She was feeling better, or she would not have asked for one, but her hands were shaking.
“What was his name?” I asked.
“Oh, he was someone Mel always talks about,” she said. “Grimshaw, Foghorn Grimshaw. Why does everyone have some damned nickname in the army?”
I had often wondered myself, but her words were moving faster.
“And do you know what he wanted? He wanted to tell me all about Mel and he wanted to congratulate me, darling … but they don’t want Mel to leave the service. They want us to wait until everything can be arranged properly. Time, he kept saying, time.… But Mel wants to go to Carmel, or else he wants to be somewhere with troops. Oh, God, I’m ashamed.”
“Well,” I said, “you ought to be. You haven’t any right to ruin Goodwin’s life.”
“Darling,” she said, “I don’t want to ruin his life. I’d much rather have ruined yours. We could have gone to hell together, and we would have had a lot of the same ideas.” Her face brightened. “Would you like to go to hell with me?”
“No,” I said, “not right at the moment, Dot.”
“I thought of it when we were on that plane. If Mel hadn’t been in Paris …” She was retreating from fact again. “All right,” she said, “but don’t say you never have thought of it.… Sid, aren’t you going to help me?”
I was thinking of Mel Goodwin and I felt a sudden surge of revolt.
“No,” I said. “Damn it, Dottie, if you feel that way, hurry up and tell him so.”
“But I don’t want to tell him,” she said. “There must be some other way. I don’t want to hurt him.… He believes in me.… No one’s ever believed in me the way he does.”
“He’d better stop,” I said.
It was exactly like her, I was thinking, not to be able to say yes and not to be able to say no, and to try to put the burden on someone else.
“Sid,” she said, “will you tell him?”
“Certainly not,” I said. “Dot, you ought to be ashamed.”
“Damn you,” Dottie said, “I told you I was ashamed. Can’t you be kind to me, Sidney?”
“No,” I said.
She was struggling like a struck fish.
“Sid,” she said, “suppose I went to see her and just told her everything. Suppose I told her how terrible it is, and it’s all a big mistake. I’d rather do that than tell him.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Oh, hell!” Dottie said. “Mrs. Goodwin, that dreadful wife of his—Muriel.”
“If you do that, he’ll lose Muriel, too,” I said.
I had never suspected that she would arrive at the old chestnut of the confrontation of the wife and mistress, but as I considered it, I realized that Dottie enjoyed dramatic scenes. Her mind was still vacillating like a needle, between degrees of reason. She was too egocentric to realize that by trying to let herself out the easy way, she might create a situation with Muriel that was irreparable. I could not see Muriel accepting this sort of annunciation.
“Sid,” she said, “suppose you tell her.”
“Dottie,” I said, “I’m not in this, and Mrs. Goodwin isn’t either, unless she refuses to take him back. You’ll have to take it up with Mel Goodwin, Dot. He’s the one you’re letting down.”
There was not much need for retribution in the life hereafter. You usually paid for the party while you were still on earth.
“Why not face it?” I told her. “You’ve been through this with other men.”
“Darling,” Dottie said, “that isn’t fair. It wasn’t the same with you and me. We had other things on our minds.”
We must have both thought about this through a second or two of painful silence. You always had to pay for every party.
“I wasn’t referring to you and me,” I said. “Let’s forget it, Dot.”
“Oh, hell,” Dottie said. “You didn’t believe in Santa Claus.… Darling, no one else I’ve ever known ever threw in everything the way he has. Darling, he must fight like he can love.”
I thought of the young Melville Goodwin, just married, just out of the Point, just before he went overseas, walking down Sixth Avenue with Muriel and hearing that old song.
Dottie was sitting up straight. She had picked up all her frankness and confusion and had packed it away. She might have been talking to her lawyer about business matters.
“Sid,” she said, “are you going to let me down?”
“No one’s letting you down, Dot,” I said. “I can’t pick up the check.”
“By God,” Dottie said, “I’ll never trust you or anyone again.”
She had twisted everything around, as she always could.
“You never have, Dot,” I said.
She stood up and I stood up.
“God,” she said, “I hate your guts. I guess I’d better be leaving now, but I do want to say good-by to poor Helen. Will you have someone call Bernard, please?”
I opened the library door, and she walked past me. She hated my guts, but then, she had hated them a good many times before and again I was thinking “If you can fight like you can love, good night, Germany.”
“Helen darling,” I heard her saying, “I’m terribly sorry I kept Sidney so long. I had no idea it was so late, and I have to be back in time for dinner. Sidney’s calling Bernard.”
I was glad to be able to tell Helen about it all, instead of keeping it to myself. At least there was a chance now of bringing some order into Melville Goodwin’s problem. The worst of it was that I had once been almost like Melville Goodwin. Thank God Dottie was gone, I kept thinking.
“You ought not to be so hard on her,” Helen said. “She can’t help it, Sid.”
It all went to show that no one should risk interfering with other people’s lives. Dottie and the Goodwins could work it out themselves from now on.
“Don’t say you don’t care,” Helen said. “Of course you care what’s going to happen to him and poor Muriel. She certainly must know everything by now.”
Helen and I were like good little children who had behaved themselves. We were safe at Savin Hill.
“Why are you so sure she knows?” I asked her.
“Any woman can tell,” Helen answered. “It’s just a matter of how she’s going to take it.”
Things never seemed to settle down, there in the country. I never suspected that Muriel Goodwin would be with us all by herself spending Monday night, but then perhaps this was inevitable, since I was growing to be the greatest living authority on Dottie Peale.
XXXIV
And She Never Dropped a Stitch
It was cold and windy on Monday night. The house looked even larger than it had when I had first seen it, now that the trees were bare. Its size engulfed me suddenly, almost like a return to consciousness, as I heard Williams asking me what the orders would be for tomorrow. The wind was whistling past the house. This business of trying to spread myself between New York and Connecticut would be too much, I was afraid, in winter.
“I’ll tell you what to do,” I said. “Ask Mrs. Skelton tomorrow morning what the plans are.”
I wanted to get inside out of the cold, and when I was in the hall, Oscar took my hat and coat.
“I’ve had my dinner,” I told him. “Where’s Mrs. Skelton?”
“She’s in the living room, sir,” Oscar said.
I could not understand why Helen had not come into the hall to meet me as she usually did after my trip from the city. I felt a little neglected, seeing that the house had been Helen’s idea. If I had really had my choice, we all would have still been in New York, and I would be entering an apartment just a few blocks away from the office. By the time I reached the living room I was thinking longingly of the place in the Fifties where we had lived.
“Hello, dear,” Helen said. “I didn’t know you’d be so late. Here’s Muriel Goodwin.”
Helen spoke as though I were Camilla being prepared for company, and I had certainly not expected any. Not until Helen had mentioned he
r, did I see that Mrs. Melville Goodwin was seated on the sofa, working on another washcloth, finishing some border stitches quickly so she could leave it and greet me. It was the washcloth as much as the apparition of Muriel Goodwin that confused me. My first thought was that it was utterly inappropriate, under the circumstances, for her to be crocheting another of those things, and then I remembered that the threads of Melville Goodwin were being removed from Dottie Peale’s tapestry.
“Don’t get up. You might drop a stitch,” I said.
“Oh, no,” she said, “I never drop them,” and she held out her hand graciously, as though Helen and I were young people on the post on whom she was making an informal call which she should have made some time before.
“I just called up rather on the spur of the moment,” she said. “Helen was most hospitable and sweet and asked me to come out for the night. I had run up to New York to see Pamela Hardee—that’s an old army family, really old army, who were stationed with us at Colon—and then I thought of you and Helen, and I thought it might be better for Melville if he were by himself a day longer.”
It was an effort for me not to look questioningly at Helen, but the situation was obviously under control, and Muriel Goodwin was the chairman of the board conducting the meeting.
“We’ve been having such a nice time,” she was saying, “talking about everything under the sun all through supper, especially about children and husbands. I told Helen not to call you up. I didn’t want you to be worried about my being here.”
I wanted very much to know whether Helen had told her anything about Dottie Peale, but there was no way of finding out.
“I’m awfully glad to see you,” I said.
“I’m glad, too,” Mrs. Goodwin answered. “I only had such a short glimpse of you in Washington, Sidney. I was just telling Helen I wished you were both in the service, too—but it’s funny, I still keep on feeling as though you were.”
At last I felt it might be polite to look at Helen, but she only smiled at me unhelpfully.
“We’ve only been talking in a very general way,” Mrs. Goodwin said again, “about children and husbands, but not about anything in particular.”
She seemed anxious for me to know that I had missed nothing, but I knew, as she looked up at me from her work, that she was no longer going to talk about nothing in particular. She was going to talk about everything. It was not a pleasant prospect for the end of any evening.
“Sidney,” Helen said, “I think I’d better go upstairs and leave you both together.”
“Don’t run away, dear,” Muriel Goodwin said. “Of course I’m here to talk about the General—but there’s nothing you shouldn’t hear.”
“Sidney,” Helen said, “I wish you’d please sit down,” and she sounded almost like Dottie Peale. “I don’t know why I can’t ever stop Sidney from prowling around the room.”
“It’s all right,” Mrs. Goodwin said, and her smile was sympathetically gracious. “Let him if he wants to. Mel often does, when I’m talking things over with him.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I found a chair and pulled it near the sofa where Mrs. Goodwin sat. She waited for me, giving me time to settle myself, and I found myself doing this hastily and guiltily, like a young officer called suddenly into conference. She was patient. She even waited a moment longer than was necessary, and then she spoke again.
“I know you’re both fond of Melville,” she said. “He has a gift for making friends. I’ve been very touched by how many people are concerned about him at present. Now General Grimshaw … Did Melville ever mention him—Foghorn Grimshaw?”
She smiled again, this time at Helen, and the army had taken over. She was no longer the General’s wife dropping in to call. She was closer now to being the spokesman at an army conference, giving a thumbnail sketch of background material.
“You know, dear,” she said to Helen, “Sidney made a very favorable impression on General Grimshaw. He went out of his way to speak of Sidney, and Goochy likes Sidney—he was Melville’s old chief of staff in France—and Robert liked him so much, too. That’s why I can’t help feeling that you’re all in the family.” And she smiled at me again.
Muriel was taking over, and she was running things very well. She was not even being a brave little woman. It was not fair, perhaps, but in a way I could sympathize with Melville Goodwin. He had been away a long time and had become used to running things for himself.
“I admit that General Grimshaw and General Gooch, too, know the General very well,” Muriel Goodwin was saying. The only sign of repression that I could detect was her impersonal reference to General Goodwin as “the General.” She had raised the barrier of rank and had deliberately made him a symbol, just as Victorian wives had once referred to their husbands as “Mister,” even in the bedroom. “But I know the General rather well myself, and I’ve known him longer than anyone else. I’ve seen him grow. Now they are talking to me of waiting, and of time curing everything. Of course I know all about waiting. You see, you have to, if you’re married in the service … but I would really like to know something definite, and no one will tell me.”
She had woven a large part of the General’s life, and now at last she was getting somewhere. I was forgetting where we were. I was following again in the parade after Melville Goodwin.
“Of course a part of me thinks of Mel as a person and as my husband,” she said, “but I realize too that ever since I was a girl in Hallowell, another part of me has always thought of what he means to other people, and what he stands for. I suppose this happens more in the service than anywhere else. If an officer dies, his wife can always remember what he has meant, not only to her, but to the service. Now I’ve had a good deal to do with making the General what he is.”
I was afraid she would speak of self-sacrifice, and it would have disappointed me if she had, but she went straight ahead marshaling her facts.
“Melville has his record, and no one can take that impersonal part of him away from me. He’s something more than my Melville Goodwin. Do you see what I mean when I say I don’t think of him entirely as a person?”
She paused and turned her head toward me abruptly, and her gray-blue eyes repeated the question. I had often thought how pretty she must have been when she was a girl, and I had no impression of faded beauty now. Although her bluish-gray hair and her plump figure made her look older than Melville Goodwin, she also looked wiser. The motion of her hands stopped. She laid the washcloth gently on her knees, and waited patiently to be sure I understood.
“You mean,” I said, “that you think of him as government property?”
She nodded to me quickly and pulled a long loop of thread through with her hook. I noticed that Helen was looking at me in a proud, complacent way that made me hope that I was not becoming a symbol myself.
“I hoped you’d say that,” she said. “I’m so glad you understand, and I do hope Helen will. I suppose I’m talking from the point of view of other service wives, and it’s hard for people on the outside sometimes to see it. There’s been so little ever written about service wives, hasn’t there?”
I turned my thoughts dutifully to literature, but I could only recall a few brief sketches of army women in the short stories of Kipling and a few lines in Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads. There were also pages from Lever, but then there was Thackeray.
“Well, there are the Newcomes,” I said.
Her whole face brightened. Somehow I had never thought of her as reading Thackeray.
“Oh,” she said, “the Old Campaigner. I hope you don’t think I’m like her. I’ve always been afraid you might.”
“No,” I said, “I thought you were at first, but I don’t think so now.”
She laughed, and when she did, she was almost like a girl who had been paid a compliment.
“Thackeray was so unfair,” she said. “He did nicely with the colonel, but when he came to her, he only made a caricature. It’s unfair, because army wives
really have as much to do with the service as the men. Now take my General. I don’t think Melville would ever have made general if I hadn’t prodded him sometimes.… I wish Melville didn’t know this, too.… We might have been happier if I hadn’t been so ambitious—but at least I’ve done something for the service, and the service is more important than Mel or me.”
Muriel Goodwin stopped again, and memories of the Goodwins in Tientsin, Schofield, Panama, Benning and Bailey crowded uninvited into the living room. These and certain others had become as vivid to me as the footage of a documentary film. There was little Mel Goodwin fighting that Stickney boy at school, Mel Goodwin studying algebra with Muriel Reece, the first kiss at the Sunday school picnic, Goodwin at the Point, and Goodwin, captain of Company A. I was with him near Château-Thierry when the machine guns opened up. I encountered him walking back wounded in North Africa, and I could hear the enlisted man saying that he was a Goddamned fighting bastard, those words that he wanted on his tombstone. Melville Goodwin had been an officer who earned every cent of money that the taxpayers had paid out on him.
“You know”—and the voice of Muriel Goodwin took over again, like that of a lecturer in a darkened room—“Melville is difficult sometimes. I’ve sometimes thought he never wanted rank. I don’t mean that he’s afraid of it, but he’s like an absent-minded professor sometimes. Of course we both knew that Melville would be a general one day, when his orders came for the War College, but all Melville really cares about is the practical side of war. I’ve often thought he’d rather be a colonel, because he would be nearer to the front. Well … now he’s a general, and I’m very proud.… He can’t help being a general now … and perhaps I’ve done all I can for him, but I can’t bear to think of his not keeping on and being a lieutenant general.… Dear me, I’ve talked a lot, but I’ve had a reason for it.” She laid down her crocheting again and gave me all her attention. “There’s not much reason to discuss the personal side of Mel and me,” she said. “The boys are all grown up, and besides, I’m old enough to know that certain things do happen some times, but, Sidney … I’ve got to know what to do next … and I have to come to you, because he met … her through you, Sidney.”
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