Once an Eagle (71 page)

She lowered her hands. On her word of honor. She could not take her eyes from his. Down on Avenue Wagram the taxi horns sounded festive and remote …

An Indian Scout in a buckskin jacket and crow feathers swung by, clutching a heavy woman in a turban and pantaloons—a Nautch girl, perhaps. Courtney was talking about an argument between colonels Fahrquahrson and Metcalfe over the meaning of the Japanese blockade of the British concession at Tientsin, and she let his voice slip along the edge of her consciousness. She saw Kay Harting again, laughing wildly, dancing with a Moro juramentado naked except for a pair of loose silk trousers gathered at the ankles, his massive chest and arms laced tight with strips of bamboo. Lieutenant Jarreyl—she knew. Of course, that was what he would love to be, a Moro running amok, shrieking hate and vengeance, hashing and slashing with his bolo in an orgy of blood and destruction. His mouth was pressed against the Harting woman's throat now; she was still laughing fiercely. Watching them, Emily thought for an instant of Sam Damon—gone now, deep in the mountains of Shansi or the loess hills of Chahar or God knew where, trudging along through the stones, the blued dust. So far away …

Back at Leavenworth, while Courtney was enrolled at the Command and General Staff School, she had become ill. It had started innocuously enough, with migraine headaches and pains in her chest; then she began to experience difficulty in breathing, palpitations, and a recurrent vertigo that left her weak and nauseated for days. Doctor St. John treated her for Ménière's disease and the dizziness left with time, but now her arms and legs were convulsed with sudden spasms, and violent shooting pains in her head made her cry out. Doctor Silvia diagnosed it as the onset of relapsing fever; old Doctor Stannard disagreed with both of them and gave her the codeine prescription.

Then the world changed—from jagged splinters of sound caught on the tips of her nerves, the unbearable rasp of commands, the shriek of bugles that seared her flesh—changed to a soft, wool-wrapped world of gentle languor. She gave thanks, and took it regularly whenever her nerves got bad again, which was often. Time altered, slowed in dulcet, lapped meanderings; time and distance, held in a Bellini stillness. It didn't matter where she was—a bridge afternoon or a benefit or working in the garden: time held her in its arms and nothing mattered—neither Courtney's icy silences nor Jinny's devilish pranks, nor even the savage duels of will between father and daughter. In time's long domain nothing could reach her. It mattered not at all that a Democrat, and a Democratic Roosevelt at that, was in the White House, that a strutting little pouter pigeon had brought a rearmed Germany to the Rhineland, that Japan had started a bloody war of conquest in China; they happened, they were “events,” but with the remote substance of a newsreel seen years later.

It was deliverance, a reprieve, and she guarded it like the most precious of jewels; she became extremely clever at walking that quivering, treacherous razor's edge between torment and withdrawal. On the occasions when she had trouble, others—like Elaine Kneeland or Tommy Damon or Mimi Metcalfe—supported her, protected her. She played the game; she got through the days, got through the still longer nights. There were no more children, no more nocturnal grapplings and shamed silences. Courtney made—as everyone had known he would—a brilliant record at the Command and General Staff School; his 201 file bore the magic legend
Recommended for High Command;
and he went out to the Islands in an atmosphere of high anticipation.

But here things had gone wrong. MacArthur had received a directive from the Chief of Staff transferring him to the States; furious, he had requested retirement—and Washington had accepted with ominous alacrity. Marshall, that quiet, plodding G-3 from the First Division and Infantry School, had been made Assistant Chief of Staff over the heads of a score of senior officers, and Courtney's Uncle Schuyler said in his last letter it was in the cards that Marshall would be Chief. MacArthur's arch rival from France! It seemed impossible.

“It can't be!” Courtney had fumed on reading the letter. “What does he mean—
in the cards?
Why, Drum has it in his hand—all he has to do is go down to Washington and take it. Or De Witt, or Rowell …”

Everything had gone wrong. MacArthur, his chief patron, was out of the Army, fussing around with his Philippine Reserve Army and feuding with Washington; Europe was getting ready to go to war again; everyone was lining up choice regimental commands or staff positions in the most advantageous places—and here he was, stuck at the jungle end of the world: a sitting duck if the Japanese took it into their fanatical yellow heads to attack. In a flurry of design he requested transfer to Washington, put in for the War College, wrote Pershing, Drum, Connor, Bannerman; he pumped Uncle Schuyler for news out of the Munitions Building; he had wires out in all directions. His whole career was slipping through his fingers. But who would have believed it? That dull, sour, solemn Marshall—
Chief of Staff
… It defied all logic, all sense!

Finally, one evening, weary of his interminable speculations and schemes, she had said: “Oh, why don't you give it up, Courtney.”

His eyes had flashed at her sharply. “Give what up?”

“All this—finagling. What difference does it make? If they want you they'll call for you.”

“Don't be absurd.”

“Either the war will finally come along and you'll make two stars, or three, or thirty-three; or it won't, and you'll be put out to pasture.”

“That's a perfectly fatuous remark. Why should I hide my light under a bushel? waiting for some mythically omniscient, divine call? That's a silly, romantic notion.”

“Maybe.”

“The squeaking wheel gets the grease. That's the Third Law of Thermodynamics.” He smiled thinly. “Isn't it also an old New England adage?”

She said, “It doesn't seem to have helped General Hugh Drum a great deal.”

“He'll get it. You'll see. He's got to get it … though he's going about it in the wrong way. He's pushing too hard: he's built up a climate of resentment. I don't intend to make any mistakes like that.”

“Only the really big ones, Courtney.”

His face became very white and long and hard. “What do you mean by that?”

“Why should it matter to you?”

“I want to know,”
he almost shouted. “Tell me!”

She put down her embroidery and folded her hands. “Like dropping Sam Damon. For one thing.”

“Damon? He's ruined his career twenty times in the last fifteen years. And now crawling around in the mountains with the Reds, playing cowboys and Indians … he's a fool.”

“Maybe.”

“No maybes about it. He's going to be the oldest captain in the history of the United States Army.” He snorted, watching her in amusement. “If the Age-in-Grade Bill had ever gone through they'd have had to throw him out years ago.”

“Then why did you spend so much time with him last year?”

“Because I thought there might be something worth salvaging. But there isn't. He's a sentimental fool—the dangerous sort that never profits from experience. There's nobody in a position of influence who would touch him with a twenty-foot lance. Even his father-in-law's given up on him.”

“How do you know that?”

“It's obvious, isn't it? If old Caldwell thought he was any good he'd have asked for him, in some capacity or other. He knows Damon's a washout, just as everyone else does.”

She was angry, for no reason she could see. “You're wrong, all the same. Even though I know you're never wrong about anything.” She leaned forward and said softly: “There'll come a day when you'll get down on your knees and pray for him to bail you out.”

His eyebrows rose, he smiled at her. “My—that'll be a sorry day indeed.”

“Yes,” she said. “It will. But it will happen.”

“And will he be there to save me?”

She paused. “I don't know …”

He had stopped smiling then, and got to his feet. “An unprofitable conversation, if ever there was one. He'll probably never come back, anyway—there's another rumor floating around that he was wounded watching an ambush of a Jap supply column; and if you get wounded in
that
neck of the woods, believe me, it's good-bye, boys, just break the news to mother.”

“Does Tommy know about it?”

“No. I don't imagine so. I got it through the grapevine, from Folsom. What's the good of telling her? It would only make her more frantic.”

Gazing up at him then—the handsome, lean face, faintly hawklike with its high-bridged nose and high cheekbones, his hair turning silver at the temples—her heart misgave her. She still loved him; she loved him, she feared him, she pitied and revered him—and all this mélange of feelings, balanced so precariously on the hopes and despondencies of eighteen years, brought her close to tears. She felt her chin begin to tremble; she wanted to rush to him and clasp him to her breast, crying softly that nothing mattered, nothing but the fragile affection of two lonely people who touched each other, heart to naked heart … but he had already turned away, was walking swiftly back along the corridor to his study. There was no way: no way to get back to anything. Bending over, blinking rapidly, she went on with her piece of embroidery, which was an old Chinese design of a dragon and a crested bird …

The music had stopped again, without warning.

“You might try to keep your mind on the subject for a moment or two,” he was saying tersely. “Or are you too far gone for that?”

“I have had exactly three drinks since arriving at this bear garden,” she answered.

“You know what I mean.”

The band started again, blaring into “The Carioca,” and the dancers began to leap and bounce about. Jitterbugging, they called it. She started to say something and stopped. All at once the teeming blue serge and taffeta and gold epaulets made her eyes swim. She felt dizzy, quivering, on edge.

“I've got to sit down,” she said. “I feel a little tired. You go and dance.”

“All right … You'll be careful now: won't you?”

She nodded, watched him move off into the press. A refugee from Valley Forge, with rag-wrapped feet and a scarf stained with mercurochrome wound around his forehead, came up to her. She shook her head; he turned away crestfallen, and passing by one of the long mirrors she saw that she looked very attractive in the upcurving red satin mask. Hateful, hateful! Trembling badly now, nauseated, her stomach burning again, she hurried toward the ladies' room.

 

“I'm telling you,”
Bob Mayberry said, swaying in front of the table. “If Guam isn't properly fortified and reinforced, I—I don't know what I'll do.”

“Tell it to the crummy Navy,” someone answered.

“No no no,” Jack Cleghorne broke in, “—what we need is a standing army of two million men …”

“A peacetime draft!” Mayberry, who was very drunk, looked shocked. He had lost his Indian headdress during the course of the evening, and his blond hair kept falling into his eyes. “You're off your chump, buddy.”

“It's going to come to that, anyway …”

Tommy Damon, sitting at a table in one of the adjoining rooms with the Cleghornes and Major Thompson and Courtney Massengale, listened to the argument indifferently. It was late. The unmasking had taken place at midnight to a chorus of shrieks and hoots of surprise, the prizes had been awarded, and the high rank had gone home; and the party, like all service parties, had noticeably relaxed. Biff Lanier and a short, stocky engineer lieutenant from Fort Caceres were Indian wrestling. Bill Styles, known to Fort Garfield as Mandrake, was doing magic tricks at a nearby table. The band had quit for a while and a group was gathered around the piano, singing softly in harmony.

“—gonna land at Lingayen Gulf,” Mayberry was saying doggedly, one hand extended in front of him; he kept staring at it as though it might turn on him. “Three divisions, reinforced. Come straight down the valley—”

“No, they won't. That'll be a feint. The real landing will take place at Lamon Bay, and Legaspi—”

“All right, boys,” Alec Thompson said mildly. “That's enough.”

“True, isn't it?”

“Not necessarily. We'll stop them on the beaches if they try it.”

“With what?” Mayberry demanded. “Banana
fronds—?
”

“A big air corps,” an adenoidal man from Clark Field named Klaus said. “Planes, what we need. Clouds of planes. They'd never try it if we had two fighter-interceptor wings at Clark …”

Tommy finished her drink. Mae Lee was saying, “Honestly, I get so sick of all this strategy talk.”

“Boys will be boys.” Jack Cleghorne was looking at her and she made a face at him. With his slouch hat and cavalry mustaches he looked fearsome, much more masculine. Curiously, most of the women looked less imposing with their masks removed. Mae Lee, dressed as a Confederate belle, had looked mildly seductive; now, unmasked, she had reverted to her confused, ineffectual self. She was thinner and bonier, if anything, than she'd been back at Fort Dormer—she was like a child playing in cast-off grownups' clothes.

In spite of Alec Thompson's admonition the men went on talking of war, of invasion. On the brink: the world was hanging on the brink. Italy had invaded Ethiopia, Germany had invaded Czechoslovakia, Japan had invaded China, everyone under the sun had invaded Spain. It was the new international game, invasion. And here they sat, laughing and singing and playing games and talking about the CMTC as a viable cadre for a citizen army, the inadequacy of the Canal Zone defenses, the devilish intricacies of the Maginot Line, and what the Japanese were or were not going to do—