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epitome of everything he was supposed to be, cool, laconic, and remorseless, meaning without remorse. You got the feeling there wasn’t anything that could throw him, anything that could possibly be bad enough to ruffle his feathers, much less break him. Nerves of steel, some guys said, but Mitch thought it was more like no nerves. It was less like a guy who reaches into a fire out of courage and more like the wounded with nerve damage who’ll touch something burning and never know it.
    They’d just been transferred to Aviano in Northern Italy, the 24 planes in the squadron, to back up the ground war against the Austrian offensive around Venice, when he’d seen the picture, a slightly crumpled formal portrait of a woman with long dark hair, a secret smile and the high collared shirtwaist of a decade ago. He’d asked the exec, Browning, if she was Gil’s wife. Browning had been there from the beginning, since they were back in the States, and he gave Mitch a hard look. “She’s dead,” he said shortly. “Her and the baby both. Leave it alone.”
    He had, of course. He’d never said a word to Gil about it. But he filed it away, the thing that made Gil cold in the air, taking the kind of chances man and machine couldn’t bear. The French called it sang froid. Mitch thought it was more like not caring. Gil had picked Mitch up when he’d had to ditch, and Mitch had his tail the first time things went pear-shaped over the Piave River.
    And then there was Alma. She was an ambulance driver with the corps, an Army brat who’d grown up at various posts all over the west, the motherless daughter of an Army Sergeant whose benign neglect had translated into remarkably checkered experiences. She spoke a little Navajo and a great deal of Spanish, knew how to break a horse and set a leg, could find her way with nothing but a compass and the stars, and was utterly and completely confounded by the niceties of behavior expected of civilized women. Mitch thought her father had done her no favors, not that he would have said it. There wasn’t much a decent young woman could do that she was fit for.
    His own mother would have been dumbfounded and then felt terribly sorry for her. But then his mother was used to getting food on the table three times a day for ten people, baking two pies a day for dinner and breakfast, curing cheese and pickling a hundred quarts of vegetables every summer. She’d sent four boys off to college to better themselves, and all of them had. Mitchell was the oldest, Trinity College class of 1915. Well, he supposed it was called Duke University now, but it had still been Trinity when he’d graduated. He’d gone straight into service, charging off to France as soon as he had the sheepskin in his hand. Frank was class of ’18, and he was a surgeon now. Charles was class of ’19, and he was a minister. Howard was the baby, class of ’24, and he’d just finished law school and gone home to Winston-Salem to set out his shingle. And Grace and Evelyn were both married. There were ten grandchildren between them all, and Mitchell the only one not settled down.
    The bed gave as Jerry manhandled the case of books onto it, and Mitch opened one eye. Nope. Didn’t need help. Just that abstracted look Jerry got when he was thinking hard, his gold framed glasses creeping down his nose.
    Jerry had been an artillery officer, a Classicist who never got tired of walking the footsteps of the Caesars, and certainly never shut up about it, not for ten minutes. He’d been with the artillery defending Venice, a rotten job actually. Much more so than providing air cover, though it hadn’t been until Vittorio Veneto in October that he’d been wounded, in the same battle as Gil, less than a month before the Armistice. Alma’d probably saved his life, stopping the bleeding, though ultimately she hadn’t saved his foot. It had to come off a year later anyhow.
    By that time Alma and Gil were married, and so Jerry had come to