LITMIR.BIZ

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it.”

      “But Mom, isn’t that lying?”

      “No, lying is saying something that’s untrue. Saying nothing is not lying. It’s discretion.”

      Both Stalls knew that their daughter would beat a path to her dictionary, so Stall said to her retreating, pajamaed form, “That’s d-i-s, not d-e-s.”

      After washing and drying the dishes, Stall and his wife sat at the kitchen table, the place of their most serious discussions, with third martinis in front of them and commenced what Stall hoped would be a kind of elegy for Jack Leaf. The best thing they could do tonight, a thing in keeping with what Stall thought of as his love of the world, was to remember Jack Leaf well. Tell stories. Bring him back to life in words.

      “Why did he do it?” Maureen sipped and gave Stall a look he saw only rarely. She was what the frat boys called a cheap date; the reference was to capacity for liquor not morals, though the two sometimes became confused. From experience, Stall knew that she was very close to the line that separated earnestly inebriated from stupidly drunk. He had only seen her on the far side of the line a few times, and over there she was not pretty. In that country she was abrupt, far too truthful, sometimes angry, and often inclined to think she had discovered things about her husband that her sober mind would have left alone. Stall had poured the third martini hoping it would be elegiac, lubrication for a Whitmanesque celebration of Jack Leaf. He had led Maureen here to the borderland, or at least he had not stopped her from approaching it. He said, “We’d better take it easy,” and reached out to place a hand across her glass.

      She slid the glass out of reach. “I asked you why he did it.”

      Stall shrugged. In the last hour, fatigue had hit him. It was nine o’clock and felt like midnight. He’d had five drinks and was reconnoitering number six. “I don’t know,” he said. It was the truth, but not all of it.

      Maureen gave him the sharp look again, and when her head turned toward him, her glass lurched, spilling some of the crystalline fluid. “Was it the war?”

      Jack Leaf, like many men who had fought, had not talked much about the war. He answered questions when asked, but questions were rare and his answers were brief. The English faculty were his social group, and they were, like Stall, mostly born to the role of spectator. Jack Leaf could have said a lot about the war, most people knew that, but he chose not to talk, and people respected his silence.

      Stall had gone to the war, had served honorably if briefly, had been wounded, had nearly died of an infection probably resulting from having contaminated the shrapnel wound at the back of his thigh with shit that had exploded from his bowels with the concussion that came milliseconds after the explosion of a German shell. He had returned to consciousness lying in the snow between two dead men. He could not call them buddies, friends, anything like that. In the darkness, confusion, fear, and frenzy they had been shapes, faces safer for him than those of the men shooting at him, but nothing more than that.

      When Stall awoke, the battle had moved on. In the distance, rifles rattled and cannons flashed. It was unbearably cold and he had no idea where he was. He assumed that he had been left for dead, covered as he was with blood from the men on either side of him. He waited until morning, shivering in the pathetically light wool greatcoat the army had considered adequate for Europe in the winter of 1945. The bleeding at the back of his thigh had stopped, and when dawn came he found that he could walk well enough leaning on the rifle he had found, and that walking did not cause the bleeding to start again. He never found his platoon (most of the forty had been killed), and never found his company, but he found the army and attached himself to it. He did not report the wound which he considered insignificant. For another week he walked, crouched, starved, shivered, and tried to hack holes in frozen ground until his thigh swelled to the size of his waist and he was sent to the rear with a raging fever, incipient gangrene, and the probability of amputation.

      His leg was saved by the first-ever application in wartime of a new drug known as penicillin. His recovery took months, and when he was strong enough to enjoy a weekend pass, he went to Paris. Like Jack Leaf, Tom Stall never talked much about his war. He was proud to have served in what he considered a great cause, but he had seen too much of the chaos that arose from the best intentions to care much for causes again. One cause in a lifetime was enough. Now life, to Stall, was an everyday thing. Goodness was in a wife’s kiss and the feel of her breast as you left a warm bed in the morning, a child’s smile at the breakfast table. It was in a good cup of coffee at a drugstore counter, it was in talking to friends, and in more complicated ways it was in good books, and that was all there was to it.

      If Stall had a regret, it was that his wound was not in the front of his body. He had been lying facedown in the snow when the shell exploded, a German 88 with a proximity fuse. A shell designed to burst above the heads of troops, to kill men crouching in holes in the ground. White-hot fragments rained down and killed what they could find, and it was only a tiny piece of steel that found Stall. He still wore it behind his femur. It hid there telling him nothing, not even when the weather would change. His only regret about his war was literary, or perhaps more accurately, historical. He loved the quotation attributed to Alexander the Great when, after years of conquest, his army mutinied before a battle in India. The men were worn out and demanded to go home. The young king called them to assembly, stepped forth, and stripped naked. “Does any man among you honestly feel that he has suffered more for me than I have suffered for him? Come now—if you are wounded, strip and show your wounds, and I will show mine. There is no part of my body but my back which has not a scar; not a weapon a man may grasp or fling the mark of which I do not carry upon me. Show this man to me and I will yield to your weariness and go home.” No one came forward. Instead, the army burst into wild cheering. In tears, the men begged Alexander to forgive their lack of spirit and pleaded with him only to lead them forward.

      Stall’s wound was in the back of his leg. His war had been brief, and all he knew of life so far, it had taught him. Keep your head down when you can. Be good to others, ask for the same in return, drink the wines of the countryside and eat the good food, and don’t overcomplicate simple things. Occasionally people asked Stall about his war, and when they did, he gently tried to change the subject, and if they pressed him, and if he’d had a little bit to drink, sometimes he said, “I was only there for a few months. I was shot in the ass, but I was not running away.”

      Stall drank some of his unusual third martini and said, “Jack fought all the way from Normandy to the Rhine with the 101st Airborne. He was wounded three times, and he won a medal. One of the big ones. He had a good war, or a bad one, depending on how you look at it.” Stall set down the drink and examined it, begging it for the truth he knew it held. In vino veritas. Was survival itself enough to justify three wounds and a year of brutal fighting? He’d never asked Jack Leaf that question.

      “How did he look at it?” Maureen waited. She was very close to the line Stall did not want her to cross.

      “He didn’t say. At least not to me. I saw his medals mounted in a glass case in his study. I just stuck my head in there one night at a party. You know, curious to see a colleague’s lair. His was close to perfect—like an English gentleman’s study. Leather chairs, a big rosewood desk, rows of books, a mahogany humidor, and a rack of pipes. Everything neat as a pin. Jack was all about order in life and work.” Until the end, Stall thought.

      “Where was he wounded?”

      Stall wanted to say, All over Europe, but knew that would be the gin talking. He said, “I don’t know. I never saw him in anything but his professor outfit.”

      “You never saw him naked?”

      Maureen knew, of course, that Stall had showered with many of his colleagues. Handball was the English professor’s game of choice. Played well, it was serious exercise. Several of the younger men played the game at noon, showered, and returned to their offices for sandwiches at their desks. So, yes, Stall had seen a lot of professorial nakedness, some of it ugly, some of it beautiful, none of it Jack Leaf. Stall shook his head.

      “Where was he from?”

      “Oklahoma, I think.

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