The Last Mission

  Dark puffs were everywhere, followed by the tinkle of steel shards, armor chunks, and old bearings against the metallic sides of our plane. Below us, two of the B-17s took direct hits and simply vanished, creating debris fields of their own. An explosion lifted the already damaged left wing. There was an awful grinding sound, as pieces of flak cut through to the propeller reduction gear. The engine shaft tore loose and the propeller jerked to a stop. Then the reduction gear crashed through the bottom of the number-one cowling.

  “Thirty seconds,” the lead bombardier intoned with all the authority of God’s voice from the heavens. Then, “Twenty seconds.”

  All the while we were being rocked by the percussion of antiaircraft explosions, and shredded by debris cutting through the bomber’s skin. We were only seconds from drop, but it didn’t seem possible that we could survive that long.

  “Bombs away, mark!”

  “Fifteen seconds,” the bombardier called on the intercom.

  A flak blast appeared directly in front of us. It was still expanding as we flew directly through its center. There was an instant of scorching heat and a wind force that for an instant had the nose corkscrewing in circles in front of us. I have no idea why the steel pellets, driven like rifle shots, didn’t cut through the windscreen and blast my face away, but no one was hurt and nothing was damaged.

  “Ten…nine…eight…”

  Another blast, this one under the right wing. Part of the aileron bent backward, and then tore away. We rolled a bit and pitched upward. The fortress snapped back to its drop course.

  “Three…two…one…bombs away.”

  The Fortress jumped up as the bombs fell free. The rail station below was doomed.

  There were no fighters when we turned back. The formation, minus about a quarter of its planes, turned southward and headed back toward the French border. Occasional bursts of flak harassed us, but most of it, from older guns, fell well below. We were damaged, but overall in repairable shape. We’d be ready to fly within a week. Our only loss was the ball turret gunner. The fighter hit above the wing route had cut the ball free and dropped it, along with the gunner, twenty-five thousand feet onto the German landscape. Mast would omit that detail when he wrote his condolences to the family.

  It was a three-hour return, spent in stunned silence, our formation opening and spreading despite the colonel’s threats. We were doing fine on three engines; the tail section was holding, and if the hole in the dorsal was causing us to yaw, I couldn’t feel it. The biggest problem was the damaged aileron, and with a little luck, that wouldn’t come into play until we were over England and getting ready to land. Whatever the theoretical number of bombing raids, we had just reduced it by one.

  When we landed, we went directly into a postraid review. We shouldn’t have lost so many planes, the staff officers told us. The liaison officer, a pipe-smoking captain who wore wings even though he never flew, showed us that German morale was falling like a stone. The intelligence officer—another captain, but this one crippled in combat—quoted statistics to prove that the Germans were running out of planes. Another staffer added that they were also out of fuel. Colonel Mast interrupted from his place near the back door. “I’ll tell you what they’re not out of: courage. The guys who came up today weren’t interested in surviving the war. They were more interested in protecting their wives and babies, and the more we hit their hometowns, the more courageous they’re going to get.”

  There was an awkward pause. Staff officers weren’t used to being contradicted.

  “Marron, tell these officers what happened to Schneider,” Mast asked. It wasn’t an order; it was a request for me to repeat the horror that had destroyed the plane to my left.

  “A 109 dove right into him. A Mustang had shot him up until he was a ball of fire. But the pilot didn’t jump. When he went by me, he was still flying his plane. He flew it right through Schneider’s. No one got out.”

  “Fanatical,” the liaison officer commented.

  “Courageous,” Mast corrected. “We give medals for that sort of thing. They do, too. So don’t assume that from here on in they’re all going to be milk runs. The last German fighter will be shooting at us, and the fifteen-year-olds on the ground know how to shove a flak round into a cannon.”

  He was right, of course. The lottery was going to continue. There would be losers, even on the very last day of the war.

  It took me four days to get Browning to summon me to the police station. By the time I saw Angela come out of her building, I was nearly frantic to touch her. We ran into each other’s arms and I stroked her hair, touched her cheek, and ran my fingertips across her lips. We walked silently to the park and sat on a bench. We didn’t need to talk. All we needed was to know that we were together. Then, at that moment, our lives were complete.

  What we both understood, I think, is that we had no lives in the ordinary sense. Nothing in the past had prepared us for one another. We had been thrown together by the same kind of cosmic accident that makes two meteors collide. And we had no future. Would we be together tomorrow? There was no way of knowing. Could we plan for the weekend? Absolutely not. Was this the last time we would hold one another? Perhaps.

  There were no trend lines reaching from the past into the future. No actuarial tables to predict probabilities. Nothing from the past to be undone. Nothing to do in preparation for the future. There was only now. This moment. This instant. So there was never a reason to say good-bye. Now was always, so we were always together. When I touched her, the reality was obvious. But even when I wasn’t touching her, she was still my reality.

  So what could I say to her after all these years? Nothing profound that would explain my silence. Just, “Here’s what happened in my life. I didn’t plan it. I don’t regret it. But I can live with it. I can live with it now!”

  Now

  I write and tear up a half dozen letters, one of them well into the second page. It’s like my stay in the hospital overlooking Lake Champlain when I tried to write Kay and tried to write Angela. My words don’t fit my thoughts, and my thoughts are very different from the reality I know.

  How could I have loved her and not gone back? How could I have loved Kay, with little thought of a prior commitment? How could I have abandoned my son because he chose not to be like me, particularly when I never chose to be like me?

  How could I have flown a dangerously overloaded airplane with a primitive navigation system on fourteen-hundred-mile round trips to unknown destinations and then taken up commuting as a way of life? How could I have flown through cannon fire and fighter attacks and then made risk management my vocation?

  Are there people who plan their lives and then follow the plan to the last detail? Does someone else—a loving God or a great clock maker—write master plans that we follow unknowingly? Is there one life that’s better than another? Is something left undone that I should have done?

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come back to you,” I wrote, but that sounded as if I was sorry I had married Kay. “Things changed so profoundly after the war,” I tried again. That sounded as if she were just a momentary convenience. “I’ve always loved you,” which was certainly true, but it is also true that I’ve always loved Kay.

  I don’t know the answers. As with Todd, maybe the only answer is not to ask the questions. Here’s where I am now, at this moment. Is it important whether this is where I really belong? Does it make any difference how I came to be here? There are no answers, so why ask the questions?

  I call Kit and ask her and Henry to join me at one of Manhattan’s more pretentious restaurants for dinner. Kit is delighted. She calls back later to say that Henry will meet us there.

  I telephone Todd. “Well, this is certainly a step up from the Grand Street Shelter. Should I bring my guitar?”

  “I’m not sure that it’s a step up, but I think they already have a harp. Anyway, I need to talk, much as I’d like to listen.”

  There’s a pause. Then Todd says, “Do
you remember that we had this conversation before? I think it was during my second year at college.”

  “No, I don’t. With two college tuitions, I don’t remember that I could afford first-class restaurants.”

  “I think you had just gotten a notice that I had been thrown off campus. Or maybe it was a fine for furniture that I had set on fire in the quad. Anyway, you came into town, booked into the best hotel and demanded my presence for dinner.”

  A vague image of a lovely old hotel appears. “Yes, I think I do remember, although I don’t remember the dinner.”

  “There was no dinner. You told me that you were taking me to this particular restaurant because you didn’t want us to be disturbed. You said you were going to do the talking and that I should bring an open mind and be ready to listen.”

  “I said that?”

  “Yeah. And then you told me that there would be decent people at the place. ‘Try to find a coat and tie, and for God’s sake, shave!’ you told me. I said I wouldn’t do that, and you told me to just forget the whole thing. No tie and coat, no dinner.”

  “Jesus, did I really say that? I honestly don’t remember. But I’ll have to admit that it sounds like something I might have said. I was such…what’s the current expression…an asshole!”

  “I think I can scrounge up a coat and tie now,” Todd says.

  “Don’t. Wear whatever in hell you want. And don’t bother to shave.”

  He arrives with a sports coat over a T-shirt, which I guess means he is willing to meet me halfway. When I see him coming through the door, I quickly peel off my tie and stuff it into my jacket pocket. Todd catches me in the act. “There, now. That wasn’t so hard,” he teases. We are having a drink at the bar when Kit walks in, and before her drink is served, Henry joins us. We make light talk at the table while we study the menu and listen to the waiter’s tongue-twisting specials. We order, and I ask for another round from the bar.

  It’s Kit who tries to put the evening on track. “Well, are you going to tell us what’s the special occasion?”

  “Yes. I’ve decided to try living in England.”

  “Permanently?” She is shocked and heading toward disappointment.

  “No, not permanently—just for a while.”

  “How long is that?” she persists.

  “I don’t know. I’ll just have to see how a lot of things work out. But I’m not buying a round-trip ticket.”

  Todd shows a faint, amused smile. Kit’s face sinks a bit, which I guess is something of a tribute. Henry asks the unanswerable question. “Why?”

  “I’m not sure I can answer that. I think I know the answer, but I can’t put it into words.” Henry’s lips purse. That’s not an answer he would tolerate from a subordinate. Certainly not what he expects of me.

  “Has it anything to do with the woman you were telling me about?” Todd asks, not specifically to me but rather to the gathering in general.

  “It has everything to do with her. And it has everything to do with a monument in the American Cemetery at Cambridge. And with an unfinished policeman’s biography. And with a couple of bunkhouses that still stand at the edge of a piece of runway near Whittingbridge. There’s a museum I want to visit that has a perfectly restored B-17. And I want to find an auto dealer who specializes in classics and see if I can get a 1939 Austin sedan. There’s a totally different life of mine that’s not nearly as finished as the one you know. I don’t want to leave it that way…unlived. I want to see how it plays out.”

  Kit weighs what I’ve said. “Then you won’t be coming back. That’s where you want to spend the rest of your life.”

  “I might find that it isn’t going anywhere, so I might be back in a month. I just don’t know.”

  Henry rises to my defense. “Today it doesn’t make a bit of difference where you live. You can get back and forth on a few hours’ notice.”

  Kit isn’t impressed. “They why live there? Why not just visit whenever you feel like it?”

  “Because I think it does make a difference, even though I can get back and forth on a few hours’ notice.”

  The waiter leads two tray bearers to our table, uses white towels to set the plates, and than ladles out the sauces with the kind of motion you might use to paddle a canoe. He decants the wine, which is kind of silly for a three-year-old bottle, and pours small measures into oversized goblets. He steps back and looks at the finished table in near ecstasy.

  “This is a cut above the shelter,” Todd decides.

  Henry rolls his eyes. He hopes the waiter realizes that he is not an intimate of Todd’s.

  “This isn’t up for discussion,” Kit recognizes. “You’ve made up your mind.”

  “I think I have.” And then, after a pause, “I have.”

  “You know what you’re doing,” Henry tells me with approval.

  “Not at all. I can’t explain why this is important to me. No one over there has an urgent need to have me around. Maybe it’s the onset of dementia—or a late-life crisis. I might be much better off buying a roadster, or getting back into flying.”

  “Why don’t you try the roadster first?” Kit asks. She’s smiling, telling me this isn’t a serious suggestion; she just wants me to know that she’ll miss me.

  Todd raises his wine. “Good luck. Write if you get work.”

  Henry is looking at me suspiciously. “That’s it? You just pick up and head off to a new life in Europe?”

  “An old life,” I correct.

  “Well,” he rationalizes, “you can always come back.”

  “I know this will sound crazy, but I honestly don’t think I’m leaving. All of you, everything here, will always be with me. I’m not going to say good-bye. It’s just this is what has happened, and I want you to know where I’ll be.”

  I have a long talk with my landlord, who has my signature on a two-year lease and is not about to let me out of it. Todd comes up with a plan. I tell the owner that I’m going to let my son use the apartment. Todd sends over a fledging rock group with the lead vocalist, pierced just about everywhere, posing as my son. I’m out of the lease, with only one month’s penalty.

  Kit’s daughters take all the furniture, including some of the items in storage, for their new apartment. Todd arranges for the rest of the things in storage to be distributed from the shelter. In exchange for his help, I give him my car. It took me just two weeks to own nothing.

  But I do need two large suitcases. I’m taking a suit, dark and medium slacks, and two sports jackets. I pack three dress shirts, along with a colorful range of ties, and three casual shirts. Some socks, underwear, brogues, loafers, and sneakers.

  It’s all I’ll need to get me by until I see how the English do it.

  I phone Arthur Lyons at the inn and ask him to get me a good rate on a room for a week or so.

  “Good to have you back for another visit,” he laughs.

  “It’s not a visit, Arthur. I’ll be looking to rent a flat, or maybe even buy a house.”

  I should phone Angela. I haven’t yet responded to her letter. But maybe the best way to tell her I wasn’t trying to say good-bye is simply to show up at her doorstep. God knows that’s what I did hundreds of times in 1943 and ’44.

  Kit and Todd come out to the airport to buy me a drink and wave at the airplane. They have the address and phone number of the inn, and I’ll be able to keep them up to date on my address changes. And then I’m gone through the gate, walking down the ramp toward the plane. It really is easy to step out of one life and into another. I land the next morning, rent a car, load my luggage, and drive up to Whittingbridge. I use the afternoon to catch up on my sleep and then go down to the dining room, just as Arthur is coming on duty. We embrace each other like brothers who have been separated for decades.

  “Welcome back, Yank!”

  “It’s nice to be back.”

  Herbert joins us at the bar, giddy with delight that I have decided to return. That’s another decision I didn’t make: it wa
s Herbert who decided that Angela should know I was back and traced her down. It was Herbert who made the telephone call.

  I tell them of my plan to settle here for a while, and they immediately assume that Mrs. Murray and I have decided to take up residence.

  “No,” I assure them, “she doesn’t even know I’m here.”

  “Well, then…” Arthur looks at Herbert. Herbert shakes his head and they both look at me.

  “Angela was good enough to spend a day with me, but that doesn’t mean she’d like me around all the time. Old friends are always welcome, as long as they pack lightly. I have to expect that she already has her days filled.”

  Arthur and Herbert both make cautious offers to put me up and are clearly relieved when I turn them down. “I’m going to look for a place in Cambridge,” I tell them.

  “Pricey,” Arthur cautions. “There are lots of places where you can get more for your money.”

  “I have friends in Cambridge. Fellows I used to fly with.” They remember the American Cemetery. “And all I’ll need is a small flat, or maybe just a suite in a house.”

  The next morning I drive west to Cambridge and submit myself to the wiles of a Realtor. Mr. Livingstone still believes that all Americans are rich. He doesn’t understand that the money we pay for houses in our best neighborhoods wouldn’t buy a bedroom in the south of England. He starts me with manor houses that were taxed away from their owners and haven’t had new roofs since Harold Macmillan.

  As I shake my head at something Georgian with about twenty rooms, he cautions me not to make up my mind until I’ve seen the stables. At a town house that is at about twice my price limit, he allows that it’s been in the family of Isaac Newton’s mistress. The next place he shows me belonged, so he claims, to the man who invented radar. He’s tempted me with prestige, sex, and high technology, all to no avail. He sighs, and begins showing me flats on the periphery of town that generally go to the less affluent students. I take the first one he shows me.