Peace

by Richard Bausch

  They were all awaiting orders. The rumors kept flying that the Germans were on the run, and nobody was supposed to talk about any of it. There was a report that General Patton had heard two troops speculating about what Italian coastal city would be the site of the invasion and that he’d had them arrested and sought to have them both shot for treason. General Eisenhower, the story went, had prevented it. Patton got reassigned north, and that fed the rumor that it was true.

  All you could do when it came to talk, then, was talk about home. Because home, really, meant everything else, everything that wasn’t the war: women, buddies, sports, jokes, music, children, food, drinks, cars, parents, school, houses. Home. But it hurt to talk about home. Marson dreamed of Helen. He put his hands on either side of her lovely face and kissed her, crying. And woke, crying. He wiped his eyes in the dark, buried his face in the pillow, and suffered in hiding.

  The weather cooled slightly toward the middle of August and the sky was clear and blue over the darker blue sea in the mornings. The days dragged on. It got easier and easier to believe that nothing would change.

  In the evenings, Mario would come around, and Robert Marson would call to him. “Paisan,” he would say. “Come play poker with us.”

  “Sì,” Mario would answer. “You will all lose money.” It was like a ritual speech. They expected the exchange, and they never seemed to notice that it was the same, every time. Mario had told them that he had been taught to play by his father long before the summer he spent in New York. His father had learned the game from the Europeans who used to visit the island before Mussolini and the war and the Germans, back when this, like much of Italy, was a place for wealthy people to come and spend money. “You will owe me your houses,” Mario would say, cheerfully. “You will all pay.” For Marson, it brought to mind something he had read once, how Caesar had played some card game with his captors, the Gauls, saying repeatedly and jovially how he would escape and come back and hang them all, and how he had indeed escaped and then come back—and kept his word. And Caesar had been an Italian. And the killing had been going on unabated all the centuries. Marson had the thought and considered its uselessness. He did not finally care about any of it, but looked down at his own hands holding cards and wanted them never to be dead, wanted everything in the world to be different and better.

  Mario was a bad, inattentive, helplessly social poker player, who wanted to chatter and tell stories and hear stories and seemed not to care a whit about the money, and often he quickly lost what little he had—no one knew where he got it to begin with—and Marson would stake him, for the wine.

  “Mario,” Marson would say after the first few hands. “Vino.”

  “Chianti, Mar-sone?”

  “Montepulciano, this time.”

  “Serious.”

  That was the boy’s word, and Marson knew how he meant it, without having to think about it. It was something only between the two of them, a form of respect. A man was serious who asked for good wine and who knew how to appreciate it.

  Marson had knowledge about wine because his father had taught him. The old man, Charles, also brewed his own beer, and in the summer of 1929, when Marson was twelve, the workmen building houses in Piqua, Ohio, where the family then lived, would come to the door of the house and say to his mother, “Mrs. Marson, do you think we could have a little of Charles’s cold home brew?” Everyone in that town knew Charles, because of the brew and because of what he knew about wine. The German whites, the French clarets, and burgundy. But the old man loved Italian and Spanish wine best. Chianti, and Grenache. And cold, cold beer. When Marson turned fifteen, his father gave him a frosted glass of lager. “You can have a whole life of pleasure with this stuff if you learn to taste it rather than look for any strength or comfort in it.”

  At twenty-six, the young man was familiar with all the available pleasures of good drinking. “Mario,” he would say. “Vino. Valpolicella this time.”

  “Serious,” Mario would say.

  Marson and Asch would follow him to the edge of the perimeter and watch him go on up the long prospect of the shadowed narrow alley, leading away from the water. The boy would dissolve in distance, and the dark, and they would go back to playing, the game lighted by a candle stuck down into a Chianti bottle, and in a little while Mario would return with the wine, three or four of the unlabeled bottles. It tasted always cool and dry, and they drank it from water glasses and jars, sitting in the flickering light and getting easy in the blood. Marson would lie down on his pallet those nights and, against all efforts not to, would think of Helen, seeing the little half-moon scar—the result of a fall when she was five—below the right side of her mouth, that widened when she smiled.

  ELEVEN

  CORPORAL MARSON, the only one awake in the freezing darkness, considered that he would keep a watch over the others. Maybe the rain would lessen at last, and they could proceed without being drenched. Alone, he opened a tin of rations and tried to eat. His stomach wouldn’t accept it. He moved off a few paces, into the downpour, and retched up what little he had swallowed.

  He told himself that things had happened too fast for him to think. He replayed the scene in his mind—the shapes in the muddy straw, as if the two people were made out of it, emerging from it in a stream of epithets, the shots from the black Luger, Hopewell and Walberg falling, and his own shot, knocking the man over, the pale German with his bright red hair and his green eyes. It was all out of the realm of time in some way, and then time slowed while the Kraut died, and the woman kept shrieking, and Marson could not take his gaze away from the look of wonder in the dying man’s eyes, until he heard the last shot, and turned to see the woman fall over, the legs coming up in that clownish inertia and thwacking back down in the mud. He should have walked over and challenged Glick about it then. The truth was that he had stood staring in sick amazement. He was still filled with that same feeling.

  He saw Walberg and Hopewell as they had been that morning and in the hours of the day. He couldn’t help himself. He saw Hopewell talking about Miami. The warm air coming in off the sea; the sweet nights with the sound of the waves. “Man, just try if you can and think about the music of the shoreline,” he said, “those waves have been coming in like that for millions of years. Makes you feel small. Makes you see how little you are, how insignificant your problems are. Try if you can to think about that water, rolling in under the stars and under the sun over and over like that forever.”

  McCaig had said, “Try if you can to see how full of shit you are, Hopewell.”

  “It’s true, though,” said Hopewell. “I’m full of shit, all right, but that don’t stop it all from being true. It’s true.”

  And Walberg, talking about his father. “My dad,” he would begin. It was always a story involving the man’s prowess. His wit. His escapades, some of which were rather unconvincingly exaggerated. “My dad set a blanket down and put food out for his first sophomore class, a picnic, you know, in the middle of the Lincoln Memorial. Right under Lincoln’s statue.” A look would come to his dark eyes, an anxious widening of them, as if he understood quite well that no one would believe him, and yet he was compelled to tell the story. Probably it was a story his father told. And it was clear that, for reasons of love, or pride, he believed it. Walberg. That boy, with his clumsy ways and his big feet and his soft chin that made him look always as if he were about to cry. Walberg never knew what hit him, and everything of him was gone now, all of it, the memory and the stories and the hope of being as funny and entertaining as the others—the desire to be a storyteller, like Marson—and the generations, too. Generations. His children, and their children. The thought went through Marson like an evil vapor.

  Twenty-two years old. Walberg. His parents were probably not yet aware of what had happened to their just-grown boy. Hopewell’s parents, too, were probably, like so many, oblivious to what was heading toward them across the awful curve of the world. Hopewell was only twenty. At that age, Marson was p
itching a baseball in Charlotte, North Carolina.

  He went back to the lee of the rock and nudged Asch awake.

  “Christ, not yet,” Asch said.

  “Tell me,” Marson demanded, “why you haven’t reported it about the woman.”

  “I don’t know. Leave me alone, let me rest.”

  “When I was twelve, I saw two guys in a fight. It was the first time I saw anything like it. The sound it made—fists hitting the faces. These two guys, teenagers. They danced and boxed, one coming forward and one backing away, and there was a thin line of blood around the one’s mouth—the one who was coming on. They must’ve traveled a mile or more in that dance. And I followed them.”

  “Good for you,” Asch said. “What the fuck are you telling me?”

  “I was fascinated.”

  “Yeah?”

  After another space, Asch said, “You’re saying we were fascinated?”

  “No. I don’t know. I just thought of it—hell.”

  “I’ll tell you,” Asch said. “I couldn’t believe it and then I could believe it. And it was not anything to do with politics or the liberation of Europe, you know?”

  Joyner stirred and sat up. “Can you guys shut the fuck up?”

  “We should move soon,” Marson said.

  But then they were all three very still, listening. Something was moving in the trees beyond the ledge. They got closer to the rock, waiting, trying to hear through the sound of the rain. Angelo sat up suddenly, and the sound beyond them stopped. They were all looking out into the pouring dark, and the old man wrung his bony hands and murmured something that sounded like praying. Perhaps five full minutes passed, in which no one moved or looked to one side or the other. The sound was there again, embedded in the incessant thrumming of the rain.

  In the next moment, with a kind of haughty obliviousness, a deer walked slowly past where they were. It was a doe, and she stopped to look at them, only half curious, then went on, stepping neatly through the leaf and pine-needle slickness of the way down.

  “She better not go down to the road. She’ll be breakfast,” Asch said.

  They were all quiet again, a kind of aftershock from the alarm of something other than themselves moving in the dark. Marson offered Angelo some water from his canteen, and Angelo produced a little bottle of something that smelled of peppermint—it was schnapps. He drank from it and held the bottle toward Marson.

  “Per calore. Hot your blood.”

  Marson took a sip. It burned all the way down and caused his gorge to rise yet again. Asch had gone back to dozing, and Joyner, too, seemed to be nodding off. But Joyner had seen the schnapps, and though he was a teetotaler he reached over for it.

  Marson said, “This is schnapps, Joyner.”

  “I don’t care. I’m fuck’n freezing.” He took a pull of it. “Goddamn,” he said, swallowing. “It tastes like candy.” When he handed the bottle back, he said, “In a situation like what happened yesterday, everybody ought to keep his fuck’n mouth shut.”

  Marson made another try with the schnapps, and this time it went down smoothly. He gave the bottle back to Angelo, who put it under his cloak and then sat there nodding and muttering, hands tight on his knees.

  “No matter what,” Joyner said. “We’re all guilty now because we didn’t report it. We gotta just keep the fuck out of it.”

  The rain kept coming. Marson thought of home and then tried not to. He had never seen weather this extreme go on for this long.

  Asch sat up and looked around. He had apparently been dreaming again. “Goddamn it,” he said through gritted teeth. The old man offered the bottle of schnapps to him and he took it, drank from it, then wiped his mouth and said, low, to Marson, “Where’s Mario when we need him.”

  Marson got up and moved off again, and urinated into the cold running of the rain down the side of the mountain. Here was this humble need, that he had been answering his whole life, and standing there he felt as though he were something set down in the world from a profound distance, another species altogether.

  TWELVE

  HE HAD MET HELEN when he was eighteen years old. They dated for six years before they were married, and during these nineteen months in the army, he had thought with regret about how he could have been a husband and father much sooner. In that other life he had used baseball as an excuse, a reason not to take on responsibility. He knew that now. He had always assumed he would one day have a family; he believed in that. He wanted to be in the world as his father was. But all of it was something he had imagined in a distance. He was in possession of a talent for throwing a baseball very fast. The ball jumped, moved when he threw it. He was very difficult to hit. And he did well on the farm team. There was talk of sending him up. It became easy to believe he would actually walk out on the perfect green expanse of a major-league ball field and pitch a game. He was that good. And perhaps nothing else would have made his father more proud. But in the third year, a stubborn tendonitis developed in his throwing arm, and then Pearl Harbor happened, and the war was upon him.

  His father had worked for the navy yard since ’37, having brought the family to Washington after the failure of the farm equipment business in Ohio. He got the job thanks to Roosevelt’s New Deal, and he was a Roosevelt Democrat. This was not an automatic thing with him: Charles Marson knew politics and kept up with all of it like some men follow sports. His own parents had come to America from Frankfurt, Germany, in 1893. He was Lutheran by birth, and he had made a pledge to a dying aunt, who knew of his interest in a young Irish Catholic girl named Marguerite, that he would never convert to Catholicism. He married Marguerite in 1916, with the promise that the children would be raised Catholic. He would not himself go to the church, but he would see that they did. Robert Marson’s mother was from Irish immigrants, the Delanceys, all of whom had settled in the Ohio Valley in the middle of the nineteenth century. They had come for freedom—not from political or religious oppression but from hunger. Marguerite had the rare quality of being very devout while also being quite forbearing. She allowed differences between people, and when the workmen in the neighborhood asked for a bottle or two of her husband’s home brew, she invariably provided it for them, like a woman in wartime feeding hungry soldiers—all of this while having never tasted any kind of alcoholic beverage in her life. And all of this before the Depression, and the war.

  Her husband was tall, strong, blond, fierce eyed, direct, a man whose respect you wanted, and people usually did what he asked them to do. He had a way of talking in pronouncements at times. It was difficult for his children to believe he was not certain of the truth of every utterance. Marson knew his father’s self-assurance had a cost: being the oldest, he had been privy to some of the doubts and worries, the hesitations, about the move to Washington. Charles had fought in the first war, in France. He had a shrapnel scar just below his elbow—a lozenge shape of lighter flesh—and on his left wrist and right cheekbone there were beaded lines where fragments of metal had grazed him. He was intensely patriotic, and sometimes his son felt this as an unexpressed—even unaware—form of compensation for the fact that he was of German blood.

  Marson’s last evening as a civilian was spent at his parents’ home, where he and Helen had been living since the marriage. They all had a sad, quiet dinner, Robert, his brother Jack, who could not go to the war because he had asthma, Robert’s young sister Mary, Helen, and his parents. Several times the dinner was interrupted by Marguerite’s trips to her bedroom to cry quietly into her pillow—it was her way, had always been her habit when something hurt enough to bring tears. Helen sat weeping without trying to hide it, holding the ball of her belly where the baby was, and not eating, but with a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray by her plate. Jack smoked, too, and talked of how he wished he could come with Robert. He wanted to serve. Near the end of the meal, he got up from the table and went up to his room and was gone awhile, and Marson thought he, too, might be crying into his pillow. But he came back down, and
he had with him the title of the car Marson had bought in the summer, a Ford sedan.

  “What’s this?” Marson said to him, only beginning to understand.

  “I’ll keep it clean as a whistle for you,” Jack said. “And of course no one will drive it anywhere until you get back.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “He paid it off,” Marson’s father said. “You own it outright.”

  Marson stood and embraced his younger brother, and then stepped back and shook his hand. “You didn’t have to do that, Jack. But I’m so glad you did.”

  “I thought you would be,” Jack said, as if he were joking, but his eyes welled up. Marson put his arms around him again.

  When it was time to go, he hugged Mary and then his mother, and he allowed her to hold his face in her nervous, thin, cool hands, to look into his eyes that last time. Then he stood holding Helen Louise for a little while, with one hand resting on her abdomen, the lightest touch. His father walked with him out to the end of the sidewalk, where a taxi waited to take him to the train station. Jack and the women and the little girl waited on the porch, Marguerite with a stricken look on her face—but she was not crying now, would not cry—and Helen with her hands folded over the baby in her belly, fingers knotted so that the knuckles showed white. She, too, was managing not to cry, now. Mary was gripping the porch rail, smiling at him through her own complicated feelings. She was only eight, and all this leave-taking, and the talk of the war and distant places, was hard for her to understand. Marson waved at them and blew a kiss. It was a warm twilight, and the stars were beginning to show above the tree line behind the house. It came to him that he had taken this scene, this street, these people, for granted, had simply accepted all of it, and them, as his world. He had a thought: this is the surround. Just the word, surround, in that sentence, seemed freighted with new meaning. It could not be spelled any other way, was not the word surroundings. It was a different word. It was his life itself, containing his home, these parked cars, this house, this sky. Twelve thirty-six Kearney Street, Washington, D.C. The surround.