Losing Julia (41 page)

“I’m so sorry.”

He placed his head in his hands for a minute, then looked up.

“Daniel was in the business with me. Good worker, that boy, never complained.” His voice trailed off. He took another swig of his beer. “Then he met some woman. Well, you probably know the story. Ran away. Broke our hearts, he did.”

“I know some of the story, not all of it.”

“Oh blessed Mary mother of Christ, why would my son run all the way to France for a woman?”

“I don’t think he went to France for her. I don’t think that’s why he joined the army.”

“You don’t, eh?” He turned and looked at me. His face was red and his heavy features showed his age. “What then do you think was in his head?”

“I think he wanted to make you proud.”

His face broke and he turned away. I wondered what he knew of Daniel’s death and if I should try to make the best of it and tell him more about how his son never flinched and how even the captain seemed to look up to him, or should I say nothing? Was there anything Daniel wanted me to say? There must have been, we talked about it, didn’t we? But I couldn’t recall the words, the proper words. At least I could say that he was felled by a single bullet to the heart. Never saw it coming. Never felt a thing. Or should I tell him that last rites were said? That Daniel had just enough time to see Mary coming for him.

I cleared my throat. “I was wondering, do you happen to know where Julia lives, how I might contact her?”

“Haven’t the faintest notion,” he said quietly, tugging at his chin.

“Do you remember her last name?”

“Never laid eyes on her.”

We sat for another half hour but both of us were at a loss for words. Before I left he asked me if I needed work. I thanked him for the offer and told him I’d try to stay in touch, though I knew I wouldn’t because it made me too sad to think of him and his wife and their lonely conversations with God, not knowing what they did wrong.

“You know, Daniel’s mother and I, we’re simple folk,” he said as I started down the front steps. “We work and we pray and at night we are thankful for the chance to rest.” I nodded nervously. “My grandfather
starved
to death back in Ireland, do you understand?”

“Yes, well, no, that’s awful.”

He started to say something and then stopped. At the curb we turned to each other and shook hands.

“Daniel’s with the Lord now. Sooner than we’d wish but with the Lord nevertheless.” I nodded again then turned and walked down the sidewalk, trying to imagine what on earth the Lord would make of Daniel and vice versa.

After stopping twice for drinks and then for a loaf of sourdough bread I rented a small room on the third floor of a sailor’s hotel near the wharves. Then I returned to the streets to look for Julia. I searched for nine days, asking bartenders and waitresses if they’d heard of her, checking with art galleries and sometimes sitting all day at trolley stops watching the faces stream by. I even took a ferry across the bay to Sausalito and rode the train that zigzagged up to the top of Mount Tamalpais, from where you can see the entire bay and even the Sierra Nevadas on a good day. Partway down the mountain I got off the train and took a coach down to Stinson Beach in hopes that I might see a woman with brown hair and bright green eyes sitting before a canvas and painting the thrashing surf. Instead I found dozens of sand dollars that had been coughed up by the tides. I wrapped the three largest in my handkerchief and stuffed them in my pocket but they all broke before I got back to the city. I tossed the pieces into the bay.

Before I went back east to study accounting I placed an ad in newspapers in both San Francisco and Los Angeles with Julia and Daniel’s names in boldface and my name and address in small print below. After a month I stopped paying for the ads. Two years later I met Charlotte at a Christmas party and a year after that we married. I knew within weeks of our honeymoon on the Carolina coast that something was missing and I remember lying in bed at night in the small flat we rented and wondering whether anyone else felt the same way so soon or whether I was just an absolute fool. Either way there seemed to be nothing to do about it at that point but settle in and hope for the best. Besides, I was busy with work and Charlotte was soon pregnant, so our lives took on a certain inevitability and routine, like everyone else’s, I suppose. I tried to forget about Julia and Daniel and the war but of course I couldn’t. Not even for a night.

THE BOTTLE
arrived five days after Easter. The halls were still wallpapered with pictures of bunnies and baskets while the smell of rotten eggs lingered from the annual Easter egg hunt, when the number of eggs hidden invariably exceeds the number found.

I was walking by the nurses’ station when Erica stopped me. “It’s for you,” she said, pointing to the small wooden crate on the counter. “And be careful, it’s marked fragile.”

“Me? Oh God, not more Easter eggs.”

The return address was written in large block letters with a black felt marker: Marblehead, Massachusetts. I felt confused, then sick.

“What is it, Patrick?”

I closed my eyes for a minute, then opened them. “Could you just put the box on my bed?”

“Sure. You okay?” She placed her hand on my forearm.

“I’m okay.”

I didn’t open the box that day. I couldn’t. I just stared at it. Martin knew enough not to ask.

“PAGE DIED,”
I murmured. We were sitting on our beds the next morning.

“Who is Page?” asked Martin.

“Nathaniel Page. The only other surviving member of my old squad and company. He was the Harvard boy.” I smiled wistfully, trying to slow my breathing. Martin waited for me to continue.

“Just after the war twelve of us met for dinner in New York and after drinks we decided to pitch in on an expensive botde of Scotch—bootlegged stuff, quite good—which was to be kept by the oldest living member of the company, and then passed along after he died. The last man to get the bottle, the last survivor, would open it. The joke was that he’d need a stiff drink, if he could still handle the stuff.”

“And now that’s you?”

“Now that’s me.” I pulled the bottle gently from the crate, where it rested in wads of brown wrapping paper. The label was crowded with signatures, some small and angular, others large and florid. I saw my drunken scrawl and John Galston’s and Nathaniel Page’s. I noticed a chip on the bottom of the bottle and wondered who dropped it and how relieved they must have felt when it did not break. I wished it had broken.

I put the note from Page’s widow on my bed stand and washed up for breakfast.

Cut off from the land that bore us,
Betrayed by the land that we find,
The good men have gone before us,
And only the dull left behind.
So stand by your glasses steady,
The world is a web of lies.
Then here’s to the dead already,
And hurrah for the next man who dies.

—From the mess song of the Lafayette Escadrille, a squad of American volunteer airmen.

“WILL YOU BE
leaving tomorrow then?” Julia asked, as we walked down an uneven brick-paved street after having dinner at a small restaurant on the south end of town.

“Yes, back to Paris. What about you?”

“I think I’ll stay a few more days. The place seems to have a bit of a hold on me.” She was walking close to me now, so that our shoulders touched.

Was there any way I could stay longer? A few more days? I thought of Charlotte and Sean and felt all the guilt and confusion again.

“Your wife is very lucky,” said Julia, stopping and turning toward me.

“Thank you.”

“But I’m lucky too.” I waited for her to continue. “Because now I know that Daniel wasn’t the only one.”

“What do you mean?”

“I always thought he was the only man I could really talk to. The only one who would understand. Then I met you.”

I felt the skin on my face redden and I had to stop my arms from reaching out and pulling her toward me.

“I don’t want to go,” I said.

“And I don’t want you to go.”

I thought of the sailboat I’d bought for Sean and how his cheeks would fill with a tremendous smile when he saw it and how he wouldn’t let me out of his sight for hours once I returned, even following me into the bathroom. “I have to.”

“I know that.”

“I don’t know what to do,” I said finally.

She held my stare.

“I have this terrible feeling that I’m going to lose my chance… ”

“But you already found someone. You’re fortunate. I don’t want to… ”

“It’s different. It’s so different, Julia.”

She started walking again. I knew she didn’t want to hear the things I wanted to say. Was she afraid of what I might say? I knew I was.

“I’d like to go back to the memorial tomorrow, perhaps try to paint it, though I’m not sure I can. Not the way I’d like to,” she said.

“I thought I’d stop there on my way to the train station. Maybe I could meet you?”

“I’ll be there early,” she said.

“So will I.”

She turned and looked at me for a moment, then nodded. When we reached the hotel we stood in the lobby for several minutes, talking nervously. Finally she took both my hands in hers, thanked me for the dinner, kissed me quickly on the cheek and said good night. I tightened my grip on her hands just slightly, then felt them gradually slip away from mine. From the landing she turned and looked at me again and her face seemed full of pain.