Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (10 page)

“Was she sick?”

“No worse than anyone else here.”

I
CAUGHT A TRAIN
that night to Marseilles. There was rain all the way to the coast. The chair car was crowded and overheated from a coal-burning stove and smelled of unwashed bodies and damp wool. The dawn was bleak when we pulled into the station, the sun little more than a pewterlike glow on the horizon, the railroad ties and rails in the yards shiny with waste that had been dumped from the passenger toilets onto the tracks. I brushed my teeth and shaved with cold water in the station and hired a cab to take me to the address of the pension given me by the clerk in the displaced persons camp.

It was located four blocks from the harbor on a decrepit cobbled street where most of the buildings had been pocked by small-arms fire. I could see two large rusting freighters lying on their sides by the entrance to the harbor, their screws in the air. The pension was three stories high and made of stucco and had a dirt courtyard in back and two balconies strung with wash. I could hear children playing beyond the courtyard wall. A solitary palm tree extended above the wall, its fronds yellow and serrated by the wind.

I gave the concierge Rosita’s name and waited, my heart thudding, as though I had labored up a hillside only to discover that the air was too thin to breathe. The concierge’s body was swollen with fat, her black dress almost ripping on her hips. Her eyes were as cautious and intense as a hawk’s.
“Je suis un ami,”
I said.

“What do you want with her?” she replied in English.

“To see her.”

Her eyes dropped to my lieutenant’s bars. “The Americans machine-gunned my building. There were no Germans here. They robbed and destroyed the houses down the street.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Boche, les Américains, ils sont la même chose.”

She gave me a dirty look before walking heavily up the stairs, her back bent, her hand clenching tightly on the banister. A moment later, Rosita came down the stairs. She was wearing a white skirt that went to her calves, with a frill on the hem, and a lavender peasant blouse. Her hair was thick and full of lights and cut short on her neck. She looked absolutely radiant. “Hey, kid,” I said.

“Hello, Weldon,” she said. “How did you know where I was? I’ve tried since March to find you.”

“A major in my outfit told me you were in Nancy. I went there yesterday and took the train here last night.”

“Your commanding officer knew where I was?”

“Don’t worry about the major. Let’s go to breakfast,” I said.

“I leave for Palestine by boat tomorrow.”

Outside, the sun had broken through a cloud and was shining on the cobblestones, slick with rain. “We can talk about that.”

“Talk about it?” she said, looking up into my face.

“There are lots of options in this world. You have to open up your parameters. Why limit yourself to one or two choices?”

She started to speak, but I didn’t let her. I put my arm around her shoulders and walked her with me out the door and down to a café whose windows were steamed with heat.

W
E HAD YOGURT
and smoked fish and freshly baked bread and marmalade and rolled butter, and coffee and sugar and hot milk, all the things you didn’t believe you’d ever be able to buy again in a European café. Rosita’s skin seemed to glow in the warmth of the café. Her hair had lightened during the summer months, and the streaks of brown in it had a gold cast that made me want to reach out and touch them. “Come to Paris with me,” I said.

“I have to be on the freighter by nine
A.M.
”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

She looked away from me and smiled. “Do you know how difficult it was to get passage on that ship?”

“What’s in Haifa?”

“A new life. Maybe a new nation in the making.”

“I want you to meet someone. We’ll leave for Paris in two hours.”

“Meet whom?”

“You’ll find out when we get there.”

“Do you realize how presumptuous you’re being?”

“You’re going, Rosita.”

“It’s been very good of you to come here. You’re a fine man. We’ll always be friends. But you should not be a romantic about these things. You shouldn’t dictate to others, either.”

“There are other boats to Haifa. We’re going to Paris. We’ll go back to the pension and pack your things. Then we’ll go to the train station.” I didn’t know how long I could brass it out. My heart felt like a lump of lead. “Rosita?”

“What?” she said irritably.

I took her hand and held it on top of the table and did not let go of it. “You’re the one,” I said.

“One what?”

“You know what I mean. If things don’t work out, I’ll take you to Haifa myself. I give you my word of honor.”

I
GOT US A
compartment for the trip to Paris. We pulled out of the station at 10:46
A.M.
and were within sight of the Eiffel Tower at twilight.

“Where is this person I’m supposed to meet?” she asked.

“At the Jardin des Tuileries. Come on, he’s quite a fellow.”

“Where are we supposed to stay?”

“At a hotel on the Left Bank.”

“How do you know Paris?”

“I was here the day we liberated it. I met Ernest Hemingway here. He bought me a drink in the bar at the Ritz. I’ll take you there.”

“I can’t believe I’ve done this.”

“You’re going to love this friend of mine.”

I hailed a cab in front of the train station. We got in the backseat, and she felt my forehead, then her own.

“Why did you do that?” I asked.

“I wondered if you might have a form of brain fever. Or if perhaps I do.”

At the Tuileries I paid the driver and took our suitcases out of the cab and set them down on the walkway that led into the gardens. The air was damp and cold and smelled of the sewers by the Seine and the sodden leaves of the chestnut and maple trees that stained the fountains and stone benches. The light had gone out of the sky, and I could feel the temperature dropping. The autumnal odor on the wind seemed to presage more than a change in the season; it spoke of a winter that had no April on the other side of it; it spoke of the way the world had been since September 1, 1939.

“Where is your friend?” she asked.

“He’s coming.”

She had tied a scarf on her head. She looked up and down the walkway. “I think we should go. I think perhaps both of us have acted foolishly.”

“Look yonder,” I said, pointing. “He’s a little eccentric, but he’s a man of his word.”

The figure approaching us wore a cowl and had a face that was a cross between a Canterbury pilgrim’s and a goat’s. He walked with a thin cane and wore oversize shoes and baggy pants and probably could have been called Chaplinesque. His teeth were purple with wine. He smiled broadly at Rosita and bowed.

“This is Father Sasoon. He’s not formally a ‘father’ any longer, but he’s still called one out of respect,” I said.

“Bonsoir, mademoiselle,”
Father Sasoon said.

“He’s a defrocked priest?” she said.

“I think that’s the term normally used.”

“Defrocked for what?” she said.

“I’ve always been afraid to ask,” I said. “Father, let me have a word or two with Rosita, then we’ll take the next step.”

“As you wish, my friend,” he said.

I reached into my coat pocket and took out a small felt-covered box. “This belonged to my grandmother. My mother gave it to me just before I shipped out. She said, ‘If you meet the right girl, give her this.’”

“You’re asking me to marry you?”

“That’s one way of looking at it. I actually think it’s already a done deal.”

“A
what
?”

“You’re the most magnificent woman I’ve ever known. I’ve never seen eyes like yours. I’ve never known anyone as brave. Since last March, I’ve had you in my mind every minute of every day. You think I’m just going to walk away? That’s a ridiculous idea.”

“You know almost nothing about me.”

“I know everything about you. You radiate light. You’re unafraid. You probably have an IQ of over 160.” I took the ring out of the box. It was set with two diamonds and two sapphires. “How about it, Rosita? You could get stuck with worse than me. You’ll love Texas. I was thinking about getting us a place down on the Gulf. It’s like the Riviera without the riffraff.”

And that’s where and how we got married, between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde, not far from the tomb of Napoleon and the bells Quasimodo swung on, in the last week of October 1945, in a European city where the ashes from chimney pots rose into the sky, perhaps as a reminder of the past or as a harbinger of the future.

Chapter

7

B
Y CHRISTMAS EVE
of the same year I had been processed out of the army and we had taken up residence at Grandfather’s ranch. At sunrise the fields and the barn and trees had been limed with frost, the stock tank by the windmill glazed with ice. As the sun rose higher into a flawless blue sky, the day warmed and the trees began ticking with water; steam rose from the tank and squirrels began racing about in the pecan orchard. It was another fine winter day in a land where all four seasons could visit us within a week’s duration. From the front porch I watched a Western Union messenger come up the dirt road on a service cycle. He dismounted and pulled his goggles up on his face with his thumb, the skin white around his eyes. “Beautiful day, huh, Mr. Holland?” he said.

“None better,” I said.

I tipped him and sat down on the steps and opened the telegram and read it. There are moments when you make decisions that seem inconsequential. Later you discover that your life has been changed in an inalterable way by a choice as arbitrary as not dropping a message in a drawer and forgetting about it. I reread the telegram, then folded it and stuck it in my shirt pocket. Let go of the past, I told myself.

Unfortunately, upon my return to civilian life, I had entered a troubling period marked by indecision and depression. At my age, the idea of sitting in a classroom and listening to a professor lecture on books I had probably already read did not seem very appealing. Also, I had begun to dream every third or fourth night about the war. I didn’t tell Rosita about my dreams, nor did I mention them to my mother or to Grandfather. One night I sleepwalked into the kitchen and woke up only when Rosita turned on the light. I was at the breakfast table, my ears roaring with the sound of tank treads, Grandfather’s ancient pistol in my hand.

Now Rosita was sitting behind me in a rocker. She was wearing jeans and half-top suede boots I had bought her, a magazine on her lap.

“Want to take a ride to Kerrville?” I said.

“What for?” she asked.

“Hershel Pine is coming in on the bus and wants to get together,” I replied.

“Is he all right?”

It wasn’t an unreasonable question, considering the times. The revisionists had not had adequate time to rewrite our recent history, and for many of us who had been participants, who knew war for the dirty business it was, resuming old relationships was sometimes another way of keeping the wounds green.

I took the telegram from my pocket and unfolded it and looked again at the words pasted in strips across the pale yellow paper. “He says, ‘Told you I would pay you back.’”

I
T TOOK AN
hour and a half on the old road, most of it unpaved, to reach the café in Kerrville that served as the bus stop for our intrastate line. When Hershel stepped down from the bus, he was wearing an ill-fitting suit, the kind you could buy off a Robert Hall rack for twelve dollars, and a clip-on bow tie and brown shoes that didn’t go with the suit. The backs of his hands were tanned and freckled, the top of his forehead pale from wearing a hat in the sun.

He carried a cardboard tube and a suitcase held together with a belt. “Y’all are a sight for sore eyes,” he said. “The docs took off three of my toes. I could go the rest of my life without seeing snow again. How you like Texas, Miss Rosita?”

“Just call me Rosita, Hershel. It’s very nice to see you again,” she said. “We’ve thought of you often.”

“That’s kind of you,” he said. He hadn’t shaken hands and clearly felt awkward. He set down his suitcase and stuck out his hand to Rosita, then to me, his face coloring.

I patted him on the shoulder. “What do you have there in the tube?”

“Designs,” he replied.

“Why do you keep looking at the bus?” I asked.

“A peculiar fellow was sitting in the back,” he replied. “Maybe I’ve got a permanent case of the heebie-jeebies. That’s what my wife says.”

“Let me help you with your bag,” I said.

“That’s him now, that tall unshaved guy going into the café. I’d swear his eyes were burning holes in the back of my neck.”

“He looks like a regular guy to me, Hershel.”

“Maybe so. Linda Gail, that’s my wife, she says I’m a worrywart.”

“What are the designs?” I asked.

“I’ll show them to you when we can relax. Boy, the sky out here is sure big.”

I wondered how long it would take for the subject of money to come up.

B
UT I WAS
unfair to Hershel. He was obviously happy to see us, and filled with childlike curiosity about everything he saw on the drive to the ranch. I suspected the paintless Victorian home and six hundred acres I associated with “genteel poverty” was the equivalent of a kingdom to him. As soon as he set down his suitcase in the hallway, he went into the dining room and asked permission to spread the rolls from his tube on the table, as though he had to justify his presence in our home.

“What you’re looking at is the diagram for the welding machine that created the Tiger tank, Loot,” he said. “See, the Germans were two or three steps ahead of the process we use. They tacked together homogenous rolled nickel-steel plates that nothing short of a point-blank hit from an antitank shell could crack. You with me so far?”

“I think so,” I said.

I could see Grandfather looking at us from the kitchen, his expression bemused. He was almost ninety, his eyes like blue milk, his calves swollen into eggplants.