by Edwin West
“No,” she said. “I don’t know who is there. Drive by the house slowly. Let me see who’s there.”
“It’s your parents,” he said.
“Did you see their car?”
“No, but who else could it be? It must be them, and they might look out the window and see us.”
“I don’t care. I want to know what’s going on there. Drive by the house, Bob.”
He sagged, defeated, and released her hands. “All right,” he said in a resigned tone, and the Plymouth moved forward again.
As they drove by the house, Angie peered out the side window. The porch light was on, as Bob had said, and there were lights on in the living room, but she couldn’t see anyone moving in there. A car was parked in the driveway beside the house, but it wasn’t her parents’ car. It was her Aunt Sara’s old Dodge.
“Stop the car!” she cried suddenly. “Bob, stop!”
“Why? What’s the matter?”
She didn’t know, she wasn’t sure, she didn’t want to know. Yet she really did know, already had an inkling, and fought to keep that premonition out of conscious thought.
Bob stopped the car, though unwillingly, and Angie got out and ran back down the street to the house. As she raced up the stoop, she saw Aunt Sara through the living room window, coming into the foyer and moving toward the door.
Sara met her, pushing the screen door open and holding her hand out for Angie to take.
Angie was out of breath and frantic. “What--what is it? What’s the matter?”
“Come in, Angie. Come on in here.” Aunt Sara was drawing her gently into the house, pausing to look out at the street. “Is Bob still with you? Wasn’t that his car?”
“Aunt Sara, tell me. What’s happened? I know something’s happened, tell me.”
“Come in, dear,” said Aunt Sara, and led her to the living room.
She already knew. Before her aunt told her, she had already guessed, even though she was doing her best to ignore the knowledge.
“It’s your mother and father, dear,” Aunt Sara began.
Angie shook her head violently from side to side. “No. It isn’t. Don’t say anything. I don’t want to hear it.”
“They were in an accident, dear. Sit down here. I’m sorry, Angie, but they were in a head-on collision with another car.”
There was one last hope and Angie reached for it.
“They’re hurt,” she said rapidly, desperately. “They’re in the hospital, they’re hurt--”
Aunt Sara shook her head. “No, dear. I’m sorry. They were both killed.”
From then on, it was all a blur. Angie could remember, later, having stayed in the living room for a while -- how long, she didn’t know, five minutes or five hours, it could have been either--and at one point the low murmur of Aunt Sara’s and Bob’s voices at the front door. And then, at another point, she could remember Aunt Sara bringing her tea and bread with butter--women like Aunt Sara, at times like this, always think immediately of food -- but she hadn’t been able to eat it. And, finally, she could remember Aunt Sara gently putting her to bed, and turning out the light.
But one thing she could remember clearest of all -- how she had betrayed the memory of her parents, her love for them, almost immediately after they had died. She remembered that thought with guilt, shame, remorse and self-loathing--the last conscious thought she had before falling into exhausted, troubled sleep that night:
Now, Bob can’t keep me to the promise. Now he can’t make me decide. It’s useful, anyway.
TWO
It was an emergency leave, so he had top priority, and he was able to get a MATS plane out of Frankfurt the same afternoon he arrived there from the base. He sat in the plane, still numb, not feeling anything yet, not really believing anything yet, and watched the ground slide by as the plane took off. His eyes shifted to the emptiness of the sky and he tried to think.
His name was Paul Dane. He was twenty-one, an Airman Second Class in the United States Air Force. He was on a four-year enlistment, with one-and-a-half years to go. He’d spent not quite two years in Germany. He had a sister, Angie, who was seventeen, and he had a mother and a father.
No, he didn’t. This morning, Monday morning, his commander had called him into his office and introduced him to a doe-eyed, black-haired gentleman from the Red Cross. The Red Cross had a small office on the base, as it did on most bases of any size, and this gentleman was from that office.
Paul hadn’t understood what was going on. The commander and the Red Cross gentleman had both been solemn and soft-spoken, and Paul tried to figure out what was wrong now. Then the commander excused himself, leaving his office to Paul and the Red Cross gentleman, and then the Red Cross gentleman told him that he no longer had a mother and father.
Head-on collision. Drunk at the wheel, the occupant of the other car--a salesman of fifty-eight, on a spree. He’d killed himself and two perfect strangers. And now Paul Dane didn’t have a mother and a father any more.
It wasn’t real. The orderly room rushed through the emergency-leave orders for him, and Sergeant Wilcox offered to drive him up to Frankfurt, which would be quicker than taking the five p.m. courier bus. The normal, bureaucratic slowness of getting a flight to the States from Frankfurt had been speeded up fantastically, and Paul had, almost at once, been put on a plane, with wishes of good luck from Sergeant Wilcox. It still wasn’t real.
He sat there in a MATS plane high over Germany and he tried to make it real. My mother and father are dead, he thought. My mother and father are dead. But they were just words; they conveyed no sense or meaning or impact.
It was true, damn it. And if it was true it had to be real. Had to be--but wasn’t. It was the same as when the end had come with Ingrid--the feeling of unreality, the mind’s refusal to accept the facts.
He tried to make it real for himself, and he tried to remember now what he had done the last time, with Ingrid. Suddenly, instead of thinking of his mother and father who were dead, he was thinking, instead, of Ingrid who had been his wife and who was a whore.
Ingrid. Ingrid Thuringen, out of Vienna in fifty-five, now living in Kaiserslautern and working in the PX at the air base. Out of Vienna in fifty-five. He’d never thought much about that year when he met her--what difference did it make what year she’d moved to Germany from Austria?--but the old hands filled him in, after it was a over. It seems that that was when the U.S. Army had left Austria, when all the troops were pulled back from Austria into Germany. And all the Austrian whores had flocked into Germany right after them.
All the Austrian whores.
Goddamn it, but Ingrid didn’t look like a whore! No matter what you knew about her, no matter what you thought of her, you had to admit that. She didn’t look at all like a whore.
Black hair, as soft and deep as night in the Black Forest, a cascading Schwartzwald billowing down to her shoulders, framing a face that would tempt an angel into the deadly sin of envy. Palest, creamiest complexion you’ve ever seen, and cupid-bow lips, red and ripe and fashioned to be kissed. Large, round, deep-set eyes of so dark a blue they seemed almost black. A figure to make a Hollywood plastic surgeon sit down and cry.
That was Ingrid, but that wasn’t all there was of Ingrid. There was also the voice, soft but husky, that made any word a love song. There was the way of moving, of gesturing, of standing up or sitting down, of reaching forward or looking back; there was every movement she ever made, because her every movement was grace itself. There was the way she molded herself to you when she danced, the way her eyes burned with black fire when passion coursed through her, the sound of her murmurings in the bed at night, the exciting feel of her magnificent breasts, the sleek sweep of loins and hips and thighs mashed against him, driving him wild, giving and taking, wild and wanton and endlessly inventive.
All that was Ingrid, too, and even that wasn’t all of Ingrid. There was her accent, which was German but not quite German. There was her love for music--music as flamboyant a
nd sentimental and vital as she could find, ranging from the weepings of Tchaikovsky to the bull roarings of Wagner. There was her passion for literature, her instinctive understanding for art, her easy conversation on any subject.
And Ingrid had married Paul Dane.
He never doubted, never once. Fool that he was, he never for a moment doubted that she loved him. Other German girls married GIs for a chance to get to the States, but not Ingrid. Other German girls married GIs for their pay checks--high by German standards -- and the security that such a marriage meant, but not Ingrid.
They never told him. Some of the older hands like Sergeant Wilcox had known the truth all along, but none of them had ever told him. Even when he was going to marry her they said nothing, but only offered him congratulations and patted him on the back.
After it had ended, Sergeant Wilcox had talked about that time. “We thought she was done with that,” he said. “We really did. Sure, she used to hell around -- go down for twenty in the back seat of anybody’s car. But when you came along she stopped all that. From the minute you started going with her, she played the virgin bit all the way. We figured, what the hell, the girl wants to reform, and they say whores--girls like that -- make the best wives.”
Not this time.
Paul’s memories were clear and they made him squirm. He could remember the first time they’d gone to bed together and he knew why he hadn’t been able to tell what she was. Her response hadn’t been cold, objective or professional. Her response had been one of genuine passion, of eager demand for him.
It had happened three months after they’d met. He’d been too shy to ask her for a date the first few times he saw her in the PX but, finally, he got his courage up and asked her to go to the base movie with him. She agreed, and Paul squired her as innocently and chastely as he would any virgin. Her feeling for him seemed genuine and they went out together more and more often. She cooked him dinner a few times at her little one-and-a- half-room apartment in town, and they progressed slowly from the first kiss to the first, tentative explorations.
That final night, three months after he’d met her, they were at her apartment. After dinner, they played records and talked, he sitting in the crowded little room’s one chair, she sitting cross-legged on the bed, dressed in black sweater and black slacks, her feet bare, her black hair falling richly around her shoulders.
She had never looked so desirable to him--never in all the time he’d known her. But he couldn’t move. He couldn’t get out of the chair to go to her. He could do nothing but sit, palsied, and look at her.
The record ended. She rose from the bed and crossed the room to replace it. He watched her move, watched her bend over the small tinny-sounding phonograph, watched her walk back to sit cross-legged on the bed again.
Abruptly he got to his feet and walked over to the bed. He sat in front of her and raised wondering hands to touch her cheeks, framing her face. She smiled at him, her eyes level and bright, whispering, “It’s all right, Paul.”
His hands slid down from her face, across her firm breasts to her waist, and rose again, lifting the sweater up from her body. She bent her head and raised her arms--the sweater peeled off and was discarded on the floor.
Her bra was black. He leaned forward, his lips just barely touching hers, their eyes open and only inches apart, watching one another unwinkingly. His hands brushed around her warm body md unfastened the bra. It fell away, to be discarded with the sweater.
Now he sat back and stripped off his own shirt, T-shirt, shoes and socks, his eyes never leaving her body, her firm, pink-tipped breasts, her legs, still encased in the tight slacks.
They looked at one another for a long time without moving, and at last he reached out one hand to the button and zipper at the side of her slacks. It was difficult to undo the button and open the zipper with one hand, but he did it. Then she smiled and slowly lay back on the bed, and he couldn’t move so slowly any more. He had to leap up and hurry, and quickly come to her.
Their union was a violent, ecstatic experience for both of them. His hands were all over her smooth naked flesh caressing and fondling and his mouth followed the trail of his hands. She let him take his will of her, urging him on with her own lips and hands until he thought he’d go mad. And when, finally he had possessed her it was like nothing he ever remembered.
They were married five weeks later in the base chapel. Her family was still in Vienna, and his people were all in the States. But all their friends--the other guys from the outfit, and the girls who worked in the PX -- were all there, and they had a reception afterward in the NCO club. They went to Munich for their honeymoon, then moved into a three-room apartment in town -- Paul was only Airman Second Class, so he couldn’t live in the base housing area. The marriage lasted five months.
Until the afternoon he got off work at three o’clock instead of five and found her at home in bed with a first lieutenant named Grimes.
All he saw at first was the shocked face of Grimes, Staring up at him from the bed. Then, in stunned disbelief, he saw also the face of his wife, below Grimes, twisted around to stare at him, her arms still entwined around Grimes’ broad, naked shoulders.
He took one step into the room and Grimes, unmoving, said, “Watch yourself, buddy.”
“My wife.” That was all Paul managed to say, and that came out half-choked.
“You better go out and come in again, buddy--later,” said Grimes.
“Ingrid?” He asked the question as though he couldn’t believe she was really there.
“Go away, Paul!” she cried, her voice sounding angry.
“Come back later,” said Grimes. He still hadn’t moved in the bed, and his first open-mouthed shock had been replaced by self-assurance and a kind of easy contempt. “You can chat with Ingrid later,” he said. “But I wouldn’t advise you to get fist-happy with her.”
“You what?” It was too fast, too incomprehensible. None of this was real.
“Go away, Paul!” shrieked Ingrid.
“You son-of-a-bitch,” whispered Paul. “You egotistical son-of-a-bitch.”
“Take it easy, sonny,” said Grimes harshly, frowning at him now.
Paul took another leaden step toward the bed. “You filthy son-of-a-bitch. You think you can get away with anything, don’t you? Even with this.”
“I wouldn’t start anything I couldn’t finish, if I were you,” Grimes warned him.
Paul leaped. He hadn’t known he was going to do it, nor had they suspected it, and Grimes’ contemptuous expression suddenly reverted to the shocked look he’d worn when Paul had first come in.
Grimes was big and blond and, under normal circumstances, Paul probably wouldn’t have been able to win a fight with him. But Grimes was too surprised at Paul’s sudden leap, and Paul was fighting with blind, red rage. Besides, Grimes made a ridiculous picture--dressed only in an undershirt and frustrated by the interruption of his love-making--and a man who feels embarrassed and ludicrous doesn’t fight too well.
Paul came in swinging. Grimes had barely enough time to get up and away from the bed. Then Paul was all over him, and Grimes was driven into the wall, leaning open-mouthed, trying to get his hands up to protect himself. Paul caught him solidly on his open mouth and Grimes’ head bounced off the wall.
He started to slide down the wall, but Paul kept swinging, the punches holding Grimes up. Ingrid jumped at
Paul, screaming, “Stop it! Stop it! You’ll kill him!”
Paul and the naked girl staggered across the room, she trying to confine his arms and he trying to push her away. Grimes sagged to his knees, one eye already closing and the lower half of his face bloody from a broken nose and a cut lip. Paul managed, at last, to hurl the girl away from him. She stumbled over a chair and went sprawling. Then Paul grabbed Grimes by the hair, dragged him to the door and kicked him down the stairs. Grimes went flying, arms flailing, trying to grasp the banister. He kept rolling down the stairs, not able to stop himself until he thu
dded the floor at the bottom.