The Fire by Night

by Teresa Messineo

  Clotilde MacPherson came up to her, touching her gently on the shoulder, and Jo jumped, she had been so lost in her reverie. David’s mother’s eyes went right through her, right down to the marrow of her soul.

  “That’s back home,” Duncan said, coming up to the two women. “That’s back home, before it was damaged in a raid. David always loved to fish there—he did everything outdoors there.”

  But Jo wasn’t listening.

  “My greatest fear now is forgetting,” Jo said softly.

  The old woman took Jo’s hand in hers; her skin was soft and smooth, like a baby’s.

  “Forgetting how he looked, how he sounded, the words he said. Once I lose that—lose the memory, I mean—then I’ve lost him forever.”

  Jo stood, rooted in place, until the boys’ mother managed to finally, gently pry her away, get her to sit down again, to take some brandy.

  Then the clock over the mantle was striking 11:30. “My curfew, ma’am, I must get started back.”

  And the old woman insisted that Duncan escort her. Jo smiled at her stubborn determination. Did their mother know what wild places she had walked alone in? Jo tried to compare London with North Africa or Sicily or Occupied France, to explain it to her. But the older woman would hear none of it, and Duncan was already putting on his hat, a silk scarf superfluous in the heat; she was being kissed by Kit and shaking hands with their uncle and when she came up to David’s mother she had the picture of David in her hands and she gave it to her. Jo took it and she and Duncan started down the front steps. Then she turned and ran back to his family—David’s family—hugging them each in turn, holding on to them, crying.

  “Now I know why he loved you all. I would have loved you too.”

  DUNCAN GAVE HER his arm, and it had been so long since anyone had made the gesture that she had looked stupidly at him for a second before registering what it meant. “Oh, oh, yes, thank you.” They walked down the street the way Jo had come earlier that day, stepping gingerly over sandbags, over holes in the road, under great elms, stately and dark in the night.

  “Good evening, governor,” someone said, and Duncan touched his free hand to the brim of his hat as they walked past. If David had made Jo feel like she was running barefoot across the moors, Duncan was the very soul of propriety, of refined manners—here was a man who would always know which fork to use, how to pronounce the names of difficult hors d’oeuvres. He was sophistication itself, and Jo found it hard to believe he was the son of a Scottish farmer. They stepped out from under some overhanging boughs Duncan held back for her, and she found herself eyeing him surreptitiously.

  “Go ahead, look,” he said, with a little laugh.

  Jo was ashamed, but she couldn’t resist. She was hungry for David, starving for him. She looked at Duncan as if she were memorizing every inch of his face.

  Duncan smiled and they walked on, Jo devouring his profile, his gestures in the light of the streetlamps, against the canopy of stars. He prattled on about London and his club and where you could get a fairly decent steak and the DeSoto he wanted to buy from America when they lifted the restrictions and started making civilian cars again. Jo looked at him, at his mouth that was David’s, but the words were all wrong, and she wondered for a second if David would have been like this too in peacetime. Duncan seemed to read her thoughts and broke off in the middle of a sentence.

  “You’re comparing me to my brother—”

  Jo started to protest.

  “No, no, I don’t mind. David was a wonderful person, but you’re wondering—what? If this is what he’d be like?”

  “Please, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to do it—”

  “Not to worry, sweetheart,” and he smiled again, his eyebrows raised coyly. “I’ll tell you honestly. No, my brother and I were quite different people.”

  Please stop using past tense. Please.

  “He never seemed to develop a taste for the finer things in life—no, that’s not quite fair. Well, David and I disagreed, let’s say, about what the finer things in life really were.”

  They were at Jo’s barracks now; the clock tower above the colossal building read five minutes to twelve.

  “I had no desire to live out my life as a Highland herdsman. Can you even imagine?”

  And Jo couldn’t, looking at him now, the smooth lines of his tailored suit, the pearly white of his scarf, perfectly tied; she could not imagine him whistling for the sheep to come down, to be fed, to be sheared. Singing and laughing in the sunlight.

  “The ironic thing is that David had the real refinement out of the two of us, as rough as he seemed on the outside. If I had one-tenth of that—”

  He looked past her for a moment, frowning; then he shrugged and came back.

  “He was a great one for poetry, he was. For singing, for talking about life, about what he felt in his soul—that’s it, exactly. David was soulful—anyway, more soulful than I am, honey.”

  Jo knew that was why she loved David, loved him in the present tense. That was what she had recognized beneath his lice-ridden clothes, in the letters she wrote for him. Even in his feverish ramblings he had prayed, recited poetry; whether it made sense to her or not, he had done it, it had been a part of him, so deeply ingrained it would never leave him—not even if he died. No one could take that from him, not ever.

  The hands of the old clock inched closer together—they were nearly vertical now.

  “Thank you for walking me home.”

  And for talking about David—thank you for talking about David.

  “Could I call on you tomorrow?”

  Jo panicked.

  “I can’t, Duncan, it—it would be selfish—it wouldn’t be fair. Looking at you, I see David.”

  He stepped closer to her, was facing her now; in the half-light he looked more like David than ever.

  “Thank you,” she said again, slowly mouthing the words. “Thank your mother again for me. For the picture.” She was almost whispering.

  His eyes were the same, his eyes and his mouth were the same; the pale skin under the dark head of hair. She felt herself slipping—she was mesmerized.

  “Oh, I have something for you too. Something of David’s.”

  The Milky Way spread out above them, a swath of pure light taking up the whole sky.

  “This is from David.”

  And he kissed her, a simple kiss, the kiss of a man used to kissing every girl he walked home good-night. But then Jo kissed him back, and it was so violent, so desperate, he drew her close instinctively, and her hand was behind his head in an instant and it felt like David’s, her fingers were in his hair—and she was back in the hospital tent and here right now and the truck was honking outside and the rain came down through the canvas and soaked them both where they stood beneath a sea of stars and he was David and she was his and she was cursing him and loving him and telling him all he had to do was live.

  The clock struck twelve, and Jo stepped back, horrified, covering her mouth.

  Duncan was apologizing: “I had no right, I’m sorry, I—I didn’t understand—”

  But she was running up the stairs, leaving no glass slipper behind, no prince to follow her. She was running and crying, and she pulled open the door and pushed past the matron without explanation just as the last chime sounded and the old spinster locked the door for the night.

  14

  Kay Elliott

  February 3, 1945, Santo Tomas Internment Camp,

  Manila, Philippines

  In the end, the cavalry came. MacArthur pushed through Manila without securing the ground he covered, even bringing his injured along with him; time was of the essence for the internees at Santo Tomas, and he knew time was running out. The Forty-Fourth Tank Division, the First Cavalry rolled right through the gates and played their searchlights over the compound. A soldier walked in front and called out for survivors: Are there any Americans here? Is anyone left? Then the prisoners pounded on doors and called from windows: You betcha we’re h
ere! We’re in here! The Japanese commander had given the order to kill them all—to light the barrels of gasoline stacked in the stairwells and burn them alive—but the tanks had been too fast, had come in time, and the doors were broken down and then the courtyard was filled, and people were cheering, were screaming, people were crying.

  Kay heard some of it. There was motion and sound where it had been still for so long; there were bright lights playing on the ceiling where all had been blacked out before. She was carried downstairs and laid down on the hard ground—there were others, all around her. The new soldiers looked like supermen—they were so healthy, so filled out, they looked like gods. People were hugging each other and dancing and hugging each other again, but all this was happening off to one side. Kay had to turn her eyes as far as she could to see the celebration. She was a little distance away, lying with many others in a corner of the courtyard where the searchlights didn’t play. Then she realized where she was. Nearby there were doctors and medics and internees already volunteering, already helping out only minutes after liberation—but she had triaged patients herself, she knew how it was divided: those likely to survive no matter what care they received, those likely to die no matter what care they received, those for whom immediate care might make a difference. And those beyond help. The morgue.

  The bodies around her were still, too still. No one called out, no one complained, there wasn’t even a whisper or a moan rising off of them. The soldiers were busy securing the buildings, going floor to floor; the Japanese had retreated to the educational building just behind Kay. They were holding the Americans trapped there hostage, Kay could hear the angry American and Japanese negotiators going at it, back and forth—You damn well better give them up, you bastard . . . Not without safe passage to city limits . . . You can all go to hell . . . So can the hostages, back and forth, back and forth. Kay had to make herself heard, make herself known, before they forgot all about her, before they buried her alive. She tried moving, but her legs wouldn’t budge; her brain sent the message to lift her arm, but all that happened was her little pinky twitched twice.

  “Where’d you put her, you blockheads?” came a voice. “She’s not with the injured anywhere. Yes, I’m a nurse, I’ll help you in one second, doc, but I have to find out where your men put my—oh shit,” and then Sandy’s voice broke off midsentence. “You two orderlies, come with me.” Kay heard them give her flak about it, and then one of them yelped, “Hey, she slapped me,” and then four strong hands were lifting Kay up, off the ground, out of her grave, and Kay managed to whisper, “Not. Dead. Yet.”

  THE C54E LANDED in Hawaii. The nurses wore new uniforms flown in from Australia, ten sizes too big; they had them pinned, had them rolled up to stay in place. Their caps were newly issued, snatched so quickly off the assembly line they didn’t have insignia yet—no caduceus, no eagle, no stars. Photographers were there when they stepped off the plane, someone put leis over their heads and the girls knelt to kiss the ground. A man made a speech, and everyone cheered, and they were driven off to a base hospital for their physicals.

  “Step on the scale, miss,” the doctor said. He was big-boned and bulky and dressed all in white; he reminded her of Mr. McCann, the butcher back home when she’d been a kid.

  He scribbled something on his clipboard, looking quickly up at Kay.

  “How much do you weigh, miss? I mean, before the Japs took you captive?”

  Kay thought back to her Army physical, when she had joined the Nursing Corps in New York. “We only take women in perfect health,” the recruiter had emphasized, smiling. “You’ll do nicely, miss.”

  “A hundred and twenty-five pounds, sir. Although I’ve lost a little since then.”

  The doctor looked at her again through his rimmed glasses. The lenses had fingerprints all over them. She wondered it didn’t bother him, wondered why he didn’t clean them off. He wrote something down, then held the chart to his chest, arms crossed in front of him, looking at her strangely. Kay wondered what was wrong. She was so much stronger now, so much better than she had been in Manila, on the transport. She could walk and talk again, she was healthy, she had eaten every day for a week, and for a week before that she had been able to keep down coffee. Well, after the first few days anyway.

  “Sir?”

  There was no mistaking it. The man’s eyes had gone red, they were shining and brimming behind his dirty glasses. Then he came to attention and saluted her—saluted a woman, a full rank beneath him—and everyone else in the clinic stopped and stared.

  “Seventy-four pounds, Lieutenant.”

  THE SUN POURED into the railway carriage, and Kay looked out at the Pennsylvania scenery streaming past. She was nearly home after all this time, after the thousands of days and miles behind her. The conductor had called out—he had really called out—Mount Carmel, next stop, Mount Carmel. Kay looked at the fields already green with last year’s winter wheat, at the red buds ready to burst on the bare maple trees. It was drafty in the passenger car reserved just for her, and Kay put her hand up against the windowpane, feeling its smooth coolness; she had been hot for so long, it felt delicious. She never wanted to be hot again. She looked out at the small farms, at the mountains showing gray, showing blue in the distance. It was March, and she was going home. A month ago she had been in Santo Tomas, in hell, and here she was nearly back.

  When they had arrived in California, the nurses had been given six days off. Six days. After being in captivity for three years. The head nurse at their new barracks had told them, straight-faced, that they’d get six days’ leave, and no one laughed because that would have been Sandy’s job. Sandy would have laughed, and covered her red mouth, and said, “No, no, I’m sorry,” and then burst out laughing again. Everyone knew it and no one said anything, because Sandy was dead, they had buried her back in Manila. Beautiful, faithful Sandy, who had been untouchable, who had been invincible, who had seen Kay through hell and survived the entire fucking war in the Pacific. But after she found Kay lying there in that graveyard, the Japanese had started shelling the camp, and a little while later they had found Sandy’s body, crushed under the plaster and mortar of the hospital floor above her. She had been feeding a baby in the nursery. Its mother was dead, its father was dead. One minute Sandy had been cooing and cradling the child—and the next there was the telltale whistle, then the crash of glass and fire and stone. But she had gone down as she had lived, throwing her body over the tiny infant in that last second. They had heard the baby crying as they dug Sandy out. The back of her head was smashed in, and half her face was gone, but the baby was fine, the baby was crying for the other half of its bottle.

  Kay thought of Sandy, who had saved her life a dozen times over; of everyone they were leaving behind them; of Aaron. She was returning home as Kay Elliott. No one knew she had married. She had loved Aaron and worshiped Aaron, and he was perfect. He would remain eternally perfect, more perfect than he ever could have been if he had lived. But the end had come too soon, before they were ready, before either of them could even write home about it, about them. The minister who had married them had died, and the witnesses (Sandy had been maid of honor) had died, and even the Army offices where marriage records were kept had gone up in smoke when the Japanese attacked. If she had had her baby—if the Japanese had not stolen even that from her—it might have been different. She would have found his parents, gone to California, seen the vineyard that he played in as a boy, that would have been his, and then his son’s, one day. But Aaron was dead, and his son was dead, and she wanted to make no claim on his family. She knew Aaron would have wanted her to, but this was one thing she wasn’t willing to do, even for him—she would not share him. No, Aaron had been perfect, their love had been perfect, and she was a nurse (she was so empty and dead inside, that’s all she had left) and that was what she was and how she’d support herself, that’s how she’d live. She would ask for nothing from his family. Nothing.

  As they passed the crossings,
people outside waved and cheered.

  “Twenty-five thousand,” Miss Billings, her chaperone for the trip, had said delightedly, popping her head into the carriage for a moment. “Twenty-five thousand people are lining up along the route, to cheer you on, honey. To welcome you home.”

  Home.

  She had called home long-distance when she got to the States. It was late in Pennsylvania, nearly midnight, when the call went through. Kay had asked the Navy ensign to make the call, to break it to her parents gently, so they wouldn’t hear Kay’s voice right off and faint or have a heart attack. And then she was listening to her mother’s voice—small and tinny across that great nation—and all her mother could do at first was cry and thank God and say Kay’s name over and over again. But when Kay asked for her father, asked about her brother, the line went dead for a moment. Her mother’s voice had trembled, and she was saying, Dear, they died, they died years ago. Her brother in Africa in ’42, and her father in his bed a few months later. The black soot in his lungs from a lifetime of mining had finally claimed him, taking him back into the earth. Kay’s heart had stopped, and she’d felt queer, gone numb all over. Someone she had thought was alive, someone she had loved in the present tense, in the here and now, had been dead and buried for years, the grass grown green, then brown, over his grave with the passing of spring and winter and another spring and winter again. Kay was going home. But not to the home she remembered.

  The train pulled into the station. It didn’t look like her hometown at all; she couldn’t see the sidewalks or the streets because they were filled with people. She didn’t recognize anyone—even the mayor was new. He was motioning to her to step forward onto the platform, he was yelling and giving her the key to the city, but she couldn’t hear anything for the cheering, for the boys’ choir singing along with the brass band right behind them. She couldn’t hold all the flowers the little girls brought up to her. Boy Scouts kept parading around and around in the confetti that poured down from the second floor of the Feed ’n’ Seed—teenage boys were tossing it out with pitchforks. She had a sash on now, over her dress uniform with its new Bronze Star, its oak leaf clusters, and then she was standing in the back of a convertible—they were going so slow, it was easy to stand up—inching their way through the crowd that kept crying and cheering and tossing streamers at her. If it had been summer, they would have torn up the flower beds and thrown those at her too.