Prudence (15 page)

The war had changed that much, at least. It had managed to put some things in perspective even as it tore other things apart. Nothing had the same weight. It wasn’t that nothing mattered. The war didn’t mean that. It meant
everything
did, everything mattered, not least what he would do when he got out. What he felt, what he had felt all those years—all those years at the Pines that, when he lived them, felt filled with empty longing and fear—had been full. They had been full, completely and utterly full. What mass, what earth-tethered mass, did those years and all those feelings have, compared to the bombs he dropped every week? Much more. He had been living as a fake thing, a copy, but there was no reason to continue living that way. None at all. He had been nothing more than a wooden puppet. That’s why he liked that silly cartoon so much and watched it a few times before the reels were sent on to some other base. He had been a wooden puppet suspended by the strings held by Ernie and Emma and Jonathan, and himself, too: he had held his own strings and made himself dance all those ugly dances. And what a mistake! What a mistake it had been to want to be a man! His wish should have been the same as Pinocchio’s: Make me into a boy. Make me into a
real
boy. And he might have gotten that wish if only he had been “brave, truthful, and unselfish.”

Instead he’d been a coward, a liar. He’d been selfish. When they had left the woods that awful day, he was not able to look at his father or the others. It had taken all his nerve to lift his head and mumble
something to Prudence. “Sorry,” he’d said. That was it. That was all he could manage. Not “sorry for what I did” or anything even remotely like it. Instead, he’d collapsed gratefully into the embrace of Billy’s lie.

After. The lie hung there in the air—as humid and cloying as the air itself. He felt as if he couldn’t breathe. Emma and Jonathan had carried Prudence into the maid’s room. Jonathan checked her for injuries while Emma bustled about, heating water and stacking clean towels. She had the good sense to get some clean clothes from one of the kitchen girls, and after Prudence was checked and bathed, Emma helped her dress and took the bloody clothes away and burned them so that no one, least of all Prudence herself, would have to look at the blood. Frankie had hung around the kitchen, useless, as his father and mother tended to her. He wanted to speak to her, to say something to her, but didn’t know how and didn’t know what to say. After a while he went upstairs and sat in his room. He sat in the chair in the corner and looked over the room itself: just the bed, with its white sheets and the wool blanket and quilt folded down at the foot of his bed. His suitcases, stacked to the right of the door. His uniform in its bag, hanging in the wardrobe. The nightstand, on which stood a windup alarm clock and the kerosene lantern. An empty bedroom. A stupid bedroom. Nothing seemed to provide any kind of answer, much less any relief. Eventually he shucked his shoes and took off his pants and got into bed.

Sleep didn’t come. Not even when it grew dark. He turned first to one side and then to the other.

Billy came and then left. He’d offered to go get some books for Frankie. As if that would do any good. What he wanted from Billy he couldn’t have. When Billy came back he feigned sleep.

At some point he got up. The Pines was quiet. Billy had left for the night. Ernie and David were either drunk or asleep in their cabin. Frankie listened at the top of the stairs. He could hear nothing. He tiptoed down the stairs and turned into the hallway and entered the
kitchen. The windows were open. The temperature had dropped and a breeze came through the open windows. He walked the few short steps to the maid’s room, his heart in his throat. A sliver of light showed under the door. Frankie knocked. No answer. He knocked again. No answer.

He turned the brass knob and pushed the door open. The maid’s room was tiny. Just large enough for a washstand, a small desk, and an iron-framed twin bed. Prudence sat on the bed, her knees drawn up to her chest. Her arms were wrapped around her legs and her chin rested on her knees. Her hair had been washed and combed and braided. A kerosene lantern, its wick smoking and in need of a trim, stood on the washstand next to the pitcher and bowl. Prudence was looking but not looking, her eyes unfocused. Her skin was shockingly dark against the white nightgown she wore.

Frankie didn’t know what to say.

“Hi,” he finally managed.

Prudence’s eyes flickered over to him, then back to whatever it was they were actually seeing.

“Are you okay?”

She still said nothing.

“Do you speak English? Can you understand me?”

She looked back at him quickly.

He didn’t move into the room. He leaned on the jamb, his arms folded across his chest. He rubbed his own arms as though he were cold, though he wasn’t.

Everything he had meant to say left his head. Standing there, looking at her, he had no idea what to do or say.

“I’ve got to go to the Air Force.”

Silence.

“I’ve got to go to the war.”

More silence.

“But I’ll come back. I’ll come back, okay? I’ll come back and help
you. I’ll make this better. I swear. I’ll come back and we’ll fix this. I’ll fix this. Do you understand?”

He thought he saw her nod, ever so slightly.

“You understand, okay? I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry this happened to you, to your sister. I’m just so awfully sorry. I’ll write you when I’m gone. Promise. I’ll make it up to you.”

She didn’t move or say anything in response. He closed the door and went back to his room, not sure at all if she had understood him.

What he had really wanted was to apologize to Billy. Billy came back the next day. And the day after that. He tried to hold Frankie’s hand, but Frankie wouldn’t let him. He wanted a chance to apologize for that. Why hadn’t Billy just held his hand anyway? Why had he become a coward, too? It was bad enough that Frankie had gone down to Prudence’s room and hadn’t managed to tell her the truth. That had been his chance to be a man—not by shooting so blindly and so quickly. Not by “getting the Kraut!” That’s not what men did. He’d had his chance down there on the threshold of the maid’s room, but with each tick, tick, tick of the Westclox, the chance to tell the truth had grown more and more remote. And Billy. Billy had been awkward and tentative. He should have crawled into bed with Frankie. Billy should have held him, forced his body around him. Billy should have ignored Frankie’s words and just held him anyway, the way Felix had held Prudence despite her protests. But Billy had chickened out. They’d all been puppets jerking on their little strings of guilt and shame.

Frankie put the pages next to him and got out a fresh sheet and placed it flat on the training manual.

My Dearest,

One of the problems I never expected to have over here is that I’ve got too much time to think. And the best thing, the easiest
thing, is to try and spend all that time finding ways not to think at all. I never succeed, of course. I always end up going over that day in my mind, thinking how it could have, how it should have, turned out differently. But it didn’t. No matter how often I return to that afternoon in my mind, it always turns out the same. That poor girl. That poor, poor girl.

Up till very recently I always added “and poor poor me” to the end of that. But that’s not really fair, and it’s not really true, either. There were many who suffered that day.

I worry about you most of all. And that’s the truth. I worry about what happened to you. You had to stay there, at least for a while. I got out of there so quickly and then everything happened so fast with my training and my deployment. I’m sorry I haven’t written you till now. Truly sorry. I just didn’t know what to say or how to say it, and so I thought it best not to say anything. But that’s not right, either. That’s not the right thing to do. I didn’t think about how what happened affected you. Really affected you most of all.

So let me fix the record while I can. I am so sorry for what happened. Nothing I can do can change it, I know. But I am sorry. I’m sorry, too, for how I acted. You needed me and I wasn’t there for you. I shouldn’t have pushed anyone away, least of all you. I should have gone to you then and told you how sorry I was and tried as best I could to make things better. I didn’t.

The whole world is at war. They call this WWII, and they are right. So I know you are in it somehow doing your part. Hopefully you’re still up north and not someplace else. It’s safe up there—when Germans aren’t escaping from that damn camp—and so I hope you stay there. Because when this is all done, all over and done, I’m going to come back and take you out of there. Neither you nor I will be reminded, or have to be
reminded, of the mistakes we’ve made or the things we’ve done or the things we’ve endured. It’s so simple. We could leave and never go back. One thing I’ve learned over here in England is that the world is a really big place. It sounds so silly to put it that way, but it is. I think about this every time I get up in the nose and we fly out over England and across the North Sea and out over the Continent: it’s a big world. And it’s beautiful, too. Beautiful in ways I can’t begin to describe. I think about that every time I fly. The rest of the guys are stuck in different parts of the plane. They have these little windows to look out of and can only see small parts of everything, little bits of the countryside, little bits of the other planes around us, the fights and the flak and the ground. But I can see everything up in the nose. I watch the runway speeding up underneath us and then, when the wheels leave the ground and we go faster and faster, we fly over fences and hedgerows and walls. And in between them I see the gardens and fields and streams and the forest. All of this gets smaller and smaller underneath us, and then the whole world is spread out. I see the villages and towns and roads. The factories and trains and rail yards and everything in between. And then we’re off over the sea. If it isn’t cloudy I can see the waves and the light blue of shallow water and the dark, deep blue of the depths. It’s hard to focus on all this once we’ve passed the coast over the mainland, but it’s there for me to see anyway. All those little towns and villages and orchards and fields and roads. It is so green, so full of life, despite the war. So green and so full of life and so large. When all this is done I will come back, I promise. I’ll come back and take you out of there. There’s no limit on us. Not like we think there is. There’s no reason why we can’t make our own decisions. I don’t know what I will do or what you will do. Right now the only thing I am qualified to do is to use the Norden bombsight to kill
people. I don’t imagine that skill will be much in demand after the war. But I’ll find something. Even over here. We could come over here. They’ll need people to rebuild this place when the war’s over. We could come to England. Or France. It’s funny. I’ve spent so much time over France in the plane but I’ve never touched it. Never put my feet there. Never put my hands in her earth. It looks very beautiful. A lot of the small towns and villages we fly over haven’t been bombed. The bigger cities are a mess, but the war has passed some of the smaller places by. The houses are there. The fields are there. Everything is there. And it’s waiting for us. And it’s not so far off. It’s almost Christmas. The Germans can’t hold on much longer. We have destroyed their air force. Even now, every time we cross over the French coast there are fewer and fewer German planes waiting for us. Of course, the Army has pushed the Germans out of France by now. Still—the same is true when we cross over into Germany. Fewer and fewer planes. They don’t have any oil and they don’t have any fuel. They don’t have any parts for their planes and tanks and guns. I’m not sure if they even have any men left. The Russians are rolling them up to the east, and we’re rolling them up from the west, and pretty soon we’ll meet in the middle and the war will be over.

We could come over here together then, far away from the sad past, and start where no one knows us. I mean really start. They make their houses—in the villages, I mean—out of stone. They cluster together down in these little valleys, all those little stone houses. We could make one of them ours. A little snug place where nothing bad could ever happen. And we could spend the days reading or out cutting our own firewood. When it gets cold we will start a fire. There won’t be anyone else around except for us. I’ll read to you. You could lie down and put your head on my lap while I read, if you don’t feel like
reading. With the shutters closed and the fire going we’ll be snug and warm, snug and safe, and it’ll be as though there’s no one else in the world but us. Just you and me. No one will know us. They won’t even know our names. They won’t know where we’re from or what we’ve done or what we’ve seen.

After everything that’s happened—to you, to me, to the whole damn world—I’m ready for that now. It won’t be long and I’ll be in your arms. I’m getting tired and I’m ready to go to sleep. Before I do, I just want to say, “I love you.” I know that’s a bold thing to say, especially after everything else. I should have said those words before I left. I hope it’s not too late to say them now. I hope that when this letter reaches you, you are far away from harm, that you’re safe and sound and happy to hear from me.

Your (if you’ll have me) Frankie

It was time to be a man. He would find Billy after the war was done. How much longer could it last? Satisfied, he placed the new pages on top of the other ones and put them all in a large envelope. He put the necklace he had gotten for Prudence on top. He would mail them all together the next day. He felt light, very much lighter. As an afterthought he jotted a note for the postmaster to explain to Felix that the necklace was for Prudence and the letter was for Billy. Then he took off his boots and socks and padded over to shut off the light switch and crawled into his cot, fully clothed. The other guys would be back the next day. He missed them a little. They would, no doubt, have a lot to say about what they had done in London.

He closed his eyes. Sleep didn’t come right away. First, he thought ahead to the future he would have with Billy. It was pleasant to do so, a long-deferred dream. But then, as he was drifting off, he again saw the man who’d bailed out in front of him. He saw the body in its
tucked position, turning slowly through the air toward the nose of Frankie’s plane, and then up and over the props, and over the wing and out into space. Only this time Frankie was that man. Maybe he was dreaming. He crossed his arms over his legs and brought his knees to his chin to begin his rotation. The plane loomed, coming at him upside down and then right side up, and then he was past, and the plane grew smaller above him. He made the calculations in his head. He bailed out at 25,000 feet. At that altitude his time to impact—not counting friction, cross winds, and humidity—was 40.52 seconds. His speed upon impact would be 888.27 mph, without calculating the drag coefficient, so he’d most likely fall more slowly than that. Energy upon impact (calculating his weight at 147 pounds) would measure 0.000000883 kilotons. Hardly anything at all. Barely measurable, really. He continued to fall, moving faster and faster. He picked out shapes on the ground now. Roads. Individual trees. The trees looked soft, even cushiony. The ground was closer now. He saw individual trees, and also bushes and stalks of wheat. It must be late in the summer, the harvest was about to be brought in.