The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (44 page)

After awhile, as his heart slowed down, he found he could think only of the way Christine's voice had flickered to nothingness with the words “Okay, honey.” There had never been anything to fear. All this time, if he had ever before taken a stern tone with her, she would have vanished from his life in an instant—“Okay, honey”—even, perhaps, with an obliging, cowering smile. She was only a dumb little London streetwalker, after all.

A few days later there was a letter from his wife that changed everything. She had mailed hasty, amicable letters once a week or so since she'd been back in New York, typed on the rattling stationery of the business office where she'd found her job, but this one was in handwriting, on soft blue paper, and gave every sign of having been carefully composed. It said she loved him, that she missed him terribly and wanted him to come home—though it added quickly that the choice would have to be entirely his own.

“. . . When I think back over our time together I know the trouble was more my fault than yours. I used to mistake your gentleness for weakness—that must have been my worst mistake because it's the most painful to remember, but oh there were so many others . . .”

Characteristically, she devoted a long paragraph to matters of real estate. The apartment shortage in New York was terrible, she explained, but she'd found a fairly decent place: three rooms on the second floor in a not-bad neighborhood, and the rent was surprisingly . . .

He hurried through the parts about the rent and the lease and the dimensions of the rooms and windows, and he lingered over the end of her letter.

“The Fulbright people won't object to your coming home early if you
want
to, will they? Oh, I do hope you will—that you'll want to, I mean. Cathy keeps asking me when her daddy is coming home, and I keep saying, ‘Soon.'”

“I have a terrible confession,” Judith said over tea in her sitting room that afternoon. “I listened in to your talk on the phone the other night—and then of course I made the silly mistake of hanging up before you did, so you certainly must have known I was there. I'm frightfully sorry, Warren.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, that doesn't matter.”

“No, I don't suppose it does, really. If we're going to live in close quarters, I suppose there'll always be these small invasions of privacy. But I did want you to know I'm—well, never mind. You know.” Then after a moment she gave him a sly, teasing look. “I wouldn't have expected you to have such a temper, Warren. So harsh. So loud and domineering. Still, I must say I didn't much care for the girl's voice. She sounded a bit vulgar.”

“Yeah. Well, it's a long story.” And he looked down at his teacup, aware that he was blushing, until he felt it would be all right to look up again and change the subject. “Judith, I think I'll be going home pretty soon. Carol's found a place for us to live in New York, so as soon as I—”

“Oh, then you've settled it,” Judith said. “Oh, that's marvelous.”

“Settled what?”

“Whatever it was that was making you both so miserable. Oh, I'm so glad. You didn't ever really think I believed the nonsense about the illness in the family, did you? Has any young wife ever crossed the ocean alone for a reason like that? I was even a little annoyed with Carol for
assuming
I'd believe it. I kept wanting to say, Oh, tell me, dear. Tell me. Because you see when you're old, Warren—” Her eyes began to leak and she wiped them ineffectually with her hand. “When you're old, you want so much for the people you love to be happy.”

On the night before his sailing, with his bags packed and with the basement flat as clean as a whole day's scrubbing could make it, Warren set to work on the final task of clearing his desk. Most of the books could be thrown away and all the necessary papers could be stacked and made to fit the last available suitcase space—Christ, he was getting out of here; Oh, Christ, he was going home—but when he gathered up the last handful of stuff it uncovered the little cardboard music box.

He took the time to play it backwards, slowly, as if to remind himself forever of its dim and melancholy song. He allowed it to call up a vision of Christine in his arms whispering, “Oh, I love you,” because he would want to remember that too, and then he let it fall into the trash.

NOTHING EVER SEEMED
to go right for the 57th Division. It had come overseas just in time to take heavy casualties in the Battle of the Bulge; then, too-quickly strengthened with masses of new replacements, it had plodded through further combat in eastern France and in Germany, never doing badly but never doing especially well, until the war was over in May.

And by July of that year, when service with the Army of Occupation had begun to give every promise of turning into the best time of their lives—there were an extraordinary number of unattached girls in Germany then—all the men of the luckless 57th were loaded into freight trains and hauled back to France.

Many of them wondered if this was their punishment for having been indifferent soldiers. Some of them even voiced that question, during the tedious ride in the boxcars, until others told them to shut up about it. And there was little hope of welcome or comfort in their destination: the people of France were famous, at the time, for detesting Americans.

When the train carrying one battalion came to a stop at last in a sunny field of weeds near Rheims, which nobody even wanted to learn how to pronounce, the men dropped off and struggled with their equipment into trucks that drove them to their new place of residence—an encampment of olive-drab squad tents hastily pitched a few days before, where they were told to stuff muslin mattress covers with the clumps of straw provided for that purpose, and to cradle their empty rifles upside down in the crotches formed by the crossed wooden legs of their canvas cots. Captain Henry R. Widdoes, a gruff and hard-drinking man who commanded C company, explained everything the next morning when he addressed his assembled men in the tall yellow grass of the company street.

“Way I understand it,” he began, taking the nervous little backward and forward steps that were characteristic of him, “this here is what they call a redeployment camp. They got a good many of 'em going up all through this area. They'll be moving men out of Germany according to the point system and bringing 'em through these camps for processing on their way home. And what we're gonna do, we're gonna do the whaddyacallit, the processing. We're the permanent party here. I don't know what our duties'll be, mostly supply work and clerical work, I imagine. Soon as I have more information I'll let you know. Okay.”

Captain Widdoes had been awarded the Silver Star for leading an attack through knee-deep snow last winter; the attack had gained him an excellent tactical advantage and lost him nearly half a platoon. Even now, many of the men in the company were afraid of him.

A few weeks after their arrival in the camp, when their straw mattresses had flattened out and their rifles were beginning to speckle with rust from the dew, there was a funny incident in one of the squad tents. A buck sergeant named Myron Phelps, who was thirty-three but looked much older, and who had been a soft-coal miner in civilian life, delicately tapped the ash from a big PX cigar and said, “Ah, I wish you kids'd quit talking about Germany. I'm tired of all this Germany, Germany, Germany.” Then he stretched out on his back, causing his flimsy cot to wobble on the uneven earth. He folded one arm under his head to suggest a world of peace, using the other to gesture lazily with the cigar. “I mean what the hell would you be doing if you
was
in Germany? Huh? Well, you'd be out getting laid and getting the clap and getting the syphilis and getting the blue balls, that's all, and you'd be drinking up all that schnapps and beer and getting soft and getting out of shape. Right? Right? Well, if you ask me, this here is a whole lot better. We got fresh air, we got shelter, we got food, we got discipline. This is a
man's
life.”

And at first everybody thought he was kidding. It seemed to take at least five seconds, while they gaped at Phelps and then at each other and then at Phelps again, before the first thunderclap of laughter broke.

“Jee-sus
Christ,
Phelps, ‘a man's life,'” somebody cried, and somebody else called, “Phelps, you're an asshole. You've always
been
an asshole.”

Phelps had struggled upright under the attack; his eyes and mouth were pitiably angry, and there were pink blotches of embarrassment in both cheeks.

“. . . How about your fucking
coal
mine, Phelps? Was that ‘a man's life' too? . . .”

He looked helpless, trying to speak and not being heard, and soon he began to look wretched. It was clear in his face that he knew the phrase “a man's life” would now be passed around to other tents, to other explosions of laughter, and that it would haunt him as long as he stayed in this company.

Private First Class Paul Colby was still laughing along with the others when he left the tent that afternoon on his way to an appointment with Captain Widdoes, but he wasn't sorry when the laughter dwindled and died behind him. Poor old Myron Phelps had made buck sergeant because he'd been one of the only two men left in his squad after the Bulge, and he would almost certainly lose the stripes soon if he went on making a fool of himself.

And there was more to it than that. Whether Paul Colby was quite able to admit it to himself or not, he had agreed with at least one element in Phelps's outburst: he too had come to like the simplicity, the order and the idleness of life in these tents in the grass. There was nothing to prove here.

Colby had been one of the many replacements who joined the company in Belgium last January, and the few remaining months of the war had taken him through pride and terror and fatigue and dismay. He was nineteen years old.

At Captain Widdoes's desk in the orderly room tent, Colby came to attention, saluted, and said, “Sir, I want to request permission to apply for a compassionate leave.”

“For a what?”

“For a compassionate—”

“At ease.”

“Thank you, sir. The thing is, back in the States you could sometimes get a compassionate leave if you had trouble at home—if there'd been a death, or if somebody was very sick or something like that. And now over here, since the war ended, they've been giving them out for guys just to visit close relatives in Europe—I mean nobody has to be sick or anything.”

“Oh, yeah?” Widdoes said. “Yeah, I think I read that. You got relatives here?”

“Yes, sir. My mother and my sister, in England.”

“You English?”

“No, sir. I'm from Michigan; that's where my father lives.”

“Well, then, I don't get it. How come your—”

“They're divorced, sir.”

“Oh.” And Widdoes's frown made clear that he still didn't quite get it, but he began writing on a pad. “Okay, uh, Colby,” he said at last. “Now, you write down your—you know—your mother's name here, and her address, and I'll get somebody to put the rest of the shit together. You'll be informed if it comes through, but I better tell you, all the paperwork's so fucked up throughout this area I don't think you better count on it.”

So Colby decided not to count on it, which brought a slight easing of pressure in his conscience. He hadn't seen his mother or sister since he was eleven, and knew almost nothing of them now. He had applied for the leave mostly from a sense of duty, and because there had seemed no alternative. But now there were two possibilities, each mercifully beyond his control:

If it came through there might be ten days of excessive politeness and artificial laughter and awkward silences, while they all tried to pretend he wasn't a stranger. There might be slow sight-seeing tours of London in order to kill whole afternoons; they might want to show him “typically English” things to do, like nibbling fish and chips out of twisted newspaper, or whatever the hell else it was that typically English people did, and there would be repeated expressions of how nice everything was while they all counted the days until it was over.

If it didn't come through he might never see them again; but then he had resigned himself to that many years ago, when it had mattered a great deal more—when it had, in fact, amounted to an almost unendurable loss.

“Well, your mother was one of these bright young English girls who come over to America thinking the streets are paved with gold,” Paul Colby's father had explained to him, more than a few times, usually walking around the living room with a drink in his hand. “So we got married, and you and your sister came along, and then pretty soon I guess she started wondering, well, where's the great promise of this country? Where's all the happiness? Where's the gold? You follow me, Paul?”

“Sure.”

“So she started getting restless—damn, she got restless, but I'll spare you that part of it—and pretty soon she wanted a divorce. Well, okay, I thought, that's in the cards, but then by Jesus she said, ‘I'll take the children.' And I told her, I said, ‘Way-
hait
a minute.' I said, ‘Hold your
horses
a minute here, Miss Queen of England; let's play
fair
.'

“Well, fortunately, I had this great friend of mine at the time, Earl Gibbs, and Earl was a crackerjack lawyer. He told me, ‘Fred, she wouldn't have a leg to stand on in a custody dispute.' I said, ‘Earl, just get me the kids.' I said, ‘Let me have the kids, Earl, that's all I ask.' And he tried. Earl did his best for me, but you see by then she'd moved down to Detroit and she had both of you there with her, so it wasn't easy. I went down there once to take you both to a ballgame, but your sister said she didn't like baseball and wasn't feeling very well anyway—Christ, what grief a little thing like that can cause! So it was just you and me went out to Briggs Stadium that day and watched the Tigers play—do you remember that? Do you remember that, Paul?”