Flora

in the hospital from a fall.

“Cats prefer to stay in their own home even without their owners,” he said.

“So do humans,” I pointed out, which struck me as a very witty comeback except that Flora sideswiped it by asking if poor Miss Adelaide had broken anything. She very luckily hadn’t, Finn said, though she was bruised all over her body from head to toe. Into my overexcited brain popped the image of a naked old lady showing Finn her bruises from head to toe and out of my mouth burst a childish snort of laughter, which embarrassed all three of us.

“But we want to hear what’s been happening to you,” said Flora, taking Finn lightly by the arm and steering him into the living room. “Is there any news from that military board you met with?”

“No final decision yet,” said Finn, settling into his former place on the sofa. “But if a person can guess when he’s made a good impression, I’d say there’s hope.”

“Can you talk about it?” asked Flora breathlessly, sliding in next to him, “or is it a confidential matter?”

“Sure, I can talk about it—with friends,” said Finn. “But to fill you in properly I’d need to go back a little. Ah, I was hoping you’d have that lemonade again.”

“And Helen made the cheese straws.”

“Not totally,” I corrected her. “You were standing right over me.”

“Well, you shaped them completely without my help,” insisted Flora, which drew attention to their rather clumsily twisted bodies on the serving plate.

“Let him go on,” I said.

“Well,” Finn began again, “I have to go back a little for it to make sense. Maybe as far back as September of ’forty-three, coming up two years ago, when we docked at Liverpool. There were five thousand of us on this transport ship built to carry one thousand. A bit crowded, but there you are. But it made our Nissen huts in the English countryside where we ended up seem like little palaces at first. My company was training hard, building foxholes, perfecting our skills of loving the ground. Remember, Helen, on our little… er… walk that day”—his eye caught mine to signal our secret was still safe—“and I was telling you how we learned to use the ground to keep ourselves alive?”

“I remember,” I said, looking meaningfully back.

“Then the weather turned cold and wet and many of the men came down with asthma or pneumonia. Pneumonia was your first choice because asthma was considered a chronic thing and they transferred you to a desk job. When I was diagnosed with pneumonia, I danced for joy because I could still be cured in time to make the big jump we’d been practicing for two years.”

I could picture Finn dancing for joy the way I had seen him do it that day in the crater. Flora couldn’t have such a picture because she didn’t know we’d been in the crater together and she never would.

“Then my lung collapsed and this one doctor saw scar tissue on an X-ray which he thought was a sign of tubercles, and I was evacuated so as not to infect others.”

“You had TB?” I asked excitedly.

“Don’t be rushing me, darling.”

“Sorry.” But it was the first time anyone had called me darling since Nonie died, which somewhat lessened the shame of his reproof.

“As it fell out, I didn’t have TB, but they weren’t sure till they got me to the military hospital here. And then there was the long recovery from the collapsed lung, and I missed the big jump on D-Day.”

“Well, I’m glad you missed it!” Flora cried. “So many boys were killed!” She had her arms crossed over her chest and was rubbing them up and down, the way she did during our scary programs.

“Ah,” said Finn, not rebuking her for interrupting but giving her an appreciative nod as if she was helping him along. “Which brings us to the second part of my sorry tale, how I joined the ranks of the mentalers. By now I was all clean in the X-rays but I still had to undergo a regimen to build back my lung power. Every day we… Recoverers (I love that word) were driven out to a mountain near the hospital and had to walk up and down a trail, a bit farther each day, and have our breathing monitored. The big jump had happened without me, but I was expecting to be sent back overseas soon. The D-Day casualties had been heavy and there was plenty of fighting left to do. Then, one day they told me I had a visitor and I went down and there was my mate Barney’s mother. Barney and I had gone through jump school together and he was in the Nissen hut with me in England. While we were training in Georgia, he had taken me home on leave to his mother’s apple orchards, which he was going to run as soon as the war was over. She was a widow and he was the only child. When I came into the reception room, she gave me a strange smile and said I looked a little fatter than when I had visited. She had ridden the bus up from Georgia, she said, to bring me some baked goods and a few keepsakes. She hadn’t said Barney’s name, but as soon as she said “keepsakes” I knew he hadn’t made it. She said she had heard “from overseas” that I had been sent home to this place. I knew it must have been in a letter from Barney in the winter of ’forty-four. Still there was no saying of his name. It was like we were in a contest not to be the unkind one to speak it first. Then she said she’d brought a drawing I’d done in the Nissen hut, it was in the tin, along with a snapshot of me taken at her house. I knew she meant my drawing of Barney because I remembered him sending it to her. When I said she should keep it, she said she’d rather not. Still no saying of his name, and then she switched to asking about me and the state of my health and she was smiling that strange smile again.”

“How was it strange?” I needed to know.

He didn’t say “don’t be rushing me, darling” this time, but gave it some thought. “It wasn’t a friendly smile,” he presently said. “It was more what you’d call a malevolent smile. Like there was something more to come that you weren’t going to like. Only I didn’t know yet what that something was.”

Flora, still rubbing her arms up and down, hung on to his every word.

“I told her my lung was healed,” continued Finn, “and that I was expecting to be sent back into combat: there was still the war to be won. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘well, I hope you see some action, if that’s what you want. Maybe there will be more jumping to do.’ Then she said she had a taxi waiting and a return bus to make and she was glad I had been spared. I was touched by her being able to say that just as I was extremely touched that she’d come all this way, and I must have made some move toward her, but she shoved the tin of baked goods into my hands and said, ‘He didn’t get to make the jump because their plane was shot down. A few of them jumped and then it was shot down. You could have been on that plane, waiting your turn to jump. Though maybe with your good luck you’d have been one of those first few who made it out.’ And then came that smile again and she said, ‘You know what I keep asking myself? Why couldn’t he have been as clever as you, getting yourself evacuated like that?’ And then she was gone.”

“Oh!” cried Flora, unclasping herself. “What a dreadful thing to say!”

“If I hadn’t been hugging that tin to my chest, the whole thing could have been something I’d dreamed,” said Finn.

“You must have felt awful,” said Flora, whose eyes were predictably brimming.

“I felt nothing, nothing at all. Instead, there were these important tasks I had to fulfill to set things right.”

“What kind of tasks?” I asked.

“Oh, very logical, orderly tasks. Or they seemed so to me. They presented themselves to me in a very logical and orderly fashion, one after another, hour after hour, day after day, and within a week or so I had crossed right over the line into madness, following my logical, orderly little list. First, I had to obtain the names, ranks, and serial numbers of every man in the stick—the eighteen paratroopers carried by each C-47 make up a stick. Then I had to ascertain the fate of each man: Did he jump or did he go down with the plane? And if he made it to the ground, did he survive and accomplish his mission or—Then it got more and more complicated and more and more specific. What was his mission if he lived and where, exactly, was he buried when he died? I can tell you, I made a nuisance of myself with the hospital staff. I required all this special information and I told them they had to go through the channels and get it for me quickly because lives were at stake. ‘Don’t you realize much of this stuff is still under censorship?’ they said. Until they started looking at me differently and saying, ‘Don’t worry, son, we’re taking care of it. In the meantime, swallow these pills and get some rest.’ But somehow I escaped back up that mountain we had to climb to strengthen our lungs. I don’t remember at all how I got there, they say I must have slipped out of the hospital during the night and hitchhiked. When they found me at the top of the mountain I was wrapped around a tree, starkers, covered with leaves. Just as well we were having a warm November. Not that I thought so when they found me. It took three of them to hold me down. They had aborted my final mission, you see. I was supposed