“I don’t know where to start.”
“Start anywhere.”
She told him about her sons, her love for them but also her sense of being confined by motherhood. She told him she loved her husband but resented his assumption of her fealty. She told him about her sisters and their families, about Irving’s death on Bataan. He told her about how he’d veered toward becoming a drunk, how Marian had taken him to Vancouver, about Judith Wexler and Sally Ayukawa, about going to the mountains and leaving again, about Wallace dying. The afternoon waned. The room grew dim, but they didn’t turn on any lights. After they’d dressed, they held each other for a long time by the door, knowing that once they stepped outside, something would be over. He walked with her to the lobby, watched her go out into the evening, her hair still loose.
When he checked out of the hotel, before he boarded his train for San Francisco, he gave the clerk a paper-wrapped parcel and paid for it to be delivered by courier to Sarah’s house. The note, which he’d written on hotel stationery and tucked inside the sketchbook, read:
Technically this belongs to the United States Navy, and it’s not mine to give. But I don’t want to send it to Washington, and I don’t want to carry it around anymore. Would you keep it for me? Maybe I want to leave something with you so I have an excuse to see you again—yes, I do—but really the reason I’ll come back is because I love you, and what I’ve left of myself can never be reclaimed.
Stalag Luft I, near Barth, Germany
June 1943
Around the same time Jamie sailed from San Francisco Leo, when Eddie first saw him, a week after he arrived in camp, was onstage in a gauzy blue dress of dyed, stitched-together handkerchiefs and a brittle wig made from Red Cross packing material, two straw braids tied with twine. He was Gabby in The Petrified Forest, playing against a set made from Red Cross crates, with props bartered from the German guards, who had borrowed them from a theater company in town. Thousands of men desperate for distraction made good audiences. The guards came, too, sat in the front row.
“A lot of girls I know could learn a thing or two from that,” the guy next to Eddie whispered, gazing appreciatively at Leo.
That. Because what was he? He was obviously not a woman, but also, somehow, he could make himself indistinguishable from one. Some of the guys who played girls （not just in the plays, Eddie learned, but at the camp’s oddly earnest dances and teas, too） fully embraced the rituals of womanhood and shaved their arms and legs and concocted homemade lipstick and blush, but Leo with his big beaky nose and hairy arms only had to put a bit of softness into his joints, a bit of sway into his spine and a careful flourish into his fingers, and he was a lonely, pretentious, impetuous girl tending a gas-station lunchroom in Arizona. Watching, Eddie could almost feel the desert heat, smell the grease of the deep fryer.
Eddie started looking for Leo after that, almost didn’t recognize him when they wound up next to each other in the wash shed, despite the nose. “You were great in the play,” he ventured. “Were you an actor before?”
“No, I was a bombardier.”
“I mean before before.”
“I knew what you meant. Only in my dreams. I never had the nerve even to audition in high school. But here—why not? What do I have to lose?”
“You were terrific. The guy next to me said real girls could learn something from you.”
Leo pressed his lips together. “They like to say that.”
“I suppose it’s all in good fun,” Eddie said, cautious.
Leo gave the same brief, polite smile. “Can be.”
“Desperate times, desperate measures?”
“For some.”
Eddie dropped his voice almost to a whisper. “Poor bastards,” he said.
* * *
—
The plane had been shot up by a Messerschmitt; the engine caught fire. The copilot and the tail gunner were dead already, shot, when the pilot told the rest to hit the silk. The bombardier went out first, through the same bay from which he’d dropped so many bombs, then the radioman, then Eddie. Strange to plunge through the sky only in his body, without the encapsulation of the plane, falling among the flak and the bullets and the droning engines, the fire. He’d pulled the rip cord.
The radioman was shot dead while hanging from his parachute, and Eddie didn’t know what happened to the pilot and the other guys. Eddie and the bombardier were taken to Frankfurt to be interrogated, and from there he was sent to the camp, on the Baltic. As the prisoners walked from the train to the gates, people gathered on the side of the road to jeer at them and mime nooses and firing squads.