Beyond the Call (36 page)

E
LEANOR WAS IN
the house alone with Carol Ann the day the telegram arrived from Washington. Even now it gave her a start, so conditioned had she become over the past year to fear the arrival of a War Department telegram. It was addressed to Robert. He was away on military business, so she opened it. It was a short, simple message commanding Captain Trimble to report to Army Air Forces headquarters.

Thinking it must be urgent, she called Robert up. Their dialogs with each other had become strained to the snapping point, so she simply read the telegram to him.

Robert didn't know what to make of it. He'd never heard of the senior officer who'd sent it, and there was no hint of what it was about. He arrived home that night and went straight upstairs to start packing. He'd need to stay overnight in Washington so he'd be fresh for a morning meeting.

He seemed brighter than usual when he left the house, and he parted from Eleanor with a semblance of affection. It had occurred to him that he might be about to get some recognition at last for what he'd done. Maybe somebody – Spaatz, Deane, Ritchie – had made a case on his behalf. Of course they could never openly refer to his secret work, but all those powerful men could pull something out of the bag to acknowledge that his efforts were recognized and appreciated by the people at the top. It wouldn't heal anything, but it might help.

Walking out of the hotel into the bright sunshine the next morning, he felt like smiling for the first time in weeks. He took a cab out to the Pentagon. The building was still almost brand-new, and its scale was breathtaking. He found his way to the AAF Department and reported to the front desk. A clerk collected him and escorted him to the office of the general who had sent the telegram.

As soon as he entered the office, he got the feeling that the meeting might not be what he'd hoped for. The general, who had the air of a bureaucrat who'd never been within a hundred miles of a combat zone, was frigidly unfriendly.

The general picked a file up off his desk. ‘I have a document here. A report on various incidents that occurred in the USSR during the tenure of Eastern Command. I understand you were commanding officer there for a time.' He said it in a manner implying that they must have been desperately short of better candidates.

Robert set his jaw. ‘Yes, sir, I was.'

‘It seems that you were responsible for several actions which antagonized the Soviet authorities. Refusing to authorize flights for a certain Russian pilot, and demanding that he be suspended from duty; declining to allow your personnel to participate in the Russians' VE Day parade; repeatedly objecting to Soviet flight restrictions which
had been enacted to prevent unauthorized activities by US personnel in Soviet-controlled forward areas—'
¹⁰

‘Sir, that isn't so,' Robert interrupted. ‘Eastern Command took part fully in all the VE Day celebrations.'
¹¹
(As none knew better than he, cringing at the memory of that drunken night.) ‘And the Russian pilot was a dangerous incompetent.'

The general glared at him and went on as if he hadn't spoken: ‘… activities in which you, Captain Trimble, had been one of the perpetrators. Activities which included smuggling British and American prisoners of war to Poltava disguised as AAF aircrew. And, as if that weren't enough, drawing your sidearm and threatening a senior Soviet officer with it. Do you deny
that
?'

Robert said nothing.

‘And what do you have to say about
this
…?' The general pulled a document out of the file and handed it to him.

Robert recognized it immediately, and felt sick. It was one of the dozens of routine situation reports he'd written or signed off on as commanding officer. It dated from the time when he was feeling at his lowest about being forced to bow to Soviet demands – the time of the court-martial of King and the delivery of Shenderoff to Moscow for execution. He'd written in large letters in the margin,
Shame on America
.

‘What is the meaning of this, Captain? I'm astonished at such a lack of patriotism in an American officer in a position of command. It's disgraceful.'

That did it. ‘Were you over there, sir? Were you ever actually
in
the war?'

The general glared at him. ‘What does that have to do with it?'

‘It has everything to do with it. How dare you question my patriotism? Or anybody's who was there. You saw nothing of what we went through. You have no idea what we gave. We all served our country, and we had to watch politicians like you trade away its honor to a dictator.'

‘Watch your tone, Captain.'

‘I'll watch my tone when I'm ready to! Now, you can tell whoever gave you those documents—'

‘I said
watch it
, Captain. Show some decorum, or your days in the Army Air Forces are numbered.'

‘They already are. I already put in for my discharge.'

The general fumed silently for a few moments, then hissed: ‘Captain, you're dismissed. Get out of my office.'

Mustering all the dignity he could, Robert saluted, turned about, and walked out the door.

T
HE HOUSE WAS
silent. Nobody was home. Robert paused a moment in the hallway, listening, but didn't call out. All he heard was the pounding inside his head.

The journey back from Washington had been a blur. He'd gone straight from the Pentagon back to his hotel and then caught the first train to Harrisburg. Walking into Union Station, he'd got the same weird, dislocating sensation as when he'd first seen it on his return to the States last month – the building looked so much like the rail stations in Lwów and Kraków, he could almost feel the ice under his boots again and the air of tension. It was bizarre to see swarms of GIs and sailors in place of the knots of refugees and Red Army guards.

All the way home, his head had pounded with indignant anger, confusion, and despair. How could it have come to this? After everything he'd been through, all he'd given of himself, to be scorned like that, told he was unpatriotic; to have longed so deeply to come home, only to find that the war tormented him more here than it had when he was in the thick of it. He seemed to have no home, and soon he would have no marriage.

Robert went up the stairs two at a time and strode into the bedroom. He went straight to the dresser and yanked open the drawer where he kept the Colt. He dug through the stacks of underwear, but the pistol wasn't there. Blind with anger, he pulled the drawer right
out and upturned it over the bed; then the second drawer. Still there was no pistol.

‘Is this what you're looking for?'

He spun round. Eleanor stood in the doorway. The Colt was in her hand.

Robert froze. She held the pistol reluctantly, as if it were a venomous animal, but her finger was on the trigger, and even from here he could see that the safety was off. ‘You were looking for this?' she repeated, gesturing awkwardly at him with the heavy pistol, and his heart lurched. ‘Well, you can go ahead and use it – right after I'm done with it. I'm following you to the end.'

He stood motionless, going cold with fear as she railed at him. ‘I don't know what happened to you in the war, of course I don't, but I know it had to be awful. You suffered, but so did I, Robert.
I
suffered too. My heart almost broke when you went away, and every time the mailman called, I was scared half to death. I was
so
proud of you. I saved every clipping from the paper, about your medals. You were my hero.' She waved the pistol dangerously. ‘You were so unhappy when you were young, when your father left. But you
know
I understand that – my father
and
my mother let me down, and they're gone now, and Howard too.' Eleanor fought against her tears, struggling to get her feelings out before it was all over. ‘I so longed for you to come home, but now it's like I don't know you at all. And now it looks like you're getting ready to leave me.' She gestured wildly with the pistol. ‘But if you're going, I'm going first …' Eleanor raised the Colt, and her knuckles whitened.

Robert found his voice. ‘No! Eleanor … put the gun down. I'm begging you. Put it down. Please, Eleanor, I love you …'

Eleanor just stared at him, her eyes red with tears. The pistol barrel was shaking, but she didn't lower it. He took a step toward her. Something was breaking down inside him, a barrier of thorns that had grown around his insides, and the truth about what really, ultimately mattered in his life dawned on him. ‘Eleanor, you're scaring me. Don't do this. … I can't live without you. I love you.'

They stared at each other. Slowly, the barrel of the Colt lowered and it slipped out of Eleanor's fingers, falling with a thud on the carpet. Robert dropped to his knees and threw his arms around her, and sobbed. The tears that had refused to come when he embraced her at the station flooded out of him, the emotion that had seemed dead during the weeks that followed shook him to his core. He cried, and her arms went around him, pressing his head against her belly. ‘Don't ever leave me,' he said. ‘You're more important than anything to me.'

Eleanor stroked his hair, her heart close to bursting. The words she said stayed with them both as long as they lived. ‘I'll never leave you, Robert, as long as you never leave me.'

Slowly, Robert's breathing subsided, and a peace began to settle on him. He felt a gentle tug on his sleeve, and opened his eyes, focusing through the tears. Carol Ann had crawled into the room, drawn by the noise, and was looking up at him uncertainly, her mouth open. Robert reached out toward her tentatively, smiling. She hesitated, then grasped his finger and smiled back.

He had come home at last.

EPILOGUE:

NOT WITHOUT HONOR

H
E AWOKE TO
birdsong. For a while his mind was lost in a mist, and he had no idea where he was. He recalled lying on the ground, with a fierce sun on his back, and a painful flame igniting in his skull. He believed he'd been in the garden, tending to some plants, when a haze came over him, and then he was burning up. They told him later it was dehydration and low blood pressure, and too long gardening in the sun. He recalled being lifted and carried, and then blackness … and now birdsong.

It was around noon when he opened his eyes. He was in a hospital room. The sound he'd thought was birdsong was the soft bleeping of machinery. He found his eyeglasses on the stand beside the bed, and his dirty gardening clothes folded nearby. Pulling the tube from his arm, he got out of bed and pulled on the clammy garments. Then he shuffled out into the corridor, following the glow of daylight to the front desk.

‘Where am I?' he asked.

They told him he was in the infirmary of the Willow Valley Manor retirement community. He relaxed. The Manor was his home; he had an apartment in the complex, living there alone now. He was growing accustomed to the solitude, but it was hard. They told him to go back to bed. He refused, and when a nurse came to assist him, he brushed her aside. ‘Leave me be,' he said gruffly. ‘Go find some sick people to tend to.'

He headed off down the hallway. He was getting the hell out of there and going home, but he had a call to pay first. He knew the
infirmary well; how odd that he hadn't recognized it. He took the familiar turn, stopped at the familiar door, and opened it.

She was asleep. He padded across to his regular chair and sat down beside the bed. Taking her hand in his, he murmured softly, ‘It's me.' Eleanor's eyes opened and gazed dully at him for a few moments, then she smiled, and he forgot about the aches that had dogged him all the way from his own bed.

Eleanor would not be long in the world now; she had been in the infirmary for six months, and was fading week by week. After all those long decades together, it was hard being without her. He'd kept her by him for as long as he could, until the round-the-clock care became too much for his own deteriorating health. All that was keeping him going now was sheer stubborn toughness.

Their hands lay together, and he talked softly to her, reminding her of the world outside and the lives they'd lived together, even though she could no longer understand. ‘You saved my life, Eleanor,' he said. ‘Three times, by my count. First time when we were nothing but kids. And again when you let me go to Russia instead of another combat tour. And the third time …' He squeezed her hand, and she smiled again.

He sat there an hour, and soon she was sound asleep again, her breathing accompanied by the soft chirping and sighing of the machines. He laid her hand down, stood up stiffly, and walked off down the corridor, glancing sternly at the nurse who tried to divert him back to his room. He walked out through the door and into the sunshine.

R
OBERT PUT THE
old cigar box on the table and raised the lid. Here it all was – the artefacts that had survived the years, all that was left of the war other than the memories. He hadn't kept much. The medals, the papers, all worn and discolored now, shut away in a box. One by one he lifted them out and laid them on the table.

Each one dragged a train of memory with it, a disjointed spool
of images and half-remembered emotions that came to life in his old, trembling fingers. Near the bottom, still astonishingly bright after all these years, was the scarlet-and-green ribbon of the Croix de Guerre. Its silver star was tarnished almost black, but the ribbon was vivid and the cross still had a sheen. What a wonderful, warm surprise it had been to receive it. The memories that came with it were unalloyed, as fresh as ever.

It was in the middle of that troubled summer of 1945. He was down at San Antonio, waiting for his discharge. Peace had come; Spaatz's men had dropped the big one on Japan, and the war was finally over. Robert's time in the Army Air Forces was coming full circle, bringing him back to the very place where he'd begun his flying training. One afternoon, a voice barked over the camp PA, telling him to report to the adjutant's office. An order had come through for him to proceed to Wright Field, Ohio. The French government was going to give him a medal.

He was mystified. Why would the French want to give him a medal? And why now? And then he remembered that afternoon meeting in the eatery on the outskirts of Lwów, and the ring of pretty faces looking at him like he was some kind of unearthly hero.

Even now, holding the aged medal in his hands, touching the tarnished star, he could see their faces still, past all the intervening years, still feel the kisses on his cheeks. He couldn't recall their names (if he'd ever known them) except for one – Isabelle. She must have remembered his name, and told her story. The result had been this, the only official thank-you he ever received.

When he arrived at Wright Field, it was like a state fair on the first sunny Sunday. Teeming with GIs, WACs, trucks, jeeps, and planes, it was starting to gear up for the big Air Fair, scheduled for the fall, in which the USAAF would show off its latest technology and put on a public display of the amazing planes captured from the Nazis. Robert and two other American airmen were receiving the Croix de Guerre that day.
¹
They'd been told that the presentation would be made by President Charles de Gaulle himself, who was visiting President
Truman in Washington, but there had been some kind of spat between him and the United States, and the event had been removed from his itinerary.
²
Instead the French ambassador, M. Henri Bonnet, came and pinned the beautiful bronze cross on Captain Trimble's breast.

It looked such a small thing now, but it meant a lot. All those suffering people, sent on their way to home and freedom. When you came down to it, that was all the acknowledgment that mattered – the hugs and handshakes of those men and women long ago as they boarded the trains, his rubles and dollars in their pockets, along with a precious hope that the war and the NKVD between them had almost obliterated but which Robert had revived. He prayed they had all reached their homes, and rebuilt their lives, and been blessed with wonderful children and grandchildren as he had.

Maybe the time had come to talk about it. Several months had passed since his fall in the community garden. Lee had been asking about his war service, wanting to hear all over again the stories that had enthralled him as a boy. His sister Carol was encouraging him.
³
Until now she'd never seemed very interested in those distant events on the far side of the world when she was an infant. But her own kids were grown up now and had children too; that's when a person can grow conscious of the past and the way it pulls at the generations who follow after.

Robert's children knew nothing about their father's war service beyond his adventures as a bomber pilot. The Russian episode had been kept locked up. Maybe it was time now to unlock the box and let it all out.

I
N
W
ORLD
W
AR
I there was a well-known recruitment poster designed to shame reluctant men into enlisting. It depicted an embarrassed-looking father being asked by his little kids, ‘Daddy, what did
you
do in the Great War?'

Every boy of my generation liked to believe that his dad was a war hero; when we got older, most of us were satisfied just to know
that our fathers had given their best, that they had played a part in the great human machine that went overseas to defeat tyranny and end suffering. When I listened to Dad's tales of danger and excitement in the air war, it never occurred to me that there was a whole other half of his war story that he never spoke about.

I don't know for sure how much his silence was due to the secrecy of what he'd been involved in, and how much was due to the pain that went with the memories. As the years went by, I guess it just got easier for him to keep the lid shut down on it.

When it did come out, it took a long time. There was so much to tell, so many memories to untangle, and such complex emotions mixed up with them. I recorded what I could during my visits with Dad, but there were hours and days of talk that went unrecorded, mostly over games of pool. He rediscovered a few forgotten delights (the warmth of his bed at the hotel in Lwów was a particular joy, and the delight of those French girls at the prospect of freedom), and anything to do with airplanes was always a fond recollection. But as each memory was disinterred, the recurring themes were sadness and anger. His voice, gruff with age, still rasped with indignation when he talked about the fate of Poland. And when he spoke about the atrocities, about the abused and murdered prisoners of war, it was with a bleakness in his voice, so evocative you could almost feel the cold desolation of the railroads and the camps.

There was just a trace of sadness for himself, because he felt he hadn't done as well as he should, and that other people – from Colonel Hampton, relieved of his command, to the people he hadn't been able to bring out of Poland – had suffered because of him, either due to his actions or his failure to act. Like most of the men and women who undertook covert work – such as the two OSS agents who helped and advised him but whose names he never knew – he was given no token of appreciation by his own superiors, little indication of how valued, important, and successful his work had really been. That final interview in Washington withered his sense of self-worth. He was told that he would, at best, be given a ‘Satisfactory' rating, and not
be eligible for any promotion. It's heartbreaking that he never knew exactly what his immediate superiors, Generals Hill and Deane, had said about him to General Spaatz – that he'd been commended for ‘the exceptional nature of his duties and performance' as well as for his outstanding service as commanding officer.

By the time I learned the full truth, buried in the archives, it was too late to tell him. But in his lifetime, we, his children, Carol, Robert, and I, believed in him.

My last memory of Dad is clear in my mind. I was at his bedside in his last few hours. He could no longer speak, and drifted in and out of consciousness. I took his hand and said, ‘Dad, if you can hear me, squeeze my hand.' I was startled by his sudden, fierce grip. He was still with us. My heart swelling, I continued, ‘You can go to Mom now; go to Eleanor. You've done everything you can – for your family, for your country, and for the world. We all love you and thank you more than you could ever know.'

Those were, as best I can remember, my exact last words to him.

Robert Trimble never wanted to be a hero. He just wanted to fly, and taste a little of what he believed would be the adventure of war. But when the time came to go beyond the call of duty, he went, and he did his best, laying his life on the line in order to bring his fellow Americans safely home.