Night of Fire and Snow

by Alfred Coppel

  The interruption banished tension and Alaine and Billy and Miguel laughed companionably together.

  “What’s the news from Kasserine?” Billy asked.

  “Bad right now,” Miguel said. “We’re taking a pounding.”

  “The Krauts can’t hold what they’ve taken.”

  “No, but a lot of good men are getting the hammer.”

  “Wait till the pride of the Navy gets there.”

  “To Kasserine?” Miguel asked.

  “Well, no. That’s expecting too much. Even for the Navy.”

  “I thought nothing was too much for the Navy,” Miguel said dryly.

  “I wish you could see my ship,” Billy said proudly. “A DMS—that’s a Destroyer Mine Sweeper, flyboy.”

  “I know.”

  “I didn’t know what they teach you in those Army barnstorming camps. But she’s a beauty. She’s sitting over in the basin at Hunter’s Point. We could drive out and take a look at her from the club, if you like. I’ve got my car.”

  “No, thanks,” Miguel said.

  “We’re on four hours’ notice, alerted,” Billy said, the golden stripe on his sleeve gleaming importantly.

  “What are you doing out tonight?”

  “If I have to go,” Billy said with an air of sacrifice, “Allie can. take my car back to Mother’s place for me.”

  That would be perfect, Miguel thought hopefully.

  “If I have to leave you with this guy, Allie,” Billy said, “watch him. He’s not to be trusted.”

  Miguel decided to change the subject. He didn’t like the trace of malice that was creeping back into Billy’s voice. He’d be starting on Tom again soon.

  “If you ever run into my brother Luis while you’re out tidying up the mine situation,” Miguel said, ‘let me know, will you?”

  “Luis is one of the boys in blue?”

  “He was on the Antietam the last I heard. He doesn’t write much.”

  “You know, of course, you aren’t even supposed to know there is such a ship as the Antietam?”

  “I promise not to tell, Admiral,” Miguel said.

  Billy was feeling his liquor slightly. “A slip of the lip may sink a ship,” he murmured. And then, looking at the way Alaine was watching Miguel, he added, “And a slip of a girl may sink—

  The waiter brought another round. Poor bourbon for Alaine and Miguel and a rum Coke for Billy. Miguel noticed Alaine had barely touched her first. The piano player started in on “As Time Goes By.”

  “I’m glad they brought that one back,” Alaine said.

  “It was written in thirty-one or two, wasn’t it?”

  “That Ingrid Bergman,” Billy said clicking his teeth. “Yipe. Did you see the picture? Casablanca?”

  “In Oklahoma City,” Miguel said.

  “Were you at Will Rogers Field?” Alaine asked.

  “I was with a P-38 group there. Before this.” Miguel touched one of the enameled aide’s shields on the lapels of his dark green blouse.

  “My brother,” Alaine said quietly, “was killed there.”

  “I’m sorry,” Miguel said. “Was he a pilot?”

  “Yes. It’s all right, really. It happened before the war. I hardly knew him. At least it seems that way now. Only fliers—“ She stopped and shrugged a little. “I worry about them.”

  Miguel wanted to reach across the table and take her hand. Instead he sat quietly making love to her in his mind.

  She wore a black cocktail dress with a collar that stood up like a ruff. He knew he would always remember that dress. The material draped from her wide shoulders with the static fluidity of a waterfall. He noticed the smooth breadth of her brows and how she wore her thick hair parted in the middle like a madonna’s.

  She didn’t really look like Aldyth Wylie, he thought. She was uniquely and completely herself. But because he had once loved Aldyth so, he knew that he was trying to love Alaine. Quickly and without any period of probing and testing. And now, please God, Aldyth would fade into perspective and become, instead of a mountain of guilt, a fragment of childish experience, a birth of tenderness. Let me be grateful, he thought, but let me forget her.

  “Have you lived in San Francisco long, Allie?” he asked, calling her by that name for the first time.

  “I was born here.”

  “Odd we never met.”

  “I went to school in the East.”

  “A woman’s college.”

  Her eyebrows arched. “Wellesley. Does it really show? They told us it might, but I never believed it.”

  “Well, it could have been Vassar. Or,” he said, wanting to impress her, “or just as a long shot, maybe Stephens. But Wellesley is better yet. You went there because some woman in your family went there before you.”

  Alaine smiled and nodded. “Correct, sir. My mother.”

  “They told you right when they said people would be able to tell. There’s a quality to a girl who has been educated in a a woman’s school—”

  “Good or bad?”

  “Neither, really. Just something.”

  “Ah,” Billy Alberg said sarcastically. “An indefinable something. Trust a Latin’s intuitive understanding of Woman to detect it.”

  “Then, too,” Miguel said, ignoring Billy’s comment, “there are good coeducational schools out here. Stanford, of course. Even California. So if a girl goes East its generally because she wants a woman’s school.’

  “You see?” Billy said. “He reads us gringos like a book.”

  “That’s come up before, hasn’t it?” Alaine said. “Are you a Latin, Mike? Rinehart doesn’t sound like it.”

  “My mother was Spanish. Some day I’ll tell you about her. It’s quite a story.”

  “Is she living?” Alaine asked.

  “No,” Miguel said, remembering the terror of the night Maria died. “No, she isn’t.”

  “Maria was a great lady,” Billy said, with a ring of alcoholic sincerity in his voice. “I know that sounds like pure com, but it’s true.” He rattled the ice cubes in his glass moodily. “She was one of Mother’s best friends. She and Mother both expected Mike to be a big writer some day. Important. I guess I was always a little jealous.”

  “Are you writing something now?” Alaine asked.

  “Yes and no. I have a pocketful of notes. For a novel about—what else?—fliers. Nothing too definite yet. I have a title. The Canceled Skies.”

  “That’s from something of MacLeish’s, isn’t it?

  “It’s from ‘The End of the World,’” Miguel said, pleased.

  “One thing all of us have always liked about the Spick,” Billy Alberg said. “He’s a right cheerful boy.”

  “It’s hard to write well about flying. You need imagination to write and imagination is bad in a pilot. It makes him afraid. Not many people have been able to turn the trick except maybe Saint-Exupery.”

  Alaine said: “I’ve read only Flight from Arras. Frankly, it depressed me terribly.”

  “Try Wind, Sand and Stars, or some of the earlier things he did. Like Night Flight.”

  Billy Alberg lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair looking bored. He rubbed his palm over the new gold braid on his sleeve for a moment and then said, “You know I was thinking about that summer you and Tom and I spent on the river. And Sandy. Remember Sandy?”

  “I remember,” Miguel said.

  Billy turned to Alaine. “One time Mike, here, tackled Tom out behind the general store. David and Goliath. Oh, Lord, that was a long time ago. Fighting, kicking, biting. No holds barred.” He looked across the table at Miguel and asked, “Whatever happened to Anson Wilbur, anyway?”

  “He went to Spain.”

  “He always was a little pinko, wasn’t he?”

  “You could call it that,” Miguel said.

  Billy said to Alaine, “A real nut. Campaigned for William Z. Foster.” To Miguel, he said, “I always thought he had it out for your sister Essie.”

  “My sister,” Miguel s
aid to Alaine, wishing Billy would let him tell her these things in his own good time, “is a nun.”

  “You’re Catholic, Mike?” Alaine asked.

  Tm nothing.”

  Billy regarded him disapprovingly. “His mother,” he declared with surprising primness, “was interested in Science.”

  If Alaine misunderstood, she gave no sign.

  “I’ve tested the power of prayer, let’s say. It never worked out for me,” Miguel said in a faintly sardonic tone.

  “That’s a terrible thing to brag about,” Billy said.

  “Just stating a fact.”

  “He talks like this, Allie,” Billy said. “But he wears a medallion around his neck. Just try and get him to part with it and see how religious he gets.”

  “It belonged to Maria,” Miguel said. “Religion has nothing to do with it.” He glanced across the room and said, “Here’s Tom.”

  “And about time,” Billy declared, twisting in his chair. “What’s that with him?”

  “From the look and size of it,” Miguel said, “I would say it was a girl. A rather attractive girl, too, wouldn’t you say, Allie?” Billy snorted. “I know a V Girl when I see one.”

  Miguel signaled to Tom and stood up. Eubanks, bulky in his new Eisenhower jacket with the silver wings and bars gleaming on it, pushed through the crowd toward them, pulling the girl along behind him.

  Then he was at the table, laughing and teasing Allie and making introductions with the air of a man who has just found a ten-dollar bill in the street. Miguel couldn’t remember ever having seen Tom more pleased with himself.

  “This, chums, is Nora.”

  Almost on cue, the piano player again took up “You Are Always in My Heart.” It was as though he had timed it with Nora’s entrance.

  She wore too much make-up and her sweater and skirt were too tight and wrong for an evening in the city. Her hair was bright and combed into a high pompadour. She was a little cheap and ill-at-ease, but there was a feral brilliance in her large and expressive eyes as she surveyed the group around her. She made Miguel feel tainted with snobbishness and it annoyed him. She looked so vulnerable and so much what Billy Alberg said she was. It was Alaine who made her welcome, but it did not seem to be in Nora to respond to a woman.

  “Hello, Nora,” Miguel said.

  The girl looked at him and smiled slowly. Her face seemed to come alight when she smiled. You forgot the cheapness and noticed only the fine bone structure of the thin face and the small even white teeth and the almond-shaped Magyar’s eyes. “Tommy has talked to me about you, Mike,” she said carefully, seeking his approval. “I think we will be friends.”

  Tom put his arm across Miguel’s shoulders and hooked his fingers through the shoulder loops of his blouse. “You bet you will, baby,” he said. “Isn’t she something for the troops, boy?”

  And then to Nora he said, “Well, baby? Shall we tell them now?”

  Miguel knew exactly what was coming now and for an unreasoning instant, he rejected it with all his power.

  But Tom said proudly, “I want you to help me break it to the folks, Spick. Nora and I were married this afternoon.”

  The rest of the evening seemed indistinct. The Eubanks party was like all the other Eubanks parties he remembered. Ella cried over Nora and Ollie slapped Tom on the back and said that he was proud of his boy and then to Miguel he said that it would be Miguel’s turn next, wouldn’t it. And then the evening became more and more raucous and even the fact that their only son had taken a wife that day couldn’t change the pattern the Eubanks had established back when they mixed their own gin in the bathtub. The people from the apartment downstairs came up and Miguel realized that Ella and Oliver hadn’t changed a bit, they had only grown older.

  Miguel, after the first shock had worn off, didn’t pay much attention to Nora or Tom. He spent the evening jousting with Billy for Alaine Winter’s attention.

  So there had been nothing in that first meeting to warn him that a line had fallen across the years of his life, nothing to tell him that forever afterward he would think of times and events in terms of “before Nora” and “after Nora.”

  And in the weeks that followed, he thought very little about Tom and Nora. Because he was in the process of making Alaine Winters fall in love.

  FOUR

  The Constellation banked steeply around to give the tourists a last view of Paris. Below the dark shape of the wing, the city lay in a wheeled pattern of light fanning out from the floodlit hub of the Etoile. Traffic was heavy on the Champs Elysées, streaming around the round point and on down the gentle slope of the Avenue de la Grande Armée. The paving reflected the amber driving lights wetly.

  Miguel wondered if J. C. were right, after all, and he would never again see Paris. He thought of the musty little apartment in Montparnasse, the cobbled street below, the bistro on the corner where you drank sweet vermouth and watched dusk fall over the city. It would be a pity not to return.

  The airplane leveled and nosed into the low stratus deck and the city was gone—snuffed out of existence.

  The No Smoking light went out and Miguel produced a pack of Chesterfields. Lieutenant Artigue accepted one with gratitude.

  “Why it is, I do not know. No nation can produce a cigarette like America.” He held a light for Miguel. “You are returning home?”

  “To California.”

  “Ah,” the Belgian said approvingly. “I, with regret, deplane in Ireland. A holiday. It will be a change from constant association with the accursed French.”

  The lieutenant shook his head and inhaled deeply. “I surprise you? Surely not.” He ran a finger over his thin mustache, looking at Miguel inquiringly. “You have been in Europe long enough to know the French. If I may venture an epigram, their lack of morality is surpassed only by their ineptitude in the sanitary arts.”

  The stewardess, standing in the aisle with the passenger list in her hand, glanced darkly at Artigue. Miguel felt certain she had overheard.

  “I know them,” the Belgian said heavily, “ah, how I know them. Would you believe this, m’sieu? I am stationed in Fontainebleau with the NATO Command. Now attend me, m’sieu. The Command, with commendable generosity, ordered apartments built for the French civil employees. These were new buildings, you understand, completely new. Now, m’sieu, would you believe that the French architects designed these structures without plumbing? Not a pipe, not a stool. Natural functions were relegated to an out-building. In this day and age, I ask you.” He looked indignantly at Miguel and when Miguel could think of no comment, he added, “Depravity. The heartland of Western Europe and rotten to the core.”

  Miguel had a whimsical picture of Bea Lillie singing in her relentless soprano, “France, you’re rotten to the core—”

  The stewardess was eyeing Artigue frigidly, but the Belgian continued without pause or remorse.

  “One loses count of their governments since the war. Ten? Fifteen? France is congenitally headless. If the Reds were to drop an atomic bomb on Paris tomorrow one would be able to discern no difference in the behavior of the French nation.” Miguel had a fleeting picture in his mind of a fireball consuming Paris. The Louvre, the Opéra, the Tour Eiffel, vaporized. Sickening thought. But so in tune with the times.

  He said, “You look for war in Europe, Lieutenant?”

  “Pray le bon Dieu will permit no such tragedy,” the Belgian said, crossing himself. “But one must, after all, consider the bestiality of the enemy. They butchered the Royalists trapped in Madrid in 1936, they kill their own people with reckless abandon. Why should they pause at atomizing civilians?”

  Miguel wondered what Anson would have to say to this so-positive young man. Anson had been as positive, as sure he knew what was right. Miguel could close his eyes and see him pushing the mower across the grass in front of the big house on Rockridge Terrace, wearing corduroy trousers and a gray sweat shirt with A.W. and E.R. in a painted heart across his back. And Miguel remembered the day Anson w
rote to say that he was boarding a ship to fight the good fight. Or what had been the good fight then, in the starry-eyed thirties.

  The Belgian officer was twenty-five, perhaps. Eight years Miguel’s junior. It made a difference in the way things were remembered. The lieutenant would have been six years old when Anson died in Barcelona, fifteen when the first civilians were atomized in Japan. Time and expediencies interacted and perspectives changed. The Loyalists of yesterday were on the Attorney Generals list today. Last years Falangists were this year’s friends and allies. To stay completely sane, you must stay completely flexible. Inconstancy was the key to survival in the twentieth century. Raoul had always understood that. Maria had not, and she had gone under, been demolished. Essie had found the timeless refuge of the cloister.

  The family, the family, Miguel thought bleakly. What, in the end, had it come to. Scattered, disaffected, embittered. Where, for example, was Luis? The last Miguel had heard had been in 1947. Luis had been serving on a Palestinian blockade runner and talking of joining Haganah. How that must have pained Essie.

  The stewardess served dinner to those who had purchased meal tickets. A limp salad, a chicken bisque, Vichy water, and a fair Moselle. Lieutenant Artigue ate rapidly but daintily. When he had finished, he announced that there had been no good French wines since 1937.

  The remains of the meal were cleared away and the Belgian chattered pleasantly about the fall of the Mendes-France government, the brutality at Dien Bien Phu, and the Chinese Nationalist question. Miguel listened with half-closed eyes and after a series of unanswered sallies, Artigue smoothed his mustache philosophically and buried himself in a dog-eared copy of Les Nues de Paris.

  Miguel turned off his reading lamp and regarded his fellow passengers. Near the front of the cabin sat a pair of American honeymooners, not young, rather loudly dressed. The woman, who was wearing orchids, had her face close to her husband’s and they were whispering. In a seat across from Miguel, a baby slept peacefully beside its mother. Outside, the green wingtip light blinked steadily in a halo of mist.