by Paul Gallico
Jerry went to the foot of the stairs and called up: “Mother . . .”
“Jerry! Jerry! Oh no, I can’t believe it! Harman, do you hear! It’s Jerry. Jerry’s back . . .”
Helen Wright came running down the stairs, and Jerry took her in his arms and hugged her and let her cry and kiss him. His father came down, wiping shaving-soap from his face, shouting: “Jerry! Why didn’t you let us know? By God, let’s look at you, son!”
He was home now. It was what he had thought it would be like seeing his father and mother—their excitement, surprise, and joy, Reston’s pop eyes, and the hysterical Skipper. He grinned at them. “I just landed forty-five minutes ago, and thought I’d come right out. Gee, Mother, you look great! Dad, you’re a sight for sore eyes, even with only half your whiskers off.”
Helen Wright was saying over and over: “Jerry, Jerry, darling! . . . I just cannot believe it.” She was a small, nervous, somewhat breathless woman, with a still handsome face and figure, expressive eyes, and a way of making herself the centre of things. For all that hers had been a perfect marriage, blessed with an adoring and indulging husband and a fine son, she was always girding herself for the effort of coming to grips with little things.
Her husband was feasting his eyes on Jerry’s ribbons, his features flushed with excitement and pride. He was an older and more firmly settled edition of Jerry, with the same dark, glossy hair and blue eyes, and the pink-and-white complexion of a man for whom everything has gone right. His figure in his silk dressing-gown was heavier but as trim and well-muscled as Jerry’s. There was no doubt that they were father and son, though they might have been taken for brothers.
He said: “By God, son, D.F.C., Air Medal, Silver Star, you’ve got ’em all, and thank goodness, no Purple Heart! . . .”
Helen stood off to contemplate him better. “Jerry, you’re taller—and better-looking. Is it really true you’re here? I simply cannot wait to hear about you. We had a letter from you only yesterday. And look at Skipper, he’s turning himself inside out . . .”
They went into the library, where Jerry smelled the old familiar scent of leather and books and said: “Oh gee, it’s good to be home!”
His father said: “You’ll find everything in your room exactly as you left it. Son, I’m so pleased and excited at having you back I don’t know where to begin, and I guess Mother feels the same way. Let’s get our breath and hear all about it . . .”
“Tell us everything, Jerry, how long you . . .” Helen Wright paused in the middle of the sentence and then exclaimed: “Catharine! Jerry, does Catharine know you’re home? Of course not, if you came right here. Don’t you want to call her right away? I’m sure she’s at home . . .”
Jerry looked at his mother. In the pleasure of being there, the genuine joy he felt at seeing his parents, he momentarily had forgotten everything else. Now he thought: “Oh, Lord . . . it’s got to come! . . .”
Helen was making plans, sharing in the romance of the moment when Jerry and Catharine would be together again. She said: “Of course you’ll want to go over there first. Oh, Jerry, you ought to prepare her—it’s only fair. Let me call Millicent and just hint . . .” In her excitement she had moved half-way to the telephone when Jerry said: “Mother—don’t . . . please . . . I mean . . .”
His father said: “Jerry probably has his mind made up just how he’s going to spring it on Cat, Mother . . . It’s just that we’re so damned excited at your walking in this way, son . . .”
Jerry faced them both, and his tone was serious and troubled. He said: “Look, I guess you’ll think I’m pretty screwy for doing it, but I’m not really back at all. I’m flying out again at two o’clock tomorrow morning. I was on leave in Scotland and ran into a guy—remember Eagles Wilson? He was flying a V.I.P. on a seventy-two-hour turn-around. I went along for the ride.”
Harman Wright threw back his head and laughed lustily. “By God, what a war! A.W.O.L., eh?”
“Well, not exactly, except I’m not supposed to be in this country. My leave isn’t up until Wednesday. I’ll be back in Scotland Sunday night.”
Helen slumped into a chair and said: “Oh dear, I’m sure I just can’t bear any more. Jerry, you’ll be the death of us.” She stiffened suddenly. “But, Jerry, that’s all the more reason for your seeing Catharine at once. She’ll be so happy—and so disappointed. Oh, I want to be with you every minute you’re here, but we can understand, can’t we, Harman?”
Harman Wright was looking at his son, looking beyond the clean young figure to the shadows on his face and the eyes that did not seem either young or happy. He said, tentatively: “Why, sure, Jerry. You run along over if you want to. Maybe you can bring Cat back for dinner . . .”
Jerry was standing in the centre of the room thinking: “Oh Lord! . . . How am I going to tell them?” Aloud he said: “I’ll go over later, after a while, but I wanted to have a chance to talk to you first. It’s on account of Catharine I came home . . .”
“Jerry!” The note of alarm in his mother’s voice filled him with foreboding. “Is there anything wrong between you and Catharine?”
The emphasis his mother placed upon the question made it pregnant with apprehension of disaster, as though the turning of the wheels of the world depended upon things being right between Catharine and himself, and Jerry for the first time began to have an inkling of the enormity of the trouble he was in and its possible effect upon others. He suddenly felt a thousand years old and a thousand years tired, and his heart swelled with gratefulness when his father said quietly: “I think a drink might be in order, son. You’ve had one hell of a long trip!”
He went to the side table, where whisky and soda stood, and poured out a double for his son, noting the gratitude in his eyes and how the boy’s hand shook when he took it.
Jerry sat across a chair and leaned forward on the backrest, as he always had, trying to think what to say. His father suggested quiedy: “Tell us about it if you feel like it, Jerry . . .”
It was his mother who was worrying Jerry, the fidgeting of her fingers and the frightened look on her face. He said: “There isn’t anything wrong . . . I mean I haven’t seen her yet to talk to her. It’s . . . well, I met a girl over in England, and . . .”
“Oh, Jerry, no!”
Helen Wright had spoken the words as though it were the end of the world, and for a moment it made Jerry angry. The hurt, shocked look on her face, the expression of her voice, her emphasis of the words, made him feel the way he had when he was a small boy confessing to something. But his anger faded when he realized that she was deeply distressed.
Harman Wright said nothing, but nursed his drink and studied his son.
A new alarm seized Helen and she cried: “Jerry, you aren’t . . . you haven’t . . . ?”
“Married her? No. But I want to. That’s why I had to come home and talk to Catharine.”
“Jerry! . . . It isn’t true. I can’t believe it. You couldn’t . . .” There was a hint of hysteria in her voice that frightened Jerry. His father caught it too and asked quietly: “Who is she, Jerry?”
Who was Patches? What was she, a being, one of the countless millions who occupied a tiny pinpoint of earth somewhere, to be identified with a name and coloring and ancestry, a catalogue of features, a place in society? Or was she the beating of his heart, his hunger and his thirst, his hope on earth?
Ever since they had parted and he knew what she meant to him, he had been groping in his mind for words to express the music of Patches that permeated him, to find release for the things that had come alive within him. And now that his father had asked: “Who is she?” he could only reply: “Her name is Patch . . . Patrice Graeme. She’s in the RAF. She’s a radar expert.” Then he added: “I’m in love with her.”
His mother drew in a deep breath. “Jerry! How can you say such a thing? It can’t be anything but an infatuation . . .”
Jerry winced. He hated the word. He always had ever since he first had heard it. He ha
ted it all the more now because his mother had brought it up in connection with Patches. It was a word that somehow cheapened things and made him feel less like a man.
His father flicked his cigarette stub into the fireplace with concise accuracy, and said, surprisingly: “Jerry isn’t a child any more, Helen,” and drew a look of gratitude from his son. “Go on, Jerry . . .”
Jerry said: “That’s all, sir. I didn’t want to write. When I met Eagles and had a chance to come home and see you all and try to get straightened out, I took it.”
The disappointment, frustration, and helpless anger that were mounting in Helen Wright were more the result of her perpetual defences reared against any possible threat to the security she had built, and the suddenness with which the crisis had been presented, than due to any lack of sympathy or love for Jerry.
He was still a child to her. She had only the most meagre conception of the war, of the part men were called upon to play, of the kind of life he had been living, or of what he had been called upon to face. The war had taken Jerry from their home. She had not realized how quickly she had substituted Catharine. Beyond the minor annoyances of rationing and the whole-hearted performance of patriotic duties, the holocaust had simply not managed to penetrate her home.
But she loved Catharine Quentin genuinely, and the forthcoming marriage of her son and the daughter of her dearest and oldest friend had been even closer to her heart than she might have realized. And as a woman, she foresaw at once and could even pre-experience vicariously something of the dreadful shock and pain that was to be brought to someone who was young, innocent, loving, and loyal, and who in the years that Jerry had been away had become very much a part of her own life.
She said in a voice that was beginning to shake: “Jerry, do you realize what this will do to Catharine? I won’t even speak of how your father and I will feel . . .”
Harman Wright said: “Helen, don’t you think—”
“Wait, Harman! That girl loves you, Jerry. To her, the sun rises and sets in you. She is prepared to devote her life to you. Catharine has already become our daughter. Is that nothing to you, because of some strange girl who . . .”
Some strange girl! . . . The words echoed in his ears. In the night he had held her to his heart. Some strange girl! . . . Patches, who had read his soul the time the flyer’s horrors had come upon him, and who, without hint or word from him had unerringly divined his need and, like a soldier and dear comrade, had reached across the gulf to help him . . . All the books and people and causes, the colors and the shapes of earth, the fragrances of living, all the great, and also all the little, things she loved, he knew and loved too. They had laughed and played and made nonsense rhymes together, and had lain awake at night side by side and talked of life and death and where God was to be found in beauty . . .
“Oh, Jerry, I can’t bear to think of it. Tell me it isn’t true,” said Helen Wright, and suddenly put her face into her hands and began to sob hysterically.
Jerry got up. He loved his mother. He wanted to go to her, but did not know how. Harman Wright signalled to Jerry and said: “Maybe you want to wash up a little, son. Afterwards we might have a talk together.”
After Jerry had gone out, Harman Wright went over to his wife and put his hand on her shoulder with considerable tenderness. He said: “Pull yourself together, Helen. Nothing really final has happened. I understand how you feel.”
She grew quieter under his touch and cried: “Harman, it’s too dreadful! We can’t let him. He doesn’t realize. He’s too young to know his own mind. He’s just a child. You know he’s loved Catharine all his life . . .”
Harman Wright was genuinely upset by his wife’s distress. His family was more to him than merely a habit. He loved them greatly and wished them above all to be happy. To make them so, he provided all that was physically in his power of luxury and good living, and to this added the formula by which he had lived so long—the best of all possible worlds, in which good triumphed and the wicked were punished—when they were caught at it.
His was a stratum of society that at least liked to live like gentlemen. His way of life was impregnable to change, disaster, or disintegration. He believed in it, in its mission and its tutelary gods—money, business, advertising, and position—all minor but not insignificant deities, assistants and acolytes to the main god, who was a dignified Episcopalian. He believed in it wholly, since it had been very good to him, and associated only with those who believed likewise.
Nevertheless, he had been a captain of artillery in France in 1917-18, and had his memories.
He said: “The boy’s been to war, Helen. A lot of things can happen. Let me handle him. Go and lie down until dinner and don’t worry. You’ll make yourself ill. I’ll have a talk with him. Jerry’s O.K. He’ll do what’s right in the end.”
Jerry looked up as his father came into the library, his shaving completed, and dressed. He wanted and needed to talk to him, for he respected and trusted him. He asked: “How’s Mother?”
Harman Wright replied: “She’s lying down. She doesn’t want any dinner. I’m afraid she’s pretty unhappy over this.”
“I’m sorry, Dad . . . I wanted to have a chance to talk to you alone first before I said anything, but it . . . sort of all came out.”
Harman went to the side table and made two highballs. “Women always have to be eased up to a new idea gradually,” he said. “Cigar?”
Jerry again felt warmed towards his father for the simple and genuine way he created the atmosphere that his son was a boy no longer, his tacit acknowledgement that the things that had happened to him since he had been away had changed their relationship. He felt strongly that his father was a good man.
They lit their cigars and puffed on them for a moment. Then Harman asked: “When did you say you were going back?”
“I’m due at the airport at two in the morning. I’d better leave here a little before one to be on the safe side . . .”
“Hmmmm! You’re going to have to work fast, son. Do you want to tell me more about it?”
It was still difficult to tell about Patches and himself and how he felt. Jerry could be more articulate with his father, but there were many omissions, things he could not say, things of which he was regretful; others he instinctively felt might be disloyalties to Patches or intrusions upon her privacy.
Words and emotions that came to him to express his love for Patches sounded silly and strained, and he discarded them as quickly as they rose up in his mind. His father was listening quietly, smoking without comment, while Jerry talked, and his very silence placed an added burden upon the telling. He heard himself saying: “I met her a couple of months ago . . .” and his own mind made the comparison. “You met her a couple of months ago. And you’ve known and loved Catharine for as long as you can remember . . .”
Here, in his own home, in the familiar surrounding of his father’s study, he seemed for the first time removed from the immediacy of the things that had been happening to him. But he was still filled with echoes of the days spent with Patches, pictures of her that drifted across his mind, longings, little visions of scenes and moments, and, above all, the ache in his heart, but they had to be reduced to words and the sound of his own voice and the dreadful inadequacy of speech to convey emotion.
He heard himself saying: “We went off for a holiday together for ten days, up in Scotland. After she went away I realized what had happened, that I was in love with her. I guess I can’t help it, Dad. I’ll always be in love with her . . .”
Harman Wright poured out another drink. He had been listening with his mind as well as with his ears, and he thought that he had a clue. He came directly to the point.
“Do you mind if I ask you something, Jerry?”
“Go ahead, Dad.”
“Do you want to marry her because you think you ought to, on account of going away with her?”
“Oh, my God, Dad, no! . . .” The thought had never entered Jerry’s mind, but i
t was startling to hear his father say it, and for the moment it seemed to open a kind of gulf between them, as though he had heard a voice out of another generation, an older man trying to warn a boy not to be foolish and do something quixotic for which he would later be sorry. He thought suddenly how curious that there should be no compulsion upon him to marry Patches because of what had been between them, and so much compulsion in his conscience to marry Catharine, who for all was yet a stranger to him. He said: “I don’t even know if she’ll marry me, but I’ve got to ask her, to make her understand . . . How can I tell her if I’m still engaged? I can’t make my run until I’m free. Haven’t I done enough to her already? . . .”
Harman said quietly: “I was only asking, son. I just wanted to be sure your thinking was clear. It’s your own life, and you are going to have to make your own decisions . . .”
He paused, and in the pause Jerry seemed to feel that the momentary gulf was closing once more. He was too deeply concerned with his problems to realize that he was under attack by a man who was divided between love for his son and love for his wife and family and a way of living, that he was in a fight . . .
His father continued, dragging at his cigar between sentences: “As long as you realize whatever decisions you make will affect not only yourself . . .”
“Gee, Dad, I know . . .”
“They will affect your mother—very deeply, and Catharine and her family. It may change the whole course of that girl’s life and do her irreparable damage. They will also affect Patches. From what you say, she would surely make you a good wife, but she’ll be a stranger in a strange land. What’s the use of kidding ourselves, Jerry? You know that whoever she is, we’ll make your wife welcome as our daughter, but it won’t ever be the same, will it? Can it? Your mother will get over the shock eventually, but she’s only human after all, and her life has been pretty much wrapped up in you two kids.”