When the War Is Over (7 page)

“Doctors,” Phelan said. “Here is a young lady who describes herself as twenty, minister's daughter, cultured, seeking to cheer a military gentleman with news from home.”

“A spinster. Doomed to the single life. Bad complexion,” and Catto went on quickly, avoiding Phelan's eye, “bow legs, doubtless overweight. What newspaper is that?”

“The
Gazette
. You make her sound like those female nurses. Did I tell you of the official requirements?”

“No. Nothing under sixty, I suppose.”

“Wait.” Phelan scrabbled among documents. “Here we are. Listen now, because this shows that Washington is on to you. ‘Past thirty,'” he read, “‘healthy, plain almost to repulsion in dress, and devoid of personal attractions.'”

“That would be going some,” Catto growled. “In my present state Surgeon Phelan is not devoid of personal attractions.”

“Dear me. But we are of different faiths.”

Catto sat up, swung his unshod feet to the floor, hunched forward. “Jack. I want to ask you something. Tell me about the smallpox.”

“The smallpox?” Phelan tossed aside his newspaper. “At this time of night? Well, it is still a problem. All the conditions—”

“No. Yours.”

“Mine?” Phelan blinked and mulled. “Ah no. I see what you're at. This is not smallpox.”

“Oh. I'm sorry. I thought—”

“Of course you did. I don't mind. No, no. This is merely the chicken pox, my friend. As experienced by a young man of four, in a family of eight living in one room, in a house of twelve rooms, in each a family of six or so. A house surrounded by many other such houses, served by pumps in the street and earth closets. I was lucky it was not the black plague. That is what they call the ould sod. Although the country folk had it better.”

“God. You were lucky to get out.”

“I got out at eighteen, when it was too late. My brothers and sisters never got out, though four of them were lucky enough to die young. There were three more, you know, who died the first month. Hearth and home. The Anglo-Irish provided charity each Christmas, in joyous celebration of the birth of our Lord.”

“I know. I had nine years in a home for orphans.”

“Nasty little buggers, no doubt.”

“Yessir. And perishing cold, believe me. We used to fight just to keep warm.” He laughed awkwardly and blushed.

“Oho. What have you remembered?”

Catto laughed frankly then, in hoots and roars. “Buggers is right. The vilest set of moral cripples in the United States of America.”

Phelan applauded. “Now that's a lovely phrase, from you.”

Catto was still red. “There was a lady used to come with exhortations three or four times a week. God and the good life and so forth. She used to hug us. She hugged all of us, so nobody was any worse embarrassed than anybody else. She was a good stout lady with a great soft bosom, and she had the trick of pulling your head right in there in between. Some of us used to line up twice. Those over twelve.”

Phelan was cackling.

“And the food. I eat better in the army. Sometimes I'm sick to my stomach just remembering that food.”

“Ah. Unlike me you never knew the ecstasies of family life.” Phelan pulled a sour face. “I wish to God my own mother had been blessed with a bosom. She was a broomstick and spent her life half-starved. I pass over any mention of the food itself. The garbage in New York was tastier. New York was paradise.”

“How'd you get there?”

“Jumped ship. Which is why I signed on. I was, if you can believe it, rather a bright boy, and won a certificate from the fathers, which impressed the captain of some tub out of Cork. Oh, I was sick.”

“Well, I'm glad you made it.”

“And now I am an honored member of a respected profession. I never sent a penny home and never wrote. Damn them all.”

“You don't mean that.”

“I mean it, all right. I never asked to be born, and starved, and disfigured. I can't even grow a decent beard to hide the damn things. I tried once and it looked like the mange. The ladies are very polite.”

Catto brooded. “The ladies. God damn it, Jack. They drive me crazy.”

“Yes. We are born with these great cannon and no work for them. Did you ever have a look at a newborn baby boy? Enormous equipment. There is something mysterious about it: animals have their heats and such, and go sniffing about in their seasons, but men must be trained to decent behavior. We are always ready. Give us five minutes with nothing to do and we start moaning and scratching ourselves. Or burying ourselves in fat bosoms at the age of twelve. Well, boy, that's the way of it. And it's worse here. An army of scruffy, ill-bred louts with time on their hands. They'll have something else on their hands every night.”

“Not me,” Catto said stiffly. “I'm too old for that.”

“Oh no. Too scared. Hell-fire or whatever. But you're right. Save it for the ladies. You'll enjoy it all the more. Now I wish you would let me get on with my studies here. I am looking for an advertisement by a beautiful young woman with a figger like Juno and ungovernable passions, in desperate need of an expert, pockmarked Irish surgeon of thirty-four. Her father must be a rich distiller with old-fashioned beliefs like the dowry.”

“Ask her if she has a sister,” Catto said. He groaned feebly. “Or even a widowed grandmother.”

Catto was a virgin. Virgins existed in those days. One of his great fears had been that he would die a virgin. The fear sprang not from any desire to leave descendants, but from lecherous curiosity and a poor orphan's sense of waste. The death of a virgin was to Catto inexpressibly sad, being also a contradiction, a contravention of natural law, an unfulfillment, a betrayal of logic, of nature itself, something in it of the house that burns the day they finish glazing, or the pumpkin pie fumbled, hot from the oven, spang on the day's heap of dust, scraps and mouse droppings. And it was easy enough to die a virgin. Millions of young people were carried off betimes by a merciful Providence, catapulted directly to the Good Place and spared poxes, thumbscrews, suppurations—and raptures. In war, yes, many. And woman was, as much as death, an ultimate mystery; sad to miss the one when the other was inevitable. Catto, in whom motive and means flourished, had lacked opportunity and courage. First because in an orphanage administered by God, or by his canting surrogates, young gentlemen tended to find pleasure in one another; Catto was fifteen before he spoke a single serious word to a female under thirty-five, and his seduction was accomplished not by a buxom, raven-haired beauty out of Walter Scott, much less by some fair, inaccessible Rowena, but by a plumpish rogue called Chester. And then because he was afraid, intensely afraid, not precisely of God (Catto was uncertain about God, and at best vexed with Him), but of lightnings, thunders, witherings, castrations and simple horsewhippings. Also of failure, and of unspecified marks of shame: a scarlet letter, boils, a permanent erection necessitating bespoke britches. And then came the war, and camp-followers, with many men behaving like animals, and Catto saw no reason not to join them, really, having long thought of himself as a mutt, a hybrid of the better beasts, lone wolf, gay dog, young cock, Tom Catto; but he made a discovery, a most inopportune, piteous and calamitous discovery: he was a coward. His cowardice took the form of a haughty belief in his own singularity, which kept him off public conveyances, so to speak, and left him waiting endlessly on crowded corners for cabs that never came. The dreams and fantasies that now and again overmastered him were trite; the evasions and lies that permitted him to live on terms of manly equality with the Phelans of this world—those painful twists and strains so alien to a young, direct, apparently uncomplicated man—left his withers always badly wrung; they were voluntary and public, and therefore more shameful than his incorrigible private passions. But he knew no “nice” girls, who were anyway not to be so rudely thought of; and in 1863 a special hospital had been established in Louisville for the treatment of venereal tragedies: the tales were harrowing. Rumor, gossip, myth, loneliness: these were what he (and more others than would confess) knew of fleshly love. Or for that matter of ethereal love. Marriage would, someday, be natural and necessary and doubtless even pleasant, and marriage implied—though Catto was of two minds about this—a creature soft, ignorant, fragile and vulnerable, above all vulnerable, whose bruising destiny it was to submit to pain and indignity, and whom it was simply not fair to sully with the residue, the leavings, of past concupiscence. (The very word, concupiscence, in use among the clergy, appalled him.) Catto had sufficient sin in his heart—those throbs of pleasure at a good shot that took a life—and felt that other slates might better be kept clean. He was always kind to children, as became a hero.

So this lieutenant fought his own war too, moving through company streets on nippy fall evenings, the sun just down, the cold air with its hint of smoke quickening his breath and blood so that his body blazed and then ached, desiring unknown warmths, as though he bore, slung in his trousers, a cold, hungry bear cub, so cold, so hungry, that often Catto turned away from his companions, from himself, with moist eyes as a deep, murderous, clutching emptiness annihilated him. “Just thinking about a girl I knew,” he would say, and Phelan would chuckle and tell him, “Ah, my boy, if I had your youth and vigor,” and they would go on to talk of other things.

Yet it was not all bad. Catto had sense enough to recognize the glory of expectations, and to suspect fulfillments, and sense enough to know that if sufficient generations honored any state of mind or body (God looks after naturals) there might indeed be something honorable in it. I wish I had a girl, he would think; someone to save it
for;
virtue in a vacuum was not easy. Virtue, virtue, virtue my ass, he would think, and add round expletives, as men do when profoundly embarrassed, making inner noises, profane and loud, to distract themselves, to drive off a shameful memory or an unwelcome truth. And he breathed the chill night, calming himself, remembering that he was a lieutenant of infantry and so forth. Give me time, he decided, and I will do a bit better. At the notion of a future he wondered again what that wife of his might be like. Honey-colored hair, he hoped, color of eyes unimportant, but a fine figger, she must be a fine figger; and that brought him to the beginning again, to his avid, detached, hovering lusts, and he saw himself trapped in a circle of want and wait, wax and wane, will and wont. So marched heavily back to his cabin, his men, a nip of whiskey, a game of cards. The cards eased him, fifty-two of them flying about the blanket like birds in patterns, five fluttering into his hand, raising and relieving small excitements, and the money, bits and pieces and scraps of scrip to bet, to win, to count, to stack and stow, and if all the woman he had tonight was the smallest corner of a pasteboard queen, squeezing slowly into sight after the draw, he unsure if she was one of his original pair and then knowing she was a red-headed stranger, glancing in spite of himself at the glittering money in the yellow lamplight—well, if that was all he had tonight it was better than a ball in the belly, and it was no small consolation to know that he had survived. Where there's life there's hope, he thought, as Silliman laid down three aces.

“Well this is a galled jade they have given me,” Phelan said.

“It's a dark night,” Catto said. “You don't want a horse too frisky on a night like this, and a little snow in the air too.” He trembled with excitement, and thanked God that Phelan could not see it.

“Nobody else out, anyway.”

They trotted along, just north of the city, no starlight and no moonlight but a faint glow all about them. Now and then a spark of lamplight, a farmhouse. Catto shifted in the saddle, perturbed. Fires on the hearth. Father and Mother and Little Willie and Baby Mary. “God damn,” he said aloud. “God damn,” but the vision persisted. “What's wrong?” Phelan asked. “Nothing,” Catto said. He saw the kitchen, a long, solid wooden table, a tremendous fire in a tremendous stone fireplace. Around the table ruddy faces, in the warm air warm smells: burning wood, charred meat, leek soup. Catto blinked, and contracted in mysterious embarrassments. A cold night, November, winter closing in.

Well, all right, it would be not bad. Leek soup. Hot potatoes and butter. Worth saying grace.

He considered some future Catto, father of seven. You, Little Willie, chew with your mouth shut. Baby Mary, come here for a pat.

His face was warm in the freezing air. Where did a man pat his own daughter? Fool. This is your home. This blue suit. That's all. Even the horse is only borrowed.

“Not long now,” Phelan sang out. They clattered across a bridge. “Check small arms.”

It was true: in the distance Catto saw a light. A mile, two. He drew in a deep breath, and the cold air seared, and abruptly his body was hot, and there was a deep, flickering, lapping ache in his belly, and all upon him, as if he lay at the bottom of the sea, yearning for air, dizzy and dying. He blinked again, firmly, and brought his knees tighter against the horse. He wondered again what she would look like. Smell like. Better than leek soup? Cold air streamed beneath his collar; he hunched; Phelan had led him into a canter and he had not really noticed. Quick! Quick!

And there they were, whickering into the stable-yard like a couple of knights-errant, with a hostler emerging to take the reins, and Phelan dismounting with all the grace and nonchalance of some silly dook somewhere, as if he would fling the man a bag of silver. Faint odors steamed from the inn, contended briefly with manure, lost, regrouped, steamed forth again. Catto had never seen, or smelled, or heard so clearly; his fingertips tingled. “Pound for pound,” he said, “I am the strongest man in the whole world.”

“That's right,” Phelan said. “Just behave now.” An oil-lamp glowed above the door, another on the porch. Phelan strode in; Catto shut the door carefully, and removed his hat timidly. They stood in a bright hallway, before them a grand staircase rising wide, curving both ways like a ram's horns; to the right and left of them were doors, a saloon, a dining room. Upon a polished table, candlesticks, a dancing flower of light. “Some house, hey? It was once a rich man's.”