by Julie Berry
That last night in the hospital, after Hazel’s parents had returned to their rooms to pack for tomorrow’s trip to London, James arrived in Hazel’s room and sat beside her.
“You’re not really leaving me tomorrow, are you?” he asked her.
Already her scars were flattening a bit, though still crimson and cruel. Her face would never be the same. He knew that; she knew it. Her smile was crooked now, and her right eyebrow was crisscrossed with lines. A wedge of pink lower eyelid intruded upon the view of her right eye. Her cheek would never again be round and smooth.
But she was wholly here, and entirely Hazel.
“They’re kicking me out,” she said. “I haven’t been paying my rent.”
“I wish you could stay,” James told her, “but I’m glad to have you safe, away from here.”
Hazel rolled her eyes. “It’s quiet now,” she told him. “The papers say the Allies have pushed the Germans back to the Hindenburg Line.”
“The tide is turning,” he said. “This year, I think we just might be done by Christmas.”
Hazel closed her eyes. “Wouldn’t that be heaven?”
She turned and watched James. Her heart was brimming, and broken. He’d been so kind, and she, ever since waking in this hospital room, had played along with the charade that all was still right between them. It seemed the kindest thing to do. But the pretense could not continue.
When she first woke up, life felt bundled in sweetness and gratitude. Any life, even a maimed life, was a gift. Her scars, hidden behind bandages, didn’t weigh her down.
But with each passing day, the sweetness sloughed off, leaving uncertainty in its place.
At last she made up her mind. It was time; she was going home. The war wasn’t over. Any parting could turn out to be a last goodbye. And some things die even when everyone survives. There were words she needed to tell James while she still could.
“Thank you,” she said. “For saving my life. And staying close by me, all this time.”
He smiled. “You don’t need to thank me for that.”
“You’ve been the dearest of friends to me,” she said. “Your kindness has meant everything.”
James’s eyes grew wide. “Hazel,” he said quickly, “what are you saying?”
Her heart sank. For days she’d been dreading this. How could she ever put it into words?
“Hazel Windicott,” he said, with a waver in his voice. “Are you telling me goodbye?”
She took a step back. How could he sound so shocked, so hurt? And how could she bear to do it? She took a deep breath and steeled herself to what must come next.
“I’ll never be the same,” she said. “That’s plain to us both.”
He drew closer. “You can’t mean what I think you’re about to say,” he said. “You can’t.”
She turned her face so that her right side greeted James in full. Gashed by livid red lines. A mockery of what her face had been.
“Is this the face—”
“It is the face.” He cut her off. “The face I want to see.” His eyes searched hers. “Do you think scars would matter to me?”
How could he ask such a question? When she looked like this now? “They should matter,” she protested. “They’d matter to anyone. That doesn’t make you unfaithful or weak.”
“Hazel!”
Her hands gripped the back of a chair for strength. “I can’t let you yoke your life to this,” she said. “I can’t let you promise your forever to this out of pity, or noble duty.”
His face fell.
Now he would protest, now he would insist, now he would make some declaration that the years would wear away at like water upon sand. He’d be trapped.
Now she would have to argue with him and win, to persuade him to let her go. A horrible treason of the heart against itself.
He reached up and softly, gently, stroked her face with his fingertips. He hovered lightly over the scars to not cause any pain.
Hazel’s left eye ran with tears.
James pulled Hazel to him and encircled her in his arms. She couldn’t escape, nor had she the will to try. She hid her cheek against his chest.
“I’ll never be the same,” she said.
He pulled away to look into her eyes.
“You will always be the same,” he told her. “You’ll always be my lovely Hazel.”
Was that still love she saw there? As much as in Lowestoft? Chelmsford, Poplar?
James kissed her scarred cheek. “I will never be the same,” he reminded her. “You know that.”
“You are to me,” she protested.
He looked at her pointedly.
“You’re doing splendidly,” she said. “Your troubles are behind you now.”
He was silent for a time.
“I wish,” he said at length, “that that were true. That my troubles were behind me.”
She wanted to embrace and reassure him. No, foolish girl, she reminded herself. That’s what you can no longer do.
“You’re still you,” she said. “Still James. Still wonderful. Still clever and kind. Still handsome. Still brave. Still strong.”
James paced back and forth like someone desperate. He raked his hands through his hair until it stood on end. “Do you think I sought you out at the Poplar dance for your face?” he demanded.
“Watch it there, Charley,” she told him. “I suppose now you’re going to tell me my old face was horrid?”
He reached his hands toward her, then held them back. “Your face has never been horrid,” he said. “It’s always been perfect. It still is.”
She laughed in bitter disbelief. “You’re mad!”
He looked at her pointedly. “Yes,” he said. “I am. Now you see. So mad, so mental, I had to sit for weeks in a pink room. After spending weeks doped on morphine. Who knows when I’ll need to go back and do it all again?”
Hazel hadn’t realized. Not really. He’s still afraid.
“If you do need to go back,” she told him, “that’s nothing to be ashamed of. You’ll get through it. You’ll get better, just like last time. What happened to you isn’t your fault.”
He looked back at her.
Of course what happened to her wasn’t her fault either, but it wasn’t the same.
“Why didn’t you leave me?” he whispered. “Why didn’t you run away from the lad touched in the head?”
Hazel felt tears prick her eyelids once more. “How can you ask me that?” she said. “Why would I ever do such a thing?”
“You think I love you less than you love me,” he said softly.
“I never said that!”
“You think I can’t see past lines on your face,” James said. “Lines that in time will fade.”
Hazel wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “But never go away.”
“Yet you see past the shadow,” he said. “All that’s left of a kid who went off to war.”
She shook her head angrily. “You’re wrong to call yourself a shadow.” Her breath came rapidly. “You’re everything to me.”
He sank into a chair. “Then how can you leave me?” he cried. “How can you try to make me leave you?”
She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, but the tears wouldn’t stop. “Because all your life, James,” she said, “you’ll look at me, and you’ll see the scars. You’ll see them, and I’ll watch you. All your life, if I let you stay, I’ll watch you work to reconcile yourself to the face you made a promise to. Even as you come to wish you hadn’t.” She hid her face, scars and all, behind her hands. “I won’t be able to bear it.”
“You’re wrong to call yourself a face,” he said. “Damaged or otherwise.” He pulled something from his pocket, pried her hand gently off her face, and placed the thing on her palm.
A slim circlet of gold.
“If you think I can live without you, Miss Windicott,” James said, “you don’t know me at all.”
DECEMBER 1942
Handkerchiefs
IF ONE COULD listen with a god’s ear, in that dark hotel room, in the pregnant hour before dawn, one might hear the moist sound of immortal gods holding back tears.
Hades produces a pile of handkerchiefs. Even Ares takes one.
Aphrodite turns her gorgeous eyes to her husband.
“Do you see?” she asks. “Why I envy them?”
Ares stuffs his used hankie behind a cushion. “You mean, you’d trade places with her?”
“It’s easy to give an answer for a choice that will never be offered to me,” she says. “Yes. In less than a heartbeat, I would.”
The god of war shakes his head. “You’re the goddess of beauty,” he says. “Why would you ever trade your looks—your perfection—for her mortality? Her scars?”
Apollo and Hades exchange a despairing look.
“We see what we’re capable of seeing,” says Hades.
Ares rolls his eyes. “Don’t be cryptic. I’ve had enough of that.”
Hephaestus grips the armrests of his chair and prepares to duck. In case Hades takes issue with Ares’s tone.
“Whether you see a scarred face,” says Apollo, “or a love for the ages, is up to you.”
APHRODITE
Elevens—1918 and Beyond
WEEKS PASSED. Autumn grew colder and grayer, but four young hearts barely noticed.
And then, a miracle: the war ended. The Kaiser abdicated, a new German government formed, and German delegates signed the armistice, at 11 a.m. on November 11: 11/11, 11:00. Most soldiers on either side of the Front just watched the morning pass, and then turned around and left. In some spots, hostilities carried on right until the minute hand struck eleven.
One must be precise about killing, it seems.
It took a long time for the American Expeditionary Force to bury its dead, pack up, and return to the States. While they waited, Aubrey Edwards’s 369th Division traveled to Germany, becoming the first Allied division to reach the Rhine—something the Allies had believed they could do before summer’s end, 1914. Or by Christmas. Always, always, “by Christmas.”
* * *
When they weren’t busy, Aubrey spent time in a French military hospital, visiting Émile. This poilu had lost an arm in the last week of fighting, and he had four years’ worth of accumulated curses to fling—not at his wound, but at its timing.
“Where were you, you stupid injury, when I could’ve used you to get out of this wretched war?” he would roar. “But non, you stayed away, leaving me healthy and sound, so the Germans could piss on me with their shells and bullets year after year, and now, now, when it’s finally over, now you show up?”
He waved his stump at the sky.
“Nurse,” Émile would say, “fetch us a bottle of wine, and a piano, so my useless friend here, with all his fingers, can put them to some good use and get my mind off my sorrows.”
Émile was a great favorite with all the nurses.
“Who are you calling useless?” demanded Aubrey.
“You, you swine,” Émile said. “Some of us are working hard here, having our toenails trimmed by the nurses and our buttocks wiped—very pretty nurses they are, too—and you just sit there, like you’ve got nothing better to do than come laugh at your poor friend Émile, who taught you everything you know.”
“Well, you’ve got me there,” Aubrey said. “After a year of fighting, and weeks of rebuilding roads all day long, and playing jazz all over France, I come here just to prove how useless I am.”
“I always knew you’d amount to no good,” Émile said. “I told my lieutenant, ‘Don’t pair me with this useless piano player, for God’s sake,’ but does anybody listen to Émile? Nobody listens to Émile.”
Half a dozen nurses stood in the hall, giggling and listening to Émile.
“I’ll die a lonely man,” roared he, waving his stump around.
“I can see that,” said Aubrey.
“Nurse!” bellowed Émile. “Fetch me that piano!”
And one day, the nurses actually did. Émile laughed so hard, he fell off his bed. From that day on, Aubrey’s concerts drew patients from the entire hospital, until finally Émile recovered enough to be sent home. One of the nurses, it seemed, had resigned at around the same time and would be traveling home with him.
He seized Aubrey with one hand and one stump and gave him a whiskery kiss on each cheek. “You’ll come see us, my friend,” he declared. “And we’ll come see you in New York. We are brothers, you and me.”
“Brothers,” said Aubrey.
* * *
James made it home long before Aubrey. After a stop in Chelmsford, he went to Poplar and stayed with his uncle to be as near to Hazel as possible. He took her to dinner. To museums and winter festivals and Christmas concerts. To J. Lyons tea shops.
“My mother wants to know,” James told her one evening, as they strolled home from a play, “if we would join them for Christmas dinner.”
Hazel’s eyes grew wide. Christmas dinner, two weeks away, sounded quite official. But nothing was truly official yet. At least, not to anyone but her and James.
“I’d love to,” Hazel said. “But I’d feel terrible, leaving my parents all alone.”
They crossed a crowded street. “They’re invited,” James said. “The more, the merrier.”
“Perfect!” Hazel grinned. “My mother will spend the rest of the holiday season worrying about what to wear.”
“I was thinking,” James continued, “that we should invite Colette and Aubrey, too. If he could get some leave, they could come spend Christmas here.”
“Oh! I’ll write to her immediately,” Hazel said. “No. I’ll send a telegram.”
James wasn’t finished. “And then I got to thinking,” he said, “that if we’re all gathered for Christmas dinner, we ought to kill two birds with one stone.”
Hazel paused to notice a woman’s garish orange hat. “And celebrate Boxing Day?”
His reply was nonchalant. “And hold a wedding reception.”
Gone and forgotten was the hat.
Hazel’s jaw dropped. Her feet refused to take another step. “You’re not serious.”
He nodded. “Like the maggot,” he said, “I’m in Dead Ernest.”
Hazel couldn’t even scold him for the joke. Her mind reeled. On her bureau at home stood a little china trinket dish. Inside, hidden to the world, lay a golden ring. Sometimes, at night, she’d slip it on. But she never wore it openly. Her parents didn’t know it existed.
James stood before her, watching, waiting.
Hazel treasured the ring, and the love it represented. But to her mind, it only meant that someday, some far-off someday, they would, if James still felt the same, perhaps, eventually . . . She couldn’t even admit to the word. And now—
“You want to get married,” she said slowly. “In two weeks.”
He nodded. “Only because I can’t think of a respectable way to do it sooner.”
How is one supposed to behave at such a moment? Not, Hazel was sure, like a beaming idiot. (She was wrong, incidentally.) But someone, she thought, ought to keep a level head.
“Marriage is forever, James,” she told him firmly.
“That’s the point.”
She gulped. “Aren’t we rather young?”
A look of worry crossed his face.
“Do you think so?” he asked seriously. “After this war, I feel a hundred and two.”
“Me too.” She smiled. “Ninety-seven, at any rate.”
He wrapped his arms around her, whispering close to her ear.
“I waited once to kiss you,” he said, “and almost lost my chance. I waited for the war to end befor
e asking you to marry me, and you nearly died.” He kissed her forehead. “If the war’s taught me anything at all, it’s that life is short. I won’t waste any more of it waiting for you.”
“I had no idea,” she said, “that you were so impatient.”
You can imagine, I’m sure, what happened next. I, of course, got to watch.
They took their time about it. But finally speech was once again possible.
He folded his arms across his chest. “You still haven’t answered me,” he said sternly. “Christmas dinner? Christmas wedding? What will it be, Miss Windicott?”
She must find some way to torment him, just a little longer, first. So she tapped her finger against her chin.
“Now, I wonder what I should put in Colette’s and Aubrey’s Boxing Day boxes,” she mused. “We must make it fun. I imagine neither of them have ever celebrated it.”
He slipped his arm through hers, and they resumed their progress down the street. “So long as they’re there on the twenty-fifth, I don’t care a bit about their twenty-sixth.” He gave her a meaningful look. “We will be otherwise occupied.”
* * *
Aubrey managed to get leave to travel to London and take Colette to the wedding. He played, and she sang, and James’s Chelmsford friends marveled that he had made friends with such jazz luminaries during the war. Those two were going places.
Chelsmford was correct.
Hazel and James ate the cake and threw the flowers, and found a cheap little second-floor London flat. Hazel kept flowerpots in windows. James pulled a muscle wrangling a secondhand spinet piano around a bend in the impossible stairs. To their neighbors’ dismay, they adopted a poodle.
