Losing Julia (13 page)

My little piglet. Some nights when the pain won’t break I lie on my side and think up appellations for her: Peaches, Honey Bear, Bunny Bear, Angel Face, Sweetie Pie, Sugar Bear, Lollipops, Pookie, Muffins, Snuggle Puppy. Sometimes when I hold her little white hand in mine I am mesmerized by it, staring like a tourist transfixed before
La Pietà.

They don’t visit much, the little ones, despite the presents I send and the big Easter baskets from the Senior Crafts Store along with cards that play songs when you open them and flat figurines that expand when you soak them in water. Instead, I get photos: smiles peering out from Halloween costumes or posed over birthday cakes or a pair of eyes set deep behind a football helmet. I keep them neatly tacked on the bulletin board above my desk, layered back to the day I moved into Great Oaks two years ago last May.

It’s nothing to feel sorry for me about, them not visiting. I didn’t visit my Grandpa Neil much either when he was old and dying. “You just can’t imagine what it would mean for him if you and your sister would just spend a few hours at his bedside,” pleaded my mother, who still felt guilty for not visiting her Grandma Claire more often before she died of consumption at seventy-six. “Mother, Grandpa has breath like a dead fish and besides he won’t remember if I do visit so what’s the difference?” I said, heading out the back door to the woods where Jimmy and I were fortifying our clubhouse with planks stolen from the freight yard.

I’m all paid up now, Grandpa, just as my offspring will be when they are old and sick and lonelier than all bejesus and the grandchildren they long to hug or just stare at for hours don’t bother to visit any more than is absolutely necessary, which is less and less these days.

Guilt and loneliness seesawing through the generations like a family curse.

I SEE HER
again: her face wet with tears, her eyes searching mine. Slowly, very slowly, I reach my hands out and trace my fingertips along her skin, first down her neck, so warm and fragile, then across her breasts and down along the curves of her hips. Then with all my strength I wrap my arms around her and pull her toward me, but she is gone.

FROM MY BED
I can see the moon tonight, so bright and ripe and salmon pink it looks as if it might drop from the sky. I imagine pirates on deck just before sunrise with the wood groaning and the moonlight streaking across the water in a straight line from the horizon. Did Caesar see the moon exactly so as he strode down the Roman Forum on the way to some debaucherous celebration? And what about Moses and Galileo and some wretched young Londoner pulling a cart full of corpses during the plague? Or an American Indian crouched by a fire in a small clearing surrounded by huge primeval trees that glow orange from the flame?

And Julia?

I LOST ANOTHER
roommate today. Frank Denton. He’d only arrived three weeks ago. Must have been twenty years younger than me. Looked a lot healthier. I’m starting to wonder if God’s crossing his wires.

“Patrick? You awake?” he whispered, two nights before he died.

“I’m awake.”

“You ever find yourself getting disoriented in the dark, right after the lights are out?”

“Frank, I feel disoriented when the lights are on.”

“I was just thinking about this girl I dated in college. Holy toledo, she was a looker.”

“Yeah? What was her name?”

“Iris. Iris Perkins. From Rye, New York.”

“They don’t age in your memory, do they, Frank?”

“Not one bit. It’s the strangest thing, but for a moment I thought… ”

“What? What did you think?”

“I thought I was back at my dormitory at New York University, lying awake and fantasizing about Iris.”

I imagined the young man lying in a bunk bed, hands clasped behind his head, staring at the ceiling.

“She had great ankles,” he said. “Doelike and nimble. Like those tall champagne flutes.”

“You’re killing me, Frank.”

“Yeah, me too. Jesus. The longing never goes away, eh?”

“No, just the ability,” I said.

“Yeah,” he laughed. “But the funny thing is, even when I had the ability most of the good stuff still took place in my dreams.”

I thought of Julia; of her smell and the feel of her skin and the warm moistness of her lips.

“But not all of it,” I said.

“No, not all of it.”

Frank had been a second lieutenant in the Marines fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. At Tarawa he watched fourteen Marines drown in ten feet of crystal-clear water. “We came in to this beach under intense fire,” he told me one afternoon as we sat on the porch playing cards. “Bullets smacking against everything and great big spouts of water splashing down on us. We were certain we’d be hit before we even made land. And God what a beach, beautiful white sand, water the color of robins’ eggs. Honeymoon stuff, you know? Well, the captain in the landing craft next to mine must have panicked because he opened his ramp early and the boys went charging out into the water and sank straight away like stones. Jesus, Patrick, they just sank right to the bottom with their packs weighing a hundred pounds, and we could see them struggling clear as day but nobody could help them because we were all getting shot to pieces. A whole goddamn platoon standing on the bottom and staring up at us. Never forget it so help me God.”

I saw the men, and their faces caused a dull pain in my abdomen.

“Of course, you were on the Western Front weren’t you, Patrick? So that kind of shit is nothing new to you. But goddamn, you know, it sticks with you.”

I wonder whether Frank was looking at those boys’ faces under the water or Iris’s ankles when an aneurysm in his chest burst and dropped him straight to the linoleum in the hallway just off the kitchen.

I hope he was looking at Iris’s ankles.

WE FOUGHT IN
the Aisne-Marne region northeast of Paris throughout June and July, first repelling the German advance, then slowly turning them, farm by farm, village by village, as the U.S. Expeditionary Forces swelled into the millions. Everywhere the battered countryside was littered with the dead, who often lay unburied for weeks, so that you could walk for miles without getting away from the smell.

In September we took part in the huge American assault on the Saint-Mihiel salient south of Verdun, losing thirty percent of our company before being rushed north into the Meuse-Argonne during the final push to take the railhead at Sedan.

At the time we rarely knew where we were or where we were headed, and the days ran together in a strange tincture of terror and monotony, distinguished only by whether we were at the front or at rest. Most of the villages we passed through were in ruins by the time we reached them, their ancient buildings pocked with shell and bullet holes and their streets cluttered with debris and the carcasses of animals and burned-out trucks and tanks. Others we destroyed ourselves trying to drive the determined Germans out.

From May until the end of the war that November our battalion lurched from battlefield to battlefield, ordered about by invisible—and much cursed—forces up the ranks to plug a gap, make an assault or hold the line on the fast growing portion of the Western Front being held by the Americans. Sometimes we fought on the move, taking shelter in hastily dug rifle pits and funkholes. Other times we dug in deep and lived underground, bracing for the desperate German counterattacks and the unremitting shelling. Each day more men died and more replacements arrived. And somehow we continued.

The bravest and the meekest were the first to die. The rest of us tried our best not to look like cowards but sometimes, when asked to charge a German Maxim nestled in a concrete bunker surrounded by three belts of wire, a man would shit in his pants and there was no stopping it. The body goes berserk like an animal being dragged kicking and whining to the slaughterhouse.

We were all in awe of the stretcher-bearers, who as a matter of principle would risk everything to bring back the wounded and even the dead. I often looked into their eyes as they headed out and wondered why men will risk almost certain death in an attempt to save other men. I decided it was because men will do anything to give their lives some meaning and virtue, especially if it looks like they’ll die anyway.

“In a way I envy them,” said Daniel, the morning a stretcher-bearer from Minnesota was shot in the groin bringing a man in. We had just moved up in the predawn darkness from the reserve trenches to the front for our ten-day shift on the line and were struggling to repair the duckboards that were half-submerged in the mud at our feet.

“You’re kidding.”

“At least they can feel good about what they’re doing.”

“Until they’re shot,” I said, pulling at a wooden plank. “You’re not a pacifist by any chance? Because as a squad leader that might—”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” I yanked at a long plank until it came free.

“Yes and no.”

“I didn’t realize pacifism was a yes-and-no kind of thing.”

“I should have been. It’s too late now, so I’m not. That’s what I mean.” He picked up his gear and headed for the entrance to a large dugout thirty feet underground. Thick wet blankets hung from the entry to guard against gas. I followed him, pausing to let my eyes adjust to the candlelight before descending the narrow wooden stairs. Down below half a dozen men sat smoking, writing letters, playing cards and cleaning their weapons.

“So when are you two going to get married?” asked Giles, looking up. “Might as well make it official. We could even have a party.”

“I’m just waiting for Paddy here to pop the question,” said Daniel, smiling.

“Courage,” said Lawton, looking at me. I flipped him off.

The chairs and bunks were taken so we sat on the floor against the wall.

I watched as Giles methodically cleaned his bayonet, pausing to test the blade with his thumb, which was filthy. His youthful face had grown somewhat slimmer while the sun had made his freckles more pronounced, so that some of the larger ones merged into reddish splotches. I thought he might eventually be considered handsome, except for his overbite and teeth, which went every which way, as though completely estranged from one another. Meanwhile his eyes, which were very round and dark brown, belied a softness he tried to hide by hunching up his shoulders and spitting a lot. Lately they’d looked unusually bloodshot and I thought I detected a slight tremble in his hands.