Villa America (13 page)

“Mrs. Murphy?”

Sara looked up, flushed.

“Is the fire too hot?” Miss Stewart asked, her face concerned.

“No,” Sara said, trying to control her breathing. “I was just…is it bath time?”

“Yes,” Miss Stewart said. “I’ll get the maid to bring in the tub and the water.”

After the small zinc bathtub was placed in front of the fire and the steaming water poured from the pitcher, its temperature tested carefully by both Sara and Miss Stewart, Sara gently woke Honoria up.

There was a little fussing as her daughter reacquainted herself with the world, still so new and strange to her. But she finally settled down and Sara undid her child’s white dress and got her out of her underclothes and her diaper.

Then she placed her baby gently in the warm water and held her suspended with one hand while she splashed her with the other. After a while, she let Honoria down in the water and propped her up so she could play. Tiny hands slapping against the surface, so gratified by the noise and the movement and light from the fire reflected in the droplets spinning up around her.

Sara smiled at her, saying, “Yes, yes, I know,” to every expression. Then Honoria stopped splashing, and for a moment Sara thought there was something wrong. But her daughter just cocked her head a little and looked her straight in the face. Those brilliant gray eyes surrounded by pale bronze lashes. The pupils a little dilated. It gave Sara a jolt, a sensuous pleasure she recognized from somewhere else: in the dark of her bed with Gerald. It swept over her. And she let out a sigh. And Honoria let out a sigh, as if they were thinking the same thing.

Afterward, when Honoria was dried off, her hair a little red duck’s fluff on her head, Sara rubbed oil into her pale skin and she glistened. The baby wiggled at her touch and stretched her toes towards the heat coming from the grate. And she tried to eat the oil off her hands, making Sara laugh.

Then Miss Stewart settled both of them back in the settee, Honoria safe and clean in Sara’s arms. And in the warmth of the fire and the wake of the pleasure, they both fell fast asleep.

Owen lay on his cot in a château somewhere near Chaudun, France, listening to the breathing of the other men in his squadron, punctuated from time to time by the sound of night bombers dropping their calling cards on the rapidly moving front lines.

The canvas cot felt tight around him. At six feet, he was too tall, and his shoulders too broad, for these cots made for Frenchmen. After two years of sleeping in them, he should have been used to it, but this one felt smaller than usual. Next to him, Quentin wasn’t sleeping either. He could tell by the rhythm and pattern of his breath, which he now knew as well as, if not better than, he knew his own. They were both waiting for daylight.

He guessed it was around three o’clock in the morning, and they all had to be up in less than two hours to prepare for their mission. They’d been moved from the tip of the salient at Château-Thierry to this place, their jump-off point, to cover the Second Marine Division on their advance to retake Soissons. There’d been some fuckup the day before at the start of the counterattack, and an advance that should have been fought with three regiments now had to rely on only one, the Sixth Marines. Owen’s squadron, along with three others, had been brought in to provide whatever help they could from the air.

Their orders were to fly at a hundred feet and strafe as much of the German front line as possible while the Marines advanced behind a rolling barrage. They’d never flown so low, and they’d known what it meant when they’d been informed: all the Boche fighters would have altitude advantage on them, and the Germans’ generally useless antiaircraft artillery would have a real chance to make contact. It was a pilot’s no-man’s-land. It also meant that the Allied Powers’ command didn’t trust the tanks.

“Something’s wrong,” Quentin had said last night, rolling a cigarette after dinner, his dark hair shiny from want of a bath.

“Not enough tanks,” Owen said. “Or not good enough.”

“Not enough men,” Quentin said.

“Too much information,” Owen said.

Quentin lit his cigarette, nodding. As a fighter squadron, they were never given many specifics on their missions. This time, however, they knew a lot, and it worried them. It made them feel insecure as to who was really in charge. Owen could feel it in himself as well as in the men around him.

“Jesus. Those poor bloody Marines,” Quentin said.

Owen reached for the tobacco pouch. He rolled a pinch up and lit it, then ran his hand through his hair, cropped close because of recent nits, bleached blonder by the July sun.

They’d sat smoking, silent. Owen could feel the warmth and smell the body odor coming off Quentin. They’d been together for almost two years now, since that November at Pau, their aviation finishing school, a dream after the hardships of training at Avord. Their bodies had hardened, thinned together; the lists of their enemy kills and their own minor wounds had lengthened together. The only two Americans in their French escadrille, they’d opted out of joining their own country’s ranks together.

Now, lying in the dark of that room in that nameless château, Owen knew what Quentin was thinking because it was what he and most likely every other man in that room was thinking. It was about fire, the eternal question for aviators. If your machine burst into flames, did you jump to almost certain death, or did you risk the agony of burning alive in the hope that you might be able to land before you were incinerated?

Over the many months they’d flown together, through the winter at Verdun and the hell of the Chemin des Dames, they’d seen men make both choices. There were so many ways for the planes to catch fire—the fabric, the tank, the wood; they’d debated the dangers of wings versus tails, engines versus entire fuselage. But in the end, the conversations always concluded one way: Quentin was for jumping, and Owen was for staying.

“Look,” Quentin would say, “you have to be realistic. You know when it’s bad, when it’s too far gone, and you just have to cut your losses. I’d rather go out with a quick broken neck than with my flesh melting.”

“There’s always a chance you could land the plane,” Owen would say. “Always a chance that you misjudged how bad it was, always a chance you might make it.”

“You’re talking about a miracle.”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“No,” Quentin would say, “the miracle would be that you jump and you live.”

The longer they flew, the moodier these conversations made Owen. It was said that combat pilots had an average survival rate of three months. Quentin had been flying for fourteen, minus about six months scattered here and there due to chronic appendicitis and a broken arm and other injuries. Owen, however, had been flying for twenty. It was, after all, only an average.

Quentin was the ace; he’d surpassed the necessary five official kills and now had a total of eight. But Owen was the phenomenon. His nickname in the squadron was La Chance, for his lucky escapes. Once, while he was being pursued by three Fokkers, his aileron control rod had been hit, and with wires whipping across his face and slashing his scalp, he’d been forced into an uncontrolled dive, yet he’d still managed to land, blood pouring into his eyes, right next to a first-aid station. Then there’d been the time his engine had cut out over no-man’s-land. He’d crawled through a triangular barrage to an Allied trench before the Germans exploded his machine with heavy shelling. The favorite story among the boys in the squad, though, was the time he’d been seen going down into a forest, plane smoking, only to reemerge hours later over the trees, his plane decked out with flowers and ribbons supplied by the French peasants who’d found him and helped him repair it.

Owen didn’t want to rob the boys of the laughs they got from recounting these stories, from joking about his nickname, so he kept quiet. But he hated it. He thought it was jinxy. Jinxes and superstitions, good-luck charms and rituals—these occupied a huge space in the imaginations of the pilots, himself included.

Most of the boys carried charms when they went up. Quentin kept a gold cigarette case in the front pocket of his flight suit. He said it had been given to him by an Indian maharani he’d met during his travels.

Quentin, it seemed, had been everywhere. He’d come from a bit of money, somewhere in Connecticut. After his mother died and his father took off for South America, Quentin had traveled to France and then worked his way from Algiers to Tunisia to Egypt and then to Bombay, where he got a job as a ticket agent in a railroad station. He’d seen his first airplane in Calcutta, where he became a mechanic for a stunt pilot before traveling back to France. There, he’d joined up with the French Foreign Legion.

Owen’s own experiences felt gray in comparison: The two years working in a tannery in Boston, coming home each evening to that hovel of a room in Chinatown, the smell of wet-blue sticking to him, and staring at the place in the corner of the ceiling where the horsehair plaster crumbled a bit more every day from the oily damp. No friends, no money. Then his mother dying. The farm being sold. He’d found out about the Lafayette Flying Corps at a town hall–style meeting he’d attended out of sheer loneliness and had heard all about the Americans fighting in the air for the French cause. He’d managed to wrangle a letter of introduction from Mr. Cushing, who’d taken on the task of disposing of the farm and the livestock, and also from a reputable missionary in Chinatown he sometimes talked with. And eventually, in the spring of 1916, he’d set sail for France. Only then, at twenty years old, did he feel his life had really begun.

Quentin always said it was a strange philosophy, for Owen to believe that his life began at the moment he’d started preparing for death. But Owen knew the difference between dying in an airplane in a war while fighting with men you loved and dying in a shithole in Chinatown watching horsehair plaster crumble in the corner of a room.

In the darkness now, he heard a shuffling and a click. He knew Quentin was opening the cigarette case. He often played with it when he couldn’t sleep.

He waited. And then it came:

“Owen, you awake?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been thinking about that girl.”

That girl
could be only one girl, and it frightened Owen to hear him say it; they had an unspoken agreement not to mention her.

“Don’t think about it.”

“No, I know. I just can’t help it tonight, for some reason.”

“Try.”

There was a silence. Then: “Why should I?”

Owen turned over and sighed. “Because…” What could he say? There was no concrete reason, at least not one he felt equipped to articulate. Just that to him, she represented the same thing as jumping out of a burning airplane; she represented giving up. “Because she’s bad luck,” he said finally.

“See, I don’t think so. I’ve been thinking about it and I think she’s what we’re fighting for. I mean, that’s the reason we’re here, why we’re flying and not sitting behind a desk at Pau or Avord twiddling our fucking thumbs and waiting for all the fighting to be finished.”

The girl would always be
that girl
to them; she had to be, because they didn’t know her name. They didn’t know anything about her except what had happened to her. And even then they didn’t know why. But she’d become their story, and they owned her motivations now.

It had started seven months ago, this story with the girl. December in Paris. Quentin and Owen had gone up to take their physicals with the U.S. Air Service. The United States had finally joined the war that April, and like all the other Americans in the Lafayette Flying Corps, Quentin and Owen wanted to fly under their own colors.

They’d been given a day of leave in the capital before their exams, but a trip to the Red Cross had made them tense. They’d run into two other Lafayette Fliers who’d just failed their physicals. They were being sent back to the States.

“I just had another official kill three days ago,” one of them said angrily. “And now I’m blind, according to the U.S. Air Service? Fuck that.”

There were more stories like that, of course—they’d heard about aces like Lufbery and Thaw, their heroes, being shoved behind desks, being forced to teach boys with zero experience how to fly a Penguin, or, worse, being sent back home to shift paper there.

“They can’t make us transfer,” Quentin had said as they’d strolled on the Quai de Conti along the Seine. “We have the choice. We can stay with the French.”

“We can,” Owen said. The sun hit his face. The weather seemed particularly mild.

He thought about the men they’d been fighting with. It had come to mean something, this country. They’d watched this nation send one tide of men after another to their deaths until finally they were scraping grade schools for new soldiers to hold the front.

“I don’t know, though,” Quentin said. “It feels wrong somehow. I mean, this isn’t home.”

“No,” Owen said. “But they might need us more.”

“You going to save the whole of France all by yourself? Quite the hero.”

“Don’t act like what we do is nothing, Quentin. I can’t believe that.”

“Jesus, the eternal optimist. ‘There’s always a chance, Quentin, always.’ Don’t you ever get fucking tired of that?”

“Fuck you.”

They were angry, but so many things made them angry now. It might have been a relief to hit each other. Their eyes were locked, their hands tense and itching.

That’s when the girl made her entrance. First, a scream from above, then, as they looked up towards the sound, she came down from the bridge in front of them, feetfirst, her black dress like a parachute, a black veil streaming above her. Then, sickeningly, she hit the river.

Quentin didn’t move, but Owen tore off his coat, his sweater, his shoes. He was in the freezing December water before he could think. She hadn’t surfaced. He dove down. It was dark. He couldn’t see anything. It was too cold. He wouldn’t last long, he knew. Surfacing into the sunshine, he heard shouting. One more dive and then he’d have to get out. Back down under the water, he thought he saw the outline of a pale face and swam towards it, but it disappeared farther below. He kept going and then knew he couldn’t. He started swimming back up but was suddenly too tired. He knew that face. It wasn’t the girl’s face. It was Charlie’s face; it was Flora’s face. Then someone’s arms were around his waist, pulling him up. And in the daylight, he saw Quentin, Quentin holding him.