—That’s not my point, stinky, Ginny said. The whole business seems so wrong . . . so fiendish. No human beings should have to suffer the way those kids do. Life itself is so natural and so good. Those kids love life as much as you and I . . . more maybe . . . I don’t know why you came overseas, stinky. I did because I was bored in the States. Well, I’m not bored any more. I bit off more than I could chew. Now I understand how Jesus Christ felt on the cross . . .
— Watch that talk, Louella said, tapping her foot clinically. First thing you know, you’ll be in the nut ward of the Forty-fifth with a Messiah complex.
—No danger, Ginny said, squashing out her cigarette and tucking in her mosquito netting. I’m a tough nut, stinky. I don’t cry much. And I don’t know what it is to feel sorry for myself. . . . But I’m troubled . . . terribly troubled.
—You probably gab and think too much while you’re serving your coffee and doughnuts. Wounded men like quiet. Just smile, squeeze their hands, and pass on. And are you quite sure you don’t permit greater familiarities?
—If it would help them any, Ginny said, raising her voice, I’d let them put their hands inside my blouse. Some of them try to, you know. And if anyone who isn’t out cold wants to kiss me, why, I let him. Wouldn’t you?
—Dear, it’s possible to excite wounded soldiers more than you help them.
Ginny sank back on her pillow and looked through the netting at the ceiling. She’d stopped crying now, and her sleepless little face looked like rice pudding fallen on a dirty floor.
—Go away, stinky. We don’t see eye to eye. What the hell do you think you’re doing in Naples, anyhow?
—Each has her own ideas of service, darling, Louella said, turning. And at the Last Judgment we’ll all get a chance to state our cases. . . . Don’t presume to judge other human beings, dear. I myself have frequently been mistaken. Get some sleep.
With a sigh she went around the room picking up Ginny’s slip and bra and uniform that seemed to have been stripped off her by a cyclone. She put them neatly on a chair and shut down the blinds. At her approach the sandflies broke apart from their cloud. The hum of Naples reigned in the now shadowed room. Ginny turned over on her face and entombed her cheek in the crook of her arm. She had a wispy little body and skinny shoulders. She appealed to the GI’s the way a signorina does on Via Roma—a certain one-night-stand air about her, a certain shrillness in her voice that chimed in with the stridency of wartime Naples in August, 1944. Louella was big enough to pity Ginny. Others would have slapped her face and told her to go back to where she belonged. But Louella’d learned something of frailty and charity. It took all kinds, even though the saying was a desperate cliché.
The vein in her left temple was throbbing when she let herself out of her apartment. Ginny’s selfish tirade had got her worked up a little. That was one of Louella’s major faults, that she was more sensitive to situations than they demanded. She always tried to descend to other people’s levels instead of insisting that they meet her on her own. It was an exhausting philosophy of life, but she had an inkling that, after she’d left them, people gave vent to an admiration and a veneration they never dared show to her face.
The Italian elevator carried her dubiously down into the cortile. She pulled down her blouse and marched out into Piazza Carità. The heat at nine in the morning was like a club in her face; she had difficulty breathing. In spite of her feeling of incipient suffocation she put on her bravest smile. It was this smile which some of the air force had called a violet floating in a tornado. Louella strode along. She carried her head and its blue overseas cap like a filly she’d loved and ridden as a child. There was a spring in her step. Neapolitan women turned and looked at her. This had been one of Louella’s few gratifications in Naples, that homage paid her by the Italian women.
Before crossing Piazza Carità Louella had to wait a moment. Crossing a street was about the most dramatic thing a woman can do in modern life. Louella felt that to traverse a street in Naples of August, 1944, was almost as heroic as crossing the Volturno. Finally she spotted an open space in the truck convoy that made daytime in Naples one long roar. She took a long and dainty run. She’d always been fleet-footed, but this time she simply skittered across the street.
There was a screech of brakes. Louella thought her last moment had come. A tech five leaned out over the windshield of his jeep; there was a panicky grin on his face, and he was steadying himself against the wheel.
—Ya almost went to join my late Aunt Minnie, baby, he said.
Louella braced herself for a gentle but forceful reply. But then she saw the name stenciled below the windshield of the jeep. Most of the legends painted on jeeps amused her—names of girls and little maxims in English, French, or Italian. But this jeep bore the two simple words Wet Dream. So she hunched up her shoulders and marched into Piazza Carità. She now knew what she’d long felt from conviction—that many American men, especially the GI’s, had frightful manners. She hoped they’d learn something from Europe. She saw finally that she was intellectually justified in preferring the company of officers.
She entered the cool corridor of the Red Cross Annex. One thing she would say for Italian architecture was that they certainly knew how to build—and to last. The palazzi were iceboxes in winter, but in summer they had solidity, coolness, and spaciousness. Red Cross girls working in Naples were billeted in this annex. Except Louella.
She climbed the stairs and entered the snack bar, which was just opening its screen doors. Here she always started her day with coffee and buns. She pulled down her blouse and pushed the screen door to. The room was dark and calm. At the ticket desk Adriana, the Neapolitan who sold chits, sat with her usual squaw frown. She was a dark hunched little thing with a soupçon of a mustache.
—Buon giorno, Adriana, Louella said cheerily.
Louella’d learned six or seven words of Italian, which she sprinkled into her conversation like paprika. She didn’t really care for the language, which made her think of gooey kisses pressed by some greaser on the neck of his sweating mistress. And she saw no good reason to learn it because the Italians were a conquered people. The sooner they learned the clean intricacies of English, the better for them. There was also something sinister about Italian, in which they could spit out ten words to your one and talk you down by sheer breathing power. Louella had nothing against Italian culture; that was fine in its place, but she didn’t need to learn the language to appreciate Rigoletto and look at a painting by Botticelli. Yet somehow it seemed to her a gracious gesture to fling out a few words in his own language to every Italian she met. It would remind him that noblesse oblige wasn’t quite dead in the world, even if the Neapolitans didn’t wash regularly and had far far too many children.
—I said buon giorno, Adriana.
The girl looked up from pressing her brown forehead.
—Good morning, mees, she said.
Louella smiled and walked to a near-by table. All the Neapolitan waiters loved her. She had only to sit down and one of them would bring her coffee and a bun. She never had to stand in line the way the officers and nurses did. And now Pinuccio brought her a potsherd cup of coffee and a dry raisin bun. He’d told her he was a student at the University of Naples, but of course she hadn’t believed a word of it. Italians were always telling her in broken English of what they had been and of what their army might have done. She didn’t see why they had to lie to her that way. Pinuccio had one of those long olive faces that seem already dead of weariness and grief. This lack of spunk was what Louella loathed in Italian men, especially the good-looking ones. They were much too effeminate. And they had the kind of cringing good manners of a Negro, when he’s afraid you’ll push him off the sidewalk—which you won’t if he knows his place. Louella guessed the reason why Italy’d lost the war. Too much inbreeding and not the virility to support their culture.
—Grazie, Louella said. And cheer up, Pinuccio. It’s not as bad as you think it is.
He
left her with a look that she knew how to interpret only from her long reading of the classics. She suspected Pinuccio of secretly desiring her. He had a passionate mouth and slender hands lightly coated with hair. Louella knew that Italian men weren’t to be trusted sexually. His cankered look told her that he’d like to possess her, then put a knife between her shoulders. She shivered slightly and sipped her coffee. She wasn’t at home in the arcana of love; she preferred the way American men had of laying their cards on the table. They got drunk and threw themselves all over you, and you could say either yes or no.
She drank her coffee slowly, with a sense that energy for her day’s catalogue of good works was beginning to flow back into her body. She watched the Neapolitans mopping up the floor. They wore small mustaches, by which they attempted to ape matinee idols of twenty years ago, some in their green fatigue coveralls that they’d begged or stolen from the Americans. She’d never think of the word parasite in the future without modifying it by the adjective, Italian. She hardly ever saw a Neapolitan on the streets without American shoes. And those who weren’t fully dressed had an OD GI undershirt. Louella laughed a little bitterly and wondered what the American taxpayers would think if they knew where their money was going. Not on the backs of American soldiers. How Karl Marx would have loved Naples in August, 1944! Practically a universal distribution of the world’s goods—and upon people who would bite the hand that fed them.
Louella sighed. She saw bearing down upon her, like a corvette with shortness of steam, the American Red Cross field director for Naples. Bessie McCloskey symbolized to Louella the sort of thwarted old maid who sublimates all her repressed love urges into a passion for organization, a delight in seeing other people made miserable by bureaucracy. Bessie plumped her jittering body into the chair opposite Louella, adjusted her pince-nez, and began her old act of finger shaking. Louella put on her most patient smile and thought to herself that Bessie deserved a lecture fellowship in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.
—Oh here you are, Bessie panted. How in God’s name does a body get hold of you? Do I have to make an appointment with your receptionist? Why don’t you go to Capri if you want to take a vacation?
—Having trouble with your asthma, darling? Louella said.
—Asthma, hell. . . . Now you listen to me, Louella. . . . Your club at Aversa is a shambles, a perfect shambles. If you don’t want to work for the Red Cross, why don’t you pack up and go home?
—I believe you called my club a shambles? Louella said with tender hauteur. Perhaps you’ll explain. There are lots who claim it’s the prettiest little club in Italy . . .
—Through no fault of yours, my fine lady. You’ve got good assistants and Italians who aren’t afraid of working up a sweat. . . . But you don’t seem to realize that Red Cross clubs run on programs. You can’t expect American officers to entertain themselves. They’re not that far civilized. You must schedule events and keep scheduling ’em till you’re blue in the face. Otherwise you’re going to find all the air corps joes shooting crap on the front terrace, as I found them last night.
—Oh, spying? Louella said, looking out from under her lashes.
Nothing was easier than to lash McCloskey into mania by needling.
—It’s my job to spy. . . . And now this spy will tell you a mouthful since you’re asking for it with your nonsense. You’re the worst Red Cross worker in Italy. You’re using the Red Cross, which God knows receives criticism enough, simply for your own joy ride. You think you’re running a house party here and that you can invite your own guests. . . . I’m just an old hen with no illusions, but I tell you that it’s immoral of you to use the Red Cross to play Lady Bountiful. As a program director it’s your business and your duty to have something doing all the time at your club, specifically stated on your bulletin board, even if it’s only tiddly-winks in the lounge. If you’re not resourceful enough to do that, by God I’ll take steps to have orders cut shipping you out of this theater. Now how about it? You’ve really put me on the spot, I can tell you.
—Louder, please, Louella said, pushing back her cup and rising. You’ve missed your vocation, darling. You’d have done better in a nunnery, shoving around a lot of tittering novices. Then you could wear a swastika on your veil and an SS brassard on your sleeve . . .
—I want your answer tomorrow, McCloskey shrilled, still shaking her finger.
Louella left the snack bar at a speed greater than she’d have liked. Adriana at the desk looked up from counting her chits, and Louella fancied that a spiteful smile crossed that muddy face—just the way Italy had stabbed France in the back. Louella descended the stairs around the glass elevator shaft. She felt something inside her crying, the way French poets say it does. Yet she’d suffered before and probably would again. It was the lot of every extraordinary person to be misunderstood and harassed by the ordinary. The more you were capable of giving to the world, the more the world picked at you.
She went back to her apartment and laid herself down on her bed. The heat of Naples pressed like a vise round her head, and the coffee was making her heart pound till she could feel it in her temples. She got up, went to the bathroom, and took a dose of phenobarbital. A stout graying little major at the Fifth General dispensary had given it to her for her sleeplessness when she first came to Naples.
With the phenobarbital Louella poured herself a glass of vermouth because she never trusted Neapolitan drinking water, even when it came out of the udder of a Lyster Bag. She knew that the sedative would soothe and relax her the way love and music did others. Returning to her bed, she lay down on it fully dressed. She wished she could cry the way the other girls did, but she was incapable of feeling sorry for herself. Soon she fell asleep.
Like most intelligent people, Louella rarely dreamed. Since her training in psychiatry in college no symbols ever visited her in sleep. She slept the sleep of a little girl who has nothing on her conscience. People had told her that while she was asleep her face took on an expression of incredible rapture. And Louella had modestly replied with her theory that when people were asleep or drunk their souls came to sit like shy wrens on their faces. This was the only flight into fancy she’d ever permitted herself.
When she awoke, her watch said three o’clock. The torpor of afternoon Naples was at its peak; the hum in the city below had subsided because the Latin population gets off the streets from the sun, as they did from bombardments. Louella’s body was drenched. There was still a slight aftertaste of the vermouth she’d swallowed, and a muted jangling in her nerves from the opiate.
Nevertheless the bitterness of her morning had died, and she thanked God for some vitality in her that allowed her to cast off ugliness. Otherwise she’d have long ago been dead. She guessed she had that magnanimity of mind that Shakespeare must have possessed—the ability to come through any situation, understand it, but retain intact the integrity of her soul. What had she learned overseas? To forgive. She lifted her arms with a soft smile and lit a cigarette.
She bounded out of bed, washed her face, and redid it. In Naples she was allowing herself a brighter shade of crimson on her lips than she’d thought permissible at home. When in Rome . . . and Naples wasn’t so far south. . . .
Ginny had gone out, her room had been straightened up by the signorina. Louella never could find out where Ginny went after sleeping, before it was time to return to the airport and serve coffee and doughnuts to the hospital planes. Possibly Ginny tied a bandanna round her head, put on sandals, and went out and leaned carelessly on Via Roma, pretending to be an Italian girl. Perhaps it was a trifle unkind, but Louella had too broad a knowledge of the world not to see that those women who affected an unbounded love of humanity were simply disguising an indiscriminate and insatiable sexual appetite. This could be the only explanation of why Ginny had so many GI friends from every state in the Union and from quite a few parts of the United Kingdom. She’d even brought a French soldier to the apartment. It rather looked like the vast humanit
arianism of Mary Magdalene.
The signorina housemaid was still loitering around. Louella knew all her tricks: she’d pretend she wanted to clean up the room. Actually what she did was to help herself to Louella’s cigarettes, bathe in Louella’s bathtub with fragrant American bath salts. And possibly the signorina spied on all Louella’s activities, of which reports were then sent to the Germans in North Italy.
Seeing that the signorina was watching her golden pencil of lipstick, Louella took pains to hide it. Then she went out. She knew full well that ten minutes after she’d locked her apartment door the signorina would be entertaining some fisherman from the Bay of Naples on the couch. They’d jabber at each other in dialect, laugh at the Allies, hang Mr. Roosevelt’s picture upside down, and have one another till supper time.
The crowds on Via Roma made it seem like pushing your way into a haystack coming at you full tilt. Louella knew that the harbor was full of LCI’s, that three American divisions were in rest areas around Naples. Everybody said that there was to be an invasion of southern France, though for military security they never discussed this, except with their best friends. Naples was always a tense hot city, but in the past week Louella’d been aware of a lull like that before a twister.
Though she loved the carnival movement of Via Roma, she never walked on it unescorted after dark because all the Allied soldiery were drunk from sundown to curfew time. You got propositioned twenty times in one block or were in danger of being hauled up an alley, and the CID found your body a week later and said it was the work of black market operators.
But Louella preserved her entity on Via Roma, walking like Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, looking neither to right nor left, but scattering hypothetical roses. She was whistled at, but she smiled understandingly—after all she was an American woman, and these boys were lonely. It indicated that if Bessie McCloskey didn’t appreciate her, there were lots who did.
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