In War Times (19 page)

She pounded the table with her fist, making her Red Hook Ale jump, and he wanted to unfurl her fist, clasp her hand, and comfort her with all that he was and all that he might ever be, although he knew that that was not possible. L-for Love, his mind said and the sudden truth of it both warmed him and cast him into despair. He didn’t dare tell her. She was in a place past comfort, on the other side of love.

But she paused in her rant and took in his look with complete recognition.

“
D
-for Dance,” she said soberly and pulled him from his chair. It was a fast tune and then a slow one and she clung to him for a second in silent entreaty, then lifted her head and said,
please, let’s go home now
. And,
I’m sorry
, a whisper, afterward, as she lay naked and beautiful and spent in her bed.

Sorry?

To be so savage
, she replied, and burst into tears in his arms.

He had fallen in love with Elsinore. He was not at all sure that she had fallen love with him, but was not bothered by that. She was complicated. If he could comfort her somehow by being there, he would be there.

But the closer he got to Elsinore’s physical self, the farther he seemed from her heart and mind. She still went from listless to manic at the drop of a hat. At dances, she sometimes cried hysterically on his shoulder as the band played. He soon realized that it was always the same song, and asked the band not to play it. Otherwise, he was tense the entire time they were there, thinking about how the next few notes after the lull between songs might be the ones to set her off. She was chain-smoking, and her face was pale, thin, and focused on something far off, usually over his shoulder, if they sat opposite one another with their tea.

But whenever he had to leave, she hugged him tightly and begged him not to go. “Oh, they won’t miss you over there. Use your head. You know, make one of those dummies to sleep in your bed at night and…and pay a bunch of guys to answer roll call. You’re clever. Think of something. I need you here with me, Dance.”

“And they shall be named,” she cast a wicked look at him, “Edwin, Branwyn, and—”

“Tin-tin.”

“No, they must all end with
win
. I am in a winning mood. And this is a new thing beneath the eye of heaven. The Germans are but a mote in my eye.” She was manic on this sea-cliff. He could see the radar tower thin and wavering to the east, so far away that it sometimes disappeared as if in a mist.

Another month had passed, during which time she had become increasingly possessive of him. He preferred this aspect to her stone-darkness, a blackness so profound that within it nothing stirred and no light penetrated. She would reach bottom and then begin her upward trajectory as if a launched rocket, bursting from negative to positive and then beyond. He knew there was something terribly wrong, and that he was doing nothing to help. Neither could the chaplain nor any of her multitudinous friends. One sign of her decreasing grip on reality was that it pleased her to talk about their imaginary children, their names all ending in “win” or “wyn”; to plot their characters and lives. He thought he was quite braced for her sudden turn away from him in some future, but hoped that they could move through that to something more like normal, like the normal she had been when they first met. He wanted to be that which saved her, or perhaps father the child who could. The best he could do, though, was be here as she weathered it. Only she could save herself.

He divided his free time between thinking about the device and spending time with Elsinore, or at least with the kids, feeling her essence around him in the huge old kitchen even when she was not there. He worked in the garden with the children, often in the evening and sometimes in the early morning. Red-haired Charlie took a particular liking to the enterprise. He carefully and sparsely sowed the tiny lettuce seeds, covering them tenderly, and weeded alongside Sam and Elsinore.

It was a season of growth and hope after a terrible winter. Sam was becoming very used to the place and did not think about what was ahead, when he would no doubt be transferred to the arena of war.

Around the time the lettuce was making its first fragile appearance, Sam became afraid. She was on one of her upswings, breathtaking as the arc of a Mustang as it rose to meet the enemy. Ever more bright, breathless, and smiling while lighting one cigarette from the last, she kept a bottle of gin next to her bed. She thrashed around in nightmare, and always cried out the same thing: “Give it to ’im Will! That’s it!”

And then she took a Spitfire and went up.

He told himself afterward that he should have known. He should have figured out that she’d do something deeply heroic and mad. She had planned it, apparently, for weeks.

The uniform was the easiest part, he surmised. Getting to know the roster was a bit more complicated. Targeting the flyboy she replaced took guts. He apparently quite willingly drank more than he should have, considering he’d had but a few hours of sleep in the past five days. He passed out on the couch in her room. Littering the washroom floor with dark sheaves of her hair was the last thing she did before running down the stairs clutching his mask and hat, attired smartly in the RAF uniform, and riding her bike to the airstrip.

She simply jumped into the flyboy’s hastily patched plane and took her place in the formation.

If Sam had been outside at the time he might have seen the battle. She fought valiantly, toughly, courageously. Apparently Jimmy had not only let her sit in his plane and learn how to operate the simple controls, but had given her detailed instructions. She downed a Junker, for which she would have gotten a medal had she been a legitimate flyboy.

That was not how she died, though. She ditched her smoking plane expertly on the water and was picked up. There was quite an uproar at the hospital when they cut off her seared uniform, and quite a puzzle until the groggy flyboy woke about ten hours later. He enlightened them, which was rather embarrassing for him, not to mention the entire outfit.

She was a sensation, a hero. For the next week or two, she was calm, her old rational self, the burn on her face bandaged and one arm in a sling, her short hair astonishingly fetching. They didn’t quite know what to do with her. So they let her just go back to work.

She was in the garden shed when a buzz bomb fell. It was quite early one morning, but several children were gardening with her, as was Sam.

He was pulling weeds, thinking about what he could get done in the fifteen minutes before he had to leave. Charlie and three of the girls were staking tomatoes. Charlie wielded the scissors, cutting off lengths of string from a large ball of saved-up mongrel pieces knotted together.

Sam heard the ominous lawn-mower sound, leaped up, and tried to get to the children, to shelter them somehow, but the sound had stopped and then there was a geyser of black, finely turned earth spewing into the dawn-fresh sky, scattering and showering in great clumps. Sam was thrown into the trees by the blast.

Aching, but still conscious, he pushed branches and debris from him, realizing that his arm might be broken. The shed, crushed by the impact, was on fire. He finally struggled free of the tree and hurtled across the crater that had been their garden.

“Elsinore!”

She screamed hideously from the shed.

Sam ducked beneath the sagging lintel; saw her legs beneath a tangle of fiery garden tools, their wooden handles ablaze. Elsinore was engulfed by flames.

He grabbed her legs and pulled her out with strength he had not known he possessed, tossed dirt on her to smother the flames.

Her face was horribly burned, but her eyes were open. “Where are they?” Then she screamed, “Find them!”

Mrs. Applewhist and the milkman helped Sam search the bomb site. He saw an arm, and a bit of bloodied red hair, and pulled Charlie from the dirt. He was lifeless, his head shattered from a rock. Sam found the little girls a few yards away, sprawled beneath a wheelbarrow, which had almost torn them in half. They were holding hands. They must have been running away.

Then he heard another buzz; another silence. This bomb hit the manor house, taking many more of the orphans with it. Elsinore died later that day of her burns, in the gymnasium hospital.

It was random; senseless. It all came down to luck, good or bad. Elsinore was only one of hundreds of millions of non-combatant civilians who died in the war, killed by the insanity that surged through the world and, he feared, would surge again.

As if his life had become some kind of grim game he scratched out a mark for her in his being. Two of mine, he thought. Two of mine, and several millions of all the others, all of them dear to at least one other beyond belief.

All this dearness, gone from the world. It must set off a firestorm of aching loss, a dark wind which rose from somewhere within all of them, they who birthed this wind. There was no stopping it.

The image of her that lodged in his mind forever afterward was one he hadn’t actually seen. It was the way she must have looked when she flew out over the Channel. Determined, cool.

Taking things into her own hands. Fighting all the way.

It was eventually discovered that the most effective weapon against the V-l buzz bombs was the top-secret M-9 Director, which located, tracked, and shot down the terrible weapons.

Sam and Wink, being experts on the M-9, traveled around England during the next six weeks, helping to set up the fire directors, working out glitches, instructing crews, supervised by an American civilian. On noticing that some of the gun crews had penciled corrections onto the wall next to their chairs, Sam included the field corrections, which resulted in increased accuracy, in a report. His notes from his Aberdeen course, which stated that the M-9 would work perfectly using the firing tables developed there, were obviously untrue.

Soon a visiting inspection by a member of the design team did some detective work. Apparently the Army had provided tables for three-inch guns; the M-9 used a 90mm gun, which was slightly different in diameter—but so slight that it was deemed “close enough for aircraft work.”

In August 1944, M-9’s shot down eighty-nine of ninety-one V-l’s launched from Antwerp. Not quite 100 percent.

But with corrected firing tables, this changed. The last day that Nazis launched V-l’s, a hundred swept through the sky, at six hundred miles an hour, toward London.

A hundred were shot down by the M-9’s.

After that the Germans didn’t bother any more.

They had something worse.

Looking at the grainy newspaper picture of the huge-finned rocket as it plunged into the London building, Sam was cast into darkness. These were the rockets he had seen with Hadntz. His own lack of faith in Hadntz’s project had, perhaps, allowed this to happen. He should have been pushing, trying to figure out how to take it to the next step, never letting up.

The V-2’s rained down on London, retaliation for the bombing raids that killed hundreds of thousands of German civilians. England and Europe were turning into a wasteland of rubble, a howling firestorm of released rage, out of control, with no discernable end.

British Intelligence once again grilled him, trying to pinpoint the launch sites. They were like giant ski jumps, usually concealed with brush so they could not be seen from the air.

Suddenly, the Allies had a new problem. Although the Army newspaper,
Yank
, daily warned of the German army buildup in the Ardennes, Allied command assumed that the terrain was too forbidding for a major attack to take place, and was caught completely by surprise when without warning, without even the barest hint of radio chatter, German forces poured down the center of France. The Germans, having realized that their communications were compromised, had switched to delivering oral commands.

German strategy, materiel, and the skill of their soldiers were all that Europe had learned to fear over the last several years of darkness. Allied troops were slaughtered in the snowy fields of France and Germany. Air support during those cloud-covered days was limited; the ground troops were on their own. Combat troops were held back as reserves. Hastily drafted cooks, bakers, band members, and all manner of non-combat personnel were thrown in as shock troops and front-line warriors.

Company C received orders to ship out in late December. Their destination was the French port of Le Havre, and then Camp Lucky Strike.

Sam and Wink devoted special skill to packing the components they had used to create the device. Sam kept the microfilm in a zipped inner pocket of his shirt at all times. Wink confiscated a typewriter and madly retyped the paper, with two carbons, cursing over the footnotes and his frequent mistakes while Sam redid the drawings on tracing paper and had them blueprinted.

Sam packed the device itself into his duffel, wrapped in some underwear. It still showed no sign of any kind of function. They decided that they had done something wrong, and determined to try again as soon as they had an opportunity.

And then, they waited.