The Last Innocent Hour
Page 55
She carried the child up the stairs without looking at her face, until she couldn’t stop herself. The little girl slept, her eyelids almost translucent, the dark down on her head soft as clouds. Sally stood in the middle of the hall waiting as the mother opened the door of her apartment, staring down at the child, studying her.
“Thanks, dear,” said the woman.
Sally looked up. The woman was impatient, eager to go inside. “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Sally and handed the baby over, her arms bereft as the weight and small bulk left them.
In Tim’s apartment, Sally hung up her coat and tunic, kicked her shoes off and went into the kitchen and poured herself a slug of vodka, something she hadn’t done in a couple of weeks. She knocked it back and waited for the liquor to hit her stomach.
It didn’t help and she fixed herself a vodka and tonic and sipped that standing at the kitchen sink. Instead of calming her, the alcohol made her more upset, and she started to cry.
“Shit,” she swore out loud and went to find a cigarette. By the time Tim got home, she was better. She had changed into her slacks and sweater and had half a chicken from the PX roasting in the little oven.
Tim came into the kitchen and kissed her neck while she stood peeling carrots. Just as though we were . . . but she didn’t finish the sentence. She smiled at him, trying to hide her depression, and nearly did so.
Until they were in bed and, for the first time, she pushed his hand away. He immediately sat up and turned the light on. Sally tried turning away from the light, but he bent his head to look at her. Then, still without talking, he got a cigarette and lit it.
“Want one?” he said. She shook her head and turned on her side, facing away from him, sick about shutting him out, but unable to explain. He smoked awhile in silence, then, for the first time, he talked about his wife.
“That was how it started with Nancy. Silence. We’d go to bed mad. Push each other gently away. So we just stopped talking. We lived in this little house—her dad had given us the down payment when we got married—it was nearly outside of town, nearly in the prairie. In front were oak trees, the road, a fence, and out the back we had a little bit of yard. But you could see past the fence, to the prairie rolling to the horizon. I used to get up in the middle of the night and stare out the kitchen window, till I felt that silence inside of the house, inside of me.
“Sally, I don’t mind you not wanting to make love every time I do. Well, yes, I do. But I’m grown up enough to accept it. But, don’t go mute on me, Sal.” Though he said it in an even voice, she knew him well enough to hear the hurt he kept covered up.
“I’m sorry,” she said, not turning. “You still miss her, don’t you?”
“No. I missed my life for a time, but now I just miss my boys.” She moved to him, laying her head on his chest, within the circle of his arms. He was quiet and she almost dozed off, her breathing rising and falling with his.
“What was it?” Tim asked. “You been thinking of him?”
“Oh, no, Timmy,” she said, opening her eyes. “Not at all. No.”
“Tell me, Sal.”
“It’s stupid. Sentimental nonsense.”
"Tell me.”
“I helped Sergeant What’s-his-name’s wife up the stairs. She gave me her baby to carry. I don’t know . . . I . . .” And she sat up against the headboard, pulling her knees up so she could lean her elbows on them, her hands over her face. “Stupid.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. The kid just lay there, all pink and with that damn smell babies have when they’re clean. Oh, shit.” She beat her fists against her knees.
“Oh. Oh, I see. Come here,” he said and sat up next to her, his arm around her. “I guess it’s a lot easier forgetting about Christian than your lost baby?”
“It felt so good. Her weight in my arms. The smell of her. I feel this sadness all the way to my middle, where my baby was killed. It’s the worst of it all. The worst, that I couldn’t protect her. I should have protected her. I should have.”
“What . . . what could you have done?”
“I don’t know.” She pulled away from him, rolling to the other side of the bed. “Fought back.”
“You did.”
“I lost and he killed her.”
“Might have killed you. And I, for one, would have hated that.”
“It’s not just her, it’s what that doctor told me.”
“Do you know for sure you can’t conceive?”
“He told me.”
“And all these years you’ve believed him? I don’t understand. You’re intelligent. Why didn’t you have a doctor in California check you out?”
“And what if he said yes?” she said, starting to cry again. “And then if by some miracle I could, who? Who would want me, after what’s happened to me? Christ, listen to me moan. All I’ve done for the past month is moan and cry. Do you have anything to drink? I want something—don’t, I’ll get it.” And she walked into the kitchen and poured a shot from the vodka bottle.
When Tim came after her, she was sitting on the floor in the dark, leaning against the cabinet. He sat down next to her and she leaned against him. The pain was there, but he made it better.
“I lost my kids, too, you know,” he said. “I know how you feel.”
“Yours are still alive somewhere. That must help.”
“Yeah. I do know they’re safe. Yesterday, I heard this man, a father talking about losing his kids in a selection at Auschwitz. You know, on the platform. Of course, he didn’t know they were going off to the gas chamber, but he soon realized. Yesterday, as he tried to tell me about it, he was tied up in knots, he was so angry, so frustrated, so full of hate. A lot of it at himself. And you know what I felt? Profound gratitude that my boys are safe in the States, that they were never in this kind of danger.”
“Do you hear from them?”
“No. They were so young and I thought a clean break would be easier for them.”
“Oh, Timmy.” She sighed, letting the sadness ripple through her, not fighting it. “What’s happened to us all?” She touched his face, gently pushing his hair off his forehead.
He laughed, sadly. “Thank God for sex,” he said. “Thank God for you.” And he kissed her, putting his hands under the pajama top she was wearing. His hands slid along her bare back, down her and around her, touching her breasts. He pushed up the pajama top and, bending down, put his mouth to her body, his mustache, his lips, his teeth making her quiver. She folded over him, her fingers in his soft hair, holding him against her, lifting his face to her mouth and tongue, wanting him in her everywhere. He lowered her to the floor and entered her and she wrapped her legs around him. They made love there until the floor grew too hard and the kitchen too cold and the night too long and they fled back to bed and comfort, to hold each other and sleep, the demons at bay once more.
CHAPTER 2
I DON’T MIND your going without me,” Tim said, pushing his dark glasses up his nose. “I just worry about your going into the Russian zone alone.”
“It’s in the middle of the day. I’ll wear my uniform, and besides, if I get into any trouble, you can contact Annaliese’s Russian colonel. What is his name? Sorin. He seems a fellow who likes to rescue women.” Sally had been invited to a party at Annaliese’s, to meet someone, who, Annaliese said, “knew something.”
Tim didn’t answer, just grunted. He and Sally were walking through the huge black market that flourished under the Brandenburg Gate.
Sally stopped to look at a nearly complete set of china displayed on an old sheet. She crouched to pick up a plate. “Wedgwood,” she said, turning the plate over to check the mark. “My mother had this color. I think. Or maybe it was the green.” The seller, a middle-aged man in a neat black coat and hat, smiled hopefully at her. Carefully, she put the plate down and stood up, brushing her gloved hands off. “I really hate this,” she said, walking away.
“What?” asked Tim, loping after her.
“It’s buying and selling,” said Tim, taking her elbow. “A basic human activity. So who else would be at this party?”
“I don’t know. Friends.”
“Not yours.”
Sally studied Tim, who, dressed in civvies and his uniform topcoat, looked so clean and healthy and very American. She turned toward a table of crystal and picked up a bowl.
“Look at this. How much?” she asked the seller in German, and shook her head when she heard the price. “Peanuts. Peanuts.”
“Why don’t you buy it?” asked Tim, taking the bowl from her hands. He held it in both of his and turned it from side to side. Sunlight hit the carving on the sides and turned into multicolored prisms, spilling onto the ground.
Sally shook her head. “I don’t want it. What would I do with it?” She wandered toward a display of used books. The seller had put a blanket on the ground and arranged his books, nearly all large German medical texts, on it. Sally bent down and opened the cover of the first book she saw, but quickly closed it, not wanting to look at colored illustrations of skin disorders.
She noticed a man looking at her, down at the end of the row of sellers. He was tall with light hair, and when he saw her notice him, quickly turned and disappeared into the crowd.
Sally stared after him, wanting to chase him, knowing it would be ludicrous to do so. She didn’t believe it could be him. But still, she suddenly felt the cold, in spite of the sunshine, and she turned to find Tim.
He had come up behind her and Sally, not noticing, turned right into him. “Whoa, girl,” laughed Tim, holding a bulky package, wrapped in brown paper, out of harm’s way.
“Sorry. What’s that?”
“It’s for you.” He thrust it at her.
“It’s the bowl.” She held it in both hands, feeling the weight of it. “Why?”
“’Cause I wanted to.”
“Timmy, that’s sweet, but what am I going to do with a crystal bowl that weighs fifteen pounds?”
“Use it as a door stop? Hell, I don’t know. I gave it to you. You figure it out. Save it for your vine-covered cottage.”
“Can you see me in a vine-covered cottage? Honestly, Tim. And now I have to lug it around.”
He smiled at her, a closemouthed smile, and said, with perfect, irritating patience, “Then I’ll carry it for you.” He took the package back. “C’mon, let’s go get a beer.”
THEY WENT TO the Basement Dive. Doug Finkelstein was standing at the bar talking to Willie, the bartender. A man was picking out a tune on an old upright at the other end of the bar. It took a moment before Sally identified the song he was trying to play as “Maresy Doats.”
“Hiya, Tim, old boy,” said Doug jovially, slapping Hastings on his shoulder. “Sally. Where’ve you two been? Come on and join me.”
“I’m going to sit down,” Sally said, still irritated about the bowl. Without waiting for the men, she sat down at a table. She really should just go home and be alone, she thought. Tim brought her a beer and she thanked him, trying for a pleasant expression.
“Think I’ll talk to Doug for a while,” he said.
“Fine,” she said to his back. She picked up the beer. So much for trying to be pleasant. He had left the bowl, clumsy in its paper wrappings, on the table, and she fingered the brown paper.
“Hey, Doug,” she called, “where did the old piano come from?”
“Did you know Sally played?” Tim asked Finkelstein.
“No, I didn’t. Say, Willie,” Doug called to the bartender, “where’d you dig up the piano? Sal, you ought to play us something.”
“I’m out of practice.”
“There’s nobody here,” Finkelstein said. “Please. Do you know any good stuff?”
“Good stuff?” she laughed, putting her mug down.
“Yeah. Chopin. Schubert. That good stuff.”
“I used to, but I haven’t played in years. Literally.”
“Well, Sal,” Tim said, “now’s the time to start.”
She dropped her eyes from him to her hands, aware of what he was saying, resenting a little his correct assessment. Music had been such an important, rich part of her life, a good part, and she had pushed it aside with everything else, making it part of the bad things that had happened to her. She stretched her hands in her lap and wondered if they remembered how to play. It would feel good to play. She stood up.
“You guys stay here.”
The man who had been playing, just fiddling around, really, got up as she approached. He was a lieutenant, young. “It’s all yours,” he said. “But watch the low E and F. They’re pretty dicey.”
“Thanks, Lieutenant, I will.” Sally sat down. There wasn’t a regular piano stool, just a bar chair, and it felt strange. She stretched her foot to the pedals, tried them, then sat still for a moment. The beat-up old instrument looked, she thought wryly, as though it had gone through the wars.
The worn ivory keys were rubbed bare to the wood through the middle register, but they felt good to her fingers. She tried a few chords. From a C to a D, back to C. The sound was tinny and she imagined that if she looked, she’d find the pads on most of the hammers as bare as the middle keys were.
Oh, well, hell, so what? And she started to play a Chopin nocturne. She stopped and started again. Her hands remembered, but were clumsy and unable to do what they used to do. It was frustrating, but she didn’t mind. Not really. She felt as though she had come home.
Tim came and stood next to the piano after a little while to ask if she’d like another beer. She shook her head, but smiled at him, not stopping or minding anymore that he had been so right about this. He touched her arm and went away.
When she finished, the men applauded.
“Thanks,” she said. “God, I’m so rusty.”
“It’s been a long time,” Tim said, grinning at her.
“Oh, don’t look so smug,” she teased him, then got up and joined the two men at their table. “He has this project,” she said to Doug. “He’s rehabilitating me. My own little denazification.”
Tim whistled. “Phew. Just trying to get some music into my life. Meanwhile, I think I’ll just move over here, out of range.”
“Coward,” she called, as he went off to the bathroom.
“You and him,” said Doug, nodding his head in the direction Hastings had gone. “You an item?”
“Yeah,” said Sally. “When he’s not playing doctor. Can’t you tell? I think I’m a project.”
“There are worse things to be. I mean, you look, you both look, a lot more relaxed. Nothing like a good lay. Whoops,” he said, his face turning red. “Sorry, Sal. I forget sometimes you’re not a guy.” And Sally smiled at him, a smile that started small and grew until she had to laugh, making Doug laugh with her.
“He buys me crystal,” she said, patting the paper-wrapped bowl. “Look at this, some poor bastard’s Waterford.”
“Well, he probably stole it from some Jew,” Doug said.
Sally stopped laughing.
“What?” he said. “I can’t joke about it? Listen, kiddo, if you can’t joke about it, you might as well go belly-up.”
“You’re probably right.” But she fell silent, thinking.
“Course I’m right. Anyway, I’m glad for the two of you. It’s nice, you know, that you found each other.”
“Nice? No, it’s more than that. I’m Tim’s project. Aren’t I, Tim,” she said to Hastings as he sat down again.
“Aren’t you what?”
“Your project.”
He smiled, tilting his head so that she couldn’t see his eyes behind his glasses. But he didn’t say anything and she thought maybe she had made him angry.
“WHY DO YOU say things like that?” he asked her when they got back to his apartment, after a silent car ride. She had said that maybe she would go
back to her own place, but he had taken her by her wrist and pulled her gently in his door.
“I don’t know,” she said, sulking. “Because it’s true. You do treat me like a patient.”
“I don’t have sex with my patients.”
“Is that all it is? Good, because I’m the perfect lay. I can’t get pregnant. . .”
“Probably can’t,” he put in.
“Never did in a year of screwing around. Anyway,” she continued, “I’m tough, so you don’t have to worry about breaking my heart. Actually, I don’t think I have one anymore.”
“Sally.”
“Well, isn’t that the way it is? You don’t have to love me, you can just take care of me like a good doctor and have sex with me without responsibility. I’m probably totally incapable of loving anyone.” She dropped her bag on the ground and fell onto the sofa, not looking at him. “You’re not the first one to figure that out. And, after all, a good lay’s a good lay.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Don’t talk like that. Why do you talk like that? How many guys told you that, Sally? How many?” He turned quickly away from her and, making his hand into a fist, hit his forehead. “Jesus, I can’t believe this. Look, I don’t care.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No, I don’t. Do you? Do you care about the women I’ve slept with?” He sat on the table in front of her.
“No.” She studied the arm of the sofa. “Yes. Just one.”
“Yeah, one, right. You got it.”
“Your wife,” she said sadly.
“Your husband,” he echoed.
She saw the truth in his face, the fear he had of the hold Christian still had over her, the hold she let him have.
“I was young,” she said.
“So was I.”
“Was she pretty?”
“Yes,” he said. “A brunette with big dark eyes and a great figure—big breasts, tiny waist. Small, came up to here on me.” He indicated on his shoulder, then sat down next to her on the sofa. They didn’t look at each other.
“Are you trying to make me jealous?” Sally asked.
“Yes,” he answered. “As jealous as I am.”