The Moth (43 page)

I’d never even heard of it, except the off-agin-on-agin part. She recited it, pretty funny, a whole lot about a section boss named Finnigan “a-boilin’ down his report” about a wreck, for a superintendent named Flannagan. We sipped our drink and I kept peeping at her hair. It was the color of honey, and I wanted to touch it with my hand, like it was a powder puff. She said she’d just come from France, that she’d been in Cherbourg three months. I’d never even got to Cherbourg, and we talked about what it was like, and the gray color of the sea, with the gulls white against it. I said on the Pacific the gulls looked black, as the sun blazed away in the south, and the shadows were on the near side. She thought that was interesting. We drank out, and she pushed her glass away. I paid and we went out in the lobby. “Well, what do you feel like doing, Lieutenant?”

“Oh, my. Have we got to be doing?”

“They’ve got shows.”

“I saw a show.”

“Would you like to ride?”

“I think I would.”

We went out, got in my car, and started off. She said something about the Isle of Hope, to see the terrapin farm, and we headed for it. Next thing we knew, we were rolling up the coast, and there didn’t seem to be any terrapin farm. I started into a filling station to ask, but she said: “Oh, let’s forget the turtles. Can’t we just ride?”

“All right. You could sit closer.”

“... Oh, could I?”

“If you care to.”

She measured, with her hand, the distance between us. It was about one span. It was also about the prettiest hand I’d seen in a long while, and I took it. “... Well?”

“Let me think a little bit.”

If she had laughed, that would have been one thing. If she had said: “Want to think about it,” that would have been something else, meaning something but not much. When she said: “Let me think a little bit,” it meant she was really thinking, and I felt a prickle go over me. I let go her hand, and we drove quite a while. Once she said something about not going too far, and I asked her if she was stationed in Savannah. She said no, in Miami, but she was visiting the other nurse, at her home. I said I’d have her back in plenty of time. I nearly hit a cow, which is a feature they’ve got all over Dixie. We rolled through some more scrub woods, the same scrub woods, as I’ve said, that starts in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and ends at Sabine, Texas. After a while it began getting dark, and we were twenty or thirty miles from Charleston. “... How about having dinner with me?”

“In Charleston?”

“It’s not good, like Savannah, but it’ll do.”

“I’d like to. I’ve never been there.”

“I’m living there, and I’ll do my best.”

“Thanks.”

With that she moved over. I put my hand down and she put hers in it.

We ate in a place near the old market, pretty gruesome after New Orleans and Savannah, but we managed to get a meal. She talked about the Civil War, and I told her about the
Star of the West
and Sumter and the rest of it, anyway a little bit. Then she said she had it in her mind that Poe had been here, and said he’d always been a favorite of hers. I said he’d been a soldier at Moultrie, and as a matter of fact laid
The Gold Bug
on Sullivan’s Island. She got pretty excited and talked about the cryptogram and how wonderful she had thought it was, when she was young, the solution of it. I said we could drive over there. She asked if we had time, and I said we could still get to Savannah before it got too late, as we’d make better time at night. “Unless we hit cows.”

“Oh, they go to bed.”

“A black cow just
looks
like she goes to bed.”

We thought that was pretty funny, and laughed, and then were in the car, driving over the Cooper River and on past the flats. I’d stop now and then and show her Moultrie and Sumter and Folly Beach, where Gershwin is supposed to have written
Porgy and Bess,
no great chapter in history, I would say. They were nothing but bunches of lights, but I kept on talking. We went on, to the island at last, which is nothing but a stretch of sand, with a flock of cottages on the south end. But we drove along, and the ocean was out there, and pretty soon there weren’t any houses, and I pulled off the road, and stopped. We got out, walked around, and watched the surf, where it was coming in, but not rough. We came to kind of a dune we could sit on. My hand went down in the sand and it was warm. I had a bright idea and slid down, so the dune was at my back and the warm sand spilling over my pants. Then I grabbed her by the feet, and pulled her down. Then we were in each other’s arms, and she was whispering: “At last, at last, it’s been so long.”

I don’t know if it was an hour later, or how long, that I looked out to sea, and into the silver path to the moon, and knew if the moth would fly across it, I could watch it, and love it, and not have things happen inside. I knew it was the most beautiful moment of my life. She was lying close to me, her cheek under mine, her nose against my neck, when I raised up and spoke to her. “Lieutenant—”

“Yes?”

“Isn’t it time we told names?”

She raised up and stared at me, a look of horror in her eyes. Then she jumped up and went off. I lay there a minute, wondering what the trouble was. Then I got up, felt around for my barracks cap and started after her. By then she’d put on her shoes, and was on the road, running back, toward town. I tried to run, but kept slipping back in the sand. Then I remembered the car. I ran back to it, got in, and started the motor. But when I shot power to the wheels they spun in the sand. By then I could barely see her. I jumped out and cut beach grass, with my knife. When I had a little pile I jammed it under one wheel and tried again. The car gave a jerk and I rolled on to the road. I raced along, trying to spot her, and couldn’t. Two or three hundred yards away, I saw a bus stop, take somebody on, and go off. I overtook it. Every time it would stop, I’d be right behind, watching who got off. Pretty soon I could see inside of it, ahead of me, on the bridge. It was empty.

I went back to the island and drove all around. Next day I went down to Savannah and asked, and the day after that called Miami, anything to find her. So that’s what I was doing when I got this wire from Sheila. And that, once I’d answered, was what I kept right on doing.

1945 NOV 9 AM 11 51

MAJ JOHN DILLON

HOTEL TIMROD

CHARLESTON SC

SHEILA HAS JUST SHOWN ME YOUR TELEGRAM WHICH WAS FIRST I KNEW SHE HAD COMMUNICATED WITH YOU MY HEART IS ACTING BADLY SO WOULD BE GRATEFUL IF YOU WOULD ACCEPT MY INVITATION TO VISIT ME WHICH AM NOW IN POSITION TO EXTEND IF IT WOULD NOT BE TOO UTTERLY UTTERLY TIRESOME TO YOU

PATRICK DILLON

I
T WAS ONE OF
those yellow November days that they have in Maryland, when I got there, with red and brown and spotty green leaves still hanging to the trees, and the air clear but everything damp. I had spent the night in Richmond, then got going early, so I rolled up the terrace a little after noon. I had a look at the new statue to Martin Luther they’d put up in the park since I left, took a turn up the street, so as to park in front of the house, got out and went up there. I had my thumb on the bell, then figured a minute, my heart beating fast, and decided it would be friendlier to use my key, which I still had. Then Sheila opened the door. I caught her in my arms, and held her tight, while she cried. Then Nancy was there, and I hugged her too. I kissed and patted them both, and noticed how gray they’d got. Then they took me back to the den, and I was shaking hands with my father, who was in a wheel chair. His color was a little queer, pink in the cheeks but white around the eyes, but outside of that he looked all right. He asked about my trip and I told about the stopover in Richmond at the John Marshall Hotel, and my aunts said I was lucky to get in there at all, the way things were now. Then he and I were alone. We were alone, that is, except for the silence that came in, parked its hat, and sat down with us. After a long time he asked: “Well Jack, how have you been?”

“Oh, can’t complain. And you?”

“I could complain, but—”

“Then hell, complain!”

“At any rate it’s a disease that’s enjoyed sitting up, not lying down, which is something. And what have you been doing with yourself?”

“Oh, this and that.”

That wound it up for a while. Then he said: “And them and those?” I didn’t connect, and he looked away quick. “Just injecting a little lubricant into a conversation otherwise a little creaky. Perhaps the quip limped, but the intention was amiable.”

Sometimes, when he went into his Derry brogue and used grammar in the grand style that only an Irishman seems capable of, it brought a lump to my throat, and one came there now. I began to talk about Charleston, the Timrod, the poet it was named after, the Civil War, anything, so it made words. It was chatter, but seemed to please him. “Are those major’s leaves on your shoulder, Jack?”

“Yeah, dime a dozen.”

“However, Anderson was a major.”

“... Who?”

“The commander you were talking about.”

“Oh, at Sumter.”

“He presided at one of the epic moments of history, and every detail of his conduct shows he knew it for such, and yet he was a major—a dime a dozen, as you say. In those days they had different ideas about rank. Where did you serve?”

“France.”

“Yes, but how?”

“Target.”

“You were in action?”

“These rifles on my collar mean infantry.”

“I don’t see well any more.”

But he was looking at my chest, where there wasn’t any fruit salad, as I didn’t wear it. I opened my brief case and got out the little leather box and handed over my ribbons. They were just routine, as I’d never been cited. The Purple Heart he looked at quite a while. “What was the wound, Jack?”

“Slug in the leg.”

“Where was this acquired?”

“Normandy.”

“You were with Patton?”

“No, Wyche was our guy. That made it easy for the guardhouse poets. Cross of Lorraine Division, we called ourselves.” I showed him our shoulder patch, the gray Lorraine Cross on a blue field. He asked if it wasn’t the same as de Gaulle’s emblem, and I said it was. Then I got out a brochure somebody had lent me in Charleston, that had been printed in 1919, to explain to the boys about the insignia, so they’d understand what it meant. “Though, the way I heard it, the cross wasn’t picked on account of the ideals it represented, but because General Kuhn happened to see it on a beer-bottle top in Bar-le-Duc one night, and decided it was what the outfit needed. Until then they had been the Joan of Arc Division, and Miss Geraldine Farrar had agreed to break a bottle over their heads. But all that was while the General was away in France, observing how things were done before the division was sent over, and it so happened that Miss Farrar was to do her stuff the night he got home. He raised hell, and stopped it. Nobody had told the division yet that to the French Miss Arc was a saint, and he figured they might not like it to see her picture on every doughboy’s shoulder. So they went across without having any insignia, until he had this inspiration, which to my mind hit the spot in a very noble way.”

“I’d have given five dollars, cash of the realm, to have heard the remarks of Miss Geraldine Farrar on this highly interesting occasion. In fact, had I been the General, I’d have taken my chances with the French.”

“Little temperamental, hey?”

“Some girl.”

He glanced through the brochure, then wanted to know more about my wound. I told him it was above the knee, on the outside, and had required plenty of surgery, massage, and heat. “Are you all right now?”

“Yeah, sure.”

I wanted to say more, but nothing would come out of my mouth. He closed his eyes for a while, then said: “Jack, I’m going to die.”

“Hey, quit talking like that!”

“I have angina pectoris, which in Latin means agony of the chest, the most painful way in nature that a man can go. That I can face, or hope I can. But—I ruined my life.”

“I wouldn’t say so.”

“There were those who could have said it.”

“Did they?”

“If they didn’t, they forebore.”

“Are you talking about my mother?”

“I’m talking about a good many things, some of them hard to talk about, some of them hidden and obscure and shameful, almost impossible to talk about. I’m trying to say, what I’ve done to my life I don’t want you to do to yours.”

“Oh well, I probably have.”

“What are you talking about? It’s hardly begun.”

“It’s half lived. I’m thirty-five.”

“It’s a matter of youth, and it’s in your eye. Your face is battered and seamed and hurt, but the look of a boy is still on it.”

“I interrupted you.”

“There are things I want to tell you.”

“O.K., shoot.”

“... Jack, I can’t talk to the man who says: ‘O.K., shoot,’ and he doesn’t want to talk to me. Why deceive ourselves? Your tongue is as paralyzed as mine. We live under the curse of the inarticulate, some horrible murky screen that’s always been between us. Think of it, it’s thirteen years this fall, since you left this house, and yet, when I ask what you’ve been doing, you tell me ‘this and that.’”

“I’ve been doing a lot of things.”

“I know, lots and lots.”

“Some things I’m not proud of.”

“I know of them.”

“... What do you mean, you know of them?”

“Rumors reached me.”

“Rumors?”

“Let us say, inquiries.”

I don’t know how long I sat there, blinking at him, but after a while I said: “All right, I had some trouble with the police. Just once, on mistaken identification. You bat around like I did, you can have. What did they ask you about me?”

“When you went into the Army, telegrams were sent me, and I answered them. I’m not interested in your police record. I’ve one of my own, it may surprise you to learn. I got into a brawl on O’Connell Street one night, and before I was done with it they had me in Dublin Castle and some filthy jail, and it was days before I was done with it, and was out. It’s not important, and it’s been years since I thought of it. But the frilled shirt on the statue of George III, but a few blocks up the street, in the old Grattan’s Parliament Room of the Bank of Ireland, that’s important, and it’s of such things I’d like to talk to you about. Think of it, every thread, every knot, every flower, is hewn from the virgin marble, with the light showing through every tiny opening, and one mislick with a tool could have ruined it. John Bacon spent years on it, and even then died before it was done, and his son, John Bacon, Jr., had to finish it. It’s a trivial conception, like engraving the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin, and yet it represents one man’s consecration, and a second man’s acceptance of it, to an ideal, and has sustained me at times when I thought about it. I’m not talking of jails, or police, or incidental things. I’m talking of fundamentals, of what men believe in, and dedicate their lives to, of what your heart dreams of, and may yet have, and what mine wanted, and lost.”