Losing Julia

by Hull, Jonathan

  I got off in Oakland and took a boat across the bay to San Francisco, disembarking right at the wharves where Julia grew up. It wasn’t San Francisco to me but Julia and Daniel’s town and I looked at every street and store wondering how often they had passed by that very spot. I wanted to scan all the faces of the pedestrians until I found Julia but instead went straight to the library to look up the address of Daniel’s parents. Three hours later I arrived in front of a slightly run-down light gray two-story house in time to see an elderly looking man pull up in a small wagon drawn by a tired-looking horse. “MacGuire & Sons” was painted on the sides in bright red.

  “Mr. MacGuire?” I said, removing my hat.

  He turned and looked at me, rather more warily than I expected.

  “You must be Mr. MacGuire?”

  “I am indeed,” he said, in a deep brogue.

  “Sorry to disturb you. My name is Delaney, Patrick Delaney.” I paused, searching for the right words. “I was a friend of Daniel’s.”

  “Oh Lord, come right in.” He jumped down off his wagon, shook my hand vigorously and gestured toward the front door. “Mrs. MacGuire is at her sister’s. Won’t be back for a few hours still. Here, let me get you a beer.”

  We sat down on the front stoop.

  “Been to San Francisco before?”

  “No, never.”

  “Ah, lovely city. A pity what burned, but still lovely to look at, especially in the fall.”

  “Yes, I look forward to a little sight-seeing.”

  He quickly drained his beer and opened another. His hands were extraordinarily thick and callused and he made a habit of slowly opening and closing a fist, as though testing for soreness.

  Finally, he said, “So you were with Daniel.”

  “Yes. Yes I was.”

  He placed his bottle of beer down beside him and then looked straight ahead. “My poor boy.” He shook his head slowly and then mumbled something, a prayer maybe. Should I say something?

  “He was very brave. We all respected him a great deal.”

  Mr. MacGuire nodded, his head slung low between his knees and his hands clasped out in front of him.

  “When he enlisted the first thing his mother said was, ‘Daniel is much too brave to be a soldier.’ She was right.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  He placed his head in his hands for a minute, then looked up.

  “Daniel was in the business with me. Good worker, that boy, never complained.” His voice trailed off. He took another swig of his beer. “Then he met some woman. Well, you probably know the story. Ran away. Broke our hearts, he did.”

  “I know some of the story, not all of it.”

  “Oh blessed Mary mother of Christ, why would my son run all the way to France for a woman?”

  “I don’t think he went to France for her. I don’t think that’s why he joined the army.”

  “You don’t, eh?” He turned and looked at me. His face was red and his heavy features showed his age. “What then do you think was in his head?”

  “I think he wanted to make you proud.”

  His face broke and he turned away. I wondered what he knew of Daniel’s death and if I should try to make the best of it and tell him more about how his son never flinched and how even the captain seemed to look up to him, or should I say nothing? Was there anything Daniel wanted me to say? There must have been, we talked about it, didn’t we? But I couldn’t recall the words, the proper words. At least I could say that he was felled by a single bullet to the heart. Never saw it coming. Never felt a thing. Or should I tell him that last rites were said? That Daniel had just enough time to see Mary coming for him.

  I cleared my throat. “I was wondering, do you happen to know where Julia lives, how I might contact her?”

  “Haven’t the faintest notion,” he said quietly, tugging at his chin.

  “Do you remember her last name?”

  “Never laid eyes on her.”

  We sat for another half hour but both of us were at a loss for words. Before I left he asked me if I needed work. I thanked him for the offer and told him I’d try to stay in touch, though I knew I wouldn’t because it made me too sad to think of him and his wife and their lonely conversations with God, not knowing what they did wrong.

  “You know, Daniel’s mother and I, we’re simple folk,” he said as I started down the front steps. “We work and we pray and at night we are thankful for the chance to rest.” I nodded nervously. “My grandfather starved to death back in Ireland, do you understand?”

  “Yes, well, no, that’s awful.”

  He started to say something and then stopped. At the curb we turned to each other and shook hands.

  “Daniel’s with the Lord now. Sooner than we’d wish but with the Lord nevertheless.” I nodded again then turned and walked down the sidewalk, trying to imagine what on earth the Lord would make of Daniel and vice versa.

  After stopping twice for drinks and then for a loaf of sourdough bread I rented a small room on the third floor of a sailor’s hotel near the wharves. Then I returned to the streets to look for Julia. I searched for nine days, asking bartenders and waitresses if they’d heard of her, checking with art galleries and sometimes sitting all day at trolley stops watching the faces stream by. I even took a ferry across the bay to Sausalito and rode the train that zigzagged up to the top of Mount Tamalpais, from where you can see the entire bay and even the Sierra Nevadas on a good day. Partway down the mountain I got off the train and took a coach down to Stinson Beach in hopes that I might see a woman with brown hair and bright green eyes sitting before a canvas and painting the thrashing surf. Instead I found dozens of sand dollars that had been coughed up by the tides. I wrapped the three largest in my handkerchief and stuffed them in my pocket but they all broke before I got back to the city. I tossed the pieces into the bay.

  Before I went back east to study accounting I placed an ad in newspapers in both San Francisco and Los Angeles with Julia and Daniel’s names in boldface and my name and address in small print below. After a month I stopped paying for the ads. Two years later I met Charlotte at a Christmas party and a year after that we married. I knew within weeks of our honeymoon on the Carolina coast that something was missing and I remember lying in bed at night in the small flat we rented and wondering whether anyone else felt the same way so soon or whether I was just an absolute fool. Either way there seemed to be nothing to do about it at that point but settle in and hope for the best. Besides, I was busy with work and Charlotte was soon pregnant, so our lives took on a certain inevitability and routine, like everyone else’s, I suppose. I tried to forget about Julia and Daniel and the war but of course I couldn’t. Not even for a night.

  THE BOTTLE arrived five days after Easter. The halls were still wallpapered with pictures of bunnies and baskets while the smell of rotten eggs lingered from the annual Easter egg hunt, when the number of eggs hidden invariably exceeds the number found.

  I was walking by the nurses’ station when Erica stopped me. “It’s for you,” she said, pointing to the small wooden crate on the counter. “And be careful, it’s marked fragile.”

  “Me? Oh God, not more Easter eggs.”

  The return address was written in large block letters with a black felt marker: Marblehead, Massachusetts. I felt confused, then sick.

  “What is it, Patrick?”

  I closed my eyes for a minute, then opened them. “Could you just put the box on my bed?”

  “Sure. You okay?” She placed her hand on my forearm.

  “I’m okay.”

  I didn’t open the box that day. I couldn’t. I just stared at it. Martin knew enough not to ask.

  “PAGE DIED,” I murmured. We were sitting on our beds the next morning.

  “Who is Page?” asked Martin.

  “Nathaniel Page. The only other surviving member of my old squad and company. He was the Harvard boy.” I smiled wistfully, trying to slow my breathing. Martin waited for me to continue.
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  “Just after the war twelve of us met for dinner in New York and after drinks we decided to pitch in on an expensive botde of Scotch—bootlegged stuff, quite good—which was to be kept by the oldest living member of the company, and then passed along after he died. The last man to get the bottle, the last survivor, would open it. The joke was that he’d need a stiff drink, if he could still handle the stuff.”

  “And now that’s you?”

  “Now that’s me.” I pulled the bottle gently from the crate, where it rested in wads of brown wrapping paper. The label was crowded with signatures, some small and angular, others large and florid. I saw my drunken scrawl and John Galston’s and Nathaniel Page’s. I noticed a chip on the bottom of the bottle and wondered who dropped it and how relieved they must have felt when it did not break. I wished it had broken.

  I put the note from Page’s widow on my bed stand and washed up for breakfast.

  Cut off from the land that bore us,

  Betrayed by the land that we find,

  The good men have gone before us,

  And only the dull left behind.

  So stand by your glasses steady,

  The world is a web of lies.

  Then here’s to the dead already,

  And hurrah for the next man who dies.

  —From the mess song of the Lafayette Escadrille, a squad of American volunteer airmen.

  “WILL YOU BE leaving tomorrow then?” Julia asked, as we walked down an uneven brick-paved street after having dinner at a small restaurant on the south end of town.

  “Yes, back to Paris. What about you?”

  “I think I’ll stay a few more days. The place seems to have a bit of a hold on me.” She was walking close to me now, so that our shoulders touched.

  Was there any way I could stay longer? A few more days? I thought of Charlotte and Sean and felt all the guilt and confusion again.

  “Your wife is very lucky,” said Julia, stopping and turning toward me.

  “Thank you.”

  “But I’m lucky too.” I waited for her to continue. “Because now I know that Daniel wasn’t the only one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I always thought he was the only man I could really talk to. The only one who would understand. Then I met you.”

  I felt the skin on my face redden and I had to stop my arms from reaching out and pulling her toward me.

  “I don’t want to go,” I said.

  “And I don’t want you to go.”

  I thought of the sailboat I’d bought for Sean and how his cheeks would fill with a tremendous smile when he saw it and how he wouldn’t let me out of his sight for hours once I returned, even following me into the bathroom. “I have to.”

  “I know that.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said finally.

  She held my stare.

  “I have this terrible feeling that I’m going to lose my chance… ”

  “But you already found someone. You’re fortunate. I don’t want to… ”

  “It’s different. It’s so different, Julia.”

  She started walking again. I knew she didn’t want to hear the things I wanted to say. Was she afraid of what I might say? I knew I was.

  “I’d like to go back to the memorial tomorrow, perhaps try to paint it, though I’m not sure I can. Not the way I’d like to,” she said.

  “I thought I’d stop there on my way to the train station. Maybe I could meet you?”

  “I’ll be there early,” she said.

  “So will I.”

  She turned and looked at me for a moment, then nodded. When we reached the hotel we stood in the lobby for several minutes, talking nervously. Finally she took both my hands in hers, thanked me for the dinner, kissed me quickly on the cheek and said good night. I tightened my grip on her hands just slightly, then felt them gradually slip away from mine. From the landing she turned and looked at me again and her face seemed full of pain.

  “YOU WANT TO take a walk or something?” Martin looked at me hopefully. It was just after nine a.m. and we were both sitting on the edges of our beds, unsure how to proceed.

  “Sure, I’ll take a walk.”

  “Not a long walk.”

  “No, not a long walk.”

  “Good, let’s go on a walk.” He leaned forward and pushed himself off the bed with a low grunt, then went to the dresser to brush his hair. I rose and finished buttoning my shirt in the mirror, then followed him out the door and down the hall.

  Outside the sun was just piercing the morning mist. It smelled of wet evergreens and I had a vague memory of watching my father chop wood and then helping him stack it, careful to shore up the ends of the woodpile.

  “Nice day.”

  “Yes, nice day.”

  We walked slowly, looking down a lot the way old people do, scanning for danger.

  “I always wanted to go first,” he said after a while.

  “Go first?”

  “To go before Doreen. I always hoped I’d go before Doreen.”

  “Oh, you mean there.”

  “Yes, there. She was much stronger than me. She would have been okay.”

  Most men feel this way about their wives. Fortunately for them, most men get their wish.

  “I guess I always just assumed that I’d go first,” he said. “I didn’t give a lot of thought to it being the other way around.”

  “Well, if it’s any consolation, I hope I go before you,” I said.

  “Oh no, I hope not.” We looked briefly at each other and exchanged thin smiles.

  “Do you suppose everybody has somebody they hope will outlive them?” I asked.

  “Sure they do. The only thing worse than going first is going last. We lived next to a couple, the Bennetts, who had a son who died in a skiing accident. Ed and Nancy hardly left their house for a year. One day Ed told me—I’ll never forget it—he told me that God better not exist, because if he does there’s a madman on the loose.”

  We walked on in silence. Then Martin said, “For two years I didn’t throw out her clothes. Nothing. Sometimes I’d stand in her closet—she had a big walk-in closet that she loved, double-tiered hangers and lots of cubbyholes, she loved cubbyholes—and I’d look at her things and I’d smell her, just like she was there.”

  I patted him on the shoulder.

  “And then I’d imagine her voice coming from the shower, asking me if she should wear the red dress or the green dress. She always laid out several outfits on the bed before we went out, with matching shoes and purses and earrings. Sometimes just before we got into the car, she’d decide her outfit was all wrong and run up and switch into the other one. But she wasn’t lavish; she made a lot of her clothes herself.”

  “You want to keep walking?”

  “No, I’m kind of tired of walking.”

  “Me too. Let’s head back.”

  “Yes, let’s head back.”

  We turned and slowly walked back.

  I WAS AWAKE when she knocked. I was sitting in the chair by the window, listening to the creaks of the hotel and watching the moon. It was sometime after two a.m. I hadn’t been waiting exactly, just sitting and thinking and hoping and praying, unable even to close my eyes.

  When I opened the door she stepped in immediately, closing it quietly behind her. I could just see her face in the moonlight. It was wet, streaked with her tears.

  “Thank God,” I said, putting my arms around her and pulling her toward me. I could feel her back tremble.

  “I had to,” she whispered, cupping my face in her hands and staring up at me. “I had to be with you.”

  “Julia, I want to tell you something.”

  “Please don’t.” She pressed her finger against my lips. I kissed it, then pulled it away and kissed her hard on the lips and then her face and neck and down along her shoulders. I felt her hands in my hair and then searching down my back, frantically. I pushed her toward the bed and tore at her clothes and struggled to keep from
saying the things I wanted to say.

  We made love for hours, exhausting ourselves against each other’s lips and mouths and skin until the bed was soaked with our sweat. Sometime during the night I promised never to let go but I must have, for when I awoke at dawn she was gone.

  I’VE BEEN staring at a blank page of my sketchbook all day but nothing is coming to me. Maybe tomorrow.

  SARAH CAME into my room this morning just as I was struggling with my pants. She invited me to her house for the Fourth of July. “We’re having a little backyard barbecue, me and the boys, and we thought you might like to join us. It’ll be fun. We’ve got sparklers and those little black snakes that smoke and there’ll be lots of ice cream. I can pick you up and bring you back. It’ll just be for a few hours.”

  “I’d be delighted, if you’re sure.” I held the top of my pants closed as I tried to sit up on the bed.

  “We’d love it.” She patted me on the shoulder, then turned and left.

  That afternoon I took the bus into town and stopped at Henry Shay’s Store for Men, where after some debate I settled on a new shirt: dark blue with a modest button-down collar. When did I last buy a shirt? Five years ago? I used to like clothes, in so much as women liked men who understood clothes. But the clothes I wore never felt right; they never said what I wanted to say. Not that I wanted my clothes to say much; rather, I just didn’t want them to say the wrong things, to say too much too loudly. Yet I couldn’t find anything that would just shut up and let me be: understated said boring, conventional said conservative, casual said kicked-back in a premeditated sort of way, formal said uptight.

  A short and balding salesman with a tentative, commercial smile measured my sleeve and then my neck. Didn’t I used to be a forty-two long instead of a forty regular? I’m sure I was. And how old were the clothes I now owned? Did I look like some threadbare cat-food-eating miser? I decided to go through my closet as soon as I got back to my room and toss out everything with a stain or a rip.