Randy was prone to give orders and to rudeness, both of which Phil understood and to a degree tolerated. Randy was not the first rich socialite he had known. There had been a plethora of them in his youth at the seven boarding schools Phil had attended, and then been sent home from.
[ TWO ]
Shortly after ten, Phil thought that by now his wife would have arisen and be in the kitchen having her breakfast. He went there to see if that was the case.
It was.
Brunhilde was sitting at the kitchen table with “Miss Grace,” full name Mrs. Grace Hail, the septuagenarian African-American woman who had been in their employ since they had come to Foggy Point twenty-odd years before.
They had not lived on the grounds of the Foggy Point Country Club then, but in a nice, much simpler home in the adjacent town of Goodhope, Mississippi, to which they had moved when Phil had been discharged from the United States Army Advanced Marksmanship Unit at Fort Benning, Georgia.
That house, on Creek Drive in Goodhope, had been purchased on a No Money Down thirty-year mortgage guaranteed by the Veterans Administration. It had three bedrooms, two baths, a one-car garage, and in the backyard, instead of a swimming pool, a shallow stream that flowed eventually into Muddiebay Bay, and thus the source of the street name.
“Good morning,” Phil said, when he walked into the kitchen of 102 Country Club Road, the French doors of which opened upon the swimming pool, the pool house, and the gazebo that sheltered the gas-flamed barbecue grill, and the fairways beyond of the Foggy Point Country Club.
“Good morning,” Miss Grace replied. “Can I fetch you a cup of coffee?”
Brunhilde said nothing.
Brunhilde was blond, five feet six, weighed 135 pounds, and was nine months older than her husband. There was a dancer’s grace about her, which was not surprising, as she had begun the study of ballet when she was six years old, and given up the art only when she became pregnant with their first child, also named Brunhilde.
“No, thanks, Grace,” Phil said. “I’m already coffee’d-up.”
Phil looked at his wife.
She looked away.
“Randy wants me to go to Scotland for ten days with him next week to shoot pheasants with Bertie,” Phil said. “Is that all right with you?”
“I don’t give a good EXPLETIVE DELETED!! where you go,” Brunhilde said.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, talking to Mr. Phil like that,” Miss Grace said.
“EXPLETIVE DELETED!! him,” Brunhilde said.
“I’ll take that to mean I can go,” Phil said.
Brunhilde snorted.
Phil walked out of the kitchen.
Brunhilde had become increasingly difficult over the last several years or so, something Phil attributed primarily to two things. First, she had entered “the change of life.” As one of the corollaries of that, she had put on some weight, and that to a ballet dancer is akin to having leprosy.
Second, Brunhilde was suffering from Nearly Empty Nest Syndrome.
Brunhilde Williams, their oldest child, had eloped two years before to marry Robert Brown, whom she had met when he was the editor of Mississippi Traveler, the university newspaper, the day after he graduated.
“Brownie,” as he was called, had accepted a job as a reporter on the Jackson Afternoon Gazette and Brunhilde, who could not bear the thought of being separated from him, had married Brownie, even though she knew this would probably drive both of her parents up the wall.
Although the marriage seemed to be working well—Brownie had become assistant state editor, and Brunhilde was now assistant society editor—Brunhilde remained terribly unhappy about her daughter.
Little Phil was of course now in Dallas.
And only Franz Josef—named after Brunhilde’s late father and also after the former head of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—remained at home. “Franzel,” as Brunhilde called her baby, spent just about all of his time, depending on the season, on the tennis courts or at the swimming pool of Foggy Point’s Grand Hotel.
One of Phil’s unlikely friends was Professor James K. Strongmensch, who, although he had never graduated from college, had twenty-seven honorary doctorates. Strongmensch had published forty-odd books (the titles of most of which Phil didn’t understand) and was simultaneously both professor of philosophy and professor of psychiatry at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Jim was aware of Brunhilde’s problems, and had told Phil there wasn’t much that could be done for her except to wait for nature to take its course. The alternative was for Brunhilde to take mind-altering drugs, which (a) probably wouldn’t work and (b) were liable to be addictive.
So Phil waited for nature to take its course.
[ THREE ]
Phil went from the kitchen to his office, and there photocopied what he had written so far on his current book in progress.
Twice before when he had been out of town, Brunhilde had, in innocent curiosity, turned on his Dictaphone to find out about his latest work and in the process had somehow erased it. Phil believed this was done innocently, of course, just as he believed in the good fairy and that the earth was flat, but he was determined it would not happen again.
He put one of the copies into his briefcase and took the other with him to the gun room, a concrete block structure with a steel door that he had built in the rear of the garage when he bought the house. Sometime after Brunhilde had begun to act strangely, he had replaced the original door to the gun room with one that was both stronger and had a combination lock.
Phil didn’t think that Brunhilde really would carry through with her threat to go into the gun room, get one of his EXPLETIVE DELETED!! guns and use it to blow the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! off the next EXPLETIVE DELETED!! golfer whose EXPLETIVE DELETED!! ball crashed into the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! windows of the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! pool house.
But, as they say, better safe than sorry.
Professor Strongmensch had described the gun room as a “miniature arsenal” and his description was accurate. It was full of weapons. One wall held the “long guns,” mostly shotguns, but also a dozen rifles of different calibers. Another held more than twenty-five pistols of all shapes and sizes. Sturdy wooden worktables held rows of shotgun shell reloading machines, and across the room from them were the presses, tools, scales, and other equipment necessary to “reload the brass” of all the calibers of the rifles and handguns hanging on the walls.
This might suggest to some, especially readers of romance novels, such as this, that Phil was something of a “gun nut” who drooled and breathed deeply as he fondled his instruments of death, or that he was one of those rural boobs “who cling to their guns” for no good reason, to more or less quote a herein unnamed former instructor of constitutional law who later entered politics.
The truth is far less dramatic. His association with firearms began in his sixteenth year, on the day he was loaded aboard the New York City–bound train of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad by the Reverend James Ferneyhough Fitzhugh, D.D., who had just expelled him from St. Malachi’s School.
“Philip Wallingford Williams the Third,” Dr. Fitzhugh had told him, “by stealing Miss Bridget O’Malley’s intimate undergarments and then hoisting them to the top of our flagpole and then cutting the rope, you have brought shame upon Saint Malachi’s School, the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the entire fraternity of Northeastern U.S. boarding schools named after saints. I am left with no alternative but to give you the boot.”
On the train, Phil had naturally wondered where his life would now take him.
He considered several possibilities, of course, but it never entered his mind that he would one day become a world-class rifle, pistol, and shotgun marksman. At sixteen, the only firearms he had ever fired in his life had been the .22 caliber rifles with which one could fire at movable little duck targets at Coney
Island in the hope of shooting well enough to win a stuffed animal. (Five shots for only a dollar! the carnies barked.)
And, if this needs to be said, although even at that tender age he had quite an imagination, it never entered his mind that he would one day become a special agent of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps, or marry a dancer of the Corps de Ballet of the Vienna State Opera, or become a Wall Street Journal and New York Times best-selling novelist.
What he did on the train to Manhattan that day was consider his options for the immediate future. He decided they did not include going home to face the tearful wrath of his mother in South Orange, New Jersey. He literally shuddered at the thought of what would follow once his mother stopped weeping and screaming long enough to solicit the support of her husband in dealing with him.
His mother was married to Keyes J. Michaels, M.D. Dr. Michaels was a psychiatrist she had met professionally when she was in the process of seeking a divorce from Phil’s father, P. Wallingford Williams, Jr.
Once she had married Dr. Michaels, which she did two days after her divorce became final, she prevailed upon him to “help” Phil, who even then was having trouble accepting authority figures such as teachers, guidance counselors, and headmasters of schools named after saints.
Phil knew that if he went home to South Orange, he would shortly thereafter find himself prone on Dr. Michaels’s couch, and the exchange between them would go something like this, as the good doctor sucked noisily on his pipe:
Dr. M: Well, Slurp, Philip, my boy, Slurp, why do you think Slurp you wanted to hoist Slurp Bridget O’Malley’s intimate undergarments Slurp to the top of the flagpole? Slurp.
Phil (knowing that “It seemed like a good idea at the time” would not be a satisfactory answer): Doctor, I just don’t know.
Dr. M: Tell me, Phil. Slurp Do you spend a lot of time thinking about Slurp panties, Slurp brassieres, Slurp and other such things?
Phil (having decided either “Yes” or “No” in response to the question is going to further excite the doctor’s curiosity, says nothing).
Dr. M: Phil, my boy. Slurp How can I Slurp help you if you Slurp refuse to help yourself? Slurp Why don’t we start over? Slurp.
And from there it would go downhill.
Phil knew this because this would not be the first time his mother had asked the man she called “My Own Sigmund Freud” to help her only son.
He thought again about joining the Army, leaving his shame and the painful wrath of his family behind him for all time. He knew what was involved with that. He had thought of joining the Army twice before, first when he’d been booted from St. Charles’s School (for smoking in his room) and again when he’d been sent home from St. Timothy’s (for selling beer and cigarettes in his room during the poker game he was running).
He hadn’t had to go through with signing up then—although the first time he’d gotten as far as changing the date on his birth certificate to make him a year older than was the case—because other schools had given him a second chance. But he’d run out of schools willing to give him a second chance.
This time it was the Army!
When he got off the train in New York, he caught another to Newark, New Jersey. He went from Pennsylvania Station to the Public Service Building. That was sort of a misnomer for the latter. The Public Service Company was a for-profit business enterprise that did very well, indeed, selling electricity, gas, and bus and trolley service to the public of New Jersey. They had a monopoly on all four services.
He knew this because his mother’s father was vice president, legal, of the Public Service Company. He also knew that in his grandfather’s secretary’s desk was an embossing device that punched the fact that she was a Notary Public of the State of New Jersey into sheets of paper.
Phil “borrowed” the Notary Public stamping tool and a dozen or so sheets of paper and returned to Manhattan. He went to his father’s apartment at 590 Park Avenue, got the doorman to admit him, and once inside wrote two letters on his father’s typewriter.
One was to his father, in which he said he realized he had shamed the family more than enough, and was going to join the Army to spare the family any further pain. The second was To Whom This May Concern.
The second said the undersigned had no objection to the enlistment of his son Philip W. Williams III in the Army. He signed the letter P. Wallingford Williams, Jr., and Marjorie B. Alexander, Notary Public of the State of New Jersey, and applied the stamp to it.
It took him three tries to get it right, but finally it looked legitimate.
He took the letter and the previously altered birth certificate from where he’d hidden it in a copy of War and Peace on his father’s bookshelves, and went back to Newark, this time to the Recruiting Office in the Post Office Building.
He didn’t get to join the Army that day. But the Army put him up overnight, and the next morning, after a physical examination, swore him in and put him on a bus for Fort Dix, New Jersey.
It wasn’t until his father returned to Manhattan three days later that his family learned what he had done. A family conference was held on how to get him out of the Army—“My God, he’s only sixteen!”—and then what to do with him when he came home.
His grandfather, who was after all a lawyer, offered a suggestion:
For the time being, do nothing. Give him a week or so’s taste of Army life, having barrel-chested sergeants yelling at him, marching, et cetera, and he’ll be begging for us to get him out of the Army. And maybe when he’s learned his lesson, he’ll behave.
Every once in a while, despite what they would have you believe, lawyers are wrong. And this was the case here. Phil took to the Army like a duckling to water.
[ FOUR ]
U.S. Army Reception Center
Fort Dix, New Jersey
Monday morning, October 7, 1946
On Phil’s first day in the Army, he was issued about fifty pounds of uniforms and given inoculations against every disease known to medical science. In the morning of his second day, he was given the Army General Classification Test, known as the AGCT, to see where he would best fit into the nation’s war machine.
In the afternoon, he faced a Classification Specialist, who took one look at Phil, his AGCT score, and then arranged for him to take the test again.
“Secondary school dropouts” are not supposed to score 144 on the AGCT test. All it took to get into Officer Candidate School was an AGCT score of 110. The second time Phil took the test, this time under supervision to make sure no one was slipping him the answers, he scored 146.
The next morning, he faced another Classification Specialist, this one an officer, who explained to him the doors his amazing AGCT score had opened for him in the nation’s war machine. Heading the list of these, the captain told Phil, was that he could apply for competitive entrance to the United States Military Academy at West Point. If accepted, he would be assigned to the USMA Preparatory School, and on graduation therefrom be appointed to the Corps of Cadets at West Point.
That suggested to Phil that he was being offered the privilege of jumping from the frying pan into the fire. He had had experience with a military academy, specifically the Bordentown Military Academy, and it had not been pleasant. He had been sent home after seven weeks of military service, so to speak, after having been found guilty of having talked a fellow cadet, PFC Edwin W. Bitter, into stuffing three unrolled rolls of toilet tissue down the muzzle of the saluting cannon. When the cannon had fired at the next morning’s reveille formation, it looked for a minute or so as if Southern New Jersey was experiencing a blizzard in early October.
On the Greyhound bus back to north New Jersey later that October day, ex–Cadet Private P. W. Williams had been enormously relieved that his military service was over.
Another option, the captain explained, was for Phil to apply for the Army Security Agency. The ASA was
charged with listening to enemy radio communications, copying them down, and if necessary, decrypting them. Personnel selected to be “Intercept Operators,” the captain said, had to have the same intellectual qualifications as officer candidates, that is to say an AGCT score of 110 or better.
Reasoning that places where radio receivers were located were probably going to be inside, and that Intercept Operators would probably work sitting down, Phil selected the ASA for his career in the nation’s war machine.
He was given yet another long form to fill out, this one asking for a list of his residences in the last twenty years, and other personal information. He had no way of knowing of course that ASA Intercept Operators were required to have Top Secret security clearances, or that the form was the first step in what was known as the “Full Background Investigation Procedure,” which was necessary to get one.
The next day, Phil was transferred from the Reception Center to a basic training company.
There he and two hundred fellow recruits were issued blankets, sheets, a pillow and pillowcase, a small brown book titled TM9-1275 M-1 Garand Manual, and an actual U.S. Rifle, Cal. 30, M-1 Garand.
They were told that until graduation day, when they actually became soldiers, they would live with their Garands. And yes, that meant sleeping with it. And memorizing its serial number.
The idea was for the recruits to become accustomed to the weapon. They wouldn’t actually fire it until the sixth week of their training. Until then, they would in their spare time, after memorizing the serial number, read TM9-1275 and learn how the weapon functioned.
The first indication that Phil had empathy for Mr. Garand’s invention—or vice versa—came that very evening at 8:55 p.m., or, as the Army says that, twenty fifty-five hours.
At that hour, Sergeant Andrew Jackson McCullhay, one of Phil’s instructors, walked down the barracks aisle en route to the switch that would turn off the lights at twenty-one hundred.
As he passed the bunk to which PVT WILLIAMS P had been assigned, he saw something that both surprised and distressed him. PVT WILLIAMS P had somehow managed to completely disassemble his U.S. Rifle, Cal. 30, M-1 Garand. All of its many parts were spread out over his bunk.
The Hunting Trip Page 3