In Sunlight and in Shadow (57 page)

“Except in accuracy,” the Texan said. His small mustache accented his very blue, darty eyes. “I have a bias toward accuracy and against squirrels. Granted, squirrels don’t shoot back, but I have to say that one accurate shot is worth its weight in—what’s scarce these days?”

“Everything,” said Claire.

Like a magician at the cusp of his trick, Harry was delighted with expectation. Lifting his head, he said, “That’s where my special relation to the carbine comes in. Mine is as accurate as, or more so than, the M1.”

“How did you manage that?” Chester asked. “Or is it a military secret?”

“Unfortunately it isn’t a military secret, being of little value in that it can’t be generally replicated. What we did was this: My detachment consists of seven men and is devoted to a special purpose. I went up the chain of command all the way to a lieutenant general and received permission for each of us to take two carbines to the range each time we went. We compared them for accuracy, and returned the lesser of the two. Every day thereafter, we would check out a fresh weapon, compare it to the one we had retained, and keep whichever was better. They vary, of course, according to the peculiarities of manufacture, quirks in metallurgy, how new was the blade of the machine tool that shaped them, the concentration of its operator . . . God only knows.

“By this method, after months of comparison and subjecting ourselves to double gun-cleaning and the armorers to an absolute hell of record-keeping, we nicked, as it were, those carbines in the top one or two percent of accuracy. But we didn’t stop there. We applied the same process to the ammunition, which also varies by batch, putting aside the stable and accurate loads once we had discovered them.

“It comes down to this. My carbine, like those of my men, while shorter than an M1, lighter in weight, easier to load, and able to carry thirty rounds at a time and fire on full automatic, is, like the M1, accurate to about a quarter of a mile. And we are practiced to use it to the peak of its capacities. The squad has the firepower of a platoon. The individual has almost the firepower of a squad.”

When Harry finished, no one said anything. It was as if he had committed some sort of faux pas, although he didn’t know which one. And then he realized that they were not impressed. They neither admired what he had done nor shared in his enthusiasm. If not embarrassed, they were at least put off—and sad for him almost to the point of pity, because he had spoken too much and they had seen his exceptional intelligence made common by the needs of war. He didn’t understand, and never understood, and had never been able to accustom himself to the society into which—as what he had called a Jew out of water—he had been only half, and even then merely provisionally, accepted once he had arrived at Harvard. He would never know the rules by nature or intuition, never know when force and brilliance are best reined in, or how to rein them in, never know what was right to say in dinner conversation in any setting but that of a boy and his father eating at a kitchen table on the eleventh floor next to an echoing alley off Central Park West, using just a few utensils so as not to make washing difficult, while, as he remembered it most, a cool spring wind whistled through the iron gates that closed off the back courtyards from the street. There he learned to speak freely, with consideration only of the substance of what he said, and not a thought about the intricacies of its reception.

So he ended, and perhaps added to whatever transgression he had committed, by saying, “I’m fond of my carbine, and have etched my name on the stock. I killed some Germans with one that was far less accurate, and now I may kill more, which may help to prevent little clouds of parachutes from blooming over the parks, gardens, and parade grounds of London, and keep the Germans swaying beneath them from landing on your roofs and crashing through your skylights.”

After some time had passed in which silver upon china and the slight hiss of the candles were the only sounds, Harry, not solely out of politeness, asked Claire what she did with
her
days.

“I work in a factory.”

“Making?”

“Field kitchens.”

“Would you please make them so that the food tastes better?”

“’Fraid not.”

“What part do you play?”

“Ophelia.”

“Ophelia’s the one,” he asked, “who makes the fittings that drown the Spam in gravy?”

“No, she bolts on the clamps that hold the gas canisters and the lines that lead to the burners.”

“All day long?”

“All day long, in Slough, and then she goes home to nothing.”

“But she reads.”

“Of course she does. She reads. She dreams of splendors. She remembers before the war and imagines after. And, someday, she’ll get on a ship in winter and glide happily and sadly over two oceans, to summer and home.”

“What if the war ends when it’s summer in England?”

“You know what? Just the way you were sharp about your carbine, I’ve been sharp about that.”

“About what?”

“About the schedule for when the war ends. I’ll be dismissed from my factory, which will stop making field kitchens long before the fighting stops. They’ll look at the battlefields and see that it’s likely to come to a close within a certain length of time. And when the battles are still raging, the gates will shut, our war will be over, and I’ll go home. If it’s summer here, I’ll wait until winter. If it’s winter, I’ll go, knowing that my job is done.”

“You don’t want to stay?” Margaret asked.

Claire shook her head back and forth, her eyes closed. She was lonely, too.

Two trains left for Leicester that night, one from Marylebone and one from St. Pancras. Harry was determined to make the first from Marylebone and keep the second in reserve. He simply could not be absent without leave, not only because of the penalties but because they had no idea where they might be moved before the invasion or when the camps would be sealed or struck. As an officer and a member of an advance element, he had to be available when it was expected of him—as it was also expected and required that he would without hesitation leave the warmth and color of London, and leave a woman alone in her bed when he should have been next to her, for a line of tents that he could hardly see in the cold fog.

He hoped at least that, availing herself of any one of the many trains that left Paddington and made a stop at Slough, Claire would walk with him through Hyde Park to the station, and he broached with his hosts the subject of leaving in time for this. But the Texan jumped in and promised a cab.

“There aren’t any cabs,” Harry said. “What if we can’t find one?”

“We’ll leave early enough.”

So they stayed on, adjourning to the salon and talking about the war a lot, which Harry didn’t like, because there was nothing he could do about it except what he was doing, and whatever that might be there would be no trace of it in history. They talked about British politics as well, which Harry found theoretically of interest but less so than the chance, now gone, of walking through the park with Claire.

Half an hour before her train from Paddington they rushed out as if from a sinking ship, politely but quickly, and with the women’s heels clicking upon the pavement like castanets they double-timed to Exhibition Road, where there were no cars at all, much less taxis.

“What shall we do?” Claire asked.

“Walk toward the park.” They were already doing that. “Maybe a taxi will come along. If not, we’re headed in the right direction.”

“No,” the Texan said. “We should go down to Brompton Road. There’ll be much more traffic there.”

“We’ll split up,” Harry proposed. “You don’t have to make a train. If you get a taxi, come along this way and pick us up. If we get one, we’ll just go.”

“Okay” was the reply, and the Americans turned on their heels and walked determinedly in the opposite direction. Everyone had been breathing hard and moving fast. Even so, Harry and Claire picked up the pace. “Can we make it?” she asked.

“If you can keep this up.”

“I can.”

“Then yes.”

“Is there time,” she asked as they sped forward on the deserted street, “or will there be time, for a kiss—or two?”

“I’ve been wanting to kiss you ever since I walked into that room.”

“I know,” she said.

In a single movement, he stopped suddenly and stepped in front of her so that she would run into him, and when she did they first clasped hands, and then their hands, like the receivers on rifles, slid up the other’s forearms until each held the other by the elbows, which locked them tightly at the hips and enabled them to press their upper bodies together, and then he kissed her, lightly at first, like stroking, with rhythm in each touch, all in what seemed like seconds. He opened her coat, and then his, and found out how thin and conforming silk is, as if it were not there, but better because it is. He kissed her neck, and his hands found her back and then her breasts, which he bent to kiss. Harry and Claire, the war suspended by the only thing in the world that could suspend it, embraced in the dark, standing alone on Exhibition Road. A wind came through the trees, the kind of wind that comes only at night, and shook droplets of water rather gently from the leaves, in a shower that wet nothing. Because the street lamps were extinguished, the museums were closed, and the lights of London were blacked out, they could have been deep in the forest.

Both knew that he would soon go back into the war and had no say in when or if he could come down to London. Five years had been enough to instruct her in that uncertainty, and, for him, two with the shock of ten. When they had exchanged addresses on little pieces of paper in the hallway as everyone was donning coats and looking for umbrellas, the papers seemed more powerfully sad than paper was ever meant to be, and when thrust into their coat pockets the notes were like the lockets that hold remembrances of the dead. All they could do was kiss, and so they kissed, and the purest and kindest that was in them echoed from one to the other.

Until a horse-drawn cab came racing up the street, and as it stopped they did too, and got in, with the Texan and his wife pretending unsuccessfully not to have seen. “Paddington Station,” the Texan said. “Can you gallop this horse?” The cab driver answered with a crack of his whip. Claire was all red and disheveled, but no one could see this in the dark, except everybody.

O
THER THAN IN
replaying over and over the several minutes before the cab drew up on Exhibition Road, he never did get back to London or to Claire. Shortly after his return, leave was canceled, the camp was sealed in, and in May the division moved to the airfields from which it would rise sometime in June on its way to France. As they drove through the countryside to the departure point, Harry knew with each change of heading in which direction London lay, and as if the canvas cover of the truck were one of the many outdoor movie screens he had seen in desert camps and in Sicily, he envisioned upon it scenes of life as they played out oblivious of him: tugs puffing down the Thames; traffic crossing bridges; trucks rolling; horses trotting, clopping; women in scarves, wending their way to work; and Claire, who did not know that he was watching. In his imagination, as if in a film, she was in a great hall where here and there and never ceasing, showers of bluish-white sparks arose from welders’ arcs and then died into cool smoke fleeing sadly on the air, and because of the way things were and had to be, her back was turned to him as he receded dimly on the road, goodbye, Claire.

The charm of northern European summers is that because they are so cool you do not need to yearn for fall. The summer light, the scents, and the sounds of warblers and owls at night and doves of any type in morning, and crows that caw for corn months before it ripens, come in England and in Normandy on currents of cold glassy air. Summer colors in high sun, vivid and clear, pierce the density of the atmosphere, which otherwise might be misty or vacuous, blurring sight and sound. The sun shone warmly upon rows of tents at the side of the airstrip, and refreshing air wound like a brook through their rolled-up sides. In the fields and woods, except when airplanes racing down the runway stunned them into silence, doves cooed with the precision of clocks.

At the beginning of June, when they were ready on the airfield, had packed and checked their equipment many times, and were as determined to live as they were at peace with dying, Harry and his men were visited by a colonel from the Combined Chiefs of Staff. The seven paratroopers were summoned to the officers’ mess, where in a room with diaphanous curtains that rose and fell with the breeze they stood at attention and saluted the colonel, who was on the phone, and who, with the rocking of his left hand, had them stand at ease. Then, furthering his order, he pointed to the benches and chairs scattered against the walls.

“I have no idea, and they don’t either,” he said into the phone, “but it has to be done.” The unintelligible response sounded like Louis Armstrong playing with the mute against the bell of his trumpet, and the impression given was that a creature like Rumpelstiltskin was on the other end of the line, a munchkin with three stars and a big office filled with maps, map cases, and telephones. “Two thousand here and another two thousand with the Hundred and First,” the colonel said to the munchkin. “I’ll let you know as soon as I can. Meanwhile, I’m talking to the blocking forces. Oh. Okay. Yes, sir.” He hung up.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “Good news and bad news for you, depending upon how you look at it, and depending on how it works out.”

They were silent.

“We go on the fifth. You’re first. You won’t jump first, however. We’re detaching you, and you’re going farther south. Your plane has to swing way out into the ocean to get you where we want you and not conflict with the traffic, of which there will be so much that we fear that no matter what we do we’re going to have collisions.” The colonel stood and walked over to a map of northern France, which because it had neither indications of enemy dispositions nor invasion routes marked upon it could have been lifted from a high school French class. “Here,” he said, pointing to a small town about twenty miles south of St. Lô, “rather alarmingly in the interior, is Tessy sur Vire, and somewhere around here is the Seventeenth SS Panzergrenadier Division. Very bad.”