Go to the Widow-Maker (106 page)

“Honey,” he said to Lucky in the bed.

“Don’t wake me up,” Lucky said, in her sleep. “Let me sleep. Please. Please let me sleep. Please don’t wake me up. Is it hard? I’ll hold it for you. But please don’t wake me up. I promise I’ll make love to him tomorrow the best he’s ever had. I’ll kiss it for you. But please don’t wake me up. Now. I haven’t slept in so long.” And, in fact, she was still asleep. Even as she talked.

He had sat down on the bed edge again, nude, and now he rubbed her shoulder in the shorty nightie, and the back of her head beneath her hair. “I’ve got to go out. For a while. Will you be all right if you wake up and find me gone? Can you hear me? I’ve got to go out. But I’ll be back. Hear? I’ll be back.”

“Go,” she said, and turned herself violently over onto her side, away from him. “Go. I know you’ll be back. I’ll be all right. And I’ll be here when you get back. What is it? Bonham?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Cathie Finer?”

“I think so,” he said.

“Go. I know you have to go. I’ll be here when you get back,” she said. She wiggled her shoulders and settled herself into the bed.

Grant sat looking at her for a moment. Then he reached for his bikini shorts. Had she? Hadn’t she? Had she? Hadn’t she? What couldn’t Jerome Kern or Cole Porter have done with that refrain?
Had she? hadn’t she? had she? hadn’t she?
Had she? Hadn’t she? He began collecting the rest of his clothes.

It was quite a scene when he got there. They were all sitting around the motel room looking embarrassed, except for Cathie Finer, who was the most unclad of the group. She was still in her shorty nightie, not too different from Lucky’s. Bonham had put his pants and shirt on, but was barefooted. The others of course were fully clad. They were, altogether: Bonham, Cathie Finer, Orloffski, Letta Bonham, and an embarrassed-looking police sergeant in his uniform of very starched khaki shorts, khaki shirt and blouse, and the khaki cap with the red band.

“Hello, Cathie?” Grant said.

“Hello, Ron,” she said, and then actually smiled. “Do you think you can do anything about this mess?”

“I’ll try,” he said. It was pretty obvious what had happened, and even Orloffski, with his banged-up face, looked a little embarrassed. But he also looked bullheaded and stubborn as hell. Letta Bonham was not embarrassed at all. She was just plain mad. Orloffski had told her where Bonham and Cathie were stashed up for the night, and she had insisted on going there, with Orloffski, and she herself had called the police sergeant. The laws on adultery in Jamaica were stringent enough, but the elders of Ganado Bay had added their own wrinkle. A person caught in the act of adultery with witnesses was subject to immediate jailing. He could of course post bond.

Grant tried to reason with Letta Bonham, but she was indomitable.

“How much is the bond?” Grant asked the sergeant finally.

“I don’t know, Saar,” the sergeant said. “We must have to go down to the Post and I will aither call the Inspector, or look it up in har book.” Grant noted, with that peculiar quality of overawareness of detail that so often crops up in tragedy, that he said ‘Post’ and not ‘Station’ or ‘Stationhouse’, and remembered that he was in fact a member of the Constabulary. “I had rahther hhate to call the Inspector, Saar,” the sergeant added. “At this hour.”

“Well, will three hundred dollars be enough?” Grant said.

“Oh, yes, Saar,” the sergeant said, and grinned. “I am sure that it would.”

Grant wrote out the check. “Now, let’s all get out of this and get some sleep, what do you say?”

“I, Saar, ham in fact on duty,” the sergeant grinned. “I can’t.” He said it cahn’t’, like an Englishman.

“It would be rather difficult for me to call a taxi now, at this hour,” Cathie Finer said. “Would you mind giving me a lift back to my hotel, Sergeant? It’s in town. You could drop me off on your way back to the Station—the Post.” She was staying, in fact, it turned out, at the next ritziest hotel in GaBay, next ritziest to the West Moon Over.

“Sartaintly not, Mom,” the sergeant said gallantly. “I be most hhoppy to.”

“Then would you all mind getting out of here for a few minutes so I can get dressed?” Cathie said.

They all stood outside in the court, including Bonham himself, while Cathie dressed. Grant tried once again to reason with Letta Bonham, but to no avail. The motel manager approached them, the group, for what was apparently the third or fourth time, and explained and protested that he was not responsible since they had registered as man and wife. How might he know? he asked with that flatted peculiar Jamaican-English accent.

“You heard that, Sergeant?” Letta Bonham said. “You noted it?”

“I did, Mom,” the sergeant said. “An’ I noted him. Each time hair.” Bonham said nothing. Neither did Orloffski.

When Cathie came out, she went off blithely with the police sergeant in the police car without saying goodby to anyone particularly except Grant. Orloffski escorted Letta Bonham to her car, Bonham’s old Buick, with all the solitude of a man escorting a new widow. Which in a way, Grant supposed, she sort of, probably, was. Wanda Lou Orloffski, he noticed, was sitting in the back seat.— “I guess I’ll sleep here,” Bonham said. His half-drunken face was as sphinx-like, as cold and as stony, as it got when he talked about money. Grant nodded. He got in his You-Drive and drove back to the hotel. Lucky was still all curled up fast asleep. He looked at her for a long time after he got undressed, standing nude beside the bed. She really was so beautiful.

During the next two days before their flight out, Ben and Irma and Lucky disported themselves at the hotel with its tennis courts, its miniature golf, and its pool. None of them bathed in the sea off the pretty beach on whose edge the hotel was built. They all had enough sea for quite a long while. Grant disported himself with them, when he could, feeling pretty much the same way. But a good deal of the time he was in town. He saw Letta Bonham three times. Nothing he could say would move her, even when he carefully and very exactly explained to her what Orloffski was trying to do, had done. He saw Bonham once, and Bonham had nothing particular to say. He was still staying at the motel.

The day before they left a meeting of the Bonham-Orloffski-Grant-Finer-Schooner Corporation was held, with lawyers present. Grant did not attend. It was not necessary. There was nothing he could do. Orloffski had of course wired Sam Finer the news in New York, and quite legally and properly, the news also of the meeting. He had received back only an enigmatic wire saying only “WILL NOT VOTE TWO PERCENT.” It did not matter. Orloffski with his 44 percent and Letta Bonham with her 20 percent Bonham had assigned to her had plenty more than a sufficient majority. Bonham was voted out as captain of the schooner
Naiad
and as President of the Corporation. Orloffski was voted in. Bonham, Grant understood (from the manager of the West Moon Over, who like everybody else in town was following the case closely), did attend the meeting. Grant did not know if he voted. In any case, Bonham was out.

In the taxi on the way to the airport the next day with all their luggage and Ben and Irma with them, they saw Bonham sitting on one of those dusty stone benches in the dusty square —the Parade, as it was called in Jamaica. He was looking at the dusty ground. Grant swung around in the front seat beside the driver, raised his hand, but then decided not to have the driver stop.

“You know,” Lucky said to them all, in a rather somber tone for her, “I hate to see it happen to him. Like that. Even though I didn’t like him much, and even though I knew it, I really do hate to see it happen to him like that.”

“I guess there’s no reason really to stop and say goodby,” Grant said. “Is there?” he added.

Nobody answered, and covertly Grant studied his wife, her sitting there in the back seat with Ben and Irma, all of them looking out the back window at the square. She really was so beautiful. And for whatever reason, she did love him quite a lot, very much, he thought. Hansel and Gretel. The babes in the woods. Poor Hansel and Gretel and poor babes in the woods. They didn’t have a chance. And alone, they didn’t either one of them have even that much of a chance. In these woods. In these Orloffski and Bonham woods. Sam Finer woods. Maybe, if he hung on, if
they
hung on, they might someday again achieve that sort of strange wonderful Single Viewpoint they had once had, during those first few short days back at the Crount, and during that even shorter time at Evelyn’s villa here in GaBay. Maybe they could. They had not even called or gone up to see Evelyn. Maybe they could: That feeling of looking at the world through the same, single, the one pair of eyes. In the two different heads. Maybe they could. God knew they needed it. Because they really were Hansel and Gretel. Grant studied her some more, intensely. Deeply, wonderingly, unknowingly. The back of her head and the champagne-colored hair. Then when she turned back and looked at him, he smiled quickly; and then he thought he could see in her eyes that she had been thinking the same thing.

Cathie Finer was not on their plane. They did not know if she had left before or would be leaving after.

Nor did they hear of, or from, her afterwards.

They heard of him later, of Bonham; in New York. From friends who had been down to GaBay on vacation. Grant was into rehearsals by then, and also deep into the new play, the ‘schooner’ play, as he called it. Bonham had got a job with the Ganado Bay Chamber of Commerce, conducting tourists. There were quite a few sights around, waterfalls, famous old bays, plantations back in the hills. He drove them around in one of the Chamber of Commerce’s cars. Orloffski had, as captain and president of the schooner and the corporation, run the
Naiad
aground on reef and sand on a cruise to Grand Bank Island, and the cost of getting her off had bankrupted the Corporation. Sam Finer had not put in another additional $10,000. Letta Bonham had gone back to her family in Kingston, and was teaching school there, a divorcee. Grant of course had been informed. His New York lawyers were quite pleased with the way René had handled his loan, because when the schooner was sold at auction in the liquidation of the corporation’s assets, Grant’s first mortgage on the schooner of $4,500 was the first thing to be paid.

James Jones (1921—1977) was one of the preeminent American writers of the twentieth century. With a series of three novels written in the decades following World War II, he established himself as one of the foremost chroniclers of the modern soldier’s life.

Born in Illinois, Jones came of age during the Depression in a family that experienced poverty suddenly and brutally. He learned to box in high school, competing as a welterweight in several Golden Gloves tournaments. After graduation he had planned to go to college, but a lack of funds led him to enlist in the army instead.

Before war began he served in Hawaii, where he found himself in regular conflict with superior officers who rewarded Jones’s natural combativeness with latrine duty and time in the guardhouse. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, which Jones witnessed, he was sent to Guadalcanal, site of some of the deadliest jungle fighting of the Pacific Theater. He distinguished himself in battle, at one point killing an enemy soldier barehanded, and was awarded a bronze star for his bravery. He was shipped home in 1943 because of torn ligaments in his ankle, an old injury that was made much worse in the war. After a period of convalescence in Memphis, Jones requested a limited duty assignment and a short leave. When these were denied, he went AWOL.

His stretch away from the army was brief but crucial, as it was then that he met Lowney Handy, the novelist who would later become Jones’s mentor. Jones spent a few months getting to know Lowney and her husband, Harry, then returned to the army, spending a year as a “buck-ass private” (a term which Jones coined) before winning promotion to sergeant. In the summer of 1944, showing signs of severe post-traumatic stress—then called “combat fatigue—he was honorably discharged.

He enrolled at New York University and, inspired by Lowney Handy, began work on his first novel,
To the End of the
War (originally titled
They Shall Inherit the Laughter
). Drawing on his own past, Jones wove a story of soldiers just returned from war, presenting a vision of soldiering that was neither romantic nor heroic. He submitted the 788-page manuscript to Charles Scribner’s Sons, where it was read by Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. Perkins rejected it, but saw promise in the weighty work, and encouraged Jones to write a new novel.

Jones began writing
From Here to Eternity,
a story of the war’s beginning. After six years of work, Jones showed it to Perkins, who was fully impressed and acquired the novel. After Perkins’s death, the succeeding editor cut large pieces from the manuscript, including scenes with homosexuality, politics, and graphic language that would have been flagged by the censor of that era, and published the novel in 1951. The story of a soldier at Pearl Harbor who becomes an outcast for refusing to box for the company team, it is an unflinching look at the United States pre-WWII peacetime army, a last refuge for the destitute, the homeless, and the desperate. The book was instrumental in changing unjust army practices, which created a public outcry when it was published. It sold 90,000 copies in its first month of publication and captured the National Book Award, beating out
The Catcher in the Rye
. In 1953 the film version, starring Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift, won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and made Jones internationally famous.

He returned to Illinois to help the Handys establish a writers’ colony. While living there he wrote his second novel,
Some Came Running,
which he finished in 1957. An experimental retelling of his Midwestern childhood, it stretched to nearly 1,000 pages and drew little acclaim.

In 1958, newly married to Gloria Mosolino, Jones moved to Paris, where he lived for most of the rest of his life, spending time with his old friend Norman Mailer and contributing regularly to the
Paris Review
. There he wrote
The Thin Red Line
(1962), his second World War II epic, which follows a company of green recruits as they join the fighting in Guadalcanal; and
The Merry Month of May
(1970), an account of the 1968 Paris student riots.
The Thin Red Line
would be brought to the screen by director Terrence Malick in 1998.