Sons (35 page)

She lived, as it turned out, in a stone farmhouse about seven kilometers from the field, which made it all very convenient. Her mother was dead, and her father was a smelly old wop who had a cataract over one eye, and who would have sold his only pair of pants for a good meal and a steady supply of
vino.
There were only two rooms in the house, a bedroom and a sort of combined kitchen-living-dining room. But there was also a barn and the arrangement we later worked out was that Gino, the old man, would sleep in the barn whenever Ace and I came over to see his daughter.

On the night of the Kraljevo raid, Ace and I stopped to lift a few at the Officers Club, and ran into the pilot who had flown the lead bomber. He told us that everytime he went onto Automatic, turning the plane over to his bombardier to fly through the bomb-sight, he experienced all the qualms of a man running through a thunderstorm without an umbrella, certain he would be struck by lightning at any moment. It was always with an enormous sense of relief that he took back the controls after the bombs were away, as if returning his fate into his own hands once again. It turned out that his airplane was the one Ace and I had picked up off the target and escorted home, or at least close enough to home for him to contact Big Fence for a vector without getting jumped by bandits. In gratitude, he kept buying us drink after drink, and we didn’t get to leave the club until ten o’clock that night. By the time we got over to the farmhouse, Gino was already asleep in the big lumpy double bed in the bedroom at the rear of the house. We had thoughtfully brought over two packs of cigarettes, and therefore felt no qualms about shaking him out of the sack and sending him off to the barn. The obsequious old bastard gratefully slipped out of bed in his underwear and thanked us for the pleasure of being banished from the house, while tucking one package of Camels (the other we gave to Francesca) into the waistband of his droopy long johns and praising the United States Army Air Force for its noble and courageous pilots,
grazie, grazie, mille grazie
for bomba the town, for fucka the daughter, but especially for bringa the cigarettes.

Only stupid women ask questions, only beautiful women ask favors. Francesca was neither. She knew why we were there, and she knew what she could expect in payment for her small sacrifices. We were reasonably decent fellows, though involved in the occupation of escorting bombers, and we never beat her or abused her, even when we were drunk. We were drunk whenever we went to her after a mission (which was sometimes five days a week and sometimes twice a week, and sometimes not at all for a week or ten days or two weeks or however long it took for the weather to break), and we always brought additional whiskey to the farmhouse because we wanted Francesca to have a drink with us before we went into the bedroom. I don’t think Francesca enjoyed whiskey, but she always had at least one with us before we went to bed.

There was no electricity in the old farmhouse; if there ever had been any, the repeated bombing raids had effectively knocked it out, and nobody involved in the war was worrying about repairing electrical lines to Gino’s cruddy little spread. Ace and I undressed in the light of the single kerosene lamp burning on the round table in the center of the large room, then went into the bedroom wearing only our khaki undershorts and climbed into bed to wait for her. In the beginning, when we had first started with Francesca, one of us would go into the bedroom with her while the other waited outside. But a fireplace provided the only heat in the farmhouse, and wood for fuel was going at premium prices, and it got pretty damn cold even on a summer’s night, sitting in that big empty stone room without a fire. So one night Ace came into the bedroom, shivering, and said, “I hate to disturb you,” and I said, “Then please don’t,” and he said, “Move over, Francesca,” and climbed into bed on the other side of her, and it had been that way ever since.

She blew out the kerosene lamp on the round table now, and came padding across the stone floor of the house and into the bedroom. The door on the wooden
guardaroba
creaked open. In the darkness, she put on a cotton nightgown, and felt her way across the room to the bed, and crawled in between Ace and me.

She let us do whatever we wanted to do.

I don’t know whether she enjoyed it or not.

She never said a word in bed, not a single word.

In the morning, we went back to the field at seven a. m., in time for briefing, knowing that if the weather was good we would fly to Hungary or Yugoslavia or Germany or Poland or Austria to bomb.

My hands and feet were always cold in the airplane, and I always came back with a headache.

That Sunday afternoon, Allen Garrett called me a Bolshevik.

Nancy was in the kitchen doing the dishes with Allen’s wife. He and I were in the parlor, drinking and talking and smoking cigars, a habit I had picked up from him out at the mill. He got up out of his chair suddenly and stretched himself to his full six feet two and a half inches, raised his arm and pointed his forefinger at me, his eyes blazing, and shouted, “Bert, you’re a goddamn Red!” Even though everyone was calling everyone else a Red or a Bolshevik along about then, I was surprised anyway by Allen’s accusation. And hurt. And angry.

The hysteria had started back in April, I guess, when Mayor Ole Hanson of Seattle (who had previously been making trips all over the country to alert it to the menace of a world proletarian revolution as openly promised by the Russians themselves at the formation of their Comintern) found a bomb in his mail. On the very next day, in Atlanta, Georgia, a colored girl had her hands blown off. She happened to be working for Senator Thomas R. Hardwick, who was chairman of the Immigration Committee, and who was strongly advocating stricter immigration quotas in order to keep the Bolsheviks out of America. It had been her misfortune to open a package addressed to her boss, presumably with his permission, the servant situation in Georgia being what it was. And on the last day of April, sixteen bombs bearing the same false Gimbel Brothers return address were discovered on a shelf in a New York City post office. It was not considered coincidental that they were addressed to such capitalists as J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, or to such high government officials as Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

The situation only got worse in the weeks and months that followed. We were a people who had mobilized more than four million men to make the world safe for democracy, and suffered close to 365,000 casualties in history’s bloodiest war. We were not ready to have our sacrifices rendered meaningless, we were not ready to lose our country to wild-eyed anarchists and dedicated revolutionaries. We knew how to deal with imminent danger, and we dealt with it effectively and mercilessly, the way we had dealt with Kaiser Bill’s misguided troops on the battlefield. On May Day in New York City, the offices of a Socialist newspaper named the
New York Call
were ransacked and seven members of the staff were beaten up so badly they had to be sent to the hospital. A parade of Socialists in Cleveland was stopped by a mob of soldiers who insisted they get rid of the red flag they were carrying, leading to the throwing of a punch, and then a fistfight, and then open combat, and finally riots all over the city in which one man was killed and dozens more injured.

It was my opinion that people were getting a little crazy only because the country was about to go completely dry. I was not a hard-drinking man, but I had learned a little bit about alcohol on my recent trip abroad (Nancy always giggled when I referred to my war experience that way), and I knew that there was nothing wrong with a nip or two, especially when the weather was as miserable as it was this October. The Wartime Prohibition Law had gone into effect on the first of July, just in time for Independence Day, and the Volstead Act had been passed by Congress this month, putting teeth into the already ratified Eighteenth Amendment by making it a crime to distill, brew, or sell any beverage containing more than one-half of one per cent alcohol by volume. In the meantime, Allen and I were
still
drinking Bronxes in the parlor of my own home that afternoon, while waiting for the Eighteenth Amendment to go into effect in January. But it was not surprising to me that a nation deprived of its right to consume alcohol, however moderately, was a nation that would go looking under its bed for bearded bomb-throwers.

It seemed to me, I had been saying, that we could not blame everything that was happening in this country on the Communists. The Boston police had had every right to strike last month, they were only earning eleven hundred dollars a year...

“That’s more than what you and I make, isn’t it?” Allen said.

“We’re new on the job,” I said, “and we don’t have to buy our own uniforms and guns. There’s nothing wrong with a man striking for a decent living wage.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a strike that isn’t instigated by the Bolsheviks,” Allen said.

“Are you telling me the Boston cops are Bolsheviks?”

“I’m telling you there’s no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime! That’s what the governor of Massachusetts said, and that’s what I’m saying.”

“Then how about the steel workers? Do
they
have a right to strike?”

“Bert, don’t you know that whole crowd there is infested with Reds? Who’s the man who did the most to organize the steel workers, can you tell me that? Well,
I’ll
tell
you,
Bert. It was William Z. Foster, a left-wing syndicalist. The whole damn strike there is a conspiracy. If I owned a steel mill, I’d do just what they’re doing over in Gary, I’d bring in strikebreakers by the thousands and protect them with the National Guard, that’s what I’d do. You wait and see how quick this strike’ll be settled now that they’re wise to those Reds.”

“Well,” I said, “you can’t bring in strikebreakers every time there’s a strike. John L. Lewis has called one for November first, now are you going to...?”

“The UMW voted for public control of the mining industry,” Allen said. “What’s public control if not Communism?”

“They want more money,” I said. “How would
you
like to work underground twelve, fourteen hours a day, breathing all that stuff into your lungs?”

“The hell with them,” Allen said. “Palmer’s got the right idea. He told them if they go ahead with this strike, they’re violating the Lever Act. Do you know what the Lever Act is?”

“What’s the Lever Act got to do...”

“It gives the President the power...”

“... with here and now?”

“... to step in whenever anything inter—”

“It was a wartime measure!”

“... feres with the production of...”

“The war’s
over,
Allen!”

“Coal is fuel!” Allen said. “And the President can tell those Red bastards to cut the crap and start producing it! That’s the power the Lever Act gives him!”

“Gives the Attorney General, you mean. Wilson’s a sick old man, he doesn’t know
what’s
going on in this country any more. If you want my opinion, I think Palmer’s a lot more dangerous than either the Boston police
or
the steel workers
or
...”

That was when Allen jumped out of his chair and said, “Bert, you’re a goddamn Red!”

“No, Allen, I’m not,” I answered, surprised, and hurt, and angry.

“What’s going on out there?” Allen’s wife called from the kitchen.

“Its nothing,” Allen said.

“It sure
sounds
like something,” she answered.

“It
is
something,” I whispered to Allen. “It’s very
definitely
something when a friend of mine can call me a Bolshevik simply because...”

“I didn’t say a Bolshevik!”

“You said a Red!”

“I said you
sounded
like a Red.”

“No, you said I way a Red.”

“Is that
you,
Bert?” Nancy called from the kitchen.

“The girls are getting upset,” Allen said.

“No more upset than I am,” I said.

“I see you’ve managed to smell up the entire parlor,” Nancy said, coming into the room. Rosie Garrett followed immediately behind her, a tall slender girl with long black hair and dark eyes, wearing lip rouge (“The devil’s own paint,” Nancy called it, though she herself had begun putting powder on her face) and a tan suit, skirt tight above the ankles, tan spats to protect her from Chicago’s winds. Congress had passed the Nineteenth Amendment in June, making it illegal to deny the right to vote on account of sex, and the thought of Rosie Garrett casting a ballot next year, when the law would go into effect, was somewhat frightening. Both she and Allen were older than either of us, each in their early twenties and terribly sophisticated. (They had spent Allen’s week-long vacation in New York City this past summer, and had seen
Up in Mabel’s Room,
which Rosie claimed had not shocked her the slightest tiny bit.) Rosie smoked cigarettes. Together, she and Allen made a very striking couple, and I was always conscious of my own, well, not exactly handsome looks when I was with them; my nose especially, though Nancy insisted it was a quite regal nose. Nancy, of course, looked fresh and lovely
anywhere,
in
anybody’s
company. She had put on a little weight since we got married, but those few extra pounds only brought her up to where she’d been before her illness. Slightly flushed as she came into the parlor, she flapped her hands at the cloud of cigar smoke. Behind her, slender dark Rosie put a cigarette between her rouged lips and struck a match.

“What was all the shouting about?” she asked.

“Allen thinks I’m a Red,” I answered.

“Allen thinks Douglas
Fairbanks
is a Red,” Rosie said, and Nancy burst into laughter. Rosie blew out a puff of smoke and then went to sit on the arm of her husband’s chair, putting her hand on his shoulder. He was still frowning, though God knew why.
He
was the one who’d called
me
a Red.