Through all these strange scenes Victor Henry had preserved a happy sense that he was moving toward a new life, a fulfilled life he had almost despaired of, a life delayed, postponed, almost lost, but now within grasp.
When he thought of Rhoda it was usually as the effervescent Washington girl he had courted. He could understand falling in love with that girl and marrying her. The present-day Rhoda he pictured with detachment, almost as though she were somebody else's wife, with all her faults and all her charms seen clear. To divorce her would be cruel and shocking. How had she offended? She had been giving him an arid, half-empty existence -he now knew that-but she had been doing her best. Yet the decision evidently lay between being kind to Rhoda and seizing this new life.
He had written the letters to Pamela as he had written the one about the Minsk massacre-to get a problem on paper for a clear look at it. By the time he arrived in Tokyo, he had decided that letters were too wordy and too slow-travelling. He had to send one of two cables-come, or DOre'T comis. Pamela needed no more than that. And he had concluded that Pamela was wiser than he, that the first step should indeed be a love affair in which they could test out this passion or infatuation before wounding Rhoda; for it might never come to that. In bald fact the prescription was a shackup. Victor Henry had to face the novel notion-for him-that in some circumstances a shackup might be the best of several difficult courses.
In Tokyo he had actually hesitated outside a cable office, on the point of cabling: come. But he had walked away. Even if it were the best course, he could not yet picture himself bringing it off; could not imagine conducting a hole-in-corner affair, even if with Pamela it did not seem a squalid or immoral idea. It was not his style. He would botch it, he felt, and weaken or tarnish his work as the new captain of the California. So he had arrived still undecided in Manila.
And in Manila, for the first time since his talk with Pamela Tudsbury in Red Square, an awareness of his wife Rhoda began to overtake him and the reality of Pamela to fade. Manila was saturated with Rhoda, the good memories and the bad memories alike, and with his own hardened identity. Red Tully, his classmate, a bald commander of all the submarines of the Asiatic Fleet; the Army-Navy game, in which he had last played twenty-eight years ago, when Pamela had been an infant a few months old; the dozens of young Navy lieutenants on the club lawn, with girlfriends Pamela's age-these were the realities now.
The wild Siberian scenery was a fading patchwork of mental snapshots.
So was the incandescent half hour on Red Square.
Was it really in the cards for him to start over, to have new babies learning to talk, little boys playing on grass, a little girl twining arms around his neck? Manila above all recalled to Pug the pleasure he had taken in his children. Those days he looked back on as the sweetest and best in his life. To do it all once again with Pamela would be a resurrection, a true second life. But could a rigid, crusty man like himself do it?
He had been hard enough on his kids in his thirties.
He was very tired, and sleep at last overtook him in the chair, as it had in the Tudsburys' suite in the Hotel National. But this time no cold caressing fingers woke him. His inner clock, which seldom failed, snapped him awake in time to drive out to Cavite and watch the Devilfish arrive.
Byron was standing on the forecastle with the anchor detail, in khakis and a life-jacket, but Pug failed to recognize him. Byron sang out, as the Devilfish nosed alongside the pier, 'Holy smoke, it's my father. You Dad!
Dad!' Then Pug perceived that the slim figure with both hands in his back pockets had a familiar stance, and that his son's voice was issuing from the lean face with the curly red beard. Byron leaped to the dock while the vessel was still warping in, threw his arms around Victor Henry, and hugged him hard. Kissing that scratchy hairy face was a bizarre sensation for Pug.
"Hi, Briny. Why the foliage?"
'Captain Hoban can't stand beards. I plan to grow one to my knees.
God, this is a monumental surprise, Dad." From the bridge an officer shouted impatiently through a megaphone. jumping back on the moving forecastle like a goat, Byron called to his father, "I'll spend the day with you. Hey, Mom wrote me you're going to command the California! That's fabulous!"
When the vessel was secured alongside, the Devilfish officers warmly invited Victor Henry to lunch at a house in the suburbs which they had rented. Pug caught a discouraging look from Byron, and declined.
'I live aboard the submarine," Byron said. They were driving back to Manila in the gray Navy car Pug had drawn from the pool'. "I'm not in that setup."
'y not? Sounds like a good thing."
"Oh, neat. Cook, butler, two houseboys, gardener, five acres, a swimming pool, and all for peanuts when they split up the cost. I've been there for dinner. They have these girls come in, you know, and stay ovemightdifferent ones, secretaries, nurses, and whatnot-and whoop it up and all that."
"Well? Just the deal for a young stud, I should think." "What did you do, Dad, when you were away from Mom?"
"Think I'd tell you?" Pug glanced at Byron. The bearded face was serious. "Well, I did a lot of agonized looking, Briny. But don't act holier-than-thou, whatever you do." "I don't feel holier than thou.
My He's in Italy. That's that. They can do as they please."
'What's the latest word on her?"
"She's flying to Lisbon on the fifteenth. I've got a picture of the kid.
Wait till you see him! It's incredible how much he looks like my baby pictures."
Pug had been poring over the snapshot in his wallet for two months, but he decided not to mention it. The inscription to Slote was an awkward detail.
"God, it's rotten, being this far apart," Byron exclaimed. "Can you picture it, Dad? Your wife with a baby you've never even seen, on the other side of the earth-no telephone, a letter now and then getting through by luck? It's hell. And the worst of it is, she almost got out through Switzerland. She panicked at taking a German airplane.
She was sick, and alone, and I can't blame her. But she'd be home by now, if there'd been any other way to go. The Germans! The goddamned Germans." After a silence he said with self-conscious chattiness, "Hot here, isn't it?"
"I'd forgotten how hot, Briny." "I guess it was pretty cold in Russia."
"Well, it's freezing in Tokyo, too."
"Say, what's Tokyo like? Quaint and pretty, and all that?"
"Ugliest city in the world," Pug said, glad for a distracting subject.
"Pathetic. A flat shantytown stretching as far as the eye can see. Downtown a few tall modern buildings and electric signs, and crowds of little Japanese running around. Most of the people wear Western clothes, but the cloth looks to be made of old blotters. You see a few women dressed Japanese doll-style, and some temples and pagodas,. sort of like in San Francisco's Chinatown. It's not especially Oriental, it's poor and shabby, and it smells from end to end of sewage and bad fish. Biggest disappointment of all my travelling years, Tokyo. Moreover, the hostility to white men is thick enough to cut with a knife."
"Do you think they'll start a war?"
"Well, that's the big question." Victor Henry's fingers drummed the steering wheel. 'I have a book on their Shinto religion you'd better read. It's an eye-opener. The ambassador gave it to me. Here are people, Briny, who in the twentieth century believe-at least some do-that their kings descended from a sun god, and that their empire goes straight back two thousand six hundred years. Before the continents broke apart, the story goes, japan was the highest point on earth. So she's the center of the world, the divine nation, and her mission is to bring world peace by conquering everybody else-you're smiling, but you'd better read this book, boy. Under the religious gibberish it's exactly like Nazi or Communist propaganda, this idea of one crowd destined to take over the world by force. God knows why this idea has broken out in different forms and keeps spreading. It's like a mental leprosy. Say, how hungry are you? Let's look at the old house before lunch." Byron's smile, framed in
the neatly trimmed red beard, looked odd but no less charming. "Why, sure, Dad. I've the r
mi ve done that. I don't know
why."
As they drove along Harrison Boulevard and approached the house, Byron exclaimed, "Ye gods, is that it? Someone went and painted it yellow.)# "That's it." Pug parked the car across the street and they got out. The unpleasant mustardy color surprised him too. It was all over the low stone wall and the wrought-iron fence, as well as the house-a sun-faded old paint job, already peeling. On the lawn lay a tumbled-over tricycle, a big red ball, a baby carriage, and plastic toys.
"But the trees are so much taller and thicker," Byron said, peering through the fence, "yet the house seems to have shrunk. See, here's where Warren threw the can of red paint at me. How about that?
There's still a mark." Byron rubbed his shoe over the dim red splash on the paving stone.
"I had a bad time here, all in all. Warren laying my head open, and then the jaundice-2
'Yes, and that truck hitting you on your bicycle. I wouldn't think you'd remember it pleasantly."
Byron pointed. "That's where we used to sit, right there under that tree, when you'd tutor me. Remember, Dad? Look how thick that trunk is now!"
"Oh, you recall that? I wouldn't think that would be a pleasant memory either."
"Why not? I missed all that school. You had to do it."
"But I was a lousy tutor. Maybe your mother should have taken it on.
But in the morning she liked to sleep late, and in the afternoon, well, she was either shopping, or getting her hair done, you know, or fixing herself up for some party. For all the times I lost my temper, I apologize." Byron gave his father a peculiar glance through half-closed eyes and scratched his beard. "I didn't mind."
"Sometimes you cried. Yet you didn't cry when you got hit by the truck. Pain never made you crypt "well, when you put on that angry voice, it scared me. But it was all right. I liked studying with you.
I understood you."
"Anyway, you got good marks that year."
'Best I ever got."
They looked through the fence without talking for a couple of long minutes. "Well, now we've seen the place," Pug said. "How about lunch?" "You know something?" Byron's gaze was still on the house.
"Except for the three days I had in Lisbon with Natalie, I was happier here than I've ever been in my life, before or since. I loved this house." "That's the worst of a service career," Pug said. "You never strike roots. You raise a family of tumbleweeds."
The crab cocktail at the Army and Navy Club was still served with the same bland red sauce in the same long-stemmed cups, with one purposeless green leaf sticking up in the crabmeat. The roast beef from the steam table was lukewarm and overdone, much as it had been in 1928.
Even the faces of the people eating lunch seemed the same-all but Byron's.
The thin little boy who had eaten with such exasperating slowness was now a bearded tall young man. He still ate too slowly; Pug finished his meat first, though he was doing nearly all the talking.
He wanted to probe Byron a bit about Pamela, and about Jochanan Jastrow. He described Jastrow's sudden incursion into Slote's Moscow flat, and his spectral reappearance in Spaso House out of a snowstorm.
Byron exploded in anger when his father mentioned Tudsbury's refusal to use the Minsk documents, and his guess that Jastrow might bean NKVD emissary. "What? Was he serious? Why, he's either a hypocrite or an idiott Vnat he said about people not wanting to help the Jews is true, God knows. Hitler paralyzed the world for years by playing on that chord.
But nobody can talk to Berel for five minutes without realizing that he's a remarkable man. And dead on the level, too."
"You believe the story about the massacre?"
'y not? Aren't the Germans capable of it? If Hitler gave the order, then it happened."
wasn't that sure myself, Byron, but I wrote to the President about Byron stared openmouthed, then spoke in a low incredulous tone. "You did what, Dad?"
"Well, those documents got shunted aside in the embassy as probable fakes. I thought they deserved more investigation than that.
It was an impulse-probably a stupid one-but I did it."
Byron Henry reached out, covered his father's hand, and pressed it.
The bearded face took on an affectionate glow- "All I can say is, well done."
"No. I believe it was a futile gesture, and those are never well done.
But it's past. Incidentally, have you ever met Tudsbury's daughter? Natalie mentioned in the Rome airport that she knew her."
"You mean Pamela? I met her once in Washington. Why?"
"Well, the Tudsburys and I travelled in the combat area together.
She struck me as an unusually brave and hardy sort. She endured a lot and always remained agreeable and well-groomed. Never whined or crabbed."
"Oh, Pam Tudsbury's the original endurer, from what Natalie says.
They're not too unlike in that way, but otherwise they sure are.
Natalie told me a lot about her. In Paris Pamela was a hellion."
"Really?" ' "Yes, she had this Hemingwayish boyfriend who used to room with Leslie Slote. She and this character raised Cain all over Gay Paree. Then he dropped her and she went into a bad spin. I'm ready for some dessert, Dad. You too?"
'Sure." Victor Henry could not help persisting. "How-a spin?"
. "Oh, can't you imagine? Sleeping around, trying to drink up all the wine in Paris, driving like a maniac. She wrapped a car around a tree outside Marseilles and almost killed this French writer she was with.
What's the matter? You look upset." "That's an upsetting story.
She seems a fine girl. I'll be here a week," Pug said abruptly, "unless the Clipper changes its schedule. Can we get in some tennis?"
"Sure, but I'm not in shape, the way I was in Berlin." 'Nor am I."
They played early in the mornings to dodge the heat, and after showering they would breakfast together. Victor Henry did not mention Pamela again. At night, lying awake in warm humid darkness under the moaning fan, he would think of ways to reopen the subject. But facing his son at the breakfast table, he couldn't do it. He could guess what Byron would think of a romance between his staid father and Pamela Tudsbury. It would strike the youngster as a pure middle-aged aberration-disconcerting, shabby, and pathetic. Victor Henry now had spells of seeing it the same way.
C)the day Branch Hoban prevailed upon him to visit the house in Pasay for lunch. Byron mulishly would not join them. Pug took a long swim in a pool ringed by flowering trees, and enjoyed a superb curry lunch; and after a nap he beat Lieutenant Aster at tennis. It was altogether a satisfying afternoon. Before he left, over rum drinks on a terrace looking out on the garden, Hoban and Aster talked reassuringly about Byron. They both considered him a natural submarine man; only the military bone, they said, seemed to be missing in him.
Transfer to the Atlantic was his obsession, but Hoban tolerantly pointed out to the father that it was impossible. The squadron was far under complement now, and the Devilfish could not put to sea if it lost one watch officer. Byron had to make up his mind that the Devilfish was his ship.
Victor Henry brought up this topic at what he hoped was a good time-just before breakfast next morning after their game and shower, when they were having coffee on the lawn. On other days Byron had been in the highest spirits over this early cup of coffee. As casually as possible, Pug remarked, 'Incidentally Byron, you said Natalie's flying to Lisbonwhen? The fifteenth of this month?"
"That's right, the fifteenth."
"Do you think she'll make it this time?"
"God, yes. She'd better! They've got every possible official assurance and high priority."
"Well now, the fifteenth isn't very far off, is it? This transfer request of yours-"- Victor Henry hesitated, for a look came over Byron's face which he knew only too well: sullen, vacuous, remote, and introverted. 'Isn't it something you can table, at least until then?"
/>
"Table it? It's tabled, don't worry. I've been turned down by Hoban, Tully, and Admiral Hart's personnel officer. What more do you want?"
"I mean in your own mind, Briny." "Listen, I'm assuming she'll get home with the baby. Otherwise I'd probably desert and go fetch her out. But I still want to be transferred. I want to see them. I want to be near them. I've never seen my own son! I've spent the sum total of three days with my wife since we got married."
"There's another side to it. Your squadron is desperate for watch officers, we're in a war alert, and-" Byron broke in, "Look, what is this, Dad? I haven't asked you to go to Tully and use your influence with him, have I?"
"I'm sure glad you haven't. Red Tully can't do the impossible, Byron.
Herman Wouk - The Winds Of War Page 111