Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille

by James Van Pelt

  Keeping her head steady, her eyes focused on the window, she took a step to the left, away from the telescope. The face disappeared.

  She stepped back. Moonlight did reflect from the window; the glass was wavy, but it didn’t look like a face now, only like shimmery glass. There’s no way I could mistake that for a face, she thought. There’s no way. She moved again, tried to see a forehead in the reflection, a cheek’s curve, the dark shadow under a nose. Maybe it was there, but the moon had advanced in the sky a tiny bit. Maybe the image required an exact alignment of light and viewer. Maybe there was no image at all, only nervousness about a new house.

  Never looking away, she unscrewed the counterweight and slid it off the shaft; its bulk filled her hand reassuringly. The porch door creaked. Meadoe reached around the corner to turn on the light. Shadows fled, and within seconds moths fluttered against the screens. She repeated the move on the back door; the back of her hand and wrist screaming their vulnerability when she stuck them in the dark to find the switch.

  Light flooded the empty room, and the rest of the house was just as empty. In her bedroom, feeling foolish, she put the counterweight on her dresser.

  The posters on the wall almost glowed. Meadoe sat on her bed again, as she had in the afternoon, and studied them. Ingrid Bergman looked wistfully into the distance. Fred Astaire danced across a ballroom floor. The wolf man glared straight into the camera. Planes diving. Battleships sailing. VICTORY IN EUROPE trumpeted a headline. It’s practically a museum, she thought. A moment in time captured on the wall. She thought of her own photographs taken through the telescope, also snapshots in time. The scale was different; some of her subjects were millions of years away, but the principle was the same. Captured time.

  She squinted at the wall. There was a pattern in the design, an order. Not straight lines, but lines nonetheless. The Life covers formed three curves; the hand drawings two more; the movie poster swept in their own arc. News articles and war photos filled the gaps but created a sight line too. It took her a while to decipher the underlying purpose, but as she lay on the bed, letting her eyes roam from image to image, it became clear. All lines led to Tokyo Rose. No matter where one started, the natural flow was to the Japanese beauty.

  Later, she read with all the lights on, then decided that was silly. She checked the doors and windows again, flicked the living room and kitchen lights off. With only her reading light on, she closed the book and rested it on her chest. She listened with half an ear to a radio drama about someone named the Great Gildersleeve. Some of it was pretty funny, and it took her mind off sounds she couldn’t identify: a metallic rattle that might be a pipe expanding, a thump and buzz that might be the refrigerator cycling, a dog barking. There wasn’t enough light to see the posters now, and the window was a gray square leaking moonlight. She worried that someone might look in, and she laughed. No matter what side of the window I’m on, I’m scared of the other! Tomorrow she would hang curtains.

  She turned off the radio and the light and slipped into a dream. It seemed she’d slept for a long time, and she knew she was dreaming. In the dream she rested on a white beach, like one of the models on the cover of Life, like Rita Hayworth, and the sun beat down hot, oppressively hot. Overhead a plane rumbled across the sky, too far to identify, but clearly military, a B-29 maybe. She rolled. In the dream she shifted away from the sun, but she felt blankets on her shoulders and knew she rolled in bed too. It was so hot. I should find some shade, she thought. I need sunscreen. Waves hissed in the dream. Heat shimmered off the sand blurring the horizon.

  Someone stood beside her. It was too hot on the beach, and it robbed her strength, but she could feel him standing there. For a long time he said nothing, and she thought, if only he would set up an umbrella.

  Then, he touched her back. His hand was smooth, and the overheated skin felt instant relief. She closed her eyes against the brightness, could feel sand beneath her cheek. The hand moved. It stroked to her shoulder blades and down to the base of her spine spreading coolness the whole way. Meadoe moved into the stroke. Then softly, a voice in her ear.

  “Do you trust me?”

  She woke, screaming, and the bed was sweat-soaked again. She had to flip the mattress before putting on dry sheets.

  In the morning, her linen drawers were open and once folded clothes piled messily within.

  August 2, Research: Sunday Morning

  The library didn’t open until noon on Sunday, so Meadoe disarmed the alarm system before entering. The lights were off. Flyers from different publishing houses touting their newest releases covered her desk, and she moved them aside to give herself room to work. The Real Estate/Assessor’s Office didn’t have a web page but the City and County Records Office and Building Permits did. She punched in her address. After a few seconds search, a list of names and dates scrolled onto her screen with her name at the bottom. From 1928 until 1945 the house had two owners: the Belascoes who owned it until 1940, and the Shirleys who owned it until September of 1945. Since then the house had changed hands seventeen times. The realtor said young couples bought the house, and then moved out when they had children. Meadoe tapped her fingernail against the keyboard. She typed in her neighbor’s address to the north, a house that looked very much like hers from the street. Three owners since ’45. The house to the south of her, four owners in the same time period. Across the street, two owners. She checked another dozen addresses in the neighborhood. None had more than four owners since the end of World War II.

  Scrolling back up the screen, she returned to the Shirleys. Howard J.T. Shirley bought the house in May of 1940. Margaret L. Shirley cosigned the loan. Wife? Mother? Sister?

  A name search for Howard J.T. Shirley brought her to a Shirley genealogical site where she found he died in 1982. Margaret L. Shirley, his wife, died two years later. The site listed one child, Nathaniel Shirley, born January 15, 1929, died August 6, 1945. He was sixteen when he died, the same day the atomic age opened its awful eye over Hiroshima. Meadoe could hear her father’s voice, thickly accented, “Your grandfather dug all day for the rest of his friends. Dirt covered their faces. There were scars on his arms from broken glass in the rubble.”

  Nothing turned up on a search of Nathaniel’s name.

  The historical archives were in the basement. Turning on lights, Meadoe worked her way to the local history shelves. On the top row, Harriston High School annuals. Nathaniel smiled from the juniors section in the 1945 book, and the little hairs on her arms stood straight up as they had when she’d pulled down the wallpaper. She wished she’d brought a sweater.

  Nathaniel had light hair with a shiny, sculpted look that most of the boys sported. Glasses. He wore a dark tie, white shirt and dark jacket. Varsity track. Art club. She thumbed through the annual. Grainy black and white photos of football games and victory gardens. At the homecoming dance, several boys were in uniform. Some downtown Harriston buildings in the background of the homecoming parade were familiar.

  Prom pictures were in a copy of the school paper, The Lions Roar, stuck in the back of the book. On the second page, she found Nathaniel, his arm around a pretty girl with dark hair like her own, but curled instead of straight, hanging to her shoulders instead of trimmed to just under the ears. The caption read, “The Prom’s best couple: Junior Nathaniel Shirley and Senior Erica Weiss.”

  Meadoe went back to her computer. If Nathaniel did the wall art, he didn’t enjoy it long before he died. Why did people move in and out of her house so often? Thoughtfully she typed in a search for “ghosts and poltergeists.” Her research offered numerous explanations for ghosts and hauntings. One source suggested that ghosts wanted attention. That’s why so many of them threw things. Another argued that poltergeist phenomena was caused by the emotional upheaval of someone in the house, generally a pre-adolescent girl. Was she effectively pre-adolescent? Could her house be responding to her? One ghost hunter said ghosts recreated the circumstances that held them to the earth. Another maint
ained ghosts existed because they had unfinished business.

  In the August ’45 Harriston Independent, on the second to last page, she found Nathaniel under the headline, “Truck Strikes Local Youth.” He’d been crossing the intersection of Harriston Boulevard and Broadway when a milk truck hit him. The paper reported Nathaniel died at St. Joseph hospital that afternoon of head injuries. Beside the article was the same class picture she’d seen in the yearbook looking so formal, so young in his coat and tie.

  Before going home, she stopped at the video store.

  “Do you carry The Outlaw, with Jane Russel?” Meadoe asked.

  The teen cashier keyed the title into his computer and shook his head.

  “Four Jills in a Jeep?” On the wall beside her, Meadoe counted at least 60 copies of the latest release. “How about The Haunted Honeymoon or Destination Tokyo?”

  “Nope.” He hit a key that brought up more information about the films. “Jeeze, those are old. You’d probably have to order them special.”

  “Casablanca?”

  “That we have. Two copies. The film’s in black and white though. I’m supposed to tell you that because some guy rented it last year and raised a stink because he thought it was defective.”

  At home she phoned Joan. “I’ve got curtains to put up you can help with, and a video to watch if you aren’t doing anything.”

  “I’ll bring wine,” Joan said.

  In the middle of the afternoon, the whole ghost theory seemed suspect. Certainly the apparition in the window could have been her imagination, and maybe she’d messed up her own clothes in the dresser in the middle of the night. She’d never done that before, but she’d never moved into a house of her own either, nor had she had night sweats.

  Which was Joan’s point an hour later as they hung the bedroom curtains. “There’s numerous medical reasons for profuse sweating. You’re young for it, but it could be early signs of menopause.”

  Joan pushed a hook into the drape’s back while Meadoe held the fabric up. None of the windows were standard width, and the curtains really should have been special ordered, but Meadoe couldn’t afford that. Custom curtains were on the lengthening list of home improvements. She tried to keep her tone light. “Oh, no. It couldn’t be that. My grandmother had a child when she was forty-three.” A medical condition? she thought. Her father spent four months in a hospital dying of colon cancer when she was twelve. She remembered how frail his arms became—how thin his face. Cancer killed her grandfather too. Slow mushroom clouds erupted in his lungs, a part of Hiroshima’s omnipresent past.

  Joan took three hooks from her chest pocket and moved down the drape, pushing each one in. “That’s the benign explanation. Anxiety provoked by severe repression could cause it too—a purely psychological symptom—but night sweats can accompany diabetes, M.S., AIDS, polio and a half dozen other things I can’t think of off the top of my head. First things first, we ought to get your estrogen checked.”

  In Meadoe’s bedroom, Joan examined the wall for a long time, touching some of the pictures, then moving back with her head cocked, as if she were in an art gallery. “Whew! And you think this was all done by a sixteen-year-old?”

  “No more than a month before he died.” Now that Meadoe had seen the pattern that drew her eye to Tokyo Rose, it seemed it should be obvious to Joan too, but Joan didn’t seem to notice it.

  “I always liked ’40s hair styles. They struck me as more… deliberate. This low maintenance look we all go for now just isn’t as romantic. There must be a half a can of hair spray on that woman’s head. Oh, look at that.” She had found Tokyo Rose. “She looks a little like you, Meadoe. Did you notice that? She’s beautiful.”

  “We all look alike to you.” Meadoe laughed.

  “There’s more of the west in you than the east, girl.” Joan put a stool under the curtain rod and hung the drapes. “There, now you won’t be wondering about peeping Toms in the shrubbery.”

  Over a glass of wine, Meadoe told Joan about her scare the night before and the dream. Meadoe looked into her glass as she spoke. Remembering the touch on her back raised new goosebumps. She could still feel the fingers over her skin.

  “Doesn’t the timing of these things strike you as fortuitous?” said Joan. “I mean, it’s pretty obvious that the evening I bring up a delicate topic in our session—ask you what you fear most—your subconscious supplies fears. Of course, the face in the window is symbolic in some way. It could be your repressed self looking out at you, or it could be Christopher Towne coming back in your imagination.” Joan laughed. “Or it could have been a funny trick of light. Not everything has a psychological explanation. The dream now, that is interesting. What were you wearing in it?”

  Meadoe shook Casablanca from its plastic box and put it in the VCR. “I don’t know. I suppose a bathing suit. He touched bare skin.”

  Joan settled onto the couch after slipping a coaster under her wine glass. “How do you know that he was a he? You said you only saw feet.”

  “I… I don’t know that either. In the dream I assumed it was a man.”

  Meadoe sat on the couch. Joan moved over to accommodate. It was more of a love seat than a proper couch, not large enough for Meadoe to stretch out to take a nap on.

  “And you said when he touched you in the dream you liked it? I’d say that was a good sign. It’s obvious the dream has sexual overtones, and you welcomed them.”

  “The sun was hot. I was burning up, and his hand was cool. Do we have to talk about it? The movie has started.”

  Black and white maps appeared on the screen with a voice over. Lines traced a path through Europe to Casablanca. The narrator said of refugees without visas in Casablanca that their fate was to “wait and wait and wait.” She thought about Nathaniel Shirley. What if he was a ghost in this house, caught in his sixteenth year, and like the refugees, looking for a way to escape?

  An Englishman wearing a monocle said, “We hear very little, and we understand even less.” Meadoe nodded. That made sense. She hadn’t seen Casablanca before, and it struck her as funny. The music seemed overstated, and the acting stilted. A plane flying in one scene was clearly a model, and the Germans were stereotypical. She wondered how Japanese were portrayed in other films from that era.

  Then a woman walked into the cafe. Ingrid Bergman. The prefect of police said to her, “I was informed you were the most beautiful woman ever to visit Casablanca. That was a gross understatement.” Meadoe leaned forward. It was true. She was beautiful. A fragility in the face. Flawless skin. A half smile that changed her appearance from somber to knowing. The pictures on Nathaniel’s wall didn’t do her justice.

  Joan picked up her wine glass and sipped from it. Somewhere in the film Meadoe stopped thinking of it as stilted. Her own wine warmed on the table. At the end she cried so hard that Joan put her arm around her until Meadoe giggled at the ridiculousness of it.

  “It’s all right,” said Joan. “There must be something in the story that speaks strongly to you. That’s why movies are such a powerful medium. They help us live the tales we can’t tell ourselves.”

  An hour after Joan left, Meadoe didn’t feel tired at all. Normally she was in bed by 9:00 before work, but her mind raced with a million thoughts. With the curtains up, the house seemed homier, more enclosed and safer. She picked up a book, reread the same page twice without understanding a word; put it down. She looked into all the rooms for the tenth time, and then decided a shower might relax her. Afterwards, wearing a robe, she poured herself another glass of wine and started the video again.

  She noticed details she missed the first time. The young woman who sought Bogart’s help was in the opening crowd scene hopefully looking at the plane overhead. Every time an Italian military officer appeared in the film, everyone ignored him. Senor Ugotti said to Bogart, “I have lots of friends in Casablanca, but just because you despise me, you’re the only one I trust,” which made Meadoe smile. There were jokes in the first half of the film
she hadn’t got earlier. She poured more wine, feeling a pleasant torpor steal over her and closed her eyes. One of the books about ghosts said spirits were doomed to replay the circumstances of their deaths over and over. Is it like video, Meadoe wondered, or can it be changed? Bogie never gets the girl.

  In the film, Sam sang “As Time Goes By.” Meadoe drifted. The tune went on and on. “And you must remember this, a kiss is but a kiss, a sigh is but a sigh.” She felt she wasn’t on her living room couch anymore, but in a theater watching Casablanca on a movie screen, back row. Silhouettes of heads filled the seats in front of her, the woman’s hair curled and styled. A curl of her own hair blocked her vision. But my hair is straight! she thought. She shook her head to move it. Buttered popcorn smells. After shave. Plush underneath her hands.

  Bogart stared down a glass of whiskey. “Of all the gin joints in all the world,” he said.

  Slowly, Meadoe realized someone’s hand was on top her left one, the fingers clasped around her hand, very proper and gentle. She didn’t move, but let it rest there. It didn’t make her feel anxious. Her stomach didn’t tighten. This is a good dream, she thought; no contact phobia. Joan would be proud.

  At the roulette wheel, the young woman’s husband won a lot of money. Bogart had rigged the game so they would win and she wouldn’t have to make an unnamed sacrifice to save them both. Everyone congratulated Bogart, and he squirmed. Meadoe sighed. The scenes no longer seemed to be in order, but she liked it just as much. She leaned a little to rest her head on her companion’s shoulder. The theater air washed her in warmth, very warm, and sweat trickled down the side of her face. She didn’t mind though. She was comfortable. “Yes, Ugotti, I do respect you more,” said Bogart.

  Her companion turned in his seat. She knew it was a he, and his hand came across her to stroke her other arm. His breath touched her cheek, but she kept watching the movie. Bergman told her husband she’d been lonely in Paris, but she didn’t tell him about Bogart. She didn’t tell him she’d fallen in love.