The Last Mission Page 30

  The neighborhood could be suburban America, with small homes styled to look differently, but probably containing identical floor plans. There are sidewalks, small gardens behind low stone walls, and driveways leading to narrow carports. Angela’s address is one house in from a corner. There’s an English Ford sedan parked in her driveway, nose against the door of a one-car garage. I pull in behind it, smooth my thin hair in the car mirror, and pick up the bouquet of wildflowers on the seat next to me. By the time I get out of the car, Angela has stepped out to greet me.

  I think I would have recognized her in a sports arena crowd. The smile, the aura of pleasure in her expression, the light in her eyes are all absolutely unchanged. Like her voice, I could never recreate the intangibles of her face, but they are instantly familiar. She’s very different, of course, changed by the years from a thrilling young girl to a dignified older woman. She seems shorter—a bit heavier—her figure filled in until the curves are unimportant. Her face is smaller, a bit drawn, with deep creases etched at the corners of her eyes and the edges of her mouth. Her hair is shorter, its color less distinct. If she is wearing lipstick, I certainly can’t tell the color.

  “Jim, you haven’t changed a bit.”

  It’s a polite lie, because my hair is thin and gray, my brows bushy, and my face sagged down until it piles on top of my collar. I’m nothing like the photo of the young Air Force pilot she loved.

  “You’re exactly the way I imagined you’d be.” I hold out the flowers. “Did I ever bring you flowers before?”

  Angela laughs—a sound that thrills me to the bone. “You brought them to my mother, but not to me.”

  “It must have been your mother I was in love with.”

  She laughs again, fondles the flowers, and then leans her cheek toward me. I kiss it quickly, the way you might kiss a maiden aunt. She turns and leads me through the open door.

  “Let me just put these in water,” she says and then asks, “Should I open a bottle of wine or put on a pot of tea?”

  I follow her into a very neat and very functional kitchen, a miniature version of the American tract-housing kitchen, with less chrome and more charm.

  “I’ll open the wine, if that’s okay.”

  She points to a cabinet over a cutting board. “There’s a decent Chablis up there and glasses over the stove. I’ll get some cheese and biscuits.”

  She finds a vase and arranges the flowers while I uncork the wine, set down two stemmed glasses and pour generously. She goes into her refrigerator, and comes back out with a wedge of cheese that had probably been bought against the possibility that I would opt for the wine. All the while, we make small talk about how the cheese would go with the wine, and whether the wine might be too early in the day. Finally, with the flowers in one hand and the cheese and biscuits in the other, she leads me into a small, delightful parlor.

  There are two soft chairs looking toward a coal stove that is set into a fireplace. The mantle is adorned with framed photographs. There’s a bookcase to the right, filled with bound sets, a shelf of colorful dust jackets, and a television to the left. In another grouping there is a small Queen Anne sofa behind a coffee table, flanked by wooden upholstered chairs. The colors are deep, set against light walls. Two pastoral prints in elaborate frames hang between the windows.

  Angela goes to the coffee table, where she carefully positions the flowers and sets down the snacks. I pause in the center of the room, and then go to the mantel to look at the photographs.

  A black and white—turned tan and cream—of her parents in front of the Bridge Street house. Her father looked more relaxed, probably because I wasn’t there. Her mother seemed older, perhaps sadder. “Your folks,” I say, indicating that I recognize them. “They were very good to me.”

  “And you to them. They often talked of the gifts you brought. Father said that he had the best whiskey in the neighborhood during the war.”

  She walks over next to me. “That’s Edward, my husband.” A thin-faced man with a circle of dark hair around a shiny tonsure. “He flew for BOAC, and later for British Airways. Fifteen years on the same flight to Johannesburg.”

  “You had a way with flyers,” I say, and then try to take back the remark.

  “Or they with me.” She doesn’t seem at all offended. “We married in 1954. He had been in the RAF right after the war, and then went commercial. He was a civilian when we met.” She hands me a black-and-white wedding photograph. The Angela in my desktop photo, with a shorter hairstyle, wearing the kind of white dress that would be appropriate for a small city-hall ceremony. The man is a younger version of the thin-faced portrait, with curly dark hair, wearing a three-piece suit.

  “How did you meet?”

  “A friend’s wedding. And I didn’t catch the bouquet.” Then she picks another framed photo, this one in full color, of a girl whose eyes resembled hers, but who is waiflike in size. “Our daughter, Jennifer. She works with the airline and lives in Paris.”

  “Are you close?”

  “Once a year, for a few days, when I travel over to visit her. Jennifer bounced from one trend to another until she reached the age where trendiness stopped being fun. Her father got her a job and she’s done quite well—living with a Frenchman and planning to get married. But I haven’t bought my dress; I might change a few sizes.”

  “I have a son she should meet,” I start, but Angela is handing me another photo, again in color, of a prep-school lad with his father’s ax-like features.

  “This is our son, Edward Jr. He was killed in a boating accident.”

  “Oh, my God! That’s terrible…”

  “Yes, it is. His father never recovered. I’m not sure that I did either.”

  She takes one of the glasses from me and raises it in a toast. “It’s good to see you, Jim.” We sip and turn back to the setting around the coffee table, where she readjusts the flowers before we sit. She’s in one of the straight upholstered chairs and I’m on the sofa, which isn’t much bigger than a love seat. We both sit on the edge, balancing our glasses on our knees. Our first awkward pause.

  “You must have a few family photos,” Angela suggests. I nearly spill my wine, set it on the coaster, and stand to retrieve my wallet. I slide to her end of the sofa so that we can share the pictures.

  There’s a photo of Kay, taken in her midthirties. She could be a movie star.

  “She’s beautiful,” Angela says generously.

  Here’s a photo on her sixtieth birthday, which was the occasion of the biggest bash in our family history. She is aged, of course, but what she has lost in softness is made up in character.” Angela nods and smiles at me. “Just beautiful.” I’m suddenly sorry that I didn’t call her husband handsome.

  I turn through shots of the children at various ages, and then photos of the young ladies who are my granddaughters. Angela does the usual oohs and ahhs.

  When I close the wallet, she asks about the son I mentioned. There are no photos of Todd.

  “We haven’t been close,” I admit, “until very recently. Right now he’s facing the prospect of going to prison for a series of minor offenses. Drugs…”

  She looks more sympathetic than shocked.

  “I think right now that keeping him out of jail is the most important thing in my life.”

  She nods. “Just love him. You’re lucky to have him.”

  I remember the boy in her photograph. Lucky indeed.

  We chat on, filling in the chronology of our adult lives. As Herbert remembered, Angela stayed on in Whittingbridge until her mother died. That was in 1953. It was then that she moved to London, leaving her father alone in the house. Her marriage was happy, except for all the times her husband was away on his Johannesburg flights. Life fell apart when her boy was lost on a simple sailing weekend down in Southampton. Then her daughter followed some rock group into SoHo and vanished into a series of cultures, each a bit more bizarre than the one before it. Her husband, Edward, gradually lost interest in living. When
he was diagnosed with cancer, he didn’t seem terribly disappointed.

  I begin with my work, which wasn’t nearly as exciting as flying to South Africa, take her through the move into the suburbs, the joys of parenthood, and then our own measure of disappointment. Our stories aren’t all that different. Upstanding lives that didn’t quite meet our expectations. Happy overall, but not without painful burdens, like nearly anyone else you might happen to talk with.

  We both fade out when we reach the present time. Here we are together, sitting face to face, our knees nearly touching. And yet we are so terribly far apart.

  “Jim, I need to explain. You left once without me telling you the truth. I won’t let you do that again.”

  “I know all about it, Angela. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “But it mattered then. It drove us apart and kept us from even writing to one another.”

  I don’t understand. “What mattered then?”

  “The way we met. I should have told you. You had every right to be angry.”

  Now I’m beginning to see. “You mean the way Sergeant Browning was using you?”

  “And forcing me to use you,” she says angrily. “I should have told you the day we met. Remember? You took me to dinner.”

  I nod. Of course I remember.

  “I wanted to say that this wasn’t just happening. That we were being forced together. But I was afraid what the detective might do to me. And then later, I was afraid what he might do to us. I knew you would find out sooner or later, and that when you did it would be over for us. But I…”

  She is nearly frantic with pent-up guilt, and I’m horrified to think that she has been living with this for so long.

  “Angela, I didn’t know. I never found out. Not until a few days ago, when I was going through Sergeant Browning’s records. That had nothing to do with my leaving. It was orders from the Air Force. The war brought us together, and then it pulled us apart.”

  I realize that I’m holding her hand, comforting her as if she were dying. “Even if I had found out, I couldn’t have just left.”

  “But you would have thought I was part of that scheme. One of those grave robbers.”

  “You know I wouldn’t have believed that for even an instant.”

  “Please, just listen to me. Let me explain.”

  I get up, take the two empty glasses into the kitchen, and return with them filled. I set them on the napkins. “You don’t need to explain anything to me. I was the one who left without a word. I owed you much more than that.”

  But she wants to tell me, so I give her my full attention and listen carefully. She had gone to a dance arranged by some town committee to make the Americans feel welcome. She met a fighter pilot—a young kid her age who was flying a Lightning as escort to our bombers. He asked to see her and they had gone out twice. When he asked again, she turned him down. He sent several messages to her through her friends, but she didn’t respond.

  “Then, a few months later, a policeman called my business phone and asked me to stop by the police station. He wouldn’t tell me why, just that I could be helpful in a very important investigation. I kept the appointment and was introduced to Sergeant Browning.”

  She paused to drink, and I raised my own glass. These were things I didn’t need to know. I was embarrassed, listening to what seemed to be private matters.

  “He started politely, but within a few minutes he gave me a notice to read. The boy had been killed in action—shot down over Holland, I remember—and he had named me beneficiary to his insurance. The sergeant stopped being polite. He accused me of being part of some sort of ring that was defrauding the American servicemen. He made it clear that seducing these young men was a crime and that he had all the evidence he needed to send me to prison.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said, sympathizing with her.

  “I was nineteen,” Angela said. “One year out of school. He was accusing me of seducing a boy I had kissed only once. He implied prostitution. The innuendos were ugly. None of it was true, but he said they would investigate everything: my home, my job, my friends. I was so frightened, I was crying.”

  “Sergeant Browning?” It didn’t seem to fit. He had always been courteous and respectful. Of course he had no authority over me. I reported to a military legal system, but Angela lived on his turf. Apparently he used two sets of rules.

  “Then he offered me the easy way out of this terrible crime. He was going to introduce me to another American flyer—you. All I had to do was encourage you to help him.”

  My affection for Browning was turning to dust. What was he telling her? Don’t sleep with him for his insurance money; sleep with him for information.

  “And that’s what I had to tell you—that I wasn’t what I appeared to be. I was the enticement to get you to cooperate. You were being deceived, and I was part of the lie, but I was afraid of him and what he might do to me. And later, when I loved you, I was afraid of what you would think.”

  “I never knew,” I told her. “I never doubted you for a second. I couldn’t.”

  Angela’s eyes were hazy and there were tears pooled on her eyelids.

  “I left because I was wounded, and because my commanding officer didn’t want me forced back into combat. Then, when I recovered, I was back in my own life, living in my own home. That seemed to be where I belonged.”

  She looked, and then smiled. “Well, I just had to tell you. I guess you could say that I waited quite a long time.”

  “And I wanted to tell you. I suppose I’ve always hoped that you would listen, and maybe even forgive me.”

  Angela laughed. “Aren’t we the pair of fools?”

  I joined her laughter. “Would it be possible for me to take you out to dinner?”

  “Oh, that isn’t necessary.”

  That was what she had said to me the first time we were together. So I repeated what I had said. “Yes, it is. I can’t live without it.”

  I never suspected that she felt any guilt. The fault was mine, and that fault made me fear that she might be feeling a great deal of pain.

  Whenever I thought of Angela, it was my sin that I regretted. I had forgotten her too easily, and I could only hope that she had forgotten me just as easily. Arrogantly, I suppose, I had thought of her as Madame Butterfly, and hoped to God and that she wasn’t looking up every time she heard a plane and wondering if I was landing.

  I would like to have known about her life with Edward—that she had found someone who loved her as much as I did and who wouldn’t desert her the way I had. I would liked to have known about her children and her home. If I had, I could have told her about my family and my home without fear of hurting her. Then we could have shared our lives. All it would have taken would have been one honest letter from me. Here’s what happened, and this is the way that it is. I never planned it. I don’t know why things turned out as they did, but that’s no reason why we should be afraid to talk.

  It was the same with Michael Carberry. Here’s what happened and this is the way it is. I never planned for the flak to hit your plane instead of mine. I don’t know why it turned out that I spent a year driving your car, but that’s no reason why I can’t be your friend.

  Or like Glenn Randlett. Our plane was too damaged to fly so we would have moved to a new bomber—except that I was hurt and sent home. That’s why he got his own command and took over a brand new B-17. Ultimately, that’s why he died. His plane blew an engine when they were doing treetop bombing over Normandy. It went out of sync, stalled, and fell into a hillside. Everyone was buried in the wreck. That’s what happened and this is the way it is. I didn’t mean to leave you. I never planned to be sitting on a porch in Lake Champlain when the engine quit.

  Brain tumors account for less than one percent of the deaths around the world. When Kay began complaining of headaches, neither of us thought for an instant that the lottery had found her. She took over-the-counter pain medication and went on with her life. She redecorated two
of the rooms in our house and replanted the garden. She kept her one-day-a-week commitment at the homeless shelter. She even improved her golf game into the nineties and was joking about someday shooting in the eighties. Kay loved to shop, and was forever finding exactly the right sweater or blouse for one of our grandchildren. She was still talking to Todd at least once a week and gushing enthusiasm for whatever was his latest harebrained scheme.

  And we traveled. We took a train across Canada and toured the Canadian Rockies. We went to Mexico’s Copper Canyon, sunned at a few Mediterranean beaches, and spent a week in Paris. In many ways, we were closer to one another than we had ever been before. The time we could give one another was limitless.

  Then her hand began to tingle. Her balance faltered and she began knocking things over. Her doctors ran a battery of tests and thought she was just exaggerating her symptoms—until the CAT scan saw it and the MRI confirmed the diagnosis. A time bomb was buried deep in her brain where there was no way of operating. It was ticking faster and faster.

  Here’s what happened, Jim. This is the way it is. I didn’t mean to leave you to fumble through your later years on your own.

  Here’s what happened, Kay. This is the way it is. I didn’t plan on losing you to a bomb, like Michael Carberry. How could I know that you would be brought down by a mechanical failure, like Glenn Randlett?

  Angela suggests a local Italian place, plain, simple, and quiet. The wine is cheap and the food plentiful. She talks about the order of her day over the past ten years since her husband died and her daughter left for Paris. Weekly cards with her friends. Bird-watching trips into the country. Some foreign travel on the continent. Lots of reading.

  I tell her about my much shorter life alone, starting with finding my footlocker in the attic. I stun her when I set her picture on the table, still wearing the locket that her parents gave her as a graduation present.