I thought for a while before I answered. I might as well have tried to stop a fire horse from running to a fire. His men had not tied him to the mast, and he was hearing the sirens.
“Never mind it,” I said, “but just take it easy, Mel.”
He looked at me and I looked back at him. It was another of those rare moments when he did not have the rank.
“Say, Sid,” he said, “has anything happened between you and Dottie since Paris? I get the idea that you don’t seem to like her any more. You don’t seem to understand her charm, her sympathetic quality or anything.”
“Oh, let’s skip it, Mel,” I said. “I like her in a different way from you, that’s all”—but of course he did not want to skip talking about Dottie Peale.
“There’s one damn funny thing about me, Sid,” he said, “that I don’t understand. Any time I dance with a pretty girl twice on Saturday night, there’s always a general air of disapproval up and down the scale, a raising of eyebrows and a lot of God-damned kind advice. I don’t know why it is that other people seem to be able to raise hell and get away with it. There are a lot of high-ranking nonmonogamists—you’d be surprised—but when it comes to me taking a day off—God almighty! Eisenhower or Clark or Bradley or somebody gets me on the carpet. The whole damned army wants me to be true to Muriel. What are you smiling about? Do you think that’s funny?”
“Yes,” I said, “a little funny.”
We had reached the stable, and now we turned right oblique to the house.
“You ought to get some horses, Sid,” he said, “but let’s get this straight. I know where I am and what I’m doing. Do you understand?”
“Of course I understand,” I said.
“I just want a few moments off,” the General said, “just a few God-given moments out of a hectic life to talk to someone who listens to my ideas. Dottie always listens. She even likes some of my ideas.”
“That’s right,” I said, “Dottie always listens,” and I wondered if he knew that he had opened himself like a book and had guilelessly turned page after page.
“Maybe I’m smoking too much,” he said. “I always seem to have catarrh in the morning.” The General drew a deep breath and cleared his throat. We had almost reached the house. “Well, that’s all there is to it. I just wanted to give you a little briefing, Sid, so you’d see there’s nothing serious about this at all,” and then he smiled that very young smile and nudged me with his elbow. “And besides, everything’s secured. Flax is taking those orchids to Washington.”
There was something incredibly naïve about the boyish gesture of suddenly selecting a best friend to whom you could tell everything. General Goodwin had tossed the secrets of his life out casually and carelessly, just as though he were pulling objects from a hastily packed bag and strewing them helter-skelter around the floor. I was not in his age group and hardly a brother-in-arms, except by his own directive. I could only explain his action from what I knew of the way military figures dealt with material classified “Top Secret.” Once they knew you had the proper clearance, they would shoot the works with pleasure, just to get it off their chests. By some eccentricity Mel Goodwin had decided that I was cleared. I did not want to be his intimate friend handling his top-secret files, but there I was, a voice of experience.
There were checks and balances, I supposed, in any marital relationship, which were always undergoing subtle change. Once the General had not minded Muriel’s taking over the controls, and now he did. I wished I knew what had happened at their first meeting when he had descended from the plane at Washington, fresh from Berlin; something between them must have been unfamiliar. I thought of Muriel Goodwin in the living room working on the washcloth, one of the set they would use when they eventually started housekeeping again. She had always been crocheting for Mel Goodwin, but I had never dreamed that I, too, would be crocheted into Mrs. Goodwin’s washcloth, somewhere on the margin, and that Dottie Peale would be a part of it as well. That episode in Paris had meant more than it should have to Mel Goodwin. I was more convinced than ever that he had not recovered from it in a normal way.
“Say, Sid,” the General said, when we were walking down the hall to the library, “I was thinking of a poem last night.”
“What?” I asked. “Push off and sitting well in order smite?”
I was certainly mixed up with the crocheting and there was no rank any longer, because the situation had grown fluid.
“No, no,” the General said, “I’m referring to Kipling’s ‘If.’” He stopped and I knew I was going to hear a piece of it. “The part that goes this way.…” He was almost but not quite standing at attention.
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same.…
He was looking beyond me, not at me. I was thinking how heavily obvious that poem had always seemed to me, but it still fitted Melville Goodwin.
“Well, what’s that got to do with anything?” I asked him. “Where’s there any disaster?”
The lines around his mouth had hardened. Compared with his expression out of doors, he looked as though he were ten years older.
“Listen, son,” he said. “You never want to underestimate a situation. Never discount disaster.”
I could not tell whether he was thinking of World War II or of Dottie Peale, and I did not want to ask him.
“Come on,” he said, “I want to get this over. One thing at a time, son, one thing at a time.”
XXV
War Is Hell—in Alexandria or Anywhere Else
I followed the General into the library and closed the door. He had a well-compartmented mind that could move effortlessly from one thing to another.
“Let’s get this thing cleaned up, Phil,” he said. “I have to be in New York by five o’clock. That means leaving here by three forty-five. Make a note of it, will you, Flax, and take it up with Mrs. Skelton. Where did we break off last night?”
“You were back in Washington,” Phil Bentley told him, “in the summer of 1941.”
Melville Goodwin laughed and sat down by the fireplace.
“It was really hot that summer,” he said. “Everyone, as I remember, was sort of crazy with the heat.…”
In the final draft of his profile, Phil Bentley came up with only a paragraph on Melville Goodwin’s pre-Pearl Harbor experiences.
With his deceptively boyish smile that softened but did not obscure the tough corners of his mouth, Melville Goodwin described those months of shoestring improvisations and basic organizational blueprinting as follows: “The whole crowd were like jugglers in a three-ring circus, keeping pie plates in the air. No sooner did you catch one than you had to get rid of it in time to get the next one that the Old Man was scaling at you—and you couldn’t break them either. It was lucky for me I was a fast mover.”
He meant by this that he was a sort of liaison trouble shooter down in Washington, shuttling back and forth among high echelons, because A. C. Grimshaw, who had already attained a temporary two-star rank, began using him more and more as a second pair of legs and eyes. Grimshaw would send him as his representative to policy conferences on training and plans, and he did a lot of doubling and tripling in brass that summer. He never mentioned Muriel’s place in this picture to Phil Bentley, but he did take up the subject of Muriel with me privately.
Muriel, he said, came right up from Benning to Washington to win the war, and they had a few differences of opinion as to where he should fit in the scheme of things. Washington was quite a place, Mel Goodwin said, for an army girl that summer. Anyone who had what it took was bound to get more rank, and if you had some time for a little daydreaming, which he hadn’t, you could dream yourself right up to four stars. Of course the whole town was overcrowded, not alone with service personnel, but with dizzy New Deal civilians who were beginning to spin like
dancing mice when Congress began upping the appropriations. Though he was assigned to duty under Grimshaw at the Department, he could not rustle up any living quarters for Muriel and young Charley and it was lucky Robert was at the Point. He had wanted Muriel and Charley to stay where it was cool until he could at least find out what the score was. He even suggested that Muriel might take Charley to Hallowell to visit her mother, who was living all alone in the house there since Mr. Reece’s death. He could not very well afford to keep them in some Washington hotel on his pay, and though Muriel and her mother never did get on well sharing a house together—because each of them was always taking over without consulting the other—he did hope Muriel would keep out of Washington for a while—not that he would not miss her.
He pointed out to her in several long letters, which he should not have spared the time to write, what with all the reports and directives he was always drafting for the boss, that he had no time for family life anyway. When he was not being sent somewhere around the country, he was at the Department during all his waking hours. Whenever he got back to the room he had occupied in “Shorty” Telfer’s apartment, he was in his sack in five minutes. Shorty was on the training program then, and Shorty was so tired at night that his wife Beatrice couldn’t get a word out of him, and even if there had been time for family evenings, you couldn’t tell your wife what was going on, because everything was classified.
Of course he must have known subconsciously that Muriel would never keep out of Washington. However, he did think that she might have warned him that she was coming instead of just appearing at Shorty’s apartment with Charley as though she had been airborne. It meant that for five days Muriel and Beatrice had to share the main bedroom while Shorty took over the guest room and Melville had the studio couch and Charley used a bedding roll on the living room floor. They all used one bathroom, and he was always forgetting about Charley and tripping over the bedding roll when he got home at night.
Finally, of course, they did get settled, because Muriel called up Enid, Bud Joyce’s wife, whom she had not seen since Schofield. Bud had rented a little house in Alexandria, and Enid told them to move right in with them and share expenses, even before she took it up with Bud. He never forgot old Bud’s expression when he came home to find the whole Goodwin family spread out, but then he had done Bud a good turn when Bud had begun feuding with “Bing” Bishop at Schofield. Besides, Bud was always a good sport, and he and Enid had always wanted a boy, and there was Charley. Bud’s only remark was that war was hell in Alexandria or anywhere else. As a matter of fact, Bud and Enid kept Muriel and Charley right there through the whole war, and they were all still good friends at the end of it, though he never understood how they had managed it.
There was another complication when Muriel came to Washington. As Bud said, the gals made up a general staff of their own and began doing long-term planning. Bud, with his desk at G–2, and limited duty because of disability, was not much for Enid and Muriel to work on, but Melville was really good material for two bright girls. He had done all right at the Tank School and Leavenworth and the War College, and Muriel’s thinking was always around the top of the heap. Still, if there was going to be a war, he did not want to be on any staff. As he pointed out to Muriel, somebody had to fight the war, but Muriel wanted him to be nearer the top and more on the administrative side, where the big brass might notice him, instead of being lost in some training area. When they wanted someone, she said, it was only human nature to look around and pick someone in sight rather than someone buried down in Texas. He did not have time to discuss these matters with Muriel except occasionally when they went for a walk on Sunday, but Muriel had lots of time to consider them.
One night in August when he had a few minutes alone with the chief in his office, he brought up the subject of the southern maneuvers and expressed a sort of wish, as definitely as you could express such a thing, that he might get down there with a regiment or something, but Grimshaw only said that he was needed right where he was and the situation was still fluid.
“And besides,” he said, “I may be wrong, but I think Muriel has some pretty sound ideas about you. Why don’t you leave things to Muriel and me?”
They had recently spent two Sundays at the Grimshaws’. When the General had the time, he liked to get a small crowd around and cook hamburgers in his back yard at Georgetown, and Muriel was very proficient with outdoor grills. He certainly did not want the General to think that he differed with Muriel, and it was quite a problem to think up an answer.
“Muriel really can cook hamburgers, sir,” he said. “Muriel can stir up anything.”
He was relieved that the Chief seemed to see what he meant.
“Don’t you worry about Muriel,” the General said. “Muriel intuitively knows what’s cooking.”
Grimshaw always did have a quiet sense of humor.
“Yes, sir, she certainly does,” Melville said, “but I don’t want her to overdo me on both sides.”
This was about as far as he could go, even with anyone like Grimshaw.
“Mel,” the Old Man said, “Muriel never overdoes anything, but maybe you and I both had better go down and look over those maneuvers. I may be wrong, but we might both get a few ideas.”
It was the best news he had heard in a long while. You never knew how the Chief was going to jump. Actually, when they were down there he was able to fix things so that he did something with simulated tanks before he was yanked back to Washington. You could never tell what was in the Chief’s mind, and he never knew why he was being kept on ice. When he asked for a job in the Philippines just before Pearl Harbor, the Chief turned him down flat, and twice that winter when he asked for something in the Pacific, the Chief turned him down again. Grimshaw was never a Pacific man. By the spring of ’42 he was still sweating it out there in Washington, when suddenly the Chief sent him out to Arizona to observe desert maneuvers, but not to take command of anything. He only got the connection when work began on “Torch” and he was promoted to temporary colonel. Muriel was beginning to find him pretty hard to hold when they were in the middle of the North African planning, but it was not until September that the Chief said the word, and then he dropped it casually.
“Mel,” he said, “some of you younger fellows will have to be going over. Maybe you’d better start thinking about packing.”
Two weeks later his orders were cut for Paisley, where they were training the armor, and the best thing about it was that Muriel had known nothing whatsoever about it. She had cried half the night when she heard he was going to Paisley because she was certain he would be lost down there. There were lots of rumors, but “Torch” was all top secret. The truth was Muriel did not want him to be killed, and it did no good to point out to her that it was about time someone did a little fighting.
Her feelings were hurt when he gave her the word that she had better stay with Bud and Enid and not go to all the trouble of following him down to Paisley.
“But you’ll be there for a year,” she said, “before you go overseas.”
Muriel could not be right about everything. She only got the point when he flew up to Washington to say good-by, and of course she could not ask him where he was going. Secret orders never did help home life, and curiously enough, Charley was the one who came closest to guessing it, because Charley was a smart kid. He had just turned fourteen and he really followed the war news.
“Say, Dad,” he said, “I’ll bet you’re going after Rommel.”
He always remembered this. Charley thought a lot of him and knew he could lick anyone.
“No,” he answered, “I’m going up to the North Pole to help out Santa Claus.”
“Shucks,” Charley said, “you wouldn’t be packing khaki pants along with your woolens if you were going to see Santa Claus.”
Charley was smart and he had narrowed down the operation. The only thing to tell him was to believe in Santa Claus and to take care of his mother. Actually he had only an
hour or two to talk over plans and this was just as well. Sitting there in the living room in Alexandria looking at Muriel and Charley, he realized how big the break was going to be, even though it was something for which they had all been waiting. He and Muriel had been together ever since he had come back from the AEF. They had been everywhere as a family unit, even as far as Tientsin, and now it was all over. There would be no Muriel where he was going, to guide him or to talk to the boss. It was quite a thing to consider, quite a thing.
“Muriel,” he said, “don’t you think it would be best for you and Charley to go up to Hallowell?”
“No,” Charley said, “Ma gets into arguments with Grandma.”
“We don’t get into arguments, Charley,” Muriel said, “but your grandmother is an old lady and she has rather fixed ideas. The schools are better in Washington, and maybe I can be of some help here in Washington. At least I’ll be able to get some news.”
Still North Africa was quite a way from Washington.
“All right,” he said, “and say good-by to Robert for me, won’t you? Tell Robert to keep his nose clean, will you?”
“You always pick up coarse expressions,” Muriel said, “when you get away with troops.”
“Well,” he said, “he’ll know what I mean.”
“And what’s your final advice to me?” Muriel asked. “What about my own nose?”
“Muriel,” he said, “you always did have a pretty nose.”
“I wish you wouldn’t behave as though you were going to a surprise party,” Muriel said.
“Damn it, Muriel,” he said, “you don’t want me to cry, do you?”
“I just don’t want you to act as though you were going on a vacation,” Muriel said.
He could feel the tension and he was glad Charley was there because it eased things somewhat, and it was unsettling to see that Muriel was on the verge of tears.
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