"Do you have enough time to lay down like that? I mean."
"To lie down like that--yes. It's early."
His wife suddenly seemed to be struck with a rather serious conjecture. "I hope they put you in the Calvary. The Calvary's lovely," she said. "I'm mad about those little sword do-hickies they wear on their collars. And you love to ride and all."
"The Calvary," said the young man, with his eyes shut. "There's not much chance of that stuff. Everybody's going to the Infantry, these days."
"Horrible, Sweetie, I wish you'd phone that man with the thing on his face. The Colonel. The one at Phyll and Kenny's last week. In Intelligence and all. I mean you speak French and German and all. He'd certainly get you at least a commission. I mean you know how miserable you'll be just being a private or something. I mean you even hate to talk to people and everything."
"Please," he said. "Keep quiet about that. I told you about that. That commission business."
"Well, I hope at least they send you to London. I mean where there's some civilized people. Do you have Billy's APO number?"
"Yes," he lied.
His wife was making another apparently grave conjecture. "I'd love some material. Some tweed. Anything." Then, almost instantly, she yawned, and said the wrong thing: "Did you say good-by to your aunt?"
Her husband opened his eyes, sat up rather sharply, and swung his feet over to the floor. "Virginia. Listen. I didn't get a chance to finish last night," he said. "I want you to take her to the movies once a week."
"The movies?"
"It won't kill you," he said. "Once a week won't kill you."
"No, of course not, Sweetie, but--"
"No buts," he said. "Once a week won't kill you."
"Of course I'll take her, you crazy. I only meant--"
"It isn't too much to ask. She isn't young or anything any more."
"But Sweetie, I mean she's getting worse again. I mean she's so batty, she isn't even funny. I mean you're not in the house with her all day."
"Neither are you," he said. "And besides, she doesn't ever leave her rooms unless I take out somewhere or something." He leaned closer to her, almost sitting off the edge of the bed. "Virginia, once a week won't kill you. I'm not kidding."
"Of course, Sweetie. If that's what you want. I mean."
The young man stood up suddenly.
"Will you tell cook I'm ready for breakfast?" he asked, starting to leave for somewhere.
"Give us a teeny kiss first," she said. "You ole soldier boy."
He bent over and kissed her wonderful mouth and left the room.
He climbed a flight of wide, thickly carpeted steps, and at the top landing turned to his left. He rapper twice at the second door, on the outside of which was tacked a white, formal card from the old Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York: Please Do Not Disturb. There was a faded notation in ink, written in the margin of the card:
Going to Liberty Bond Rally. Be back. Meet Tom for me in lobby at six. His left shoulder is higher than his right and he smokes a darling little pipe. Love, Me
The note was written to the young man's mother, and he had read it when he was a small boy, and a hundred times since, and he read it now: in March, 1944.
"Come in, come in!" called a busy voice. And the young man entered.
By the window, a very nice-looking woman in her early fifties sat at a fold-leg card table. She wore a charming beige morning gown, and on her feet a pair of extremely dirty white gym shoes. "Well, Dickie Camson," she said. "How did you ever get up so early, you lazy boy?"
"One of those things," said the young man, smiling easily. He kissed her on the cheek, and with one hand on the back of her chair casually examined the huge leather-bound book opened before her. "How's the collection coming?" he asked.
"Lovely. Simply lovely. "This book--you haven't seen it, you terrible boy--is brand new. Billy and Cook are going to save me all theirs, and you can save me all yours."
"Just cancelled American two-cent stamps, eh?" said the young man.
"Quite an idea." He looked around the room. "How's the radio going?" It was tuned to the same station he had had on downstairs.
"Lovely. I took the exercises this morning."
"Now, Aunt Rena, I asked you to stop taking those crazy exercises. I mean you'll strain yourself. I mean there's no sense to it."
"I like them," said his aunt firmly, turning the page in her album. "I like the music they play with them. All the old tunes. And it certainly doesn't seem fair to listen to the music and not take the exercises."
"It is fair. Now please cut it out. A little less integrity," her nephew said. He walked around the room a bit, then sat down heavily on the window seat. He looked out across the park, searching between the trees for the way to tell her he was leaving. He had wanted her to be the one woman in 1944 who did not have someone's hourglass to watch. Now he knew he had to give her his. A gift to the woman in the dirty white gym shoes. The woman with the cancelled American two-cent stamp collection. The woman who was his mother's sister, who had written notes to her in the margins of old Waldorf Please Do Not Disturb cards....Must she be told? Must she have his absurd, shiny little hourglass to watch?
"You look like your mother when you do that with your forehead. Yes. Just like her. Do you remember her at all, Richard?"
"Yes." He took his time. "She never used to walk. She always ran, and then she'd stop short in a room. And she always used to whistle through her teeth when she was drawing the blinds in my room. The same tune most of the time. It was always with me when I was a boy, but I forgot it as I grew older. Then in college--I had a roommate from Memphis, and he was playing some old phonographs some afternoon, some Bessie Smiths, some Tea Gardens, and one of the numbers nearly knocked me out. It was the tune Mother used to whistle through her teeth, all right. It was called I Can't Behave On Sundays 'Cause I'm Bad Seven Days a Week. A guy named Altrevi stepped on it when he was tight later on in the term, and I've never heard it since." He stopped. "That's about all I remember. Just dumb stuff."
"Do you remember how she looked?"
"No."
"She was quite a package." His aunt placed her chin in the cup of one of her thin, elegant hands. "Your father couldn't sit still, like a human being, in a room if your mother had left it. He'd just nod idiotically when someone talked to him, keeping those peculiar little eyes of his on the door she'd left by. He was a strange, rather rude little man. He did nothing with interest except make money and stare at your mother. And take your mother sailing in that weird boat he bought. He used to wear a funny little English sailor hat. He said it was his father's. Your mother used to hide it on the days she had to go sailing."
"It was all they found, wasn't it?" asked the young man. "That hat."
But his aunt's glance had fallen on her album page.
"Oh, here's a beauty," she said, and she held one of her stamps up to the daylight. "He has such a strong, bashed-nose face. Washington."
The young man got up from the window seat. "Virginia told Cook to fix breakfast. I'd better go downstairs," he said. But instead of leaving he walked over to his aunt's card table. "Aunt Rena," he said, "give me your attention a minute." His aunt's intelligent face turned up to him.
"Aunt--Uh--There's a war on. Uh--I mean you've seen it on the newsreels. I mean you've heard it on the radio and all, haven't you?"
"Certainly," she snorted.
"Well, I'm going. I have to go. I'm leaving this morning."
"I knew you'd have to," said his aunt, without panic, without bitter-sentimental reference to "the last one." She was wonderful, he thought. She was the sanest woman in the world.
The young man stood up, setting his hourglass flippantly on the table--the only way to do it. "Virginia'll come to see you a lot, Kiddo," he told her. "And she'll take you to the movies pretty often. There's an old W. C. Fields picture coming to the Sutton next week. You like Fields."
His aunt stood up, too, but moved briskly past him. "I ha
ve a letter of introduction for you," she announced. "To a friend of mine."
She was over at her writing desk now. She opened the topmost left-hand drawer, positively, and took out a white envelope. Then she went back to her stamp-album table again and casually handed the envelope to her nephew. "I didn't seal it," she said, "and you can read it if you like."
The young man looked at the envelope in his hand. It was addressed in his aunt's rather strong handwriting to a Lieutenant Thomas E. Cleve, Jr.
"He's a wonderful young man," said his aunt. "He's with the Sixty Ninth. He'll look after you, I'm not at all worried." She added impressively, "I knew this would happen two years ago, and immediately I thought of Tommy. He'll be marvelously considerate of you." She turned around, rather vaguely this time, and walked less briskly back to her writing desk. Again she opened a drawer. She took out a large, framed photograph of a young man in the high-collared, 1917 uniform of a second lieutenant.
She moved unsteadily back to her nephew, holding the picture out for him to see. "This is his picture," she informed him, "This is Tom Cleve's picture."
"I have to go now, Aunt," the young man said. "Good-by. You won't need anything. I mean you won't need anything. I'll write you."
"Good-by, my dear, dear boy," his aunt said, kissing him. "You find Tom Cleve now. He'll look after you, till you get settled and all."
"Yes. Good-by."
His aunt said absently, "Good-by, my darling boy."
"Good-by." He left the room and nearly stumbled down the stairs.
At the lower landing he took the envelope, tore it in halves, quarters, then eighths. He didn't seem to know what to do with the wad, so he jammed it into his trouser pocket.
"Sweetie. Everything's cold. Your eggs and all."
"You can take her to the movies once a week," he said. "It won't kill you."
"Who said it would? Did I ever once say it would?"
"No." He walked into the dining room.
12. A Boy In France
AFTER he had eaten half a can of pork and egg yolks, the boy laid his head back on the rain- sogged ground, hurtfully wrenched his head out of his helmet, closed his eyes, let his mind empty out from a thousand bungholes, and fell almost instantly asleep. When he awoke, it was nearly ten o'clock--wartime, crazy time, nobody's time--and the cold, wet, French sky had begun to darken. He lay there, opening his eyes, till slowly but surely the little war thoughts, those that cold not be disremembered, those that were not potentially and thankfully void, began to trickle back into his mind. When his mind was filled to its unhappy capacity, one cheerless, nightful trend rose to the top: Look for a place to sleep. Get on your feet. Get your blanket roll. You can't sleep here.
The boy raised his dirty, stinking, tired upper body, and from a sitting position, without looking at anything, he got to his feet. Groggily he bent over, picked up and put on his helmet. He walked unsteadily back to the blanket truck, and from a stack of muddy blanket rolls he pulled out his own. Carrying the slight, unwarm bundle under his left arm, he began to walk along the bushy perimeter of the field. He passed by Hurkin, who was sweatily digging a foxhole, and neither he nor Hurkin glanced with any interest at the other. He stopped where Eeves was digging in, and he said to Eeves, "You on tonight, Eeves?"
Eeves looked up and said, "Yeah," and a drop of sweat glistened and disengaged itself from the end of his long Vermont nose.
The boy said to Eeves, "Wake me up if anything gets hot or anything," and Eeves replied, "How'll I know where you're gonna be at?" and the boy told him, "I'll holler when I get there."
I won't dig in tonight, the boy thought, walking on. I won't struggle and dig and chop with that damn little entrenching tool tonight. I won't get hit. Don't let me get hit, Somebody. Tomorrow night I'll dig a swell hole, I swear I will. But for tonight, for just now, when everything hurts, let me just find someplace to drop. All of a sudden the boy saw a foxhole, a German one, unmistakably vacated by some Kraut during the afternoon, during the long, rotten afternoon.
The boy moved his aching legs a little faster, going toward it. When he got there he looked down into it, and his whole mind and body almost whimpered when he saw some G.I.'s dirty field jacket neatly folded and placed on the bottom of the hole, in the accepted claim. The boy moved on.
He saw another Kraut hole. He hurried awkwardly toward it. Looking down into it, he saw a gray woolen Kraut blanket, half spread, half bunched on the damp floor of the hole. It was a terrible blanket on which some German and recently lain and bled and probably died.
The boy dropped his blanket roll on the ground beside the hole, and then he removed his rifle, his gas mask, his pack and helmet. Then he stooped beside the hole, dropped the little distance to his knees, reached down into the hole and lifted out the heavy, bloody, unlamented Kraut blanket. Outside the hole, he rolled the thing into an absurd lump, picked it up and threw it into the dense hedgerow behind the hole. He looked down into the hole again. The dirt floor, he saw, was messy with what had permeated two folds of the heavy Kraut blanket. The boy took his entrenching tool from his pack, stepped into the hole and leadenly began to dig out the bad places.
When he was finished he stepped out of the hole, undid his blanket roll and laid the blankets out flat, one on top of the other. As if they were one, he folded the blankets in half the long way, and then he lifted this bed thing, as though it had some sort of spine to it, over to the hole and lowered it carefully out of sight.
He watched the pebbles of dirt tumble into the folds of his blankets. Then he picked up his rifle, gas mask and helmet, and laid them carefully on the natural surface of the ground at the head of the hole.
The boy lifted up the two top folds of his blankets, placed them aside slightly, and then he stepped with his muddy shoes into his bed. Standing up, he took off his field jacket, bunched it up into a ball, and then he lowered himself into position for the night. The hole was too short. He could not stretch out without bending his legs sharply at the knees. Covering himself with the top folds of his blankets, he laid his filthy head back on his filthier field jacket. He looked up into the darkening sky and felt a few mean little lumps of dirt trickle into his shirt collar, some lodging there, some continuing down his back. He did nothing about it.
Suddenly a red ant bit him nastily, uncompromisingly, on the leg, just above his leggings. He jammed a hand under the covers to kill the thing, but the movement caught itself short, as the boy hissed in pain, refeeling and remembering where that morning he had lost a whole fingernail.
Quickly he drew the hurting, throbbing finger up to the line if his eye and examined it in the fading light. Then he placed the whole hand under the folds of the blankets, with the care more like that proffered a sick person than a sore finger, and let himself work the kind of abracadabra familiar to and special for G.I.'s in combat.
"When I take my hand out of this blanket," he thought, "my nail will be grown back, my hands will be clean. My body will be clean. I'll have on clean shorts, clean undershirt, a white shirt. A blue polka-dot tie. A gray suit with a stripe, and I'll be home, and I'll bolt the door. I'll put some coffee on the stove, some records on the phonograph, and I'll bolt the door. I'll read my books and I'll drink coffee and I'll listen to music, and I'll bolt the door. I'll open the window, I'll let in a nice, quiet girl--not Frances, not anyone I've ever known--and I'll bolt the door. I'll ask her to read some Emily Dickinson to me--that one abut being chartless--and I'll ask her to read some William Blake to me--that one about the little lamb that made thee--and I'll bolt the door. She'll have an American voice, and she won't ask me if I have any chewing gum or bonbons, and I'll bolt the door."
The boy took his hurting hand out of the blankets suddenly, expecting and getting no change, no magic. Then he unbuttoned the flap of his sweat-stained, mud-crumbly shirt pocket, and took out a soggy lump of newspaper clippings. He laid the clippings on his chest, took off the top one and brought it up to eye level. It was a syndicated Broadway col
umn, and he began to read in the dim light:
Last night--and step up and touch me, brother--I dropped in at the Waldorf to see Jeanie Powers, the lovely starlet, who is here to attend the premiere of her new picture, The Rockets' Red Glare. (And don't miss it, folks. It's grand.) We asked the corn-fed Iowa beauty, who is in the big town for the first time in her lovely lifetime, what she wanted to do most while she was here. "Well," said the Beauty to the Beast, "when I was on the train, I decided that all I really wanted in New York was a date with a real, honest-to-goodness G.I.! And what do you suppose happened? The very first afternoon I was here, right in the lobby of the Waldorf. I bumped square into Bubby Beamis! He's a major in public relations now, and he's stationed right in New York! How's that for luck?"...Well, your correspondent didn't say much. But lucky Beamis, I thought to my--
The boy in the hole crumpled the clipping into a soggy ball, lifted the rest of the clippings from his chest, and dropped them all, on the natural ground to the side of the hole.
He stared up into the sky again, the French sky, the unmistakably French, not American sky. And he said aloud to himself, half snickering, half weeping, "Oo la-la!"
All of a sudden, and hurriedly, the boy took a soiled, unrecent envelope from his pocket. Quickly he extracted the letter from inside it and began to reread to for the thirty-oddth time:
MANASQUAN, NEW JERSEY July 5, 1944
Dear Babe,
Mama thinks you are still in England, but I think you are in France. Are you in France? Daddy tells mama that he thinks you are in England still, but I think he thinks you are in France also. Are you in France?
The Bensons cane down to the shore early this summer and Jackie is over at the house all the time. Mama brought your books with us because she thinks you will be home this summer. Jackie asked if she could borrow the one about the Russian lady and one of the ones you used to keep on your desk. I gave them to her because she said she would not bend the pages or anything. Mama told her she smokes too much, and she is going to quit. She got poisoned from sunburn before we came down. She likes you a lot. She may go in the Wacks.
22 Out-of-print J. D. Salinger Stories Page 10