“I’m sorry, Mother,” he said when she told him she’d planned a cocktail party in his honor on Sunday, “I should have said something sooner. But I won’t be here over the weekend.”
“But the invitations have already gone out—”
“I’m going to Memphis tomorrow,” he said firmly. “For a couple of days. Navy business. I called the airfield. They have planes running to the Memphis NAS, and I can catch a ride on one.”
“Whatever do you want to go to Memphis for?” his mother asked.
The reason he wanted to go to Memphis was to see if the little girl who had been so passionate in bed at the Chambers’ vacation home in Alabama would give him the same kind of welcome she had given him before he went away, but he could hardly say that to his mother.
“Navy business,” he said again. “The Navy has a large air station at Memphis. I thought you knew.”
“No,” she said unhappily. “And I don’t see why the Navy’s making you go all the way to Memphis,” his mother said. “With your knee in the shape it is.”
Having me as a naval hero, he thought, a little unkindly, works both ways.
“Mother,” Bitter said. “I’m a naval officer. The country is at war.”
She swallowed that whole.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “Your duty comes first. I was only thinking of your well-being.”
At Glenview Naval Air Station, he was given space aboard a Navy R4-D bound for the Memphis NAS.
At Memphis, when he asked in base operations where he could find a cab, the aerodrome officer took a quick look at the cane and the AVG wings and announced: “We have cars for people like you, Commander. Welcome home, Sir!”
It probably is unfitting and childish of me, Ed Bitter thought, but under circumstances like these, there is much to be said for being a hero returned from the wars.
He had the driver take him to the Peabody Hotel rather than to the newspaper. He didn’t really want to see Ann Chambers. He wanted to see Sarah Child and get her off somewhere before Ann could guess his intentions and throw up obstacles. With a little bit of luck, Sarah Child would be alone at the Peabody.
He drew a blank with the hotel operator when he asked for Miss Child, but when he asked for Miss Chambers, she said, “Oh, you meant Mrs. Schild. I’ll ring.”
Who the hell is Mrs. Schild?
“Hello?”
He recognized Sarah’s voice, and his heart jumped.
“Hello yourself, pen pal,” he said. There was silence on the line for a long moment. “Sarah? That is you, isn’t it?”
“Where are you, Ed?” Sarah asked, calmly, distantly.
“In the lobby.”
My return, he thought, has not sent the lady into paroxysms of ecstasy.
“Give me fifteen minutes, Ed,” Sarah said. “Make it twenty.”
“And then what?”
“And then come up.”
“Caught you in the shower, did I?”
Maybe I am getting lucky!
“Twenty minutes,” she replied, and hung up.
He went into the bar and had a Scotch, and then another. There were a number of possibilities. She could have been in the shower, or had her face covered with mud, or any of the other things that females did to achieve beauty. Or she could have some guy up there. If she had a guy up there, a likely prospect considering her hot pants, she would either have to get rid of him or explain me to him.
It was a dumb idea coming here in the first place. I should have left things as they were. Pen pals, nothing more.
He waited precisely twenty minutes from the time he had spoken with her on the house phone and then walked across the lobby to the elevators.
He had just given the floor to the operator when he heard a familiar female voice shout, “Hold that car!”
It was Ann Chambers.
That’s why Sarah had needed twenty minutes. To summon Ann. Sarah was afraid that I would open the door, carry her to the bedroom, tear off her clothes, and rape her.
“If you say ‘Hello, Ann,’” Ann said, “I will say, ‘Hi, there, Cousin Edwin. How’s tricks?’”
“She called you, right?” Ed Bitter snapped.
“Right.”
“What the hell for?”
“I don’t really know,” Ann said. “Did Dick Canidy get home yet?”
A year before, when both Ed Bitter and Dick Canidy were flying instructors—and roommates—at the Navy base in Pensacola, Florida, Ed had brought Dick to The Plantation in Alabama. The Plantation was an antebellum mansion and several hundred thousand acres of pine trees her father, Ed’s uncle, hoped one day to turn into newsprint.
Dick Canidy looked like the answer to a maiden’s prayer in his white Navy uniform with the gold wings of a Naval Aviator pinned to his manly breast, and she would have cheerfully given him her pearl of great price right there on the carpet in the library of The Plantation had he asked for it. Or shown a slight interest in it.
But he hadn’t. He had made it perfectly clear that he regarded her as a college girl, beneath his consideration, and a relative of Eddie to boot. But an hour after Ann Chambers had first set eyes on Dick Canidy, she had decided that didn’t matter. She was going to marry him.
His disinterest in her hadn’t changed that decision, only made her realize that the way to capture this man was not to stare soulfully at him and wiggle her tail. She would have been perfectly willing to do that, too, but that wasn’t going to work. The way to catch this man was, she knew, to become his pal, his friend, a buddy in skirts. The birds-and-the-bees business would come later. She barely managed to start this, by talking flying with him—she had her commercial single-engine license, an Instrument rating, and 520 hours in her father’s stagger-wing Beechcraft—asking intelligent questions, putting him at ease, when Dick and Ed set off for China to save the world for democracy.
That had reduced her campaign to letter writing. Funny letters, the envelopes containing more clippings she thought would interest him than text. But she did just happen to mention that she had quit college and was working for the Memphis Advocate and hoped to get overseas as a correspondent. He had responded as a pal. Without even mentioning what he was doing in the war, he wrote about China and about the problems of navigation where there were no navigation aids and about how difficult it had been to reassemble crated airplanes with a Chinese workforce.
And then the letters had stopped. She had no idea why, but there was a chance that Ed Bitter knew something she didn’t.
“Why do you ask about him?” Ed Bitter replied as the elevator doors closed. And then he remembered that Ann had had a schoolgirl crush on Dick Canidy.
“Yes or no,” she said. “Simple question, simple answer.”
“He’s been home for some time,” he said.
The way he said that alarmed her. It was evident in her voice. “He’s been hurt?”
“No,” he said. “He has not been hurt.”
“Then what?”
“He was sent home months ago,” Ed said.
“Why?”
“Is that important?”
“It wouldn’t be if you weren’t reluctant to tell me.”
“If you have to know,” Ed said, “he was relieved.”
“What does that mean?” Ann asked.
“He was—discharged—from the AVG,” Bitter said. “Under not quite honorable circumstances.”
“What, exactly, were those ‘not quite honorable circumstances’?” Ann demanded.
“It was alleged that he refused to engage the enemy.”
She looked at him intently and saw that he was telling her the truth.
“He must have had his reasons,” she said loyally. “Where is he?”
“I have no idea,” Ed said. “Under the circumstances, I don’t think he wants to see me. Or, for that matter, you.”
“I would like to hear his side,” Ann said.
“I really don’t know where he is, Ann,” Ed Bitter said.
&nb
sp; “My advice is to leave it that way.”
The elevator was by then at the eighth floor. The operator opened the door and they stepped into a corridor. He followed Ann down the corridor. She stopped before a door, took a key from her pocket and unlocked it, and stepped inside.
She waved for him to follow her inside. There was a sitting room, with doors opening off either side.
“Sarah!” Ann called.
A door opened. And Sarah stood framed in it—with an infant in her arms. She looked at Ed Bitter and then away. Ann went to her and took the child.
What the hell is all this?
“Don’t tell me that’s yours,” he said to Ann.
“Okay. I won’t tell you it’s mine,” Ann said agreeably. “It’s not mine. It’s yours.”
She walked to him and abruptly handed him the infant.
“He’s mine,” Sarah said. “You’re the father, but you don’t have to think of him as yours unless you want to.”
“I don’t believe this,” Ed Bitter said.
“Scout’s honor, Cousin Edwin,” Ann said. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“I’m glad you’re home safe, Ed,” Sarah said.
“Goddamn it, don’t get off the subject!” he said. “Why wasn’t I told?”
“Theoretically,” Ann said, “because you were off saving the world for democracy, and she didn’t want to trouble you. Actually, because she was afraid of what you would do when you found out.”
“Ann!” Sarah said.
“Jesus Christ!” Bitter said.
“So now that you know, Ed,” Ann pursued, “what are you going to do about him?”
“Ann!” Sarah said again.
Ed Bitter looked down at the child in his arms. He felt no emotion whatsoever.
This boy is unquestionably my child, if for no other reason than that a practical joke of this magnitude is beyond even Ann. And if it is my child, I certainly will have to do the decent thing: Recognize it, legitimatize it, marry the mother, give it and her my name.
He looked at Sarah. She was staring out a window.
He looked down at the child again. He had no sense of recognition, he thought, no animal sensing that this was the fruit of his loins. It was simply a baby, indistinguishable from dozens he had held as reluctantly as he held this one.
“If I seem somewhat stunned by all this,” he said, “I am. I came here with the intention of rushing Sarah into becoming engaged before my leave was up.”
“You took your sweet time getting to Memphis, Romeo,” Ann said.
“And now,” he said, ignoring the remark, “it would seem that it is not a question of whether she’ll marry me, but how soon.”
“You don’t have to marry me,” Sarah said, not meaning it.
“I love you, Sarah,” he said, surprised at how easy the words, the lie, came to his lips. “And we owe it to Whatsisname here, don’t you think?”
Ann laughed. “Give me Whatsisname,” she said. “And I’ll take him for a walk.”
“No,” Bitter said. “You take a walk, Ann. But leave him here. I want to get to know him.”
Ann looked at the two of them and left, saying nothing.
Sarah finally turned to him.
He looked gaunt, she thought, but even more handsome than the first time she had seen him. She was reacting to him now as she had reacted to him then. Except now she understood what that reaction was. He was more than the most handsome man she had ever seen, he was the sexiest. Perhaps that was really what handsome meant.
She wanted very much to rush to him, to put her arms around him, to feel his body against hers. But that, she sensed, was not what she should do right now. There had been shock in his eyes when he looked at her, maybe even fear. Certainly not lust.
“How’s your friend Canidy?” Sarah asked. “Ann hasn’t heard from him in a long time, months.”
“To hell with Canidy,” he snapped. “Let’s talk about this.” He raised the baby in his arms.
“He’s very healthy,” Sarah said. “And most of the time very happy.”
“He looks like you,” Bitter said.
“Too early to tell,” she said. “You like him?”
“I like him,” he said, and looked at her and smiled happily.
I’ll be damned if that isn’t true!
“I’m glad,” she said. She smiled back. It was the first time she had smiled since he had arrived.
“Me, too,” he said. “Glad, I mean. Happy. Stunned, but happy and glad.”
“It wasn’t what you expected, was it?”
“I came with evil designs on your body,” he said.
Sarah met his eyes.
He means that. He came hoping for a quick piece of ass, and was instead presented with his child. But that is not important. I am not offended, or hurt. He didn’t know, and he came. That is enough.
“He’s usually sound asleep at half past five,” she said. “And he sleeps like a log until it’s time to feed him again.”
He was strangely excited. He recognized it as sexual excitement.
What the hell. What’s wrong with that?
“We’ll have to get rid of Ann,” he said.
“If she can’t hear the baby cry, she couldn’t hear us,” Sarah said.
She saw the surprise on his face and added: “I’ve been thinking about you that way, too. Does that shock you?”
“I don’t think anything will ever shock me again,” Bitter said.
Lieutenant Commander Edwin H. Bitter, USN, and Miss Sarah Child were united in matrimony seventy-two hours after he learned that he was a father.
There were two ceremonies, the first in the chambers of Judge Braxton Fogg of the U.S. Circuit Court for the Tennessee District. Before going on the bench, Judge Fogg had represented the Chandler H. Bitter Company, Commodities Brokers, in Memphis and become a close friend of Chandler H. Bitter.
Judge Fogg was pleased to be able to be of service, and between Judge Fogg and Miss Ann Chambers it was arranged to keep the news of the wedding from being released to—more important, published in—the Memphis Advocate, or any other newspaper.
Both the father of the groom and Joseph Schild, the father of the bride, agreed that the important thing was that Ed had come home alive to assume—if a little late—his role as husband and father. The story, it was agreed between them, to be given out was that Sarah and Ed had been secretly married before Ed had gone off to the Flying Tigers.
It would have been better if Sarah had been willing to divulge the name of the father before now, so that story could have been circulated earlier, but there was nothing that could be done about that now.
Mr. Schild confided in Mr. and Mrs. Bitter the unfortunate reaction his wife had had upon learning that her only daughter was pregnant, and told them that she was again in the Institute of Living in Hartford. He was of course desperate to do anything that might help her.
Could Chandler Bitter and his wife possibly see their way clear to participating in a Hebrew wedding ceremony, photographs of which would be taken and shown to Mrs. Schild? Together with photographs of the married couple with their child?
A second wedding ceremony was performed by Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum in Memphis’s Congregation Beth Sholom. Wearing hastily rented formal clothing, Mr. Schild gave his bride to marriage to Commander Bitter, whose father served as his best man. Miss Ann Chambers served both as bridesmaid and supervisor of wedding photography.
It was the first time Commander Bitter, his parents, or Miss Chambers had ever been in a Hebrew place of worship.
2
HANGAR 17
NEWARK AIRPORT
NEWARK, NEW JERSEY
JUNE 25, 1942
Dick Canidy was standing in the fuselage of a Curtiss Wright CW-20 airplane (military designation C-46 Commando) wearing oil-stained mechanic’s coveralls. He had come up to Newark from Summer Place in Deal on a New Jersey Central Railroad commuter train in a business suit, taken a Public Service bus to th
e airport, walked to Hangar 17, and changed into the coveralls. He had made the same trip every day for the past four days.
Two men, also wearing grease-stained overalls, were with him inside the cavernous main compartment of the C- 46—there was room, in addition to general cargo, for 40 fully equipped troops, or 33 stretchers, or five Wright R- 3350 engines, or their equivalent weight of other goods. One of them was an airframe mechanic on loan from Pan American Airways, and the other was Colonel Charles Augustus “Lucky Lindy” Lindbergh, U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve, Inactive, the first man to have flown solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
Lindbergh and the airframe mechanic were trying to come up with a simple, reliable means of augmenting the C- 46’s fuel-carrying capacity with auxiliary tanks that could be jettisoned in the air. The normal range of the C-46— 1,170 miles at 180 knots—was not going to be enough for the mission planned.
Canidy no longer felt as awed as he had been initially in the very presence of Lindbergh. For one thing, Lindbergh didn’t act like a colonel, much less like one of the most famous and admired men in the world. The lanky aviator Lindbergh had made it almost immediately plain that since Canidy was another flier, he was thus a brother.
He had then proved, in a number of small ways, that he meant what he said. Canidy had shared a dozen cold and soggy hot dogs with the tall, shy hero. Twice, wearing Pan American coveralls, Lindbergh had walked the half mile to the terminal to buy them himself. He had not been recognized. He looked like just one more airplane mechanic trying to fix a broken bird.
That was not to say that Canidy had grown entirely comfortable around Lindbergh. He hadn’t been sure what to call him, for one thing. He certainly couldn’t call him Slim, and—considering President Roosevelt’s refusal to call Colonel Lindbergh to active duty—he wasn’t sure how Lindbergh would react to being called Colonel.
Finally, toward the end of their first day together, he had gathered his courage and asked him what he would like to be called.
“How about Slim?” Lindbergh said.
The Secret Warriors Page 12