Once an Eagle

by Anton Myrer

  In time Tommy gave her a bromide and put her to bed while Sam talked with Ben, minimizing the whole incident, calming him down, and still later they went back into their half of the quarters and checked the children. Donny was sleeping restlessly, as he always did—convulsed like a climber clinging to a rock face, his forehead sweaty, his eyelids twitching, the bedclothes wound around his wiry body; but Peggy lay as placid as a fairy princess, her cheek in a lovely little curve, her braids pressed against her throat. When Damon kissed her forehead she did not even murmur to herself. How different we all were: how bewilderingly different! The rebels, the acquiescent, the driven and the serene—and everyone toiling along with his full marching order of dreams and fears; some straggling, some falling by the wayside, a few turning off into the jungle or even firing into the column with the savagery of the desperate and lost. But for all that, the procession still wound its laborious, errant way …

  Tommy was brushing her hair at the little vanity when he came into the bedroom. Yawning he sat down on his cot and said: “Well, it’s nice old Butch doesn’t go for your type.”

  “Isn’t it?” she said. “Isn’t it just?” She gazed at her own image severely, her neck arched. “Well,” she said, “you patched things together again. Old Mr. Bromide. But it’s no solution.”

  “What do you mean, honey?”

  “All that.” She tossed her head toward the partition. “Nothing’s solved, you know.”

  “Honey, nothing’s ever solved for good.”

  “Some other rummy or self-appointed post stallion will start climbing Marge, and Ben’ll blow his stack and lay him out and then the fat will be in the fire.”

  “Maybe so,” he answered.

  “Maybe? Inevitably. You’ve only bought him some time, that’s all.”

  He watched her a moment. It was almost 3 A.M., his eyes were burning and his shoulder ached where he’d piled into the wooden frame; but she seemed to want to talk this out, and he was willing to indulge her. “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?” he asked. “Buying time? It’s like the kids, and mumps and measles: you get over one crisis, and move on to the next.”

  “But this is totally different—the precipitating factors are different, don’t you see?” She set down her brush and turned to face him. “Why do you do it, Sam?”

  “Do what?”

  “All that—bucking her up, bailing him out … Why go to so much time and effort with him?”

  He lighted a cigarette, and said: “There are times when nothing is as important as loyalty.”

  “But if he’s only going to get in trouble sooner or later—”

  “He’s a good officer, Tommy. And a good man. He’s terrific with troops—you’ve never seen him. He’ll make a fine commander.”

  “If he ever gets the chance.” She looked down at her hands. “You take too much on yourself, darling. You really do. You can’t keep people from being what they are.”

  “I’m not trying to do that.”

  “Haven’t you ever wondered why he’s running along the edge of insubordination all the time?”

  Probably for the same reason I have to be always helping everybody out and you break out in tantrums, he wanted to say—because of something that happened to us when we were seven, or twelve; and what the hell would that prove? But he stilled the impulse. “That’s just the way he is, I suppose,” he said aloud.

  “It’s because he hates the Army,” she declared. “That’s why.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He hates the whole system, from muzzle to butt plate—and yet he’s stuck with it. He can’t stand it, and he can’t leave it. And maybe he’s not so far off base, either.” She looked at him from under her brows, her eyes very deep and intense. “Sam, has it occurred to you that the wrong things are on trial here? that it’s not a question of Margie’s sexy body or Ben’s violent temper, but the whole impossible, myopic lunacy of the Army? Has it?”

  Watching her without expression he nodded. “Yes. It’s occurred to me.”

  “I’ve been giving it a lot of thought. Between letting Bubbles De Grace Charleston all over my toes and smiling winningly at Peavey and passing the canapés around like a good dutiful junior officer’s wife, that is.” She got up and stood straight as a sentry on post, hands at her sides. “You know something, Sam? It’s all a pretty little fraud. This whole band-playing, spit-and-polish system you’re wound up in. It is simply insane. The system says you’re all noble knights in modern armor, holding the wall against the shaggy barbarian invaders. The fact of the matter is that there aren’t any invaders anywhere around—and if there were the American public wouldn’t give a hoot in a gale. The system says Batchelder is a fine, upstanding old soldier and Peavey is a brilliant tactician and Votaw is a wizard with weapons, and that they’re all officers and consummate gentlemen. The fact—the truth which nobody can mention inside this myth-laden booby hatch—is that Votaw is a pompous ass and Peavey is a power-drunk sadist, and dear old Batchelder is a miserable, wretched, skirt-chasing rummy! …”

  The last sentence, spoken in a low voice but with great intensity, rang in the little room. Damon said quietly: “He drinks more than he should.”

  “Oh, Jesus. You sound like Poppa.—He’s a disgrace to the uniform eighty-five percent of the time.”

  “Not quite … He was badly gassed at Vauquois.”

  “All right, and you were badly wounded at Mont Noir and Ben was badly wounded at Malsainterre. What does that prove? That your luck ran out—that’s what you used to say, anyway. Why should he be able to barge in on the four of us at any hour that pleases him? Why should he be honored so?”

  He sighed, and rubbed his face with one hand. “You don’t have to worship at his feet. The theory is that you respect the rank he holds.”

  “But I don’t respect him—!”

  “Look, Tommy, we don’t any of us come up to all we might in this world …”

  “That’s no answer—”

  “Ideally he would act in such a way as to command the respect of the lesser grades.”

  “The fact is that Batchelder can’t command the respect of a frog, and that they busted you down from major without a qualm. The fact is Courtney Massengale remained a captain, and now he’s made major, and he’s just been assigned to the War Monuments Commission.”

  He felt himself start in surprise. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Jeannette North told me. Yes—per diem and a fancy apartment in Paris and a private car to go tooting around to all the battlefields—the ones you crawled all over and left your friends on—taking notes for a cute little guidebook.” Her face was hard now with scorn. “And he hasn’t any combat record at all. Who has a better right to be there, doing that—Massengale or you?”

  Well, it was a blow: more than he would have believed. A man who had never been in the line, never cringed under the shriek and slam of high explosive, never stepped out into the terrible chatter of the Maxims—that he should walk through the cemeteries where—

  He dismissed the thought; took a deep breath. “Honey, every profession has its own preferments and favoritism.”

  “And how!”

  “All right—people are people. Why do you expect the Army to be immune? It’s full of people, too. And some are like George Caldwell and some are like Clarence Batchelder; and most of us are somewhere in between. Do you think I’d have got to be a major without your father’s influence?”

  Her eyes flashed up at him. “You did it on sheer ability—sheer courage and personal example! He told me so …”

  “Not quite. Plenty of people did as much as I did, or more, and they didn’t get to command a company of infantry.” He smiled at her. “I think I earned my way, but look at it from the point of view of somebody like Batchelder: Caldwell takes this brash young sergeant—an enlisted man, mind you, next thing to a recruit, he wouldn’t even have been a corporal if it hadn’t been for our entering the war; he writes him u
p for every decoration under the sun, pushes him up to a majority—and the conniving little bootlicker not only grabs everything within reach but marries Caldwell’s daughter into the bargain, to advance himself some more …”

  Tommy’s mouth drew down wryly. “Well: at least nobody can accuse you of that.”

  “Of course they can. Anybody can accuse anybody of anything. There’s no action on earth, from Adam on down, that can’t be misconstrued, if the beholder has the inclination.” He paused. “You know all this, honey. You’ve known it longer than I have.”

  “No. I didn’t know it at all.” Standing by the window now she gripped her arms together as if she were cold. “I just accepted it. And then I rebelled against it, without really knowing, either … I got a letter from Marie Lovewell today,” she said.

  “Really?” Pete had resigned from the service when they were at Hardee. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wanted to think about it awhile first. I wanted to talk with you about it.” She studied the toes of her slippers. “Pete’s been making a lot of money building houses in and around Chicago—there’s a big building boom, apparently. They’ve got a lovely place out in Evanston and the kids are in private school. Marie was asking me about places to stay in France. They’re going over to Europe in a month or two. A vacation.”

  He found he was looking at the two parallel grooves in the floor that had probably been made by some heavy piece of furniture. The round nickel alarm clock on the bed table kept up its dry, furious ticking—when you listened to it closely you were almost certain its rhythm varied, that it picked up and then fell away again, every twenty seconds or so.

  “Where are we going, Sam?”

  He glanced at her uncertainly. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean where are we headed? really? You’ll finish up here and you’ll stand high in your class, maybe at the top, and it’ll go into your 201 file—and where will they send you then? Luzon, Wyoming, back to Texas, Nicaragua maybe—another school, another post sunk deep in the plains. And we’ll go on showing up at the Saturday night hops, and you’ll go on drilling people and studying the campaigns of Artaxerxes or learning Finno-Ugrian on your own … and then in ten more years, or twenty, you’ll be back to major, if you’re lucky, and ready to be put out to pasture, and the kids will have the glorious possibility of other army brats to choose their mates from … ” She ran her hand through her smoothly brushed hair, disheveling it abruptly. “What’s it all for, Sam? Really and truly. You know something? Life’s going by, our lives, the only ones we have—and we haven’t got a whole awful lot to show for it, either. Our lives, Sam … ”

  To his surprise she was not on the edge of weeping; she had not raised her voice. But there was something in the flat, controlled tone and the set of her face that frightened him more than tears.

  “I don’t know what to say,” he murmured. “I can’t tell you anything I haven’t already. I just feel my place is here, that’s all.”

  “But why?” she cried softly. “It’s against all reason—”

  “War is against all reason.”

  “And so you’re going to sit here, like Votaw, waiting for another war, hoping for another blood-letting that will give—”

  “No,” he said tightly; he was angry all at once. “You know better than that.” He raised his hand. “If God came into this room right now and told me there’d never be another war—anywhere, any size—even for just my lifetime, I’d dance for joy. Don’t say that, because it isn’t true.”

  She bit her lip, came over to him and pressed his head against her breast. “I’m sorry, Sam. I had no right to say that. I’m sorry.”

  “I know there are Votaws around. Maybe there’s more of them than there should be.”

  “Maybe we ought to leave the Army to the ones that want killing, that love it and pray for it—maybe we ought to leave it to the butchers and the sadists.”

  He shook his head. “There are enough of them anyway. Let’s make sure there are a few of the other kind.”

  “Sam …”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Sam”—she leaned back and looked at him—“you’re not scared, are you?”

  He smiled at her slowly. “I’m scared of a lot of things. Scared of what in particular?”

  “Of the outside … You’re not afraid you couldn’t make a go of it?—the way Pete Lovewell has?”

  “No,” he answered. “I could get a job in civilian life and a good one. Why couldn’t I?” He paused, searching her face. “Don’t you think I could?”

  “I don’t know. It’s—everything seems to move so fast out there. This is such poor training for the world. So many of them seem to be just floating along, passing time. Look at Howie Searles, playing piano at the parties and telling funny stories. Or Walt Marburger with his card tricks and home brew. The funny thing is, after awhile it does begin to look complicated and demanding, out there beyond the main gate … You’re too good for this, Sam!” she cried softly. “These Batchelders and Votaws and Searleses. Can’t you see that?”

  “You’re always saying that.”

  “But it’s true …”

  “I’m too good for what was good enough for Grant and Lee and Wood and Pershing and Colonel Marshall and your dad?”

  “Yes,” she nodded. “You could do better. You could do such tremendous things, I’m sure of it. But it’s impossible, the way the cards are stacked. And every time you have to temporize with a jughead like Batchelder it makes you that much less a person. It’s a war of attrition, Sam: you have to give up more than you can ever get back …”

  “Maybe so.” He released her, then drew her to him gently and took her onto his lap and kissed her on the cheek. The early morning breeze stirred in the tall pines at the far end of the row and then subsided, like a night animal changing position in its lair. “I love you, honey,” he murmured in her ear. “You’re just this whole world to me, you and the kids. I know I haven’t got a bushel of money and a string of horses and connections in the AG’s office, and I can’t blow my own horn the way some of them can. But I care, honey. I care about this world and this country and what’s happening to it.”

  He paused. We don’t talk enough, he thought; we talk a lot but not about the really crucial things. Maybe it’s a good thing this crazy wing-ding came off tonight. Suddenly it seemed terribly important that she see and understand what he felt about this—more important than anything else they’d ever had between them.

  “I’ve been detailed for this, honey. That’s what it is. Like a soldier who’s drawn outpost duty beyond the front lines. He’s just drawn the detail, that’s all. He didn’t ask for it, it was laid on him—maybe because his platoon leader thought he was more alert or competent or careful than the others, or maybe the sergeant had it in for him and stuck him with it, or maybe it was just the luck of the draw. But that doesn’t matter—there he is: he’s drawn the obligation, he’s out there, and what he does during those hours will mean the lives of all the rest. And so he’s got to do everything in his power to prepare himself for that moment. I’m like that man. Don’t you see?”

  She gazed at him for a moment with terrible intensity—and then she smiled the saddest smile he’d ever seen on a woman’s face. “All right, Sam.”

  “Do you see? Do you really?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I see.”

  He felt all at once overjoyed; he would never have believed ten short years ago he’d have been so lucky as to have married a girl as wonderful as this. “Tell you what, honey,” he said. “I’ll have two months’ accumulated leave when school’s over here, and I’ll put in for it. We’ll go anywhere you like—mountains, seashore, north or south. For as long as you like, anywhere you say. How’d you like that? You name it, we’ll do it.”

  She laughed then—a laugh that was like a gasp, and kissed him. “All right, Sam. If you can stand the gaff I guess I can.”

  “It’s a deal, then?”

  “It�
�s a deal.” She nodded slowly. “You know something? You’re a good man, Sam Damon. You’re a good man but I’m afraid you’re an awful fool.”

  He pressed his face against her breasts. “Maybe so,” he murmured. “Maybe so.”

  5

  In the summer of 1929 they went north for accumulated leave. Damon took the back seat out of the LaSalle and built a frame on which he laid two cut-down mattress pads, where the children were to play and sleep during the long, hot afternoons, in a welter of toys and cookie crumbs and discarded clothing. Their camping gear he stored under the frame—a light tent with a fly, bedding rolls and cooking utensils. Tools went into boxes clamped to the running boards, the spare tires were lashed to the radiator. Tommy made fun of him. “Darling, you’d think we were crossing the Gobi Desert.” He’d laughed, hammering and sawing and fitting, but he’d persevered: the trip was a symbol, and like all symbols it must be flawless, executed with perfection.

  It was a voyage of discoveries. Tommy was like a new person: she laughed and sang, told stories to the kids or played games with them. They rambled over the rutted, washboard roads, Tommy reading from the “Routings for Motor Car Tourists—Central United States” a disillusioned captain named Whelpey had given them. “Thirty-eight point two. At Triola, jog right. DO NOT CROSS railroad tracks. Grandview Hotel on left. Veer right with main wires, keep Catawba River on left, jog left four point six miles to Hermes Perps’ Blacksmith Shop. Right at huge elm tree. Oh honestly!” She doubled up, convulsed with laughter. “What if the tree’s blown down in the meantime?”