Sex and the High Command (13 page)

After breakfast, he commented over coffee, “Last night was quite a contrast to my first night home.”

“I had a cold, then.”

“That was my risk.”

“To tell the truth, Ben, a cold was only part of the problem.”

“Try me with the whole truth.”

“A wife doesn’t like to tell her husband everything.”

“From what I’ve heard around the Pentagon, I felt that your hen party, the night I came home, might have included a lecture on feminine hygiene.”

“Oh, well. I’ll confess a misdemeanor to clear myself of a felony. I couldn’t hoist ‘baker’ because I already had a flag up.”

“I’m sorry.” He was contrite. “I thought it was Vita-Lerp. Quite a few of the ladies are indulging, I heard.”

“Only the in-groups, and the wives of admirals and generals who have no other recourse.”

“Some of the country girls must be using it,” he said. “Five hundred Russian women are being imported to entertain the boys in the armed services. The first shipment of ten is supposed to arrive at Dulles next Tuesday.”

“You mean
our
government is allowing five hundred Red hussies into
our
country to subvert
our
boys?”

His heart soared at her indignation.

“Not only that. Your husband has been detailed as an official greeter.”

“Why, this is ridiculous!” She paused to ponder for a moment. “Ben, it isn’t even true! Five hundred Russian floozies, working at top speed, could only service one serviceman once every three years, in rotation. Those girls aren’t being imported for our servicemen. They’re coming for the staff officers.”

Surprisingly, he had never considered the mathematics, but Helga was completely correct. Five hundred women couldn’t service the
Chattahoochee
on a Saturday night.

“I never heard of such! Sometimes, I think Mother Carey is right! One cannot rehabilitate what has not been habilitated.”

“
Mother
Carey. Don’t tell me, Helga, that you’re one of her chickens.”

“Of course I am. How else would I have known about the conspiracy I started to tell you about last night?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve joined the in-group of Vita-Lerp users?”

“Ben, there’s something I simply must tell you.” She leaned forward, suddenly serious. “Get the word back to Admiral Primrose that Dr. Carey is announcing her candidacy for President of the United States, next Monday. She’s organizing cadres to spread her message and her methods into rural areas. If she succeeds, our nation will have reached some
ultima Thule
.”

“Ultimate what?”

“Ultima, Ben. Not ultimate,
ultima Thule
, the final dark regions of myth.”

“I thought Thule was in Greenland.”

“Oh, Ben! It’s Latin. But that woman is expecting to recruit Vita-Lerp users and swing them into her column by next November.” She rose for the coffeepot, and there was genuine anxiety in her voice and eyes as the poured.

“Don’t let it upset you, dear.” His voice was calm and reassuring. “The Navy’s working on the problem.”

“Now, I
am
upset!” She poured part of bis coffee into his saucer. “Listen, Ben. I’m with the League of Loyal Women Voters, and we’re on to her plots. One of her schemes is to order us married women to bet our husbands she win lose. Naturally, the men will vote for her in order to win their bets. Isn’t that devious?”

“She can’t win,” be said. “We’ve never had a woman President. She’s bucking tradition.”

“When the horse saw the first tractor, it no doubt heehawed! By the way, you can pass along the word to Admiral Primrose that one of the counterattacks conducted against Carey by die League of Loyal Women Voters is a do-it-yourself movement. Our movement keeps the waistline trim without forcing a girl to drink all that flatus-causing goo. Oh, we’re fighting her, Ben.”

“Your group is fighting Dr. Carey?” He kept his voice casual. Here was a bit of intelligence worth recording.

“Not openly. She’s too powerful, and if we’re blacklisted by the FEM’s, our espionage value is jeopardized. You can tell your little Sug that he has a partisan group fighting underground in his support and, Ben Hansen, if you start fooling around with any of those Commie Mata Haris Sug is bringing over, my girls will know about it, and you’ll go right back on top.”

“But the Vita-Lerp…”

“We’re fighting that, too. There’s no challenge to swallowing a pill upside down.”

“What inspired you to break with her, Helga?”

“Because I love you, Ben, and because I was one of the first members of the Virginia Beach Chapter of FEM, and I was in line to be the president when that woman. Dr. Carey, flew in, with no knowledge of local conditions, mind you, and set up a permanent table of organization. I was appointed merely vice president, and that dear little Sue Benson, who should have been my vice president, was made sergeant-at-arms. Can you imagine, Ben, of all the persons to make president, she chose that horsey, sharp-nosed Elaine Jackson, and her husband is an over-aged lieutenant commander in charge of a firing range.”

“He hits the bottle, too, I hear,” Hansen said.

“Who can blame him! I saw Elaine the other day in a miniskirt, and, I declare, Ben, her knees looked like arthritic golf balls… So Sue and I got together with two or three other girls…” Suddenly, Helga looked at him and smiled. “This woman talk must bore you stiff.”

“Not at all,” he said truthfully. “I enjoy it.”

“Joan Paula’s boy friend is coming by, then Sue and her husband will drop in for drinks, and we’ll all head to the club for the Saturday night dance.”

“Sounds great,” Hansen said. “But tell me, honest Injun, have you ever tried this Vita-Lerp?”

“I knew you’d get to that question, sooner or later.”

Slowly, she nodded her head, looking into his eyes for disapproval. “Are you angry, Ben?”

“Oh, no,” he admitted. “If all the girls reacted as you have, the High Command would order ‘bombs away.’ What did it feel like?”

“Like a paratrooper taking his first jump… That is, at first. Then, I thought, well, if I’m going to be raped, I might as well relax and enjoy it. But, I’ll admit, Ben, it wasn’t unpleasant, and I can see where it would be worth a dollar sixty-eight to spinsters. It felt like a cave full of frightened bats fluttering out in broad daylight…

“Get out of here, Ben, before I crawl over the table after you!”

Hansen exited chuckling. He loved the give-and-take of family life with its intimacies, and when he turned in his report to Sug and Ogie, they were going to be bowled over by its note of optimism.

Strangely, neither the admiral nor the Secretary of Defense seemed excited over the Partisan League of Women Voters. Admiral Primrose was alert, as always, doodling behind his desk, but the secretary, sprawled on the admiral’s settee with his hands linked across his stomach, listened with detachment. At times, one of them would break into his report with questions that seemed hardly relevant to the captain.

“Was your spouse absent for any length of time before commencement of coition?” The secretary’s question was asked in an abstract, almost bored manner.

“Absolutely not.”

“Did you detect the odor of eucalyptus?”

“Never!”

“Chlorophyl?” His question was directed to the admiral.

Primrose, doodling on a note sheet, said, “Possibly. Carey knows chemistry.”

“How did Sue Benson impress you?” Defense drawled.

Hansen thought for a moment to gather his impressions into one succinct and appropriate figure of speech.

“Balls, sir,” he said finally. “She was wearing sandals and shorts when they dropped by in the afternoon. When she walked the muscles popped out on her calves like billiard balls, and her kneecaps were croquet balls. She was fairly broad abeam for a short girl, and she had a bouncy way of walking that made her buttocks look like basketballs being dribbled. And…”

Hansen caught himself. In his own voice, he heard the avidity for lewd details he so condemned in the men around him, but it had brought the Secretary of Defense bolt upright on the couch, leaning forward, gripping the edge of the seat. Out of the corner of his eye, Hansen could see the admiral’s pencil pause above a doodle.

He resumed the old abstract and impersonal tones of a naval officer describing a lady. “She was a very cute and charming young miss.”

“Continue, Captain. Continue,” Defense said. “Her breasts?”

“Her breasts, sir?”

“Bowling balls or tennis balls?”

Hansen was being taken aback by the civilian’s effrontery until the admiral interjected, “Or quoits?”

Looking directly at the admiral, Hansen answered, “Polo balls, sir.”

“Say, Sug,” Defense said, “did you hear about the girl from Detroit? With her thing she was very adroit. She could narrow it in to the width of a pin or flatten it out like a quoit.”

“At the moment I was thinking of a lady in Scotland,” the admiral said, resuming his doodling. “Tell me. Captain, at any time during your association, did you hear the ladies use words not familiar to you?”

“Well, sir, it was a very intellectual gathering. Both girls and my daughter read books, and Helga takes courses. Sue was talking about the neo-Romanticism of Capulets. Now, ‘neo-Romanticism’ isn’t a word that pops up…”

“Caponets!” Defense seemed stricken.

“She said Capulets,” the admiral turned to Defense, “because there were elements of neo-Romanticism in Mercutio’s speech, when he referred to his death wound—‘not so wide as a church door, nor so deep as a well.’ ”

“Mercutio,” Pickens said with sudden anger, “was talking about that sweet little Juliet. She’d been two-timing Romeo. I wouldn’t believe him on a well-stacked stack of Bibles, and you don’t, either. Else, why your remark about Lady Macbeth?”

Obviously the two were talking in code, Hansen decided, because no one had mentioned any Lady Macbeth.

“She would have died, hereafter,” Defense added ominously. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in its petty pace till the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November… Thank you for the report. Captain. I enjoyed the spicy parts. See you, Sug.”

He walked out, strangely preoccupied and dejected.

With a bluntness not his usual wont when addressing a flag officer, Hansen turned to Primrose. “Admiral, my policy has always been to sail the straight great-circle course, but the secretary seemed to be zigzagging. Was he trying to scramble a message to you that my wife and daughter are in danger?”

“No, Ben,” the admiral assured him, laying his pencil down. “Defense has many virtues, but as a Shakespearean scholar, I rate him little higher than Alexander Pope. Speaking of Pope, Winken is sending your side boy to meet his future First Lady, this afternoon, in the company of Steward, and I don’t want any other service hogging the limelight. Go along, Ben, and show the flag. We’ve got the girl moored up at Birch Mountain, in a monastery. You’ll enjoy meeting the Father Superior. He’s a former admiral who gave up the High Command for God. But on your way to Birch Mountain, Captain, keep Steward off the subject of enclitics.”

“Enclitics, sir?”

“If you don’t know what enclitics are. Captain, I would advise you not to ask Steward.”

Pope wheeled his Mustang into the U-shaped driveway and parked in front of a Tudor mansion.

Pope was vexed because he could not get Cora Lee out of his mind. Sight of the mansion irritated him even more. While the average Joe sweated to maintain his credit and family on industry, thrift, and a low salary. Papa Pepite Regal lived in a joint like this.

Not that Regal wasn’t a respected businessman: he controlled three savings and loan companies in California, all chartered, and several floating loan companies around New York City, which were not chartered. He also headed an importing firm not listed on the big board and was czar of an entertainment industry noted for its low overhead, particularly in talent costs and electricity.

Pope’s rap was answered by a Negro butler in full livery who was not over thirty and who carried himself with an easy grace that was too fluid for a butler. “Tell your boss that Pope’s here.”

“He’s expecting you, sir. This way.”

Pope was ushered into a room where a man sat behind a huge desk in front of a huge window. His bullet-bald head was balanced on a ball of fat. The man arose to extend an affable hand which Pope did not accept because there was a large diamond on it and its owner reeked of garlic.

Regal, seeing the hostility, swept the hand in a face-saving arc toward a chair in front of the desk and said, “I am happy to have this little truce in which we can talk as friends.”

“Yes,” Pope said, seating himself, “we can talk.”

Regal eased his huge blob into “his chair while the butler stood rigidly at attention behind Pope.

“I have checked on you, Mr. Pope, and I want to tell you, as a patriotic businessman, that I admire your war record.”

“I have checked on you,” Pope said, “and you were rejected by the services on grounds that you were a psychopathic personality and a pathological liar.”

Regal’s globe trembled with mirth. “I have not been talked to with such frankness since Mama was alive. I laugh, but it touches me, here.”

With a dramatic flourish, he drew his hands against the upper part of the chest.

“What’s there?” Pope asked. “An ulcer?”

Again the girth quivered, and Papa pulled out a large handkerchief to dab the mirth from his eyes.

“Mr. Pope, I like you. If you tire of your job, come to see me. I will pay you twice as much.”

“Send your man back to the pantry,” Pope said, “and let’s talk.”

Regal nodded and the butler glided away.

“What’s your problem. Regal?”

“You are not a T-man, so I will not bore you. Only one thing is worse than income tax, and that is no income to be taxed. I have a large family, Mr. Pope, and I have large expenses—groceries, senators, doctors’ bills, charities, congressmen, gifts, clothing, entertainment…”

“I can lend you five dollars till Monday,” Pope broke in.

Again the mass quivered, and a pudgy finger moved toward a button on the desk. “As a Chink once said, Mr. Pope, a picture is worth a million bucks.”