A Midwinter's Tale

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “I know, Brig. I’m deeply honored. I’ll treasure our friendship all my life—which by the way I plan on being a long one.”

  She laughed happily and left me. I have kept the promise, not that it was hard to keep.

  “There are all kinds of loves in the world, Chuck O’Malley,” John Raven would say. “God seems to have blessed you with quite a variety of them.”

  I would tell him that I wasn’t sure it was a blessing.

  “You wish you’d never known Brigitta?”

  That would settle that.

  Heart pounding fiercely, I approached Captain Polly.

  “Staff Sergeant O’Malley’s compliments, Captain, ma’am. And this time I really mean compliments.”

  I bent over and kissed her cheek. She hugged me with one arm.

  Please don’t be a crook, pretty Polly. But I’ll love you even if you are.

  “Oh, Chucky, thank you. Drat, I’m crying! I’m always crying these days!”

  I stood up. She removed her arm.

  “But we’re so happy,” she sniffled. “We’ve been trying for so long.”

  “I’m sure the kid will talk funny, the same way you and John do.”

  “At least he won’t talk like he’s from Capone’s hometown . . . and thanks for the presents.” She winked.

  “Captain, ma’am,” I got to the point, “I’m going to need a car till the weekend. Special operation.”

  “Sure.” She reached for a stack of signed requisitions from the general. “Buick all right?”

  “Why not?”

  She filled in the details. “I’ll tell them to fill the tank.”

  She had not asked why I needed the car or what I was going to do.

  “Great.”

  She looked up at me, her dark blue eyes shrewd. She knew at least vaguely what I was going to do and did not disapprove. Later they would call it sisterhood, but loyalty to other women threatened with violation has transcended almost all other loyalties since the beginning of the species. Polly Nettleton did not want to know the details, but she was on my side.

  “Be careful with it, Chuck.” She gave me the requisition paper.

  “You know me, Captain Polly, ma’am. Safest driver in the Army.”

  She sniffed her skepticism. “I hear you encountered my new assistant yesterday.”

  She waved at the cornflower blonde sitting at a smaller desk next to her.

  “And naturally it was a pleasant encounter . . . Lieutenant Nan, ma’am.”

  “Sergeant Chucky.” She was blushing.

  “You certainly make your conquests in a hurry, Sergeant.” Polly grinned impishly.

  Nan’s flush grew deeper.

  “No, ma’am. I’m usually conquered almost immediately.”

  It was pleasant banter. I had no desire to become involved with Nan Wynn. Well, I had lots of desires to be honest about it. But other things had to be done and I did not need another woman thinking that she loved me.

  Trudi called to ask, as always hesitantly as one who wrongly intrudes on an important person’s time, if we were still to meet in the afternoon. It was, she said, such a beautiful day.

  “I’ll pick you up at your apartment at one?”

  “Oh, how wonderful!”

  No, I didn’t need another one loving me.

  Yet, as I gathered material off my desk, it occurred to me that I had not given quite the right answer to Brigitta. So I stopped by her desk.

  “I want to add to what I said before, Brig.”

  She looked up from her typewriter, surprised. “There is no need for that.”

  “Yes, there is. I love you too, not like a husband, not like a father, not like a son.” My face felt warm. “Rather like a combination of all three. That’s what will never end.”

  She drew a sharp breath, emphasizing her lovely little breasts, and, with tears in her eyes, smiled softly.

  “I’ll never sleep with you,” I rushed ahead madly, my face suddenly hot, “and I’ll never stop thinking that it would be nice to do so.”

  Then she did weep, peacefully, happily.

  I beat a hasty retreat.

  The sergeant in charge didn’t want to give it to me. It was not “fucking right” he informed me that he give a good car to a “fucking punk” like me. I warned him of the consequences of ignoring General Meade’s signature and he backed off a little.

  “Not flicking right you should have this, kid.”

  “You question General Meade’s signature?”

  “No, I question your ability to drive this beauty. If you mess it up, I’ll cut off your balls.”

  “I’ll note that observation in my report to General Meade. . . . Is there an extra key?”

  “Fuck off, asshole.”

  “Where?”

  “In the glove compartment, asshole.”

  I emptied my bank account—two thousand dollars of carefully saved money. Two gumshoes followed me to the Army bank. They might try to find out what I was doing, but they’d need to make charges before the tellers at the bank—as incorruptible as any Americans in Bamberg—would tell them. When I left the bank, they had disappeared.

  Then I went back to my room and studied the maps I had gathered at the transport pool, despite the sergeant’s protests that I had no right to them either. Some 460 kilometers round-trip, about 270 miles. Driving at sixty on the autobahn that was five hours, two and a half either way, if there were no delays. All right, since you are a cautious man, double it, ten hours. Leave at twenty hundred hours, be back in Bamberg at six hundred at the latest. Plenty of time to set up the playlet for the next morning. I would schedule that tentatively for eight hundred. I’d have to tell General Meade about it late tomorrow. That could be the trickiest part of the whole scheme.

  I went over the maps again. I had driven to Nürnberg before and it was a piece of cake. I had never tried to drive farther. In fact I had never driven two and a half hours in all my life, especially at night. To say nothing of five hours. Well, there was always a first time.

  Why not make our run tonight? I had reviewed that possibility several times and always came up with the same answer—on the lips of the good April: “Never forget, Chucky, that haste always makes waste.” In fact, sometimes it doesn’t. But in this case it would. There would not be enough time to prepare General Meade and Rednose Clarke. Nor enough time for the Schultzes, as I must now think of them, to organize their departure. They must not leave anything behind that would stir up Rednose’s suspicions.

  After lunch—four large sausages—I picked up Trudi in my shiny new Buick. She was appropriately impressed. “You have been made a general?” she asked with an impish grin.

  “On special assignment from a general.”

  I drove into the country, proud of my car and proud of my woman. For a glorious couple of hours, I would forget that neither were mine by any rights and that in two days both would be gone.

  We made love by our favorite rural bridge in the Hauptsmoor, plunged into the waters of the stream, chilly even in August, and then huddled under our GI blankets to warm up for another bout of love. I kissed every inch of her body, storing up memories of summer sweetness for the hard winter that would start in two more days. My love sighed contentedly, unaware of my own grim foreboding. She drew me into her mouth and I licked her loins. Our wanton love turned into reckless abandon. We groaned and screamed and moaned and shouted and then collapsed, spent and exhausted, on our blanket.

  “You’re fantastic, Karl,” she sighed, “I want to do everything with you.”

  “I think we just about have.”

  She giggled and drew me close to her.

  It was a bittersweet experience. It would be our last session of lovemaking for a month or two, maybe longer. I could not face the possibility lurking in the back of my head that it might be our last love ever.

  Trudi did not seem to sense my unease. There was no point in telling her anything till tomorrow. I would not tell them about our escape
until the last minute. I thought I could count on Trudi’s nerves, but I wasn’t sure about her mother and her sister.

  We stopped at a little, old stone church near the bridge, named after St. Killian, the Irish monk who was the patron saint of Bavaria. (The Chicago Irish never did comprehend that the saints of the three great parishes of the South and West Sides in the 1930s—St. Mel, St. Killian, St. Columbanus—were patron saints in Germany. Needless to say, they did not want to comprehend that the Germans had appropriated three perfectly good micks.) The onion-dome roof, typical of many old churches, suggested Bavaria’s onetime contact with the Orthodox world, not its religious dependency on Ireland.

  “Let us pray again for our futures, Karl,” Trudi said simply. I wasn’t sure that I would be welcome in church twice in the same week. Nor could I understand why she thought God would welcome two sinners. Perhaps she didn’t think what we were doing was a sin. Maybe she saw it as a necessity for survival and trusted that God would understand.

  We knelt at the altar rail longer than I could usually manage without my knees protesting. In gloom, I saw her lips moving in rapid entreaty. For what? I wondered.

  Help me save her, I asked the One in Charge. Give her a chance for life. You made me save one who didn’t want to live. Assist me with this one who does want to live.

  No one whispered reassurance into my ear. But I still left the little chapel feeling once more that I was one of the guys in the white hats.

  When I dropped her off in front of the food store on the Untersandstrasse, I said casually, “Could you meet me for coffee tomorrow morning in the Grüner Markt? Ten o’clock? I’d like to talk over something with you.”

  She looked at me somberly, appraising my face as she had done the night I had pulled her out of the alley.

  “Certainly.”

  There was even more affection and invitation than usual in her kiss. I drew her close, reached under her dress, and captured a breast, which I pushed against her ribs. She groaned in pleasure. Roughly I pulled the dress off her shoulders and played with her breasts and her nipples, licking, biting gently, sucking on them. She yielded herself completely. The dress fell to her hips and she clutched at it.

  Why not make love here, on the Untersandstrasse under the stars? Would that not be a memory on which to cling in the lonely weeks ahead? She would not resist me.

  Yet I could not do it. For all her wantonness with me, Trudi was a model of Catholic modesty in public. I had to respect that. So I released her and she dashed up the steps to their dingy apartment, pulling the dress up over her shoulders as she went.

  There were no gumshoes watching at the Vinehaus when I returned.

  Sometime during the night, the daimon crept into my head and took over. I was running for the end zone again, so scared that I could not eat breakfast when I awoke, but my mind was racing, leaping ahead, considering and rejecting alternatives, planning responses to contingencies, imagining answers to my friend Rednose if he violated the scenario I had prepared for him.

  In my dreams I also engaged in violent sexual play with most of the women I knew and many I didn’t know.

  23

  Inviting in her thin, white hotel maid’s dress, despite her grim face, Trudi waited for me in a sidewalk café at the upper end of the Open Market. We had met there often before, indistinguishable I suppose from the scores of other young GIs with equally young, blond fräuleins. It was another glorious summer day. The market echoed and reechoed with young laughter. Winter and death had been put behind. Temporarily.

  I kissed her lightly. “Sorry if I went too far in the Untersandstrasse last night.”

  “You understood and respected my modesty, Karl. You were wonderful.”

  The way she saw it, I was incapable of any wrong.

  “Sit down, Trud, we have some serious work to do.”

  She nodded, waiting for my words.

  “First of all, your friends in Stuttgart, they are close friends, you can trust them?”

  “Of course.”

  “You know where they live?”

  “Certainly.”

  “I’m afraid it will be necessary to bring you and your mother and sister to them tonight. Will your friends take you in on such short notice?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Are you as confident as you sound in those answers?”

  She touched my hand. “Yes, Karl. But you must not risk yourself.”

  “I don’t intend to risk anyone.” I picked up my coffee cup and then put it down again. My stomach was protesting that I was risking far too much. “There is some danger, I will not deny that, but much less danger than you have survived before. It is important that you and your mother and Erika obey all my instructions perfectly. Do you understand?”

  “Jawohl.” She smiled.

  “You are not to tell them our destination. Is that understood? . . . Good. Are they working tonight? . . . No? That helps. At eighteen hundred tell them that they must put on the best American clothes they have. They may bring one small bag each. Pack whatever is most valuable and anything American which might hint that you have a friend in the military. Understand? . . . Fine. Leave everything else. Don’t worry about money, that will be arranged. I want the apartment to look like a German refugee room from which nothing has been removed, as if the three of you might return any minute. Got it?”

  “Ja.” Her eyes bore into mine.

  “Good. At twenty hundred proceed to the alley where we first met, beneath the Oberpfarrekirche. I’ll be waiting in the Buick. Climb in and we leave. Any questions?”

  “Papers?”

  “They have been arranged.”

  “Truly?” Her youthful face exploded with joy. A passport to paradise.

  “Truly. But you must tell no one, say good-bye to no one, talk to no one unless you have to. Insist that your mother and Erika do exactly what I have told you. Do not go back to the Bambergerhof for anything you might have left there. Do not leave your room between eighteen hundred and twenty hundred. Understand?”

  “I think so.”

  “Any more questions?”

  “I worry about you.” She touched my hand again.

  “Don’t.” I smiled like a cowboy hero—Randolph Scott or maybe Joel McCrea, a sturdy WASP this time. “It’s going to work out all right. It’ll be a few weeks before we can see each other, that’ll be the hardest part for me.”

  “For me also.”

  “One more thing.” I had a brilliant idea, or so I thought. “Do you have an extra picture of your mother and father and you two from maybe ten years ago that you could leave someplace?”

  “Surely. Perhaps in the little box on the table.”

  “Great. . . . And, remember, do not tell your mother or sister where they are going. Do not mention the papers. Tell them that my orders are most strict. I will explain all in the car. Okay?”

  “Okeydokey, Herr Yankee.”

  I didn’t eat any lunch.

  By now the reader of these pages, being wise and more experienced than was that callow lad playing Galahad or the Rider in the Dom in Bamberg, anno Domini 1947, has doubtless perceived the potentially catastrophic omission of which I was guilty.

  In August the days are shortening rapidly in Europe, but there is still much more light than darkness. We would be driving in twilight or dusk most of the way to Stuttgart. I’d be returning in darkness, maybe in time to see the dawn. Even if I was delayed, there would still be time for the operation to be launched on schedule.

  As long as I could sell the schedule to Clarke.

  Then I walked over to the Residenz for a truly tricky part. It had been on my list of options and I had debated whether to try it. General Meade was not the kind of man whom you could easily fool, even if in this case he might not mind being fooled. I would not lie to him. I hope the reader notes that I rarely lie, but I certainly deceive—being skilled in Jesuit casuistry, albeit trained by the Dominicans.

  Captain Polly had left some l
etters on my desk to type. I polished them off quickly and brought them and the carbons up to her. I noted with some relief that Lieutenant Nan was not around. I would hardly have made my next move if she was.

  “Good morning, Captain Nettleton, ma’am. Staff Sgt. Charles C. O’Malley wonders if the captain persists in her request for personal information about Sergeant O’Malley?”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Chucky?” Her face betrayed the look of your Irish woman when her patience with a recalcitrant male is about to reach its limit.

  “You’ve forgotten?” I tried to sound as if I were devastated.

  “I have forgotten what?”

  “That you wanted to see the Clancy kid’s picture. Well, that’s all right.” I turned to leave.

  “You have it with you?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Gimme!”

  She almost snatched the picture out of my hand. It was Rosie in her peach-colored prom dress, smiling and happy (pure fakery at the time).

  “Gosh, Chuck,” Polly said softly. “Is she really this gorgeous?”

  I peered over her shoulder as if I were unfamiliar with the picture.

  “Perhaps more so,” I said judiciously.

  “Are you in love with her?”

  “There’s some debate about that.”

  “No wonder you don’t have any fräuleins on the line. . . . Do you plan to marry her someday?”

  My stomach protested that question. “We’re too young to think about that, Polly.”

  “I’d like to meet her.”

  “You can never tell what might happen.” Not if I can help it.

  “What’s she like?”

  “Typical Irish matriarch in the making—contentious, opinionated, outspoken, strong-willed.”

  “Ah?” Polly tilted her nose up in the air, ready to fight.

  “Well, she’s also smart and sensitive and generous and loyal and lots of fun.” She drinks too much, but I was not going to say that.

  “What more do you need? . . . What’s her name?”

  “Rosie, ah, Rosemarie.”

  “Fits her. She’s lovely, Chuck.” Polly handed the photo back to me. “Be good to her.”

  “I’ll try. . . . Tell your man that I’m out here.”