Jo thought of those first Italian POWs they had met—cheering, waving, whistling at the American nurses, holding out their hands for cigarettes, jostling each other for a chance to see them better: Ciao, beautiful woman, I love you, I kiss you. They had taken some Germans captive that same day, some of them seriously wounded. Queenie had argued with a patient eighteen inches taller than herself, asking him to lie down, to get onto the table: Sir, we need to operate, to start the anesthesia. In broken English, the officer had defied her, saying he could endure the surgery while still conscious. Pain was for weaklings, for Americans, not for a man such as himself; then he had yelled at the scared Bavarian farm boys and music students from Berlin to rise up out of their cots and kill their nurses, to destroy their oppressors, to fight to the last man. Queenie, wearing the disapproving expression of an elementary school teacher, had said, “Bloody hell,” and strapped the anesthesia mask to his face, holding it there until the überman had fallen in a heap on the floor in front of her as she yelled for the orderlies to get him the fuck up. The Italian patients had laughed, and a few of them had started to applaud.
Jo missed the Italians. She had been called upon to act as translator. They understood most of her dialect, they smiled even when they didn’t: Giusepinna, cara mia, io voglio tanto tanto bene. They couldn’t keep their minds on what the American officers were trying to get across—the terms of repatriation, their legal status for the duration of the war. “We eat? We have cigarettes?” they would laugh, slapping each other on the back at their good luck. “God bless America.”
Jo remembered one Italian soldier she had met early on; she had asked him the usual string of questions in Italian—his name, where he was from—and, in a perfect Brooklyn accent, he had asked her for a Lucky Strike.
“You’re American?” Jo had asked, astonished.
“Listen, sister, I was over here visiting my aunt when all of a sudden we up and join this war. I couldn’t get home, and my aunt didn’t want me getting shot for being an American, see? So I end up getting conscripted into their army.” Jo’s face had showed her amazement, and he had laughed out loud. “I’ve been shooting up into the air for months now, just waiting for you guys to take me prisoner.”
Jo missed singing to the Italians. She was shy about her voice with almost everybody else—she had never sung for her parents; once or twice Gianni had come to hear her practice at Signor Luigi’s, but the men and women she worked with always seemed whiter, always seemed “more” American than she was. Why that should make a difference to her about her singing she didn’t know, but it did, and her voce argento had been silent around them. But one of the Italians had caught her humming Puccini when she hadn’t even noticed she was doing it, and at the end of her shift he had somehow elicited her whole story from her and had her singing every piece she knew in Italian. (He didn’t care so much for the German operas.)
O mio babbino caro,
mi piace, é bello, bello.
Vo’andare in Porta Rossa
a comperar l’anello!
When she spoke of wanting to buy the ring, the Italian soldiers had smiled blissfully, but talk of throwing herself into the Arno had sent them into absolute ecstasy.
Mi struggo e mi tormento!
O Dio, vorrei morir!
Babbo, pietà, pietà!
She could still see their adoring faces, the older men actually crying, propped up two or three to a bed, the guard assigned to watch them with his gun slung carelessly over one shoulder, playing poker with the orderlies and cursing when he lost. His work was easy—no one was trying to escape here. Where on earth would they go?
But they had gone, reluctantly, to some other place of detention, to different cigarettes and different rations and (they hoped) different women to flirt with. Jo looked around the tent now, and everything seemed gray without them. The mud floor had dried and cracked into a gray, powdery mess; her patients’ skin was a paler shade of gray. Her hair was streaked with it, the linens tinged with it; the sky outside was a solid sheet of it. The weather was petulant, dangling the hope of spring in front of them one day, ramming winter down the back of their shirt collars the next. Puddles froze and thawed and froze again.
The Germans hadn’t found them yet, and Clark’s men hadn’t encountered any on their patrols, but whether the enemy was advancing their way or completely surrounded them or had passed them by weeks ago remained a mystery. The Rangers, after hastily burying their comrade, had been in a hurry to leave (to “get away from that crazy nurse,” one of them had muttered, spitting). Two of Clark’s best men had gone with them, to reestablish contact, to get them back into the goddamned war and out of this limbo. But they had left five days ago now and still no word. The world turned. And it was gray.
Jo thought of another monotonous steel-gray morning, but one that had been monotonous in a different way, in a much busier way: she had been wrapping and plastering heavy orthopedics, hanging the casts, moving the never-ending stream of broken men farther down the line. Nearby, just outside the open tent flap, she had noticed half a dozen men in a semicircle, apparently questioning one of the new recruits. The young man had looked nervous, smoking a cigarette and smiling ingratiatingly. “C’mon, guys, quit foolin’,” she had heard him say. Then more men had joined the group, some of them officers. The other men saluted and stepped aside; then the officers were questioning the newcomer, an orderly who had joined their unit only a few weeks before. A nice kid, from all Jo could make out; she had never had to ask him for anything twice.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, this is crazy—” he was saying.
Then the low murmur of his interrogators’ questions.
“Of all the goddamned nonsense, who’s been saying that?” His voice was high now, irritable; he looked like he was going to cry, or punch someone, or both.
“I’ve never even been to—”
He was cut off by another question.
“I’m from Cleveland Heights—”
“Yes, right next to Cleveland.”
“In Ohio, goddamnit, what do you take me for?”
“God Almighty.” He was keeping his temper in check now, but barely. “Bordered by Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, and a little bit of Michigan, for Christ’s sake.”
The officers straightened up at that, rubbing their chins. They looked solemnly at one another, eyebrows raised. The kid looked from one to the other of them, hopefully—
“Okay now? Satisfied? Can I get back to work?”
One of the officers nodded his head, and the others started to widen the semicircle that had been slowly tightening around him. The orderly relaxed his shoulders almost imperceptibly and exhaled; he wiped his forehead with a dirty handkerchief. Almost as an afterthought, one of the officers—a major—looked over his shoulder at Jo and said, “Miss?”
“Yes, sir?” She slowly lowered the heavy cast she had been working on.
“We have reason to believe someone around here is not what he—or she—seems to be.”
“Sir?” Jo had found deference the easiest way to deal with the brass.
“I know I can trust your discretion, miss, so I’ll be blunt. We think there is an enemy agent under cover here, perhaps in your own unit.”
Jo stared at the major, then at the orderly, then back at the major; she waited.
“Is there anyone you can think of who has acted suspiciously in the past few weeks? Think carefully, miss.”
Jo had been so busy, so overwhelmed with work, that she wouldn’t have noticed if Queenie had shaved off all her hair, but she just answered, demurely, in the negative. “No, sir, I haven’t noticed anything unusual.”
The major shook his head, as if he were a detective following up on a lead, unwilling to give up the scent while it was still fresh. “Isn’t there anything, miss,” he asked, throwing up his hands, “anything at all you can think of that a Jerry wouldn’t know? I mean, they’re smart, I’ll give the bastards that
, they’re well trained. They know the starting lineup for the Dodgers and Superman’s girlfriend’s name and U.S. geography better than my own kids back home. Can’t you think of anything?”
The officers all looked at Jo expectantly; the baby-faced kid sitting on a barrel looked at her and smiled impishly behind their backs. She was too busy for all this cloak-and-dagger stuff. Probably someone had it in for this kid; he had swiped someone’s chocolate or someone’s girlfriend, or even just cut in front of the wrong person in chow line. Of all the silly comic-book nonsense—
The men were still looking at Jo. She would never get back to work at this rate.
“I don’t know,” she began, looking up as if she were searching the lowering clouds outside for an answer. Then, exasperated, grasping at straws, at anything—“Ask him to sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ Everybody knows that.” Then Jo went back to her work, apologizing to her patient for the wait, for the colossal waste of time.
Her back was turned, so she could not see the kid’s face.
Because the boy on the dented barrel stopped kicking his heels aimlessly, his smile melting from his features. His eyes became wide and terrified for a moment, then narrowed, giving him an almost inhuman visage. Jo heard someone yelling, but she couldn’t understand the words; and when she turned around she saw he had snatched the sidearm from the sergeant standing next to him and had emptied three shots into his chest before they gunned him down, still screaming, his free hand clenched, blood spattered over his freckled face. Then he stopped moving on the ground, but he was still staring at Jo with hatred, with fixed eyes that froze and glazed over but didn’t close. They had found their leak.
Jo’s mind was wandering today. They were out of medicine, they were almost out of food. Her patients slept fitfully; she felt more like a hall monitor than a medical nurse. She sat up with people; she noticed if they lived or died; she held a hand, when they wanted to, when the pain was too bad. Her body was stuck in space, but her mind wandered.
One of the men’s helmets had rolled under a cot, and she stared at it now with her head cocked to one side, looking at its dull green luster, crisscrossed with scars and scratches. Her thoughts ran to that shell-shocked patient she had had a few months back, the one who could never catch his breath, who always thought he was suffocating. He had been in a house in the French countryside, he told her, freezing and begging for food with some of his buddies. They had been separated from their unit, and the family there had taken them in. Then the family’s little boy had burst through the front door, saying the Germans were coming down the road, ma mère, mon père. It was fields all around, not so much as a tree or a hedgerow for them to hide behind. The Americans were trapped—and the family along with them, for harboring the enemy.
The quick-thinking femme au foyer had said, Get below, we’ll bury you in the coal in the cellar until they leave, it can’t be long. Dépêchez-vous! Hurry up! And they did. They buried the soldiers under the coal. Take a deep breath, boys, and cover your face with your helmets, they’ll dig us out again all right. The Germans came, and they didn’t find the GIs. But they hadn’t come this time to search the house or scavenge for rations and then leave, but to set up a temporary headquarters, a reconnaissance station. Three days later, when the Germans finally left and the Americans rolled by afterwards in their dull-green trucks, the same housewife had hailed them by flapping her white apron above her head and saying, Come, dig up your dead soldiers, they’re down in my cellar, get them out of my coal. But not all of them were dead. The one boy lay there on the cold, frozen ground of the farmyard when they hauled him up (at last), coughing and gasping for breath, his face black, spitting up dark phlegm and gritty blood. Try as they might, they couldn’t reason with him, couldn’t get him to open his eyes, couldn’t get him to let go of the helmet he still kept clamped in front of his face so he could breathe.
Jo looked from cot to cot, her eyes searching the faces of the six men in front of her, looking at them, looking right through them. Father Hook, his hair needing a trim, the fringes starting to curl around his ears; his freckles standing out starkly against his pale skin; his eyelashes so fair they seemed transparent, thick but colorless, shielding his little boy eyes. Major Donahue, weak and exhausted, perpetually scratching at the scar on his right side. His hair was dark and his eyes were dark and he desperately needed a shave—and antibiotics, to knock out the lingering infection that kept him too weak to sit up. The major sighed, and rolled over, and started to scratch again. Jo looked at Bill—Billy, she mentally corrected himself—propped up with pillows, with rolled-up blankets, with the men’s uniforms folded up and stuffed beneath it all, so he could breathe. He really was bald, she could see that now. Everyone else looked disheveled and hairy, even herself, but his egg-shaped head was taut and shiny. His small eyes were closed behind his gold-rimmed glasses, and he was breathing fast, fast, always too fast. Across the aisle from him James sat up in bed, his knees pulled up to his powerfully built chest, his face averted. She had taken off his bandages earlier in the week. The skin had healed—it was no longer raw and oozing—but it had formed into rounded lumps of flesh around his cheekbone and eye socket. His fingers tentatively explored the new terrain of his face, following its crests and valleys, fissures and cracks, as if by doing so he might stop it, might make his real face come back. And David. David should have been dead. From everything she knew about medicine he should have been either dead or better by now, but not still dangling, stuck in a half-world between life and death. The typhus had to come to a head soon, but something—a secondary infection, a mutation of the illness itself, maybe his own strong constitution—kept him from healing and kept him from dying and left him just hanging on. Jo looked at him now, lying still (too still) on his right side, his thick eyebrows shadowing his eyes, his mop of shiny black hair contrasting with the cool whiteness of his skin beneath. She remembered an old lithograph of Endymion she had seen once, eternally beautiful, eternally asleep, cast into endless slumbers so the goddess Selene could come to him and make love to him and give him fifty daughters he would only see in his dreams.
“Miss?”
Jo snapped out of her reverie.
“Yes, Jonesy.”
Looking at him from across the tent, Jonesy looked incredibly prosaic—his features were enormous, disjointed; he was bucktoothed and big-eared, his nose seemed to take up half his face. There was nothing ethereal about Jonesy.
“Anything I can do for you, miss?”
“No, nothing, Jonesy. Thank you, though. I guess we just have to wait.”
“Begging your pardon, miss, but, wait for what?”
Jo didn’t answer. He hadn’t meant her to. This was all they did. Wait.
Was there any hope left? That was the question anxious family members had asked her at that receiving hospital uptown; the question soldiers had asked her as they carried in their wounded buddies, bleeding and unconscious; the question she asked herself every day. The problem was, she didn’t know how to answer it now any more than she had known back then. It was the same conundrum the nurses had always been in. If a soldier was dying, should they tell him he was dying? Should they give the soldier that final chance to make his peace with his God or his demons or the agony of his unfinished, truncated life? Or would he, poised on the knife’s edge between life and death, hear a nurse’s words as prophecy? Would his psyche oblige? Would his heart stop through the sheer power of suggestion? Would the nurse be doing more harm than good? Was there any hope left? She didn’t know. She had never known.
And what role, after all, was faith supposed to play in all of this? If someone had asked Jo outright, she would have said that it was her faith that sustained her. The only trouble with that was, for a long time now, she had been unable to feel her faith, to access her faith. She could pray with words—hollow, empty things rattling around in her head—or pray with her very suffering, but the prayer itself was no longer a part of her. It didn’t seem to be coming from J
o McMahon at all. She was too numb or paralyzed, or had become, somehow, immune to the awesome, terrible power that prayer used to hold for her. Maybe she was just too tired. Tired or hungry or cold. Maybe this black emptiness was prayer, true prayer. Maybe what she had mistaken for piety back in the civilized world had in reality been the effect of clean sheets and central heating and at least one square meal per day. Maybe her own goodness and generosity had only ever been the result of shaved legs and combed hair and hot showers with plenty of lather—nothing to do with her, with the person who took credit for those things. Maybe God was in the emptiness, in the cold and pain and despair. Maybe finding Him there would be faith. Maybe even imagining He could be there was hope.
She looked again at David, and her heart lurched, and she said, “Goddamn, that’s all I need—not that, not now.” She shook herself and walked briskly to one corner of the tent. “Maybe you could do something for me after all.”
Jonesy looked up hopefully, like an ugly bull terrier.
“Are you any good with radios? Ours is broken, but I’m not sure how bad it is. Maybe you’d like to look at it.”
Jonesy willingly took the offered machine, its outer case cracked in two, turning it over and over in his hands.
“I’ll have a go at it, miss.” His face was glowing. He was already lost in another world, a boy tinkering with a new toy. She handed him an old screwdriver, and he took it without even looking up, gently tapping at the box, shaking it, lifting it to his ear, and rattling it again.
Jo needed something to do. She had to keep busy. She knew that much.
She emptied the bedpans and straightened out sheets and blankets. (But she shouldn’t have done that—the sweet, unwashed smell rising off of David made her head swim.) She boiled water for coffee, but they were out of coffee, so she waited for it to cool a little and gave the men hot water to drink instead. James wouldn’t speak to her, wouldn’t look at her; he shielded his face with his hand when she came near. But when she asked Father Hook for the hundredth time if there was anything she could do for him, he didn’t immediately say no.
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