Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (43 page)

“Just a little while longer,” I said, patting his non-Gauloise-bearing hand. “I know it’s corny, but so am I, and I like it.”

At which point, with a grunt of surprise, Jean-Luc pulled his hand away, because he’d just found out he needed it. “Apparently,” he said. “And why,” he demanded, “why did you drag me up here, on our very last day before you go back to Kansas and I blow my brains out, when you’ve been up to the top of the Tour Eiffel before?”

On a nearby bit of railing, among the initials and messages scratched there over the years, he was pointing at an inscription. You may already have guessed what its three words were.

Kilroy Was Here,
it said.

My eyes began to smart with their special astigmatism, and not from Jean-Luc’s Gauloise smoke either. Yet you should not suppose from this that I, Mary-Ann, was living in some fantasy realm all my own. I was perfectly aware that thousands or possibly hundreds of thousands of
men, few if any of them named Kilroy, had scratched those words wherever there was space and they had time, from Guadalcanal to El Guettar and from I wo Jima to Remagen. And also, in letters too large and awful to be read by human eyes, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, too; as I knew with, by now, some misgivings, for all I still wished the scientists had hurried. But all the same, I couldn’t help myself, for I had always liked to imagine that whoever wrote those words, anywhere—or anywhere
else,
anyhow—had somehow been a little bit my daddy.

After a second, I got my nail file out of my purse, and scratched
MaryAnn
in front of the other three words as Jean-Luc watched me, green-faced and impatient.

“Can we go now?” he asked.

“In a sec,” I said, and it wasn’t much. It was more of a jerk, really, and I brought my hand back down as if I were only smoothing my hair. But I had waved.

And down below, where a tiny but discernibly green-eyed Sukey Santoit had just pulled him up out of the Seine and untied him, my daddy, Eddie Kilroy—Corporal John G. Egan’s missing twin, who was still only nineteen, and whom I was now older than, and would now be for however long I lived—had boyishly waved back.

Once we were back down on the ground, Jean-Luc grew less nauseated and more cheerful, as I knew as soon as he started describing the two or three things he might put into any movie
he
made about Paris, if he ever got to make movies. Perhaps predictably, the Tour Eiffel was not one of those two or three.

Somewhat less predictably, neither was Les Deux Magots. Yet there our footsteps took us next, so automatically that neither of us had to say a word. We found an outside table for two between the one occupied by Sartre and de Beauvoir and another at which sat a gray-eyed American with hair as sandy as Omaha Beach, alongside his pretty wife.

Although it was a clear day in August, we might as well have sat down in a fog. While Sartre was, as usual, smoking like a freighter, his sandy-haired
opposite number smoked like a destroyer; it was almost as if they were conducting a silent duel between pipe and cigarette, in which the Marlboro man was pulling ahead. And if his conversation with his wife had left me in the smallest doubt we shared a country, which it did not, I would have needed no more confirmation of the fact than one look at their young son, a boy of three years old or so who was practicing his still fresh and therefore interesting skill at walking by coming up to his parents’ table and then wandering away again. In one fist, he was clutching a tiny Stars and Stripes.

To my surprise, though, when he spoke in answer to a waiter’s smiling request for some room to get past him and bring Sartre another
café crème,
it was in piping, fluent French. “
Mais c’est qui ce monsieur-là, après tout
?” he asked, pointing at Sartre, which turned the waiter’s smile into a grin.

“Junior!” his father called sharply. “Quit getting tangled up in people’s feet. They know where they’re going and you don’t. Come back here.”

“Oui, Papa”
the boy said, trotting toward them with his flag.

“Tu sais
,” Sartre was confiding to Beauvoir, giving the kid a walleyed glance as he did so, “
rien de ce qui se passe dans la rue ne m’importe
.” I didn’t know what that was in reference to.

“Oh, Jack, please don’t call him ‘Junior,’ “the American woman said. Her voice had a sunny lilt of the South in it; North Carolina, I would have guessed. “I don’t know why, but I always thought that was sort of the worst of both worlds—to have no name of your own, but this strange
burden
to live up to,” she laughed lightly, “all the same. We women may put up with a lot, but at least we’re spared being Juniors.”

Her husband’s answering laugh was like hearing a police squawkbox enjoy itself. “Yeah? What is it you women have to put up with? Meet me at the office sometime, and you’ll see what I put up with—that’s all
I’m
going to say.”

“Jack,” his wife said gently, “I
did
meet you there. Maybe consular work didn’t seem all that important, comp—seem very important, to you. But there was many a night in Bonn when I watched you lock up the office across the hall, and then went back to work in mine.”

She glanced after their son—who, upon hearing himself talked about as if he weren’t there, had evidently concluded that he wasn’t. In search of wherever he should be instead, he’d gone toddling off again.

“Well, then, just be glad you’re out of it,” the man told her. “Honest to Christ, Shirl, sometimes I wish to hell I were. God damn, but I’d like to just get on a boat, and-”

“ ‘Set sail straight for the horizon,’ “his wife quoted, fondly. Even if I couldn’t see much cause for her fondness in her husband’s alert gray eyes, it was plain she could; or else had seen it enough times, however long ago, that she didn’t need to look for it now. “I know, honey—I wish you could, too.”

“Sorry, Shirl. Pretty hectic times around the shop these days.” While I couldn’t be positive, I thought I detected faint quotation marks around the word “shop"—quotation marks no set of non-American ears would ever be able to pick up, however good their owner’s English.

“Et moi,”
Sartre had just told de Beauvoir,
“je fume ma pipe et j’espère,”
with a shrug that could have toppled governments, “
que nous ne nous rendrons pas ridicules encore une fois”
I still had no idea what they were talking about.

“And any-
hoo,
Shirl,” the American now said with a self-amused bearing-down on the word’s folksiness, having resettled himself and lit a fresh Malboro as if he needed to do all these things to give himself permission to grin cheerfully at his wife, “I haven’t heard
your
son complain about being called Junior. Not even once.”

“He’s three years old, Jack, and scared of—well, it’s probably a pretty long list, come to think of it,” his wife said, with a briefly troubled look. “But believe me, it’s going to be a damn cold day in Rochester, Minnesota, before he complains about
anything
you do, and we’ve never even taken him back there.”

“Why should we? The garage is sold. My dad’s in Florida. Now it’s just a name on a map. Why should he care?”

“Because you grew up there, honey. He doesn’t think we’re from anywhere.”

“Well, what the hell. If ‘Junior’ ‘s out,” her husband came back, with a slight but detectable lessening of good humor, “what am I supposed to
call him? Unless I want to have to come running when
he’s
who you want, or sound like I’m yelling at
myself
to put that damn thing down right
now,
‘Jack’ is taken in this family. And everywhere else soon, at least if someone I used to know gets a job he wants to get,” he laughed. “Bad luck all around. Anyway,
he
calls me ‘
Papa
,’ for Christ’s sake. Why can’t he say ‘Daddy,’ like a normal kid?”

“Honey, I don’t think it was
your
son’s idea to live in Paris,” his wife said. “Here, ‘Papa’
is
what the normal kids say. That’s what he’s used to hearing, even if he hasn’t let go of that flag since you gave it to him. But if we’re only allowed one Jack in the family, we
could
try calling him by his middle name instead—which you ought to be able to remember and feel represented by, since it’s yours too.”

“Huh!” the man said in an intrigued way, putting out his cigarette. “Hey,
Junior]”
he called.

“Oui, Papa, j’arrive,”
the little boy piped, trotting back to the table again with his tiny Stars and Stripes. Once there, he looked up at his father curiously.

Resting his large hands on the kid’s shoulders, the American’s hard and alert gray eyes peered intently into his son’s three-year-old face. “Junior, I’m going to make you a deal, starting right now,” he said. “If you’ll call me ‘Daddy’ instead of ‘
Papa
,’ I’ll call you-”

But he never finished that sentence, at least not then and there. For at that exact moment, we all heard the last bomb ever set off in Paris by either the O.A.S. or the Lili Gang. It wasn’t all that near, and a glance at the headlines in the newspaper kiosks that evening, after we’d made love for the first time, would tell Jean-Luc and me that no one had been injured. Even so, the noise sure upset Junior—and not only, I don’t think, because it left him nameless for now. After a stunned and wide-eyed second, he started crying, with the kind of hysterical raucousness that sounds like a klaxon inside lungs you’d think were too small to produce that much noise, and lashing out blindly with his little American flag as he lurched around us all. I think he got Sartre right on the nose, which may have been the first time the great philosopher’s eyes were ever in perfect alignment; not to mention blinking with a coordinated stunned expression, as the little boy turned and confusedly started toward the Boulevard St. Germain.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the American father said, getting to his feet with jackknife speed. All in one swift, smooth, muscular movement, a Marlboro bobbing in his mouth, he took three steps out onto the sidewalk and scooped the sobbing kid up onto his shoulder before the last of the three was done.

“For Christ’s sake, Gil! It’s just a
bomb
,” he said with startling rage. Then—in a pleasanter tone, as if he’d caught himself—he spoke to all of us at the outside tables. His own French, it turned out, wasn’t that bad: “Ce
n’est qu’une bombe, après tout”
he repeated, smiling and flipping away his Marlboro. “
On en a entendu beaucoup, à l’époque.”

“Ah, oui! Nous autres, oui”
de Beauvoir said to Sartre.
“Et le père aussi-évidemment! Mais le gosse, non.”

The American father hadn’t heard her, but he looked at their table with a small lift and then incline of his chin. “Monsieur Sartre,” he called.
“Je vous demande pardon-à cause de mon enfant, la.”

“A cause de
qui?” de Beauvoir gasped under her breath. But the American had already looked away in any case.

“Hey, Mrs. Egan!” he called to his wife. “Pay the nice man and let’s get out of here. I don’t like being embarrassed in public. Can’t take you anywhere, can I?” he said, with what I presume he supposed was affection, to his son. “Except maybe back to the States, and you know something?
All
the kids say ‘Daddy’ there.”

Indeed we did—and needless to say I, Mary-Ann, had caught the name he shouted. But that man now waiting for his wife to pay the bill could never have written the letter I still knew by heart. Or could he? Of course, I knew that whoever had written the letter had survived the battle for Iwo Jima, or it would never have been written. Yet Corporal John G. Egan, USMC, could still have died
of
it, I thought suddenly, watching the small American family start down the Boulevard St. Germain. Over the man’s shoulder, the little boy was staring back at Les Deux Magots, and particularly at me for some reason. As they headed on toward God knows where, his father had already lit a fresh cigarette.

That man could have died of my own daddy’s death, I thought; which was, incidentally or perhaps not, the moment when I realized that I hadn’t.

I had been born of it instead, I saw.

But Sartre had been watching them go too, and now he nudged de Beauvoir. “
Eh bien!”
he snorted, with a quizzical look. “
Regarde-moi notre nouveau chef! Ma foi, Castor, il est pareil que Vanden.”

As I have noted, my translation skills are not what they were. But in English, what the great philosopher had just said would go something like, “Take a look at our new boss! I swear, Simone, he’s the same as the old boss.”

And Sartre—so I remembered with some wonder, as the American

family vanished from sight—had lived through the Occupation, too.