Casualties of War: The Advocate Trilgy

by Bill Mesce

  Never.

  *

  The program Harry had outlined for the next several days consisted of morning sessions in which first I and then Peter Ricks would relay the relevant points from the interviews we’d conducted in Wiltz. In the afternoons and evenings, Harry would try to elicit some response from Sisto – observation, commentary, corroboration, dispute; any kind of contribution – to the revelations of earlier in the day. During the debriefings we’d all sit together, but I was not to be a part of those later sessions. Again: confidentiality.

  The sequestration carried with it the air of suspicion and distrust, and though I kept reminding myself that a thorough sort like Harry was, no doubt, simply being prudent, I couldn’t quite shake the sense of umbrage. We had had occasion to trust each other with our lives in the past. After that, sharing a few trial secrets seemed almost inconsequential.

  That afternoon after our first morning session, at a postern in the rear wall I found la comtesse moving up and down the muddy paths of what I presumed had been a garden at one time; beds of tangled shrubs and withered flower stalks. She wore an old, stained mackintosh, muddy boots and heavy work gloves. She did not hesitate to kneel in the muddy ground, her thick, gloved fingers wrestling with the intertwined branches of the shrubs.

  “We meet again.”

  “Oui.” She did not look up from her labors.

  “This doesn’t seem to be gardening weather.”

  She reached into the pocket of her mackintosh and extracted a pair of rusty garden shears, began pruning some of the longer, less restrained bits of shrubbery. “This is to be ready for spring. Maybe not so much for the garden. It is for me.”

  “Some time alone.”

  “Oui.”

  “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

  “Non. S’il vous plait, it is fine. I do not talk so much with the soldiers. What is it to say? Sometime they talk to me like I am their mother.”

  I ventured closer by a few steps. “I’d offer to help, but…” I indicated my leg.

  “It is fine. I prefer. You are not the English, yes?” She pointed to her ear. “I can hear.”

  “Good God, nae! I’m a good Scotsman, thank you. A Scot. Scotland.”

  “Ah,” she said, finally understanding. “Good whisky, yes? Bad haggis. In Scotland I know Edinburgh, yes? Glasgow?”

  “Actually, my people were from Edinburgh way.” I nodded at some stalks that looked to have been trampled into the mud. “I don’t think these’ll be coming back.”

  She stood by me, looking at the crushed and overturned flower plantings. “Mais non. A favorite,” she said mournfully. “It is funny? To have a favorite? Just a flower, yes?”

  “One likes what one likes.”

  “You are to like the flower, too?”

  “My mother. She fancied them. We were not from Edinburgh proper, but a small village just outside. You wouldn’t know the name. And we were just outside that small village just outside of Edinburgh. We had a sheep farm. Not much of a place.”

  “I do not see you farming the sheep.”

  “I will always remember my father sitting on the front stair with his newspaper. It was a weekly and he would sit there each evening, from gloaming ‘till it grew too dark to see. He was not well–educated, you understand, and it would take him near a week to read it through, but read it through he would. I would see that paper, the stories and the pictures from all round the world. America, Europe, the Orient…and here we were with our little sheep paddock.”

  “You wanted to see.”

  “I wanted to be.”

  “Que?”

  “One of those light–footed lads flitting here and there about the great globe, being a part of the Great Adventure.”

  She tossed a pruned branch away, rose from where she’d been kneeling with a slight sigh. She looked about the garden, a resigned, hopeless look on her face, and dropped the shears back into her pocket. “This is far from your little sheep farm.”

  “Aye.”

  “Have you seen enough of the world?”

  “More than enough.”

  “Why do you not go home?”

  “The Americans have a saying: you can’t keep them on the farm once they’ve seen Paree.”

  She began walking toward a gazebo sitting at the nexus of the garden pathways. The cupola was holed, the paint dull and peeling, and the ivy that curled round the railing and the pillars was brittle and dead. She looked back toward me to see if I was following and only then I realized I’d been invited along. She sat on a bench on one side and I sat across from her, wondering if the rotting wood would hold beneath me.

  “It would never bother to me to sit here in the cold,” she said, her eyes wandering up through the splintered rafters framed in the holed cupola against the gray sky. “Yves could not understand. I would sit here with the chocolate. Sometime even when the snow come down.” Her eyes came back down to me. “You can go home but…” She searched for the English words: “Qu’est que c’est? It is always here, yes?” She tapped that high, regal forehead of hers. “You bring this home, and then it is not home. Comprenez?”

  “Aye. Oui.”

  “There is no one? You must have to be married sometime.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  She smiled. “The tongue, it is golden. You must speak the romance well.”

  “I was a rather glib young lad, I must say, and I could speak the speech that might capture the ear of a young, impressionable lass.”

  She chuckled. “You see? I do not understand all, but a young girl…”

  “Aye, but then, after a while, neither of you are young or impressionable.”

  She nodded. “It is different. You would be on your adventure, and she would wait. Then she would not wait, yes?”

  “Aye.”

  “Children.”

  “Non. Et vous?”

  “My daughter, she fall in love with a German. I do not know where now. My son…in 1941, the Boche take him away.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “They take him away. I am thinking he must be dead.” She said it quietly, almost without emotion. She was long past crying.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I know. And so do you.” She turned her face toward one of the towers of the chateau. “That boy. The one they keep. What did he do?”

  “They accuse him of disobeying orders.”

  “He is younger than my son. Do you know him?”

  “No. Comtesse, I am sorry you’ve been put out this way, having to host all these – “

  “‘Guests?’” She was joking. “I appreciate that you say this. And the other man who come with you, the older one.”

  “Lieutenant Colonel Voss.”

  “For you I feel it is real. Not like the young one.”

  “Captain Courie?”

  “As I say, I appreciate. Merci. But it does not change this, yes?” She looked to the chateau once again. “I wish it would fall. Then you would leave and so would I.”

  “You can always leave.”

  “It is here, I stay. I cannot explain. My name. The family. My responsibility. It is here, so I belong. Ah,” she shivered inside the mackintosh and stood, rubbing her arms. “Now I begin to feel the cold. Bon jour, Monsieur.”

  “Bon jour, Comtesse.”

  I stood in the crumbling gazebo and watched her wind back up the muddy paths, occasionally stooping to pull a lifeless stem from the ground and toss it away, before she disappeared through the postern. And then it was I who began to feel the cold.

  *

  Except for those few morning sessions requiring my presence, and evening mess when I would sit with Harry and Peter, or which we sometimes held with Dominick in his quarters, I saw very little of Harry between our return from Wiltz and the trial. But there was one evening we did have together which I have always remembered fondly.

  This was, as I recall, not more than a day or two before the witnesses and jury pool wer
e to arrive. Harry, Peter and I took dinner in the main dining hall. Wanting “his team” (as he enjoyed calling us) fresh for the final sprint into the trial proper, Harry had decreed this to be an evening of rest and recuperation. There would be no evening session with Dominick (“I think the kid can use the break, too” he reported to us). We followed dinner by pulling our chairs round one of the dining hall fireplaces and Peter Ricks scrounged up the few dregs left of Courie’s schnapps.

  It began as a typical quiet–night–in–the–barracks session of tale–telling and reverie, but later in the evening, as the chateau grew quiet, Joe Ryan sneaked into the room. Always one to be concerned about the appearance of impropriety (actual impropriety being another affair altogether), Ryan had been sure to wait until it had seemed Courie and Alth had retired to their own quarters for the evening before he’d come down to join us (“It would be like the bride getting caught with the groom before the wedding,” he explained).

  Fueled by the remainder of the schnapps and a bottle of scotch Ryan had managed to procure, the evening took on a particularly risible quality with Harry Voss and Joe Ryan the featured performers. That night I heard their stories of home: of sundry friends and relatives, of the various neighborhood characters – Apple Mary; Philip Meyer, the Jewish shopkeep who spoke Italian like a Catania native; the Pennicho family and the throat–burning homemade wine they bottled in their meat shop cellar; Signor Giordano, the quiet old widower in Harry’s tenement who was always impeccably dressed in vest and celluloid collar, but appeared with mandolin in hand, a voice like an angel and a repertoire of boisterous Old Country songs at the slightest hint of a festive occasion. The stories went on into the night, each a thread adding to what I came to view as a single, large tapestry with a cast – as they say in the cine – of thousands. I heard about “Ol’ man Cappetti’s Chevy he had to start by banging on the starter with a baseball bat,” games of “stickball” played on the cobble streets, and the vicious canine Sebastian, aka Tripod, who evidently made nipping at various body parts of Joe Ryan a life’s avocation. I heard of street festivals for this saint and that, the streets perfumed with the smells of the street vendors’ wares: zeppoles, sausage and peppers, mogiadelle and the enormous blocks of torrone, a hard, glazed candy the neighborhood urchins lusted after and which had to be apportioned with an axe. Like Dominick Sisto, they savored memories of Apple Mary’s sweet, sweet candied apples; they would save up their pennies for the occasional treat of a canoli from one of the neighborhood pasticerria, they had loitered outside such posh restaurants as the Vesuvius and Vittorio Castle, and imagined what it would be like to dine at the elbow of Joe DiMaggio, Jack Dempsey, or any of the other celebrities who came to partake of the more savory side of the Newark’s North Ward.

  They had told the stories often enough – to others, to themselves – to know how to tell them to best effect. Their respective styles – wild exaggeration by Ryan, equally comic understatement by Harry – played off each other like a grand piano and delicate viola in an exquisitely executed duet.

  But it was more than simple entertainment that made the evening memorable. It was a window – though perhaps only a distorted, funhouse glass – into their lives. Their families. Who they loved. How they lived. They told the stories not just to amuse, but as a way of visiting what they had left what seemed so long ago, and had longed for ever since. Like Dominick Sisto, it was a love of a time as much as a place – a time I think they suspected had passed irretrievably. I’ve seen most quarters of the world worth visiting. I’ve witnessed the kings and criminals of most nations of note. But I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a visit as much as that verbal journey through the Italian neighborhoods of Newark upon which I was escorted by Joe Ryan and my friend Harry Voss.

  But there was something else that gave the evening an especially piquant meaning to me; a reason I’ve held it so close all this time. “The life of every man is a diary,” wrote a more talented Scots scrivener than I, Sir James Matthew Barrie, “in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he hoped to make it.” That night, comparing my volume not only with what I’d hope to make of it, but with what these other two men had etched in theirs…that was my humblest hour.

  I had only ever known them as the men they were in uniform: Harry Voss, the plodding meticulous, dogged legal swot; Joe Ryan, the supercilious, glad–handing apparatchik. But on this “trip” home, Ryan was more the impish prankster and the real charm under all that facile politicking – for once – shone through. And Harry was his sometimes unwilling and other times unwitting accomplice, and often an unsuspecting victim. But it was all inflicted without real malice, and suffered without true vindictiveness. I envied them that friendship outside of the war, outside of the profession of the law. I envied them their Apple Marys and three–legged dogs and their families, pets, priests, teachers, shopkeeps they knew by name, the street corners where they’d lingered about. I envied them the years that added up to lives.

  I had still been a teenager when I’d left the farm and it was not much longer after that when I’d fibbed and cajoled my way into my first job and it was not a few more years before I was here and there about the Isles for the paper, and then a few more years and it was the Continent, the Americas, the Orient. I could dazzle my company that evening, amaze them with tales of the exotic and the bizarre and that was my contribution to the evening. But I could provide no counterparts to their tales of home. I had no colorful tales of family, of local characters, of…anything human.

  And I suddenly understood my failure with Cathryn; my own, gnawing dissatisfaction with myself. As fleet of foot as I’d been, meeting and marrying her could be considered no more than a happy accident. Had I ever alit home longer than a few weeks at a time we could have built that accident into the kind of history I’d heard related that night. But I’d so dedicated my life to covering the lives of others I’d rather neglected to live one of my own. I realized, then, it was not my absences that had killed it between Cathryn and me; it was the endless waiting to begin, and the eventual realization it would not happen.

  So here I was, along with chronological peers like Harry and Joe Ryan, all of us entering into our respective Third Acts. I could point to my headlines and bylines as my accomplishment. I had, on more than one occasion, contributed something to the enlightenment, edification, and betterment of the species in my small way. They, on the other hand, only had their memories candied apples and three–legged beasts. But it was I who felt empty.

  The hour turned late, and Harry and Ryan and Peter Ricks retired. For some time I sat alone by the dying fire with the last of Joe Ryan’s bottle.

  At the end of the world, that sole liquor–sodden crippled survivor mourns…not for the world.

  For himself.

  *

  One of the reasons that evening stands out so distinctly – I can hear their voices, still, giddy with the liquor but as clear as their living remembrances, see Harry’s delicious rolling of the eyes over yet another distorted rendering by Ryan – was what came after; a coda provided by Dominick Sisto

  I found him as I had most nights atop the castle walls. But this particular night he was wrapped in quietude. I respected his silence, shared it with him as we stood together, watching la comtesse gallop out into the dark woods.

  “You married?”

  It was so sudden, I hadn’t quite caught it. Sisto repeated the question.

  “Divorced.”

  “Kids?”

  “Nae.”

  “I didn’t get a lot of time with my dad. Always working. Lotta times he wasn’t even home when we went to bed. Even when he was there…” A sigh, a shrug. “Maybe he was just too damn tired. The signor, he got to work out of his place a lot. He was always messin’ with papers on his kitchen table, or if he was doin’ something for somebody in the neighborhood, it was easier for them to come by then to go downtown where his office was.
He was around a lot more, so I used to go hang around his place a lot. ‘Do me a favor, Dominick, play with my kids and keep ‘em outta my hair, I gotta do this thing here.’ But he would take time with ‘em. With me. Sometimes I’d be down there and nothin’ was goin’ on and him and the signora, they’d be playing cards. They were real fiends for gin. The radio’d be on, I’d be horsin’ around with his boys, and the two of them’d be playin’ on the kitchen table. They were…” He was uncomfortable with the word. “I don’t want to sound all goofy or anything, but you had to see ‘em together. They were sweet. They were like a coupla kids. It wasn’t like that up in my place. There were nights I don’t think my mom and dad said boo to each other. But the signor and his lady…I would say to myself, ‘This is how I want it. When I get married, I want it like this.’”

  His eyes probed the night sky, as if trying to pick out particular stars through the scudding clouds. “There was this girl. Nice kid. Stella Fumante. I think I had a thing for her ever since I was, I dunno, eleven. They were having the feast of Saint Michael and they would dress up these little girls as angels and hang them by ropes from the fire escapes like they were flying around over the crowd when the priests brought the statue of Saint Michael down the street. I was eleven and I saw her in that white robe and I thought she was the most…” He looked at me and smiled. “You know.”

  “Aye.”

  “But you’re eleven so instead of saying, ‘I like you,’ you bean her with a zeppole.”

  I laughed.

  “Then, later, when we got older, we dated a couple of times. I brought her up to see Signor Roosk ‘cause that seemed more right than bringin’ her up to see my folks. The last leave before I shipped out, she came down to the station, gimme a kiss, and I just went all moony.” A frown, now.”Then you wind up in a Naples whore house and it’s like none of that stuff at home ever happened; you just want to make sure you don’t die with your cherry.” He looked to me for a judgment. “That really stinks, doesn’t it? I mean – “, a salvaging, scampish grin, “– what would Mama Sisto say about that?”