Lovely War Read online

  “What are you doing?” Aphrodite cries. “You put us down at once.”

  “Your court date has been moved up,” answers the bellhop. “Father Zeus will officiate at the bench, and the other gods will form a jury.”

  The goddess of beauty has turned a delicate shade of pale green. The spectacle of the entire pantheon of immortals howling and cackling at her mortification! Nobody knows the sting of gods’ mockery better than a god. And nobody knows your weak spots better than sisters. Those prissy little virgins, Artemis and Athena, always looking down their smug, goody-goody noses at her.

  Bagged like a chicken she might be, but Aphrodite still has her pride. Far better to bargain with her husband in a swanky Manhattan hotel than to quail before her entire family.

  “Hephaestus,” she says smoothly—and Aphrodite can have a brown velvet voice when she wants to—“is there, perhaps, a third option?” She sees her husband is listening, so she presses her advantage. “Couldn’t we just talk this out here? The three of us?” She elbows Ares. “We’ll stay in the net and listen. Ares will behave. Surely we don’t need to drag others into such a private matter.”

  Hephaestus hesitates. Privacy is Aphrodite’s domain. A hotel room practically gives her a home-court advantage. He smells a trick.

  But she does have a point. He, too, has pride to sacrifice upon the altar in hashing this matter out publicly.

  “Let me get this straight,” he says slowly. “You decline your right to a trial by jury?”

  “Oh, come off it,” says Ares. “You’re a blacksmith, for Pete’s sake, not an attorney.”

  Hephaestus turns to his wife. “All right,” he tells her. “We can do it here. A more private trial. I’ll be the judge.”

  “Judge, jury, and executioner?” protests Ares. “This kangaroo court is a sham.”

  Hephaestus wishes he had a bailiff who could club this unruly spectator on the head. But that’s probably not what bailiffs are supposed to do.

  “Never mind him,” Aphrodite tells her husband. “You’re already sitting in judgment upon us, so, yes, be the judge if it suits you.”

  Ares laughs out loud. “Tell you what, old man,” he says. “Fight me for her. May the best god win.”

  Just how many times Hephaestus has imagined that satisfying prospect, not even his divine mind can count. The devious and cunning weapons he’s devised, lying awake and alone at night, plotting a thousand ways to teach his cocky brother a lesson! If only.

  But you don’t accept a challenge to duel with the god of war. Hephaestus is no fool.

  Except, perhaps, where his wife is concerned.

  He produces for himself a bench and a gavel. “This court will come to order,” he says. “Let the trial begin.”

  DECEMBER 1942

  The Judgment of Manhattan

  HEPHAESTUS LOWERS THE net back to the couch and lets it expand so his prisoners can at least sit comfortably. They can stand up, but they can’t go far.

  “Goddess,” he says, “in the matter of Hephaestus v. Aphrodite, you are charged with being an unfaithful wife. How do you plead?”

  Aphrodite considers. “Amused.”

  Ares snorts.

  “You’re in contempt of court,” Hephaestus says. “How do you plead?”

  “On which charge?” asks the goddess. “Infidelity, or contempt?”

  Hephaestus’s nostrils flare. This is already off to a terrible start. “Both.”

  “Ah,” she says. “Guilty on both counts. But I don’t mean to be contemptible.”

  Hephaestus pauses. “You plead guilty?”

  She nods. “Um-hm.”

  “Oh.” He hadn’t expected this. The clever lines he’d prepared, the scalding words, they desert him like traitors.

  “I’ve disappointed you.” Aphrodite’s voice oozes with sympathy anyone would swear is sincere. “Would it make you feel better to present your evidence anyway?”

  Who’s manipulating whom here?

  She’s not afraid. No amount of evidence will matter.

  But Hephaestus spent months gathering it, so he submits it for the court.

  The lights dim. A succession of images appears in the air before them like a Technicolor film in their own hotel room. The goddess of love and the god of war, kissing under a shady bower. On the snowcapped rim of Mount Popocatépetl at sunset. Cuddling on the shoulder of an Easter Island statue. On the white sand beaches beneath the sheer cliffs of Smugglers’ Cove, on Greece’s own Zakynthos Island.

  “Hermes,” mutters Aphrodite darkly. “Zeus never should’ve given him a camera.”

  If Hephaestus had expected his wife to writhe in embarrassment at this damning proof, he has only disappointment for his efforts. She’s shameless. His brother is shameless. He was a fool to think he could shame either of them.

  The images fade. Silence falls.

  Aphrodite watches her husband.

  Hephaestus’s thoughts swirl. What had he expected? A tearful apology? A pledge to be true? He should’ve known this would never work.

  But he’d been desperate. Even Olympians, when desperate, can’t think straight. Of all the beings in the cosmos, Hephaestus is the only one who can’t pray to the goddess of love for help with his marriage troubles. The poor sap hasn’t a clue.

  “Hephaestus,” Aphrodite says gently, “this trial was never to get me to admit something you know I don’t mind admitting, was it?”

  “You should mind.”

  “Your real question,” she says, “if I’m not mistaken, is why don’t I love you?”

  “It’s simple,” Ares says. “She loves me.”

  Something is apparently hilarious to Aphrodite. Ares’s huge arms fold across his chest.

  She wipes her eyes and speaks. “I don’t love either of you.”

  Ares sits up tall and thrusts out his lower lip.

  “Hephaestus,” Aphrodite continues. He feels like he’s now in the witness stand. “Do you love me?”

  He’s not sure what to say. What’s she doing? He wishes his dumb brother weren’t here.

  “I’ll answer for you,” she tells him. “Of course you don’t.”

  “I . . . That is . . .” Hephaestus stammers. “I’m here because I want—”

  “No one can love me,” she says. “No one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That is the price,” she tells him, “of being the goddess of love.”

  Ares’s deep voice breaks the silence. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. “The only reason Father Zeus made you marry him was because all the other gods were fighting tooth and nail for your hand. He stuck you with him to avert a civil war. We all wanted you.”

  She shrugs. “I know you all wanted me.”

  Modesty was never her forte, but then, a humble god is hard to find.

  “I’m the source of love,” she says, “but no one will ever truly love me. The fountain of passion, but I will never know a true passion of my own.”

  Ares throws up his hands. “You’re nuts! Have you read Homer? Hesiod?”

  “Goddess,” Hephaestus says quietly, “what can you mean?”

  She gazes into his eyes until he squirms. “You male gods are all rapacious pigs,” she says dismissively. “I grant you, Husband, you’re less horrible than some. You all brag of your exploits. You’re no more loving than an anvil is. Fickle and capricious and completely self-centered. You’re incapable of love. Just as you’re incapable of dying.”

  “You’re calling us self-centered?” replies Ares. “You’re no Florence Nightingale.”

  “You have no idea what I am,” she tells him, “nor what good I do. I know what you think of my ‘silly romances.’”

  She turns to Hephaestus. “I might find a mortal to love me,” she continues, “but that’s worship, not love. I’m perfe
ct. Mortals aren’t meant to love perfection. It disillusions and destroys them in the end.”

  Hephaestus is baffled. Aphrodite has no one to love her? He, the god of fire and forges, has no shortage of ore and fuel. Ares, the god of war, has been enjoying a blood-soaked century like no other in history. Artemis has no shortage of stags to hunt. Poseidon’s not low on salt water.

  And his wife, the gorgeous goddess of romance, is lonely?

  “Do you know what it’s like,” she says, “to spend eternity embedded in every single love story—the fleeting and the true, the trivial and the everlasting? I am elbow deep in love, working in passion the way artists work in watercolors. I feel it all.” She wraps her arms tightly across her chest, as though the room is cold. “I envy the mortals. It’s because they’re weak and damaged that they can love.” She shakes her head. “We need nothing. They’re lucky to need each other.”

  “Yeah, well, they die,” Ares points out.

  “Why have you never said this before?” Hephaestus asks her.

  “Why should I?” she says. “Why would you care? You think my work is stupid. You never come out of your forge.”

  She’s right. Not stupid, not exactly. But, perhaps, inconsequential. Iron—there’s something that lasts. Steel and stone. But human affection? Hephaestus, as any Greek scholar can tell you, wasn’t born yesterday.

  Aphrodite still looks cold. She couldn’t be. But Hephaestus breathes at the fireplace, and the logs laid out there burst into sizzling flame.

  Firelight plays across Aphrodite’s features. She tilts her head to one side. “Do you want to see what real love looks like?”

  Hephaestus looks up. Her eyes are shining.

  “Do you want to hear about my favorites? Some of my finest work?”

  “Yes.” Hephaestus’s reply surprises him. “I do.”

  A groan rises from the couch, but the goddess ignores War.

  “I’ll tell you the story of an ordinary girl and an ordinary boy. A true story. No, I’ll do one better. I’ll tell you two.”

  Ares lifts his head. “Do we know these stories?”

  “Barely, if at all,” she says. “You never pay attention to girls.”

  He snickers. “I beg to differ.”

  “I’m not talking about their bodies.” Aphrodite’s eyes roll. “You never pay attention to their lives.”

  “Ugh.” His head drops back. “I knew this would be boring.”

  Aphrodite’s eyes blaze. “I’ll make it easy on you,” she says. “My two stories involve soldiers. From the Great War. The First World War. You’ll know their names and their rank, at any rate. You may find that you remember bits of their stories.”

  Aphrodite’s dark-lidded eyes gaze out into the skyline of a Manhattan autumn evening. The Big Apple’s lights have dimmed, in case of German U-boats in the harbor, or Zeus forbid, Luftwaffe bomber planes from who knows where, but not even a global war can completely snuff out the lights of the City That Never Sleeps.

  Ares watches Aphrodite’s lovely face, and Hephaestus’s grotesque one. For the millionth time, the war god wonders what Zeus intended, forcing these two to marry. What a curse, to be yoked to that monstrosity! All the more tragic for someone so perfectly perfect as she.

  Why, then, does Ares find the hairs on his arms prickling with jealousy? Even now, though the golden net divides the blacksmith from the goddess, there’s something between them. Something he can neither conquer nor destroy. Impossible though it is, a silver thread binds Hephaestus and Aphrodite together, if only slightly, barring Ares from making Aphrodite completely his own.

  But what does he expect? They’re married, after all.

  “Goddess.”

  Aphrodite meets her husband’s gaze. He points his gavel at her.

  “Present your evidence.”

  When she tilts her head slightly, he smiles beneath his whiskers. “Tell your story.”

  Ares rolls his eyes. “Gods, no,” he moans. “Bring out the hot pincers, the smoking brands! Anything but a love story!”

  Aphrodite glares at him.

  “She’s always yammering on,” Ares says, “trying to tell me about some dumb love letter, some random kiss or other, and how long it lasted, and, by Medusa’s hair, what they were wearing at the time.”

  “Goddess?” says Hephaestus.

  “Mmm?”

  “Leave nothing out,” says the god of fire. “Make your tale a long one.”

  ACT ONE

  APHRODITE

  Hazel—November 23, 1917

  I FIRST SAW Hazel at a parish dance at her London borough church, St. Matthias, in Poplar. It was November 1917.

  It was a benefit, with a drive organized for socks and tins of Bovril broth powder to send to the boys in France. But really, it was a fall dance like the one they held every autumn.

  While others chatted and flirted, Hazel glued herself to the piano bench and played dance tunes. The chaperones gushed about her generosity, putting others’ enjoyment before her own. Hazel was neither fooled nor flattered. She hated performing. But she’d rather stick pins in her eyeballs than make awkward conversation with boys. Anything was better. Even the spotlight.

  She thought she was safe. But music draws me like a bee to honey. And not only me.

  A young man sat some distance away and watched her play. He could see her hands, and the intent expression on her face. He tried not to stare, with limited success. He closed his eyes and listened to the music. But even as he listened, he saw in his mind’s eye the tall, straight form of the piano girl, dressed in pale mauve lace, with her dark-haired head lowered just enough to watch the keys, and her lips parted, ever so slightly, as she breathed in time with the song.

  Oh, the minute I saw those two in the same room, I knew it. I knew this could be one of my masterpieces. You don’t find two hearts like this every day.

  So I sat next to James, while he watched Hazel play, and kissed his cheek. Honestly, in his case, I don’t even think I needed to do it. But he had a very nice cheek, and I didn’t want to miss my chance. He’d shaved for the party, the little darling.

  I was jealous of how he watched Hazel, drinking in her music like water and tasting how she dissolved herself in it like a sugar cube. None of the girls whirling by held anything for him. He was a neat sort of young man, very careful about his clothes, as though he dreaded the thought that his appearance might offend anyone. He shouldn’t have worried. He wasn’t exactly handsome, not at first glance, but there was something in those dark brown eyes that might cause Hazel to forget Chopin for a moment or two. If she would ever look up.

  I slid onto the piano bench beside Hazel. She was so absorbed in her music that she didn’t notice my arrival. Of course, almost no one notices me, yet all but the hard-hearted do sense a new mood. Perhaps it’s my perfume. Perhaps it’s something more. When I pass by, Love is in the air.

  Of the young men present, some hadn’t yet left for battlefields. Others were home on leave (medical or R & R). To their credit, the girls were wonderful about those with ghastly injuries, and made the wounded feel like princes. A few lads worked war production jobs in weapons factories. Some saw them as cowards shirking the battlefield, but this crowd of girls welcomed them in good humor. They were practical, these Poplar girls, and they preferred local beaux over absent loves. Some enterprising girls hedged their bets and held on to one of each.

  The young ladies worked in munitions factories and in private homes as domestic servants. Not long ago they’d all been in school.

  And then there was Hazel. She played like the daughter of a duchess, raised under the eye of the finest musical tutors. But she was the daughter of a music hall pianist and a factory seamstress. Hazel’s father pounded the keys at night to keep the wolf from the door, but he taught his daughter to love the masters. Beethoven and Schubert and Schumann and Brah
ms. She played like an angel.

  James felt her angel music whoosh through his hair.

  Poor James. He was in a predicament. The one girl to whom he’d like to speak carried the party’s entertainment in her hands. To interrupt her would be unthinkable; to wait until the party ended would mean she’d disappear into the crowd.

  She reached a refrain, and I lifted her chin toward James’s watchful face.

  She caught his expression in full. Both of them were too startled, at first, to break away.

  Hazel kept on playing, but she had seen straight through those brown eyes and into the depths behind them, and felt something of the thrill of being seen, truly seen.

  But music won’t keep. So Hazel played on. She wouldn’t look up at James again. Not until the song was over did she sneak a peek. But he wasn’t there. He’d gone.

  It’s the quiet things I notice. Hazel exhaled her disappointment. She would’ve liked one more glimpse, to see if she’d imagined something passing between them.

  Hazel, my dear, you’re an idiot, she told herself.

  “Excuse me,” said a voice beside her.

  APHRODITE

  First Dance—November 23, 1917

  HAZEL TURNED TO see a forest-green necktie tucked carefully into a gray tweed jacket, and above it all, the face of the young man with the dark brown eyes.

  “Oh,” said Hazel. She stood up quickly.

  “Hello,” he said very seriously. Almost as if it were an apology.

  His face was grave, his figure slim, his shoes shined, and his dress shirt crisp. Hazel watched his shoes and waited for the heat in her face to subside. Did those shoes contain feet like her father’s, she wondered, with hair on top? Stupid, stupid thought!