Once an Eagle (41 page)

 

And then, his eyes still tightly shut, he raised the trumpet to his lips, and the melody showered around them like silver rain. Someone near shouted, “Hey!” and now the horn's bell dipped and swayed, blasting its clarion call over the thump and rumble of drums. She was reminded of parades, reviews, of bugles piercing the still dry air of morning.

“He means it, you know,” she said aloud.

“Who's that?”

“Dex. He does. He'll get you that job, if you want.”

He looked down at her—an expression that troubled her subtly. “You've got only one tiny little flaw.”

“And that is?”

“You pay entirely too much attention to Lieutenant Poindexter.”

“—How can I help it?” she cried. The nervousness swept back—an alien trembling somehow lodged in the marrow of her bones. “He's so attractive. You're
all
attractive, of course, but Dex is most of all.”

“That isn't everything—”

“He wants me to share his fortunes. For
tune
is correct, I suppose. How do you think I'd look as an Oyster Bay matron? Riding to hounds and our own sloop out in the Sound, and lovely, lush, lawn parties under the elms? It sounds so grand …”

“It wouldn't last,” he said.

“Oh, really? And why wouldn't it?”

“He'd tire of you.” She stared at him in angry amazement. “He would,” he continued. “That kind of man is never content with one woman—you'll be barely settled in and he'll start looking around—”

“Well, I like that!” she exclaimed. She was furious; she was so mad she stopped dancing. Someone stepped on her foot and she cried, “Ouch!” and swore. “Of all the nerve—who do you think you are, telling me I can't hold a husband? You're insufferable!—and smug—just because you've been ordering troops around you think you can say anything you want. Now you can take that back, Sam Damon!”

“Wait, I didn't mean—”

“I know just what you meant! And you can take it back—right now …”

Up on the stand the Negro bandleader chanted:

 

“It's so entrancing

To keep on dancing

In toe-tappy, skip-scrappy, jazz-happy Voodooland—!”

 

“I meant you—you'd be unhappy …”

They swung past the stand, the drummer caught her eye and winked, rapped out a thumping, shattering
rat-a-pa-kan, pa-kan!
and she laughed, dancing again; all the fury had gone out of her.

“Don't be mad,” Sam was saying in her ear. “I take it all back. The whole thing. I didn't mean it that way.”

“Oh, I can't stay angry at anybody for five minutes,” she cried. “It's my Huguenot blood.” She saw his face change, stiffen into a much older man's; remote and very hard. “What's the matter?”

“Nothing.” His eyes were so sad! She had never seen such sadness in a person's eyes. “An—old friend of mine once said that. That same thing.”

“… I'm sorry.” She looked off over his shoulder—at the drummer, at Ben, his beaked, bony face cracked open in its huge grin; at the red giant on the great blue wall. That was how life was—a tipsy juggler who caught some of the glittering objects and dropped others …

He had lurched against her badly; his face was taut and strained.

“You're ill,” she said.

“No.”

“It's your leg—it's hurting you.” He nodded. “But this is absurd, Sam! You're such a bingo-bongo old masochist. Why on earth didn't you
say
so?”

He looked rueful. “Because then we'd have to go back to the table and listen to Poindexter.”

“Dex is all right.”

“Sure he is. But I want you all to myself.”

“You can't always have everything you want. Even if you are one of the three most decorated men in the AEF.—This is silly,” she said, after another minute. “Come on, let's go back to the table. Dex is such fun! I want to hear more about his—”

“—Don't marry him, Tommy,” he said; the words seemed to burst out of him, as if he had been holding his breath for hours. “Don't marry him.”

“Why not?”

“Marry me instead.”

“You!” she cried mischievously over the band. “Why on earth you?”

“Because I love you, Tommy.” They had stopped dancing again; he was holding her so hard it hurt. “A good heart, Tommy: a good heart is the sun and the moon … I want you to be my wife. Please say you'll marry me.”

She made a swift little sound of distress—part gasp, part groan—and tossed her head. “Oh, damn!” she said.

“What's the matter?”

“I didn't want this to happen. I didn't, I didn't—”

“Why?”

“This shouldn't have happened—it's just cheap sympathy … ”

His eyes were filled with alarm. He said, so quietly she could hardly hear him, “It can't be just that … you feel something for me, don't you? Don't you feel something?”

“—No,” she stammered, “—for
me!
I meant for me!” She was in a turmoil; she realized she'd misunderstood him, that he'd meant himself, because of his wound—she could sense his relief in the changed pressure of his hand. At that instant she didn't know what she felt, beyond the weight of his insistence. He was so compelling! She was aware of nothing but his nearness, the pressure of his arm around her, the steady, importunate force behind him. She could feel herself sway toward him, body and soul, like some marine plant in a mighty tide …

“You're very sweet,” she murmured, her eyes held to his. “A sweet, good man … A girl could fall in love with you, Sam.”

His face became animate with joy. “Marry me, Tommy,” he repeated. “Say you will. Marry me.”

“Sam, I—”

There was a burst of applause behind them, doubled, redoubled—a pattering wave of handclapping. With a violent start she saw they were alone on the floor, the bandstand was empty, everyone was watching them …

“Come on back, children, all is forgiven,” Poindexter called out.

“Sam,” she whispered, “they're
looking
—”

He held her tightly. “Will you?” he breathed tensely, triumphantly. “Will you?”

“Oh God, you're trying to ruin my life,” she wailed.

“What? No—”

“You'll stay on in the Army and become a fat, pompous idiot gushing regulations and pawing the lieutenants' wives at the Saturday night hops. I can just see you … oh, damn!”

They were suddenly bathed in amber light—it hurt her eyes. She tried to break away, and at the same moment a slight man in tails with a leathery face and pale golden eyes had tapped them both on the shoulder, was saying in French, a confidential stage whisper that carried into the far reaches of the room: “If I could just borrow a bit of the floor for a moment or two—you don't
mind
…
?
” Laughter rang out, the piano was playing a strident little cabaret tune; all at once Tommy remembered the affiches on La Croisette and near the station. It was Claude Guétary. He still hadn't smiled.

“I'm sorry,” Sam was saying in some confusion, “I didn't realize the—”

“Not at all. I know they'd far rather watch
you.
Don't go. Here—” he produced from nowhere at all a high, four-legged stool and perched on it, his legs crossed in rapt attention. “Go on with the scene and I'll coach. Fine. Go on. He's imploring you, begging you to give him one, just one more chance. Isn't he? But you've had enough, of course you have, life is too short to go on putting up with his infidelities and amours. Still, there he stands, looking so trusting, so noble, eh?—and you can't help but wonder, ‘What is he made of, this fine, upstanding Yank officer? What are his dreams, what is his private life—what is he
really
like?”' Claude Guétary made her a deep bow. “And
that
is precisely why I am here, Mademoiselle—to show you what your man is made of. Alors, on verra, hein?”

And now he was moving around the bemused Sam, his hands darting, flowing, fluttering with a deceptive casualness, his dead-pan voice commenting on each discovery. From Sam's tunic pocket he drew a pair of black silk lace panties (“Now we're approaching the truth of the matter”), from an ear a dirty, battered piece of what looked like a military map of Africa, across whose face was scrawled in black crayon the single word
MERDE
(“No wonder it took you four years!”), from his blouse a blacksnake whip (“So that's how you treat your men, eh?—or is it your women?”), from his mouth a rubber hand grenade which he tossed to a nearby table amid shrieks and howls, from the other ear a marshal's baton festooned like a party favor with pink and blue ribbons (“You can dream, can't you?”). The club was in an uproar. Laughing, blinking in the yellow spotlight glare, Tommy could see Sam had adopted the role of straight man: he grinned, shrugged, gaped in amazement—and finally threw out his hands in a fleeting Charlie Chaplin plea … At that moment she knew she loved him. While the audience roared and squealed and Guétary produced in bewildering succession a brassière, a pistol, a baby chicken and a half-empty flask of Cognac, she reached up on tiptoe and kissed Sam on the cheek.

“I will,” she said. “I'll marry you.”

He gazed at her enraptured; he seemed scarcely aware of the litter of objects at his feet, the howling audience around him. “You will?” he said. “You will? You mean it?” She nodded. Sam bent over and whispered in Guétary's ear—a pantomimed message behind his hand. The magician's eyes glinted, he laughed soundlessly, reached deep into Sam's breeches pocket, twisting and squirming, while Sam twisted and squirmed back; drew forth a large ring on a white silk ribbon, slipped the ring through Sam's nose and handed the ribbon to Tommy, made some indecipherable signal to the pianist—and to the thunderous strains of a jazzed-up wedding march of Mendelssohn Claude Guétary bowed and handed the baton to Sam. “A consolation prize.” And then to the crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen, an American hero and a good sport, Commandant Dai-mone—and his bride to be!”

They were borne back to their table on waves of congratulation and hilarity. Everyone was talking at once. Ben had grabbed Sam's hand and was pumping it up and down. “I knew it. I knew it!” he crowed. “It had to happen, it just had to, didn't I tell you that? It's wonderful.”

“You might congratulate
me,
” she chided him. “After all, I'm the one who said yes …”

“When did all this happen?” Poindexter demanded.

“Just now.”

“Just now—he proposed?
He
proposed to
you
—and
you
accepted?” She nodded at him happily. “Well, of all the suicidal moves—”

“Do I get to kiss her now, Sam?” Ben was saying. “Do I get to kiss the bride now?”

“Keep your shirt on, buddy.” Sam had left the ring clamped to his nose, which gave him a barbaric, vaguely threatening air.

“Well—on account.”

“On account of what?”

“On account of I'm so beaucoup zeegzag.”

Poindexter was still looking at her reproachfully, shaking his head. “Felicitations,” he said hollowly. “I hope you'll remember, when you're scrubbing his shirts in a tin tub at the bottom end of Agony Row, you had the world at your feet …”

“
I'm
placing the world at her feet,” Sam retorted.

“You are so sentimental, Dex,” Elise said with imperious ennui. “And so dishearteningly naïve. Why did you tell him you would make him a millionaire if you didn't want him to propose to her?”

“That offer is withdrawn,” Poindexter barked, and drained his glass. “You can have the girl or the job, but not both.”

“Too late!” Ben chortled.

“Don't be a bad loser,” Sam said broadly. “Isn't that what they teach you at New Haven—to lose gracefully?”

“I flunked that course. And while drinking my champagne, too. Haven't you two
any
sense of propriety at all?”

“Dex,” Tommy pleaded, “you wouldn't want me to ignore the calling of my heart, would you?”

“Calling of your heart—it's just all that damned tinsel and bric-à-brac. Tommy, I'm—I'm actually disappointed in you.”

“I think it's delicious,” Elise said in her indefinable accent. “Every woman should yield to every mood, every adventure—psychological, sexual, geographic—”

“—oceanic,” Ben put in.

“Why not? I have lived with nine different men, and each experience was more exciting than the one that preceded it.”

“Have you really, Elise?” Arlene Hanchett said eagerly. “Nine different men?”

The Empress sighed wearily. “You Americans. You are so circumscribed. Does one choose to eat boiled potatoes every day of one's life?”

“How about the Red Sea, baby?” Dex said.

“Yes.” She turned her dense, smoky eyes on him and nodded. “Briefly. At Aqaba.”

“Oh, well—if it was only briefly …”

Later they left the others and took an open carriage through the sleeping town, along La Croisette and out to Golfe Juan, where the pines made a crouching canopy, hissing in the sea wind. The air was fresh and cold in their faces and full of salt, and to Tommy the thop-clop of the horse's hoofs was indescribably merry. The stars too seemed very near. It was curious: a moment caught you up and you did something, took some action—and all the constellations of sensation and desire shifted. She had been lonely for so long; now, cast adrift at the end of this pitiless war she wanted with all her heart to be a part of someone, bound to someone indissolubly. Beyond the point they were night-fishing, the lights playing over the inky purple water, turning it, like one of Claude Guétary's sleights, into dazzling little patches of topaz and emerald. She huddled against the rough cloth of Sam's overcoat and turned her face up to his.