The Pledge (5 page)

“Karma again. What is it? Fate? Kismet?”

“Oh, no. Nothing is fixed. If we wish to talk philosophically, everything is changing, everything is flux. Karma is in the nature of that flux. Your friend Hal Legerman fills his pockets with pice each day and he gives charity where he can. He comes from a place in your country called Brooklyn, where a display of emotion is not popular, so he covers his action with indifference. You wear your emotion more openly, so in a fit of guilt you gave rupees to the children in that poor village.”

Thinking, What in hell gives him the right to lecture me? Bruce said coldly, “That's my damn karma.”

“And now you are angry with me.”

“Oh, no, no — but this place gets to me, palaces — like this restaurant, which is a damn palace, and palaces all over the city, sitting in an open sewer of human misery.”

“True. I wouldn't have put it just that way, but it's true. That's the colonial system.”

But for all his annoyance, Bruce ate with relish when the food appeared. The food was delicious, beautifully prepared and seasoned, and in the gentle coolness prompted by the slowly spinning ceiling fans, he was able to relax and put the local misery out of his mind. He realized that this was a unique privilege for him, to know Majumdar, to go out into the countryside with him, to be able to question him, a privilege that none of his colleagues enjoyed or sought. The end of the war, the suicide of Hitler, the taking of Berlin by the Russians, the washing out of the Japanese effort, had left small war news to write about here in India. Nor was he sending stories back about his attempt to get the truth about the famine — was it a natural or unnatural event, an act of God, or a crime against humanity?

“I think of today,” he said to Majumdar, after they had finished eating and were sitting over small cups of sweet, thick Turkish coffee, “and what you did — day after day — why? What sense does being a communist make? You're such a poor, limited party. The Congress Party has millions of followers, and they don't even acknowledge you.”

“That's true. There are millions of good people who will follow the Congress Party and the Mahatma. Gandhi is a saint and he has uplifted the whole nation. But still, day after day passes. Shall we sit back and wait? Someone must be the point, the reminder, the conscience, the gadfly. Someone most go to the poorest of the poor. Someone must be beyond betrayal, sellout, confusion. Are we that? I don't know. We try.” Majumdar went on, telling Bruce how he had been sent to Calcutta to take part in an organizing drive in the jute mills, how he had been jailed, beaten, tortured, followed for months at a time by police spies, how it became a matter of life and death for him to go near the mills. That was when he took the job on the newspaper and began to work with the peasants. He was forty-seven years old and he had spent eleven of the forty-seven years in British jails.

When they parted that night, just before midnight, he took both of Bruce's hands in his and held them for a moment. “We have become very close,” he told Bruce. “It must have occurred to you that I am using you. To some extent, that is true, but someday, perhaps, you will see it in another way. In my faith, all men are knit together. I want you to tell the truth about this famine.”

“I'll try,” Bruce said. Those were the last words he ever said to Ashoka Majumdar.

When Johnson dropped Bruce back at the palace, the bar had closed, and aside from Greenberg, an old, sour
Daily News
man, sitting in a corner and chewing on a dead cigar, the lounge was empty. Bruce's typewriter was upstairs in his room, but he felt that this, in any case, was something that should be handwritten and not punched out on a typewriter. He took a sheet of writing paper, with its fancy CBI inscription, and began to write:

“Calcutta, India

“Mrs. Bruce Bacon

“Dear Pru,

“I have been carrying around your letter.”

He crossed that out. What in hell did it mean, carrying around your letter? He began again, “I have your letter. Since it is the first letter that has reached me in six weeks, I was relieved to hear that you were well.” He was determined not to be sentimental. She had not been sentimental. “I must agree with you that romantic love, so slightly rooted, does not bear the test of absence very well, and I am ready to believe that your feelings about Captain Dennis are more firmly rooted in reality.” There, damn it, he had rooted himself in reality twice in the same paragraph. Well, the hell with it. Fuck her! The unspoken oath hit him like a sledgehammer. Was that it? Was he so indifferent to a beautiful young woman who was his wife that he could sling such curses at her? Why wasn't his heart broken? Three years ago, the very creation of such a thought would have been unthinkable. He tore up the paper and began again:

“Dear Pru,

“Congratulations. You have found someone to love. Even if his goddamned destroyer had not been in ‘grave jeopardy,' as you put it, I would not have thought less of you. The point is, love dies. You remember Swinburne, ‘love grown faint and fretful'? Well, the damned, bitter truth is that I have been neck deep in something and I forgot about your letter. By all means, have the marriage annulled. Tomorrow, I'll find whatever the army equivalent of a notary public is, and I'll swear under oath that the marriage was never consummated. I will certainly never contest the proceeding. I don't want the ring back. I am not angry, not even greatly disappointed. Whatever was between us, this lousy war destroyed. It destroyed many other things as well. I wish you happiness.”

Later, Bruce would regret the letter and realize the unnecessary agony it might have caused a woman he had once loved. But he never knew how she responded, and he felt that it was at least a truthful letter. He had come to a point where he neither missed her nor thought a great deal about her.

The postal clerk usually kept stamps in the lower left-hand drawer of the big center table. The drawer was empty now. Greenberg took the cigar out of his mouth and asked whether Bruce was looking for a stamp. “The native kids steal from the drawer. I can spare you one.”

“Thanks.” Bruce accepted the stamp.

“How are you making out with the famine?” Greenberg asked him.

“You know about that?”

“It's around.”

“Not good. Not anything I can send back to print.”

“The trouble is,” Greenberg said, yawning, “that there's too much killing around to score a beat that anyone gives a damn about. Yesterday, I heard the new estimate of the number of people put to death in Hitler's death camps. Nine million, and they figure that six million of them are Jews. One out of every two Jews on the face of the earth, and do you think anyone really gives a damn? You want them to weep over Indians?”

“I'm not in the weeping business,” Bruce said. “I want to get at the truth and print it.”

“Listen, kid,” Greenberg said, not unkindly, “you know who made this famine and I know who made this famine, and every
shmuck
correspondent who's quartered in this stinking palace knows who made the famine, and nobody is ever going to print it except maybe that commie sheet they call
Prasas
or something of the sort.” He laid his cigar down in the ashtray. “Never press out a cigar. You allow it to die, nobly.” And with that bit of sage advice, he said his good night and lumbered upstairs to his quarters.

Alone in the lounge, Bruce remembered that there were other unwritten letters, letters to his father and mother, letters to friends. But not tonight. He was bone tired, and his bike muscles hurt like the very devil. He went to his room, took three aspirins, and crawled naked under the mosquito netting. But sleep came hard. He was back on the misbegotten British bike, his sore ass growing raw on the wire that poked through the leather seat, the coconut palms leaning over the dusty road, and on one side, stretching away forever, the waving fields of yellow mustard, a golden, glowing ornament to this hellish place. Why did sorrow and beauty go so well together?

Very early in the morning of the third day after this, a GI brought a note from Public Relations at army headquarters. The note requested him to report to Lieutenant Colonel Frank Scott, Public Relations, if possible on this same day. The GI who brought the note drove a jeep, and he said he was told to wait if Captain Bacon would return with him.

“I'm no captain,” Bruce said. “It's a warrant commission. I'm a correspondent.”

“It never hurts to be sure,” the GI said, and Bruce said that he was ready to go now, but since it was no great distance, he could just as well walk.

“I was told to get you, sir, so I might just as well get you.”

“All right, you got me,” Bruce agreed. He had been thinking about Prudence Carter Bacon since the night before, when he had a long, absurd dream about her, in which he seduced her mother. The Carters were an old Boston family, with excellent small features, who aged well, although since Pru's mother was only in her late forties, one could hardly speak of her as aged. She was very good-looking, as was her daughter, and Pru's father was president of the First Eastern Bank of Massachusetts, which had been organized in 1811, and all of it added up to a very fortunate marriage — although Bruce never regarded it as such. His parents did. The Carters were an old, cultured, and impeccably well-mannered family. Mr. Carter had gone to Harvard, and Mrs. Carter to Wellesley, as had Prudence. Bruce's mother — Chicago-born, as was his father — had helped put William Bacon through medical school by working nights as a waitress while she was getting her master's at Hunter College. They had come a distance since then, and since they were Congregational Church members at that time and engaged in what the Carters regarded as suitable professions, the Bacon son was approved as a match for Prudence. Bruce had met her in the home department of the
Tribune
, where she was gainfully employed creating recipes for rationed foods. There was a whirlwind courtship, a proper marriage, and then Bruce was off overseas.

During the short ride to headquarters, Bruce tried to shake loose from both Carter women and decide whether to seek for at least a modest romance among the many nurses and Red Cross ladies who worked in the hospital across the road from the palace. His growing guilts impeded him, not guilt because of what he had done to Prudence — for he had done very little in that direction — but guilts concerning the character of a man like himself, who could let go of one so lovely and certainly decent as Prudence, without a tear. No solutions offered themselves by the time the jeep reached headquarters, and Bruce comforted himself with the thought that all his emotional responses had been shaken out of context here in Calcutta. Or replaced by other responses totally unfamiliar to him. Within sight of headquarters was one of the many pools that abounded in Calcutta, large square basins of filthy water that were a response to the Bengali lust for cleanliness where no cleanliness was possible; and these pools were crowded with kids swimming and adults washing and cleaning dhotis and shirts and dresses, and, seeing the pool this morning, Bruce was brought back to a book he had read as a child,
The Water Babies
, by Charles Kingsley, and the refrain that ran through the book, something like “he who would be clean could be clean,” perhaps the strangest connection imaginable — or perhaps not so strange at all.

“Sir?” the jeep driver said.

Bruce left the jeep and entered the building. There was a long mirror just inside the entry, and the sight of himself was curiously unfamiliar, a tall man with brown hair, hazel eyes and glasses, nondescript features, all of it encased in a wrinkled uniform. His appearance won no points from Colonel Scott, very proper and military and not too long ago the head of a large New York advertising agency. Colonel Scott felt that war must be appreciated, and he had already made up his mind that Bacon was one of those whose appreciation of war was limited.

“I have just a few points to make with you, Bacon,” Colonel Scott said. “Then Major Hillton would like to have a talk with you.”

“Who is Hillton?”

“Army Intelligence.”

“And what does Intelligence want of me? My own is strained to the breaking point.”

“I presume that's a joke. I think you might take a more serious view of things.”

“What things?” Bruce asked angrily, finding a convenient target for his stifled frustration and irritation. “I want to remind you, Colonel, that I am a civilian. I am a newspaper man, and I have been covering this godforsaken war where it was fought, in Africa and on the Continent. You dragged me over here without so much as a by your leave —”

“Oh, come on,” Scott interrupted. “I sent a jeep for you. You weren't dragged anywhere.”

“OK. You want to see me. Why?”

“Nothing very serious on my part. Major Hillton informed me that he desired to have a talk with you and would I send for you, and since you're here, I thought I might mention a thing or two, small matters.”

“All right. Mention them.”

“I don't understand your hostility,” Colonel Scott said. “We have done everything conceivable to make matters easy and as pleasant as possible, considering that this is Calcutta, for correspondents stationed here.” He paused, and when Bruce did not elucidate on his hostility, continued, “The shirt you are wearing. I noticed the same shirt or type of shirt on two occasions when I briefed the correspondents at the palace. Aside from the fact that it is khaki, it bears no resemblance whatsoever to government issue. It has no theater patch, no epaulets, and no other sign of military distinction.”

Containing himself, Bruce said, “I came here directly from Europe, Colonel. The shirts I owned were heavy. My mother bought three shirts at Abercrombie's and sent them to me. Are you against motherhood, Colonel?”

“Just for the record, I'm not against motherhood, and I damn well don't know what that has to do with it.”