The Secret of Raven Point: A Novel

by Jennifer Vanderbes

  “Private, you’re safe here. I’m an American, understand? You’re safe now.”

  “Go back to Germany!”

  “You’re safe,” said Willard. “It’s all going to be okay, I promise. We will make you better. Do you hear me? We will make you better.”

  Wilkowski nodded as though in agreement, and then Juliet heard the shot and watched Willard fall to the ground.

  EPILOGUE 1947

  It is a sunny September day, and Juliet steps off the bus into the bustling depot. From her purse she pulls a small piece of paper, directions for the city bus she should take. She makes her way through the crowd and out onto the sidewalk. A cool breeze greets her, and after hours of sitting she adjusts her skirt and slip, makes sure her blouse is tucked in neatly.

  She finds the signpost indicating her next bus and waits behind several young men in suits; it still startles her to see men of a certain age in anything but khakis. The men are clean-shaven, their hair is neatly combed. But they cannot be more than twenty-five years old, thirty at best, and she wonders where they have been.

  When the bus arrives, the men make a playful show of insisting she board first; she thanks them and takes a seat near the front, turning to look out the window as the bus rumbles away. The sun is strong, glinting off the wide ribbon of river; tall, gray buildings tidily line the avenue. At the eighth stop, she stands, and one of the men helps her lift her bag off.

  She has been traveling for two days, and she is exhausted; but now that she is close, she begins to move briskly, excited. She double-checks the piece of paper in her purse.

  Finally she comes upon the redbrick town house. There is a small front porch with a planter box of bright white flowers. Over the steps a wooden plank has been laid at an angle. She walks up the plank and rings the doorbell.

  It is a while before she hears anything, but she knows it would be awful to ring again; she sets down her bag, and finally the doorknob turns. Fingers wrap themselves around the midsection of the door, slowly pulling it open.

  “You came,” he says.

  She looks down at Willard, who has clasped his hands. His eyes are red. “You don’t know how happy this makes me.”

  “I keep my promises,” she says.

  “You didn’t have to hike in the cold, did you?”

  “I rode on a lovely stuffy bus. And I could not have been happier.”

  “Come in.”

  He deftly backs up his wheelchair and turns it around in a flash. By instinct, she almost reaches out to push it for him, but stops herself.

  “Can I get you some water?” he calls behind him. “Some coffee? We have serious coffee here, award-winning coffee.”

  “Water,” she says. “But I’ll get it.”

  He turns and narrows his eyes at her, with only a flicker of playfulness. “I’ll pretend you didn’t say that.”

  The old severity is back, and it makes her grin. “I’d like coffee,” she says, “with milk and sugar.”

  “Better.”

  He is wearing a blue collared shirt, a navy tie, and pinstriped gray trousers; this, she thinks, is more odd than seeing him in the wheelchair. He looks like a man, not a doctor or a soldier—a normal man. He is staring at her as though the sight of her in a skirt and blouse is equally bizarre. She no longer wears her hair in braids, and she senses him taking this in—the curls that fall gently on her shoulders—though she knows he will say nothing.

  “It seems like you’re getting around okay,” she calls as he pushes the wheelchair into the kitchen.

  “Let’s face it, I was never much of an athlete.”

  She hears the sound of the gas stove click to life, and she looks around the living room: there are yellow flowers—daffodils—on the mantel and a stack of records, almost spilling from their cases, loosely piled beside a Victrola. The walls are cluttered with framed photographs and paintings. Watercolors. Of flowers and bowls of fruits. Of a town house, the one she has just walked into.

  “Claire did those,” he says.

  “They’re beautiful.”

  “She’s at the market. Getting asparagus for dinner. Chicken and asparagus, is that okay with you?”

  Juliet nods, scans the seating in the living room, and decides upon the sofa. She settles in, even as Willard lingers by the kitchen.

  “She’s been . . . good to you?”

  “Angelic, all things considered.”

  “Good.” She feels a slight sting, after all this time, at the discussion of his wife, but tries to push it away. “I actually have a fiancé,” says Juliet. “Amazing, right? Me.”

  She sees a look of faint injury in his eyes and she thinks, This is perhaps all I ever needed.

  “And the lucky man is . . . ?”

  She cannot resist a small jab: “Younger than I am. By a year. His name is Charlie.”

  Willard nods quietly, recognizing the slight. “I couldn’t be more pleased for you.”

  The kettle begins whistling, and he disappears into the kitchen. He returns a minute later with a tray in his lap, balancing two cups of coffee, a creamer, and a bowl of sugar.

  “Impressive,” she says.

  He carefully pours cream in her coffee and mixes in a spoonful of sugar and hands her the cup. “I’ve become quite domestic!”

  The tension is behind them now, as it will forever be behind them, a distant memory that will pass further into the distance with every year that they know each other. In time, with each birth, she will send pictures of her three children. And one Christmas, when Willard and Claire visit, Juliet and Charlie will ask them to be godparents to their youngest son, Tucker. Claire will take Juliet aside and thank her, offering a tearful hug, confessing that she had always hoped to be a mother herself.

  In time, Juliet will get a PhD in chemistry and will teach at a women’s college for twenty-seven years. She will become a grandmother of six, and when her oldest grandson studies in Florence for a semester, she will demand, upon his return, to examine every photograph, without explanation. In this other life, she will speak little of her small and unremarkable part in the war. She will tuck it deep in the pocket of her soul like a shiny penny snatched from the ground. Along with the other tens of thousands who served, who quietly returned home and shoved their memories in the attic, she will eventually seem to the world a doddering relic of a bygone era. This won’t bother her, though, this succession. For in the quiet moments of contemplation her later years will bring, she will begin to sense she was part of something longer than the war, larger than herself: a collective human walk, the unending march of history. Along the way, things were dropped, others picked up. Tuck had vanished, but during those long years when the world tore itself apart, Willard joined her. Together they had walked side by side; of all the human beings that could possibly exist in the past or the future, this man had been her fellow traveler. That was the arc of life, it seemed; the slow and grateful recognition of those who were, by chance or fate, simply with you.

  “How is home?” Willard asks.

  “My father and Pearl have been pretty wonderful. My father knew to ask some questions but not to pry. They give me space. He’s started to talk a bit about his work during the Great War—as a way of filling in my silences, I suppose.”

  “Did you ever learn anything more about your brother?”

  “No,” she says. “We held a funeral for him last month. It was my idea. It helped, I think.”

  “He’d have been amazed to know the lengths to which you went trying to find him.”

  “I did hear from Barnaby,” she says. “First I got a postcard from his sister a year ago—from Florida, of all places—saying, ‘Thank you, everyone is well.’”

  “Florida,” says Willard. “He’s a free man again, I guess.”

  Juliet had heard nothing from Barnaby and Reardon until the Armistice was signed; she had no way of returning to Signora Gaspaldi’s from the hospital, but Alfonso eventually let her know that his mother said her friends were well
and on their way home. That was all.

  Willard, even from the hospital back in the States where he was recovering from his injury, had continued to petition against Barnaby’s sentence. Eventually Barnaby’s court-martial was struck from all records. The embarrassment of his escape was too great, the story of his trial so barbaric, that the army had decided it was better to list him as missing in action.

  “And then I got this letter from Barnaby,” says Juliet, “three months ago.”

  Dear Nurse Dufresne,

  It’s been a long time since we said our good-byes in that small, cold room in Florence, and I wanted to say thank you once again for all you did for me. You saved my life, as did your brother, and I will forever be indebted to your family and never know what brought me the luck of finding both of you in my life at its two darkest moments.

  But for the past few years, a few things have been eating at me. I’ve discussed them with Tina, and she thinks the truth is best. She said you were intent on letting her know the truth of what had happened to me, and it seemed you’d come a very long way to find out some truth about your brother. I told you as best I could everything that happened. And everything I believed. I don’t know what I said during those sessions with Dr. Willard. Maybe you already know some of this, but from what you asked me that last day, I wasn’t so sure.

  But you asked me that final day if I thought your brother had lost his mind. You wanted to know what kind of soldier he’d been. If he was happy. The truth is I don’t know. What I do know is that the man he was in that dugout with me, when he saved my life, was not the man he’d been a month earlier.

  I will forever honor the memory of Tucker Dufresne, and count him a hero among the men I met in the war, and yet he was once responsible for an incident that makes it hard for me to think of him as the same man. Near Naples, in what they first thought was a joke, Tuck and Sergeant McKnight strung me up from a tree. They hung me from my pack. I won’t go into any detail as it won’t help your understanding of things, except to say it quickly became much more than a joke, and they did something bad to me. That is the truth. I don’t know why he did it. But I suspect it speaks to his mind, or what the war may have done to it.

  So the question is: Had he lost his mind when he did that, or when he saved me? He never much spoke to me in between, not wanting much to do with me, so I can’t really answer that.

  I think the war has left us all with a lot of questions. I don’t sleep that well, and suppose I never will. But there’s a thing about the white glove that sometimes eats at me. Tina was the one who first mentioned it a while back, when I told her about them stringing me up from the tree. You’ll recall that Tuck left me in that dugout in the dark of night; so maybe he had to rummage for his things and the glove fell from his pocket. Maybe he didn’t want to risk running across a darkened field with a piece of bright white fabric. So it’s possible, I have to concede, that it wasn’t a signal, that he never meant to come back. It’s possible when Rakowski heard him shouting “Forgive me,” it was for leaving me there to die. . . . Or maybe he was apologizing for what he’d done to me and what he’d done in the war. Maybe he wanted it all to end, just like I did. That’s a feeling I know. You don’t mind dying when you feel like you’ve already been killed.

  I write this as a confession, I suppose, because these are the things I wouldn’t say to you back in Florence. Things I hadn’t really even thought through. I was scared; I didn’t know who my friends were. Didn’t think I had any. I only knew that you’d come looking for your brother and would look after me if you believed he would have wanted you to. And it’s what you’d come to believe. And besides, if he’d returned alive one day, what would you hold him accountable for? But I know now you would have protected me no matter what I told you, that you are kind and decent, and I’m sorry for whatever I withheld.

  And the truth is: I still believe he left the glove for me as a sign he meant to return. I believe he meant to save me. And I believe he regretted his treatment of me and he finally saw me in that dugout as a fellow soldier. Brilling and the others didn’t think he was coming back for me, but they were wrong.

  We all have to walk away from those years with some way of putting together the pieces. We’re all assembling our stories; I see the world around me assembling its story. Well, I’ve told you my entire story, the one that helps me sleep.

  Forgive me if these thoughts are unsettling. It is all I have left to say on the subject, and I figured I should do it now so you can put it all behind you.

  I hope you are healthy and happy and have come to realize what good you did during those dark months. I often think of all you and Dr. Willard did for me. May the angels watch over you.

  Christopher Barnaby

  “I wanted you to see it,” she says, “because you’re the only other person in the world it would mean anything to. And now I want to tear it to shreds.”

  “You loved your brother, Juliet.”

  “But did I know him? You’re the psychiatrist: Do we ever really know another person?”

  “People are complicated. War is complicated.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “Probably better than I know myself.”

  She folds the letter three ways and sticks it back in her bag. She will not destroy it, but she will never look at it again. The war changed her brother, as it did all of them, and in his final moments he redeemed himself by saving Barnaby. That is her story. That is the tale she will carry with her. And when the question of the white glove comes to her in the thick of night, she will push it from her mind.

  “I heard from Glenda,” she tells Willard. “She married a dentist.”

  “My, my, everyone kept in touch with you.”

  “Not everyone,” she says. “I wonder what happened to Liberata. The little girl. And her brother.”

  “I remember.”

  A quiet sadness passes between them. Outside, there is the sound of a car gliding down the street.

  “Are you ready for college?” Willard asks. She will go next month, finally, to a women’s college in Virginia.

  “I’m ready to stop changing bedpans.”

  “I’m excited for you. You have so many great things ahead of you, so many great books. You’ll read Darwin and Freud, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Thomas Mann. You’ll be dazzled, Juliet. You’ll hear Bach’s cello suites for the first time, Handel’s Messiah. There are so many beautiful things in the world, Juliet, so much better in life than what you’ve seen.”

  “We’ve seen.”

  He nods, sorrowfully. “Yes.”

  He looks at his watch. “Dinner is at seven. Will you need something to eat before then? I have some cheese and crackers.”

  “Seven is perfect,” she says.

  He wheels himself over to the Victrola and studies the pile of records. He pulls two records from the pile, looks from one to the other, and then, with a grin, sets one on the player and lowers the needle. He brings his hands together in childlike anticipation, waiting for the music to begin. Finally, the first few triumphant bars of an orchestra ring through the house.

  “Puccini,” he announces. “Tosca.”

  He wheels back beside her, and they sit in silence listening to the music, a plaintive voice singing in Italian. It seems an ancient language from a faraway land. Outside the windows the sky is beginning to darken, and Juliet becomes aware of the lamps in the room, the soft yellow light settling over them. It is the light of a house, of a home, the glow of safety.

  There is a pause between arias, and he turns to her.

  “Do you like it?”

  “I love it,” she says.

  “Oh, good.” The music begins again, and quietly, almost inaudibly, he says, “I’m just so glad you’re here.”

  “I’d have hiked in the cold,” she whispers to him.

  He smiles.

  She will remember this moment many times in her life, and when, at age sixty-eight, Willard dies in his sleep, and Claire calls
with the news, it is here, in this room, listening to his music, that Juliet will picture him.

  And in the hour of her own death, at eighty-six, she will think again of Willard and of Tuck, of her father and Pearl, and of all the young men she saw pass away decades earlier. “I’m coming,” she will say as her breath weakens, and her children beside her will wonder to whom she is speaking.

  But here, now, they are young still, and the lamplight is beautiful, the music perfect, and they are beside each other, sitting contentedly.

  “Friends?” she asks.

  He turns and clasps her hand between his. “The best.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction drawing heavily on fact, and so it may be useful to note where I’ve chosen, for the purposes of my story, to veer from historical accuracy. The town of Charlesport, South Carolina, is a fictional locale based loosely on Beaufort, South Carolina, where I once lived; the movements of Tuck’s division (noted as the 88th in the novel) are in fact a compendium of the movements of both the 88th and the 91st Divisions of the US Fifth Army; and none of the battles or troop movements mentioned are intended to correlate with the real-life actions of any particular unit. Artillery was used in the Battle of Pisa. The field hospital depicted is fictional, as are its movements, although the flyer discovered by Mother Hen is an actual German propaganda leaflet reproduced in Leon Weckstein’s Through My Eyes: 91st Infantry Division in the Italian Campaign, 1942–1945. There were approximately fifty thousand desertions by American soldiers during World War II. Forty-nine were sentenced to death. Only one sentence was carried out: Private Edward Donald Slovik was the first and only American soldier to be court-martialed and executed for desertion (in January 1945) since the Civil War.

  I began researching this book ten years ago, long before I knew what, exactly, the story would be, and along the way many texts were returned to libraries before I could dutifully note their titles. Of the books that remain in my possession, I’m deeply indebted to Foot Soldier: A Combat Infantryman’s War in Europe by Roscoe C. Blunt, Jr.; Reflections of One Army Nurse in World War II by Gladys Bonine; The War North of Rome: June 1944–May 1945 by Thomas R. Brooks; Lingering Fever: A World War II Nurse’s Memoir by LaVonne Telshaw Camp; The 1st Field Hospital: The Experiences of T-4 Robert U. Shepard by D. A. Chadwick, Robert Shepard as consultant; My Darling Margy: The World War II Diaries and Letters of Surgeon Charles Francis Chunn, MD edited by Celeste Chunn Colcorde; The Duration and Six Months: Letters of a World War II Army Nurse by Shirley Coressel; Hospital at War: The 95th Evacuation Hospital in World War II by Zachary B. Friedenberg; The 92nd Field Hospital: A Surgeon’s Memories of WWII by John C. Gaisford, MD; Roll Me Over: An Infantryman’s World War II by Raymond Gantter; Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of the Great War edited by Margaret R. Higonnet; Sixty Days in Combat: An Infantryman’s Memoir of World War II in Europe by Dean P. Joy; Quiet Heroines: Nurses of the Second World War by Brenda McBryde; And If I Perish: Frontline U.S. Army Nurses in World War II by Evelyn M. Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee; Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby; Our War for the World: A Memoir of Life and Death on the Front Lines in WWII by Brendan Phibbs; A Half Acre of Hell: A Combat Nurse in WWII by Avis D. Schorer; Bedpan Commando: The Story of a Combat Nurse During World War II by June Wandrey; Through My Eyes: 91st Infantry Division in the Italian Campaign: 1942–1945; and From Anzio to the Alps: An American Soldier’s Story by Lloyd M. Wells.