Random Winds (38 page)

Now orders begin to arrive. Major So-and-so is to proceed to Michigan or New York to receive the wounded from the Pacific theater. Captain So-and-so is to proceed to California to embark for the Pacific theater.

One day, Mary speaks what for many weeks has been unspoken between them.

“They’ll be sending you home soon,” she says.

It is both a statement and a question. Martin doesn’t answer.

He went outside and lay down in the grass. At the top of the rise, he could see the wheelchairs on the terrace where convalescents had been let out to gaze at a spring that some of them had thought never to see again.

At the foot of the modest hill, a stream curved under an arched stone bridge. Gilded catkins hung from the willows, which in summer stood like young girls with streaming,
long pale hair. A hawk sailed over Martin’s head, paused in the sky and plunged behind the rim of the trees.

He closed his eyes. The air was full of sounds, blending into one long hum of afternoon, of bees, wind and larks. There was a rhythm to lark-song: five beats long, two short. There was rhythm and music in all things. Passionately, he wished he could know more about music.

Someone was playing ragtime on the battered piano in the hall. It was the boy from Chicago, no doubt, the one whose arm he had repaired so well, except for one lost finger. The boy had been worried about the piano; it meant a lot to him, he said, although he was no musician. He was playing pretty nicely in spite of the lost finger! Boom da da-da, boom da da-da.

From the porch came the click and tick of Ping-Pong balls; there was a cadence in the volleys. All his senses were so sharp today! Most of the time, he thought, we are only half alive, missing things. But perhaps it was better so, better not to feel so sharply.

The dog beside him licked his hand. He had forgotten that the dog was there, he’d grown so used to it. One cold night in the previous winter, he had found it sitting outside the local pub where he had gone for a beer. It was only a shabby mongrel of a type so common as to have become almost a breed in itself, with pointed ears and a setter’s tail meant to be carried in pride and gaiety. But some pleading in its face had caught at him, and he had stopped to talk to it Two villagers had come out and warned him away.

“It’ll bite you,” they said. One had picked up a stone. “Get out of here! Get the hell out of here!”

The dog moved a few steps and sat down. It had been desperate enough for food to risk the stone.

“People abandon them,” Major Pitman remarked. “It’s a disgrace.”

The man who had picked up the stone rebuked him. “They don’t have rations enough for themselves. What do you want?”

They had started to walk back to the hospital. At the end of the street, Martin had realized that the dog was padding behind them.

“I’ll have to get him something to eat,” he’d said.

“You’ll never lose him if you do,” Major Pitman had warned.

“I know.”

At Martin’s door, the dog had stood on the step waiting to be asked in.

“Oh, no,” he’d told him, “I’ve nothing for you.”

And the wretched creature had licked his hand.

“What am I to do with you?” he asked now. “It’s soon going to be over between you and me.”

The dog raised sorrowful brown eyes. I
understand
, they said, and he crept closer. A grasshopper, with green transparent wings like finest paper, lit a few inches from his paw, but the dog took no notice of it.

You will not abandon me
, he told Martin;
I believe in you
.

Martin laid his hand on the warm flanks where you could no longer feel the ribs. “Yes, you know, don’t you? You know I can’t turn you out.”

The dog’s tail thumped the ground.

“Mary will have to take you. I’ll leave you behind with Mary.”

And Martin sat up.
Leave you behind?
Was he, then, really to go away? Twice in a lifetime? Haunted, haunted! A fairly intelligent man, supposedly in charge of his own life, he had been obsessed since the very first day.

What was it all about? Why were we here? What was history but a history of turbulent past griefs? Crackle of fires as Troy burned, he thought; splitting timbers as Jerusalem fell and Rome was sacked, weeping of parents when the Black Death emptied Europe, agony and shame of the concentration camps, thundering of bombs on burning London. So little time to flower in the sun and live and take one’s love!

Mary, Mary, I can’t leave you again. I can’t.

The dog crept closer still and licked his hand.

Hazel wrote, “Lorraine Mays tells me your unit is to be brought home by summer. She was surprised you hadn’t let me know, but I understand, darling, that prudent as you
are, you didn’t want to raise my hopes until you could be absolutely sure.”

There were only three weeks left before departure. In the morning, every morning, while a crowded day still lay ahead, he assured himself that at some point in that day, everything would suddenly be resolved. And always the night came without solution. Well, tomorrow then?

There were two weeks left.

One day in London he passed a toy shop and saw in the window a wooden horse like one that Enoch had played with. Later he had an errand that took him past the Brompton Oratory, where he had pushed the newborn Claire in her perambulator. Here in these old, old places, past baroque stone, through mews and Georgian squares, she had first learned to walk. Always he saw her in that yellow coat and bonnet.

He felt weak, aware of his heartbeat. Turning into a cardiac neurotic, he thought, scornful of himself. But he was trembling when he arrived back at the hospital.

“Don’t you feel well, Colonel?” his new lieutenant asked.

“No, I’ve been fighting a blooming cold all week.”

He sat down at his desk before a sheaf of records which had been left for his signature. The words made no sense.

Was there any possible way he could request postponement? Any way orders could be rearranged, so that perhaps some other man who was in a hurry to go home—as who was not?—could go in his place? He needed time! Time to think! But of course, that was nonsense. This was the army. And shutting the door, he put his head down on the desk.

Write to Hazel? Take courage and put it all on paper? A lot of men in this war were doing and had done just that. For one sharp moment, he saw her sitting in the chair at the kidney-shaped desk where she used to read the mail; he saw her eyes crinkling in a smile, her face softening, as she opened the letter. He shivered.

Go home and tell her then. Give her as gently, as kindly, as reasonably as you can, the truth. But what of Enoch? What of Claire?
Carpe diem
, it is said; seize the day, seize
life. It speeds away while you watch. And I’m forty-four years old.

He knelt on the floor beside their chair where Mary sat knitting. Narrow blue veins crossed and merged in delicate webbing on her wrists. He took the wool away and kissed her wrists. Had he been asked what he was feeling, he could have said it was not worship, it was not comfort, it was not joy, it was not desire. It was all of these and it was beyond them. It was beyond the farthest reach of longing.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Can’t go away?”

“No. Can’t go away.”

After a few days another letter came. “Enoch will be in the second grade next fall, imagine! He’s so like you, Martin, always reading. People say he looks like you, too. He wanted to have a picture of you in his room, so I had a duplicate made of the one on my night table. It’s the last thing I see before turning out the light and the first thing I see in the morning when I open my eyes.

“I think sometimes that if you were to stop loving me, I couldn’t bear it But then I know that couldn’t happen any more than I could stop loving you. I don’t think there can ever have been two people who understand each other better. I feel that even though you’re three thousand miles away, we’re still together. And soon, please God, we really shall be. I’ll turn in bed at night and you’ll be there, and it will no longer be a dream.”

Martin put the letter down. A dull sadness seeped into the room, like fog. He read on.

“I’ve saved so much of your allotment, you’ll be surprised. Living alone like this, a woman doesn’t need to spend much. I hardly ever go to the stores except for Enoch’s clothes. And yesterday I bought a necklace for Claire’s birthday, seed pearls on a gold chain. She’s such an amazing girl. It’s hard to believe she’s only fifteen … Now that you’re coming home, though, I shall treat myself to some new clothes. Would you like to see me in a black lace nightgown?”

She had used to sit up in bed and wait for him when he was called out. She always said she couldn’t fall asleep until he was home. If only there were some meanness in her, some sly and reprehensible selfish streak which could assure her survival while it gave him an excuse! But no, she had wanted only and always to please everyone, even her exasperating relatives. God knew what fears, what chained resentments even, underlay that anxious love of pleasing!

And suddenly Martin heard his father’s voice. So often in the crises of his life, he had recalled that voice, not necessarily its words, rather its tone of earnest conviction. He remembered, too, the expressive movements of the hands, so uncharacteristically Mediterranean for a man from Ulster. And he thought of his own little son. What would that boy remember of his father?

He went down to the street He needed to move. Mary was to come in later from the country, but she had her key. The night was gray and the scudding clouds threatened rain. His footsteps pounded so that he startled himself and made himself walk more softly. He walked across the city and came to the river.

In the middle of the bridge, facing the Victoria Embankment, he lit a cigarette, then threw it down into the iridescent, oily water and watched it blink out. The sky behind the Houses of Parliament blackened as the storm approached. A flash of lightning brightened the long, even facade, the fretwork pinnacles, oriels and turrets of this place where men sat and made rules to keep themselves from consuming each other. He lit another cigarette, threw that one, too, into the water and began to walk home.

Some soldiers passed, their laughter stilling to a startled salute when they saw the American officer. Hearing their muttered “Had too many, that one!” as they passed him, he realized that they had heard him groan. Did he look as wretched as he felt? As woebegone? Yes, his head was bent, his hands were knotted behind his back as though he were pacing the floor of his own house. He straightened up.

Mary was asleep on the sofa when he let himself in. Dismayed, he remembered that he had left Hazel’s pages scattered.
She had picked them up and placed them neatly on the table next to the lamp.

She opened her eyes. “I didn’t read
it,”
she said.

“I didn’t think you did.”

“It’s from home, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

And kneeling down, he put his head on her lap. Then, ashamed of his wet eyes, he couldn’t raise his head. The price a man paid for manhood! Valor and steel, the ramrod back, the stiff upper lip!

“You’re going home to stay?”

“Yes,” he murmured.

She got up and, going to the window, pressed her cheek against the cold glass. At last she said, “A commitment. I understand.”

He couldn’t answer. What words could he have found? He thought perhaps dying would be easier, going down into oblivion and rest.

“We deserve something better …”

“Who knows what anyone deserves?”

“Our timing is always wrong.”

“God knows that’s true.”

“Bitterness is ugly, Martin. And I am so damn bitter.”

They lay in bed, talking.

“There was a couple who lived near Alex and me. He was twenty-eight, and he died one Saturday morning after playing tennis. Before the war, people of twenty-eight weren’t dying. It was a grief so terrible that you turned away from looking at her. And still I couldn’t have understood it … Tonight I do.”

He took her in his arms. The last time, the last time. He thought he had cried the words aloud; perhaps he had only heard them in his head. A swelling tide of blood crackled and surged as he lost himself in her; never draw apart, he thought; never, never … and then he did fall away and lie apart at last, seeing shadows, hearing the sound of rain.

It must have started while they lay in love. Trucks were passing at the corner, a rumbling convoy of army vehicles, each one guided by a being as filled with his own essentiality
as Mary and he. The little room trembled with their thunder. The clock struck three. A few hours more, and it would be over.

When she came out of the bedroom in the morning, he had already collected his things.

“Just your clothes, Martin? Not the Churchill mug or the Rowlandson prints I gave you or anything?”

“Only your
Three Red Birds
. I don’t want anything else.”

They stood in the little hall.

“Do you think we’ll ever be in the same place at the same time again?” Mary asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“If we ever are, I’ll walk quickly away, and you do the same. Will you promise me, Martin?”

“I promise.”

“It’s eight, and you’d better hurry,” she said.

But neither of them moved.

“I’ll go down the stairs, Martin. I won’t look back. Wait two or three minutes until I’ve driven away.”

“No. I’ll see you into your car.”

“Please. I can’t just drive off with you standing there. Please. Help me.”

“I want to go down together,” he insisted.

In the instant before he put the light out and shut the door, she began to look like a stranger. She was wearing a skirt he had never seen before. It had grown chilly, and she had put a sweater over her shoulders, a complicated knit of the kind people receive as gifts. Yet, under the skirt and sweater was the flesh he knew so well, more dearly than any he had ever known, or ever would.

And was he absolutely mad to be doing what he was doing, or was it the only way to keep from going mad?

They went downstairs and out to where her car was parked. It seemed to him that they ought to be saying something. He wanted to say: Understand, we are the kind of people who cannot step on other people’s faces. He wanted to say: You see, the trouble with you and me is that neither of us has courage enough to preserve ourselves. For, isn’t that the first law of nature? Yes, but nature
isn’t civilized, and we are, you and I. He wanted to say all those things, but he said none of them.