by Anton Myrer
He smiled at her gently. “Lead me to it.”
“Sad, bad old Sam,” his sister Peg said to Tommy, and winked. “Stirred them all up, gave them something to think about. Hasn’t changed any, has he?”
“No,” she answered, “he hasn’t changed.”
“Come on, Sam,” Ty called, “let’s go. Nobody’ll move till you do.”
“You go on ahead.” He reached out and took her hand, deep in his, the way he’d used to in Cannes, on La Croisette; she looked at him, startled. “We’ll see you back at the house.”
“But look, we ought to get back—there’s no sense in hanging around here …”
“We’ll see you there. We’ll walk it.”
“Wants to show off his girl to the town,” Ted Barlow said. “Who wouldn’t?”
Ty looked full of consternation. His hair, thinning, was parted neatly in the exact center of his scalp. “We’ve got room—it’s half a mile, Sam …”
“We can swing it. Go ahead,” he said with a mock glower, “be off with you …”
The streets were crowded and people kept calling to him, stopping them to chat and wish him well; they all wanted to utter his name, over and over, like a talisman; like the old franc piece he always carried in his right-hand trousers pocket, with his bone-handled penknife. “Sam,” their voices floated through the fine fall air, “Sam … Sam Damon…”
Then they had turned up a hill past a large white house with columns and a greenhouse and a high wrought-iron gate, and then they were alone at the edge of a field that swept down toward the river’s edge, where a big gray dog was circling, its nose to the ground.
“Sam,” she said, “they’ll throw the book at you for that speech.”
“Yes. Damned good chance.”
“Those reporters were taking it all down.”
“I thought I’d give them a good reason for hanging me. What the hell—I’ve kept my mouth shut for four years. Nobody listens to two-star generals, anyway.”
“It was a good speech,” she said. “I’m glad you said what you did. Though I don’t imagine they’ll look on it too joyfully in the AG’s office.”
He snorted. “After Captious Court gets through with my efficiency rating they won’t give me the Service Depot at Snoqualmie Junction.”
“—Oh, but he can’t do that,” she protested, “not after the Citation—”
“Can’t he, though. You just watch him. He can do just about anything he wants. He’s MacArthur’s fair-haired boy out there.” He smiled grimly. “They understand each other.”
From far off, down among the cottonwoods and thickets at the river, there came a solitary gunshot. The dog had vanished.
“Well, anyway,” she said, “it’s over.”
“No. It’s not over.”
“What?” She glanced at him in alarm.
“The biggest battles are still to be fought.”
She thought of Bill Bowdoin tucking his shirt into his trousers at East Hampton, the rain drumming against the glass. She felt utterly sick at heart. “Russia?” she murmured.
He shook his head. “No. I don’t know. That’s not the problem. It’s us. Here. It’s got to come to a head. Between those who want us to be a democracy—a real one, not a show-window one—and those who want us to be a Great Power. In caps and with all the trimmings.” The gun fired again, its report echoing and reechoing along the river. “Some kid with a shotgun,” he said absently, staring. “No—it’s never over. I’m catching on. There’s no discharge in this war.”
She lowered her head. “That’s an insupportable thought to me right now.”
“I know. It was for me, once. But that’s how it goes. People are going to go on being scared and vindictive and greedy and forgetful and everything else they happen to be. And all you can do is keep on going yourself, do what you can and hope for the best. That’s a pretty drab philosophy, isn’t it?—when you compare it with someone like Massengale. Sitting on his pinnacle, molding the minds of millions.”
“No, it’s not,” she said with some distress. “It’s just that you get so tired—there doesn’t seem to be any end to it … ”
He swung back to her. “Well: say not the struggle naught availeth. Perseverance keeps honor bright, they say.”
She smiled awkwardly. “You said you weren’t going to use any of those words.”
“That’s right—I did, didn’t I?” He smiled, but his eyes were full of shadows. “Tommy.” He had taken her hand again, but differently. “Tommy, I hope you’ll come home with me. I want you to—if you want to, of course. I don’t know how you feel about things …”
Wordless, she watched his face, feeling the firm, warm grip of his hand, the old pull to compliance, submission to what he wanted. But there were also the despairs and fevers of the past three years. His hand let go of hers and came up around her waist; that slow, gentle pressure. There were so many things she wanted to say and she couldn’t seem to say any of them. Trembling with agitation she pulled away and turned to face him. “A lot of things have happened, Sam …”
“I know. That’s true for me, too. Look, there are certain things that are more important than anything else.” She had never seen him this confused. “Sometimes the most important thing is just to keep on going, doing what you have to, hewing to the line … I need you, Tommy. I do. I know I don’t always act like it—I know I’ve done a lot of things badly, I’ve been a troublemaker and stubborn—but it’s because I believe in things, in people. You do understand that, don’t you? I never did one single thing for the hell of it …”
His face was very close to hers: he looked so old and worn. He’s tired, she thought suddenly, he’s so tired he’s going to get sick if he doesn’t take care of himself; if somebody doesn’t take care of him … Her mind swayed like kelp in deep undertow. No discharge. She wanted to be a person of responsibility; didn’t she? That’s what Sam was: the kind of man people said they’d want to have with them in a rough deal, when all the chips were down, the kind of man they always went to when they were in trouble—she’d heard them at Hardee, at Ord, on Luzon. He hadn’t had the rank, but he’d had this other thing, and that was what they all wanted, what they all leaned on.
“… I need you, honey. You don’t know how much.” He gripped his hands together in that old gesture she remembered. “Honey, about Donny—I never influenced him about enlisting. I tried to dissuade him. You’ve got to believe that. Tommy, he was a man—his mind was made up, it was what he had to do, don’t you see? You can’t keep a man from doing a thing like that …”
“I know,” she said. “He was old enough to know what he wanted. I know that now.” She put her hand on his arm to stop him. Bill was wrong, she saw; dead wrong. She didn’t want to lash Sam with the boy’s death, she had no desire to play the Cormorant, roweling him with vengeance. The realization gave her a swift little surge of relief. She wanted—she wanted to be complete, a person of responsibility. There was a virtue simply in having begun together, in having struggled through the arduous years, neglected, unvalued, sharing the hopes and wonders of parenthood. All those years: was she to turn her back on them now, betray them, belittle them?
And more than that, too: he had said he needed her. He had never said that before, never exactly that, in all those years—
“We’ll do it the way you want it,” he was saying, “the way you’d like it to be, from now on. That’s a promise. Will you try it with me? once more?”
She smiled at him gravely. Dear funny old Sam: he could no more change what he was than he could sprout wings and fly out over the river, the willows and cottonwoods huddled against its banks. She nodded once.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll give it a try.”
His gaze softened still more, turned inward. “Ben used to say that: it’s worth a try … Fair enough,” he said, and embraced her gently; his lapel insigne scraped her forehead. She felt calm, and resigned, and hopeful and a little sad. Behind him at the turn in
the road she saw two boys watching them, and thought of the sailors that afternoon on the parapet at Le Suquet. She had been crying then.
5
DELTA
1
“What they’ve got is a blasted menagerie,” Gertrude Woodruff declared. “It seems they have to have a baby sitter—imagine two kids thirteen and fifteen needing a baby sitter!—and they got this girl, blue jeans and a nice sweet smile, and the next thing they knew she turned up in a motel outside Miami with two men. Not one but two. And so they engaged—I guess that’s the word—another one, blue jeans and a nice sweet smile, and a week later when they were staying overnight with friends on St. Catherine’s, that’s one of the Sea Islands, this new one took it upon herself to throw a beer party right in the living room. And after a while they got bored with doing the Limbo and drinking beer and began to throw toys and odds and ends of furniture down the front stairs.”
“Couldn’t have been just beer,” Tommy Damon said.
“You bet. And it wasn’t. Pot, they call it. Goodness knows why.” Gertrude gave her short, cackling laugh. “Do they take it out of a pot to make the cigarettes with it?”
“Tea,” Tommy said, musing. “They call it tea, too. They used to call them reefers. And muggles and vipers and Mary Jane.”
“Goodness, how do you know all that?” Jean Mayberry asked.
“Fascination, I guess. All the sinful delights have hundreds of names, have you ever noticed?”
“I guess that’s so. It never occurred to me.”
“Then what happened?” Tommy prompted Gertrude.
“The police got calls from next door and broke in. And there they were, our rising generation, hurling Ellie’s platters and chairs end over end and singing some crazy dirge of a song. And there were Bobby and Karen in their pajamas, hurling and singing right along with them. And did any of the little dears take to the windows or cower in the closets? Not one. It was all a lark. It seems the ringleader, the sitter’s boyfriend, told the cops he was going into the Army in three days and couldn’t care less. ‘Khotiane, bing, bang!’ he said. ‘I’m in no hurry to get zapped. No hurry at all.’ The words they use! It isn’t true at all, of course. It’s just advisory teams out there, isn’t it? Career personnel.”
“Not entirely,” Tommy said.
“Anyway, that’s what they came home to. I swear, the kids these days are a mystery to me. I don’t understand them …”
“I do,” Tommy answered slowly. “They feel just the way we did in ’19, only they don’t have to go through it. They can see it all coming and they know just what it’s going to be like, and why.”
They both were gazing at her, startled and blinking.
“Tommy,” Gertrude said, “you don’t mean that …”
“I do. I do indeed.”
“But we can’t let them just—run all over us. Norm says if Khotiane goes—”
“Southeast Asia goes. Then Hawaii. Then the world. I know.” Tommy sighed. “I wonder if it’s true—really true, the way they tell us it is. Personally I’m inclined to doubt it.” Gertrude was still watching her with that troubled expression, and she gave a quick, easy smile and tossed her head; she didn’t want to quarrel with these two friends, and over politics at that. “Well, it’s their problem, not mine,” she added lightly. “I’ve put in my time on the old rock pile. And so have both of you.”
“Amen to that, and carry one,” Jean said.
They all laughed, and looked idly away. The three women were dressed in slacks and blouses and reclining in tube-aluminum folding chairs on the cramped sun deck behind the Damons’ house. The sun was warm through the pines, but every now and then wraiths and scarves of fog would drift gently overhead, and they would shiver and pull their sweaters over their shoulders. On the redwood coffee table between them was a welter of empty highball glasses and coffee cups and a box of candy whose scalloped wrappers fluttered in the light breeze. From the front of the house, muffled, came the hollow clank of something heavy dropped in a wheelbarrow.
“What’s he doing?” Gertrude asked.
“A walk. He got these redwood sections for a dollar apiece. A bargain, apparently. Then he’s going to plant dichondra all around them.”
“Oh, for a ground cover. I wish Norm would get interested in gardening. All he does is talk golf over at the club and watch TV all evening long. The Late Late Show. It’s getting like your reefers. The other night I said, ‘For God sake, come to bed, Norm—you’re acting like a nine-year-old!’And he said, ‘Just a couple more minutes. I didn’t realize all the movies I missed out on.’ Last week he said his eyes were hurting, he wanted to know if I had any idea why. I said hell no, I couldn’t imagine—I told him maybe if he got a little closer to the set they might improve … I wish Sam played golf. If he did it would get Norm out more.”
“Sam won’t play golf. I talked him into getting a set of clubs when we first came out here, and he played a few times, quite respectably for a beginner. But then he lost interest. He’s suspicious of the game.”
“Suspicious?”
“That’s right. He’s got it all hooked up with finance capitalists in linen caps living it up while the laboring children look out of the barred mill windows. Et cetera. Same thing with tennis—he can’t forgive it for being connected with the idle rich. Unlike baseball or swimming. Only he can’t play baseball anymore.”
“Norm and Jerry used to play golf every chance they got, when they pulled duty together …” Reminded all at once that this might not be too tactful a subject in the face of Jean Mayberry’s widowed state, Gertrude bit off the rest of what she had been going to say and picked at the lint on her slacks, frowning.
“Tommy,” she said after a moment, “do you really think that?”
“Think what?”
“About Khotiane. Do you really think it’s not—necessary?”
Tommy turned and looked at the lined, vigorous face, the nicely waved gray hair. Gertrude Woodruff had been a handsome woman and a fine army wife. It wasn’t her fault that Norm had been on Packy Vinzent’s staff when Packy’d been relieved after Sidi Bou Noura and nobody seemed to want him for a while. For an instant Tommy was tempted to turn the question aside; but something wouldn’t let her. If Gert really wanted her opinion she would have it.
“I don’t know what you mean by necessary,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned it’s about as necessary as theft or prostitution.”
“Yes, but the spread of Communist terror—”
“Look: if this struggle in Khotiane is so important, so vital to us, why don’t we get with it? Why don’t we declare war and get behind it, then, put ourselves on the line and make the necessary sacrifices? Why all this furtive pussyfooting?”
Gertrude frowned. “It’s not furtive, it’s the way things are done nowadays.”
“Yes, I can see that.”
“Tommy,” Jean intervened, “I don’t see how we can judge—we don’t know what they know back in Washington.”
“Yes, that’s what the Germans said in ’33. Papa knows best. Well, maybe he doesn’t know best. Had you ever thought of that? Maybe he’s every bit as confused and guessing as the rest of us.”
Gertrude was staring at her hard, but Jean was grinning indulgently, her head back. “Oh, Tommy, you always were such a maverick!”
“Wasn’t I, though? And now school’s out, girls.” She sipped at her coffee, cold now, and watched the sun roll lazily through the streamers of fog. That was one advantage to having a reputation: people made allowances for you (if they felt like making allowances) in advance. At any rate, she had decided to say what she pleased from now on, within reason. She had kept her mouth closed—most of the time, anyway—for years and years, and now that was over. Sam had stood his last review, back at Beyliss, standing straight as a ramrod, taking the salute with perfect precision, his face hard, the tears slick on his cheeks; and they had come out here to Monterey and bought a home. He didn’t like Carmel, where the Hamm
erstroms and Woodruffs and Jean Mayberry lived—its casual opulence and hoked-up rusticity offended him; so they had come over the hill and settled on a pleasant little redwood-and-stucco house in Monte Vista, deep in the pines, looking out toward Mount Toro and the Bay.
From over in Seaside where they were building the new express highway came the dense boom of blasting, and she thought of Hardee and the interminable crump of demolitions, and Major Bowers’ wife. Well, this wasn’t an awful lot, but at least they couldn’t be ranked out of it. It had been pleasant enough. They had made some friends outside the military circles—a musician and his wife, a former rancher from Montana, a retired professor from Berkeley; but not many. They were still bound by the narrow channel of their lives. For a time Tommy had fought it, but after some months she had acquiesced to the casual round of bridge evenings and movie going. She started to paint, bought herself a set of oils and a collapsible easel at Oliver’s Art Store and daubed at fanciful scenes of fishing boats anchored in the harbor or horses cantering through sunlit fields; but she couldn’t get the effects she wanted. She dabbled in adult education courses at the high school on Tuesday nights, and finally settled on weaving, turning out place mats and curtains and napkins in blue-and-yellow designs. Then the restlessness would take hold of her again, and she would walk through the dry, sepulchral woods behind the house, assaulted by the scent of heather and manzanita.
Her life was over: was it? She was sixty-two, astonishingly, and one of Peggy’s boys was in college. All those years had fled like shadows, in the dust and bugle clarions of two continents. Her father had died on the second anniversary of VJ Day, peacefully enough, after passing a few tart observations on the reluctance of certain highly placed military personages to accept the unified command, and had been buried at Arlington with full military honors. They had been transferred to Benning right after that. Her life had slipped away in a thousand teas and hops and receptions, her father and her son were dead, and all that was left were two grandsons, big, genial louts she saw perhaps once a year, a house they had barely started paying for, and a husband she wanted to love …