“That’s impressive.”
“I haven’t spent my life teaching Sunday school,” I said. “I got a PhD. I published articles. I’ve slept in a foxhole. I’ve sat on a hill in the dark and watched the tracer bullets go by. I landed on the beach at Normandy.”
“Really?” Now, at last, she looked at me with real interest.
“D-Day plus thirty-eight. Bastille Day—July 14.”
“What was it like?”
“What was it like?” I used her trick of repeating the question—not on purpose, but because suddenly I wasn’t sure how to answer. Now that I had introduced this topic, what did I want her to know? “It was a mess,” I said.
“You must have a lot of stories.”
“Of course,” I said. “Doesn’t everyone?”
“I meant about the war. Everyone doesn’t have those.”
“No,” I said. “Everyone is lucky.”
She let a silence lapse before she spoke. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“Bringing up a painful topic.”
“You didn’t. I did.” I didn’t like her mentioning my pain. “I don’t mind telling my war stories. Nobody asks.”
“What about your family?”
“I told them some things. I wrote letters home. But all the people who got them are dead.”
“There’s no one left?”
“One nephew, two grandnieces,” I said. “One of them I like.”
“No kids?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t left much of a record of myself.”
What a serious face Jennifer has. She looked at me like this was terrible news. “You should write your stories down.”
I didn’t know what to say. Why would I do that? Who would I do it for?
After she left, I couldn’t concentrate on my book, an old Martha Grimes I’d somehow missed. Though it took considerable, exhausting effort, though even now my right elbow hurts from that effort, I dragged my army trunk out of the guest room closet. It’s where I keep all my memorabilia from the war. My souvenirs. I used to have real souvenirs—empty perfume bottles, framed postcards of girls from different regions of France—but I divested myself of all that bric-a-brac long ago. Here’s what remains: the letters I sent home to my parents; the frayed, folded map on which I tracked my movements; a photo album I never open because I pressed a flower inside; my scrapbook. I pulled out the scrapbook, which is a heavy, fragile thing these days. It’s probably sixteen inches tall, more than a foot wide, with a cover made of fake boards, complete with wood grain. On the front it has a drawing of two mallards in flight, one large in the foreground, one small in the back. Above that are the words Scrap Book in an old-fashioned cursive. Scrap book used to be two words. Now it’s one. So many changes happen without our noticing, without our say-so. The pages are crisp and brown, decorated with menus and postcards and pictures held in place by photo corners, or slipping out of them. All the things I thought worth saving. So brittle now. I turned the creaking pages carefully until I found the first picture of Kay.
These photos are tiny. They’re snapshots, “snaps” we called them, from the forties, three-inch-by-two-inch black-and-white rectangles with thick crimped white borders. And my eyes are not what they used to be. So I can’t swear by the resemblance. Kay’s hair was dark, a rich brown, almost black, not blond like Jennifer’s, and she wore it rolled back, pinned, and curled, as was the fashion of the age. Her eyes were dark, too, and mischievous, and she had a sardonic grin, a way of flashing it at you like she knew exactly what you were thinking. These things I remember without the aid of photographs. I’d forgotten how slender she was, how small she looked encased in men’s coveralls and a gas mask, how short. When we stand together in a photo I look a good five inches taller, and I was only five six myself, before I started to shrink.
Still, I think it is Kay she reminds me of.
Ghosts