by Paul Gallico
Jerry was staring at him. Eagles laughed. “Scared? Hell! The guys do it all the time. I’ve got a C-87. It’s a sleeper jump.”
Jerry’s mind was spinning. Home . . . Catharine . . . a sleeper jump . . . Even to a Bomber pilot used to tooling his tin goose on a twelve-hundred-mile round trip to drop his eggs, home was a place that was aeons away from Gedsborough Airbase, separated by ocean, time, and distance—and fifty missions.
The hangar buildings and the low, flat concrete plains of the ocean air-lanes terminus at Prestwick began to loom up in the distance. Prestwick! Next stop La Guardia Field! Home lay just beyond those low, curved grey buildings . . .
Now his mind began to race. He would be able to see Catharine. Talk to her face to face. Go to her and tell her what had happened, make her understand. She must understand if he had a chance to talk to her, to tell her how it was and how he felt about Patches. Those things happened to men. What could not be set down coldly on paper could be spoken face to face. It was the decent way to do it. Catharine would realize and set him free—free to go back to Patches, to storm up the grim alley of Bishop’s Lane and push the button under the name, “Sgt. P. Graeme, WAAF,” and go in and shout up the stairs: “Patches . . . Patches. I’m back . . . I’ve got to see you . . .”
She wouldn’t even know he’d been away, that he’d been to America and back to fetch his freedom and the right to beg her to marry him, to tell her what was in his heart. But she would know what was there when he plucked her off the stairs and held her to him . . .
Eagle said: “Sold?”
“You’re sure . . . we’d get back on Sunday? . . .”
Eagles snorted: “Huh! Or else! I’ve told you it’s a very important personage . . .”
He might be back in Kenwoulton by Sunday night saying to Patches: “I’m free. I’m not engaged, Patches. There’s nobody but you . . .” It was fate that he had run into Eagles that way, fate that Eagles was flying a round trip, fate that meant him to have his chance to speak to Catharine . . .
They were at the entrance to Prestwick and showing their AGO cards to the M.P.s.
Eagles said: “That’s all, brother. I can see it on your face. It’s what the doctor ordered. Now look, stick around close to me and just don’t talk to anyone and you won’t have to tell any lies. Go aboard when I do. It’s my ship, and nobody will ask any questions. I’ll let you have one more schnapps before we go if you think you need it.”
“To hell with it!” said Jerry, “I don’t. Eagles, you’re the tops! . . .”
Jerry sat up in the nose of the C-87 with Eagles as, with the four motors drumming, the concrete floor of Prestwick slipped away beneath them and the blue waters of the Firth of Clyde appeared below, with the Isle of Arran a green patch to the north.
Ireland passed beneath them and was gone. They climbed into the high clouds, and soon, through the rifts, there was nothing but the sea below. Eagles set the automatic pilot and checked with his engineer. He said to Jerry: “Take a snooze, sonny. I’ll wake you when we pass the Statue of Liberty . . .”
“Sleep!” said Jerry. “My God, are you crazy? . . .”
He wondered what his mother and father would say . . .
I I
THE BIG SHIP came in from the sea and lazed down Long Island, and the familiar panorama spread beneath Jerry’s eyes—Jericho Turnpike, farmlands that were cut and fenced like the chequerboard fields of England, Mitchell and Roosevelt with the landmark of the big gas tank, then the curve of Flushing Bay and the grey asphalt surface and gleaming buildings of La Guardia Airport.
The engines, throttled down, were whistling, sighing, and popping as they circled for a landing. What lay below was so well known, so much a part of him, and yet Jerry was not stirred. He was standing up in the pilot’s compartment of the ship, his eyes picking up the flat, concrete administration building, judging the distance with Eagles, bringing the ship in with him in his mind—another airport, another landing . . .
Markers, trucks, men digging at the side of the runway flashed by. The wheels touched; the ship settled and rolled. The engines picked up, and they taxied to the main building, where a car with motor-cycle escort awaited the Very Important Personage, who left the plane and entered his conveyance hugging a brief-case to him.
Eagles looked at his watch. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. He said: “On the nose! You can get a cab right outside in a few minutes. Need any money? Here, better take twenty until you get home. They don’t understand about pounds over here yet. Be back here at two in the morning. I’ll meet you at the information centre. Then you can stick around with me until we go aboard. Okay, kid, good luck! And give her a big kiss for old Eagles . . .”
Jerry drifted into the rotunda of the main passenger hall. He walked as if in a dream, past the news-stands, where well-remembered New York newspapers flashed the big headlines of the war; people, his kind of people, sat, or sauntered, or rushed behind porters carrying their bags. Over the loud-speaker system a woman’s voice announced: “American Airlines, the Southwesterner, for Washington, Nashville, and Dallas, Texas, now loading at gate three.”
Only yesterday he had heard the same kind of voice, but speaking in a cool, clipped British accent, announcing: “London Express, for Carlisle, Manchester, Stoke, Birmingham, Northampton, and London, now ready at platform one.” That was the train on which Patches had gone back.
He passed a row of telephone booths and hesitated. Should he call up home and tell them he was coming? He felt no urge to do so, no sensation of being within a telephone call of his mother and father and Catharine. A five-cent piece, a number spoken into the mouth-piece would have verified it. But he could not bring himself to cross the threshold. It was almost as if by doing so he would have destroyed the spell.
Jerry went out to the entrance through a door marked “TAXIS.” A Yellow, with a long hood, looking enormous and ornate with dilapidated gimcrackery, lamps, and ornaments, pulled up to him from the head of the line. Like the newspapers and the people and the talk he was hearing, it was familiar and a part of him. And yet it could not quite penetrate the still dreamlike quality of his being there. The cab made him think of a circus wagon he had once seen in Westbury as a child.
He got in and gave the address, 12 Severn Avenue, Westlake Park. The driver looked around. “Cost ya a fin, bud. I gotta come back empty.”
“That’s okay.”
The driver set the cab in motion and headed for the parkway that would take them out on the island. When they were rolling, he half turned his head and asked: “Well, how’s things over there?”
Jerry said: “Over where?” and meant it. His body had been transported to America, but his mind had not yet made the transition. He had been thinking of Gedsborough Airbase, Sam Bognano, his ship, and the crew.
The driver said: “On the other side. Ain’t you just back from there? I see by them ribbons you got on . . . I got a kid in the Pacific. How’s it—pretty tough?”
Jerry replied: “It gets a little rugged sometimes.” He looked at the photograph and name of the driver on the identification placard inside the cab. It was Edgerton Bibber, Long Island City. The last time he had been in a cab had been a fortnight ago in London with Sam Bognano, his pilot. They had gone to a night club in one of the tiny-bonneted, high-fashioned London taxis, driven by a cockney who had a son with the Eighth Army in Italy. There had been a V alert on at the time, but the cabby paid it no mind and told them about driving all through the blitz of ’40.
The driver of the Yellow remarked: “I guess you fellers get a bellyful . . .”
Jerry did not reply. His mind was impaled upon something he could not catch. Then it came—the name of the driver. Patches would have loved it, and would have started to make a song about it. They had collected odd names seen on shop fronts and hotel registers all through their trip together. There was one in particular he remembered they had come upon at Stronachlachar, a gentleman by the name of Peabody Twitillie, and
they had cycled to its refrain for hours.
Jerry started a couplet—“Oh, Edgerton Bibber, he was a . . .” But it wouldn’t come. It wasn’t any good without Patches. Nothing was any good without Patches. That’s why he was bowling along Grand Central Parkway in a taxicab to go and talk to Catharine and get straightened out.
He had to get a grip on himself, to put his hand down and feel the leather of the seat and look up again at the name placard of the driver and beyond to the familiar traffic of the parkway. Home and Catharine were beyond, and Patches had only just pulled out of St. Enoch’s Station, wearing that silly little hat with the blue cornflowers on it, and holding up her hand to him, framed in the window of the railway carriage until she was out of sight.
In Jerry’s mind the coughing of the taxi motor turned into the chuff-chuff-chuff of the long, packed train as it snaked its way out of the station in Glasgow; he no longer saw the parkscape of Long Island, but only the grey canopy of the terminus and the gap left by the departed train. “Chuff-chuff-chuff,” and then the mournful shriek of those damned English locomotive whistles. He’d never get the sound out of his ears.
Patches ought to be in Kenwoulton by now, back to the dismal, lightless brick house in Bishop’s Lane, with the chimney pots like rabbit’s ears—back to the war, back where she started from with her fat little bag and her wistful, shadowy smile. It was there at the foot of the stairs that she had looked at his watch and timed the beginning of their adventure together. He wondered whether she would glance at the time again and note when it was ended . . . The cab reached the end of the parkway and swung off. Only a few more miles. Oh, God, he was in a mess! . . .
When they approached Westbury on the Jericho Turnpike, Jerry said to the driver: “Never mind taking me to that address. Drop me on the edge of town somewhere. I’ll tell you when . . .”
“Whatever you say, bud. Guess you don’t want to walk in on ’em too sudden, eh?”
Jerry let it go at that. Actually now that he was nearing Westbury and passing over roads every inch of which he had traversed in his jalopy when he was a kid, he wanted more time to think, to get acclimatized to being back, to rid himself of the dream fabric that seemed to enfold him like a mantle. He had the queer feeling that if he came banging up the house in a cab, slamming the door, he would wake everyone. He wished now that he had telephoned. Sometime the queer illusion must break, sometime he must find himself at home . . .
Half-way through Westbury he tapped on the window. “This will do right here.” He got out and dismissed the cab at the corner of Main and Chestnut opposite the high school.
The street was filled with Saturday-afternoon shopping traffic. Through the store window he could see Joe the shine man giving the final gloss to a patron’s shoes with the characteristic flamboyant flip of his polishing rag. Next door was Malloy’s, the candy store where he and Catharine would stop for some ice cream after the movies. Down the street the Bijou Theatre marquee advertised a picture he had seen six months ago at Gedsborough Airbase. Templeton’s market, where his mother used to send him on his bicycle to pick up something the delivery boy had forgotten, was jammed with people picking over the vegetables and fruits. He recognized Herbert the fat groceryman tearing off the greens from bunches of carrots.
Under the noise of motor traffic and the squawks of a swing band from Milt’s radio shop, he could hear the thudding of ball against racket gut from the tennis courts at the side of the high school. Looking up at the high school, he could see the windows of the chem. lab. were open and figures moving about or bending over, kids working overtime on a problem late Saturday afternoon . . . The showcase of Pappos the florist was full of blue hydrangea plants, and Jerry remembered that his mother liked them. The air smelled of expensive cars and caramel popcorn from Malloy’s and gasoline and summer sun on pavements, and still he was not at home . . .
His mind was turning back to Kenwoulton with a queer kind of yearning for the ugly red-brick buildings with their bomb gaps, odor of bitter beer when you passed a pub, the persistent peat-smoke smell that hung in the air, the drab queues waiting at the bus signs, the tobacco shops with their green- and red-colored packets of cigarettes and tins of tobacco, old newsmen hawking the London papers, apple-cheeked slatterns gossiping in front of the butcher shops or standing in line at the fishmongers’, startling and yet amusing his ears with the off-key music of their Midlands burr.
It wasn’t that he liked Kenwoulton, or even England. He had felt exiled there like the rest of the kids, and thought only of home, talked of it, longed for it, counted each mission, each day that brought him nearer to it. It was more that his mind, confused and harried by the events of the past forty-eight hours, was searching for surroundings where he would not feel a stranger, where he could feel comfortable. He had never so much as consciously looked at Kenwoulton when he had been in that dismal, ugly Midlands manufacturing town, but now his memory of it was suddenly sharp and filled with warmth. And it was the place where Patches would be . . .
Jerry saw no one he knew; no one appeared to recognize him. There was no one who expected to see him standing there. He was just a young Air Force officer, another soldier of many who were a part of the afternoon traffic, but it gave Jerry the strangest feeling that he was invisible, that he did not exist as a corporeal body, that physically he was not really there at all.
He turned slowly and walked up the street towards the road that would lead him the half-mile to Severn Avenue and home. A block away he saw the familiar porticoed front of the public library and the building of St. John’s Episcopal Church next to it. A girl came out of the library with some books under her arm, and something about her swinging walk and slender figure made him stop and stare.
He was saying to himself: “It’s Catharine,” as though this were part of the dream too and he was identifying someone. Even this queer inability to move was dreamlike, a remembered fantasy out of the night when the body became suddenly heavy and leaden and refused to obey the dictates of the mind. Catharine—within his sight, within his reach. With a curious pang he saw her sunny smile flash as she recognized an acquaintance on the way to her car at the curb and paused a moment to talk.
Jerry moved slightly, half into the doorway of the stationery shop, and was startled to find that his limbs still retained the power of locomotion. Then why was he not running forward down the street to Catharine? A crying of her name, a shout of greeting, a wave of his arm, and she would look up and see him coming towards her. Old habits, old memories, days and nights of longing to see her, of thinking about her, were strongly impelling him, and yet he remained where he was.
Then through the confusion and turmoil in his mind a stronger power penetrated the chaos within him like a sombre undertone—the remembrance of the reason for his presence there, the purpose of his mission—and he felt suddenly like a traitor. He thought at once of Patches, and she came so alive in his mind that for a moment he felt like a traitor to both.
Time seemed to hang suspended while he waited, and he had the feeling that at any instant Catharine would feel his presence, would look up and come to him. But she did not. She chatted for a moment and then moved on to her car, her books under her arm. For her, Jerry was three thousand miles away, no closer than his latest letter, which she carried in her handbag. Even had she glanced down the block in his direction, she might not have recognized him shielded in the doorway, because in her thoughts he was so firmly placed in England.
Still motionless, Jerry watched her climb into her roadster and drive away towards home, her hair blowing out behind her, and his thoughts went back to the daydreams he used to have during the long, dreary hours on their way to and from missions when there was no enemy attack and he would soothe his nerves and pass the time with fantasies of how it would be to come back to Catharine again, what their meeting would be like, and where, and how.
In his mind he had gone over them all, placing it in New York, perhaps at the airport, or at the little
railway station of Westbury, or even at the door of her home, beneath the tall elms and the lilac bushes, and his yearnings would always culminate in the moment when she would run into his outstretched arms and he would feel her hair against his cheek, and the tender touch of her mouth, confirming for all time the promise they had made to each other before he left.
And as he stood there he realized that the moment had come and gone, and that he was no longer the same Jerry Wright who had left Westbury two years ago with his new wings on his breast and Catharine in his heart, and never would be again. And he had a sudden longing for his home, his father and mother, his room and his things. He left the doorway and began to walk rapidly.
He took a back way to Severn Avenue so as to avoid the necessity of passing Catharine’s house across the street from his. Coming around from behind, he walked the short gravel driveway, and, standing inside the white-columned Georgian portico, he pressed the button of the bell.
Deep inside the house he heard the well-remembered sound of the vibration and a sharp bark, and for the first time he had the feeling that the dream shroud was breaking up, that he was indeed a living person.
The touch of his finger upon the bell, the sounds, the entrance with the polished brass letter box, the nick in the woodwork he had made with his hockey stick when he had slipped there one winter’s day, the familiar feel of the worn, thick mat beneath his feet—seemed to bring him back and give promise of the dear objects that lay just behind those walls . . .
Reston the butler opened the door, stared, and fell out of all calm and order. His eyes started, his stout face flushed red as he cried:
“Mister Jerry! Bless me!”
There was a wild scrabbling of toenails on polished hardwood floor, and Skipper, Jerry’s golden cocker, precipitated himself upon him and into his arms, yelping and screaming, licking his face hysterically. A door opened above and a woman’s voice called; “Reston! What is it? Is there something the matter?”