Second Generation (57 page)

"There will be others."

"No," Eloise whispered.

"No? What does that mean?"

"I don't care if John Whittier comes," she said recklessly. "I know he must come. But I won't give this kind of a party without inviting Jean."

"I'm giving the party."

"It's my home as well as yours."

"By virtue of what?" Tom asked coldly.

"By virtue of the fact that I am your wife," Eloise said desperately.

"I don't intend to argue this. We'll give the party, and mother will understand why she's not here."

"I won't be here either."

"What?"

"I'll stay in my room," Eloise cried, tears in her eyes now.

"You'll do as I say!"

"I will not."

He had not intended to hit her, just as he had not anticipated the wave of burning anger that overtook him. As he lashed out and struck her across the face with the palm of his hand, he was almost as surprised as she. She staggered back, stared at him with her hand pressed to her face, and burst into tears and fled from the room. '

He followed her upstairs a few minutes later. She lay on her bed, a damp cloth across her brow.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I lost my temper. That's what you do to me. You make me so damn angry."

"I know," she whispered, squeezing the words out through the pain.

"What is it, one of those damn migraines?"

She didn't reply.

"I just look at you wrong and you get one of those damn headaches of yours. You're doing it to yourself. You know that. Up the guilts. Show Tom what a sonofabitch he is."

"I don't mean to," she managed to say, each word exploding a torrent of pain in her head.

"All right. We'll talk about it when you feel better."

The next day, her head still throbbing, Eloise went to the gallery and poured out her heart to Jean, omitting only the part when Tom had struck her. This she could not bear to communicate to anyone else.

"But my dear," Jean said, "you have invited me and I shall not come. You must not be too hard on Tom. I can't bear to see John Whittier, and to spend a whole evening in the same house with him would be punishment most cruel and unusual."

"Jean?"

"Yes, dear?" -

"May I ask you something very personal?"

"Yes."

"How could you marry a man and not know how hateful he would be to you?"

Jean laughed. "Oh, my dear Eloise. There must be ten million women in America to whom you could legitimately put that question, and I don't know what any of them would answer you. It comes down to the fact of being a woman—and the male of the species being what he is, God help him. Marriage is probably the most difficult, delicate undertaking any human being attempts, and we don't have an iota of preparation or training, only the idiotic presumption that marriages are made in heaven and that one lives happily ever after." She paused and studied Eloise. "That frightens you, doesn't it?"

"A little."

"And you're not very happy, are you?"

"I have Freddie. He's darling. He's good and beautiful. I would have brought him oyer today, but you know he listens to everything, and I don't like to talk in front of him about things like this. People imagine that a two-year-old understands no more than a puppy, but they're wrong."

"Of course they are. But you haven't answered my question."

"No, I haven't. No, I'm not very happy."

"Well, what shall I say? You're a lovely, sensitive young woman. I remember myself at your age. I had a shell of ice, and I didn't hurt too easily. But I was luckier than you. I married a man who was quite remarkable, but he had his own shell. I suppose we were both as hard as nails, or perhaps so soft that we had to pretend to be. It's so difficult to know anything about yourself, and to learn something about another is almost impossible. But we were both of us very tough. You're not. You're gentle, and you hurt too easily. If Tom hurts too much-—don't destroy yourself and don't let him destroy you."

"I couldn't leave Tom," she said plaintively. "I know what his plans are. A divorce would wreck his career."

"I suppose it would," Jean agreed.

For thirty-eight hours with no sleep, stimulated by Benzedrine, Joe Lavette had been operating in the base hospital hastily thrown together at Guam. He had amputated arms, legs, hands; separated bits of metal of every shape from intestines, kidneys, lungs, liver, and stomach; probed, dissected, sutured; found himself soaked with blood; changed, scrubbed, operated again; become blood-soaked again— and was finally relieved. Walking blindly, dumbly, he was handed a letter that had just arrived. He went to his tent, sat down on his cot, and stared at the letter, his eyes closing with fatigue. He lay back on the cot and-in a moment he was asleep, the letter clutched in his hand. When he awakened, nine hours later, the letter was still there. He sat up and stared at it, unable to remember how it had come to be there. It was from Sally Levy, and as he straightened the envelope, smoothing it where he had crushed it, he smiled for the first time in days.

He placed the unopened letter tenderly on his pillow, and he washed and shaved. It was two o'clock on a hot and damp afternoon. He was ravenously hungry, and he took the letter with him to the mess tent, putting off the pleasure of reading it. There had been no mail for -weeks. He filled his stomach with plasticlike scrambled eggs, soggy bacon, sliced white bread, and three cups of black, sour coffee; then, carefully and gently, he opened the letter and began to read:

"My dear, beloved Joe," she wrote. "This is an unhappy letter. Our beautiful, darling Joshua is dead. I write these words and look at them, and they have no meaning. How can it be? He was only twenty years old. He hadn't even begun to live. And he was so gentle and sensitive and kind. I don't think he ever hurt anyone in his life. I thought that I was through with tears, because it is four days since we received the news, but now I had to stop and weep again. I live with my own guilts. I was so vile to him. I used to push him around unmercifully, and when I would lose my temper, I would turn on him and hit him, and he would just stand and grin at me and take it, and I'm writing this because I can't say it to anyone else, but you will understand because you know how horrible I can be.

"The thing is, you have two big brothers and you just accept them. You don't think about it, because there they are and they will always be there. And then the letter came, and mother opened it, and she just sat there staring at it. How does it feel to be a mother, and then you get a letter telling you that your son has been killed in a kamikaze attack and that he has been buried at sea, so you will never look at his face again or see his grave? I know what it feels like to be his sister, but I think that if I were mother, I would have died there. Right there. And she didn't say anything. She didn't even cry at first. She just handed the letter to pop, and he read it, and then he put his head down on the table and began to cry. I had never seen him cry before. I guess I had never seen any grown man cry, and I didn't even know what had happened, but I could guess. And then mom went over and put her arms around him. I think women are maybe stronger than men, or maybe some women, because pop just went to pieces. He was in the first war, so I suppose he felt this terribly, I mean with terrible pain. He hasn't spoken to me since it happened, except he puts his arms around me, and when he does that, the tears start again. Mom won't let me see her cry, but I walked into her room, and she was sitting there, crying as if her heart was completely broken, which I guess it is.

"What makes it worse is that we haven't heard from Adam in two weeks. We believe that he was in the D-day landing on Normandy, and that would account for him not being able to write. He is always very thoughtful about writing. Then we read in the papers that there were heavy casualties among company commanders, and he's a company commander, which just makes everything more terrible. I know that this isn't a pleasant letter, but I can't go on if I don't share everything with you, and the thought that you are out there somewhere in that crazy war in the Pacific just makes me half insane with worry. If anything happened to you, I would die, Joe. That's it. I would just die. I wouldn't want to live anymore. And almost everyone I love is gone now, with Barbara away somewhere in Asia or India or someplace. I tell myself that I have to remain calm and composed. Now mom and pop look at me, and I know what they are thinking. They are thinking that I'm all they have left.

"Dear good Joe, please, please be careful and take care of yourself, I love you so much. I love you more than I can say or put down on paper. Please come back to me just the way you are."

Barbara sent her editor a short cable, very much to the point: "I think I've had enough. Returning. Cable me at the USA PR in Karachi." But it was a week before she could be cleared for a flight to Karachi, the first stop on the Air Transport route back to the States, a week of boredom and misery in the wet heat of Calcutta. A few days before she left, there was news of the Normandy invasion, and Barbara could only reflect with gratitude that soon, perhaps, the war would come to its finish. The flight to Karachi, across the whole great subcontinent of India, was without incident, but at the public relations office in Karachi, there was no answer to her cable. This was provoking but not too disturbing, for she had known cables to take ten days between India and the States. She left word to be notified the moment a cable arrived for her, and she checked into the press hostel.

Once in her room, she discovered with relief that she had her own shower. It had been hot and wet in Calcutta; here it was a hundred and ten degrees in the shade when her plane landed, and dry. She had often wondered which Was worse. Showered and with a change of clothes, she went down to the lobby and ran into Mike Kendell, a correspondent for the Washington
Post
whom she had wet briefly in North Africa. Kendell was in his mid-forties, fleshy and scarlet-faced from a consistent consumption of alcohol, a city desk reporter who had gotten his first chance overseas during the war. Barbara would not have remembered him, but he fell upon her with joy.

"God in heaven!" he shouted. "A beautiful woman in this pisshole! Don't you remember? Mike Kendell."

"Of course."

"Let me buy you a drink."

"In this weather? All right, tonic water. I don't dare drink when it's this hot."

"Best time. Warms the inside, cools the outside." And seated in the bar, he asked her, "What brings you out this way?"

"Going home, I hope. I've had it—up to here." She touched her throat. "War is for men and idiots. Or are they the same?"

"Come on, baby. Don't be so hard on us."

"Which way for you, Mike?"

"Burma, maybe China, if we get there, if I survive, if I can stay drunk. When do you pull out?"

"I'm waiting for a cable from my editor. Today, tomorrow, the next day. It can't come too soon. I've had eight months of this. It's enough."

"Look, Barbara, you're in for tonight, anyway. No more planes out of here today. The limeys are throwing a party tonight. Come along with me. You know, very posh, regimental headquarters, charge of the light brigade, gunga din, all that Indian crap. You'll enjoy it."

'This is my last clean uniform."

"You look great. Listen, they got a great dry cleaning service here, honest to God. Give me all your stuff and I'll get it cleaned for you. That's paying my dues. Anyway, you're safe with me. By midnight, I'm too drunk to make a pass at Mae West."

"O.K., I'm your date," Barbara agreed.

"Pick you up at eight."

Barbara had been to British regimental parties before, and this one was no different: British officers grasping an opportunity to wear their dress uniforms and pretend that nothing in India had changed, British officers up from the ranks who had never owned a dress uniform, American officers, stringy, dried-out British ladies who had lived a lifetime in India, Red Cross women, a sprinkling of nurses, a few correspondents, a few civilians, but very noticeably no natives, no Indians. The moment she entered the room —a broad, handsome room with a high ceiling and polished teak beams-—she regretted that she had agreed to come. She would be bored; she would be told by half-drunk, lonely men that she was the most attractive woman there; she would spend the evening in a miasma of alcoholic breath; she would dance with men who grasped her out of hunger and desperation; and she would be looked at with envy by other women who were older, tired, plain. How often she had despised her own beauty, seeing it as an illusion that separated her not only from the world but from herself; but those were bad moments. Tonight she told herself that even this banality was better than another evening alone in her room, trying to read, trying to sleep, trying to forget the things she had seen.

Men clustered around her. On these occasions, men always clustered around her. She lost Mike Kendell to the bar and found herself dancing with a British officer and trying to decipher the layers of ribbon on his blouse. His name was Wescott, Colonel Wescott, about forty, very charming, breaking his back to be charming: "Never could find the proper words for American women. God's gift, you know. But whoever thought to find a girl like you in Karachi. Makes the war worthwhile, don't you know?"