On Green Dolphin Street

by Sebastian Faulks

  The next escape had been in France, where, after a period of rest and recreation, his unit was dispatched in 1945. He had never been to Europe before and found the unscarred part of France more beautiful than any landscape he had seen outside the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue. They traveled through the small towns of Belgium in triumph, throwing candy bars from the roof of train cars to the children waiting by the track.

  As they came to Aachen, they saw the rubble of a real front and their exhilaration stalled. They relieved another unit, dug in just short of the Rhine, and from his foxhole Frank could see the twin towers of Cologne Cathedral. Billy Foy was next to him and they clutched one another’s arms in wonder at the sight. Two days later they pulled out, crossed the river and ran through an area the artillery had flattened, yet even in the rubble there were courtyards with flowering fruit trees and a sense among the young men as they leaped over piles of German bodies that nothing now could halt their progress. They ran into enemy patrols and, down below them by a river, a company of German infantry. Even as they surrounded them and cut them off, Frank was aware of the beauty of the meadows, of the sheep grazing on the side of the hill as they ran through them, firing.

  They navigated, it seemed to him, by church steeples in the moonlight. One night they were so far ahead of the supplies that they ran out of ammunition; they lay on a hillside with German cannons going off all around them. Wexler and Douglas had assembled a mortar, but there was nothing to fire from it, so they took it apart, stood up the face plate, like a waffle iron, and took cover behind it. In the morning, with new supplies, they resumed their progress through the cobbled streets and flowering orchards of the German villages.

  If only, as Billy said, they had not had to kill so many people on their way.

  Frank looked out of the window as the plane began its descent toward the Twin Cities. The most exhilarating means of escape had been Mary; it was through her that he had finally seen a way to transcend what he had become and to leave behind the wounds the public world had laid on him. How truly did she feel the same?

  In Minneapolis he stayed in the hotel where he had met Charlie. He called Mary and spoke to her in her room; she sounded feminine, her voice light and almost girlish, yet frighteningly composed, as she always did on the telephone.

  That night Frank lay down on his bed and gazed up at the ceiling. It was Mary’s choice, he thought. He could not be the instrument of so much destruction. Her future was hers to decide, and so, it followed, was his.

  Mary woke late on Thursday to find Frank gone. She looked round the disheveled hotel room, at the scene of the crime, abandoned clothes, and she longed, suddenly, for respectability.

  Toward one o’clock she went outside into the city, with no particular goal in mind. She had to watch her step in the narrow streets, where push-boys were wheeling hand trucks full of dresses, sport coats, skirts and blouses that swayed from their metal rails as they guided them to the delivery trucks that stood with their engines running at the curb as the disgorged bolts of material were replaced by finished garments. The freed workers of the sweatshops pushed into cafeterias and lunch counters or clustered round the pitchmen at the junction of Broadway. On the street corner, they gazed up longingly at the winter sun, obliquely visible through the gaps of the looming skyscrapers, checked their wristwatches and reluctantly chucked away their cigarette butts before heading back into the workrooms where no light shone.

  On Seventh Avenue, out of habit, Mary took a cab downtown to the Village and walked round Washington Square. The temperature was only a little above freezing and she dug into the pockets of her coat to find the gloves that Deke Sheppard had given her. She looked from the south side, between the wintry trees and through the triumphal arch up Fifth Avenue to the distant Empire State Building, a mile or more away, but clearly outlined in the sparkling air.

  She would stay here; she would make this her home. When Frank came back, she would tell him what she had decided. Somehow, she would make an arrangement with the children and with Charlie; she would divide herself between the two countries, and if the children continued to live, as they should, in her parents’ house, they would be safely wrapped in the love of family that had once been hers.

  —

  It was done, it was decided, and she passed the day, somehow, a sandwich, a long sleep in her room, a movie in the small cinema next to the Plaza, a cocktail in the Warwick on Sixth Avenue, and home to an early night. She switched her airline departure from Washington to New York; she thought it would be tempting providence to cancel the return completely. She called Dolores to make sure the men from the shipping company had been, but she could not bring herself to telephone London.

  It was quiet when she awoke in the morning: no dumpster truck resounding, no rain pattering on the condenser, but a soft ethereal quietness. She released the white roller blind to see snow rising up the shaft between the buildings, floating upward, falling and rebounding like popcorn on the hot air of the ventilation shafts below. She climbed back into bed to watch it. Frank telephoned from the airport at Minneapolis and asked her to meet him at one o’clock in the bar of a hotel called the Ambassador on East 68th Street, just off Madison.

  She tried to read a book, she tried to read a newspaper, but found it impossible to concentrate. She took a long bath and dressed in a navy skirt and a beige cashmere sweater, what she had worn on her first lunch date with him, fussing and straightening the hems; she made up carefully, as for a performance. She had brought her mother’s old fur-lined boots in case of such weather and, although they spoiled the appearance of casual chic she had wanted, there was no alternative on the snowbound streets.

  She arrived punctually at one at the Ambassador, whose lobby was like a viable small town, with a hairdresser’s at one end, through whose window Mary could see an elderly woman with orange hair reading Life magazine. In front of her was a newspaper kiosk with piles of the Times and The Wall Street Journal stacked on the floor beneath lead weights. The circulated air was warm and heavy; she hesitated for a moment as her eye was caught by the white flutter of a letter tumbling down the glass-fronted mail chute beside the elevator.

  She found the bar, which was decorated like a gentleman’s club with wood paneling and leather armchairs. This time Frank was not there. Mary took a seat at a table, where a white-jacketed waiter leaned over her with an empty tray.

  “Yes … A tomato juice, please.”

  She was beset by questions. What if, when she said that she was leaving her family to live with him, Frank should say no? Did it make any difference that they would first of all be in Washington, and who knew where after that? Was it New York itself that she really cared for? Was her decision motivated by something unworthy? That one she could answer: it was love, there was no doubt about that; it was an unstoppable force: it was, in its own way, a moral force.

  What would her mother have said about this awful decision?

  She had a clear vision of her mother’s loved face. She would be appalled. Or would she? The one thing dead people were sure to be was understanding: they would, like Troilus floating high above the world of fallen Troy, break into eerie laughter. From their perspective, there was no mortal urgency; tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner, after all, but it was more than that: to know everything is to laugh at it. It was in any case her mother who had once explained to her how the jealous Titans had so resented humanity’s perfection that they had sundered the human soul and left each lost half forever searching for the other. That, she had told the fourteen-year-old Mary, was the Greeks’ explanation of the love instinct, of its awful power.

  She sipped the drink, keeping her eyes on the door into the lobby. Each time a shadow came across it, she tensed forward in her chair. The minutes were passing.

  Perhaps the reason she had made this decision was out of simple self-protection: she could not face the pain of separation from Frank. It was not a moral choice, or even one of balanced judgment, it was simply co
wardice. She did not know. In the long term perhaps the separation from her family would be worse. That too she did not know. It was impossible to analyze these things, and that was how in the end she had made her choice: out of instinct, because estimation and judgment had failed her.

  “Would you care for another drink, ma’am?”

  It was nearly half past one.

  “No … Yes, yes, please.”

  Clearly, he had been delayed. But why had he not got word to her? Surely he could have called the Ambassador and had them pass a message to the lady on her own in the bar? She began to dislike all the men who came into the room, smacking their shoulders, knocking the snow off their shoes, congratulating themselves on the nugatory achievement of having survived a minor snowfall on the streets of New York before they gorged themselves on giant sandwiches and burgers from the bar. She hated them because they were not Frank.

  By the time she left, at ten to two, she was close to tears of frustration. She had kept a level head, she felt; she had kept calm through a great deal in the last few months, but there was something in his failure to appear that seemed unforgivably cruel. She went back to her own hotel, despondently, in order to sit by the telephone.

  It was six in the evening and she was again dozing when it rang. He was at La Guardia. Snow had closed the airport at Minneapolis; he had rented a car and driven across the state to Green Bay, Wisconsin. He had talked himself onto a small propeller plane to Chicago, where the runways were clear.

  “My darling,” she said. “I … I was afraid. But I shouldn’t have worried, should I?”

  “Do you want to come down to my apartment?”

  “Yes. Call me when you’re back. I don’t want to be too quick for you …”

  One last time, she sprung the chrome catch of a yellow cab on Seventh Avenue and headed south.

  She had one thought as the snowflakes rose and churned beneath the rushing streetlights: Charlie. Everything she had said to him in Moscow still held true; nothing had been insincere. Yet here she was a world apart: there were different skies, altered gravitational fields; the polar forces were switched and reinvented.

  Charlie, even in his confused state, had been very delicate. She remembered his words when he had first hinted that he knew something was going on. “I no longer felt … uniquely culpable.” It was beautifully phrased: she could leave it or take it. How little, she thought with a wistful squeeze of regret, how little she had cared about his own affair to which this was a tactful admission. And then, when she had left London a few days ago, he had again been meticulous; he had simply asked a question: “Will you be coming back?”

  Perhaps all those years of inventing lines of poetry had paid off; if he had been coarser or plainer in his words, there might have been no way back. Perhaps verbal nicety was more than just decorative or pedantic. Perhaps it had kept a life available to her.

  After dinner they returned to Frank’s apartment. Mary had said nothing of any decision she had reached; she could not bring herself to break the shimmering pleasure of the night. Frank put on a record and passed her a drink; they could see the snow whirling outside the window, as it fell to the streets so far below. Mary moved closer to Frank on the couch and he wrapped his arm around her.

  When they lay in bed later there seemed to be no sounds at all from the city, not even the comforting rumble of distant automobiles and of their tires throwing up slush.

  Frank was lying on his back, crying silently, determined that Mary should not know. The thing about crying when you lay on your back, he thought—something he had forgotten since the last occasion, when he heard of his father’s death during his time at army training camp—was that the water rolled into your ears.

  He remembered the drill sergeant, who was always screaming at the wretched Godley, and how he had once turned to him, when, after a daylong cross-country hike with weighted packs, they had been required for no obvious reason to scrub the floor of the barracks. “Be a man, Renzo,” the sergeant shouted, with his face up against Frank’s, brandishing a scrub brush beneath his nose. “Don’t be a wop. Be a man.”

  In the morning Frank did what he had done so many times before: went to the bakery and bought bagels for breakfast, then bought a newspaper. “So many times …” Who am I kidding? he thought. What did he really mean? Twelve? Thirteen? Eighteen at best.

  Mary did not want to leave the sanctuary of the apartment; when Frank suggested they go out later, she said it was too cold.

  “What time’s your flight?” he said.

  “At seven. So I suppose I need to be there at about five.”

  “Sure.”

  “But, Frank …”

  “Yes?”

  “If you’d like me to stay, I will.”

  She was still sitting on the couch, but now dressed, composed, her hands folded in front of her knees.

  Frank breathed in. “That’s not a decision I can make for you, sweetheart. I’ll support you, but you have to decide alone.”

  “I know,” said Mary calmly. “But I wanted to have some idea before I decided whether it would be … welcome to you.”

  Frank felt the tears coming at him again and he sucked the air in over his teeth. Be a man, Renzo. He heard the mocking southern voice.

  “I want to stay, Frank. I’ve decided. I decided while you were away. I’m not going to tell you all the agony of the choice. I’m being true to something beyond myself. This is my only life and I believe that I’m doing the right thing. I think we would be happy.”

  “You’re an extraordinary woman, Mary. You surprise me more and more.”

  Mary sat motionless, as though she did not dare to move, in case it affected the outcome of his thoughts.

  Frank said, “If you go, that’ll be an end of something in me. Some hope, or some desire. Some thought that I could be more than I am. It’ll close over. It’ll die. But I’ll still … I’ll still be a man. I’ll still be someone. I’ll be someone who knew something great. Once in his life.”

  “Oh my God, Frank.” Mary’s voice was shocked; it had gone quiet. “It sounds as though …” She trailed away.

  He turned to face her. “Mary, I think you should go home.”

  Mary let out a moan of grief and went to him. He felt detached from her, as he looked down at the top of her head, thrust against his shirt; he held her there, tightly, because he knew if he saw her face he would weaken and change. Her body was quite still in his arms: she was not crying.

  Frank could think of no consolation to offer because the thoughts were too awful to find words. Death would cure her; death would also solve his woe; but he could not say such things.

  Eventually he managed to say something, a shadow of what he meant. “The way you make people love you, the way you made me love you … That’s something your mother left to you, I guess. It’s a legacy from her, from the happiness she gave you. The way you’ve inspired me with a sense of what life could be. That’s no mean gift. No one else has done that. No one I’ve ever met could possibly do that. It’s something you inherited. A gift of love.”

  Mary pulled back her face from his chest. “It’s not much of a legacy, is it? The ability to make people miserable. A talent for despair.”

  He could think of no reply.

  She said, “I won’t beg you, my love. I’m too old, too proud. And I’m too unhappy. But I swear to you that I have thought about this and I know in some deep, deep place inside me, somewhere that I can’t explain, that it’s right. And I know another thing. A simple, simple thing. That we’d be happy. It’s a kind of miracle, Frank. That we’ve come from so far apart, different worlds. Across the sea. But only I could give you the happiness that you deserve. The life that could be yours.”

  Frank went to the kitchen, poured coffee that he did not want, made as though to wash some cups, did things to keep his hands moving. Then he sat on the stool he had used on the first night Mary came to his apartment, to keep himself away from her.

  “I
won’t do it,” he said.

  “Are you being a coward, Frank? Is it that you don’t dare?”

  “Maybe it is. You can believe that if it helps you. I want to go out. I want to get out of this apartment.”

  “Can I come?”

  “Of course. I have only a few hours left of you. I’m not taking my eyes from your face.”

  They were early for lunch in the local bar, where the young waitress was still setting the salt and pepper on the tables.

  “Sure it’s okay,” she said. “What can I get you?”

  The bar began to fill, and somehow they went through the process of lunch as though they were normal people. A menu came and went; they placed an order and drank without knowing it from the glasses on the table.

  A nervous exhilaration came over them because they knew they had almost no time left. At the next table was a man in his thirties with a boy of about eight, possibly a son to whom a divorce settlement gave him weekend access. The man tried to cheer the boy along, talking of the ball game they would see later and the big dessert he was going to order him. The boy was no good at conversation and between times the man kept sneaking glances at the newspaper on his lap.

  Frank and Mary, with no reason to hold back, said things of riskless rhetorical candor.

  Mary told him what her mother had explained about the Titans and concluded, “You are the other half of my soul. I can’t bear that I wasted all those years before I met you.”