“To me?”
He nodded and smiled as if he’d just offered the most beautiful Christmas gift—frankincense or myrrh. And he was right. It was a gift of immeasurable value.
When the men had wandered off for their nap, I found myself alone in the common room. I walked about, picking up framed photos in an effort to glimpse the Jack-of-the-past: the boy, the adolescent, the soldier, the atheist, the man. Seventeen of his years had occurred before I even entered the dingy world of the “Jewish ghetto” in New York City.
There he was—a boy wearing knickers and knee-high black socks, a dress shirt with a triangular white collar, a white whistle lanyard looping down and into his top left pocket. I picked up the photo, ran my finger along the grainy black-and-white of the boy with a mother who loved him and had not yet fallen ill. Then there was another—a young boy, maybe eight years old, standing with his brother in the Irish countryside, both in suits and knotted ties, holding onto their bicycles, staring almost blankly at the camera. Then the soldier with a pipe in his mouth, a roguish smile on his face as if he knew he would survive and that God was fast on his heels. The posed photo of a man of maybe twenty, sitting in a three-piece suit with a book on his lap, gave me quite the thrill. Goodness, he struck such a handsome pose, so trim as he looked directly into the camera, his grin the same, impish and ready for trouble. I loved that young man I never knew. A far-reaching yearning bled backward in time, to a world that existed with Jack in it while I was still young and an ocean away. I pined for the time lost, something and someone I never could have had even then.
I set the past aside and entered the kitchen. I’d volunteered to cook Christmas dinner and half expected the men to retire to the common room or their offices while I bustled about the kitchen. Instead they planted themselves at the wooden kitchen table, regaling me with stories as I basted the turkey and simmered the cranberries, as I lit the stove and chopped the potatoes.
In the lull of another story about Warnie and his childhood happiness at Little Lea, I spoke.
“I once believed that it was Christianity that would finally make me happy.”
“Oh, the history of man looking for something to make himself happy.” Jack smiled.
“Well, I don’t know if I’ve ever been happier than I’ve been today, even with the melancholy of missing of my little boys.”
“If you’re looking for a religion to make you happy, it wouldn’t be Christianity,” Jack said with a laugh. “A bottle of port might do that, but Christianity is rightfully not here to make us comfortable or happy.”
“Cheers to that,” I said and lifted my glass. “Tell me another childhood story.” I poured a cup of burgundy from Magdalen’s wine cellar into the gravy and stirred.
“Wait!” Warnie stood. “You pour wine into gravy?”
I stopped midstir. “You’ve never seen such a thing?”
“Never,” Jack said.
“Well, I’m here to educate you on finer cooking.”
Warnie scoffed with laughter. “Oh, don’t you let Mrs. Miller hear you talk of any finer cooking than hers.”
“I won’t let her hear me, but my goodness, of course there is.”
Silence settled for a moment, and then it was Warnie who answered me first. “My favorite times were the ones when our family would go to the seashore. It was where I fell in love with the ocean. With ships and with mariners.”
“When Mother was alive,” Jack added, in a voice so tender it took great self-control not to put down my whisk and sit before him, take his soft and beautiful face in mine, and kiss every corner of it.
“Let’s not talk of this on Christmas Day,” Warnie said firmly. “Look at that huge turkey. I’m not sure where you found one that size, but in anticipation, let’s imbibe immediately.”
“What we need,” I said, “is some champagne.”
“Oh no.” Jack placed his burgundy glass on the table and lifted his hands in surrender. “Anything but champagne.”
“Who doesn’t like champagne? That seems nearly impossible.”
His brow furrowed between his spectacles, his eyes going distant in the look I’d come to understand meant his mind’s eye had been cast to the past. “It was the Battle of Arras in 1915,” he said, but then fell silent.
This was the first time I’d heard him talk of his time in the First World War. I knew from his writing he’d been a commissioned officer in the Somerset Light Infantry and he’d reached the front line in France on his nineteenth birthday. I could barely imagine his fear, yet he not once had spoken to me of it. That May he’d been injured in the Battle of Arras—these were the facts, but I knew nothing else. I set my wineglass on the counter in a silent urge for him to continue.