Authors: Jane Smiley
watching them? Five people were killed, including two children, and dozens injured. In
the days after that, Margaret had her typing done by nine in the morning, and then went
straight to the hospital. She hardly thought any longer of what now seemed like the
utterly vanished life of not being at war.
But Andrew was unmoved by the war. Even though the entire knitting circle
thought that the Germans had paid members of the IWW to get onto the island and blow
up that magazine as a warning, he thought that the powder in the magazine had heated up
overnight, and a rush of air into the building in the morning had set it off. Nor was he
daunted, in his daily walks to the observatory, by what they saw around them--ash and
rubble, death and burned-out buildings from the explosion, but also new buildings meant
for the war effort seeming to shoot out of the ground. However, he allowed her to lock
their doors, which they had never done.
Andrew did wonder aloud about Pete--he regretted not having him around as a
sounding board for his expanded theories of the universe. Margaret had nothing to say
about Pete. Like everything else, thinking of him reminded her only that fresh waves of
men were getting shot every day, for either fighting or defending, spying or deserting.
Dora's pieces began to appear, the first entitled "My Woman Lorry Driver," about
a trip she took between London and Southampton with a twenty-year-old girl who was
transporting cabbages. Dora then got from England to France, made her way from Calais
to Bordeaux, then over to Pau, Marseilles, and Genoa. She skirted the front lines, though
not the war. Her tone was adventurous rather than fearful, and each time Margaret read
one of Dora's pieces, she thought that her wish--her attempt--to keep Dora away from the
war had been worse than futile and worse, even, than selfish. Surely Dora and Pete had
known exactly what she was doing and laughed at her for trying to trim their adventurous
lives to the dull pattern of her own. Her embarrassment lingered even when the
dispatches from Italy began to sound worried--"Portrait of a Family That Has Lost Five
Sons (Savona, Italy)," "A Russian Speaker Is Silenced by Doubt (Lucca, Italy),"
"Children on the Beach (Portofino, Italy)," and "Opinionated in Parma." The pieces
conformed to a pattern: Dora would set out to find a loaf of bread or to enjoy a patch of
fine weather or to meet a long-lost friend, and she would encounter someone--in one
case, children playing with a battered ball, whose father had been killed in the war and
whose mother had disappeared a week before. Dora talked to them and gave them money,
but when she returned with a local priest who promised to help, the children had
vanished. The opinionated young woman in Parma was German. Her opinions concerned
the catalogue of crimes committed against the Germans by the French, the English, the
Russians, and the Americans. Dora quoted her without comment. She lingered in Parma
for three weeks, then went east to Bologna, and farther east to Padua. She kept moving
toward the war, recording the hardships that she saw, but with that same idle, wandering
tone. In a piece called "Three Nights in the Mountains," she was driving from Padua to
Perugia when her car broke down. She saw no one but deer, hawks, and a wildcat for
three days. The village she walked to was abandoned. Then two men came along in a
wagon. There was also "Hidden Treasures of Ravenna," in which she reflected on
someone named Theodoric, who had previously conquered Italy from the north and was
buried there. In "I Am Grazed by a Bullet," she related how the sleeve of her jacket was
torn by a bullet outside of Trieste, which everyone seemed to be fleeing. But by the time
the Italians lost the battle of Caporetto, Dora's dispatch was from Rome, and after that
two weeks went by and she was in Spain, far from the fighting ("Toro!")--her Trieste
experience seemed to have aroused a belated sense of caution. Beatrice wrote that the
Bells did not read her articles, and put her letters away in a box, unopened. Bit by bit,
Margaret forgave herself for trying to save Dora. Like everything else from before the
war, she thought, the idea of "saving" things seemed the rankest delusion.
There was no word of Pete at all.
The two screens had been wrapped in blankets and tied with twine.
One day, she laid the first one on the rug and untied the wrappings. The screen
consisted of four panels, each about two feet wide, depicting a mountainous scene. To the
left and to the right, rugged slopes rose in the foreground, steeper than anything she had
seen even in the Sierras. In the middle of the scene, more distant peaks were still more
jagged, and on those slopes, several stunted pine trees were bunched together. The
mountains were painted in a vaporous dark ink, so as to seem especially threatening, and
the farthest ridges were partly hidden by clouds. A river flowed through a U-shaped cleft
in the mountains, and in the river floated a long narrow boat with a rounded prow,
carrying a man in a kimono. Her eye was drawn straight to the tiny face of the man, who
was sitting quietly, looking upward, not, it seemed, in fear, but in curiosity and interest.
The water flowed, the clouds drifted, the trees huddled, but the man seemed undaunted
by his surroundings.
The second screen was smaller--only about four feet tall--also four panels,
entirely painted on gold. The largest object was a black tree with rough bark, twisted and
bending to the left. Willowlike fronds of leaves seemed to toss in a breeze. Turf, or
perhaps moss, spread in irregular dark-green patches around the trunk of the tree, and
colorful birds flew in and out among the blowing leaves, or perched on rocks sunk into
the moss. Above the tree, golden clouds billowed in the golden sky. To the left, clouds of
red flowers on long, frondlike stems also tossed about, and the branches and leaves of
some other variety of tree, something like a plane tree, spread across the golden horizon.
She stood this screen up beside the first one and stared from one to the other, taking in
both effects--the startling and the soothing. She found herself breathing deeply, as if she
could inhale their atmosphere or fragrance. She sat there for hours, it seemed, but
possibly little more than a single hour. When Andrew came in, he stepped in front of her
and surveyed the two, then said, "My dear, so this is what they look like. He offered them
to me."
"To
buy?"
"Why, of course, my dear. As an investment. But my mind was on other things,
and the subject dropped, as I remember."
"They are beautiful."
"But not for display, my dear, in such humble surroundings as ours. I see that."
This seemed true. He helped her wrap them up again, and put them away. At
supper, he said, "It has crossed my mind to wonder what we shall do with them."
So, Margaret thought, Andrew thinks Pete is dead, too.
Her daily round consisted of typing, cooking, knitting scarves, packing boxes, and
discussing with the other naval wives the ins and outs of the million things that they did
not understand, including what to think of the dead whose names they knew, among all of
the dead whose names they did not know.
On the first anniversary of the U.S.'s entrance into the war, it seemed to Margaret
to have lasted much longer than a year. The island was never silent at any time of the day
or night. One thing happened that was amusing even to the knitting ladies--when the
Secretary of the Navy had issued an edict saying that there could be no sales of liquor
within five miles of a naval base, liquor and beer left town by the wagonload, and there
was a funeral for "John Barleycorn" that passed down Sonoma Street. The corpse was a
coffin-load of empty whiskey bottles. She remembered this because it was on this very
day when Andrew commented on a disease outbreak in Kansas. "Strange thing, my dear.
Very sudden, and it's not as if Fort Riley is at a crossroads. The Katy doesn't even pass
through there." He shook his head; she felt her habitual inner clang of alarm, and then, in
mid-May, he said, "Now, here, this Fort Riley thing, remember that, my dear? Very like
this flu they've had in Spain." He wrote a column about it for the
Examiner
, but it was
bumped from the paper by the Battle of the Marne. Things were so busy that she forgot
about her fortieth birthday until three days after the date.
He went to the Base Commandant about it--one morning, he merely walked down
their street and knocked on the Commandant's front door. The Commandant was in, and
Andrew told him about what he considered to be the Fort Riley/Spain connection, though
what that could be Margaret didn't understand. When Andrew got home half an hour
later, all he said was "He listened." Then he went into his study and closed the door.
The news was about the Allies' advancing from one French city to another, and
"the Bolsheviki" in Russia, who had slaughtered the Tsar and his family--nothing about
the Spanish flu. But Andrew found out that the receiving ship at the Commonwealth Pier
in Boston was overflowing with very ill sailors. Only a few days after that, Andrew heard
that dozens were falling ill at Fort Devens, also in Massachusetts. He walked back up the
street. Boston was far away. But, then, Kansas was far from Spain, too, and Spain was far
from Boston. It was a mystery, but Andrew was determined that its mysteriousness would
not lull the Commandant into apathy, even though the man had plenty of other matters to
deal with. In early September, Andrew wrote about the Massachusetts outbreak in his
Examiner
column; the next day, the mayor declared that the influenza would never come
to San Francisco and that to suggest that it would was irresponsible in the extreme.
Andrew did not flinch, but said to her, "My dear, they may all
hope
that the influenza will
not come, but I will nevertheless be vindicated."
The first case appeared toward the end of September. In two weeks, the base
hospital was full. Cases cropped up in Vallejo. The Commandant issued face masks to
everyone, and Andrew insisted she use one. About a week later, Margaret was standing
on their walk, surveying her flowers, when she saw Evie Marquardt, who lived one door
down from the Pritchards, come out of her house to the porch and sink to her knees.
Margaret didn't know what to do, but then she pulled up her mask and went and helped
Evie back into the house and onto her sofa. When she came home, Andrew made her
wash her skin and hair with lye soap and leave her dress on the back stoop. He sent a
passing sailor to the hospital to report Mrs. Marquardt's illness, and about an hour later,
they came to get Evie in the ambulance wagon. She survived. Tales abounded--four
women playing cards until midnight, three of them dead by morning. Roger Mattock, on
the hospital ship, took water and food to all of the patients, but never got sick. Everyone
on a certain block in Vallejo came down with it, except the ladies living at the brothel.
Then the Commandant himself was near death, but he survived; Captain Asch, home on
leave from China, never got ill but was killed by a motor truck late at night. It seemed
death was all around them, especially every time Margaret was delegated to write the
notification letter to the family of a victim.Dear Mr. and Mrs. Smith,The United States
Navy regrets to inform you that your son, Evan Walter Smith, seaman third class, has
succumbed to the Spanish flu during the recent outbreak. He reported to sick bay at 11:30
on the morning of October 6, 1918. The progress of the illness was rapid, and he
succumbed to a catarrh of the lungs during the evening of October 8. Owing to the highly
contagious nature of the disease, all victims at the naval base have been buried in the
cemetery on the island. A service was held for your son and the other victims who died
on October 8 in the nondenominational chapel on October 9. We regret that they have
had to take these summary measures owing to the virulence of the disease. Your son's
effects have been disinfected, and will be shipped to you in a separate parcel. All
inquiries may be addressed to me, George McCracken, Commandant of the Base.
I am yours, regretfully
And Margaret, in her turn, lived in fear of letters. Beatrice's son Lawrence
succumbed, but Beatrice and Robert lived. Elizabeth, Lucy May, and Eloise never came
down with it, but Mercer almost died. Dora lived, though she was in Cairo and Jerusalem.
The Lears lived, but Hubert, in the navy off Jutland, died and was buried at sea. The
sailor who washed their windows lived; his friend died. Mrs. Wareham and her daughter
Cassandra lived, but Angus and his wife and child died. Mrs. Kimura lived, though she
continued to visit every sort of patient, according to Mrs. Wareham. Naoko lived.
On Armistice Day, everyone Margaret knew or heard of was exhausted or
changed by the Great War except for Andrew. In between the bookends of Andrew's two
vindications, the powder-magazine explosion and the Spanish flu, every day had had its
frightening news or its dire thought. The lesson of every incident was that forces were at