The Wild Dark Flowers (10 page)

And he put his head in his hands. All the despair he’d been trying to suppress flooded over him. He felt worse in those few moments than he had ever felt. It was like being enveloped in choking soot: like being buried. He balled his fists and pressed them to his eyes, making an effort not to gasp.

After a while, he became aware that his father’s hand was on his arm. He had dropped his hands, opened his eyes, and looked miserably at him. His father was frowning. “Now look, John,” the older man began quietly. “You’ve had a hell of an experience here, and I can see what it’s done. I don’t say you planned it, and so far as that goes, you couldn’t help it. I know what these things are. It’s like a railroad crash. The damn thing comes roaring out of the dark and its plain pushed you flat. But you’ve got to get up and walk away. The woman isn’t yours, and she’s the mother of children. I didn’t bring you up to wreck families.”

There had been a long silence. In it, John wondered for the first time what was in his father’s past. He’d spoken as if he knew the kind of hell that John was living through.
A railroad crash
. Yes, it was exactly like that. All the life had been knocked out of him: he felt thin, transparent.

“I can’t forget her.”

“You won’t,” his father replied. “You don’t have to. But you can never go back.” He sighed; his concern for John was obvious. But his voice was firm. “I’m telling you the decent thing here, John,” he said. “Whatever’s gone on over there, you have to put it from your mind. You’re home now. You’ll get over her. You have to look forward. And that’s all that matters.”

John had never discussed it with his mother. That in itself was unusual, but she had perhaps taken advice from his father and tried to move him on. She arranged several parties that autumn and winter, and invited suitable women. Pretty, available women of good stock, women of his own age and younger. He was as polite to them all as he could be; he dutifully danced with them and he accepted one or two invitations in return. But the moment that he got near a girl, he got a kind of twisted feeling in his chest, a sharp and penetrating ache. He thought that he understood then why people said “a broken heart.” Sometimes the pain was so acute that he thought he must be ill, and he tried to ward off his longing with activity. He went sailing, and he started swimming in the sea in the depths of winter. The cold made him gasp so much that he felt sick, but at least his body was numb.

But nothing turned the slow music of Octavia down. She was a constant subtle chemical running in his bloodstream. He only confided in one other person all winter—a man he played racquetball with in New York City. This man had gone into his father’s banking business—he had had to shape up and be the pillar of respectability—and he had eyed John sympathetically. “I had a girl in California,” he said. He had sighed and shrugged. “Can’t have those kind,” he had told John. “Got to get a good girl to marry. Think of that. Focus on it. Let the other one fade. And she will.”

But Octavia would not leave John’s head. In January, he had done as his father suggested and tried to work at the giant department store that had made the family fortune. He had really made an effort, getting up at six and being there even before his father, walking the empty floors, trying to drum up an interest. He had an idea that if he exhausted himself, he would find a cure for Octavia.

He found that he had quite a talent, but it was not for selling curtaining by the yard, or lace for elaborate trousseaux, or the vast mahogany bedroom sets. He rediscovered what he had always had: the ability to tell charming stories and laugh people out of their indecision. He could smooth ruffled feathers, and the sunny glow he imported as he walked his rounds was a quality that he turned on quite deliberately. He was saying to himself,
See? I can do it. I can be happy. I can get along.
Sometimes he amused himself for whole days at a time with this fantasy, until he would get home and go to his own room and sit at his desk, and find himself pouring words onto a page, addressing them to Octavia, sealing them in an envelope, and sending them to her.

He dared not plead—that would be as cruel to her as this whole charade was to himself—but he tried to be subtly persuasive. He tried to say appealing things. And in between the words he hoped she could feel him leaping out towards her, wrapping her in his arms. That’s all he wanted to do, in the end. Have her with him, in his bed, in his days. Christ! It was unbearable. It was purgatory. And it went on, and on, and on.

One evening, his parents held a dinner party. It was late March; there was the scent of spring in the air. There was a cherry tree in the garden, and it was all in bloom. One of the guests, a newspaper editor, remarked on it; and, as Harry stood at the man’s side, he had turned to him and held out his hand. “Joshua Bellstock,” he had said. “I hear you’ve written a book.”

“Yes,” John had replied. “On English houses.”

“Travel there much?”

“Yes, last year. There, and Europe.”

“Know the English?” he had asked. “Know how they think?”

John had had to stop himself laughing out loud. He was afraid it would come out rather bitterly. “Some,” he had replied.

“Anyone in government? Anyone who could get you into France?”

John had frowned. “Well, I guess we can all travel there if we want. We’re neutrals, after all.”

Bellstock had considered him, assessing him. “I want a man to go there and give a view.”

“Why is that?”

Bellstock had smiled. “There’s a few of us who think opinion needs directing.”

“You mean to enter the war?”

“Perhaps.”

John had nodded. He knew why he was being asked at this particular time. Just a day or two before, on March 28, the British merchant ship
Falaba
had been sunk by a German submarine. New York was buzzing with the news. Over a hundred people had been killed, including one American, a mining engineer from Massachusetts. As a matter of fact, the incident hadn’t surprised John; merchant vessels were regarded as auxiliary navy, and the German Admiralty had already said a month before that they would attack any merchant ship they could find in the water surrounding England and Ireland. And their point had been soundly proved when the
Falaba
’s end was hastened by the thirteen tons of high explosives that she was carrying.

Five days later, the
New York Times
had an editorial. “Shall we go further, and let loose the sympathies we have labored to repress in the struggle against barbarism?” it had asked. John could feel his own countrymen being whipped up and into the Allied cause. At the same time, the agriculture minister was soothingly saying that the war in Europe would be over by October, and the new Cape Cod magazine wrote lyrically about the spirit of the Cape calling, and softly lapping waters and gentle breezes.

Like most of the men of his generation, John felt himself pulled this way and that. He didn’t like Germans—at least, he didn’t like the couple of Germans he had met recently, the unpleasant preening military attaché Von Papen and his sidekick Karl Boy-Ed. They always managed to ingratiate themselves into society galas, but they made his flesh crawl. It didn’t help that one of his father’s diplomatic friends had overheard Boy-Ed calling them all “idiotic Yankees.” There was a rumor too, that they were whipping up opinion in the Irish dockworkers against American shipping—causing strikes, disputes, and bad feeling.

He didn’t know if that were true, but one thing he did know. He didn’t want to go to war. He felt that it would stain his country. And then he would think of Octavia, and her son in France. He supposed Harry must be in the thick of battle by now—he couldn’t imagine him sitting on his hands while the flower of England, its gilded youth, flocked to the recruiting stations. And yet, Harry . . . He couldn’t begin to imagine Octavia and William’s anxiety. He had already read heartrending stories of only sons, heirs to businesses or estates, dying in France. And so he had looked at Bellstock with mixed emotions. “You want what, someone banging a drum?”

“No, no,” Bellstock had assured him. “But personal views. What England’s really thinking? How things really are.”

“And out in France?”

Bellstock had shuffled his feet. “The fact is, the Canadians are there. And Indians and Australians. They’re coming from all over while we stand back.”

“We ship them arms,” John observed.

Bellstock laughed rather too heartily. “Well, to quote yourself, we’re neutrals,” he said. Then the smile left his face. “I don’t want to ship arms and do nothing else,” he said. “Do you? It’s like handing a gun to a guy in a fistfight. You can’t do that and then say we’re neutral. We’re in this already. I say we should stand out front, not in the background.”

“Well,” said John thoughtfully. “I’m not sure at all I want to stand in front.”

Bellstock has raised an eyebrow. “That so?” he asked. “I’d do it in a minute. Got to do it, like it or not.”

John had thought about it for a few days. Then, at breakfast in the first week of April, he had broached the subject with his parents.

His mother had blanched and laid down her knife and fork. “You are not going to France,” she said.

“As an observer for Bellstock’s newspaper.”

“No,” she said firmly.

He had looked at his father. Oscar Gould had pushed himself away from the table. “I guess that damn traveling bug is rearing its head again,” he sighed. “I told you when thirty came, I wanted you here.”

“I’ve been here,” John had replied equably. “But I’m not thirty till August.”

Gradually, the two smiled at each other.

“Keep yourself way behind the lines,” his father warned.

“I’ve no desire to get a bullet,” John replied. “They sure must spoil the cut of a good suit.”

At the other end of the table, John’s mother had exclaimed in exasperation, thrown her napkin at them, and missed by a mile.

*   *   *

H
e opened his eyes now, and looked around him.

Outside, he could see the coal elevators on the wharf; theirs was a constant drumming, lifting five thousand tons of coal into the ship. All around him the passengers milled, some carrying today’s newspapers. He could see that a few conversations were going on even in the ticket line, and, at that very moment, a lovely woman ahead of him turned around. She was with another man who was talking to a porter. “My goodness,” she said anxiously. “Do you think there’s anything in it?”

He touched his hat. “In what, precisely?”

“All this talk of the Germans trying to sink us.”

He smiled at her; she was very charming in her dove-grey costume. Under the broad brim of her hat, she shyly smiled back. Her husband turned around. “This is Robert,” she said.

John shook hands with the man. “Annie here is worrying,” her husband said, grinning. “But how can you sink a ship that can outrun any submarine on earth?”

“You can’t,” John replied. He’d heard the rumors, and he had read the newspaper.

“But the warning they printed today,” Annie murmured.

Robert Matthews had a copy of the very page in his hand, John saw. There was a boxed item halfway down the page among the advertisements for Cunard shipping.
Notice!
it was headed in bold type.
Travelers intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany and her allies. . . .
It was signed
Imperial German Embassy
at the bottom.

“Read it all the way down,” Robert gently encouraged. “Vessels flying the flag of Great Britain or any of her allies are liable to destruction. . . .”

“You see!” Annie exclaimed.

“But we don’t fall into that category. We’re not an ally,” John told her. “And she’s not flying a British flag, is she? I don’t see one at any rate.”

“Precisely,” Robert agreed. He smiled at John. “Just an attempt to get us all rattled,” he said. “Their U-boats can’t outrun us. And how could you smuggle anything onto the ship with the secret service around?”

He nodded in the direction of two men who were mingling with the Cunard clerks.

“Is that who they are?” Annie whispered.

“Looking for suspicious persons.”

Annie, at last, began to smile. “Then you’re not safe, darling.” And the couple laughed.

He laughed with them. He hoped the woman felt better, for he really believed what he had told her. He wondered if, at any time during this voyage, he would be able to say to her, “Look, this ship won’t sink. You know why? Because it’s charmed. It’s carrying me back to England. And I’ll be on the same soil of someone there . . . it’s carrying me back to her.” He stole a glance at Annie, so sweet, so charming, so evidently in love with the man she was with. She would understand, he knew.

John watched as his luggage was marked with chalk and loaded onto a conveyor belt. It lumbered off with the Matthews’ steamer trunks alongside, and soon it was joined by a huge series of matching cases. Annie nudged John’s arm. “Rita Jolivet,” she said. “The actress, you know.”

“Is that so?” John knew nothing about the theater, though he had been tempted to go and see Barnum & Bailey before he left. But in the end he had not found the enthusiasm for skating bears and warrior elephants, nor the miraculous motorcyclists in their suspended golden globe. And he had not relished pushing his way through the ice-cream-eating crowds at Madison Square. He would have done so once, however—he would have enjoyed it. Now, he couldn’t decide if it was his lethargy in missing Octavia that stopped him, or the fact that he might be—at last, his mother would say—growing up.

“Anyone else I should look out for?” he asked Annie.

“Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt,” she replied.

“Please ignore her,” Robert told John. “Society pages. She drinks them up.”

“I certainly do not,” Annie said. “But if Mr. Vanderbilt should cast an eye in my direction . . .”

“He’ll certainly do that,” Robert replied. “You’re female, aren’t you?”

John suppressed a smile. He knew Vanderbilt. He was a handsome man, and fond of his sports. Some years before, his divorce had been the scandal of the day. But John could not glimpse him among the crowds. Perhaps he had canceled at the last minute, but John hoped not. Three years ago, Vanderbilt had canceled his voyage on the Titanic so late that they assumed he had actually been on board, and listed him as a casualty. Superstitiously, John crossed his fingers behind his back; then, a moment later, he rapidly uncrossed them as he saw Vanderbilt’s familiar profile at the Customs Hall door. He allowed himself a small smile of chagrin.
This ship won’t sink
, he told himself again.
She’s as fast as they come.
In a week, he would be in England.