by Bryan Young
She didn’t seem to notice that, above her own protests, she’d taken the glass and had begun to sip. It’s difficult to ignore that response; when there’s a glass of wine in your hand, it’s the most natural thing in the world to drink.
Sipping my own wine, I asked her to tell me about herself.
“What’s to tell? I volunteered like everyone else.”
“Where are you from?”
“London,” she said.
“And why not volunteer in London?”
“You’re an American? Why not volunteer there?”
“I thought I could do more good over here.”
“You see? I’m just like everyone else. What of you? Your friend Renault has made sure to remind me you’re a hero every time he passes by me.”
“None of us are heroes,” I said.
“That’s not fair to say. You’re all heroes from where I sit. I wouldn’t have the courage to do what you do.” She swirled the wine in her glass, looking down into to it as though the red reminded her of the blood.
“When we’re all the same thing, it takes the specialness out of it.”
“That doesn’t discount what you’ve done,” she said.
“I didn’t do much.”
“That’s not what I heard.” She masked her smile by pressing the glass once more to her lips.
“What is it you’ve heard?”
“Stories travel fast in a place with nothing else to do but heal and talk. And your story seems to be the one most whispered about. Tell me, did you really assault a French officer and live to tell the tale?”
“I hope that’s not the only part of the story they tell.” I looked away.
“Well, they say it was to save a great deal of lives. You do know what they call you, right?”
“They don’t call me Preston?”
She laughed. “You really don’t know? They call you Fusée Faucon.”
“Fusée faucon?”
“It sounds much better to the ear in French. In English it means Rocket Falcon. They say you torpedoed a mile up, killed a dozen Germans single-handed, and saved many poilus from the gas and bombs. Then, you crashed back to Earth and lived.”
I shrugged. “If that’s what they say.”
“Is it true?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
Silence took us and I was consumed by the sensation that I was drowning in that quiet.
The silence came from many places. It came from drifting memories of the men I’d killed in the German flying machine. It came in the sensation of falling in the zeppelin’s control room. And the blunt blackness of the impact.
“Is it hard,” she asked, “carrying all you’ve done and seen with you?”
“Is it hard for you? You see things just as horrible in the hospital. Worse even.”
“One is trained to see such things in hospital.”
“They never told us in our training what we’d see on the battlefield. Maybe that’s where you’re braver than we are. They have to trick us into doing what we do. You still went to work in the hospital knowing what was to come.”
We spoke like that for a time, both of us clearly raising walls and defenses for the other. She wanted to take credit for nothing; I didn’t want to talk of my feelings of the war.
For me, my defenses grew out of my self-consciousness, my timidity, and my acute fear of rejection.
For her, I only had guesses.
A second glass of wine brought with it the courage I needed. “How can someone like you, so caring and charming, not have someone in their life?”
“That’s easy,” she said, letting out a deep breath. Her eyes turned down toward the blanket, working to hide a sadness. “There was someone else.”
“Was?” That she said it in the past tense washed away my pent up dread.
It was a subtle jealousy, and jealousy had always been the most destructive force in my emotional repertoire. Perhaps that kind of spite was why I wasn’t healing as fast as the doctors thought I might.
I poured more wine into her glass and my voice grew quiet. “Tell me a secret, Sara.”
She lowered her voice to that same longing whisper. “There was someone.”
“Tell me about this someone.”
Staring into her wine, she grew lost in memories. Judging by the grim smile that grew on her beautiful face, the image she conjured must have been a pleasant one, once. “He was young and handsome, eager to fight in a war he didn’t know anything about. Like all of you, I suppose. I never wanted to get involved with a soldier, because I felt our days would be numbered by the savagery of it all, and I was right.”
“At the front?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Gas.”
A lump caught in my throat.
Gas was a suffocating death, like drowning, but with the added frustration of being out in the air. Underwater, your breath is easier to hold because you can take in nothing but water. The gas breathed as easy as air, so it finds its way deeper and deeper into the pit of your chest. I was lucky because I had no personal experience with it other than training with the masks, but I imagined that it burned going down the lungs, disintegrating them chemically like a fire would char a building until nothing remained.
“I’m sorry,” I said, quietly.
Moisture appeared in her emerald eyes. She gulped the rest of her new glass of wine. “I took a vow after that.”
“What vow?”
“Never again,” she said from many miles and many more years away.
I apologized again, but wasn’t sure why. I told her I wished there was something I could have done.
“Never mind all that.” Her countenance changed almost immediately, her mind free from her bittersweet memories as if on command. “It’s your turn, now. You tell me a secret.”
I wanted to tell her everything. I wanted to begin my story at the time of my birth, tell her about my parents, about Lucy, about everything I’d ever done and everyone I’d ever known. I wanted to feel connected to her, as though we were born on the same day. Instead, I restrained myself and started small. “My name isn’t really Robert Preston.”
“It’s not?” Her face brightened. “What is it then?”
“Ulysses.”
An even brighter smile came to her face.
“Ulysses Grant Preston.”
“That’s beautiful. Why ever would you change it?”
I shrugged as though I didn’t know the answer, but confessed just the same. “If no one knew my real name, they’d never have a chance to get too close… And Grant had a reputation I could never live up to. But maybe that’s why I turned to the army when I wanted to run.”
The ever waning sunlight softened the look in her eyes. A band of flaxen light shifted down over her face, forcing a soft twinkle in her eyes, exacerbated by the tears she’d been suppressing.
She finished the crimson liquid in her glass and set it aside on the blanket and I followed suit.
Sara wiped her eyes. “Thank you, Preston.”
“For what?”
“I thought I was starting to forget the pain. And that made me feel guilty. And you reminded me of it. So, thank you.”
I winced at the thought of causing her pain, but put on a thin smile. “You’re welcome.”
It’s difficult to describe the connection between us then through the cracked lens I find myself writing and remembering through. I know how it felt, but it’s hard to summon the proper feeling or words.
The most vivid sensation I can conjure is my kinship with her. I felt close to her, like we had something more in common. We both nursed broken hearts and our paths managed to cross at a French field hospital.
I’m not sure I’d ever felt anything like it before. There was a closeness of mind and experience I never knew with anyone, even Lucy.
I doubt I’ll ever have a chance to feel anything like it again, and there is no one to blame but myself.
Though some of these
feelings have been tainted in my memory, I can still recall perfectly the tingling sensation in my heart as we leaned in to each other, kissing passionately for the first time in the sunset.
Another indelible image that haunts my waking dreams.
I close my eyes and see the sun there, passing down below the French hillside, and I can see us there in the third person, the two of us leaning in for that first kiss.
I recall the taste of the wine on her lips, bringing something out of the sweetness that hadn’t been there before.
This was it.
The seeds of my plants had sprouted, breaking through the soil in my flower bed.
We kissed passionately, for all in the hospital to see, as the light of the sun turned to a deep red, then faded into blues and eventual darkness.
Not once did we stop for air.
It was love.
14
It was two days before I would get a chance to talk to Sara again. The day after our kiss I spent almost fully with the doctor and Hortense. I’d made progress and my treatment was changing. There would be less bandages and much more ointment, which was a blessing.
I could tell they were taking the bandages off the side of my head for the last time because it didn’t hurt so bad, even through Hortense’s rough handling. It was tender still, but it was a pain more dull than sharp.
Hortense spent every moment apologizing for having to hurt me, which I thought would have been effort better spent learning how to apply something as simple as ointment without digging her fingers into my wounds.
They got me walking around more, which I was grateful for. They encouraged me to stand this time, which was a change. Every time I’d stood to walk on my broken leg prior to then, they’d scolded me. The doctor didn’t want to reset the bone or have me injure myself any further.
The doctor rattled off to Hortense a list of things to do for my care since my needs had changed. He spoke in French and at a speed too quick for me to understand, but I could guess at what he was talking about by the way he pointed at various parts of me. The gashes on my face. The healing ribs. The leg. And so on.
Afterward, he pointed outside and seemed to tell her I’d have to spend more time out there, walking, if I was going to get well again.
The next day, the first thing I did with my newfound freedom was to seek out Sara. I found her easily enough, she was across the room making adjustments to one of the respirators.
The respirator took up most of the wall, all glass and bellows, connected by cogworks to a steam generator outside the hospital. Half a dozen small ventilation tubes ended in rubber masks, each strapped to the faces of six of the hospital’s most damaged gas victims.
Sara was fine-tuning their flow of oxygen when I approached, delicately twisting knobs and checking dials in a way that made me think she would have made a good Aeronaut if they allowed women to fight on the lines.
“Thank you,” I said over the throbbing breath of the respirator and turning cogs.
She jerked. I’d startled her. Her back was to me and she hadn’t noticed my approach. “Oh. Preston. You’re welcome. But I did nothing. Thank me for what?”
“For the other night…”
When she said that, the muscles in her smile slackened and my heart deflated.
But she took on a conspiratorial tone, pointing a finger into my chest. “This might not be the best place to discuss such a personal medical matter. Why don’t we talk about this elsewhere?”
Confused, I followed where she led me, slowly, from the hospital room and out to the nurse’s station. To my relief, it was vacant. All the other nurses were busy with their duties. “I’m not sure what’s the matter…”
I could see in her face a flush of temper, but that’s as far as it went. “Preston, it is probably not wise to talk like that in front of other patients. I broke enough of my rules taking that walk with you in the first place, and the last thing I need is you making the others jealous. It’s not good for their recovery.”
“I’m sorry, I meant no…”
“I know you meant nothing by it. Which is why I brought you here instead.”
I stood there, dumbfounded. I knew I had come to say something to her, but the odd circumstance and lecture left me too out of sorts to remember exactly.
“Was there anything else, Monsieur Preston?”
“I…”
One of her eyebrows arched and I was mesmerized by the motion. “Why don’t we do this: when you’d like to speak to me about something…more personal, meet me here and we’ll find a spot to talk. That way, I won’t have to worry about upsetting any of the other patients.”
I grinned. “You’ll take me on then, as a special case?”
“I miss speaking English,” she said, nodding her head. “Besides, I think you’ll be good for me.”
What more could I ask for?
After that, we fell quickly into infatuation, magnetically attracted to one another, wanting to know everything we could about each other. I wonder if that head over heels feeling one gets for a person, those feelings that come with the newness of a relationship, stem less from lust and attraction and more from the exhilaration of getting to know a new person. That’s the most intoxicating part: learning all the minute details of a woman, her secrets, her habits, and everything else. It was riveting to learn the intricacies of the small things, like the way she shot her eyes to the side when she pulled the bun from her hair, or how she turned her head to answer a question, showing off the slender lines of her neck and how those lines led to her softly freckled chest.
Or how she’d take in a breath while you were talking, hanging on your every word, and then seemed to not let that breath out until she’d reached an appropriate climax in your story. Or how she’d arch a single eyebrow and smile with only half of her perfect mouth when she thought she was being told a lie.
There were so many idiosyncrasies I’d have never noticed if we hadn’t done our best to spend every waking moment we could together.
She told me about her life and her friends. She told me more about the soldier she’d lost. That was the most recent hurt in a life of them and was the easiest for her to conjure. It enabled us to talk of loving things without necessarily having to talk about each other. It made it easier to discover what she liked and didn’t like in a loving relationship when she would drift into the occasional discussion of what it was about her dead beau that hadn’t pleased her.
I remember that it made me crazy to think anyone could be with so perfect a creature and find ways to displease her. No matter how insignificant those things seemed, the right man for her would eliminate them from everything he did.
I learned that James, the boy she’d fallen for and lost, had a habit of second guessing her decisions.
She’d say something like, “I told him on more than one occasion that his attitude was frustrating, but he was still so much a boy. He didn’t understand. How could he? But, it simply isn’t proper to speak of the dead like that.” Then she’d quickly change the subject.
Every time we spoke, I copied every dislike she mentioned down in my memory as though I was etching it in a notebook, confident I’d do everything I could to remove any reason to give her from disliking me.
I became, in essence, the stenographer of her heart.
But no matter how much I soaked in or took down in those precious few weeks, it never seemed as though it would ever be enough to convince her to stay with me for the rest of our lives.
My favorite memory of our trysts were the ones where we had to outwit Hortense. It was as though she had a built in radar for Sara and I. If we were together, chances were high that Hortense would arrive, innocently enough, and give Sara a task to complete. I wondered if she dogged our steps, listened for our loving chatter, waited until it might turn into kissing, and then interrupt us, sending Sara as far away as she could. Somehow, she would always know when things were getting the most intimate, because inevitably, that’s when she wo
uld barge in.
“Nurse Baker,” she would say, “you are required to adjust the respirator.”
Sara would smile at Hortense and say something like, “Yes, Nurse Bertrand. I’ll be right there.”
This particular time, Sara and I had retired to the sprawling supply closet, assuming that it would be disused and private enough for a conversation.
We spoke in low loving tones beneath the dim and flickering electric bulb in the closet that reminded me of the strings of them that lit the last trench I’d been in. All around us were shelves full of wound dressings, clean sheets, and potent antiseptics.
“I want to know more about you,” I told her. “Tell me something, another secret.”
“I haven’t got many secrets,” she said in her beautiful accent.
“What were you before you came here?”
“I was in school,” she said.
“To be a nurse?”
Her smile grew coy. “It was only secondary school.”
“Secondary? How old are you?”
“Twenty.”
I remember being shocked. I’d assumed she was at least in her mid-twenties and at least a few years older than me. I never suspected she’d been two years younger. Suddenly, as she said it, I could see it. The newness in her face, all the youth and naiveté seemed to have a glow around it.
“Where did you learn to be a nurse then?”
“They taught us in London.”
“Is that where you met James?”
She nodded and closed her eyes, remembering.
“How did you meet him?” I asked, not really wanting to know the answer. That she’d been with another man before we met served nothing but to cause an ache inside me.
“It was at a rail platform. We’d both just missed our cars and were alone at the station in the middle of the night. He kept me company and walked me to the pub and we talked all night.”
“You never made it home?”
“No.”
“He must have been a very nice fellow.”
“He was. And a perfect gentleman.” Her eyes turned down as though she could see him there in the distance beyond me. “Enough about my sad things. Tell me why you came here, to fight with the French.”
