by Herman Wouk
BIG GERMAN BREAKTHROUGH IN BELGIUM! Still Not Our Fight, Declares Lacouture
PASSING a newsstand on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, where a fresh stack of afternoon papers fluttered under a cobblestone, Janice Lacouture said to Madeline, “Oh gawd, there’s Daddy again, sounding off. Won’t your folks be impressed!” Madeline was helping her shop for her trousseau. Rhoda, Pug, and Byron were due at three o’clock in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, aboard the cruiser Helena. Janice’s first encounter with Warren’s mother was much on her mind, far more so than the bad war news.
A rough May wind swooped along the avenue, whipping the girls’ skirts and hats. Madeline clutched a package with one hand and her hat with the other, peering at the two-column photograph of Congressman Isaac Lacouture on the Capitol steps, with three microphones thrust in his face. “He’s handsome, you know,” she said.
“I hope you’ll like him. He’s really an awfully smart man,” Janice said, pitching her voice above the wind. “Actually the reporters have pushed him further than he ever intended to go. Now he’s way out on a limb.”
Madeline had redecorated the little flat. The walls were pale green, with cream-and-green flowered draperies. New Danish teak furniture, austere and slight, made the place seem roomier. Jonquils and irises in a bowl on the dining table touched the place with spring and youth, much as the two girls did when they walked in. It was not a flat where one expected to find a Communist boyfriend. Indeed Madeline had long since discarded the poor popeyed trombone player in brown—something Janice had been relieved to learn. Her current boyfriend was a CBS lawyer, a staunch Roosevelt man and very bright, but going bald at twenty-six.
She called her telephone answering service, briskly jotted notes on a pad, and slammed the receiver down. “Rats. I can’t go with you to meet my folks, Janice, after all. Isn’t that a pain? Two of the amateurs have loused out. I have to spend the afternoon listening to replacements. Always something!” She was clearly quite pleased with herself at being kept so busy. “Now. Do you happen to know a man named Palmer Kirby? He’s at the Waldorf and he says he’s a friend of the family.” Janice shook her head.
Madeline rang him and liked his voice with his first words; it had a warm humorous resonance. “You are Rhoda Henry’s daughter? I saw your name in the book and took a chance.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Good. Your family was very hospitable to me in Berlin. Your mother wrote me they’d be arriving today. I just thought they might be tired and at a loose end, their first evening in New York. I’d like to take all of you to dinner.”
“That’s kind of you, but I don’t know their plans. They won’t arrive till one or so.”
“I see. Well, suppose I make the dinner reservations? If your folks can come, I’ll expect you all in my suite at six or so. If not, just give me a ring, or your mother can.”
“I guess so, sure. Thank you. Warren’s fiancée is visiting me, Mr. Kirby.”
“Ike Lacouture’s daughter? Excellent. By all means bring her.”
Off Madeline went, brimming with zest for existence, while Janice changed into warmer clothes for the Navy Yard.
Madeline was now the “program coordinator” of The Walter Field Amateur Hour. Walter Field, an old ham actor, had stumbled into great radio popularity with the hackneyed vaudeville formula of amateur entertainment. Suddenly made rich, he had gone into a whirl of big real estate deals, and just as suddenly dropped dead. Hugh Cleveland had stepped in as master of ceremonies. Madeline still fetched chicken sandwiches and coffee for him, but she now also interviewed the amateurs. She remained Cleveland’s assistant for his morning show, and she was making more money than ever. For Madeline Henry, May 1940 was as jolly a month as she had ever lived.
In the Brooklyn Navy Yard the wind was stronger and colder. The cruiser was already tied up at the pier, fluttering a rainbow of signal flags strung down from the mast to stem and stern. Amid a swarm of waving, shouting relatives on the pier, war refugees were streaming off the gangway. Janice found her way to the customs shed, where Rhoda stood by a heap of luggage, blowing her nose. The tall young blonde in a green wool suit and toque caught Rhoda’s eye.
“Well, isn’t this Janice? I’m Rhoda Henry,” she said, stepping forward. “The snapshots didn’t do you justice at ALL.”
“Oh, yes, Mrs. Henry! Hello!” Rhoda’s willowy figure, modish straw hat, and fuchsia gloves and shoes surprised Janice. Warren’s father had struck Janice, during their brief meeting in Pensacola, as a coarse-grained weather-beaten man. By contrast Mrs. Henry seemed youthful, elegant, even sexy. This was true despite the woman’s reddened nose and frequent sneezing.
“Aren’t you CLEVER to wear that suit. I dressed for spring and it’s positively ARCTIC here,” Rhoda said. “Where’s Madeline? Is she all right?”
Quickly Janice explained why the daughter hadn’t come.
“Well! Hasn’t Mad turned into the little career girl! My dear, I want to kiss you, but I daren’t. Don’t come near me. I’m virulent! I’ve got the cold of the ages. They should quarantine me. I’ll infect the nation. Well! How beautiful you are. You’re ravishing. Lucky Warren! How is he, anyway?”
“All right, I hope. He’s sweating out carrier landings, down off Puerto Rico somewhere.”
Victor Henry, looking more impressive than Janice remembered in a gold-buttoned blue bridge coat and gold-encrusted cap, came through the crowd with a surly-looking customs inspector. After a brusque greeting to Janice and an inquiry about Madeline, he wanted to know where Byron had gotten off to.
“Briny disappeared. He had to make a phone call,” the mother said.
As the inspector glanced through the luggage, Janice told the Henrys about Palmer Kirby’s invitation. Between sneezes, Rhoda said, “Well, of all things. His factory’s in Denver. What’s he doing here? I don’t think we can go, can we, Pug? Of course dinner at the Waldorf would be a lovely way to start life in the USA again. Take the taste of Berlin out of our mouths! Janice, you just can’t picture what Germany is like now. It’s gruesome. I’m cured. When I saw the Statue of Liberty I laughed and cried. Me for the USA hereafter, now and forever.”
“Matter of fact, I have to talk to Fred Kirby,” Pug said.
“Oh, Pug, it’s impossible, I have this filthy cold—and my HAIR!” Rhoda said. “What could I wear to the Waldorf, anyhow? Everything’s a mass of wrinkles, except what I’m standing up in. If I could only get my pink suit pressed—and if I could get to a hairdresser for a couple of hours—”
Byron came sauntering through the noisy crowd. “Hey, Janice! I’m Warren’s brother. I thought you’d be here.” He produced from his pocket a small box with a London label, and gave it to her.
Janice opened it, and there lay a Victorian pin, a little golden elephant with red stones for eyes. “Good heavens!”
“Anybody who marries one of us needs the patience of an elephant,” said Byron.
“Ye gods, if that’s not the truth,” said Rhoda, laughing.
Janice gave Byron a slow female blink. He was even handsomer than Warren, she thought. His eyes had an eager aroused sparkle. She kissed him.
“… I have nothing to offer,” said the grainy strong singsong voice out of the radio, slurring the consonants almost like a drunken man, “but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”
“Why, he’s a genius!” Rhoda exclaimed. She sat on the edge of a frail gilt chair in Kirby’s suite, champagne glass in hand, tears in her eyes. “Where has he been till now?”
Smearing caviar from a blue Russian-printed tin on a bit of toast, and carefully sprinkling onion shreds, Byron said, “He was running the British Navy when Prien got into Scapa Flow and sank the Royal Oak. And when the Germans crossed the Skagerrak to Norway.”
“Shut up and listen,” Victor Henry said.
Janice glanced from the son to the father, crossed her long legs, and sipped champagne. Palmer Kirby’s eyes flickered appreciatively at her legs, which pleased
her. He was an interesting-looking old dog.
“… You ask, what is our policy? I will say, it is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory—victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror… I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men…”
The speech ended. An American voice said with a cough and tremor, “You have just heard the newly appointed Prime Minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill.”
After a moment, Rhoda said, “That man will save civilization. We’re going to get in now. The Germans overplayed their hand. We’ll never let them conquer England. There’s something strangely thick about the Germans, you know? One must observe them close up for a long time to understand that. Strangely thick.”
Victor Henry said to Dr. Kirby, glancing at his watch, “Quite a speech. Can we talk now for a few minutes?”
Kirby got to his feet and Rhoda smiled at him. “Champagne, caviar, and business as usual. That’s Pug.”
“We’re just waiting for Madeline,” Pug said.
“Come along,” Kirby said, walking into the bedroom.
“Say, Dad, I’m going to have to mosey along,” Byron said. “There’s this plane to Miami I have to catch. It leaves La Guardia in about an hour.”
“What! Dr. Kirby thinks you’re dining with him.”
“Well, see, I made the reservation before I knew about this dinner.”
“You’re not waiting till Madeline comes? You haven’t seen her in two years. She’s taking us all to her show after dinner.”
“I think I’d better go, Dad.”
Abruptly, Pug left the room.
“Briny, you’re impossible,” his mother said. “Couldn’t you have waited until tomorrow?”
“Mom, do you remember what it’s like to be in love?”
Rhoda surprised him and Janice Lacouture by turning blood red. “Me? My goodness, Byron, what a thing to say! Of course not, I’m a million years old.”
“Thank you for my marvellous pin.” Janice touched the elephant on her shoulder. “That must be some girl, in Miami.”
Byron’s blank narrow-eyed look dissolved in a charming smile and an admiring glance at her. “She’s all right.”
“Bring her to the wedding with you. Don’t forget.”
As Byron went to the door, Rhoda said, “You have a real talent for disappointing your father.”
“He’d be disappointed if I didn’t disappoint him. Good-bye, Mom.”
In the bedroom Dr. Kirby sat at a desk, checking off a stack of journals and mimeographed reports that Victor Henry had brought him from Germany. As he scribbled in a yellow notebook, the little desk shook and two reports slid to the floor. “They must rent this suite to midgets,” he said, continuing to write.
Victor Henry said, “Fred, are you working on a uranium bomb?”
Kirby’s hand paused. He turned, hanging one long loose arm over the back of his chair, and looked into Henry’s eyes. The silence and the steady look between the men lasted a long time.
“You can just tell me it’s none of my goddamn business, but”—Pug sat on the bed—“all that stuff there zeroes in on the uranium business. And some of the things I couldn’t get, like the graphite figures, why, the Germans told me flatly that they were classified because of the secret bomb aspects. The Germans are fond of talking very loosely about this terrible ultra-bomb they’re developing. That made me think there was nothing much to it. But that list of requests you sent gave me second thoughts.”
Kirby knocked out his pipe, stuffed it, and lit it. The process took a couple of minutes, during which he didn’t talk, but looked at Captain Henry. He said slowly, “I’m not a chemist, and this uranium thing is more or less a chemical engineering problem. Electricity does come into it for production techniques. A couple of months ago I was approached to be an industrial consultant.”
“What’s the status of the thing?”
“All theory. Years away from any serious effort.”
“Do you mind telling me about it?”
“Why not? It’s in the college physics books. Hell, it’s been in Time magazine. There’s this process, neutron bombardment. You expose one chemical substance and another to the emanations of radium, and see what happens. It’s been going on for years, in Europe and here. Well, these two Germans tried it on uranium oxide last year, and they produced barium. Now that’s transmutation of elements by atom-splitting. I guess you know about the fantastic charge of energy packed in the mass of the atom. You’ve heard about driving a steamship across the ocean on one lump of coal, if you could only harness the atomic energy in it, and so forth.” Victor Henry nodded. “Well, Pug, this was a hint that it might really be done with uranium. It was an atom-splitting process that put out far more energy than they’d used to cause it. These Germans discovered that by weighing the masses involved. There’d been an appreciable loss of mass. They published their finding, and the whole scientific community’s been in an uproar ever since.
“Okay, the next step is, there’s this rare hot isotope of uranium, U-235. This substance may turn out to have gigantic explosive powers, through a chain reaction that gives you a huge release of energy from mass. A handful maybe can blow up a city, that sort of talk. The nuclear boys say it may be practicable right now, if industry will just come up with enough pure U-235.”
Pug listened to all this with his mouth compressed, his body tensed forward. “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” he kept saying when Kirby puffed on his pipe. He pointed a stiff finger at the engineer. “Well, I follow all that. This is vital military intelligence.”
Kirby shook his head. “Hardly. It’s public knowledge. It may be a complete false alarm. These chemical engineers don’t guarantee anything. And what they want will take one hell of a big industrial effort to deliver. Maybe the stuff will explode, maybe it won’t. Maybe as soon as you have enough of it, it’ll all fly apart. Nobody knows. Five minutes of scratch pad work shows that you’re talking about an expenditure of many many millions of dollars. It could run up to a billion and then you could end up with a crock of horseshit. Congress is on an economy rampage. They’ve been refusing Roosevelt the money for a couple of hundred new airplanes.”
“I’ll ask you a couple of more questions. If I’m off base, tell me.”
“Shoot.”
“Where do you come into it?”
Kirby rubbed his pipe against his chin. “Okay, how do you separate out isotopes of a very rare metal in industrial quantities? One notion is to shoot it in the form of an ionized gas through a magnetic field. The lighter ions get deflected a tiny bit more, so you stream ‘em out and catch them. The whole game depends on the magnetic field being kept stable, because any wavering jumbles up the ion stream. Precise control of voltages is my business.”
“Uh-huh. Now. One last point. If an occasion arises, should I volunteer my valued opinion to the President that he should get off his ass about uranium?”
Kirby uttered a short baritone laugh. “The real question here is the Germans. How far along are they? This cuteness of theirs about pure graphite disturbs me. Graphite comes into the picture at a late stage. If Hitler gets uranium bombs first, Pug, and if they happen to work, that could prove disagreeable.”
A doorbell rang.
“I guess that’s your daughter,” Kirby said. “Let’s go down to dinner.”
Madeline arrived in a black tailored suit with a flaring jacket and a tight sheath skirt, dark hair swept up on her head. It was hard to think of her as only twenty. Possibly she was putting on the young career woman a bit, but she did have to leave the table in the Empire Room twice, when the headwaiter came and said with a bow that CBS was on the telephone. Victor Henry liked her confident, demure manner and her taciturnity. With aler
t eyes darting from face to face, she listened to the talk about Germany and about the wedding plans, and said almost nothing.
In the studio building, at the reception desk, a stiff, uniformed youngster awaited them. “Miss Henry’s party? This way, please.” He took them to a barren low-ceilinged green room where Hugh Cleveland and his staff sat around a table. Briskly cordial, Cleveland invited them to stay in the room till the show started. He was looking at cards, memorizing spontaneous jokes he would make later, and discussing them with his gagman. After a while he snapped a rubber band around the cards and slipped them in his pocket. “Well, five minutes to go,” he said, turning to the visitors. “I hear this fellow Churchill gave a pretty good speech. Did you catch it?”
“Every word,” Rhoda said. “It was shattering. That speech will go down in history.”
“Quite a speech,” Pug said.
Madeline said, “Darn, and I was so busy I missed it.”
The show’s producer, who looked forty-five and dressed like a college boy, put a manicured hand to the back of his head. “It was fair. It needed cutting and punching up. Too much tutti-frutti. There was one good line about blood and sweat.”
“There was? How would that go with the butcher who plays the zither?” Cleveland said to the joke writer at his elbow, a melancholy young Jew who needed a haircut. “Could we throw in something about blood and sweat?”
The joke writer sadly shook his head. “Bad taste.”
“Don’t be silly, Herbie. Try to think of something. Captain Henry, how’s the war going? Will the Gamelin Plan stop the Krauts?”
“I don’t know what the Gamelin Plan is.”
Madeline put her guests in privileged seats on the stage of the studio, near the table where Cleveland interviewed the amateurs before a huge cardboard display extolling Morning Smile pink laxative salts. She posted herself in the glassed control booth. A large audience, which to Victor Henry seemed composed entirely of imbeciles, applauded the stumbling amateurs and roared at Cleveland’s jokes.