Once an Eagle (120 page)

“And it brought down the house.”

“Yes. That was the worst part of it. The very worst. They all jumped to their feet and yowled and howled and blew kisses at me and bought bonds till they were coming out of their ears. And those damned photographers, and everyone hovering around me on the platform as if I were a mental basket case, or pregnant out of wedlock or something. Ghastly.”

“It served its purpose. What happened then?”

“Nothing happened. Who could follow
that?
Emily took me home in a cab and gave me a good stiff drink and put me to bed.”

He put his hand over hers. “You're extraordinary,” he said. “Do you know that? Really and truly extraordinary … Why don't you marry me?”

She looked at him in amazement. “
Marry
you?”

“Why not? It's done, you know.”

She smiled, still held in surprise. “You'd get tired of me in half a year. Like the others.”

“Oh, no I wouldn't. I want continuity now. One rhythm. I want someone with force, with discipline. Someone just like you.”

“Good lord.” It astonished her beyond measure that he could see her that way.

“I mean it … marry me,” he repeated. “What's holding you? You know it's all gone to hell between you and Damon.”

“Sam was a good husband to me,” she replied stoutly—and only then realized with a pang the tense she'd used.

“I'm sure he was. But he's given up—you've told me so yourself.” His gaze was confident and piercing. “You're more than he can handle. You always were, only neither of you saw it.”

She shook her head. The clouds kept streaming in from the sea, all silver above and charcoal-dark on their bellies. “I couldn't, Bill. It wouldn't be right. With him out there … ”

“What difference does that make? He knows it's all over. He's a professional soldier, with a war to win, a kingdom to take—do you think he'll resign and come home to mope? Or do you think he'll put his pistol in his mouth?”

“Bill, for Christ sake—!”

“You think he'll pine away and die of a broken heart? You know how he's been passing his lonely hours.”

She stared at him. “What? What do you mean?”

“That nurse he's been playing around with out there …” His eyes were very wide. “You mean you didn't know about that? For God's sake—I thought you Army types knew everything that's going on everywhere …”

We do, she thought angrily; everybody but the goat. So that was what it was. God, it was just like him—go along like a stick for twenty years, a perfect stick, never even
looking
at anything in skirts—and then take up with some blowzy, giggling bedpan wielder in a way that would splash it all over the Army inside of a month. The big, dumb lame-brain. She was all at once furious and vengeful—then the incongruity implicit in this attitude turned her derisive.

“Well, that's up to him,” she muttered. “If he wants to be the laughing stock of the Theater …”

“Gee, I'm sorry, Tom-Tom.” Bill looked abashed—an expression she'd never seen on his face before. “I thought you knew, no kidding. Brad Parry over in Somervell's office told me he had it from—”

“Never mind,” she said crossly. “I don't want to know any more. It's none of my business, anyway.” Though it was her business, of course. If it wasn't hers, who in hell else's was it? But she was still struck with consternation: if
Sam
—steady old rocklike Sam—could fumble his way into a perfectly witless liaison like that …

All men had feet of clay, as Court Massengale once said; it was only necessary to discover the particular weakness and play upon it artfully—

Bill was scowling at his nails. “Damn. Just my luck. Now you'll think I threw that at you just to strengthen my case.”

“Don't be silly,” she said. “I know you better than that.”

“Good. Marry me, then.”

“Bill, it still doesn't alter the fact that he's out there in the wretched boondocks.”

“Of course he is: he chose it, it's his life. That's a hopelessly sentimental attitude.”

“I'm a sentimental gal.”

“No, you're not. You're romantic—but you're not sentimental.”

Her arms behind her head she considered this, while the clouds shouldered implacably overhead and the locust branches dashed up and down just beyond the window. She was romantic, all right: and here it was, at her feet—a life she had yearned for through five thousand dusty, sweltering afternoons, listening to the terse cries of command, the rippling pop of range gunfire, the hard, silvery bugle calls: the world of leisure and position … And yet here, now, she found herself shrinking from it. What was the matter with her? You had one life, one voyage—why not seize this moment, follow it wherever it led? Bill was right: the thing with Sam was over, he was through with her and she with him—he'd even found someone else, it seemed. To coin a phrase. And they could never bridge the marsh of recrimination and estrangement of the past two years. What was there to hold them? Donny was dead, Peggy didn't need her, she was happy on that Quaker farm project in Flemington, there was even a boy interested in her now; Poppa had immersed himself in his own concerns—what ties did she have left from that old, worn life? Here was a forceful, attractive, wealthy man offering her his hand, a new life fixed in the web of the present; a dalliance that could laugh at time … And if there wasn't love, not love exactly, there was affection, a lively interest in the partner, respect—why shouldn't she do it? Why this dismay, and a stealthy sense of loss?

All it meant was cutting a few frayed and unraveling hawsers, summoning up her courage and willing the change. Why shouldn't she?

She would: she would do it.

She opened her mouth to answer and the telephone rang. He bounded out of bed and went over to the table and picked up the receiver while she watched him; his trim, stocky figure, still nicely muscled and flat-bellied at forty-eight, his smooth silver hair pleasantly disarranged. Teeth pressed on her lower lip she carried her gaze around the room, which now looked as strange as some Arthurian castle—and as familiar as her father's old set at Fort Sam.

“Yes.” He winked at her, his hand on his naked hip, the wrist cocked. “Yes, speaking.” Then his whole manner changed. The confident, faintly amused air was gone, his face looked exasperated and tense; his eyes roamed blankly over her body. “It's confirmed, then?—definitely confirmed? Jesus. Yes. Jesus, yes. All right. All right, I'll get down there as fast as I can make it. Right.”

He put down the phone as if it were a rare porcelain.

“What's the matter?” she asked.

“Oh my,” he muttered. “My oh my.” He was still staring at the phone. “The President,” he said after a moment. “The President has just died. Massive cerebral hemorrhage.”

“Oh,” she heard herself murmur. “Then he won't live to see it.”

“Not very likely. See what?”

“Why, the victory …” It was her first thought.

“Yeah.” He was already dressing hurriedly. “I've got to get back right away. Do you want to go back with me or stay on here?”

“There's not much point in my staying on alone.” She smiled at him, but his mind was already back in Washington.

“Boy oh boy.” He was tugging savagely at his laces. “Now the walls'll come tumbling down. Steve Early said he was tired almost to death—I guess that's what he meant, all right.”

“Truman'll be President,” she said.

“Won't he, though? Won't he just.” He snorted. “Too bad I never learned how to play poker. Think you could teach me on the way down? Cram course? Oh my God, what a royal changing of the guard there'll be. Probably get back just in time to find I'm out on my ear.”

“They won't do that, will they?”

“I really couldn't tell you, sweet. Your guess is very bit as good as mine. Harry doesn't like us New York slickers, I know that much. Yes sir, he's one scared chicken right about now.”

“What do you mean?” She was up now and throwing on her clothes.

“The President was carrying everything in his hands.
Everything.
Now the fat will be in the fire, along with everything else.”

She felt her eyes fill all at once. “He was so brave,” she murmured.

“FDR? Baloney. He was a power-drunk egocentric and the prince of political manipulators. But he knew how things worked, and he could make them go the way he wanted. Now watch old Naval Person take over, lock-stock-and-barrel. The Indomitable Cigar.” She gathered dimly that he meant Churchill. “Stand by for the Red Menace. War at the Elbe.”

“What?”

“Sure Mike. The New Hundred Years' War. 1914 to 2020 or so. Hadn't you heard? And this one will be a daisy. And after the Russkies comes China, and after China—who knows? Africa, I suppose …”

She stared at him, wordless. His flat, wry tone filled her with such desolation she felt rooted to the floor of this room forever.

“… I don't believe it,” she said.

“Don't. See if I care.” He completed his Duke of Windsor knot with a flourish, cinched the foulard against his perfectly fitting collar. “That's what's going to happen, though. And now we haven't got anybody who knows the combination to the safe.”

“—It can't be,” she protested. “Not after all this …”

“Anything can be. Anything old homo sapiens decides to put his dirty, devilish little mind to. Anything at all … He's a beast,” he declared with sudden declamatory heat, shrugging into his jacket. “Your fallen god, the master of his fate. He loves it: he
loves
slaughter and waste and the torture of his fellows. Wait'll you see what we find in the glorious Thousand Year Reich.”

“Yes, the Nazis—”

“Nazis, hell—they've only done what we all of us dream of doing. There's nothing the human animal gets a greater kick out of than smashing all the glass in the palace, ripping open a few bellies, slurping up his own vomit—he's a hairless ape with a taste for flesh and devilment. Can't you see that?”

“No,” she said fearfully, “—he's not a beast. Not just a beast.”

“Oh God. And you've been hanging out in Washington for the past three years. Oh, you crippled, maudlin romantics …”

They were back on that again. Raising her head, she watched the rain driving in out of the Atlantic under the ragged canopy of cloud. Suddenly she knew she couldn't marry him—if only for the reason that she
was
a crippled, maudlin romantic at heart. There was something impassable in this argument. She could not agree with him; she couldn't. Man was not a beast, simply—he had captured glorious visions, he had chained the lightning, fashioned things of great beauty, grappled with the awful mysteries of the Universe: he was the only creature who had burst the bonds of the moment—

With quick surprise she glanced at Bill. But he had no further interest in the discussion, if discussion it was; he was packing swiftly and deftly, frowning, humming to himself. Perhaps that was as good an indication as any other. Well: the President was dead, his own future was vitally affected; but even so …

She felt a quick rush of concern for Sam, so forceful it was like an object held in her hand: what he might be doing at that moment, what he was thinking; what his opinion might be about this war, and the world that would emerge from the fire and rubble … The Second Hundred Years' War. Snatching up her pajama bottoms, she glanced at the rumpled bed with a mild aversion. I lie to myself, she thought; all the time. To
think
—to reflect, to speculate, to remember was to renounce the claims of the moment, thrust out in time. That was what it meant to be a man.

It was the hairless ape who drowned in the moment.

“Bill,” she said quietly, “I don't believe you.”

“I gathered that.” He looked up then, and saw what she meant. His brows drew down; she had wrenched him back to the problem of the two of them, here on Long Island, and he resented it. “What are you talking about?”

“I mean—Bill, it's no go,” she said lamely. “It won't be right. I can't do it.”

He snapped his suitcase shut and straightened, watching her—a slow, measuring glance, his lower lip thrust out, his clear, cool eyes narrowed; and for an instant she felt a curious fear.

“Maybe you're right,” he said. “Maybe you ought to go back to him. Just think what it would do for your martyrdom. All the things you could do—walk in with a grief-stricken countenance and drop onto the living-room couch and charge him with the death of the boy. Really stick him with it. A nice, raw wound lined with salt …”

She gazed at him, shocked into silence, half-stunned. His face was wearing a thin smile, but there was a dark red flush at each side of his throat; he was angrier than she'd ever seen him. Was this how she seemed—was this what she really wanted?

“You'd love it, wouldn't you? Mope around all day, jigsaw puzzles and hen sessions. The brave little army wife bearing up so nobly under this dreadful burden. Just think—you could be a conscience to him all day—and half the night, too; what a thrill that would give you. The Masochist's Delight.”

She stammered: “Bill, that's not fair—”

“Isn't it? Think about it. Isn't that what you'd like better than anything else? A Gold Star Mama With a Cause. Oh boy.” He pointed to the floor at his feet. “I just offered you—I'm not sure the offer still stands—a positive new life. A real break-out. Maybe it isn't exactly the life your romantic soul wanted when you were fifteen. But a real life, with dignity and purpose, and respect. No medals or reviews, but respect. There isn't an awful lot of that these days. And you could be a help to me, too—we could carve out something together. I think you know that.”