Cocoa Beach Read online

  Now the time has come to discover the truth about the other.

  Over breakfast the next morning, I inform Clara that I’m taking Evelyn to Miami for a few days. We’ll drive off in the Packard as soon as the dishes are cleared and the suitcases packed.

  “Miami?” she says. Toast suspended in midair.

  “Yes. Miami.”

  “Whatever for?”

  For fun, I tell her.

  Clara finishes her toast and her tea, dabs her mouth with a delicate napkin, and informs me that she’s not going to let us run off without her, oh no.

  And by the way, if it’s fun I’m after, the place to go is Miami Beach.

  Chapter 4

  France, February 1917

  A personal inspection. That’s what Captain Fitzwilliam told me, anyway, once we had started on our way, out of the stable yard and down the turgid road, twenty military minutes later. The drizzle had let up; the chill descended. Corporal Pritchard rode in the back with the wounded men, while Fitzwilliam sat next to me on the Ford’s narrow seat, bracing one hand on the corner of the windshield while the damp crept in through the cracks in the rubber curtains.

  “To inspect your hospital personally, of course,” he said, in answer to my question. “I can’t send patients to an auxiliary hospital without a thorough inspection of the premises.”

  Was he smiling? I couldn’t take my eyes from the road in order to see his face, even if I’d had the courage to do it. In any case, the winter daylight was already retiring behind the thickening fog. But I thought I heard warmth in his voice. An impish emphasis on the word thorough, which I was then too unworldly to understand.

  “I suppose not,” I said.

  “You’re a Red Cross outfit, you said?”

  “Yes. The Eighth New York chapter, the Overseas Unit.”

  “Which the redoubtable Mrs. DeForest organized.”

  “Yes. Mrs. DeForest was very eager to assist in the war effort. Directly, I mean.”

  “Of course she was. I can just picture her now. I do wonder if she’ll match the image in my head. But what about you, Miss Fortescue? The astonishing Miss Fortescue.”

  I switched on the headlamps, not that it made much difference. The road went around a slight downhill curve, ending in a muddy hollow that required my concentration. When we had plunged through and emerged on the other side, a flatter stretch, straight and bordered by lindens at even intervals, he relaxed his grip on the windshield and repeated the question.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean what you’re doing here, plowing your ambulance through shellfire and whatnot, along roads deemed impassable by my doughty British drivers. Are you a nurse?”

  “Not a qualified one, no. That is, I’ve had first aid training and the Red Cross coursework, of course, but I’m mostly here as an auxiliary.”

  “A dogsbody, you mean.”

  “Not at all.”

  “But Mrs. DeForest has you doing all this wretched driving.”

  “I happen to like driving.” The road was drier here, slightly elevated. I moved the throttle, and Hunka Tin reached forward. Engine screaming, mud flying from the tires. “My father taught me.”

  “What’s that?” he said over the noise of the engine.

  “My father! He’s—well, he likes to work with machines.”

  “What, a mechanic?”

  “Not exactly. An inventor, I guess.”

  “More and more extraordinary. What has your father invented?”

  “Nothing, really. Industrial gadgets.”

  “Aha. Lucrative stuff, I suppose? Greasing the wheels of American commerce?”

  We jumped hard over a rut. Fitzwilliam crashed into me. Straightened, apologized. I said don’t be silly. He smelled of disinfectant and human skin and exhaustion. His beard stood in need of shaving; I had felt it briefly on my cheek, warm and raspy, and I thought, That’s what it feels like, a man’s unshaven jaw, like the rasp of sandpaper.

  You know, it’s a cozy roost, the cab of a Model T. And the ambulance cab was cozier than, say, a Ford roadster or a coupe, because you had that wooden box stuffed up behind you, and you were perched on the narrow seat, while your legs crowded into the narrower dash. Put a fully grown male in the passenger seat—a man like Captain Fitzwilliam, long-legged and loose-shouldered, oh yes, fully grown indeed—and there was just enough room for breath and awkwardness, for human sweat and anxiety.

  “I don’t know about lucrative,” I said. “We don’t much speak about money at home.”

  Fitzwilliam rubbed his jaw. I imagined the soft scratch of bristles, somewhere beneath the engine’s rattle. A pair of headlamps surfaced in the gloaming, and a moment later a supply truck labored heavily past, plastered with mud, the driver’s shattered face visible for an instant in the glow of Hunka Tin’s blinders. Then another one, following close. Headed for the front.

  “I suppose that was an impertinent question,” he said.

  “Impertinent?”

  “About your father’s inventions. Quite out of order. It’s been rather a frightful two days, I’m afraid. Stretchers arriving every few minutes. Scrambles the gray matter.”

  “Of course.”

  “And then I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like, speaking to a lady.”

  “What about your nurses?”

  “Oh, the nurses. Have you met any of them? They’re all ancient and exactly like schoolmarms. The RANS does it on purpose, to prevent fraternizing. Amazingly successful. One forgets they’re women at all. Liberates conversation to a shocking degree. Mind you, they’re terribly good at what they—oh, look out!”

  Hunka Tin blew her left front tire.

  If you’ve never had the pleasure of inhabiting an old French château, let me assure you: the reality’s less charming than you’d think.

  Oh, they have a way of bewitching you from the outside. A black night had fallen utterly by the time we reached the Château de Créouville—not so much as a breath of moonlight behind all that cloud—but the lamps blazed from the windows of the great hall and the bedrooms above, so that you emerged from the surrounding forest to encounter seven cone-topped stone turrets rising dreamlike against the sky, and a lake shimmering with gold. Captain Fitzwilliam straightened in his seat. “By God, is that it? Isn’t there supposed to be a blackout?”

  “Mrs. DeForest isn’t one for hiding.”

  “Must be damned expensive, however, burning up all those lights.”

  “She doesn’t care about expense.”

  “Yes, that’s the lovely thing about having blunt, isn’t it? Well, she’s failed one test already. She’s got to observe the blackout. I suppose the Boche reconnaissance haven’t found you yet, but they will. They’ll think you’re the new staff headquarters, and bomb the blazes out of you.” He sat back and folded his arms against the solid khaki bulk of his greatcoat. Our elbows met, and I was surprised by the size and strength of his, by how much more assertive the male elbow could be. How confidential, there inside a humid little enclave, where you couldn’t help tasting his vaporous breath and the flavor of his soap, detecting each movement of his fingers and jaw, while a castle glimmered nearby against a sooty night. He went on, more whispery: “It’s beautiful, however. Good God. Like a fairy story. Is it built on that lake?”

  “Yes. The lake forms a kind of moat around it, only much prettier than a real moat.”

  “Oh, agreed. Nasty, swampish things, moats. Imagine this in summer, set against a blue sky.”

  Well, I already had. I’d imagined the château in full, vigorous, fertile summer, five centuries ago: teeming with knights and stags, each stone pink in a rising dawn. I had imagined people inside. I had imagined love affairs and troubadours. Long ago, I had learned that you could imagine anything you wanted, that the space inside your head belonged only to you. Furnished and decorated and inhabited only by you, so that your insides teemed and seethed while your outward aspect remained serene.

&
nbsp; “You’ve got some imagination,” I said. “If you look closely enough, it’s falling apart.”

  “Of course it is. Everyone’s skint these days, including and perhaps especially the upper classes. Except your Mrs. DeForest, it seems. Or is it just Americans in general?”

  “Not all Americans are rich.”

  “No, but the ones who are . . .”

  We were climbing the drive now, a slight incline, and the tires slipped in the mud. I reached down with my left hand and shifted the Ford into low gear. The windows grew before us; the exuberant decoration took shape. The ripples on the lake made you think of enchantments.

  Because everything looks better in lamplight, doesn’t it? Tomorrow, in the harshness of the winter morning, Captain Fitzwilliam would see the crumbling of the old stones, the chunks of fallen fretwork, the brown weeds thrusting from the seams. The sordid state of the gravel, the broken paving stones in the courtyard. How Mrs. DeForest had grumbled! But now, at dusk, in the glow of a hundred lamps, everything was new and luminous. You couldn’t speak for the beauty of it.

  And we didn’t. We didn’t say another word, either of us, all the way up the drive and over the stone bridge, beneath the rusting portcullis and into the courtyard. Captain Fitzwilliam leaned forward, and the movement brought his leg into contact with mine. He didn’t seem to notice; the spectacle of the château immersed him. One gloved hand reached out to grasp the top edge of the dashboard, and I thought how gamely he had helped me change the flat tire, how he’d knelt in the mud and turned the bolts while I held the rectangular pocket flashlight, turning it off and on at intervals so the battery wouldn’t quit. The cheerful way he’d risen from the half-frozen slop and said, I could just about do with a bottle of brandy, couldn’t you? As if I were a partner of some kind, a person of equal footing, deserving of brandy and respect.

  I hadn’t replied. How could I reply to a thing like that?

  I brought Hunka Tin to a careful, battered stop just before the main steps and switched off the engine. There was an instant of rare silence, like a prayer. Captain Fitzwilliam turned to me and said, “Miss Fortescue, I—”

  The door flew open, and Hazel popped outside in her woolen dressing gown.

  “Good grief! We thought you’d been killed!” she said, and then Captain Fitzwilliam unfolded himself onto the gravel, muddy and unshaven, wet and weathered, and she paused. One foot hovering on the next step, one hand covering her mouth. Behind her, the hinges squeaked rustily, and somebody shrilled about the draft.

  “Home sweet home,” I muttered, and went around back to release the doors.

  My father bought our first Ford secondhand when I was eleven years old. We had just moved into a narrow, respectable brownstone house on East Thirty-Second Street, after two years of renting a basement apartment somewhere on the West Side—I don’t recall the exact neighborhood, just that it was quiet and slightly downtrodden, the kind of place where you minded your own business and didn’t get to know your neighbors—and Father came home one day and said he had a surprise for us. I still don’t know why he bought it. We hardly ever drove anywhere; we never left Manhattan. I think he just wanted something to tinker with, or maybe to keep my sister busy. She shared his joy in mechanical things. I didn’t; I learned how to drive and how to keep the flivver in working order, but only because I had to. Because Father said so. When Sophie was old enough, I washed my hands and turned the Ford over to her.

  But even if you didn’t take joy in engines, you couldn’t help admiring that car. It was blue—before the war, you could buy a Model T in red or green or blue, just about any color except black—and really a marvel of simple utility, easily understood, made of durable modern vanadium steel, lightweight and versatile, so that you could jam the family inside for a Sunday drive or build a wooden truck atop the chassis and call it a delivery van.

  Or an ambulance.

  And when I went to Paris and knocked on the door (metaphorically speaking) of the American Ambulance Field Service in Neuilly and begged for a vehicle, I didn’t tell them I hadn’t bent over the hood of a Model T in five years. I just bent like I knew what I was doing, and it all made sense again. The neat, economic logic of engine and gearbox. The floor pedals and the gear lever, the spark retard on the left of the steering wheel and the throttle on the right. And I thanked my father for making me learn, even though I hadn’t wanted to, and I thought—as I drove out of Neuilly, truck packed tight with hospital supplies and spare parts—about that first driving lesson. How frustrated I had been, how angry at Father’s unsympathetic sternness. But why do I have to learn? I don’t care a jot for automobiles, I said recklessly, and he said implacably, Because a car can make you free, Virginia, a car can take you anywhere you want to go.

  But maybe need was a better word. A car could take you anywhere you needed to go. Like the garage of a medieval château in north-central France—a garage that wasn’t really a garage, just an old stable, lacking electricity, lit by a pair of kerosene lanterns, smelling of grease and wet stone and melancholy. I didn’t want to be here, cleaning the mud from Hunka Tin’s brave, scarred sides, changing her oil and examining her tires, but I needed to be here. And needing was of a higher order than wanting, wasn’t it? A nobler calling.

  By the time I finished, it was nearly midnight, and the lamps in the great hall had darkened at last. The atmosphere lay black and dank on the stones of the courtyard. I strode from the garage to the main house, carrying one of the kerosene lanterns, so absorbed by the question of Hunka Tin’s suspect fuel line—to replace or not to replace?—that I didn’t notice the fiery orange dot zigzagging at the corner of the western wing until the smell of burning tobacco startled my nose.

  I lifted the lantern. “Who’s there?”

  The orange dot flared and disappeared. “Your humble servant.”

  “Captain Fitzwilliam?”

  “I didn’t mean to disturb you. Have you been taking care of your ambulance all this time?”

  “Yes.” I raised the lantern higher, and at last I found him, resting against the damp stone wall, arms folded, cigarette extinguished. The peak of his cap shadowed his eyes. “How are the patients?”

  “Tip-top. Showered in grateful attention from the ladies of the Overseas Delegation of the—which chapter is it?”

  “The Eighth New York Chapter.”

  “Of the American Red Cross. Yes. They were delighted to see us. I was reminded of Jason and the women of Lemnos. Except that ended rather badly, didn’t it? In any case, commendable zeal. Commendable.”

  “Does that mean we’ve passed your inspection?”

  “With flying colors.”

  I wondered if he had been drinking. I thought I smelled some sort of spirits on his breath, though I wasn’t close enough to be sure, and the pungency of the recent cigarette still disguised any other smell that might have inhabited the air. His voice was steady, his words beautifully precise. I couldn’t fault his diction. Still. There was something, wasn’t there? Some ironic note at play. I stepped once in his direction, so that the light caught the bristling edge of his jaw. “You’re making fun of us, aren’t you?”

  “I? No, indeed. Perish the thought. I admire you extremely, the entire enthusiastic lot of you. So fresh and dear and unspoiled. The fires of heroism burning in your eyes.”

  I lowered the lantern and turned away. “Good night, Captain.”

  “No, don’t go. I apologize.”

  “You’ve been drinking.”

  “I have not been drinking.” Injured air. “I’ve had a glass or two of wine, served over dinner by your redoubtable directrix, but I haven’t been drinking. Not as the term is commonly known.”

  “You had dinner with Mrs. DeForest?”

  “She insisted.”

  Yes, I had lowered the lantern and turned away, but I hadn’t taken a step. The soles of my shoes had stuck to the pavement by some invisible cement. I don’t know why. Yes, I do. Captain Fitzwilliam had that quality; he cou
ld hold you fast with a single word, a single instant of sincerity. Don’t go. I apologize. And there you stood, rapt, wanting to know what he really meant. Wanting to know the truth. All that charm, all that marvelously arid English wit—there had to be something behind it, didn’t there? It couldn’t just dangle out there on its own, a signboard without a shop.

  A light flickered to life in one of the bedrooms above us. Fitzwilliam went on. “I made my escape, however. As you see.”

  “You might have chosen a warmer place for it.”

  “Ah, but I wanted a cigarette, you see, after all that. Rather badly. And my mother, who detests cigarettes, always made us smoke outdoors.”

  “I see. An old habit.”

  “That, and I was hoping to encounter a certain intrepid young ambulance driver, to thank her for her fortitude. And for enduring the cynicism of a jaded old soldier along the way.”

  “That wasn’t necessary.”

  “Not to you, perhaps. But essential to me.”

  The handle of the lantern had become slippery in my bare palm. I had left my gloves in the garage. Essential. That word again. “Well, I’m sorry to have put you to the trouble. I hope you weren’t waiting long.”

  “Not too long.” He levered himself from the wall. “I just want to be clear. I wasn’t mocking you, Miss Fortescue. I was mocking myself.”

  I started walking toward the door, or rather the rectangle-shaped hole in the darkness where the door should have been. The air was opaque and full of weight. I heard the crunch of his footsteps behind me. “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

  “Yes, it does. It matters terribly. All this, it’s no excuse to lose one’s humanity.”

  “You haven’t lost your humanity. I saw you working, back there. You cared for those men; you were—you were passionate.”