Once an Eagle (115 page)

Ben. Beaupré crouched, put out a hand. Yes. Ben. They'd stripped him of that crazy yellow scarf of his and torn the tin star from his collar but there was his helmet not two feet away, with the ITC monogram stenciled just above the brim, and a star riveted at the apex of the T. His '03 was gone, there were no clips left in the dirty cloth bandoleer over his shoulder. His eyelids were slightly raised, revealing blued whites, giving him a mean, sly look. Flies crawled at his open mouth.

Beaupré looked around fearfully, as if discovered at something shameful—reached down and pressed his fingers against the lids; but they would not close any further. He straightened then and stepped to the edge of the hut and called softly: “General … ” Heads turned as if on strings, and Damon stared at him, mute and wild. “General,” he repeated, “Over here, if you will … ” The buck-toothed medic started over and he snapped, “No. Not you.” The corpsman paused and turned away. Beaupré watched Sam come toward him with a heaving, ponderous gait, his face contorted with the effort. When the General had reached him he murmured: “It's Ben, Chief.”

Sam gave him a quick, frightened glance—for an instant he looked as if he were going to hobble away. Then he sank to his knees and started to touch the nearly severed head, the cruelly ripped and shattered body that now looked puny and absurd, no longer human. No longer anything at all.

“—Oh,” Damon said in a low, shaken voice.
“Oh.”
With his good arm he made a swift, petulant gesture to drive away the flies, which rose grossly and then began to settle again in lusting swarms; their clamor filled the air. “Ah God,” he said. His eyes filled and his lips moved numbly. “Ah my God …” He threw Beaupré another swift, agonized glance, then suddenly began to try to lift the body with his arm—a clumsy, straining, ineffectual motion.

“Sam—” Beaupré said.

The General fell back, panting. Scarlet began to seep freshly through the layers of gauze at his shoulder; he fell against one of the poles, his face drained of color.

“Sam!” Beaupré cried in alarm. “Now God damn it, cut that out!”

“—Frenchy,” Damon whispered, “Frenchy, we—”

“No—now stop it! You're going down. I'm going to send you down …”

Sam made another clumsy movement toward the corpse. Beaupré leaned down and held him by the good shoulder and said, “Sam—
no!
Over. It's over! You've had enough. Now let it go, now …”

The General looked up at him—a beaten, desperate, awful gaze. Then he nodded dumbly and dropped his head on his chest; and his shoulders began to shake rhythmically.

“Find anything, Colonel?”

Beaupré whirled around. The buck-toothed medic was gazing at them with bovine solicitude.

“Beat it!” Beaupré snarled. “Take your ass out of here!”

“Yes
sir
…” The corpsman backed away into the light. Beaupré stood in the humming silence, gripping his belt hard with both hands; his stomach heaved. There was nothing to do but watch Sam slumped against the house pole, weeping quietly.

13

There was a
long wait after they rang, and Emily Massengale glanced at Tommy, who for answer rolled her eyes toward the foyer ceiling and said: “RHIP. A suitable interval will be maintained.”

“Now, you promised,” Emily reminded her.

“Okay, okay.” Tommy gave her wry grin. “But don't think I don't know why she's throwing this bash.”

Emily had started to ask her, when the door was flung open violently and Irene Keller stood before them in a flaming orange-and-black hostess gown and gold earrings whose chased oval balls flailed against her cheeks.

“Darlings!” she cried; she embraced them both passionately, Emily first. Emily was half-smothered in perfume. “What took you so long? But then, you were never very punctual, were you, Emmy dear?”

“No,” Emily said with a calm smile, “I never was. Though I've improved.”

“So I've heard. Come on in and have some Yuletide cheer. Most of the clan's already gathered …”

Irene Keller had blossomed out. Her hair was an almost feverish platinum blond; some big assiduous Finn had pounded her body nicely into shape. Her capped teeth gleamed porcelain between her wide orange lips. This was her night, and she was dressed for it.

“I thought it would be fun,” she was saying to Emily, “—just us camp followers. No kids, no dogs. While the men are all overseas. Just a good chance to let our hair down.”

She led the way into a great pink shell of a living room where a superfluous fire was roaring. A Christmas tree towered in a far corner, and the women Emily had known for years sat or stood in little groups, chattering with one another, while a phonograph brayed carols through the smoke-burdened air. She heard Tommy mutter something inaudible, and then Irene had called, “Girls: Emily Massengale and Tommy Damon,” and had turned back to them with a prideful glint in her eyes, her head thrown back, her hair gleaming.

“Well,” Emily said. She stared: she was unprepared for what she saw. These were not merely the habiliments and furnishings picked up on foreign tours and purchased over the years with calculated care. This was something quite different. There were porcelains from Alsace and Limoges, a French provincial secretary on delicately turned legs, an octagonal Moorish table inlaid with mother-of-pearl; there was a silver tureen filled with fruit and a silver figurine of a nymph reclining on a silver rock, there was a huge tapestry in faded blues and golds of huntsmen ringing a boar, and a chest whose lace-edged runner revealed the fine, gleaming wood. But above and beyond everything else was the glassware: goblets and stem glasses, pale green Arabic decanters with the necks of serpents, ruby vases and matching figures—they were ranged all about the room, on sideboards, on the mantel, in two handsome glassed cupboards. Some of the baubles on the tree were ingeniously blown globes and spirals, their gilt sparkling in the candlelight.

“Well,” Emily repeated, in some confusion. She decided she'd better not look at Tommy. “Well, what a surprise, Reeny …”

“Oh, you haven't been by, have you, darling? Bart's got the nicest man on his staff, in G-2 Section—very social, professor of art history at Yale. Reserve, of course; but wonderfully cultured.”

“And such a
profusion!
” Tommy exclaimed; her eyes had begun to shine. “The very heart and soul of Europe …”

“It's been fun. I never know what Bart will send home next.”

“Every day must be like Christmas!”

“Bart says things are breaking so fast now he has to refer to his aide's journal just to hold it all.”

“But just think—he'll have this lovely little treasure trove to remind him.”

Irene's eyes narrowed, though she was still smiling complacently. “Don't be bitter, darling. Luck of the draw, you know.”

“Bitter—how could I be bitter, Reeny?—seeing all
this?
And it's so right for you, dear. Why, it all looks like that castle in
Citizen Kane
—what was it called, Em?”

“Xanadu,” Emily said dryly.

“Xanadu. Exactly! It does …”

For some reason Irene appeared mollified. “You're so sweet. Bart's always saying he was so lucky to be in on TORCH and OVERLORD and now this new command. Rather than various other assignments he might have drawn.”

“Nonsense, dear—it's talent and capability and nothing else that placed him there …”

Emily glanced warningly at Tommy, but her face displayed nothing but interest and delight. She decided she'd better keep an eye on her. Tommy had remained essentially the same little girl who at the age of eight had walked out to the exact center of the parade ground at Fort Sill at two o'clock in the morning and on a band trumpet, holding the first two valves down, had blown fire call—and then had raced over to the headquarters building to watch the excitement. For months now Emily had taken her under her wing and kept her going. By spring Tommy had been moving on a fairly even keel—and then in late August her father had turned up as head of a decoying mission in connection with DRAGOON, and she'd started to come apart all over again. Her oscillations in mood had become more violent and abrupt: at times she seemed devoured by a need to scourge everyone—friends, tradespeople, her own tormented spirit.

She turned and said: “Peace on earth, good will toward men, Tommy.”

Tommy looked at her from under her brows. “Oh boy!”

“All right, now.”

Elaine Kneeland came up then and embraced her; Irene had gone off toward the door. Someone handed her a glass of eggnog and she let the greetings and gossip sweep over her, swallow her up in their easy, comforting turbulence.

“—I told her, ‘No more of that for me, I brought up you and the twins in the middle of centipedes and snakes and God knows what else, and that's my quota.' Of course I didn't mean it for a moment—but my God, I hadn't any idea she was going to go to work in a war plant!”

“… and Spider sent for Jerry and told him: ‘All right now, you're out here and you're going to toe the line just the same as any other replacement officer. Also you're going to be the last shavetail in the whole command to get promoted, because I'm not going to have anybody out here saying Spider Spofford's favoring his son over the others. Now have you got that?' And he said Jerry popped to and answered, ‘Very good, sir,' just as if Spider had been his Tac. Spider said he almost burst out laughing. Then he grinned at him and said, ‘All right, now that we understand each other, sit down and relax.' And he got out that bottle of Old Fitzgerald I gave him when his orders were cut for TORCH—”

“—asked for an audience with him and in they came, all feathers and loincloths and blowguns and things. And the chief outlined a plan for a raid on this other tribe on the other side of the mountains. Told Mac if he'd come in with him on this private operation with the RCT, he'd agree to a fifty-fifty split with him over this other tribe's livestock and women. I wrote him he must have been a bit tempted after all those months in the jungles and he wrote back, ‘My God, Ella, you haven't seen these old crows!' … ”

Nodding, smiling, Emily looked around the room. Our class reunion, she thought wryly; the only kind we'll ever know. They were nearly all here: Elaine, whose husband was G-1 on Lucian's staff in DRAGOON, and Betty Baird, whose husband was with PBS at Naples, and Maggie Vinzent, whose husband had been sent home after that awful business at Sidi Bou Noura; Jane Cross, whose husband had wrenched his back when a Jacob's ladder had let go off Attu and stuck him with a limited duty out in the desert at Huachuca, and Jenny Spofford, whose husband was on Krueger's staff on Luzon …

Good girls. They were good girls. They had done what they could, had skimped and saved during the lean years, worried over their men's careers and brought up the kids, helped one another out with food and dishes on the evenings they entertained the CO and his wife, and maybe even flirted with one another's husbands after a post party; and here they were, at the grand climax of the greatest war in history, their sons at the Point or in service, their daughters married or off to school, their husbands away in foreign lands running the big show—and all it meant for them now was separation and dogged cheerfulness and incessant strain. Even now, crowded together at this artificial conclave, wearing the suits and dresses of two years past, feverish and a little unsteady with drink, a somber dignity seemed to flow from them. They had paid, some of them, in very hard coin. There was Mae Lee Cleghorne, who was a widow, and Jean Mayberry, who—God help her—didn't know after two and a half years whether she was one or not; there was Iris Walters, whose husband was a POW in Germany, and Jane Holtzman, whose husband had been so terribly burned at Salerno; Enid Groat and Tommy had both lost sons, and now Sam was wounded. Thank God Marge Krisler wasn't here; she couldn't face Marge tonight. Not now, not here at this overstuffed Saturnalia Irene Keller had got together to celebrate Bart's fourth star and show off his plunder. It was bad enough that Courtney had been Corps Commander when it happened. His last letter had been brief—a few words about the Gold Dust Twins and their fatal impetuosity, and field commanders who never got over the Jeb Stuart mentality; and then he'd passed on to other matters. It had given her a shiver of apprehension, but she'd beaten it down. Of course they had both taken terrible chances, Ben and Sam. You had to if the command was endangered, she could understand that; but you couldn't go on exposing yourself time after time, unscathed …

“I just adore hors d'oeuvres,” Elaine was saying, her taut, muscular jaws working rapidly. “Emmy, remember the party at Malacañan Palace where they served the raw octopus or whatever it was?”

“Indeed I do.”

“Have you tasted these?” She held up what looked like an exfoliate green button. “What
are
they?”

“I think they're miniature artichokes.”

“And pickled. How divine! Where do you suppose Reeny got them?”

Same place she got everything else, dear, she was moved to say tartly; but she bit it off. Good will toward men. The carols—some sort of girls' choir now—were still mooing through the room. She started to go and get herself another drink, thought better of it. She and Tommy and a few others would leave after a decent interval and eat dinner out somewhere; and they would have got through another day. It was hard living alone—even for those, like her, for whom marriage hadn't been all it might have been.

“—dizzy little fool,” Elaine was saying, “I swear these young girls don't have their heads on straight. Jim got word to her he was going to be able to stop off on his way through and I thought she was going to go right out of her mind. Flying around cleaning up and shopping for things, and then at eleven she got that home permanent goo mixed up with the contraceptive jelly, the tubes do look alike—and of course she was
on fire.
”

Several of them laughed boisterously and Tommy said, “But what did you
do?
”

Elaine rolled her eyes at them. “Called the doc and kept flushing her out. What else was there to do? Jim got in around three, the flight was delayed at Gander. I thought it better under the circumstances if I'd retired, don't you know. I refrained from any inquiry as to how things went—but I want to tell you, Jim had one strange and mystified expression on his face at breakfast …”

There was a commotion at the entrance to the room, and looking past Elaine's head Emily saw Marge Krisler, standing there a bit diffidently, talking to Mae Lee. Oh no, she thought, not here, not tonight—and then she was moving quickly through the room in time to hear Irene say: “Why, darling! I thought you'd gone home to Wisconsin …”

Marge shook her head. “I started for home. But then I came back.” Her face looked puffy and faded and covered with pink blotches. The buxom prettiness that men always found so attractive had gone slack; her eyes, usually so clear and wide and bubbling with enthusiasm, were whipped and apprehensive now. “I couldn't go,” she went on, “—I wanted to be here, where I could—hear from Joey …” Some of the gabble and chatter had died away with her entrance, and now she opened her hands, and her eyes filled. “You're all I've got,” she cried softly to them, and her shoulders began to shake, though her voice was steady. “It's true—you
are…
”

They surrounded her then, quickly, with the special warm benevolence given to the bereaved; they asked her about the children and her mother and wanted to know if there was anything they could do, and someone brought her a drink. The groups broke up under the pressure of Marge's presence: she was an army wife and she was the most recently afflicted of their number. They were—even Irene Keller—as tender as they knew how to be.

Nevertheless a curious constraint had fallen on the party. The world, which had been for a few sentimental moments a rather pleasurable arena of family and unity and heroism and nostalgia, stood revealed as a yawning pit of loneliness and terrors; Marge's presence made them feel, instead of relief, an increased sense of their own losses and dangers … And yet what, Emily wondered, were they to do? Go back to their worn, empty rooms, their jigsaw puzzles and detective novels and tomato sandwiches, one ear cocked for the relentless, hourly bulletins that meant triumph or death or maiming for their men… ?

It's utterly absurd, she thought, with her slow, wintry smile, this life we're leading; it's a wonder we're not all of us stark, raving mad. Maybe we are—we certainly were to come to this place.

It was time to leave; the women were all stirring restively now, glancing at the overladen Christmas tree, the array of glassware. They all wanted to go, despite Irene's strident blandishments. As the wife of the ranking officer present, except for Reeny, it was up to Emily to lead the procession. She signaled Tommy with her eyes, excused herself and went to the bathroom, a lavish blue-tile affair adorned with scatological mementoes obviously taken from the walls of Wehrmacht and Schutz Staffel barracks and pillboxes. One lusty Teutonic maiden bore an astonishing resemblance to Reeny; Emily laughed, studying it.