The Last Mission

by William Kennedy

  I pass around the newspaper articles, much to everyone’s amazement. “That’s you? That’s really you?” Each of the girls takes a turn, doubting that I could have had another life before I became their grandfather. They rapidly conclude that I was the highest-ranking American in a war that was worth about a chapter in their history courses. That leads me to explain how many of us were there, what we did, and what kinds of planes we flew.

  Kit and Todd are only a bit more familiar with my story. They remember a younger version of me, and know about my military service, but they have always pictured the younger me in a background that fit their own experience. In the photos, I’m standing among women who are feathered and jeweled in the style of another world. The buildings are quaint and the homes unbelievably small. And the airplanes! Did those preposterous looking tail-draggers really fly? An eight-hour mission from England to Czechoslovakia is beyond imagining. Kay and her children flew to Hawaii in eight hours.

  Henry is the most impressed of all. He looks directly at his daughters and tells them that these extraordinary deeds are the stuff of true heroism. Men like me answered the call, stepped forward, and rescued the world from slavery. He implies that I could be their role model, a man who knew how to shoulder responsibility. I’m not sure whether he’s more interested in building me up or tearing Todd down. Certainly his definition of responsible manhood is framed to cut Todd out of the picture.

  I realize that Henry is exactly the way I was when I was in my midforties. He believes he is shaping the future, not just for himself but for a large sector of mankind. He believes in the ten-hour workday and the six-day week and makes no effort to hide his disdain for those who can’t keep up with his pace. Henry plans to be president of his company and to be recognized as one of the giants of his industry. He expects greater financial rewards that will allow him to lavish even greater excesses on his wife and children. Responsibility is his definition of manhood.

  There’s no point in taking issue with him. Nothing less than life itself will change his mind. At least that’s what it took to shake me back to life. The experience of being unable to direct my own children. Of being unable to save a dying wife. Of seeing the tide of events obliterate all the lines I had drawn in the sand. Of letting my happiest moments be run over by my mindless momentum. Of building a future at the expense of relishing the present.

  Someday Henry will understand that being a giant of his industry is no more important than singing for the homeless at the Grand Street Shelter. That his wife and daughters need not more, but rather less. That the future is nothing more than a continuation of the present, and if we lose the present there will never be a future. But he can’t know that now. Henry’s next breath has never been in doubt. He has never experienced life one day at a time as I did in East Anglia, and he’s still too young to have learned it on his own.

  It’s one of the girls who wonders were there any women involved in the war. I could duck the question and tell her about the WACs, the WAVES, and Rosie the Riveter, but I know she’s asking were there any women I was involved with. And I answer frankly. As we sit over our coffee and half-filled wineglasses, I tell them about that part of my life in East Anglia that I’ve never mentioned before—about the woman who helped me get through it all. I describe Angela Priest as a girl still a year younger than they are, who had bombs fall on her city. Who thought she might be killed the next time the sirens blew. Who let go of everything familiar to keep me from dying of terror and loneliness. I talk of dinners with her family and picnics in the country. Naturally, I leave out the physical intimacies. They remain deeply private and, in truth, they were peripheral to the feelings I recapture.

  “Did you love her?” Kit dares to ask.

  I avoid the question. “This was all before I found out that your mother had grown up.”

  Henry has to catch the six a.m. train in the morning to get a head start on the competition. The girls go out to visit with some friends. Todd and I do the dishes, under Kit’s supervision, then he puts on his jacket and I walk him outside to his car.

  “All these years, you never mentioned the girl in England,” he says, as if he’s been cheated out of something.

  “I hadn’t really thought about her until all these wartime clippings came in.”

  “But you did love her.” It’s a statement of fact.

  “Oh, I…” I fumble for a way of explaining my feelings. “Yes, I did. I loved her very much.”

  He pauses, with his hand on the car-door handle. “That’s nice,” he decides. “I’m glad you had someone to be with.”

  He has the door open when a question occurs to him. “Did you look her up while you were over in England?”

  “Not really. But friends that I met over there looked her up for me. We spent a day in Cambridge…at the American military cemetery.”

  “And were the feelings still there?”

  “Todd, that was half a century ago. I’ve had a wonderful life with your mother. She married and had her own family. Maybe we got a bit sentimental over old times. But everything has changed.”

  “That’s too bad,” Todd says thoughtfully. “I wish you had someone to be with now.”

  So do I. Maybe there will be someone. I’ve heard that men who have survived their marriages are in great demand by marriage-surviving women, who outnumber them by about five to one. But right now I’m facing the next day without Kay, and I’m not sure where to begin.

  I haul a few pieces of furniture out of storage to fill my new apartment. The result is usable and comfortable, but certainly not something that would appeal to a decorator. Our sofa fits in the living room, but with space for just one end table. The television is too close to the coffee table, and the casual table just about makes it between the TV and the bedroom door. One of our two double beds is perfect for the bedroom, and the small television works on top of my chest of drawers. I buy new cookware for the kitchen, and new tableware. So I can cook, eat, sit comfortably and read, watch television, and sleep with the late-night shows to help me nod off.

  In the midst of the process, while I’m too busy to weigh my thoughts, I send a letter to Angela. It’s a standard bread-and-butter note, thanking her for hosting my visit, putting me up, and taking me on a tour of Cambridge. I comment on the irony of two unimportant people being used by both sides of the invasion: the British police and the American military. But I’m grateful, I admit, that whatever devious plans they had for us, they did introduce us. In some strange way, they made the worst days of my life the happiest days of my life. I mail it instantly, before I try to put more into it.

  And she responds instantly. Formally on the front side of her monogrammed personal stationery. Wonderful to see me, learn what I had been up to and all that. But emotionally inside the fold: “You never said good-bye to me, until now. I rather thought that some part of you never intended to. But it’s good for both of us to put our youth to rest.”

  Is that what I said? Is that why Arthur Lyons chastised me for packing it in too early? I sit with her letter in my hand, looking at the blank gray screen of the television.

  Kit comes over the next day to see what I’ve done, and immediately begins adding the missing feminine touches. She interposes figurines between the volumes on my bookshelf, supplies a holder for the kitchen napkins and paper towels, and gives me a decorative basket to hold my mail. Silk flowers appear on the kitchen counter, and a small piece of sculpture settles on the corner of the coffee table. The improvement is vast.

  Then I show her my letters, both the one to Arthur and the one to Angela.

  “They’re fine,” she decides. “Why? What’s bothering you?”

  “The responses,” I tell her. “They sound like acknowledgments to my obituary.”

  Kit smiles when she reads Arthur’s letter. “I think he’d like you to promise that you’ll stop by the bar on your next visit. He wants to keep the friendship going.”

  “But I told him that I’d look forward
to his visit…”

  “Oh, sure,” she cuts me off. “If he’s ever in the country. That’s what you write to someone you meet on a cruise.”

  She reads Angela’s letter, then rereads my letter to her. She holds both in her hand as she looks at me. “She loved you very much,” Kit concludes.

  “And I loved her very much. But that was fifty years ago.”

  “Was it?” Kit asks. “Did it stop fifty years ago? Because if it did, you never told her. I think she’s telling you that it didn’t stop for her, and that she didn’t know it was over for you either, until she got your letter.”

  “How could she have thought…” I don’t finish the question, because I know the answer. The same way I thought. What we shared was part of each of us forever. I was part of the woman who married Edward Murray. She was part of the man who married Kit’s mother. I knew Angela was still alive inside me. Why didn’t I think that I might still be alive inside of her?

  “Write her again,” Kit says. “This time tell her what you feel.”

  “I’m not very good at telling people what I feel. Ask your brother. He’ll tell you that I’m a war hero.”

  “You told Todd. He knows that regardless of whatever happened in the past, your love was always there, reaching out to him. You ought to be able to tell Angela what’s inside you.”

  “I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do.”

  “How can trusting someone else with your feelings ever be the wrong thing to do?”

  “It’s been too long since I poured myself out to her,” I say definitively.

  “So why does it have to be any longer?”

  Kit hands me back the letters. “Henry and I don’t talk much. He’s too big a deal to let his feelings leak out.” She stands and picks up her purse. “But I’m not such a big deal. When I get home I’m going to have his cocktail waiting, and I’m going to tell him how much I love him.”

  Good God, now what have I started?

  Then

  Probably the reason Angela and I never said good-bye was that we never thought that we could go on living without each other. In all the times I left her, knowing that my name might come up in the lottery on the next day’s mission, I never once felt that our love could end. I might vanish. I might never see her again. But that wouldn’t be good-bye.

  We were going to Berlin on the first report of clear skies. As usual before a big strategic raid, the base was closed down. Our intelligence people figured that this was the best way to keep the Germans from rushing their defenses to the target, but the absence of American flyers in the towns was a clear announcement that something big was brewing. That would put the Germans on alert. They could pretty well figure the target once they got a track on our planes.

  I had taken personnel data to Browning, this batch indicating that only one of our men had left insurance benefits to another woman he had under surveillance. At the time, I thought it was a useless detail and that the sergeant might see through it and end our relationship. In retrospect, I probably gave him the information he needed to turn another young woman, just as he had forced Angela to become his informant.

  I might have been the only American on the loose in Norwich, and Angela met me at our one-room rendezvous. We were both somber, me because of the impending raid into Berlin, and she for reasons of her own. I hadn’t told her of the dangerous mission in store, but I figured that she had noticed the disappearance of Americans. All the signs she had learned to recognize pointed to something big.

  As we lay together, I tried to assure her that what was coming up was just routine, but my own fears came through plainly. I remember she thanked me for trying, but told me that when I lied my nose got longer. Then she admitted that there was another problem. As her father had predicted, her mother’s family had heard about her affair with an American flyer. They inquired delicately.

  “Lots of our girls are going to be left behind with a bun in the oven,” an aunt had warned her mother.

  “Well, I suppose the French girls are doing it with the Germans,” her grandmother had remarked philosophically. Her mother was hand-wringing frantic, and too embarrassed to shop in the local stores. Her father had turned sullen, his daughter a common camp follower.

  Angela could no longer deny what was obvious. Her mother could no longer take pleasure in her daughter’s happiness. The dinner invitations dried up. Mr. Priest wouldn’t even accept a bottle of black-market liquor. In truth, our relationship was long overdue at the altar, but the American military and British civil authorities tended to discourage wartime marriages between allies. Angela would have been referred to her pastor for counseling. I probably would have been transferred to a squadron in North Africa.

  “But I don’t want anything to change,” she insisted that day. Nor did I. The war would end and we would be free to do as we pleased. That was her hope of surviving her family-imposed exile. And it was my hope when the weather cleared the next morning. After some theoretical number of missions, there would be nothing left to bomb. Someone would have the good sense to advance the notion of peace. All I had to do was keep coming back from the missions. But Berlin was a difficult target to survive.

  In early 1944, Berlin was still a fortress whose surrender was beyond imagination. To the west, half of Germany, all of France and the English Channel stood between the city and its enemies. To the east, all of Poland and much of the Ukraine. The only threat to the city was the bombers flying all the way from England, and Germany was pouring much of its dwindling resources into keeping them away. Raids against the capital encountered the newest high-altitude interceptors: the reengined Focke-Wulf 190s. Antiaircraft batteries in the city’s western approaches had been fitted with high-altitude guns, capable of reaching us at thirty thousand feet. There were even rocket batteries that sent projectiles through our formations at dazzling speed. Göring couldn’t stop the British at night or the Americans by day from flying over his city, but each day the radio broadcasts reported on the number of planes downed and the number of attackers killed. Even when discounted for the expected exaggerations, we were paying a heavy price to bring the war to Berlin.

  We were under attack all the way. Interceptors came at us when we were over the Dutch border, Hannover, and Wolfsburg. There were quick jabs into our formations by pilots clearly unwilling to fight their way back through our escort fighters. Still, they sent two of our bombers down in flames and started engine fires in two more. The four planes lost were in four different sectors of our box formation. The roulette wheel was already spinning.

  The stakes jumped when we reached Brandenburg, with the Berlin suburbs visible ahead. First came the fighters in a coordinated attack from ahead and from the high side. Our Mustangs clobbered the Messerschmitts coming down on us, but the frontal attack hit unopposed. Fortresses flashed into fire along our leading edge, some staying in line, but most spinning out, then one of the damaged attackers from above rolled within a few feet of our wing tip. The flame coming out the cowling had enveloped the cockpit, but the pilot was still in control. He dove his doomed fighter precisely into the cockpit of the B-17 below and to the left. The concussion rocked my ship.

  The Mustangs switched their attention to the frontal assault, following the Germans out in a wide turn to the north. At that moment, a group of the long-nosed 190s came diving down from high above, leveled out to follow the slope of our formation, and blew away a half dozen of our bombers with their cannon fire.

  Suddenly we had surviving fighters of the first two groups, along with the new arrivals attacking us from three different directions. Every gunner in my plane was firing at a German fighter coming right at him, and the Germans’ tracers were crisscrossing all around us. A hole blasted through the left outboard wing and another in the dorsal extension of the rudder. The plane shuddered, as if we were driving along a potholed back road, but none of the crew was hurt and we were still holding our position.

  The Mustangs must have knocked down half the Ge
rman fighters as they repositioned for another pass, but these guys didn’t seem to care about engaging our escorts. They were single-minded about getting us.

  Back they came from high on the right and low on the right quarter. The bomber to my right lifted its nose abruptly and then simply broke in half. A cannon round exploded just above my right wing route, and there were screams over the intercom. The ball turret in the belly stopped firing.

  “Close it up, Marron!”

  Sure, Colonel. Close it up to where? The plane above and to my right was gone, along with the one below and to my left. The two planes directly ahead in the leading box were missing. I was out in the open with a big piece of sky all to myself. Exactly what was I supposed to close up against?

  “Marron, take Hardy’s spot.” I eased the nose up and kicked a flat turn to the right, moving up the line closer to Colonel Mast. “Simon, drop back above Jones.” The colonel was breaking our line of bearing into two shorter lines with a space in the center. Our eighteen-plane line had become two six-plane lines. The Germans were regrouping for still another attack, this time from high over the rear, but the Mustangs cut them off. With the Germans concentrating on us, the Mustang pilots could simply swing in behind them and shoot them to pieces. The final pass was ineffective, and of the sixteen or so fighters that attacked us, only four were left to leg it away.

  Then the antiaircraft guns started. We saw them flashing ahead and did a ten-degree turn to the left. A minute later, a dense flak field exploded to our right. Instantly, we altered back toward our base course, knowing that the next round of fire would be somewhere off to our left, but there were a lot of guns and they had our altitude. When we settled on our bombing run, we would be the doomed ducks in a row.

  The lead bombardier took over. Each successive wave figured its drop time from the lead plane’s mark. Our bomb-bay doors swung open. We were at twenty-eight thousand to twenty-four thousand feet, locked on a course of zero nine two degrees, pinned into place for the next two minutes until our bombs were released on a major freight terminal and switchyard. At this point, all the antiaircraft gunners needed to calculate was a lead angle. A minute later, we were in the center of a flak field.