Losing Julia (6 page)

WHERE TO START?
With Daniel? Yes, dear Daniel.

I see him so clearly. Handsome as all hell. Smart as a whip too. Always seemed to know things I needed to know but never could figure out, like he was one of those people who are born with answers built right in. You were so young! My young friend Daniel, sitting there cold and hungry in a tarpaulin dugout in the rain with your knees drawn up and writing page after page. Always writing.

Daniel MacGuire was from a family of San Francisco Irish Catholics who proudly traced their lineage to a treacherous trip around Cape Horn in 1851, the final leg of a two-year flight from the potato famine. His father Conor was a stonemason, as was his father and father before him. The second oldest of seven—the two youngest died of scarlet fever—Daniel was pulled from school at the age of fifteen to help his father, who was backlogged rebuilding San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. But Daniel kept studying. “It was either stones or books, and what the hell did I want to spend my life putting one stone on top of another for?” he said. By sixteen he had published his first short story in a boy’s adventure magazine. Though he wanted to apply for a job with a newspaper, he didn’t have the heart to leave his father, who had a bad back and increasingly relied on Daniel to run the business. Then one day, on a Sunday afternoon in September, Daniel was walking along Stinson Beach when he saw Julia.

“She had this little chair and an easel and this look on her face like she was completely lost in what she was doing, and I just thought she looked adorable. I must have walked by her four times before I got the courage to walk up and ask her what she was painting.”

“What was it?”

“What was what?”

“The painting?”

“Oh hell, I can’t remember, I was so struck by her face. Absolutely thunderstruck, like I’d been physically hit. But she’s a damn good painter. She may even make a name for herself.”

Maybe I saw her sitting on the beach too, or maybe it was just the expression on Daniel’s face when he talked about her, but for me, Julia soon became my own escape from the war; my personal guardian angel who beckoned me away from the madness every time I closed my eyes. Daniel offered hundreds of dots and I connected them, until the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen emerged, my angel in the trenches; my incantation against despair. My Julia.

Her father was killed in an accident on San Francisco’s wharf when she was a child; her mother worked as a waitress in a coffee shop. After school each day Julia sat at one end of the counter doing her homework or drawing pictures. She preferred drawing pictures, mostly landscapes inhabited by children at play or workers at rest. Daniel said her portraits were all of poor people with callused but unbeaten expressions and I imagined that she had no tolerance for the rich or well-connected.

She grew up in a series of cheap one-bedroom apartments near the wharves and Daniel described how the dampness of the bay mingled with the smells of leather and sweat and wet wood and the fresh fish on display early each morning in the market stalls. Like Daniel (and me!) she loved to read from an early age, disappearing for days into books when the pressures of childhood threatened to overwhelm her. “My bookish beauty,” he called her.

I struggled to picture such a thing. “Sounds like you’ve met your match—and I’m referring only to the bookish part,” I said one evening as we sat in a trench after returning from water duty.

“Oh no, I’m entirely outclassed.” He lit a cigarette and slowly inhaled. Looking past him down the line I could see the glow of other cigarettes dancing in the darkness like fireflies. “She once told me that she got her self-esteem through books and I asked how that was possible, and she said that through books she learned what other people, even great people, were really made of inside, and it wasn’t anything that she didn’t have.”

When she was eighteen, she won a scholarship to study at the Art Institute but dropped out after her mother got sick. She divided her time between waiting tables and caring for her mother, painting only at night after her mother was asleep.

“She’s not like other women,” said Daniel. “At least not the kind I’ve met.”

“How is that?” I asked, watching as he exhaled his smoke into the lice-infested folds of his uniform.

He looked over at me and smiled. “It’s not just her beauty. There are plenty of women who are prettier than her. But she’s got this incredible charm. And she’s completely unconventional. She doesn’t want to live like everybody else with all their petty ambitions and fancy clothes and numbing routines. We’ve even talked of spending our lives on the road, just traveling and meeting people and seeing the world. All of it: South America and the Orient and even Africa.” His face took on a wistful expression. “But the best part about her is that I can tell her anything. I never imagined that that would be possible.”

“Everything?” I couldn’t imagine divulging the contents of my soul—much less my imagination—to any woman without the severest of consequences.

He nodded.

“There is one thing about her though.”

“What’s that?”

“She’s totally absentminded. It’s almost scary. For example, when I met her on the beach, she’d lost track of time and missed her ride home.”

“How convenient.”

“You wouldn’t trust her to heat a pot of water.”

“She’s an artist, what do you expect?”

“I just hope she doesn’t forget she’s in love with me,” he said, smiling.

“Doubtful. Did you start dating right away?” I was hungry for details.

“Immediately. It was incredible. We’d meet as often as we could, sometimes at the beach or in a park or by the wharves. Often I would just sit and watch her paint and I used to laugh to myself because I knew that no matter how talented she was, nothing she could paint was as beautiful as the sight of her painting.”

“Are you engaged?”

He laughed. “You kidding? My parents won’t even meet her. She’s not Catholic. Doesn’t even go to church. ‘It’s not the girl we don’t like, Danny, but by God you marry out of the faith and you’ll split the family forever.’ That’s my father. Mother just kept quiet and wrung her hands, which is her way of voicing discomfort. ‘The faith is all we have, Danny. It’s who we are.’”

Two months later Daniel and Julia ran away, heading north along the coast up to Mendocino, where Daniel tried his hand at poetry and Julia taught art. His letters home were returned unopened. That was 1916. A year later he joined the army, figuring that his parents would be unable to resist a son in uniform, even with a Protestant at his side.

I pray you may never encounter a modern bombardment, it is simply hell let loose. The sights one sees are too dreadful to talk about, no chance of burial for the dead, they slowly rot in the ground, mangled and re-mangled by shells, and the flies come in swarms. Imagine trying to eat food under these conditions, also up to the knees in mud and water for 4 or 5 days at a time. I pray to God it will soon be over and this madness of slaughter comes to an end.

—Reginald Gill, Australian Imperial Force, 1916.

I FIRST MET
Daniel in France. I was a replacement; he was a veteran, at least in my eyes. I was hastily assigned to the eight-man squad he led after being assembled with other replacements at a crowded railroad siding south of Paris. Within an hour the replenished combat battalion was marching toward the front, part of a dusty column of men and horses and trucks and ammunition limbers that stretched across the rolling French countryside, hurrying to meet the great German spring offensive, which was pushing the exhausted French Army back across the Marne River for the second time since 1914 and now threatened Paris.

I liked him immediately. He was tall and broad-shouldered with tousled, reddish-brown hair, a slight gap between his front upper teeth and a habit of rocking forward on the balls of his feet even after a long march. He was very handsome with intense, hazel-colored eyes that maintained a constant, penetrating squint, a strong chin and thin lips set in a slight smile. He had large, powerful hands, the kind where you can see the muscles and tendons at work, and incredible stamina. When he laughed he threw his head back and shook without making any noise. Though I only saw him cry once I felt it sometimes, in the darkness during a shelling or standing next to me at a burial service. But what I remember most about Daniel was that he seemed to have complete self-control over every muscle in his body, which is unusual when you are under fire. And no matter what we were doing, he always seemed to be preoccupied with something more important, like someone who is in the middle of making a momentous decision.

He was a good soldier, much braver than I was but not foolhardy, with an economy of motion and agility that made him seem almost graceful, which is no mean trick in war. Yet he never seemed the military type, not the gruff, cigar-chomping sort that inevitably intimidated me. He was far too gentle and soft-spoken, with a soothing, compassionate manner that made you want to spill your fears and secrets to him. (He was one of the few men that other men felt comfortable crying in front of.) By temperament, I think he would have made an excellent doctor or priest.

“Fresh off the boat?” he asked, dropping back to walk next to me.

“A few weeks,” I said, broadening my shoulders.

“We got a good bunch of men,” he said, sizing me up.

“I’ll do my best.”

He nodded slowly, still studying me. Then he gave me a friendly smile and said, “I was scared shitless the first couple of times.”

I shrugged. The first couple of what? Shellings? Bayonet charges? Gas attacks? I wanted to ask but didn’t dare.

“It’s amazing what you get used to,” he continued, offering me a cigarette. I took it. “Though to be honest, I wish we didn’t get used to it. Then it couldn’t go on.”

“You been here long?” I asked.

“Long enough.”

“Pretty bad?”

“Worse.”

I wondered if he was testing me.

“Why did you enlist?” I asked.

He was silent for a moment. “It’s complicated,” he said finally. “How about you?”

“Seemed like the thing to do.”

“Yes it did, didn’t it?” he said, with a distant expression on his face.

An hour later we entered a small village, where we were stopped for two hours by a huge traffic jam. At the center of the square an angry officer stood on the top of a delousing truck, bellowing orders.

By midafternoon the straps of my pack cut into my shoulders. I mentally itemized my load: a hundred rounds in my cartridge belt; two bandoliers, sixty rounds in each; a nine-pound rifle; my haversack, filled with extra clothes, my kit bag, mess tin, pay book, extra boots, pup tent, blanket and four tins of hard bread; my greatcoat, which was rolled on the top of my haversack; a canteen; a pistol; a shovel; a first aid pouch; a bayonet; a gas respirator, which hung around my neck, and my helmet. At least some of the men were smaller than me. I studied their faces, looking for signs of stress, then wiped my brow with my sleeve.

“Pershing’s Ammunition Train,” said Daniel, smiling.