The Longest Ride Page 13

  Bud had turned us toward home in a desperate bid to make our escape, when flak shattered the cockpit. Joe was struck, and instinctively, he turned toward me. I saw his eyes go wide in disbelief and his lips form my name. I lunged toward him, wanting to do something - anything - when suddenly I fell, my body losing all its strength. I couldn't understand what had happened. At the time, I didn't know I'd been hit, and I tried and failed again to get to my feet to help Joe when I felt a series of sharp, stinging burns. I looked down and saw large blooms of red spreading across the lower half of my body. The world seemed to telescope around me, and I passed out.

  I don't know how we made it back to base, other than to say that Bud Ramsey performed a miracle. Later, at the hospital, I was told that people took photographs of the plane after we landed, marveling that it had been able to stay airborne. But I didn't look at the photographs, even when my strength had returned.

  I was told that I should have died. By the time we'd reached England, I'd lost more than half my blood and I was as pale as a swan. My pulse rate was so low that they couldn't find it in my wrist, but they nonetheless rushed me into surgery. I wasn't expected to survive the night, or the night after that. A telegram was sent to my parents, explaining that I'd been wounded and that more information would be forthcoming. By "more information," the army air corps meant another, later telegram informing them of my death.

  But the second telegram was never sent, because somehow I did not die. This was not the conscious choice of a hero; I was not a hero and remained unconscious. Later, I wouldn't remember a single dream or even whether I'd had any dreams at all. But somehow, on the fifth day after surgery, I woke, my body drenched in sweat. According to the nurses, I was delirious and screaming in agony. Peritonitis had set in and I was rushed into surgery once more. I do not remember this, either, or any of the days that followed. The fever lasted for thirteen days, and on each successive day, when asked about my prognosis, the doctor shook his head. Though I was unaware of it, I was visited by Bud Ramsey and surviving crew members before they were assigned to a new plane. Meanwhile, a telegram was sent to the home of Joe Torrey's parents, announcing his death. The RAF bombed Kassel, and the war continued.

  The fever finally broke as the calendar turned to November. When I opened my eyes, I didn't know where I was. I couldn't remember what had happened, and I couldn't seem to move. I felt as though I'd been buried alive, and with all my strength, I was able to whisper only a single syllable.

  Ruth.

  The sun grows brighter and the winds have grown sharper, yet still no one comes. The terror I felt earlier has finally passed, and in its absence, my mind begins to wander. I note that being buried alive in a car by snowfall is not unique to me. Not too long ago on the Weather Channel, I saw a clip about a man in Sweden who, like me, was trapped in his car while snow gradually buried him alive. This was near a town called Umea, near the Arctic Circle, where temperatures were well below zero. However, according to the broadcaster, the car became an igloo of sorts. Even though this man would not have survived long if exposed to the elements, the temperature inside the car could be tolerated for long periods, especially since the man was dressed appropriately and had a sleeping bag with him. But this is not the amazing part; what was amazing was how long the man survived. Though the man had no food or water and ate only handfuls of snow, the doctors said his body went almost into a sort of hibernation state. His bodily processes slowed down enough for him to be rescued after sixty-four days.

  Good God, I remember thinking. Sixty-four days. When I saw the segment, I could barely imagine such a thing, but obviously it has taken on new meaning at the present time. Two months in the car, for me, would mean that someone would find me in early April. The azaleas will be blooming, the snow long since gone, and days will already begin to feel like summer. If I'm rescued in April, it will probably be by young people wearing hiking shorts and sunscreen.

  Someone will find me before then, of this I'm sure. But even though it should make me feel better, it doesn't. Nor am I comforted by the fact that the temperature is nowhere near as cold or that I have two sandwiches in the car, because I am not the Swedish man. He was forty-four and uninjured; my arm and collarbone are broken, I've lost a lot of blood, and I'm ninety-one years old. I'm afraid that any movement at all will cause me to pass out, and frankly, my body has been in hibernation mode for the past ten years. If my bodily processes slow any further, I'll be permanently horizontal.

  If there is a silver lining in any of this, it's that I'm not hungry yet. This is common for people my age. I haven't had much of an appetite in recent years, and I struggle to consume a cup of coffee and single piece of toast in the morning. But I am thirsty. My throat feels as though it has been clawed with nails, but I don't know what to do. Though there is a bottle of water in the car, I am afraid of the torture I will feel if I try to find it.

  And I am cold, so cold. I have not endured this kind of shivering since my stay in the hospital a lifetime ago. After my surgeries, after the fever broke and I thought my body was beginning to heal, a fierce headache set in and the glands in my throat began to swell. The fever came back, and I felt a throbbing soreness in the place where no man wants to feel it. At first, the doctors were hopeful that the second fever was related to the first. But it wasn't. The man next to me had the same set of symptoms, and within days, three more in our ward became ill. It was mumps, a childhood disease, but in adults it's far more serious. Of all the men, I was hardest hit. I was the weakest and the virus raged through my body for almost three weeks. By the time it ran its course, I weighed only 115 pounds and I was so weak that I couldn't stand without help.

  It was another month before I was finally released from the hospital, but I was not cleared to fly. My weight was still too low, and I had no crew to speak of. Bud Ramsey, I learned, had been shot down over Germany, and there were no survivors. Initially, the army air corps wasn't sure what to do with me, but they eventually decided to send me back to Santa Ana. I became a trainer for new recruits, working with them until the war finally came to an end. I received my discharge in January 1946, and after taking a train to Chicago to pay my respects to Joe Torrey's family, I returned to North Carolina.

  Like veterans everywhere, I wanted to put the war behind me. But I couldn't. I was angry and bitter, and I hated what I had become. Aside from the night over Schweinfurt, I had few combat memories, yet the war stayed with me. For the rest of my life, I carried wounds that no man could see but were impossible to leave behind. Joe Torrey and Bud Ramsey were the best kind of men, yet they had died while I had survived, and the guilt never quite left me. The flak that tore through my body made it a struggle to walk on cold winter mornings, and my stomach has never been the same. I can't drink milk or eat spicy food, and I was never able to regain all the weight I lost. I have not been in an airplane since 1945, and I found it impossible to sit through movies that dealt with war. I do not like hospitals. For me, after all, the war - and my time in the hospital - had changed everything.

  "You are crying," Ruth says to me.

  In another place, at another time, I would wipe the tears from my face with the back of my hand. But here and now, the task seems impossible.

  "I didn't realize it," I say.

  "You often cried in your sleep," Ruth says to me. "When we were first married. I would hear you at night and the sound would break my heart. I would rub your back and hush you and sometimes you would roll over and become silent. But other times, it would continue through the night, and in the mornings, you would tell me that you could not remember the reason."

  "Sometimes I didn't."

  She stares at me. "But sometimes you did," she finishes.

  I squint at her, thinking her form is almost like liquid, as if I'm staring at her through shimmering heat waves that rise from the asphalt in summer. She wears a navy dress and a white hair band, and her voice sounds older. It takes a moment, but I realize she is twenty-three, her age whe
n I returned from the war.

  "I was thinking about Joe Torrey," I said.

  "Your friend" - she nods - "the one who ate five hot dogs in San Francisco. The one who bought you your first beer."

  I never told her about the cigarettes, for I know she would have disapproved. Ruth always hated their smell. It is a lie of omission, but I long ago convinced myself that it was the right thing to do. "Yes," I say.

  The morning light surrounds Ruth in a halo.

  "I wish I could have met him," she says.

  "You would have liked him."

  Ruth clears her throat, considering this, before turning away. She faces the snow-caked window, her thoughts her own. This car, I think, has become my tomb.

  "You were also thinking about the hospital," she murmurs.

  When I nod, she emits a weary sigh.

  "Did you not hear what I told you?" she says, turning to me again. "That it did not matter to me? I would not lie to you about this."

  "Not on purpose," I answer. "But I think that maybe, you sometimes lied to yourself."

  She is surprised by my words, if only because I have never spoken so directly on this matter. But I know I am right.

  "This is why you stopped writing me," she observes. "After you had been sent back to California, your letters became less frequent until they finally stopped coming at all. I did not hear from you for six months."

  "I stopped writing because I remembered what you'd told me."

  "Because you wanted to end it between us." There is an undercurrent of anger in her voice, and I can't meet her eyes.

  "I wanted you to be happy."

  "I was not happy," she snaps. "I was confused and heartbroken and I did not understand what had happened. And I prayed for you every day, hoping you would let me help you. But instead, I would go to the mailbox and find it empty, no matter how many letters I sent."

  "I'm sorry. It was wrong of me to do that."

  "Did you even read my letters?"

  "Every one. I read them over and over, and more than once, I tried to write so you could know what happened. But I could never find the right words."

  She shakes her head. "You did not even tell me when you were to arrive home. It was your mother who told me, and I thought about meeting you at the station, like you used to do when I came home."

  "But you didn't."

  "I wanted to see if you would come to me. But days passed and then a week, and when I did not see you at the synagogue, I understood that you were trying to avoid me. So I finally marched over to your shop and told you that I needed to speak to you. And do you remember what you said to me?"

  Of all the things I've said in my life, these are the words I regret the most. But Ruth is waiting, her tense expression fixed on my face. There is a fierce challenge in the way she waits.

  "I told you that the engagement was off, and that it was over between us."

  She arches an eyebrow. "Yes," she says, "that is what you told me."

  "I couldn't talk to you then. I was..."

  When I trail off, she finishes for me. "Angry." She nods. "I could see it in your eyes, but even then, I knew you were still in love with me."

  "Yes," I admit. "I was."

  "But your words were still hurtful," she says. "I went home and cried like I had not since I was a child. And my mother finally came in and held me and neither of us knew what to do. I had lost so much already. I could not bear to lose you, too."

  By this, she means her family, the family that had stayed behind in Vienna. At the time, I didn't realize how selfish my actions were or how Ruth might have perceived them. This memory, too, has stayed with me, and in the car, I feel an age-old shame.

  Ruth, my dream, knows what I am feeling. When she speaks, it is with a new tenderness. "But if it was really over, I wanted to understand the reason, so the next day, I went to the drugstore across from your shop and ordered a chocolate soda. I sat next to the window and watched you as you worked. I know you saw me, but you did not come over. So I went back the next day and the day after that, and only then did you finally cross the street to see me."

  "My mother made me go," I admit. "She told me that you deserved an explanation."

  "That is what you have always said. But I think you also wanted to come, because you missed me. And because you knew that only I could help you heal."

  I close my eyes at her words. She is right, of course, right about all of it. Ruth always did know me better than I knew myself.

  "I took a seat across from you," I say. "And then, a moment later, a chocolate soda arrived for me."

  "You were so skinny. I thought you needed my help to get fat again. Like you were when we met."

  "I was never fat," I protest. "I barely made weight when I joined the army."

  "Yes, but when you got back, you were all bones. Your suit hung from your frame like it was two sizes too big. I thought you would blow away as you crossed the street, and it made me wonder whether you would ever be yourself again. I was not sure you would ever again be the man I once loved."

  "And yet you still gave me a chance."

  She shrugs. "I had no choice," she says, her eyes glittering. "By then, David Epstein was married."

  I laugh despite myself, and my body spasms, neurons blazing, nausea coming at me. I breathe through gritted teeth and gradually feel the wave begin to recede. Ruth waits for my breathing to steady before going on. "I admit that I was frightened about this. I wanted things between us to be the way they had been before, so I simply pretended that nothing had changed. I chattered about college and my friends and how much I had studied, and that my parents had surprised me by showing up at my graduation. I talked about my work as a substitute teacher at a school around the corner from the synagogue, but also mentioned that I was interviewing for a full-time position that fall at a rural elementary school on the outskirts of town. I told you also that my father was meeting with the dean of the Art History Department at Duke for the third time, and that my parents might have to move to Durham. And then I wondered aloud whether I would have to give up my new job and move to Durham, too."

  "And I suddenly knew I didn't want you to go."

  "That is why I said it." She smiles. "I wanted to see your expression, and for just an instant, the old Ira was back. And then I was no longer frightened that you were gone forever."

  "But you didn't ask me to walk you home."

  "You were not ready. There was still too much anger inside you. That is why I suggested that we meet once a week for chocolate sodas, just like we used to. You needed time, and I was willing to wait."

  "For a while. Not forever."

  "No, not forever. By the end of February, I had begun to wonder whether you would ever kiss me again."

  "I wanted to," I say. "Every time I was with you, I wanted to kiss you."

  "I knew that, too, and that was why it was so confusing to me. I could not understand what was wrong. I could not understand what was holding you back, why you did not trust me. You should have known that I would love you no matter what."

  "I did know," I say. "And that was why I couldn't tell you."

  I did eventually tell her, of course, on a cold evening in early March. I had called her at home, asking her to meet me in the park, where we had strolled together a hundred times. At the time, I wasn't planning to tell her. Instead, I convinced myself that I simply needed a friend to talk to, as the atmosphere at home had become oppressive.

  My father had done well financially during the war, and as soon as it was over, he went back into business as a haberdasher. Gone were the sewing machines; in their place were racks of suits, and to someone walking past the shop, it probably looked the same as it did before the war. But inside, it was different. My father was different. Instead of greeting customers at the door as he used to, he would spend his afternoons in the back room, listening to the news on the radio, trying to understand the madness that had caused the deaths of so many innocent people. It was all he wanted to
talk about; the Holocaust became the subject of every mealtime conversation and every spare moment. By contrast, the more he talked, the more my mother concentrated on her sewing, because she couldn't bear to think about it. For my father, after all, it was an abstract horror; for my mother - who, like Ruth, had lost friends and family - it was deeply personal. And in their divergent reactions to these shattering events, my parents gradually set in motion the largely separate lives they would lead from that point on.

  As their son, I tried not to take sides. With my father I would listen and with my mother I would say nothing, but when the three of us were together, it sometimes struck me that we'd forgotten what it meant to be a family. Nor did it help that my father now accompanied my mother and me to synagogue; my intimate talks with my mother became a thing of the past. When my father informed me that he was bringing me in as a partner in the business - meaning the three of us would be together all the time - I despaired, sure that there would be no escaping the gloom that had infiltrated our lives.