by Irwin Shaw
“Because I can’t wait,” Benjamin said. “She won’t be waiting when the war’s over and I’ll lose her.”
“That’s what she says, too. About you.” Woodham drank his whiskey irritably. “Everybody thinks the god-damn war’s going to last forever. Maybe it’ll be over in a month. Who knows?”
This was in 1942. “It won’t be over in a month,” Benjamin said. “You know. And I know.”
“Have you got any money?” Woodham tried a new tack.
“Twenty-four dollars a month,” Benjamin said.
“God damn,” Woodham said. He paced annoyedly back and forth in the shaded room in front of the window. Through the window Benjamin could see the Bronstein’s tennis court and the two lilac bushes.
“Why don’t you wait until you get out of OCS?” Woodham said. “Then she’ll at least have a second-lieutenant’s pension when you get killed. I can rush through your application and—”
“I don’t want to be an officer,” Benjamin said.
“What’s the matter, is it against your religion?” Woodham glared at him.
Benjamin laughed. “No.”
“What’ve you got against officers?” Woodham demanded.
“Nothing. I just don’t want to be one.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t trust myself enough,” Benjamin said. “I don’t want to be responsible for getting anybody else but myself killed.”
“You’re overeducated,” Woodham said. “That’s what’s the matter with you. You couldn’t be any worse than ninety-nine out of a hundred of the idiots they’re pinning bars on every day. What’s your IQ?”
“One thirty-eight.”
“They grab anybody with an IQ of over one ten,” Woodham said. “Especially with a college education. Don’t you know that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t Sir me, Federov,” Woodham said. “One thirty-eight! Huh! As far as intelligence goes, you’re in the top five percent of the whole damned army. You don’t belong as a private in the infantry. You’re derelict in your duty, if you want my honest opinion.” He scowled at Benjamin, waiting for a response. Benjamin sat silently, enjoying his whiskey, looking out the window at the lilac bushes.
“You’re not even a good tennis player,” Woodham said. “The only point that Peggy and I’ve agreed on since she met you is that you have a laughable backhand.”
“You’re both absolutely right.” Benjamin stood up. He knew the argument was over. Woodham would have stopped the marriage if he could, but everybody knew he couldn’t, including Woodham himself.
“If you don’t get killed,” Woodham said, “will you at least come out to San Francisco to live after the war, so I can see Peggy once in a while?”
“I’ll try,” Benjamin said.
“You can play tennis all year around. You can work on your ridiculous backhand.”
They both laughed.
“Okay, PFC Federov.” Woodham sighed and they shook hands. “I wish I had eight daughters. I wish I had so many daughters I’d have difficulty remembering their names. I wouldn’t mind losing a couple along the way then.” He poured them both fresh drinks.
They had a week’s honeymoon in Atlanta, the usual, frail wartime barricade against violence and fear of what lay ahead in the days to come. The ceremony in the office of a justice of the peace had been a hasty one. Three other couples were waiting to be married. Only Peggy’s father and mother and Benjamin’s platoon lieutenant and another soldier from Benjamin’s squad, a huge boy from Kentucky who shared the pup tent with Benjamin on maneuvers, were present. Benjamin’s father and mother hadn’t been able to come down from New York because they couldn’t afford the trip, and Louis was at an airfield in Texas.
Benjamin had sent Peggy’s photograph to his parents, and his mother had written that she was beautiful and God bless both you children.
Woodham loaned Benjamin his car and they drove to Atlanta over the baking roads of summertime Georgia, carefully not going more than thirty-five miles an hour because of wartime fuel restrictions. It was not a day on which Benjamin wanted to be stopped by a traffic cop.
They closed the yellow fake-oak door of the meager hotel room, which was all they could find for the seven days, and Federov locked it behind them, hearing the steps of the bellboy who had carried up their bags retreating down the creaking corridor. They were alone in the room with the window closed and the blinds drawn against the heat of the Southern sunlight. Benjamin leaned against the door and watched his wife unpack, admiring her small, neat movements as she hung up her two extra dresses and put her things into the bottom drawers of the bureau. Neither of them said a word. There was only the silken sound of Peggy’s passage across the room. When she had put all her things away, Peggy turned to him. “Give me your watch,” she said, coming over to him and holding out her hand.
“It’s twenty minutes past five,” Benjamin said, glancing down at his wrist.
“I don’t want to know the time,” she said. “Give me the watch.”
Benjamin gave her the watch. She put it in her bag, then locked the bag and put the key away in the drawer, under her two nightgowns. “I don’t want to know the time,” Peggy said, “for seven days.”
They went out at odd hours, when they were hungry or wanted to swim in a pool or go to a movie, but for seven days the center of the world was a darkened hotel room with a yellow almost-oak door and one window. For seven days they forgot the tides of bleached summer uniforms that oceaned around them, forgot the snarls of command, the sound of the waiting guns. For a week life was two bodies, greedy and grateful at the same time. Then Peggy unlocked her bag to pack it for the trip home and she gave him back his watch.
Two weeks later, Federov’s division was moved North. Peggy did not follow him. For one thing they didn’t have the money for the fares and rented rooms that it would have cost and they knew that it was only a matter of a few weeks before the division would move again, probably for overseas, and they decided that one leave-taking was all they could bear during that war.
Two months after his wedding day, Federov’s division was sent to England. He and Peggy didn’t see each other again for three years. They wrote constantly, of course, but by the time Federov met Leah in Paris, Peggy had become a remote, strange ghost lost somewhere behind a small volume of V-mail envelopes. He had done what most soldiers do under similar circumstances and had had several affairs with the locals in Cornwall, where he was stationed for amphibious training, and with a girl from the British Ministry of Information when he had been sent up to London for a special liaison course with British noncommissioned officers. He had never felt guilty about any of the girls. His loyalty to the ghost who sent him the dutiful V-mail letters was suspended, postponed for the duration. A war is a long time.
Leah had been divorced in 1939 (three years too late, she told Federov in Paris), and she liked him and was amused to turn down the full colonels and generals who surged after her, with the explanation that she had a date with a buck sergeant. Leah had coquetted herself into an apartment of her own from her elevated military connections, and she and Federov had made love with a great deal of satisfaction in it and Leah had talked of marriage. The idea was attractive to Federov; he had known Peggy for only three months or so and the ghost behind the V-mail envelopes was a stranger, unreal, only conventionally related to him by a hasty and almost forgotten ceremony, a pretty faded ghost who sent photographs of herself, like a shipwrecked sailor casting messages in bottles into the sea, a ghost occupied with matters that seemed piddling and unimportant to a man fighting so long for his life on another continent. The ghost had no claims on him with her news of rationing, stateside politicking in the Medical Corps, complaints about the cynicism of men who hung onto soft berths at home and who were making a good thing of the war.
After three years the professions of love were merely formal and dutiful. He himself sent no photographs home. The agony of his face was no proper adornment for
the bedside table of a young girl in a white tennis dress who went to USO dances and sold silly books to clerks in uniform in Georgia.
On his side, his letters were generalized, meant to be reassuring, with no details of the massive dying of the years 1944 and 1945 which had become his daily routine. He had not known his wife long enough to tell her the truth of what he was enduring. Sometimes, when he sat down to write Peggy a letter, he had the feeling that he was writing to a friend’s child, known fleetingly a long time ago, a bright, beautiful child who naturally had to be protected from the misery of the grownup world as long as possible, a child who would grow and change so much before he saw her again that it would take a feat of memory to recognize her.
By the winter of 1945 he found it difficult to consider himself married. The years of absence outweighed too heavily the brief, interrupted months when he and Peggy had been together.
1948
HE HAD BEEN HOME from the war for three years now, but Peggy still got up and made him breakfast. He was cranky in the morning and preferred being alone to make his own breakfast and read The New York Times, his matutinal darkness of spirit reinforced by the morning’s news from all over the world. He also liked his coffee very black, but Peggy thought it was bad for his nerves and never made it strong enough for his taste. She also thought, having been coached by her father, the doctor, that breakfast was the most important meal of the day and should include a large glass of orange juice, biscuits and jam, bacon or ham and eggs, or pancakes with sausage, a glass of milk and coffee. She told Benjamin and his friends that Benjamin was working too hard and was too thin and that he drank too much and ate too little, and nothing Benjamin could say, morning after morning, could dissuade her from piling the breakfast table inordinately, decorating it with their best linen and glasses and a small vase of cut flowers, and coaxing him, in the dearest way possible, to finish his food.
Peggy had the notion, too, that a wife should look her best at all times, and she had whole outfits of lounging pajamas and embroidered nightgowns and robes in which she appeared as she brought in the platter heaped with food and drink. This was the realization of the dream he had had so many bitter nights of the war. Now he had it.
All this, plus the fact that Peggy’s job as a receptionist in an art gallery on Fifty-seventh Street didn’t necessitate her getting out of bed until nearly ten o’clock, made it impossible for Benjamin to complain. Complaint would have been boorish and ungrateful, so Benjamin sat there, stuffing food into his mouth, furtively stealing glances at the headlines on the chair beside him, wondering daily by what ruse he could manage in the future to keep his wife in bed while he ate and drank as he pleased and grunted sardonically at the columns of The New York Times.
During the war, too, he had gotten into the habit of drinking a small slug of Calvados or brandy before breakfast, and this was impossible with Peggy up and about. There were also the mornings when he had a hangover. When he drank, he often became ugly and pugnacious, and Peggy’s silent forbearance on the subject of the scenes of the night before made him want to strangle her as she sat across from him, sipping her cold milk like a little girl and looking like something just a little bit better than a colored photograph from House and Garden.
She also discussed the menus for dinner at breakfast. Surfeited with food, facing with loathing the difficulties and compromises of a young man struggling to get ahead one day more in the heartbreaking city of New York, he found it almost impossible to concentrate on such questions as, “Would you like a soufflé?” or “I saw some wonderful sea bass in the market yesterday. Are you in the mood for fish?” and, “Remember, we have to sit down for dinner at seven sharp. Prudence has to be up in Harlem by eight-thirty, the latest.” Prudence was their maid, who came in at one in the afternoon and, as Peggy accurately put it, had to be up in Harlem by eight-thirty sharp each evening come what may.
It wasn’t that he didn’t love Peggy. He did, and often enjoyed long periods with her, and he had never gotten over his joy in her body or his appreciation of her tenderness and the amusement she gave him by her brightness and outspokenness. He just felt a good part of the time that it was too much. She surrounded him. She had had so many anxious, lonely years to contemplate her marriage, wondering all the time whether he was going to come back alive or not, that she had figured everything out too perfectly—the décor of the apartment, the meals she was going to serve and how they were to be served, her husband’s marvelous and impossible behavior on all occasions, the people she would invite and who would invite them in return, the holidays they would take, the perfect exchange of love after the last gun had fallen silent. Benjamin sometimes felt that, in an excess of devotion, Peggy had managed to put him into a perfect vacuum in which everything was offered to him, everything allowed him, except getting out of the vacuum.
He drank, he slept with other women, he paid the bills, he felt that soon he and Louis would break through in their business, he admired the results of Peggy’s loving calculation, her unswerving selflessness—but there were evenings when he walked along the avenues of New York, looking longingly at the clerks and pathetically bedecked secretaries bursting out of their ugly offices for an evening that, good or bad, had not been planned for them, and thought seriously of throwing himself under a bus because he knew he had to be home by seven o’clock. Sharp.
It was a Saturday morning. Those days, people worked on Saturday mornings. There were jonquils on the breakfast table because it was spring. The sun was shining on the plane tree, with its new pale green foliage, in the back garden of the apartment in which Benjamin and Peggy lived on East Seventy-sixth Street near Second Avenue. Looking out at the sunlit tree, Benjamin thought that the human race must be insane to inhabit cities in the springtime.
Peggy had made an apple pancake with maple syrup for breakfast. Benjamin didn’t like apple pancakes, except once in a while in a German restaurant for dessert, but his usual sense of a vague, secret disloyalty to his wife kept him once more from protesting breakfast and everything that went with it. Peggy was wearing pale blue denim slacks and a white tennis shirt and her blond hair, longer now than when he had met her was caught up by a narrow black ribbon. She was barefooted. Later in the day, Benjamin knew, he would have thought the outfit delightful. If he had seen her thus for the first time that morning, he would have fallen in love with her.
“What an absolute bang of a day,” Peggy said, smiling across the table at him, making sure he ate the last morsel of the apple pancake. “I’m off this afternoon. Why don’t we have lunch and just wander around the city for the afternoon?”
“I have a date for lunch,” Benjamin said.
“With whom?”
Benjamin always hated this question. It was part of the vacuum, part of being surrounded. But he had never had it out with Peggy because fundamentally he believed she had the right to ask it He never asked her with whom she had lunch. He had an exaggerated sense of the value of privacy and solitude that approached the neurotic. He also never questioned her because he was trying to give her an example, which, of course, she never followed, of the necessity of leaving as many corners as possible of one’s life unexposed, even to the most loving eyes. She went through all his mail, too, and although he didn’t feel she had the right to do it, whenever he called her on it she denied it and he couldn’t bring himself to lay traps for her—put hairs between pages, in the fashion of melodramas, or scraps of paper, so that he could demonstrate the papers had been disarranged. As far as he was concerned, divorce was conceivable between two people who had once loved each other, or who still loved each other; detective work was not.
“With whom?” Peggy asked, the House and Garden loving young wife perfectly turned out for all occasions, including breakfast, interested, as a wife should be, in every aspect of her husband’s life.
“Jimmy,” Benjamin said. “Jimmy Foynes.”
Peggy made a face, as Benjamin knew she would. Jimmy Foynes was a friend he had
made during the war, a newspaperman who had stayed on and off with Benjamin’s division. They had had some riotous nights together and twice had nearly been killed together, and they had both talked, in the rain and misery, of the great things they would do together after the war. But Jimmy drank and was loud and spilled ashes all over the living room, never picked up a check, and appeared each time with a different girl. The girls too often answered precisely to Peggy’s definition of them. Tarts, she said. The girls also sometimes made passes, with generalized affection, at Benjamin. In his own house, too. Slowly but surely, Peggy had wiped out Jimmy Foynes. Among others. Among many others. The wife keeps the address book and receives the invitations. Three years after VJ Day, Foynes never came to the apartment and, since Benjamin never went out at night without Peggy, they never had dinner together. Their friendship continued at lunches, ball games and during hurried drinks after work, before Benjamin looked apologetically at his watch and said, “I have to be home by seven.”
“Can’t you see him on Monday?” Peggy asked.
“He’s out of town on a job,” Benjamin said. “I can’t get hold of him.”
“All right,” Peggy said, delicately pouring honey over a small piece of toast. “I’ll have lunch with you both. If I’m invited.”
“But you can’t stand him,” Benjamin said. “You always say that…”
“I’ll stand him today,” Peggy said. She put the toast and honey neatly into her mouth.
Benjamin remembered the last few times, dating back more than a year now, that he had tried to go out with Foynes and Peggy together.
“We’ll all have indigestion,” he said.
“I just want to be with you today,” she said.
“Oh, God,” Benjamin said, bent under the crushing burden of a great love.
“You don’t have to say, ‘Oh, God,’” Peggy said. “I’m not forcing you. I just thought, a day like this…”
“We’re meeting at the Oak Room,” Benjamin said. “It’s only for men.”