“This should be yours,” Bunny said, handing me the folder, which she had carefully reorganized while I daydreamed.
“I just want Robbie’s letter. I’m tired of looking at photos.”
“I understand what you mean, dear.”
“I’m sure you do.”
22
BUNNY
He could still be alive,” I said. “He could be out there, an old man. He could’ve had an entire life. A happy life.”
Wonder crept out of the edges of Ceola’s mouth and the soft wrinkles in her cheeks and the corners of her dark eyes. It spread across her face, a wave of emotion, loosening her expression, releasing the tense muscles in her forehead. She grew younger, gentler, the feisty girl-detective coming out to play, the Blue Hearts Club back in action, the impertinence, the frustration. I saw her following Jay into the woods, blithely ignoring the branches scraping her arms or catching in her hair. I saw her combing the “scene of the crime” for clues, her Mary Janes rooting around in the dust and dry weeds. I saw her looking intently at Jay, the mingling of a schoolgirl’s crush and a sister’s grief. I saw her, up on the Ferris wheel that beautiful August day, Jay leaning toward her, kissing her. I saw every minute of her sad vigilance. I saw her in the wrecked station wagon, distraught, angry, her face bloody, her body bruised. I again met her accusing gaze.
“You’re a murderer,” she’d said, and I’d believed her for fifty-five years. It was the story of my life. But that had changed—I had been released—and as I sat beside her, I watched as the story changed for her. I certainly wasn’t going to do anything to stop it.
While I was watching her dream about her brother’s life, one of my mother’s favorite Kipling poems came to mind, one I had chosen to memorize years ago in school. It begins:
Once on a time, the ancient legends tell,
Truth, rising from the bottom of her well,
Looked on the world, but, hearing how it lied,
Returned to her seclusion horrified …
What I saw in those photographs, what I read in Jay’s note and Robbie’s letter, and what had been encrypted in the crossword made me, like Truth, want to return to the well.
It came as a slow revelation. It began with the photo of Terry Trober that Jay had dodged, a version he’d never shown either of us. The “veil” had been removed, and although the face was still difficult to see, it stirred a deep, almost subconscious curiosity in me. I felt as though I had just seen something of great significance but didn’t have the faculties to understand it, like seeing a ghost, which was why I turned it over and out of Ceola’s sight.
In Robbie’s letter, he spoke of an Australian soldier who talked about “leaving the Navy” and “hopping a cargo ship.” The discovery of the hidden message—“Leaving war. Will find u. Love u”—solidified it for me: There was no Australian soldier. Robbie was talking about himself. The man in the photo wasn’t Terry Trober. There was no Terry Trober. In my quick once-over of the undoctored image, I had seen what I wouldn’t have otherwise. At times, the mind works that way. If it studies something too hard, it only follows the old patterns of thought, like a needle retracing grooves in a record. But a momentary glance can reveal uncharted territory, a flash of insight. I knew in an instant it was Robbie’s face, contorted and empty of life, underneath that tangled blond wig.
He hadn’t merely escaped. He had made it to England. He had come for Jay. However, he wasn’t the innocent young man who read detective magazines to his kid sister anymore. What he had seen, what he had done, like Jay in the Ardennes, had made him into something altogether different. He was a man without a country, without a name, and he had to be bold and creative, perhaps even courageous, to survive. He had to reinvent himself, write a new fiction, and quickly too.
Perhaps—and only perhaps, for I’ll never know the absolute truth—when Jay and Robbie found each other again, Jay had been frightened by his transformation. The Robbie he knew—the sweet, shy boy who dove into Culler’s Lake with him, who accepted him and loved him—had been vanquished by the war. The story he’d told Ceola was as close to the truth as he could tell her without completely falling apart, without risking his own sanity. He couldn’t tell her he had murdered the man he loved, because in his mind the man he loved had already been murdered by the war. There had been no way to explain it. The story he’d told her was for him only insomuch as it could also be for her. He had wanted to confess, but more than that, he had wanted to preserve Ceola’s memory of her brother. Like Truth in Kipling’s poem, Jay had returned to his subterranean world and allowed artifice to reign on the surface.
So as I witnessed Ceola bloom with hope, I wanted her to believe the story she was already writing in her head, the story of Robbie’s parallel life. I wanted her to take it with her, to be a light for her. For that reason, I’ll never publish a word of this as long as she is living, perhaps as long as either of us is living. It would be right for it to be Kevin’s inheritance, his choice.
I must confess, after we said our good-byes and made our promises to stay in touch, I doubted myself and, for a few minutes, began to believe in her version of the story. Had I been too sober, too pessimistic? I wasn’t sure anymore. Ceola had referred to Terry as Robbie’s doppelgänger. Perhaps Terry did look just like Robbie. As I flipped through the photographs, the veil lifted and fell, lifted and fell, Robbie’s face dodging and burning in my mind, refusing to materialize and proclaim with certainty either, “I am Robbie Bliss!” or, “I am Terry Trober!” And then, I thought about the name Trober, and I laughed. Out loud, I think. It’s Robert, but with the T glued on the front, inverted.
Truth had emerged again from her well.
I gathered the photographs together and dropped them on the fire. I’d seen what I needed to see—and so had Ceola. After all, hers was the better story.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As my novel begins with the gorgeous and unsettling photograph of Lily Vellum, so I begin by thanking the talented photographer Nic Persinger, who took it with a period Speed Graphic camera. I’m also grateful to Julianna Corby—Nic’s supremely talented partner-in-life (and patient good sport)—for modeling for the photo. I can report: She is very much alive.
For the sacrifice of time, brainpower, and expertise, I’m deeply appreciative of everyone who read early versions of this novel, either in part or in whole, and provided me with feedback: Rebecca Borden, Matthew Ferrence, Janis Goodman, Debbi Hamrick, Jeni Hankins, Maya Lang, Tara Laskowski, Bernadette Murphy McConville, Frances McMillan, Valerie Morehouse, Jessica Hendry Nelson, and Matt Norman. In particular, I want to thank Greg Hankins, who passed away in 2016, for his enthusiastic support for me as an writer and his astute thoughts about early drafts of this book.
It’s clear to me that this book—and everything else I’ve written—couldn’t have been possible without the great teachers in my life. In particular, I’m thankful to Katherine V. Forrest, who read its first chapters and set me in the direction of making it a better book. I’m also thankful to Thomas Mallon and Luís Alberto Urrea for their guiding comments on my work and their willingness to support my career. I’m also grateful to Sara Blair, who first sparked my interest in photography and its undeniable connection to the evolution of literature through the twentieth century.
I’m grateful to Lambda Literary, especially Tony Valenzuela and William Johnson at the helm, for providing a space for LGBTQ writers to find each other and learn from one another and, of course, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities for their financial support and their belief in this project. Bread Loaf—both the School of English and the Writers’ Conference—have had an immeasurable impact of me as a writer. The number of amazing and gifted teachers who have walked the halls of its yellow clapboard buildings is staggering. I’m indebted to the residencies at VCCA, VSC, and the Ragdale Foundation for providing space and time to breathe, think, and create. Finally, I’m thankful to the incredible educators, administrators, and students at Flint Hil
l, who offered me encouragement and saw my writing life as benefit to, not a distraction from, my role as a teacher.
To the entire Pegasus team, thank you for believing in this book, especially my brilliant editor, Katie McGuire, for her keen editorial eye and her intern Angelina Fay for initially reading and advocating for the book. Without my marvelous agent, Annie Bomke, Dodging and Burning wouldn’t be what it is today. Thank you, Annie, for your candor and care, your energizing feedback, and your tireless championing of the manuscript.
To my family, you have always encouraged me to use my good sense, maintain a healthy skepticism about the world, and above all persevere, which have time and again, both in life and in my literary pursuits, guided me well. For that, I’m grateful.
To Jeff—my husband, my best friend, and my chief advocate—thank you for your unyielding belief in me and my writing, for urging me to keep writing and keep fighting for this novel.
NOTES
This book is a work of fiction molded into a specific historical moment, the mid-1940s—a time of great turmoil and bloodshed abroad and nationalistic unity at home. A time during which being gay wasn’t socially tolerated or legally protected. A time during which LGBTQ people—even those who served in the armed forces—found it necessary to conceal their sexual identities or fear persecution. For those reasons, the rich gay culture of the 1940s was rarely recorded for posterity. To re-create this world, I spent time with the following books: James Lord’s My Queer War, Robert Peter’s For You, Lili Marlene: A Memoir of World War II, and Jeb Alexander’s Jeb and Dash: A Diary of Gay Life, 1918–1945. In the absence of historical record, I used my instincts as a fiction writer to give verisimilitude to this complex and remarkable underground community.
The logistics and politics of World War II, on the other hand, have been painstakingly (and overwhelmingly) documented. My focus, however, wasn’t so much the reams of documentation but the brave documentarians—the war photographers, whose images have shaped and challenged our understanding of war. For that research, I looked to Peter Maslowski’s Armed with Cameras: The American Military Photographers of World War II, Evan Bachner’s Men of WW II: Fighting Men at Ease, Charles Eugene Sumners’s Darkness Visible: Memoir of a World War II Combat Photographer, and Ray E. Boomhower’s One Shot: The World War II Photography of John A. Bushemi.
Like my characters, all the places in this book are inventions, but still they are based on the world I know. Royal Oak, Virginia, in particular, is inspired by my hometown of Marion, Virginia, a place of great natural beauty, rich history, and extraordinary people, a place that I’ll always be at once departing from and returning to, the very definition of home. Washington, DC, my other home, is a place that continues to unfold in front of me, always offering new historical and cultural layers, a place where I feel at once myself and an outsider. Also, I think, the definition of home. For the other places in this novel that I don’t call home—London and the Ardennes in the 1940s—I hope, if I’ve not managed to get them exactly right, I’ve captured their spirit. The documentation of war, after all, consists of at least as much opinion as it does fact.
Finally, there are a few works that have deeply influenced my interest in the problematic ways that photos represent or misrepresent reality: Susan Sontag’s On Photography and Errol Morris’s Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, and Weegee’s photography; his images will never cease to compel me and repel me.
The following are the sources I consulted while writing the novel, many of which I mentioned previously, all of which were so helpful to me:
Alexander, Jeb, ed. Jeb and Dash: A Diary of Gay Life, 1918–1945. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994. Print.
Bachner, Evan. Men of WWII: Fighting Men at Ease. New York: Abrams, 2007. Print.
Boomhower, Ray E. One Shot: The World War II Photography of John A. Bushemi. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 2004. Print.
Cole, Hugh M. The Ardennes: The Battle of the Bulge. Old Saybrook, CT: Konecky & Konecky, 1965. Print.
Coplans, John. Weegee’s New York: Photographs 1935–1960. Cologne, Germany: Schirmer/Mosel, 2006. Print.
Heimann, Jim. All-American Ads of the 40s. Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 2003. Print.
Lord, James. My Queer War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Print.
Maslowski, Peter. Armed with Cameras: The American Military Photographers of World War II. New York: Free Press, 1993. Print.
Morris, Errol. Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography. New York: Penguin Group, 2014. Print.
Peters, Robert. For You, Lili Marlene: A Memoir of World War II. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1995. Print.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador, 2010. Print.
Sumners, Charles Eugene. Darkness Visible: Memoir of a World War II Combat Photographer. Ann Sumners, ed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002. Print.
“They Also Serve …” The US Army in the British Midlands during World War II. Web. July 18, 2017.
“Welcome to the WW2 US Medical Research Centre.” WW2 US Medical Research Centre. Web. July 18, 2017.
The 1940’s, 1940–1949, Fashion History Movies Music. Web. July 18, 2017.
Williams, Paul Kelsey. Washington, D.C.: The World War II Years. Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2004. Print.
DODGING AND BURNING
Pegasus Books Ltd.
148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2018 by John Copenhaver
Photograph on pages 4–5 © by Nic Persinger
First Pegasus Books hardcover edition March 2018
Interior design by Sabrina Plomitallo-González, Pegasus Books
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-68177-659-0
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