The Fire by Night

by Teresa Messineo

  They stopped at Saint Paul’s, and everyone grew grave—except the little boys, who were turning somersaults in the rectory yard and wondering why no one stopped them. They went inside and knelt down and no one spoke and it was silent, and that was the best part, the part Kay would remember forever, all cool marble and tapered candles and the morning light coming in through the stained glass and it was Christ in the garden and He was in agony and she looked up and prayed, I know now, now I know.

  When the car started up again, it could hardly move. They were almost at her house, and people had camped out, had lined the streets and yards the night before so they could see her, could be there when their war hero came home. And then, just as she had imagined it, just as she had dreamed it a thousand times before—in Manila and Corregidor and the jungle before that—she saw the roof of her house come into view as they rounded the corner. It looked the same, thank God, in a world gone mad everything here was the same—the birdbath in the yard, the ceramic lovers kissing under the willow tree, the vines creeping up the chimney painted white. The chimney pot was still cracked, it still needed to be replaced after all this time, and that in itself broke her heart. She was so happy, so very happy something small and meaningless like that could still exist, could still matter. Then she heard someone screaming, high and shrill over the roar of the crowd. The car had stopped—it couldn’t go any farther. Kay jumped out, and people grabbed at her, thumped her on the back, but it didn’t matter, she was running forward, pressing her way through the neighbors and strangers and families wishing they were welcoming home their own son, their own daughter. The voice kept screaming, and suddenly she realized it was her own.

  “Mother! Mother!” she was yelling.

  Her mother was on the front porch. Kay had known she would be there—not at the chaotic station, not in the silent church—she had dreamed she’d be there and now she was, standing on the weathered, paint-flecked porch, welcoming her daughter home. Her mother was wearing her best dress (at least, it had been her best dress four years ago) and someone had curled her hair and put silly little bows in it and she had forgotten to take off her apron. She stood there with her arms outstretched, moving her mouth and saying words no one could hear, no one but God.

  Mother, Mother.

  And then Kay was in her arms, and they held on to each other and they were all alone in that sea of humanity, they were all the family they had, they were all they had left in the world.

  Kay was home.

  15

  Jo McMahon

  June 1945, St. Bees, Cumbria, England

  Jo stood in line at the front desk. The seaside hotel was bustling: bells were ringing, newspapers were being folded and refolded, page boys trotted to keep up with overweight women telling them, Pick up this suitcase, no, that hat box, can’t you just carry them both, now there’s a good boy. The smell of sausages and eggs came wafting in from dining room B. A radio was playing as mothers counted off the heads of their children before heading down to the beach. The sun reflected on the water far out at sea, and the air was clean and bright and hard. It was a perfect day, and the proprietor wore the exhausted and peaceful expression of someone finally turning a profit.

  “No, I’m sorry, sir,” she was explaining, tucking a pencil into her disheveled hair, then removing it to check off a room on her list. “We are completely out of rooms with private baths.”

  “But I must have a bath, I simply must.”

  The conversation went on, the lady proprietor not really minding; this was a ritual she did every day. What did it matter; the bills were getting paid, she was putting a little aside even.

  “But I must—”

  “We have a very nice suite, one overlooking the garden.”

  “But the bath—”

  “It shares a full bath with only two other rooms.”

  That would never do, it couldn’t possibly do, and the conversation went around and around again. Of course he would take it in the end, he’d be a fool not to, even he had begun to realize that already. It was such a perfect day, he should be on the beach. Everyone should be on the beach.

  “Well, if you’re absolutely sure that’s all you have—”

  “The very best I have at this time, sir.”

  The great register swiveled around to accommodate him, to accept his reluctant signature.

  “If anything else should become available—” he couldn’t resist saying, a parting shot.

  “Oh, certainly, sir. I will inform you at once.”

  The woman smiled again, a tired, good-natured smile. She was dimples all over—her cheeks, her chin, even her elbows. She was fat, to be sure, but proud to be fat after a time of such shortages. A little meat on your bones never hurt anyone, it certainly hadn’t hurt her. She glanced up at the next person in line, a lady officer, and chuckled contentedly to herself. You could knock the girl over with a feather.

  “Yes, miss, looking for a room? I have just one left, the very nicest—although I regret to say it doesn’t come with its own bath.”

  Jo hesitated, and the woman went on by rote.

  “Oh, I daresay you could look around town, you’re welcome to, but I happen to know everyone’s sold out, completely sold out—the weather’s so fine, and it’s not always that way here, miss, I can tell you. You’re quite lucky, you know, coming here in the height of the season. Very lucky indeed, but I shouldn’t like to do it myself, too risky, you know, the way rooms can sell out.”

  The lady officer still hadn’t risen to the bait. The hotel had half a dozen rooms still vacant, but she couldn’t possibly know that.

  “You’re American, aren’t you?” the proprietor asked, looking at the Silver Star, the golden eagle.

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m sure your hotel is very lovely—it looks lovely—but you see, I haven’t come for a room.”

  The woman’s face darkened. “Now, I hope you’ve not come soliciting, young woman,” she said, her voice changing completely. “I’ve posted out front—out back too, as your kind insists on coming at all hours, and through the back doors no less—no, I would not like to take out a subscription or buy a bond or so much as a postage stamp from you to help the war effort. The war in Europe is over and—and—” For a second the woman stopped looking angry and just looked terribly sad instead. Jo looked at her face, and it was like watching a piece of paper suddenly crumple up.

  “No, ma’am. I haven’t come for that either.”

  The woman was truly confused. Jo’s dress uniform was impeccable, her shoes polished, her luggage new. Here was no charity case—someone down on her luck, asking for a meal and a chance to sleep out in the kitchen.

  “You’re not in trouble, are you?” Her eyes grew wide and she nodded her head encouragingly.

  Jo laughed. “No, ma’am. Not that kind.”

  “Well, what is it then?” the woman exploded, exasperated. “Jasper, come here,” she snapped. Jo thought she was calling for a dog, but a very small man with bad eyes turned around from where he had been sorting the mail a moment before.

  “Yes, love?”

  “Oh, there you are. What are you doing underfoot? No, never mind. See to the rest of these guests. This woman here—”

  “How do you do, miss?” the man said, squinting.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “Never mind about that, just take care of the rest of these check-ins. This woman”—she motioned for Jo to step into an adjoining office with frosted-glass doors with cherries painted around the border and a crooked sign hanging off one of them reading PRIVATE—“seems to have a story to tell.”

  She smiled broadly, and all of a sudden she was a human being.

  Jo sat in that office for half an hour. At first, the woman wouldn’t hear of it: It’s ridiculous, you don’t know what you’re saying. But Jo had stayed firm, repeated herself: she was done with nursing, done with the military. Her office in London had closed, its personnel were moving back to the States or to the Far East; the
y were gearing up for big things in the Pacific. She wasn’t cleared for duty—she was a liability, really. They had said she could go home, get out, but she had stayed behind. She couldn’t go home, not yet. And then, over biscuits and tea—This is the good tea, don’t worry, not the kind I serve my guests—Jo had told her about David. About how he was still missing—how they had lost all trace of him—how he was from Scotland and St. Bees was halfway there, how this was the third place she had stopped at today on her way up from London. She needed to find work, to make a go of it—I have to do something, ma’am.

  “But you’re a lady,” the woman had said, truly shocked.

  Jo smiled. “I wasn’t so much of a lady, not that kind anyway, before the war. Out of my uniform, you wouldn’t know me from anyone.”

  “But what would you do? My husband and I run the desk ourselves.”

  “I kind of had laundry in mind, ma’am.”

  “Laundry?” the woman spluttered.

  “I figured, a big place like this, in the summer, must make a powerful lot of laundry.”

  “God knows we do, and the silly little chits never can remember to iron things properly. But if you think I’d let a decorated American officer do laundry—”

  “Please,” and Jo grabbed on to the woman’s flabby arm. “Please.”

  And she looked like her heart would break.

  “I need to do something where I won’t have any—any terrible responsibilities. Not have to interact much with people for a while—do something mechanical, mindless even—”

  The woman noticed Jo’s hands were trembling; she had forgotten to hide them.

  “I need to not think. I mean, be kept so busy I can’t think—not all of the time.”

  The woman looked at Jo like she was crazy; her mouth was open in shock or disgust or disbelief. Jo let go of the matron’s arm and stood up, sighing.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve taken up too much of your time already. You couldn’t possibly understand. Can you tell me when the northbound train comes in?”

  But the woman’s face was all crumpled again, like it had been before, but worse.

  “No,” she said, blowing her nose loudly into an embroidered handkerchief, frayed around the edges. “No, I can understand. I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier, when I thought you were looking for donations. It’s just—I feel I gave enough—my son, you see—” and she blew her nose again.

  “I’m sorry,” Jo said, tiredly, for the thousandth time, the ten-thousandth time.

  “No, no, he’s alive.” The woman stood up, straightening out her skirt, brushing the crumbs off the lace on her blouse. “But his mind, miss. They say he’s lucky to be alive, but his mind—it’s not there. He just lies in bed—I have the neighbor sit with him while I’m working, I sit up with him at night, but he doesn’t need it really, he doesn’t even know I’m there. He just keeps looking up at the ceiling and counting. He hasn’t stopped counting, miss, since he came back. They say, in time—” Her voice broke, and she lifted up her hands in a helpless gesture.

  The woman gave a little snort and sniffed loudly again. She took a deep breath in and let it out all at once and wound the little watch she wore on a gold chain around her neck.

  “He gave a lot, miss. You did too, I’m sure. You all did. And if all you’re asking for is a little time, some space to heal, maybe forget—well, I’ll be damned if I don’t give it to you.”

  Jo’s face lit up in surprise.

  The woman was pumping Jo’s hand up and down, up and down, and smiling.

  “You’re hired.”

  THE SUMMER SPED by, and it was hard to believe there had ever been a war—in St. Bees anyway. To Jo, the American, the place seemed timeless. Back home, the oldest church she’d ever stepped foot in was St. Peter’s, in the city, built around the time of the Revolutionary War. But in St. Bees, any aspect of the village commanded a view of the Priory, tall and towering above it all, built over sacred ground—back in the eleven hundreds. Jo would sneak inside its silent nave, all rose-red and beautiful, a red-patterned carpet running down the aisle, ornate metalwork filling in the arches. It was ageless, it was solid, it would stand forever. The place was holy.

  Of course, she didn’t have much time for sightseeing, for exploring or holidaymaking. Her employer, Mrs. Greerson, was true to her word: there was plenty of laundry to keep both her mind and her hands busy. Jo washed and ironed, folded and starched, from morning till late afternoon. She took an inordinate pride, a misplaced pleasure, in her work, bringing to it an exactitude that was completely unnecessary. She measured out Farmer’s soap as if it were cc’s of plasma; she heated the iron till the spit on her finger sizzled when she touched it, gauging it carefully like she was sterilizing equipment.

  On some level, Jo realized what she was doing and she told herself it was odd, but not unbalanced. She was trying to clean off the dirt, the grime, to wash the smell of blood out of her hair, her hands, her memory, replacing it with the powerful, stinging smell of bleach. Everything now was white, everything was clean. She had taken a mop and brush and disinfected the laundry room that first day as if they’d be using it for surgery later on. Mrs. Greerson had two enormous Bendix washers in the laundry room that overlooked the kitchen garden, and had even invested in their newest gimmick—something they called a drying machine. But it wasn’t good enough for Jo. No, I don’t mind ironing, ma’am, just wait a minute, I’ll have your sheets for you. They look so much nicer when they’re fresh, when they’re freshly cleaned and ironed.

  Jo had been given a little room of her own on the third floor. It certainly did not have its own bath, and no view to speak of, but it was hers and it was quiet and she kept it immaculately clean. She lined up her pins every night, each hairpin adjacent to but not actually touching its neighbor; she rinsed and dried out her washbasin, setting her pitcher of water for the next day right next to it, filled exactly to the three-quarter mark; she dried off her bar of soap with a towel after using it, then placed it, imprinted side up, on a little porcelain dish.

  She was kind of okay. That’s what she told herself. Kind of okay. She’d been better, of course, but she’d certainly been worse. She was hanging on. She didn’t see Gianni anymore, didn’t see any dead people at all usually. Practically speaking, that had to be a good thing. Sure, she was obsessing about silly little things—washing and rewashing towels that didn’t come out right, for example. Or the way she’d hung up her uniform in the back of the tiny closet, for the last time, like she was burying the dead. She had bought herself six dresses—each exactly the same, plain dresses, gray pinstripe—and hung them up, two inches apart, not letting them touch at all. But that was just a little bit eccentric—unusual perhaps, but harmless—not that strange at all when you really stopped to think about it.

  Jo tried not to think.

  She hadn’t been thinking when she walked into the laundry room that morning, hadn’t been thinking of anything at all. It was early, too early—the dirty laundry wasn’t even down, the maids hadn’t gotten to it yet—and she looked at the sheets she had hung up the night before. They were clean, they were ironed, but they had needed to air, a little air never hurt anything. So she had hung them up, and now she looked at them in the gray light seeping in from the windows high above the enormous steel sinks.

  The sheets were white, they were beautiful, they hung all around her in that spacious room like clouds, like billowing snow. She surveyed their barren perfection with something bordering on satisfaction as she sat down at the great oak table with a cup of coffee she had brewed herself; no one had been up yet in the kitchen. One second the sheets were pristine, flawless—and the next they were covered in blood, spattered with blood, and she held on to her cup with both hands and repeated, “It isn’t real, it isn’t real,” like a child, like a little girl trying to wake up from a dream. “It isn’t real,” she said again, eyes shut tight, even though she could feel them, feel their fingers picking at her sleeve, tugging at her arm. “T
hey’re not there, they’re dead,” but she could hear them breathing, feel their hot breath on the back of her neck. She could smell them too, smell the blood and the rot rising off of them, and the smell of bleach was gone from the room, she couldn’t find a trace of it, although a minute before it had been so strong it had stung her eyes when she came in. It smelled so bad, like the amputation dump in Sicily, like the tent where they had kept the dead and she’d gone corpse by corpse looking for one of the nurses, killed in her bunk when the shell dropped. The tent was so hot, it stunk, she couldn’t find Ilsa, couldn’t find all of her. Then the whispers started and she said, “Please, God, no,” still holding on to her cup, but her head was down now, on the table. She couldn’t listen, she couldn’t let herself listen, because at first they’d make sense, they’d tell her things only she could understand. But then the voices would change, no longer be the voice of her brother or her mother or her friend, but become shrill and piercing, in a pitch she could no longer hear with her ears but only with her mind, cold and terrible. The words wouldn’t be words, but they would always mean the same thing—despair and anguish and death. She cried out, as David had done, with some prayer from the past, something memorized in grade school when the words hadn’t made any sense: “Soul of Christ, sanctify me, Body of Christ, save me.” Save me, oh Lord, from my madness, you saved the lunatics, save me, come to me and save me, Lord, for I have no one. Come to me. It was a prayer and it was a command and she opened her eyes—not to her Savior but to Mrs. Greerson, shuffling into the room in her worn slippers, eyes bloodshot and puffy, half her hair pulled up messily into spit curls. She yawned.