Gone to Soldiers (123 page)

“Zach, I think it's fair to assume I will go to my grave with no more experience of men than you.”

“I should think I might in some ways prove sufficient.” He grinned and lifted a hand to silence her. “Someone at the door. Presumably our supper. Do let them in.”

As they sat down to prime rib, Zach would hear no more of her desires and plans. He regaled her with tales of his exploits in France, Yugoslavia and Indochina until they had finished the meal and the bottle of French burgundy he had ordered with it. He made occasional corrections. “The smile is a little too … effusive? Propitiating? The voice should stay pitched lower. It's passable but could be better.”

If he was giving her a critique to improve her performance, did that mean he would come through? Instinct warned her not to press him. Walk on through the evening, walk on.

After supper, he began to question her about Alaska. She had been studying maps, reading everything she could lay her hands on. She had a map with her she spread on the table. She also had brochures of used planes. The Army was divesting itself of large quantities of cargo and transport planes. She was careful not to ask him for money. She needed more, but with a new identity, she might be able to borrow. The false identity, the honorable discharge, the flying record, the accouterments of an alien male identity only he could give her.

“Think of my poor little friend, out there in the fog wandering. I think he was fooled by you. It's amusing, isn't it? But we won't give him cause for jealousy. It's too elegiac, isn't it? Are you disappointed?”

“Of course,” she lied firmly, “but it will make it easier at home for me too. Flo was being very jealous.”

“I must meet her sometime,” he said languidly, grimacing at his watch. “Don't you think in a way he has something of Jeff's style? The litheness, the quick grace. Did you notice how he moves?”

Bernice produced an encouraging noise, unable to recall any resemblance.

“He's an artist too. Writes poetry in French and Vietnamese. All the cultured ones have that veneer of French culture.” He looked at his watch again. “I told the little bugger to be back here in two hours, and it's close to three. I don't like that. Mommy must spank. Where would he take off to in a city he doesn't know, in a foreign country? I must have patience with him. The Oriental mind knows not of clock time.”

As she left he was glaring at his wrist, peering down the corridor after her in the direction of the elevator.

It was a month later to the day when a package arrived registered mail from Overseas Enterprises Unlimited. In it was everything she needed to establish herself as Harry Edward Munster, formerly of Boston and the Army Air Corps, assigned to OSS during the war and honorably discharged as a captain with ratings up to four-engine planes. There was no note inside, but there was a letter of recommendation from Colonel Zachary Barrington Taylor who had been his commanding officer, and who said he could be relied upon at his new corporate address in Rockefeller Center for a more detailed reference.

Bernice held the package and smiled into the mirror as she took off the wig she had been wearing to work. It might work. It just might. It would be an adventure to try it together, at least for a couple of years. She could always kill off Harry in an accident in the Alaska wilderness. What other chance did they have? What other choice?

LOUISE 12

The Second Gift

In the three months since she had been brought to the dragon's treasure in the mountain by Oscar, she had seen him three times rather formally. They made appointments to spend a day walking in the countryside or touring with his jeep, eating at any country inn still functioning. They were not lovers, but amazingly they had resumed being friends. She imagined that would be the shape of their relationship, perhaps until one of them died.

She had been in flooded Holland, in Denmark covering their remarkable resistance and their marked success in protecting Jews, in Norway to view the burned northern areas, in Paris to cover what
Collier's
described as the rebirth of French fashion, and again and always back to the DP camps.

Thanks to her own reporting and that of others, a fact-finding mission on the treatment of displaced persons arrived in July. She had talked to the Harrison Commission about events she had witnessed, including Patton's use of German police and MPs to round up and beat Jews who had survived camps and were living in Munich and to force them into sealed boxcars for shipment to Poland, whence came tales of their murder. Thus she had rendered herself unwelcome as a correspondent. What was happening to the DPs in the camps, living on near starvation allotments of soup, bread, coffee and dehydrated food, behind barbed wire and guard towers, was the story she most wanted to cover; that was also the story in which magazines were least interested. Assignments were tapering off.

She had just gone to Bergen-Belsen again to visit the community the Jews had created there of impromptu schools and workshops. She was driven by her vision of these people who had been stripped of home, possessions, work, family, friends, community, country, everyone and everything they had loved, all connections now smashed, murdered, gone. How much loss could any human endure? They were that measure.

She had just finished interviewing a boy of fifteen who was frantic to find any surviving family when she was seized by cramps that doubled her over. She had dysentery from contaminated water. The doctor also told her she was suffering from total exhaustion, prescribing a month's bed rest. She shrugged that off, but Oscar, who turned up on the fourth day, did not.

The bug she had was stubborn or her resistance had been demolished by more than a year of living out of a duffle bag, no fresh food, catching what sleep she could on the ground, in barns, in empty ammunition trailers, in dripping tents, in bombed hotels where the plumbing had gone the way of the dinosaur. She was up and seated by the window in her hospital room reflecting to herself that her body was telling her something, perhaps that she was forty-two years old and not twenty-one and lacked an unfailing reservoir of strength to draw upon. Suddenly her body was charging her for the stress she had put it through. Then Oscar walked in carrying roses.

“I'm essentially done,” he said. “OSS is being dismantled. R & A is going to the State Department, but not with me aboard. I leave for New York August twenty-eighth.
Collier's
has you booked on a flight two days later, via Lisbon. Will you go?”

She nodded. “If they let me out. I hate hospitals.”

“The war's over. The announcement should come today, but we picked up the emperor Hirohito broadcasting his surrender to the Japanese people. It's done, Louise.”

She lurched to her feet and stared out the window. In the courtyard a jeep was executing a smart turn. The day looked clay colored and dusty. “Is it really over? Those atomic bombs did it?”

“Perhaps they gave the peace party in the Japanese cabinet more leverage. Their sticking point was the emperor, and it seems that after insisting on unconditional surrender all the way, we will let them keep their divine emperor. It isn't clear whether we dropped those bombs on the Japanese or if they were actually aimed at impressing the Soviets.” He steadied her. “They'll let you out of the hospital tomorrow. But only if you behave.”

“What does that mean?”

“If I could have got you passage sooner, I'd have done it. It's time to go home. You look like death in life, by the way.”

Louise sighed. “I hate the idea of hanging around here. If I'm to be unemployed, I'd rather be unemployed at home.” She could do nothing more for the camp victims here; any political pressure would have to be applied back in the States.

“I have a place we can go. Peaceful. No ruins. That is, no contemporary ruins. No camps. Quiet. We can have it for two weeks, starting tomorrow. It's in Devon. Have you ever been?”

She shook her head no, sinking into her chair. “I think the bug is stubborn because it isn't just a bug. Reality made me sick, not a microbe.”

“Will you go to Devon with me? We're both finished over here.”

“It seems decadent and uncaring to take a vacation.”

“Consider it a convalescence. Or you can stay in the hospital, if discomfort sits better with you. It won't be luxurious. It's just a cottage on a big estate we've used.”

A decision felt too difficult. It was simpler to acquiesce.

“It's a little more rustic than I'd realized,” Oscar said ruefully, surveying the cottage. In the big house where he had stayed before, an archives division of R & A was packing the war for shipment to Washington. By the end of August, OSS would be out of here, and its owners reinstalled.

The cottage was built of stone under a thatched roof, picturesque as he had described it to her, but with only a peat stove for chilly evenings and to heat water for a bath or dishes. The kitchen had another stove, fortunately with some gas left in a cylinder. It lit with a match and a great whoosh. There was only one bed, an observation which caused her a moment's suspicion until she saw how woebegone he was looking.

“It's beautiful, Oscar. Just be glad it isn't more authentic. Have you ever seen the figures on how much of rural England lacks indoor plumbing? Besides, I'm the invalid. You're the cook and housekeeper on this trip, right?”

“You'll be amazed how I've learned to take care of myself.”

“Abra didn't take good care of you?”

“Abra didn't take any kind of care of me. She's not a berrieh, Louie, but it was educational. I have new skills. I can cook, I can clean, I can iron my own shirts, although I confess I look forward to New York laundries.”

“You can cook, you can clean, and I have no housekeeper any longer. Maybe I should marry you?”

“That's my idea,” he said. “If we can manage between us to do one good thing. Now I'm taking that ancient bicycle to town for provisions. Will you be all right?”

“I'll be fine.” And she was, bundled in a quilt to watch the afternoon fog creeping over the lavender and maroon moor. Oscar had borrowed several books from the library of the big house, and she had Joyce Cary's amusing new novel
The Horse's Mouth
in her lap. Much of the time she just watched the fog stealing toward the cottage, built on the edge of the manor park with only a low stone wall keeping them from the vast treeless spaces that beckoned. Inside she was rebuilding her sense of self.

Clotted cream seemed to be the medicine her dysentery required to quiet it. The food here was more plentiful than anyplace she had been since Normandy, with smoked trout, salmon and Dover sole. The fishing boats were going out regularly and they bought local runner beans, gooseberries and plums. Dining in town the third night, they had lamb. Her strength came seeping back. Every day they walked farther out on the moors.

As she grew stronger they wandered from hut circle to menhir to stone row to stone circle and up on a tor for the long view, which always led on to more hut circles, more menhirs, more stone rows and other high rocky tors. Fortunately Oscar had a good map. Maps, he explained, had not been sold in England since the invasion scare in 1940 and had only just become legal again, however, they had always had maps in the big house, to guard against adventurous OSS personnel falling into bogs. Each morning it did not pour, they set out for a clapper bridge, a tor, a particular circle. The half-wild ponies began to recognize them and only moved a modest distance away.

He looked handsome and vigorous with the exercise, the fresh food, but she knew he was not sleeping well in his bag on the floor of the central room. She was up in the loft bedroom with a view out on the moor. Downstairs was the kitchen and the other room and a toilet. They bathed in a washtub in the kitchen. She thought that on the whole Oscar probably found it rougher camping than she did, after her months with the Army. For her it was a welcome halfway house between utter discomfort and utter comfort.

Letters from New York came for him via London OSS. “I'm fondly awaited back at Columbia. I have three classes, a graduate seminar. I don't know how I'll do it—bluff through with my old notes in a box somewhere. They say they're expecting a lot of vets to enroll. That should be interesting, don't you think? A different kind of student body. Not so naive. My publishers want me to spruce up my book on the Weimar Republic and the roots of Fascism, bring it up to date. That should keep me busy and off the streets all winter.”

“I don't know what I want to do. I don't see much scope for myself as a correspondent any longer.”

He wrote replies and went to town to post them. As the sun shone brightly, she dragged a chair outside. She half dozed, musing in the overgrown garden. Small fuzzy lavender daisies in busy clumps stuck up above the matt of weeds drawing bees. Something smelled sweet but she could not track it down. She had never had a garden, so she had never learned the names of plants. She had reference works at home that contained plates of garden flowers. When she needed to be accurate for one of her stories, she looked up an appropriate name, then forgot it five minutes later.

Reunion stories would be big. The man has been at war, but the parting had occurred earlier, perhaps the year war broke out. Were they divorced? No, too racy. Safer to have them engaged and ruptured. They break apart from selfish immaturity on both their parts. In this story, she has to have sinned against him (out of pride? immaturity?) as well as he against her. Is he maimed, wounded, like Rochester? Not this one.

She felt him standing behind her. He had returned from town and in her story trance, she had not heard him. She spoke without turning, her eyes on a raven passing over the long slope, “Love, I wonder if there's a typewriter ribbon in the big house I could have? Mine's so worn I can hardly use it.”

“I'll check it out. Are you filing a story from here?”