, fascinated by the idiosyncracies of her body as the few other men she had known never were. He was delighted by discovering, for example, this small birthmark on her stomach just above her left hip. He ran his fingers over it, watching how it shifted shape when she moved. She had never been looked at with such intensity before. It dismantled her. She would come apart, her body gathering itself up and then falling sweetly to pieces each time they made love, still amazed that he was really there beside her.

  Because it was so difficult to describe or understand, his beauty made her want to paint again for the first time in years. What would it be like to try to fix that quality of intensity? She found her mind tracing his lines and wondered, Could she capture them? Some part of her that had been dormant began to stir.

  And yet she was aware of how this same quality translated into the possibility of carelessness. Most of the time they were together, she tried not to think about the complications of their shared past. But inevitably sometimes she would remember when she had seen this other dimension of him. She would recall Clara trying in vain to get his attention to ask him something simple while he was talking about painting with Arthur or photography with Alfred. He just doesn’t think, Clara would say in frustration, and this was, Marion now realized, half-true. He did think, but with his eyes. He became consumed and lost sight of other things and other people. When she lay by him those nights, kept awake by her own restless mind and body or by the sounds from the street, she understood that the other side of his vitality was a potential for neglect.

  A GROUP OF little girls, all sisters, came out of mass in Le Sacré-Coeur. It was Sunday morning, and Edward and Marion had climbed Montmartre for the view and arrived just as the services were ending. The girls, five of them, were ushered out ahead of their mother, and the younger ones ran down the white steps in front of the church and up to the railings nearby. They were laughing and describing to one ano
ther the landmarks that they recognized: There’s Eiffel. There’s Arc de Triomphe. Can you find our house? asked one of the older ones. I can, I can! The three youngest all pointed, with absolute conviction, in entirely different directions.

  After their mother called them back, Edward said: “Because of the war, I got used to never seeing children. I am a little surprised to discover they still exist.” He looked after the family as they were walking away. “I miss my daughters,” he said. “I wish, at least, I still had my photographs of them.”

  He took Marion’s hand and began to walk down the stone steps that wound across the face of the hill.

  “It could have been the English soldiers who destroyed the photographs,” he said. “The ones who were in the house after Clara and Kate left.”

  “Yes,” Marion said. “It could have been them. Or there could be another explanation entirely, one you haven’t even thought of.”

  “Promise me something.” His voice was quietly fierce as though he were trying to harden his words into something solid.

  “What?”

  “Never to tell anyone else what I thought happened to the photographs. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, they were destroyed by accident, by damp. That is what I’m going to tell people. Promise you will keep this secret for me.”

  “I promise,” Marion said.

  IT WAS THEIR sixth day in Paris and they were coming down to breakfast late again, almost late enough to be lunchtime. Marion was ahead of Edward on the stairs. No one was around, the other guests all out at this hour, and he caught her by the waist on the first landing, drew her back and kissed her on the neck. She pushed him away, smiling, and ran down the stairs ahead of him. He saw her go as far as the top of the last flight of stairs, and stopped. She was staring across the foyer toward the front door of the hotel, and though he couldn’t read her expression from where he stood, he saw her look around her as though searching for a route of escape. He came down toward her, wanting to know what she had seen, and she turned, putting a palm up as though to push him back, away from her. Her mouth formed the word “Don’t.” But by the time he understood, it was too late.