Once an Eagle (43 page)

That had been during the wedding dinner—a horrifyingly sumptuous affair at Foyot's for the whole party George Caldwell had insisted on giving. He'd suggested a military wedding at the Regiment but she had put her foot down on that: she and Sam had met outside the orbit of Mars and they would be married that way. The dinner however was fun. Ben Krisler was there, and so were Harry Zimmerman and Walt Peters from Sam's old company, and Liz Mayhew and two other girls from the hospital at Neuilly. Ben read aloud a dreadful poem of his own composition bristling with fantastic predictions and warnings, Harry presented her with a silver bowl in behalf of the Battalion, Liz got quite sweet on Walt, and everyone drank lots of wine and became very merry. The haut monde French diners at the adjoining tables grew cold and disapproving—which made them still more irreverent. As Ben proclaimed, this was a historic occasion and they were going to celebrate it for all they were worth. And afterward they had got aboard one of the lovely old excursion barges and slipped down the Seine in the deep lemon light of early spring …

But now they were at Fort Hardee, where life was certainly real if it wasn't earnest. Sam got three cots that first day, two for the bedroom and one for the living room, and she made couch covers out of muslin she dyed a deep blue in the washtub. She dyed some condemned target cloth and made curtains of that. Sam got his ammunition boxes and in time she covered those; he repaired the sink and the stove and the front steps. She drove in to Hazlett and bought two chairs in a second-hand store, three Indian rugs and a brass floor lamp in the shape of a flamingo. They painted and mended and glued and sewed; they surprised each other with their skills, evoked each other's praise. The little backyard with its sunflowers drooping in the baked earth was hopeless, but she didn't care about that; for the time the interior was all that mattered. They made their courtesy calls and were called on in turn, and she could hold her head up; she had her feet under her now. The quarters were at least decent and fit to live in, even if they were worn and battered.

“—Most of them don't care a hoot or a holler,” Mrs. Bowers was saying now, her lips tight with displeasure. “The Major was talking about it only the other day. They've been over in France, away from post discipline and living the life of Riley, and they all want to give themselves airs. It's a pity. There simply isn't the old esprit there was before the war.”

“I suppose not, ma'am,” Tommy said vaguely.

“
Suppose
not! My dear, you can take my word for it. Teach their grandmothers to suck eggs, some of them … Where've they assigned the Lieutenant, by the way?”

“The Lieutenant—oh, Sam,” she answered, startled. “Oh, he's in C Company.”

“Mmmmh.” Edna Bowers paused. “Not the Point, is he?”

“No, he's not.”

“Enlisted man, wasn't he?”

She looked directly at the gaunt, muscular face, the gray-green eyes. “Yes he was. He was awarded a battlefield commission, in France. The same day he won the Medal of Honor.”

“Yes, the Major said he was a mustang,” Mrs. Bowers went on as though Tommy had made no answer at all. “But myself, I didn't believe it. I said, ‘Hiram, you must be in error. No girl of George Caldwell's would marry anyone who'd been in the ranks.' But I guess he was right, after all.” She took another noisy, displeased sip of tea. “Well, it's a new Army and no mistake. They're taking all kinds now. The Major says it's impossible to keep to the old standards of excellence. It's a new world, now—an awfully funny one in some ways …” For an instant her eyes clouded with what might have been the merest flicker of fear; then it passed. “Well,” she set down her cup, “we'll just have to make the most of it all, I guess.” She gave a mirthless, brittle laugh. “This New Army!”

Tommy looked at the wall opposite her, the field where two children were running after a little white ball. God, she thought; why is it the mean ones who always go visiting—and why do they always pick
me?

“ …I guess you're right, ma'am,” she tried with her brightest smile. “Although actually, being an army brat myself—and Sam was in the Mexican Expedition with General Pershing in '16 … so I hope you'll forgive me if I feel we're more or less Old Army, in a sense, ourselves.”

The Major's wife shot her a sharp, forbidding glance—rather startling in those faded, uncertain eyes—and again gave vent to that high little bark of a laugh. “Well you're not, my dear, and I can tell you that right off plain. Whatever gave you that idea?”

“Well, as I say—”

“Your father, yes. But not you two.” A long, bony finger rose and fell in front of her like a siege gun being cranked. “You've got a lot to learn, Miss, and don't you forget it.”

Tommy lowered her eyes and bit her lip. It was going to be more difficult than she'd thought. She'd tried to walk warily, put her best foot forward, enter into the vacuous ritual of food and clothes and the comparison of various posts at home and overseas—talk she found footless and depressing after the thunder of the past three years. But here she was, the wife of a junior officer on a hidebound army post in the heart of the Great Plains—and here was this odious gossip and martinet watching her with unconcealed disfavor. I rub people's fur the wrong way, she thought unhappily—it's the way I smile or phrase things.

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Bowers,” she said. “I certainly didn't mean to say anything out of line …” She had got the words out, and surprised herself; and having said that, she was able to go on to say more. She could school herself to this: it would be hard, it would be unpleasant but she could do it. Anyone could do it. It only needed—well, a kind of discipline …

To divert the course of the conversation she rose and said, “May I show you our quarters? They're not very grand, but Sam and I can't help but feel pleased with all we've done with it—it was really in fearful condition when we reported in. The previous tenants must have been—” She suppressed the upsurging witticism—for all she knew the Jukes who'd defiled the place were bosom friends of the Bowers. She finished, “—a bit lax about things.” Relieved to be on her feet and moving about, she led the older woman through the meager rooms, proudly showing her the curtains and pillows and rugs, the various repairs in ceilings and floors, the new work table and—her pride and joy—the kitchen cabinets Sam had made.

“Ummmh. Carpenter, was he? on the outside?”

“What? Oh no, ma'am, he's just very handy with tools.”

Mrs. Bowers turned and faced her; she had the habit of certain spinsters of using her body rather than her hands when she moved, as though she wanted to push at people with her flat, hard breasts. “Well,” she considered, and her tongue roamed in her cheek, “I can't for the life of me understand why you went to all this trouble with quarters, when you're going to be ranked out of them by the end of the week.”

Tommy found she was gripping a chair back; she did not know what her face looked like. “Oh no!” she cried. “They wouldn't dare—!”

The Major's wife gave her little dry crow. “Wouldn't they! Just you wait, my girl.”

“But it was a wreck—a complete wreck! We brought it back from nothing …”

But Edna Bowers was already clumping back through the living room to the front door. “That's the Army, my dear. I told you you had a lot to learn.”

Tommy started to say something and bit it off; she was visited by a mountainous urge to lash out at this rawboned, vindictive figure, roaring threats and imprecations—an impulse that must have been revealed in her face, for the older woman's eyes shone with an irrepressible gleam of triumph; she laughed once more, wheeled and was gone.

“Mean old bitch,” Tommy muttered savagely. She wiped the perspiration from her upper lip. A gust of air came in through the open windows, rattling the drawn shades, and that smell swam in her nostrils: an odor of brass and dried dung and parched grasses and burning.

By the time Sam came in she was half-wild with apprehension and thoughts of vengeance. “Is it true? Sam? Is it?”

He sighed and sat down on an ammunition box that passed for a bench, an end table, or a footstool, depending on one's needs of the moment. His face was burned red from the sun and wind and his eyes were narrowed with fatigue. He nodded simply. “She's right. Captain's coming in Friday. He rates it.”

“Oh, no …”

“I wasn't going to tell you for a couple days more. We'll have to move out.”

“After all this work … We've just fixed it up for someone else! Of all the cheap maneuvers …” Then, standing in the center of the room, it struck her like a dart—the next quarters they would move to would be still meaner and more disheveled than these had been, because it was further down the scale. If these were quarters a
captain
rated—

“Oh, my God,” she groaned; the thought was almost more than she could bear. “Oh my good God.” She clenched her fists and blinked to stop the tears of rage she could feel stinging her eyes. “Oh, it's so unfair!”

He shrugged unhappily. “That's the system.”

“Which makes it all just fine, I suppose. What do we do now?”

“I'll hit the adjutant, see what's available. Something'll turn up.”

“Yes, and I can just picture what it'll be, too—a cave in the side of a hill with a stone for a table and two smaller stones for matching chairs …” Her head went up. “Look, Sam. You rank all the lieutenants on this post, don't you?”

“I'm senior to all but one, I think.”

“Well, let's rank one of them out.” He shook his head. “Why not? This miserable captain's booting
you
out…”

“That's his privilege.”

“All right—and it's your privilege to kick someone else out, the same way.”

He took off his campaign hat and set it over his knee; right below the hairline his forehead was white along the sharp line of the hat, which gave him a ludicrous, surprised expression. “You want me to throw out the MacDonoughs with their three kids?”

“Well, why should it be us?”

“Because we're stuck with the detail, that's why.”

“For heaven's sake, Sam!” There were times when his stubbornness exasperated her beyond measure. “That's no answer—give me five good reasons why we shouldn't do it.”

“I just don't believe in doing things that way.”

“I remember once at Tarleton when I was a kid a full colonel came in and everybody had to move out, all the way down the row, like dominoes …”

“My,
he
must have felt good.”

“What difference does it make how he felt? It was his privilege … You yourself just said it was the system.”

He got up and faced her, his hands hanging at his sides. On his shirt were half a dozen wavery lines, like tide marks, where the sweat had dried; his breeches had a small tear at the knee. “I'm not defending everything in the system,” he said.

“I certainly hope not.”

“There's plenty wrong with it. Plenty. If I'm ordered to abide by some regulation I'll do it; but if I'm given any latitude I'm going to go my own way. Go by what I think is right.” Looking at her then, his face softened. “Honey. I'm sorry. God knows I am. After all the work you've done—the trouble you've gone to around here. But I can't see the sense in adding to what I regard as a basically stupid, toplofty practice.”

“Toplofty—it's downright sadistic—”

“I know. I can't say I'm any happier about a lot of it than you are. And maybe someday they'll work out a better one, but right now the only thing to do is go along with it.”

“All right. But I'll tell you one thing—we're going to take every stick out of here, Sam. All the curtains and cabinets and furniture you built, all the stuff we've got together.”

He smiled grimly and stood up. “You bet your life,” he said.

She nodded, watching the fine long slope of his shoulders, his slim waist and legs; his limp was very slight now—he did exercises religiously every morning and evening to build up the thigh and calf. She felt that instinctive sway toward him—his needs, his moods, the stern, vigorous cast of his mind; but hard on that came the swift little thrust of her own ego.

“Sam,” she said; and when he turned, “you're not
always
right, you know …”

“I'm not?” He wiggled his eyebrows in disbelief. “Where did you get that ridiculous, insubordinate idea? Drive it out of your head this minute.”

“All right,” she laughed. And then more faintly: “All right …”

She stood in the middle of the room—that all at once, because someone had said three words, was no longer theirs. Across the parade ground a bugle blew, its notes as sharp as if cut out of the bronze plate of the afternoon sky. She felt she'd failed Sam obscurely, this afternoon with the Major's wife. She could have found some way to charm her, couldn't she? some way to have avoided that malignant bark of triumph? No, it was probably impossible—nothing she could have done would have made the slightest particle of difference. Sam was in the bathroom now; she could hear the thin, dry roar of the shower on the section of condemned tentage she had made into a curtain. He was humming sonorously, a tune from the war:

 

“—no more van blonk or champagne,

I want the sun and the rain

Of my—home—town …”

 

He was singing: at a moment like this he could stand in that decrepit, antique tub with the rust-laden water slamming against the back of his neck, and sing. It was wonderful; it was horrible. Chafing her arm rapidly, staring at the drab yellow enlisted men's barracks across the parade ground she felt her eyes fill with tears, and she didn't know whether it was from love or anger or despondency. She just didn't know.