There were people in line ahead of her, women “getting stickers” for the family car, and a half-dozen lower-ranking enlisted men, younger men who did not have a wife, a helpmate, a life’s partner to get a sticker for them. It took her about fifteen minutes to reach the sergeant behind the desk.
She laid all the documentation out for him, including the neatly-filled-out-in-block-letters-with-ballpoint-pen Request for Privately Owned Vehicle Registration, in triplicate.
The sergeant examined the provost marshal’s Report of Safety Inspection of Privately Owned Vehicle carefully. It identified the POV as a 1964 Jaguar Convertible, Guards Red in Color, Two Doors, twelve cylinders.
“Nice wheels, ma’am,” the sergeant said.
“It’s a nice car,” Marjorie agreed.
He examined everything else.
“It run all right? I read in Car & Driver they have electrical problems a lot.”
“Not so far,” Marjorie said.
The sergeant examined all the documents.
“It all looks fine,” he said. “All I’ll need is a dollar and a quarter for the sticker, and your AGO card.”
The Adjutant General’s Office issues identification cards to military personnel and their dependents. It is sealed in plastic, and bears the owner’s photograph, date of birth, and rank, or in the case of dependents, the rank of the soldier, who is known as the sponsor. It is necessary to make use of Army facilities, such as the hospital, the dental clinic, and the post exchange.
“I don’t have an AGO card,” Marjorie said.
That was not the truth. She had an AGO card in her purse. It listed her name as Marjorie W. Bellmon and stated that her sponsor was Major General Robert F. Bellmon.
The sergeant looked at her strangely.
“I just got married,” Marjorie said.
That was the truth. She was still having trouble believing it.
“You got to have it, ma’am,” the sergeant said, not unkindly. “Not only for the sticker, but to get in the PX, the hospital, places like that.”
“Where do I get one?”
“For that, you’re going to have to go to the AG,” he said. “On the main post. A big sign out in front says, HEADQUARTERS XVIII AIRBORNE CORPS AND FORT BRAGG. ”
She knew where it was. Her father had once been G-3 of XVIII Airborne Corps.
“You’re going to have to have your wedding certificate,” the sergeant said. “It won’t take long. All they have to do is take your picture with a Polaroid camera, and your thumbprint, and type up the card and put it in plastic. Then you can come back here, and you can get your sticker.”
Marjorie left the building and got in the Jaguar and drove to the headquarters of XVIII Airborne Corps & Fort Bragg. It was a three-story brick building. She knew it had been built as a hospital before the war.
She found a parking space with some trouble, and as she was getting out of the car, a military police car pulled in beside her. She was searching in the sturdy plastic-reinforced envelope marked “Personal Papers” when an MP knocked on the window.
She rolled it down.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” the MP said. “You visiting the post?”
“No. We’ve just been assigned here.”
“You don’t have a visitor’s sign,” he said. “You’re supposed to stop at the MP shack at the main gate and get one.”
“I didn’t know that,” she said.
That was the truth.
Then she remembered that whenever she had been at Bragg before, on the times she’d come to see Jack, the Jaguar had had his red Fort Rucker sticker on it. It didn’t now. When she’d “cleared the post” for him at Rucker and taken off the temporary blue sticker, she’d spent fifteen minutes with steel wool and lighter fluid taking off his red sticker.
The Jaguar had no sticker at all, and the MP was just doing his job.
“Yes, ma’am,” the MP said. “Can I see your driver’s license and AGO card, please?”
There was a terrible temptation to give him the AGO card in her wallet. MPs are often sympathetic and understanding to the dependents of major generals.
She resisted it. She was no longer Miss Marjorie Bellmon, dependent daughter of Major General Robert F. Bellmon; she was now Mrs. Jacques Portet, dependent wife of First Lieutenant Portet.
“The driver’s license I have,” she said. “I’m here to get my AGO card. When I have that, I’m going to get the sticker for the car.”
“Lost card?”
“I just got married,” Marjorie said.
“You got orders or something, ma’am?”
She handed over Jack’s orders and her driver’s license.
He took a pad and started writing on it.
“Nothing to worry about, if you’re telling me the truth,” the MP said matter-of-factly. “This’ll come down through channels to the Special Warfare Center, and they’ll check to see if you applied for a sticker within seventy-two hours—”
“I got here last night,” Marjorie said.
“Yes, ma’am,” the MP said. “—of reporting on post, and if you did, they’ll endorse it back, and there won’t be no problem. And I don’t think they’ll give you any trouble for not getting a visitor’s pass.”
He extended the pad to her.
"Sign there on the bottom by the X,” he said. “All you’re doing is acknowledging getting the citation.”
Marjorie signed “Marjorie Bellmon” and added “Portet” when she saw what she had written.
She handed the pad to him. He tore a copy of the citation off and handed it to her.
“Thank you, ma’am,” the MP said. “This is a really nice set of wheels.”
“Thank you,” Marjorie said. She put the citation in the envelope and got out of the car and walked into the redbrick building housing Headquarters XVIII Airborne Corps & Fort Bragg.
There was a sign on the wall in the corridor of the second floor:Hours of AGO Card Issuance 1030-1200 and 1500-1630
She looked at her watch. It was quarter past nine.
She sat down to wait.
At 1125 Mrs. Marjorie B. Portet, dependent wife of First Lieutenant Jacques Portet, now possessed of an AGO card attesting to that status, got back in the Jaguar, drove back to the Dependent Services building, presented the AGO card and $1.25, and was issued two stickers, with blue printing, reading “Fort Bragg NC 56787.”
She applied them to the front and rear bumpers of the Jaguar before driving away.
And I’ll bet, she thought, that he’ll be pacing up and down in front of the SWC headquarters building, wondering where the hell I have been, how it could take all that time to get a couple of lousy stickers for the car.
Jack had said he would try to “break ground” at Rucker with the L-23 at half past seven. That would put him into Pope at about 9:30, give or take ten minutes. Figure ten minutes to tie it down, and another ten or fifteen minutes to get from Pope to the SWC, he had arrived at 10:00, certainly no later than 10:15, which meant he would have been waiting for her more than an hour. And no one knew where she was.
Johnny Oliver would have the keys to their new apartment. They would take a quick look at it to see how big it was, and then go to a furniture store and buy at least enough—a refrigerator, a kitchen table and chairs, a small television set, and, of course, a bed—to spend their first night together in their very own home/apartment/love nest.
The apartment would be furnished slowly. As soon as she could get to The Farm, she could have her pick of the furniture in The Barn, or, for that matter, within reason, in The House.
The Farm, in Virginia, outside Washington, had been in the Bellmon family for four generations, and The House was furnished with the best of a century’s accumulation of furniture. The Barn held the less desirable pieces, including, she thought she remembered, some really beautiful pieces of Philippine Mahogany acquired when then Lieutenant Colonel Porterman K. Waterford had been assigned to the 26th Cavalry outside Manila before the Second
World War.
And then, of course, there would be wedding presents. They had been married so suddenly there had been no time for that, but she knew they would start coming almost immediately.
And Hanni, Jack’s stepmother, had said she was going to ship all the furniture in their house in the Congo to the United States, and it was far more than enough to furnish the house they were going to build or buy in Ocean Reef.
But it would be a nice memory for later, to remember their first night together, when she’d driven up from Rucker, and Jack had flown up, and they’d bought their first furniture together.
Jack was not pacing up and down in front of the SWC headquarters building, nor anywhere in sight.
There was a sergeant on duty in the lobby of the building, charged with keeping unauthorized visitors out.
“Sergeant, I’m Mrs. Portet,” Marjorie said. “I wonder if there are any messages for me?”
“You want to spell that for me, please?”
“Pee Oh Are Tee Eee Tee.”
“Oh, you mean, Portet.”
“Why not?”
The sergeant stiffened.
Brigadier General Paul R. Hanrahan, the commanding general of the John F. Kennedy Center for Special Warfare, was marching purposefully across the lobby, trailed by his aide-de-camp, Captain Stefan Zabrewski.
He changed course when he saw Marjorie.
“We were getting a little worried, Margie,” he said. “We expected you early this morning. What are you doing here? Why didn’t you go to the house?”
“I was supposed to meet Jack here, Uncle Red,” she said.
“What was the message, Ski?” Hanrahan asked.
“There was a delay at Rucker, sir,” Zabrewski boomed. “He’ll let us know when he has an ETA.”
“Sorry, honey,” Hanrahan said. “Why don’t you go over to the house? I’ll have messages forwarded there, and Patricia’s worried about you.”
“Uncle Red, I’m sort of anxious to see the apartment. Johnny was supposed to have the keys.”
“Sergeant,” Zabrewski boomed. “You got an envelope there for Mrs. Portet? From Captain Oliver?”
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said. He handed over an envelope. “Sir, that’s not what the lady said. She said ‘Por-tay’ or something.”
Zabrewski handed her the envelope. It contained two door keys, and two maps, one of the route from Fort Bragg into Fayetteville and the Foster Garden Apartments, and the other of the Foster Garden Apartment complex itself, showing her the location of Apartment B-14, and where to park the car.
“Great,” Marjorie said. “I’ll go see Aunt Patricia and then have a look.”
“Patricia said she’d go with you and get the car registered,” Hanrahan said. “For some reason, Eighteenth Airborne Corps is on a death-to-unregistered-POV kick.”
“I’ve already done that, Uncle Red,” Marjorie said.
It did not seem to be the time to tell him about the MP citation.
“Good girl,” he said. “Honey, I’ve got to run. See you later.”
Aunt Patricia was almost visibly hurt that Marjorie and Jack weren’t going to stay with them until they had a chance to settle in, and Marjorie didn’t have the heart to decline her invitation to lunch.
It was a little after two before she found Apartment B-14 in the Foster Garden Apartments complex and managed to get the door open.
It was a nice apartment, she decided. It had two bedrooms, one of which, she thought, Jack could use as a home office, an area that was obviously intended to be used both as a dining room and living room—she knew there was an elaborately carved Philippine wooden screen, courtesy of Grandfather Waterford, in The Barn. There were animals and naked women carved on it, which Jack, she was sure, would like, that would fit there. The bathroom was all right, and the kitchen, while small, had room for a table and chairs. There was even a small balcony overlooking a grassy interior courtyard.
The only “furniture” in the apartment were a stove and a telephone. The stove lighted right up when she tried, which pleased her. When she bent over and picked the telephone from the floor, intending to call Patricia Hanrahan to see if there was an ETA on Jack, it was as dead as a doornail.
She took a small notebook from her purse and wrote “TELE-PHONE! !!!!!” in it, and then set out in search of Fayetteville Furniture and Interiors.
She explained to a salesman what she was after right now, just a bed and a kitchen table and chairs, and that she would be back later for other things, and then asked him if she could first use the telephone before looking at what he had to offer.
The telephone company said they would be happy to reactivate the telephone already installed in B-14 of the Foster Garden Apartments. They would call her previous telephone company to check her credit, and that out of the way, turn it right on. When they learned she had never had her own telephone before, the telephone company said in that case she would have to come by the office and leave a deposit of $125.
She decided on a natural-wood-looking kitchen table with matching captain’s chairs; a small-screen TV; a large, two-door refrigerator with an ice maker; a Simmons Best Quality king size mattress and spring, and a bed to hold it.
She paid for it with check number 0001 drawn on the account of Lieutenant and Mrs. J. E. Portet, in the First National Bank of Ozark, Alabama.
“Would delivery, let’s see,” the salesman said, consulting a sheet of paper, “the day after tomorrow, in the afternoon, be all right with you?”
“I need this stuff today,” Marjorie said. “Right now. I told you that.”
“Oh, I’m afraid that just wouldn’t be possible, Mrs. Portet,” he said, pronouncing it “Poor Tet.”
“Then forget the whole thing,” she said, hoping he couldn’t see how close to tears she was. “Give me my check back.”
“Just a minute, I’ll see what I can do.”
The furniture, promised for delivery at four, arrived at half past five, and by then it was too late to go to the telephone company and leave a deposit.
With the mattress and bed—that came in pieces, and she had no idea how she was going to manage to assemble it—in the larger of the two bedrooms, the bedroom seemed a lot smaller than it had originally.
When the refrigerator was installed in the kitchen, the door opened the wrong way.
She went in search of a pay telephone, found one outside the apartment complex manager’s office, and then found that she didn’t have any change to feed it.
She went in search of a shopping center, found one, with pay phones outside, and then had to wait in the checkout line to get five dollars’ worth of silver for the pay phones.
There was still no ETA on Jack, and Marjorie knew she had hurt Patricia Hanrahan’s feelings again when she declined the invitation to come out to the post and wait for him there.
“God, you ought to know, baby, you never know when they’re going to show up.”
“I’m getting the apartment set up,” Marjorie said. “But I really appreciate it.”
She went back into the supermarket to buy just enough food to get by until she could really go shopping, and at the commissary at Bragg, of course, to save money. By the time she was finished, the shopping cart was overloaded.
She had a little trouble getting the supermarket to accept check 0002, but finally beat the supermarket’s manager down.
Whatever the other virtues of the Jaguar XKS, there is not much trunk space, and what there was was occupied by Marjorie’s suitcases. She finally managed to get everything she had bought in the passenger compartment, but not before she had ruptured a milk carton, which gushed milk which would be sour in the morning and all over Jack’s precious carpets unless she took them out tonight and washed them.
She telephoned the Hanrahans and General Hanrahan said there was still no ETA on Jack, but if his flight was aborted he would have heard. And why don’t you come out and wait here?
She was halfway back to the Foster Garden
Apartments complex when she realized that she had a bed and mattress and spring, but no pillows or sheets. And, for that matter, no towels.
Back to the shopping center, where Bed & Bath had some very nice sheets and pillows and nice big thick terry towels, but absolutely refused to take check number 0003.
That left her with $19.40, until she noticed she was almost out of gas. She purchased $9.40 cents of gasoline and drove home.
She put the groceries in her new refrigerator. She slid the pieces of her bed out of their long cardboard box, managed to get them more or less together, and then reached the inevitable conclusion that there was no way she could get her new Simmons Best Quality king size mattress and spring on it by herself, so she took it apart.
When she cut the cardboard box the mattress came in, the mattress fell out as she predicted it would. When she cut the cardboard box the spring came in, the falling spring gouged a hole in the freshly painted wall of the bedroom.
By then, she decided she needed a shower. That reminded her of the suitcases in the car, and she went to get them, which reminded her of the milk-soaked carpet. It took her two trips to get her suitcases from the car up the stairs to B-14, and another trip to get the carpet, which was already starting to smell.
She went down a final time to use the pay phone to call the Hanrahans.
This would be the last call, she decided. I am making a real pain in the ass of myself.
There was no ETA on Jack.
When she started to unpack her clothing and hang things up behind the sliding doors of her new bedroom closet, there were no hangers.
She laid her clothing out as neatly as she could on the floor of Jack’s office, then took a shower with Jack’s carpet. That was made somewhat more difficult because the only soap in her new apartment came in a plastic bottle and was intended for use on dishes.
When she hung Jack’s freshly washed carpet on the shower door, it was sufficiently heavy to cause the screws of its hinges to pull out.
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