Abby and the Astronaut

I’m delighted to report that I have a short story in District Lines, a new anthology of stories, essays, and poems about Washington D.C. produced by the famous Politics & Prose bookstore frequented by Presidents. You can order it here. In the meantime, here’s my story:

Abby and the Astronaut

Abby was in the Air and Space Museum. She was looking at a photograph of three young men in bulky space suits grouped around an enormous Presidential seal. Only one of them could really be called handsome, with a sculpted jaw and eyes as blue as oceans seen from space. Suddenly aware of someone at her shoulder, Abby turned and found herself looking into that very face. The hair had receded to almost nothing, but there was no mistaking those eyes.

“Hi.”

He held out his hand. She shook it.

“Aren’t you...?”

“I’m Chuck B. Anderson. I went up in Zephyr III. And who are you?”

Chuck wore a turtleneck and a tweed jacket, and his waist was flat above the belt of his Chinos. He took Abby to lunch in the glass atrium of the Museum=s restaurant. Beyond the roar of voices in that echoing space, the Capitol dome levitated in the heat haze. Over their empty salad plates, the Astronaut reached for Abby=s hand and pulled gently at the webs of skin between her splayed fingers.

Everywhere in the city there were statues of celebrated men. Abby had taken them all in – Lincoln magisterial on his massive chair, Jefferson in his giant gazebo, handsomer than in life, the long-legged Andrew Jackson on a prancing horse in Lafayette Square, waving his cocked hat at the White House. They even walked the streets in flesh and blood. Pausing with his aides at a crosswalk on the Senate side, Ted Kennedy turned to watch Abby’s legs as she walked past, while she tried not to stare at that unmistakable florid face. 

There were no famous people where Abby hailed from. Whatever happened happened somewhere else. At night Main Street was deserted. All the streetlamps had to shine on was the row of empty pick-ups outside Erikkson’s bar and the metallic walls of Lundgren’s creamery, which loomed over the town like an ocean liner in dry dock.

Chuck’s apartment was the closest, down near the marina in South West. He drove her there in his silver Miata. A fountain ejaculated in the lobby of his building. The elevator was lined with mirrors, and when Abby looked up, she had a bird’s-eye view of the crown of his head. It looked rosy but hard, like a nut.

In his apartment, every flat surface held an enormous crystal. Abby picked one up and ran her fingers over its facets. 

“What are they supposed to do?” she asked, passing the rock of rose quartz from hand to hand. Chuck took it away from her and put it back on its shelf.

“You can damage their auras if you hold them too long.”

In the bedroom, Chuck closed the drapes and lit the candles ranged across his dresser as Abby perched on the edge of the bed, swinging her heels. Shaking out the match, Chuck shrugged off his jacket and came towards her.

As a girl, Abby had dreamed of being ravished by a centaur. She’d raise her legs under the covers and run her hands down the human chest and onto the coarse warmth of the creature’s hide. What she’d wanted was to have something mythical between her thighs. Nothing less would do. 

So when Chuck B. Anderson gently tipped her onto her back, she closed her eyes and let herself be entered by a legend.

 

#####

 

 

At the Going Down of the Sun

Almost 6 million men from the British Isles fought for their country in the Great War of 1914 to 1918. There can't be many British families who didn't have at least one member who served. Both my grandfathers were too young, but my great-uncle John Charles Teasdale (Jack) Mackintosh answered the call. 

Uncle Jack was born in 1893, the eldest child of John Teasdale and Madeline Foister. The family lived in Dalkeith just outside Edinburgh, from where young Jack’s father ran the Scottish branch of the family's mapmaking business. They were a typical prosperous, middle-class family of the late Victorian age until February 1902 when John Teasdale died unexpectedly of heart failure, aged only 35. 

Jack’s mother Madeline (my great-grandmother) had to become the breadwinner for four children under the age of nine. She had been trained as a teacher and for the next 25 years earned her living as a schoolmistress in various small rural schools all around the Midlands and southern England. It was always a struggle to make ends meet. (In the picture above Jack is standing behind his sister Dorothy (Dodo), brother Malcolm, and youngest sister Edina (Ina) outside the school house at Kirkby Mallory in Leicestershire - one of their mother's placements.)

In 1914 Jack was 21 and was training as a teacher to follow in his mother’s footsteps. When war was declared on August 4th, like many other young men all across Britain he rushed to enlist. At the Drill Hall in Nottingham he was signed up for the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment (otherwise known as the Sherwood Foresters). The picture on the left shows Jack in his uniform as a private. It was taken in December 1914 in Luton near where his unit was training.  He sent it as a postcard “To all at home with love and good wishes for the New Year.” 

In late February 1915, Jack’s unit - the 1/7th (Robin Hood) battalion - was part of the first Territorial division to be sent to France. The unit was involved in the defense of the Belgian chateau of Hooge in July 1915 and then in the losing British assault on the Hohenzollern Redoubt during the Battle of Loos on the 13th October 1915. A soldier who went through that action described it as: "absolute hell with the lid off. Dying and wounded all over the place. Shall never forget this day."

And the Robin Hoods were in action on the terrible first day of the Somme - July 1st, 1916. In the attack on the Gommecourt Salient, the battalion lost 424 officers and men, including 181 of the men who had enlisted with Jack in Nottingham on the first day of the war. 

Three times he could have been killed and three times he escaped with his life, not to mention all the sniping and shelling in between.And yet he came home not just alive but miraculously uninjured.

At some point, Jack was transferred to the 2/1st Staffordshire Yeomanry, which stayed on English soil for the remainder throughout the war. The picture below of Jack on horseback was taken at Leybourne Camp in Kent in June 1917. A couple of months later the 2/1st was converted into a cyclist unit, moving first to Tonbridge and then to Canterbury where Jack met the young woman he would marry, Gladys Heaton. 

 After the war, Jack became a teacher of English and French at Robert Mays Grammar School in the lovely Hampshire village of Odiham. He and Gladys had no children of their own, but Jack adored his nieces and nephews. His nephew Ian (my father) remembered Uncle Jack as having a great sense of fun. Together they used to flush paper boats down the toilet and then rush out to the garden see the boats emerge in the cesspit. Like many veterans, he never spoke of what he experienced as a soldier in the trenches. He must have known he was lucky to have survived and perhaps that's why he threw himself into his civilian life with gusto. In the picture below taken in his garden in Odiham, he is dressed up as a mother with his younger brother Malcolm (my grandfather) as the baby.

Even though he survived the trenches by 20 years, Jack's life was nevertheless to be tragically and brutally cut short. On the night of November 29th 1937, he and Gladys were driving home from Winchester. On Kempshott Hill outside Basingstoke, Jack got out of the car to clear ice off the windshield. A car coming from the other direction driven by a man who had been drinking heavily all evening struck Jack so hard that his head was all but severed from his body. He was only 44 years old. 

He was buried in Odiham and his funeral was attended by the entire staff and pupils of the Robert Mays School. The cortege was preceded by members of the Odiham branch of the British Legion carrying their standard draped in crepe, which was dipped in respect as the coffin was lowered into the grave.  After the Vicar had said the last woods of the Anglican burial service, the chairman of the branch recited the British Legion exhortation from Lawrence Binyon’s poem “For the Fallen”:
 

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

The Jazz Age on the Grand Canal

Coco Chanel (seated left) and friends on the Lido, 1925

When I first dipped into Lady Chatterley’s Lover in my schooldays, it was simply to find the scandalous passages that had kept the full text from being published for 32 years. On reading the novel properly for the first time recently, I found it to be vintage D.H. Lawrence - full of passion for nature and unmediated human emotion and against the mechanized, industrial spirit of his age. About two-thirds of the way through the novel, even though the heroine Constance Chatterley is deep in the throes of her sexual awakening with the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors, she goes off to Venice on a holiday with her father and sister. Lawrence clearly intended the episode to represent the antithesis of everything that Constance has had with Mellors - the simplicity and sometimes brutal honesty of their connection with each other in the woods of Wragby Hall. 

And one can see why. Venice in the 1920s was a pleasure ground of the rich, mixing the beaches of the Lido with the fascination of a city of ancient palaces built on water. It was hedonistic, decadent, and lavish – and almost too rich a feast to be digested. 

“There were illuminated water-fêtes, there were dances. This was a holiday-place of all holiday-places. The Lido with its acres of sun-pinked or pyjamaed bodies, was like a strand with an endless heap of seals come up for mating. Too many people in piazza, too many limbs and trunks of humanity on the Lido, too many gondolas, too many motor-launches, too many steamers, too many pigeons, too many ices, too many cocktails, too many men-servants wanting tips, too many languages rattling, too much, too much sun, too much smell of Venice, too many cargoes of strawberries, too many silk shawls, too many huge, raw-beef slices of watermelon on stalls: too much enjoyment, altogether far too much enjoyment. ... It was pleasant in a way. It was almost enjoyment. But anyhow, with all the cocktails, all the lying in the warmish water and sunbathing on hot sand in hot sun, jazzing with your stomach up against some fellow in the warm nights, cooling off with ices, it was a complete narcotic. And that was what they all wanted, a drug; cigarettes, cocktails, ices, vermouth. To be drugged! Enjoyment! Enjoyment!”

Other novels from the same period also depict this same heady mixture of pleasure and surfeit, including Eustace and Hilda by L.P. Hartley:  

“His eyes travelled round the Piazza. It was a feast-day, and from the tiers of windows on the right (he had his back to St. Mark’s) hung carpets and tapestries of crimson and pale green. They were in shadow, but the front of St. Mark’s was fast recovering the opalescent glow which it lost under the glare of the strident midday sun. Florian’s at this hour got all the sunlight. The thronged tables made an oblong continent of humanity, except that round theirs – the tables that composed their own party - flowed a circular channel which turned them into an island. Along this channel the waiters flitted with eyes more watchful and smiles more deferential than they kept for casual customers; and those casual customers, it seemed to Eustace, who were eating and drinking in a sober, self-contained fashion, cast curious and envious glances in their direction when a burst of laughter went up or Countess Loredan’s voice, like a ship announcing its departure, filled the air. What a riot of broken meats, ices, cakes, sandwiches; tea, coffee, chocolate, spoons, forks, cups, glasses, napkins, all in danger of slipping off, but all staying on, all touched, used, broached, emptied of the freshness which they had when they came gleaming from the kitchens,  poised on the waiter’s back-turned hands, level with their smiling eyes.”

And finally from Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh:

“The fortnight in Venice passed quickly and sweetly – perhaps too sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless. On some days life kept pace with the gondola, as we nosed through the side-canals and the boatman uttered his plaintive musical bird-cry of warning; on other days, with the speed-boat bouncing over the lagoon in a stream of sun-lit foam; it left a confused memory of fierce sunlight on the sands and cool marble interiors; of water everywhere, lapping on smooth stone, reflected in a dapple of light on painted ceilings; of a night at the Corombona palace such as Byron might have known; and another Byronic night fishing for scampi in the shallows of Chioggia, the phosphorescent wake of the little ship, the lantern hanging in the prow and the net coming up full of weed and sand and floundering fishes; of melon and prosciutto on the balcony in the cool of the morning; of hot cheese sandwiches and champagne cocktails at the English bar.”

Venice is still a magical place and is now rightly accessible to many more than just the privileged few, but it will probably never again have quite the flavor of opulence, extravagance, and sheer indulgence that it had in those Jazz Age days and nights.

The Bloody Bruise of War

It's easy to forget when reading the many great novels written in the 1920s that they were written in the aftermath of a great and terrible schism. Their main characters are often young men returned from the war, and even if the narrative isn’t explicit about their experiences, they are haunted by what they’d seen in the trenches. 

Think of Jay Gatsby (in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby), who commanded the Lewis machine guns of the ninth machine gun battalion and was decorated for valor for his participation in the Marne and the Argonne. Think of shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith (in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway) who hallucinates about his friend and commanding officer Evans who’d been killed in Italy just before the Armistice. And think of Christopher Tietjens (in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End), unable to forget the young boy whose eye was shot out as Tietjens was trying to carry him to safety. His soon-to-be lover, Valentine Wannop, suddenly understands that he had been through hell. “Hitherto, she had thought of the War as physical suffering only; now she saw it only as mental torture. Immense miles and miles of anguish in darkened minds.”

In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence shows how the aftermath of those four years of unimaginable suffering affects everyone, even those who had never set foot on the front line. Sir Clifford Chatterley is shipped home “smashed” in 1918 to his young wife Constance. He is confined to a motorized wheelchair, the lower half of his body destroyed, with no chance for either himself or his wife of a sexual life or of children. It is a novel notorious for its frankness about female sexuality, but it is also masterful in its depiction of a general sense of disaffection and ennui, and the pointlessness of existence left over from the great slaughter. In observing the intellectual chatter of her husband and his friends, Constance begins to understand the damage that has been done to her entire generation:

“...It was the bruise of the war that had been in abeyance, slowly rising to the surface and creating the great ache of unrest, and stupor of discontent. The bruise was deep, deep, deep... the bruise of the false inhuman war. It would take many years for the living blood of generations to dissolve the vast black clot of bruised blood, deep inside their souls and bodies. And it would need a new hope.”

“All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day to day. Home was a place you lived in, love was a thing you didn’t fool yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people, a father was an individual who enjoyed his own existence, a husband was a man you lived with and kept going in spirits. As for sex, the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing. All that really remained was a stubborn stoicism; and in that there was a certain pleasure. In the very experience of the nothingness of life, phase after phase, étape after étape, there was a certain grisly satisfaction. So that’s that!”

Unfortunately that wasn’t that. There was another conflagration still to come, and yet more millions of people around the world would be killed or have their lives and bodies smashed and broken. Constance was right when she foresaw that it would take “the living blood of generations” to diffuse the deep, deep bloody bruise of those two wars.