Once an Eagle (90 page)

“I hope so,” the boy said. “I hope so with all my heart.”

“A new heaven and a new earth,” he answered, and laughed; but they only watched him steadily, distantly. They were not charmed by him, they never would be. Poor little babes in jungleland. All those hifalutin history and government and economics courses and they understood nothing of what made the world hum: their tremulous youth refused to see that there would always be the avenues to power, and that men—being men—would always snatch at them; for no other facet of human endeavor could bestow such magical, seductive guerdons …

“Margie—bless my soul, it's old home week!” It was Meadowlark Walters, looking more puffy and soulful than ever with his basset hound's eyes and mashed-in, pulpy nose; a light colonel now—terrifyingly—over in Somervell's section. Perhaps they could still lose the war after all. There was some rather boisterous badinage and then Walters asked Marge over to his table to meet Iris and her sister. The men rose, and at the same time the Damon boy looked at his watch and said, “We ought to be moving along, sweet.”

“Moving along where?” Tommy said quickly.

“I promised two of the guys we'd meet them at this place we know.”

“Can't they come here?”

The boy smiled at her fondly. “Well, I think they'd feel more at home there—it's not quite so high-powered as this.”

The Shifkin girl rose, then. Donny bent over to kiss his mother, who took his hand in both of hers. “Will I see you tomorrow, dear? Poppa thought we might—”

“Oh, sure.”

“Why don't we have breakfast together? If you don't mind getting up.”

“Fine.” He laughed once, softly. He was wearing his hair as long as was consistent with regulations, and he looked suddenly very young and carefree. “I've changed my hours,” he answered. “I get up early now.”

They said good-bye to Massengale quickly and firmly, moved off through the forest of braid and brass, the Shifkin girl rather diffident, young Damon tall and assured and a bit defiant. Tommy's eyes were following her son as though he were about to enter a burning building. Then the couple passed out of sight and she turned back to the table; her face did a funny little quiver, and her eyes filled with tears.

“Well,” she said, and clasped her hands demurely at the table's edge. Her face was faintly flushed. She was dressed in a Paris blue suit that set off her deep copper hair and green eyes; a lemon silk scarf floated at her throat. She looked proud and lovely and utterly defenseless; and Massengale knew now why he had sat down and stayed on through the inconsequential talk, the arrivals and departures.

“Well,” Tommy repeated. “I'm getting maudlin, it seems. A silly, maudlin old woman.”

“That's the last thing you are,” he murmured. “The very last.”

“Oh, I don't care if I am. This damned, dirty war.” Her eyes flashed around the room with a savagery that surprised him. “Look at them. With a little objectivity, I mean. Gulping down Scotch and bourbon like toads, grinning like toads …”

“It's their day in the sun,” he answered.

“I know all about their day in the sun.
They
don't have to go overseas, face the bullets and shrapnel—oh no:
they're
all taken care of …”

“Some do. And some do not.”

She nodded stubbornly, implacably. “Yes. Well, most of them don't.” She took a sip from her glass, set it down again and looked at him—a direct, wanton gaze that unsettled him. What was she going to say now?

“I don't suppose you would, would you,” she observed.

“I might. What?”

“See to it he doesn't get sent to England. To the Eighth.” His brows rose. “Sweet, we go where we're sent …”

“Some of you do,” she echoed him. “And some do not. Most of you wangle the cushy jobs, the nice fat berths along the Potomac. So dignified …” The orchestra had begun to play “Poor Butterfly,” in a much more dreamy, saccharine way than he remembered it, and she exclaimed: “That song!” Her expression changed all at once, her mouth quivered again. “Please, Court. Please. For old-times' sake. For any reason, or no reason at all. Will you twitch wires, pull strings, cut orders, whatever they do—Jesus God, will you do
something?…
”

She's going to weep now, he told himself; wild little tough little Tommy Damon is going to break down completely and we'll initiate a scene, right in the center of the Statler Lounge … But she didn't break down. Her voice remained steady, she controlled the trembling of her lips. “He's all I've got, Court. Really all. In my life. I swear to you, nothing else matters but that boy …

“I can't help it. I used to have such contempt for craven or scheming women. Irene Keller, Kay Harting, the Rutherford bitch. Remember them? The vamps, the menaces, the pleaders and connivers … Now I know—I'm just like them. I am. I'd do anything, commit any crime on earth—any!—to keep him stateside … You don't believe me?” she demanded softly, with a faint smile. “Just try me, then. Ask me anything. I'll do it without the slightest qualm. Do you see?

“…I know,” she went on after a little pause. “I'm a disgrace to the service. Conduct unbecoming a camp follower. I know.”

“I won't put you on report,” he said. “Please, Court,” she whispered. “Keep him here, at home …”

The importunate anguish in her voice, the naked pain that shadowed her eyes seemed actually to trouble the smoke-laden air between them. For an instant his mind rioted with images of the two of them at sea, in a hotel room overlooking some bay, moving through full-dress Washington receptions—then the extravagant congeries of vision subsided. Nothing could come of it. Nothing. Too many obstacles lay in their path, not the least of which was—

“… But there's Samuel,” he replied, not sure of exactly what he meant by that.

She made a frantic little gesture with one hand. “He's saving the world from the Yellow Peril. Or maybe it's only the Black Knights. Sir Modred or something. And now he's a general. Only Sears Roebuck rank but he made it, he always knew he was going to be one, and now he is. Oh Jesus …” She put a hand to her chin, and now her face, drained of irony and anger, looked simply defeated and sad. “I did what he wanted—and he wanted me. I can see that now. It's always the way. He gets everybody to do what he wants.”

Not everybody, Massengale thought; oh, not everybody. He said nothing.

“That's what he did at Moapora. I know. He got them all to do what he wanted—no matter what
they
wanted to do. He probably told the nasty little Japanese to go and jump in the ocean and they all did. After all, he's only got their bandy-fluking emperor to compete with, there. Command presence. I'm sick of it, sick to holy death of it …” She raised her head again, her eyes glistening and savage. “I swear to God, if anything happens to that boy I—”

She broke off and looked away feverishly, and he inserted a cigarette in his long jade holder and then offered her one. He felt none of the dread that was consuming her. Watching her eyelids droop before the flame, he thought: my son. It could have been my son, our son, and we would not be sitting here like this. We would have a set out at Myer, and the boy would be at the Point or perhaps VMI; and she would know how to charm the Chief and Handy and McNair—she would even know how to handle Jinny, they're very much alike in certain ways … He gave way to the old, dry interior laughter. Her impact on him was so compelling she could, momentarily, make a romantic even out of him.

“Look, I'd do what I could—” he began; but her expression was so desolate and bereft he fell silent.

“This war will never be over,” she said in a dull monotone. “It's still 1918 really: the same war. It never ended. We only thought it did. It's the same one, and it's going to go on for a hundred years. Oh, they'll change the uniforms and tanks and planes, they'll talk about different objectives, different war aims but it'll be the same broken, gasping bodies in the wards, the same forlorn little burial parties nobody knows or cares about. It'll go on and on because we can't let it alone. We've become more fond of war than of anything else … Look!” she commanded, sweeping the room with her eyes. “Look what it does to us—what a ducky injection in the adrenals, the sex glands! It's like alcohol or masturbation or drugs. Why should we give it up? It's so much
fun …

“You know these idiots who are always saying, ‘Gee, if only I had my life to live over'? Well, I'll join the club. I swear I wouldn't do a single solitary damn thing I've done. Not one. I'd marry a rich sportsman or a big-time publisher or an oil magnate—I'd get myself so wrapped up in money and family and privileges that nothing could reach me with a bangalore torpedo …”

You'd find that wouldn't do it, my girl, he almost told her; the world would still get at you. Besides, if you want to dream the great dreams you must be prepared to pay the price. You won't do it.

Aloud he said: “Yes, that'd be pleasant.”

“—What do you want, Court?” The question startled him. She was staring at him frankly now, looking—if it were possible—even lovelier than before. “There you sit: so composed and debonaire. Is life that clear, that meaningful to you? Do you really hold it in your hand so firmly? Don't you ever wake at night, your palms moist and your heart wrung with terror—?” Her eyes hung on his, almost fearfully. “No, I guess you don't … I do. Oh God knows, I do.—Court, don't you ever have a desire to break all the windows, kick over the cart, bust your way out of the whole, silly, sickly pattern of play-the-game and row-the-galley? What's the use of all the striving and conniving, when it all turns to dust anyway, and we all depart in darkness, as the old Bible says—doesn't that ever make you want to throw it all over …?”

It was very, very strange … Gazing into her glistening emerald eyes, held there, entangled, he felt for one slow heartbeat the rush of desire for a life free of sycophancy and manipulation and scheming; free of the worry, the tireless approaches, the disappointments, the strain of bringing timid or stupid or downright hostile people around to seeing things the way you saw them … Then it passed, as lightly as a cloud slipping across the sun, and he smiled and said: “But then who'd do the world's work, darling girl?”

She lowered her eyes; he knew she would not say anything more. In another moment he saw Caldwell coming toward them through the cocktail boom and chatter.

“Tommy, I'm going to have to go back to the office this evening. Gene tells me there are two things that just won't wait.” Noting her agitation he frowned, glanced at Massengale, patted his daughter's wrist. “Now, honey,” he said. “You mustn't get all wrought up over things. It's natural the boy should want to see some of his own crowd, show off his girl …”

She nodded rapidly. “It's all right. I'll get over it.”

“Look at Marge—she's got
three
boys …”

“—Yes, and Harry's a chemistry major, and Benjy's far too young to go, and Joey's safely stowed at West Point.”

“Honey—”

“Isn't he? Well, isn't he?”

Caldwell regarded her a moment, mournfully. “Now honey, you know that's not true.”

She looked down again; she was pulling her gloves all out of shape.

“I know,” she muttered, “It's not. I know. That's a perfectly rotten thing to say.” She looked up at the ceiling. “Margie's a wonderful gal and I'm a rotten bitch.”

“You mustn't get so worked up about things …”

Listening to them idly, Massengale caught again the dry, distant interior mirth. What a farce it was—what a devastating occasion for comedy! All this apprehension and protectiveness when around them the very chemistry of the nation was being altered, the old counters were losing their currency. The old way was individual—the embattled farmer with his musket, the businessman personally responsible to his associates and clients, a government responsive to the will of the people. But none of that was true anymore. The core now was diffuse, technological, manipulative: now the counters were the tank and the heavy bomber and the radar screen, the corporation and the interlocking directorate; and the host of government agencies proliferating on all sides like some lunatic anagram game—OPD, WPB, OPM, OTD, OPA, OSRD, OWI—were concerned with exhorting or soothing or distracting the citizen, with engineering his responses rather than with handing him anything resembling the truth …

Here was old Caldwell, ostensibly such a wizard in the matter of training and equipping the new dogface soljer; a tireless, perceptive, reasonably imaginative soul, one of the organizers of victory—and yet he hadn't the remotest idea about what was happening. The Shifkin girl saw more than he did. The Shifkin girl was right in essence—she didn't understand it but she felt it in some slow, visceral way. Postwar America would bear no more similarity to prewar America than the Restoration Monarchy bore to Revolutionary France; what would emerge would be a vast, impersonal juggernaut of industrial cartels, a mountainous administrative bureaucracy and a prestigious military junta—and beneath these, far beneath, an emotional and highly subservient citizenry whose attitudes and actions would be created, aroused, manipulated, subverted by the roar of the mass media … it was so clear! Why couldn't the dunderheads see it? Whoever
could
see it—whoever rode this wave deftly, keeping just ahead of its boiling crest—would hold the future securely in his fine right hand …

They were still talking about Donny. That arrogant, ill-mannered boy! It was time to move along. The moment—a kind of moment, with its revelations and overtures—had passed. It was time to move out along the broad, stately avenues, seek the solace of the long, still rooms where the maps and charts and intelligence reports and appreciations and tables of organization and equipment cast their shadows far into the lives of men, transformed them irretrievably …