by Kate Walbert
• • •
The bagpipers were strolling now, families turned in their seats to watch. They were three men in kilts and berets, kneesocks. The nuns seemed to enjoy them the most and applauded every time they passed their small groups among the graduates and guests. The bagpipers nodded to the applause and continued; they were, at present, heading directly toward us.
“I can’t bear it,” Betty said, and, placing her napkin on her plate in a way Mother would have forbidden at home, stood. She gestured to me to follow. I told Mother and Daddy that I needed to show Betty the ladies’ room, that I would be right back. Betty linked my arm in hers, a rare sisterly gesture I found comforting, and we walked away.
“Don’t they drive you nuts?” she said.
“The bagpipers?” I said.
“Well, yes, but I meant Mother and Daddy,” she said.
We were passing other families, some of whom I recognized as the families of friends. I felt both proud and ashamed to be with Betty; she looked so, well, loud in the middle of that setting, yet defiant. “Sometimes,” I said.
“Sometimes?” she said. “Daddy sitting there with that bib on and Mother practically biting my head off at anything. When did she get all high and mighty?”
I shrugged. “She misses Rita,” I said.
“Rita, Rita, Rita. I’m so tired of Rita being the excuse for everything; you’d think the two of us just dried up and shriveled away. I mean, I wrote Mother and Daddy about my promotion and I didn’t hear boo.”
“What promotion?”
“Exactly.”
“I’m asking.”
Betty pulled up a bit. We had reached the edge of the Great Lawn, near the wide stone steps that led to McCalister Library. I seemed to always head toward McCalister whenever I was walking; it had become a habit of mine, a secret destination. As seniors, we were given keys to the library, and sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would pull on some clothes and take a walk here. It was my favorite place, not modern the way the library had been at Bryn Mawr, more like a wealthy man’s library, a vast stone fireplace, never lit, in the front room, around which were gathered the green leather reading chairs. The chairs had been donated by the seminary that served as our brother school and were pen scratched and worn, leaking stuffing; still, they suggested contemplation, poetry, or this is what I would think when I’d enter McCalister after midnight, knowing the reading room well enough to cross it in almost complete darkness. The globe in the corner had once been illuminated, but had broken years ago, or simply shut off; the story went that it happened on D-Day, as if the globe had wanted to aid the Allies’ secrecy. This is at least what Sister Pat, the librarian, had told us, though Sister Pat also kept a stash of hooch in a locked drawer just beneath the checkout desk; on afternoons when we were bored studying, we’d take bets on the number of times she would cloak it in one of her long sleeves and take a swig before dinnertime.
Here Betty and I found ourselves, Betty practically breathless. “Clarence Ledger,” she said. I noticed that a fleck of lipstick nicked her front tooth.
“Clarence Ledger?” I said.
“Clarence Ledger, Esquire,” she said. “One of the partners. He made me his personal assistant.” She tugged at one side of her skirt to straighten it, eyeing me, and I had the odd feeling that she expected me to salute, or to do something equally officious.
“Congratulations,” I said.
“Congratulations?” she said. “Do you have any idea? First of all, Clarence Ledger looks like Gregory Peck. No, better. He wears these suits and a hat and he’s the youngest partner the firm has ever had.”
“And you’re his secretary?” I said.
“God, no. Do you have any idea? His secretary is this old hag that’s been at the firm for six zillion years. She’s very kind, but. God, his secretary? No. I’m his personal assistant. I take care of gifts, arrangements.”
“Gifts?”
“For his wife, his kids. If somebody’s getting married.”
We stood at the base of the steps up to McCalister; I would have liked to have taken her inside, to have shown her the green leather chairs and the dead globe and how a fire was laid in the fireplace, though it had been stone cold for years, and how a dictionary too heavy to lift sat on its own pedestal near the pencil sharpener. But she seemed to be entirely elsewhere. She yawned and covered her mouth and I saw now that her fingernails were filed to long, rounded points and painted pink. “And I’m beat,” she said, a little too proudly. “Last night I took the trolley to his house in Locust Hill. He asked me for help with wallpapers and drapes.” She winked. “He’s surprising his wife.”
I wanted Betty to stop talking; I wanted to be in McCalister reading one of your father’s letters in the dead of night, because these are what I brought with me on my walks. Your father’s letters—there were eleven of them, including the original—he wrote every week. On Sundays, I believed, or imagined, since I thought of war as work, somehow, with Sundays off. Each was dated Kumwah; each sent on the regulation blue airmail paper; each addressed to Daphne at Bryn Mawr.
I told Betty congratulations, again, that it sounded fascinating. Then I said I had to say good-bye to someone, or good luck, and that I would meet her back at Mother and Daddy’s table. I put my hand on her shoulder, still warm, still my sister’s, and told her I was proud of her, that I was sure Mother and Daddy were proud of her as well, they just didn’t know how to say it. For an instant, Betty looked as I remembered her, like we were upstairs in the attic room, her feet on the dresser Rita had shellacked with movie ticket stubs, her hands behind her head, imagining where she would go when she left. She had no intention of college. She couldn’t earn a scholarship and Mother and Daddy couldn’t afford to send her without one. This never bothered her; it was understood, from years before, that I would be the one to go to college. She thought at first she might go to New York City, or that she might join Rita in Texas. But then, after Rita died, she said she would no longer do anything she had thought of when Rita was alive and so she looked in the Philadelphia newspapers, in the want ads, and left. I don’t believe Mother and Daddy had any idea what she had found, or where she intended to stay; they were too shocked to worry about one of their living daughters. I had already been accepted to Saint Mary’s, and spent most of my free time in the orchard, anyway; Betty simply went away.
I cannot, quite truthfully, remember saying good-bye.
Betty looked back at me and smiled. “Next time you might do something a little less virginal,” she said, snapping one of my spaghetti straps. I curtsied and stuck my tongue out, then lifted the hem and ran up the steps to McCalister. I had to drop my hem to pull open the heavy door and I turned around and saw Betty still watching me. She waved a little and I waved, too. I knew she wouldn’t return to Mother and Daddy’s table; I knew she’d go from there back to the world she had decided to build for herself, a world with high fortress walls and rows and rows of defenses, a world she remained in for the rest of her life.
• • •
I pulled on the brass ring that opened the heavy door to McCalister, stepping in to the immediate coolness of the vestibule. The pair of arched wooden doors that led into the reading room had been propped open, perhaps as an invitation to any of the parents who might want a tour of campus; but the room was empty, or I believed it was. I went in and headed for my favorite chair, the one that sat closest to the fireplace beneath an oil painting of a fox hunt, the horses arrested in their chase, dogs at their heels, as the fox, a splash of red, lounged in the foreground. The painting had the look of something valuable. It hung in a place of prominence in a heavy gilded frame. I had often wondered about it, whether the painter intended the scene as a joke; after all, didn’t the fox bare his teeth as if he were smiling? Weren’t the horses and dogs and hunters heading in the entirely opposite direction? A plaque screwed to the frame, bronze, in need of polishing, simply read, The Pursuit. I peered at it again; it seemed a great puzzle to me
, one I should be able to solve. Only then, while I was examining the painting, did she step out of wherever she had been and stand next to me. How she had known I would eventually find my way to the library I never got a chance to ask her.
“God-awful,” she said. Daphne, of course.
“You’re here.”
“For an instant.”
She looked better, fresher than before; she still wore the glasses but they seemed to fit her face more snugly. Perhaps in honor of the occasion, she wore a blue shirtwaist dress that took the edge off the paleness of her arms, her face, the thick black frames. “I didn’t want to leave before delivering this,” she said. She held out another letter from your father. “It arrived yesterday,” she said. “He must not have gotten your letter about the post office box.”
“No,” I said. I am, as you know, a terrible liar.
She crossed her arms and stared at me. “You’ve never written him, have you?”
I shook my head. I felt suddenly cold, a child: my dress sleeveless with darts I couldn’t fill.
“You’re such a goddamn moron,” she said. “He could have been in love with you by now.”
“In love with you,” I said.
“Me, you, what’s the difference.”
I felt the weight of The Pursuit: the horses and dogs jumping, the men with their guns drawn, the fox in the foreground smiling.
“Look,” Daphne said. She crossed the reading room to Sister Pat’s checkout desk, unlatching the little wooden gate to get behind the desk. I thought, for a moment, that she might know about Sister Pat’s stash, but she came back with some lined notebook paper and a pen. “No time like the present,” she said.
“My parents are waiting,” I said.
“As are the butchers of Yugoslavia, wherever the hell that is.”
“You’re going?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Yes,” I said. I had already tried to convince her of this back at her rooming house. I had told her of Randall and Jeannette, of Sterling; how Ruby had simply moved away for a while, how it could be done in quiet, that there were places she could go. I would find one for her, I promised.
But she had been adamant. Radcliffe started in September, and she would have to forfeit her scholarship if she waited a year. No, she had said. Her mind was set.
Now she sat at one of the long desks in the middle of the reading room and switched on one of the amber-glass lamps. I stood next to her, though she didn’t appear to notice. She bit a fingernail and looked away, as if searching the oriental pattern of the carpet for the words.
May 18, 1952
Dear Darling,
I keep your letters close to my heart, where I also keep my goddamn books, unfortunately. All I can say is I’m sorry I haven’t written sooner. The road to hell and all that. I know you’re out there in the trenches making the world safe for democracy, and I am here in the cradle of it, sleeping peacefully, but you have to understand that these nuns are slavedrivers—
I tapped Daphne on the shoulder. “This doesn’t sound like me,” I said.
She looked up, annoyed.
“He doesn’t know what you sound like. Anyway, I like the business about the nuns. He won’t know who he’s writing, and it won’t matter.” She pushed her glasses up her nose with the pen and returned to the letter.
—I graduate today and I’ll have more time and the first thing I’m going to do is knit you a sock, though I know I’m a little late, and if I could I’d pack up a dozen tomatoes—
“That’s good,” I said.
—and some fresh ears of corn. Anyway, darling, I hear the bagpipers practicing, which means soon we’ll have to march like lemmings to the stage and say our how-de-do’s. I think of you every night before lights out and kiss the seal you kissed. God bless you.
She folded the lined paper and gave it to me.
“Now you won’t break my heart if you toss the goddamn thing out entirely. This was just a lesson in how it’s done. Not too adoring, not too coy, a little tutti-frutti. He’ll love it,” she said.
I nodded and took the letter. “Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t mention it,” she said.
I wanted to think of something else to say, some parting wisdom I could give, but I couldn’t seem to.
“Good-bye,” I said.
“Good-bye,” she said.
That was the last time I saw her.
4
May 2, 1952
Kumwah, Korea
My Dear Daphne,
I have begun to give up hope that you will ever write, though around here there are sometimes rumors of letters being intercepted, of planes going down with sacks and sacks of mail, and I suppose this keeps me going . . . the idea (the prayer?) that your letters are on that plane, the ship in the typhoon spun off course and left in the doldrums of Cape Horn. We give great leeway around these parts. We think the best. We refuse, suffice it to say, to believe that we have been forgotten. Have I been forgotten?
This will be a long one, forgive me. There’s been little sniper fire, and it’s a sunny morning, and I can almost picture you listening, sitting across from me in a restaurant. We have ordered a great bottle of wine and you look as beautiful as the day we met and you are patient because I am just returned and have a thousand stories to tell. I will only tell a few of them now and save the rest for that restaurant, that day (you will join me for dinner, won’t you?), and I’m afraid the stories I have today are not the best ones, but you’ll understand, won’t you?
I know that my other letters have been filled with weather. This is the first break we’ve had from the cold, and though I never thought I would be able to feel my fingers and toes again they have thawed remarkably well. It is ironic, mostly, that now, warm fingered and toed, my spirits should dip so low. This is their intention, of course. We look up at them from our ridge and they look down at us from their ridge and we both know that even if we were to take their hill we would not be able to hold it. Hill 854 is the current objective. (We have given up on the clever nicknames. Did I mention to you the twin peaks we called Jane Russell Hill? After they’d leveled it we renamed it Katharine Hepburn Hill.)
The Chinese have the high ground in front of us and we’ll be asked soon enough to take it. For what? To impress the brass who’ve been driving up here for the last month. It makes me madder than hell. The colonel says he’s talked to the military men who came up with this idea, but no one seems to be stopping. They’ve got lookout stations for the generals and their guests. I remember hearing that they did this during the Civil War, that men and women would pack picnic lunches and ride out to the edge of battle, make a party of the day. And here we are, nearly a hundred years later, the same soldiers entertaining the same fancy people. They say taking 854 will help with the negotiations. I say hell. They’ve been negotiating over a year now, remember? I thought I’d be coming home some letters back and nothing’s changed. All night long they blare the Dixieland music from the loudspeakers and last week they had some woman with no trace of a Chinese accent I could hear telling us we were stupid. We were stupid to be here, we should be home. We belonged with our families, she said. Again and again. And some of the boys got real down and I have to say I did as well and I’ll admit it now when I thought of family I thought of you as much as anything, because that’s what happens here. We had a bad spell then and we’re still not out of it. One of ours, Air Force, got shot down just beyond 854. It was near noon and we saw he was in trouble, saw the smoke like if this were anywhere else, at the seashore, we would have expected to read somebody’s love letter in that plume, a Will you marry me? Or Jackie, I’ll love you forever. The smoke went into a flame more like a glare than anything else, a daytime shooting star, and he was gone. Somebody thought they might have seen a parachute but we said no, he bought the farm. God wish it were so. A few hours later we saw the Chinese were up to something. Ted P., the lookout, said Jesus Christ and passed the binoculars around but w
e didn’t need the binoculars. He wasn’t so far away, the goalpost to our center field. Still alive, the poor son of a bitch. They had nailed him to a cross. We heard his moans throughout the night, and God I wish I could think of anything else. It’s what I’ve been thinking of and trying not to think of and not being able not to think of since then. He’s still there, though birds have swallowed most of him. I told the colonel you can’t make us take goddamn 854 when that poor son of a bitch is there like somebody’s mascot.
I’m sorry, Daphne. I can’t write this to my folks and I don’t know what you’ve become to me, an intimate stranger. Perhaps you don’t even exist. Perhaps I concocted you out of my imagination that day of the game, perhaps I spoke only to the air.
But I can still see you. Flesh-and-blood Daphne. A beautiful name. You are sitting across from me in this restaurant and sharing a bottle of wine. I feel it already. My toes, my fingers warm.
God Bless You —
5
Professor X arrived in Washington, D.C., and made his way to the government building where the deliberations on where to drop the bomb had, for months, taken place. Apparently there were certain men who suggested that the Japanese—the emperor and generals who could make the decision to surrender—be simply instructed to turn west, to look to the Sea of Japan, where, at a particular hour, the Americans would drop the bomb and the Japanese, presumably, would witness the horrible evidence of what might be used against them. I have always found it interesting to consider their flag in light of this story, prescient, somehow: the round red sun against the pure white sky, or this is how I see it. Think of rows and rows of Japanese standing on the beach, shading their eyes against the blast like tourists in awe of a particularly beautiful sunset.