“Well,” Brace said, “not for a little while, anyway. That was a bad night. We didn’t have any artillery on us, we were luckier than you there, Lew, and we didn’t have any walls to climb either, but as I said there were these two Jerry machine guns up on the bank, and that seemed plenty bad enough at the time. How we ever made it to the other side I’ll never know. One thing, I had this damn good B.A.R. man. He got that old B.A.R. into action in about one second flat, right from the boat. That way nobody got panicky, even though two—no, three of the kids were hit, two of them killed. In the boat behind ours they all panicked and went over the side, all their damn equipment strapped to their backs and everything. Some of them drowned and the rest weren’t fit for anything when they did get ashore. The third boat had it a little easier, because by that time our own people back on shore had a couple machine guns firing and they were able to provide some cover. But let me tell you, when we finally did get to the other side it was a lonely damn place to be.”
“What on earth did you do?” Betty asked.
“Had to get those damn guns some way,” Brace said. “What we needed was mortar fire, but I couldn’t call for any because our goddamn radio was on the blink, either that or the radio man was too scared to operate it right. ‘Course, I figured the people back there had sense enough to start putting down some mortar fire anyway, without being asked, but where we were, exposed and all, we didn’t feel much like waiting around for them to make up their minds.” Brace paused and put his empty glass on the low table behind him. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes, shook one loose and stuck it in his lips, leaning forward to accept a light from his wife. “It was one of those moments,” he said, “when you have to do some damn-fool thing before you even think about it, just to keep your men from losing their heads completely. Thing is, you have to act like you’re in command of the situation. So what I did was this: we were right close to one of the Jerry guns, and I could see from the tracers it was pretty busy defending itself against the fire from the other side, so I had that B.A.R. man I told you about keep laying it on the other gun, further down the line—he didn’t need much coaxing; he was a damn good man—and I crawled up to within about fifty feet of the near gun and started pitching grenades. Luck? I want to tell you, I’ve never been so lucky in my life. The gun quit after the second grenade, and we found these two Jerries deader’n hell. Then about that time our mortars started in on the other gun, and all we had to do was he low and sweat it out till the rest of our people got across.”
“My God,” Betty said.
“Wasn’t that the time they gave you the Silver Star, darling?” Nancy Brace asked.
Brace laughed, winking at Miller. “Isn’t that just like a woman?” he said. “That’s the only part of the story she cares about.”
“My God,” Betty said, “it sounds to me as though you should have gotten several Silver Stars.”
“What are you people doing,” the hostess said, appearing suddenly through veils of cigarette smoke, “fighting the war all over again? Or are you planning the next one?”
“We’re still on the last one,” Nancy Brace said, “only now it’s VE Day and it’s time to go home.” She slipped her arm through her husband’s, bracelets jingling, and smiled up at him. “How about it, Lieutenant?”
“But you can’t leave,” the hostess said. “You have to stay and plan the next one. What’s the point of fighting the last war if you’re not going to stay and plan the next one?” She had taken several too many of her own martinis.
“Guess this is what you call a strategic withdrawal,” Brace said. “Right, honey? No, but listen, it’s been a great party but we’ve really got to go. I’ll get the coats, honey.”
“Oh, look what time it is,” Betty said. “I think we’d better think about going too, darling. Will you get our things?”
“You mean you’re all going?” the hostess said. “But who’s going to stay and help me plan the next war?”
Miller smiled and nodded, backing away, and then turned to follow Brace into a dark bedroom, where the coats of guests lay ensnarled on the bed. Brace already had his own coat on and his wife’s furs over his arm, and as Miller came into the room he straightened up from the bed and turned around. “This yours, Lew?” he asked, holding up Miller’s gabardine topcoat. It looked somehow forlorn, rumpled and not quite clean, hanging there from Brace’s hand.
“Yes,” Miller said, “that’s it. That’s my hat next to it, and that’s Betty’s coat over there, near the foot. There, that one. Thanks, Tom.”
When they came out the two wives were waiting by the front door. “The nice things have all been said,” Nancy Brace told them, “so all we have to do is get out of here.”
“Good girl,” Brace said.
They went out and down several flights of neat, carpeted stairs to the street. “Oh it’s raining,” Betty Miller moaned as they stood huddled in the doorway. “We’ll never find a taxi.”
Tom Brace trotted up the three wet steps to the sidewalk, turning up his coat collar and peering both ways down the gleaming dark street. “Here’s one,” he said. “Taxi!”
“Oh, you’re wonderful, Tom,” Betty Miller said.
As the cab swerved to the curb Brace sprang for its door, wrenched it open and called, “You people take this one, Lew. I’ll run up to the avenue and grab one for us.”
“Oh no,” Miller said, “there’s no need for that, I—” But Brace was already gone, sprinting up the street with the easy grace of an athlete. “Goodnight,” he called back. Miller turned to Nancy Brace. “No, look, there’s no reason why you people shouldn’t—”
“Oh don’t be silly,” she said. “Go on now, hurry up.”
Betty was already in the cab. “Come on, Lew,” she said, “for heaven’s sake.”
“Well I guess there’s nothing I—” he laughed stupidly. “Goodnight.” Then he ran across the sidewalk into the cab and shut the door. He gave the address and settled back beside his wife as the cab started up.
“Oh God,” Betty said tiredly, “I’ve been to some dull parties, but that one! That one takes the all-time cake.” She sighed and leaned against the cushions, her eyes closed.
“Those damn conceited Brace people. Darling, why do you let an ass like that eclipse you so in a conversation?” Her head was off the cushions now, her eyes were fixed angrily on him in the darkness. “I’ve never seen it fail. You just stand there completely silent and let some awful show-off Tom Brace talk us both to death. You let those people eclipse you so.”
“Betty,” Miller said. “Will you do me a favor?” And he watched her frown turn to a look of hurt in the light of a passing streetlamp. “Will you shut up? Will you please for God’s sake shut up?”
A Clinical Romance
THE NEW PATIENT was a big, thick-chested man, twenty-three or so, and he didn’t look sick at all. But the moment he tiptoed into the admitting ward and headed for the empty bed beside Frank Garvey’s, during Quiet Hour one June afternoon, Garvey could tell he was a repeat case. First-time patients looked shy in the hospital pajamas as they walked or were wheeled into the long, high room. They would glance about uneasily at the rows of horizontal men in tousled sheets, the sputum cups and Kleenex boxes and photographs of wives, before they yielded, tentatively, to the fresh bed that was to be their own, and usually they started asking questions right away (“How long’ve you been here? Eighteen months? No, but I mean, how long is it for the average cure?”).
But this one knows his way around; a couple of the old-timers in the rear of the ward were waving and grinning at him, which proved it. Observing the rules of the Quiet Hour, he put his folded clothes in the bed stand with elaborate care to avoid noise. Then, seeing Garvey was awake, he offered his hand across the space between their beds. “No point waiting for a formal introduction,” he said in a whisper, and with a boy’s smile that broke the tight Irish toughness of his face. “My name’s Tom Lynch.”
“Frank Garvey; glad to
know you. Been here before?”
“Fifteen months the first time; then I got fed up and signed out. That was five months ago.” He smiled again. “I had a five-month vacation.”
Miss Baldridge, the charge nurse, broke it up with a shrill command from the door that jolted several other men awake. “All right, Lynch, let’s cut the talking and get into that sack. You know better than to come blabbing around making noise before three.”
Lynch swung his bulk around to face her, outraged. “Listen, we weren’t making any—” She stopped him with an explosive “Sh-sh-sh!,” advanced into the room and aimed a stiff finger at his bed. “Inside, boy!”
Slowly he scraped off his slippers and climbed under the sheet. Miss Baldridge stood there watching him, hands on hips, ready to give the ultimate shout—“You’re on Report!”—at the next sign of impertinence. She was a former Army major, devoted to nursely discipline and critical of any nurse on her present staff, notably a pretty young blonde named Miss Kovarsky, who called the patients Mr. or listened to their complaints at any length, and she was in top form today. This morning she had commanded the radios to be silent while she paced the center aisle and delivered a lecture on luckiness to all the twenty-odd men in the ward. If you had to get tuberculosis, she felt, you were lucky to have the Veterans Administration taking care of you, and luckier still to be in this particular hospital, so close to New York, with its first-rate medical staff. Therefore, she had pointed out, her small eyes triumphant over the rim of her regulation linen mask, the least you could do was cooperate. Garvey, who was a former English instructor and spent most of his time reading, was singled out on two counts—the disorderly pile of books on his windowsill (he was lucky to be allowed any books) and the cigarette ashes on the floor near his bed (he was lucky to be allowed to smoke; in most TB hospitals it was against the rules). And though Garvey was unwilling to be contrite he was equally unwilling to smile foolishly at her, or to lose his temper, either of which would only have made it worse. There was no defense, he had decided grimly, just as there was no defense for this hulking, amiable stranger in the next bed who knew better than to come blabbing around before three, and who now lay sweating on his back, controlling himself. There were no sounds except breathing, and, beyond drawn venetian blinds, the sound of insects charging the window screens, buzzing and bumping against them in a fury of frustration before they zipped away.
Satisfied, Miss Baldridge turned on her rubber sole and started toward the door.
“Tune in tomorrow,” said a low voice across the aisle, in the fruity tones of a radio announcer, “for another heartwarming chapter in the life of—Pru Baldridge, Girl Army Officer.” She paused only for a split second in her prim departure, but that was enough to make it clear that she had been stung, then abandoned her impulse to attack in favor of a quick retreat, pretending she hadn’t hear. As she neared the door the voice became louder, joined now by a chorus of badly suppressed laughter from all over the ward: “Can a girl soldier find happiness in a veterans’ hospital?” It was Costello, an ex-salesman and former Air Force gunner, and he had scored a clean victory, a rout. The laughter rose jubilantly around him; he sat up in bed and went through the burlesque of taking a bow.
“Thanks,” Lynch called across the aisle in a stage whisper.
“Don’t mention it,” Costello said. “Any time.” He was a slight, dark man of thirty whose face was prematurely creased with laugh wrinkles. Though he had been here only a few months, his record of quitting or being expelled from one hospital after another dated back to the end of the war.
Coyne, a big, pimpled boy whose bed was next to Costello’s and who always appreciated Costello’s jokes whether they were funny or not, was almost unconscious with laughter now, his face beet red, his bed trembling. At three o’clock, when Miss Baldridge reappeared to signal the end of Quiet Hour, he was still grinning. “Hey, Miss Baldridge,” he asked her, “can a girl soldier find happiness in a veterans’ hospital?”
“Oh, Coyne,” she said, “for heaven’s sake grow up.” And she began snatching open the venetian blinds, admitting the blaze of afternoon. A moody attendant followed her, passing out a thermometer to each man, and Miss Kovarsky moved gracefully from bed to bed taking pulses.
“How are you today, Mr. Garvey?” Miss Kovarsky’s voice was low, her fingers small and cool on Garvey’s wrist.
“Fine, thanks.”
She smiled at him, or at least her eyes narrowed above the white mask, and then she went on to Lynch’s bed.
In a minute the radios were on again with the accounts of several ball games, and the coughing, laughing and chattering of the ward was resumed. Most of the afternoon revolved around Lynch; it was necessary for those who knew him to welcome him back, and for those who didn’t to assimilate him into the crowd. First he was surrounded by the old-timers, elderly men who had lived in the admitting ward for years and whose memories were long. After they had brought him up to date on hospital gossip, chuckling and scratching themselves with weak fingers, and while one of them, old Mr. Mueller, shuffled off to spread the news of his return through the other wards, Lynch exchanged names and information with Costello, Coyne and some of the other younger men who had arrived since his time. Then Mr. Mueller came back with an enthusiastic group of ambulant patients, strangers to Garvey, some of whom wore convalescent uniforms of green cotton gabardine. They all said they were sorry to see Lynch back, and that it must be tough to be here in the admitting ward, right back where he had started from, and then they settled down to talk of old times, of beer parties in the latrine and of stolen visits (the wards were on the ground floor, and there were fire exits in the latrines) to neighborhood bars. They talked of innumerable good guys who had been kicked out, or were doing well or badly, or were as crazy as ever, or were “over in surgery now,” and of one or two good guys who had died. Garvey put on his glasses and began to read.
Shortly before supper, Miss Baldridge scattered the crowd. “All right, get back where you belong,” she said. “All of you.” When they had gone, Lynch shook out a cigarette and offered the pack to Garvey.
“How long you been here, Frank?”
First names were almost never used in the admitting ward, and Garvey felt a surprising glow of pleasure at the boy’s friendliness. “Three months,” he said, “I’m just starting out.”
“You been through the worst part,” Lynch assured him. “I know that was the worst part for me. After that the time goes by faster. You get used to the life; you get to know different guys.”
“Any idea how long you’ll be here this time? Have they told you anything?”
“Told me I got a new cavity and I turned positive again, and that means they’ll want to give me a lobe job. Probably keep me here on bed rest for two or three months, and then take me over to surgery. After that there’s no telling. A year; maybe more.”
A lobe job means a lobectomy, the removal of a section of lung and the ribs around it; that was all Garvey knew about it, except that it usually left a man with a partly crumpled chest and a perpetually half-shrugged shoulder, and that it often led to complications. There was some chance that Garvey’s own disease might require surgery, and he didn’t like to think about it. “Well,” he said, “I certainly hope you make it soon. What did you say your first name was?”
“Tom.”
During supper and for the rest of the evening they talked; if the time went by faster when you got to know different guys, Garvey decided, it might be well to get to know them. They compared stories about the hospital staff, agreeing that Miss Baldridge was a tough customer but that most of the other nurses and attendants were all right, though Lynch took exception to one of the night attendants, a small, roguishly effeminate man named Cianci, who, he said, had tried to make a pass at him once. “I told him, ‘Look, Buster, if you want to play games, you picked the wrong boy, understand? I think you better keep outa my way from now on.’” Then they talked of the outside and Lynch told about
his father who had retired from the fire department and his kid brother who wanted to be a professional middleweight. He asked Garvey about teaching and said he had always wanted to go in for that kind of work himself; as a kid he had thought about joining the Jesuits, and later about qualifying for the regular board of education, but of course it was too late now. What he should have done, he said, was use his GI Bill for college after the Navy, instead of fooling around as he had, working in a supermarket and playing semipro football on Saturdays, until the disease caught up with him.
But it became increasingly clear, as Lynch led up to the subject, touched on it, paused shyly and studied his cigarette, that what he really wanted to talk about was his girl. “I just started going with her when I was home this time,” he said, after Garvey had helped him along. “Started getting pretty serious. I know it sounds corny, but I never knew I could get that crazy about any girl. She’s all I think about, all the time. I don’t know, she’s—” Gently he smoothed the sheet with the palm of his hand, finding, perhaps, that there were no words delicate enough for the thing he was trying to say. Then he grinned. “Anyway, all I want to do now is get married. Soon as I get out of here the right way, with an arrested case, I’m going to collect that pension, maybe get myself some kind of easy, part-time job, and then I’m going to get married. You’re married, aren’t you, Frank?”
Garvey said he was, and that he had two children.
“Boys?”
“Boy and a girl.”
“That’s nice, a boy and a girl. They come here to see you?”
“My wife does; they don’t let the kids in. She’ll be here tomorrow,” he added. “You’ll meet her. And maybe I’ll get to meet your girl.”
The Collected Stories Page 46