The Rebellion of Yale Marratt (31 page)

They stayed clasped together for a long time, listening to the night sounds.
Yale pulled away from her suddenly. "God, we'll run this boat aground yet.
The luck of the devil has been with us."

 

 

"I'm the devil," Marge said, huddling on the seat, her arms across her
breasts. "I'm sorry, Yale." He could hear her sobbing.

 

 

"Look, Marge, don't cry." He patted her face. "It was very nice. I guess
you're right, I'm a bastard." He started the engine and was relieved to
find that once again it caught and the cylinders fired. Pat certainly kept
the boat in excellent shape. "What I'm wondering is how we are going to
get back without any clothes. Boy, this is going to be a scandal that
will rock Midhaven. If I could get us back to the boathouse, without
anyone seeing us, you could hide down there. I could sneak in the back
way and get you a coat or one of Bobby's dresses."

 

 

Marge didn't seem interested or even concerned about getting back. All
that she wanted to do was justify her actions. "You see, Yale, you just
got my goat. All anyone in Midhaven knows about you is that you are an
intellectual giant. You look in disdain at the amusements of the common
herd. You never come out to the Club. You've been asked by Jim, and the
Ames boys, and the Hastings. Your family are regular people. How did you
get to be so stuffy? Then to graduate Phi Beta Kappa, that's the last
straw. We won't hear the end of that among the High-C average Lathams
for a long time."

 

 

Yale drove the Chris-Craft in low speed back up the river. He listened
with a smile to her chatter. The fact that she had flung herself into
intercourse with him didn't seem to bother her at all. How many men-boys
had she already made love with? Plenty, no doubt. At eighteen she was
an expert. He felt sorry for her. In the area of sexual relations she
had nowhere to go but downhill.

 

 

He turned the last bend in the river before the boathouse, and realized
it was too late. The river was lighted up in all directions by floodlights.
Pat must have taken someone down to see the Chris-Craft and found it gone.

 

 

"There's the boat, Pat," someone yelled. The sound of many voices drifted
to them across the narrowing distance to the boathouse. Yale kept the boat
in the lowest speed, hoping desperately to think of some solution to their
predicament.

 

 

"We're sunk, Marge," he said, imagining the expression on Pat's face.
He wondered if this would be the proverbial straw that broke the camel's
back. "I'll pull up close enough to yell. I'll tell them all to go away
while you get out."

 

 

"Don't be dumb, Yale Marratt! You may know everything there is to know in
books, but in a situation like this there is only one thing to do. Face
it with aplomb! Act as if it is simply nothing. We went for a swim and
lost our clothes. Happens in the best of circles." Marge giggled. "Most
natural thing in the world to be in your birthday suit. Come on, stop
poking . . . just drive right into the dock, and act as cool as a cuke."

 

 

Yale patted her shoulder. "It was kind of fun, Marge."

 

 

"Any time, Yale . . . Just keep cool." She smiled at him and leaned back in
the seat. He increased the speed and headed for the boathouse. He wondered
if the
Life
photographers would be waiting. Brother. . . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PART TWO

 

 

Our age is retrospective. It builds sepulchres of the
fathers . . . Why should not we also enjoy an original
relation to the universe? Why should not we have a
poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition,
and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of
theirs . . . ? The sun shines today also. There is more
wool and flax in the fields. Let us demand our own
works, and laws, and worship.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

 

 

1

 

 

Yale felt that he might be missing something if he remained in the hotel.
The room, with the wallpaper removed and painted gray; the crowded army
cots and the piles of duffel bags had a feeling of transience, underscored
by the certain knowledge that the bed you slept in tonight would probably
be slept in tomorrow by some other soldier on his way to parts unknown.

 

 

He walked through the lobby noticing the newspapers at the cigar counter.
The headlines screamed "German Breakthrough." "The Battle of the Bulge."
How much longer could it go on, he wondered? He had a quick picture of mud
and snow, and soldiers miserably waiting . . . waiting, while somewhere
Generals pondered the situation and tried to determine what to do. Of
one thing he was certain, the battle in Europe was not his immediate
problem. He was shipping out to India. Karachi . . . a place so remote
from his thinking that when he discovered it on a map he had looked at
it as idly as he would have looked at a photograph of the moon. This
strange world did not concern him. But he was going there. Today or
tomorrow or the next day. Just as soon as the gears of Air Transport
Command meshed and there was a plane available. It didn't really matter
when. For nearly four years he had been drifting toward God knew what
goal. Would he ever be able to establish a clear objective? First it
was Pat with definite plans for him, and now it was the Army.

 

 

He checked at the Headquarters desk. No, he wasn't on orders
tonight. Nothing could come through until three tomorrow afternoon. He
was free. This was Miami. He couldn't get excited about it. The first few
days it had been fun; exploring the other night clubs along the beach,
or getting drunk with a group of other officers who were your buddies
on a moment's notice; pitching a line at every girl you met or trying to
play the game of going to bed with an utter stranger. Then the loneliness
would seize him and there was nothing -- nothing on earth that he wanted
except the warm brown eyes and oval face of a girl who had vanished,
leaving a love that somehow wouldn't die.

 

 

Yale didn't know what he wanted to do this evening. Some of the fellows had
asked him to go along to a strip joint they had discovered. The evening
would end up with his getting soggily drunk, wanting not women in general,
but a particular woman. He refused, and wandered out of the hotel by
himself in the direction of Miami Beach.

 

 

A soldier waiting. shipment feels himself detached from the people around
him. The busy traffic moving toward the beach or into Miami is a phenomenon
apart. He was no longer Yale Marratt. He had seen others like himself in
the past two years, thousands of them. Wandering, looking in darkened
windows, staring unbelievingly at their own reflection.

 

 

He had seen them lighting unwanted cigarettes, or drinking unwanted beers
at crowded bars, or just pacing the streets looking for pick-ups. You might
think they were lonely, and for a moment feel a tinge of regret. The same
feeling you might have for a blind violinist tottering along as he sawed
out lonely discords and begged for pennies. But soldiers didn't need
your regrets. They were carefully trained beyond loneliness. They had
lost the conceit called
I
. They still thought of themselves in the
first person, but the
I
had no meaning. They were Angelo Grazziani,
or Dick Bryan, or a host of other names, and when they moved or talked
or loved they were still
I
to themselves, but the connecting link had
been carefully eradicated by Army training. Each
I
existed peripherally
and would disappear as one action supplanted another. Without a war to
unify them, many of them would become dangerous men. They belonged to
the empty nowhere. In cities all over the world in this year 1943 they
were going nowhere, coming from nowhere . . . and caring less.

 

 

Yale climbed on a bus headed for Miami Beach. The driver was a girl.
The traction company had evidently run out of male applicants. Yale
squeezed into one of the small leather seats that backed up to hers.
In this position he could watch the back of her stringy yellow hair,
a fraction of her profile, and an occasional full face view in the mirror
over her head. He was full of admiration for the way she slurred the bus
up Second Avenue.

 

 

"You're pretty good, sister," he said. "How long have you been driving?"

 

 

"Couple of months," was the brief reply as she slammed her foot on the
brake and pulled the lever opening the doors.

 

 

A man, an unlighted cigar in his mouth, his belly tight against a
green slack suit, boarded. Behind him was a white-haired blonde with
black eyebrows. She climbed languidly up the step, delaying a wispy,
grey-haired woman who followed her. The grey-haired woman, impatiently
glaring from behind her pince-nez glasses, fumbled in a laundry type
handbag and finally produced a bill. The bus driver looked at her in
disgust. "Five dollars! For God's sake, madam, haven't you got a dime?"

 

 

"No, I haven't, and I'll thank you not to be fresh, young lady."

 

 

The bus driver snapped quarters, dimes and nickels from her change dispenser
and handed them in a fistful to the lady. The lady clutched them, edging
back in the bus.

 

 

"Madam, your ten cents! You put your ten cents in this little gadget
and then we all go where we are going."

 

 

The lady looked suspiciously at the pile of change in her hands wondering
whether she had four dollars and ninety cents or five dollars.

 

 

The bus driver started the bus with a jerking of gears. The old lady
nearly catapulted through the windshield. Swishing the cigar to the
other side of his mouth the man grabbed her to keep her from going
over. Uncertainly, she deposited ten cents in the coin box.

 

 

"I don't ride on buses very much," she said plaintively to no one in
particular.

 

 

"Jeez," snapped the bus driver. "you meet all kinds."

 

 

There were several seats in the rear but the blonde with the black
eyebrows stood directly in front of Yale holding onto a strap. The bus
swayed violently. The blonde lurched toward him. Yale noticed, with
sudden amazement, that all she seemed to be wearing was a pink dress
which clung tightly to her stomach. Even the dull lights of the bus did
not obscure the black hairs below her navel. I could almost pluck one
or two for a souvenir, Yale thought.

 

 

The bus driver was playing cops and robbers with a blue Chevrolet sedan.
The driver of the Chevrolet was trying to pass on the left. The bus driver
was determined that he wouldn't make it.

 

 

"The lousy bastard. No need to be in such a damned hurry. I'll fix him."
She swerved the bus directly across his path, stopping on the corner of
Tenth Street. Yale heard the squeal of the Chevrolet's brakes. He grinned
as he visualized the driver cursing.

 

 

A few passengers walked out the rear door and waited for the light to
change. Yale watched the crowd moving along the widewalk. He was feeling
better now. He was in the movement of things. He was a speck on the
current of people going somewhere. The faster the current moved the less
the plaguing
I
bothered him. It was like the water therapy that they
give to the insane. The motion, ceaseless, vacillating, bending back on
itself but always going, was a sedative. It smoothed out the tangle of
nervous energy and like a transformer set the current flowing in steady
pulsations instead of an overcharged torrent.

 

 

The bus was moving again. The man with the cigar sat down beside Yale.
The black eyebrowed blonde still stood, her navel enticingly near,
her perfume overpowering in the Woolworth tradition. The man was friendly.

 

 

"I'm President of Pearlstein's Clothiers, New York City," he said,
examining Yale's uniform as he spoke. "Little business and a little
pleasure combined in this trip. How's the war going?"

 

 

"Lousy," Yale answered. What did Pearlstein expect that he would shout
for joy?

 

 

"You oughta be a civilian. You can't get anything. Cigarettes, liquor,
butter . . . that's not all. Try and run a business. The government's at
your neck every minute. You can't get this, you can't hire that. Hell,
I'd rather be in the Army."

 

 

Yale sympathized. It was tough to be a civilian.

 

 

"What are you doing now?" Pearlstein demanded.

 

 

"Nothing much."

 

 

"Come on over to my room. I've got some good Scotch. We'll have a shot."

 

 

Yale got off the bus with him at 15th Street. They walked through to
Collins Avenue. The blonde had gotten off, too.

 

 

"That's an itchy bitch," Pearlstein said. "Watch." He held Yale's arm.
They stopped, waiting. Pearlstein relighted his cigar. The blonde
sauntered by, staring at them coolly. "How much?" Pearlstein asked

 

 

 

 

The blonde turned. She shrugged. "What's money? You have it, you spend it!"
Pearlstein laughed. "There you are, lieutenant. Come on. I'll treat you all
to a drink."

 

 

They walked together in step, the blonde in the middle, Yale and Pearlstein
on either side.

 

 

"My name's Kathie Winters," she said. "I'm not what you think."

 

 

Yale wondered how she had got her hair so yellow white. It looked like
Santa Claus' whiskers.

 

 

"Mine's Jake Pearlstein," the fat man said.