“That much is obvious!” the colonel yelled as she stormed away. He was panting.
Tatiana and Alexander lowered their heads. Anthony said, “Hi, Nick.”
“Anthony! Shh.”
Anthony opened the gate and went in. “Want a cigarette? Mama, come here.”
She looked at Alexander. “Can I have a cigarette for him?” she whispered.
But it was Alexander who went to the colonel—his body and face slightly twisted—took out a cigarette from his pack, lit it, and held it to the colonel’s mouth.
The man inhaled, exhaled, but without his previous fervor with Tatiana. He didn’t speak.
Tatiana put her hand on Nick’s shoulder. Anthony brought him a stag beetle, a dead wasp, a raw old potato. “Look,” he said, “look at the wasp.”
Nick looked, but said nothing. The cigarette calmed him down. He had another one.
“Want a drink, Colonel?” Alexander asked suddenly. “There is a bar down on Main Street.”
Nick nodded in the direction of the house. “They won’t let me go.”
“We won’t ask them,” Alexander said. “Imagine their surprise when they come out and find you gone. They’ll think you wheeled yourself down the hill.”
This made Colonel Nicholas Moore smile. “The image of that is worth all the screeching later. OK, let’s go.”
Swezey’s was the only bar in Stonington. Children weren’t allowed in bars.
“I’m going to take Anthony on the swings,” Tatiana said. “You two have fun.”
Inside Alexander ordered two whiskeys. Holding both glasses, he clinked them, and put the drink to Nick’s mouth. The liquor went in one gulp. “Should we order another one?”
“You know,” said Nick, “why don’t you order me a whole bottle? I haven’t had a drink since I got hit eighteen months ago. I’ll pay you back.”
“Don’t worry,” Alexander said, and bought Nick and himself a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. They sat in the corner, smoking and drinking.
“So what’s the matter with your wife, Colonel?” Alexander asked. “Why is she always so ticked off?”
They were leaning toward each other, the colonel in a wheelchair, the captain by his side.
Nick shook his head. “Look at me. Can you blame her? But not to worry—the army is going to get me a round-the-clock nurse soon. She’ll take care of me.”
They sat.
“Tell me about your wife,” Nick said. “She’s not afraid of me. Not like others around here. She’s seen this before?”
Alexander nodded. “She’s seen this before.”
Nick’s face brightened. “Does she want a job? The army will pay her ten dollars a day for my care. What do you say? A little more money for your family.”
“No,” Alexander said. “She was a nurse long enough. No more nursing for her.” He added, “We don’t need the money, we’re fine.”
“Come on, everyone needs money. You can get yourself your own house instead of living with crazy Janet.”
“And what’s she going to do with the boy?”
“Bring him, too.”
“No.”
Nick fell quiet, but not before making a desperate noise. “We’re on a waiting list for a nurse, but we can’t get one,” he said. “There aren’t enough of them. They’ve all quit. Their men are coming back, they want to have babies, they don’t want their wives to work.”
“Yes,” said Alexander. “I don’t want my wife to work. Especially not as a nurse.”
“If I don’t get a nurse, Bessie says she’s going to send me to the Army Hospital in Bangor. Says I’d be better off there.”
Alexander poured more needed drink down the man’s throat.
“They’ll certainly be happier if I’m there,” Nick said.
“They don’t seem like a happy pair.”
“No, no. Before the war, they were great.”
“Where d’you get hit?”
“In Belgium. Battle of the Bulge. And there I was thinking colonels didn’t get hit. Rank Has Its Privileges and all that. But a shell exploded, my captain and lieutenant both died, and I was burned. I would’ve been fine, but I was on the ground for fourteen hours before I got picked up by another platoon. The limbs got infected, couldn’t be saved.”
More drink, more smoke.
Nick said, “They should’ve just left me in the woods. It would’ve been over for me five hundred and fifty days ago, five hundred and fifty nights ago.”
He calmed down by degrees, helped by whiskey and the smokes. Finally he muttered, “She is so good, your wife.”
“Yes,” said Alexander.
“So fresh and young. So lovely to look at.”
“Yes,” said Alexander, closing his eyes.
“And she doesn’t yell at you.”
“No. Though I reckon she sometimes wants to.”
“Oh, to have such restraint in my Bessie. She used to be a fine woman. And the girl was such a loving girl.”
More drink, more smoke.
“But have you noticed since coming back,” said Nick, “that there are things that women just don’t know? Won’t know. They don’t understand what it was like. They see me like this, they think this is the worst. They don’t know. That’s the chasm. You go through something that changes you. You see things you can’t unsee. Then you are sleepwalking through your actual life, shell-shocked. Do you know, when I think of myself, I have legs? In my dreams I’m always marching. And when I wake up, I’m on the floor, I’ve fallen out of bed. I now sleep on the floor because I kept rolling over and falling while dreaming. When I dream of myself, I’m carrying my weapons, and I’m in the back of a battalion. I’m in a tank, I’m yelling, I’m always screaming in my dreams. This way! That way! Fire! Cease! Forward! March! Fire, fire, fire!”
Alexander lowered his head, his arms drooping on the table.
“I wake up and I don’t know where I am. And Bessie is saying, what’s the matter? You’re not paying attention to me. You haven’t said anything about my new dress. You end up living with someone who cooks your food for you and who used to open her legs for you, but you don’t know them at all. You don’t understand them, nor they you. You’re two strangers thrown together. In my dreams, with legs, after marching, I’m always leaving, wandering off, long gone. I don’t know where I am but I’m never here, never with them. Is it like that with you, too?”
Alexander quietly smoked, downing another glass of whiskey, and another. “No,” he finally said. “My wife and I have the opposite problem. She carried weapons and shot at men who came to kill her. She was in hospitals, on battlefields, on frontlines. She was in DP camps and concentration camps. She starved through a frozen, blockaded city. She lost everyone she ever loved.” Alexander took half a glass of sour mash into his throat and still couldn’t keep himself from groaning. “She knows, sees, and understands everything. Perhaps less now, but that’s my fault. I haven’t been much of a—” he broke off. “Much of anything. Our problem isn’t that we don’t understand each other. Our problem is that we do. We can’t look at each other, can’t speak one innocent word, can’t touch each other without touching