Then the General must have realized himself that it was not for the good of the service.
“I guess I didn’t phrase my thought quite correctly, Flax,” he said. “The thought I was trying to convey is, I can never feel sorry for anyone who was killed clean in the line of duty, and that’s how I should have put it. Frankly, I’ve never been greatly interested in death, one way or another. Old whiskers with the hourglass is always hiding around some corner, isn’t he?” The General laughed, and looked relieved now that matters were back on a firmer basis. “Give me a cigarette, will you, Flax? My only thought, now that the old boy isn’t chumming around with me as much as he used to, is that I’ve got to do some future planning, and I’ve kind of forgotten how to sit still.”
“Now, General,” Colonel Flax said, “you know that the bosses won’t let anyone like you sit still.”
Melville Goodwin smiled again. For years there had been someone around prepared to tell him the right thing.
“Well, anyway, Flax,” he said, “I may be able to take a little time off to do some hunting and fishing. Did you ever try that wild boar shooting in Germany?”
“No, sir,” Colonel Flax said.
“Let’s see,” he said, “where was I?”
There was a curious pause. For a second or two no one seemed to remember where the General had left off.
“I guess you were about ready to hit that beach in Normandy,” Phil Bentley said.
“That’s right,” the General said, “it was Omaha.”
We all waited for him to go on, but he did not continue, and then I knew that he was empty and finished. His clock had stopped at Omaha and he did not want to wind it up again.
“You know,” he said, “I think you’ve got about all I have to give. Let’s break it off at Omaha.”
He glanced at his watch and stood up.
“What I want, Sid, is one or maybe two of those nice pale Martini cocktails and then a bite of lunch, and then I’d better kiss the girls good-by. Get yourself braced for it, Myra.”
It was the first time that he had called Miss Fineholt “Myra” and that concession was like the dropping of a curtain. Phil Bentley must have known how things were. There must have always been a time in other interviews when it was useless to go further.
“All right, let’s call it a day, sir,” Phil Bentley said, but it was not quite a day.
Now that the show was over, we were reluctant to leave the show, and Melville Goodwin was like a gracious host.
“You get my point, don’t you?” the General said. “There comes a time when you can’t blow your own horn any more. The rest of it is what you might call straight military history, and Flax can give it to you if you want it, or you might get in touch with my old chief of staff, General Gooch.”
“The Washington Bureau’s covered that already,” Phil Bentley said.
The General laughed.
“Well,” he said, “let’s hope I’ve lived right.”
We all laughed, but the General was waiting expectantly, as though something were missing, and I knew what it was. There had been no formal speech of acknowledgment, but just as I was about to make it, Phil Bentley did it instead.
“General,” he said, “I want to thank you for everything. You say you’re a specialist, and I suppose I’m one, too. I must have done thirty or more of these interviews and some of them have been tough. Well, this one hasn’t been tough at all.”
“And Phil and I wonder if you’ll sign us each a photograph,” Myra Fineholt said.
It was exactly the right touch, the photograph, and as she pulled two out of her briefcase, I could see that Mel Goodwin approved.
“Well,” he said, “I didn’t know this was coming. Flax, lend me your pen, will you?” but Colonel Flax had his pen out and waiting before the General asked for it.
To Myra, he wrote on Miss Fineholt’s photograph, who took down all of Operation Windbag, With love, from Mel.
To Phil, who made the old man stick his neck out, he wrote across Phil Bentley’s picture, and is too good a guy to chop it off, With admiration and affection, Mel.
“Say, Flax,” the General said, “how about going out and whistling for drinks.” The operation was over but headquarters was still intact. In fact I was almost embarrassed when he remembered where he was.
“Forgive me, will you, Sid?” he said. “I’m just like Muriel. I’m always taking over.”
XXVI
Once More the Sirens Sing
I had traveled extensively before, during and after the war. Many of my trips had been highly uncomfortable, combining physical fatigue, bad water, inadequate food, and insects; but when a trip was over, a mellow glow immediately began to dull its grimmer aspects. I would think of the sights I had seen, and the companions, whose eccentricities I had scarcely been able to tolerate, became warmly agreeable in retrospect. Small grudges and annoyances would be forgotten, and regrets would begin to arise that the party was breaking up and everyone would exchange addresses and promise everyone else to get together sometime soon.
We had all followed Melville Goodwin through a strange country, and the experience had drawn us together, but I personally was experiencing the sort of museum fatigue that comes when you have seen and heard too much. Somehow I had not been the casual observer that I had thought I would be—but it was almost over now. The portable bar was in the living room for the last time, and they would all be gone directly after lunch. One more of those peculiar meals, and Goodwin, Fineholt, Flax and Bentley would be drawn back to the orbits of their own lives. The old rule was already working. It had been quite a trip with Mel Goodwin and we were a swell lot of people, and we must get together sometime soon. I even remember suggesting to Fineholt that we have lunch so that I could show her the studio, and Helen herself was sorry now that the end was near, because I heard her telling Mel Goodwin, who was showing us for the last time how to mix Martinis, that nothing had been any trouble at all. He had not descended upon her. She had enjoyed every minute of it.
“I’m just beginning to understand the army,” I heard her say, “and now you’re going and I’ll have to start understanding Sidney all over again.”
“Say, Flax,” the General said, “upstairs in my room there are two parcels on top of my kit bag—some things I’ve been saving for Sid and Helen. Would you mind asking Oscar to bring them down?”
Of course Colonel Flax did not mind, and Mel Goodwin took a swallow of his Martini.
“Just two little things I picked up after the surrender,” he said. “They’ve been knocking around in my baggage. They don’t amount to anything, but they do have an association value.”
In spite of the casual way he put it, our journey together had meant something to him also. When Oscar brought the two parcels tied up in brown paper, I could not help remembering the postwar days when everybody began pinning medals on everybody else. The parcel he gave to me contained one of those ugly Luger automatics that had passed almost as currency in the early occupation.
“I suppose you own one of these things already,” he said, “but this is a special Luger. It turned up when they were searching Goering’s baggage—that time when they fed him chicken and green peas. It belonged to old Fatso personally, and here are the papers to prove it.”
I held the thing as though it were a hot potato, and everybody laughed.
“Is it loaded?” I asked.
“That’s funny,” the General said, “I’ve had it all this time and I’ve never thought to look. Hand it over here, Sid.”
It was impressive to watch him with the Luger. He handled it in an expert, half-contemptuous professional way, breaking out the magazine with a quick one-two motion.
“By God,” he said, “it is loaded. I wonder what was the matter with our boys. Here, Flax, you keep the ammunition. Maybe Mrs. Flax might like it.”
“She certainly would, sir,” Colonel Flax said, “particularly if—er—Sidney would let me have a copy of those documents.�
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“Hand Helen her little bundle, will you, Flax,” the General said. “It’s a sloppy package. I didn’t tie it up myself.”
His words gave me a fleeting memory of young Mel Goodwin sealing packages in his father’s drugstore.
“Why,” Helen said, “what a lovely tea cloth.”
“It was right on the table in the bunker in the room where Hitler shot himself,” the General said, “but the stain on it is tea, and here’s the paper to prove it, signed by the Russian Intelligence. I got it at one of those vodka parties when we were still hotsy-totsy with the Russians.”
“Oh,” Helen said, “it’s lovely.” I recognized the tone, though the General did not, as one she employed whenever I gave her something that she could not imagine how to use.
“Just from me to you, dear,” he said, “and Muriel particularly wanted you to have it.”
Then I wondered fleetingly what grisly relic he might be saving for Dottie Peale. It was bound to be good, although I could not think of anything that might outrank Fatso’s gun and Eva Braun’s tea cloth. It was the direct measure of his gratitude, and I could not help but be touched.
“Why, son,” he said when we both thanked him, “they aren’t anything. I wish they could be the Hesse jewels,” and then he thought of Phil Bentley and Myra Fineholt. “I wish I weren’t running clean out of souvenirs,” he said. “Say, Flax, how about getting the powder taken out and then loosening up and handing Phil and Myra each one of Fatso’s cartridges?”
It was the time for passing out the Legions of Merit.
“I’d love to have one for a lipstick holder,” Myra said, “and Phil can put his on a key ring.”
“It takes a woman to think up things,” the General said. “Sister, you’ve got a lot of bright ideas.”
We were all a swell crowd, and the trip was almost over, and now the General was in a reminiscent mood. He was about to tell another one of his stories, and it was sad to think that it would be the last of them.
“I don’t know why I should have thought of this,” he was saying. “There was a young officer at Maule. That was right in the middle of the Bulge show, and everything was pretty scrambled up. Goochy, my chief of staff, sent him to report to me personally about some snarl up forward. I don’t remember what, because it was all one big foul-up. He was just a kid, a nice first lieutenant, nice face, nice hands. He gave me his name and outfit, but I forgot his name because I was thinking of the tactical situation. He gave a good report, too, all the facts in order. Then I saw him swaying. I should have seen he was going out on his feet—just plain pooped—but I wasn’t thinking about him until he fell down slam on the floor, out cold. Then I thought what a dead-game kid he was, and I wanted to make a note of his name personally so that I could pin something on him later. So I looked in the kid’s pocket and pulled out a letter, and found myself reading it, forgetting I shouldn’t. Well, do you know what the letter was? It was a ‘Dear John’ letter. The kid’s wife was leaving him for a navy flier in Jacksonville. He reminded me of Robert, stretched out there on the floor, except he didn’t have my kid’s physique. Well, anyway I saw he got a bronze star out of it, even if he lost the gal. Maybe it helped a little, but it didn’t fix anything permanently, because he was killed up on the Rhine. Well, I don’t know how this crossed my mind. Who’s ready for another drink?”
I wished that Oscar would appear with the news that lunch was ready, because the shadow of the young lieutenant lingered in the room, an uninvited guest, the ghost of an unknown soldier who should have stayed in the ETO where he belonged. I wondered myself how he had escaped out of the tight compartment in which Mel Goodwin kept the memory pictures of other officers and men, to run erratically across the General’s mind. There was more in his mind than one ever thought. There were the scars of old decisions and old regrets, for instance, and the weight of responsibilities that still rested on him, which he could not shift from himself to any subordinate or superior. Those were the things he had to keep all buttoned up and packed away and which he could never allow to move up front. There must have been a lot of things that he had felt obliged to forget as rapidly as possible. It made me uneasy that the young lieutenant should have appeared, but Melville Goodwin was forgetting him again and remembering something funny.
“The blast lifted us right off the seat,” I heard him saying, “and then we landed on it again hard, right by the numbers, and Goochy began to swear. Swearing was all right for Goochy, though it always hurt him when I used bad language.
“‘What’s the matter, Gooch?’ I said. ‘Did you pick up one of the pieces?’ You see, it was an HE shell and a lot of metal was flying around.
“‘No,’ he said, and he looked as though he wanted to cry, ‘but I sat down on that God-damned pint.’
“It was that pint of bourbon in his hip pocket. We hadn’t seen bourbon for two weeks and I had told him not to carry it on his hip. Well, you should have seen Goochy doing his work that evening. He had to write his orders lying down flat while the medics were taking pieces of glass out of him. The glass was there but the bourbon was all gone. It was really a two-way operation.”
Colonel Flax and I were standing a few steps away from the portable bar. We both joined in the merriment, relieved that things were back in the right groove.
“I think this has all been good,” the colonel said to me. “Don’t you think the General handled himself all right?”
He was appealing to me as a connecting link between the service and the eccentricities of civilians.
“I think Mel did a swell public relations job,” I told him.
The colonel looked toward the portable bar and lowered his voice discreetly.
“I’ve been watching Bentley,” he said, “and frankly I had my fingers crossed once or twice. The General is the type that’s hard to put over public-relations-wise. You never know how the combat type is going to jump. They get too natural. He’s getting pretty natural right now.”
I did not answer. After all, the show was over.
“The hours I’ve sat with combat types, sweating it out in press conferences,” the colonel said, “waiting for them to drop it all on the floor. The rough-and-tumble ones are never public-relations-conscious.”
“They can’t be everything,” I said.
Colonel Flax sighed. “Someday,” he said, “you and I have got to get together and tell each other stories. I don’t know why they’re always dropping bricks. They want to be liked and the public is all set to like them and indulge in a little hero worship, and then they drop a brick. Take Patton.”
“Well, he was the greatest figure in the war,” I said.
“I didn’t say he wasn’t,” Colonel Flax answered, “but, oh brother—whenever he made a speech!” He cast a level appraising glance at General Goodwin. “He hasn’t got the color but he’s got a few of the Patton traits.”
“Well,” I said, “they’ve got to be the same piece of goods because they all have to do the same thing. Maybe the public understands them better than you think.”
“Not the left wing,” Flax said.
“Everybody isn’t left wing,” I told him.
“Sometimes it seems as though everybody is,” Colonel Flax said, and he sighed again. “Somebody is always pulling the carpet out from under combat generals,” and he glanced again at Melville Goodwin. “They have to put over their personality to a lot of twenty-year-old kids. They have to tell themselves they’re good about a hundred times a day. They’ve got to hold that thought or else they’ll crack. Look at Goodwin. He looks pretty good, doesn’t he?”
Now that he had mentioned it, I had never seen Mel Goodwin looking better.
“He’s got his mind on something else now,” Colonel Flax said. “Boy, I’m feeling tired,” but Mel Goodwin was not tired.
“Hey, Sid,” he called, “come over here. I’ve been asking Helen the name of your tailor, and she can’t remember.”
“What do you want a tailor for?”
I asked.
“That tweed jacket and slacks of yours,” Mel Goodwin said. “I need something to wear on Sundays. The war’s over.”
I wondered whether it was a desire common to all army officers to get out of uniform or whether he was thinking of Dottie Peale. There was something preposterous in the idea of Melville Goodwin dressed in a tweed coat and slacks, minus stars and ribbons with only perhaps a small single enameled decoration in his buttonhole. I wondered what Dottie Peale would say if she saw him in gray slacks or a conservative double-breasted suit. Half of him would be gone and he did not know it.
“Well, what’s so funny about it?” Mel Goodwin asked.
He could read my thoughts correctly at the most unexpected times.
“It would give you schizophrenia,” I said. “You’ve been in uniform too long.”
The General put his arm around my shoulders. “Sid always comes up with something good,” he said. “Maybe Sid’s got something.” He finished his cocktail and set his glass down deliberately. “All you people on the outside seem to have queer notions about officers in civvies. Now I’ll bet Sid here got out of his uniform as soon as he had the chance. Didn’t you, Sid?”
“Yes, sir,” I answered, “I certainly did.”
“You’re damned well right you did,” Melville Goodwin said. “There’s nothing more satisfying to an army man, after a hard day, than getting out of uniform into some everyday clothes. It’s like taking off your corset and scratching—excuse me, Helen, my dear.”
We all smiled at one another appreciatively.
“Just walking down the street like a plain citizen, without having to take a salute, means a lot. It’s like getting out of school.… But do you know what Muriel told me as soon as I got off the plane?” He paused dramatically, but none of us knew. “She said that Charley—my kid Charley—had taken over all my civilian wardrobe—and it was a pretty sharp one—and had worn it ragged for the past two years. So here I am, without a fig leaf, except my uniform.”
Something in his voice showed it was no time to be amused, even when he mentioned a fig leaf.
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