The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  Guinness, his lips compressed in a mirthless, ironic smile, took the offered hand and held it just a moment longer and in a grip just a shade tighter than the acquaintance warranted. His eyes searched the other man’s face, as if he were considering something unpleasant.

  The policeman was almost as tall, and probably had the advantage in weight, but he didn’t attempt to disengage himself. Perhaps he was simply being polite—he certainly was a very polite lad. Perhaps he was thinking about Dion O’Banion. Perhaps his education didn’t extend that far.

  When Guinness’s hold relaxed, and the handshake ended, he had the definite impression that he had lost his friend at court, which was okay. Perhaps that way they wouldn’t waste a lot of each other’s time on the psychological niceties.

  Instead of the police station, as he had expected, Guinness was driven to the county hospital. It hadn’t occurred to him before, but the local police wouldn’t have the facilities for a forensic autopsy. They probably didn’t even have a morgue.

  He and Peterson had little to say during the drive, and they exchanged only whispered monosyllables in the hospital itself. Peterson guided him into the basement, where he swung open a heavy, pale green door, bidding Guinness enter with a gesture of his open hand.

  The room was perhaps twenty feet square, with a ceiling high enough to be lost in shadow and massive doors at either end. Linoleum tile of some indistinct pale shade covered the floor, and the walls, like the doors, were a pale frosted green, giving one the impression of standing in the center of an enormous ice cube. It took several seconds before Guinness located with his eyes the camouflaged fixtures that made the light seem to seep in from every direction.

  There was a heavy smell of antiseptic, and the room was perfectly empty except for a gurney table in its precise center. The table was covered with a sheet, and under the sheet were visible the outlines of something that had once been human and female.

  Peterson seemed to hesitate, as if embarrassed, so Guinness took the few short steps to the head of the gurney and lifted back the sheet just enough to reveal the head and shoulders of all that was mortal of Louise Harrison Guinness.

  It wasn’t as bad as he had imagined it might be. There was the faintest odor of burnt flesh, and he could see where the hair had been singed along the back of the skull, but her face was unmarked.

  Death was always an undignified business; her jaw was slack and her eyes half open. In life her eyes had been almost black, but now they were too glazed over to make it possible to pick out their precise color. Seeing her like this seemed a hideous intrusion.

  He reached down and gently closed her eyes with thumb and first finger, and an emotion like nothing he could have expected or prepared for flooded through him. He brought the sheet back up to cover her.

  “Can you identify these as the remains of your wife?”

  Peterson’s ritual question, whispered though it was, sounded in the hushed room like a pistol shot. Guinness nodded and allowed himself to be led away.

  He remembered that the first time he had ever seen Louise’s face it had been bent over a typewriter. She styled her hair longer then and tied back, and the glasses that she wore only to read had slipped down to rest on the saddle of her nose, giving her the appearance of some substantial, ferociously midwestern schoolmistress.

  That had been almost six years ago, the summer before the first year he had taught at Belmont State. Louise had just started on her M.A., which was the only advanced degree offered in English, and was making a little pocket money and generally ingratiating herself by working part time as one of the three assistants to the department secretary. Guinness needed a voucher signed for moving expenses, and Miss Harrison was the only person in the office. She took the form, smiled one of those automatic secretarial smiles, and said she would give it to the chairman when he made it back from lunch.

  It was hardly love at first sight. Guinness simply noticed her existence, filed it away for future reference, and then went about his business for the next several months.

  He got settled into his job and pursued other passions, and then one day at the beginning of the spring term he leaned across the vast composition board counter top that separated off the inner sanctum of the typing pool, into which no member of the teaching staff was ever supposed to venture, and asked for a date. It had been as simple as that.

  They had dinner at a little German place in San Mateo and went to a movie at the Palm Theater and then stopped back at her place, a little walkup apartment over a jewelry store about three blocks from the campus. They were lovers before eleven that evening, there having been only a single feature, and she had moved in with him within a couple of weeks.

  Toward the middle of the summer they made a quick trip to Las Vegas, lost two hundred and thirty-two dollars at the blackjack tables, and got married. In retrospect, they were both a little astonished at how casually their relationship had developed. Anyway, within reasonable limits, it had worked well enough.

  Louise had been twenty-seven at the time, having returned to school out of boredom with clerking for an insurance company and making the rounds of balding salesman types with shiny faces and closets full of checkered sports jackets. Life seemed to have been leading nowhere, and she had a vague idea that she might enjoy teaching Jane Austen in some semirural junior college. So she set about getting the necessary credentials and, at least in theory, was still a graduate student even up to the time of her death. In the drawer of her night table the police discovered the typescript of an unfinished thesis on Persuasion.

  . . . . .

  Perhaps that had never been what she really wanted. Perhaps her spiritual destiny all along had been to find an agreeable, unattached male who didn’t own any checkered sports jackets, tie the knot, and honorably retire.

  And Ray was agreeable enough. It wasn’t a bad life. It was steady enough, certainly; he seemed to place a high value on orderliness and predictability. He liked to be told in the mornings, before he went to work, what dinner would be; and, barring an act of God, they went to the movies on Monday evenings.

  By common consent, the race and chase adventure flicks were the best. Ray said they had moral clarity.

  She had married him—oh God—perhaps only because he had asked without seeming to assume that the suspense was killing her. Just a contract between two consenting adults who happened to strike a few sparks for one another, no big deal. Not quite a simple tax arrangement; there was more to it than that. But not Tristram and Isolde, not breathless and ethereal passion either. And it was something to his credit that he had the decency to refrain from pretending that it was.

  And after all the other men she had known she was ready to give him a little credit. I’ll be this, baby, or I’ll give you that—just you wait and see. Promises of excitement or distinction. The Great Life, oh so very different from this one, always just perceptibly ahead. A few years, a change of jobs, a lucky break. Somewhere in the distance. And all the time they knew and she knew that the future would be precisely like the past, a reality too insipid even to allow you the privilege of ignoring it.

  But not with Ray. He had a habit, when he didn’t seem to be thinking about anything, of taking hold of her little finger and curling it up so that as he held it he could easily have crushed the joint under the pressure of his thumb. They would sit together—he would seem a million miles away, in some private existence of his own—and her heart would pound like a tom tom.

  Of course he never did it. She had never seen him harm any living thing—probably he never had, never would; but not perhaps because it had never occurred to him that he could. Somehow, in his very insistence that his life be uneventful, he managed to suggest that it might have been different had he chosen.

  Once, to celebrate the publication of one of his papers, they had gone out to dinner in San Francisco, to a fish place on the Wharf, where the little square tables at which they seated couples were so close together that you couldn’t have s
lid a book of matches between them. The man at the next table had left his cigarette untended—apparently he had forgotten about it completely—in a little tin ashtray, and the smoke was drifting remorselessly into Ray’s eyes.

  He had only just recently given up cigarettes himself and tended to be a little touchy on the subject, as if sensitive to the injustice of anyone being allowed what he was not. Finally he turned to his right and, very politely, asked if the gentleman would mind putting the damn thing out.

  The gentleman was about ten years older, at least twenty pounds heavier, and none the better for a number of vodka and tonics consumed while waiting for his lobster claws. And just to make everything perfect, he was there with a woman quite obviously not his wife.

  One gathered from the expression on his face that he did mind, but he stubbed out the cigarette anyway. Ray thanked him and went back to his Manhattan chowder.

  The matter seemed closed.

  But it wasn’t; a second later, apparently having thought the thing over, the gentleman at the next table started to flick Ray noisily on the sleeve of his jacket with the first two fingers of a pink, fleshy hand. It seemed there was a point of etiquette that it was imperative to have settled.

  “Listen, Mac. When somebody does you a favor you should smile when you say thank you. That was a favor I just did you, so why don’t you smile?”

  Louise wasn’t perfect, and she knew it. She shared with most women a morbid curiosity to see how her husband would behave under fire, what he would do when the bully at the beach kicked sand in his face. So she sat very quietly, torn between a certain guilty excitement and her dread over the prospect of a scene. She tried very hard, however, not to give the impression that she believed he had anything to live up to.

  Her husband did, in fact, smile—a friendly, open, relaxed sort of smile—but it was directed at her. He covered her hand lightly with his own and for a moment she thought he was simply going to ignore the whole stupid incident. But, of course, it wasn’t something he could ignore. Drunks don’t often allow themselves to be ignored.

  “I think, pal,” he said finally, turning only very slightly in that direction, “that I’ve already expressed my gratitude. I’d settle for that if I were you—I really would.”

  She didn’t know—there was something in the very calmness of his voice, something not precisely of menace, that Louise, at least, found far more intimidating than any implied threat in the words themselves.

  It amounted, almost, to a hope that offense would be taken, taken and acted upon. It almost seemed as if Ray wanted the man to pick a fight, as if that prospect somehow appealed to him. But of course that was impossible.

  Fortunately, just at that moment the waitress came and brought the slob his dinner, and he took it as an excuse to let the matter drop. Of course the evening was ruined; they were all miserably uncomfortable together at those two little tables, silent and humiliated.

  Except for Ray—he went on talking and eating as if he had forgotten the whole thing the moment it ended. Perhaps he had.

  It wasn’t until they got home that the reaction set in.

  He sat up in bed while she brushed out her hair, staring glumly at the lump his feet made under the blanket. When she mentioned it, all he said was that he couldn’t be responsible for every middle aged Lothario who had a little too much to drink. It seemed to make him angry.

  “What would you have done if he’d called you out, Ray?” It was only a playful question. “Would you have gone out back in the alley with him and hammered away until one of you said uncle?”

  Ray apparently didn’t think it was funny and indicated by that impenetrable reticence of his that he wished the subject dropped.

  “He didn’t call me out.”

  So that was it. He was simply that way sometimes. Men were whimsical creatures, Ray no more than most; but when he did not choose to discuss a subject he did not discuss it.

  Had that man in the restaurant upset him? Was he afraid of death, or a black eye, or the prospect of turning forty? When it suited him he was as silent and as fast as a stone wall. It did no good to pry.

  Perhaps he had painful thoughts. Or perhaps it was the vagabond in him, she couldn’t tell. She had lived her whole life within a few hundred miles of the hospital in Yuba City where she had been born, but Ray had traveled, had lived in England and had been all over Europe. Perhaps things had happened. Perhaps it had given him a sense of being a stranger everywhere. Perhaps that was it.

  Sometimes he would talk about such and such a place in London, or what the train ride was like between Munich and Amsterdam, but he would only talk about the place or the thing, as if he were merely a pair of impersonal eyes.

  As fast as a stone wall. The past, she had the feeling, was served up in carefully edited versions.

  But if the past did not, the present belonged to her.

  Their life together was to her taste; Ray was a good man and seemed to love her. She didn’t mind housework, especially in a small house, and Ray made her feel that he was pleased with her, that she was to his taste too and that their relationship was enough for him.

  At least he wasn’t clamoring after her to have babies. Why should he? After all, he had been married already once and had had a daughter, aged about nine now, whom he never mentioned or visited but whose picture, she happened to know, he carried around with him in an inside flap of his wallet. She didn’t think he owned a picture of Kathleen.

  Aside from one brief mention of her existence once when they were still Living in Sin, he never talked about his first wife. Things hadn’t worked out, was the way he had phrased it. She had apparently left him, but nothing was said about what her motives might have been. It had all happened while he was abroad.

  Did he think about her? Had he loved her with more of himself than he gave to his poor little Louise? Another area that wouldn’t bear probing.

  Well, let him have his past and his memories in quiet. She didn’t mind. She had him now and would keep him as long as there was breath in her. And, after all, everyone was entitled to his little secrets.

  . . . . .

  With Peterson still tactfully leading the way, the two men came out a side door, directly up a little stairwell from the basement into the parking lot, where the dead sunlight was bouncing off of cars and the pavement and tier upon tier of hospital windows. It made you flinch away, as if some great hand were closing painfully over your eyes.

  Guinness hoped she had been happy, that he had been able to make her happy. He hoped five years could somehow be counted as an atonement in advance for the way she had died. He was responsible for her death, just as surely as if he had murdered her himself. The how and why were still uncertain, but they were only details. He had killed her—or rather his past had, which came to the same thing. Something had come up out of that silence he had imposed on it and her, and had killed her. That much it was pointless to try evading.

  Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

  3

  Fifteen years ago there had been no sun. That day when it all started it had rained all morning long, had rained in rhythmic sheets that came and went every few seconds like the crackling of static on a radio. People were hurrying to get out of it, running with their heads folded forward and their hands in their pockets as they splashed along over the undulating sidewalks on their ways to some place dry.

  Guinness tried not to notice. Instead he followed with his eyes the droplets wriggling down one of the front windows of a tea shop half a block off Bond Street. Between his hands he was nursing a mug of pale Darjeeling, almost room temperature by now. Once in a while he would take a birdlike sip—not too much, because he would have to leave when it was gone and he didn’t have anywhere else dry he could go. Even his raincoat was up the spout, pawned the day before for five shillings. Minus the nine pence for the tea he was supposed to be drinking, it was all he had left, and he couldn’t think of anyplace he could spend the night on that kind of money.


  He had read once in Orwell, his literary hero and guide to the morality of poverty, about places where you could rent a chair by the fire for three and six, but he supposed all that was dead and gone. Swept up in thirty years of Social Progress. He couldn’t even sleep on the benches around Trafalgar Square, not in the middle of February. Not in the pouring rain he couldn’t. Well, perhaps by then it wouldn’t be raining. But the bobbies wouldn’t let him sleep there anyway; they hadn’t let Orwell.

  No, tonight would be another night of walking and hiding out in doorways and walking and walking. And tomorrow he would have to turn himself over to the American embassy so they could ship him home. It was all over, the whole fucking thing. Finished.

  It had begun toward the end of his senior year in high school, a week after he had received notice that he had been accepted into the following year’s freshman class at Ohio State. They would waive tuition and give him a scholarship, enough to cover most of his expenses, the assumption probably being that his parents would pick up the slack. What a laugh.

  Anyway, a week after the good news, Guinness dropped a dime in a pay phone and called up the margarine plant where he worked five nights a week as a swamper and told them he had the flu. They believed him, and twenty minutes later he was in the Reserve Book Room of the university’s main library, sitting in front of a stack of graduate school bulletins.

  They were all there, all the luminous names. Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Berkeley, Oxford, Columbia, Princeton, Cambridge, Stanford. But the one that really made his fingers sweat was the University of London.

  To be sure, it wasn’t Oxford, but then Guinness wasn’t George Lyman Kittredge. Bright, yes—good enough. His scholarship proved that much. Not even OSU, however, was scattering rose petals in his path.

  But London might just be within reach, with a lot of crust wiping over the next several years. And wouldn’t it be something to live in London.