The First of July(104)

Once he’d done all he could, he sat back on his heels. He was tired and his side ached; his feet were already cut and sore. It was all very well getting the injured man under cover, but he urgently needed help. If he set out to Corbie now, where the British were, if he could get across the river, he could fetch assistance. If the man lived that long. He looked at the soldier’s wrist for identification but, finding nothing, remembered his sergeant saying the British wore their names around their necks. Feeling slightly awkward, he felt for a plaque and found a cord, but nothing hung from it.

Jean-Baptiste slipped his hand into first one pocket of the corporal’s uniform and then the other, but all he found was a small notebook, its pages crammed with writing—handwriting, mostly in pencil and in English so it might as well have been written by a pharaoh. He turned to the pack. Empty water bottle, a waterproof cape, rolled-up bindings. In a side pocket there was, finally, an identification disc. Isaac Meyer, it said.

He touched the corporal, who appeared to be asleep, put the man’s own rain cape over him, then the grimy blanket, and left him. He walked back across the yard, remembering the last time he had left, with old Godet muttering under his breath following him to the cart. He thought of stolid old Mabelle, the chestnut who had pulled it. Long since eaten, he assumed.

He headed toward the river bank, looked carefully upstream and downstream, then walked to a spot a hundred meters south where the waters divided briefly to pass on either side of the small island he’d spotted from the window. The island where Vignon, poor Vignon, had spent a few stolen hours sinking into Madame de Potiers’s welcoming white flesh. Jean-Baptiste remembered returning to the island to see the flattened greenery after the couple had left; it was an impressively large area and showed the passion of the doctor’s lovemaking. He had been excited and angry and ashamed at the thought of the power that had crushed the long blades of grass.

Now the island would provide a place of rest, dividing his swim into two parts. He sat on the bank, his bruised and scratched feet cooled by the water for a few moments, then he fixed his eyes on the island and slipped into the water. He was nearly home.





CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN


Marina, New York,

July 1, 1916, 9 A.M.


MARINA SYDENHAM SETS OUT FROM home just to buy flowers. She has had a restless night and woken with a slight headache and a stiff neck, but it is a beautiful day: the first of July, the doorman of her apartment reminds her. She thinks of Harry, his day coming to an end on another continent, just as hers begins. It is just nine o’clock and another fine, hot morning, and she stops momentarily at the shock of it, absorbing the early warmth and enjoying the sight of Central Park, where the trees have yet to take on the darker shades of high summer. Here she is at the start of a summer’s day and there, more than three thousand miles away, Harry’s day moves toward mid-afternoon. He is, she thinks, not so very far away in hours.

It is unusually quiet; so many have left the city for the beach in fear of the poliomyelitis epidemic. She had promised her father that she would go away, but she knew that Harry’s letters would come first to New York and she didn’t want to worry him with the city’s hysterical response to the epidemic. He could not run away, so she would not. So many restaurants and theaters are shut, invitations are few, and she has found that she likes a less social city: prefers it when most of her friends intrude only by letter. She thinks Harry would love it too. She is painting a lot. Not now of imagined wilderness, but of scenes around her: places she learned to see properly through the eyes of a stranger in love with the city.

Ornamental lakes have been drained: some say, loudly, that water is the danger in the epidemic. But she often walks to Battery Park, mostly because it is where Harry first took her and where they had stood looking out across the Hudson, to Ellis Island.

“In different circumstances it could have been me. Herded toward the sheds and the baths and the doctors,” Harry had said. “Petitioning or easing in. Rich or poor, English, Irish, Italian, German: we’re all immigrants to a country vast enough to absorb us.”

Despite war and epidemics, she feels happy today. She thinks she will buy a bunch of delphiniums as blue as the sky, and she turns left toward the small flower stand. She knows that the flower-seller is too poor to close up or to leave the city, despite poor trade; and anyway probably the safest place the woman can be is away from the disease-ridden tenements and out in the fresh air.

She walks slowly because of the heat and because the whole day is hers. The early newsstands no longer show headlines and grimy pictures of faraway battles, but of rows of polio-stricken children in high-sided hospital cots right here in New York. But she has, anyway, long since stopped reading of every advance and setback in France. The stories are mostly distorted: exaggerated for pathos, or lightened so as not to lower morale among those with European connections on either side. Beautiful, ancient Europe. It was hard to imagine it: the little countries, civilized countries, that had centuries of literature and music and ideas, and, yes, cruelty and violence and poverty in their history too, as Harry insists on reminding her, now all tearing each other apart. Their sons gone, their unimaginably old monuments and churches pounded to rubble. She never wants to return, even if it becomes possible, to see those places brought so low.