by Julie Berry
But what if it was Aubrey’s regiment? He was dead.
His commanding officer, at least, could confirm that to her. She might still spend the rest of her nights lying awake, but it wouldn’t be wondering. Not if she knew for sure.
Colette could handle the truth. She knew that much about herself.
The battle had taken place a few weeks prior, in May. It was now mid-June. They might still be there. It was worth a letter to find out.
APHRODITE
Medical Review Board—July 1, 1918
THE MEDICAL REVIEW board in Chelmsford declared James to be improving. A great deal of eating, dancing, and laughing were apparently the tonic he’d needed. He received orders to report for retraining on July 15.
Everything had changed. He had no desire to go back to war and die for Bobby. He wanted to live for Bobby, and for Maggie, and especially for Hazel. Nights became harder again, as scenes from the trenches stalked his sleep. But when morning came, he pulled himself together. Why waste sunny summer days with a lovely girl by your side? Seize the day.
Hazel hated the news, hated it, but it was still two weeks out. They’d had two weeks already. She determined to enjoy these remaining weeks without fear.
After all, the news reports were very hopeful. The Allies had managed to stop all four major German advances thus far this spring. The Germans hadn’t reached the Channel, and Britain’s naval blockade of Germany still held. The Americans were finally exerting their strength. What the Americans lacked in experience, they made up for triply in morale, in supplies, and in seemingly limitless numbers. The tide was turning. It had to be turning. The rest of the war would be brief, and James would come home safely, and soon.
APHRODITE
Mail Delivery—June 29, 1918
“COLETTE,” TANTE SOLANGE called. “Someone here to see you.”
It was early morning. Colette stumbled out of bed. Perhaps Papin, the oily manager at the café, had followed her home, the slime. She’d tell him where he could look for another waitress.
“Un moment,” Colette called to her aunt. She pulled on yesterday’s clothes and shoved a few pins into her hair. She wouldn’t bother to look too polished for Papin. Should she clean her teeth? Non. She’d kept the visitor waiting. If it was Papin, and her breath was foul, bien.
She came into the sitting room.
Leaning against the doorway, filling it up, filling the entire room, drawing to himself all the morning light, was Aubrey.
Really and truly and solidly Aubrey.
Her shriek did, I admit, wake the neighbors. She nearly collapsed for crying. She just about buckled in two. She slid down to the floor and wept.
Joy can do that. It can hurt as much as pain.
Aubrey, who’d spent a train ride fretting over what to say, panicked. This was terrible.
“You monster!” she cried. “I thought you were dead.”
Yep. He was in huge trouble.
There was that rascal smile she remembered.
“The Boche did their best to kill me,” he said, “but I didn’t hold still to let ’em.”
Colette would not let him charm his way out of this. “What do you have to say for yourself?” she demanded, through tears. “How could you do this to me?” He smelled of soap and peppermint. She remembered, to her horror, that she did not.
(That’s not what Aubrey was noticing just then.)
This, he knew, was a moment where he’d better choose his words carefully.
He held out an envelope. “I wrote you a letter,” he said. “I wanted to make sure it got here, so I figured I’d better bring it myself.”
She eyed the letter suspiciously, then edged away. “Let me get cleaned up . . .” she began, but Aubrey held her hand.
“I promise,” he said, “you’re the cleanest thing I’ve seen in months.”
Tears crashed over her once more, and her vision blurred. “Are you really here?”
“I am,” he said, “but don’t tell Colonel Hayward.”
She pulled away. “You’ll be shot for desertion!” she cried. “You must hurry back!”
He laughed. “I worked out a deal with Captain Fish. I’ll go back tonight.”
But to leave Colette Fournier behind, now that he’d found her! The Kaiser’s armies combined couldn’t make him do it.
Poor Colette’s emotions besieged her. “I thought you were dead,” she repeated. “We heard about a murdered soldier, and—Why didn’t you write?” She swallowed. “Those things you said to me. Did you mean none of them?”
“I meant them all.” His throat was a lump. “I still do.” He held out the envelope once more. “It’s all in the letter.”
Colette took the envelope uncertainly. She’d waited long enough for an answer, and yet, somehow, being asked to wait for as long as it would take to read the letter felt like one insult too many. Just tell me!
But he’d come this far. He was trying to apologize. She should be gracious.
She sat on a couch and heard stirrings from Tante Solange’s room.
“Be careful,” she whispered to Aubrey. “My aunt will have her hands all over you.”
He laughed. “I think I can handle an old lady.”
Colette shrugged. “Bonne chance. You are on your own.”
* * *
Ten minutes later, they left the apartment and strolled the streets.
“You weren’t kidding,” he told her, “about your aunt.”
Colette had no time for her aunt’s misbehavior just then. “Aubrey,” she said, “I am sorry about your friend.” She shook her head. “Quelle horreur!”
Aubrey said nothing but squeezed her arm. They walked on. Aubrey’s eyes saw Paris, its charming streets, its elegant shops, without taking in much.
“I understand why you didn’t write,” Colette told him. She poked him in the ribs. “That’s not to say that I forgive you. Yet.”
Aubrey knew he was forgiven and continued.
It was the grin that got her, every time. To think, she realized, she’d never before seen it by morning light. Never even known how this Aubrey of hers glowed in the sunlight.
I wasn’t even doing that, I swear. It was pure Aubrey. Other women they passed on the street noticed it, too.
Colette smiled to herself.
Of course, her smile made Aubrey melt. Just like the first time.
“It doesn’t seem right,” he said at length, “me, here with you, while Joey’s in the ground. When it was me, thinking I’m immortal, that they were coming for.”
Colette listened. She let Aubrey take his time.
“Why me?” he said aloud. “Why do I get to live when so many die? Why do I get to live when so many black folks get killed just for breathing the same air as angry white folks?”
Colette didn’t trust herself to answer then. If she said what was in her heart—“You were spared because I need you”—she would reveal to the treacherous skies that she needed Aubrey, and then, next time, the Fates wouldn’t miss the target she’d just painted on his chest.
“If I’d heard them,” Aubrey went on. “If I’d gone out with him. If I’d had my pistol.”
“Then you might be dead too.”
“If he’d just not had to take a leak!”
She leaned her head against his shoulder. “I know.”
Aubrey remembered, then, how well she did know.
“He was my friend,” he said. “I know that’s not the same as losing your family.”
She stopped him with a kiss on his cheek. “Grief is not a contest,” she said. “What happened was horrible. No one should face it. Especially not from their own countrymen. It’s a crime against humanity. Against decency and reason.”
“Sometimes it feels like America’s short on all of that,” Aubrey said bitterly.
&nbs
p; “But America produced you,” she said. “So it can’t be all bad.”
“It’s not as if,” Aubrey said, “this was just a couple of bad guys. Sick in the head, you know? This is all over the place. All over the military. All over the South. And not just the South.”
Colette watched him. “Will you go back?” she asked. “Or can you stay here in France?”
His eyes grew large. “Stay here?” He considered the prospect, until his expression fell. “Uncle Sam won’t let me,” he said. “And I’d miss my family.”
She leaned against his arm. “If you have a family,” she murmured, “and you can be near them, do.”
He kissed the back of her hand. “I can’t believe I’m here,” he said. “You can’t know how much I’ve missed you.”
“Yes, I can.”
His smile fell. “I’m not who I was before,” he said. “I haven’t got much to offer you. I’m a soldier now, not a pianist.”
Colette laughed. “Yes, and I’m a ballerina.”
“You are?”
She rolled her eyes. “You’ll always be a pianist, Aubrey. No one can take that from you.” She gazed at him with sorrowful eyes and traced a fingertip lightly over the contours of his face. “You’re not just mourning Joey,” she told him. “It could’ve been you. You think it should’ve been. You blame yourself for not being the one in the latrine when killers came looking. You’re in shock over your own death.”
He stiffened. “You make me sound selfish.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Non. I make you sound exactly like me.”
He watched her curiously.
“I blame myself, every day, for crossing the river that morning to pick apples. For running for the convent as soon as I heard the first guns.”
He caressed her hand. God bless apples, and God bless nuns.
“I feel like a monster for surviving the Germans who hunted down my family and shot them in cold blood. I’m a selfish coward—after my mother died of grief, my heart kept on beating. I loved my own life, you see, more than I refused to face a world without those I’d lost.”
Pedestrians filed around them on the street.
“You’re not a monster for living,” he told her. “There’s no crime in picking apples.”
“And there’s no crime in sneaking out at night to see your petite amie,” she said, then smiled wryly. “Well, the army would say there is, but that’s a different matter.”
Aubrey watched curls of Colette’s hair, escaping from her scarf, dance in the breeze. They’d found each other once, then found each other once more. Here she stood—not a jazz singer, not a glamorous Belgian, but a grieving girl who understood. Who had fought to live, and who filled Aubrey with the will to fight and live beside her.
But what came next? Tonight he had to go back to the Front. If this war ever ended, he’d have to go back to New York.
New York felt so very far away. In New York, he couldn’t kiss her in the open air without fear of what onlookers might say.
But in Paris, he could. He could kiss her like he was making up for lost time.
At least for that kiss, death and grief were far away.
Maybe, he thought, he ought to just kiss Colette and never stop.
But even the best kisses end eventually.
“I’ve missed you so,” he whispered. “I never wanted to leave you behind.”
They strolled on. A kind of peace filled Aubrey’s body. He hadn’t realized how heavy a weight it had been, keeping Joey a secret for all those months.
“I wish I could do something for Joey,” Aubrey said at length. “Or for his family. Or something to remember him by.”
She smiled. “That’s a good idea,” she said. “Something to preserve his memory.”
“But what?” he wondered. “A fancy gravestone?”
They turned a corner. “I have often wished,” she said, “that I could do something for my brother, Alexandre. A memorial. But any idea I’ve ever had felt weak. Insufficient.”
“Gravestones are cold,” said Aubrey. “Memorials only go so far.”
“Get rich,” she teased, “and donate a building in Joey’s name.”
They began to look around and actually see Paris. He realized he was thirsty, so they stopped in a café for lemonades.
“I wrote songs for Joey in the trenches,” he told her. “I wrote songs for you, too.”
“Let’s go to New York, and record them,” Colette said.
Aubrey dropped his straw. “Is that an offer?”
Colette flushed. Had she spoken too soon? “Um, is yours an offer?” I’ll go anywhere you are, Aubrey Edwards.
“It’s an offer, mademoiselle,” he told her. “You’d better believe it.”
DECEMBER 1942
A Possible Ending
“WE CAN END there,” Aphrodite tells the other gods. “We can end at this moment, with both our young couples happy at last, after enduring much.”
Hades presses his fingertips together and watches the goddess of love thoughtfully.
It’s been a long story, but what is time to immortals? Aphrodite can squeeze an epic into the space between second hand clicks of the clock.
Hephaestus strokes his bearded chin. Then he rises and hobbles over to the golden net. At one touch of his hand, it parts, leaving an opening for Aphrodite to pass through.
“Court is adjourned,” he says. “The defendant is acquitted.” He smiles wryly. “This defendant’s arrest is declared unlawful. Forgive me, Goddess, for detaining you.”
Aphrodite blinks. For a moment she’s too stunned to seize her exit. She draws close to Hephaestus and speaks softly, for his hearing only.
“Do I leave now?” she asks. “You want me to be done?”
He gestures toward the door to show he will not stop her. “You’re free to go if you like.”
“It’s not what you think,” she whispers. “Me, with him.”
He shakes his head. “Don’t,” he says. “Let’s only deal in truth from now on, you and I.”
She bites her lip. “That’s not what I mean.” She turns to catch Ares craning his neck to try to hear them. “I’m not denying the affair. What I mean is . . .”
Hephaestus would rather hear anything but this right now.
“The pull, for you, is strong, during a big war.” Far better for him to voice the words than her. “Too many hearts need you. It’s intoxicating, being needed. Is that it?”
Apollo tinkers at his piano and pretends not to eavesdrop. Hades watches out the window at the city street below.
“I’m not what they think.” Aphrodite’s gaze is on the floor. “I’m not just some tart.”
“I know.” He does know. No matter what others might say, nor how they might judge.
She steps through the opening he’s created for her in the golden net.
“Thanks for the story, anyway,” Hephaestus tells her. “I won’t forget it. You’re good at what you do. And . . . I think I understand what you mean.”
Her pensive face breaks into a smile.
Hephaestus can’t resist smiling back. “I envy your mortals.”
One of her eyebrows rises. “As Ares says, they die, you know.”
The god of fires nods. “They do. But the lucky ones live first.” He bows slightly. His crippled back makes it hard for him to bend far. “The luckiest ones spend time with you.”
Aphrodite blinks in surprise.
Ares has had more than enough of these two whispering. He tries to dart through the opening Hephaestus has created, but he’s unable to pass. “Hey! Let me out of here.”
“You can rot in hell,” Hephaestus tells his brother.
“Technically, he can’t,” observes Hades.
Ares calls after his brother. “That isn’t the end of the story. She’s n
ot telling you everything.” A sneer spreads across his lips. “She’s never told you everything.”
The Rest of the Story—July 15–August 17, 1918
ARES
THE WAR GROUND ON. The Germans’ last big push, the Champagne-Marne Offensive, or the Second Battle of the Marne, had ended in crushing defeat for Germany. At a total cost of a quarter million casualties, dead and wounded.
Both James and Aubrey saw combat in the battle, many miles apart on the Western Front. James had been reassigned to Britain’s Tenth Army under General Charles Mangin. He was sorry not to be back with his old friends, but that couldn’t be helped.
James arrived at the Front just when the battle began. A seasoned veteran, a deadly shooter, he fought like an Aegean warrior. Not because he loved a battle, but because it gave him the best chance of coming home.
I wish I could say that he fought without fear. That he felt impervious to danger, after all he’d been through. But the battle was brutal. Death on every side. If he hadn’t had his girl to think of, and his family back home, he never would’ve have made it.
Aubrey, too, fought like a dragon. This was the worst combat he’d seen by far. All the 369th men were dragons on the battlefield. Giants. Hoplites. Of them, 171 would receive the Croix de Guerre from the French. “Les Hommes de Bronze,” they called them. “Blutlustige Schwarzmänner.” German for “bloodthirsty black men.”
I don’t know about “bloodthirsty,” but you didn’t want to be a Jerry who fell into a Harlem Rattler’s trench. You definitely didn’t want to be a Jerry who took a Harlem Hellfighter prisoner. They’d be coming after you, and they always got their man.
They fought as one. They fought how they played in Lieutenant Europe’s band. Experience breeds unity; a band of soldiers who have fought the same enemy, the same war, together, for their entire lives, understands unity. As did their parents and grandparents before them.
