by Irwin Shaw
“I’ll put a request through channels,” Michael said as lightly as possible, “for permission from my Commanding Officer …”
“Don’t joke, damn you,” Louise said. She turned sharply and went to get her coat.
He watched her as she walked across the room. Colonel Treanor stopped her and Michael saw him arguing swiftly and secretly with Louise and hold her arm. She pulled away and went on to the dressing rooms. She walked lightly, Michael noticed, with a prim, stiff grace, her pretty legs and small feet very definite and womanly in their movements. Michael felt baffled and wished he had the courage to go to the bar for a drink. It had all been so light and comradely, offhand and without responsibility, just the thing for a time like this, this time of waiting, this time before the real war, this time of being ludicrous and ashamed in Mincey’s ridiculous office. It had been off-hand and flattering, in exactly the proper proportions, and Louise had cleverly erected a thin shield of something that was less than and better than love to protect him from the comic, unending abuse of the Army. And, now, it was probably over. Women, Michael thought resentfully, can never learn the art of being transients. They are all permanent settlers at heart, making homes with dull, instinctive persistence in floods and wars, on the edges of invasions, at the moment of the crumbling of states. No, he thought, I will not have it. For my own protection I am going to get through this time alone …
The hell with it, he thought, Generals or no Generals. He strode, upright and swift, through the room to the bar.
“Whiskey and soda, please,” he said to the bartender, and drank the first gulp down in a long, grateful draught.
A Colonel in the Supply Service of the British Army was talking to an RAF Wing Commander at Michael’s elbow. They paid no attention to him. The Colonel was a little drunk. “Herbert, old man,” the Colonel was saying, “I was in Africa and I can speak with authority. The Americans are fine at one thing. Superb. I will not deny it. They are superb at supply. Lorries, oil dumps, traffic control, superb. But, let us face it, Herbert, they cannot fight. If Montgomery were realistic he would say to them, ‘Chaps, we will hand over all our lorries to you, and you hand over all your tanks and guns to us. You will haul and carry, chaps, because you’re absolutely first-rate at it, and we will jolly well do the fighting, and we’ll all be home by Christmas.’”
The Wing Commander nodded solemnly and both the officers of the King ordered two more whiskeys. The OWI, Michael thought grimly, staring at the Colonel’s pink scalp shining through the thin white hair on the back of his head, the OWI is certainly throwing away the taxpayer’s money on these particular allies.
Then he saw Louise coming out into the room in a loose gray coat. He put down his drink and hurried over to her. Her face wasn’t serious any more, but curled into its usual slightly questioning smile, as though she didn’t believe one half of what the world told her. At some moment in the dressing room, Michael thought, as he took her arm, she had looked into the mirror and told herself, I am not going to show anything more tonight, and switched on her old face, as smoothly and perfectly as she was now pulling on her gloves.
“Oh, my,” Michael said, grinning, piloting her to the door. “Oh, my, what danger I am in.”
Louise glanced at him, then half-understood. She smiled reflectively. “Don’t think you’re not,” she said.
“Lord, no,” said Michael. They laughed together and walked out through the lobby of the Dorchester, through the old ladies drinking tea with their nephews, through the young Air Forces Captains with the pretty girls, through the terrible, anchored English jazz, that suffered so sadly because there were no Negroes in England to breathe life into it, and tell the saxophonists and drummers, “Oh, Mistuh, are you off! Mistuh, lissen here, this is the way it goes, just turn it loose, Mistuh, turn that poor jailbird horn loose out of yo’ hands …” Michael and Louise walked jauntily, arm in arm, back once more, and perhaps only for a moment, on the brittle happy perimeter of love. Outside, across the Park, in the fresh cold evening air, the dying fires the Germans had left behind them sent a holiday glow into the sky.
They paced slowly toward Piccadilly.
“I decided something tonight,” Louise said.
“What?” Michael asked.
“I have to get you commissioned. At least a Lieutenant. It’s silly for you to remain an enlisted man all your life. I’m going to talk to some of my friends.”
Michael laughed. “Save your breath,” he said.
“Wouldn’t you like to be an officer?”
Michael shrugged. “Maybe. I haven’t thought about it. Even so—save your breath.”
“Why?”
“They can’t do it.”
“They can do anything,” Louise said. “And if I ask them …”
“Nothing doing. It will go back to Washington, and it will be turned down.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s a man in Washington who says I’m a Communist.”
“Nonsense.”
“It’s nonsense,” Michael said, “but there it is.”
“Are you a Communist?”
“About like Roosevelt,” said Michael. “They’d kept him from being commissioned, too.”
“Did you try?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, God,” Louise said, “what a silly world.”
“It’s not very important,” said Michael. “We’ll win the war anyway.”
“Weren’t you furious,” Louise asked, “when you found out?”
“A little, maybe,” said Michael. “More sad than furious.”
“Didn’t you feel like chucking the whole thing?”
“For an hour or two, maybe,” said Michael. “Then I thought, What a childish attitude.”
“You’re too damned reasonable.”
“Maybe. Not really, though, not so terribly reasonable,” said Michael. “I’m not really much of a soldier, anyway. The Army isn’t missing much. When I went into the Army, I made up my mind that I was putting myself at the Army’s disposal. I believe in the war. That doesn’t mean I believe in the Army. I don’t believe in any army. You don’t expect justice out of an army, if you’re a sensible, grown-up human being, you only expect victory. And if it comes to that, our Army is probably the most just one that ever existed. I believe the Army will take care of me to the best of its abilities, that it will keep me from being killed, if it can possibly manage it, and that it will finally win as cheaply as human foresight and skill can arrange. Sufficient unto the day is the victory thereof.”
“That’s a cynical attitude,” Louise said. “The OWI wouldn’t like that.”
“Maybe,” said Michael. “I expected the Army to be corrupt, inefficient, cruel, wasteful, and it turned out to be all those things, just like all armies, only much less so than I thought before I got into it. It is much less corrupt, for example, than the German Army. Good for us. The victory we win will not be as good as it might be, if it were a different kind of army, but it will be the best kind of victory we can expect in this day and age, and I’m thankful for it.”
“What’re you going to do?” Louise demanded. “Stay in that silly office, stroking chorus girls on the behind for the whole war?”
Michael grinned. “People have spent wars in worse ways,” he said. “But I don’t think I’ll only do that. Somehow,” he said thoughtfully, “somehow the Army will move me some place, finally, where I will have to earn my keep, where I will have to kill, where I may be killed.”
“How do you feel about it?” Louise demanded.
“Frightened.”
“Why’re you so sure it will happen?”
Michael shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “A premonition. A mystic sense that justice must be done by me and to me. Ever since 1936, ever since Spain, I have felt that one day I would be asked to pay. I ducked it year after year, and every day that sense grew stronger; the payment would be demanded of me, without fail.”
“Do you think you’v
e paid yet?”
“A little,” Michael grinned. “The interest on the debt. The capital remains untouched. Some day they’re going to collect the capital from me, and not in the USO office, either.” They turned down into St. James’s Street, with the Palace looming dark and medieval at the other end, and the clock glistening palely, a soft gray blur, among the battlements.
“Maybe,” Louise said, smiling, in the darkness, “maybe you’re not the officer type, after all.”
“Maybe I’m not,” Michael agreed gravely.
“Still,” said Louise, “you could at least be a Sergeant.”
Michael laughed. “How the times have slid downhill,” he said. “Madam Pompadour in Paris gets a Marshal’s baton for her favorite. Louise M’Kimber slips into the King’s bed for three stripes for her PFC.”
“Don’t be ugly,” Louise said with dignity. “You’re not in Hollywood now.”
“Roll me over,” sang three young British sailors who swung abreast diagonally across the wide street, “in the clover, Lay me down, and do it again.”
“I was thinking about Dostoievski before I met you tonight,” Michael began.
“I hate cultured men,” said Louise firmly.
“In Dostoievski, who was it, Prince Mishkin, tried to marry a whore out of a sense of his own sin and his own guilt.”
“I only read the Daily Express,” said Louise.
“The times have grown less drastic,” Michael said. “I don’t marry anyone. I merely remain a private for my guilt. It’s not so hard. After all, there are eight million like me …”
“Oh, this is number four,” sang the sailors, swinging down toward the palace, “and she asked him for more, Oh, Roll me over and do it again.”
Michael and Louise turned down a side street, on which only one house had been bombed. The young voices, sweet and hoarse, despite their song, grew muffled and lonesome as the sailors wandered away.
The Canteen of the Allies, for all its imposing name, was merely three small basement rooms decked with dusty bunting, with a long plank nailed onto a couple of barrels that did service for a bar. In it, from time to time, you could get venison chops and Scotch salmon and cold beer from a tin washtub that the proprietress kept full of ice in deference to American tastes. The Frenchmen who came there could usually find a bottle of Algerian wine at legal prices. Almost everyone could get credit if he needed it, and a girl whether he needed it or not. Four or five hungry-eyed ladies, nearing middle age, whose husbands all seemed to be serving in Italy in the Eighth Army, ran the place on a haphazard voluntary basis, and it conveniently and illegally served liquor after the closing hour.
When Michael and Louise entered, someone was playing the piano in the back room. Two English Sergeant pilots were singing softly at the bar. An American WAC Corporal was being helped, drunk, to the bathroom. An American Lieutenant Colonel by the name of Pavone, who looked like a middle-aged burlesque comedian and who had been born in Brooklyn and had somehow run a circus in France in the 1930s, and had served in the French cavalry in the beginning of the war, and who continually smoked large expensive cigars, was making what sounded like a speech to four war correspondents at a large table. In a corner, almost unnoticed, a huge dark Frenchman, who, it was reputed, dropped by parachute into France two or three times a month for British Intelligence, was eating martini glasses, something he did when he got drunk and felt moody late at night. In the small kitchen off the back room, a tall, fat American Top Sergeant in the MP’s, who had taken the fancy of one of the ladies who ran the place, was frying himself a panful of fish. A two-handed poker game was being played at a small table near the kitchen between a correspondent and a twenty-three-year-old Air Forces Major who had just come back from bombing Kiel that afternoon, and Michael heard the Major say, “I raise you a hundred and fifty pounds.” Michael watched the Major gravely write out an IOU for a hundred and fifty pounds and put it in the middle of the table. “I see you and raise you a hundred and fifty,” said his opponent, who wore an American correspondent’s uniform, but who sounded like a Hungarian. Then he wrote out an IOU and dropped it on the small flimsy pile in the middle of the table.
“Two whiskeys, please,” said Michael to the British Lance Corporal who served behind the bar when he was in London on leave.
“No more whiskey, Colonel,” said the Lance Corporal, who had no teeth at all, and whose gums, Michael thought, must be in sad shape from British Army rations. “Sorry.”
“Two gins.”
The Lance Corporal, who wore a wide, spotted grayish apron over his heavy battledress, deftly and lovingly poured the two drinks.
From the piano in the other room, quivering male voices sang,
“My father’s a black market grocer,
My mother makes illegal gin,
My sister sells sin on the corner,
Kee-rist, how the money rolls in!”
Michael raised his glass to Louise. “Cheers,” he said. They drank.
“Six bob, Colonel,” said the Lance Corporal.
“Put it on the book,” said Michael. “I’m busted tonight. I expect a large draft from Australia. I have a kid brother who’s a Major there in the Air Forces, on flying pay and per diem.”
The Lance Corporal laboriously scratched Michael’s name down in a gravy-spotted ledger and opened two bottles of warm beer for the Sergeant pilots, who, attracted by the melody from the next room, drifted back that way, holding their glasses.
“I wish to address you in the name of General Charles de Gaulle,” said the Frenchman, who for the moment had given up chewing on martini glasses. “You will all kindly stand up for General Charles de Gaulle, leader of France and the French Army.”
Everyone stood up absently for the General of the French Army.
“My good friends,” said the Frenchman loudly and with a thick Russian accent, “I do not believe what the newspapers say. I hate newspapers and I hate all newspapermen.” He glared fiercely at the four correspondents around Colonel Pavone. “General Charles de Gaulle is a democrat and a man of honor.” He sat down and looked muddily at a half-chewed martini glass.
Everyone sat down again. From the back room, the voices of the RAF clattered into the bar. “There’s a Lancaster leaving the Ruhr,” they sang, “bound for old Blighty’s shore, heavily laden with terrified men, Shit-scared and prone on the floor …”
“Gentlemen,” said the proprietress. She had been asleep, on a chair along the wall, with her glasses hanging from one ear. She opened her eyes, grinned at the company, and said, pointing to the WAC, who was returning from the bathroom, “That woman has stolen my scarf.” Then she fell asleep again. In a moment, she was snoring loudly.
“What I like about this place,” Michael said, “is the atmosphere of sleepy old England that is so strong here. Cricket,” said Michael, “tea being served in the vicar’s garden, the music of Delius.”
“… oh, they’ve shot off my bollocks,” sang the RAF in the other room, “and screwed my hydraulics, Oh, Bless them, lads, bless them all …”
A stout Major General in Services of Supply, who had just arrived in England that afternoon from Washington, entered the bar. A large young woman with long teeth and a flowing black veil was on his arm. A drunken Captain with a large moustache followed him carefully.
“Ah,” the Major General said, heading straight for Louise, with a wide, warm smile on his face, “my dear Mrs. M’Kimber.” He kissed Louise. The woman with the long teeth smiled seductively at everyone. She had something wrong with her eyes, and she blinked them, quickly, again and again, all the time. Later on, Michael found out that her name was Kearney and that her husband had been a pilot in the RAF and had been shot down over London in 1941.
“General Rockland,” Louise said, “I want you to meet PFC Whitacre. He loves Generals.”
The General shook Michael’s hand heartily, nearly crushing it, and Michael was sure the General must have played football at West Point at one time. “Glad t
o meet you, Boy,” said the General. “I saw you at the party, sneaking out with this handsome young woman.”
“He insists on being a Private,” said Louise, smiling. “What can we do about it?”
“I hate professional Privates,” said the General and the Captain behind him nodded gravely.
“So do I,” said Michael. “I’d be delighted to be a Lieutenant.”
“I hate professional Lieutenants, too,” said the General.
“Very well, Sir,” said Michael. “If you wish, you can make me a Lieutenant Colonel.”
“Maybe I will,” said the General, “maybe I will. Jimmy, take that man’s name.”
The Captain who had come in with the General, fumbled through his pockets and took out a card advertising a private black-market taxi service. “Name, rank, and serial number,” he said automatically.
Michael gave him his name, rank and serial number and the Captain put the card back carefully in an inside pocket. He was wearing bright red suspenders, Michael saw, as the blouse flipped back.
The General had Louise over in a corner by now, pinned against the wall, his face close to hers. Michael started toward them, but the long-toothed girl stepped into his path, smiling softly and blinking. “My card,” she said. She handed Michael a small, stiff white card. Michael stared down at it. Mrs. Ottilie Munsell Kearney, he read, Regent 4027.
“I’m in every morning until eleven,” Mrs. Kearney said, smiling without ambiguity at him. Then she wheeled away, her veil blowing, and went from table to table, distributing cards.
Michael got another gin and went over to the table where Colonel Pavone was sitting with the correspondents, two of whom Michael knew.
“… after the war,” Pavone was saying, “France is going to go left, and there is nothing we can do about it and nothing England can do about it and nothing Russia can do about it. Sit down Whitacre, we have whiskey.”
Michael drained his glass, then sat down and watched one of the correspondents pour him four fingers of Scotch.
“I’m in Civil Affairs,” Pavone said, “and I don’t know where they’re going to send me. But I’ll tell you here and now, if they send me to France, it will be a big joke. The French have been governing themselves for a hundred and fifty years, and they’ll just laugh at any American who tells them even where to put the plumbing in the city hall.”