Life Between Wars

by Robert Patton

  Anna was a born-again virgin. Disavowing the fitful sexual encounters of her twenties had restored a rigorous innocence that made a perfect podium from which to pass judgment on others. Her natural modesty had formed a hard chrysalis of habit from which, by her midthirties when she’d foregone even daydreams of sexual fulfillment, Anna emerged metamorphosed into a rarefied neurotic. Her virginity seemed more organic now than it ever had been, an arbitrary physical trait now a rooted trait of character — sex fascinated her as a result. She saw it everywhere, idealizing as only an outsider can its pleasures and trespasses. She believed America’s epidemic of sexually transmitted disease to be a warning from heaven that sex is no joke, that sin is serious. We’re all of us fallen, Anna believed. Our sin is refusing to fly. Within the cloister of Our Lady of Grace, the Connecticut nunnery where she often went on weekend retreats, she intended to take flight at last. A life of plain dimension would find the epic it always had craved.

  Anna visited Robby Cochran in his cell at the police station. Lois had told her he’d requested a Bible, and, rising to the bait, Anna purchased a modern English translation at a Penscot bookshop and presented it to him almost bashfully. A bag of cookies lay on Robby’s bunk, another gift from Johnwayne Locke. “I didn’t know what else to bring,” Anna said.

  “You brought yourself. Why?”

  “Why? You’re my brother-in-law. I’m concerned for you.”

  “I thought maybe you wanted to know what it was like to kill somebody. Because to save a sinner you gotta know a sinner.”

  She gave a laugh. “It seemed more complex to me earlier.”

  “Nope. Totally simple. Killing somebody showed me the soul of man.” Robby sat cross-legged on the floor of his cell, speaking through the bars to Anna seated on a folding chair. He waved the Bible she’d brought him. “The soul of man is empty as nothing till grace comes and fills it. I’m filled with it. I’m full up to here with God’s pure grace. We’re brothers, Anna. I always thought you was a bitch before, but now I know you’re full of it too.”

  She blinked.

  “Do you feel Jesus in your step?”

  “Well, sometimes there’s a presence — ”

  “Do you see bars between us? What bars, right? You and me, we got angels in our hearts. Inside our jails, we cruise.”

  “I don’t think of myself as jailed.”

  “Me neither! Ain’t it the best?”

  “But you are jailed, Robby. That’s the difference.”

  This puzzled him only briefly. “I’ve kneeled before the Lord. I piss on the chains of man.”

  “And your victim?”

  “Who?”

  “The person you killed. How does he fit in?”

  “I praise him every moment. He’s made possible my happiness as I’ve made possible his.”

  “He’s dead, Robby.

  “There is no death. You know that.”

  “I do?”

  “Lois said you’re gonna be a holy sister. That puts us in the same trade. We represent eternity, you and me.”

  “You’re talking nonsense.”

  Stung, Robby said softly, “Maybe I don’t got the words yet. But I got a song.” He grabbed his guitar and fingerpicked a folk tune to which he’d set the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father who ah-art in heavenn, / Hallowed be thyee name, oh yeah . . . ”

  “Stop it, Robby. Just stop it.”

  “Play it, Robby. It’s fine.” Jerome Cochran came down the hall looking pretty fair considering last night’s binge. Robby shyly continued singing, cowed by Anna’s criticism. His voice swelled as his brother hummed along tunelessly. When the song was over Jerome pushed a plastic cup of coffee through the bars. “You could be passing a knife,” Anna said. Jerome didn’t smile.

  “Sister Anna and me were discussing the Lord,” Robby said.

  “In a manner of speaking,” she amended.

  “At the pier yesterday it was Bernadette. You change names again?” Jerome, who could blank on whole weeks, had a gift for retaining the odd detail, like a toddler who blurts mommy’s secret.

  “Just Anna, okay?”

  “I thought you was a holy sister! No wonder you attack me. She attacked me,” Robby complained.

  “How did I attack you? I just think this, this cheap piety is grotesque. Where’s the hurt, Robby? Where’s the horror?”

  “See?”

  Jerome glared at Anna. “The fuck you think you are, messin’ him up like this? The man was in trouble, the good Lord rescued him — you got nothin’ to say about it.”

  “He wants an easy way out — it won’t work. He’s got to face what happened, then strive to redeem himself. What he’s doing now can’t last. We’ll find him hanged in his cell.”

  Jerome whirled on Robby. “You thinkin’ to check out?”

  “No way.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I got too much good works to do, come on.”

  “He’s heading for a fall,” Anna said.

  “Hey!” Jerome’s shout made her flinch. She expected a head blow, a brutish tirade. He fixed his eyes on her and quietly said, “He’d need somewhere to fall from, now wouldn’t he?”

  Robby jumped in, “Darn right!”

  She regarded the brothers, Robby shirtless and thin on his cell floor, Jerome on the outside gripping the bars as if preparing to bend them — when his grip released, the moment’s tension eased. Anna felt her shoulders relax. Jerome reached in his shirt pocket and offered gum all around. Anna accepted. “Thanks.”

  Robby said, “Sugarless?”

  “I dunno, fuck.” Jerome examined the pack. “Yeah.”

  “Okay then.”

  Anna laughed. “You can’t be dieting, Robby.”

  “Sugar’s poison. Give a man a hundred years ago the sugar we eat today, he’d drop dead. We’ve lost the purity.”

  Jerome shook his head. Anna was stunned to see his eyes tear.

  Robby went on, “It’s the same with smokes. They’re another master. I’m off ’em, Jer. Cold turkey. I pray you do the same.”

  “Too late. I quit as of this mornin’.” Jerome, having relapsed last night, had forsworn doubly to his son Brendan this morning, giving up booze and cigarettes both. He waggled the gum pack. “I’ve sunk to this.”

  “Praise Jesus!”

  The policeman Del Locke approached them. Nervously he asked Jerome to leave. “Chief Rickert gets nervous about guests with the prisoner. Did anyone frisk you?”

  “That a joke?”

  Del asked Anna the same. She shook her head in apology.

  “Well, you’re okay but — ” He glanced at Jerome imploringly.

  “Rickert’s got no worry from me.” Jerome made to leave, remembering his tacit deal with the police chief to delay Robby’s transfer to the mainland for arraignment until Jerome could raise some cash. As Anna moved to follow, Robby thanked her for the Bible.

  “New words for new tunes,” he winked.

  Outside the station, Anna cut to Jerome’s personal business in typical fashion. “It pains you to see Robby jailed. I sympathize.”

  Jerome snapped, “I catch you bustin’ him again, I’m gonna be upset. This religion’s all he’s got.”

  “But how about some thoughtfulness, a decent interval before he turns saint?”

  “The man is a dunce. All he knows is what he feels, and right now he’s scared crazy. Let him be nuts. It’s a step up.”

  “He’s not nuts. Faith can save him, if he deals with what happened honestly, with his heart. He took someone’s life — ”

  “Allegedly.”

  “— he has admitted. Next must come pain,” she was rolling now, “and only then salvation.” She stopped. “Please don’t do that.” He’d backed her against the wall.

  Jerome stepped away.


  “Not that — yes that, but I meant the tears. Here.” She produced a tissue. “I can’t preach when you cry.”

  “It’s nothin’. I’m hung over. Been worse if I hadn’t puked.”

  “I think your brother might have something to do with it.”

  “Well, the bars. Seein’ him behind bars.”

  “Of course.” He blew his nose and tossed the tissue over his shoulder. She watched its flight with a kind of wonder.

  “When I was a kid,” Jerome said, “nothin’ depressed me like a zoo. Seemed like the animals knew they’d fucked up but didn’t exactly know how. And that’s Robby. He’s a dog in a pen. He ain’t gonna learn why, he ain’t gonna improve — he’s gonna sit there and wonder what hit him.”

  “In time he might come to some finer awareness. It does happen, you know.”

  “You’re gonna be a nun. You hafta say that.” He touched Anna’s arm as a priest might a divorcee’s, people heading in two different directions. “Otherwise, hell. You’d be normal.”

  “God, if I could have one wish, it’d be that people would stop thinking I’m not normal. It can give a girl a complex.”

  Jerome shook his head. “God loves the weak but requires the strong.”

  “Where’d you hear that one?”

  “Thought it up myself. I thought: To go with God, you gottabe His puppy or His trooper. You’re a trooper-type. My kid’s same way. Robby, he’s a puppy to beat hell.”

  “And you. What are you?”

  “Neither one, that’s my point. I ain’t nothin’ but normal.”

  Anna turned her head slightly as if, askance, she might get a better view of this new thing before her, this unlikely source of interesting things to see and hear.

  “So what I said to you was a compliment,” he said. “Okay?”

  To her surprise Anna answered, “Okay.”

  Seventeen

  No one was home at Lois and Robby’s apartment when Willoughby rang the doorbell. Matthew came downstairs to answer it; they’d arranged last night to meet for breakfast. While Matthew showered, Willoughby wandered to the house’s third-floor studio and browsed through Matthew’s strewn-about artwork. Prominent were Matthew’s recent watercolors of a condominium development on Penscot’s west end. These were oddly perspected views of wood framing, dirt piles, and hand tools, no living creature in evidence to disrupt the chilly geometry. The pictures were pretty in their description, the colors suited to any decor; their theme was elusive, suggesting if anything that pretty pictures don’t necessarily cheer. Matthew didn’t ask Willoughby’s opinion on the paintings. Trotting upstairs after his shower, he became nervous, as if his art were diaries carelessly left open, embarrassing not for their revelations but that they might reveal too little, no secret passions at all.

  They ate at one of the better restaurants still open, Matthew paying. “Please. It’s inherited money, allow me to flaunt it.” When Willoughby eventually asked about Jerome Cochran, Matthew waved the subject away, a gesture catty and injured that didn’t square with Willoughby’s experience of relations between regular guys. “I’m sure you two have much to discuss.” Matthew tried to be flippant. “Not on my time.” His preferred topic was disease.

  He broached it by way of his mother, who’d died of cancer almost twenty years ago; and Willoughby proved a sensitive and yet agreeably indelicate listener to Matthew’s sad reminiscence, able to appreciate the black comedy and degrading detail that often attends, along with heartache, slow death in a modern hospital. Matthew, in speaking so candidly of his late mother, found himself stirred not to dread by the memory but to ironic dispassion. And it was a good feeling, an improvement at least, considering the shadows on his X ray and his future.

  Willoughby thanked him for the meal. He lit a cigarette. “Now. Where do I find Cochran?”

  A pause. “You used me.”

  “I had a good time. That doesn’t change things.”

  Matthew didn’t want him to leave. Without someone nearby through these hours, life and death would have Matthew outnumbered. But unselfish to a fault, he gave Willoughby the tidbit he wanted. “Last night he was planning to visit Robby this morning, then I gather he had a carpentry job. In the afternoon he was going to work on his boat over at the Coast Guard station. Tell me,” Matthew said. “What exactly do you want with him. He’s a person I’m devoted to, despite our ups and downs.”

  “I want to understand what happened to me. In the war.”

  “Fifteen years after the fact?”

  “Slow burn, I guess.”

  “Fooey. Tell me another one.”

  “My father killed himself two weeks ago, all right? Burned himself up like a brush pile. You could say it set me to thinking.”

  “Ah,” Matthew said, as if confirming the obvious — which angered Willoughby, for no one likes his cherished woe trivialized. “I assumed there was nonsense behind the nonsense. I’m gratified to be right.”

  Willoughby slid his chair from the table. “And fuck your mother too.”

  “Touché.” Matthew smiled. “Forgive me. I’m not the enemy.”

  “Do tell.”

  “I swear, if you try to hurt him — ”

  “From what I’ve seen, that would be redundant.”

  Matthew’s voice turned apprehensive. “I must ask you. Was this all about Jerome?”

  “Our date here this morning? Mostly.” Willoughby felt sorry for Matthew. Perhaps for the change from feeling sorry for himself, he brightened. “Relax. I’ll be around.”

  “I count on it.”

  The thought struck Matthew as he walked home alone that his mother had weighed eighty pounds when she died. Eighty pounds, adrift in a bubble of morphine indifference, with someone who cared crying beside her.

  Willoughby had taken a room at a boarding house in town. He spent part of his morning playing with Jerome’s pistol there. The sheer chance that had delivered it to him was intimidating; not to use the pistol for revenge would be impertinent, a slap in fortune’s face. He pointed it about the room, and at his forehead also. He’d seen the effects of a bullet shot there from close range. The gore you get used to — modern movies catch it exactly. It’s the power that impresses, the abruptness. A life flicked away. Dismissed. Gone.

  In the years since Vietnam, Willoughby had seized on several possible motives behind his fragging, none enduring very long past the bitter delight of discovery. Whether a victim of a soldier’s petty gripe; whether a victim of America’s war policy, the tactics of attrition that worked brilliantly but backwards — such hindsight reconstructions sickened him with their fatedness and logic. He wanted to see his fragging as random, a bullet in a crowd, its victim wholly innocent. Guilt would lift off him only when it became something that could have happened to anyone. Till then, the explosion in his bunker would be its own implacable verdict.

  His brief military career effectively ended on that spring day in 1972. The Army bars amputees from serving in combat units. And there was no way his fragging wouldn’t be blamed on him — it would show up in his efficiency reports and stifle any promotion. As his father had remarked of Willoughby’s wound, “It’s something we can’t wash away.”

  It pained him to imagine his reception had he returned from Vietnam honorably wounded or dead. Certainly his father would have dealt better with a KIA for a son, would have accepted the folded banner with tearful pride. But a frag? The utter odd shame of it proved too much for the man and consequently for Willoughby, whose life was a walking apology thereafter. His father, a happy lifer, had loved the U.S. Army. But passed over for Sergeant Major, Jack Claire had undergone the transformation a rejected lover may, his hurt becoming a distant, desperate adoration of something he wasn’t worthy of. So Jack sent his son to win his beloved back. Willoughby gained a Presidential appointment to West Point in 1967. His father, strange as an im
migrant in his civvies, saluted him outside Thayer Hall before Willoughby’s plebe summer. Willoughby saluted in return. He never smirked in those days.

  His father had seen lots of war. When he said he missed it he meant the men. The sergeant’s passion was frightening when he spoke of fellow soldiers, of officers who’d led them well and ones who’d got them killed. That his own son had become an officer, a Claire wearing brass, was Jack’s great vindication. Willoughby was twenty-two when he soared west into an infantry-blue sky in 1972. His father shook his hand at the air base and gave a battler’s last command: “Protect your people, Lieutenant. They’re the best in the world.” The send-off was less cold than it seemed, for it presumed Willoughby’s safety and his ability to accomplish the mission. His father, a brute romantic, trusted the genetics of fortune. Through combat in Europe and Korea he’d never been wounded, never lost the respect of his comrades, never lost a war — nor ever could his son.

  Willoughby had returned to live home after the hospital and the Army discharged him, perpetuating himself as unformed, unworthy, and deeply grateful for his father’s punishing love. For years nothing changed in his crippled existence except the depth of the secrets he kept. He was known in his town as quiet but decent, one of those Vietnam vets touched in the head.

  When Willoughby’s mother ran off with her lover, his father tried to do it that night, gut himself with a deer knife. Willoughby caught him with his shirt off in his La-Z-Boy, the Randall and its whetstone in two fists. The scene that followed felt like a happy ending. His father wept apologies for forgetting that his son still loved him loyally. Willoughby had thrilled to be the one dispensing strength and forgiveness. He cursed his mother, said “It’s you and me, Dad,” as his father fiercely concurred. The next day they fixed fences together, Willoughby for the first time sharing a few funny war stories. That afternoon he drove into town to buy them a case of beer. Driving home he saw smoke rising over the hill. He saw trucks and flames. Dad had proved a fairweather friend.