On the boat to Italy, Arch dreamt. His mother was right, he was sleepy, congenitally, chronically. This was an advantage on the boat, the USS Montrose, which was so overcrowded the soldiers stood, lay, sat in shifts. Eight hours of each. A lot of the guys got anxious when it came for their turn in the belowdecks bunks. Their chance to sleep: What if they couldn’t? Standing came next. Some of them, just out of bed, fainted from exhaustion. You could sleep when you sat down, but if you overindulged in sitting sleep, you might be too rested to sleep on your sleeping shift.
Not Arch. He dreamt in any position. He could fall asleep as a party trick. He made bets. “How can we tell you’re not faking?” his shipmates asked, but once he’d fallen asleep—in seconds—there was no question. Look at him. He didn’t snore. His mouth didn’t hang open. He looked bigger asleep than awake, as though an equestrian statue, except a bunk instead of a horse. Standing he could doze and not tip over, and then he’d dream of otherworldly quotidian things, a grocery store that sold pulled teeth, a trolley line that took a sudden left turn into the ocean. Sitting dreams were about the unmet war: having to shoot only to discover that your rifle operated like a concertina, with buttons and bellows. Prone, he dreamt of his family—Roy, his mother, his long-gone father. He dreamt of Cracker Graham riding a penny farthing through the bowling alley, and wrote to her to say so.
All his life, insomniac friends would regard him with jealousy, his wakeful wife with loneliness, his children, alone and conscious, pining. He was the object of more hard feelings over his sleepfulness than any other of his bad habits.
Sometimes he thought Italy didn’t wake him up. He dreamt through it. What else could explain setting up a hospital in a deserted fairgrounds, an enormous allegorical statue of a seated woman watching over him as he humped sacks of sugar into the kitchen? The Prima Mostra Triennale delle Terre Italiane d’Oltremare di Napoli—the first triennial exhibition of overseas Italian territories. First and last and never recurring no matter the interval. The allegorical woman in the central hall was Ethiopia, conquered by the Italians in 1935, already returned to Haile Selassie by the time Arch passed by her with his sacks of sugar—Arch, who had never met a statue he didn’t suspect of being animate, biding its time, no matter how big, how misshapen, how dead-eyed or spraddle-limbed. Wax figures were alive to Arch, department store mannequins, the tractor-pelvised women of Henry Moore. Ethiopia would at any moment stand up and snuff Arch out with her helmet as though he were a candle.
The Mostra delle Terre Italiane d’Oltremare had been designed to strike awe, like the harpoon in Ethiopia’s hand. Arch had been staring up at her when he met Joan, who had sidled up beside him and whispered, “Look on my works, you mighty, and despair.”
“Ye,” said Arch. “Ye mighty.”
“Yeah, thanks,” said Joan. She wore the brown seersucker uniform of the hospital staff. She looked like she should be doling out chocolates at a Fannie Farmer’s. She said, “I stole something.”
The uniform came with a wraparound skirt, in case the dress got dirty, reversible, in case the skirt did. She pulled aside one flap to display a white tablecloth.
“There are hundreds of them,” she said. “I can show you where.”
“I don’t need a tablecloth. Where?”
They’d come ashore at the same time but hadn’t seen each other—later Arch would speak of storming a beach, but Naples didn’t need storming. There was nobody there. Even an abandoned cottage is eerie; even an abandoned bicycle. They waded, waddled, onto the sand, then began to set up the hospitals in the fairgrounds—three hospitals, plus another down the road at the thermal spa.
Joan was from Wyoming, a place that Arch had no notions about at all. She had brown hair with severe bangs, and a mole at the corner of her mouth that Arch found tragic: beautiful in its way but also unsettling. He never stopped noticing it. There was something mean about her that drew him, a wisp of cruelty that suggested she might push him down a flight of stairs just to see the look on his face. He went with her to the vast kitchens of the Imperial Hall, to the gleaming metal cupboards in the back. Hundreds of tablecloths in stacks.
“Take one,” she said.
“I don’t have a table.”
“So what? You got a mother? Your mother got a table?” She kicked him in the calf; she was a kicker. “Don’t be a chump.”
“I’m not a chump.”
“Don’t be one is what I’m telling you.”
In one of the outbuildings they came upon the dioramas celebrating the Italian military: boats, and mountains, and fields of battle, populated by miniature Italians in uniform. They each kidnapped half a dozen tiny servicemen.
What Arch really wanted: one of the many of commercial-grade espresso machines still wrapped in plastic, the Italian cousins of Bertha Truitt’s Stanley Steamer, though how would he smuggle it out? Could he ever get it to work? He stole other things: covered silver dishes, pepper grinders, tablecloths to wrap them in.
Why did he steal? Because Joan made him. Because he wanted things. He wanted things. For revenge, said Joan, against Mussolini. Because he was frightened of war and needed talismans. Because the war would end and he needed evidence that he had been there. Because he needed evidence that he wasn’t entirely good: the one sure way of dying in war was being a saint. The shifty would survive.
Because nobody was looking at him. Because Joan was looking at him.
They drove from Napoli to Sienna in a jeep, and the ash off Mount Vesuvius silvered their hair and eyebrows.
“This is how we’ll look when we’re old,” said Joan. “Oh dear.”
Arch pulled to the side of the road, beneath a tree with dripping lopsided pink blossoms that looked like lungs. They appraised each other.
“Yes,” said Joan, deciding. She was the one who unfolded the blanket on the side of the road. They could feel the dropped pink blossoms beneath them, hear the ticking of the jeep. She was little. That was clearer as they lay down.
“What if the volcano erupts?” asked Arch, “I mean, fully,” and Joan answered with a dirty laugh.
“Tell it not to,” she said. “Take off your pants.”
Later, he’d discover that he’d taken only silver lids and no bottoms to those covered dishes, and he told himself that this was because he’d felt guilty: he’d punished himself ahead of time. As he stole them, though, he did not feel guilty. He felt righteous. To feel guilty would have meant he was himself, watching himself do wrong. Deep down, said Joan, you’re a good guy.
What about you, deep down?
Ah! I’m bottomless.
He was not himself. He stole because he was a thief.
All this time Cracker Graham wrote to him with news from home. Roy had left the alley, the apartment, Salford entirely.
I thought your mother would fire me, but she says with Roy gone she needs more hands anyhow, so here I am. I don’t hear from Roy. I can’t write to him because he’ll have nothing to do with me, so here I am writing to you. I am a stinker.
Cracker Graham was at the heart of it all, why his mother had broken Roy’s ankle. When Arch had first seen Cracker in her coveralls and ballet slippers, he thought he might ask her out. Then he found out she was a year older than he was. He’d never considered going out with anyone older, and for a while he lost interest, and once he’d come around Roy was interested and that was that.
The letters back and forth were the longest conversation they’d ever had. Arch’s stories were full of Italy, and no Italians; full of the war but no people; full of the bowling alley and full of Cracker Graham herself. He wrote everything he remembered about her: her father was dead. She hated the taste of peanuts. She loved egg salad. When she braided her curly hair, the plaits hung to her shoulders; loose, it came only to her chin. One day he’d been bowling with his girlfriend, Angela Cedrone, a little drunk, and when he saw Cracker he wanted her, Cracker, to throw him, Arch, over her shoulder and carry him off. (Angela was a tough girl. How else would he get away?) In a few months of writing he was signing his letters love.
That was all it took for Cracker to fall in love with Arch, for Arch to fall in love with Cracker.