From Here to Eternity (68 page)

CHAPTER 41

KAREN HOLMES had been saving up for this moment for almost a full week. The evening of the same day Milt had called her she had learned, by carefully probing her husband about the new catastrophe of Bloom's death in his Company, a thing she already had suspected but did not intend to ask about point-blank: that lst/Sgt Warden had not, as yet been induced to put in his application for the Infantry Officer extension course. In discussing Bloom with her, her husband had been especially bitter on this point since Warden's mere application, let alone his acceptance for a commission which was a foregone conclusion, would have been a feather in his cap that would more than have offset this new stroke of ill fortune. (A selling point presented to him by his wife some weeks before in connection with the trial of Prewitt, which he had since made his own.) Times certainly had changed, was his bitter comment, when an Officer had to beg an Enlisted Man to become an Officer, and then he refused. All of which philosophizing went impatiently in one of Karen's ears and out the other, now that she had learned what she wanted; her suspicions were confirmed; she had been taken for a fool; she barely refrained from pouring out the whole story to her husband for his sympathy. All she could think of was that during those two weeks of a greater happiness than she had ever known, while she was deliberately refraining from testing her suspicions in order to prove her faith in him, he had been just as deliberately deceiving her. Feeling a great singing happiness at the prospect of being near him once more, she had laid out carefully, with an excess of both love and vengeance, the penalty she would inflict down to the smallest lash of the tongue, knowing in the love what would cut him deepest, and determined in the vengeance to cruelly make him drink every last bitter drop before allowing herself to be mollified, and when he climbed in the car with that brilliant-eyed wild look of precariously contained agony and did not even notice her, she knew immediately something was drastically wrong and forgot all about the vengeance, while the love began to fill up with a maternal anxiety for him and a wild unhinged murderous anger at whatever had hurt him, as she shifted the gears coolly and drove on around the Park calmly and out Beretania without saying a word. They went through the slow-cooking business district and past the dry-baking Punchbowl in silence, Karen driving expertly and Warden smoking bitterly, and on past the Masonic Temple into the tree-leafy shade of the residence section across Punahou where Round Top and Tantalus, unseen but invisibly felt, dominated everything. They were almost out to the University Avenue before he flipped his cigarette away viciously and began to tell her the whole story. He told it clear across Kaimuki, Waialae, and Wailupe. By then they were almost out of town and across the causeway to Koko Head and instead of going on out into the country Karen turned off at Koko Head and drove down in under the grove of kiawe trees and out onto the bluff where the big gravelled parking lot for Hanauma Bay was. There was a bunch of haole highschool kids, thin-limbed in swimsuits, out there on a picnic and running, yelling up and down the zigzag path down the bluff to the beach where somebody had once blasted out a hundred yards of coral reef to make a swimming place, the boys chasing the girls, and the girls being chased by the boys. While they watched the kids (who suddenly seemed more alien to both of them than any foreigners could ever have been) he went through it one mote time, this time with her asking the questions. "So-o-o," he wound it up shruggingly, "the son of a bitch took off and transferred." "Wasnt there anything you could do?" "Sure. I could have talked him out of it again." "No you couldnt," Karen said positively. "Not if you're the kind of man I've always thought you were." Warden looked at her disgustedly. "You think not. I've done it plenty times before." "Then why didnt you do it this time then?" she said triumphantly. "Why?" he hollered violently. "Because I just wanted to see if the son of a bitch would turn it down on his own, thats why. And of course he didnt." "Did you expect him to?" "Hell ho," he lied. "Do you think I would?" She did not answer. It had taken a little while for the enormity of it to penetrate in to her. "Then that means our seeing each other afternoons will have to be postponed almost indefinitely," she said finally. Warden grinned at her stiffly, as if that was something he had failed to think of, and yet somehow was expecting. "Thats about the size of it, yes." "And just When we thought we had it all worked out. Oh, Milt! And after you working so hard! Isnt there a thing we can do?" "I dont know what. Unless you can get away sometimes at night." "You know I cant do that." "You're going to do it when I'm an officer, aint you?" "Yes, but thats different; that will be for good. Who would I get to stay with the boy? that I could trust?" "Okay, maybe you got some suggestions." "If you worked hard, couldnt you do most of the work in the mornings?" Warden looked bitterly at a panorama of the unbelievable work he had been doing for the past week, wanting to laugh wildly. "I might, yes. Only this time it aint the work. This time its the mere fact of not being present during duty hours. With a situation like this nobody supposes you'll get the work done, not even your loving husband can expect that. It'll take months before it even begins to be straightened out; thats why its so important for everybody to be on hand and put on a big act of trying to help with the emergency. And every man who has to stay will make it his job to check up on the others." "Then you couldnt just go ahead and take off anyway. That would ruin all your chancers of becoming an officer. And we certainly dont want that." "No," Warden said, "we dont want that. Any more suggestions?" Karen, watching his face, felt the vengeful cruelty (that she had carried for him as carefully as eggs for seven full days and then lost completely in as many seconds) suddenly blossom again in her, this time aimed at her husband, who had been such a stupid fool as to let things get into this state. With the indignation of an experienced wife who is sure of her control she promised herself firmly that he'd wish he'd never seen the day. "I dont know the intricacies of your work the way you do," she said, "but it would seem to me that the best thing and the first would be to get Sgt Galovitch out of that supplyroom as quickly as possible." "Apparently you dont know your husband either. The ony way he'll ever consent to relieving Ike Galovitch now will be after a month, or maybe two, but certainly no less than one, and probly a lot more than two; after he has saved his face, and after Ike has fouled him up enough times personally to make him mad." "Not when I get hold of him," said Karen crisply. "Who do you want in the supplyroom in Sgt Galovitch's place?" For a moment, with a certified heart-skip, Warden found himself staring fullface at a new 100% -unbeatable method of rejuvenating and running his whole outfit; wanting to kick himself in the ass for not having thought of it before. With a deal like that there would be no limit to what a man could accomplish. Then he remembered that it was already too late, that Leva had already flown the coop, that he couldnt be touched in M Company even with this wand, and the bottom fell out of it. "Pete Karelsen," he said without hesitation, bitterly viewing the fading wings of all the splendid opportunities he had let get past him. "He's the only one who's had supply work. And what he's had was too damn little and too damn many years ago." "He certainly will be better than Sgt Galovitch," Karen told him calmly. "And if he's all there is he's what you want. You're in no position to pick and choose." "Sure, he'll be better. But not enough better." "Then thats settled. Sgt Karelsen's the man. You give me a week," she said crisply. "Just one week. And Sgt Karelsen will replace Sgt Galovitch in the supplyroom. It mightnt," she said firmly happily, "even take a week." "Either way it will take months." "But, darling, thats the best I can do for you. Certainly Sgt Karelsen will be better than Sgt Galovitch in the long view. And thats what we're looking at, the long view. I thought we were working for something stable and permanent. "If we have to be separated for a while, for the sake of our future," she said firmly, "then we'll just have to, thats all." "You've got it all figured out. Okay, say we only have to be separated for four months. For the sake of the future. Just four months. And thats conservative. Have you forgotten that by a year from now we will be in the war?" "Well, theres nothing I can do about that," Karen said, calmly cancelling it. "Mark it on your calendar. On July the 23rd 1941 Milt Warden told you we'd be in the war in a little over a year. We're liable to be in it in less than a year," he said, enjoying making it even worse. "Very well," Karen said calmly. "Suppose we are in it in less than a year. Does that mean everything thats been between us is just to be marked off the slate? Does that mean we should say to hell with the future and to hell with the plans? And what'll we do then, after the war?" "I didnt say that!" Warden said, beginning to be angry at her lack of understanding. "What I said is its stupid to live all your life in the future when there may not be any. I say plan for the future, sure. But dont let the plans for the future that there may not be any of, displace what little life you can live now." "And I say," Karen said, beginning to be angry at his lack of understanding, "that we shouldnt take chances now and do things that in themselves arent even happy and may cost us any chance at a future. I say if anything has to suffer, let the present suffer for the sake of the future." "And I say if we cant have the goddam afternoons," Warden said, coming to the point they both knew he was approaching, "like we've planned, then we can at least have some nights, even if it is a little more dangerous. We may never get a chance at them, after a year from now." "You know how I feel about that," Karen said. "Sure I know how you feel about it. Now you know how I feel about it." "Do you think I give a damn, you fool?" Karen said, openly angry finally. "And I've got a whole hell of a lot to lose if we get caught, haven't I? I'm only thinking of you, you damned fool. Where will you be? if we should happen to get caught in a scandal? You, an Enlisted Man involved in an affair with an Officer's wife, - and not only just any Officer's wife, but your own Company Commander's wife!" "And I say piss on that," Warden snarled. "They cant shoot me any farther off my cross than the war will shoot me off it. When you got a war staring you in the face, you believe in living today. If you'd ever been in China, like I have, you'd believe it too:" "Perhaps," Karen said icily. "But let me ask you something: Is that the philosophical tenet that kept you from putting in your application for Officer's extension course as you told me you had?" He had been going good, and getting well warmed up, and even almost coming on to proving it. But that stopped him; There was a considerable silence. Karen fixed on him now the same steely-eyed look he had enjoyed so much seeing her get for Holmes, but that he did not enjoy now, as she waited for his answer. "Yes," he said in a strangled voice. "Thats why." "Then I fail to see," she said crisply, "how I can be expected to take risks and jeopardize myself for the sake of your purely animal desires for a few nights in the bed. "And let me tell you something else, my friend," she said in the precise enunciations of a trained nurse talking to a worried patient. "It is all very easy for a man to talk about living in the present. Much more so than for a woman, who is liable to get knocked up higher than a kite every time the man enjoys himself in the present. Thats one thing I dont have to worry about, thank God. But there are a lot of others; such as what I am going to do when my husband kicks me out and then my lover throws me over when he has to support me, and me not being trained for anything but to be somebody's wife and having to do all my politicing and achieving and gain what little success I can by getting behind some stupid man and pushing him. "Perhaps that is what you meant by living in the present? That we will just do it when you want to, which apparently is all the time, and let the Officer part and the marriage part, which depends on it, take care of themselves? Or better yet, take themselves off somewhere and conveniently die? Perhaps that is what you meant?" "I did it, I mean I dint do it, because I dint want anything to come in and disrupt those afternoons, which doing extension course lessons surely would have," Warden said strangledly and subduedly. "Thats why I did it." "And why was it you didnt tell me, instead of lying to me?" "Because I knew goddam well you would've reacted just like you did. Thats why." "But if you had been honest, maybe I wouldnt have. Did you ever think of that?" "You would have," Warden said. "And so now," Karen, who had had him coming and going either way he answered, said triumphantly, "so now you have already reached the place of the husband who only tells the little wo-man whatever percentage of the truth he feels she ought to know. And without even having the virtue of being the husband yet. Dont you think that is a lit-tle previous? not to say presumptuous?" "No more presumptuous than you reading me off like the heavy-handed better half," Warden exploded violently into flame under the lash, like a piece of paper under a very accurately focused magnifying glass. "Well, you may not have to put up with it very much longer," Karen threatened crisply. "And you wont have to put up with the masculine foibles." "And so they got married and lived unhappily ever after," Karen smiled. "Thats it," Warden said. He grinned back crookedly, feeling the woman-generated guilt spreading all through him like the slow groping tentacles of a fungus. "Dont look so goddamned guilty," Karen said distastefully. "Who the hell looks guilty?" "Well, at least you wont have the excuse of our lovely afternoons anymore," she said cruelly, "to keep you from putting in your application." "And I'll put the son of a bitch in, too, dont think I wont," he said, stung again. How they could do it, on and on, one after the other, each a new climax of sharpness, it was unbelievable, even for a superior race. "I dont know whats happened to you," Karen said, less classically, going down under the crust a little. "You were honest once. That was the thing that first caught me about you. You were honest, and if you thought it by god you said it, and to hell with