by Herman Wouk
Victor Henry plunged, fearing Hopkins might overcommit him by speaking up first. “I’m not sure, Mr. President. Admiral Nimitz has requested my services as Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations.”
“Oh, I see! Really!” The President arched his heavy brows at Hopkins. Clearly this was news to him. A shade of vexation flickered over Hopkins’s face. “Well, then, that’s where you’ll go, I suppose. I certainly couldn’t blame you for that. All the best.”
Roosevelt rubbed his eyes with two fingers, and put on his glasses. This changed his aspect. He looked younger, more formidable, more the familiar President of the newspaper pictures, less an old man with mussed gray hair in bed with a cold. Obviously he was finished with Victor Henry, and ready to get on with his morning’s work. He was turning toward the other men.
It was Pug who took the matter further, with a few words that haunted his memory always. There was a touch of disappointment in the President’s reaction, a resigned acceptance of a naval officer’s narrow human desire to promote his own career during a war, that stung him into saying, “Well, Mr. President, I’m always yours to command.”
Roosevelt turned back to him with a surprised and charming smile. “Why, Pug, it’s just that Admiral Standley really did feel he could use you in Moscow. I had another cable from him about you only yesterday. He has his hands full over there.” The President’s jaw lifted and stuck out. A formidable aspect came over him, as he straightened up under the cape. “We’re fighting a very big war, you know, Pug. There’s never been anything like it. The Russians are difficult allies, Heaven knows, perfectly awful to deal with sometimes, but they are tying down three and a half million German soldiers. If they go on doing that, we’ll win this war. If for some reason they don’t, we may lose it. So if you can help out in Russia, and my man on the spot seems to think so, why, maybe that’s where you should be.”
The faces of the other men were turned to Victor Henry with mild curiosity, but he was scarcely aware of them. There was only the sombre face of Roosevelt before him; the face of a man he had once known as a handsome Assistant Secretary of the Navy, scrambling up a destroyer’s ladders like a boy; now the visible face of American history, the face of a worn old cripple.
“Aye aye, sir. In that case, I’ll go from here to the Bureau of Personnel, and request those orders.”
A pleased light came into the President’s eyes. He held out his hand with a sweep of a long arm from under the cape, gesturing manly gratitude and admiration. It was all the reward Victor Henry ever got. When he thought about this scene in after years, it seemed enough. A love for President Roosevelt welled up in his heart as they shook hands. He tasted the acrid pleasure of sacrifice, and the pride of measuring up to the Commander-in-Chief’s opinion of him.
“Good luck, Pug.”
“Thank you, Mr. President.”
A friendly nod and smile from Franklin Roosevelt, and Victor Henry was walking out of the bedroom, the course of his days turned and fixed. Hopkins, near the door, drily said, “So long, Pug.” His eyes were narrow, his smile cool.
Rhoda jumped up as her husband walked into the living room. “Well? What’s the verdict?”
He told her. At the way her face fell, Pug felt a passing throb of his old love for her, which only told him how nearly it was gone.
“Oh, dear, and I was so hoping for Washington. Was that what you wanted — Moscow again?”
“It’s what the President wanted.”
“That means a year. Maybe two years.”
“It means a long time.”
She took his hand, and twined her fingers in his. “Oh, well. We’ve had a lovely couple of weeks. When do you take off?”
“As a matter of fact, Rho”— Pug looked uncomfortable —“BuPers used some muscle and put me on the Clipper that leaves tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow!”
“Dakar, Cairo, Tehran, Moscow. Admiral Standley really seems to want me there.”
They drank their best wine at dinner, and fell into reminiscing about old times, about their many separations and reunions, retracing the years until they were back to the night when Pug proposed. Rhoda said, laughing, “Nobody can say you didn’t warn me! Honestly, Pug, you talked on and on about how AWFUL it was to be a Navy wife. The separations, the poor pay, the periodic uprooting, the kowtowing to the wives of big brass, you reeled it all off. At one point, I SWEAR, I thought you were trying to talk me out of it. And I said to myself, Tat chance, mister! This was your idea, now you’re HOOKED.’”
“I thought you should know what you were getting into.”
“I’ve never regretted it.” Rhoda sighed, and drank her wine. “It’s such a pity. You’ll miss Byron. That convoy should be getting here any day.”
“I know. I don’t like that much.”
They were relaxed enough, and Rhoda was female enough, and it was near enough to the end, so that she couldn’t resist adding, very casually, “And you’ll miss Pamela Tudsbury.”
He looked her straight in the eye. What they had never yet talked about suddenly lay, as it were, out on the table — his romance with Pamela, and her affair with Palmer Kirby, a name that had not crossed his lips, any more than Warren’s had. “That’s right. I’ll miss Pamela.”
Long seconds passed. Rhoda’s eyes dropped.
“Well, if you can stand it, I’ve made an apple pie.”
“Great. I won’t get that in Moscow.”
They went to bed early. The lovemaking was self-conscious and soon past, and Pug fell heavily asleep. After smoking a cigarette, Rhoda got up, put on a warm robe, and went downstairs to the living room. The album of records she pulled out from a low shelf was dusty. The record was scratched and slightly cracked, and the faded orange label was scrawled over with crayon, for at one point the kids had gotten at this album, and had played the records to death. The old recording was tinny and high-pitched, a ghostly voice from the distant past, coming weak and muffled through the worn surface:
It’s three o’clock in the morning
We’ve danced the whole night through
And daylight soon will be dawning
Just one more waltz with you…
She was back in the officers’ club in Annapolis. Ensign Pug Henry, the Navy football star, was taking her to some big dance. He was much too short for her, but very sweet and somehow different, and crazily in love with her. It showed in his every word and look. Not handsome, but virile, and promising, and sweet. Irresistible, really.
That melody so entrancing
Seems to be made for us two
I could just keep right on dancing
Forever dear with you.
The antique jazz band sounded so thin and old-fashioned; the record ran out so fast! The needle scratched round and round and round, and Rhoda sat there staring dry-eyed at the phonograph.
PART FIVE
pug and Pamela
56
PUG didn’t miss Byron by much.
Two days after the Clipper left for the Azores on the first leg of his circuitous flight to Moscow, the destroyer Brown came steaming up-channel into New York harbor. Happy sailors crowded the flying bridge, hands jammed in the pockets of their pea jackets, feet stamping, breath smoking in eager ribald talk about shore leave. Byron stood apart from them in a heavy blue bridge coat, white silk muffler, and white peaked cap, staring up at the Statue of Liberty as the green colossus slid past, starkly lit by a clear cold midwinter sunrise. The crew were wary of this passenger officer. Because the wardroom was short-handed he had stood deck watches under way; a cool shiphandler who spoke little and smiled less while on the bridge. Joining the watch list had made Byron feel that he was getting back in the war, and the officers of the Brown, relieved of a grinding one-in-three, had gratefully treated him as one of themselves.
As the convoy scattered, the merchant vessels heading for the New Jersey shore or the sunlit skyscrapers of Manhattan, the screening ships toward Brooklyn, Byron impatiently jingled in a c
oat pocket a fistful of sweaty quarters. When the Brown tied up at a fueling dock, he was the first man down the gangway and into the lone telephone booth on the wharf. A queue of sailors was lined up at the booth by the time his call got through the State Department switchboard.
“Byron! Where are you? When did you get back?” Leslie Slote sounded hoarse and harried.
“Brooklyn Navy Yard. Just docked. What about Natalie and the kid?”
“Well —” at Slote’s hesitation, Byron immediately felt sick, “— they’re all right, and that’s the main thing, isn’t it? The fact is, they’ve been moved to Baden-Baden with those other Americans who were in Lourdes. Just temporarily, you understand, before they’re all exchanged, and —”
“Baden-Baden?” Byron broke in. “You mean Germany? Natalie’s in Germany?”
“Well, yes, but —”
“GOD ALMIGHTY!”
“Look, there are reassuring aspects to this. They’re in a superb hotel, getting A-one treatment. The Brenner’s Park. They’re still classed as journalists, still in with diplomats, newspapermen, Red Cross workers, and such. Our charge d’affaires who was in Vichy, Pinkney Tuck, heads the group. He’s a top man. A Swiss diplomat is at the hotel, looking out for their rights. Also a German Foreign Ministry man and a French official. We’re holding plenty of Germans that their government wants back very badly. It’ll just be a haggling process.”
“Are there any other Jews in that group?”
“I don’t know. Now, I happen to be busy as hell, Byron. Phone me at home tonight, if you like.” Slote gave him the number and hung up.
As Byron’s white forbidding face passed through the wardroom full of officers dressed for going ashore, the raillery died. Alone in his cabin, folding uniforms into his footlocker, he tried to plan his next move, but he could scarcely think straight. If one brush with Germans on a French train had been too grim a risk for Natalie to take, what about now? She was in Nazi Germany, over the line, over on the other side! It was, beyond imagining; she must be scared out of her mind. In Lisbon Slote had told a bloodcurdling tale of what was happening to the Jews, even claiming that he was returning to Washington to deliver evidence to President Roosevelt. Byron found the story beyond belief, a hysterical exaggeration of what was probably going on in Germany in the fog of war. He did not fear that his wife and son really risked being caught in a continent-wide process of railroading Jews to secret camps in Poland, where they would be gassed to death and their bodies burned up. That was a fairy tale; even Germans could not do such things.
But he did fear that their diplomatic protection might fail. They were illegal fugitives from Fascist Italy, and their journalist credentials were phony. If the Germans turned ugly, they might be singled out first for harsh treatment, among those Americans trapped in Baden-Baden. Louis might sicken or die from mistreatment; he was such a little thing! Byron left the Brown sunk in wretchedness.
Trudging through the Navy Yard with his footlocker, amid laborers thronging off their jobs for lunch, he decided that if he could locate Madeline, he would stay in New York overnight; then go to Washington, and from there fly to San Francisco, or to Pearl Harbor if the Moray had departed. But how to get hold of Madeline? His mother had written that she was back working for Hugh Cleveland, and had sent him an address on Claremont Avenue, just off the Columbia campus. He could drop his stuff at his old fraternity house, he figured, and spend the night there if he couldn’t track her down. Since their parting in California, he had not heard from her.
The cab wound through Brooklyn, came out on the Williamsburg Bridge for another brilliant view of the skyscrapers, then plowed into the lower east side of Manhattan, where Jews in numbers were hustling along the sidewalks. His mind circled back to Natalie. She had struck him from the start as a sophisticated American, all the more alluring for a dusky spicy trace of Jewishness — to which she had never alluded in the old days except in self-mockery, or in contempt for Slote because he had allowed it to matter. Yet in Marseilles she had appeared overpowered, paralyzed, by her Jewishness. Byron could not understand. He took little account of race differences; he thought it was all bigoted nonsense, and his attitude toward the Nazi doctrines was one of incredulous contempt. He felt out of his depth in this thing, but the residue was anger and frustration at his stiff-necked wife, and scarcely endurable concern for his son.
The fraternity house had the same old dusty banners and trophies on the walls. The brick fireplace was piled as ever with cold wood ashes, fruit peelings, cigarette packages and butts, and over the mantel, the portrait of an early benefactor was much darkened by more years of wood smoke and tobacco fumes. As always, two collegians clicked away at the ping-pong table, watched as always by idlers on broken-down sofas; and as always blaring jazz shook the walls. Surprisingly callow and pimply high school boys seemed to have taken over the place. The spottiest of these introduced himself to Byron as the chapter president. He had obviously never heard of Byron, but the uniform impressed him.
“Hey,” he bellowed up the stairs, “anybody using Jeff’s room? Old grad here for overnight.”
No answer. The spotty president ascended with Byron to a back bedroom where the same sepia picture of Marlene Dietrich hung, wrinkling and askew. The president explained that the occupant Jeff, about to flunk all his midterms, had abruptly joined the Marines. The wise-guy Columbia grin that went with this disclosure made Byron feel more at home.
One o’clock. No use trying to track down Madeline now, all those radio types would be out to lunch. Byron had stood the midwatch, and had stayed awake ever since. He set his alarm for three and stretched out on the dingy bed. The discordant crash and bleat of jazz did not keep him from falling fast asleep.
Cleveland, Hugh, Enterprises, Inc. 630 Fifth Avenue. The directory at the telephone under the staircase was a couple of years old, but he tried the number. A blithe girlish voice came on. “Program coordinator’s office, Miss Blaine.”
“Hello, I’m Madeline Henry’s brother. Is she there?”
“You ARE? You’re Byron, the submarine officer? Really?”
“That’s right. I’m in New York.”
“Oh, how terrif! She’s at a meeting. Where can she reach you? She’ll be back in an hour or so.”
Byron gave her the number of the pay telephone, hunted up the spotty president through the smoke, and got his promise to take any message that came in. He escaped from the jazz din into the windy freezing street, where he heard very different music: the “Washington Post March.” On South Field, blue-coated ranks of midshipmen were marching and countermarching with rifles. In Byron’s time the only marching on South Field had been for anarchic antiwar rallies. These fellows might be a year getting out to sea, Byron thought, and then months would pass before they could stand watch under way. This marching mass of unblooded reservists made him feel pretty good about his combat record; then he wondered, in his low frame of mind, what was so praiseworthy about repeated exposure to getting killed.
Why not walk to the Prairie State, scene of his own reserve training? Nothing else to do. He strode up Broadway, and over to the river on 125th Street. There was the old decommissioned battleship, tied up and swarming with midshipmen. The smells from the Hudson, the piping and loudspeaker announcements, deepened his nostalgia. On the Prairie State, in the long bull sessions at night, there had been so much talk of the kind of wife one wanted! Hitler and the Nazis then had been ludicrous figures in the newsreels; and the Columbia demonstrators had been signing pledges right and left not to fight in any wars. Natalie’s predicament seemed, in the familiar scene at the foot of 125th Street, a dim incredible nightmare.
It occurred to Byron that he could go back to the fraternity house through Claremont Avenue, and slip a note under Madeline’s door telling her where he was staying. He found the house, and pressed the outside call bell beside her name. The door buzzed in reply; so she was in! He opened the door, leaped up two flights of stairs, and rang her bell.
Before Byron could say anything, a deep rich male voice rumbled from inside, “What is it, honey?” Hugh Cleveland came in sight, nude to the waist, and below that clad in a flopping flowery lava-lava, scratching his hairy chest.
“It’s Byron,” Madeline gasped. “How are you, Byron? My God, when did you get back?”
Fully as disconcerted as she was, Byron asked, “Didn’t you get my message?”
“What message? No, nothing. Well, Jesus Christ, now that you’re here, come in.”
“Hi, Byron,” said Hugh Cleveland, with the charming smile that showed all his big white teeth.
“Say, are you two married already?” Byron said, walking into a well-furnished living room where an ice bucket, a bottle of Scotch, and soda bottles stood on a table.
Cleveland and Madeline exchanged a look, and Madeline said, “Sweetie, how long will you be here, anyway? Where are you staying? Jesus Christ, why didn’t you write or telephone or something?”
A door was open to a bedroom, and Byron could see a big rumpled double bed. Though abstractly he accepted the possibility that his sister was misbehaving, he literally did not believe his eyes. He said to Madeline, with clumsy blundering bluntness, “Madeline, come on, are you married, or what?”
Hugh Cleveland might have been well-advised to keep quiet at this point. But he smiled a big white smile, spread his hands, and rumbled warmly, “Look, Byron, we’re all adults, and this is the twentieth century. So if you’ll —”