Once an Eagle (55 page)

The last sentence, spoken in a low voice but with great intensity, rang in the little room. Damon said quietly: “He drinks more than he should.”

“Oh, Jesus. You sound like Poppa.—He's a disgrace to the uniform eighty-five percent of the time.”

“Not quite … He was badly gassed at Vauquois.”

“All right, and you were badly wounded at Mont Noir and Ben was badly wounded at Malsainterre. What does that prove? That your luck ran out—that's what you used to say, anyway. Why should he be able to barge in on the four of us at any hour that pleases him? Why should he be
honored
so?”

He sighed, and rubbed his face with one hand. “You don't have to worship at his feet. The theory is that you respect the rank he holds.”

“But I don't respect
him
—!”

“Look, Tommy, we don't any of us come up to all we might in this world …”

“That's no answer—”

“Ideally he would act in such a way as to command the respect of the lesser grades.”

“The fact is that Batchelder can't command the respect of a frog, and that they busted you down from major without a qualm. The
fact
is Courtney Massengale remained a captain, and now he's made major, and he's just been assigned to the War Monuments Commission.”

He felt himself start in surprise. “Where'd you hear that?”

“Jeannette North told me. Yes—per diem and a fancy apartment in Paris and a private car to go tooting around to all the battlefields—the ones
you
crawled all over and left your friends on—taking notes for a cute little guidebook.” Her face was hard now with scorn. “And he hasn't any combat record at all. Who has a better right to be there, doing that—Massengale or you?”

Well, it was a blow: more than he would have believed. A man who had never been in the line, never cringed under the shriek and slam of high explosive, never stepped out into the terrible chatter of the Maxims—that he should walk through the cemeteries where—

He dismissed the thought; took a deep breath. “Honey, every profession has its own preferments and favoritism.”

“And how!”

“All right—people are people. Why do you expect the Army to be immune? It's full of people, too. And some are like George Caldwell and some are like Clarence Batchelder; and most of us are somewhere in between. Do you think I'd have got to be a major without your father's influence?”

Her eyes flashed up at him. “You did it on sheer ability—sheer courage and personal example! He told me so …”

“Not quite. Plenty of people did as much as I did, or more, and they didn't get to command a company of infantry.” He smiled at her. “I think I earned my way, but look at it from the point of view of somebody like Batchelder: Caldwell takes this brash young sergeant—an enlisted man, mind you, next thing to a recruit, he wouldn't even have been a corporal if it hadn't been for our entering the war; he writes him up for every decoration under the sun, pushes him up to a majority—and the conniving little bootlicker not only grabs everything within reach but marries Caldwell's daughter into the bargain, to advance himself some more …”

Tommy's mouth drew down wryly. “Well: at least nobody can accuse you of that.”

“Of course they can. Anybody can accuse anybody of anything. There's no action on earth, from Adam on down, that can't be misconstrued, if the beholder has the inclination.” He paused. “You know all this, honey. You've known it longer than I have.”

“No. I didn't know it at all.” Standing by the window now she gripped her arms together as if she were cold. “I just accepted it. And then I rebelled against it, without really knowing, either … I got a letter from Marie Lovewell today,” she said.

“Really?” Pete had resigned from the service when they were at Hardee. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“I wanted to think about it awhile first. I wanted to talk with you about it.” She studied the toes of her slippers. “Pete's been making a lot of money building houses in and around Chicago—there's a big building boom, apparently. They've got a lovely place out in Evanston and the kids are in private school. Marie was asking me about places to stay in France. They're going over to Europe in a month or two. A vacation.”

He found he was looking at the two parallel grooves in the floor that had probably been made by some heavy piece of furniture. The round nickel alarm clock on the bed table kept up its dry, furious ticking—when you listened to it closely you were almost certain its rhythm varied, that it picked up and then fell away again, every twenty seconds or so.

“Where are we going, Sam?”

He glanced at her uncertainly. “What do you mean?”

“I mean where are we headed? really? You'll finish up here and you'll stand high in your class, maybe at the top, and it'll go into your 201 file—and where will they send you then? Luzon, Wyoming, back to Texas, Nicaragua maybe—another school, another post sunk deep in the plains. And we'll go on showing up at the Saturday night hops, and you'll go on drilling people and studying the campaigns of Artaxerxes or learning Finno-Ugrian on your own … and then in ten more years, or twenty, you'll be back to major, if you're lucky, and ready to be put out to pasture, and the kids will have the glorious possibility of other army brats to choose their mates from … ” She ran her hand through her smoothly brushed hair, disheveling it abruptly. “What's it all for, Sam? Really and truly. You know something? Life's going by,
our
lives, the only ones we have—and we haven't got a whole awful lot to show for it, either. Our lives, Sam … ”

To his surprise she was not on the edge of weeping; she had not raised her voice. But there was something in the flat, controlled tone and the set of her face that frightened him more than tears.

“I don't know what to say,” he murmured. “I can't tell you anything I haven't already. I just feel my place is here, that's all.”

“But why?” she cried softly. “It's against all reason—”

“
War
is against all reason.”

“And so you're going to sit here, like Votaw, waiting for another war, hoping for another blood-letting that will give—”

“No,”
he said tightly; he was angry all at once. “You know better than that.” He raised his hand. “If God came into this room right now and told me there'd never be another war—anywhere, any size—even for just my lifetime, I'd dance for joy. Don't say that, because it isn't true.”

She bit her lip, came over to him and pressed his head against her breast. “I'm sorry, Sam. I had no right to say that. I'm sorry.”

“I know there are Votaws around. Maybe there's more of them than there should be.”

“Maybe we ought to leave the Army to the ones that want killing, that love it and pray for it—maybe we ought to leave it to the butchers and the sadists.”

He shook his head. “There are enough of them anyway. Let's make sure there are a few of the other kind.”

“Sam …”

“Uh-huh?”

“Sam”—she leaned back and looked at him—“you're not scared, are you?”

He smiled at her slowly. “I'm scared of a lot of things. Scared of what in particular?”

“Of the outside … You're not afraid you couldn't make a go of it?—the way Pete Lovewell has?”

“No,” he answered. “I could get a job in civilian life and a good one. Why couldn't I?” He paused, searching her face. “Don't you think I could?”

“I don't know. It's—everything seems to move so fast out there. This is such poor training for the world. So many of them seem to be just floating along, passing time. Look at Howie Searles, playing piano at the parties and telling funny stories. Or Walt Marburger with his card tricks and home brew. The funny thing is, after awhile it
does
begin to look complicated and demanding, out there beyond the main gate … You're too good for this, Sam!” she cried softly. “These Batchelders and Votaws and Searleses. Can't you see that?”

“You're always saying that.”

“But it's true …”

“I'm too good for what was good enough for Grant and Lee and Wood and Pershing and Colonel Marshall and your dad?”

“Yes,” she nodded. “You could do better. You could do such tremendous things, I'm sure of it. But it's impossible, the way the cards are stacked. And every time you have to temporize with a jughead like Batchelder it makes you that much less a person. It's a war of attrition, Sam: you have to give up more than you can ever get back …”

“Maybe so.” He released her, then drew her to him gently and took her onto his lap and kissed her on the cheek. The early morning breeze stirred in the tall pines at the far end of the row and then subsided, like a night animal changing position in its lair. “I love you, honey,” he murmured in her ear. “You're just this whole world to me, you and the kids. I know I haven't got a bushel of money and a string of horses and connections in the AG's office, and I can't blow my own horn the way some of them can. But I
care,
honey. I care about this world and this country and what's happening to it.”

He paused. We don't talk enough, he thought; we talk a lot but not about the really crucial things. Maybe it's a good thing this crazy wing-ding came off tonight. Suddenly it seemed terribly important that she see and understand what he felt about this—more important than anything else they'd ever had between them.

“I've been detailed for this, honey. That's what it is. Like a soldier who's drawn outpost duty beyond the front lines. He's just drawn the detail, that's all. He didn't ask for it, it was laid on him—maybe because his platoon leader thought he was more alert or competent or careful than the others, or maybe the sergeant had it in for him and stuck him with it, or maybe it was just the luck of the draw. But that doesn't matter—there he is: he's drawn the obligation, he's out there, and what he does during those hours will mean the lives of all the rest. And so he's got to do everything in his power to prepare himself for that moment. I'm like that man. Don't you see?”

She gazed at him for a moment with terrible intensity—and then she smiled the saddest smile he'd ever seen on a woman's face. “All right, Sam.”

“Do you see? Do you really?”

“Yes,” she said. “I see.”

He felt all at once overjoyed; he would never have believed ten short years ago he'd have been so lucky as to have married a girl as wonderful as this. “Tell you what, honey,” he said. “I'll have two months' accumulated leave when school's over here, and I'll put in for it. We'll go anywhere you like—mountains, seashore, north or south. For as long as you like, anywhere you say. How'd you like that? You name it, we'll do it.”

She laughed then—a laugh that was like a gasp, and kissed him. “All right, Sam. If you can stand the gaff I guess I can.”

“It's a deal, then?”

“It's a deal.” She nodded slowly. “You know something? You're a good man, Sam Damon. You're a good man but I'm afraid you're an awful fool.”

He pressed his face against her breasts. “Maybe so,” he murmured. “Maybe so.”

5

In the summer
of 1929 they went north for accumulated leave. Damon took the back seat out of the LaSalle and built a frame on which he laid two cut-down mattress pads, where the children were to play and sleep during the long, hot afternoons, in a welter of toys and cookie crumbs and discarded clothing. Their camping gear he stored under the frame—a light tent with a fly, bedding rolls and cooking utensils. Tools went into boxes clamped to the running boards, the spare tires were lashed to the radiator. Tommy made fun of him. “Darling, you'd think we were crossing the Gobi Desert.” He'd laughed, hammering and sawing and fitting, but he'd persevered: the trip was a symbol, and like all symbols it must be flawless, executed with perfection.

It was a voyage of discoveries. Tommy was like a new person: she laughed and sang, told stories to the kids or played games with them. They rambled over the rutted, washboard roads, Tommy reading from the “Routings for Motor Car Tourists—Central United States” a disillusioned captain named Whelpey had given them. “Thirty-eight point two.
At Triola, jog right. DO NOT CROSS railroad tracks. Grandview Hotel on left. Veer right with main wires, keep Catawba River on left, jog left four point six miles to Hermes Perps' Blacksmith Shop. Right at huge elm tree.
Oh honestly!” She doubled up, convulsed with laughter. “What if the tree's blown down in the meantime?”

“Or Hermes Perps. Maybe he's sold the place.”

“He
does
sound flighty … The names!” she cried. “Listen to this:
Ask condition of bridge at Whoopingarner's Feed Store, center town.
”

“You'll never find him. They've incarcerated him by now.”

“What's incarcerated?” Donny wanted to know. He had turned into a wiry, intense little boy dominated by an insatiable curiosity.

“That's when they sick the law on you,” Damon answered him, “and throw you in the calaboose.”

Singing a song about the calaboose they rolled on, running west by north, through pine forests and savannah. In the early morning meadowlarks shot down the sky in wild abandon and deer danced away through the woods, their scuts swaying like tasseled white plumes. The country seemed to swell before them, fanning out beyond the tarnished Indian on the radiator cap, in wave on wave of wonders. Sometimes, driving into the setting sun, or lying in his bedding roll with Tommy and the children fast asleep and the stars pouring like luminous dust across the heavens, he felt as if they were the last family traversing the virgin earth and he their sole and vigilant protector. When they reached the Platte, its feathered fringe of willows and cottonwoods crouched against its sandy banks, the sienna-and-blue strip of water under a cloudless sky, he felt his heart leap with recognition.

The family was still further dispersed. Uncle Bill had given up farm work and opened up a hardware store, which was doing fairly well; Ty was clerking for him. George Verney had died of pneumonia and been buried in his Grand Army uniform, as he'd requested. His mother looked thinner, but her manner was as crisp and vivacious as ever. Peg had married; she came over with her brood, and everyone sat around eating too much food and drinking lemonade or Uncle Bill's homemade beer, and talked about crops and the heat.

“Ah, the money's all in the hands of the eastern banks,” Bill Hanlon declared. “Bloodsucking monsters.
They
don't care …” After a year of venting his spleen on quaking recruits from Oregon and California he had finally shipped overseas—only to arrive at St. Nazaire on the fourteenth of November, 1918—a defection from paths of glory Mr. Verney hadn't failed to remind him about when he got home. Now, his Philippine exploits eclipsed by this newer, greater war, and George Verney dead, he railed at the government. “A pack of tinhorns and thimbleriggers. And that Coolidge!—dried-up husk. Run a pin into him anywhere and you know what you'd get? Liquid ice, colder than Greenland's icy mountains. You know what we called his kind in the Old Army?”

“Billy,” Damon's mother said.

“It's the truth! And this Hoover—a sweet-talker, a pussyfooter with the face of a baby … What we need is a soldier, a fighter—another TR to bust 'em up, the conniving, slippery, pork-barreling grifters …”

“Maybe Sam ought to run,” Peg offered slyly. “He's a soldier-hero—and a man of destiny.” She made a face at Sam who smiled at her, pleased that his favorite sister had kept her spirit. She'd lost her first child in the big flu epidemic, and her husband was a gaunt, colorless farmer named Jellison.

“Sam!” Bill Hanlon crowed with amazement. “They'd eat him alive! They'd serve him up on a platter, garnished with mortgages and their cheating, nefarious stock certificates. What does Sam know about farms and farming? No, what we need is someone tough as rawhide, wily as a lynx on the prowl, and with the courage of a regiment of lions…”

Damon laughed with the others; but he was ill at ease. It was pleasant enough sitting here in the ladder-back rocker sipping beer, but he couldn't escape the sense that they all felt he was evading the issues of life, which were palpably farming and putting in gas ranges and refrigerators; that he had chosen to slip away into a remote and unnecessary world. On Main Street Fritz Clausen called out to him, “Not still playing soldier, are you?” His tone was congenial enough, but that seemed to epitomize the town's attitude.
Sam Damon? Oh sure, a regular fire-eater with the AEF in France—they named the plot in front of the town hall for him. Used to be smart as a button, too. What in hell is he doing roaming around army camps for, now it's over? About time he stopped fooling around and settled down to business, isn't it? Can't bear to take off that uniform, I suppose. Well: no accounting for some folks …

He became restless, without knowing exactly why. He took the children to a ball game—Ted Barlow was still coaching the Warriors—and then swimming at Hart's Island. He passed a weary, commiserating hour with Mr. Thornton, who was bedridden with dropsy. Pop Ainslie, now demoted by prohibition to caretaker of the Grand Western, pressed on him a bottle of genuine Canadian scotch for old-times' sake. Big Tim Riley had been killed in a lumbering accident up in Minnesota right after the war. He did not see Celia Shurtleff; she was now a grand lady in the upper echelons of Chicago society—Peg showed him a clipping in the Rotogravure …

Sitting on the old porch, rocking idly, he watched the great apple tree where the children were playing. That was his daughter swinging up and away, shrieking, her dress in a feathery billow above her fat little knees: his daughter … Tommy was telling about Donny's birth at Hardee and Tweaker Terwilliger, and he watched the others' eyes on her. They didn't know how to take her—she was too volatile, too high-strung and sophisticated for them. A woman who had been brought up in the Army, of all places … He thought with a little shock: And they don't know how to take me, either. It was true. He had run off to Mexico and France and won all those tin medals, there was the picture of Black Jack Pershing decorating him for valor cut from the Omaha
Herald
and framed, hanging above the chiffonier in the parlor; and here he was, silent and preoccupied, in slacks and a faded old shirt, an emissary from this unfathomable world of violence and punctilio. Time changed people; time and experience estranged them irrevocably. The realization was like a chill wind. He wasn't needed anymore … He was glad when they left two days later for Lake Erie, where Tommy's uncle had offered them the use of the untenanted gardener's cottage for six weeks.

They rolled east along the Platte, across the fierce green seas of Iowa cornfield, the red earth. They crossed the Mississippi on the new bridge at Davenport, where they caught sight of a riverboat downstream, its stovepipe stack pouring black smoke, side-wheels churning silver water; they woke up the children who bounced up and down, their eyes wide with excitement. In Kentucky they camped in lush meadows where slick brown horses grazed and nickered at them, cut back across Ohio and ran up along the French-blue sweep of the lake, and reached Erie late on a blazing hot afternoon, after radiator trouble and two punctures.

The Downings' house looked unbelievably splendid. It was set back from the road behind a majestic sweep of lawn—a stone pile three stories high, with two cupolas and slender white columns flanking the big front door. The verandah was cool and deep, framed with wisteria and morning glories. A brand-new green Packard stood on the neat graveled drive.

“Momma, are we going to live in that?” Donny inquired.

“No, dear. We're going to be in the gardener's cottage. I told you.”

“That's bigger than General Murrow's quarters—that's bigger than anything!”

“Yes, dear. It's a very spacious house.”

“They must be rich!” Donny had his head between theirs, peering forward through the windshield as they approached. “Are they rich, Momma? Aunt Marilyn and Uncle Edgar?”

“They're quite well-to-do, yes. And see?—there's the lake. It's lovely! All so cool and green.” She put her hands to her hair, pressing at it.

“Will we have a sailboat?” Donny asked.

“I don't know, dear,” Tommy said. “We'll have to see.”

Marilyn Downing came out to meet them. She was a tall, capable woman with iron gray hair and a quick, pleasant smile.

“What courage!” she called. “To drive all the way from Nebraska. In this heat!”

Inside it was cool and still, the reflected light from the lake muted by the heavy curtains. There were carved mahogany chairs upholstered in petit point, marquetry tables resting on an oriental rug of the softest indigo and magenta hues. A grand piano, its wing up, stood at the far end of the living room, a silk shawl thrown across one end; there were glass cabinets with coil cloisonné vases and figurines and in the dining room a handsome rosewood sideboard where serving silver lay gleaming against a blue velour cover.

“Marilyn, it's lovely,” Tommy exclaimed. “It's what you just dream about …”

Carrying Peggy on his hip Damon watched Tommy's eyes as they roamed over these hundred and one appurtenances, these things of wood and cloth and metal that bespoke wealth, permanence, grace—the good life. She would have had all this if she'd married another man: someone like Poindexter. She would have a stable full of horses, and a home of her own crammed with Renaissance furniture and a yacht out on the Sound; just as he'd said. She could be living more elegantly than this, and not chained to an infantry subaltern of twelve years' service who didn't have a pot to piss in—

“Ed couldn't get away early,” Marilyn was saying. “There was a meeting he couldn't leave. He'll be home in an hour or so—we're having some friends in for dinner. I imaging you'd like to get cleaned up and settle in.”

The caretaker's cottage was built like a Swiss chalet, with a high-peaked roof and fieldstone fireplace. It was modest enough, but compared to what they'd lived in over the past ten years it was palatial. There was a little flower garden and a porch, the kitchen was fully equipped and there were porcelain set tubs in the cellar, part of which was decorated as a playroom, with a hobby horse and dart board and a jungle gym painted in red and yellow. The children were ecstatic. They unpacked and took turns bathing—there was a huge built-in tub in the bathroom surrounded by blue tile—and later they went over to the main house and sat on the wide flagstone terrace sipping Tom Collinses and gazing at the broad plate of the lake, glaucous and remote now in the late summer evening haze.

It was still another world—as strange as Walt Whitman had been, but in a different way. Here the atmosphere was nervous, exciting, crammed with wealth and appetite. Everyone kept interrupting everyone else. Damon was anxious to hear their opinions on Briand's treaty draft or the three-power naval conference at Geneva, but nobody seemed to be interested in any of these things. They were in the market. Everybody in America was in the market. The men talked casually of brokers' loans and market pools and automotive shares and eight percent income on ten percent margin. He understood very little of it. They spoke of someone named Bruce Barton, and someone named Raskob; they laughed uproariously about a little old cleaning woman in Teaneck, New Jersey, who had invested fifteen dollars a week and ridden it into a cool million.

“You ought to come up here and settle down, Sam,” Edgar Downing told him. He was a pudgy man with reddish gold hair; when he talked he moved his hands in quick, short, chopping motions. “You're missing out on a barrel of fun.”

“Not to mention the happy wampum,” a man named Headley said.

“Why don't you take yourself a leave of absence? six months or so, see how it works out?”

“I'm afraid I can't do that, Mr. Downing.”

“What's the matter, can't they spare you down there?”

“It'd mean resigning from the service,” Tommy explained.

“Is that a disaster?” Headley inquired innocently, and there was general laughter.

Dinner was vivid with old silver and Burgundy in slender stem glasses and the still glow of tapers. Downing was still excited about Lindbergh's flight. “The nerve that took! The raw, unbridled daring … it's what's made this country the greatest place on earth.” His eyes were snapping with enthusiasm; he looked like a man who ran on impulse, on momentary excitements, and stopped to think afterward. “Why didn't you take up flying, Sam? That's where the future is.”

“You may be right, there. I certainly plan to learn how to fly if I get the chance.”

“What branch are you in, Damon?” a man named Nickerson asked him; he had served with the field artillery during the war, and they talked for a few moments about some wet, weary villages in the Argonne.