Better Times Than These (61 page)

The jet airliner was flying peacefully over the ocean, high above and beyond the turmoil that had consumed his life these past months. It still seemed cold in the cabin, and he considered asking the stewardess if she would turn up the heat. But nobody else seemed to mind, so why should he? Strange, he thought; he was the only one left in this section, except for a woman in front of him. Perhaps it was warmer in the rear . . .

It wasn’t that, of course; the reason came to him quickly enough: it was
him
they were moving from. He hadn’t noticed it until now, but his khakis, which had lain for months in the shitsmoke and rot,
stank!
—the more so to people like these, who were used to the villas and hotels of Saigon.

There was some shaving lotion in his AWOL bag, and he considered going into the lavatory and dousing himself with it. But that would only make it worse, he decided. He wished he had a blanket, it was so cold. He was starting to shiver a little. Cold like the cold in the jungle at night when you don’t expect it . . . cold as in a damp, cold vault . . . cold like dead men . . . like Holden, Crump, Sharkey, Muntz, Major Dunn . . . all of them, fiercely cold . . . and he was going home.

He might have done that one thing for them . . . might have gone to the general and demanded a Board of Inquiry . . . might have simply told Spudhead to write his father . . . might have, might have . . . it was always “might have.” . . .

Somewhere in his brain the debt bird flapped its wings. What now? he thought. There must be something else . . . being in a war, living through it, was not enough!

The woman in front had put down her magazine and was fiddling with her handbag. Kahn leaned forward a little between the seats. She was going to leave! Oh, please don’t . . . he hoped. Please stay . . . but she slipped quickly past him, and then he was alone.

He reached up and turned out the light and slouched down in the seat. He had to go to the bathroom too, but was embarrassed to get up.

Somehow, he had let them down. His men. His friends.
His!
He felt awfully, terribly helpless. There must be something . . . at least write a letter to their parents . . . or call them . . . or go to the funerals. It was not over yet. They were still his men—alive or dead, it didn’t matter.

They were whistling their way northeastward, far out to sea, beneath which lay a nether world of silent stillness. And yet if such things could be recorded, somewhere deep below there might have been heard a sound of soft crying.

He tried to stop the tears—tried quite hard, in fact—but they flooded upward from a tightly gripped heart. In the dark, Kahn sobbed quietly and alone, and though it was partly from relief and partly from sorrow, it was partly from shame too. Because he
was
ashamed—of what he hadn’t done; and embarrassed too, because he smelled so bad.

36

B
illy Kahn picked up the phone and dialed the Holdens’ number. From his hotel window he could see the open fields of Central Park, little patches of snow dotting the ground beneath barren trees. But the day looked fresh and crisp, and there were people in the park, walking dogs or hurrying to work.

“Holden residence,” someone answered.

“Is Mr. Holden in?”

“Who’s calling, please?” the voice asked.

“My name is Kahn. I was . . . in the same company with Frank Holden. I’m in New York City.”

“Just a moment, please,” the answerer said.

It had taken him a week to get out of the Army, since Patch’s pull apparently did not extend much beyond the flight line at Long Binh. It had been a week of interminable form-filling, physical examinations and orientations—in between which he lived in one of the BOQs at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

For the first day or so he had spent his spare time hanging around the officers’ club, where he could buy a meal and a drink. Even though he was a stranger, people frequently engaged him in conversation about the war as soon as they noticed the division insigne he was wearing, and that it was on his right shoulder, indicating he had served in a combat zone. He quickly discovered, however, that the questions were often tedious and sometimes painful and that, in fact, he did not want to talk about it, and so he started staying around his BOQ.

In the mornings he would walk to the commissary and buy sandwich fixings, which he prepared himself in his room, and he also purchased a couple of bottles of whiskey. Darkness came early in the month of February over the flat New Jersey plains, and after he had made himself a sandwich he would go and sit in a chair by the window and have a drink and look out over the empty parade ground. When the whiskey began to make him feel good, he would have another drink, and when he felt good enough he would begin to think about it . . . but only then . . .

Once, the day before he received his discharge, he had walked through the lobby of the BOQ past a television set showing the news. The story was of a big antiwar demonstration in Washington, and he stopped to watch it. The other officers, mostly second lieutenants, jeered and swore—but he did not. When the commentator switched to some real war footage, he went back up to his room and poured himself a larger-than-usual drink of whiskey.

“Hello,” a woman said. “Mr. Holden is unable to come to the phone right now. May I help you? This is Mrs. Holden.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Kahn said, faltering a little. “I . . . ah . . . knew your son, Frank. I was the . . . the Company Commander just before he took over.”

There was a pause at the other end.

“Are you in New York?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am—I’m in a hotel near Central Park.”

“Would you hold on a moment, please?”

The previous afternoon he had taken the train out of Fort Dix, sitting next to a haggard-looking woman in a blond wig who said she was a dancer and invited him to the club where she worked. Paying off the court-martial fine had left him with savings of eight hundred dollars, more or less, with which to begin the rest of his life, and the first thing he realized was that he needed some clothes. He had bought some slacks and a windbreaker at the post PX, but today he planned to go down to one of the shops along the street and buy himself a suit or sports coat.

“Hello,” a man’s voice said. “This is Francis Holden. I understand you knew our son.”

“Yessir,” Kahn said. “We were friends. He was my Executive Officer.”

“Where are you staying?”

“I’m in the Filmore Hotel . . . on Seventy-second Street—West, I think. It’s near the park.”

“If you didn’t know it, the funeral is today—at two,” Mr. Holden said. “But won’t you come over here a little before? We’re having some people in.”

He sounded slightly stiff, but very polite, Kahn thought, and thoroughly in control. Not at all like Mrs. Crump, whom he had phoned earlier down in Mississippi. But these were a different kind of people from the Crumps . . . and from himself, too.

“Please, Mr. Kahn,” Mrs. Holden said from another phone. “We aren’t too far away . . . You knew Frank. We’d like to see you very much—won’t you come over?”

“Yes, ma’am, I’d like to very much.”

“We’re on East Sixty-second Street,” the elder Holden said. “You can catch the crosstown bus or take a cab . . .”

After he hung up, Kahn went to the window and looked down at the busy sidewalks. The racket of automobile horns and other city noises drifted ten stories up to meet him, and he wondered if they knew, any of them down there. If they had any idea at all . . .

A few minutes later the phone rang. It was the long-distance operator. “I have your party now,” she said.

“Hello, is this Mrs. Dunn?”

The voice at the other end sounded pleasant and young, with a trace of an accent.

“My name’s Kahn, ma’am. You don’t know me, but I was a friend of your husband’s . . .

“Yes, we met on the ship going over. Oh, he wrote you? I didn’t know that . . .

“. . . Well, I was wondering when . . . the funeral was going to be. I’m in New York City now, but I’d like to try to come down for it . . .

“. . . It has . . . already? . . . Oh, at Arlington Cemetery . . .

“. . . With full military honors . . . I see . . . It must have been very nice. Yes . . . of course—I just didn’t think he . . .

“. . . Oh, of course . . . I had just been wondering if there was anything I could do, to be of help. It must be very hard . . .”

“. . . Well, if you think of anything, please don’t worry about calling. I’m at the Filmore Hotel in New York City, at least for another day or so . . .

“. . . No bother at all, ma’am. I, ah, I want to tell you something, though. Your . . . husband, Major Dunn . . . was a fine man. Very fine . . .

“. . . No, ma’am, I’m out of the Army now. My time was up . . .”

He put on the windbreaker and went to the elevator. It was nearly 11
A.M.
, and if he wanted to get over to the Holdens’ house he was going to have to hurry up and buy that sports coat and put it on.

The church was a gray Gothic spire situated at the confluence of the great and powerful avenues of Wall Street and Broadway. Former First Lieutenant Billy Kahn arrived jammed in a limousine with an aunt, an uncle and two cousins of the Holden family. They went straight inside, but he stood on the sidewalk for a while, watching other limos, taxicabs and private automobiles disgorging serious-faced, proper-looking people in front of the church. He thought he recognized some of the faces, but wasn’t sure. In any case, he thought, the Holden family were certainly well connected.

An icy gust deviled down the canyon of skyscrapers and needled his eyes, and he clutched the front of his new tweed jacket together against the cold—and also to make it fit better, since when he bought it he had simply asked for his old size, forgetting that he had lost weight. He hadn’t noticed how loosely it hung until he stopped in front of a plate-glass window on his way to the Holdens’, and by then it was too late to do anything about it.

They had ushered him warmly into the Holden household, offering food and drink, and taken him into the big living room where everyone was gathered and introduced him around. All eyes were on him, and the room fell silent when the Holdens began asking questions about their son. He had answered delicately but truthfully, and given as close an account as he could of the final battle—leaving out, however, any mention of Patch’s refusal to relocate the company. During this time, most—except for the Holdens themselves—looked down at the floor, and a few had shaken their heads sorrowfully from time to time. In the end, though, all seemed relieved to have been carried back through the last moments by someone who had been especially close to it.

When he had finished, only Holden’s sister, Cory, was moved to tears, and as she sobbed quietly in a chair, Holden’s father said to him, “Billy, do you believe Frank had any idea what he died for?” Kahn thought about it briefly, then said, “Mr. Holden, he had a whole company to look after, and from everything I heard, he did the best he could. That’s the only answer I can give you.”

The honor guard arrived in their dress blue uniforms and formed up alongside the church. They received mostly passing, awkward glances from those filing in—with the exception of a tall, pretty girl standing on the steps, and she stared at them with such a narrowed fierceness in her bright green eyes that Kahn had a sudden inkling he knew who she was. He walked over and said, “Excuse me—is your name Becky?”

She continued to stare at the honor guard—six lieutenants and a captain, who were talking together quietly. “Yes,” she said.

“I guess I thought so. Frank told me about you.”

She looked at him. Her eyes were slightly red as though from crying, but not for a while.

“I’m Bill . . . Billy Kahn. Frank and I were in the same outfit.”

“Oh,” she said flatly, then added, “Why are you here?”

He stumbled for words for an instant. “I am . . . well, because . . . he was my friend . . .”

“Oh, no, I didn’t mean that,” she said, softening. “I meant, how did you get here . . . if you were just over there with him?”

He was about to answer when a tall, slightly graying man joined them. He was craggy and handsome and almost fatherly-looking, but he took Becky’s hand.

“Sorry I’m a little late—something came up,” he said. She leaned over and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

“Richard,” she said, “this is . . . Billy. He knew Frank . . . over there.”

The man extended his hand. “Hi, I’m Dick Widenfield,” he said. They shook hands, and Kahn fished around for a cigarette. In his pocket was Holden’s unsent letter; he had read it again this morning, and yet had no more idea what to do with it now than he had had the day he got it.

“You’re in the Army, then?” Widenfield asked.

“Until two days ago.”

“Oh, so you just came—”

“Oh God! It’s so stupid!” Becky suddenly blurted out. “Why did he have to die? For
what?”

It was the second time that day someone had asked that question. He knew that the answer he had given before wouldn’t do this time . . . different people, different answer. Maybe there wasn’t a single answer. Maybe there wasn’t an answer at all . . . so he stood there dumbly and said nothing.