Lovely War(105)
A slim circlet of gold.
“If you think I can live without you, Miss Windicott,” James said, “you don’t know me at all.”
DECEMBER 1942
Handkerchiefs
IF ONE COULD listen with a god’s ear, in that dark hotel room, in the pregnant hour before dawn, one might hear the moist sound of immortal gods holding back tears.
Hades produces a pile of handkerchiefs. Even Ares takes one.
Aphrodite turns her gorgeous eyes to her husband.
“Do you see?” she asks. “Why I envy them?”
Ares stuffs his used hankie behind a cushion. “You mean, you’d trade places with her?”
“It’s easy to give an answer for a choice that will never be offered to me,” she says. “Yes. In less than a heartbeat, I would.”
The god of war shakes his head. “You’re the goddess of beauty,” he says. “Why would you ever trade your looks—your perfection—for her mortality? Her scars?”
Apollo and Hades exchange a despairing look.
“We see what we’re capable of seeing,” says Hades.
Ares rolls his eyes. “Don’t be cryptic. I’ve had enough of that.”
Hephaestus grips the armrests of his chair and prepares to duck. In case Hades takes issue with Ares’s tone.
“Whether you see a scarred face,” says Apollo, “or a love for the ages, is up to you.”
APHRODITE
Elevens—1918 and Beyond
WEEKS PASSED. Autumn grew colder and grayer, but four young hearts barely noticed.
And then, a miracle: the war ended. The Kaiser abdicated, a new German government formed, and German delegates signed the armistice, at 11 a.m. on November 11: 11/11, 11:00. Most soldiers on either side of the Front just watched the morning pass, and then turned around and left. In some spots, hostilities carried on right until the minute hand struck eleven.
One must be precise about killing, it seems.
It took a long time for the American Expeditionary Force to bury its dead, pack up, and return to the States. While they waited, Aubrey Edwards’s 369th Division traveled to Germany, becoming the first Allied division to reach the Rhine—something the Allies had believed they could do before summer’s end, 1914. Or by Christmas. Always, always, “by Christmas.”
* * *
When they weren’t busy, Aubrey spent time in a French military hospital, visiting émile. This poilu had lost an arm in the last week of fighting, and he had four years’ worth of accumulated curses to fling—not at his wound, but at its timing.
“Where were you, you stupid injury, when I could’ve used you to get out of this wretched war?” he would roar. “But non, you stayed away, leaving me healthy and sound, so the Germans could piss on me with their shells and bullets year after year, and now, now, when it’s finally over, now you show up?”
He waved his stump at the sky.
“Nurse,” émile would say, “fetch us a bottle of wine, and a piano, so my useless friend here, with all his fingers, can put them to some good use and get my mind off my sorrows.”
émile was a great favorite with all the nurses.
“Who are you calling useless?” demanded Aubrey.
“You, you swine,” émile said. “Some of us are working hard here, having our toenails trimmed by the nurses and our buttocks wiped—very pretty nurses they are, too—and you just sit there, like you’ve got nothing better to do than come laugh at your poor friend émile, who taught you everything you know.”
“Well, you’ve got me there,” Aubrey said. “After a year of fighting, and weeks of rebuilding roads all day long, and playing jazz all over France, I come here just to prove how useless I am.”
“I always knew you’d amount to no good,” émile said. “I told my lieutenant, ‘Don’t pair me with this useless piano player, for God’s sake,’ but does anybody listen to émile? Nobody listens to émile.”
Half a dozen nurses stood in the hall, giggling and listening to émile.
“I’ll die a lonely man,” roared he, waving his stump around.
“I can see that,” said Aubrey.
“Nurse!” bellowed émile. “Fetch me that piano!”
And one day, the nurses actually did. émile laughed so hard, he fell off his bed. From that day on, Aubrey’s concerts drew patients from the entire hospital, until finally émile recovered enough to be sent home. One of the nurses, it seemed, had resigned at around the same time and would be traveling home with him.
He seized Aubrey with one hand and one stump and gave him a whiskery kiss on each cheek. “You’ll come see us, my friend,” he declared. “And we’ll come see you in New York. We are brothers, you and me.”
“Brothers,” said Aubrey.
* * *
James made it home long before Aubrey. After a stop in Chelmsford, he went to Poplar and stayed with his uncle to be as near to Hazel as possible. He took her to dinner. To museums and winter festivals and Christmas concerts. To J. Lyons tea shops.