The Invention of Everything Else (30 page)

But then Archduke Ferdinand was murdered by the Black Hand's bullet and Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and since Russia was allied to Serbia, Germany allied to Austria-Hungary, France bound by treaty to Russia, Britain allied to France, Italy the only nation to ignore its treaties and alliances altogether, and the United States displeased with German submarines threatening its commercial shipping—World War I sucked and swirled, drawing a very unwilling Walter off to the European front and away from his wife.

Walter and the other soldiers in his regiment were loaded aboard ships so large and long that their hulls could easily be spread at any one time across the backs of thirty different waves. Walter managed to hide out during the two-week crossing. He'd secret himself away in a stairwell so that he could forge ahead through a curious book he was then reading, Laurence Sterne's
Tristram Shandy.

There was much in the book that made perfect sense to Walter, though it was written between 1760 and 1767. It seemed aligned with many emotions he was experiencing in the Army on a ship as large as
a city carrying him of to what he was certain would be his untimely demise. He thought about Freddie always, carrying on conversations with his absent wife to the exclusion of people who were actually there. He tried to see the small, beautiful things that she would see onboard. He tried to pay attention to little details, but he was not as good at it as she was, so he'd stick to the sometimes mundane. "What did you have for dinner, darling?" he'd ask, imagining the food that was lucky enough to be intimate with Freddie's throat and stomach. He had not made friends with many other soldiers. His New York accent and something in the odd angle created by his slight build made him unpopular with the beefier, corn-raised sorts who dominated the ranks.

The loneliness of Walter's time in the service was broken at least once a day by a conversation with Heshie, a soldier from Omaha, of all places. Heshie loved airplanes and could distinguish a Curtiss JN-D4—he called them Jennys—from a Loening M-8 just by listening to the tick of the engine. He kept his eyes peeled for the Curtiss F-5L, a naval plane that could land on water. Walter could not have cared less about aviation, but he let Heshie talk about the planes and then Heshie would listen, day after day, while Walter described the exact shade of her hair or how she would silently move her lips with the words when reading or how freckles were speckled across her shoulders or how, if he brought her flowers, she would always dissect one, pulling off all its petals to get at its inner workings. Heshie and Walter were both relieved by these conversations. It was the one hour a day that Walter didn't spend considering pages 33 and 34 in his edition of
Tristram Shandy
where Sterne's character, poor Yorick, has expired and to mark this death Sterne has printed both the front, page 33, and the verso, page 34, in pure black, two solid rectangles of color which Walter imagined were secretly connected through the page, creating a hole in time, a tomb, a volume that was as infinite as the grave, a deep place of nothing and more nothing.

Walter blurred his sea-sickened eyes on this page, certain that without the protection of the other soldiers his own fighting abilities, which were severely limited, would soon fail him and this black hole, this page, would be his end.

As the ship arrived in port Walter stood at a railing, duffel bag hunched up onto his back. He was one of what appeared to be a million soldiers. The Army-green mass on deck was so tightly packed
that their ranks surged and bristled in one motion like the hairy back of a creeping caterpillar. Walter's knees felt loose and unreliable. He shrank. He was overcome by a series of deep sighs that racked his chest every time he tried to exhale. The sway of the mob was moving toward the gangway, and though he wanted nothing more than to remain planted here onboard this vessel that would be returning to America, he was caught in the push of the soldiers, most of whom were sick to death of this ship and would gaily trample anyone who got in the way of their feet and solid ground.

Once ashore the soldiers were ushered through various corrals that snaked past the administrators shouting questions. "Number?" Then, "Name?" It wasn't that he was a coward, he was just in love. But here, in this mass of men, Walter surrendered to fate, certain that he would never be returning home to his wife. Indeed, making his way through Army processing, Walter was nearly able to convince himself that he had died already and this was hell. "Number?"

"US55231082," he answered.

"Name?"

"Walter Dewell."

He was drilled on a series of routine questions until the very last. "Soldier, do you know how to type?"

Type? He barely understood the question. Letters? Yes, Walter knew how to type. His mother had taught him when he was nine years old. He used only his pointers and middle fingers, but with those four fingers he was a whiz. He thought he'd misunderstood the question. His mouth, though open, formed no words.

"All right, move on," the interrogator said. But he didn't. Walter stood there lost for a moment, remembering sitting in the kitchen of the house on Eleventh Avenue where he was born. His mother earned extra money by typing letters for people on a typewriter she and Walter's father had salvaged from a destitute newspaper office. It was a Sholes & Glidden model, made from black metal, decorated with golden illustrations of flowers and birds, though some of the decoration was sloughing off. Walter remembered sitting on his mother's lap. By poking just his fingertips out from the cuffs of his sweater, he could put his hands on top of hers as she typed. Finally he knew the keys so well he could demand she tie a dishtowel around his eyes and test him. "Spell
steward
" she'd say. It was a trick word.
Steward
uses only the left hand.

"Move on, soldier!"

"I type. Yes, I type," Walter said, stretching his head, neck, his vocal cords forward out of the bucket of his helmet to chirp his answer.

"You type?"

"Yes, sir."

"Step out of line, soldier. Take this pass up to the gate there, and transport will bring you to the base. You'll receive your assignment there."

"Yes, sir."

And Walter went without once turning back. He was afraid that if he looked too happy with his assignment the Army might take it away from him. He cast his eyes down. He did not look at the other soldiers, who were being loaded onto convoy trucks destined for the front. He did not turn to look for Heshie. The guilt he felt was like an anchor in his belly. The soldiers were being issued rifles. They were going off to fight while Walter, by some chance happening, had diverted fate, plucked up by long delicate fingers, his mother's hand reaching down out of the sky. He'd been saved.

No more than a thousand people lived in the town, and each one of them seemed entirely indifferent to the American soldiers and even to the war. The people, men and women, were primarily ropemakers. The outskirts of town were buffered with fields and fields of hemp plants that grew to extraordinary heights—ten, eleven, twelve feet easily. Once these plants were harvested in the fall the townspeople spent their winters in the factory turning the hemp fibers into rope that was later sold for nautical uses.

It was here, about twenty miles outside of Lyon, that the U.S. Army decided to base an administrative office. It was remote and small enough to be unnoticed, easily camouflaged. Which was important because the job Walter, four fellow typists, and one commanding officer were given was to type up every single battle command, every call to advance, retreat, attack, establish medical facilities, sabotage rail lines, ship food supplies, rescue captives, assassinate leaders, accept surrenders, and even stay put. Everything, every order for ten cases of tinned ham, had to be typed on carbon papers so as to be reproduced in triplicate and shipped back to America, where they would be collected in a room filled with metal file cabinets.

When Walter arrived, the other typists had been working together already for seven months. Two soldiers were wearing straw sun hats rather than regulation uniforms. There was a small shelf of books with a cardboard sign above it.

LARRY'S LENDING LIBRARY
SELF SERVICE
5¢ a week per book or 10 cigarettes.
No browsing and, Pavolec, that means you!

On the shelf Walter saw Dostoevski's
The Idiot
next to a pulpy piece of work entitled
In the Hall of Women
by an author named Thad Black. This abutted a selection of
Saturday Evening Posts, Ladies' Home Journals,
and a collection of works by Edgar Allan Poe.

The soldiers stationed with him here in the hemp fields of France were oddballs of a sort, including their commanding officer, a cryptologist named Horace Crosby, who had a dream to one day design terrifically odd-shaped swimming pools for a California clientele. The staff was made up of bookworms, birdwatchers, crossword puzzlers, and one mycologist who regularly harvested a bountiful crop of delicate mushrooms from the woods behind their office, which he would prepare sautéed in local butter for the soldiers.

The office was filled with the clickety-clack of fingers pounding the oft-to-malfunction keyboards. The men typed quickly and peppered their official activities with more pleasant ones, like swimming in a creek they had dammed into a pool or reading or sleeping or writing daily letters home to their wives. Walter kept at
Tristram Shandy.
It was a very long book, and in between working and reading Walter would think of Freddie and sweat over a collection of poems he was writing to amuse her. Some ponderous, some absurd. One read:

In a desert or in a wood,
where lovers meet to reckon
Hearts ecstatic rushed with blood
Do to the lonely beckon.

And another:

Than beer there is no deeper brew.
Than whiskey it is cheaper too.
It comes in either can or bottle,
And if a little won't, a lot'll.
What'll I have? Well it must bubble,
Till it tickles like a stubble;
Makes the fumes rise in my noodle,
Till I'm fuzzy as a poodle;
Trickle thickly down my throttle—
Oh, quickly open up a bottle!
Here's a riddle not so subtle:
What'll I have? Why beer! That's what'll.
Beer and me let no man sever;
A thing of brewery is a joy forever.

So the war happened around Walter and he felt extraordinarily lucky when, after the armistice was signed in the Compiègne Forest in November 1918, he was allowed to return home to Freddie with a collection of dubious poems and a pair of Parisian silk stockings tucked into his duffel bag.

He stood outside the door to their house. He'd imagined it happening in so many ways. She'd be sleeping on the couch and he'd bend low to kiss her awake, or she'd be standing at the sink and he'd wrap his arms around her waist, surprising her. But now that it was real, he was terrified to think he would actually see her. He stood outside the door. Should I knock? he wondered. Two years is a very long time, no matter how many letters home one has written. After a moment's hesitation Walter decided not to knock. He walked back into their home, and like a heat that's only been waiting for the oxygen it needs to ignite, Walter and Freddie consumed each other down to ash, down to the bone.

Walter soon went back to work for the Water Department, and Freddie learned, nearly immediately, that she was pregnant. He was delighted, yet less so when seven and a half months after he returned home from the service, Freddie called down from upstairs, calmly, saying she needed to speak to him.

"Call for the doctor." Her voice was slow. She was seated in a rocking chair looking out the back windows of their room down into the courtyard. "I am going into labor, Walter." She turned to look at him. "The baby must be premature." Her voice a whisper.

He stared. She gripped herself, contorting into the rush of a contraction, and Walter continued to stare, trying to make sense of this schism of dates. Seven and a half months. Freddie was beginning to pant some. Sweat collected above her lip, and she had obviously been waiting up here in labor for some time already.

"Walter," she said more desperately. "Call for the doctor." And he continued to stand there staring at her, weighing his options. He could reach into his torso, rip out his heart, and leave it here with her where she could finish crushing it underneath her foot, or he could believe her. Premature. She winced again. The contractions were coming fast. Finally she had to scream it. "Walter!"

He sent a neighbor for the doctor and went back upstairs. Freddie, making her way over to the bed, had fallen onto the floor. Her belly seemed to be scuffling with her, moving on its own. "Here. Put your arm around my neck," he said, lifting her into their bed. Rigid. Kind. He gently undid the buttons of her high-necked blouse and helped her into a white nightgown. Walter saw quite quickly that birth was perhaps a more complicated process than he'd anticipated. The nightgown, where Freddie clutched it between her legs, was stained bright red with blood.

"Walter," she said.

He did not answer.

"Something's wrong."

Walter was staring at her. All the time they had been apart, he never felt separate from her. Two years away and still she'd been part of him. Until now. What was happening to her body at that moment scared him. She was coming undone. She was becoming herself, alone, a person without Walter.

"Please," he said. "Don't." Imagining that she wanted to make some sort of confession that would explain why the baby was arriving after only seven and a half months.

"Something is wrong with the baby. I can feel it. I can—"

A knock at the door interrupted her, and Walter went to let the doctor in. Walter's face was a blank.

The doctor held cotton batting soaked in ether over Freddie's mouth and nose. The fumes made Walter's head swim. He remained dazed. He stared at Freddie for as long as he could, but it hurt him to see her twisted in pain. He turned to look out the back bedroom window. A squirrel sat nibbling something on a sill across the courtyard, and when he looked back to Freddie the ether had taken its effect. Walter fetched the things the doctor required. He said almost nothing. He
watched the motions of the delivery. Freddie's hair was splayed out across the pillows. Things were happening too quickly. Where was his wife? Blood stained the wooden floorboards beneath the bed. It was a lot of blood. He touched the tip of his boot into it. The house seemed terribly silent for that much blood. But really, he thought, does blood leaking from a body have to make much noise? No, he decided. No, it did not.