by Andre Dubus
‘Langley,’ Ellen said.
She knew them all. Joe had their photographs on the bulkhead in his office and each time a new man reported in, he brought the photograph home and showed it to her. When he had brought Langley’s picture home she had studied it for a long while, speaking his name aloud, and thinking of lanky, because Joe said he was. A week later he was a gate sentry and as Ellen stopped the car she had rolled her window down; when he saluted she had smiled and said: Good afternoon, Langley. He had never seen her before, but he knew the Major’s car, and for a moment after his salute they had grinned at each other, proudly.
‘He’s darling,’ Becky said.
The fresh log was burning now and its warmth reached Ellen’s face.
‘He didn’t salute when I drove through,’ Pete said.
‘He didn’t?’ Ellen said. ‘Did you tell Joe?’
‘Oh, he’s teasing. It was the sharpest salute he’s had in weeks.’
‘They’re all sharp,’ Pete said. ‘I wish the Navy was like that.’
Becky brought an ash tray to Ellen. As she leaned over to place it on the arm of the chair, Ellen looked closely at her face. Then she glanced at Pete, who was talking about the old Navy when sailors had discipline. She was thinking that pilots’ wives were a little better off—in the matter of aging anyway. Becky looked a year or two older than Pete, but at least they both appeared near middleage. Perhaps because of jet-flying, pilots aged nearly as quickly as their wives.
But not infantry officers: during peacetime Joe’s work was almost relaxing, or Ellen thought so. He was outdoors more often than not—hiking, climbing hills, running—and his trouser size had increased only one inch since their wedding, while she had gone from size ten to twelve. Even at Whidbey Island, where he commanded a security barracks and his troops did little more than stand guard, Joe exercised daily: handball or running at noon. During his tours of infantry duty he went to the field for days or weeks and came back looking relaxed and sunburned, to tell her funny stories: a lieutenant who got lost, a king snake in the chaplain’s sleeping bag…
To occupy herself during their separations, and also because it was expected of her, she was active in wives’ clubs. At Whidbey Island she was their president, a good one and proud of it; she felt that she was like Joe: the senior Marine at a Naval air station, and she had impressed the rival service. At the Armed Forces Day cocktail party, she had invited the Admiral’s wife to go riding with her. But it won’t be much of a ride, she had said, because all the horses are nags. Then she had talked about that for ten minutes. Three weeks later there was a new petty officer in charge of the stables and the Admiral had appointed a full commander to buy horses. Through the Special Services Officer, Ellen had arranged for a ladies’ night at the hobby shop on Tuesdays and the indoor swimming pool, which had been used solely for water survival training, on Thursdays, so that wives of deployed pilots could make pottery, and swim. She felt a special pity for pilots’ wives. Their husbands were gone for seven months each year, flying from carriers in the Western Pacific. They flew A3D’s and it was rare when a year passed without at least one wife attending a corpseless memorial service.
Flames from the big log were reaching the chimney now, and Ellen leaned back in her chair, moving her face from the heat. Her legs were comfortably hot. Pete rose to mix another drink, but Ellen told him she had to leave.
‘I’ve had a break,’ she said. ‘Now I can go back and be a Marine again.’
By the time she reached the sidewalk in front of the Crawfords’ house, she was cold. The wind was stronger and she blinked and wiped her eyes. Across the island, on the west side, she could hear A3D’s taking off and climbing into the wet black sky.
The next day, Christmas Eve, Ellen baked large cookies. She also stuffed and roasted their turkey, for she was having Christmas dinner that night, so it wouldn’t interfere with the open house. Pete and Becky were coming to dinner.
She didn’t mind the work. Having the open house was her idea, because they had never had one for Joe’s troops, at any duty station, and she told him this was their last chance. He would be a lieutenant-colonel soon, his next command a battalion. Then, except for a few Staff NCOs and clerks at battalion headquarters, she wouldn’t know the names and faces of his troops anymore. So she had planned the Christmas open house, and Joe had placed a handwritten invitation on the bulletin board at the barracks. He had told his Staff NCOs and two officers that no Marine would be forced to attend.
Christmas Eve morning, Ellen was up at five. Hers was the only lighted house among the officers’ quarters; from her living room window she could see the red light of the radar tower at the Seaplane Base; out her kitchen window, which faced the water, there was only darkness. She was outside in the cold fog getting kindling and two logs when she heard six-thirty reveille being sounded for the sailors in the squadrons’ barracks a mile away. By the time her neighbors’ lights went on, she was giddy from coffee and cigarettes on an empty stomach, the kitchen and living room smelled of freshly-baked cookies and wood smoke, and one countertop was filled with platters of cookies. Shortly after eight o’clock, she looked out the kitchen window at the grey choppy water and a crash boat moving slowly through the fog, clearing the seaplane lanes of driftwood; by then she had baked three hundred and fifty cookies.
She was only beginning. Posy helped her and they were in the kitchen all day, making sandwiches and stuffing the turkey. The fog never lifted and Posy kept adding wood to the fire. At four o’clock there were three hundred sandwiches and a thousand cookies; then Ellen put the turkey in the oven and Posy delivered platters of sandwiches to twelve neighbors who would store them in refrigerators. Just before Joe came home, Ellen made up her face and combed her hair; when he entered the house, unbuttoning his green raincoat, she said:
‘You’d better get some more rum.’
‘There’s plenty.’
‘You know these Marines, Joe.’
He started to object, but then he smiled and said all right, and went out into the fog again.
The Crawfords arrived for dinner at eight, and they drank with Joe in the living room, the three of them gathered at the fireplace, while Ellen had her drink in the kitchen. Becky offered to help but Ellen said no, it was all done and there wasn’t room for two in the kitchen anyway. She put her drink down among the dishes on the countertop and then forgot it; when she noticed it again, Joe was mixing second drinks for the Crawfords and himself and she gave him her glass and told him to stiffen it. Once she had two cigarettes burning in different ash trays.
She lighted two candles on the table and said: Let’s eat the bird. They filed past the counter separating kitchen from dinette and served themselves turkey and dressing, peas and creamed cauliflower, rolls and jello salad. Joe went around the table, pouring the first glasses of wine; he gave wine to Posy and Ronnie too. Ellen served herself last and sat down. Then she found that she wasn’t hungry. All day she had nibbled, eating cookies and small sandwiches as unconsciously as she had lighted thirty or more cigarettes. For the past hour she had tasted the dinner. So she took only a few bites of everything and drank a lot of wine and before dessert she was tight: not cheerfully, though, but tired and foggy. She drank three cups of coffee while Joe and the Crawfords started on the second bottle of wine and their voices grew louder. Then Joe was telling her that he would fly to southern California next week, to buy uniforms from the tailor shop at Camp Pendleton.
‘Who’s flying you?’ she said.
‘Larry Sievers. In an A3D.’
‘Why one of those? They won’t let you aboard anyway, will they?’
‘We’ll run him through the pressure chamber,’ Pete said.
‘Oh. Why don’t you just go down on a prop plane?’
‘I’ve never been in one of the big birds before.’
There was no argument to that. It had been his reason too often: for going to a three week Army Jungle Warfare school, returning to tell her of eat
ing monkeys; going to a mountain leadership course in the Sierras, where he learned to rapelle from cliffs; and, also in the Sierras, a survival school where he was interrogated and thrown into a cold mountain stream and kept for hours in a wooden box and finally was left in the field for three days with only a knife and no food.
‘Well, if you’re going down where all the sunshine is, you’d better bring me a nice present. I rate it—’ she looked at Becky ‘—since you’re making me a pilot’s wife. Pilots always bring back nice things from their deployments.’
The lines deepened and spread in Becky’s face as she smiled at Ellen. But Ellen looked down, into her coffee cup, then she drained it and poured herself a glass of wine. She was remembering an afternoon last winter when Pete had been deployed on a carrier; there was a light, cold rain, blown almost horizontally from the sea. Driving past the golf course, Ellen had seen a solitary player, clothed in what appeared to be a wool jacket and ski pants and, over them, a hooded plastic suit. Then she recognized Becky and sounded the horn and Becky turned: the golf bag hanging from one shoulder—the earth was too soaked for carts—an iron in her left hand, and the right arm lifted in a cheerful wave.
‘Joe, don’t we have some brandy?’
‘Sure. Becky? Pete?’
The men took their brandy to the living room. Posy and Becky cleared the table and scraped plates, while Ellen put Ronnie to bed.
‘I want to put up the tree,’ he said when she had him covered.
‘You had three glasses of wine, corporal. You’d be drunk on duty.’
When she got back to the kitchen, Posy had filled the dishwasher and turned it on.
‘The pots wouldn’t go in,’ she said.
Ellen kissed her.
‘Thank you, baby. We can do them while Daddy puts up the tree.’
She took her brandy to the living room, where Pete was standing with his back to the fire and saying: ‘We had a good summer last year, but I missed it: I had the duty that day.’
Ellen chuckled. It was an old island joke, but like all good jokes it was true and you either had to laugh or curse. She was feeling better now that her work was nearly done, and she was going to tease Joe again about his three day deployment to California; but with her mouth open to speak, she looked at Becky and said:
‘It’s good brandy.’
You could never tell. Navy wives often talked of deployments, but Becky rarely did. Ellen recalled a wives’ bridge party at the Officers’ Club at Camp Pendleton during the Korean War: at one table a major’s wife was talking loudly about the Chosin Reservoir. They’re cut off and outnumbered, she had said, but by God you wait and see. They’ll make it to the beach. Until finally a young girl, probably a lieutenant’s wife, threw down her cards and rose suddenly, her chair overturning, and cried: Shut up! Shut up, you hard-nosed bitch! She had left the Club then, walking quickly past the quiet staring tables of foursomes. Ellen had tried to catch up with her in the parking lot, but she hurried away: an unknown girl whom Ellen never saw again and never forgot.
Deployments weren’t that bad, no one was being shot at, but you couldn’t really tell what was bad. When Joe returned from Korea, Ellen had thought if he could finish his career without ever going to war again, she could bear anything. But three years ago he had gone to Okinawa with an infantry battalion for thirteen months and, after a while, that separation was no better than the first. Again, though her mother invited her to Sacramento, she had stayed at Camp Pendleton with the other battalion wives. They did Navy Relief work, interviewing Marines who needed money, recommending loans or grants. At bridge tables their conversations finally came to sex; sometimes they jokingly alluded to their husbands’ probable infidelities, but they grinned with only their lips. Once at a luncheon a captain’s wife finished her second martini then looked around the table and said GodDAMN, I’m horny, and they all laughed, their raised glasses tilting and dripping.
Maybe it didn’t really matter whether your husband was being shot at, or was flying jet bombers in peacetime, or was merely being tempted by Okinawan whores. Maybe, at the heart of it, it was simply that he was gone; and when a man is gone he might not come back. Even when he does, nothing can replenish the four hundred days you spent without him. So, glancing at Becky, she did not mention planes or separations.
When the Crawfords left they all stood under the mistletoe and kissed. Joe put his arm around her waist, and she drew in her stomach muscles, and they stood in the open doorway until the Crawfords had walked out of sight. Ellen shivered. Joe closed the door, then put a log on the fire and went to the kitchen to mix Old Fashioneds. Ellen went to the bedroom for her diaphragm. The children were asleep; she went to the couch in the living room, and waited for Joe.
BY CHRISTMAS morning the fog was gone. They were awake at six, bringing Posy and Ronnie to the living room where the gifts were laid out. Posy no longer believed in Santa Claus but, for Ronnie, she pretended; while he was trying to play with all his toys at once, she quietly kissed Joe and Ellen. At precisely seven o’clock, as she had planned, Ellen served breakfast.
All morning the sky was grey. The water was grey too, and choppy, and the visible portion of beach was covered with grey and brown driftwood. At mid-morning Posy went to the neighbors’ and brought back the sandwiches. Joe was outside with Ronnie, teaching him to ride his new bicycle. Ellen had thought he was too young, but Joe said there were five-year-old kids riding bikes all over the neighborhood. When Posy came back with the twelfth and last platter of sandwiches, Ellen took the movie camera outside. She told Posy to come get in the pictures but Posy, whose face was red and eyes watering, wanted to stay by the fire.
From a distance of perhaps a hundred feet, Ellen focused on Joe and Ronnie: they were approaching her, Joe running alongside the bicycle, holding the seat. Then he let go. Ellen got that in the picture too: held the camera on him as he called softly: Keep steering, Son, keep steering—
She turned quickly to Ronnie. The front wheel was veering from left to right, his pedalling was slowing, and finally the bicycle leaned to one side and he went with it: falling on his shoulder, lying for only an instant on the hard earth, the dead grass, then rising again. Ellen moved in for a close-up of his face: hurt and determined, he looked at the camera as if he were about to curse, then he turned away and, grabbing the handlebars, jerked the bicycle upright. Ellen went back into the house. By noon, Ronnie was beginning to ride.
The open house was to begin at two o’clock. At one-thirty Joe put on his blues and she fastened the high collar for him and, with masking tape, removed lint from his blouse. She changed clothes, then took moving pictures of the table: silver punch bowl and silver platters of sandwiches and cookies. She swung the camera toward the living room, pausing on the fireplace, the hors d’oeuvres on the coffee table, and Joe, who was sitting in his easy chair. She went to the kitchen and, smiling at herself, focused the camera on the clean stove, bare of pots; the empty sink; the countertops which she had cleared and sponged; and the deck. Then she went to the living room and waited.
She didn’t wait long. At exactly two o’clock Captain Jack Flaherty arrived, wearing a suit and tie. He was a bachelor. Then Lieutenant Ed Williams came, with his wife Katie. He was slim and boyish and wore civilian clothes; he looked afraid when he saw Joe in blues. Then he came into the living room and saw Jack in the dark suit and tie, and his relief was so apparent that Ellen almost laughed aloud. Katie was a pretty brunette with rather dark skin and faintly rouged cheeks; she began talking as soon as she entered the front door, but by the time she was settled on the couch with a glass of punch, she was quiet. Ed had done more preparation: he didn’t run out of conversation until at least five minutes had gone by. Then he was finished. He looked around the room and said, very quietly to Katie, that it was a nice house. She nodded and asked for a cigarette. They had a friendly low-voiced argument about who was smoking more. Then Katie noticed that the others were listening and she blushed and said: ‘He smok
es more than I do.’
‘He drinks more too,’ Ellen said. ‘He needs a refill.’ She got up and took his glass to the punch bowl. Then First Sergeant Rosener came, with Paula; they had been in for twenty-one years and they talked. So did Gunnery Sergeant Holmes, who got there shortly before three; his wife had divorced him two years ago, when he was ordered to Whidbey Island, because she refused to go with him. She was tired moving, she said, and she stayed in San Diego. Or that is the way he told it. Holmes and First Sergeant Rosener were wearing green winter uniforms; Jack and Ed seemed embarrassed by that.
So with the arrival of the Staff NCOs, there was conversation: five men talking shop, and Ellen and Paula joined them whenever they could. Ellen called Rosener and Holmes First Sergeant and Gunny; she addressed the officers by their first names. All the men called her ma’am, and Paula and Katie called her Ellen, but Katie was uncomfortable about it. Then at three o’clock Ellen began waiting again. At three-thirty she and Ed Williams looked simultaneously at their watches. Ed and Gunny Holmes exchanged frowns. Ellen waited another fifteen minutes, listening beneath the conversation for a knock at the front door, then she excused herself and went to the kitchen. She stared through the window. Their back yard sloped down to the beach: dead grass, then dirty sand littered with driftwood. She clasped her hands together as in prayer, squeezing until her fingers reddened. From the living room she could hear Gunny Holmes’ voice above the others: ‘Does the Major know Colonel ‘Cold Steel’ Harkness?’
‘Very well. I was his S-3 on my last tour.’
‘I was in his battalion in the Fifth Marines. In fifty-six. I see in the Gazette where he’s made bird colonel.’
‘Now that’s a Marine officer,’ the First Sergeant said—
But Ellen didn’t hear the rest. She didn’t hear anything distinctly now, only the sound of their voices, for at that moment a dark grey seaplane appeared to her left, descending toward the water. Her first reaction was anger: the plane had probably been on patrol since morning and, now that Christmas was over, the men were coming home. In the enlisted quonset huts and officers’ houses, women had been alone all day; watching the children with their toys, taking pictures, receiving phone calls from home. The plane smoothly struck the water and moved westward, toward the Seaplane base, and now Ed Williams was talking: ‘—dropped four points all the way, then he got to three hundred rapid and put on the wrong dope, and got seven maggies and three deuces—’ then laughter, and First Sergeant Rosener now, starting another story about rifle ranges. Watching the seaplane, she clasped her hands and squeezed until the fingers reddened. Then she looked at the table in the dinette, at the stacked cookies and sandwiches, and thought of the troops: some would be in the barracks, lying on bunks and talking about women or what they would do when they got out of the Corps; others would be in bars, playing bowling machines: losers buy the beer. They should be bachelors, she thought. They should all—Then she had to raise her hands to her face and quickly wipe her eyes.