The Pledge (8 page)

“Jack, you're missing the point,” Bruce argued. “Nowhere in what I've written do I accuse the British of engineering this famine, because I have no proof that they did. But I have plenty of proof that they never lifted a hand to stop it. I saw the rice, thousands of sacks of rice, and I interviewed the dealers. It's all in there. I write that the common belief around Calcutta was that the British had done it, but I specify that I have no proof that I could go into court with. But this is not simply an accusation thrown at the British — it's the whole world indifferent to the death of millions.”

“The war was at its highest point. How could you expect the nations to drop —”

“Jack, don't give me that. It wouldn't have made a particle of difference in the war effort if those starving people were fed.”

“You're not hearing me, Bruce.”

“I hear you. I sent you a story that was a clear, clean beat. No newspaper, no magazine touched it. It's good, decent professional work, and now you tell me that you won't print it.”

“What did the
Trib
say?”

“It's fifteen thousand words. It's not a newspaper piece, it's a magazine piece. You know that.”

He walked uptown from that lunch meeting at “21.” It was a fine fall day, a sweet day, not too cold and not too warm, one of those very special days that New York is blessed with occasionally. It was a sort of benediction on a world finally at peace, a world with all possible futures achievable, a world not yet actually aware of the atom bomb. Bruce couldn't remain depressed. Prudence had moved out of their one-bedroom apartment in a brownstone on East Seventy-sixth Street, leaving it for him, furnishings intact. Very decent of her, he thought, recalling a conversation with a psychiatrist about “Jewish guilt.” He didn't think it measured up to white Protestant New England guilt. He could think of Prudence very objectively, and that bothered him. Had he ever loved her? Like everything else during this war, relationships had changed; but if the word
love
defined something else, he didn't know what that might be. Should he have doubts about Sally Pringle? But why? She pleased him, she excited him — or did she? Now, as he walked up Madison Avenue, he wondered why, when he started a train of thought, it would end up either confused or shattering some belief that he had accepted as the rock and foundation of his existence. Somewhere, all the rocks and foundations had become slithery. There was the matter of his friends. Before the war he had friends all over the place, people on the newspaper, leftovers from college, magazine people he dealt with, older people who were family friends. Of course, some of them were in the service, but they were starting to trickle back. The trouble was that after he had shared lunch with them, with one or another, and occasionally double-dated, he had no desire to see them again. What had happened to him?

He brought the matter up with his father. He had always been close to his father, and after three years of separation, he found they could talk together as grown men. His father, Dr. William Bacon, sixty-three, had aged noticeably during Bruce's absence. He was a tall, slender man with a rather forbidding face that melted under a smile. His smile made his patients adore him, and his unsmiling face, when the need arose, made them follow his orders.

“You've undergone what might be called,” his father said to him, “the ultimate experience that anyone could endure on this earth. You would have to be either a fool or pathological not to be affected by it, and you are neither.”

He recalled it this fine October day, walking uptown along Madison Avenue and wondering why Jack McGregor's rejection of the story he had worked on so carefully had not devastated him. Yet it had not, and perhaps the reason was that somewhere down deep he had expected precisely that kind of response. What do you do? he asked himself. He had entertained some thoughts of doing the Indian experience as a book, fleshed out perhaps by his prior experience in the European war. Of course, a slew of books about the war, fiction as well as nonfiction, would be pouring into the bookstores. Every correspondent had a story to tell, yet his own story would be different. Insofar as he knew, no one else would be telling it. On the other hand, if he sat down to write a full-length book, he would have to ask for a leave of absence from the
Tribune
, and then it was a question of money. He and Prudence had a joint account for the money gifts that had come with their wedding, but as far as the earnings of each was concerned, they kept separate accounts. The twelve thousand dollars they had received as gifts, Prudence had split evenly between them, and in his own account, almost thirty-six thousand dollars had accumulated during the years abroad. The way he lived, Bruce decided, forty-two thousand would see him through the next five years, and he was young enough not to worry about what would happen after that. The thing to do now was to get home, take a shower, change clothes, and meet Sally. Tomorrow was time enough to start talking to publishers.

Sally was a model, sport clothes. She worked for Hillsdale Fashions, a very large garment company on Seventh Avenue, and at nine thousand dollars a year, she was well paid indeed. This was information conveyed to Bruce at their first date after meeting her in church, and after having told him this, Sally observed that he appeared surprised if not shocked.

“You aren't shocked, really, are you?”

“No. Oh, no.”

“Then why so surprised?”

“Well, you know —”

“I don't know,” Sally said. “Tell me.”

We're starting off on the wrong foot, Bruce decided, and what can I say that won't make it worse? The truth of the matter was that after the church meeting, Mrs. Pringle, a widow, and her daughter were asked to tea at the Bacons'. In one corner of the room, Bruce chatted away with Sally, and his impression was of a very bright, well-informed young lady. They talked about a number of things, but mostly it was directed toward Bruce, and while he was very impressed with her, he didn't learn that she was a model until he took her to dinner two nights later.

“Well, you know, one —”

“You said that before.”

“Did I? I mean, well, you know. Yes. What I mean is that one develops certain stereotypes and one applies them to a model —”

She burst out laughing. “Oh, Bruce Bacon, you are precisely the kind of man one would meet in church.”

“Hey, come on,” Bruce said, “that was the first time I've been to church since I was in school.”

“Oh, I'm not putting you down, believe me. I mean you have such a delicious lack of sophistication — I mean you're the way guys should be but aren't. Oh, hell, I'm making you feel foolish.”

He felt foolish, damn foolish. She reached across the table and took his hand. “Bruce, I model sport clothes. In college I majored in biology, and I thought I would do postgraduate work and become a marine biologist. That was the thing a few years ago. Very romantic. Then I met this designer — purely by accident — his name was Phil Sturtz, and he's a part owner of Hillsdale. I met him at a party, and he asked me to help him out because one of his girls was sick, and that's about it, and it's as prissy and proper a job as one could have, and Hillsdale is a very large corporation, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and they had a very good war —”

“What did you say?”

“I said they had a good war.”

“Explain it, please,” Bruce said. “What is a good war?”

“Bruce, you've been away too long, and I know exactly what you're thinking, but people have made scads of money out of the war, and they say this one or that one had a good war, and it's nothing I invented —”

They worked it out. Bruce was able to confront his indignation and put it in its place. Sally was quite right; it was nothing that she had invented. Sally was bright, practical, and pragmatic, and indeed she helped anchor Bruce in a world called “postwar U.S.A.” It was a world apparently untouched by the incredible suffering the war had caused, and while there were those who wept for the dead, there were infinitely more untouched and unmoved who wanted to forget the extermination camps and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bleak, jobless days of the Depression were behind them forever, and there was a brisk, strutting little haberdasher who had come into the presidency. Nothing was the same, and Bruce might just as well come down to earth and realize that nothing was the same.

On his second date, he took Sally to bed. There had been a

French girl whom he met in Paris, and who was sweet and willing, and whom he had taken to bed in a brief affair that lasted for the three days he was in the city at the time; but beyond that he had not been unfaithful to Prudence. Now his passion exploded, and when their lovemaking was over, Sally studied him with surprise and new interest. She had not dreamed of such passion.

“I want to marry you,” Bruce said. Actually, he was not expressing a need or even a desire; he was reacting to the sudden erasure of his loneliness, to the warm, wonderful feeling that he was part of another human being. Sally, on the other hand, had no thoughts or intentions of marriage, and certainly not to a newspaperman who spoke of giving up his job to write a book. Yet she found in Bruce qualities lacking in so many of the men she met: he was warm, nonjudgmental, well educated, better in bed than she could have expected, reasonably tall and good-looking, and well mannered. Sally had grown up with a mother who had very urgent social pretensions. She hardly could have escaped being influenced by those social pretensions and sharing in them to a certain degree, and while Bruce's family were not a part of what went for society or celebrity — the two becoming interchangeable in New York City — they had enough breeding and elegance and money to satisfy her. But as for marriage, that was another thing entirely.

“Do you?” she said, kissing him and stroking his cheek. “It was very nice. Did that decide you?”

“Sex? Good sex?”

“It was very good. There should have been all sorts of awful problems, but there weren't,” Sally said, laughing. “But one has to get out of bed occasionally.”

“I hate to think so. Look, Sally, I don't mean tomorrow.”

“You just wanted to stake out a claim?”

“I don't even know how you feel about me.”

“I'm in bed with you, Bruce. That's how I feel about you.”

Afterward, Bruce was relieved that Sally had not accepted his offer of marriage. He hardly knew her. What did she think about anything? What were her dreams? She certainly made good money, but her apartment on Central Park South was almost regal — at least in terms of his tiny place on Seventy-sixth Street — and out of this he came to have a sense of escape vying with his need for a permanent connection. He stopped by the desk of Joey Kemp, who did an “on the town” column for the newspaper, and asked him what he knew about Phil Sturtz.

“Sturtz? Why Sturtz?”

“Curiosity.”

“A good newspaperman don't have curiosity, old buddy. You got something going, tell me about it.”

“Just curiosity.”

“Well,” said Joey, “when the curiosity matures, buzz me. Meanwhile, Phil Sturtz is one of a new crop of fancy clothes designers that's come to life since the war. They're native, by which I mean they don't genuflect to Paris, and they've changed the
shmata
game to very big business — listed on the stock exchange and all that — and at the same time, they're the neon lights of the new top fast crowd in town. But that's off your beat, right?”

“You could say that. What does he look like?”

“Tall, dark, and handsome. What goes on, Bacon, is he competition?”

“I wonder.”

There was too much running around in his mind, like a spinning cage full of hamsters, and nothing adding up to a direction or even a point of view. The paper put him on full salary for two months, making up for unclaimed vacation time, and then the managing editor called him in for a talk. “What about it, Bruce, what kind of assignment do you want? The way we feel about you, you can pretty damn well name it.”

“Even after I raised such hell about your not printing the famine story?” Bruce asked cautiously.

“You were entitled. We never turned down any dispatch of yours, but we have an editorial board and only so many pages. You know that things get turned down for a variety of reasons.”

“I know that,” Bruce agreed. He had given up on arguments for the famine story.

“So you name it. The big story today is Berlin. Fitz is there, but he wants to come home. Can you speak German?”

“I can get by with it, but I don't think I want to go to Berlin.”

“What else? Name it.”

“I don't know,” Bruce said slowly. He could feel his heart tightening. This was a city where people would kill, lie, connive, to work on a major newspaper. Right at this moment, he was still a hotshot correspondent, a younger Ernie Pyle, a man who had crawled into foxholes with the ordinary unstriped dogfaces, who had been under fire and faced it and written about what he saw and felt. But that was yesterday, and he had come to understand full well that the American public had a memory and a concentration span that could wash out in twenty-four hours. Already, people he met who had been in the service had put away their “ruptured ducks,” the tiny brass pins that marked them as ex-GI's.

The managing editor was watching him thoughtfully.

“I think,” Bruce said, “I want to write a book.”

“Come on!”

“Yes, sir. That's what I think.”

“Jesus God, Bruce, every goddamn correspondent who ever left this shore is writing a book. There are going to be so many books about this war that a man would have to live to be a hundred to read half of them.”

“I guess you're right, but I still think I have to write a book, so what I really want is six months' leave. If you can do that, I'll be grateful.”