The smell of the smoke from the inferno lasted long after the firemen contained the blaze, and we were still choking on the ashes the day my husband’s ship finally came in.
“Now, remember what I told you,” I said to my boys, straightening little Ashley’s tie. “You’ve seen men on crutches before, so you mustn’t stare.”
“Are people on the dock going to think he’s a pirate with his peg leg?”
“A pirate? No. They’ll think he’s an injured soldier.” It had, after all, been misreported in the papers that my husband had lost a leg fighting in the French lines, and I knew this false story would give Willie embarrassment every time he had to correct the record.
When I stood up, there Willie was, hobbling down the gangplank, his well-tailored pant leg covering the false limb. To prevent undue attention, I held the boys by their collars to make them wait for him—a seeming eternity for two children who hadn’t seen their father in nearly two years. Leaning on one crutch, Willie gave me a tip of his hat. “Beatrice. Boys.”
My husband was a formal man, unsure of how to show his affections, but I’d raised our boys to be free and frank with theirs, and they flew at him. “Careful!” I cried, worried they might topple him in their embrace.
My admonishment embarrassed Willie. “Not to worry! I’ve spent all these months strengthening my arms and remaining leg. I’m steady as a rock.”
Perhaps he was, but he was also pale, and the effort it took him to get into the car drenched him in sweat, though he insisted it was only the summer heat. And his obvious exhaustion vindicated my decision to have separate rooms readied for him at the Vanderbilt. Of course, there was another reason too. Namely that I wasn’t sure upon which footing we stood. I promised he’d have a wife waiting for him, but he never promised I’d have a husband . . .
Once Willie was settled on the divan, the boys tried to disguise their interest in their father’s peg leg. “I don’t suppose there’s anything to drink?” Willie asked, and I understood he needed a little liquid courage to indulge their curiosity. By the time I returned with a crystal decanter of scotch and a bucket of ice, he had his pant leg up and was knocking on the wooden prosthetic. “I tried everything else, but in the end, the peg worked best. It was good enough for our ancestor, old Peter Stuyvesant, when he built New York. So it’ll be good enough for me.”
I smiled, relieved by his old bravado. The boys seemed reassured too. For the next hour, they chattered excitedly at their father about everything from their toys to their lessons and marks in school. “I’m r-rotten in arithmetic,” Billy complained.
It was his speech that most worried his father, as I learned when we sent the boys to bed with a promise of an outing in the morning. “Billy’s stutter hasn’t improved.”
“It certainly has. You just don’t remember how bad it used to be.”
My husband poured himself a glass of liquor, and one for me too. If we were about to quarrel about our sons, our marriage, or the past and future, I might need it. I took a gulp, only to see my husband’s shoulders round with defeat. “I saw Victor, you know, the week before he died.”
“That’s—” Familiar grief rose up at the mention of my nephew’s name and made it difficult to speak. I’d put the picture up—the one we took in Amiens when Victor was mourning his friend Kohn and wanted so badly to make his life count for something. “I’m so glad you saw him . . .”
Willie nodded, rolling the crystal glass between his hands. “He’d been wounded. His head was still bandaged; I told him no one would blame him if he took time to recover. He said it didn’t matter. He said, Of course, I shall never come out of this alive, Uncle Willie.”
My hand fluttered to my lips, my throat a painful knot. I tried to think of words of comfort, but nothing came. Then I reached for my husband, because I realized it wasn’t only the amputation of his leg that had left him exhausted, pale, and unwell. It was grief too. We’d both loved Victor, but my husband had loved him like a son. “I shouldn’t have let him go out on another mission thinking that way,” Willie said, his hand gripping mine. “You can’t go into battle deciding to die, or you will.”
I had no place to argue with him about war, but by now, the details of Victor’s flight had made all the papers. “That’s not how it was. Victor had a basket of oranges with him. He was going to deliver them to a wounded friend after the sortie. You don’t make plans for the future if you’ve decided to die, Willie. But none of us can cheat death when our hour comes.”