The Hunting Trip

by William E. Butterworth, III

  They did and she did.

  Gwendolyn said she was willing, so as to be better able to comfort him in his time of sorrow, to learn about his life, so he taught her what Magda Countess Kocian had taught him about Forrós magyar Nyalókát, and once he had turned her into his Forró Sioux Falls, S.D., Nyalókát, or Hot Sioux Falls, South Dakota Lollipop, she really couldn’t get enough.

  Finally, exhausted, he was able to talk Gwendolyn into going back to the Berlin Red Cross Club so that she could pass out comfort in the form of doughnuts and Coca-Cola to other enlisted men.

  She gave him her telephone number—which was strictly against the rules, as Red Cross Girls are not permitted to socialize with enlisted men—and he promised to call her.

  “Cross my heart and hope to die,” he said, but he didn’t mean it.

  The letter from Aunt Grace came four days later.

  MISS GRACE ALICE PATRICIA HORTENSE WILLIAMS

  MAYFLOWER-WILLIAMS HOUSE

  BACK BAY, BOSTON, MASS.

  Dear Nephew Philip:

  By now I presume you have been apprised of the demise of my brother and your father, the late P. Wallingford Williams, Jr.

  The cause of death was the rupture of an aortal aneurism. I have been assured that death came both quickly and painlessly, although with regard to the latter it was an unnecessary blessing as a blood test indicated the amount of alcohol in his system meant he had been incapable of feeling any pain for the four hours previous to his fall, apparently while trying to make his way from his bed to the water closet in his bathroom at approximately 3:25 a.m.

  He was interred, so to speak, in the Harvard Yard in Cambridge, just as soon as the UPS-expedited special-delivery service could get his ashes from the Manhattan Crematorium to Boston. While the Harvard Men’s Glee Club provided appropriate music by singing “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder,” a delegation of the Hasty Pudding Club scattered your Daddy’s ashes across the yard.

  I am sure you will be relieved to hear that I, to preserve the reputation of the Williams name, have taken care of all of the debts your father left, of which there was a plethora, including a mind-boggling one from J. Press, where, at about the time you were sent to Germany, your father apparently went on a drunken clothes-buying spree.

  As the figure is a five-digit negative there is no point in getting into the details of your inheritance here.

  Which brings us to your future:

  I have spoken to Dr. Peabody at Groton, and he has agreed, providing you can convince him you have learned your lesson in the Army, and intend to lead a decent and chaste life in the future, to let you back in on a probationary basis, which means that you will wait on tables during the week, and cut the campus grass, pick up leaves, or shovel snow, depending on the season, on afternoons and weekends.

  I remain, faithfully yours,

  Aunt Grace

  A week after that, Phil received a letter from his mother:

  Dear Philip:

  Ever since I heard of the passing of your late father from your late father’s sister, your Aunt Grace, I have had several conversations with my husband, Keyes Michaels, M.D., who is now your stepfather, about your future.

  “My own Sigmund Freud,” as I so fondly call him, has willingly accepted his new responsibilities in your regard, to wit:

  You may now call him “Daddy” or “Daddy Keyes.” The choice is yours.

  He is prepared to provide, pro bono, which means “for free,” whatever psychiatric counseling you require to get you through both your grief and the trauma to your id caused by your service as a common enlisted man in the Army.

  Additionally, and this is the really good news, your Daddy Keyes has arranged for your matriculation in St. Hippolytus’s School for Troubled But Possibly Salvageable Through Tough Love Youth.

  The school, in Pascagoula, Arkansas, is a joint venture of the Jesuit Order and the Brothers of St. Hippolytus. The former deals with academic matters, and the latter with disciplinary issues. Saint Hippolytus of Rome is the patron saint of jailers.

  Please let me and Daddy Keyes know as soon as you can when you will be paroled or otherwise let loose from the Army so we can get the ball rolling.

  Love,

  Mother

  P.S. in re: Your late father’s golf clubs.

  Inasmuch as she doesn’t play golf, your Aunt Grace, who didn’t want them, sent them here via Recipient Pays Shipping Charges. And since you don’t play golf, and your new stepfather does, I knew you would want Daddy Keyes to have them, so I gave them to him.

  [ FOUR ]

  Berlin, Germany

  Wednesday, December 15, 1948

  Just over a year later, a master sergeant wearing as many medals and ribbons as Phil had ever seen appeared at Phil’s office door.

  During that year, a good deal, good and bad, had happened.

  For one thing, he got to go back to the Pferd und Frauen, something he had secretly hungered to do since his first visit. And he didn’t have to sneak into it as he thought he might have to do. He was ordered to go there, by none less than Pastor-in-Chief Caldwell. And an order from Pastor-in-Chief Caldwell was like a deep voice from On High accompanied by the sound of celestial trumpets.

  What happened was that Pastor-in-Chief Caldwell called him into the office and said that he had just had a call from the Honorable Ralph Peters telling him that the German-American Gospel Tract Foundation was about to be visited by Sir Oswald T. Cholmondeley, OBE, Knight Commander of the Garter, and DSO, who, using the beard “QT,” headed the British MI-5, which was more or less the British equivalent of the CIA.

  “Now, ol’ Chummy isn’t a problem. Ol’ Ralph Peters, I, and ol’ Chummy are old chums from the good old days of World War Two, and I don’t mind at all showing him all the secrets of the German-American Gospel Tract Foundation. But he’s bringing with him his aide-de-camp, Second Lieutenant Charles William George Michael Bertram of His Majesty’s Own Scottish Light Lancers, who is the son of the Earl of Abercrombie.”

  “How is that a problem, sir?”

  “Just because someone has four first names and lives in a castle, Phil, doesn’t mean he gets to learn all the secrets of the German-American Gospel Tract Foundation. I’m surprised I have to tell you that.”

  “I didn’t think that through, sir. Sorry.”

  “So, what I want you to do, Phil, is entertain this Scotchman while he’s here.”

  “Yes, sir. How should I do that?”

  “Take him anyplace he wants to go, let him do whatever he wants to do.”

  “Sir, what if he wants to do something like go to the Pferd and Frauen?”

  Pastor-in-Chief Caldwell, shaking his head, had looked at Phil for a long time. Finally, he said, “I knew from the moment I laid eyes on you, Phil, that you were one of us. I don’t mean just socially. I mean one of us, intelligence-wise. I congratulate you for thinking of something I, as an intelligence officer of great experience, should have thought of myself.

  “By all means, after laying on a photographer first, take ol’ Four First Names to the Pferd und Frauen. It might be very useful in the future when dealing with my old chum Cholmondeley to have a picture—half a dozen pictures—in the files of his aide-de-camp cavorting with a naked woman on a Clydesdale. Phil—please don’t let this go to your head—I think you have a great future in our chosen profession.”

  When Phil first met Second Lieutenant Charles William George Michael Bertram of His Majesty’s Own Scottish Light Lancers, he wasn’t at all sure Cholmondeley’s aide-de-camp would be at all interested in cavorting with a naked woman on a Clydesdale, because the young Scot was wearing a skirt.

  An hour or so and half a bottle of Famous Pheasant later, however, he was convinced that the young Scot was as heavy on his feet as he himself was, and half convinced that wh
at the young man he was now calling “Bertie” had told him about “kilt” wearing being common in Scotland was true.

  So they went to Pferd und Frauen, where the future Earl of Abercrombie, calling out, “Hi-Yo, Silver! Away!” took first place with the lady Valkyrie riding the Clydesdale with him in the 3 a.m. steeplechase competition.

  And while the prize, a two-liter bottle of Slivovitz, was being awarded, Phil removed the film from the photographer’s camera.

  —

  Other good things that happened included Phil’s triumph at the Second Annual Berlin Brigade Brandenburg Gate Skeet Shoot. There he won “The Hundred Straight Grand Prize,” which was another 12-bore Browning Diamond Grade und so weiter shotgun. At the presentation ceremony, Phil dropped into the conversation that he already had an identical weapon.

  “This one,” Phil said, holding up the year-old 12-bore Browning Diamond Grade und so weiter shotgun he had won the previous year and which he had just used to go one hundred straight so that the press and Browning company photographers could get their own good “shots.”

  The man from Browning gritted his teeth and said the Browning company would be delighted to swap the second 12-bore Browning Diamond Grade und so weiter shotgun for a 16-bore version of the weapon, if that would make Staff Sergeant Williams happy, and providing he was willing to make a statement to the press, while holding one hand on a Bible, that he would have been unable to go one hundred straight without using a 12-bore Browning Diamond Grade und so weiter shotgun.

  Phil agreed to do so, even though he knew it would almost certainly get him in trouble with his new boss, Pastor-in-Chief Peter O’Shaughnessy, who had replaced Pastor-in-Chief Jonathan Caldwell III. But that’s getting ahead of the narrative of this romance novel.

  Getting back to it:

  Phil did make the sworn statement before the press, even knowing that he could have gone one hundred straight firing a Sears, Roebuck Single Shot Youth Special, which went for a relatively few dollars, as opposed to the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! incredible price Browning not only asked but got for their Diamond Grade und so weiter shotguns, and thus he was not being entirely truthful.

  By then Phil had learned that in the intelligence profession, there is truth and then there is truth, and that the truth that matters is that truth which does one the most good at that moment. In this case, telling a little white lie seemed entirely justified since it resulted in his now having two Browning Diamond Grade und so weiter shotguns in alligator-hide cases.

  Besides, it wasn’t setting a precedent, as the Browning company announced that with deep regret they were canceling their sponsorship of the Annual Berlin Brigade Brandenburg Gate Skeet Shoots for financial reasons.

  Having both Brownings on the wall of Phil’s sitting room in his suite in the field grade bachelor officers’ hotel helped toward assuaging the pain in Phil’s heart caused by his loss of Gwendolyn’s comforting, but did not completely do away with it.

  As someone once observed, all good things must come to an end, and so it was with Phil’s having his own personal Red Cross Comfort Girl.

  What actually had done him in, he believed, was either one of two contributing factors, or both.

  The first was a growing awareness on Gwendolyn’s part that her comforting of Phil had gone beyond simple comforting and into something resembling a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship.

  Such a relationship, of course, violated the XIth through XIIIth Commandments of Red Cross Girls, to wit:

  XI—Thou shalt not allow enlisted men to get any closer to you than a ten-foot pole under any circumstances.

  XII—Thou shalt have social relationships of any kind with only commissioned officers and gentlemen, preferably those who are graduates of the United States Military Academy at West Point or the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis.

  XIII—(a) In the event that you find yourself bringing comfort to the enlisted men in a remote area where there are no USMA or USNA graduates with whom to socialize, you may have social relationships with commissioned officer graduates of lesser schools, such as the U.S. Air Force Academy and the U.S. Coast Guard Academy.

  (b) If such 90 percent socially acceptable commissioned officers and gentlemen are not available, then, and only then, you may have social relations with commissioned officer graduates of such 50 percent socially acceptable schools as Norwich University, the Virginia Military Institute, the Citadel, and Texas A&M.

  (c) For the purposes of this Commandment, except for commissioned officer graduates of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and similar ivy-covered institutions, who are deemed 33⅓ percent socially acceptable, all other commissioned officers no matter what their rank, or source of commission, are to be considered common enlisted men, and the ten-foot-pole rule of Commandment XI will apply.

  The second factor that removed Gwendolyn and her comforting from Phil’s life was Second Lieutenant Oscar Hormell III, infantry, pay grade O-1, who the previous June had graduated from the USMA in the footsteps of his father, Major General Oscar “Hot Dog” Hormell, Jr., and his grandfather, Brigadier General Oscar Hormell, Sr.

  Lieutenant Hormell had been assigned as the junior aide-de-camp to the Berlin Brigade’s commanding general. This was a different Berlin Brigade commanding general than the one with whom Phil was familiar. That one had suffered a mental breakdown while watching Phil walk away from the Brandenburg Gate with his new 16-bore Browning Diamond Grade und so weiter shotgun and then had been reassigned to the War Plans Division in the Pentagon, where he had been given responsibility for launching missiles at the Russians should that, in his calm and rational judgment, be determined necessary.

  As soon as Oscar went to his first meeting of the Berlin Brigade Chapter of the WPPA, his peers got him alone and—with the caveat “This is no bull EXPLETIVE DELETED!!, Oscar, this is the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! truth, the whole EXPLETIVE DELETED!! truth, and nothing but the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! truth”—began to fill him in on the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! staff sergeant who didn’t even finish EXPLETIVE DELETED!! high school, who was not only living in the field grade bachelor officers’ hotel but chauffeuring around town a Red Cross Girl named Gwendolyn—who had the most amazing EXPLETIVE DELETED!! teats and gluteus maxima—in his EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Cadillac.

  “And not only that, the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! enlisted man cheated the previous commanding general of the Berlin Brigade, who was a USMA classmate of your father, which is why you’re here in Berlin instead of learning how to dig foxholes at Fort Benning with the rest of your class, out of two—not just one—two EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Browning Diamond Grade und so weiter shotguns.”

  “How does he get away with all those gross infractions of Army Regulations? And how can a staff sergeant afford a Cadillac?”

  “Well, the only thing I can say is that he goes around with a U.S. Pistol, Cal. 45 ACP Model 1911A1 in a shoulder holster and that when on rare occasions he wears his uniform, pinned to it are all his medals, of which he has two: The Army of Occupation Medal and The Order of Karl Marx, Second Class, with pearls and rubies.”

  “That sounds like it might be a Russian medal.”

  “You’re a second lieutenant now, Oscar. Draw your own conclusions.”

  —

  Lieutenant Hormell made a point of meeting the Red Cross Comfort Girl who the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! enlisted man was chauffeuring around Berlin in his Cadillac. He did so by waiting in the alley behind the Red Cross Doughnuts and Coca-Cola dispensary until her tour of duty was over.

  For him, it was love at first sight. What he had been told about her physical attributes was right on the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! money.

  “Excuse me, miss,” he said. “If you are a Red Cross Comfort Girl, I would like to introduce myself.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Just before I left the United States Military Academy at West Point to embark on my military career in the
footsteps of my father, Major General Oscar Hormell, Junior, and my grandfather, Brigadier General Oscar Hormell, Senior, I was counseled to seek out, if possible, Red Cross Comfort Girls such as yourself. The guidance counselor said that your kind matches well with our kind, and are in fact the kind of young women a West Pointer should seek in case he is searching for a wife to march beside him in the Long Gray Line.”

  “You don’t say?” Gwendolyn replied, pleased. She had joined the Red Cross hoping that she might bump into a young officer of good family. “My name is Gwendolyn. What did you say your name was, handsome?”

  Oscar drove Gwendolyn from the alley to the Berlin Brigade officers’ club in his Volkswagen. There, after he plied her with beer, he told her he could look into her eyes and know that the things he had heard about her—that she was socializing with a common enlisted man who was chauffeuring her around Berlin in his Cadillac—simply couldn’t be true.

  “I can’t imagine where those scurrilous rumors got started,” Gwendolyn replied.

  The next day, she went to Phil’s apartment in the field grade bachelor officers’ hotel, handed him a chocolate-covered doughnut, a strawberry-stuffed doughnut, and an Economy Size 1.5-liter bottle of Coca-Cola to remember her by, and announced that it was all over between them.

  [ FIVE ]

  When the master sergeant, wearing as many medals and ribbons as Phil had ever seen, appeared at Phil’s office door, as previously stated, a good deal of water had flowed under the Bridge over the River Havel during the previous year.

  “What can I do for you, Master Sergeant?”

  “If you are Staff Sergeant Williams, Philip W. Third, the question should be rather than ‘What can you do for me? but ‘What am I prepared to do for you?’”

  “I am. So, what are you prepared to do for me?”

  “I am Master Sergeant F. J. Lacitignola, known as ‘Friendly Frank the Recruiter,’ and I am here, Sergeant, to point out to you the manifold benefits of reenlistment in the U.S. Army.”