She lifted her eyes from her notebook. He was looking at the place it should have been, the drape in the sheets, the leg that wasn’t there but still somehow throbbed and burned and itched.
“I can’t either,” she said.
“It might have had an ingrown toenail, but I’m not sure now. I can’t remember. It looked like all the others.”
She had the sudden thought maybe she would cut her hair, cut it all off in a handful at the base of her scalp. She would like to be shorn. She would like to lose something that didn’t matter.
“We’ll find something,” she said. “Something that works. And once you’re better, we’ll go back to Vevey and our house and our garden.”
“Our garden? It will have to be your garden now.”
“Don’t be silly, darling. We’ll starve.”
Tim had started to tremble and blanch. The nurse was on her way.
“Tell me, Mary Frances,” he said. “Tell me how we will go back.”
And she began.
Vevey, Switzerland
Spring 1939
It would be the last time they took the train to Milan. They had no reason to take it now, no business in Milan, but they used to love to take the train, and these last times were what was left to them. Le Paquis was sold, their trinkets sorted, boxes packed. At the end of the week they would take the Normandie to New York, and on to California, the new home they would buy in the desert, the whole of Europe slouching toward war.
They spent money as if it were paper now: they bought books and left them in cafés, they drank gimlets and good wines and ate whatever they pleased: potato chips and beer for dinner, plates of fried minnows sparkling with salt. They bought gifts for everyone they knew, vellum stationery and broad-nibbed pens, Italian paintbrushes, hats, perfume. They bought fourteen months’ worth of Analgeticum, each ampoule wrapped in a cardboard comb and sleeve, nested like honeybees in a steamer trunk she’d pushed beneath the narrow bed at the Hôtel Trois Couronnes. When the Analgeticum ran out, Tim would lose his other leg. If he lived that long.
They bought the drugs from Dr. Nigst, and only the Analgeticum helped Tim’s pain, not the cobra venom or bee stings, the careful diet or the mountain air, not morphine or whiskey or beating his head bloody against the hospital wall. And they sold the Analgeticum only in Switzerland, where the end of the world was coming soon.
The full trunk beneath the bed became a kind of liquid calendar. They had fourteen months. They knew how it was going to go; they had it all locked away. What was there to do but take the train once more to Milan? What was there to do but be together?
* * *
Tim woke, his midnight shot run out and the electric licking in his guts already chattery and loud. He watched the ivory face of the clock. He could hear Mary Frances breathing like the breath of the clock, slow measured rounds, the minute hand, the seconds, the dial spinning in him now faster and faster until he keened on his springs. He reached for Mary Frances, and Mary Frances reached for the ampoule and syringe. She scored the glass top with her teeth to break it open, drawing up the dose, fast into a muscle, any muscle—his arm, his hip, his thigh. He watched her face now, still sleeping or half sleeping, the thick hum of sleep on her breath and the needle aspirating in her closed hand. She rubbed the spot she’d hit and whispered things he could not focus to hear. Seconds more, seconds more; they waited.
It took longer to do everything now. Once the shot hit, she swung herself across his lap, one foot flat on the bed beside his hip, watching as he pressed himself against her. She smiled at him—oh, the mornings, the slow turns she made, her dark hair loosely braided down her back, her eyes always open, her hands on the sharp new jut of his ribs. It was June; they had been married now three weeks, four days, and they rubbed themselves against each other every morning in one way or another, like flints and sticks, and half the time, miraculously, they caught.
The shot took hold and gave him time.
Later she bathed and dressed. Her head was empty in the morning; the day had yet to wear her down. She was working on a new book, several books, the coupling of sentences harmonic and loud like the coupling of trains. The love-life of an oyster is a curious one. Spatting and spawning, spawning and spatting. She relied on rhythms now, the blue ribbon in her hair matching the blue in her sweater, the blue shadow she painted on her eyelids down by the lash. Spawning and spatting, spatting and spawning.
She called the line aloud into the other room.
“Tim? What do you think?”
He was probably asleep. But she knew one day she could do something wrong with the needle or the dose, she could leave too much within his reach. She knew he was probably asleep, but her hands gripped the edge of the marble vanity, and for a full five seconds, she couldn’t bring herself to go and see.
Then, “Darling,” he said. “I didn’t hear it. Come tell me again.”
* * *
The train left the station at ten, Tim navigating the narrow passageways with his crutches; he never stuttered at it, as if the leg had never been necessary in the first place. He loved the swaying motion of the cars along the tracks, loved to watch Mary Frances sway in front of him, would follow her anywhere. To their compartment, and then the restaurant car, the dark scarred tables and wide views, the faded advertisements off-kilter above the windows, as they had always been.
And the same people worked the train as always; in the restaurant car, the old waiter and the young, their black jackets and long Parisian aprons, leaning against the bar of the kitchen with small glasses of vermouth and cigarettes. When the old waiter came for their order, tears leaked from both eyes that he did not wipe away; they might have been for them, for this journey, his country, it didn’t matter, really. Mary Frances told him she had missed their trips together. Tim asked about the weather. No one acknowledged the cause or need for crying.
“Your Asti, as always,” he said. “And something else?”
Tim tipped his hand to Mary Frances. She didn’t look at the menu, and the old waiter didn’t write anything down. In all their trips to Milan, all the things she’d eaten on this train, the old waiter had always pretended to listen to her order and then brought her what he wanted to, whatever was fresh and good from the kitchen, what he thought she’d like. She was flattered to be treated so carefully. Still, she said some things, he nodded and left, and she turned back to Tim.
They leaned into each other across the table, threading their hands together; they touched whenever they were near enough now, Tim’s foot resting on the seat next to her, his crutches by the wall. The train chuffed and runneled through the Alps, still distantly cragged with snow. Their Asti arrived, popped and poured for them to toast their future or their pasts, but they just drank it down.
Soon the tunnel would appear ahead of the tracks, and always before they had dreaded it: the echo of their own travel, where they had been and where they were going disappearing in the blackness. Their waiters dreaded it, too, and the chef in his high white hat. But today they sat across from each other, and the dread never came. Whatever was happening to them had already been cast, was here, now. As they slipped into the darkness, Tim whispered something to Mary Frances, and she laughed the kind of low, throaty laugh not heard in public places anymore. The young waiter watched them and sighed.
When the train stopped at Domodossola, they made their way back to their compartment to wait for the border guards. In the corridor, they passed two Blackshirts, a man between them, his hands cuffed to each. You saw that sort of thing all the time now, their three faces sharing the same empty look, and Tim met it squarely, stopping to let them pass.
Their compartment was full of German tourists, their backpacks and girth, their ruddy faces and long legs a tangle in the aisle. They stood politely, to make room.
Tim was hurting now, she could see it in how his hands seemed to shimmer in his lap. She
looked at her watch; it was too soon for another shot. She went into her bag for the pills to hold him, but she would give him a shot if he needed it, she didn’t care anymore. She had come to hate this as much as he did. The border guard appeared at the compartment door, but Mary Frances kept her eyes on Tim, his beautiful birdlike face so taut, his eyes so fragile. She swore she heard something shatter and bent to her purse again. The pills were in here somewhere.
Finally she pressed a tablet into his palm. The compartment door slammed; the guards were running in the corridors. The Germans smelled of hay and sweat, their words chinking low in their throats, but Mary Frances watched Tim. Slowly his face released; he might have been asleep.
* * *
The train had been stopped for too long by the time the young waiter came to fetch them for lunch. He was anxious, his French rushing from him all at once, how wonderful, wonderful to see them both again. He had thought—but then he couldn’t finish that sentence. He hoped—but that one fell short too, finally asking them only to be careful, monsieur, be careful. There was a spot on the passageway that was slick.
The border guards stood by the spreading puddle, and a woman with a broom swept the shards from a broken window into a pile at their feet. Inside, the train had been hosed down. Water still dripped from the glass caught in the frame
“What happened?” Tim asked the waiter.
“It was nothing, nothing. An accident.”
But the waiter’s voice hitched as he rushed ahead, leaving them to their table, little dishes of pickles, salami and sweet butter, a basket of warm bread. He brought a bowl of peeled fava beans, Mary Frances’s favorite, as though that were answer enough.
The old waiter was yelling in the kitchen; he’d torn the sleeve of his black jacket. He waved his hands; the chef continued to smoke passionlessly.
As the old waiter passed, Tim reached out for his arm. “What happened?” he asked again.
The old waiter jerked away. “The bastards,” he said. “It is not my business. I was not there. I didn’t do anything, but look what the bastards did to my coat.”
He turned his head; he might have spat. His face, always given to coldness and crease, seemed fully hateful now. Mary Frances looked out her window, the small station, the black toe of a guard’s boot. Tim leaned back against his seat. He was on the downhill slide of his shot; he’d need another soon, and she’d left the works in the compartment.
Finally, slowly, the train began to move.
The young waiter appeared with a bottle of Chianti. He was sorry; the old man was upset, he was crazy.
“What happened back there?” Tim said.
The young waiter leaned close. “There was a prisoner on the train since Paris, with the Blackshirts. They were bringing him back to Italy. In Domodossola he broke the window, leaned his head out, and pressed his throat—”
The old waiter had seen it happen. It was why the train had stopped so long at the border. Mary Frances looked at Tim, his eyes fluttering closed. She noticed for the first time that the restaurant car was not empty; other passengers seemed poised and listening, the clatter of their plates quiet, their forks in midair. Outside the window, the blue blur of spring rushed past as the train picked up speed. The young waiter touched their arms, and left.
Tim was exhausted now.
“Eat,” she said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Tim?”
“But you should,” he said. “You’ve had too much to drink.”
She looked away. They never talked about too little or too much anymore; they just ate and drank. The accounting would come later.
Their plates arrived, little nests of pasta, and the first mouthful tasted like ashes; she could barely swallow it. Long ago they had been different people who had seemed as complete and solid as the ones they were now. Mary Frances put a hand to her chest, the knot there. She no longer thought of home and the Ranch and the Kennedys, of Al and his new wife and the baby they would finally have, she never thought of Le Paquis, now full of boxes, their cellar full of stores they would never use, and she didn’t think of Tim, standing tall in the rows of their garden, his face tipped back to last summer’s sun. What she had was right in front of her, and she thought, only and always, of that.
But now, bite by bite, the train shattered and heading south, their past lives leaked in. What was there left to do but go along?
Pasadena, California
1943
It was basically done. She pushed away from the desk, her hands coming to rest atop the full basket of her pregnant belly. It pressed before her everywhere now, insistent, ponderous, entirely her own.
She had been writing all day in the tiny rooms at the boardinghouse, rooms that reminded her of so many other places she had written in her life. Her emotions seemed so close to the surface now, and the heat, the last throes of July made her melancholy anyway, but this book was finished, and it was good, she knew it. She’d written it in ten weeks flat.
She’d written to Edith and Rex, the rest of them, that she was taking a leave of absence, that she’d been hired to do some government publicity work, secret, for the war effort, that she’d be incommunicado for some time; she threw in as many official words as she could think of. She’d also said she was thinking of adopting a child.
Instead she had come to Pasadena and rented these rooms through August. She’d spoken to no one but Dr. Bieler and the chambermaid, and because she was weighted with consequence, and because she had nothing better to do, she pounded at her typewriter day and night. To begin at the beginning, to take the measure of her powers, to taste the first thing she remembered tasting and wanted to taste again: from there, she’d written the book she was meant to write, about how she came to be herself, The Gastronomical Me by MFK Fisher. She had written about her grandmother’s boiled dressing and dour face, about Aunt Gwen and the hills above Laguna, about making curried eggs with Anne when they were children, so hot her face flamed for days after. She wrote about crossing the ocean, about Al and Dijon and Tim. Tim was everywhere; she owed this book to him, and in her mind, would owe every book after, would owe everything that happened to her for the rest of her days.
This child, when it was born, would have his name.
And if she said it, by the state of California, it was true. That was the miraculous thing she was learning, that the power to say something with conviction, with grace and beauty, made a story that felt as real as whatever might have been the truth, that these were equal forces in the world, just as powerful as records, maybe even more so. Memory, love, pain: these were the things that people believed. These were the things that made her believe herself. And now if she wanted Tim’s child, this was how she was going to get it, and this had always been how she was going to get it, by saying so.
He had been dead for almost two years, the trunk of ampoules beneath her bed long emptied, despite her half doses, her stretch and pull. In the end, there had been no lying about it. Tim watched her with the last needle in her hand.
“So that’s it,” he said, and she said yes.
She’d turned from him and slipped her dress over her head, a gesture she’d made a thousand times in their life together and yet one that always felt filled with anticipation, his first light touch, the way they always began, and she lay down beside him in the heat and waited.
They looked out over the desert, the blistered sunset. He had a gun; he’d asked her to hide it, but what was a hiding place between them? The night came on, the sounds in the darkness, and she tried to listen only to that, not what she knew would come, but only Tim now, his arms wrapped around her, their lengths pressed together on the bed, and night in the desert beyond.
The sound of the shot, all the way out in the canyon, woke her at dawn.
The tightrope of his pain had required all their time and concentration. They had carved themselves awa
y from everyone to manage it; she wrote to read to him, she cooked to feed him, she lived way out there in the desert to pour herself into him, and now he’d left her. It was a long time before she found a reason to continue on.
Her hand dropped along the dark seam of her belly and disappeared in her lap. She had six more weeks to go. Sometimes it felt as though the parts of her she couldn’t see would never return to her, that she would have to learn to live without her feet, the thatch of hair around her sex. She hadn’t thought about sex in years, though she’d had plenty of it. She hadn’t thought about sex since she stopped having it with Tim.
She was hungry. She ate tiny meals these days, craved lemony things, and spicy things, and beer, which Bieler had said was good for the production of milk. She wouldn’t nurse this baby, though, no matter what Dr. Bieler wanted. Because this baby had been adopted; that was what she planned to say. Until the day she died, that was what she planned to say.
She stood slowly from her chair, the full arc of her form pulling her forward. She needed to move. She stacked her pages and flipped the coverlet up over her pillow, drew a smock over her head. She wanted nothing against her skin these days and dressed only to leave the room, her hair pulled back tightly, her sunglasses and a bright slash of lipstick. She would be back in twenty minutes, but leaving felt as if she’d peeled herself from the cocoon.
Heat shimmered on the asphalt. Sweat ran from her scalp, the backs of her legs, places she had not known sweat was made, and she walked slowly so as not to melt away. Back in her rooms, she would fill the basin with tepid water and sponge herself off, she would wash her hair and let it dry across her pillow as she took a nap, and so dreamily she stepped into the grocers’ on the corner, the fan pitched down hard from the ceiling, blowing its hot breeze against her skin. She collected a bagful of small yellow tomatoes and a carton of blackberries, a loaf of semolina bread, some soft white cheese. She pulled two bottles of soda from the cooler and a chocolate bar: she’d had a sweet tooth and saw no reason not to satisfy it.
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