Losing Julia Read online

  —Manual of the Bayonet, War Department, 1913.

  THE GERMANS began shelling us just after three a.m. We were dug in to a farmer’s field southwest of Soissons, bracing for their assault when the first murderous concussions stung my ears.

  Oh shit, I can’t take this. Clods of dirt smack against my shoulders and helmet. I press against the wall of the trench. Screams? Who is that? I’m thrown backward, then down to the ground. My cheek stings. It’s wet. I crouch lower and lower, curled up against the earth. Something metallic strikes my helmet. My left hand hurts. A gas siren? No, that’s the shells falling. Right? My box respirator hangs in a bag around my neck, but it feels tangled. Everything feels tangled. Something picks me up and throws me down again, hard. I feel seasick. I can’t do this. Oh fucking Christ.

  Back on my feet. Am I hurt? I look at my arms and legs and chest. Everything’s there. Down the trench I see Tometti clutching his photograph of Teresa right up to his face and humming a song, tears streaming down his cheeks.

  Another explosion. I’m down again. I feel a hand on my shoulder. Someone is pulling me. It’s Daniel. He points to the left, where the trench wall has collapsed. Men begin digging. Daniel grabs a shovel and pushes it into my chest. Dig.

  My arms ache as I stab at the dirt; down down down I must dig down farther. Something hits my face. My nose is bleeding. Am I crying? My face is so wet. I fall down again. Who’s screaming? My ears are bursting. Stop the noise, please. What’s that on the ground? A head. Johnson. I vomit.

  The shells land farther behind us now. I am back on my feet, dizzy. Christ it’s smoky. I can’t see.

  “Fix bayonets!”

  Jesus God. My hands shake as I struggle with the steel locking ring. Come on come on come on. I hear dozens of metallic clicks up and down the line. Vomit burns my throat.

  “The Germans are coming!”

  Flares arch up from behind our lines and hover above, as if held by curious ghosts. To my right a Hotchkiss fires and men are shouting and firing and I hear tremendous screams over the parapet. I climb up and peer over the edge and see silhouettes of men running toward me; hundreds and hundreds of men with bayonets gleaming and rifles flashing. They are coming for me.

  Holy mother of God.

  I aim and shoot and load and aim and shoot as the figures come closer and now I see faces, faces of young men and middle-aged men hurtling toward me and my whole body wants to turn and run and hide from this horror. You bastards!

  A sudden weight presses against my right side and I grab and push and pull until I see the face of Mark Castings, barely eighteen, illuminated by the moon. His jaw hangs sideways on his shoulder. I turn and load and fire. The figures are hesitating. I watch them drop to the ground. The rest turn and run back.

  I SEE THE moon, the moon sees me, the moon sees somebody I’d like to see…

  “SON OF A BITCH would you look at that,” says Giles, who has a long cut across his chin and dried mud in his eyebrows. The sun is up and I peek above the parapet. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of bodies. Some moving, some still. And flies. Flies everywhere.

  I can’t eat.

  “Don’t be a goddamned idiot, Delaney,” says John Galston, the platoon sergeant, pointing his spoon at me. A former police officer from Brooklyn who once clubbed to death an entire German machine gun crew, Galston is short and thick and all business. “A soldier can always eat. Anything, anywhere, anytime. Eat or I’ll kick your ass.”

  So I eat, then vomit.

  “You’re a goddamned embarrassment. Ought to put you back folding the fucking laundry.”

  I would love to be folding the fucking anything.

  GOD BLESS the moon and God bless me and God bless somebody I’d like to see.

  THE NEXT MORNING we counterattack. Daniel squats beside me, snapping open and closed the ten pouches of his cartridge belt one by one.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  “I’m okay.” I tighten the brown leather chin strap on my helmet, then run my hand along the wooden grip of my trench knife, which hangs from the left side of my cartridge belt. At four a.m., our artillery begins. First the 155s, then the 75s. We go over the top at five a.m., when the covering barrage will begin rolling forward at a rate of a hundred meters every five minutes.

  “Stay right with it,” says Daniel.

  “Yep, right the fuck with it,” I say.

  I am desperate to stop my shaking. Daniel puts his hand on my shoulder. I see his thumbnail is completely torn off. “Look, all you’ve got to do is get your ass out of the trench with the rest of us and run like hell and shoot at anything that moves. Don’t be first and don’t be last. Maybe we’ll even get some souvenirs.”

  Yes. Right. Okay. Just crawl up and run. I can do that.

  We are perhaps four hundred yards from the German front lines, which are bordered by barbed wire thirty feet deep in some places. Galston warns that several German machine gun teams will inevitably survive the bombardment. “Get to them and the rest is easy,” he says.

  “Yeah, no sweat.”

  At four-thirty a.m. I must piss terribly and hurry down the trench to the latrine, squeezing past dozens of huddled figures and tripping twice over bangalore torpedoes. So far the Germans are quiet, either in retreat or dug deeply in their trenches, which I’ve noticed are much better than ours.

  Back in position I check my bayonet and make sure that all my pockets are buttoned. My eyes sting from the dirty sweat beading down my face. Someone to my left is saying the rosary. The smell of damp soil and sulfur and shit and urine seems unusually strong. “Anything happens to me, I want you to write Julia and send her my diary and make sure she’s okay,” says Daniel. I nod. “Anything happens to you, I promise that after the war I’ll go visit your parents.” Again I nod, imagining Daniel in a crisp new uniform sagging with medals and his hat in hand as he rings the doorbell and my mother placing her teacup back in its saucer and pulling the shawl around her shoulders as she walks to the door.

  “Ten minutes, boys.”

  I tighten my helmet again, then tug on the haversack that hangs around my neck and holds my gas mask. Then I check the bolt of my rifle and run my hand along its smooth stock and finger my cartridge belt and grenades and the metal knuckle dusters on the handle of my trench knife and God my mouth is dry.

  The bombardment from our artillery suddenly shifts forward. Across the field the Germans remain quiet. I look sideways and see Daniel and Giles and Lawton and Tometti, their faces rigid. Tears have started down my face.

  Mother, I am nauseous.

  The captain’s whistle shrieks.

  SIX OF US are sitting in the day room, more sullen than usual. Emmett O’Rourke fell this morning as he rose from the breakfast table, smashing his left hip and elbow on the white linoleum floor. “Same thing happened to Walt Wallers and he was dead in a month,” says Mitzie Smith, an annoyingly perky woman whose genial face testifies to nearly nine decades of smiling about God knows what.

  “Well, I think Emmett is ready,” says Bernie Mumford, shuffling in with his walker and pelting us with his ruthless smiles. “Ready to be reunited with Lyddia.”

  Bernie is the self-appointed chaplain of Great Oaks, constantly probing residents for remorse and possibilities for eleventh-hour reconciliation. This morning he looks particularly excited as he plunges into our silence, his furry eyebrows rising and dropping like window shades. “So, Jack, what would you do differently if you had it to do all over again?” he asks, pausing his walker to rest. Jack is actually gassy ol’ Oscar, who is spared from his own perfidies by the oxygen tube he wears. But Bernie calls all the men “Jack” and the women “Dear.”

  “By God, I’d do it all differently,” says Oscar. That’s what I like about him: he hasn’t lost his verve. If he didn’t smell so bad I might even get chummy with him.

  “Everything?” Bernie looks dumbfounded.

  “He’s pulling our leg,” suggests Mitzie, rather gingerly. A rail-thin homo barely e
rectus blue-hair, the predominant species at Great Oaks, Mitzie’s spine is curled like a dried seahorse, so that when she stands her hunchback is level with the top of her head. She has heart disease and glaucoma and a habit of falling asleep in the middle of every meal, sometimes with food still left in her mouth, unprocessed.

  “Everything except for that trifecta I won at Del Mar in 1967 and the time at Sycamore High in 1923 when I hit two homers against the Trojans to claim the state title.” Several of us recoil, fearing that Oscar will launch into yet another soliloquy on his glory days at Sycamore.

  “How could you feel that way?” asks Bernie.

  “You want to hear about the thirty years I wasted in the steel business?” continues Oscar, sucking a big hit of oxygen in through his nostrils.

  Half a dozen voices shout, “No!”

  “So what would you have rather done?” I ask.

  “I never would have married, for starters.”

  “I thought you loved Rose,” I say.

  “Sure I did. I’m just sorry I married her.” He takes in another long hit of air. “What I really wanted to do was play baseball. The majors. And maybe date some movie stars. Only I ended up marrying Rose and selling steel. You see my point?”

  “I see your point,” I say.

  “What about you, Mitzie?” asks Bernie.

  “Gosh, I wouldn’t have done anything differently,” chirps Mitzie. When I first arrived at Great Oaks Mitzie seemed to have something of a crush on me, but lately she’s been doting on Bernie. I couldn’t be happier. “I’m proud of what I did. Proud of the way I raised my kids. Proud of my grandkids. I just thank the Lord for my blessings.”

  Amen. But I wonder: was Mitzie’s life really better than most, or did she appreciate it more or just remember it differently? I suspect she remembers it differently, which is really the trick. If you want to age gracefully, remember selectively. Old age is best spent in the editor’s booth, whittling a life down to its greatest hits, which are played over and over again until the tape finally snaps.

  “I always wanted one evening where I was the most beautiful woman at the ball,” says Helen, giving me the eye, or what’s left of it. “Where all the handsome young men, the pick of society, were desperate for my attentions.” She inhales dramatically, then winks at me. “Mind you, I had my good days.” She presses her palm gently against her cheek, as if she had just awoken from an attack of the vapors. “Days when I felt so pretty, so put together, that I just had to get out to be seen.”

  “Anybody else?” asks Bernie, pursing his lips and beginning to whistle, which is the other reason he annoys me: he whistles constantly, as though he is doing us a favor by providing a little background noise.

  “I would have studied piano,” whispers Howard Bullard, who always whispers and always wears the same lime green cardigan with ketchup stains down the front. “Always wished I could play the piano.” Howard’s sallow, pallbearerlike pallor makes him look like a younger man made up to look like a very old man. He blinks constantly from behind thick glasses that greatly magnify the size of his eyes, making him appear as though he is always right up close to you and fighting back tears or a sneeze.

  “Why didn’t you?” asks Mitzie.

  “My mother played for years. Beautifully.” He pauses and shakes his head with a pained smile. It occurs to me that Howard is one of the nicest men at Great Oaks. “I remember sitting in her lap after dinner and watching her hands skate across the keys.” I can see Howard’s mother in the animation of his face. “After she died I inherited her piano, a baby grand Baldwin. But when my son Chris got sick we had to sell it to pay the medical bills. The Depression and all.”

  “What about you, Jack?” Bernie peers over his walker at Jim Runyon, a much-decorated Korean War vet who at only sixty-five was enfeebled by a series of strokes.

  I try to intercede, placing my hand on Runyon’s arm. He looks confused.

  “Let’s try somebody—”

  “I would have taken my son to Canada,” says Runyon, his head bobbing slightly as he talks. Runyon’s son—and only child—Timothy was disemboweled by a claymore in Vietnam in 1968 in a bid to emulate Dad. We are silent. I squeeze his arm. Runyon begins to cry, as he does several times a day and especially during meals, when he slumps forward in his wheelchair and stares back in time, looking for his son.

  I walk outside and then stop, both hands resting on the carved wooden handle of the dark brown cane my children bought me for Christmas after my heart attack. The wind is picking up and the low clouds look discolored like fresh bruises. I raise my head slightly and notice that the air smells of an approaching storm, which is a pleasant thing to smell; seductive, even. I slowly close my eyes, then open them again as the wind buffets my face. That’s the feeling of nature to me: cool, bark-laced wind against my face. Even the birds are silent now and the only sounds I hear are the wind brushing my ears and the gentle whoosh of air rushing in and out of my windpipe as though the earth were infusing me with its dewy breath. Strange, but as I stare at the large oak tree across the lawn I think I see a face in the shadows.

  Daniel?

  But it can’t be, can it?

  I grip the cane with all my strength.

  Humanity is mad! It must be mad to do what it is doing. What a massacre! What scenes of horror and carnage! I cannot find words to translate my impressions. Hell cannot be so terrible. Men are mad!

  —Alfred Joubaire, French Army, diary entry.

  May 23, 1916, shortly before his death at Verdun.

  WHEN WE got back to the hotel that evening it was almost dark. On the sidewalk a Frenchman with one leg was selling tobacco. Had I seen that face on the Paris-Metz road?

  In the lobby Julia took her knapsack from me.

  “Can I buy you dinner?” I asked.

  “I’m very tired. But thanks.” She started toward the stairs, then stopped and turned back toward me. “I thought I might do some painting tomorrow. I was wondering if you’d join me?”

  “I’d love to.”

  She smiled. “Tomorrow then.”

  I nodded. “Tomorrow.”

  After she had gone upstairs, I went back outside and bought a cigar from the Frenchman, who spoke no English but still managed with his expression to acknowledge our bond. Then I went across the street to a small bar and ordered a carafe of red wine. The bartender smiled and said something about America’s Prohibition. Then he made his hands into a machine gun and made a ba-ba-ba-ba-ba sound with his lips, spraying me with saliva.

  “Yes, silly, isn’t it?” I said, carrying the carafe over to a small round wooden table in the corner covered with cigarette burns. I sat for an hour sipping from a small glass with a chip on one side and nodding occasionally to some of the men at the other tables, who played cards and laughed and smoked continuously.

  So what in God’s name are you doing, Patrick? I smiled to myself, suddenly overcome by a familiar sense of absurdity. That’s what the war was really about, wasn’t it? Final proof of humanity’s vast, monstrous absurdity. Love and die, you pitiful bastards. The French and British understood that: how the war changed everything; how it made fools of mankind and all his feckless Gods.

  And so here I sit with my wine and all I can think of is this woman I’ve just met. Also absurd. Impossible, really. You see, Paddy ol’ boy, you’ve already got yourself a wife and family. A good wife and a beautiful son. And so now you’re one scared son of a bitch. And the damn thing is, the goddamn thing is, you promised yourself after the war ended that nothing else would ever scare you again.

  After I finished the wine I went for a walk through the town, weaving slightly down the narrow wet streets that were flecked with moonlight and half-expecting to come across bands of drunken soldiers singing to the night. I started on the north side and worked my way around in a gradual circle. The air was unusually warm and humid and I wondered if everyone else associated that sensation with childhood, with bare feet and wet grass and fireflies and
heat lightning and repeated entreaties to come in for dinner.

  When I passed a church I noticed a small graveyard on the right surrounded by a rusty wrought-iron fence. The headstones and statues pointed at odd angles like bad teeth, some still white, others worn and blackened. There were angels too, some bent with devotion, others standing with heads cast down and hands clasped together, bereft. I thought of Julia and Daniel and how maybe the important thing is to have somebody grieve for you; to know that angels will bow in sorrow.

  I heard laughter and looked down the street to see a French couple walking shoulder to shoulder as though propping each other up. They must be young; older couples rarely walk that way.

  That’s how Daniel left Julia; frozen in time when they were young and still leaning against each other when they walked. She has the memory of perfect love forever, which would make it difficult to love again. Heartbreaking, to compete with angels.

  I lit a cigarette, tossing the match into a small puddle.

  So who is better off, those who share love long enough to see which parts inevitably fade or those who lose their love when it is still pristine? I think each is lonely in a different place, though if you lose your love while it is still perfect you at least have a clear explanation for your grief, while if it gradually crumbles in your hands you do not.

  When I returned to the hotel I noticed that a window on the second floor was lit and I wondered if it was Julia’s room. I stood in the street for a few minutes, hoping I might see a silhouette cross the light. Then I went into the hotel, waving at the concierge who was half asleep in a chair in the corner near the stairs. Once in my room I pulled off my shoes, closed the shutters and lay on the bed with my clothes on. I fell asleep immediately.