LITMIR.BIZ

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Vane stood when Stall approached the table, and Stall’s eyes could not help but go to the coat sleeve, turned up and sewn. What would Frank Vane be now, Stall asked himself as he tried to fit a smile to his lips? Thirty-two years old? The man who stood waiting for him looked older than that, looked a little weary, a little pinched around the eyes and the corners of the mouth, as though a lot of what he had tasted in the last thirteen years had been bitter. But his light-gray summer suit and regimental tie were fashionable and, Stall could see, expensive, and the look on his face was confident. Frank Vane extended his right hand for Stall to shake, and Stall thought, Lucky it was the left arm he lost. Vane’s grip was firm and brief.

      When they were seated, Vane said, “I took the liberty of ordering coffee for us.” Then: “I went back to see her after you were sent home. Actually, not really to see her. I just went back to the pension where we spent a couple of days. I bet you don’t remember what it was called.” Vane waited, lifted his coffee cup to his lips and sipped.

      Stall’s coffee was untouched on the table in front of him. He could not remember the name of the pension.

      “It was Le Petit Cavalier. Like I said, I went back, about a month later, on my next furlough. You were already back in, what was it, Greenville?”

      Stall nodded. He had been separated from the army because his fever never fell below 99.5 degrees. Another degree, a normal temperature, would have sent him back to the front. The army doctor who signed the papers that sent him home, a kindly, avuncular man who seemed to consider Stall an intriguing case, said, “I’d send you back to your squad, but your fever might spike and it’d take two men out of the fighting to haul you back here.”

      The mathematics of war were usually merciless, but for Stall this time the numbers were mercy. He received his honorable discharge and his CIB, and later, in the mail came the black leather box with the blue felt lining that contained his Purple Heart.

      He hung around Greenville for a while, staying with his parents and generally considering everything life offered him dreary and meaningless, and then he conquered what he later realized was a deep melancholia, and returned to the University of Virginia to finish his PhD in English. And it was there, in the library carrels and the classrooms, and in his grad student apartment with Maureen, that Stall had made up his mind. Despite all that had happened to him thus far in his young life, he would love the world. The choice was simple, one thing or the other, affirm life or deny it. It was sometimes a dirty world, but he chose to love it.

      “Yeah, it was Greenville,” he said to Frank Vane, “and then on to UVA, and after that, here.”

      “An enviable career so far, a good life.”

      “So far.” Stall could not keep the grim note from his voice. “You were telling me about going back to Paris.”

      “You’re thinking I looked for your girl, but I didn’t. I just wanted to stay in the place where we stayed. I knew you’d met someone, but I didn’t know who she was. I wanted to sleep in the same seedy little flop and see the sights again, see if I could hold my liquor a little better the second time around.”

      “So how did you . . . ?”

      “She came looking for me. Or rather for someone who might know you. The owners of the pension told her you’d been there with another GI. And when I showed up again, they called her. It was about a month after you . . . spent some time with her, and you know what a girl knows after a month goes by.”

      “She told you she was pregnant with my child?”

      Vane looked at Stall for a long time. “Imagine how tough that was for her, Tom. She was only fifteen. Did you know that when you got involved with her that way?”

      What could he say? He had not known. She had seemed far older than her fifteen years and seven months. Maybe war, occupation, did that to young girls, made them look and act older than their years. Stall had seen boys in combat become old men in a few days. He said, “No, I didn’t know. I suppose I thought she was at least eighteen or nineteen.”

      “And that would have been all right?”

      Vane’s face was blank. Stall saw no reproach in his eyes and heard none in his voice. He said, “Yeah, I suppose so. In a foreign country. In wartime. The French were . . .”

      “More sophisticated than we were?”

      “Sure.”

      “Not Brigitte.”

      There it was. The first sign of Frank Vane’s anger. Something in his eyes that said he had known the girl well, the girl Stall had known for only two days. The girl Stall had loved for two days.

      And yes, he had told Brigitte he loved her, and he had meant it. And when the army had ordered him home, he had promised himself he would see her again, had imagined it like a scene in a movie, getting off the train at the Gare du Nord and walking with his musette bag over his shoulder, the handsome veteran with the slight limp (actually, the only proof of his wound was a scar the size of a dime behind his thigh) making his way up the street to the little pastry shop where her parents toiled for a modest living, and surprising her there, the beautiful girl who had waited for him, had spurned all the blandishments of men to wait for him, and Brigitte looking up from the napoleons she was making and smiling with a dot of flour on her pretty nose.

      And what happened then? What happened after the girl with the flour on her nose looked up and smiled? It was the question Stall could never answer. And it was the want of an answer that kept him from going back to find Brigitte, and as the years passed, it was the never going back that made him forget her little by little until the night when he asked himself, as he lay beside the sweetly sleeping Maureen, if he had ever really loved Brigitte, and the answer came whispering out of the darkness: I don’t know.

      Frank Vane said, “Brigitte was not sophisticated. She was a kid trying to act more grown up than she really was, and she was caught up in all that excitement, all that freedom after four years of occupation. Didn’t you notice how thin she was, or was that something a man could ignore in the throes of passion?”

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