Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille (8 page)

August 3 and 4, Monday and Tuesday Night: In the Interim

It took willpower to undress for bed both nights. Even with curtains, Meadoe felt watched. Pictures of her parents on her dresser seemed to have been rearranged. The medicine cabinet door opened on its own accord. No matter where she tuned the radio, it eventually played oldies. She listened to Chet Huntley read the news from a station she couldn’t get in the car and there was no listing for in the newspaper. It played polka favorites for an hour at 7:00.

When she finally turned out her light, she lay rigid on her back, hands at her side, looking at the ceiling. Did a floor board creak? Did the spoons drawer rattle in the kitchen? She thought, if I shut my eyes and then open them, will a face be staring into my face? Dare I sleep? Can I?

Then so softly at first, so imperceptibly she wasn’t sure it hadn’t started much earlier and she’d dismissed it, a voice talked steadily. It rose and fell. No words she could distinguish, but it lasted a long time. When it broke off, she stopped breathing, listening as hard as she could. Then sobbing. A young man’s muffled weeping as if it were miles away. It was hardly there—no more than wind against the house; no more than a whisper of a sheet dropping across a long, long room, but it was beside her too.

When she slept, she didn’t dream. She woke refreshed.

August 5, Wednesday Afternoon: An Interview

Meadoe stood in front of the impressive house for a long time before ringing the bell. What if she decides I’m a loon? She stepped off the porch, thinking she might be able to slip away, when the front door opened. An elderly woman with thin, white hair, heavily powdered, held the doorknob.

“You’re the young lady who called from the library? I’m Erica Weiss. Come in. Come in. I’ve made coffee.” Her voice was surprisingly full considering her age, and Meadoe entered the living room.

“Thank you for having me.” Dozens of framed pictures hung on the walls from long wires attached to the ceiling molding. The room smelled of vanilla and hand lotion. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell but a strong one. While Erica went to the kitchen for the coffee, Meadoe examined the pictures. There were photographs of family groups wearing late 1800s clothing sitting on the grass. Servicemen looked out from some of the pictures. Wedding portraits, graduation photos, parties, snowfalls. Meadoe recognized a younger Erica in one picture standing with what might have been parents. One was of her wedding. The groom wore a formal military uniform.

“I lost Robert in 1983,” said Erica, carrying a tray with cups and a coffee pot. “We’d just inherited the property from my mom and dad. He had a stroke while adding the garage.”

“I’m sorry.” Meadoe sat on the edge of the couch, unsure how to ask her questions, unsure, now that she was there that she wanted to ask them.

The elderly woman said, “It’s a long life, but you’ve got to live every minute of it. We had a few good years.” She balanced a cup on her knee and filled it with coffee, then filled the other and handed it to Meadoe. “I contributed to the oral history project a few years ago. Young man with a tape recorder came out and asked questions for a couple hours. Nice fellow, from the university. Don’t know what he did with all that blather.”

The coffee nearly blistered Meadoe’s lip. She blew across it and took a sip. A rich blend with a hint of licorice. “This is more for me than the library, I’m afraid. I wanted to talk about high school, about Nathaniel Shirley. I moved into his house.”

Erica put her cup on the table, then hid her hands in her lap. “What made you come to me?”

“Your picture together in a yearbook. I found drawings in the house that were his. Good art.”

Erica swayed a little, and when she reached for her coffee, her hand shook with a palsy Meadoe hadn’t noticed earlier. “He never drew me. I asked him to once, but he said he didn’t have the skill yet. He wanted to get me right.” Her voice quivered, not nearly as full as it had been at the door. She wiped at her eye. “Sorry, the infirmity of age. So many old friends have passed. I guess Nathaniel was the first.”

“Can you tell me about him?”

“It was a long time ago.” In the parlor a clock chimed the hour, six mellow gongs. Afternoon sun fell in a narrow strip along the carpet in front of the living room window. Meadoe drank again, almost holding her breath, barely noticing the scalding liquid.

“We started dating at the beginning of my senior year; he was a junior. Many of the older boys had left to Germany or the Pacific so the girls dated younger. He was a beautiful boy. Did you see his picture? He had long fingers, like a sculptor. I thought it was just a fling, of course, so I had a beau at Homecoming.” Erica sighed. “Girls now don’t understand what it was like then, I think. If a girl today likes a boy, she just asks him out. The feminists have it right; it’s a better system, but then—oh, then—a girl sat by the phone. He took me to Homecoming, and we had fun, but I didn’t fall in love until the next week. We were in choir. One morning I walked into the room, and there was a drawing of Tokyo Rose on the blackboard, a huge one done in colored chalks—he could really draw Tokyo Rose—and underneath he had written, “Erica Weiss is lovelier than Tokyo Rose.” He didn’t sign it, but we all knew, even the teacher. She didn’t erase it. It stayed there all period.”

Meadoe considered the room, the woman. It was hard to imagine her as a high school senior. In the pictures, she was pretty, curly black hair, bright eyes peeking at the camera. Meadoe couldn’t see the young woman in the old one. “I don’t know how to ask this; it sounds rude, and I don’t mean it to be, but I need to know. Were you two . . . serious? I mean . . . were you close?”

“Very close.” Erica looked at Meadoe and blushed. “Oh no, nothing like that. It was 1945, after all. Not today. We never . . . not ever. Good girls didn’t.”

“That’s not what I meant to imply.” Meadoe tried to smile, but that was exactly the question she wanted answered. The pinup girls. The touch on her back, the sitting on the couch in front of
Casablanca
were so sexual.

“Well, we were people, of course. Young people. I think most old folk forget how high their juices used to run, and the young ones, of course, believe they’ve invented sex. We thought about it. We wanted to, but I was firm. I was proper.” She looked past Meadoe at the pictures on the wall. “Most of the people I grew up with are dead now. I have their photographs.” She paused. The clock ticked. Meadoe cupped her coffee, warming her hands. “During the war young kids had less opportunity than they have now. They chaperoned the dances. My mother called slow dances, ‘vertical fulfillment of horizontal desires,’ and the chaperones separated you if they thought you were too close. We thought about it though, what with the boys going away to war. Some girls absolutely thought it was their patriotic duty.”

“But you didn’t?”

“No, we never did.” She looked miserable. “I graduated in ’45, and I was going to go to college. He still had a year left, but he told me he was signing up that summer, the summer he died.”

Talking about his death seemed to have exhausted her, so Meadoe helped put away the coffee cups.

“Did you see
Casablanca
with him?”

Erica closed a kitchen cabinet softly, hiding cups and saucers by the row. Meadoe believed most were never used, that the old woman took out the same cup or two everyday but never any more. The house seemed bigger now, and more empty.

“We did. At the Denham for an encore showing. It was a couple of years old by then.”

Meadoe remembered the popcorn, the quickening of breath. “Did you sit in the back row?”

They walked toward the front door. Erica paused. “Funny question.” She rubbed her brow in thought. “Yes . . . you’re right. We did. How did you know?”

Meadoe shrugged.

They said goodbye, but before Meadoe moved to the porch, Erica put her hand on Meadoe’s arm, stopping her. The old woman’s eyes were watery and pale, her gaze steady. “In August that year, my aunt in Fort Collins became ill. My mother left me alone in the house for three days. I was eighteen. She said she trusted me. For the first time since Nathaniel and I started dating we had an empty house. I was going to go to college. He was joining the army. I called him. He was coming to see me when he had his accident.”

Meadoe nodded dumbly. The woman’s grip was intense. Her mouth grim. “He never would have been in the intersection if I hadn’t called. All these years, all these years I’ve known, Nathaniel Shirley died because of me.”

August 5, Wednesday Evening: A Visitation

Meadoe left her car in front of Erica’s house and walked home, deep in thought.

Erica’s look stayed with her. The old woman’s grip on her arm. The way she said “Nathaniel.” Never “Nathan.” His whole name over and over again. When she’d spoke her final words it was if all the time between had been erased. As if only moments before she’d hung up the phone and sat in her empty house waiting for a boy who never arrived.

A half hour later as the dusk deepened, she rounded the corner onto her street. No cars were parked in front of the houses for once, and none of the neighbors were in the yards. Dinner time, she thought. But as she walked, she slowed. No cars. No people. Just the elms’ lazy sway, the stillness of summer lawns, the day’s last heat baking through the sidewalk. She turned to look behind her. For a moment nothing moved, and she marveled. This could be 1945, she thought. I have no evidence otherwise. Nathaniel might have seen his street just like this. A plane hummed away in the sky. Sunlight caught it there, way above her, like a golden cross: a four-engined golden cross. She thought, is that a B-29? But when she blinked, it became a jet. A car turned up the street, a mini-van that turned on its lights as it passed, and the moment vanished.

At first in the darkness inside her house, Meadoe didn’t notice the disarray. Silverware on the kitchen floor stopped her. Drawers were open. Canned goods scattered across the counters. Couch cushions were on the floor. Art hung crooked on the walls. Meadoe, clutching her hands to her chest, moved into her bedroom. Sheets on the floor. Dresser drawers open—one was across the room—her clothes emptied from them. Windows and doors were locked. Nothing missing. Nothing broken. Meadoe picked up methodically. Why would Nathaniel act out this way? Was it because she visited Erica?

August 5, Wednesday Night: Anniversary

Later, she prepared for bed carefully: a long bath, a single candle lit on the tub’s edge, the remains of the wine Joan left. The radio played a nonsense song, “Mairzy doats and doazy doats and liddle lambzy divey.” She washed her hair in the tub, sinking back until the water covered her ears, muffling the radio. Everything in her bunched together in tight fists, her stomach, her lungs, her back muscles, as if a race were about to start, but she forced herself to go slow. The wine tasted good. Warm water held her in its hand. Time felt mushy and possible.

She thought about the night of August 5, 1945, where the Enola Gay waited for its atomic payload; its crew slumbered in the barracks, while Erica Weiss’s mother packed for a trip to Fort Collins. Erica lay down to sleep, thinking about a phone call, thinking about long kisses held on a porch, thinking about a sculptor’s fingers sliding across her shoulder, touching her cheek. Nathaniel Shirley stared at his collage until midnight, hearing planes in his ears, watching Ginger Rogers spinning across a dance floor. “Here’s looking at you,” Bogey said at an airport in the fog. Nathaniel’s eyes always ended at Tokyo Rose, her dark hair, the twist in her neck. He thought about touching that hair, except it was never Tokyo Rose he touched in his imagination. It was Erica; her hair curled and smelling of shampoo. Meadoe’s grandfather in Hiroshima slept. Old, old light from stars so distant a million lives might have come and gone glittered in the sky.

Meadoe rubbed herself dry. Left the door open. She felt his eyes on her. Pulled on panties and a night shirt and headed for bed. She remembered the
Casablanca
dream where she sat in the theater. In the dream she’d directed herself. She’d turned so her companion could touch her. In the dream she’d had free will. In the dream she’d had curly hair.

11:55 p.m. The clock flicked to a new minute. Meadoe lay on her back, eyes part open but drifting, just on sleep’s edge, pleasantly buzzed. A wine glass sat on the night table where she could reach it. The radio played in the background, soft dance tunes, horns and clarinets. Big bands. Meadoe licked her lips. Felt herself doing it, knowing that she was almost asleep. A bead of sweat trickled down her forehead. Under the covers, heat pressed her on all sides. Moving slowly, concentrating on the buzz like a pressure point behind her eyes, she pushed away the blanket so only the sheet covered her.

In a dream now, she sat in her front parlor. Sun poured through the front windows. The house was almost intolerably hot, and even leaving the doors open didn’t help, but Erica, wearing a thin cotton blouse and shorts, didn’t consider it. Mother had been gone for two hours now. She wouldn’t be back for three days. Erica’s hair stuck to the side of her face, but it was nervousness, not the heat. On the table, the phone waited.

Nathaniel could be here in thirty minutes. Erica thought about his laugh. The way he touched her face. How when he was in the room she felt watery inside and hoped that he would hold her. The phone clicked when she lifted it.

In Meadoe’s home, the bed creaked; She incorporated it into the dream, turned it into a creaky chair. Erica held the phone, listening to the dial tone, in the dream, and Meadoe moved aside without opening her eyes both in her bed and in Erica’s front parlor. A weight lay beside her, scarcely breathing, and the air baked in the room. For a moment, nothing moved. The dial tone hummed. Meadoe’s heart pounded in her ears. A tug on the sheet. It slid off. Erica dialed the operator, waiting between each digit, trying to stay calm. A jostle in the bed. Lips on Meadoe’s neck. She scrunched her eyes tight, forcing herself to stay both in the dream and in her bed. A pressure moved off her arm; a hand, moved down her side, over her hip and then rested on bare leg. Meadoe breathed a sound at the touch, tried not to move. What if the hand went away? She desperately did not want to wake.