Losing Julia Read online

  I wanted to tell her more than that; I wanted to tell her that she was standing on the aorta of France and that just up the road on February 21, 1916, the Germans had raised a huge glittering blade and brought it down with all the might of the Teutonic Empire again and again and again for ten months. I wanted to tell her that the blood of a nation—the terrified and exhausted fathers and sons of France—had come coursing down the Voie Sacrée toward thundering acrid oblivion.

  I looked at her standing near the side of the road next to a ditch filled with rusted axles and engine parts and when she turned and looked at me I knew from her eyes that she saw what I saw: an endless bumper-to-bumper caravan of bulging transports and lorries and wavering columns of dirty and tired men tagging alongside, all of them doomed.

  And there was nothing we could say to them as they passed. Nothing at all.

  OUR LAST STOP was at a barren hill near Verdun that the French call Le Mort-Homme, which means The Dead Man, though it might also be thought of as a sloped anvil upon which men were smashed to little bits, bits that French Army chaplains still collect each week and place in the bulging Ossuary after the wild boars have dug them up.

  We walked slowly to the top and stopped near where a group of uniformed cadets were receiving a lecture from a severe-looking officer with a thick mustache and a chest full of medals.

  “What do you suppose he is saying?” asked Julia, turning her back to the strong wind and pulling her hair away from her face as she leaned against me. Her brow was creased and her lower lip was tucked in. It occurred to me that she was one of the few people who are just as attractive when they are serious as when they are smiling, maybe more so.

  I looked over at the French soldier, and then at the young faces of the students, riveted by what he was saying. Watching him and his dramatic gestures and the supreme pride in his face made me flush with anger.

  “I’ll tell you what he’s not saying. He’s not saying what it’s like when a shell lands in a trench full of men. He’s not saying what that looks like and smells like and sounds like and how it feels to be covered with bits of flesh. And I don’t suppose he’s saying anything about the surprising heft of a decapitated head, how awkward it is to pick up for burial and how—”

  “Please, no more,” said Julia.

  “But it’s true. Look at their faces. They’re ready to revenge their fathers. Ten years and people have forgotten. Christ, a couple of more years and everybody will be ready for a rematch.”

  “They’re so young. They don’t know any better.”

  “Maybe someone ought to tell them. Maybe we should have allowed the war to continue on one small section of the front, just a few hundred yards, enough so that anyone who starts itching for a little glory can have a taste.”

  Julia turned and looked east toward the Meuse; then northwest across low hills toward Montfaucon, site of the massive Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, the largest in Europe. Everywhere the earth was deformed like the skin of a child pulled from a fire.

  The cadets stood at attention, then saluted.

  Julia turned toward me. “Can we leave?” she asked. Her fists were clenched and she avoided looking at me.

  As we walked quickly down past the cadets and toward the car I wondered if she was upset with the war or with me for dwelling on it. But I needed to dwell on it. Wasn’t that why I had returned?

  We drove for an hour in silence. Finally Julia said, “I don’t want to see any more memorials.”

  “That’s fine with me.” Was it? I’d wanted to see the Meuse-Argonne Cemetery. Perhaps another day.

  “Maybe you want to, but I don’t.”

  “I don’t want to either. No more memorials.”

  “Good.” She smiled. “Why don’t we buy a bottle of wine somewhere and go for a hike?”

  “Excellent idea.” I stretched my right arm out on the seat rest behind her.

  We found a small store run by an old woman with cataracts and no front teeth. On the counter she kept a German helmet brimming with red and green sweets; a shell casing in the corner held umbrellas. I noticed she kept staring at me and I wondered if she thought that she knew me. When we paid she offered us each a piece of candy and then pointed to a picture of a smiling, handsome young man hanging in a small wooden frame behind the counter. Then she placed her hand on her heart and dropped her head forward slightly. The gesture hit me so hard that I found myself unable to speak.

  When we got back to the car Julia began biting her nails, then suddenly burst into tears. I turned and wrapped my arms around her and held her tight, feeling the heaving of her back.

  “He’s not dead you know,” she said, pulling back from me.

  “Who’s not dead?”

  “The man in the photograph. He’s not dead.”

  “But she was indicating that—”

  “I saw him. Just a glimpse. He was in the back room. He was horribly deformed. Like a monster. It was awful.”

  “Les gueules cassées.”

  “The what?”

  “The smashed faces. That’s what the French call them. They’re hidden all over Europe.”

  “I hate this place,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hands. “No, I don’t hate it. I hate all the destruction. I hate the bombs and the debris and the graves and the wounds and the heartbroken mothers and fathers.”

  “Yes, I do too.”

  “And I hate helmets with candy in them.”

  As she leaned back against me she rested her head on my chest and began to softly cry again. I rubbed her back and rocked her gently like a child, then closed my eyes and lost myself in the smell of her hair.

  KELLY CAME to visit me today. She was in town for a one- day management seminar and dropped by at lunchtime. I looked up from my soup and saw her walking toward me and I felt the tightness in my throat that I always feel now when I see any of my children or grandchildren.

  “Dad!” She bent down and gave me a tight hug and a kiss on my forehead. “You’re looking good today. I’m glad to see you eating.” The very young and the very old are under enormous pressure to eat.

  “You look beautiful, Kelly,” I said, clasping her hands in mine. “What a sight for an old man.” At fifty, Kelly looks barely forty, though her son David is twenty-six and his daughter Katy three. Maybe it’s because she never drank or smoked, but I think it’s probably because Kelly was born with a certain immunity to the low-level anxiety that grinds the rest of us down like old teeth. I used to think that people like Kelly were simply tougher than the rest of us; now I realize they are wired differently.

  “You always knew how to flatter,” she smiled. We walked outside and sat on the patio. I noticed that her shoes were worn and wondered if she was having money troubles.

  “How are you feeling, Dad?”

  “I’m okay. How’s work?”

  “The same. I’d quit if it wasn’t for the money.”

  “I guess that’s why most jobs include some form of remuneration. Any interesting men?”

  Kelly has been single since she and Stewart divorced eight years ago. Stewart was a bland and bulky Dartmouth boy who followed his own father nose-to-ass into investment banking in New York, abandoning Kelly for all but a few disappointing hours a week.

  “Not a one. Frankly, Dad, I don’t care if I never get married again. I’ve got plenty of good friends. I’m not lonely.”

  “You’re too pretty to be single,” I said. “Or maybe you’re too pretty to be married. I’m not sure which anymore.” As she smiled the corners of her mouth tugged more to the left than the right, just like her mother. I always loved that.

  “Do you ever wish you remarried after you and Mom divorced?” She’d never asked me that before.

  “I tried,” I said.

  “With who?”

  “A woman I once knew. But it didn’t work.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I never knew that. A heartbreak, huh?” She tilted her head slightly as she looked at me and I wo
ndered how Stewart could have been such a fool.

  “Yeah, one of those,” I said. Then I stood with my cane in one hand and held her hand with the other as we walked across the grass.

  “I felt terrible that you were alone over Christmas.”

  “I told you not to worry about that. It’s not like I’m ever alone here.”

  “I worry about you. You should be with family. Are you sure you won’t come and live with me?”

  “I’m fine right here. Besides, they’ve got great medical facilities.” I mention the medical facilities every time my children suggest I move back in with them; I think it helps alleviate some of their guilt.

  “You’re not too lonely?” she asked, looking at me closely. She smelled of soap and I remembered plucking her slippery white body from the tub each evening after dinner and wrapping her in a big yellow towel and rolling her back and forth across our bed as she howled with laughter.

  “Lonely? Christ, I can’t get a minute to myself and you know what a loner I am.”

  “I hate thinking about you here, like we’ve abandoned you.”

  I put my hand up and shook my head.

  She tried to smile. “Do you need anything? Books or something? I can send whatever you need.”

  “Got any recent photos of Katy?”

  MY STOMACH HURTS.

  “WHAT DO YOU do with your pennies?” Eleanor Kravitski was staring at me across the lunch table, her soup spoon frozen halfway between bowl and mouth.

  “My pennies?” I asked.

  “Yes, your pennies,” she said. “In my eighty-four years I have never found a satisfactory method of disposing of all the pennies one accumulates. Have you?”

  “Well, Eleanor, come to think of it, I don’t believe I have. Let’s see, you can keep them in a big jar… ”

  “But then you either have to spend two days stuffing them into those penny rolls, which always rip and bend at the edges, or you have to carry the jar to the bank, which I can’t do.”

  “You can try to spend them as you get them.”

  “Never works. It’s impossible to spend your pennies as fast as you get them unless you hold up every checkout line and count out a dollar’s worth of pennies with every purchase, which of course you can’t do. Do you know how long it takes to count pennies under pressure, especially when you have arthritis? The fact is, you can usually only spend about two or three pennies at a time to make exact change, and that’s no way to dispose of a huge penny collection.”

  “You could refuse to take pennies.”

  “I do! I stopped taking pennies two years ago. Said I want nothing to do with them, thank you. But I’ve still got a huge jar of pennies on my dresser, which means I’ll have to make exact change for another ten years or so to get rid of them all. Why, I don’t even care about the money, I’m just tired of thinking about pennies.” Her frozen spoon lurched back into motion and she slurped her soup.

  Four days later Howard and I snuck into Eleanor’s room and carted her pennies away in a wheelchair covered by a blanket. We buried them out back behind the largest oak tree, about sixteen dollars worth, we figured. Ever since, Eleanor has appeared positively radiant. I’m certain she believes her prayers were answered.

  I MISS Julia so much.

  DANIEL, PAGE, Lawton and I got passes to go to Paris for three days that August. Actually we won them for capturing three German soldiers dressed as Americans and attempting to cross over into our lines near Vierzy, south of Soissons. We were elated: passes to Paris were extremely hard to come by, especially for doughboys, who, if sent anywhere for relief, usually ended up in official “leave areas” run by the YMCA like the one in Aix-les-Bains (“Aches and Pains”).

  None of us had ever been there of course, and we were like giddy children when we got off the train and waded into a crowd of soldiers and civilians and women in beautiful long dresses all kissing and hugging and shaking hands. I don’t know what I expected but it wasn’t like anything I imagined. The stores were filled with goods while kiosks offered every possible thing you could want—at a price—including souvenirs like German helmets and belt buckles and medals and swords. Though many of the women wore black and hundreds of amputees sold pencils and newspapers on the streets, Paris seemed impervious to the war; smug in its certainty that such mindless destruction was beneath its massive, corniced dignity. The few buildings that were damaged from bombings by zeppelins and the long-range guns were already surrounded by scaffolding and there was no sign that only weeks earlier the German spring offensive had come close enough to the city to cause evacuations.

  Somehow the dense beauty of the city disturbed me. I think it was the gaiety of it all, the picnics in the parks alongside perfect rows of flowers and the brightly colored parasols and neatly pressed livery and the theaters and the perfumes and the art shows; all this a few hours from mankind’s greatest agony. Was Berlin like this too? Were the beer halls full of laughter and was a good seat at the opera still the height of achievement? I was suddenly seized with the awful sense that the war could go on indefinitely. That it wasn’t that bad.

  Lawton made it clear that he was not leaving Paris without getting laid, and hopefully more than once, but Page insisted that he first join us for some sight-seeing.

  “It’ll be good for you,” said Page, putting his arm around Lawton as we walked. “Broaden your interests.”

  “A good fuck will be good for me,” said Lawton, reaching for his groin and walking with his knees out wide.

  “Come on, Lawton, just try to keep your pants on for a few more hours,” I said.

  “I’ll give you until five o’clock. That’s all I can last,” he said.

  We walked in silence at first, just wandering and staring. Everything seemed remarkably old to me, so weathered and tempered and ornamental and written about. I couldn’t pass a single street or church without thinking of the millions who had gone before me, all those footfalls of forgotten history.

  As we walked toward the Seine and stared across at the looming Conciergerie I wanted to ask Daniel what he was thinking but he seemed too absorbed in the sights to disturb. I watched the awed expression on his face as we entered Notre Dame, which was first on our list not so much to give thanks as to be able to write home and say we went to Notre Dame to give thanks. Then we headed toward the Dome des Invalides to look at Napoleon’s tomb.

  We entered single file and stood in silence before the huge red sarcophagus.

  “I read that he’s buried in six coffins,” said Page, who loved European history, at least up until 1914. “Like a pharaoh. The first one is tin, the second mahogany, the third and fourth lead, the fifth ebony and the sixth oak. All that was put into this sarcophagus. It’s a single block of red granite.”

  “What do you suppose he’d make of the trenches?” asked Daniel.

  “Hard to imagine him in a gas mask,” I said.

  “You don’t see the Kaiser in no gas mask,” said Lawton.

  “How did Napoleon beat the Germans?” asked Daniel.

  “Beats the hell out of me,” said Lawton. “No way he had them outnumbered.”

  Afterward we walked to the Eiffel Tower, which was guarded by soldiers and closed to the public. Daniel looked up at it and laughed. “My parents would consider this just about the ugliest thing they ever saw,” he said.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I think it’s great,” he said, still staring up.

  As we crossed the Seine again I noticed a large number of painters with their easels along the shoreline and I thought what a ludicrously peaceful thing that was to do. At the Place de la Concorde a tall juggler in a red hat was performing for a large crowd of mostly women and children and old men. The front of the circle formed around him was reserved for men in wheelchairs who smiled and clapped and twisted their wheelchairs left and right as they watched. After the performance we tossed a few coins into the juggler’s hat and then stopped at a cafe for lunch before continuing on
to the Arc de Triomphe, pausing to look at the captured German artillery on display along the Champs-Elysées.

  “God I’m horny,” said Lawton, who was now leading us toward the Bois de Boulogne, which he assured us was teeming with prostitutes. When we reached the edge of the park he turned to us and asked, “Any of you ladies care to join me?”

  We shook our heads.

  “Come on, Page, it’ll be good for you. Broaden your interests.

  “Not my class of women.”

  “Oh the dumb ones are the best, trust me.” He pulled out his wallet and began counting out his money. “I know Daniel’s hopeless. How about you Patrick? Get your pecker wet. How about it?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, feeling unsure of myself.

  “Get your pecker wet in there and it’s liable to fall off,” said Daniel, who found Lawton’s farmlike libido amusing.

  “I’ve come prepared,” said Lawton, tapping his pocket. “Come on, Patrick, what have you got to lose but your virginity?”

  “No, I think I’d rather sightsee.”

  “Sightsee? Well, what do you think I’m going to be doing, closing my eyes? You’ll have your pick, Paddy! France owes you. Then we’ll get drunk.”

  “Maybe you should have gotten Patrick drunk before you asked him,” said Page.

  Lawton stood waiting for me.

  “You go on,” I said. “Anyway, we’ve got two more days.”

  “Meet you at that Vendome thing—it’s on the map—around seven o’clock,” he said, turning and walking off rapidly.

  We stood and watched him disappear into the park, then Page headed off to meet up with an old friend who worked at the American Embassy. Daniel and I walked around aimlessly for a while, then stopped at an outdoor cafe and ordered two beers.

  As we sat there I tried to point out some of the prettier women passing by but Daniel seemed distracted, staring down at his glass with a sullen expression on his face.