Crossings (57 page)

“I don't know …” And then he wondered about something. “Did Nick know?”

“Yes.”

He nodded. “What are you going to do now, Liane?” He meant about Nick and she understood him.

“Nothing.”

“But surely—” She shook her head.

“That wouldn't be fair to him. He's a human being, not a yo-yo. A few weeks ago I told him it was over, but now that Armand is dead we can dance on his grave? He was my husband, Uncle George. My husband. And I loved him.” And then she turned away and her shoulders began to shake, and he came to her, sensing her grief in his very soul. She collapsed in his arms then, sobbing almost as she had on the stairs when she'd first read Moulin's letter. “Oh, Uncle George … I killed him … he knew … he must have … about Nick. …”

“Liane, stop that!” He held her shoulders firmly with his hands and shook her gently. “You didn't kill him. That's absurd. The man did a very brave thing for his country, but it didn't just happen. He made a choice a long time ago. He knew the risks. He weighed all the dangers and in his own mind it must have been worth it. That had nothing to do with you. A man makes those kinds of decisions for himself, regardless of other people, even the woman he loves. And I think a hell of a lot more of him now than I did before. But the point is that whether you and Nick fell in love or not, the man did what he felt he had to do. You couldn't have stopped him, you couldn't have changed his mind, and you didn't kill him.” The wisdom of his words slowly got through to her and she eventually stopped crying.

“Do you think that's true?”

“I know it.”

“But what if he suspected? If he heard some change in the tone of my letters—”

“He probably wouldn't have noticed if you'd stopped writing entirely. A man who makes a decision like that, Liane, does it with his entire mind and soul and body. It's rotten luck that he got found out, it's worse than that, it's a tragedy for you and the girls and his country. But you had nothing to do with any of that, and neither did Nick. Don't do that to yourself, Liane. You have to accept it.” She told him then about Armand's last letter and the things that he had said, and she admitted that there were even times when she had wondered if he cared about her, or only his country. George nodded and listened to her late into the night until her head began to nod, and at last she fell asleep on the couch, and he brought a blanket from his room and covered her where she sat. She was totally drained and exhausted.

And when she awoke the next morning, she was surprised at where she was, and touched when she saw the blanket. She remembered talking to him until she drifted off, and she had had visions of Nick and Armand, walking arm in arm and stopping to talk to a man she didn't know. She shuddered to think about it now. She sensed that the man was Moulin. And she didn't want to think about Armand. Even if she never saw him again, she wanted Nick to live. He had a life to live and a son to come home to. And then she walked to the window and looked out at the bay.

“And what about us?” she whispered to the memory of Armand. “What about the girls?” She had no answers to her questions as she went upstairs to wake them.

n July, when Liane received the letter from Moulin, Nick was in the Fiji Islands with Task Force 61, doing a rehearsal for an assault on Guadalcanal. The Japanese had built an airstrip there, and Rear Admiral Fletcher had three carrier groups organizing to take it. And the
Enterprise
, the
Wasp
, and the
Saratoga
were preparing for battle. When the
Lexington
had sunk in the battle of the Coral Sea, Nick had been transferred temporarily onto the
Yorktown
, but within weeks he was moved to the
Enterprise
, to help coordinate marine and naval troops. He was one of the few marines of his rank aboard who was not a pilot. After the Coral Sea, he had been made a Lieutenant Colonel.

On August 6, 1942, the
Enterprise
entered the area of the Solomon Islands and the next day the Marines hit the beaches, and within days the airfield had been claimed and renamed Henderson Field but the battle around Guadalcanal raged on, and the Japanese maintained a strong grip on all but the airfield. The Marines paid a terrible price in the ensuing weeks, but the
Enterprise
held her own, even though she was badly damaged. Nick had been aboard when she took some of her worst blows, and he was ordered to stay with her when she went to Hawaii for repairs in early September.

Inwardly he raged to have to stay on the aircraft carrier as she went to Hawaii. He wanted to stay on Guadalcanal with the troops, but he was badly needed aboard the crippled carrier. And in Hawaii he cooled his heels at Hickam Base, aching to go back as he listened to the news. The battle at Guadalcanal was taking a tremendous toll and marines were dying on the beaches. But in the five months since he'd left San Francisco, he had seen nothing but action in the Coral Sea, at Midway, and then Guadalcanal, with scarcely a breather between them. It helped him keep his mind off Liane. This was why he had enlisted—to fight for his country. When Liane's letter had reached him, he had been stunned by what she said. The paroxysms of guilt had apparently only struck her after he left and there had been nothing he could do or say. He had begun a dozen answers to her letter and discarded them all. She had made a choice once again, and once again he had no choice but to respect it. And now he had the war to keep his mind off his pain, but every night in his bunk, he would lie awake for hours, thinking of their days in San Francisco. And it was worse once he reached Hawaii. He had nothing to do but sit on the beach and wait for the
Enterprise
to be battle ready again. He wrote long letters to his son, and felt as useless as he had in San Francisco. It was a beautiful summer in Hawaii, but the battles in the South Pacific raged on and he was anxious to get back. To help pass the time, he volunteered at the hospital for a while, and would talk to the men and joke with the nurses. He always seemed a good-humored, pleasant man to the nurses, but he asked none of them out.

“Maybe he doesn't like girls,” one of them joked. But they all laughed. He didn't look that type either.

“Maybe he's married,” another suggested. She had talked to him for a long time the day before, and she had had the feeling there was a woman on his mind, but he had said very little. It had just been the way he had said “we” that made her realize he hadn't been alone on the mainland before he sailed, and she sensed a deep pain somewhere in his soul. A pain no one could touch and no one could heal. Because he wouldn't let anyone near him.

The women talked about him a lot on the base. He was unusually attractive and strangely open about some things. He talked about his son a great deal, a little boy named John, who was eleven. Everyone knew about Johnny.

“Do you know who he is?” a nurse's aide whispered to a nurse one day. “I mean in real life.” She was from the hills of Kentucky but she had heard of Burnham Steel. She had put it together from something he had said. And she'd asked around and an officer had told her that she was right. “He's Burnham Steel.” The nurse looked skeptical and then shrugged.

“So what? He's still in this war like the rest of us, and his ship sank underneath him.” The nurse's aide nodded, but she was longing for a date. She made herself obvious whenever she saw him in the wards, but he talked to her no differently than he did to the others.

“Christ, you can't get near the guy,” she complained to a friend.

“Maybe there's someone waiting for him at home.” Not that that stopped the others.

It was not unlike the things they said about Liane at the hospital in Oakland.

“You got a boyfriend in the war?” a boy with a gut full of shrapnel asked her one day. They had operated on him three times, and still hadn't removed all the fragments.

“A husband.” She smiled.

“The one who was in the Coral Sea?” She had talked to him about that when he first came in, and he knew that she knew a lot about the battle. But a strange look came into her eyes as he asked.

“No. He was in France.”

“What's he doing there?” The boy looked confused. It didn't tally up with the rest of what he knew, or what she had said.

“He was fighting the Germans. He was French.”

“Oh.” The boy looked surprised.

“Where is he now?”

“They killed him.”

There was a long silence as he watched her. She was folding a blanket over his legs and she had a gentle touch. But he liked her because she was so pretty. “I'm sorry.”

She turned to him with a sad smile. “So am I.”

“You got kids?”

“Two little girls.”

“Are they as pretty as their mother?” He grinned.

“Much prettier,” she answered with a smile, and moved to the next bed. She worked for hours in the wards, smiling, emptying bed pans, holding hands, holding heads while the men threw up. But she rarely told them much about herself. There was nothing to tell. Her life was over.

It was September when her uncle finally asked her out to dinner. It was time for her to stop mourning. But she shook her head. “I don't think so, Uncle George. I have to be at work early tomorrow, and …” She didn't want to make excuses. She didn't want to go out. There was nothing she wanted to do, except go to work, and come home at night to be with the girls, and then go to bed.

“It would do you good to get a change of scene. You can't just run back and forth to that hospital every day.”

“Why not?” She looked at him with a look that said “Don't touch me.”

“Because you're not an old woman, Liane. You may want to act like one, but you're not.”

“I'm a widow. It's the same thing.”

“The hell it is.” She was beginning to remind him of his brother when Liane's mother had died at her birth. But that was crazy. She was thirty-five years old. And she couldn't bury herself with her husband. “Do you know what you look like these days? You're rail thin, your eyes are sunken into your head, your clothes are falling off your back.” She laughed at the description and shook her head.

“You sure paint a pretty picture.”

“Take a look in the mirror sometime.”

“I do my best not to.”

“See what I mean. Damn it, girl, stop waving that black flag. You're alive. It's a damn shame he's not, but there are a lot of women in the same shoes as you these days, but they're not sitting around with long faces, acting like they're dead.”

“Oh, no?” Her voice had a strange icy ring. “What are they doing, Uncle George? Going to parties?” That's what she had done before. Before Armand had died. And it had been wrong. And she wouldn't do it again. Armand had died. And men were dying all over the world. And she was doing all she could for the ones who lived through it.

“You could go to dinner once in a while. Would that be so bad?”

“I don't want to.”

And then he decided to brave the taboo subject again. “Have you heard from Nick?”

“No.” The walls went up and froze over.

“Have you written to him?”

“No. And I'm not going to. You've asked me before, now don't ask me again.”

“Why not? You could at least tell him Armand died.”

“Why?” Fury began to creep into her voice. “What good would it do? I've sent the man away twice. I'm not going to hurt him again.”

“Twice?” He looked startled and Liane looked annoyed at herself. But what difference did it make now if he knew.

“The same thing happened when we came over on the
Deauville
together after Paris fell. We fell in love, and I ended it because of Armand.”

“I didn't know.” She was a strange closemouthed woman in many ways and he marveled at her. So they had had an affair before. He had suspected it, but never been sure of it. “That must have made it much worse for you both when he left here.”

She looked into her uncle's eyes. “It did. I can't go through that again, Uncle George, or do it to him. Too much has happened. It's better left like this.”

“But you wouldn't have to put him through it again.” He didn't want to add that she was free now.

“I don't know if I could live with the guilt of what we did. I still think Armand knew. And even if he didn't, it was wrong. You can't build a life on two mistakes. So if I write to him now, what good would it do? He'd get his hopes up again and maybe I couldn't live up to what he will expect when he comes home. I just can't put him through that for a third time.”