Once an Eagle (121 page)

“Bill, if you'd let me—”

“But no—you can't wait to get back to that good old rack. The agonies of the Catherine wheel, with an audience of thousands. This Martyred Matron. Else what's a soldier husband for? Why, it's better than a twenty-year annuity! Jesus, won't it be a pity if he gets himself starched in the Honshu invasion—”

“All right, Bill!…” She was angry herself now, but it was dulled by confusion and a growing alarm. She should be able to laugh at this, it ought to be a source of amusement: what in God's name was the matter with her? She had a sudden image of Sam back at Hardee, long ago, sitting on the edge of her cot, his eyes tormented and pleading.
I'm that man, honey. Don't you see?

“We're talking about identity,” Bill was going on implacably. He was holding an unlighted cigarette between his finger and thumb, like a piece of chalk, and was pointing it at her. “Yours. Now you have a choice: a good clear one. Either you can make your life serve a positive and relatively normal function—or you can turn in on yourself and put on the weeds of the professional griever, the perennial man-punisher, feeding on the stones of bereavement and vengeance. Maybe you'll enjoy that more than anything else—maybe your sado-masochism synchromeshes perfectly, for all I know.” He pointed the cigarette at her throat. “Now which road do you want to travel down?”

She shook her head; she was still full of alarm. “It isn't that simple …”

“No. Nothing is. But you better think about it: you better find out what's running you, sweet. What you really want.”

She finished packing in silence, nervously. What was running her? Her mind appeared to her as a small room crammed with cast-off furniture, outworn garments and appliances. What did she want? Did she want to punish Sam? did she want to forsake him?

The Cormorants, Poppa had used to call them—perhaps because they held themselves with such stiff pride, their heads suspended on corded necks; or perhaps because they exuded an atmosphere of such blackness. They stood forbiddingly at the ends of reception lines, or sat at tea sets pouring with icy correctness, or leaned forward, conversing with one another in a fierce, taut complicity … Was she on the way to becoming a Cormorant? That was ridiculous—she was madcap Tommy Damon, who had introduced the Lindy Hop to Fort Beyliss, whose imitation of Tallulah Bankhead was famous from Fort Myer to Manila Bay …

She closed her bag, feeling defeated and apprehensive and angry. A little while ago she had become aware of the prison of the moment, and resolved to flee it. But Sam was her past, and a lien on her future. Donny was the core of that past, Donny was what they had together, they and they alone—promise and memory: to leave Sam was to destroy Donny all over again, more cruelly than the German fighter planes had done …

“All set?” Bill said from the doorway.

“All set.”

As she descended the stairs the rain threw soft, transparent stains down the panes of glass.

 

“They did it
just to get rid of me,” Vicky Varden declared, and her smooth, lovely face tightened in a scowl. “They can put it any way they want, that's what it adds up to.”

“Now sweetie, try to look at it another way,” Al Hambro said.

“What other way is there to look at it?”

The press agent opened his hands. “You're doing yourself a world of good out here. Your publicity has been terrific, I've told you that …”

“Well, I hope it's scoring points for me in heaven,” she retorted, “because it sure as hell isn't doing anything for me here on the ground.” Her eyes were snapping. “The chance of a lifetime down the drain and here I sit on my aching fanny, ten thousand miles away from home plate. It's all T.L.'s fault. That foul-mouthed son of a bitch—”

“Now, Vee-Vee,” Lew Pfyzer chided her. Like most comedians he was soft-spoken and shy when he wasn't on stage; he looked like a competent CPA with a stubborn, rather stupid client. “General Massengale has been wonderfully hospitable to us and I don't think he's all that interested in a lot of Hollywood shop talk. Do you?”

“—Oh, I'm sorry, General!” Vicky Varden turned toward the Corps Commander. Every trace of displeasure was gone; her face was alive with the winsome, eager smile that had gleamed from screens and billboards and GI footlocker covers for three years. “I'm sorry, I really am. This is honestly the sweetest reception I've been given since General Ike's place outside of Paris, at—what was the name of it, Lew?”

“Marnesse la Coquette.”

“Oh, yes. How did I ever forget that?”

“I can't imagine, lover.”

The star shivered her shoulders pleasurably. “I love palaces: they always make me want to do crazy, impossible things—have affairs with sultans and torture people in dungeons and throw myself around …”

“You don't need a palace for all that, sweetie,” Pfyzer told her.

“Lew, you're a crummy sadist.” She ran her fine hazel eyes around the ceiling filigree. “A castle like this tells you all the things you want to be. Do you know?”

Sitting at the head of the long table Courtney Massengale nodded gravely. Well, it did something like that, and a little more; he was pleased with the effect. The private dining room with its own balcony, where the USO troupe and his senior staff officers were now eating and drinking, was separate from the officers' club proper but connected by a narrow passageway, so that the music and laughter from the main room lent a distant air of frivolity to the smaller party. Yet it was understood that aside from barboys and messmen no one was to enter here, except for the most exceptional reasons. His guests as they came through Reina Blanca—correspondents, congressmen, entertainers—always sensed this; it never failed to make them a touch more respectful and subdued. All except Miss Varden, whom apparently nothing ever subdued.

“Forgive me for being in such a brutal mood, General,” she pleaded; her face broke into a winsome little pout. “I'm standing right in the middle of the crisis of my life, I really am. And I need your help.”

He smiled his most charming smile. “Anything within my humble powers, Miss Varden.”

Her face brightened like a little girl's; there were actually tiny stars at the centers of her pupils. “Please call me Vicky.”

“I'm afraid I couldn't do that,” he answered. “I never address people by their nicknames, you know.”

“But why not? I said you could …”

“In my opinion it's both vulgar and unnecessary.”

“Oh.”

There was a funny pause. Both Pfyzer and Hambro were staring at him blankly. Pleased with the effect he smiled again and said: “But I'll call you Victoria, if I may.”

She straightened in her chair, fluttering a little. “Oh, I love that,” she cried. Abruptly she aimed a bright vermilion fingernail across the table at Pfyzer's throat. “You see, Lew? There's gallantry. Something
you'll
never know … Jesus H, why can't men hang on to their gallantry anymore?”

“We've lost it all escorting you around the fighting fronts, darling,” the comedian answered.

Vicky Varden ignored him; all her attention was focused on Massengale again. “It's just that I'm in danger of losing the role of my career. Absolutely. They're casting right now.
Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
” She put her teeth neatly on her ripe little lower lip. “It's a novel by Thomas Harding.”

Massengale nodded again. “Oh. Of course. Do they hang her at the end?”

“I don't know—I haven't read the script. It's just the chance of a lifetime and the studio roped me into this mucking tour, every damn palm tree in the Pacific Ocean—and now I'm supposed to find Chet and be
reconciled
with him. Of all the God damn loony ideas!”

“Now, Vee-Vee,” Hambro murmured.

“Well, it is. It's fantastic. In this heat … Of course you expect it to be hot anywhere in August,” she said to Massengale. “Except L.A., I mean.—Can I call you Court?” she asked him. “It sounds so—I don't know: so strong and savage. Ruthless, sort of. General Court …” Her face went suddenly blank. “Oh: I guess I better not say it that way, should I?”

“Ah, but imagine if my last name had been Marshall.”

Captain Graulet of the G-2 Section had entered from the corridor that connected the private dining room with the Corps offices and now was leaning over Fowler, speaking rapidly and urgently. Fowler had turned in his seat and was staring up at Graulet with a quizzical, irritated expression on his sober, scholarly face. Massengale watched them for a moment, and then Bucky Warren, holding forth for the dancer Diana Speers, who was shrieking happily, a hand at her throat. Ryetower and Burckhardt were both convulsed with mirth. Lowering his eyes Massengale sipped at his wine and felt the old interior laughter. These USO tours in particular amused him: the parade of stars and comedians and dancers with their little packs of attendants and advisers, their false, breezy camaraderie, their rituals of presentation and self-pretense, their demands, the lamentable vulgarity that sheathed them like chain mail. But the Varden girl intrigued him. Watching her from his screened booth at the rear of the audience the evening before, standing so straight and demure in the clinging blue gown, holding the microphone, her head inclined prettily to one side, he'd been conscious of a quick, electric brightness reminiscent of Tommy Damon: that mirror flash of eyes, and a vibrant, faintly husky voice that promised intimacy, dalliance, a triumphant surrender.

 

“…We'll ride a silver balloon

To the Taj Mahal and Cathay …

Darling, it can't be too soon

Till we've found that heavenly, golden day …”

 

And there they sat below him in their dreary, starved, unwashed thousands, their faces following her every gesture with the blind, degrading hunger that never failed to fill their eyes every time they glimpsed a woman from home. The poor, pitiful clods—chained to a myth that would never cease to mock them—

“You're lonely, aren't you, Court?”

The impertinence of these people was something marvelous. He knew his face showed nothing. He turned to her, aware of a sudden, sharp constraint among the others. They are afraid of her, he thought with stealthy pleasure—and still more afraid of me: they are caught between fears.

“
Command
is lonely,” he answered.

Smiling she shook her head. “Not what I meant. Never mind.” She emptied her glass—she had scarcely touched her food, although most of the others had exclaimed over the cuisine—and leaned toward him, her eyes wide and challenging. “Timing—is—everything,” she pronounced, and tapped the table with her nails.
“Everything…”

“I know,” he said.

“I know you do. That's why I admire you: you've never made a mistake.” She nodded, watching him steadily from under her brows. “That's why I need your help. Will you come to the aid of a damsel in distress?”

He gave his slow, deprecatory nod—part of the Massengale Manner. All the old terms had been reversed. This star sitting here beside him was a law unto herself—her scowl could send panic through her entire retinue, her moods were the stuff of national press releases; but now, here, one word from him and she would be banished from his command like any courtier fallen out of favor in a Tudor realm. There was a curious sort of gratification in the thought. Gazing at the soft, eager face, those lightly parted lips, he thought again of Tommy and felt the germ of an old fantasy rise, tremulous and sly …

Then he suppressed it. This was his world: and it would increase. The Cagayan Valley campaign would be wound up by the end of the month; Damon's division had taken Lagum on the third. By September Swanson's people could start training for the Honshu landings. CORONET. The likeness of a kingly crown. He would have it then—Twelfth Army and his fourth star, and the broad Kwanto Plain on which to deploy his legions. Japan would fall, slowly, fanatically, and then would come the delights of occupation. There might even be—who knew?—mighty annexations, his old dream of an America-dominated East Asian Periphery; there would be a need for proconsuls who could rule with force and ingenuity. But not long: a year at most. Then back to Washington, and Plans. And then—

Fowler had left the table and gone quickly into the offices wing, followed by an anxious Graulet. Massengale wondered idly what it might be. Could Yamashita possibly have sent a surrender overture? Had Kurita made some final suicide sortie out of Brunei Bay? Both were unlikely—more probable was some enemy transfer of troops from China to the home islands.

“The whole thing is perfectly ridiculous,” Vicky Varden was telling him. “The studio got this bug about me going out and looking up Chet, and you know, building it up a little. That it would help both our Hoopers. Where in hell is Lubagang?”

“Luabagán,” Massengale corrected her automatically. “It's a well-demolished town on the west bank of the Chico River, up in the northern end of Luzon.”

“God. Last time I went near the front lines I got sick as a dog. Galloping case of the trots. Damn it all, I
can't
go up there again,” she wailed. “Eating hash out of an old tin dish, dragging my fanny through the mud and trying to find a—”

“Vee-Vee, honey, this is a battle zone,” Hambro protested. “You know they said—”

“Oh dry up, Al … If only it weren't for the
bugs!
” she exclaimed in sudden exasperation. “And all the crazy diseases …”

“Who is
Chet?
” Massengale asked her.

“Chet Belgrade. He's my husband—my ex-husband, actually. He got filled full of patriotism as a Christmas turkey right after Pearl Harbor and joined up, there wasn't the slightest need for it, and he's been out here for years and years.” She gave a sharp little cluck of distress. “I didn't know he was out in the
jungle,
for Pete sake. Fighting … I got Bert Lawson to see if they couldn't send him here, or to Manila. But nothing doing. They told Bert he's too essential. It's the first time anybody's ever called him that in twenty-six years. What's his rank, Al?”