The Fire by Night Page 20

  Jo slumped back in her chair, seeming to forget that he was there for a moment.

  “I—um—I don’t know what to say, miss—perhaps, being a war hero and all now”—he smiled weakly—“we could arrange to have you sent home?”

  “No, sir.” Jo sat up straight in her chair. “No, sir—I mean, please, no, sir. Not until we win in Japan too. Not until we’re all going home together.”

  I have to stay here, until I know where David is, until I know what’s happened to David. I have no one back home. No one to go home to.

  Jo’s fire lit up the dingy room for a moment and seemed as if it might even ignite the smoldering embers that lay dormant in this captain, who hadn’t even bothered to give his name. Then his lunch came in on a tray, with two kinds of drinks clinking together in their beveled glassware. He looked at it, then at Jo. He had to bring this interview to an end—it was after twelve already.

  Bessie put the tray down heavily, right on top of a stack of papers marked “State Department.”

  “The name was Donahue, sir.”

  He looked blankly at his secretary. Really, she should do something about her skin.

  “The name you asked for. The person who recommended her for promotion.”

  Bessie stamped out, her orthopedic shoes making no sound on the hardwood.

  Of course it wasn’t Clark. Jo had known that, but she had had to find out.

  “There’s your answer to that then. And, um, miss, if you’re sure about the way you feel”—he glanced longingly at his tray, resisting the urge to look under the silver lid; it smelled like turkey—“there are a few canvassing jobs here yet, raising money for the Pacific campaign. It’s not really too involved—just door-to-door stuff, asking for donations—”

  “I’ll take it,” Jo said quickly, standing up.

  He felt there was something more he was supposed to say to this woman, something else perhaps that he should do for her; then he looked again at his meal. Perhaps turkey with dressing.

  “Bessie, will, uh, make all the arrangements, miss.”

  “Thank you, sir. Thank you for keeping me on.”

  Jo turned resolutely and walked toward the door.

  “Miss,” the captain said, already putting his napkin on his lap, “you forgot your star.”

  JO STEPPED OUT into the sunshine. Her feet hurt in her pumps as she walked quickly down the sidewalk thronged with pedestrians. There were so many Americans—officers, enlisted men. A group of Navy sailors, arm in arm, passed by her, whistling loudly. It was hard to believe this was London—it looked more like Fifth Avenue back home. Jo looked at the city and saw it but didn’t see it. There were the parts that looked like postcards, like snapshots in a travel brochure, looked like she had always imagined they would—bakeries and pubs and flats, St. Paul’s, Piccadilly Circus—juxtaposed against bombed-out rubble, shells of former homes, sandbags piled high, knocked over, ripped open, and pouring out into the street. She cut across Hyde Park and looked up at Wellington Arch, the Angel of Peace descending on the chariot of war being driven by a small boy. Who was he? Hitler as a child? Hirohito? The dictators of a year ago, of a hundred years ago, a thousand? What did it matter as long as the angel descended? Came down and stopped the runaway horses, stopped the madness. Angel of Peace. Look out for David.

  “Look out,” a cabby yelled at her angrily, and she stepped back off the pavement. She had not heard from David. How could I? she reassured herself. The war in Europe had only been decided a month before. Who knew where he was, how long it would take him to get back to civilization, to her? How long it would be until his family heard from him, until she did? And how would he even know where to find her? All he knew of her was Brooklyn; surely he would eventually look for her there, not in London. But she just couldn’t go back, couldn’t leave England, not yet, not with David still out there somewhere. Anyway, London was a hell of a lot closer to the Scottish Highlands than Bay Ridge.

  She was glad she’d be out of the hospital finally, glad she’d be going out, doing something again for the war effort. Her field patients had all healed up and moved on. Many would be home by now. Jo glanced at the American papers being sold in the street and saw the Queen Mary had docked yesterday, laden with American troops. They’d be storming New York. They’d all have hangovers by now, like New Year’s Eve and Mardi Gras and Independence Day all rolled into one. Jo didn’t miss it, though, didn’t wish she was there. She was glad, of course, that the boys were home—at least until they moved on to Japan—glad that the war in Europe was over and reconstruction could begin over here. But she couldn’t leave yet.

  She reached into her musette bag—not her old canvas one but a newly issued leather satchel, highly polished and smooth—and pulled out a penny.

  “Here, son,” she said to one of the paperboys, and opened up the paper.

  She couldn’t take it all in, the parts of the war she had missed—the last desperate push into Germany, into Poland, into deep crevices the free world was never meant to discover. She read strange words like “Dachau” and saw pictures of emaciated men, of piled corpses—but this is evil for evil’s sake—and her eyes welled up and spilled over. When she could see again, there were heavily garbed Soviets on the page in front of her. She had left the theater of war before the Americans met up with them. Their uniforms, their faces were foreign to her—she had forgotten they were even in the war. But their civilian casualties were in the millions. Jo looked around her, at the tube entrances caved in, at the libraries and schools leveled—she looked at the devastation England had sustained, the loss of 60,000 noncombatants—innocent women and children, old men, old women, bombed in their sleep, buried alive, never to wake again. Then she tried to multiply that awful figure to imagine a million Russians dying, then ten million, then the twenty million they were estimating now, even as the reports kept coming in. Jo looked at the pictures—there were happy servicemen kissing girls in the streets, naked Gypsy orphans crying on the side of the road, Axis spies being shot like dogs, Allied spies being killed like martyrs. There were crowds cheering in Manhattan on VE day and crowds cheering in Milan as Mussolini and his mistress hung upside down on meat hooks. Jo couldn’t take it in, couldn’t understand it. It was peace that still reeked of war and death and starvation and torture. How could it ever come right? How could God fix it? How could the world ever recover from this? And it wasn’t over yet. Japan, the Pacific—that war wasn’t over, not by a long shot. What was it like, really like, over there? She hadn’t heard from Kay since before Pearl Harbor; she didn’t know what had happened to her, whether she had gotten any of Jo’s letters, whether she was still alive. What brutality would the American forces face there now, taking the Pacific one bloody island at a time, pushing into the very heart of the enemy? Please, God in heaven, not any worse than this.

  Jo had folded the paper, was walking along the streets again, looking but not seeing, picking up her feet to avoid the potholes, the sandbags—now useless and littered everywhere—following the streams of humanity as they detoured around craters, around workmen removing piles of rubble from the road. She stopped to tie her shoe in front of an Anderson shelter—and from that vantage point, saw the bright plaid of a kilt in front of her. Red and white, green and blue—there were two, no three. When she had been upright, the men had been indistinguishable from everyone else on the street, but from below they were unmistakable. Jo stood up and hurried after them.

  “Please, please,” she called. There were too many people, too much noise.

  Then, remembering David, his smiling eyes, trying to teach her Scottish.

  This is how you say hello, miss . . .

  “Aye, aye, min,” she nearly yelled.

  The three men stopped dead in their tracks, two housewives with parcels bumping into them and glowering before moving on. The river of pedestrians flowed past them.

  “Good afternoon, miss,” they said smiling, bowing to her right there on Apsley Way.

&n
bsp; “Thank goodness I’ve found you, I’ve had the most awful time—”

  They smiled patiently—they had all the time in the world.

  “Can we be assisting ye in some way?”

  “You see, the British aren’t always that helpful when it comes to Scots—”

  “Aye, miss, we’ve taken a notice of that before.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not making any sense, I know. I must seem ridiculous, just coming up to you like this. My name is Josephine.”

  “Good afternoon,” they said again, in unison.

  “Good afternoon. Could you please help me? I need to find someone.”

  “A Scot perhaps?”

  “Aye,” she nearly yelled again, and they laughed.

  “I mean, yes,” she said, blushing.

  “He looked something like us, and ye met him in the war, and ye lost contact with him?”

  “Yes again. You see, I’m American Army; we don’t have any way to trace him. And you all are supposed to be a United Kingdom, but good Lord, there’s England and Australia and Canada—”

  “And us, miss.”

  “Aye,” she couldn’t help saying again, in her excitement. “And none of you seem to know where anyone else is,” she ended breathlessly.

  “We could take ye back to our captain, miss,” they offered. “We’re headed home soon ourselves, but we would be happy to escort ye. What was your young fellow’s name?”

  And that was that. Jo was walking with them down the same street, but now it was summer, Jo noticed the heat and the sun and the smells—there were flowers in the vendors’ stalls, in flower boxes, flowers coming up between the cracks in the pavement. The sky was a glittering blue, bluer than it had ever been before. The men asked questions and answered them, and the lilt of their voices brought David back. They would help her really bring him back—find him and bring him back to his mother. And Bumpy. And Kit. Bring him back to her.

  They gave her cold water in tiny paper cups when they got to their captain’s office. The captain—a great big man, too large for his kilt, for his tiny office—was friendly and formal and obliging. He got on the phone, he sent messengers, dispatched telegrams—no trouble was too much to take for young love. He wrote down her address in London and in New York. A lot of the men are unaccounted for, but not to worry, miss, it’s just the paperwork, just the backlog, we can’t process it all, can’t write it down fast enough. Jo was happier than she had been in a long time; no—a slow smile transformed her face—happier than she had ever been before. The men looked upon her benevolently, like a sister, like a friend about to marry into the family. Of course she loved David—was he not a Scot? To them, there was nothing more to it than that; it was the most natural thing in the world.

  Then the office was closing. Jo glanced up at the clock, the tiny, quiet clock that hadn’t made a sound, looked accusingly across the street toward the church bells that had chimed out the hours without her hearing them. She had been there all day, drinking little cups of water and talking about David and being blissfully happy. She stood up, apologizing for taking up their time, but they were all smiles—that was nonsense. God be with ye, miss, invite us to the wedding. Everyone laughed.

  As they were leaving the captain’s office his secretary handed him a sheet of paper. “Just come over the teletype, sir, the new list.”

  He glanced at it, and Jo kept smiling, but the captain’s face clouded for a second, for a second too long.

  “What did you say your man’s name was, lass?”

  He hadn’t called her “lass” before, and she wondered why he did now.

  And there, under the “Mac” section, overburdened on that list of Scottish names, was “David MacPherson, missing in action.”

  EVERYONE KEPT SAYING how difficult things were when, really, they were so simple. It was impossible to get good beef, the woman in front of her was complaining. That’s nothing, another joined in. Can you get sugar? Real sugar? No, I didn’t think so. Then there was the lack of dry goods to discuss, the lack of fresh eggs, of rawhide and muslin and new music records from America. But it was so easy, if you stopped to think about it. You slept in beds. You woke up. You washed your face. There were things to eat, real things, things not scooped out of cans, half-frozen and rancid. You could stay inside. Or go out, walk for miles and miles and miles, and no one knew and no one cared, and as long as you were back in the dormitories by midnight, no one even noticed. Never, not once, did anyone try to kill you. No bombs, no planes, no mines. Busy streets full of busy people, shaking their heads and commiserating about the interrupted tube schedule or the wait at the post office or the thousand other civilian worries Jo could no longer understand. It was all so easy, so terribly easy.

  She walked down the bustling sidewalk, turned quickly, and headed for a quieter part of town. Shiny black wrought-iron fences ran endlessly on and on before her, making neat shadows beneath them in the scorching sun. Jo readjusted her cap, tucking in a loose hairpin; her hair was dyed now, back to her original copper; the threads of white and gray were gone.

  The houses around her were palatial, regally set back from the road, their lawns an emerald green. Groundsmen trimmed hedges, pruned back masses of rhododendron and azalea, watered flowerbeds, and filled birdbaths. Some estates seemed virtually untouched by the recent war—she could see the topless Daimlers pull up, deposit their precious cargo of debutante and earl, duchess and industrial magnate, before being waxed down thoughtfully by a chauffeur with six boys working under him, sweating in the noonday heat. Jo walked a little farther on—she refused to solicit at any home displaying mourning, curtains drawn, women walking past the windows in their widow’s weeds. There was a Georgian mansion flanked on one side by an Italianate monstrosity and, on the other, by the gutted remains of a burned-out shell. It amazed Jo that everyone carried on as before. The families of these houses must have shared invitations to dinners, to dances. Their servants would have met at the hedgerows to smoke and exchange gossip. Then, in an instant, their domestic staff—the butcher boy bringing in the chops, the mailman lingering a second too long to flirt with the second housemaid, the gardener bringing in the last of the lilacs and hoping they would do—were gone forever, annihilated, with nothing left to show for it, for their lives, for their loves and jealousies and petty hatreds and silly dreams. Jo looked at the rubble for another moment before pushing open its neighbor’s ornate gate and starting down the long, immaculately raked gravel drive sedately curving away from the site of destruction as if from some embarrassment, some social foible, something best left forgotten.

  Life must go on.

  The sun poured down, and as Jo walked her mind raced. Missing in action. That’s worse than killed in action. Of course it’s not, how can you say that? Killed in action is the worst, it’s final, there’s no hope there, nothing. But killed in action is final, that’s the point. Your heart can break, you can die, kill yourself even, but you know what’s what. Your life is ended. He’s gone. Missing in action, now, now that’s nothing. Truly nothing. You can be missing because you’re lost or because you’re stranded or trapped or prisoner or anything. You can be missing because you’re dead and no one found your body, or because you’re alive but no one’s looking for you, or simply because someone typed an M when they meant to type a K.

  Jo imagined David in a prisoner-of-war camp in northern Poland, still shivering in June. Or starving in Germany, held by some rebellious outlaws unwilling to surrender, about to take out their anger and rage on an Allied prisoner. She saw him hanged in Dresden, drowned in Munich, lost in Russia. His typhus came back and he died on a transport ship, buried at sea before they remembered to pull off his leather identification tag. (“What was his name? Who knows? No one will miss the poor devil.”) As soon as Jo convinced herself he was alive (lost or starving or sick, but alive), doubt came in and whispered that he was dead. Then, when she had almost accepted that reality, preparing her heart for death, hope would creep back in and b
uoy up her heart, a sickening, feeble kind of hope that was worse than despair. Then the entire vicious cycle would begin again.

  The lady of the house was not at home, the servant said. Jo thanked him politely, walked back up the drive, headed toward the next house, then the next one after that, like an automaton, walking senselessly in the sun. Jo’s head ached from the heat, it ached from thinking, from not thinking—this was all she did, chasing her own thoughts, waking, asleep, in the terrible in-between land between waking and sleeping when she couldn’t tell dream from reality. David was a brave man, not a coward, but he died a thousand deaths in her mind. And just when she was about to kneel at the grave she had dug for him and weep with her head in her hands, she would hear him call to her from beyond, from where he was trapped, waiting for her—and her mind would start to race again.

  Jo felt the crumpled ball of paper in her jacket pocket as she walked. She didn’t need to read it—she had memorized the address a dozen times over.

  “This is the only address we have for him, lass,” the Scottish captain had said in slow motion—she had watched his mustached lips move as if in a dream. “We sent word to the farm, but the family moved off with the air raids. This is a relative of his, an uncle here in town. You might try him.”

  The captain’s voice had been so sad. Jo had wanted to comfort him, to rub the top of his head like a small boy, to say it would be all right, not to worry, but her heart hadn’t started beating again since he had said David was missing. So Jo had taken the address and later thrown it away; then, on her knees, had searched for it again amid the orange rinds and eggshells, smoothed it out, read it, memorized it. She would go and see the uncle, her only link to David. No, she wouldn’t. Yes, she would.

  Her feet had led her there while she debated with herself. Her mind said, Clearly you cannot do this, but her hand reached out and rang the great bell. No sound reached her ears behind that mass of mahogany and iron and steel, but in a few minutes the door was opened by an elderly servant who betrayed no emotion, standing motionlessly in the door, eyebrows politely raised.