The Verdun Affair

by Nick Dybek

  In Zurich, on the platform, Paul kissed both my cheeks before boarding a train to the east. We did not speak again for almost thirty years. And by the time the conversation finally swung around to San Lorenzo and Fairbanks, we were seated on my back patio in Santa Monica with the dead doctor’s dahlias in the center of the table. Dinner was over. Millicent had gone home, saying she was tired, and, to my surprise, Paul did not protest or offer to accompany her. Perhaps they both thought I’d be more comfortable talking about Sarah without her there. Perhaps I was.

  “Did Sarah know how you felt about her?” I asked Paul.

  “She may have sensed it. I certainly never told her.”

  “Never told her, why?”

  We’d left the plates and glasses. He stretched, and studied his napkin, a red Christmas napkin. They were the only ones I had. “She was in love with three other men already. I didn’t suppose there was much room for a fourth.”

  “Three others?”

  “You, and Lee, and Fairbanks.”

  “Lee and Fairbanks were one and the same, so that only makes two. You see, perhaps you did have a chance.”

  He offered a pained smile, then another expression, and it became clear he was about to tell me something he wasn’t sure I’d want to know.

  “It’s going to be in a picture,” I said quickly. “The song. I wonder what she would think. They’re considering Peggy Lee.”

  “Max said. She’ll see it. She goes to all the pictures.”

  “Then I suppose the question is what will she think.”

  “You haven’t asked anything else about her.”

  “You can understand how I might not want to.”

  “Yes. Frankly, Millicent and I have talked about the question quite a lot. In the end I came around to her opinion, as you see. I have wondered, though . . . I do wonder, what it’s been like, since we parted? You don’t have to tell me.”

  But, as it happened, I found myself eager to tell him. What had it been like? I explained that by the time I returned to Paris most of my friends had moved on, if not from the city entirely, then certainly from the Chevalier Vert—even Rose, whom I never saw again. I remained in Paris through the rest of the fall and winter, and, by spring, somewhat to my surprise, I found I’d nearly made my peace.

  “Your peace?” Paul asked. “What could that mean?”

  I tried to explain that, too. For a time, I said, that night in the hospital had full control of my senses: the taste of the raisin bread; the smell of the turpentine; Fairbanks’s hoarse, floating voice; Sarah’s face buried in her hands. How disappointing, how sad. How was it even possible? But, mostly, how strange.

  How strange, I’d think, back in the Chevalier Vert, as a woman sat down at our table and Marcel once again pretended to fall asleep. How strange, I’d think, watching Russian aristocrats in exile tumble from the Eastern Orthodox Church in my quartier. How strange, I’d think, as electric lights and church bells announced dusk. How strange, as Marcel cried when I left and tried to give me every centime in his wallet. How strange that the quay at Le Havre was lined with brass bands and fortune-tellers. How strange, the crossing, the ocean. How strange to return to Chicago as one of many men stamping off the slush and unspooling a scarf, and snatching a stool, and smearing mustard to sausage at lunch hour in the Men’s Bar at Berghoff’s.

  How strange to think that Fairbanks could be the man I’d met in Aix-les-Bains, the man who sang the song, who said I wrote it for my girl. And if I could think that—as I began to, without reservation, in the Chevalier Vert, in my quartier, during the crossing—why not also believe that man was Lee Hagen, found miraculously after years of desperate searching by his faithful wife?

  So, how strange, I’d think, shivering my way back up West Adams to the bank where I worked, but how wonderful. It was wonderful that Sarah could demand the return of her husband and have him returned to her. It was wonderful that I had played a part—not the part I would have chosen, but an important part—in such extraordinary fate or fortune. I never felt anything religious in it, I told Paul; rather, I felt as though the oldest stories might actually be true. And that was a comfort, perhaps more so than her hand in mine would have been in the years that followed, as the world burned again. In the years that followed, there were twinges of regret, certainly, moments of painful curiosity, but not as many as I once would have expected. It actually is quite difficult to live in the past, far more so than people make it out to be, I explained.

  Paul listened; his face was patient, understanding. He looked at me with heavy eyes and drew on his cigarette. Then he gave the slightest of shrugs, and, in doing so, dismissed everything I’d just said. We both knew it. Just a shrug. That’s a true friend, I suppose.

  “You haven’t asked me anything about her,” he said again. “Are you afraid to find out that she’s happy or that she isn’t?”

  “Obviously I’d want her to be happy, Paul,” I said. But I stopped there. We didn’t speak for a long while.

  Eventually he said, “You must be tired. Millicent should still be awake. I’ll just call.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I’ll drive you.”

  Once we turned onto Wilshire he asked if I felt like taking some air, driving for a while before delivering him home. I did. We went south on Lincoln Boulevard, the breeze through the windows pleasant after the stillness of the patio. It was all pleasant, the nocturnes of a night drive: the occasional flash of passing headlights, the underwater quiet of gated storefronts.

  “I wasn’t sure if it was right to ask about her in front of Millicent,” I said.

  “We don’t keep many secrets.”

  “Then I suppose I wondered what you were doing back in Italy when you met Millicent.”

  The filling station ahead was closed but still lit up so bright it looked dangerous, atomic.

  “I promised Drummond Green’s parents I would meet them in Bologna when they arrived.”

  “Arrived for what reason?”

  “To see their son, of course.”

  “You mean you told them about Fairbanks? After it was clear he wasn’t their son?”

  “In what way was that clear?” Paul’s voice was strained, even offended. “It wasn’t clear to me. And I must tell you. It wasn’t clear to Sarah. She’d left Bologna, she’d left Italy entirely by then.”

  The double yellow line curved away from the headlights. I turned on the radio. Nat King Cole was in the middle of a verse. If I heard her voice, would I recognize it? Unlikely. I could remember how to describe her but I didn’t really remember what she looked like. Nevertheless, this small news of her crushed my windpipe.

  “Without Lee?” I asked.

  “Without Fairbanks, you mean.”

  “You’re saying that Green’s parents recognized him?”

  We’d long since drifted from Venice. The headlights caught a sign for Ballona Creek. We must have been passing over it. A few cold lights twinkled on a ridge in the distance. Paul did not answer for what felt like miles.

  “No. They said they were terribly sorry for him, but they had never seen Fairbanks before. To be honest, it took some time before I was able to accept they were telling the truth. I was so certain.”

  “How much time?”

  “What has it been now?” He laughed. “Thirty years?”

  “Do you know what happened to him?”

  “To a point.” His voice caught, and he cleared his throat. “The American army tried to intercede. But once Bianchi left he stopped speaking, so there was little to go on. Naturally, the Fascists weren’t sympathetic. They moved him to another hospital outside Rome. After that . . . once the war began . . .”

  What a fate. But I couldn’t fully manage to feel sorry for him. It was too late. I’d pictured Fairbanks—whoever he was, truly—sitting beside some New England hearth, or shading himself on some New England lawn, too many times.

  “Now I have to ask you why she left, don’t I?”

 
“You don’t have to do anything,” Paul said.

  “I’m afraid I do, yes.”

  “I believe she left because she came to accept she had been wrong.”

  “Please explain.”

  “It’s not entirely easy to tell you.”

  The countryside was ink-black, but I knew the landscape by heart—oil derricks to the west, asparagus farms to the east. And, if we continued straight on, we’d come to the horse ranches on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, the little towns whose drugstores still had hitching posts outside. Paul fumbled to light a cigarette. It was the wind. His hands weren’t shaking, at least not in the way that hands used to.

  “She and I have never spoken about it. I only know because I spoke with Dr. Boccioni when I returned—you remember him?”

  “With the giant eyes?”

  “Yes. It’s secondhand, but this is what I understand. When they finally arrived, Lee Hagen’s AFS and army records showed that he’d always taken his permission in Paris. He was never in Aix-les-Bains. If you truly met Fairbanks there he couldn’t have been Lee Hagen. It took Sarah several weeks to admit that was so—to the doctors, probably to herself. Then she did. Then she left. At least that was the reason she gave.”

  I’d slowed the car without quite realizing it, as if what Paul said might render me unfit to steer. But my hands were steady too.

  “She was lying the whole time?”

  “Isn’t it better to say she knew you were lying the whole time?”

  “I suppose it is. Much better.”

  “There’s an ugly stretch of highway coming up. Why don’t we turn off here?”

  We took a right on Manhattan Beach Boulevard and another on Rose Street; ours was still the only car on the road. I drove slowly, gliding toward the ocean, past silent palms and lawns, while Paul explained that she had returned to America when her mother died in 1924, that she had lived alone for a time in Boston and taken a degree at Boston University.

  She’d met a man there, an engineer. She had married him, and moved to California in 1939 when he took a job designing airplane engines for Northrop. She continued her work with charities for the arts. That’s how she and Paul met again, at a gala for the Los Angeles Philharmonic that Millicent had dragged him to. He’d seen her from across the room; she wore her hair very long—halfway down her back—at an age when most women were cutting it. Paul had noticed that about her before he realized who she was.

  It was fair to call her a friend, he said. She and Millicent were quite good friends. It wasn’t easy to find cold New England manners in Los Angeles, after all. She had a daughter who was their daughter’s age and had lost another child at infancy. She’d lost her husband in 1944. He could go on, if I wanted him to. Did I want him to?

  “Turn here,” he said. “And pull over if you want. This is where she lives.”

  “What?”

  “This is her house.”

  I did as he said, turning off the engine. There wasn’t a great deal to say about the house itself: a ranch with an attached garage; a picture window, curtains drawn; a front door of frosted glass; a doorbell glowing like a fingernail moon. The actual moonlight revealed a sculpture on the lawn. A bronze man with wild hair, sitting at a piano, banging out some difficult sonata. The statue was playful and gaudy and a bit disconcerting, especially in its near-life, but not-quite-life, size. Her neighbors must have hated it.

  Paul lit another cigarette. The ocean smell hit us with a wallop through the smoke. Somehow the ocean always seemed to smell the strongest through a car window. Somehow in the middle of the night I always felt the most awake. The engine pinged as it cooled, and my chest tightened in a way I thought I had long since outgrown. I kept expecting the kitchen light to blink on. Or a window to be thrown open. It seemed that something must happen, that such potent feelings must provoke a response. But the house remained silent and dark, and, after some time, perhaps quite a long time, Paul said, “If we sit here like this any longer we may have to explain it to the police.”

  “We’d better find a filling station before we drive back up,” I said.

  “I know one in Redondo. But you’ll remember the address, won’t you? You’ll remember the house?”

  “I should think so.”

  “Good. Are you tired? Would you like me to drive?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Don’t let me fall asleep, at least.”

  He did fall asleep. I didn’t mind. The entire way back I had a story to tell myself for company. The story of my feet on the porch, the soft chime of the bell, the tremble of footsteps in the front hall, the approaching shadow in the fogged glass. A story too old to be believed—impossible in Europe, impossible in Boston or Chicago—but, as the road coiled through hills of sagebrush and nudged up to the ocean and plunged into the new tunnel under the airport, I did believe it.

  And I imagined what it would be like to turn around, to drive all the way back after leaving Paul in Brentwood. It would be nearly light by then, but I still liked to drive when I was bone-tired. It was how I learned, sleepless for days and over terrible roads with the ambulance headlights extinguished so as not to draw fire. Often, it was so dark and I was so tired and the engine shook so madly that I lost all sense of speed or distance, and to arrive anywhere began to seem like a sort of miracle. One night, a sickly and wild-looking horse wandered into the road in front of me, and I stamped the brakes only to realize that without my noticing it the engine had died and that for some time—it was impossible to say for how long—I hadn’t been moving at all.

  A Scribner Reading Group Guide

  The Verdun Affair

  Nick Dybek

  This reading group guide for The Verdun Affair includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

  Introduction

  In this heartbreaking exploration of love, secrecy, and the lingering effects of war, a romance between two young Americans in Europe in 1921 has unexpected and devastating consequences. Tom and Sarah meet in Verdun, France, where he works in an ossuary and she searches for news of her husband, gone missing during the war. Her search takes them from Verdun to Bologna, Italy, where they encounter Paul, an Austrian journalist, in an Italian hospital—all three drawn there by a shell-shocked patient with no memory of who he is, who they call Douglas Fairbanks. Decades later, Tom and Paul meet again in Los Angeles, where Tom is working as a screenwriter. As they turn over their shared history, the two men struggle once more with the mystery at the heart of their experiences with World War I, with Sarah, and most of all with Douglas Fairbanks. A gorgeous, devastating narrative of desire and loss, The Verdun Affair is a deeply moving meditation on what matters most in a world gone mad.

  Topics & Questions for Discussion

  1. At the beginning of the novel, Tom is working in an ossuary in Verdun, sorting bones. How does this impact his understanding of the war? How does it affect his feelings toward the women he meets, searching for their husbands and sons?

  2. When Tom first meets Sarah, she’s just caught a koi fish from the church’s pond in her purse. How does this set the tone for their relationship?

  3. Why do you think Tom tells Sarah that he met Lee Hagen?

  4. One day, collecting bones, Tom imagines the war experience of a man named Martin, whose mother once came to the ossuary to ask Father Perrin if her son, then dead, had ever received her letter. Tom imagines Martin’s childhood, swimming in the village lake; his adulthood as a stone mason; and then his time as a soldier, finally deciding that it “couldn’t be” (p. 36) that this man he imagined had died—that he must have been taken prisoner instead. What might be the purpose of Tom’s thought experiment?

  5. Tom, reflecting on his experiences in World War I, quotes a famous line from
Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms: “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers. Finally, only the names of places had dignity.” Why would these words (p. 41) resonate with Tom?

  6. When Tom and Sarah visit a medium together, the woman conjures up a spirit—but not the one that they’re looking for. How do the themes of miraculous connection and false hope play out further in the narrative?

  7. Before Tom, Sarah, and Paul meet Douglas Fairbanks, Tom hears of another famous soldier-turned-amnesiac, a man called Anthelme Mangin. The publisher of the newspaper where Tom works writes that this man rejects his identity because “in the age of industrial war, an identity can be stolen on the whims of strangers and at a moment’s notice” (p. 120). Do you agree or disagree, and why?

  8. Why do so many mothers wait to see Douglas Fairbanks, knowing that he is almost certainly not their son?

  9. Sarah believes men prefer a frightened woman. Paul believes men prefer a happy woman. Dr. Bianchi believes that women don’t have the freedom to express illness. How have women’s roles shifted since the 1921 portrayed in The Verdun Affair, and how have they stayed the same?

  10. When Tom and Sarah travel together, they call themselves Mr. and Mrs. Tom Morrow. Do you see irony in this choice, or is it an expression of optimism?

  11. In Los Angeles in the 1950s, why doesn’t Tom want “his” song to be written into a movie?

  12. In a world where everyone is grieving, why do Paul and Sarah hold on to the specific hope of finding a single man—respectively, the man that wronged Paul and the man that Sarah married? What’s the relationship between forgiveness and vengeance in this novel?