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Alone in the kitchen, preparing drinks and coming to an abrupt, nervous decision that he’d better have a quick one now, here, before taking the tray into the living room, Dr. Andrews wondered once again what it was that could make him tremble in the presence of this dearest child, this particular girl. She was always so calm and so competent, for one thing. She had probably never done an incompetent or irresponsible thing in her life, except for wasting her Turnbull College tuition that time—and that, now that he thought of it, was nothing at all compared to the way millions of other children had behaved in those years, with their flowers and their love beads, their fuzzy-headed Eastern religions and their mindless pursuit of drug-induced derangement. Maybe David Clark could be thanked, after all, for having steered her away from all that; but no, that wasn’t right. The credit couldn’t go to Clark because it belonged to Susan herself. She was too intelligent ever to have been a vagabond, just as she was too honest to go on living with a man she no longer loved.
Agnes Andrews would be sixty before very long, and for many years she had been obliged to wear spectacles with lenses so thick that it wasn’t easy to see the expression in her eyes: you had to rely on the smile or the frown or the patient, neutral look of her mouth. And her husband had to acknowledge that the rest of her was rapidly aging too. There wasn’t much left of her once-lustrous hair except what the hairdresser could salvage and primp; her body sagged in some places and was bloated in others. She looked like what she was: a woman who’d been called Mother in shrill, hungering voices for most of her life.
Long ago, almost beyond memory, she had been a neat, crisp, surprisingly passionate young nurse whose flesh he had been wholly unable to resist. The only minor deterrent, easily ignored from their first night right on up through the night he’d proposed to her (“I love you, Agnes; oh, I love you, and I need you. I need you…”), the only qualifying aspect of his love had been his knowledge that some people—his mother, for one—might think it strange of him to marry a girl of the working class.
ack
She was a sharp-featured, pretty girl named Carol, married at an age she often said had been much too young, and it didn’t take her long to discover that she hated London. It was big and drab and unwelcoming; you could walk or ride a bus for miles without seeing anything nice, and the coming of winter brought an evil-smelling sulphurous fog that stained everything yellow, that seeped through closed windows and doors to hang in your rooms and afflict your wincing, weeping eyes.
Besides, she and Warren hadn’t been getting along well for a long time. They may both have hoped the adventure of moving to England might help set things right, but now it was hard to remember whether they’d hoped that or not. They didn’t quarrel much—quarreling had belonged to an earlier phase of their marriage—but they hardly ever enjoyed each other’s company, and there were whole days when they seemed unable to do anything at all in their small, tidy basement flat without getting in each other’s way. “Oh, sorry,” they would mutter after each clumsy little bump or jostle. “Sorry…”
One of the presents given to Cathy at the party was a cardboard music box with a jolly yellow duck and a birthday-card message on the front, and with a little crank on one side: when you turned the crank it played a tinny rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.” And when Warren came back to the flat that night he found it, among several other cheap, forgotten toys, on the floor beneath Cathy’s stripped bed. He played it once or twice as he sat drinking whiskey over the strewn books and papers on his desk; then, with a child’s sense of pointless experiment, he turned the crank the other way and played it backwards, slowly. And once he’d begun doing that he found he couldn’t stop, or didn’t want to, because the dim, rude little melody it made suggested all the loss and loneliness in the world.
Nobody had to tell him what a triumph of masculinity it was to have a young whore offer herself to you free of charge. He didn’t even need From Here to Eternity to tell him that, though he would always remember how that novel came quickly to mind as he drew her face up closer to his own. She had made him feel profoundly strong. “Oh, that’s nice,” he said huskily, and he kissed her. Then, just before kissing her again, he said, “Oh, that’s awfully nice, Christine.”
lol
“Oh, then you’ve settled it,” Judith said. “Oh, that’s marvelous.”
“Settled what?”
“Whatever it was that was making you both so miserable. Oh, I’m so glad. You didn’t ever really think I believed the nonsense about the illness in the family, did you? Has any young wife ever crossed the ocean alone for a reason like that? I was even a little annoyed with Carol for assuming I’d believe it. I kept wanting to say, Oh, tell me, dear. Tell me. Because you see when you’re old, Warren—” Her eyes began to leak and she wiped them ineffectually with her hand. “When you’re old, you want so much for the people you love to be happy.”
NOTHING EVER SEEMED to go right for the 57th Division. It had come overseas just in time to take heavy casualties in the Battle of the Bulge; then, too-quickly strengthened with masses of new replacements, it had plodded through further combat in eastern France and in Germany, never doing badly but never doing especially well, until the war was over in May.
And by July of that year, when service with the Army of Occupation had begun to give every promise of turning into the best time of their lives—there were an extraordinary number of unattached girls in Germany then—all the men of the luckless 57th were loaded into freight trains and hauled back to France.
reminds me of that chekhov short story about the coffin-makers
Captain Widdoes had been awarded the Silver Star for leading an attack through knee-deep snow last winter; the attack had gained him an excellent tactical advantage and lost him nearly half a platoon. Even now, many of the men in the company were afraid of him.
A few weeks after their arrival in the camp, when their straw mattresses had flattened out and their rifles were beginning to speckle with rust from the dew, there was a funny incident in one of the squad tents. A buck sergeant named Myron Phelps, who was thirty-three but looked much older, and who had been a soft-coal miner in civilian life, delicately tapped the ash from a big PX cigar and said, “Ah, I wish you kids’d quit talking about Germany. I’m tired of all this Germany, Germany, Germany.” Then he stretched out on his back, causing his flimsy cot to wobble on the uneven earth. He folded one arm under his head to suggest a world of peace, using the other to gesture lazily with the cigar. “I mean what the hell would you be doing if you was in Germany? Huh? Well, you’d be out getting laid and getting the clap and getting the syphilis and getting the blue balls, that’s all, and you’d be drinking up all that schnapps and beer and getting soft and getting out of shape. Right? Right? Well, if you ask me, this here is a whole lot better. We got fresh air, we got shelter, we got food, we got discipline. This is a man’s life.”
If it came through there might be ten days of excessive politeness and artificial laughter and awkward silences, while they all tried to pretend he wasn’t a stranger. There might be slow sight-seeing tours of London in order to kill whole afternoons; they might want to show him “typically English” things to do, like nibbling fish and chips out of twisted newspaper, or whatever the hell else it was that typically English people did, and there would be repeated expressions of how nice everything was while they all counted the days until it was over.
If it didn’t come through he might never see them again; but then he had resigned himself to that many years ago, when it had mattered a great deal more—when it had, in fact, amounted to an almost unendurable loss.
i just like this phrase