She couldn’t even remember what he looked like anymore. One day, perhaps, Jack would fade into the shadows too. She had to put aside everything she thought she once knew. The beloved papa of her memories never really was her father; and Jack? All the feelings she had for him must be forgotten, and forever.
She woke up with a start, a corpsman shining a flashlight in her face. She looked at her wristwatch, it was almost midnight.
“Message from the colonel,” the corpsman said. “All the nurses we can spare are wanted up at Arzew. Bring all your supplies with you.”
Libby shook herself awake and followed him out the door in the dark.
Arzew
The jeep bounced over ruts and jolted through sandpits. The sounds of the battle were getting closer. Just before they reached Arzew, Liberty saw the blink of gunfire very close and heard the slap of bullets in the air, and the two soldiers on the Thompson gun behind her opened up. The sound of the gun deafened her. She put her hands over her ears and closed her eyes, slid down the side of the jeep, would have burrowed into the cold metal if she could.
By the time they reached the town, her ears were still ringing. She peered ahead, made out the silhouettes of palm trees, a huddle of square-roofed buildings. The staccato of gunfire over the rooftops sounded very far away now, though it could be she was still deaf from the Thompson gun.
The jeep stopped in front of a high fence, their driver shouted a password to an unseen sentry, and a wire and timber gate swung open and they drove through.
“Out,” someone shouted, and she and another nurse tumbled out of the jeep and followed the corpsman across a shadowy compound.
There was a squat building directly in front of them, and they ran toward it. Someone inside must have been waiting for them. The blackout curtain that served as a door was pulled back, and they ran through.
The stench alone was worse than Delancey on a hot day, a miasma of filth and muck mixed with the coppery stink of blood and stale ether. All around them in the dark, men were moaning. A corpsman turned on his flashlight, and Libby gaped at the rows and rows of men lying on stretchers. Most of them looked as if they had been left as they were when they brought them in, God knows how long ago, abandoned to their pain and their blood.
A captain told her she was on triage. She had done her training at Walter Reed, thought she knew how to do it, but nothing could have prepared her for this, crawling around in the dark with a flashlight, tying labels on bleeding young men, deciding who would live and who would die, who could go to the operating table and who had to suffer longer. Some of the men begged her for water, and she couldn’t even give them that, knowing that the surgeon wouldn’t thank her when the soldier choked on it when they gave him the ether.
A medic went around with her and, on her orders, went to find stretcher-bearers for the ones who couldn’t wait for surgery. Libby tried to focus on the job, fought to keep down waves of panic. She had never seen anything like this, not at Walter Reed, not in the Sternberg in Manila; the injuries were horrific—under the blood-soaked dressings were bright shards of splintered bone, raw red meat, green and gray viscera spilled and dried onto the canvas stretchers.
She had been working perhaps an hour, perhaps two, shone her flashlight into the agonized face of yet another young soldier. “Where are you hurt?” she said to him.
“I can’t feel my legs.”
She knew that voice, though it had been years since she had heard it. She held the light beam on his face until she was sure, then moved it back down his body to the blood-soaked fatigues. So she hadn’t imagined seeing him on C Deck.
“Lieutenant?” The corpsman was staring at her. “Lieutenant, are you all right? Your hand’s shaking. Perhaps you need a break.”
“I’m all right.” She tried to get a better look at the wound. Treat him like any other casualty, she thought. “Are you in pain, soldier?”
“Captain,” he groaned.
He hadn’t changed one bit. “Are you in pain—sir?”
“My back. Nothing else.”
“Let’s roll him,” she said to the corpsman.
She turned him on his side as she had done with others countless times before, the corpsman helping her, on her count. She found what looked like a crater wound from a shell fragment. The dressing was useless; blood had soaked right through it. She peeled it off, trying to assess the damage. Some of the muscle looked to have been punched out, but it was impossible to tell exactly how bad it was.
“Get him up to the OR,” she said.
“But, ma’am, it’s a spinal,” the medic whispered. “We got a possible pneumothorax over here. This guy can wait.”
“There could be renal compromise. The OR. That’s an order, Corporal.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
After the corpsman had taken him away, Liberty took a moment to compose herself before she moved on to the next soldier, but then someone tapped her on the shoulder. It was the captain.
“We need you in the OR,” he said.
“I haven’t finished here.”
“The nurses up there have been working twelve hours without a break. It’s an order.”
“Yes, sir.”
There was barely any equipment in the operating room, most of the Forty-Eighth’s supplies were still on the beach or had yet to make it off the ship. There was a wooden table in the middle of the room that had been scrubbed with disinfectant, the only light they had was a corpsman holding a flashlight. There was a single rusty spigot in the corner, and a metal hand basin to use as a scrub sink.
A blanket had been hung over the single window as a blackout.
As she walked in, the draft from the open door made the blanket blow back from the window, and Libby heard something zip by her face and she ducked instinctively, even though she knew it was already too late. There was a sharp ping as the bullet ricocheted into a kidney dish and sent it spinning across the floor.
There was a moment’s silence as everyone in the room looked at each other.
“Everyone okay?” a surgeon said, with exaggerated calm. “Anyone who is unable to answer, please step forward.” There was tense laughter. He looked up at Libby. “Can we all take a little more care with that door, please?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Libby said.
“That’s all right, Lieutenant. But let’s not do it again.”
Liberty washed her hands under the dribble of water coming from the spigot in the wall, her heart still hammering in her chest. Life turns on a dime, she thought. Ever since that fire in 1913, I’ve been riding my luck.
64
It was just after four in the morning when the doctors finished operating on their last patient. She was exhausted. She ached to find somewhere she could curl up and rest. She sat down on a box outside the OR and immediately fell asleep. It felt like only minutes later when another corpsman was shaking her by the shoulders, telling her she had to make the rounds of the post-ops, and she sat bolt upright. “Yes, I’m fine, I’ll do it.”
The soldiers who had survived the operating table—and there weren’t nearly enough of them—lay on stretchers in the unlit room next to the OR. She got on her hands and knees and went around with a flashlight, checking pulses and airways, giving a little water from her canteen to those who needed it, reassuring them as best she could.
It was pitiful. Even the most terribly wounded had been redressed in their combat fatigues to keep them warm because they did not have enough blankets. All of them were shivering, from shock or from the cold. Some of them were crying for their mothers, big men twice her size even. Some were in terrible pain, but she had to use her syrettes of morphine sparingly; the captain said they were almost out.
There were sticky pools of blood around some of the litters, but they didn’t have any plasma to give the wounded. They would have to get those boys back to the ships as soon as they could. Most of them wouldn’t make it.
She crawled around in the muck, was almost done. He was o
ne of the last. She knew him by the captain’s bars on his shoulder, though he looked so pale in the torchlight, she barely recognized his face. His breathing was so shallow, she wasn’t sure if he was even conscious, even if he was still alive. There was a corpsman sitting by his feet.
“Give us a moment,” she said to him.
“You know this guy?”
“An old friend.”
“Captain told me not to leave him. He can’t feel anything below his belt. He’s worried the rats will eat his feet, and he won’t notice.”
“I’ll call you back when we’re done. If you want to smoke, make sure you’re under cover. There’s snipers.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the corpsman said, and slipped away into the dark.
After he had gone, she shone the flashlight on Jack’s face, was surprised to find him awake.
“It is you. I thought I was dreaming.”
“Wish . . . you were. Christ . . . any morphine?”
“We’re running out. Can you hold on?”
“Guess.”
She found his hand. He squeezed so hard, it hurt.
“What . . . doing here?”
“I volunteered. What about you? I thought you were in London.”
“Old man . . . hauled me back Stateside when . . . war started. Wanted me . . . out of harm’s way.” A grimace that was meant to be a smile. “Showed him, right?”
“You sure did.”
She unscrewed the top of her water canteen, held it to his lips. He gulped at it, most of it spilled down his chin.
“Married?” he said.
“Why?”
“Yes or no, Lieutenant.”
A shake of the head. “You?”
“There was only ever you.” He blinked at the ceiling. “Still . . . hate me?”
“I crawled through the sick and the blood to find you when I’m so exhausted it’s as much as I can do to breathe. What does that tell you?”
His face contorted as another spasm of pain hit him. God, he was squeezing her hand so hard it was like she could feel the bones breaking.
“You know, when my mama went to see your father in Boston,” she whispered, “it was all an act, a show. Everything she said to him, she made it all up. Even your father never knew the real reason she did it.”
“What reason?”
“Did he ever tell you about your mother, what happened to her?”
“Clare? . . . Yeah . . . what about her?”
“You know about the little girl who disappeared in the fire?”
He nodded.
“That was me, Jack. I’m your long-lost sister. My mama didn’t want anyone to know. That was what it was all about.”
The guns started up again, artillery rumbling in the distance, the distant flashes glimmering through the top of the blackout curtains and dancing along the rafters. She waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. Instead, he started to laugh, but it was cut short by another spasm of pain, and this time he squeezed her hand so tight she gasped aloud and tried to pull her hand free. His whole body went stiff with pain. It took forever for the spasm to pass, and when it did, it left him breathless and soaked in a grease of his own sweat.
“Libby,” he said.
“Don’t talk. Enough now. Rest.”
“No,” he said, his voice cracking. “Something . . . you should know.”
65
Middlesex County, Massachusetts
George Seabrook had sent a limousine to pick Sarah up from the station. As it turned through the gates of the estate, she tried to steel herself for what she was about to do. She had spent most of her life trying to avoid this very moment.
Don’t think any more about it, she told herself. Walk in, say the words, then what will happen will happen. Then you don’t have to live with this weight anymore.
Sarah had never imagined anything quite like this, not all the wrought-iron gates and great, flat green lawns like Yankee Stadium and blue hydrangeas in the garden beds and sweeping gravel driveways lined with American elms. And the house, with its gray-white stone and Greek pillars, it reminded her of that Gone with the Wind movie she had seen. There were brown ivy branches all over the façade, like a green curtain it must be in the summer. So there was a little bit of all-for-show in this George Seabrook after all, wanting everyone to see his millionaire-ness.
The limousine pulled up under the white portico. Like Penn Station it was, with lunette windows high above, like walking into God’s living room. The chauffeur got out, came around the car, and opened the door for her. She hesitated, took a deep breath, and got out.
She had expected stiff, she had expected formal. Instead she saw George Seabrook waiting at the door to greet her himself, just in his shirtsleeves. She could not have been more shocked if he had come out in his pajamas and slippers.
“Hello, Sarah,” he said. “Been a long time.”
Not nearly long enough, bubeleh, she thought.
She followed him past a breakfast room and a library and a drawing room, everything in muted grays and greens, veined marble on the floors, all polished like nobody’s business. There were blue-and-gold Sèvres vases in niches along the walls, a grandfather clock in a walnut case, and a chandelier hanging halfway down the stairs, so big you could light Broadway with it.
She fought the urge to run away. No, I promised my Libby I would do this. As the doors to the study opened, she felt her heart hammering in her chest so hard, she thought: I am going to have a heart attack and drop dead right here on this nice silk carpet.
There was a mahogany-paneled study with a stone fireplace, just the right height, something a Yankee gentleman could rest an elbow on while expounding on the state of the Union or when he was telling some silly Russian Jewish girl she was going to go to prison for what she had done, and while he was about it, he would ruin her business too.
“I’ll have Winston bring us coffee,” he said.
Outside, the sun went behind a cloud, in sympathy with the position she found herself in. It started to rain. George Seabrook stood by the French doors, watching the water puddle on the terrace. “Would you like to sit down?” he said.
Sarah shook her head. I only want to get this over, she thought.
“Will try not to take up too much time,” Sarah said.
“Oh, that’s all right.” George went to his desk, took a cigar from the humidor. “Do you mind?” he said, holding it up.
“It’s your house,” she said, “your cigar.”
He lit a match, held it at an angle over the flame, rotated it slowly. After it had toasted, he put it in his mouth and puffed on it. His eyes creased, and he gave her a small smile. “Nothing quite like a cigar.”
“Me, I still like potato latkes.”
“Well, we all have our little vices. Never thought I’d ever see you in Boston again, Sarah. You don’t mind me calling you Sarah? After all these years.”
“You call me whatever you want.”
Her eyes fell on the photographs on the desk, one of a much younger Jack on a skiing holiday, another in sepia of a woman in a long dress and high collar, very formal, posed in a photographer’s studio.
“My first wife,” George said. “Jack’s mother.”
That threw her for a moment.
“It’s one of a very few we have of her. Let’s go out on the terrace.”
He eased open the French doors. The air outside was frigid, the lawns a glitter of moist and vivid greens. Gray clouds swept away toward the city, dragging a veil of icy rain behind them. Almost one in the afternoon, the sun weak and yellow through the scarecrow trees.
“Of course, I am wondering why you’re here today.”
“It is about Liberty.”
“I assumed it must be. How is she?”
“She is a nurse now, would you believe?”
“A nurse?”
“Even worse, she broke my heart and joined the army. Now I don’t know where she is. They sent her somewhere, I don’t know, Scotl
and, she said. Are there wars in Scotland?”
“Not since Culloden, I believe.”
“Well, if Culloden is anything like this Hitler, I wish them good luck with him. Anyway, Mr. Seabrook, Liberty is why I came, something I have to tell you, should have told you a very long time ago.”
He rocked on his heels, savoring the cigar, smiled, like he was remembering some good joke. Maybe he had been drinking before she got here. Never trust these rich types, they are drunk before breakfast and think it is sophistication.
The butler appeared in the study with a tray, a silver coffee pot, and two bone china cups. He poured the coffees and left them on George Seabrook’s big walnut desk.
“Shall we?” George said.
“First, there is something I have to tell you.”
“Very well. Whatever it is, you look like you’re in a hurry to get it off your chest.”
Sarah took a deep breath, but suddenly the little speech she had rehearsed on the train all the way from New York went right out of her mind. “Maybe first I will sit down after all,” she said to him. Her knees were shaking, she couldn’t stop it.
They went back inside, and Sarah dropped into the chair on the other side of George’s desk and took a deep breath. She felt light headed. Say it, Sarah. Get it done.
George sat down opposite her and pulled an onyx ashtray toward him, tapped the ash from the end of the fat cigar. He took a lump of sugar from the sugar bowl with a pair of small silver tongs and raised an eyebrow. Sarah shook her head. He popped two of the sugars into his own cup, took a sip.
“Mr. Seabrook—”
“You can call me George.”
“No, I will call you Mr. Seabrook. In a moment, you will see why. I only ask that you wait until I have finished before you say anything. Then you can decide what it is you want to do with me.”
Loving Liberty Levine Page 34
