Quartet for the End of Time (44 page)

So, they met. The week before Christmas. At a shabby restaurant, suggested by Louis, in Lambeth, where holiday decorations had been strung up on the lampposts—contrasting strangely with the ruined streets. Sutton arrived before Louis did, and ordered a glass of red wine, with which she hoped to still her nerves.

Her fingers trembled as she lifted the glass. What if he didn't come? She felt a sudden, visceral panic shudder through her at the thought.

But then—there he was. Looking exactly as he always had; what had she expected? Still—it was surprising. How absolutely …
himself
he was. All the unnecessary details of his particular human existence, which she had forgotten, apparent again: the lines on his face (had they deepened? Not significantly, if so), the wrinkles in his clothing, the way he nodded his head ever so slightly, apologetically, with each step—a nervous motion that belied his otherwise confident pose.

Sutton did not rise to greet him. She could not. He leaned in, therefore, to kiss her on the cheek.

He would have written, he said, after he had settled across from her and ordered scotch and soda. But then … He paused. Shifted in his seat; ran his fingers through his hair.

Do you remember … Again he paused. Cécile? The student of Ouspensky's? The one—

Yes, Sutton said.

—who could remember whole episodes of her past lives, when for the rest of us they come only in the briefest of flashes? The one who
spoke in French, Russian, Old English, and—once—in an ancient Hopi dialect, which would have gone unrecognized except for the fortuitous discovery of a local ethnologist who had, in the early 1920s, spent time studying the American Indians of the Southwest?

Yes, Sutton said. Yes. I remember.

Louis raised his glass to his lips with one hand and with the other, once again, ran his fingers through his hair.

She had, he explained, become pregnant. The child was his. Though it was difficult for both of them, he knew (he said) that Sutton would understand. There were certain responsibilities that were (weren't they?) quite simply … impossible to avoid. Even, therefore, after the war ended, he'd resolved to stay on.

Sutton had become light-headed from the wine, which she'd drunk too quickly. At first all she could think to say was: The end of the war? Is this something that you—or
Cécile
(she pronounced the name with heavy emphasis on the accented first syllable) have foreseen?

He shook his head and laughed self-consciously. Oh, no, he said. It's the past Cécile can see most clearly, not the future, and I myself have only the briefest of revelations—even of the past. No, no—again he shook his head. I base my prediction instead, he said, smiling, on what I read this morning in the
Daily Telegraph.

Oh, Sutton said, and put down her drink, which she had drained. You know, don't you, you shouldn't believe everything you read.

Louis laughed good-naturedly, and stirred the ice in his drink, which was melting fast. Mechanically, Sutton reached for her hat and umbrella, which she had leaned on the back of her chair. Louis half raised himself, but she waved him away.

No, no, she said. I'm quite all right.

I'm—I'm sorry, he said.

No, no need, Sutton said, preparing herself to depart. Absolutely no need.

Where her hands had trembled, they were steady now. She felt devastatingly calm.

Perhaps, she said—clutching her umbrella tightly in one hand as she
rose and made for the door—we should not have not given up so easily. The Messiah will be arriving after all. And somewhat sooner than expected.

—

S
UTTON WAS LESS THAN A MONTH IN
T
HE
H
AGUE BEFORE BEING REAS
signed, along with three other American journalists (two of them women) to the South Pacific. At first she was desperately disappointed. She had hoped she might be transferred to Paris—or at least (because even during the height of the war,
everyone
wanted Paris) stay on in Europe. She could not help but suspect that, even from afar, Walker was doing whatever he could to keep her, and the other female journalists, from the heart of the war.

When she landed in Guadalcanal, however, at the end of January 1943—right in the midst of the Watchtower campaign—she had to admit that this was far from the case.

S
IX WEEKS LATER SHE
was posted to Guam, which—after the soundand-light show of Guadalcanal—proved relatively quiet. At least for her. The fighting was taking place just a few miles away, but she was not permitted anywhere near it. Instead, she spent most of her time at headquarters—a dingy hotel in Honiara—typing up the reports of the other correspondents and wiring them back to Washington. It was there that she received word that her mother had died—“peacefully,” Germaine wrote, “in her sleep.” (In a hurried addendum she reported that “probable cause of death” could be owed to a bungling of prescription files, and the unfortunate oversight of a night nurse—later dismissed for her mistake.)

It was hard to feel anything. She had, after all, lost her mother many years before—that day when she was eight years old and stood in front of Brueghel the Elder's
Big Fish Little Fish
, and discovered the absolute relativity, and mutability, of perception. Thinking of that, she felt sad, but mostly what she felt—as she sat out on the balcony at the hotel in Honiara and listened to the explosions from the direction of Henderson
Field—was vague relief. She could not help but hope—and she did, so fervently in those moments that, briefly, it bordered on firm belief—that her mother had been returned, in death, to whatever native island from which she'd come; that life, which had for so long held her captive, had been shaken from her as easily as if it had been a dream.

She wrote to Alden in Paris, and tried to convey something of all of this, what she felt just then—a mixture of sadness, relief, and the stirrings perhaps for the first time of something else, something more; for which she did not, in the end, have a word, and so failed utterly to understand. (Was it faith? Was that even possible, she wondered, when one had lost, long ago, any sense that there was anything in which to believe?)

But Alden's reply when it came was almost as incomprehensible to her as the small poem that accompanied it—she could make no sense of it at all. He mentioned their mother only in passing, spending the rest of the brief note (as had become usual with him) recounting the trivial details of his daily rambles; sketches of places that seemed to her of scant significance; people whom even he didn't know.

After that, their letters tapered to a minimum, and though Sutton missed the correspondence, she did not blame Alden particularly for his cryptic replies; it was only natural, she reasoned, that their letters should have become, over the passing months, increasingly strained. Even she had begun to find, more lately, when at last she
did
sit down to write, that she had, after all (especially after the censors had been taken into consideration), very little to say.

I
N APRIL
,
SHE WAS
transferred again. To Makin Island this time, though nothing much was happening there. There was always the chance, she was told, that it might, and—sure enough—by June the Japanese had moved nearly five thousand troops to the islands of Betio and Tarawa, directly to the south. Still—no one made a move. It rained, and Sutton wired in every day that there was nothing to report. That lasted all through the summer and fall of that year—'til nearly the end of November. Then, on the twentieth of that month, just before dawn, sixty-six
U.S. destroyers, thirty-six transport ships, twelve battleships, and just as many cruisers emerged on the horizon.

The Japanese opened fire; the
Colorado
and the
Maryland
immediately countered with their own. One of the American shells found its mark, opening a key entryway into the lagoon.

The plan had been to land Marines on the north of the island, but they soon found (though they now had a point of entrance) that the boats couldn't clear the reef. They bided their time, waiting for the tide to change, but, according to later reports, the ocean just “sat there.” It was weird. Everything—the ocean itself—was at a standstill.

What they hadn't known, and so had been unable to account for in their approach, was that when the moon was in its last quarter, it exerted hardly any pull on the water just north of Tarawa Beach at all. Soon there were Marines stranded everywhere—still on the boats, or else stuck on reefs, their vehicles swamped and taking on water. By the end of the day, only one tank was still functioning properly. Still, they had somehow managed to cut Japanese communication lines, forcing Commander Keiji Shibazaki to abandon his post. He readied his men and prepared to move farther south—but before he could do so, a naval high explosive detonated just outside the command post, and he and most of his men were killed. After that, things started to go a little better for the Americans, and three days later they held the island.

“Cleanup” continued up and down the beaches for another week. When the last pockets of resistance were cleared out, only one Japanese officer and sixteen enlisted men—the only ones willing to surrender— remained alive. American casualties were disastrous as well: upward of three thousand.

The numbers set off a furor in Washington. How could a tiny island in the South Pacific possibly be worth the lives of three thousand American men? General Holland M. Smith, commander of the V Amphibious Corps, did nothing to dampen the public's growing concern when, after touring the beaches one day toward the end of the battle, he compared the scale of the loss he witnessed there to Pickett's Charge.

Sutton saw nothing of the battle itself, of course, until it was over—
but then she saw plenty. On the twenty-fourth of November, just after the worst of the fighting had ended, she traveled back to the United States aboard the hospital ship
Solace
. At first she went among the men, interviewing those who could still speak about their experiences in “the largest single operation ever launched in the Pacific,” but after a while she stopped asking questions or writing anything down. Later, when Walker asked her about a story on the
Solace
voyage, she said there wasn't any.

How's that? he asked.

Sutton had shrugged. I wasn't on assignment, she reminded him— that was just my ticket home. But who knows—maybe I'll write about it someday, she told him.

She knew, though, that if she ever did, it wouldn't be for him.

So, Walker said. Had enough? He was grinning at her.

Sutton shook her head.

—

Y
OU WOULD THINK THAT THE WAR WOULD HAVE PREOCCUPIED ALL OF
her thoughts, so she would hardly have had a moment to think about Louis in all that time—but just the opposite was the case. She found that, in fact, she had nothing but time on her hands to think back over everything that had happened between them; to retrace the chiasmic route of their correspondence, which she knew practically by heart; to count the days 'til the arrival of the Messiah (as she ever afterward referred to the child in her mind); to wonder wryly when she might begin to see the signs that he was indeed living among them, on earth …

She chastised herself endlessly for it, willing her thoughts to find for themselves some different course—but without fail they found their way patiently back to that same tired groove, each time as if they (and therefore she herself, she could only suppose) somehow imagined there was some way she might
think her way out
. That if she approached the thing (the great tear in her heart, which not even the war could distract from or repair) from the right direction—if she managed to surprise it
somehow from an unexpected angle—it might just … go away. That Louis would be returned to her; that everything would go back to the way it had been. The problem was, she considered: it never really had been anything much at all. Not, at least, anything solid enough (nor even, for the most part, she was forced to admit,
desirable
enough) that, with her rational mind, she could ever really
will
its return. Yet still, whenever she was not completely vigilant, her heart slid back there every time, and her mind followed.

Sometimes she would manage to convince herself that it was not really Louis she longed for. Perhaps, she reasoned, he stood for something else—something larger. Her father's or her mother's death; her worry over Alden; the outcome of the war. But mostly, as she could not help but be aware, it was—the pattern of her thought, and the system to her grieving—a very small, very personal, and very limited spiral.

And she had plenty of time to dwell within it—especially after she returned from the Pacific. Once more, it took nearly six months before she was dispatched again. New York, empty of Louis, was nearly unbearable; she could not remember a time she had ever felt so alone.

I
T CAME AS A
tremendous relief, therefore, when, in mid-April, she was posted to Italy—just before the Allies attacked the Gustav Line. That was the first time she got anywhere near the front—which served to get her mind off Louis anyway. That, and Lieutenant Frank Jenson—a shy young redhead from Washington State.

She was just about to go out flying with Jenson one afternoon when he got a radio call to go out on a mission instead. A rocket gun—what Jenson called a screaming meemie—had been holding up an infantry division; Jenson's job was to spot it, then radio in its coordinates back home.

Nothing too special, he said. I should be back before lunch—I'll take you up then.

How 'bout I come along now? Sutton asked.

Jenson hesitated, then shrugged. The captain—Benelli—a skinny
man of about forty with a nose and eyes like a hawk, balked at the idea, though.

Girls can't go out on missions, he said.