Villa America (11 page)

The problem was, of course, that she knew exactly what he meant. As time dragged on with no resolution in sight, it became harder to sustain the fantasy, and despite herself, Sara began to feel like she was back in that Whistler painting, a sense of inertia slowly overtaking her.

Then, one morning, she found she couldn’t, or just didn’t, get out of bed. She lay between sleep and waking, without even the energy to write Gerald, who, needing to escape the city and their predicament, had gone off on a retreat with some former members of his Yale secret society.

She missed breakfast, and when lunch was threatening to pass by as well, her mother knocked at her door. Sara expected a reprimand, but her mother’s voice was gentle.

“Sara, dearest,” she said. “May I come in?”

Sara turned on her pillow and regarded her mother. “Of course.”

“Are you unwell?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know.” She felt sleepy, that was really all. Her limbs were heavy, sinking into the mattress.

Her mother at first sat on the edge of her bed, then lifted her whole self in and wrapped her arms around her eldest daughter. She stroked her hair.

They lay like that for a while, listening to the traffic outside the window, watching the afternoon sun move against the wall. Sara was reminded of the time, so many years ago now, that her puppy had been run over by a sleigh, the tiny little body crushed and bloody under the cruel metal runner, all the warmth gone out of her pelt. Sara had carried the dog all the way back to the house and collapsed at her mother’s feet. Adeline had lain in bed with her for days, just as she was doing now, cradling her daughter until Sara’s grief had lightened.

She wanted to tell her mother that it might not work this time, but Adeline spoke first.

“Is it really so untenable here with us?”

Sara squeezed her mother’s soft hand. “Unbearable, you mean? No. Of course not.”

When Sara didn’t say anything else, her mother started again. “You are our dearest child, and we want you to be happy. That’s all.”

“I know that, Mother.” She felt safe there in Adeline’s arms. “It’s just I want my own life. And…”

“And children,” Adeline finished for her.

“You do know how old I am.” She turned and looked at her mother. Then, feeling that hard little shame that had been lodged in her for years as she’d been passed by, she said quietly: “This might be my last chance for happiness.”

Adeline looked away, as if she couldn’t bear to see that pain. She sighed and then nodded. “I forget, I suppose, sometimes. You girls have been my greatest happiness, my favorite accomplishment.”

“I know.”

“Yes,” she said after a while, “you’re right, after all. You are a woman. You must have a household to manage.” She kissed Sara’s head. “I’ll speak to your father if you promise to rise for tea.”

“I love you, Mother.”

“Yes, yes.” Then: “My darling girl.”

Sara lay there for a while longer, then rose and began to dress herself. She picked through the post lying on the silver tray in the hall and found a letter from Gerald.

When she finished reading it, she went to her writing desk and took a pen and a piece of stationery. She sat for a moment and then put her pen to paper.

G
erald stood in the mess line, the bright Texas sun beating down and making his skin itch under his wool flannel shirt. He was trying to read Sara’s latest letter amid the cacophony of hungry, waiting men.

It was a warm January day, somewhere in the sixties, he guessed, and the light bounced off the flat, yellow landscape of Kelly Field, forcing him to squint whenever he raised his eyes.

He was jostled by some other trainees fooling behind him, and he moved up a bit and redoubled his efforts to concentrate. Since he’d shipped out to the Ground Officers Training School at the beginning of the month, Sara had written him almost every other day, long letters crammed with details of her life—which was mainly taken up by their three-week-old daughter, Honoria—as well as her views on the politics of the war and her concerns that he would be shipped off to Europe.

What remained unsaid in her correspondence but was nonetheless apparent between the lines was Sara’s lingering sadness over Adeline’s death from pneumonia, a year ago now. Her mother had never been exactly robust, but her sudden decline came as a shock, and Sara didn’t seem to have fully come to terms with her passing, even if she rarely mentioned it.

In her latest “report,” as Gerald had come to think of them, fondly, Sara wrote that she’d dined with some visiting Columbia professor of Russian studies, and she cheerfully passed along his views.

Gerald folded up the letter and put it in his shirt pocket. He was nearing the opening to the mess tent, but he couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for the beans and anemic pork waiting for him inside.

He was now strangely grateful for a childhood that had prepared him for what he’d found when he’d arrived at these desolate airfields outside San Antonio. It wasn’t the freezing nights, cold showers, and small canvas cot that were familiar; it was more the feeling of isolation, the flatness of emotional life—here reflected in the dusty, open spaces of these former cotton fields—that resonated with him.

 The same couldn’t be said for some of the men, who took the conditions and the uncertainty hard. One of them, Tom Wilson, had been among the twelve trainees in Gerald’s wall tent. No one knew much about him or where he came from, but he was soft-spoken and always shared his care packages around.

After a week at camp, however, they’d woken in the night to his cries. He was standing in the middle of the tent between the two rows of cots, completely naked, screaming: “It drops down. It drops down. It drops down on you.” Eventually a medic was fetched to take him away to the infirmary. They’d all agreed the defect must have been there before, but it had unsettled them nonetheless.

A Jenny passed overhead and Gerald looked up, using his hand to shade his eyes. He watched the small biplane circle over Kelly Field’s barracks and tent cities before coming in for a bumpy landing in the distance. He felt a shiver of possibility pass through him. He’d been accepted to the Signal Corps’ School of Aeronautics in Columbus, and if all went well, he could be up in one of them in less than a month.

Still, he had to get out of Texas first, and he didn’t know when that would be. In the meantime, drills, bayonet and rifle training, and fieldwork lay ahead. It was a strange place, this camp. Two thousand acres of drought-afflicted land holding ten thousand men from all over, but it didn’t feel like America at all. It seemed more of a twilight country between what had been and what was coming, between his former life and war.

He would barely have recognized the Gerald Murphy of two weeks ago, the man who had blithely stepped off the train in New Orleans and bought, as he’d written Sara at the time, a marble-top sofa table (for the hall?), a pair of silver grape scissors, a claret jug engraved with the initial
M,
a set of ivory oyster forks, a strange lavender pitcher for Honoria’s bath, and a small agate box carved in the image of a lady’s head, trimmed with diamonds, and inscribed with
Walk on roses and think of me.

Their home seemed so far from him now, a sort of paradise that felt alien. Sara herself seemed so far. He’d left her three weeks ago, still in mourning clothes for her mother and unwell after the hard birth.

The day that Honoria came into the world, Gerald had never felt so helpless. Sara had been given the sleeping drugs during the ordeal, but her pain afterward was unmistakable. He didn’t know the details, of course, but it must have been a bloody affair, if the reams of pinkish towels streaming from the bedroom were anything to go by, and the doctor said she had suffered so much trauma that she wouldn’t be able to walk for several weeks. He’d cried at the thought of Sara’s poor broken body, because that body belonged to him now, and he was responsible.

But then he’d come here and started preparing to fight, looking towards war, and all those emotions had become less immediate. It wasn’t that he loved her any less, only that occasionally he couldn’t feel it, as if he’d been sent back to a time before her.

After lunch, Gerald headed back to his tent to collect his soap and towel for his shower. Showers in camp had to be taken in a twice-weekly rota due to the severe drought that had been plaguing Texas for almost eight months. His tent’s turn was up this afternoon—the worst time, because they had work duty directly afterward.

A truck passed him and he watched it come to a halt outside the officers’ barracks, a luxury hotel compared to the flimsy tents the inductees were assigned to. An officer stepped out, but as he turned to slam the door shut, Gerald was shocked to see him thrown back a good four feet, as if some unseen force had pushed him through the air. The officer lay there, stunned, and Gerald ran over.

“Are you all right, sir?” He put out his hand to the man, who seemed to be having trouble focusing.

“What the fuck was that?”

“I don’t know. You just…flew back.”

“I think it came from the truck,” the officer said, standing. He held up his hand as if expecting it to explain itself.

“The engine?” Gerald asked, looking at the truck.

The officer shook his head. “Don’t know. It shorted out earlier, but then it was fine.”

“Well, at least we’re not low on mechanics here, sir.”

The officer looked towards one of the airplane hangars in the distance. Gerald followed his gaze, all at once aware of a deep stillness in the air. Beyond the hangar, there was something on the horizon, a darkening, far away.

“This is some weird weather,” the officer remarked, rubbing his hand.

“A storm must be coming,” Gerald said. “I’ve got to get to the showers. Are you sure you’re all right, sir?”

“I’m fine. You go on. You’ll stink to high heaven if you miss it.” He grinned at Gerald.

Gerald had gone about a quarter of a mile when the wind came. He had to keep his head down to shield his eyes from the grit blowing up off the road. He was already late for the showers, and getting later, and it felt like he was trying to run through water. His thighs began to ache, and small pebbles stung his exposed skin.

Then a mule raced passed him, almost trampling him in its panic. Startled, he raised his head, and that’s when he saw it: what had started as a small darkening in the distance was a mountain a mile high and as wide as the whole horizon. It was eating everything in its path.

Gerald ran faster, his muscles straining, his lungs hot. By the time he reached his tent city, the darkness had covered half the distance between them, a boiling wall of dust rolling and screaming towards camp. He was paralyzed at the sight.

He had never known this kind of visceral fear except in dreams. The one nightmare he sometimes had: standing on the edge of a calm shore when, out of nowhere, a gigantic, terrifying wave came crashing down on him.

At that moment, standing ten feet from his tent, rooted in place with this hallucination thundering at him, he felt certain they would all be consumed by it. He looked over at his tent and sprinted. Then, all at once, it was upon him, and everything went dark.

The flap to his tent had been secured from the inside, and his yells to open it were drowned out in the noise of the wind and the black filth that filled his mouth and nose. Trying not to panic, he got down on his knees in the dirt and felt inside the flap for the tie. He fumbled but managed to get it loose. He yanked the corner back and crawled through the opening, then lay on the floor panting.

“Jesus, Murphy.” By the light of the oil lamp, Gerald could see John Plenner, the Philadelphian whose cot was next to his. He was tying the corner down. “You could have filled this whole place up.”

“It came too fast,” Gerald said.

“You were late,” Plenner yelled above the noise, but his voice wasn’t angry. “What the hell is going on out there?”

“It’s too dark. There was a…a wall, a mountain.” Gerald sat up.

By the light of a few lamps, he could see that the twelve-man tent was almost empty; it was just himself, Plenner, and Carter, a Texan who pronounced
San Antonio
“San Antone.” Around them, dust flowed in under the canvas like smoke, and the sides of the tent buckled.

“Where is everybody?”

Plenner shrugged.

“It’s like…” He couldn’t even say what it was like.

“The apocalypse,” Carter called above the wind. “Damn dust storms.”

The wall tent was crammed with twelve cots, six on each side, lockers at their feet; a corridor ran down the middle at the highest part of the pitch. The tent was fixed with flies that held the top rod stable and pulled the sides down low, forcing the men to stoop as they approached their cots. With every inch of space planned for, it was claustrophobic at the best of times.

Gerald went over to his locker, pulled out one of the handkerchiefs Sara had sent him, wiped his face, then used it to clean out his mouth. He sat down on his cot.

“
I saw a man touch his truck and fly through the air,”
he yelled at Carter.
“Was that…”

“
Static electricity,”
he yelled back.

Gerald wondered if any planes had been up when the storm hit.

Plenner was checking the stakes and supports, carrying his lamp from spot to spot.
“There’s too much dust coming in,”
he said.

“
How many of those handkerchiefs you got, Murphy?”

“
Ten?”

“
Give us some.”

The three of them tied the handkerchiefs around their faces, leaving just their eyes showing.

“
If it gets too bad, y’all have to cover your eyes too,”
Carter yelled.
“Pinkeye.”

“
How many of these have you seen?”
Plenner’s voice sounded hoarse.

“
Two in the last year alone. Both bad.”

Over the next hour the temperature plummeted to below freezing. They put on all their clothes: their extra work shirts, the two service coats, one wool and one cotton, and their overcoats. Then they pillaged their tent mates’ lockers for clothing and blankets, which they rolled up and laid on the floor around the perimeter of the tent to slow the incoming dust. They had no water to drink or even to wet their handkerchiefs with, and the sound of their coughing blended with the sound of the storm.

The second hour brought flying debris. First, unknown objects nicked and skimmed across the canvas outside, startling them and keeping them on edge. What appeared to be a metal locker flew against a front corner support and bent it, making the tent pitch inward. Dust spilled in through the weak spot, and they decided to move to the back.

Just as they did, a metal pole skewered the canvas fabric; its tip hit the exact spot they’d vacated only seconds before. A shaft of sand poured through the hole as if in an hourglass.

They stared at one another over their handkerchiefs, locking eyes and then looking away. They were silent, but Gerald knew they were all thinking the same thing.

Plenner got down on the ground and slid all the way under one of the cots and covered his ears, while Carter proceeded to take a sheet and build a sort of tent around himself, pulling the edges under him.

Gerald looked at the two of them and then went and lay on his own cot, facedown. After a while, he reached under his pillow and found Honoria’s baby shirt, which he’d brought with him from home. He lifted up his handkerchief and buried his whole face in it, straining to smell its milky sweetness, the odor of his daughter’s soft baby skin, amid the acrid stench of the dust.