Wait (Beloved Bloody Time) (4 page)

“But that’s wonderful,” Natália said. “And do you love her, even a little?”

He lifted his head up to look at the bare branches overhead, casting for the answer. “I…think so,” he said.

Natália pressed her head against his shoulder, briefly. “Don’t fear love,” she told him softly. “Don’t hold back. It’s the only thing we have left that is human, in the end.”

He halted and turned her to face him once more. “But what happens, later?” he asked. “I let myself love her and…what?”

Natália shook her head. “Does she know what you are?”

“We weren’t together long enough during the war, but now, with peace here…” He grimaced. “Did you tell your husband?”

Natália shook her head. “It was not that sort of marriage. I was a political asset. But I think he knew, anyway. He knew there was something not human about me, although he never said anything.”

Christian studied her, puzzled. “How did you stand it? Losing him?”

“I stood it the way everyone else withstands it.”

He breathed in, trying to think passed the panic her answer seemed to impart. “Just like humans,” he muttered.

“There is no other way,” she added gently. “They die. We go on.”

“I should stop this now. Divorce her. Let her have a good life.”

“You could give her that good life. Christian, don’t turn away happiness. It doesn’t last, but what happiness ever does? Everything ends.
Everything
. You must accept that, and take each moment as it comes.”

Her firm tone, the hand on his arm, and the rich warmth of her eyes steadied him. “Very well,” he said. “She will not regret marrying me.”

“I am quite sure she will not,” Natália told him and reached up to press her hand against his cheek with a soft smile. Then she coaxed him into walking once more. “Although you will find that the rewards flow toward you as steadily as you can steer them to her.”

He kept his jaws together, unwilling to dispute her, for he could see nothing but bleak years ahead, watching Juliet grow old and die.

“I’ve decided what I am going to do, this next life,” Natália said, her tone light and happy.

He tried to stir himself into a better mood. “And what would that be?” he asked, matching her tone.

“I’m going to go back to Europe. I’m going to go home. Your yearning for home has reminded me of my own human days and enough time has passed for me that it will be safe enough to go back now.” She smiled up at him, and there was sadness in her expression. “They say everything will change now. That the old Europe we know will disappear…that it is disappearing already, thanks to the war. I want to see it one last time before it goes.”

He nodded. “It
will
change. Everything is already changing. This war…it was unlike any battle or war I’ve ever been through.  The weapons…tanks…motor cars. It was brutal. But they say that is the way modern wars will be fought from now on.”

“Everything changes,” she said softly.

“Everything ends,” he added and sighed. “I think I am finally growing tired of wars and weapons and steel, but I’ve been trained for nothing else.”

“Nonsense,” she replied briskly. “You can learn to be anything you want. I’ve been a duchess, a farm wife, and a gypsy, for a while. Now I am a nurse. The war opened up all sorts of possibilities for women. I think the next few decades will be very interesting. Do you know they’re talking about giving women the right to vote?”

Christian snorted. “It’s hard to see that ever happening.”

“It will, and sooner than you think.”

They walked slowly, the silence falling between them, but it was a warmth-filled silence, bereft of any of the feelings that had colored the last few moments.

“If you’re looking for something other than professional solder, Christian, what about something that is the complete opposite?”

“What would that be?”

She touched the red cross on her apron. “Medicine. You could be a doctor.”

He raised his brows. “Me, a doctor?”

“Why not? Saving lives instead of taking them. It’s…I don’t know. You would be paying back something.”

He thought of the blood-splattered tents on the battlefield, the doctors with blood and dirt to their hairlines, their eyes bloodshot with lack of sleep and filled with a hopeless, helpless horror at what they had seen and participated in.  “I don’t know…” he said doubtfully.

“Well, it’s a thought.” She picked up the watch pinned to her chest and glanced at the time. “Would you…could you walk me to the hospital? I should report in soon.”

Disappointment filled him. “Of course,” he said. “It would be my honor.”

* * * * *

For the walk to the hospital, Natália kept up a steady stream of chatter, for she sensed that Christian’s mood had deteriorated even further and she had no idea how to fix things. How had everything grown so sour all of a sudden?

It’s your fault
, she told herself.
You reacted badly to the news about his wife.
She had tried hard to disguise her shock…and her disappointment. It had been foolish to think he would be conveniently free of human affairs and the complications that came with a life fully lived, just at the moment when she was clear of her own entanglements and was overcome by the oddest urge to create an entanglement with him.

She was over it now. She was completely recovered from the ridiculous and very dangerous notion of two of the blood sharing any sort of life together. Christian was clearly no longer the lost, young vampire who had needed rescuing. He was living his life. True, he still had some things to learn, but he would learn those the way they all did – with experience rubbing it in just to ensure they never forgot.

So she worked hard to keep the air between them happy and carefree, all the way to the steps of the hospital.

Christian looked up at the series of glass doors. “So….”

“So,” she agreed. She smiled brightly at him. “This has been wonderful, Mr. Hamilton.”

“Whoops. I’ve been Christian until now.” He gave her a small smile. “I’d rather go on being Christian.” His green eyes were staring directly and steadily into hers. They seemed to be growing larger…

She cleared her throat. “You will. Go on, I mean.” She held out her hand, in the new manner some women did, offering her hand to be shaken just as men did.

Christian slowly reached out and took her hand. She shook his. “Have a happy life.” She intended it to sound warm and sincere, but her voice gave her away.
She tried to override the error by keeping her gaze and expression steady and polite. “I must go inside,” she added.

He dropped her hand. “I hope you enjoy Europe.”

“Thank you. Goodbye…Christian.”  She turned to climb the steps.

His hand on her arm halted her and turned her around. Before she could protest, he pulled her into his arms and kissed her.

His lips were soft and full but there was an unyielding power behind them. His tongue swept into her mouth and it was…
wonderful
. It was better than that. It was glorious.  She lost track of where she was, their very public position on the sidewalk, the coolness of the late fall air, even the traffic clopping and driving by.

“You should marry her, soldier!” came a call from nearby.

Christian released her, but his mouth was only a fraction of an inch from hers. They hung there in that surprised moment, both of them breathing heavily.  His fingers, the ones he had curled around her head to keep it steady, moved restlessly in her hair.

Natália moved another inch away from him, enough to look him in the eye. “Tally…. I like that.”

“Has no one in your long life ever called you that before, Tally?” His voice was low and hoarse.

“I’ve never had anyone in my life close enough to me who might think to do so.”

“Not even when you were human?”

She shook her head.

He stroked his thumb very gently over her bottom lip. It was powerfully arousing and she swallowed hard. “Well, now you do,” he told her.

There was nothing she could say. Nothing that would change the facts.

So she turned and dashed up the steps, thrust open the door and pushed her way in. Inside, she leaned against a wall, trying to regain her composure. Matron Briggs was a stickler for decorum and came down hard on any nurse she even suspected might be dallying with a gentleman.

When she thought she had the courage, Natália looked through the doors, at the steps down to the sidewalk.

The spot where Christian had stood was empty.

New York City, 1968 – Fifty Years Later.

“Tally? Tally!”

Tally sat up on the mattress and pushed her hair back over her shoulder. The headband never held it in place properly. “Here!” she called.

She listened to Gabe climbing the narrow, scuffed stairs to the bedroom they sub-let from the wife of a guy who was over there. Mary hadn’t received a letter or pay check from Darryl in over a year. Sub-letting the room helped her pay the rent. Growing marijuana on the roof paid the rest of the rent, the groceries and her utilities, with some to spare, but if Mary kicked the pair of them out, then people would start asking where she got her money.

Gabe reached the top of the stairs, his pace considerably slower than when he had begun climbing. “Man! Those stairs get taller every time I use ‘em.” He plucked at the chest of his tie-dyed tee shirt, fanning himself.

“You smoke too much,” Tally told him, with a smile.

“Smoke too much. Drink too much.” He leaned over to kiss her. “Hi, sweetie.”

“Hi, yourself. You sounded excited, down there. Has something happened?”

He flopped onto mattress next to her. His dark eyes were shining. “It might have.”

“So. Give,” she coaxed him and stretched her legs out along the bare floorboards. What was left after the rent, from the little bit of money they made, was used to buy Gabe’s oils and canvases, not decorating. His paintings supplied their own decoration, for they hung on nails driven into the walls, all around the room. “Did you sell a painting?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, yeah, I did. The green psychedelic one, to that bistro on 67
th
, you know the one?”

Red plastic benches, orange lava lamps. “I know the one you mean.”

“But that’s not the news.” He turned to face her properly, his fingers gripping her thigh with excitement. “There was a guy in the bistro. My age. His number came up a year ago.”

“He’s a draftee?” she asked, her heart sinking. When Gabe’s letter had arrived, he had got stoned for two days and had been drunk, on and off, for the last week. He hadn’t picked up his paintbrush since he had opened the letter. Tally had wracked her brains, trying to think of a way to handle this. Gabe wasn’t soldier material. He lived too much inside his head. The Viet Cong would spot him the moment he stopped to admire a sunset or a tree and lost track of where he was.

But Gabe had refused to even talk about it. Flatly refused, to the point of screaming at her and stalking out of the apartment.

Now this. She tried not to let her wariness show. Instead, she radiated pure interest and hope. “Did he tell you about what it was like?”

Gabe shook his head, his smile lifting the ends of his moustache. “He didn’t go, Tally.
He didn’t go
.”

“How?”

“A doctor up in Harlem wrote him a medical exemption.”

She folded her legs underneath her, sitting up straighter. “A fake exemption?”

Gabe nodded. “He gave me the doctor’s name and address.” He reached into his vest and felt around inside the big pockets.

“But Gabe, honey,” she said, trying to use her most reasonable voice, “We don’t have the sort of money you’d need to buy an exemption.” In all their time together, she had never let him know that she was independently wealthy. In this day and age, it wasn’t always an admirable thing and tended to raise the suspicions
of humans who were the same age as she looked. She had left her funds untouched, while keeping a careful eye on them, and happily scrambled for dough to live from day to day just like Gabe did.

If he had just been able to talk about it, she would have made up a story to explain where the money had come from and bought him an exemption. But he had never given her the chance.

“That’s the thing,” Gabe replied, giving up on finding the scrap of paper he would have written the details upon – probably with a piece of drawing charcoal he found in the bottom of his pocket. He’d be lucky to be able to read it by the time he found it again, for the charcoal would be smudged and smeared. “This dude, he didn’t have to pay for it.”

“
Not
pay for an exemption? But...I don’t understand. No doctor just gives them away. Where’s the profit in that?”

Gabe shook his head, his smile even wider. “That’s just it. It’s so cool, Tally. This doc...He’s on our side. The dude, the one at the bistro? He said he just had to talk to the doctor. Tell him why he didn’t want to go. Then the doctor talked through his medical history. Said he’d come up with something that made sense. That was
all
. That was it.” Gabe was almost vibrating with excitement.

Her spine prickled. So did the back of her neck. “It sounds too good to be true,” she said flatly.

“I know!” Gabe bounced up from the mattress and onto his feet. They were bare. He refused to wear shoes until the frost set in, and even then, he wore his old steel-toe boots under protest the whole time. The back hems of his bell-bottom jeans were frayed from where the hems scuffed the floor with every step he took. The knee was out on the left leg, too.

Tally smiled as she looked at him. Gabe had misunderstood her, but that was alright. She could tell by the energy crackling through him that he wouldn’t hear her no matter what she said. He had made up his mind. This opportunity looked to him
like a get-out-of-jail-free card and no one was going to stop him from hunting down the opportunity and tackling it to the ground if necessary.

“Would you like to go up there to see him tomorrow, honey?” she asked.

He looked at her, his smile fading. The look in his eyes told her he was
really
seeing her. His mind had stopped driving him just for a moment. “You’re aces, babe. Really. You’re the best.”

“I know.” She gave her best smile in return.

* * * * *

Harlem was a chancy place to visit, so they shelled out for a taxi to drop them right at the doctor’s address. The office was on the second floor of a brownstone just across the road from Marcus Garvey Park.

Tally stepped out onto the sidewalk, brushed down her maxi dress and looked up at the brownstone. It was unremarkable. “Are you sure this is the place?” she asked Gabe as he paid the driver.

“It’s cool. This is the place,” Gabe told her. He strode over to the door of the building and scanned the row of resident call buttons and pointed. “See, here he is.”

Tally looked. Unlike the other tags, which were yellowed and curling around the edges, this one was white, clean and covered in some sort of clear plastic.
Hamilton
, was all it said.

Tally stared at it, while her heart leapt to life and beat heavily.
It couldn’t be…

“Tally?” Gabe prompted her.

She straightened up and gave him a smile. “Let’s go see the doctor,” she told him and leaned passed him and pressed the button.

The door immediately buzzed and clicked open. Gabe pushed inside and Tally followed him, trying to get her heart back under control and quiet. They climbed to the second floor and read off the door numbers until they found twenty-three. Gabe took a deep breath and blew it out, then held his thumb against the old-fashioned call button next to the door.

The door clicked open and they stepped into a room full of people, most of them black. Babies were wailing, children were playing on the faded linoleum floor in between the rows of plastic chairs where people sat waiting. It was warm and almost airless in the room. In the corner just next to the door, a middle-aged nurse in a white uniform sat behind a desk. She looked up at them. “Do you have an appointment?” she asked.

“Can the doctor fit us in?” Tally replied.

The nurse scribbled on a sheet of paper and held it out. “Have a seat. I’ll call your number when he can see you.”

Tally looked down at the note. Seventy-three. “Did you start at one, this morning?” she asked curiously.

“Have a seat, ma’am,” the nurse replied.

Gabe tugged at her hand and pulled her over to a seat on the end of a row. He took the only spare seat on the row opposite her and leaned forward. “Guess he’s a real doctor and all,” he said quietly. “Do you have a notepad and pen in your bag?”

Gabe always forgot to bring even a small sketch book with him. She pulled the spare she always carried and a 2B pencil out and handed them to him, then settled in to wait.

It took nearly ninety minutes for their number to be called and in that time, Tally had convinced herself that the doctor couldn’t possibly be Christian. It was just a coincidence in names. Hamilton was a common name. It could be anyone at all in the room behind the closed door.

So when the nurse held the door open for them, Tally walked through calmly.

Christian looked up from a file he was reading as they walked in. His hair was longer and had a slight wave to it, but it was a respectable length for a professional of this day and age, unlike Gabe’s hair, which hung below his shoulder blades.

Christian was wearing black again. A black shirt, at least, and a green tie that matched his eyes and drew attention to them.

She saw his jaw loosen and his lips part, just a little. Then he pressed them firmly together and looked at Gabe. “Have a seat,” he told him. “What can I do for you folk today?”

Gabe glanced toward the shut door. “Um…”

Tally leaned forward. “We were given your name by a former patient of yours.” She put her hand on Gabe’s arm. “Gabe got his letter nearly two weeks ago. He’s to report to Fort Dix at the end of the month.”

Christian put his pen down, studying them. “Writing false medical reports is illegal,” he said. “I don’t know what your friend told you—”

“Hey man, it’s cool,” Gabe told him. “I don’t talk to the man. I don’t tell him anything I don’t have to. You’re safe as a daisy with me.”

Christian got to his feet, which made Gabe scramble to his. Gabe was shorter by a few inches. Tally reluctantly rose, too.

“I have no idea who you people are,” Christian said flatly. “Please leave.” His gaze flickered toward her and her heart squeezed.

Tally caught at Gabe’s hand. “Come on, honey. We’re wasting our time here.”

He was staring at Christian, anger fighting with desperation on his face. “Man, you don’t understand. They’re going to send me to Vietnam.”

“I understand perfectly. We all have our responsibilities.” Christian walked over to the door and opened it. Immediately, the cry of babies, sick people coughing and the warm air of the reception room wafted in. The open door stopped Gabe from protesting, for the people in the waiting room would hear him.

“Fuck you, man,” Gabe said bitterly, brushing passed Tally and heading for the door.

“And have a good day yourself,” Christian told him.

Tally glanced at Christian. He was watching her.

She hurried to catch up with Gabe, her heart working overtime again.

* * * * *

The Astoria had been torn down during the Depression. Tally had returned from Europe when a second war was threatening to break out there, and she’d had to relearn Manhattan’s layout for much had changed, include a new Waldorf Astoria being built on Park Avenue.

She stopped at Bloomingdales on the way there and bought a conservative pair of trousers and a button-through shirt, plus some decent shoes. She brushed out her hair and tied it up in a long braid, for it swung past her waist these days. She bought a big pair of sunglasses as she left the store, and hailed a taxi to take her to the Astoria. No one she knew right now would recognize her and more importantly, the staff at the Astoria would not refuse her entry, which they might have done if she had strolled up wearing her hippy gear.

In the back of her mind was the additional thought: Now she looked more like someone that Christian would meet with.

There were five restaurants and bars in the hotel. She picked the least crowded one with the most privacy and claimed a table in the back of the room and ordered a drink and a round of sandwiches.

Then she plugged a quarter into the public phone on the wall and connected with the operator and got her to look up Christian’s number. She asked only for Dr. Hamilton in Harlem, for she wasn’t sure he was using his first name, this time around.

The operator connected her and Tally listened to the phone ring.

“Dr. Hamilton’s Surgery.” It was the battle-axe nurse.

“I have a message for Dr. Hamilton.”

“Who is this?”

“Tell him that Tally called.”

“And what is it regarding?”

“It’s personal,” she said flatly. “Tell him the Peacock Alley Bar. Do you have that?”

“This is quite irregular—”

“It’s very important. Do you have the name?”

“Peacock Bar. But—”

Tally hung up and went back to her seat to wait.

* * * * *

Christian’s heart kept breaking out and beating on its own. He knew he should rein it in and keep it under control, but he really didn’t want to. As he paid the cab driver, he glanced at the glittering brass and glass foyer of the Waldorf, and for the first time in decades, felt a genuine, gut clenching excitement.