"I like slopies," Yale said drunkenly. "I love 'em all."
"Not me, kid," someone yelled at him. "Let them come and ask me for any contributions to China Relief, and I'll shove a pair of chopsticks up their ass. There's too fuckin' many of the yellow bastards, anyway."
Yale put his glass down on the bar. He walked out of the officers' club. What am I celebrating, he asked himself? What am I drinking a toast to? Insensibility? Insularity? Stupidity? He walked back to the barracks.
Tay Yang looked at him from her bunk. "Big noise. War all done. 'Ale go home? Me come."
He looked at her, startled. And Tay Yang? What about her?
During the next few days he explored dozens of plans with Stower. Stower suggested the Red Cross. Yale disagreed. Tay Yang was an orphan. She would end up in some crowded orphanage. "She's a very bright kid," Stower said. "But what can we do?"
Yale sighed. "I don't know. I wish I knew some family. I could give Tay Yang enough money. She needs a home with people who would like her."
"If we could get her to Calcutta," Stower said thoughtfully, "I know a British family. They have a couple of kids, but if Tay Yang arrived properly endowed . . . Well, they could use some additional money. He works for the British civil service."
Stower agreed to bum a ride to Calcutta, and sound out the Eltons, his British friends. While he was gone Yale made his last contact with General Sheng-Li. Although he was careful not to show his hand, Yale knew that it would be impossible for him to buy any more rupees. The volume of rupees he had already purchased precluded any further conversion into dollars.
General Sheng-Li beamed happily as he watched Yale counting blocks of hundred rupee notes. "You will have exactly one million and eighty thousand rupees, my friend. When you change them into dollars, you will have something over three hundred and thirty-four thousand dollars. You will be a very rich young man."
Yale packed the rupees into a small canvas bag. He tried to conceal his nervousness. He knew very well that if General Sheng-Li thought they had arrived at the final transaction the cat-and-mouse game would cease.
"Three hundred thousand dollars is nothing, General," Yale said, trying to exude confidence. "Not when I know you still have several million more rupees. Shall we meet again next week?"
The General, smiling, agreed.
On the drive back to Chengkung with his bag crammed with rupees beside him, Yale felt better. He had done it! He had more than a million rupees. And he had come through with a whole skin. He wondered what Anne would think of that.
But now the jig was up. If he tried to change the rupees into dollars, using his Finance Department account, he would exhaust more than half the base's monthly payroll in the conversion. If he went to the Theater Finance officer in Kunming and tried to convert them, he would invite immediate investigation. Even though his Army accounts were in perfect balance, they would certainly find some Army regulation that he had broken. The plain truth was that he was the owner of a million rupees which he couldn't convert to dollars until he got back to the United States. He grinned. He probably couldn't convert them even in good Old Uncle Sugar. In the States be might end up using them for wallpaper. It really didn't matter since he had no idea why he wanted three hundred thousand dollars, or a million rupees, anyway!
When he got back to Chengkung, Stower had returned from Calcutta. He was jubilant. "It's all set, Yale! I've even made arrangements to fly back to Calcutta with Tay Yang. They are delighted. Especially with the five-thousand-rupee a year present! Are you sure you have the money?"
Yale wondered what Stower would think if he knew that the small canvas bag that Yale was using for a foot rest contained a million rupees. He smiled and told Stower that the difficult problem was not the money, but how to convince Tay Yang that she couldn't stay with them any longer.
It took several nights to do it . . . to explain to Tay Yang that she was going to live in a very nice home with very nice people . . . far away across the mountains. She smiled at them, her eyes big and black in her creamy round face, and agreed enthusiastically. "Go far. Long way. 'Ale come. Captain come. Nice."
When they finally made her understand that she would not see Yale and Captain Stower for a long time -- neither of them had the heart to say never -- she became very quiet. Try as they would, neither Yale nor Stower could get another word out of her the remainder of the day except a resigned, "Tay Yang go far away. Aw-right. Okay."
Stower received his orders to return to the States before Yale. Within three weeks after the end of the war the base was being rapidly de-activated. Yale knew that very soon he would be re-assigned back to India. They agreed that when Stower left, he would take Tay Yang with him to Calcutta. Stower made arrangements with one of his pilot friends to smuggle her aboard a C-47 to Dum Dum airport in Calcutta. Neither he nor Yale had revealed to anyone that their "houseboy" was a girl.
The day before Stower's orders directed him to leave for Calcutta, Yale decided that they should give Tay Yang a going-away party. He and Stower took her into Kunming, and as she followed them bewildered from shop to shop, they bought her dresses, underclothes, stockings, and shoes; trying them on her for size, while she touched the materials, staring at them in awe, unable to believe they were for her. Yale bought her a watch, a pearl necklace, and a bracelet. Then he insisted on returning to some of the clothing shops they had already visited while he purchased additional dresses and stockings, to the delight of the Chinese shopkeepers. Stowers finally protested that he would be unable to lug all the stuff to Calcutta.
"When I arrive with all this junk they'll think Tay Yang is wealthy," Stower warned him. "This Elton family where she'll live hasn't much money."
That night they opened boxes of K rations. By candle-light in their room they had a farewell party. They helped Tay Yang dress in her new clothes. When Yale fastened the pearls around her neck she suddenly started to cry. They watched her, the candlelight shadows dancing on her face, a pink ribbon tied through her short black hair, and realized for the first time that Tay Yang was a very pretty young woman. At a loss for words, they didn't know how to console her. Yale told her that he would write to her. They wrote out their addresses and told her that she could write to them. All the time they talked Tay Yang just looked at them and said nothing, while tears streamed down her cheeks. They couldn't even be sure she understood them.
Both Stower and Yale agreed that they felt like heels. But there was nothing they could do. Again Yale wondered whether he and Stower had the right coolly to decide Tay Yang's future. He gave Stower fifty thousand rupees and told him that while he appreciated what the English family was doing he would prefer that Stower set up a simple trustee arrangement with some bank in Calcutta so that they would be sure that Tay Yang was supported until she married. Whatever was left could be a dowry.
When Stower wondered aloud whether she would meet any Chinese boys in India, Yale knew that he was really wondering whether they were doing the right thing in taking Tay Yang out of China. Would it be simple kindness in the long run to take her into Kunming, give her some money and say good-bye? Where should love for another individual cease? At what point did responsibility for your brother become a yoke around his neck?
Yale was even more doubtful when he took Tay Yang to the plane the next morning. She was dressed like a boy again in her blue denim coat and pants. Yale kissed her cheek. Several Chinese soldiers watched with interest as they boosted her through the cargo door. Stower stood beside her in the plane. She spoke rapidly in Chinese, and waved good-bye to Yale. One of the Chinese soldiers looked at Yale curiously, and laughed. Yale asked him what she had said.
"She?" the soldier asked bewildered. "Not boy? Girl?" Then his face broke into a grin. What he had heard finally made sense. "Oh. She say: 'Too bad you no marry her. Make fine wife.'"
PART THREE
Then if any device could be found how a state or an army could be made up only of lovers and beloved, they could not possibly find
a better way oj living, since they would abstain from all ugly things, and be ambitious in beautiful things toward each other; and in battle side by side, such troops although few would conquer pretty well all the world. -- PLATO Symposium
1
The shore route between Boston and Midhaven is about thirty miles shorter than the highway through Hartford, but in January it is not always the best way. One portion twists and turns through the Connecticut Hills as it follows the original dirt road trails of the early 1800's. After snowstorms it gets plowed carelessly.
When Yale left Boston he was so lost in thought that he was almost in Providence before he realized that he had planned to come back through Hartford. Now, he knew that he should have kept his mind on his driving. It had been snowing since early morning. The half hour radio forecasts warned of continuing snow, and perhaps the worst blizzard in ten years.
He grabbed the wheel a little tighter. The snow whipped across his windshield in such a fury that at times the road was almost completely obscured. The glare of lights from infrequent cars moving in the other direction created a momentary blindness that forced him several times to bring his Ford convertible almost to a stop.
When he had started for Boston early that morning he had ignored the storm warnings. Four months of hanging around after his discharge, trying to make up his mind what he wanted to do, had left him jittery and nervous.
It had been impossible to tell Liz and Pat that he was married. Not that they could have any real objection to Anne. But how could he tell them that he had no idea where his wife was. Pat would have looked on it as typically Yale. To get himself married -- to be in love with a girl who obviously didn't care about him. If Pat had known about the Hindu ceremony he would have been amazed at such romanticism. Yale could imagine what he would have said once he recovered from the shock. Something like: "Forget it, Yale. It was a wartime romance. There were thousands of them. You shacked up for a while with a dame. Lots of us did the same thing in 1917. You huddled in each other's warmth like frightened animals. Then the war was over and the need vanished."
Perhaps that was the truth. If it were, he didn't need Pat's counsel, whatever it might be. He could well imagine Pat's utter surprise and Liz's shock that he would consider a Hindu marriage inviolable. They would have simply considered it an insane thing to have done. Something he should forget as rapidly as possible . . . as Anne Wilson had obviously forgotten. An interlude, which in a few years would seem completely unreal to him; something one dreamed in the early morning hours vacillating between sleep and wakefulness.
And yet it wasn't the marriage ceremony that bound him to Anne. It had been the complete giving of himself, for the second time in his life, to a woman. It was as if, in the giving of his love and the acceptance of the love of both Cynthia and Anne, he had lost a part of himself, irretrievably. In a true love union of a man and woman there was the usurping of each other's personality. What was a man, anyway, but the sum of his experiences? What more significant experience could man have than the act of love?
Or was that an intellectualized concept . . . strictly his own? Had he expected from Anne's love, as he had from Cynthia's, an emotional sharing of personality beyond her wish or desire to accept? Was the simple act of rutting the deepest relationship a man or woman could have? Didn't the individual ego rebel at a merging of personality? Most people in love maintained a distance. Most marriages were but a sharing of thousands of superficial relationships.
Yale had pondered these questions every day since he had come home. He compared himself to Swann in Proust's novel. He wondered if the same quirk of personality obsessed him. To be forever in love with a woman who didn't love you. A strange futility. Better to take a mechanistic view of the man-woman relationship. A view uncluttered by romantic notions. Something necessary but not essential in the life of a man. A piece of ass, a fuck, a life urge without reason.
But then he would remember Anne, and the quiet of an Indian night punctuated by the distant yelping of jackals. And the gradual penetration of her body as she undulated her hips toward him, whispering, ". . . I am you. . . ." The Brahmin chant of merger with God. A geometric progression of men and women everywhere embracing each other while the ceaseless flow of life whispered back, ". . . I am you. . . ." Until the sum total of all lives, all life . . . was the one Nirvana.
A few days after he had returned to the States Yale started an extensive search for Anne that had led him nowhere. He hired a detective who four months later was still assuring him that they would locate her. Twice, Harrigan had turned up what he called "hot leads." The first was the Red Cross director who had known Anne in Paris. Yale went to New York to talk with him.
"She came to me in August. She said her husband was in China," the Field Director told him. "She seemed a little distraught, as I remember. Said she had to go home. She wanted a transfer Stateside because her father was ill. I didn't question her. I knew from her records that she had no living family. Her husband was killed in the Pacific, you know. I suspected that she must have been having a pretty hot affair. A friend in Talibazar wrote and told me about your Hindu wedding. . . ." The Field Director smirked unpleasantly, implying that he felt a Hindu marriage ceremony for two Christians was peculiar to say the least. "Anyway, the simple solution was not to argue with her. We sent her home. The records show that she was at a canteen in Philadelphia until last September. After that she left the Red Cross."
The Field Director knew nothing else.
A few weeks later Harrigan located a girl who had worked at the Red Cross in Philadelphia and remembered Anne. All that she could offer was that Anne was a strange person. "She kept to herself. Several of us guessed that she was pregnant. But no one knew for sure. One day she was just gone. . . ."
Yale was shocked. Could Anne have been pregnant? If she were, why hadn't she contacted him? She knew where he lived. He had told her about the Marratt Corporation. The truth must be that Anne didn't want to find him. In India she had doubted that he really loved her. Now, she must be simply giving him the easy way out. Anne had left him because he had failed her, Yale thought bitterly . . . failed her the same way he had failed Cynthia.
The car radio interrupted his thoughts with further predictions on the intensity of the storm together with warnings to stay off the highways. Gusts of wind whipped the car. The canvas top flapped alarmingly against the metal supports. On curves he could feel the tires slurch. Fifty-five miles to go before he would be back in Midhaven.
For the next six weeks he would have the house to himself. When Pat had announced that he and Liz were going to Florida through April, Yale had tried to conceal his elation. At least he would have time to think and decide what he was going to do without the constant nagging that had been going on for the past few weeks. Pat and Liz had left two days ago. Yale grimaced, remembering the days before they had left. There had been one long round of squirming to avoid a showdown. Every night Pat had made Yale's attitude the subject of dinner discussions.
"I frankly don't know what the hell is the matter with you, Yale. You act as if you were in the middle of combat. Do you need psychiatric reorientation? All this crap about the serviceman readjusting leaves me cold. All you have to do is to dig into some project. Get your teeth into reality. The war is over. There's money to be made.
"When you first got home I had high hopes for you. You looked good. Mature. I hoped that after a couple of weeks of hanging around, you would come down to the plant. There's a new office waiting for you, boy. Your name is on the door. The Marratt Corporation is in great shape. We've ridden this thing out with the biggest contracts in the history of the company. I predict that the post-war boom will exceed anything yet. . . ." Pat chomped on his cigar. "You've been home nearly two months and you've been flopping around like a chicken with its head cut off. I'm pretty damned disappointed. What's eating you?"
Yale hadn't answered.
The next night Pat tried a different approach. He told Yale that
his Army pay wouldn't last forever. He reminded Yale of the check for ten thousand dollars that he had given him. "I wasn't kidding you when I told you that was the end of the road," he said. "You can earn your own money from now on."
Yale wondered how he would be able to tell Pat that he wasn't going to work at the Marratt plant, that under no circumstances was he going to be involved with day-to-day dealings with his father. He was convinced that the personality clash would be violent and disruptive. He simply wasn't going to live a life dominated by his father. If he gave in and be couldn't find Anne, he would eventually get involved in a routine marriage into one of Midhaven's better families, to some girl, approved by Pat and Liz, who was adjusted to the suburban golf, yacht-club, cocktail, merry-go-round. It was impossible for him to adjust to that kind of middle-class world and conform to its ingrown mores.
For him it was a "crock of shit" -- "shit for the birds." Yale grinned as he recalled the Army expressions. He imagined Pat's disgust had he used them. They were immature. He knew that. But in their inanity they summed up the confused ideas beleaguering him.
Liz had misinterpreted his vacant grin. "It's nice to see you smile, Yale. Why don't we have Yale come to Florida with us for a few weeks?" she had asked Pat. "After being in India and China this New England weather has probably got him down. It begins to get me at this time of year. You'd meet some nice girls, Yale," Liz said enthusiastically. "Pat could rent you a car. You could be on your own." Liz continued with a discussion of how nice it would be to have Yale in Miami with them.
The Rebellion of Yale Marratt Page 41