Villa America (12 page)

By the third hour, they had doused the lamps to conserve oil, and the relentless shrieking of wind was all Gerald could hear. He was thinking about Fred, who had already shipped out to France with his artillery division; he hadn’t considered the noise before, the noise of war, hadn’t conceived that sound itself might drive you crazy.

By the fourth hour, he could hear Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The “Ode to Joy.” Beginning softly, softly. Gaining pace and depth, building itself. Then filling his head, as if it were hollowing out his skull and pouring itself inside of him. He breathed in the odor from his daughter’s shirt, the vigorous presto passage vibrating through him. He listened very, very carefully, and there it was: the choir. He wanted to cry, it was so beautiful. He had reached the second theme, with its high military style, when he felt himself being shaken. He ignored it, concentrating on the thread of the symphony. But when he was shaken again, more forcefully, he reluctantly turned his head and looked up.

Carter was standing over him holding a lamp and pointing to the ground. He moved in and shouted in Gerald’s ear:
“Plenner. Man’s covered in dust. He has to come up off the ground, but he won’t.”

It took Gerald a moment to quiet the symphony and focus on what Carter had told him. But then he nodded and forced himself to rise.

They walked over, knelt down, and looked under the cot where Plenner had stashed himself. Gerald could see that he was covered in a fine silt, and his body was racked by coughs.

Carter shook his shoulder.
“Plenner. Come on, now, you have to get up, all the dust’s coming in that way.”

He didn’t move.

“
John,”
Gerald said finally,
“you’ll suffocate.”

When Plenner still didn’t move, Gerald and Carter looked at each other. Then Gerald grabbed hold of Plenner’s arm and Carter his leg, and they dragged him out.

Gerald used what little spit he had to dampen another handkerchief while Carter began wrapping a sheet around Plenner. Gerald wiped down Plenner’s face, gently digging the cloth into his nostrils and around his mouth. Plenner let them work on him, quiet, eyes unmoving.

Having something to concentrate on had hushed the music in Gerald’s head, but it hovered on the edges of his mind, and he was half listening for that melody when a dull thumping drew his attention towards the front of the tent. He stood still. Carter stopped too. In the dim half-light they saw movement behind the canvas, as if something were being hurled against it over and over. Whatever it was seemed to be gathering force, and they could see the ties beginning to give.

Carter was there first, Gerald behind him, carrying the lamp. There was a noise pitched higher than the wind.

“
Someone’s out there,”
Gerald yelled
. “We have to open it.”

“
No,”
Carter yelled.
“No way in hell.”

“
We have to. They’ll rip the canvas off.”

Carter looked at Gerald and shook his head angrily.
“Shit.”

They stood there a few moments longer as whoever it was hurled himself frantically against the tent.

“
All right,”
Carter yelled.
“But just the bottom flap. And quickly.”

Gerald put down the lamp and untied the flap. He reached his hand outside and felt the sting of the dust and something else. Hail? He grabbed in front of him and got hold of what felt like an ankle, and all at once the hurling stopped. There was a scrambling, and a dark face appeared low to the ground, one wild white eye, and Gerald clasped an outstretched hand and moved back.

Gerald stood, picking up the lamp, and as he did, the stranger stood too. His face was reddish black and masked with dust, making his eyes startling and large. His hair, also coated, stood straight on end, as if he had received an electric shock.

Moving so quickly that Gerald had no time to react, the man grabbed Gerald’s shoulder, put his face right up to his own, and screamed:
“It drops down. It drops down.”

“
Christ,”
Carter shouted.
“It’s Wilson.”

Gerald tried to wrench out of his grasp, but Wilson held on tightly.

“
Get him off me,”
he yelled. He was unwilling to drop the oil lamp but that left him with only one free hand to push Wilson away.

“
It drops down on us.”

“
Get him off.”

“
Tom,”
Carter yelled.

Wilson had gotten Gerald in a bear hug and was forcing him back towards the line of lockers and cots. He put his mouth up to Gerald’s ear and whispered into it: “It drops down. It drops down.”

Gerald could see Carter over Wilson’s shoulder and, out of the corner of his eye, Plenner still sitting on the ground off to the side, unmoving. Gerald felt the back of his calves hit the metal of a locker, and Wilson drew away slightly and looked into Gerald’s face. There was something in his eyes, not just the panic but also a kind of pleading, as if it were very important that Gerald understand what he was saying.

“
Tom,”
he yelled.

Wilson nodded. “Yes.”

“
Tom, it’s me. It’s Gerald Murphy.”

“Yes.” And for a moment, Gerald felt there was a flicker of recognition there. Then Wilson smiled, revealing dirt-covered teeth. The awful, dumb heartbreak in his eyes. He put an index finger up to Gerald’s forehead and tapped: “It…drops…down…on…us.”

Then, with startling alacrity, he pushed Gerald aside, causing him to stumble as he tried to hold on to the lamp.

When he’d managed to right himself, he saw Carter standing motionless at Tom’s side. Wilson was holding a service revolver, his elbow making a perfect angle, pressing the barrel to his own temple.

There was only the screaming melody of the wind, the sound of hail hitting the canvas, and the three men standing in tableau. Then Tom Wilson said very distinctly, “It’s something wicked,” and blew part of his skull away.

The next day was remarkably fair. Gerald sat on his cot staring at the pen in his hand, the paper beside him. He wanted to write a letter to Sara, but he didn’t know the right words.

The tent cities at Kelly Field had been destroyed by wind, by panicked mules, and by trucks crashing into barracks and the mess halls. The sound of coughing filled the space the wind had occupied, and the line for the infirmary stretched halfway down the road. Plenner, his eyes pink and swollen shut, was among those men.

Gerald had spent the day with the other boys cleaning the dust and Wilson’s brains out of the tent. He and Carter and Plenner had been forced to spend the night with Wilson’s leaking body, waiting until the storm broke and help could be fetched. Carter had covered Tom with a blanket, but when the medics came to take him away, dust had piled around him anyway and filled the hole where his eye had been, like a bottle stopper.

Wilson, they’d learned, had escaped the infirmary, raving, at the height of the storm, and no one had dared follow him out into that hell. The medics also told them that he wasn’t the only suicide; three others had taken their own lives during the storm. Gerald wasn’t sure if that was supposed to make it better for them or not. The medics had given them this information with an air of instructors contextualizing a battle, as if saying,
Yes, this sort of thing happens, all perfectly normal under the circumstances.

He didn’t think it was normal, though. And he couldn’t rid himself of the image of that arm, its neat precise angle before the trigger was pulled. Nor of Carter’s face, splattered with tissue and bone fragments afterward, little tiny pieces of Tom Wilson all over it, as if Carter were Wilson at that moment, the same reddish-black face, the same startled eyes, the same dumb-animal look of fear. A look he remembered from a long time ago, from his small, newly feral dog before it bit him.

He’d wanted to talk to Carter about this, about all of it. But when the Texan came and sat down next to him outside the tent, put his hand to Gerald’s shoulder, and said gently, “How you holding up, Murphy?” Gerald could only turn his face away and answer: “I’m fine, thank you.” After that, Carter left him alone.

In the world of other men, he’d always been stiff. Polite kindness and decent interest in their welfare—that was all he had to offer. So self-conscious, he came off as indifferent, his true feelings left unrevealed. It enraged him, it ate him up, how he couldn’t make his affection, his camaraderie, felt.

How would he be able to live with men, fight with men, die with men at war? In a trench, in an airplane, with a leg blown off, would he say politely,
I’m fine, thanks. You? Your skull does seem to be missing a piece…
?

Now, sitting on his cot, pen in hand, he looked over at Carter, who was cleaning his boots, a shock of brown hair in his eyes as he worked away the dust. He had so much to say, to share, but it was too late. The moment had passed. He had to accept that there was only one person in the world who knew him. And she would probably be the only one who ever did. Gerald put the pen to paper.

Sara was sitting in front of the fire in her bedroom in the house on West Eleventh Street, Honoria sleeping in her basket beside her. The heat was making Sara feel drowsy and she stretched carefully on the settee so as not to tear the stitches again. She’d done that in January, a month after Honoria’s birth, and now it was March and she still hadn’t healed fully from the second go-round with the needle.

She mustn’t fall asleep, she told herself, because she knew Miss Stewart, the baby nurse, would let her go on sleeping and then she’d miss Honoria’s bath. Miss Stewart, it seemed, felt almost as protective of Sara as she did of Honoria and was constantly scolding her to get more rest.

But Sara loved bath time. She loved watching her baby’s small body squirming in pleasure at the warmth of the watery cocoon. She’d heard that some babies hated being washed, but her daughter delighted in it. And she, in turn, delighted Sara.

To keep herself awake, Sara reread Gerald’s letter, which had arrived yesterday. He was now in Columbus, Ohio, studying for his preflight exams. The letter was short and beautiful and somehow sad, it seemed to her. But she was glad about it. She’d felt lately as if she were the only sad one, and she hated that.

It wasn’t just that she missed Gerald’s company, his love, his body, the little hollow place at the base of his neck. It was that she sometimes felt such huge loneliness, such isolation, in parenthood. Every change and every new feeling, she experienced alone. And she found herself either weepy or furious: she hadn’t wanted just a child; she’d wanted
a family.

It was at this moment that she most needed her own mother—needed to hear about how childbirth had been for
her,
about feeding and the child’s weight gain and what was normal and below average and what was extraordinary about her daughter.

She’d become pregnant with Honoria three months after Adeline’s death, while still in mourning. It had been such a strange thing to go about all in black while her belly got bigger and bigger with new life. The juxtaposition had disturbed her so much at one point that she’d become convinced that the mourning dress might affect the disposition of her child. Of course, the doctor had told her that morbid fantasy was not uncommon in women who were expecting and that all she had to do was put such thoughts out of her mind.

But those dusky, private suggestions had only deepened—through the pregnancy, then the birth, and now motherhood. At times, her perception of events or people or even her tiny daughter surprised and alarmed her.

She remembered Honoria’s christening in late December, two weeks after she was born and just before Gerald left for San Antonio. It was their two-year wedding anniversary. Their town house had been full of rosebuds and other hothouse flowers for the occasion. What was left of the umbilical cord had fallen off Honoria in the bath that morning.

The birth had been hard, and Sara wasn’t able to move from her bed for the christening; the doctor had cut her open between her legs to help Honoria’s passage, and the incision had become infected. So they’d decided to hold the small christening service in a bedroom adjacent to her own. Miss Stewart stood next to her bed holding a hand mirror at such an angle that Sara, lying down, could watch the proceedings in the reflection without being seen herself.

Hoytie, who was now in France in the ambulance corps, had stood as godmother, and Gerald’s father had agreed to stand in proxy for the godfather, Fred, who’d already shipped out.

In the looking glass, Sara had watched as Gerald walked into the room carrying Honoria in her christening dress. It was one they’d agreed on together, but when she’d seen it in the mirror—embroidery and lace over bright cherry-colored silk—a wave of sickness and terror had come over her. The red of the silk reminded her of the blood on the sheets and all over her legs that, in her narcotized state, had made her think she’d been shot down there.

She could remember the visceral panic even now, sitting on the settee, as her lovely girl made her sleeping noise—something between a smacking of lips and a gurgle. She put out her hand and rubbed Honoria’s back. Her child’s body was hard and soft at the same time. If Sara pressed a little, she felt the resistance of her small muscles and bones, a solidity that comforted her. And, oh, how she loved to smell her, put her nose in her neck or her stomach or the sole of her foot, so fragrant—body and skin and warmth and the scent of milk, sour and sweet.

Sara suddenly felt fiercely protective towards her child and wanted to grab her up and hold her tight and crush her against her own body. For some reason, she was reminded of the Spanish flu they said was spreading east across the country, killing grown men, and what if something happened to Honoria, so small, so unsafe? All those germs carried on the wind, on breath, on hands, on lips, on sheets, on coins circulating everywhere…