Once an Eagle

by Anton Myrer

  “Tommy—”

  “—have you seen their faces while they play these games?—really looked at them, I mean? Of course not, you wouldn’t see the blades clashing and slashing, scissor teeth swarming at you, they love it! What shit! Don’t tell me they don’t, I know!—”

  “Tommy!”

  “—don’t you understand—I can’t think! Keeps crashing in. I can’t think about anything else. Absolutely any, anything else at all! Not for fifteen seconds—” She had broken down again. No use. Sobbing she raised her head and a hand. “Emily, I swear to God you don’t know what suffering is until you’ve lost your son in war. You haven’t got any idea … I’m going now,” she declared, and wiped at her eyes.

  “No, Tommy, look—”

  “I can’t stay. Can’t stay here.”

  “Tommy, for heaven’s sake sit down.”

  She sat down obediently; but it was only for a minute. “…What am I going to do?” she heard herself whispering, “Emmy, what am I going to do?—with all the days and months—? I can’t do it, Em. I can’t!”

  “Yes, you can. Right now what we’re going to do is play a game of chess.”

  She glared through her tears at the other woman, who was setting Court’s inlaid board on the coffee table. “You’re serious …”

  “Of course I am.” She had started to arrange the pieces on the squares. “You can play, can’t you?”

  “What? No—”

  “Of course you can. Come on, now. You’ve got the blacks.” She advanced her queen’s pawn. “Make a reply.”

  “Oh my God …” She couldn’t tell now whether she was laughing or crying. “Chess—! You’re crazy, you know, you’re really crazy, the way they’ve always said …”

  “No. I’m not. Not the way they’ve said, anyway. Come on and move.”

  Tommy gazed uncertainly at the mild gray eyes that seemed all at once so full of force. What had happened? She dropped her gaze to the board, but her constant weeping made the pieces wabble and shift. She murmured, “I can’t …”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “Em, I can’t. You don’t realize … I can’t think of anything but that! …”

  “You can. Force your mind to it. Queen’s pawn four. Here. Force it!”

  “You didn’t have a son, a son—!”

  “No. I didn’t. I had something else.”

  “Oh that,” she cried, incoherent, abandoned, “—as if sex is anything to this—as if his failure to get it up is anything com—”

  She broke off in a flash of terror, half-sobered by the admission. Emily’s expression was unchanged; only her eyes tightened a little, as though with pain. The two women gazed at each other a long moment, in silence.

  “Oh Em,” Tommy murmured finally, “forgive me. Shouldn’t have said that. I’ve had too much to drink. Too much of everything. Forgive me, Em. Please. It wasn’t anything, I swear—I mean, nothing came of it …”

  Emily was smiling at her sadly. “I’m sure of that.”

  “I ought to keep my stupid mouth shut. Only I can’t, it seems. It doesn’t matter. Nothing happened.”

  “I believe it. I’ve had a certain familiarity with the problem, you might say.” Emily pushed a bishop back and forth with two fingers, watching it. “Does Sam know?” she asked gently.

  “Know—he wrote the wretched letter, I heard from him!”

  Emily nodded. “Someone in the Eighth Air Force notified him early, then.” She looked down. “How hard it must have been for him.”

  “Hard—the letter was cold enough, I can tell you that…”

  “What do you expect him to do—break down and go all to pieces, the way you have?”

  She looked fiercely at Massengale’s wife. “Why should he? He doesn’t feel anything …”

  “Oh, doesn’t he.”

  “Of course not, it was nothing to him—let Donny enlist, go overseas—No! I can’t ever forgive him. Ever!”

  “Sam loves you,” Emily declared quietly.

  “I don’t care if he put both hands in fire for me, I can’t ever forgive him for this. I can’t! …”

  Emily Massengale folded her hands in her lap. “I want to tell you, you’re a damned fool, Tommy Damon.”

  “You tell me that now—!”

  “Yes. Right now. This seems to be an occasion for frank talk. If I could have had one year with a man like Sam—just one year!—I’d thank my stars for all eternity. You’re a damn fool and your own worst enemy: but then, you always were. Now take a good stiff drink and make a move.”

  Watching the worn face, the mild steady eyes, Tommy was filled with consternation. She saw all at once that Emily was stronger than she; tougher, more resolute. But how was that? When all these years Emily had been the pliant, vulnerable soul, the fugitive …

  “Emmy, I’m plastered now,” she murmured.

  “Not too bad. Concentrate! I’m going to try to beat you. You’re going to pay me ten dollars if I win, and I’ll pay you thirty dollars if you do. Come on, now.”

  “All right.”

  She had never played much. Her father had taught her the game long ago, at Fort Sam, and in the long evenings at Dormer, early in their marriage, Sam had given her queen or rook odds; but she had never liked the game or taken it seriously. Now she was astonished at Emily’s aggressiveness: she found herself in dire trouble at the end of eight moves. Angered over a mistake in posting she’d made she fought back, forcing herself to concentrate, looking ahead, grappling with the distending possibilities. The cries from the back courtyard died away. She avoided a checkmate, extricated her king, and got well into end game before she had to succumb.

  “There,” Emily said. “You see? An hour has passed. An hour and a quarter.” She was watching Tommy gravely, speculatively. “You see what you can do? One whole hour. That’s how you get through each day. Each hour of each day. Do you see?”

  She looked down. The burdensome ache of loss had swept back into her consciousness again; but she had been free—partly free—for a time. Her glass lay untouched on the little lacquered table; she picked it up and sipped at it, set it down. “Is that how you got through?” she whispered.

  Emily Massengale smiled a sad, wry smile. “You know how I got through. All of you did. For a while I kidded myself that nobody knew, and then that only a few close friends did—and then I didn’t care anymore who knew and who didn’t. But that’s over. I’m over it, now.” Crisply she said: “I wasn’t in Boston visiting relatives. That was the official line, you might say. I was at a place in Connecticut, a very expensive place, where they treat people with my problem.”

  “You mean you got over it? the habit?” Emily nodded solemnly. “But why? What has changed?”

  “Nothing’s changed. Except me, apparently. And the world. Oh hell, I can’t claim any credit for it. It was just that one day I sort of—waked up. Realized there was never going to be any love in return—that Courtney is incapable of love as I used to dream of it; and Jinny herself mistakes violence for affection. I know some of it is my fault, that I’ve failed where I should have succeeded; but that is how it is. I’ve got to straighten up my own attic. I can do something now, to help in the war; and I’m going to.”

  There was a little pause.

  “Em,” Tommy said in a low voice, “did you ever think of—putting an end to it?”

  “Oh yes. Many times.” She smiled faintly. “But that’s not my style. I’m a Boston Yankee. The tendency is to stick it out.” She watched Tommy for a few moments calmly. “Look: five million mothers will lose their sons before this war is over; ten million will lose their homes and possessions. What makes you so special? The woods are on fire, Tommy. You think about Sam. Keep your mind on what you have: Sam, your father—”

  “That’s easy to say,” she burst out. “My God, I don’t even know where Poppa is, they won’t tell me! …”

  “What difference does it make? He’s where he’s been sent—he wouldn’t have it any other way.
You know where Sam is. Tommy, the world isn’t interested in your personal jimjams: a thousand men died in Russia this morning, three hundred in Sicily, five hundred in China, a hundred in New Guinea—the world’s got well beyond particularities today. That’s what it took me so long to see. But I see it now, all right. Your job is to get through the days, one by one; and get some purpose into them.”

  Tommy gripped the glass as hard as she could, half-hoping it would break and cut her hand. “Words,” she said sullenly.

  “Sure. The doing is harder. Don’t think I don’t know. But that’s what you’ve got to do, just the same.”

  She put her head in her hands. She felt exhausted, chaotic and mindless, aware of a rough, hard affection for this cool woman who had freed herself of drugs and won through to such equilibrium. It was amazing … Yet life was a cheat all the same, time devoured life, past and future were shadows without grace or honor, and the thought of tomorrow was a great wet black culvert, a blind journey.

  She said: “Em—I don’t know how I’ll last for a week. Even a week—”

  “I’ve shown you. One way.” Emily Massengale got to her feet and put the chess board away. “Now,” she said briskly, “we’ll go out in the garden and root around for a while. Horticulture. Come on—I’ve got a smock you can wear, and some shoes. Up with you, now …”

  8

  “Hallie was right,” Joyce Tanahill said, sponging Ben Krisler’s chest with deft, light strokes. “You’re a devil with horns.”

  “Why, that’s a dark canard,” he protested. His entire right arm was swathed in bandages and his left ankle was locked in a white club of a cast. “I’m just a clean-cut American dogface with clean-cut, healthy instincts.”

  “Oh brother.” She bent low over him, lowering her voice so that Colonels Rutherford and La Mott, across the room, couldn’t hear her. “Tell me true, now: did you actually pinch Coulter on the fanny? She was furious.”

  “Aw, she loved it …”

  “She did like hell. She was going to put you on report.”

  He grinned. “On report to who? My commanding officer?”

  “No. General Kime. The Island Commander.”

  His lip curled. “Garrison commandos.”

  “I talked her out of it—just barely. I told her you had a history of satyriasis.”

  “What in hell’s that?”

  “Hot pants. Look, you can try to pinch Morandi or me or even Hutch—but you can’t pinch Coulter. She’ll fix your wagon.”

  He winked up at her. “More challenge with Coulter.”

  “You’re incorrigible. You’ll get yourself sent home …”

  “Is that a disaster?”

  Smiling indulgently she shook her head. He’d lost weight; his face looked more bony than ever, with his big curved nose. All his hair had turned gray and his skin was yellow from atabrine. The bandaged arm smelled of sweat and alcohol and disinfectant and that dense, overripe odor of torn and mending flesh.

  “Nope,” he proclaimed loudly, “they’re not going to send this doggie home until he gets damned good and ready.” He watched her slyly a moment, dropped his voice discreetly. “Bet you wish it was Sam flaked out right here, instead of me.”

  “—Oh no,” she answered instinctively, before she’d thought—then grinned to hide her confusion. “No, he’d be more trouble than you are.”

  “He wouldn’t slap old Coulter on the pistol pocket.”

  “No. He wouldn’t. But he’d be more trouble.”

  “Kind of trouble you’d love to touch, though.” She could feel his eyes resting on her as she moved around him, toweling him, straightening his sheets. She knew what he was thinking, and obscurely it pleased her. He was a simple, happy-go-lucky nature, but in some ways he was immensely shrewd. “Don’t kid me,” he murmured. “Takes a goof to spot a goof.”

  “I guess it does.”

  “Hey, aren’t you off today?”

  She nodded. “Hogan’s way behind, and there’s nothing else to do. It’s easier to keep turning over.” Actually the fun part of the day was seeing Ben; and as usual she prolonged the ritual, plumping up his pillows, arranging his cigarettes and putting fresh water beside his bed and reminiscing about Devon Bay, now far behind them. She’d been shaken when Ben had been flown in from Lolobiti. The wound looked terrible: a mortar fragment had plowed the length of his arm, laying open the flesh from wrist to shoulder; but actually it looked much worse than it was. The piece Weintraub had taken out of his ankle, no larger than a marble, had been far more trouble. Joints were the worst. But after the first three days his natural ebullience had reasserted itself, and for two weeks he’d kept the ward in a mild uproar, teasing nurses, baiting Stackpole and Tilletson, organizing money pools on the next Pacific D-Day, and sending out scatological communiqués on toilet paper sections.

  She said teasingly, “Why don’t you try and get some sleep, like Colonel La Mott?”

  “Sleep?—when I can have a great big beautiful doll ministering to my every whim? Bernie can sack in if he wants—he’s dead from the waist down anyway.”

  “You’re just a menace.” She winked at him and turned to go.

  “I’m a—what’s that word?”

  “Satyriasis.” She formed the term with her lips, extravagantly, so that Rutherford wouldn’t hear.

  “Great. You’ve made my day.”

  There was a thorax in recovery, and then an amputee whose dressing needed changing. After that she took the desk for a while and gazed out at the dazzling light on the hard-rolled cascao beyond the Quonset hut, the drooping feather-duster heads of the palms, their trunks all curving lazily to the right. For four months the base hospital had been situated on Isle Désespoir, a pleasant little kidney-shaped island on the edge of the Bismarck Sea which the GIs had promptly renamed Dizzy Spa. It was no spa—it was hot, and the rains were devastating, but there was a satisfaction in moving up. Everything was moving up now, creeping through the green web of islands to the north—but so slowly. It would be years. Any idiot could see that—you didn’t have to be a general. While she made entries in the daily report her thoughts turned to Sam. Now that the Division had come back here from the Lolobiti operation she could not keep him out of her mind. Invariably she imagined him standing in front of a group of soldiers with his hands on his hips, his head thrust forward, talking quietly and forcefully. That was how she always saw him. His only son had just been killed over Germany: Ben had told her. He had a wife who was beautiful and slender, and a daughter who was college age. He had a family in Nebraska he sent money to, and his wife was the daughter of General Caldwell, whom Ben revered and told her had been kept from high field command because of a lot of asinine rules about age and the jealousy of incompetents and self-servers back in DC. Ben became very hot and profane whenever he got on this subject, and she had to calm him down; but when he was talking about Sam or his family she never interrupted him. She stored up information about Sam she gleaned from Ben or other Division officers and men, such as his heroism at Moapora or Wokai, his obstinate championing of the enlisted men, his inordinate love of root beer and strawberry ice cream—even unwelcome bits such as his wife’s extraordinary good looks—as though in some indefinable way it brought him closer to her.

  Her mind drifted back to Devon Bay and the moment by the jeep in the soft, false dawn; then—as so often now when she thought about Sam—into a simple, inane little fantasy. The scene was San Francisco: the war was over, the Japanese had surprised everyone by surrendering all of a sudden, Sam’s wife had just died of a swift, incurable, painless disease; they had met quite by accident at a friend’s house on Telegraph Hill and had gone from there to the St. Francis, a corner table, and he was sitting facing her, his hands clasped, his thumb against the point of his chin, he was saying—

  She picked up the day sheet and began to read it, frowning. This daydreaming was silly. Silly and pointless. You made your own life, you were the victim of your own predilections. Life did not
dispose itself conveniently before fantasy. She had met Sam, had a few brief moments in his company—she was lucky to have had that; and she ought to let it rest there. Most people in this world never met anyone who even approximated their ideal—or even anyone who was very sympatico; and it was nothing to weep over, either. Look at her marriage to Brad …

  Marty Hutchens, her tentmate, had no patience with this dreamy oscillation between reverie and the acceptance of fate. She was a good-humored brunette from Lynbrook, Long Island, who was terrific in surgery and very popular in the wards, and her credo was quick and simple.

  “What the hell, you only live once,” she’d told Joyce late one night when they were lying naked on their bunks and smoking. “I can tell you right now, you won’t get a second chance. Make a play for him.”

  She had laughed softly. “He’s a two-star general, Hutch.”

  “So he doesn’t have urges? Don’t be naïve.” She pronounced it like the aisle in a church. “Listen, he’s got the same chemical TO-and-E as a PFC.”

  “Besides, he’s got a wife and family.”

  “Yeah, and from what I hear it isn’t all it might be, either. Harry Rutherford says she doesn’t even write him! Jesus, these stateside glamor-pants bitches—I’d like to have five minutes with some of them. I’d slap their snooty pusses so hard they’d be walking backward the rest of their crummy little lives. Harry says when their son got killed she wouldn’t even—”

  “That’s enough, Hutch,” she heard herself saying sharply. “Lay off it. You ought not to peddle everything you hear.”

  Hutch sat up and swung her feet to the floor, facing her, her thick black hair low in her eyes. “Hey—you’re really gone on him …”

  “Yes,” she answered after a little pause. “I’m gone on him.”

  “Oh brother.” Hutch put out her cigarette in the ashtray an amphibious engineer had made for her out of aluminum from a crashed Zero. “A torch. Well, go after him then. Look—you’re here, he’s here. What do you want, a citation for chastity? They’re not stocking them these days … ”