Once an Eagle (47 page)

He was nodding at her grimly. “Yes, I'll sign that,” he muttered.

“You bet. And it's the same thing with you. Look at Marden, look at that sniveling phony Townsend. They hate you because you're too good for them, because you're better than any of them could ever be, and they can't forgive you for that and they never will! Their hands are against you, Sam—”

He gave a somber smile. “My record's got in my way.”

“That's a miserable way to have to put it. What kind of mystical order do you all think you belong to, anyway? My God!” She flung an arm at the cracked ceiling, the flaking walls, aware that the gesture was hysterical, melodramatic and pointless—and not caring. “Look at us! Look at us! It's indecent. It's degrading! …”

That was all she had to say. It seemed. No terms she knew could improve on them. There was a brief silence while with trembling fingers she lighted a cigarette, contrary to Dr. Terwilliger's orders, and puffed at it savagely while Sam sat on the bed and looked at her.

“What do you want me to do, Tommy?”

“I don't know. Get out, get out of this—!” She bent toward him. “There are any number of ways to live like a human being, just any number, like running a freak show at a carny, or raising chinchilla, or eating cocktail glasses—anything
sane
…”

“Tommy,” he said in a patient, weary tone that set her teeth on edge, “if we're going to sit down and talk about this—”

“—then let's be serious. Swell. Great. All right—let's. What's so silly about admitting one's mistakes, giving up this monkey-suit, monkey-shines existence as a bad job and going on to something else?”

“Such as.”

“Well …” The idea had been stirring in the back of her mind for some months, off and on, but she wanted to present it as if it had just occurred to her. “Well … what about Dex?”

“Who?”

It infuriated her that he didn't recall the name instantly. “Sterling Poindexter, from Cannes,
you
remember. He offered you a job in his father's brokerage firm …”

Sam grinned. “And then retracted the offer.”

“Oh, that didn't mean anything—that was only his kind of sophistication. I'll bet he'd give you one in a minute.”

“The world of business.” His upper lip curled.

“What's so terrible about that? That's what the world's doing, isn't it?—the sane, intelligent world, I mean: the one that's getting something out of life …”

“Honey, I couldn't do that. Sitting in an office with a lot of telephones, talking about stocks and bonds—that's no kind of life for a man. Hell, they aren't even real—they're just a lot of gilt-edged paper, they don't even stand for anything—”

“They stand for
money,
” she cried shrilly, “—that's what they stand for! …”

“Please try to keep your voice down. Skip came home the same time I did.—Tommy, I'm no sweet talker, I couldn't con a bunch of people into handing over their dough.”

“It isn't
conning
them, it's convincing them. Of course you could, your beloved troops believe you, don't they?—when you tell them what they ought to do …”

He smiled wryly. “They haven't got a whole lot of choice.”

“Don't be silly, they idolize you, I've heard them. ‘He's rough but he's square, he's straight, he'll go to bat for you any day of the week if you've got a solid beef.' I've heard them, they think the absolute heaven-sent, shining-glory
world
of you—!”

And to her surprise and anger she was weeping. She gave up then and sat down on the cot with a bump. The hell with it: the completely bloody hell with it anyway. She couldn't even argue a point satisfactorily anymore. His arms were around her now, he had pressed his face against her hair and was talking to her, murmuring gently, and she slumped against his protective strength like an exhausted child, not really listening to what he was saying, feeling spent and soothed.

“Honey,” he was saying, “honey-girl, you're all worn out from the heat and carrying the baby and you're all worked up and distraught, and you've got everything blown up out of all proportion.”

She rubbed her forehead against his neck and wondered if she had. Maybe it
was
all nerves. She didn't think so, she didn't think that at all: but it was possible, of course.

“Honey, I know this is bleak duty right now, but it won't last, you'll see, I'll get a change of post soon, I'm sure I will. And things will be better. Sweet, maybe this isn't the sun and moon and all the stars, this life, and there's a lot of ritual and repetition in it, I know that too, but there's ritual and repetition in everything, it's always there. Here it's out in the open more, that's all.” His hand held her easily: it felt so big. “The thing is, I believe in what I'm doing. This outfit of mine, they look to me for—well, for help and advice, how to be better soldiers, better men in general. Tommy, they
count
on me, is what I mean … If I went into business it would be just to fill in time, go through the motions: I wouldn't believe in what I was doing. And pretty soon I wouldn't be any kind of man at all. I'd begin to despise myself for it, and then you'd begin to despise me too, and you'd be right; because there wouldn't be anything there to respect. Don't you see, Tommy, a man has to do what he can think well of himself for doing, or he's nothing. It might be all right for some of them to go into business, but it wouldn't be for me—if only because I was at Soissons and the Argonne. And alongside everything I saw there, nothing in the business world is very real. Do you see what I mean? The businessman goes for his profits and most of the time he doesn't see where it's leading; and things go from bad to worse, you remember how it was, and he pulls the country along with him, the politicians and the churches and the newspapers and everyone else, and finally somebody says the word, the terrible word there's no going back from—and the businessmen go right on piling up their profits, and the politicians rant on and on about that last full measure of devotion … but it's the little guy—the clerk and the farm boy and the carpenter—who's left hanging on the wire with his guts all over his knees. And I'm the one, Tommy. I'm the one who has to lead him into that filthy, endless horror and try to bring him out of it again. I know I'm the one.”

She turned her head. His face looked older and sadder than she'd ever seen it, even on the dove battlements of Le Suquet: the lines around his nose and mouth etched deep, his eyes dark with a steady, angry sorrow. Sad Sam Damon, she'd heard a few of the soldiers call him: Sad Sam. Because of his initials, but it was more than that—it was because of this unspoken, constant tenor of concern that underlay even his humor, his skepticism—and which she'd scarcely guessed at. He was always siding with the enlisted men, fighting for them; he'd been on the carpet over them twice already. He was always saying they ought to have a club of their own on the post, and a canteen that sold beer, and a better-looking fatigue uniform; one night at the club he advanced the idea that the enlisted man would never have complete faith in Army justice until he was allowed to serve on courts-martial—a thought greeted by an embarrassed and impervious silence and a rather tart rebuke from Colonel Lomprey. She would wake at night to see him hunched up under the dented gooseneck lamp, his baseball cap tilted forward to shield his eyes, studying French, or ballistics, or reading Jomini or Clausewitz, or even Trevelyan and Gibbon and Thucydides.

“Darling,” she would call softly, “It's late—you'll ruin your eyes …”

“Just a few minutes more.”

He read like a starving man in a granary, and he retained what he read. He said he had to catch up, he'd missed out on so much that the Pointers and the older men already knew, there were so many fields he had to master; and always, studying late or sitting calmly attentive during the courtesy calls or singing at the piano with the others at the post hops after the rank had left, there was that persistent little current of preoccupation, like voltage moving along a cable—a sense of preparation, of holding himself in readiness for a day of sudden exigency and trial. But he didn't look like that now: now the anguish, the naked appeal in his eyes seemed boundless.

… He's suffered, the thought came to her with a rude, small shock; he's suffered terribly, more than I could ever have realized. It was hard to think of Sam as having suffered deeply—it was like so many aspects of him she could not put together. She could never believe he could have done the fierce and terrible things he had—storming machine guns, holding out against waves of Germans, carrying men forward on the force of his own ardor and tenacity—somehow she could never reconcile all that with the gentle, unassuming man who was her husband. But he
had
done those things, and he had paid the price of them; and that had made him what he was … Shocked, humbled, she put her arms around his neck.

“—I want to be a good wife, Sam,” she said softly. “I want to be everything a woman can be to a man. I mean it. I just got—down in the dumps. All this excess weight I'm lugging around.” She hugged him hard. “Just a momentary lapse, darling. I'm going to take a brace, as of right now. That's a promise.”

He was murmuring some reply, some demurral but she hardly heard him. He was right, she saw: bound fast in death, in violence he had come upon a hard and anguished truth about this world, and it had brought him to the edge of complete despair—and then he had come back from that, and resolutely built his life around that most unwelcome truth … And if it had served him this well, it ought to be good enough for her.

“Disregard these hysterical nothings,” she said aloud. “It's just a legacy from the years with Ramon at Vezelay.” She smiled, and dried her eyes and blew her nose on the huge red handkerchief he always wore in his hip pocket when he was in the field. “Disregard them. I'm all right now.” She shook her hair back. Now remember, she told herself fiercely. This moment now: remember it, and don't let him down. “What would you like for supper? Lamb stew, lamb goulash, or cold lamb?”

He smiled, then. “Cold lamb would be fine, honey.”

 

He leaped from
the running board of the truck before it had stopped and ran up the short rise toward the post infirmary, his holstered pistol flopping at his thigh. Squatting in the gray, pitiless dawn light the old building, with its mustard-colored clapboards and tall narrow windows, looked like anything but a hospital. He went in on the dead run, flinging the door wide ahead of him. There was no one at the desk. He hesitated, started down the corridor—then saw Dr. Terwilliger coming toward him.

“There you are, my bucko.” Captain Terwilliger—known as the Tweaker to his intimates—was a short, wiry man in his early thirties with a soft, plump face and bushy, taffy-colored eyebrows that turned up unexpectedly at the ends, giving him an air of mock ferocity. Beaming, bristling, he advanced on Damon; with his surgical gown billowing above his putteed calves, his turquoise eyes sparkling, he looked like a jovial little satyr. Catching the look on the Lieutenant's face he threw back his head. “Fie, Damon! A soldier, and afear'd?”

“Doc, Colonel Lomprey let me ride a truck in early—”

“That was noble of him. Noble. Even so, you're too late.”

“What—”

“Look at you! A sight. Out playing hide-and-seek amid the heliotrope—or is it prisoners' base this time? Ah, you happy children of Mars.” Eying Damon in amusement, he laughed. “Composure, composure, my dear Angst-laden Leutnant! Where is the bearing that terrified both furious Frank and fiery Hun?”

Damon blinked at him. Dirty, unshaven, his uniform blanched with dust and dried sweat after three days and nights of maneuvers, he was too weary to respond to Terwilliger's sallies. He licked his lips stupidly and said: “How is she?”

The Tweaker clapped him on the shoulder and bowed. “Let me end the suspense, the hideous tortures of nescience. Let me be the first, the very first to congratulate you on the arrival of a son and heir. That's speaking in purely euphuistic terms, of course. Right now he looks like neither son
nor
heir.”

“A boy?” Damon stammered, “—a baby boy?”

“What did you expect: —an arachnid? a cephalopod? Medical science can work wonders, it's true—but certain metamorphoses still escape us.” He clapped his hands and proclaimed: “Weight seven pounds nine ounces, length twenty-two and five-eighths inches …”

“How is she? Tommy?”

Terwilliger glared at him. “Your wife! We don't care about the
wives,
Damon. This is the New-Old Army: what we're after is cannon fodder:
bring forth men-children only; for thy undaunted mettle should compose
… ever read any Shakespeare? No, you wouldn't have. Oh, the military parts, sure—Othello's agony, and Harry at Harfleur … ”

“
Doctor
—”

The Tweaker relented then, and jammed his hands in his breeches pockets. “She's fine. Racked and battered, but she's fine. I don't mind telling you, it was a struggle. Our Tommy is a very brave girl, and an obedient one, but her pelvic girdle is not an obstetrician's dream. For a while it looked as though I'd have to resurrect my ancient skill with the forceps.”

“Doc, how about letting me see her …”

“Anon, anon. The girl needs rest. Do you wish me to curtail my saga of trial and triumph, torn as I was between conflicting loyalties? Who will write my citation if I do not? At three eighteen I was summoned down the hall to the side of Columbine Crawford, consort of our revered Second-in-Command, who was writhing and tearing at the bedclothes. ‘I don't care
who's
in labor, I'm a desperately sick woman!' ‘Where does it hurt?' I queried. You'd have thought I had just attempted her chastity. ‘Here—and
here!
' Clutching with beringed fingers at her lineae albae, her recti abdominis, her pubic crest. ‘If you haven't the brains to know what it is then I can tell you—I happen to be suffering from eclampsia!'” The Tweaker smote his forehead. “
Eclampsia!
Where did she come by that word? None of the symptoms whatever. But it sounds ferocious, you see—it smacks of cramps and iron pincers and Greek classical horrors, and that's all she needed.” He shook his head, his eyebrows flaring. “Pure fiction. Menopausal jimjams.
And
some sort of psychic competition with your beloved I won't attempt to diagnose without a witches' cauldron.”