HELEN
21
LUCERNE, SWITZERLAND
DECEMBER 1947
I watch from the window as people hug one another good-bye on the platform, and I wonder for the hundredth time if I am making a mistake. When I arrived in Europe forty years ago, I thought I’d stay until my dying breath, yet here I am about to begin the journey back to California, for good. By choice.
I remind myself—also for the hundredth time—that the last few years haven’t been at all like I thought they’d be. They broke my heart more cruelly than any man ever had. All the places I treasured—London, Paris, even Vienna—they’ve been shattered. The Europe I fell in love with as a young woman is a different place now.
I am different.
For many months, I wanted to believe I’m just like the devastated world, which has begun with great courage to rebuild itself, but I know now that I’m not. I still feel the ashes of war falling on my head.
“There is no shame in recognizing you are exhausted and inneed of rest,” Sister Gertrude said when I confessed to my closest friend in Lucerne that my tattered soul was so weary. So very weary.
“I don’t want to leave, and yet what else can I do?” I was sitting with her a month earlier, after finally revisiting Vienna and returning with a heavier heart than before I’d gone.
“If you’re being tugged home,” the nun said, “I doubt you’ll find the peace you’re aching for until you go.”
“I’ll be leaving in defeat,” I replied softly.
She leaned forward, sought my gaze. “I don’t think that’s entirely true. But even if you are, there is also no shame in going home to rest after having lost a hard battle. I should think that would be the first thing a person would do.”
When the war finally ended, I assumed the sting of my losses—and my failures—would lessen, just as the bombings had ceased and the Nazis had been stopped and the killing had ended.
How shortsighted I was, looking at newspaper stories of demolished buildings being cleared away, the debris being swept up and buried, and thinking the same was surely happening inside me. I should’ve known better. The human heart isn’t made of stone and wood and brick like the ruins of Europe are.
The human heart is nothing at all like that.
My late brother, Truman, told me once that war changes a person, whether you put on a uniform or not, but especially if you do. If you are standing on the battlefield, he said, the reason you are there, ready to kill or be killed, permeates your being. It seeps into your very bones and it stays. It becomes part of you.
But watching the violence as a horrified spectator becomes part of you, too.
The train whistle blows now, and we begin to chuff past the station and away from what was my city of refuge. I turn fromthe window, not wanting to watch Lucerne pass from my sight. The first leg of my journey—the commute to Zurich—will take an hour. Then there will be a taxi to the airport, then a flight across the Atlantic—my first—to New York, and finally a transcontinental train to California.
“Why aren’t you flying to California, too?” one of my students asked at my farewell party. I didn’t want to confess to the eleven-year-old boy, a lover of all things aeronautical even though he’s never been on an airplane, that I was already dreading the flight to New York. I wasn’t going to subject myself to that fear twice.
“I like the train,” I told him. “I haven’t seen America in a long time. It will be nice to see it again. That way.”
“But... ,” he said in a polite tone that nevertheless suggested I hadn’t thought this through. “You could see it from the sky. You’ve never seen it that way. And you’d be home in hours instead of days.”
And then he guessed without my saying it that it was already proving too much for me to believe that a winged cylinder full of people could soar birdlike across the ocean, let alone the whole of the United States.
“The DC-4 is a good airplane, Fraulein Calvert,” he said. “I can show you a picture of one in my aviation book.”
The model number of the plane meant nothing to me. And I really hadn’t wanted to see a photo of it; all I cared about was wrangling the courage to board one. Just the one. But I glanced at his book with half-closed eyes and then tried to forget what I saw. As the days for my departure neared, I wondered if I was simply too old to do something so innovative as air travel.
I don’t feel old at sixty-two. I’m trim and I’ve always treated my body with care and respect. For the nearly forty years I’ve been a nanny and then lately a teacher, I’ve felt full of energy, eager to guide and protect my young charges, ready to help themseize the most from every day and prepare for a meaningful life beyond their childhood years. But my dear Truman had been right about what war can do. It changes everything. It changes you. It changes how you look at the world, how you look at yourself.
Sister Gertrude was also right, I tell myself, as in my peripheral vision the city disappears and countryside begins to fly past.
I am tired and ready to go home.
What a strange concept home is, though. I’m headed to the vineyard, a place that has never been my address. When I wrote Celine and asked if I might come home for the holidays while I figure out my next steps, she said yes, without so much as a hint of correction that her home had never been mine. And yet the vineyard—strangely so—feels like the only home I have now. Celine and Wilson are my only family.
Even after five years, I still have trouble accepting the fact that Truman is gone. I still think of things I want to tell him, or I’ll sip a cocktail and think to myself,Truman would like this.When the news of his death reached me, I wasn’t prepared to be the last of my immediate family. Our father had already passed, dying of a heart attack the same day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Then, four months later, Truman was killed in that horrible accident. I have no one now, really, having never married or had children of my own. Celine and my nephew, Wilson, are all I have left.
