B.F.’s Daughter, page 6
She did not know very clearly what she was packing, but she knew that she had to occupy herself. Her hands were trembling as she opened her bureau drawers and her alligator-skin suitcase. It was an impossible situation, and she could not even remotely imagine herself being carried away by it. Yet for the first time in a long while she felt that she was alive and living. She was leaning over her suitcase when she heard his step in the hall, and then before she even saw him, he had her in his arms. He was kissing her again, and her knees were weak. At least she was living, at least she was doing something. She was even thinking that it might not be entirely impossible.
“Mike,” she said, “don’t, please.” But what was it they said about women? They always said no when they meant yes. It was not impossible at all. She could call the family and tell them that she was staying in the apartment for the night.
“Mike,” she said again, “don’t. Please.” And then she thought of Bob Tasmin. That must have been what stopped it. Suddenly the whole thing became a sordid, vulgar, meaningless surrender and she wrenched herself away.
“That’s enough of this damned nonsense,” she said. “Go in the other room and finish your drink, and then we’re leaving.”
She had never been so close to doing anything like that, and she wondered whether the colonel knew how near she had been to saying something else.
His face grew brick-red. “Look here,” he said, “you gave me every reason to suppose—and don’t say you didn’t, because I know.”
The humiliating thing was his knowing it, and it was only fair to acknowledge it.
“Well, it’s different now,” she said. “I’m sorry.” And it was true. She was sorry about everything.
“But what happened?” His voice was hurt and incredulous. “What did I do wrong?”
She could not very well tell him that a memory of someone whom she had hardly seen for years had been what happened. It must have started with looking at those scrapbooks. Actually there was nothing she could tell him, but she was fair enough to understand how he felt.
“I’m awfully sorry, Mike,” she said. “I wish you’d let me pay you for the dinner and the champagne and everything. I’m really sorry. I guess I’m not the type.”
Then he was what he had been before—a dreadful, harmless sort of person, but not so dreadful either.
“It’s very lovely of you to put it that way,” he said, “but it’s merely money. The evening has been a real pleasure anyway, and Polly, you’re a lovely, enigmatic character. I’ll just get back to my skitch and soda and write it off to experience.”
“Yes,” Polly said. “Let’s both do that.”
“A thing like this is the basis for a sincere friendship actually,” the colonel said. “Somehow I never can be friends with anyone I sleep with, can you?”
Polly found that she was blushing.
“I don’t suppose you’ll believe it,” she told him, “but I wouldn’t really know.”
“You’re a very, very funny and lovable character,” the colonel said. “Yes, I believe you.”
She almost wished she could tell Bob Tasmin sometime, but she never could. It would always be one of those things that you kept only to yourself and thought of before you went to sleep. She would have liked to tell him that he had saved her from something worse than death, or at any rate, from something.
IV
They All Turned Up There Sometime
Whenever Bob Tasmin traveled to the war theaters for G–2, as was happening again when he went out to the West Pacific as an Intelligence officer in Lieutenant General Waldron G. Bogart’s team, he was invariably surprised when he met someone he knew. After all most of the people in his own age group had something to do with the war. If they were not in the line combat forces, they were in Supply or Military Government, or they were writers or news commentators, or they were something. Still, he was always incredulous about those encounters.
It was all a little like meeting people at those old unwieldy subscription dinners or testimonial banquets or whatever they were called that used to be given before the war, to raise funds for indigent musicians or for the control of parenthood, for race equality, or to greet someone who had lived to be eighty, or someone who had just returned from Tibet. He had to go because Mildred had bought tickets at ten dollars a head. It was a nice way to pay back people, Mildred used to say, by getting up a table, or someone else would pay back Mildred by getting up a table. Each of those occasions was like every other.
There almost always seemed to be snow and slush, and Mildred would never wear overshoes. The taxi would take you to the side entrance of one of those large New York hotels that used to be having trouble meeting its bonded indebtedness, and once inside, you would find yourself moving with a mass of moist people in a sort of migration that was beyond your own volition. You would find yourself jammed in one of those gilded elevators—direct to the Grand Ballroom, no other stops, this way to the Save Finland Dinner, and have your tickets ready, please. The ladies’ cloakroom to the right. The gentlemen’s checkroom to the left. Cocktails now being served in the Fontainebleau Room on the Mezzanine. You began to labor under a paralysis of dull resentment at finding yourself in a place like that, particularly when it was your own fault partially. You used to say to yourself that this was the very last time you would ever let yourself, so help you, get into anything like this. You said it, though you knew very well that you would get into something like it again some day.
“You will have a good time when you get there,” Mildred always said, “and besides, you may meet someone useful.”
He used to ask Mildred in what way she thought that anyone they met there could be useful. No one was ever impressed by him at those functions, no one ever offered him a job or even a small loan. There was no use being cynical about it, Mildred used to say. How would it look if they sat at home when everyone they knew was going and when they were sponsors?
Then, invariably, just when his senses were blunted by the noise and the motion, he would see someone whom he had known quite well at some time or other, someone he had met on a ship, or at Gray’s Point, or in college. First he would have some doubts, but then the face would become more and more familiar.
“Hello,” he would say. “How did you ever get into anything like this?”
He would ask because he really wanted to know the answer and he also wanted to explain why he was there, too, and make it clear that he could not help it.
You could not help being in the war either once you were in it. He had not wanted to be on Bogart’s staff. They had started out for Guam from Washington, all Regular Army except himself, and even after a month together the general was still disconcerted by Bob’s civilian background. The general had asked him at least three times how he had been assigned to such an operation. He wanted to tell the general that it was not his fault. In the early days when everything was expanding, they had sent him to staff school because he was good at papers and reports. He had been placed in the Japanese section by accident, and he had been made a lieutenant colonel because rank was necessary. The office at the Pentagon was very much like a club, but he could not tell the general that.
“I don’t see why they didn’t give me Hokey Smith,” the general said several times. “I asked for Hokey Smith—not that I’m criticizing you in the slightest. This is a big opportunity for you. Get me Map A for Operation Blue.”
Tasmin knew how to sit at table and laugh at the general’s jokes. He knew just where to stand and when to speak and when to keep his mouth shut. He had been on the same sort of party several times before. He had been sent to London to work on Operation Peaches, he had been in Casablanca by order of the Joint Chiefs to work on Chariot. The mission to Guam would be another of those jobs involving volume after volume of secret documents. He would be more of a librarian than a soldier, a consultant waiting outside the conference room with the other consultants, to produce the maps and orders when the admirals and generals called for them.
It was perfectly obvious that most able-bodied persons would arrive sooner or later at some such place as Guam, but when he saw Harry Fulton just outside one of the Quonset huts, he felt that old bewilderment at seeing a friendly face. Harry looked unfamiliar to him in a uniform with captain’s bars and he did not belong in that light yellow sticky mud that was steaming in the sun. It was necessary for Tasmin to make mental adjustments and to pull memories into order, for all sorts of recollections of home and of other people appeared when he saw Harry.
“Well, Harry,” he said, “how did you ever get into anything like this?”
Harry Fulton’s staff insignia showed that he also was attached to some general, and Harry was just the sort of boy that a general would want. Tasmin could almost hear the general talking about Harry to some other general.
“I have a new aide. Young Harry Fulton. Yes, that’s the one. Burton Fulton’s son, and he is a good kid. Just like any other kid. Now when I was at dinner in New York at the Fultons’ … Oh, Harry, get my field jacket, will you?”
Harry was staring at him through dark glasses of the General MacArthur type. From his dress and deportment, it was obvious that he must have seen General MacArthur somewhere. In some subtle way, he was assuming the manners and attitudes of the general. There was a similar outward thrust of the jaw, the same dauntless tilt of the head, the same half-careless and photogenic, but military, way of standing. If Harry had been carrying a cane or swagger stick, he would have been a small model of MacArthur saying, “I shall return.” But then, you had to imitate someone if you were not a professional soldier.
“Why, Bob,” Harry said, “is that you? Long time no see.” And they shook hands.
The expression annoyed Bob Tasmin slightly. It reminded him that Harry had been picking up the glib phrases of the moment ever since he was a kid, and Harry still looked pretty young.
“Who did you think I was,” Bob asked, “General Sheridan?”
Harry laughed, and Bob remembered that Harry had always had an embarrassed way of laughing, as though he was not quite sure what the joke was about and wanted to be nice but was still anxious not to make too much noise.
“Of all the people I least expected to see here,” Harry said. “Well, well, this is quite a shock! When did you blow in?”
A hint of patronage in this remark made it also annoying. Harry was being a battle-scarred veteran from the great open spaces over there. He was wearing a yellow ribbon with three stars on it, and he had three service bars on his left sleeve for eighteen months overseas, but even so, a second of mental arithmetic reminded Bob Tasmin that Harry was not quite thirty yet, and he himself was forty. It also occurred to him that he outranked Harry. A lieutenant colonel might mean anything or nothing, but still he had the rank. He found himself looking at Harry in a calculating, supercilious way that he had copied from other officers who had served with troops.
“You’re not a flyer, are you, Harry?” he asked.
“No,” Harry said. “Good God, no!”
“Then how do you get to wearing one of those floppy caps?”
“Oh, that,” Harry said, and he pulled the visor a little more over his right eye. “The general has the staff wear them.”
“What general?”
“Old man Pinkham,” Harry answered. “He’s tough, but he’s a nice old guy when you get to know him.”
Perhaps they were all nice old guys when you got to know them.
“Any relation to Lydia Pinkham?” Bob asked.
Harry laughed again.
“Haven’t you been in this man’s war long enough to learn not to make cracks?” he asked.
“Haven’t you been in this man’s war long enough to get over calling it ‘this man’s war’?”
“Well, you tell me then,” Harry said, “whose war is it? I flew over with the old man. Luzon. There’s a lot going on here, fella, in case you don’t know it.”
“You have learned a lot of words, haven’t you?” Bob said. “If you don’t mind, don’t call me ‘fella,’ and I do know there’s a lot going on.”
“More damn brass,” Harry said, “and whistle-stop boys. What brass are you with? When did you blow in?”
“This morning,” Bob told him. He was already getting over being annoyed by Harry. They were getting back to a half-forgotten relationship which had existed between them once. “I came along from Washington with General Bogart. I am attached to him for the trip.”
Harry was looking at him with respect.
“Gosh,” Harry said. “I didn’t know you were in with the Joint Chiefs. Are you stopping at headquarters?”
Bob nodded. “They’ve got us all over there.”
“Well, well, that’s wonderful!” Harry said. “Let’s get together at the club tonight. It’s been a long time no see.”
There was a fine view of the ocean and a gentle breeze was blowing. They were standing on a bare hill in the sun near a greenish two-story prefabricated building with an outside staircase. Ammunition carriers and jeeps and reconnaissance cars and small touring cars with generals’ stars on the plates were all parked in front of it. The air overhead hummed with planes and from the distance there came a series of dull explosions.
“They’re still blowing out the coral,” Harry said. “It’s out of this world, isn’t it?”
“How is Polly?” Bob asked.
When his sister’s name was mentioned, Harry took off his dark glasses and put them in his pocket, and then he looked just as he used to, with brown eyes and a thin, anxious face, not confident like his father, but with the same high forehead and the same long and rather delicate hands. He looked like a newer version of his father—more streamlined, and at the same time, more fragile.
“Poll?” he said. “Oh, Polly is fine. When did you last see Poll?”
“Not for quite a while,” Bob said. And there was a short and embarrassed silence.
“That guy she is married to …” Harry said. “Well, Poll can always work things out. Did you know I’m married, too?”
It was curious that you could drift away from old associations so completely. You would become involved in some new crisis or in some new interest, and it would be like turning the page of a book to new names and another chapter. Those old friendships were back somewhere among the turned pages, but there was never much time to review them. The war had knocked everything galley-west. It blotted out the past the way a smoke screen erased the horizon. It drew you into yourself, confining you to a few essential contacts only.
“Yes, I remember,” Bob said. “I always mean to write letters about things like that, and I never do. Let’s see, when was it you got married, Harry?”
“August 15, 1942. Period!” Harry answered.
He was a little uncertain what Harry meant by “Period!”—whether it meant joy or resignation, or simply nothing.
“Let’s see—August 1942,” Tasmin said, and he found himself looking at the flagpole by the green headquarters building. All those headquarters looked alike, even when they were established in Grosvenor Square or at the Saint George Hotel in Algiers. There were always the same jeeps and touring cars, the same signs on the doors, the same orderlies and the same M. P.’s. “August—That’s why I didn’t do anything about it.”
“Were you in the North African show?” Harry asked. “You really have seen this man’s war.”
Tasmin looked at the flag again. It was rippling beautifully in the breeze, like the flag in a technicolor film.
“Who was it you married, Harry?” he asked. “I don’t remember.”
“Elsie Hollister,” Harry said. “Susy’s younger sister. Do you remember what Polly used to think of Susy Hollister?”
Tasmin looked again at the headquarters building. It was time to go inside and meet those officers known as his “opposite numbers.” He could see himself entering the office of some strange Naval Intelligence captain. They would look at each other suspiciously like two strange dogs; then they would shake hands. The captain would be wondering exactly who in hell he was, and he would be looking at the captain’s Annapolis ring and wondering why the Navy always felt that it knew everything. If it wasn’t the Navy, it was the British—they both adopted the attitude that Papa could fix it by himself without bothering the bungling United States Army. The orders were that they were to indulge in a free exchange of information, but the captain would look at him dubiously, as though he were not sure that Tasmin was quite up to receiving important secrets, and Tasmin would be feeling the same way about the captain.
He should be going inside to establish cordial relations and instead he was like a circus rider standing on the backs of two different horses—trying to remember Elsie Hollister. He knew whom Harry meant, and, of course, she was just the sort of girl Harry should have married.
A formation of Corsairs flew low over them, so low as to give the impression of incredible speed, and the multiple roar of their motors blotted out every other sound and every other thought. It was over in a few seconds, but that sudden pervading sound was like a wet cloth over a blackboard, washing everything away.
“I’ll try to see you tonight,” Tasmin said, “and if I don’t, we’ll get together sometime.”
“Oh, yes, we’ll get together,” Harry answered. “Long time no see.”
Then Tasmin felt the meeting had been too casual.
“Oh, Harry,” he said, “I forgot to ask. How’s your father?”
“B. F.?” Harry said, and he no longer looked like General MacArthur. He looked as though something had hurt him. “Haven’t you heard about B. F.?”
“No, what about him?”
“I thought of course you’d heard. He’s dead. He died about a month ago.”
The news was like the destruction of a solid, personal belief, even in a place where life expectancy was short.
“No,” Bob said, “I hadn’t heard. I’ve been out of touch with everything for a month. I’m awfully sorry, Harry.”
“It was very sudden, a coronary,” Harry said.
