Losing Julia Read online

  On good days I always shave and shower, careful to cling to the metal bars that ring the bathroom. I still wash my hair every day, though you can’t tell, and I put a small dab of cologne on each cheek to confuse the nurses. (How could something so repulsive smell so good?) The toughest part of dressing is getting my feet into my pants, as neither my arms nor my feet are willing to meet halfway. Sometimes I’ll get help—though it depresses me—or if my muscles are really stiff, I’ll turn on my side on my bed and try to squirm down into my pants until I can grab them and wiggle them on. If I wasn’t so fastidious, I might just sleep in the damn things.

  By eight a.m. I appear in the dining room for breakfast, usually some pieces of melon, coffee and toast. I used to eat tremendous amounts in the morning, great piles of pancakes and bacon washed down with freshly squeezed orange juice, the pulp crunching between my teeth. But now my body resists, unable to process more than a few feeble calories at a time. The nurses say I’m losing too much weight, but even pizza and ice cream have lost their allure, which is a scary thing, like finding out you no longer enjoy sex or music. (No, I’m not that far gone yet.) I wonder whether there was even a single day of metabolic harmony before I went from fighting to keep fat off to struggling to keep it on. If so, I would dearly like to know what I ate.

  After breakfast I either sit down with a book or the newspaper, outside on the porch if it is nice, or if I have signed up for one of the morning activities I paint or play cards or bake cookies or fiddle in the small workshop where we make leather belts and wallets and trinkets to give to our grandchildren. (I loathe the sight of old people sitting around beading and weaving and eating Elmer’s glue but say nothing.)

  For lunch I prefer soup and a grilled cheese sandwich with sliced tomatoes in it and lots of ketchup, but of course I take whatever is being offered. Then I usually return to my room to listen to music on my small tape player. Chopin and Mozart and Rachmaninoff are my mainstays, a sort of holy trinity to which I long ago entrusted my soul, but late in life I became smitten by soundtracks: Doctor Zhivago, Camelot, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, Zorba the Greek, Man of La Mancha, Exodus. Sometimes I fall asleep, though usually I remain awake in the chair in the corner, which is orange and itchy. Then at two-thirty p.m. I go to physical therapy for a forty-five-minute workout, which I suspect is shortening my life span but breaks the routine nonetheless. I try to socialize a bit in the recreation room before dinner because afterward I am often too tired to do anything but sit and watch the nurses go by, which isn’t a bad thing to do when you don’t feel like much else. Then it’s back to bed with my book and brandy, bracing for the night’s demons and debauchery.

  WHERE TO START? With Daniel? Yes, dear Daniel.

  I see him so clearly. Handsome as all hell. Smart as a whip too. Always seemed to know things I needed to know but never could figure out, like he was one of those people who are born with answers built right in. You were so young! My young friend Daniel, sitting there cold and hungry in a tarpaulin dugout in the rain with your knees drawn up and writing page after page. Always writing.

  Daniel MacGuire was from a family of San Francisco Irish Catholics who proudly traced their lineage to a treacherous trip around Cape Horn in 1851, the final leg of a two-year flight from the potato famine. His father Conor was a stonemason, as was his father and father before him. The second oldest of seven—the two youngest died of scarlet fever—Daniel was pulled from school at the age of fifteen to help his father, who was backlogged rebuilding San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. But Daniel kept studying. “It was either stones or books, and what the hell did I want to spend my life putting one stone on top of another for?” he said. By sixteen he had published his first short story in a boy’s adventure magazine. Though he wanted to apply for a job with a newspaper, he didn’t have the heart to leave his father, who had a bad back and increasingly relied on Daniel to run the business. Then one day, on a Sunday afternoon in September, Daniel was walking along Stinson Beach when he saw Julia.

  “She had this little chair and an easel and this look on her face like she was completely lost in what she was doing, and I just thought she looked adorable. I must have walked by her four times before I got the courage to walk up and ask her what she was painting.”

  “What was it?”

  “What was what?”

  “The painting?”

  “Oh hell, I can’t remember, I was so struck by her face. Absolutely thunderstruck, like I’d been physically hit. But she’s a damn good painter. She may even make a name for herself.”

  Maybe I saw her sitting on the beach too, or maybe it was just the expression on Daniel’s face when he talked about her, but for me, Julia soon became my own escape from the war; my personal guardian angel who beckoned me away from the madness every time I closed my eyes. Daniel offered hundreds of dots and I connected them, until the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen emerged, my angel in the trenches; my incantation against despair. My Julia.

  Her father was killed in an accident on San Francisco’s wharf when she was a child; her mother worked as a waitress in a coffee shop. After school each day Julia sat at one end of the counter doing her homework or drawing pictures. She preferred drawing pictures, mostly landscapes inhabited by children at play or workers at rest. Daniel said her portraits were all of poor people with callused but unbeaten expressions and I imagined that she had no tolerance for the rich or well-connected.

  She grew up in a series of cheap one-bedroom apartments near the wharves and Daniel described how the dampness of the bay mingled with the smells of leather and sweat and wet wood and the fresh fish on display early each morning in the market stalls. Like Daniel (and me!) she loved to read from an early age, disappearing for days into books when the pressures of childhood threatened to overwhelm her. “My bookish beauty,” he called her.

  I struggled to picture such a thing. “Sounds like you’ve met your match—and I’m referring only to the bookish part,” I said one evening as we sat in a trench after returning from water duty.

  “Oh no, I’m entirely outclassed.” He lit a cigarette and slowly inhaled. Looking past him down the line I could see the glow of other cigarettes dancing in the darkness like fireflies. “She once told me that she got her self-esteem through books and I asked how that was possible, and she said that through books she learned what other people, even great people, were really made of inside, and it wasn’t anything that she didn’t have.”

  When she was eighteen, she won a scholarship to study at the Art Institute but dropped out after her mother got sick. She divided her time between waiting tables and caring for her mother, painting only at night after her mother was asleep.

  “She’s not like other women,” said Daniel. “At least not the kind I’ve met.”

  “How is that?” I asked, watching as he exhaled his smoke into the lice-infested folds of his uniform.

  He looked over at me and smiled. “It’s not just her beauty. There are plenty of women who are prettier than her. But she’s got this incredible charm. And she’s completely unconventional. She doesn’t want to live like everybody else with all their petty ambitions and fancy clothes and numbing routines. We’ve even talked of spending our lives on the road, just traveling and meeting people and seeing the world. All of it: South America and the Orient and even Africa.” His face took on a wistful expression. “But the best part about her is that I can tell her anything. I never imagined that that would be possible.”

  “Everything?” I couldn’t imagine divulging the contents of my soul—much less my imagination—to any woman without the severest of consequences.

  He nodded.

  “There is one thing about her though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She’s totally absentminded. It’s almost scary. For example, when I met her on the beach, she’d lost track of time and missed her ride home.”

  “How convenient.”

  “You wouldn’t trust her to heat a p
ot of water.”

  “She’s an artist, what do you expect?”

  “I just hope she doesn’t forget she’s in love with me,” he said, smiling.

  “Doubtful. Did you start dating right away?” I was hungry for details.

  “Immediately. It was incredible. We’d meet as often as we could, sometimes at the beach or in a park or by the wharves. Often I would just sit and watch her paint and I used to laugh to myself because I knew that no matter how talented she was, nothing she could paint was as beautiful as the sight of her painting.”

  “Are you engaged?”

  He laughed. “You kidding? My parents won’t even meet her. She’s not Catholic. Doesn’t even go to church. ‘It’s not the girl we don’t like, Danny, but by God you marry out of the faith and you’ll split the family forever.’ That’s my father. Mother just kept quiet and wrung her hands, which is her way of voicing discomfort. ‘The faith is all we have, Danny. It’s who we are.’”

  Two months later Daniel and Julia ran away, heading north along the coast up to Mendocino, where Daniel tried his hand at poetry and Julia taught art. His letters home were returned unopened. That was 1916. A year later he joined the army, figuring that his parents would be unable to resist a son in uniform, even with a Protestant at his side.

  I pray you may never encounter a modern bombardment, it is simply hell let loose. The sights one sees are too dreadful to talk about, no chance of burial for the dead, they slowly rot in the ground, mangled and re-mangled by shells, and the flies come in swarms. Imagine trying to eat food under these conditions, also up to the knees in mud and water for 4 or 5 days at a time. I pray to God it will soon be over and this madness of slaughter comes to an end.

  —Reginald Gill, Australian Imperial Force, 1916.

  I FIRST MET Daniel in France. I was a replacement; he was a veteran, at least in my eyes. I was hastily assigned to the eight-man squad he led after being assembled with other replacements at a crowded railroad siding south of Paris. Within an hour the replenished combat battalion was marching toward the front, part of a dusty column of men and horses and trucks and ammunition limbers that stretched across the rolling French countryside, hurrying to meet the great German spring offensive, which was pushing the exhausted French Army back across the Marne River for the second time since 1914 and now threatened Paris.

  I liked him immediately. He was tall and broad-shouldered with tousled, reddish-brown hair, a slight gap between his front upper teeth and a habit of rocking forward on the balls of his feet even after a long march. He was very handsome with intense, hazel-colored eyes that maintained a constant, penetrating squint, a strong chin and thin lips set in a slight smile. He had large, powerful hands, the kind where you can see the muscles and tendons at work, and incredible stamina. When he laughed he threw his head back and shook without making any noise. Though I only saw him cry once I felt it sometimes, in the darkness during a shelling or standing next to me at a burial service. But what I remember most about Daniel was that he seemed to have complete self-control over every muscle in his body, which is unusual when you are under fire. And no matter what we were doing, he always seemed to be preoccupied with something more important, like someone who is in the middle of making a momentous decision.

  He was a good soldier, much braver than I was but not foolhardy, with an economy of motion and agility that made him seem almost graceful, which is no mean trick in war. Yet he never seemed the military type, not the gruff, cigar-chomping sort that inevitably intimidated me. He was far too gentle and soft-spoken, with a soothing, compassionate manner that made you want to spill your fears and secrets to him. (He was one of the few men that other men felt comfortable crying in front of.) By temperament, I think he would have made an excellent doctor or priest.

  “Fresh off the boat?” he asked, dropping back to walk next to me.

  “A few weeks,” I said, broadening my shoulders.

  “We got a good bunch of men,” he said, sizing me up.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  He nodded slowly, still studying me. Then he gave me a friendly smile and said, “I was scared shitless the first couple of times.”

  I shrugged. The first couple of what? Shellings? Bayonet charges? Gas attacks? I wanted to ask but didn’t dare.

  “It’s amazing what you get used to,” he continued, offering me a cigarette. I took it. “Though to be honest, I wish we didn’t get used to it. Then it couldn’t go on.”

  “You been here long?” I asked.

  “Long enough.”

  “Pretty bad?”

  “Worse.”

  I wondered if he was testing me.

  “Why did you enlist?” I asked.

  He was silent for a moment. “It’s complicated,” he said finally. “How about you?”

  “Seemed like the thing to do.”

  “Yes it did, didn’t it?” he said, with a distant expression on his face.

  An hour later we entered a small village, where we were stopped for two hours by a huge traffic jam. At the center of the square an angry officer stood on the top of a delousing truck, bellowing orders.

  By midafternoon the straps of my pack cut into my shoulders. I mentally itemized my load: a hundred rounds in my cartridge belt; two bandoliers, sixty rounds in each; a nine-pound rifle; my haversack, filled with extra clothes, my kit bag, mess tin, pay book, extra boots, pup tent, blanket and four tins of hard bread; my greatcoat, which was rolled on the top of my haversack; a canteen; a pistol; a shovel; a first aid pouch; a bayonet; a gas respirator, which hung around my neck, and my helmet. At least some of the men were smaller than me. I studied their faces, looking for signs of stress, then wiped my brow with my sleeve.

  “Pershing’s Ammunition Train,” said Daniel, smiling.

  “What?”

  “That’s what they call us.”

  “I don’t mind it.” I slid my thumbs under the straps of my pack, arched my shoulders and smiled.

  Moments later I heard a low buzzing sound and looked up. An airplane appeared from the south, dropping low.

  “It’s one of ours,” someone said.

  As it skimmed the treetops the flier leaned over and dropped a small object, which fell quickly to the ground.

  “What was that?”

  “A messenger cylinder.”

  “Maybe it’s from your mom,” said a voice up ahead. Laughter.

  WE MARCHED with little rest for three days, sometimes cutting through fields and woods to avoid the endless caravans that clogged the roads. Daniel and I spent much of the time talking, and after that he rarely left my side, especially at the front. We talked about our childhoods and our hopes for the future and he told me about his writings and about the war and what it did to people and how difficult it would be to ever explain to those back home. At the time I didn’t really understand what he meant.

  “But won’t you feel proud for what you did?” I asked on the third day, as we were ordered to strip down to combat packs.

  “Proud?”

  “Yes. Back home men are dying to get shipped over. They’re afraid it’ll all be finished before they get here.” I pulled out my extra blanket and boots.

  “No, I won’t feel proud.” When I looked at the solemn expression on his face I sensed for the first time that maybe the war wasn’t going to be quite what I’d expected.

  As we wound around a low ridge lined with poplar trees I looked down at the stone skeleton of a small village. One corner of a church remained; the adjacent cemetery appeared untouched. I imagined a grand wedding party pouring out of the church and into a line of black carriages and smoke arising from the town bakery on a crisp winter day. From the ridge I heard, for the first time, faint thuds in the distance, like the low growl of a very angry animal.

  “The guns, of course,” said a voice behind me. Those of us who were new tried very hard not to show any fear.

  “Yes, quite a lot of them,” said another voice.

  “How far do
you suppose they are?”

  “Maybe a couple dozen miles yet, I’d guess.”

  “Sounds like a lot of guns to me.”

  “Mostly French 75s and German 77s.”

  “What about our guns?”

  “We don’t have any guns.”

  “We don’t?”

  “Not many. We use a lot of French 75s.”

  “They any good?”

  “The best.”

  “You know something about artillery?”

  “A little.”

  “You can hear them things all the way from Dover.”

  “Where’s Dover?”

  “In England. Across the Channel.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “How far is that?”

  “Far.”

  “Must be a damn lot of guns.”

  “Wait until we get closer.”

  “Goddamn. Isn’t this gonna be something, huh boys?”

  “You got that.”

  “Time to have a talk with Fritz.”

  “Yep. Time to talk to Fritz.”

  “Fucking Huns.”

  By late afternoon the faint pounding had become a thunderous beating of drums, as though in anticipation of some gruesome tribal ritual. At a bend in the road several men were gathered around a man lying on the ground next to a tree. Nearby, I caught just a glimpse of an Indian motorcycle on its side, its front tire rim bent.

  “What happened to him?”

  “He ate it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Took the turn too fast. They say he broke his neck.”

  “Ever ride one of those things? Dangerous as all hell.”

  “Looks fun to me.”

  “Don’t ever be a dispatch rider.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’ll eat shit, that’s why. It’s the fucking suicide squad.”

  We passed abandoned earthworks and broken wagons and huge piles of empty ration tins. Many trees were shattered, bent this way and that like cornstalks after the harvest. In an orchard on our left a battery of guns manned by the French was hidden beneath chicken wire covered with painted cloth and branches.