by Chris Cander
She moved her hand deeper inside his pajama pants and Walter’s breathing changed. He closed his mouth, awake now, and reached down for her hand. Gently, so gently, he withdrew it from behind the elastic and set it back down on the mattress. Then he patted her twice on the forearm, tenderly as a grandmother would, and rolled the other way.
“Goodnight, Alta,” he whispered.
She tried to imagine him fawning over her the way Punk did Maggie. She tried to imagine herself crushed against him on the couch, talking about how a man who came to a dead stop could win a footrace. She tried to imagine them laughing together at something funny, something shared. But she couldn’t. Perhaps some things were meant to be just exactly as expected.
“Goodnight, Walter,” she said.
July 4, 1944
Eleven years John spent toiling underground without even the reward of a smile or an embrace from his wife at the end of his long, dark shifts. Myrthen would most likely be at the church, or else dropped to her knees somewhere in the shadows. No children awaited his return at the end of each day. Most evenings, there wasn’t even a hot meal. He’d long ago given up hope for either, and instead crept like a stranger into his own house and tried as best he could to make himself at home.
When John heard — as all Americans did — of the Japanese air raid on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and specifically of the sinking of the dreadnought USS West Virginia, John felt the stirrings of renewed purpose. Fate presented him with new options, the chance to trade his scrap life for something else. It wasn’t patriotism that fed his slow awakening, nor even a longing for excitement, but simply an excuse to bring an end to the meaningless, trenchant back-and-forth between the black bowels of the mountain and the gray solitude aboveground.
When he woke up the morning of December 24, he left Myrthen a note, even though he didn’t expect her to be home at all that holy day, and drove up to the post office in Charleston to consign himself to the United States Army.
Gone on an errand. Merry Christmas Eve.
~J
After the holidays, he submitted his formal resignation to Blackstone and said goodbye to his parents, who’d already lost one son to the war effort. His mother dabbed her eyes and reached for him once, twice, and then once more before he finally stepped off their porch. His father clapped him on the back with his one arm; his son had finally become a man.
At home, he packed a suitcase while Myrthen watched, unmoved, from the bedroom threshold. It might have been awkward that he would leave Myrthen, daughter of German parents, and ship out to another continent to bludgeon the descendants of her ancestors. But the truth was, John Esposito could imagine nothing better. She stepped aside to allow him to pass, and he stopped in front of her, aware that he felt not even a jot of regret nor doubt nor nostalgia. He bent down to kiss her dry cheek. “Take care of yourself,” he said.
“May the Lord be with you,” she said. She neglected to express a wish for his safe return.
At the train station, he stood alone on the snow-covered platform and stared down at his boots. When he looked up, he nodded silently to the town of Verra and to the mountains around it. He didn’t think he would ever see any of them again. As the train chuffed around the bend, he met it with a smile.
John spent the next ten weeks training at Fort Benning, Georgia, then took a train to New Jersey and a ferryboat to New York Harbor, where he boarded a troop ship that sloshed across a storm-tossed sea for thirteen days before landing at Liverpool, England, on a cold and fog-damp afternoon in early April. The soldiers were sent to a camp in the southeastern part of the country, in Winchester. Though they were allowed to visit a Gothic cathedral in the city, by that time he had no desire to ever step foot in a church again. John had never been very religious to begin with; he found more peace inside the Quonset huts they bunkered in, with their exposed dirt floors and drafts that licked at the coal stoves they used for warmth, and the shed latrines made of five-gallon buckets that were emptied each morning by an old farmer and his dirty-looking wife.
While on leave, John traveled north by train to London. He and a few friends from his company went to Covent Garden in search of a pub one night, and there he met Siobhán McCutcheon, a French-Irish street violinist who parlayed her hawk-nosed, freckled beauty into nights of drama and music and haphazard friendships with expatriate artists. That night, she played Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto alongside a mime in whiteface, the force of her bow against the strings rocking her violently to and fro with frenzied energy. The sheen of perspiration on her forehead made her glow. He couldn’t remember ever seeing a woman so vibrant, so self-assured. Lost in a reverie, he watched her until someone punched him in the arm and made him spill beer onto his army-issued boots.
Meanwhile, Siobhán took a deep bow and slunk into the pub so that the glove puppets Punch and Judy could take over with their strife encounters against the forces of law and order. Huzzah, huzzah! I’ve killed the Devil!
John had to catch her before she left. He elbowed between the multitude of drunks and made his way to where Siobhán was packing up her violin. “That was … wonderful,” he said.
“Cheers,” she said, without looking up, and toggled her bow into the case.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
She snapped her case closed and stood up to her full height of just over five feet. With her free hand on one curvaceous hip, she looked him up and down and then finally met his gaze with such level intensity that John had to look away. “C’mere, I didn’t mean to scare ya.” She laughed, a rich, coppery sound that made him smile. After another long look, she jutted her chin up at him. “You’re real, aren’t ya? You don’t seem like the rest of those blow-ins.” She handed him her case and nodded as though to confirm an arrangement. “Come with me then,” she said, and he followed her through the dark, short streets to her tiny flat two floors above a butcher’s shop. He made such grateful love to her that afterward he cried a decade’s worth of unshed tears into her ginger-colored hair.
She told him that night that although she would never offer him either monogamy or fidelity, she would gladly share her bed and her meals with him when she was free. It wasn’t uncommon for him to arrive for a weekend stay, unannounced, and find her apartment filled with other people: musicians and photographers, writers and painters, all of them representing a myriad of countries and talents. How they found Siobhán — or she found them — he never knew. She was generous with her friends and her libations and her body, but not with much else. He didn’t mind. Instead, he accepted and even grew fond of the unusual boundaries of their relationship. He was accustomed, he supposed, to sharing his wife with God, so the idea of sharing his lover with her secrets and other men was not so difficult to grasp. Only once was he turned away from her doorstep. She didn’t offer an explanation, just winked at him as she tied the sash of her silk robe and said it wasn’t a good time but would he come back the next time he was on leave. He did.
Siobhán satisfied his physical passions — finally, voraciously — and her friends satisfied his artistic ones. Through her he met the gritty and brooding Spanish photographer Raimundo Marqués, sent to the front lines to photograph the war up close, and the Bulgarian watercolorist Hercules Vidin, who almost exclusively featured prostitutes waiting for their clients. Hercules willingly shared with John many of the drawing techniques he’d learned at the Académie Colarossi in Paris and, after seeing him improve, even told him that he could be a “serious artist if he didn’t get his head blown off by the Krauts first.” He listened to the Portuguese-American poet Francisco Pousão read from his collection-in-progress, his richly accented English heavy in the smoke- and candlelight-filled room. John was taught how to do the fox-trot by a famous French prima ballerina, and how to play the bongos from an exiled Cuban who would reveal only his first name: Ulysses.
He had never in his life been as happy as he was during his time at war. John’s hometown and wife — who didn’t write him a single l
etter in twenty-six months — seemed long ago and far away, and, unlike the men of his company eager to return to America, he gave little thought to any end to his semi-patriotic expatriate adventure. That is, until he found himself standing alongside his photographer friend Marqués, who had embedded himself in John’s company, churning across the English Channel at low tide and under a full moon. It was the early morning of June 6, 1944, the day before John’s fourteenth wedding anniversary. The troops watched, stunned and steeled, as the Normandy coast grew larger on the horizon. Cold, rough spray stung their faces, and many of them vomited over the side, from either seasickness or fear. A thousand yards offshore, they started taking mortar shells and artillery, and then there was nothing but bombs and blood and screaming, crying, shooting, and chaos as the landing ship ramps were lowered and troops poured into the sea. Countless lives ended before they even reached the sand.
John ran forward onto the beach, leaderless, and somehow made it: through the small arms artillery and the litter of used K-ration cartons, tin cans, empty cartridge casings, and dead Allies, all the way to the bluffs. He had no idea about the passage of time, or how he ended up in an Army Ranger battalion at the Pointe du Hoc cliff. And he couldn’t recall how far up the hundred-foot cliff he’d scaled before he took a round to his left kneecap, which blew it to splinters inside his herringbone pants.
John woke up in a hospital in London with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star and a shattered knee that would bother him for the rest of his life. The army had no further use for him. They were going to let him heal, then send him back home, honorably discharged. He lay in his scratchy cot and stared at the ceiling, dulled. The color drained out of his dreams, and now when he closed his eyes, he saw black: slick, wet coal, the underbelly of Trist Mountain, coal dust under his fingernails, Myrthen’s ankle-length wardrobe, her opaque soul.
On Independence Day, after nearly a month in the hospital, he was finally able to sit up without pain in his back. He asked one of the nurses for some stationery and a pen. He wrote two letters. The first was to his parents, to let them know he was alive and coming home. The other was to his wife:
Dear Myrthen,
It’s been more than two years since I left. I’m not sure if you got any of my letters, because I never got anything from you. My mother wrote and said she’d checked in on you from time to time, and saw you at church, so I was at least glad to know you were doing okay.
I took some enemy fire about a month ago and am laid up for a little while longer, but they say I’m going to be discharged in a couple of weeks. They’re sending me home.
But you know I got thinking, and I’m not really sure what “home” is anymore. I know you didn’t want to marry me, Myrthen. I know you haven’t been happy being my wife all these long years. If I’m being honest, I admit it hasn’t much resembled what I’d hoped for when I said “I do.”
I met someone here in London. I should have told you about her when it started. It wasn’t very serious, but it was fun. She liked me a whole lot, and treated me better than she probably should have. I probably won’t ever see her again, or even write to her, but before I come home, I needed to tell you. I’d be lying if I tried to say I’m sorry for what I did. Truth is, I’m glad, because now I know that I was really missing something before, and I hope I’ll have the chance to find it again.
Myrthen, I’m asking you for a divorce. I didn’t want to wait until I got home and spring it on you. I wanted to give you fair warning, so you’ll have time to think about it before you see me again. We can do it quietly, and I’ll make sure you’re all set up. Believe me, I wouldn’t have thought of this if I didn’t know in my heart that you’ve probably been wishing for it all along.
See you in a few weeks.
~John
August 19, 1944
The day Myrthen received John’s letter asking for a divorce, she fell to her knees in a protracted and tearful prayer of thanks. For the years after her parents died, she’d been waiting for the day when she would no longer be yoked to her husband: the mountain would swallow him up during a shift, he would run off with another woman, or he wouldn’t come home from the war. She’d prayed desperately for severance of their marital bond, in whatever form it would take. She knew, of course, that Catholics were forbidden to divorce, but she’d spent enough time in Father Timothy’s small library, reading books on canon law by Schulte and Fournier and Donne, to learn that if she could show that one of the elements of her sacramental marriage contract was missing, she could apply for an annulment. She didn’t have enough cause before John sent his letter. But with his admission of infidelity and his desire to end their marriage, all she had to do was ask Father Timothy to help her prepare the paperwork and send it to the Diocesan Tribunal.
She was so certain of the events that would unfold and so eager to begin her new life as a contemplative nun that she didn’t bother to write back to her soon-to-be ex-husband, or share her plans just yet with Father Timothy, who would no doubt object to her leaving St. Michael’s. (Who would take over as secretary? Who would play the organ?) No, she kept her plans to herself. Her future was finally hers and Ruth’s and God’s alone.
Monday, July 24, 1944
Reverend Mother Mary-Joseph
The Carmel of St. Isabel
Bussie, Ohio
Dear Reverend Mother,
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight.
I am writing to petition your consideration. When I was nine years old, I first heard our Lord Jesus calling me to be His Bride. That was when I first learned about Sister Isabel of Lisieux and the Carmelite Order. I have spent the years between then and now in the pursuit of union with God, in imitation of Mary, who first showed us how to love and serve the Son of God, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. I am finally free of all of the obligations that prevented me from following the Vocation which He has destined for me. I am now able to live a life of humble obedience, perfect chastity, and complete poverty. I wish for a life of intense prayer, hidden in Christ, my Divine Spouse, belonging only to Him, and with Him as my great and only reward.
I believe God, for whom my soul thirsts, has led me to your monastery to live in the community of the sisters there. Although I have consecrated nearly all my days and most of my evenings to St. Michael’s in service as Secretary and organist, I hope you will help me to answer God’s call. May God bless you.
Yours in Him,
Myrthen Bergmann
Monday, August 7, 1944
Dear Miss Bergmann,
Praise be to Jesus! I received your letter dated July 24th in which you asked for information regarding the process of entering our monastery to become a Carmelite nun. There are many parts to this process, and I am enclosing a paper outlining the steps. Understandably, the application process is rigorous. We need to discern whether you are spiritually, physically, and psychologically healthy for the spiritual ascent of Mount Carmel. We want to make sure you have the potential to be formed into a good Carmelite who can live a life of prayer and sacrifice for the sanctification of priests and the salvation of souls. You must be at least twenty years of age, in good physical health, of sound mental standing, and free of outstanding debts and obligations, all of which, apparently, you are. Please, if you will, cable to arrange a time when we can meet face to face.
Yours in Christ,
Sister Mary-Joseph, Prioress
On the third Friday in August, Myrthen packed the same upholstery bag her mother had carried across the Atlantic from Saxony to West Virginia more than three decades before. Now moth-eaten and holding only a clean pair of underwear, a toothbrush, and her Bible, it suited Myrthen’s own hopeful occasion as an expression of poverty and humility.
She was ready to live a life of monastic chastity, pr
ayer, solitude, and guided Godliness. She’d always been ready.
The train took her north and west, through the verdancy of the state, through Phico and Kitchen, Fry and Leet and the Big Ugly Public Hunting Area, then to where West Virginia and Kentucky and Ohio connected themselves together along the banks of the Ohio River like distant cousins, and beyond to Coal Grove and Ironton and Garden City, and up along the winding river that led all the way around Shawnee State Forest to the tiny enclave of Bussie, Ohio. In the gloaming sunlit distance, she looked upon it as a new and everlasting home.
Sister Mary Margaret, an extern whose job it was to greet outsiders, met Myrthen at the monastery gates. Myrthen stood, transfixed. She’d never before seen an actual nun. Stirred by Sister Mary Margaret’s attire, which was as alluring to her as immodest clothing was to men, Myrthen desperately wanted to reach out and feel the fabric of the wimple. It encircled Mary Margaret’s lovely oval face like a swallow-tailed flag. For the first time in longer than she could remember, Myrthen smiled.
She was shown to the guest cottage by way of a broad vegetable and flower garden. A stone-faced Saint Joseph stood amid the blue phlox and wild ginger with the infant Jesus in the crook of an arm. Several nuns knelt along the rows, weeding. They looked up and smiled at her as she passed, but none of them spoke. It was to Myrthen’s ears the most pleasing of any potential greeting. The cottage was no larger than a garden shed, with a plain door and two windows, one facing south to let in the sun in winter, and the other facing east to illuminate dawn prayers. The bed was a cot with a thin mattress and a brown coverlet pulled neatly up. A crucifix hung above it and, next to that, a framed rendering of the Virgin Mother, her sacred heart exposed aflame. Otherwise, the whitewashed walls were bare, and the only other piece of furniture was a straight-backed chair upon which was draped a rosary.