In War Times (56 page)

Go on down. Why not?

Sliding into his shoes, he made his way quietly through the house. Leonid’s kitchen was completely modern now, in compact European style. He opened the door, taking care to leave it unlocked, and went down the stairs.

The bar was gone, replaced by some comfortable outdoor chairs. He stood behind one, remembering. The fairy lights, the accordion player, the keg—it had been right here—

“Sam.”

He turned.

And there was Bette.

She stepped out of the shadows, many years older, like him, but still slim and beautiful as that night she’d turned up and asked for a drink. Her hair was silver in the moonlight. She wore a red dress, as she had when she’d taken him to Berlin in 1945. He was afraid to speak, afraid she would vanish.

“Took you a goddamned long time to track me down, Dance.”

He reached out, and embraced time’s released melody.

J
ILL WALKED ACROSS
the wide porch of Halcyon House, and descended the steps between washes of pink and violet hydrangeas glimmering with morning dew. She adjusted her small briefpack, and wheeled her bicycle from the shed, noting that the grass needed cutting.

As usual, she would ride to the Georgetown town house and do some work. Elmore would show up later with the truck and they’d ride home together, bike in the back. It was almost ready to move in. They were building bookshelves for the store now. She was taking only one course, Complexity Theory and World Politics, and it would not meet again until tomorrow.

She liked riding her bike very early in the morning. It was quiet; the streets where she had grown up, where so much had happened, were cool and leafy. She made a note in her mind to work in Dad’s garden this evening. It was getting overgrown.

The letter she had received from him a year ago still unsettled her, but she accepted that he was gone, like her mother. He had vanished into some vastness that was concrete and yet unfathomable, a place where she had once gone and from which she had never entirely returned.

“Take care of everything, and don’t worry,” it had said. No mention of ever coming back from wherever he was.

Jill sliced through the cool morning air, shifting gears, taking tree-lined back streets just beginning to stir with people heading for work. She coasted past the recently cleaned snow-white Capitol, and turned at Union Station.

Something made her stop for a moment in front of the park across from the station, Columbus Circle. It had been done up new—overnight, it seemed, the way they changed landscaping in the city—with banks of pink, deep rose, and red begonias. Behind them were stalks of tall purple iris.

The colors blazed out against the green grass, the damp brown tree trunks. It was enough just to look at them. She pulled out her water bottle and took a long drink.

The greenness, the beauty of the city, the white and gray buildings and tall trees all around, through which she rode every day, rose up and embraced her, assuaging the deep pain she’d carried with her for years, ever since…

Ever since
then
.

Hadn’t her father said that he got off the train here, years ago, when he met their mother and they decided to get married?

They were not here. Yet they were.

It was as if they were streaming upward and outward, infinite in all directions,
there
.

She stood spellbound for a few minutes, breathing the green-infused air, thinking about the war, wondering again what, exactly, they had done. She had seen long-ago glimpses of it in the Infinite Game Board, but they had never talked much about it.

As she inserted her foot into her pedal-guard and readied to push off, she had a thought. She would get those dusty, consecutively numbered composition books of her father’s out of the attic and read them.

Their collective title was, simply,
In War Times
.

T
HOMAS E. GOONAN
, my father, wrote the sections of
In War Times
that appear as Sam’s narratives. Though the novel itself is fiction, these sections are true and factual accounts of his World War II experiences, and of his career as a fire protection engineer. Most are abridged, and only a small percentage of them appear in the book; more appear on my Web page, www.goonan.com, on the
In War Times
page. A discography, photographs of 1945 Germany, and a list of the history, biography, physics, and biology books to which I referred are there as well. Although the war years herein closely follow his Army career, Sam is not Tom Goonan. Although my mother flew for the Civil Air Patrol and owned a small plane, Bette is not my mother—except, perhaps, in spirit. Likewise, none of the men of Company C, as portrayed herein, are meant to portray actual persons.

The 610th, which set up shop in Germany four months before the surrender, was in British territory; therefore the draconian antifraternization rules of the U.S. Army, which forbade any contact between Germans and American soldiers as well as giving the Germans any kind of food (leading to much excess food being thrown away in plain sight of the starving population, and more than one American soldier court-martialed) were not strictly enforced. The soldiers of the 610th, therefore, got a slightly different view of being a conquering army than did much of the American military. This particular slice of the war, as well as the work of those who handled the buildup for Operation Overlord, are not well documented. Sir Max Hastings’s
Armageddon
, Dallas’s
1945: The War That Never Ended
, the eyewitness reports of journalists, and German accounts of the final days of the Third Reich proved invaluable.

Thomas Goonan’s M-9 training at Aberdeen, Maryland, undertaken at a time when the M-9 Director and radar were top-secret, and his subsequent troubleshooting of the circuit boards of the M-9 Director, are true. The M-9 system as finally constituted at the time the Nazis gave up on the V-l buzz bombs consisted of:

M-9 Director

SCR 584 (radar)

Proximity Fuze

Replacement wire wound cards, which embodied 90mm sun firing tables (instead of 3-inch gun tables originally provided by the Army as “good enough for anti-aircraft work.”

During his entire professional life, he has worked on the vanguard of information technologies. As a fire protection engineer working for the Navy, the Veteran’s Administration, and GSA, he was involved in projects such as the fire protection for the
Arizona
memorial, inspecting the tracking stations for the space and ICBM programs throughout the Pacific, and the development of voice-directed evacuation procedures and the entire fire protection systems for high-rise buildings. One of my goals in writing this book was to show how those who spend their careers putting their technological expertise in the service of all of us, by working for the government, contribute to our welfare. After retiring from the government, he worked on historic preservation projects, including the South Street Seaport, the Inner Harbor at Baltimore, the Furness Library at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Old Post Office Building in Washington, D.C.

I have likened the evolution of modern jazz, later dubbed bebop, to the creative ferment in science that has led to our ever-growing understanding of the world, nature, and ourselves. Like the development of the atomic bomb, modern jazz remained a well-kept secret until after the war. Unlike the development of the bomb, which can now be known, we can never revisit the original luminous thoughts of Charlie Parker as he and Dizzy Gillespie birthed a new art form. In reality, the physicists, chemists, and biologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries birthed modernity and its reflection and interpretation in literature, art, and music. Our art and our science are inextricably linked.