“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
“Let’s just eat and call it a night.”
“I was talking,” Charlotte says.
“I just said I don’t want to hear it,” Blake tells her.
“You’re right,” says his sister. “I shouldn’t’ve come.”
“Oh, now don’t start that.”
She sits with tears running down her face, and yet Julia, gazing at her, receives the unwanted suspicion that there’s something false about it all.
Charlotte sputters, “This is really it, this time, with Brian.”
Blake says nothing.
“I have a headache,” Julia manages. “I think I’ll go back to the room.”
“You know when we came though LA that time,” Charlotte says, “and he had all those meetings he had to go to? Christian ministries?”
Blake nods.
“He was seeing a woman. Spending all that so-called meeting time with her.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“Really. Well, I was. And he’s not seeing her now. That was over a long time ago. He’s seeing someone completely else now.”
Julia says, “I really do have this headache. Do you two mind?”
Charlotte appears not to have heard. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?” she says to Blake. “He’s been seeing these—other—these—these—he’s been keeping relationships with other women the whole time we’ve been married.”
“From the beginning?”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Julia stands.
“Hey, don’t go yet,” Blake says. “I thought we’d go down and sit on the pier. Just the—” He glances at Charlotte. “Just the two of us, in a little bit. Please, Julia.”
“The woman has a headache,” Charlotte says. “Let her go. Give her some room.”
“You two need to talk.” Julia reaches for her purse.
“Go down to the pier and wait?” says her husband. “Or stay up in the room and I’ll come get you? Please?”
“Don’t be absurd,” says Charlotte, and then turns to Julia. “Go on to your room and get some sleep if you can.”
Julia stares for a few seconds. “I’m going to the pier.” It’s an announcement, to both of them.
—
THE STREET IS NOT as crowded. The band’s still playing. She walks down to the water, and along the sand to the pier. Light plays across the columns of the museum in the distance, and the paleness where the moon’s behind the clouds shows on the surface of the bay. The moored boats move and bob gently. She goes up the little sand hill to the path and out onto the pier. It seems suddenly very important that she find the angle where the streetlamp gives you the hotel as the Macabre. For some reason she can’t find it. She tries going farther along, past the kiosk and the little booths where the vendors are selling souvenirs. She comes along very slowly, one hand on the wooden rail, studying the big lit sign and the lamps along the street. It just isn’t there. She sits down on what she thinks is the bench where she and Blake sat earlier. But either the bench has been moved, or it’s the wrong one. Perhaps it’s the next bench? But a couple’s sitting there necking, with food and drink containers next to them.
She stays where she is, not looking over, hearing the sighs and wanting to tell them for Christ’s sake to remember where they are; and then, strangely, feeling the impulse to tell them about the optical illusion that makes for the Hotel Macabre. It’s ridiculous. This day, with its disappointment and the revelations about Blake’s father and his pistol, the thoughts about her other marriage, those people. Poor Kenneth Broley, pulling the plastic over his head. That gentle, worried, harried presence, with his quiet consideration of her and his dignity in the face of such constant hectoring. His kind smile, and her tender feelings for him.
The couple on the next bench moan into each other’s mouths. She keeps her gaze fixed on the darkness and the water beyond the cove.
So Charlotte actually absorbed beatings to shield Blake from the casual brutality of their father. Julia has known this since the first days with him. But it’s also true that the story about being shot at was described, with great harrowing detail, in Mozart’s Ghost—except that in the book, it’s a boy who’s being chased. Julia feels oddly that she’s been made privy to something her sister-in-law has taken pains to disguise. Though there’s also an element of doubt in it, as though she’s caught the other woman in a lie. Her memory of reading the passage is very clear because in fact that stopped her from finishing—it’s the story of a little boy with great musical gifts, suffering at the hands of a brutal, aggressively atheist father who hates him because he can sing like his dead mother. The mother died having him. The boy believes in a faraway place called “the outermost world,” which he keeps as a secret. In the nights, he’s visited from there by a spirit, mysterious and frightening at first, but slowly revealed as that of his mother, who has prevailed upon the long-dead composer to help with the boy’s musical training. Mozart appears to him and gives him piano lessons on a ghost piano.
People talked about the funny scenes with the boy trying to teach Mozart to speak 1990s teenager English, and they were moved by the depiction of the boy developing an inexplicably brilliant style. They believed Charlotte’s portrayal of his triumphant entry into the music world, the prizes he wins and the money. And of course people liked it that, as the novel ends, all these victories placate the bitter old man. Julia knows these elements of the story because of the talk around it, but the scene of the man chasing the boy in the woods and shooting at him made her put the book down.
Thinking of Charlotte, the little girl running among trees, seeking protection in them, while the flash and crack of the pistol followed, she begins to cry. She’s sad for everyone, and feels unkind, more like Eunice every day, hectoring Blake about his sister and being uncharitable toward her, with Asperger’s or whatever it is, while carrying the terrible frights of a bad childhood. She wants to go home. It’s her honeymoon and she’s blue and low and she feels guilty and she wants to go home.
“Hey,” the man on the bench with his girlfriend says. “Take it somewhere else.”
Before she can stop herself, Julia, feeling a rush at her chest and along her arms, says, “Why don’t you take yours somewhere else, asshole. Get a room.”
Before they can respond, she gets up and walks over to the kiosk and orders a beer. She stands at the railing to drink it, and there again is the lamp post with its curved end like the wing of the letter r. The Hotel Macabre. She lifts her cup of beer and says, “Here’s to the Hotel Macabre.” Then she goes back past the couple, and on toward the beach, feeling strangely lighter, as if something has been lifted from her shoulders. And here’s Blake coming toward her.
“I got her calmed down,” he says. “She went to her room.”
Julia walks up and puts her arms around his neck. “I’m sorry,” she says. “For all of it.”
“Nothing to be sorry for.”
“Do you think it’s—is she—did he really—I mean she wrote it in the novel—”
“You want to know if she’s lying.”
“No.”
“Sure you do. So do I. And I don’t know. She could be. But she did put herself between me and the son of a bitch. I know that because I was there for that.”
“Let’s go out to the very end of the pier and sit for a while. Just us. And then go back to the room and make love. Do you want a beer?”
“I had some of her wine.”
“She’s gonna live with us for a while, isn’t she.”
“I don’t know. There’s—there’s really nowhere for her to go until she gets the separation finalized and some money from the bastard.”
“Oh, Blake,” Julia says, “what’s gonna happen to us?”
She didn’t mean it the way it sounded, but he straightens a little and seems to gather himself. “We’re going to try to save money and
come back here and have a real honeymoon,” he says. “Right?”
STILL HERE, STILL THERE
I
They were both very old now, and at first neither of them expressed much interest in talking about the war. Robert Marson’s medals—Purple Heart, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Silver Star, from the fighting above Naples—were somewhere in the attic of the old house on Union Avenue in Memphis, where he had lived since 1963, and he didn’t want anybody crawling around up there looking for them. Eugene Schmidt’s Close Combat badge, earned on the Eastern Front in late 1943, had been discarded long ago. They had both raised families, had lived their separate lives, their children were grown and mostly gone or dead. Their wives were dead. They did not like the prospect of traveling.
But here they were, two surviving soldiers from opposite sides, in Washington, D.C., on this soft springlike July 3, 2016. The Washington Post and NPR had contributed to bringing them together again as part of Independence Day, a small ceremony for the benefit of what Schmidt’s grandson Hans called “the media,” in a tone Marson characterized to his eldest son as being very much like that of somebody speaking about a condition or an era: the flu or the Great Depression.
The young man, Hans Schmidt, was the one responsible for it all.
His mother had come to America when she was pregnant with him, and he had been raised in the house of his grandmother’s younger sister, Brigitte. He was studying communications and film at the University of Maryland and had been spending the spring as an intern at the Post. As part of his thesis project he had set up a reunion that he would film. When he mentioned this to an editor, and spoke about how his grandfather, deciding to surrender, had saved the life of a U.S. soldier near Monte Cassino seventy-two years ago, the editor looked up from his turkey sandwich and said, “Wait a minute. Tell me that again?”
The young man repeated it all.
“Your grandfather was a Nazi soldier?”
“He was a German soldier. He lives in Boston now. And the U.S. soldier he saved is also alive. In Memphis but originally he’s from here. From D.C. They’re both alive and well.”
The editor, whose name was Will Smalley, stared for a second, then picked up his napkin and wiped his mouth. “And the one saved the other.”
“Yeah. My grandfather. And the other one grew up here in D.C. They were even in touch for a while after the war. They became friendly.”
Smalley, a unibrowed dark man with bulging eyes and a continual odor of bay rum about his person, leaned back in his chair, smiling. “This’ll be quite a thing if you can bring it off.”
“I’ve already got it set up.”
“The Naz—sorry. The German lives in Boston now.”
“He’s my grandfather, and he was never a Nazi. His name is Eugene Schmidt. A Catholic. When he was a young man he was studying to be a librarian and wasn’t interested in politics. He never had any kind of anti-Semitism, either. He was a kid, you know. He’ll tell you about it. When he got a little older he thought it was a craziness that would go away. Then the talk and the speeches and the sewed-on stars. He went into the war like all the able-bodied men, and he fought in Russia first. Then he was in Italy, where he saved the life of Robert Marson. And yes, he lives with my mother and my grandmother’s sister Brigitte now, in Boston.”
“And you’re gonna bring him and the American together again.”
“Yes, sir. That’s the plan.”
Smalley grinned. “No waiting on this one, right?”
“In today’s world, sir, they could outlive us both.”
He looked out the window. “Yeah. Guess you got that right.” On the desk at his elbow was the current issue of a news magazine, with the cover listing names of the dead in the latest mass shooting. “Aren’t you a bit young to have a World War Two veteran for a grandfather?”
Hans Schmidt nodded, talking. “My grandmother and he met when he was in his fifties. He was fifty-nine when my mother was born. My grandmother was thirty-four. She saved his life, really. He was in bad shape, I guess. I grew up here, but my mother and great-aunt still speak German in the house.”
“And how old is he now?”
“Ninety-five.”
“Damn. And the U.S. soldier, Marson?”
“Ninety-nine.”
“Jesus.”
Hans Schmidt went on: “They actually kept in touch for a time after the war.”
The editor grinned. “You told me about this because you knew what I’d do, didn’t you?”
“What’re you going to do?”
He opened his cell phone. “I know somebody at NPR. I bet we can defray some of your expenses, son.”
Hans waited.
“How’d you come to this, anyway.”
“I found a couple of old cards from my grandfather to him, addressed to a place here, in D.C.—well, Arlington. That’s what gave me the idea. I mean at first I thought I’d see about talking to someone in his family. I located his eldest son, Patrick Marson, who lives here, in Arlington. And I found out the old man’s alive and living in Memphis. So I got in touch with him. I just spoke to him again this week.”
“And he can travel? They can travel?”
“My grandfather came over here from Ansbach about twelve years ago, after my grandmother passed away. He uses a wheelchair and a walker, but he can get around. Marson doesn’t even need a cane. They’ve both been hesitant about the whole thing, but they’re going to do it.”
The editor held up one hand and spoke into his cell. “Kaye, I think I’ve got something for you-all.”
II
The word friendship describing the two men was inaccurate: they had written back and forth a few times just after the war, and had even met again once, in 1964, when Marson traveled to Naples after the two decades. Eugene Schmidt spoke a fairly rudimentary English—his mother had lived in Leeds for several years as a girl—so they could talk without much difficulty. They drank a bottle of Barolo together, and Schmidt had several snifters of grappa. Alcohol was a problem for Eugene Schmidt at the time, and there was tension as the evening wore on. They parted with frosty politeness, and for some span after that there were widely spaced postcards—birth announcements, holiday wishes, even a wedding invitation. But this had lapsed until Hans had gotten in touch with them.
The original incident had been reported in the Post just after it happened, in 1944. “Sgt. Robert Marson, 27, Unlikely Rescue.”
A strong human-interest story even then: an American soldier, on recon patrol, wounded by a mortar round that killed the two men he was with. He saw them die and then got himself out of the ditch they had been in and walked a slow lurching mile in full sight of anyone on either side, bleeding, half blind, seeking some friendly ground, trying to go anywhere but where the mortar rounds were falling, too dazed and numb with shock to take cover. He had collapsed and was only half conscious when he saw the German soldier moving toward him, rifle in hand, all stealth. The American believed that this was his death—this that turned out to be his luckiest chance: a savior from the other side. Because the German, weary, sick of the war, and beginning to see that he did not even want his own country to win, put down his rifle, took the other’s wrist, pulling him to his feet, and, with the arm held over his neck, got him out of the line of fire, to the American lines, and surrendered. Apparently neither man spoke during this. It was only when the German surrendered that Marson heard his voice, repeating as if it were a chant, in heavily accented English, “I hef hed enough.”
Marson had survived Palermo, Salerno, and Anzio, and the savage attrition around Monte Cassino, and the Liri and Rapido Valleys. He thought his prayers had failed at last, that it was God’s will and this was his last wound.
In the years just after his return home, telling others the story, he spoke of the enormous sense of peace that came over him when, opening his eyes briefly out of the swoon, he saw the enemy coming near and understood that this would be his death. In the following ten or twelve years, whe
never he had dreams about that day, even knowing the happy outcome, he still woke shaking, in a sweat.
It was all so long ago, now. And it was still, in its way, confusing.
His wife, Helen, had saved the clipping for their children: two daughters—the elder was gone, in a terrible car crash in 1974, when he was fifty-seven—and three sons. Helen was gone, too. Patrick, the eldest of his grown sons, was the only one who lived near enough to see once in a while. The other offspring were in Oregon and Kyoto, Japan. The remaining daughter, Noreen, taught English in an American school in Japan. The two younger sons ran a bike–and–Jet Ski–rental shop in Cannon Beach, Oregon, where they lived together in a kind of boathouse on the water.
He visited the boys once, on his ninetieth birthday. He took a first-class flight to Portland, where they met him. He wanted to show them that he could still get around on his own. And if he could do it, take the trouble to visit, so could they. But they stayed where they were. They did not get along with him well enough to visit. He had grown cantankerous. You tended to, over time. You had aches and trouble sleeping and memories that hurt, even when they were good memories—maybe especially when the memories were good. It was not for sissies, this life. He had said it many times. You did not get old being any kind of sissy. He had seen and been through very many awful things, and grief was the weather all the time, even as you were happy to see the sun rise in the morning.
He had talked about this some with Schmidt’s grandson, and what a surprise that Schmidt was still living. All the years. He told the boy, “I have outgrown my own life.” He meant it as a joke. He could joke. Helen was gone thirty-one years—thirty-one years this August. Barbara, the eldest child, forty-two years ago. The little girl in the picture he carried in the cigarette tin, in Italy. Seventy years, seventy years. And she only got to be thirty-one. There were her two children. His second daughter, Noreen, had five. They had, every one of them, gone off in all directions with time. Though Noreen had called to say she was flying home from Japan for a visit with her daughter Monica, in Atlantic City, and the two of them would make their way south to D.C. for the event.
Living in the Weather of the World Page 20
