The Whiskey Tide (47 page)

     
"I'm sure you do the best you can."

     
The patronizing note in Theo's voice made Joe stiffen with its unvoiced thought that of course Joe's knowledge of how to take care of a woman was limited by the class into which he'd been born. Joe drew a breath. Kate's cousin was sick, and couldn't change his spots in any case. Let it go.

     
"I just stopped by to let you know I'd finished what you started with Garvey. If it's any satisfaction, he looks worse than you do now. He's been warned off. Kate and her sister don't know anything about it. I thought you might like to."

     
The man in the bed studied him at length. "I wish you'd let me die," he said finally. "Take these pillows from under me. And pull up my blanket."

     
Joe hadn't skinned his knuckles to be given orders as if they were still in the army.

     
"Call a nurse," he said, and left.

Thirty-four

     
Was it true affection, deeper than cousinly fondness, that kept Aggie at Theo's side, or was it guilt? In times past, Aggie had often gone to extremes in attempts to atone for her misdeeds. Kate weighed both possibilities as she walked down the corridor toward Theo's room. When she looked in, he and Aggie were talking softly, their hands linked tightly together, oblivious to her arrival. Kate swallowed as a door closed somewhere inside her.

     
"You're looking rather dashing now," she said.

     
Theo laughed weakly. The bandages that had wound around his head were gone, replaced by heavy pads of gauze on his cheeks. The new arrangement, held in place by a few adroit windings of linen at his forehead and under his chin, had allowed his hair to be combed. It would be some time before he could be shaved, and where he wasn't bandaged he was well into the start of a beard.

     
"Aggie says everyone will take my scars for dueling scars and I'll look wildly mysterious."

     
"And see? Kate's saying the same thing practically."

     
Kate had stopped almost daily, either after tutoring or with her mother or Rosalie in the evening. She asked how he was feeling, said he looked better, then gave him a smile.

     
"I have to run, but I need to borrow Aggie for a conference first."

     
Aggie looked at her in surprise. What could Kate have to say that couldn't be said in front of Theo? She gave no objection, however, leaving her chair and following Kate. Outside Theo's door she raised an eyebrow.

     
"Aggie, I know this is beastly when you want to be with Theo, but Mama needs you. She signed the lease on that shop. She was worried someone else might take it. With money going out she's got to start getting things ready, but she's getting cold feet. Can't you spare just a few hours a day down there with her? Please?"

     
Aggie was subdued. "I must, mustn't I?" There was none of the argument Kate had expected. "I egged her on with the whole idea." She looked reluctantly toward Theo's door. "Would afternoons be enough, do you think?"

     
"It would save my strength if I didn't have to strain to hear what you're saying," Theo called.

***

     
For the first time in his life, unless you were counting the army, Joe had applied for work. He didn't know what had made him. No, that was lying. He did know. Some cockamamie idea that if he took a job with a future he could ask Kate out. The man who'd interviewed him for a foreman's job in a manufacturing plant had brought him back to reality.

     
"Smart fellow." The man trailed cigar ash as he studied Joe's application. "Wish I had a couple with your kind of qualifications. But you've been a working man all your life. Might be too sympathetic to labor." He eyed Joe shrewdly. "Might even turn out to be some kind of agitator."

     
Disgusted that he'd attempted something so foolish, Joe strode up the hall toward Theo's room. He'd come to apologize. What he'd said several days ago hadn't been right. If Kate happened to be there and he saw her a minute, that would be fine too.

     
She and her sister who'd caused all the trouble were just about to leave. It took his breath away how trim and perfect she looked in the serious clothes that told him she'd been tutoring. The delicate skin beneath her eyes was dark from lack of sleep.

     
"Kate, you look like the devil," he said forgetting the others. "What in God's name are you doing?"

     
She tried to laugh it off self-consciously. "I beg your pardon?"

     
"You do look rather frazzled, actually," Theo agreed in an odd tone.

     
The room had grown silent. The others were watching them. Joe knew he ought to look away but found it hard when her lips were curved at what she mistook for teasing.

     
"Tell Woody he ought to get you out in the fresh air more."

     
"He's too busy with his friend Aaron to waste time with girls." She became aware of the others and raised an eyebrow in pretended disdain at the book he was carrying. "Churchill?"

     
"I'd put him up against those free-thinkers you dote on."

     
Her laugh was golden. "Aggie and I need to go. It was good to see you."

     
"Good seeing you, Kate." They were at the door when he had a thought. "You said you owed some old neighbor of yours a sail. Billy's free Saturday, and so am I. It would give me a chance to check your boat, make sure it's set for the season."

     
Her shyness descended. "I don't like to impose...."

     
"It's no imposition."

     
"Well, then. If you want to bring anyone...."

     
Joe watched the two women leave. Theo was studying him when he turned.

     
"I came to apologize," Joe said abruptly. "Acting the way I did the other day. Leaving you in the lurch."

     
"I deserved it. Ordering you around."

     
"Habits die hard."

     
Theo's expression tightened. Then he gave a thin smile.

     
"I suppose they do." He was silent a moment. "When did you go over?"

     
"June of eighteen, the big push. You?"

     
"Fall of seventeen. One of the first." There was pride in his voice. "I suppose you were at St. Mihiel?"

     
Joe nodded.

     
Theo's chuckle was little more than a breath. "Hun bastards were more surprised than we were."

     
They shared a grin. Fifteen thousand prisoners and more than four hundred artillery pieces had fallen to the Americans in a day and a half. Silence edged in, driven by memories. Land charred and barren from years of fighting. Stray corpses from earlier battles left unburied, reduced to skeletons with fleshless fingers still gripping their rifles. The clattering of machine guns. Screaming. Fear of gas.

     
"Were they good friends? The ones who were killed?" Joe asked quietly.

     
Kate's cousin startled, as if from a dream.

     
"Ed Morris I'd known all my life. We went through school together. Ran into each other in Paris, in the officers' mess." He had the grace to look embarrassed at the reference. "Got cut in half by a bayonet before we'd been in the field a month.

     
"The other two fellows I met over there. One from here, one from Boston. All of us in artillery, glad to talk about home now and then. When we got back they'd come by and drag me off with them, cane and all. We... could talk." He swallowed. "Both of them died of influenza the first winter back. Stupid. Two men in splendid shape — dead. Me, useless — alive."

     
His words had grown increasingly bitter. Joe didn't know what to say. He'd felt it too, the guilt of being alive when so many weren't.

     
The man in the bed looked drained.

     
"They want to take my leg," he said suddenly. "Claim it's poisoning my system." He lay back on his pillows, averting his face. "Sorry. I don't know why I told you that."

     
Joe sat down uninvited. He could sense the other man's need to talk, tangled up in deeply ingrained class consciousness that told him he was better than Joe.

     
"I haven't let anyone else know," he said after a minute. "So if you'd not mention it...."

     
"Sure."

     
"I suppose I'm wallowing in self-pity."

     
"Only one who could answer that would be another fellow in your position."

     
Theo sent him a grateful look.

     
"I'm not much of a prize as it is, but I fought so hard to keep the damned leg. They wanted to take it there in the field. I thought that was just — expediency." He swallowed. "There were a lot of us injured that day."

     
Joe nodded. After a bit Theo spoke again.

     
"It might be wise to tell Kate you took care of Felix. She takes too many worries on herself."

***

     
"You're dressing up a lot these days," Vic observed as Joe came in from the hospital.

     
"Practicing to be a tycoon." It was easier to pass it off as a joke than to try and counter the notion he was trying to act finer than the other Santaynas.

     
"Rita's here," Drake said with a grin. The words were hardly out of his mouth when the kitchen door opened.

     
"Hi, Joe," she said. "You've been scarce as hens' teeth."

     
"Yeah, I've been busy."

     
They'd made up. She'd come by to see him at Vogel's, even pretending interest in the engine he was repairing. He'd taken her out on Friday, but they didn't go out as often as they had before he started thinking of Kate — pointless thoughts. Now here stood Rita, so good looking she turned heads, with drive and energy and crazy about him. Vic was frowning, willing him to act. Joe drew a breath; did what Kate herself had suggested.

     
"How would you like to go sailing Saturday? Have a picnic?"

     
Rita wrinkled her nose. "What kind of fun is a boat? I'd rather go to the picture show, or to Finnegan's. Look, I got to get home."

     
"We'll go somewhere Saturday night then."

     
"Joe isn't careful, he'll end up at the altar," Drake chortled when the front door had closed.

     
"Be smart if he did." Vic's face had relaxed.

     
Rose appeared. "Ma says tell you dinner's ready."

     
There was chicken and noodles, and Nana had come down. As plates were filled Joe noticed a cobbler sitting on the counter.