One day he was reading the book and it suddenly came to him, and he said to himself, if I’m proud of me, I don’t need to hate Mister Charlie’s people. I don’t want to. I don’t need to. If I love me, I can also love the whole damn human race. Black, brown, yellow, white. Thank you, Richard. Thank you, Eddie. Thank you, darling Fannie Mae. He looked around at the other soldiers in his ward, most of them white, and he loved the whole damn miserable wonderful human race.
He ate well and began to put the pounds back, but he still had to carry around the extra weight of bandages on his chest. Each time he shaved he noted laughingly that more and more he was beginning to look like something, resemble somebody. The letters kept coming from Millie, but now it was time for them to stop and for the cablegram to come. It was four or five days late, and what the hell was the holdup? And surely she would remember to notify him. Mama would if Millie couldn’t. Each day he told himself there was nothing to worry about and yet every day he worried. Maybe the cablegram got lost and the baby was already here and he didn’t even know whether it was a boy or a girl, not that it mattered worth a damn.
One afternoon he was seated in a chair next to his bed reading a book, but his mind was thousands of miles away with Millie and the baby and Mama. He heard a voice say, “Well, we really have improved.” He looked up into Celia’s face, and he was truly glad to see her. She pecked him on his cheek and she stepped away from him and looked at him. “If I had met you on the street I would not have recognized you,” she said. “I had no idea you were such a handsome boy.”
He could hear the other soldiers on the ward watching and listening. Visitors were rarities. And such a visitor. He said, “How’s Lieutenant Samuels?”
She said, “Bob’s all right. He comes to see you, doesn’t he?” With the perspiration and the peach fuzz above her mouth which was always rounding curves and going places.
Solly said, “Yes. He has to come out here every week for treatment and examination. I see them all once a week.”
She said, “That’s what he told me.”
Solly said, “He told you right.”
And she said, “What’s the matter, Sergeant?”
He said, “Nothing’s the matter.” He was lonesome—very lonesome.
She said anxiously, “Have you heard from home? What about your wife and baby?”
He said, “I haven’t heard. I don’t know what the holdup is.” He tried to laugh.
She said, “Don’t let it worry you. Just a case of miscalculation. Happens all the time.”
He saw the orderly coming toward him with the cablegram and he lost ten pounds of perspiration. He took it in his trembling hands and he opened it and he looked at everything else before he read the message. It had been sent six days before. It had been to the Red Cross. It had been to the Philippines. Finally his eyes went down to the message, and he would never be the same again. He was the father of an eight-pound five-ounce boy, but he was without a loving wife and his son without a mother. He read it again and again and again, but he could not change the wording. He thought, it’s a typographical error. He thought, it’s a practical joke. He thought, it’s a goddamn lie! He thought, it can’t be—can’t be—can’t be! But he knew it was. He knew it was—deep down in his bowels he knew it was! His mother wouldn’t lie to him.
“Sergeant! What’s the matter?”
But he could not hear her now as his heart began to swell, and all of the tension he had ever felt in all his life exploded in him and all of the fears and all of the sorrow and all of the love all of the hate and especially all of the guilt, everything in flood tide now. Nothing he could say, nothing he could do—nothing nothing nothing nothing could change the cablegram. He stared at it and thought, maybe if I tear it into bits she will be alive again. The tide came in and the flood came up from the angry bitter depths and built through his shoulders into his throat and pushed out his cheeks and filled up his face. It was too much! It was too much to hold inside. The dam broke loose and Solly cried like a motherless child.
Celia took the cablegram from his hand and she read it and her own eyes filled for him, and she put her hand upon his shoulder and she wanted to say something to ease the deep pain, but she knew there were no such words—no such words in any language. The tears flowed down his cheeks, and he wiped them with the sheet, and still they flowed. When finally he was aware of her and her hand on his sobbing shoulder, he turned and stared at her as if he had never seen her before.
He whispered, “Please go. There’s nothing anyone can say or do. Nothing can be changed.”
She said, “All right, Sergeant. But I’ll be back tomorrow.”
He said, “All right.” Why didn’t she go? Now, go! Go now! And she put the cablegram on the bed and walked softly out of the ward. Something in a far-off corner of his feelings heard her walking away from him and wanted to call her back. But he would not, somehow could not.
All day long and all through the night he sat up in bed, staring into miles and miles of emptiness. Millie was at this moment in a cold box buried in the heartless earth. It was beyond his imagination. Outside his understanding. How could healthy beautiful, full-of-life, life-giving urgent Millie be no more of this world? He had just left her nine months ago in Pittsburg, California, full of hope and love and future. How could all of her be gone forevermore? A flock of beautiful birds fly across the sky and the hunter aims at them for sport and fires and life is gone for one of them. Is that all there is to it, Millie? Can it be like that for you? All of his images of her were of California vintage now. The cottage in Fort Ord Village and Millie, the walks they took at the ocean’s edge at the rim of the continent and Millie, the small café in Monterey, the love that spilled over all over the place and the little telephone booth-of-a-room in Pittsburg and Millie and Millie and Millie, and the day he marched away from her. And how in the hell could they let her die? He blamed himself most of all. He should have had the courage to desert this goddamn man-made madness and should have taken her away to have their baby in an atmosphere of love and peace and quietness. She probably worried herself to death. He felt guilty about the anxious months when she thought he didn’t love her. He would never be able to make it up to her. And never was a long long time.
He didn’t eat anything until the following day at lunch and he immediately threw it up again. After lunch he got two letters from her written a couple of days before the baby was born. It was like hearing from the dead, and he pretended that the letters proved she wasn’t dead. Her letters were full of love for him and for life and for their future together, for their child’s and their children’s future. He even let himself argue with some of the plans she was making for Junior. Wait till he is born, for Chrissakes! Let him catch his breath! Doctor—lawyer—who the hell needs it? He thought, I’m losing my mind, I’m arguing with a dead woman. She’s dead and I must accept it. I must accept it. I can’t believe it—can’t believe it!
Celia came and stayed for a couple of hours, and they talked about it, and he was thankful, because he needed someone to talk to, or else he might have lost his mind, with the letters that kept coming from her day after day after day. It was a weird practical joke the Army Post Office played on him. Each letter always deepened and widened the gashes of his purplest of purple hearts. A few days later he got a letter from his mother. She told him the baby was fine and just like him, and Millie had had a very hard time and everything possible had been done to save her. It just wasn’t meant to be. He tore up Mama’s letter in little pieces, and then he knew that Millie was dead dead dead, he knew his Millie was dead.
Weeks and weeks of misery and loneliness and death-feelings and dreams of death passed by, and then another image began to make its way against his will to the surface of his consciousness. He was a dirty lowdown bastard! How could she even cross his mind so soon after his wife died giving birth to their child? She’d been dead only seventy-four days! How could he be so heartless? Damn you, Fannie Mae! And damn me! A
nd damn our love and anything and everything that came between me and Millie Belford Saunders. And yet he could not help thinking about her and wondering about her, even though guilt hung around his bed like it was on guard duty. One day he thought to himself, he figured it all out, he said, Millie is dead for over a month and a half now, and she is dead forever more. I loved her and I still love her, but she is dead and gone and I cannot bring her back, and our son needs a mother to love him and care for him as only a mother can. And Millie would understand this, and when the war is over, I will marry again, so the child will have a mother and so I will have a wife. Millie would want this for us. And when I get back I’ll take my boy and we’ll go to Ebbensville among other places, and if he falls in love with her and if she loves him, well then he’ll have himself a mother and I will have a wife. And that’s that, and I won’t think about it anymore. It’s a long ways in the future, and besides the war might never end and I am a no-good bastard for thinking about another woman so soon after Millie’s death. Millie my darling, forgive me—forgive me—forgive me.
Each weary day dragged by like a lonely month of Sundays, and yet the days were born and lived and died, giving birth to the next day and the next day and the next, till the days gave way to weeks and the weeks made way for the months, and he fought against the temptation of writing to Fannie Mae and telling her about the death of his wife and the birth of his son. He thought of just telling her this and nothing else, and letting the future take care of itself, but he never wrote the letter, because he felt guilty enough as it was. Oftentimes he blamed himself for Millie’s death. He’d made her insecure with Fannie Mae, he’d made her pregnant and then had left her and gone away ten thousand miles to shoot at total strangers.
But time does pass, and wounds do heal, superficially at least, and his head and arm were healed completely now, and one day they took the bandages off his weary chest for good, and one day from his back, and weeks went by, and months went by, and now this day he was to finally leave the hospital and go on a thirty-day convalescent furlough. In the afternoon Celia would come and drive him into Bainbridge, where she had arranged a room for him not far from where she lived. His purple-hearted buddies were months since off their furlough and were attached to a Duck outfit at Worthington Farms, a camp on the other side of town.
All morning long he was nervous and impatient and thought that 1300 would never come. He got dressed early and shaved and packed, and now he wanted to be away from the hospital and everything else that even remotely suggested the Army. He wanted to go and be gone from this place. He wanted one p.m. to come, and for thirty days he would be a free man, and he didn’t even want to hear about the Army or the war, which was still raging all over the world. He wanted to forget it ever existed. One of the things he would do once he got situated was to write Fannie Mae a long friendly letter. It wouldn’t be a love letter, just a letter that told her where he was and how he was, and who he was—a widower and father. He had to relate to somebody back in that other world, besides his mother and his son.
Celia came and drove him back to the city, and on the ride he saw nothing and he said nothing. He was lost in his own thoughts of one day getting home again and putting the pieces together. She was making like a tourist guide on a Sight-Seeing bus on Fifth Avenue. This park and that river and this bridge and that historical significance, but he hardly heard a word she said. She said, “What’s the matter, Solly?”
He said, “Nothing.”
She said, “You act as if I’m taking you to prison instead of taking you out. You must have fallen in love with one of those pretty nurses at the hospital. Or maybe you liked the steak and eggs out there.” She called them “styke” and “aigs.” She asked him, “How do you like my car?”
He said, “Fair dinkum.” And let her figure it out for herself.
She said, “It’s just a bomb, but it gets me where I have to go.”
She took him to her brother’s house about three blocks from where she lived, in a section of town called Bensington. She introduced him to Betty, her brother’s wife, and to Pamela, the sister of her brother’s wife, and they showed him his room and helped him to unpack, as they talked to him and asked him questions about the United States and the American Negro and the CIO and Harry Bridges and Paul Robeson, and he wondered, who the hell are these people? And the sister of her brother’s wife was particularly friendly, and finally Celia said, “He’s crook. Let him take a nap and freshen up. Then I want to take him to my place for a spot of tea.”
Pamela said impishly, “All right, but don’t think because you saw him first you’re going to have this beautiful man all to yourself, because you won’t, and I will see to it that you don’t. There is a male shortage, you know.”
Celia laughed. “He’ll be living in the same house as you, so you’ll see more of him than I will. Besides he’s not interested in Australian girls romantically.”
She could certainly say that again.
He lay in his Australian room and looked behind him at his life and looked at the present mess his life was and tried to look into the future. He got up and looked in his bag and found the snapshots his mother had sent to him of Solomon the Third. He sat on the bed and looked them over. Fat as a pig and big as a house, and large dark eyes and head full of hair and high forehead; he had his daddy’s mouth and mold of face, but the shape of his eyes were his mother’s—large and wide and knowing. Solly’s face began to fill. I promise you, little buddy, they’ll never send you off to war—the Army’ll never make you a man. I promise you hope and life and love and laughter and plenty to eat and Santa Claus and school and bubblegum and better world and bicycle and no-lonely-hours and peace-on-earth. And he was tired—he was weary. He stretched out on the bed again. Promise you school and opportunity . . . Sleep—sleep—please let me sleep! Come to me, sleep, and take me with you on that trip.
He could not sleep. He could hardly even close his eyes. And he realized he had not really accepted the fact of Millie’s death. He had not accepted that in time and space the her of her was gone forever and forever. For the past year he had lived with death and died with death and cried with death and walked in death and wallowed in it. Waded in it. He had breathed it, he knew its smell, its taste, its clammy touch. He knew its color. How many times had he heard death’s soft white flapping wings? So peaceful and seductive and deceitful, promising everything and giving what? But to imagine death had taken Millie, his wife Millie, whom he had lain close to and inside of and naked with and love-with and child-with and dreamed-with and future-with, to grow-old-with, to-change-the-world-with. His mind had half accepted it, but deep down in the guts of his guts he wouldn’t believe it. It couldn’t be! He was so many thousand miles away from the place where she lay for almost six months now, so still and cold and peaceful in death’s dear everlasting sleep, and he told himself, maybe she is better off, all of her troubles over, all of her anxieties ended. She was secure at last in death. And with the son she left behind her she had immortality. She has conquered Father Time. Dear Millie—darling Millie. He got up and wiped the tears from his eyes. Had he been asleep? He heard voices of strange women.
Celia asking, “Has he been asleep?”
Pam answered, “Of course he has.”
Celia asking, “How do you know?”
Pam laughed. “I put my ear to the keyhole and listened to his snoring.”
Celia said, “He doesn’t snore.”
Pam said, “You seem to have rather intimate knowledge of his sleeping habits.”
“I was his nurse, and don’t be boorish. I already told you, he has no romantic interest in Australian women.”
She could damn sure say that again.
He cleared his throat to let them know he was awake, and he came out of his room in his robe and said hello and went down the hall to the bathroom. He lay in a hot soapy bath and closed his eyes and felt a gnawing nagging emptiness. He tried to imagine his little son. What are you doing and whom
do you favor and where are you going and when will I see you? When will I hold you in my arms? When? When? When will this civilized madness stop?
When they got to Celia’s little white three-room cottage with the veranda that ran around three sides of it and the back porch with its latticework and red rosebushes, there were a couple of awkward moments in which they sat and stared at each other, alone for the first time, and for the first time she seemed to be fresh out of conversation.
Finally she said, “I have some slop if you’d care to have some.”
He said, “Slop?”
She said, “Whiskey, I mean brandy. Would you care to give it a go?”
He said, “Fine.” Exactly what he needed.
She came back from the kitchen with knick-knacks and brandy and they drank and stared at each other.
She asked him, “Would you care for a fag?” And she handed him a pack of cigarettes, and they lit up and sat there smoking and drinking and staring at each other, as if they were boxers or fencers sparring and feinting and looking for openings. Antagonists instead of friends.
She said finally, “These women will rush you off your feet, and I think I realize something of what you’re going through. That’s why I told Pam you were not romantically inclined at this point in your life.”
He said, “Fair dinkum.” Say it again and again and again.
“My sister-in-law is what you Yankees would call a wolf in a sheep’s disguise.”
And Then We Heard the Thunder Page 43