by Kate Walbert
“It was so goddamn funny,” Tilsie said. “So goddamn serious and funny.” He laughed then, remembering. He had given me his raincoat; I couldn’t stop shivering. “But the thing was, I believed it,” Tilsie said. “I mean, I somehow believed it, believed that goddamn K-ration Silver Star was straight from Eisenhower, believed all those goddamn heroic things the writer said I’d done were true, and all those nice things Henry was saying.”
“I know,” I said, because I somehow did, though Tilsie didn’t seem to hear me. He stared straight ahead, addressing no one, the yellow measuring tape still draped around his neck.
• • •
I had every intention of carrying out my original plans—returning to the school with you in tow; reciting the story of Henry’s accident; raising you to believe these fictions as our real life.
But your father’s death drained me of all courage. And so I resigned myself to go along with what Betty insisted, what Mother and Daddy surely would have if they were told the truth. Tilsie knew of a place: a convent not so great a distance from his hometown and far enough away from mine. Soon after that day in the garden he drove me there, carrying my suitcase across the lawn and into the Mother Superior’s office.
I remember little of it: nuns hovered in the corners; the hallways were long and bleak.
The Mother Superior, a woman who reminded me of Sister Pat, looked from Tilsie to me and lifted her eyebrows. Tilsie told her we had several children at home, that he had recently lost his job as a machine operator and that his wife felt incapacitated, I remember that word, by the thought of another child. Incapacitated, he said, and it suddenly struck me that Tilsie was a very good liar.
The Mother Superior placed her two figgy hands on her desktop papers; the loose skin of her neck draped in many folds. She believed none of it.
“I’ll pray for your sorrow,” she said, words that, at the time, meant little to me, though I’ve thought of them almost daily since.
• • •
Tilsie walked with my suitcase to the small room where the Mother Superior directed us. I imagine women such as myself came and stayed here often, though I was the only one at that time, my room a single cot, a washing basin, a small crucifix over a chest of drawers. I remember a stained piece of lace draped across the wooden chest top, strangely decadent within that chaste place.
Tilsie set my suitcase next to the cot and promised he would return in the morning. I understood that he would not: I was too close to the lie of his own life; and he was too close to the lie of mine.
• • •
No one knew where I was, not even Betty. My suitcase stayed next to the cot, where Tilsie had deposited it; I wore the same, simple shift every day and ate my meals in silence with the nuns. After vespers, Sister Charlotte, my favorite, would bring me a glass of warmed milk and two slices of buttered bread fresh from the kitchen ovens, one for the mother, she would say, and one for the little one. Sister Charlotte must have been close to sixty, and though I never saw her without her habit, I imagine she had curly gray hair cut short. Her hands were the softest hands I ever held.
• • •
My labor began on a sweltering July day. I had been sitting in the courtyard, thinking, when I felt the first contraction, a pain so sharp I cried out, a little, though there was no one around to hear me. I had been told by the Mother Superior that when the time came I was to walk to her office and ring the brass bell she kept on her desk for emergencies. I did this, steadying myself against the cool, dark wall of that long hallway, my eyes still blinded by the bright outdoor sunshine.
The doctor was immediately called; the Mother Superior, familiar with labor pains, understood even though I did not that you would be born quickly, violently. Sister Charlotte was also called, and she helped me to walk to the larger room where births and deaths were staged, to undress, guiding me into the heavy mahogany bed, turning down the white sheets that smelled vaguely of antiseptic. She held my hand, then, though I wanted to walk, I told her; I wanted to remain in the courtyard garden, where geraniums in large clay pots surrounded a dry fountain, its basin cracked. I wanted to stay there, I told her. Please.
But it was against the rules and besides, there was no time; the doctor said as much. You would be born within the hour, he said. And you were; you tore your way out.
I was not allowed to see you: there was a system in those days, and this was part of the system. The doctor followed the rules. He immediately handed you—I could hear your cries—to the Mother Superior, and she whisked you away to God knows where, a hidden room for such things, where you would be washed and wrapped in a bunting, where papers would be signed before you were given away. The point is, Sister Charlotte did not follow the protocol. She returned soon after the others had left the room, returned with you in her arms, saying if a rule was cruel it deserved to be broken, damn the torpedoes.
I lay propped on hard pillows, a smaller pillow filled with ice between my legs to staunch the swelling. She gave you to me so I could see for myself that you were, as she had promised, perfect—ten fingers, ten toes—and that you were indeed a girl as I had imagined. I don’t know how long Sister Charlotte let me hold you. It seemed like no time and an eternity at once. In those days, you must understand, this was a terrible breach. I imagine they believed that if I saw you I might change my mind, might keep you for my own.
No matter.
I only know that I did. Hold you, I mean, and that you were beautiful, and that before Sister Charlotte took you away I named you Rita.
· Book Five ·
There was only one thing Randall insisted I remember about the art of dramatic presentation. It was the first rule of thumb, what I would have to understand if I were going to understand anything at all. You speak, he told me, to an audience of one—a solitary listener to whom you direct your presentation, to whom you project your voice in the telling; a person whom you picture as you confide.
You have been mine since the day you were born.
• • •
Randall’s was the poet whose name I’ve forgotten. The famous one who fought in the First World War. A man no older than a boy; a poet known to all of England and to anyone versed, Randall said, in the glories of Verdun, Ypres, Passchendaele, the Somme.
He told me he pictured his poet not as a dead soldier, but as a soldier in the trenches, writing the poem that would be read in Saint Paul’s Cathedral, Easter Day, 1915, writing despite his frostbitten fingers, his blackened feet, the stench of those fallen around him— the men, Randall said, who had already crossed the river Styx.
This again the day my family reluctantly arrived at Randall’s house, Rita saying, for the love of Pete, the place looks so gloomy and haunted, why are we here at all? Don’t we have better things to do than meet old, dusty relatives who aren’t even nice? Mother saying, shhh. . . . Who told her Sterling wasn’t nice?
You! Rita said, getting Mother to laugh as she would only laugh at Rita, Betty saying, that’s right, Mother, you did say such a thing, and Mother laughing in the front seat, refusing to look at Daddy, shaking her head and saying, John Brown, when did her girls turn to magpies?
While all the time Randall waited behind that heavy front door, not wanting to open it—what were they doing idling there for so long?—though breathless with the thought of three cousins. And then, unable to refrain, he did. He opened the door before we were even out of Daddy’s Ford, just a crack, enough to see from where he hid: the tallest, prettiest one; the one who looked a bit like him.
• • •
We sat in the diner near the train station—this after Randall said the business about Hog Phelps, the boy he had met from Louisville—in silence. We were particularly good at silence as readers tend to be. There were certain Easter visits when a whole silent hour might go by as the two of us read in his room, entirely still, not a word spoken. I had learned early on never to interrupt Randall to ask a question, or to puzzle something out that I didn’t understand.
Not understanding was part of it, he had told me.
Around us soldiers scraped back their chairs, quickly leaving the other tables, an entire regiment on their way west. They exited the diner with great purpose—laughing loudly, voices pitched high, cheeks still ruddy with the wind of the outdoors and the heat of the steamy restaurant and the anticipation of what they were too soon to do.
“Well,” I said, smoothing the lap of my skirt.
“Well,” Randall said.
The last soldier closed the door. The waiters disappeared into the kitchen. Mother was elsewhere, lingering in the bathroom. She knew enough to know that we were both terribly shy, and that if we were going to speak at all we needed time and, in truth, a quiet place empty of patrons and the waiters’ constant attentions. It did seem as if a thundering hurricane had spun on. We sat in the wake of its destruction: forks and spoons and dirty plates strewn across every table, chairs knocked to the floor and a single red, lost mitten.
Randall drummed the tabletop with his pale fingers. I believe I had asked him about training.
“Instruction,” he corrected me. “Everything is instruction. When you fasten your bayonet and lunge at a scarecrow, that’s instruction in close combat. When you miss the shooting target and they wave Maggie’s drawers at you, that’s instruction in humiliation. There’s a lot of instruction in that. Humiliation. They might as well give you a college degree. A doctor of philosophy in humiliation.”
He drummed the table.
“Maggie’s drawers?”
“A red flag, that’s all it is. I don’t know where Maggie came from.”
A waiter appeared to offer us coffee. I pushed my cup closer toward him and watched him pour. He walked away and the silence descended, again. I sipped my coffee. Randall resumed his drumming. I felt his duffel bag beneath the table, a reminder that soon he would be on his way.
“And marching,” Randall said. “There’s a boatload of instruction in marching. Left, right. Left, right. Drop. Left, right, left, right. Drop. And never run straight across a field. Nothing more lonesome than a corpse in a field.”
I looked at him. I had never heard anyone use that word.
Randall shrugged. “They want to frighten you into staying alive.”
“I guess,” I said.
He stopped his drumming. “I don’t know the meaning of lonesome. We’re alike that way, aren’t we?” It seemed a question tinged with something else.
“What way?” I said.
“Oh, I don’t know. The way that matters.”
There was an unused fork near my coffee cup, and scatterings of our lunch on our uncleared plates: Mother’s bacon, lettuce, and tomato; my tunafish, only partially eaten. Randall had ordered soup, though he had hardly tasted it. Now he pushed the spoon around the bowl.
“The funny thing is, I missed home,” he said. “All that time thinking that as soon as I left I’d just keep going, and then what I thought about at night, lights out, I mean, was how good it would be to pass back through on my way here. To sit in my room and read, again. And then, when I got there, I couldn’t concentrate on a single word. It was as if I didn’t even know how to do it. Every time I opened a book all the words went gray and it just seemed like a colossal waste of time.”
I listened, my hands in my lap.
“I took a walk. I had a thousand things to do, but I went for a walk. I asked him but he didn’t want to go. It was raining, he said.”
Randall stared at his soup and pushed his spoon around.
“I walked toward the McCleans’ and then turned around because he was right, it was raining, and then I was almost home and the rain let up a bit. I could see the house and the one light on in his study and it didn’t even look like anyone’s house. It looked like a painting of a house. I went in the side way so that I’d pass his door. He was at his desk so I stopped. I thought maybe he planned to talk to me before I left, but he didn’t seem to want to say anything. Just, good night. I don’t know what I expected. Not some great good-bye or to thine own self be true. I don’t want that from anybody—” here he looked up—”except you, of course.”
“Of course,” I said. I might have kicked him underneath the table, or that might have been the duffel bag. I know I felt a sudden charge between us. I looked away; it seemed too unbearable to watch: Randall in his dull Army clothes—entirely wool, the kind that looks scratchy—a pair of olive green trousers and a khaki shirt and an olive green tie, of all things.
“But a conversation,” Randall said. “Anything to get the mind off. I was sick with thinking. At camp they kept you running and then you fell asleep in your proverbial boots. That was their plan. They’d already told you it’s hell. You’ll see your best buddies, the ones you’re training with, blown to smithereens. You might lose your mind. I kept hearing the rats of Nagasaki jumping into the sea, you know, chu chu, chu chu, until I thought I’d already been to Japan, or wherever the hell they’re going to send us. I’d already been there and I’d already lost my mind—”
“No,” I said. I wanted him to stop because he was frightening me, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I wished us back to the dark of the slaves’ hiding place, counting heartbeats, or to the dinner table, biding our time before we could ask to be excused.
“I started packing, but that didn’t take long. Then it began to rain, again. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard it in our house. The whole place leaks like a sieve, and when it rains hard you’d think the roof might cave in and you sit there listening, holding your breath because at any minute you might be washed away. Mother used to say we should hitch a lifeboat to the side of the house so we wouldn’t drown.”
Randall let his soup spoon drop to the bowl, waking me from my trance. He had never been much of a talker, and listening to his voice for so long had felt like hearing a story that carried me out of my own life and into another, where I stood in Randall’s room in the rain near the window, watching the water slosh down those old windows, the oak limbs shivering with the stormy wind, their last dead leaves blown to smithereens. I could see how the rain pummeled the glass, how the wind blew twigs and whatnot against it, the sound a ping, ping, ping sound, staccato as gunfire. Soon, I knew, the storm would lift, abating as quickly as it descended, and if it were morning the mocking birds would resume their catcalls, and if it were evening the clouds would break and out of them slip the yellow moon.
Randall continued. He told me how he had gathered what he would miss, mostly books from his bookshelves, and tried again through the night to read, it against regulations to take books— something about censures—and he wanted to have those poets in his ears.
“The funny thing is,” Randall said, “I could only stand The Gardens of Kyoto. Remember?”
I looked at him. Of course I did.
“I may soon be like him,” he said.
“Who?”
“Our damaged professor. Professor X. Madly and tragically in love with the girl.”
“He was in love with her?”
Randall looked at me and smiled.
“You had to read between the lines,” he said.
• • •
Have I told you his was a beautiful smile? Not the smile of a cynic, nor the easy, hungry smile of boys his age, those smiles that aim to get them somewhere, are a commodity in exchange for God knows what. No. His was completely without intent; an accident of a smile. The kind of smile that would have surprised him if he could have seen it for himself. But he was too young to know his own extraordinariness.
• • •
“Anyway, I left it to you,” he said.
“What?”
“Our professor, birdbrain. The book. Given the likelihood of the inevitable chu chu, you will be the owner of the property in question.”
“Nonsense,” I said, or, “Don’t be foolish.”
Randall looked away and I understood too late that I had broken something too delicate to repair.
“You’ll be
fine, I promise,” I said, smoothing my lap, again, as Mother walked up, fiddling with her handbag. She did not like the role of chaperon, and though she certainly cared for Randall, Randall had a way of standing apart from adults, as if he knew that he would never cross the line into their territory.
“Ready?” she said, a bit too cheerfully.
Randall nodded and pushed back his chair. I did the same, reaching for my coat, which I had folded over its back, when Randall intervened, taking my coat to hold out for me as if we were closing a date. He no longer appeared scared, or nervous. Certainly not talk-ative. He seemed more resigned, somehow, and oddly purposeful, as if for me to put on my coat, for him to hold it steady as I did so, was perhaps the most important thing in the world. And so I slipped my arms through, me in my pink sweater and skirt, my hands trembling; him in that tie that earlier he had looped upside down, crossing his eyes and sticking out his tongue as if the tie were a noose, as if he were a boy hanged.
• • •
We followed Mother out of the diner, crossing the street to the train platform, the train already crowded, a raucous group of boys dangling from the windows, shouting messages to a similar group of boys who dangled from the windows at the farthest end. The air smelled of popcorn and there was music—a few members from the local high school band there to cheer the soldiers off or maybe a soldier himself had brought along his brass trumpet. I don’t know. I know the whole thing felt a circus, frenzied and dangerous. I climbed the steps to the platform with Randall near enough to touch, one gloved hand in a pocket, one out to grip the steprail. Then we stood, the three of us, as if awaiting instruction. I wiped my nose with my perfumed handkerchief, wishing, again, that I had remembered my compact. Around me women who may have been mothers, who may have been wives, wore the anxious looks of women traveling, though they were staying behind, their sons and husbands suddenly animated, hurrying as the station master called, All aboard.