The Matchmaker of Kenmare (41 page)

What’s this? A mirage? Must be. No. But—how had that got here?

Even now, as I look back on it, it would have felt more at home in a Paris or Berlin suburb; and it still looks like that. I stood and stared—a cube of white with rough walls and acres of glass. As I drew closer, and by now the snow had reduced itself to light whipping flurries, I could see a pair of doors as white as the walls, and all but camouflaged in the way they had been inserted.

Lights shone inside. Suddenly breaking down, I staggered to the door at the side; judging from the unshoveled snow, nobody had come out of this building in the past twenty-four hours.

I knocked—and it wasn’t a dream or a mirage: Somebody inside opened the door. A tall woman, severe as a teacher, looked at us, and said in English, “Well, hello there!”

She reached down and tried to take Miss Begley’s bag—my fingers had frozen to the handle.

“Max,” she called.

A dog appeared, a big clumber spaniel. Too lazy to have barked when we knocked, he looked up at us without even a whit of curiosity, sort of wagged his tail, and ambled back to his place in front of the fire. He wasn’t Max, his name was Shambles.

A man appeared, twenty years younger than the woman, handsome as groomed leather.

“I’m Max Jackson,” he said. I couldn’t place the accent. “This is my wife, Joan.”

Between them they got us into the house. When, hours later, they asked about our journey, I, accustomed to countryside travel, could give them a good description. Between then and the previous day, they reckoned, with their knowledge of the area, that we had traveled about seventy miles.

“In this weather?” they said.

Architects, both Australian, they became friends of mine after the war, and I’ve visited them, and they’ve visited me here on this mountainside, and every time we meet, they ask me again to tell them (and their
guests, if I’m in their house) the story that I’ve described so far. I always leave out the killing.

That night, when they saw our condition, they became our nursemaids. Only much later did I surmise—and they’ve never confirmed or denied—that they had done this often. Their skill seemed too practiced, their surprise too mild. For instance, they wouldn’t give us much food, they said, not until next day.

Together they lifted Kate from my shoulders and carried her to a couch. I leaned against the wall and then sat on the floor.

Warm flannels, hot towels, a dab of brandy on her lips—Kate had indeed passed out and had escaped frostbite by less than an hour, they said. They carried her upstairs, where they laid her on a bed and covered her with blankets, taking off only her outer clothes. Max lit a fire in her room; an hour or two later, Joan revived her and helped her into a hot bath. I sort of passed out on the sofa downstairs.

Not for long; I took some brandy, and perked up enough to want a bath too. With every fiber of my body a burning pain, I lowered myself slowly into the water—where I almost passed out again.

Next afternoon, when we had grown lucid, and when they had taken into account all our details, they made our next plans for us. We would stay with them until, as Max put it, “the right information” reached him as to the safest place to go. He told us that we had walked through the forests above the village of Büllingen, and that he’d heard of German troops heading west through there that very morning.

I asked, “Are we safe here?”

He said, “What’s safe? Tanks. Allied or German. They could get down this road.”

I said, “Nothing to stop them, I suppose.”

Max said, “But you’re in from the weather here.”

They’d seen almost nothing of the war. Max had an office across the border, in Germany.

“I think I’m on some kind of safe list,” and he laughed. “I wasn’t part of the Bauhaus group, so I’m not suspect. And I used to work for Albert Speer—so maybe he’s protecting me.” He laughed again.

I was too tired to check the references.

Our few days there felt like a vacation. And it snowed, and it snowed, and it snowed. On Saturday morning, a plow arrived and cleared their
path and the lane. The driver, a neighbor, brought news of the war. He said that the Germans were pushing back. Hoping to take Liège.

Max said, “They’re crazy.”

Joan said, “They’ve already captured a number of Allied forces.”

And the snowplow driver said, “But the Americans have almost surrounded them. And they’re at Elsenborn.”

I think that we all play games in our minds with words and language. Even in dire conditions, we dally with little runs of word sounds and phrases that ring like small bells or bounce around like toys. This is the phrase that danced in my head in that house: “scared and scoured.” My mind went,
We are scared and scoured. Scoured and scared. Scared-scoured, scoured-scared. Scared. And. Scoured
.

No need to explain
scared
—you can tell whence that came. But we never found Captain Miller in those Belgian villages, and the failure to fulfill my dear friend’s dream left me whitened and empty inside, like a shed that has been stripped of everything but its walls, roof, and floor, and all of those whitewashed. In some places, the gray shows through the rubbed white. That’s what the inside of my mind felt like: blank; bleak; brittle—scoured.

Max’s snowplow driver got us almost to Elsenborn. Almost. A Walloon who spoke perfect German, Ernst knew every road in his region. We drove through people’s yards, we drove along the banks of rivers and across frozen streams, we drove into the woods again; the little truck must have been made of the greatest steel. In the rear sat three of the driver’s friends—with hunting rifles across their knees, their faces masked against the cold.

We stopped multiple times—to hide, to stretch our legs, or to wait while Ernst could go forward and look down a hill or around a corner. In one village (it may have been Saint-Vith), he stopped beside an army truck—a German army truck.

Ernst joked with the soldiers in German, smoked a cigarette with them, told them that he worked undercover locally for them, and said he’d return and help them. He said that we were a young Walloon couple with a pregnancy that was going wrong early, and he was trying to get through to the hospital in Liège. They told him not to go near Elsenborn, that the Americans now controlled that side of the forest.

From that village, Ernst headed east. As I was about to inquire why, he turned hard right and hard right again on a series of lanes and now we were heading west. I saw a sign for Malmédy, and we went down that road.

On the sharp crest of a hill, Ernst made an error. He stopped so hard that Kate and I, sitting beside him on the bench seat, almost cracked our faces on the windshield. Ernst began to back up—but too late: We’d been seen. Down the hill, at a crossroads, gathered a thick agglomeration of German troops—it seemed almost an army unto itself.

They saw us—they saw our sudden stop, our urgent backing up. No more than a hundred yards or so from us, they opened fire. Nothing hit us, but they began to follow. Ernst revved and revved; the wheels stuck and whizzed—no purchase on the iced mud of the little road.

The three men in the rear jumped out and opened fire down the hill. Two of them continued the fire and the third, with me helping, and Ernst at the wheel, pushed the truck out of the mud. The gunmen jumped back in, and away we went. Two miles on, Ernst turned down another hill and pointed ahead.

“You’re safe.”

In the American camp at Elsenborn, a wide and deep scattering of tents and vehicles under the loosest trees of the forest, the nurses sedated Kate and put her to bed. They had to. When she walked into the medical tent, her feet in six inches of mud, she pitched forward into the arms of the first nurse she saw.

I stood by, as though to make sure that they laid her down carefully, tenderly. “Her husband,” I told them, “is an American officer—Captain Charles Miller. We believe he’s here somewhere. We’re searching for him.”

The second nurse pointed through the door of the tent and whispered, “Go and ask over there.”

And still I lingered. When she and the first nurse had wrapped Kate like a baby and put her gently to bed, her face the shade of blue chalk, only then did I leave. I walked from the tent and, in the mud outside, bent forward and threw up everything that I’d eaten in the last ten years—or so it felt like.

This thought I remember:
The difference between a friend and an enemy is friendliness
. I had come that low—into banality, into wary thought, into nonstop fear. A bright, heavily uniformed young man with beetling eyebrows said, “Can I help you, sir?” and he smiled.

“This is who I am,” and I told him. “This is what I’m doing here,” and I told him.

“Dunno if I can help,” he said, but he certainly tried. He gave me coffee and a chair to sit on, went off to make inquiries, and returned maybe ten minutes later or maybe an hour later, that’s how stunned I was—with a senior man.

At this officer’s request I repeated my name and my mission and pointed to the tent where Kate lay asleep.

“In the name of Christ,” said this new officer, “what were you guys thinking of?”

“Don’t ask me,” I said.

“I will ask you. You’re here. Middle of a damn war.”

Billy Moloney, where were you when I needed you? You recall that Mother—that’s your grandmother—and I, in order to report his hilarious speech accurately, had agreed years ago to substitute the word
flock
for every second word Billy spoke?

“Don’t flocking ask me,” I said, not knowing that I was yelling. “Just flocking don’t. Don’t flocking order me, just flock off and leave me flocking alone.”

“Hey, hey,” said the senior officer, who had slightly bulging eyes. “Nobody’s threatening you.”

Was he the kindest man I’ve ever known? Perhaps. And he knew how
to handle men; he stood close to me, put his hands on my shoulders, and said, “You’re okay. Take it easy, take it easy. What have you been up to?”

I told him—about the woods, the hiding place, the Messerschmitt and its trigger-happy pilot, the German camp, and he said, staggered by my story, “You need more coffee, sir.” I didn’t tell him about the killing.

The “sir” did it. I started to weep and couldn’t stop. He never let go of my shoulders and he just looked at me and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

The beetle-browed young man fetched a second chair and more coffee, and this senior officer and I sat down. We drained our tin mugs, not at all battered, shiny new in fact. And we looked down at the muddy ground.

“I met a fellow called Peiper,” I said. “He has American troops.”

“Peiper’s a tough egg. Him and his gang—ravenous.”

My mood frightful, my spirits destroyed, my intellect a sputtering candle, I nonetheless noted the word.
Ravenous
. A ravening wolf. If nothing else works in the world—legend does. It steadies us, it restores us, it tells us who we are and what we do. That was James Clare’s thesis. He would have latched on to the word
ravenous
. And I, his earnest student in legend and life, took comfort from the fact that the word had been used, and I had noted it.

Kate went back to Lamb’s Head, and I home to Goldenfields. Before that, we had been debriefed at the embassy in Dublin. They didn’t try to tell her that her husband was dead; they saw her passion; nobody could stand close to that fire. It will take a long time, they said, to “sift the results of the war.”

Such diplomatic language—but it was good enough for her. She asked them to tell her when the soldiers were going home from Europe; by now we knew who was going to win the war.

And by then we looked like refugees; each of us had lost a great deal of weight; I could afford it, she couldn’t. And yet she put out so much
energy at the embassy that they all but summoned the ambassador himself. She paced up and down, she spread her hands in powerful gestures; she spoke in emphasis strong as a preacher.

“When you know something—when you know that you know it. Deep in here”—she stabbed a finger into her chest—“you have to believe it. Life is a River with Stepping-stones of Belief.”

Those officials, those decent men—I knew they’d never seen anybody like Kate. They couldn’t calm her because she wasn’t hysterical. They couldn’t deflect her because she was so focused. They couldn’t deny her because she wouldn’t allow it. Her pact with Miller was as powerful as any fuel the world has ever found.

“What will you say to me,” she asked them, “when he comes home from the war and I’m waiting for him?”

They had no answer. Neither did I.

Whatever her show of bravery, she still trembled; on the train south, she failed to keep her hands from shaking; she spilled tea. I had offered—indeed, tried to insist—that I go to Kenmare with her, but she refused, so I climbed from the train at Dundrum and, to my profound astonishment, found Mother and my father waiting. I had sent them a telegram:
IS IT ALL RIGHT IF I COME HOME TOMORROW?
They’d seen that it came from Dublin the previous day, and they had gone to meet both trains.

No embrace; neither took my arm. I had no luggage, just my battered, shattered journal, my
Wandering Scholars
, and my long black coat, and I was still wearing the clothes that I’d found in that cellar in the forest. We walked together, three abreast, each of them close by me, down the platform to the car.

As we sat inside, Mother reached a hand back and patted my knee, and my father said, “You-you-you’re all right now. All right.” How did they know what I’d been through? His little stammer used to irritate and embarrass me; not then, not ever again. We drove home in silence. My irrepressible father broke the silence just once.

“John-John-John Casey’s wife makes him sleep with the horses these days, since he’s so fond of them, she says.”

In the house, Mother beckoned me upstairs. Without a word she showed me the new bathroom, and in moments the steam rose.

“Come on down when you’re ready,” she said. Huge towels lay on shelves, and when I looked in the mirror I wondered whose face I saw.