Nightingale

by Susan May Warren

  Put that night in a box and bury it.

  In truth, his letter gave her a way to begin. It allowed her to confess their foolishness—not just hers, but for the first time allowed her to put the mantle upon his shoulders too. Now, how to forgive herself—forgive him—and forget?

  She crossed herself and knelt before the altar.

  She expected perhaps a rush of penitence, perhaps shame to lay her prostrate. Instead, just a wound, finally scarring over, followed by a dull throb deep inside.

  I’m sorry. I’m…

  Esther, do you love me?

  The question pulsed in her head, like it might be her own thoughts, except, well, perhaps they were.

  She opened her eyes. The church, with the crimson carpet leading to the altar, the high stained glass windows melting the daylight over the pews. Sadie sat on her knees on the pew, trotting Peter Rabbit across the polished back.

  Esther turned back to the figure of Christ, twisted on the cross, an ornament in the front of the altar.

  Yes. Yes, Lord. I want to…

  She pushed herself up from the rail.

  “Are you all right, child?”

  The priest stood behind her, dressed in the solemn visage of his calling. She stopped, looked up at him as she held out her hand for Sadie. “Yes, Father, I—I think I am.” At least part of her might be.

  “You’re not staying for Saturday morning mass?”

  She hustled past him.

  Outside, the day bolstered her—fresh and clear and smelling of freedom. She walked under the attention of the golden sun, swinging Sadie’s hand then breaking out in a skip together.

  Thank you, Linus.

  Caroline met her at the door, wearing jeans and a white blouse tied at the waist. “Ready to play with Aunt Caroline?” she said as she knelt before Sadie. Sadie popped a kiss on her nose.

  “Are you sure?”

  “What, sure that you should meet him? Absolutely. Sure I want to spend the day with the princess here? Again, absolutely. Sure that I want to go with you?” She grinned at her. “Absolutely.”

  Esther kissed her on the cheek. “I need to catch the bus.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  Esther had taken the train from New Jersey three months pregnant with Sadie, crammed close to other army or navy wives, most of them with handkerchiefs pressed to their faces, many with rounded bellies. She’d wanted to cry too, but couldn’t bear to allow tears for herself.

  Now, again, as she sat on the bus, third seat from the front, dressed in her church dress—the light blue one with the tiny daisies and cuffed sleeves, the one that brought out her eyes—she fought the strangest urge to cry, again. Her insides climbed over one another, and her hands slicked against her vinyl pocketbook.

  What if he… Oh, she should get off this bus this moment, hike back to Roosevelt where she’d discarded her sanity.

  “Are you going to visit your soldier?”

  She turned to the voice, an elderly woman across the row, her knitting needles clicking as she looked at Esther. She reminded her of Mrs. Hahn, with rounder edges perhaps, in a brown cotton dress, matching sensible shoes. She wore a blue hat, fraying at the brim, as if it had made this trip a few times. “You sure do look pretty.”

  “I—um—yes, I guess I am.” Esther turned back to the window, watched the ground as it pitched and rolled across the horizon, as if God had simply laid grass over the ocean. Creeks and rivers ran in the rivulets between sandstone cliffs, and oak and pine scrubbed the horizon against a sapphire sky.

  I was pledged to someone else, perhaps not formally, but in my heart, and I dishonored two people that night.

  She didn’t know why those, of Linus’s words, kept returning to her. When she read them, she’d simply brushed over them, like a hand over a flame, the other elements of his letter so much sharper. The other wounds she’d endured, accepted. But this wound seemed more tenacious, even unexpected. It bubbled up under her skin like a blister, festering. Not enough to warrant true pain, but a stinging perhaps, as she’d realized that he came to her, his heart already reserved for another.

  Linus had loved Rosemary. And while he’d given Esther a piece of himself—probably one that he didn’t share with Rosemary—he had wanted to give Rosemary his future.

  His children.

  Yes, Sadie should have been Rosemary’s child.

  More, what did that feel like, to be truly loved by handsome, dancing, brash Linus? The one who could turn her to sweet syrup with a look across the dance floor, make the music stop, call her beautiful with a smile?

  What if that smile could have been for her, alone?

  She closed her eyes. Put it in a box. In the ground.

  The bus turned west and in the distance she could make out tall towers—like guard towers—and cyclone fencing around the perimeter at the far end of the camp.

  “Every time I come here, it makes me want to cry for our boys overseas, the ones in camps like this in Germany.”

  “Like this?”

  “POW camps. The entire north side of Fort McCoy is a prisoner of war camp—a few Japs, but mostly Germans.”

  She had seen the pictures of POWs from the newsreels at the cinema—emaciated soldiers being liberated from concentration camps, their bones protruding like clubs from their bodies. Surely America took better care of its prisoners.

  If I saw a Nazi, I’d spit on him where he stood.

  The bus stopped at the end of a dirt road, at the Fort McCoy sign. The woman next to her gathered her bags, backed out of her seat.

  Esther waited for her to pass. She relieved her of one of her bags once they disembarked. “Who are you visiting?”

  “My son, Carl. I brought him a fresh kuchen. I come up every Saturday from Madison.”

  “It’s nice the army stationed him so close to home.”

  The woman looked her over, gave her a slight frown.

  They stopped at the front gate, gave their names, and the guard ushered them into a visitors’ room. The woman gave her son’s name and then exited out the side door to a picnic table.

  “Name?”

  The soldier at the desk looked up, raised an eyebrow.

  “Peter Hess. He’s a medic.” Esther smiled, glanced again at the picnic tables outside. The woman had taken out the kuchen, wrapped in cloth, and set it in front of her. Esther’s stomach had begun to knot—maybe she should have brought something.

  The guard nodded and gestured to the picnic area. She passed through the doors, outside, and noted the barbed wire fencing in the area.

  She sat down at the table. “I feel like I’m in a prison.”

  The woman glanced at her. “Of course you do.”

  Esther knitted her fingers together, placed them on the table, took a breath, and tried to remember how Peter had described himself. Errol Flynn. She’d seen the movie Robin Hood, yes, and Errol Flynn, with his sandy blond hair and square jaw, could be considered handsome, perhaps. She’d forgotten to ask Peter his rank—probably lieutenant, but she supposed, as a doctor, he would possibly be a captain.

  Oh, what was she doing here? She should just get up and run, and…

  The gate squealed open. A scarecrow of a boy, probably no more than nineteen, with a half-beard and a thatch of haymow hair, wearing green pants and a work shirt, entered the gated area. His mother found her feet, grasped his hands. “Carl!”

  Esther stared at his outfit, blood pooling in her feet. She braced her hands on the table. No. It couldn’t… The boy wore a large P painted on one leg, a W on the other. And on his arm, a band. PW.

  Prisoner of War.

  Oh. No. She turned, untangling herself from the bench—

  “It’s…you.”

  Flattened Midwestern tones. A tone of surprise that caught her heart. She froze, swallowed.

  Turned.

  If she’d had time to conjure up her visions of a POW, she may have expected an emaciated man, the sort found in the reels from Europe, with sunken, battl
ed eyes, defeat in his voice, his bones like knobs in his puppet body.

  Not this man. Tall, with wide, ropy shoulders, he had the ruddy strength of a farm boy, tanned, with dark blond hair streaked by the July sun. And his eyes—blue, so blue that she might have been seeing the ocean for the tumult in it, the way it tugged at her, hungry. He wore the same outfit as the boy—green army pants, the work shirt, the emblems of war on his legs and arms. But he’d rolled up his sleeves, revealing tanned forearms, and she recalled his words, Another man inside of me could have been a farmer. His hands, however, the long, lean fingers that reached out to her, were that of a surgeon.

  No. “Peter Hess?”

  He nodded, a smile on his face that bespoke disbelief—a sweet disbelief perhaps, because his blue eyes glistened. “Yes. I am… Peter.” His voice ruckled out of him, as if he’d had to pry it from somewhere deep inside. “You—you came to see me.”

  And then he wiped his cheek, and she knew.

  “Oh no.” She got up, backed away, her hands around her waist. “No, I didn’t…”

  “Esther?”

  She shook her head.

  “Please—Esther—”

  But she banged through the doors—“Esther!”—and through the visitor’s room, out into the hot glaring sun, now burning heat down the back of her soggy dress.

  She held in her hiccupping breath, the edge of tears, all the way down to the end of the driveway. She didn’t look back once, not at the webbing of fence or at the voice that called after her, again, then again.

  No, she stumbled until she found the shadow of the sign for Camp Fort McCoy, sat down in the feeble shade…and wept.

  CHAPTER 7

  July 1945

  Markesan, Wisconsin

  Dear Esther,

  Please.

  I stood there, my eyes disbelieving that you stood before me—you were more beautiful than I imagined with your blond hair in waves, the blue pillbox hat and dress that only matched your eyes. For a long moment I couldn’t breathe, my hopes—and of course worst fears—pressing from my lungs any words that might soften the blow of my reality.

  I wanted to reach out, to touch your hand, the one that spent so many hours cheering my darkening heart. And then—

  Your face cracked, and with the look of horror in your eyes, my own horror rose up to choke me.

  Please.

  Then you turned, backed away, your hand pressed to your mouth, as if you might be ill, and although I tried to think of a thousand words that might convince you to stop, to listen, nothing came to me, except… Please.

  I stood there in the hot dust of the gated cell, watching you disappear—and then rush down the dirt road, the sun running fingers of sweat down my back even as I fled from the pen and out into the yard, only your name in my mind, hoping to stop you. With everything inside me I hated my cruel fate, longing for the first time since my capture to wrestle the Thompson from the guard—a friend, really—and escape the barbed wire suffocating me. I imagined myself running after you, down the road, dropping to my knees. And then, finally, the right words spit out of me. A whisper at first, and then a cry.

  Perhaps you didn’t hear it—gone as you were, over the lip of the sizzling horizon.

  Please, forgive me!

  I stood at the fence, my jaw set against my grief, willing you to return. But as the sun melted into the horizon, the dusk devoured my hope and I knew.

  I am a wretched man.

  Please know I wasn’t trying to deceive you. Not really. I simply avoided mentioning the truth, hoping you might read my clues. I told myself that a tactful omission didn’t constitute lying. I deceived us both in that. But, please know, never did I intend to hurt you.

  I know now what a cruel, desperate sap I was to continue to write to you.

  Please, Esther, can you forgive me?

  I know I cannot possibly retract the trauma of your discovery. I can imagine you were expecting a man with a uniform you could honor. And, while I wish I could be that man, I beg you to understand that I am not the man you might suspect when you look at a German soldier.

  I did not lie to you when I said I grew up in Iowa. My parents moved to America during the reconstruction of Germany after the Great War. I was six years old, and while we had left a grand two-story flat in the beautiful city of Dresden, I fell in love with my uncle’s simple farm. I thrived with hard work under my nails, the sun bronzing my skin, and learned English within a year. And I did play basketball for the Conroy team.

  But while I prospered, my father struggled to put food on our table. My uncle’s farm turned to a fine powder that dissolved in the prairie winds, and he exacted high rent for our home, despite the hours I tended his animals or worked the cornfields. I well remember the day my father returned from a house call with nothing but a doughy turnip for payment. He set it on our bare kitchen table, dirty and white, and my mother stared at it without words, the tears cutting her face. I stood in the doorway, just behind the curtain of my room—no more than a closet, really, and watched as my father walked out of the house, got on our only horse, and rode away. He walked back hours later with a bag of food and train tickets to New York City.

  He paid for our passage back to Dresden the same way he afforded the ones to America—through the kindness of relatives. The year was 1934, and President Hindenburg had just died. We had no idea the power that Adolf Hitler would gather over the next four years. My grandparents welcomed us back to their home, where my father set up his practice. What could I do but join them? A seventeen-year-old immigrant, I had nothing but dirt in my pockets, no way to make a life, except with my hands. My father began to teach at university, and it paid my tuition to medical school.

  We had no idea the consequences of our decision. Indeed, I fought conscription into the Wehrmacht. My degree allowed me the luxury of postponing my enlistment. I know now that the SS watched our movements and waited for my graduation as a part of their purposes. Most definitely, none of my family joined the Nazi party, which in the end, became our demise. It’s an event I still cannot bear to recollect without wanting to wail. Esther, in truth, if I had the means, I would have secreted us all on an early transport out of Germany, back to Iowa, and would have gladly joined up with the GIs against the tyranny of Hitler.

  To be pressed into a life where every breath is as if you are inhaling poisonous gasses…this is what it is like to betray yourself. Every day I served the fuhrer, the poison crept through me, until I felt charred, even hollow inside. But, I had also taken an oath to save lives and this I did. The night I sat beside your friend Linus, talking to him of home, I somehow found myself again.

  Then, like a gift I met you. You were the pieces of light that sprinkled from the heavens into my dark life. I breathed again fresh air with your every letter. Every note from you reminded me of the life I saw again on my landscape. Indeed, I dream that this war will end, and that I will be released into the freedoms I fought against. Stupidly, I even began to wonder if I might persuade you to wait outside these rickety gates. Clearly the hallucinations of a man easily detoured from his realities.

  Now I find myself suffocating, once again, poison in my throat.

  Esther, can you possibly forgive me? I can offer you nothing but my deepest respect for your kindness. And while I would understand if you returned this letter without opening it, my hope is that you have read it, and that you might see more of me than you did.

  That you might, in fact, forebear to offer me a second chance.

  You were more lovely than my feeble imagination, yet even now, the image of your pain makes me ache.

  Please, Esther.

  Peter

  Esther had turned into her sister, Hedy. No, she’d never be as beautiful as Hedy, with her blond hair, those siren lips, the voice and moves that could turn a man—too many men—to butter.

  No, she had none of the qualities that might draw men to her—but somehow, she managed to lure men—the wrong men. Or perhaps Esther
had simply—always been—the wrong woman.

  What kind of woman gave her heart away for a smile across the dance floor, for a few sugar words scripted on paper? What kind of woman allowed herself to be cajoled into the backseat of a car, who handed herself over without a moment’s pause?

  Are you sure?

  She’d barely spoken, but she remembered nodding in the soft folds of the back seat.

  And no one had forced her onto that bus to Fort McCoy, had they?

  She sat on the roof of the hospital, Peter’s letter folded in her hand under the glitter of night, the stars cruel in their scrutiny. A thousand eyes to watch her read his words, over and over, although she’d long ago memorized them.

  Never did I intend to hurt you.

  I know now what a cruel, desperate sap I was to continue to write to you.

  Please, Esther, can you forgive me?

  Please, Esther.

  She bit the inside of her lip. Is this what Hedy’s boyfriend, the Greek shyster who had stolen her from her family, whispered to her when he soured her from Iowa farm girl into a floozy, singing in the gin joints of Chicago? Please, Hedy.

  Clearly, yes, she’d turned out just like her sister. Possessed the same foolish heart, so easily bartered for words of affection.

  Please, Esther.

  No. She folded the letter in half, then again.

  No, she would not hear his desperation. Would not imagine him standing next to the gate in the hot sun, waiting for her to return.

  Would not hear his voice, a wretched echo in her head. Esther!

  No.

  She ripped the letter into tiny squares and tossed it out into the wind. It scattered into the sky, melting into the stars, lost on the breeze. Good-bye, Peter Hess.

  She took a breath of cool, summer air, tinged with pine, the tang of cut grass. She missed the prairie smells—the husky wheat, earthy hint of angus lounging in the field, the river’s brisk freshness.