by Herman Wouk
The houseman set the silver tray there, turning up the red flickering light in the artificial fireplace. She waited until her husband was settled in his favorite chair, drinking coffee and sipping brandy. Then she said, “By the bye, there’s a letter from Byron.”
“What? He actually remembered we’re alive? Is he all right?”
They had not heard from him in months. Henry had had many a nightmare of his son dead in an Italian ditch in a smoking automobile, or otherwise killed or injured. But since the last letter he had not mentioned Byron.
“He’s all right. He’s in Siena. He’s given up his studies in Florence. Says he got bored with fine arts.”
“I couldn’t be less surprised. Siena. That’s still Italy, isn’t it?”
“Yes, near Florence. In the Tuscan hills. He goes on and on about the Tuscan hills. He seems to be interested in a girl.”
“A girl, eh? What kind of girl? Eyetalian?”
“No, no. A New York girl. Natalie Jastrow. He says she has a famous uncle.”
“I see. And who’s her uncle?”
“He’s an author. He lives in Siena. Dr. Aaron Jastrow. He once taught history at Yale, Briny says.”
“Where’s the letter?”
“On the telephone table.”
He returned in a few minutes with the letter, and with a thick book in a black dust jacket, marked with a white crucifix and a blue Star of David. “That’s who the uncle is.”
“Oh, yes. A Jew’s Jesus. That thing. Some club sent it. Did you ever read it?”
“I read it twice. It’s excellent.” Henry scanned his son’s letter in yellow lamplight. “Well. This business is kind of far along.”
“She does sound attractive,” Rhoda said. “But he’s had other nine-day wonders.”
Commander Henry tossed the letter on the coffee table and poured more brandy for himself. “I’ll read it through later. Longest letter he’s ever written. Is there anything important in it?”
“He wants to stay on in Italy.”
“Indeed? How does he propose to live?”
“He has some kind of research job with Dr. Jastrow. The girl works there, too. He thinks he can get by on what he earns, plus the few dollars from my mother’s trust.”
“Really?” Henry peered at her. “If Bryon Henry is talking about supporting himself, that’s the biggest news about him since you had him.” He drank his coffee and brandy, and stood up, retrieving the letter with a swipe of his hand.
“Now don’t take on, Pug. Byron’s a strange fish, but there’s a lot of brains underneath.”
“I have some work to do.”
Henry went to his den and smoked a cigar, reading Byron’s letter twice through with care. The den was a converted maid’s room. On the ground floor a large handsome study looked out on the garden through french windows. That room in theory was his. It was so attractive that Rhoda sometimes liked to receive visitors there, and was given to nagging at her husband when he left papers and books around. After a few months of this Henry had put bookshelves, a cot, and a tiny secondhand desk in the narrow maid’s room, had moved into it, and was content enough with this small space. He had done with less in a destroyer cabin.
When the cigar was burned out, Henry went to his old portable typewriter. With his hands on the keys he paused, contemplating three pictures in a leather frame on the desk: Warren, in uniform and bristle-headed, a stern boyish candidate for flag rank; Madeline, at seventeen much, much younger than she seemed now; Byron, in the center, with the defiant large mouth, the half-closed analytic eyes, the thick full hair, the somewhat sloping face peculiarly mingling softness and obstinate will. Byron owed his looks to neither parent. He was his strange self.
Dear Briny:
Your mother and I have your long letter. I intend to take it seriously. Your mother prefers to pooh-pooh it, but I don’t think you’ve written such a letter before, or described a girl in quite such terms. I’m glad you’re well, and gainfully employed. That’s good news. I never could take that fine arts business seriously.
Now about Natalie Jastrow. In this miserable day and age, especially with what is going on in Germany, I have to start by protesting that I have nothing against Jewish people. I’ve encountered them very little, since few of them enter the Navy. In my Academy class there were four, which was very unusual back in 1911. One of them has stayed the course, Hank Goldfarb, and he is a damned good officer.
Here in Washington there is quite a bit of prejudice against Jews. They’ve made themselves felt in business lately, doing somewhat too well. The other day one of your mother’s friends told me a joke. I wasn’t amused, possibly because of my own Glasgow great-grandfather. The three shortest books in the Library of Congress are A History of Scotch Charities, Virginity in France, and A Study of Jewish Business Ethics. Ha ha ha. This may be a far cry from Hitler’s propaganda, but the person who told me this joke is a fine lawyer and a good Christian.
You’d better give some hard thought to the long pull that a marriage is. I know I’m jumping the gun, but now is the time to reflect, before you’re too involved. Never, never forget one thing. The girl you marry, and the woman you must make a life with, are two different people.
Women have a way of living in the present. Before marriage she’s out to win you. Afterward you’re just one of the many factors in her life. In a way you’re secondary, because she has you, whereas everything else is in flux—children, household, new clothes, social ties. If these other factors are disagreeable to her, she will make you unhappy.
In a marriage with a girl like Natalie Jastrow, the other factors would all tend to bother her perpetually, from the mixed-breed children to the tiny social slights. These might get to be like the Chinese water-drop torture. If so, you’d both gradually grow bitter and miserable, and by then you’d be tied together by children. This could end up as hell on earth.
Now I’m just telling you what I think. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, or stupid, and out of touch. It doesn’t matter to me that this girl is Jewish, though there would be grave questions about the children’s faith, since I feel you’re a pretty good Christian, somewhat more so than Warren at the moment. I’m impressed by what you say about her brains, which her being the niece of Aaron Jastrow sure bears out. A Jew’s Jesus is a remarkable work. If I thought she could make you happy and give you some direction in life I’d welcome her, and take pleasure in personally punching in the nose anybody who upset her. But I think this might become a second career for me.
Now, I’m reconciled to letting you go your own way. You know that. It’s hard for me to write a letter like this. I feel like a fool, elaborating the obvious, expressing truths that I find distasteful, and above all intruding on your personal feelings. But that’s okay. You sent us your letter. I take it to mean that you wanted an answer. This is the best I can do. If you want to write me off as a bigot, that’s all right with me.
I’ll show this letter to your mother, who will no doubt disapprove of it, so I’ll be forwarding it without her endorsement. Maybe she’ll add something of her own.
Warren is home. He has put in for flight training and may get it.
Love,
Dad
Rhoda liked to sleep late, but her husband woke her the following morning at eight o’clock, handing her his letter to Byron and a cup of hot coffee. She sat up with grouchy abrupt gestures, read the letter through as she sipped, and passed it back to him without a word.
“Do you want to add anything?”
“No.” Her face was set. She had worked her eyebrows a bit over Pug’s passage on women and marriage.
“Don’t you approve of it?”
“Letters like that don’t change things,” Rhoda said with deep sure female contempt.
“Shouldn’t I send it?”
“I don’t care.”
He put the envelope in his breast pocket. “I see Admiral Preble at ten o’clock this morning. Have you had any second thoughts?”
&n
bsp; “Pug, will you please do exactly as you choose?” Rhoda said, in a pained bored tone. She sank down into the bedclothes as he left.
The Chief of Naval Operations did not appear surprised when Pug said he would take the post. At dawn Henry had awakened with an overmastering sense that he could not duck the assignment, and with this, he had stopped thinking about it. Preble told him to get ready in a hurry. His orders to Berlin were already cut.
2
BYRON HENRY’S encounter with Natalie Jastrow two months earlier had been much in character. He had drifted into it.
Unlike his father, Byron had always been directionless. Growing up, he had dodged the Sea Scouts, Severn Academy, and anything else pointing to a naval career. Yet he had no ideas for any other career. His marks were usually poor, and he developed early a remarkable capacity for doing absolutely nothing. In fits of resolve he had shown himself able to win a few A’s, or put together a radio set that worked, or rescue an old car from a junkyard and make it run, or repair a collapsed oil heater. In this knack for machinery he took after his father and grandfather. But he became bored with such tinkering. He did too poorly in mathematics to think of engineering.
He might have been an athlete. He was agile, and sturdier than he looked, but he disliked the regimens and teamwork of school athletics, and he loved cigarettes and beer, though the gallons of beer he drank did not add a millimeter to his waistline. At Columbia College (where he was admitted because he charmed an interviewer, scored well on the intelligence test, and wasn’t a New Yorker) he barely avoided expulsion for bad grades. What he enjoyed was taking his ease at his fraternity house, or playing cards and pool, or reading old novels over and over, or talking about girls and fooling with them. He did find in fencing a sport suited to his independent temper and his wiry body. Had he trained more he might have been an intercollegiate finalist at the epée. But it was a bore to train, and it interfered with his idleness.
In his junior year he elected a course in fine arts, which athletes took because, so the report ran, nobody ever failed it. However, at mid-semester, Byron Henry managed to fail. He had done no work and cut half the classes. Still, the F startled him. He went to see the professor and told him so. The professor, a mild bald little lover of the Italian Renaissance, with green spectacles and hairy ears, took a liking to him. A couple of remarks Byron made on Leonardo and Botticelli showed that, in the few sessions he had attended, he had learned something, unlike the rest of the hulking somnolent class. They became friends. It was the first intellectual friendship in Byron Henry’s life. He became an enthusiast for the Renaissance, slavishly echoing the professor’s ideas, and he finished college in a blaze of B pluses, cured of beer guzzling and afire to teach fine arts. One year of graduate work at the University of Florence for a Master of Arts degree; that had been the plan.
But a few months in Florence cooled Byron. One rainy November night, in his squalid rented room overlooking the muddy Arno, sick of the smells of garlic and bad plumbing, and of living alone among foreigners, he wrote his friend that Italian painting was garish, saccharine, and boring with its everlasting madonnas, babes, saints, halos, crucifixions, resurrections, green dead Saviors, flying bearded Jehovahs, and the rest; that he much preferred moderns like Miró and Klee; and that anyway, painting was just interior decoration, which didn’t really interest him. He scrawled several pages in this cornered-rat vein, mailed them off, and then went vagabonding around Europe, forsaking his classes and his hope of a graduate degree.
When he got back to Florence, he found a cheering letter from the professor.
… I don’t know what will become of you. Obviously art was a false lead. I think it did you good to get hot on some subject. If you can only shake off your lethargy and find something that truly engages you, you may yet go far. I am an old traffic cop, and standing here on my corner I have seen many Chevrolets and Fords go by. It’s not hard for me to recognize the occasional Cadillac. Only this one seems badly stalled.
I’ve written about you to Dr. Aaron Jastrow, who lives outside Siena. You know of him. He wrote A Jew’s Jesus, made a pot of money, and got off the miserable academic treadmill. We used to be friends at Yale, and he was very good indeed at bringing out the best in young men. Go and talk to him, and give him my regards.
That was how Byron happened to call on Dr. Jastrow. He took a bus to Siena, a three-hour run up a rutted scary mountain road. Twice before he had visited the bizarre little town, all red towers and battlements and narrow crooked streets, set around a gaudy zebra-striped cathedral, on a hilltop amid rolling green and brown Tuscan vineyards. Its main claim to fame, aside from the quasi-Byzantine church art he had studied there, was a peculiar annual horse race called the Palio, which he had heard about but never seen.
At first glance, the girl at the wheel of the old blue convertible made no strong impression on him: an oval face, dark enough so that he first took her for an Italian, dark hair, enormous sunglasses, a pink sweater over an open white shirt. Beside her sat a blond man covering a yawn with a long white hand.
“Hi! Byron Henry?”
“Yes.”
“Hop in the back. I’m Natalie Jastrow. This is Leslie Slote. He works in our embassy in Paris, and he’s visiting my uncle.”
Byron did not much impress the girl either. What Natalie Jastrow saw through the dark glasses was a slender lounger, obviously American, with red glints in his heavy brown hair; he was propped against the wall of the Hotel Continental in the sun, smoking a cigarette, his legs loosely crossed. The light gray jacket, dark slacks, and maroon tie were faintly dandyish. The forehead under the hair was wide, the long slanting jaws narrow, the face pallid. He looked like what he was—a collegiate drone, a rather handsome one. Natalie had brushed these off by the dozen in earlier years.
As they wound through narrow canyons of crooked ancient red-brown houses and drove out into the countryside, Byron idly asked Slote about his embassy work. The Foreign Service man told him he was posted in the political section and was studying Russian and Polish, hoping for an assignment to Moscow or Warsaw. Sitting in the car, Slote appeared very tall; later Byron saw that he himself was taller than Slote; the Foreign Service officer had a long trunk but medium-size legs. Slote’s thick blond hair grew to a peak over a high forehead and narrow pinkish face; the light blue eyes behind rimless glasses were alert and penetrating, and his thin lips were compressed as though with habitual resolve. All the time they drove, he held a large black pipe in his hand or in his mouth, not smoking it. It occurred to Byron that the Foreign Service might be a pleasant career, offering travel, adventure, and encounters with important people. But when Slote mentioned that he was a Rhodes Scholar, Byron decided not to pursue the topic.
Jastrow lived in a yellow stucco villa on a steep hillside, with a fine view of the cathedral and Siena’s red towers and tile roofs. It was a drive of about twenty minutes from town. Byron hurried after the girl and Slote through a terraced flowering garden full of black-stained plaster statues.
“Well, there you are!” The voice was high, authoritative, and impatient, with a faint foreign note in the pronouncing of the r’s.
Two sights struck Byron as they entered a long beamed living room: a painting of a red-robed Saint Francis with arms outstretched, on a background of gold, taking up a good part of one wall, and far down the long sitting room on a red silk couch, a bearded little man in a light gray suit, who looked at his watch, stood, and came toward them coughing.
“This is Byron Henry, Aaron,” the girl said.
Jastrow took Byron’s hand in two dry little paws and peered up at him with prominent wavering eyes. Jastrow’s head was large, his shoulders slight; he had aging freckled skin, light straight hair, and a heavy nose reddened by a cold. The neatly trimmed beard was all gray. “Columbia ’38, is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, well, come along.” He went off down the room, buttoning the flapping folds of his double-breasted suit. “Com
e here, Byron.” Plucking the stopper out of a heavy crystal decanter, he carefully poured amber wine into four glasses. “Come Leslie, Natalie. We don’t take wine during the day, Byron, but this is an occasion.” He held up his glass. “To Mr. Byron Henry, eminent hater of the Italian Renaissance.”
Byron laughed. “Is that what Dr. Milano wrote? I’ll drink to that.”
Jastrow took one sip, put down his glass, and looked at his watch. Seeing the professor wanted to get at his lunch, Byron tossed off the sherry like a shot of rye. Jastrow exclaimed with a delighted smile, “Ah! One, two, three. Good lad. Come along, Natalie. Leslie, take your glass to the table.”
It was a spare lunch: nothing but vegetables with white rice, then cheese and fruit. The service was on fine old china, maroon and gold. A small, gray-headed Italian woman passed the food. The tall dining room windows stood open to the garden, the view of Siena, and a flood of pale sunshine. Gusts of cool air came in as they ate.
When they first sat, the girl said, “What have you got against the Italian Renaissance, Byron?”
“That’s a long story.”
“Tell us,” said Jastrow in a classroom voice, laying a thumb across his smiling mouth.
Byron hesitated. Jastrow and the Rhodes Scholar made him uneasy. The girl disconcerted him more. Removing her sunglasses, she had disclosed big slanted dark eyes, gleaming with bold intelligence. She had a soft large mouth, painted a bit too orange, in a bony face. Natalie was regarding him with a satiric look, as though she had already concluded that he was a fool; and Byron was not fool enough to miss that.