“It’s strange for me to think of him here. I don’t know why. I feel as though he was in pain.”
I nodded.
“Maybe he was afraid to go home,” Jack said. “Maybe that was part of it.”
“Why would he be afraid?”
He shrugged. I saw he had grown emotional. I resisted the impulse to comfort him. It broke my heart to see him in such anguish. As much as he loved his grandfather, and spoke of him often, he was also haunted by this trip, by the journey his grandfather made after the war. Something didn’t add up, or added up in a way that he found disturbing, and I couldn’t ask without intruding. I decided early on that if he wanted to tell me, he would. I wouldn’t dig or ask to know.
“I guess I’m all set. We should find a place to stay.”
“Okay, Jack.”
“Thank you for coming with me.”
I put my hand on his back and brushed it lightly.
“It’s a puzzle. I don’t understand what he was looking for.”
“You said you didn’t think it was any one thing, right? He might not have known himself what he was searching for.”
Jack nodded.
“Would you take a few pictures?” he asked me.
I slipped my phone out and took a dozen shots. He didn’t direct me. I tried to be as comprehensive as possible. I didn’t ask him why these pictures were all right, but pictures of us having a good time were problematic. I guess he would have told me we were documenting something he needed for research.
We left late in the day and arrived at dinnertime in Vallorbe, Switzerland. Jack wanted to visit the Fortress Vallorbe, the fort his grandfather had described in the journal. It was located in the Col de Jougne mountains, an easy trip the next day. It was too late to investigate it that night, so we found a restaurant and ordered the prix fixe.
And that was where we fought again. Our own World War II.
28
A million years ago, my family drove west on a vacation to Yellowstone. I was twelve. When we reached Nebraska, my father got it into his head that we should watch the sand cranes in their annual migration. It was the proper season, and he claimed that none other than Jane Goodall, the famous primatologist, had recommended it as one of the great world animal migrations. My mother simply shrugged, and off we went. It was more or less on the way in any case.
I remember the cranes, but I remember even more the approach of a rainstorm across the wide Nebraska plains that we experienced on I-80 one late afternoon. It came from the west, and it blocked out everything. We had been driving along, playing the inevitable game of spotting various state license plates, when suddenly my father leaned close to the windshield, looked up with a strange expression on his face, and said, “We’re in for a little weather.”
I had tasted the storm in my teeth, in the soft palate of my mouth, sensed it in the nerve endings of my fingers. We did not enter the storm so much as puncture it; our car became a pliant needle that probed deeply into the rain cloud’s epidermis until, at last, we understood its nature.
“Is it a tornado?” my mother asked, her hand out to brace herself on the windshield, her other hand holding a camera.
My father shook his head, leaned closer to the windshield in order to look up, and said again, “We’re in for a little weather.”
That was the phrase that came to mind when Jack suddenly clouded.
We had been going along, sipping a salty consommé, waiting for the waiter to refill our wineglasses when suddenly I recognized the signs of a storm approaching, and nothing I could do or say could prevent its devastation. Jack smiled. And then the weather took us.
*
“I want to know what the next day will bring. Not everything—I don’t want to know everything—but I want a degree of certainty,” I said, my neck flashing red. “At least I want that option. Is that such a horrible thing?”
“It’s just…” He smiled and looked away.
What was happening? I wondered. How had we gone from these lovely, lovely, lovely weeks, traveling together smoothly and without argument, to arrive suddenly—in the mildest of environments, a perfectly acceptable tourist restaurant with checked tablecloths and soup bowls hung from hooks along the walls for decorations—at the edge of another argument? We’re in for a little weather, I thought, even as Jack became vivider and leaned forward in his seat.
“This is not about New York this time,” he said. “It’s not about New York being a prison we build for ourselves. This is about an approach to life and to living.”
“You sound very young when you talk like that.”
“Like what?”
“When you make these grand proclamations. Didn’t you just finish saying New York might actually be a good thing for you career-wise? That it might be a place where you could start your climb to world domination in journalism? You just finished saying that, Jack. Or am I crazy?”
“It’s not all one thing or another. It’s not.”
“I don’t even know what you’re saying anymore. Do you want to go to New York and try it with me? You don’t have to. There’s no gun to your head. We’ve been talking about it, but we haven’t committed yet, have we? We haven’t.”
“I’m worried what it means.”
“What what means?”
He smiled again. I realized I hated his smile at these junctures. It wasn’t so much a smile as the camouflage for a snarl.
The waiter returned with more wine. We smiled at him. We had plenty of smiles to go around. Jack said something in French. The waiter smiled. I wondered if I should get up, pretend I needed the WC, do anything to break the trajectory of where this seemed to be headed.
At the same time, I felt my heart breaking.
When the waiter moved away, Jack took a drink and sighed.
“You were my biggest fear,” he said. “You really were. You, Heather Christine Mulgrew.”
“Me? Why me?”
“A person like you. A person who I would want to join. I didn’t want to meet anyone like you. I had a pretty good plan, I thought. I had six months I could use for traveling. I think that’s why I’m reacting.”
“You still can.”
“Maybe I don’t want to. Maybe that’s the confusion I’m feeling.”
“Jack, we’re making a problem where there isn’t one. You can continue on your trip. I wouldn’t blame you if you did. Not in the least. It might even make things easier for me. I can settle into New York—”