by John Jakes
At half past six, three officers came down in the elevator. There was no mistaking the face and bearing of the senior man with the brigadier’s star. No mistaking the posture, the assertive stride, the brushed hair silvery as steel. Paul raised the paper in front of his face. His hands were cold. When the three had gone into the dining room, he jumped up, flung the paper in a basket by the reception desk, and fairly ran to the veranda.
He found it hard to breathe in the damp, pale dawn. The sky was streaked flamingo pink to the east. The lawn was soaked with dew. He started walking, paying no attention to where he was going.
What should he do? The Tampa Bay Hotel was huge. Huge, and overflowing with guests and visitors. If he stayed alert, didn’t eat in the dining room—and if he had a bit of luck—he could probably avoid his uncle.
Or should he make his presence known to Uncle Joe? Take the first step toward a mutual forgiveness, a possible reconciliation? The voice of family, common blood, said yes, powerfully.
But his uncle had banished him. What if he was rejected a second time?
He reentered the hotel by the east door and took the stair immediately inside up to his room, which was littered with his growing collection of mementos. Through the window came a distant blare of bugles and the sounds of the hotel waking. He sat on the edge of the bed. Shut his eyes and brought his thumbs against his forehead. The pressure helped him think.
He remembered the pain of his banishment from the mansion on Michigan Avenue. Then he thought of his cousin. Rash and headstrong as he was, Joe Junior’s only real crime had been caring about the downtrodden. He’d foolishly allowed himself to be influenced by Benno, and men had died. But never intentionally would Joe Junior have been a party to that.
But his father treated him as if the opposite were true. As a consequence Joe Junior was lost to Paul. Lost to his mother, his sister and brother, because of Uncle Joe’s rigidity, stupidity. And Paul had no home in Chicago, no place in America where he truly belonged.
He recognized that his uncle had been kind to him until the trouble came. Paul genuinely admired much about Uncle Joe. His bravery in coming to America alone; his idealism in fighting to free the Neger in the great war. His remarkable and successful drive to riches and position afterward.
But Paul could never condone what Uncle Joe had done when he was opposed. Fixing on that, he beat down the strong yearning for reconciliation. Scoffed at it, till it withered.
Go to Uncle Joe? …
No; he would not.
94
The General
SHE WAS SEATED ALONE at one of the small white tables. She knew he was watching; had been watching while he tensely circled the dance floor several times.
The music and heat in the Annex dizzied him a little. How beautiful she was in her clinging white dress with the red ruffle. Waiting for him …
Him.
A sudden guilt held him motionless near the main entrance. You must not do this. You must not betray Ilsa.
He swept the thought away. Stronger influences—the imminent war, distance from Chicago, renewed confidence in his own vigor, her beauty—overran his conscience. He smoothed the front of his uniform blouse and moved toward her with a quick, decisive stride.
“General, good evening. Are you feeling all right?”
The sudden voice startled him. He spun to his right. He hadn’t noticed Major Gilyard before. Gilyard was also sitting alone. His magnified eyes regarded Joe with a certain suspicion.
“Yes, Major, I am, why do you ask?”
“If I may be forgiven, sir, you look pale.”
“Haven’t been sleeping well, that’s all. This hotel may be pleasant in the winter, but right now the rooms are damned hot.”
“No arguing there, General. I hope your rest improves, sir.”
“I’m sure it will, thank you so much for your concern,” Joe said, and strode off.
She saw him coming. Her eyes, dark brown and glorious, grew larger and larger as he approached. Reaching her table, he bowed like any self-conscious swain of twenty. His eye chanced across the stunning deep cleavage above the neck of her gown. He felt himself blushing.
“Señorita Rivera, I am General Joe Crown.”
“Good evening, General, I know who you are,” she said, smiling. Her English, though flavorfully accented, was perfect. Suddenly, again, he was ashamed; she couldn’t be older than twenty-five.
“Would you care to sit?”
“I came over to ask if you would do me the honor of dancing with me.”
“I’m sorry, no.”
“Señorita, forgive me if I offended—”
“Not at all. When I fled Havana last year, I made a vow that I would neither sing nor dance again until the revolution drove the Spaniards out forever.”
“Well. Commendable idealism.” How many in the hall were staring? Gossiping? She was so lovely, it made no difference. “I wonder, then—would you care to stroll in the garden?”
Her smile returned. She had a splendid full red mouth. “A very pleasant suggestion.” Rising, she unintentionally brushed his blue sleeve with her bosom. He felt like a planet flung out of orbit, falling through space.
In the garden, on the dark paths where other couples strolled, she took his arm.
“I notice your brother isn’t here this evening.”
“A special meeting was called by General Shafter. Some problem concerning the rebel forces. Almovar was with them in the mountains until last month. He was on the staff of General Calixto García.”
A silence ensued, becoming more awkward as it prolonged itself. Desperate, Joe said, “I have wanted to make your acquaintance for many days now, Señorita.” Then, a rushed afterthought: “Your brother’s too, of course.”
“Oh, certainly.” Her irony was dry; almost undetectable.
“You say you fled Havana—”
“After a fierce family dispute. The Riveras have lived in Cuba for more than a hundred years. Our father is an importer of sherries and riojas and other fine wines from the homeland. He believes in the queen, and in Weyler—Spanish supremacy, in short. It’s to be expected, he’s Castilian, seventy years old. Age, wealth, and breeding make a strong brew. A man drinks it, he’s almost certain to become conservative. Are you familiar with that word?”
“Intimately,” Joe said, a little surprised at his own irony, which she missed. “You and your father fell out, then?”
“Yes. Both Almovar and I quarreled with him, in a very bad way. We quarreled over this war, and also over our older brother, Ernesto. Ernesto left university two years ago to fight with the rebels. He died on the trocha. It was a very grisly death.”
“Once again, I apologize. I don’t know that word you used.”
“La trocha. The trail. It’s a cleared space in the jungle, rather like a shallow ditch. A hundred fifty, two hundred meters across—eighty kilometers long. La trocha is a barrier meant to contain the rebels. The first one was built during the Ten Years’ War, from Móron all the way down to Júcara. For a while it was abandoned. When Weyler arrived, he repaired and reactivated it, then built a second one from Mariel, slightly west of Havana on the north coast, to Majana in the south.”
She went on to explain that the trocha was not merely a trench, but a fortified barricade. Trees felled during the ground clearing were piled up along both sides—“A barrier of trunks and roots wider than a boulevard, and much taller than you, General.” At intervals of a half mile to a mile, small forts, blockhouses, and watchtowers kept the jungle on both sides under observation.
“Wherever la trocha is not manned, there are bastions of sharp stakes, strung with a cat’s cradle of barbed wire. On the western trocha Butcher Weyler introduced small artillery and electric lights. But that isn’t the end. He planted bombs, each with its spiderweb of trip wires. One of the wires caught Ernesto as he was crossing the trocha with a dispatch from General Antonio Maceo. The bombs are designed to fragment—pierce their victim with many small
pieces of iron. Wounded, Ernesto was a feast for los cangrejos. Land crabs. They live near the coastal waters and scavenge in the dark. But they will come into the light if there is bloody meat. Many are the size of saucers, some even as large as this.” In the glow from the veranda lights, her silhouetted hands spread to the width of a dinner plate.
“Gruesome creatures,” she went on. “They click and clack their pincers, and they leave nothing on the bones. You never want to meet los cangrejos, General. You especially never want to meet them if you are unable to defend yourself. They will devour the flesh while the victim is still alive. Providing the victim is helpless. Ernesto was helpless.”
“Mein Gott,” Joe whispered. “Das ist schrecklich. Horrible. How did you learn of this?”
“A lieutenant inspector came along on horseback shortly after sunrise. Ernesto was not yet dead, but he had no chance to live. The crabs were still feasting. The lieutenant scattered them with pistol shots. Then he fired a bullet of mercy into what was left of our poor brother. Ernesto was carrying identification with his dispatches. The lieutenant was more decent than some, he wrote to our father. Ernesto’s death precipitated the quarrel.”
“How so?”
“Our father said the tragedy was entirely Ernesto’s fault, because he valued freedom above his own life. Almovar and I could not abide that. We packed and left our father’s house the next day.” Estella Rivera’s voice was low and bitter. Joe was stung by similarities to events in his own family.
At a bend in the path where the shrubbery grew thick and tall, she paused. The floodlit minarets and domes shone silver in the sky, but in the garden Joe and the girl were immersed in darkness. Estella’s white kerchief shone faintly as she touched it to her upper lip. “Now, General—”
“Please call me Joseph, or Joe.”
“Joseph, then. I have said enough about my history. Tell me something of yours.”
The darkness and her sweet light scent, a little like almonds, a little like tropical flowers, aroused him. In a husky voice he said, “What I have to tell you is, I think you’re the handsomest young woman I’ve ever seen. The most desirable—” His left hand clasped her right shoulder; his right clumsily groped her bosom. At the same time he leaned forward to kiss her. She twisted her head and he kissed only the corner of her mouth.
“Don’t, you’ll shame us both. Yourself for the attempt. And me for wanting it.”
Startled, humiliated by his foolish behavior—feeling his age—Joe stepped back. His hands fell to his sides. Once more she stunned him: “Come to my room. We’ll have privacy there. Four twenty-five is the number. Come in ten minutes.”
She whirled and ran off in the dark.
The dance band in the Annex played “Animal Fair,” with much boisterous, rhythmic clapping as accompaniment. Joe staggered to a bench and sat down. Was he rejected, or invited? He didn’t know.
He stole along the fourth-floor hall, feeling like a burglar. On the main staircase he heard a man and a woman coming up, chatting and laughing. He darted into an alcove, flattened his back against the wall. The voices receded, a key clicked, a door closed.
He peeked into the corridor. Empty. He rushed down the hall; found the door. One soft tap and she let him in. She’d changed to a dark red silk wrapper with a high neck.
She had a single room, smaller than his but decently appointed, and just as hot. She indicated the chair. “Please, Joseph, sit down. Would you be more comfortable without your jacket?” While he took off the heavy uniform blouse, she opened the closet. “I have a half bottle of an excellent Spanish red. The last of the supply I brought from home. Would you care for a glass?”
“I would, thank you. I’m normally a beer drinker, I brew beer, you see—in Chicago—but yes, wine would be fine.”
She poured a generous drink in a barrel-shaped hotel glass, but took none for herself. She sat down on the bed and crossed her legs gracefully. She was very assured and composed for a woman so young. Well educated, obviously; heartbreakingly beautiful …
“I thought we might talk,” she said. Though she was friendly, she was clearly setting limits. This intimacy was for conversation only. The bed was for sitting, nothing else. It made him want her all the more.
He drank a little of the rich, fragrant rioja. “Talk? Certainly, I’m interested in more about your history. But first I must tell you something. I thought about concealing it. I find I can’t.” He twisted the ring on his right hand. “I am a married man.”
“Why, I knew that the first time you looked at me. I knew it before I saw your ring. But thank you for your candor. It confirms my impression that you are a good, honorable man. Now what did you want to ask?”
“Your background. Havana—”
“I was born and educated there, initially in a convent, later in a private academy.”
“It must have been difficult for you and your brother to leave.”
“Not under the circumstances, no. Quite easy.”
“But you left your father.”
“It was our duty to resist the government at this time. He would not.”
“How do you feel about him now? If he’s still a loyalist, doesn’t it make him something of a traitor?”
“To me and my brother? Joseph, Joseph, there’s wisdom in your face, is it only a mask? Blood flows stronger than the strongest river, always. We quarreled with our father, Almovar and I, but it was a quarrel with his foolish attitudes, not with his essence. Not with his soul. You do not cancel the word ‘father,’ reject all its weight, all its importance, by saying you reject the cloak it wears at a particular time. The slogans it proclaims. The error into which it stumbles. We’ll go back to our father when the war’s won and Cuba is liberated. No doubt he’ll hate a new regime. Perhaps he’ll hate Almovar and me, he’s old and stubborn. Certainly we will never change his feelings about Ernesto. But we’ll love him all the same. What person would forever abandon a parent, or any relative, for harboring the wrong views? For being misguided? Making human mistakes?”
Joe’s hand grew slippery on the glass. “I did.”
That gave her pause. “You? Oh, Joseph. Tell me how it happened.”
“There’s more,” he said, the words suddenly unstoppable. “I drove out a second person, my nephew, because he helped the first one—who was my son.”
“Joseph. No wonder there is sorrow in your eyes. Is that why you ran away to war?”
“No, absolutely not, I—”
He cleared his throat. His eyes met hers again. In a small voice he said, “Perhaps. After it happened, after I sent both of them away, relations with my wife—she is a very fine woman, you understand—but things between us—” His chin sank. His shoulders slumped. He raised the tumbler an inch; a tiny gesture.
“Deteriorated. Perhaps I did run away from it.”
She left the bed and knelt at his knee. Her bosom pressed his leg but this time there was nothing erotic in the contact. She reached up to stroke his damp forehead with fingers surprisingly cool and dry. “Catholics go regularly to confession. It purges pain and cleanses the heart and thereby calms the mind so it can find new paths. Tonight I’ll hear your confession, Joseph.”
“I’m a Protestant, Estella.”
“Not tonight, not here with me. Wait! I see a mule rearing up in those handsome eyes. I won’t allow it. Tell me everything.”
Kneeling like a supplicant, she squeezed his hand, which, most curiously, was shaking. He felt like the supplicant. She took the tumbler of wine and set it on the dressing table.
“Everything,” she said.
All the rest of the night, midnight until morning, he sat on the straight chair under the electric lights mounted in the ceiling. He removed his tie, then his shirt and singlet; sat bare-chested, his suspenders down on his hips—again, most curiously, without embarrassment. It seemed natural to sit that way and talk with her. Perfectly easy and comfortable.
She picked up one of the paper fans supplied by the hot
el. She returned to her place on the bed and fanned the air between them, cooling them both a little. The slow rhythm of the fan seduced him; helped him talk.
The monologue that poured out of him was about boyhood, Aalen, Cincinnati, and Chicago. About Ilsa; the war; the struggle to build Crown’s. About his children—how he loved them and how they rebelled. Even dear Fritzi with her silly ideas about entering the lewd profession of acting.
He spoke in detail about Joe Junior, driven out; and his nephew Pauli soon after.
“In our family I established certain rules—”
“You drove your son out because he broke your rules?”
“Estella, you don’t understand. In business, rules are absolutely necessary.”
“Your family is not a business. Life is not a business.”
“Don’t look at me that way. I’m a human being, I have my own beliefs—strong ones.”
“I presume the same can be said of your son. It can be said of my father. Or of any person.”
“You’re confusing me. My life, my whole life has been built on the principle of order. Ordnung, that’s how we Germans say it. With my own hands, and that principle, I, created my success. Wealth—”
“Buttressed by these rules which everyone must obey, or lose your love?”
“Stop that, for God’s sake. Stop it!”
She went to him again; caressed his damp neck with her dry, cool hands. She added a jot of rioja to what was left in the hotel glass. He drank without looking at her. He drank all of it. In a few moments the confession resumed.
He talked of his need to offer himself to the Army again, at all hazards, because he believed in America and its cause, but also because he thought he’d die in Chicago if he didn’t. He described the quarrels with Ilsa, which seemed to grow more frequent after Joe Junior and Pauli left. “She has all these radical women for friends, she’s taken in by their ideas.”
“Wrong ideas, you believe.”
“Absolutely. She doesn’t see it. She says I’m the one who’s wrong.”
“Ah. A woman with backbone. A woman who speaks her mind. Another rule broken. I can see this woman. She is not docile. If she were younger—if, for example, she couldn’t abide her father’s political views—there’s no telling what she might do. Temporarily exile herself in a foreign country, perhaps.”