by Anton Myrer
Idly he asked: “How long have you been in France, Miss Caldwell?”
“—All right,” she retorted. “All right. You’re noble. You’re Sir Percival in khaki and all the blinder-fluking rest of it.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Of course not. Soul of honor. God! You should have been an Eton boy.”
“Why’s that?”
“You know perfectly well I’ve been changing bedpans for two years. You’re impossible!” She seemed nearly ready to burst into tears. All at once she brightened and said: “Well. I fooled you.” She stopped short and glared at him hard. “Didn’t I? Didn’t I fool you?”
“Yes. You did. Almost completely.”
“What do you mean, almost—!”
Sententiously, as though reading from a regional guide, he declaimed: “The ancient abbey at Vezelay was the seat of the Knights Hospitallers since 1482. The façade was admirably restored by Viollet-le-Duc in 1887 and is one of the finest examples of Romanesque art in Burgundy. It may be visited weekdays from—”
“You didn’t know that then!” she challenged.
“No. I didn’t.”
“Suspicious sneak. Are you one of these people who can’t admit it when they’re beaten? I detest them.”
“No, I’m not. You had me: you did. Only”—he watched the other couples drifting by—he was part of a couple now, delightfully, miraculously—“there was something I couldn’t quite put together. My instinct told me—”
“Oh, you run on instinct, do you?”
“Yes, indeed.” They had reached the Port, and stopped to watch the boats. “This is like a fairy tale,” he mused, “this whole town. Built of dreams. It’s hard to believe that this little fairyland and—all that mess up north are the same country.”
“Yes, and—” she began; stopped herself abruptly.
“And what?”
“Nothing.” Frowning she looked away at the water.
“… Are they tedious?” he said solicitously.
“What?”
“The Great Plains?”
“Oh, stop it,” she said, and then laughed. They both laughed now, looking at each other.
“Do you do things like that often? impersonations?”
“As often as I can.”
“I see. Why?”
“Because I don’t like the world the way it is—that’s why. So I change it.” Her face became bright and animate again. “See how much more exciting it was? I was a countess, with castles and villas galore … Don’t tell me you weren’t thrilled, because you were.”
“Yes, I was.”
“You see?”
“But not because of that … I like it much better this way.”
“That’s because you’re so pedestrian.”
“I suppose so.—Let’s go up to Le Suquet,” he proposed. “I’ve wanted to go up ever since I got here. Are you game?”
“Fortress.” Her lovely lip curled. “You Martians: you’re all in your blasted glory, aren’t you?” Again she stopped and faced him, hands on her hips. “You’re not West Point, are you? I can tell you right now I won’t even promenade with a West Point product. Are you?”
“No. I’m not.”
“Thank God for that, anyway.”
“But I guess I’d better tell you I was accepted for the Point before the war.”
“Why didn’t you go, then?”
He shrugged simply and grinned. “Glory.”
But she did not laugh. “Paths of glory lead but to the grave,” she said.
He nodded. “Who said it?”
“I don’t know.”
Le Suquet was directly above them now, like a proud little mauve toy of a fort, a child’s creation. They went up through the old city, past the markets: garlands of oranges still on their bright, leaved branches, lettuce in crazy hottentot heads, a fish stall with rouget still jumping about flailing their tails, octopi in a milk-colored slimy ooze of flesh and tentacles; on up through sweating dark passages with skulking dogs picking at garbage and crabbed old women bowed low over their loads, worn and toiling … and then they were on the battlements, the wind blowing fresh and fair in their faces, and far to the west Nice lay in a low ivory crescent below the mountains. On the parapet, her hair blowing back from her cheeks, Tommy seemed more at ease, and talked about herself.
She’d been working at Field Hospital Number One at Neuilly and had just been released; most of the patients had been evacuated and there was no further need for her. She’d had a bellyful of things military, if anyone should ask her. Her mother had died when she was six, and she’d been brought up on army posts in Texas, in Georgia and Washington State and the Philippines. There had been aunts who had come to help out, there had been vast, crooning Negresses and chattering Filipinas and Mexican women like squat Buddhist idols; she had eaten frijoles and hominy and water buffalo and God knew what else. She had ridden practically since she was able to talk; she’d had a dog she’d loved, a hammerheaded brute named Aguinaldo who had died of snakebite at Folsom, and she had cried for five days and nights and nothing could console her; she had cut her teeth on a bugle and stood to colors from time out of mind, she’d worn some sort of uniform half her life—and now there was no one, no one in the Western World who was as thoroughly sick of it as she was.
“I’m going to become a courtesan,” she declared. “A celebrated, competent, high-class courtesan, and take up with a White Russian millionaire; or an Egyptian prince. With one of those lovely white yachts right—down—there …”
“Sounds like fun,” he admitted.
“Doesn’t it? And sail round and round, from Cannes to Cyprus to Aden to Tahiti and back again by way of the Seychelles—isn’t that a lovely name? Seychelles—getting more blowzy and sinful and dreamy all the while. Now and then of course I’ll write poetry, and sip absinthe through a glass straw.”
He watched her out of the corner of his eye. “What about your poor old father?”
“Oh, he can take care of himself. He’s a general now, for heaven’s sake … I can remember when he was a first lieutenant: a thousand years old and a first looie. Acting company commander. Now he’s down there in the Blue Bar with the rest of the brass, arguing about who exposed whose flank at Sleazy, and why the Ninety-ninth Dragoons weren’t deployed on the Noodle-Wombat-Dodder line, as planned. Boy, you pirates have made a good thing out of this war.”
“Oh yes, we’ve had a royal time of it,” he said levelly. He knew she was baiting him, and yet there was a wild, tempestuous note he couldn’t take hold of—as though she had caught the contagion of the mistral gusting across from the Esterel.
“Haven’t you, though. More fun than a barrel of scorpions. ‘Men!’” she chanted in a pompous basso, ‘men, we’ve got to take that hill. Now I’ve got to go back to my mess and see if the wine’s been properly chilled for dinner, and I want it captured when I come back.’ But of course the wine hasn’t been properly chilled, the orderly has been working his fingers to the bone shining Colonel ‘Bubbleguts’ boots and pressing his uniform for that evening’s amorous conquest. And so of course Bubbleguts slaps the orderly in the guardhouse. By then”—she was staring at him defiantly, laughing—“by then the chauffeur has come by with the Rolls-Royce, all spic and span, and Bubbleguts has to make up some excuse as to where he’s going, so he picks the battalion billeted near an old chateau he’s had his eye on for some while and sends word to them to prepare for inspection. They’ve just come out of the line—what’s left of them—they’re filthy and exhausted and their equipment and clothing is a wreck. But orders are orders, any tom fool knows that, and the poor beggars drag themselves to their feet and clean their weapons as best they can and fall out for inspection, standing in the rain …”
“You’ve left out the delousing station,” Damon said.
“I’ll get to that. But Bubbleguts has no intention of inspecting them, his mind is set on that vacant chateau. He has himself driven there and i
s delighted to find it has a wine cellar, a buxom, cooperative femme de chambre, and a nice soft bed, not to mention a gorgeous view of the surrounding country, including that hill. It’s all just too providential …”
Her voice was higher now, and tense; her eyes flashed like crossed swords. Damon had stopped smiling. “Suppose we drop this,” he suggested.
“No, but wait! The best is yet to come. Old Bubbleguts—trust him!—is on the phone to Chaumont about the possibilities of promotion. Nothing doing. General Sackful-Paunch is adamant: ‘My dear boy, I can’t recommend you for BG—your casualty figures are far too low. Get ’em up where they belong and I’ll see what I can do.’ Bubbleguts is cast down about this, but not for long. Decision, decision! And what should he see but the battalion—they’ve finally realized they’re not going to be inspected after all and they’re plodding wearily back to the delousing station. The only trouble is, Bubbleguts is a trifle fuzzy, what with all the larded quail and bottles of Chateau Pomerol and chasing the cooperative femme de chambre around from room to room, and he’s lost his orientation. ‘They’re attacking,’ he cries. ‘Good boys!’ In a flash he’s on the line to artillery. ‘Give me a barrage at K42,’ he orders. ‘But Colonel B, that’s behind us, that’s back at the—’ ‘Are you telling me how to run my command?’ Bubbleguts roars. ‘I said K42 and I mean K42—I want everything you’ve got!…’Of course he’s got it confused with a football play back at the Point—on, dear old Army team—but the artillery officer can’t know that, orders are orders, old bean, and he pulls the lanyard. And yep, you guessed it—the first salvo lands smack in the middle of the column: and up they go! Oh my God, it’s just too hilarious for words, all those arms and legs flying through the air, and the medics running around trying to find enough to—”
“That’s enough!” He was on his feet; he had seized her by the arms, was shaking her. “Enough! Stop it, now …”
“Oh you’ve had enough of it, have you—!”
He felt dizzy with anger. “Now you listen to me—a lot of God damned good men got blown all to hell-and-gone in this dirty business, and you’re not to mock them, you understand?”
“—I suppose—”
“You can think anything you like, but you don’t mock them to me …”
“—You think I don’t know that?” she raged at him, “—you think I haven’t had plenty of this idiot game of stinking dressings, the bottles of pus and filth—listening to them groaning hour after hour …?” And now suddenly she was weeping, her face stained with tears, making no effort to brush them away. He stood there, confronting her, not knowing what to do; then because he was still holding her shoulders he put his arms around her very gently; sobbing she fell against him.
“—Damn you all,” she moaned. “All you foolish, noble sons of bitches …”
“All right,” he said in a low voice. “Who was he?”
She flung her head back as if he’d struck her. “—An aviator, that’s who he was, and a far finer person than you’ll ever be, a wonderful person … No, excuse me,” she broke down again, “—I don’t know if he was finer at all, maybe he wasn’t. Excuse me, Major. I don’t know. But he was so sweet. His smile … His plane was hit and he tried to land it and his spine was broken all to pieces. He tried to land the plane because he didn’t have a parachute. Why didn’t they give them parachutes?” she cried thickly. “Why didn’t they? The Germans had them. Why didn’t we?”
“I don’t know,” Damon said.
“It was so hopeless. And he never gave up. He would still give that smile. Ah, God,” she sobbed as if her heart were broken past all mending. “It’s so rotten …”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “God knows I am.”
Two American sailors came around a corner of the battlements and began to watch the scene with a certain sly avidity. Damon turned on them his most forbidding glare and gave a quick, peremptory jerk of his head; the sailors withdrew in alarm. Tommy Caldwell had felt the movement though, and raised her head in time to see them scurry out of sight behind the stone.
“Company,” she said; embarrassed now she turned away, wiping her eyes. “Stupid. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I haven’t cried over Jim in—a long while. Really. I’m all wrought up down here, I shouldn’t have come.” She shook her hair back. “Now my face will look like a redflannel washcloth for hours and hours. Jane said it would change my whole life to come down here. Jane was my superior, a nurse at Neuilly. She came down here on leave and met a captain in the Guards who owns half of Australia.” Sniffling, she blew her nose. “Wasn’t that lucky?”
“Yes, it was.”
“She’s going to be a Melbourne heiress.” She looked at him with a droll, plaintive expression. “You’re not by any chance a millionaire, are you?”
He shook his head. “No. I’m just a poor dumb farm boy.”
“Who went after glory,” she said.
“That’s right,” he said. “That was me.”
But this time, her pretty little nose and cheeks flushed from weeping, she smiled.
13
“I have swum in every ocean in the world,” Elise Lilienkron declared. She was a tall blond girl with a hard, handsome face and eyes like wood smoke. Her father had once been a diamond merchant and on the Riviera she was known as the Empress. “I have swum in the Atlantic and Pacific, and of course the Mediterranean, I have swum in the Indian Ocean at Puri, and in the Sea of Japan at Wakatsu.”
“How about the Black Sea?” Ben Krisler asked.
“Yes. In the Black Sea. At Trabizond.”
“Oh come on, sweetheart,” Lieutenant Poindexter said. “You’re not going to tell us you’ve swum in the Arctic Ocean…”
“I did.” She nodded portentously. “At Bodö, in Norway.”
“Empress baby, that’s not the Arctic …”
“It is north of the Arctic Circle.”
Poindexter turned to Tommy incredulously; his thumb lay along the line of his jaw, which made him look very handsome. “Is it? You’ve been all over the place.”
She shrugged happily, watching his eyes. “I pass. Ask Sam—he knows all those impossible things.”
“Okay, Major,” Poindexter said with a sign. “Is it?”
Sam smiled. “If she’s swum at Bodö, she’s swum in the Arctic Ocean. The Arctic Circle runs from Traenen over to Kuzomen in Finland. And Bodö’s north of that.”
“Oh-my-God,” Poindexter groaned, and Elise smiled at them all archly and murmured: “You see? He knows.”
“I instinctively distrust a man who knows something like that,” Poindexter proclaimed.
Tommy said, “Now Sterling, don’t be rude.”
“Sam knows all kinds of things,” Ben Krisler said, and rubbed his hair with his knuckles. “He’s got a memory like a deadfall. He’s going to be chief of staff by 1939.”
Arlene Hanchett, a Red Cross girl Tommy had got for Ben for the evening, leaned forward at this, her mouth open. “Is he really going to be chief of staff?”
“I don’t know why not. I’ll vote for him.”
“1939?” Poindexter said, coming back into the conversation. “What’s all this idle talk about 1939?”
The six of them were holding down a table at Le Jongleur Ivre, a stylish little cabaret off the Rue d’Antibes where dancers jostled one another pleasantly under a murk of cigarette smoke to music from a tumultuous six-piece Negro band. The bass drum said in red circular lettering Long Tom Jethro and His Delta Serenaders. Tommy Caldwell, humming the tune—it was “After You’ve Gone”—held her glass to her lips and watched the dancers shuffle and collide, and the great blue panel on the wall above the bandstand where a red giant with a hat whose brim made the shape of an infinity sign tossed in the air around him a poniard, drinking goblets, a walking stick and showers of golden coins. Someone she didn’t recognize waved to her from the floor and she waved back happily. On the table were several bottles of Moët-Chandon—Poindexter had insisted on o
rdering it, he said there was no champagne like Moët-Chandon, no matter what anybody said—and their party had by now become sublimely convivial.
“What about the Caspian Sea, Empress baby?” Poindexter was saying with an air of sly triumph.
Elise nodded seriously. “Yes. At Balakhany. That is near Baku.”
“God, that’s helpful. I never heard of either place …”
“That is because you are so provincial,” she answered in her faint, untraceable accent, and gave him a dreamy smile.
“I don’t know about that. I’ve had my moments.” Sterling Poindexter was a tall young man with dark, wavy hair and fine shoulders, and he moved with the easy grace of the world’s favored. His uniform had been custom made at Selfridge’s and his Sam Browne belt was of Russian calf worked soft as doeskin and polished like horn. He had been wounded in the foot at the Bois des Rappes and he would never forgive the Germans for ruining an excellent pair of Peel’s boots. Tommy thought he was the most attractive man she had ever laid eyes on. As though conscious of her regard he filled her glass with champagne again, his wrist turning the bottle subtly as he poured, and she smiled at him, liking him, the party, the Jongleur Ivre, the various soldiers and girls who stopped by their table every now and then to say hello and then move on. A perfect evening, she thought, and Dex brought it into being. He does everything right.
To defend him she said to Elise: “Dex sailed the old Feng-huang all the way from New York City to Tahiti with a crew of five. At the age of nineteen.”
Poindexter snorted. “Kid stuff.” He looked at Sam, who was sitting on Tommy’s left. “Ever done any sailing, Damon?”
Sam shook his head and grinned. “First boat I ever was on in my life was the Tom Jefferson, coming over here.”
Tommy smiled. That was Sam all over: simple, no-bones-about-it direct. Poindexter looked disconcerted. “You’re joking.”