Once an Eagle (62 page)

“Of course. The turn of the century was full of clashes: the British and French almost went to war over Siam, the Dutch and Portuguese wrangled over Timor—even the United States got into the row over Samoa with the Germans and the British. It was the great heyday of Western ascendancy, the imperalist apotheosis; and we should have led it, not dragged our feet the way we did. Can't you see it?—a huge oceanic salient from New Guinea to the Ryukyus, oriented toward that vast, swollen belly of the China coast. That was the true line. But we got all muggled up in murky ideas of international brotherhood, universal self-determination.”

“What about the Drang nach Osten?”

“A counterwave, an anomaly. Doomed to defeat from its inception. It never really succeeded, Samuel. Such German elements as tried to establish themselves only became Slavicized. The East Prussians are more Asiatic than West European—look at their mystic fervor, their incredible fatalism. They paid the penalty of swimming against the tide. That's why our AEF excursion in '17 was doomed to disaster—we could no more impose our doctrines on Europe than the sun could reverse its course.”

He watched the Damons as he talked, catching up threads of history, geography, political science, weaving them into the fabric of his design. The part you transformed in people was the part you possessed, and only that: all the rest was a walled-off area as remote as Tashkent, a land you never penetrated. Tommy was leaning forward, her hands folded beneath her chin—he could almost feel her spirit swaying toward him in the soft dusk, entranced and suppliant. But it was Damon he wanted, not the woman. Many officers fell under his influence in a rush—became, like Ryetower or Burckhardt, devout supporters, “Massengale men” who recognized his ultimate ascendancy to power; or they broke away in confusion or fear and stayed outside the orbit of his concerns, as poor Storey had. But Samuel had done neither. He had been attentive, respectful, even on occasion deferential (though some of that was probably the matter of rank); but there was never that sway of acknowledgment, that final surge of acquiescence that let you know you'd left your mark.

Abruptly he broke off. “That's enough hindsight theorizing,” he declared.

“Oh, don't stop,” Tommy protested. “It makes me feel like Bismarck—or Clemenceau. Remaking the map of the world …”

He laughed, eying her through half-closed lids. She felt it, too—this hunger to transform, control, possess. If only she were a man …

“Tell me, how's your father?”

“Oh, he's fine. Happy as can be. He loves teaching—he says the new generation is brighter than anyone would think. What do you suppose he meant by that?”

“Miles Draper wrote me he did a monograph on the First Marne that was masterful. Miles has nothing but praise for him.” Of course old Caldwell should have been teaching at the War College long before this; he'd been held back all during the time MacArthur was Chief of Staff. The old feud. Now the Chaumont crowd were getting in their innings, and the realignments and reshufflings were starting again, the gears grinding—you could almost hear them way out here. And yet MacArthur was the ranking general officer of his age group; he would command the armies when war came …

“Wonderful man, your father,” he said aloud. “That great intellect, that
manner.
Has he ever had political ambitions?”

She blinked in surprise. “No—not that I know of.”

“It's a pity. Couldn't you see him as Secretary of State? that combination of force and tact?”

“Oh yes—he'd be in his element!” Her eyes shone. “Things to—well, to mold, to fashion …”

“That's it.”

“But he'd never put himself forward in any way—he's almost as bad as Sam. He's always felt the army officer should be unpolitical.”

“Yes: the old tradition. But these things are changing. Perhaps you should pray to Quetzalcoatl and Huracán.”

She laughed, her eyes very wide and clear, and for an instant Massengale had the sensation that he was being drawn into them, as into a still, deep pool … Sitting erectly in the high-backed Spanish chair with the candlelight playing over her, she was uncommonly beautiful. She was vivacious and lithe and she had that exciting delicacy of feature, her father's legacy. Gazing at her, half-obsessed, he saw her all at once sprawled indecently on a couch, her lovely face puffed and sodden with drink, her hair in wild disarray, her dress torn from her body and her exposed thighs smeared with dirt, blood, offal—and his heart leaped tightly. Then the vision vanished and the old fear returned; he looked down.

She was saying: “Sam's the one that ought to go into politics, after that court-martial triumph. But he'd never do it, either. Why are people all so perverse?”

“The fatal flaw.” He lighted her cigarette, watching her lashes droop softly toward her cheeks. “You wouldn't want us to be without our fatal flaws, would you?”

“Oh, it isn't everybody,” she said. “You haven't got one at all….”

The familiar disquietude began to seep into the edges of his heart. He picked up his butter knife and bent it rhythmically between his fingers. “Perhaps,” he said lightly, “you just don't know me well enough.”

The dinner party broke up then; the two women vanished into the living room and he and Damon went into his study, which looked north toward the governor's palace. For a time they talked desultorily of one thing and another. Everything seemed to be in a state of flux. Craig's appointment as Chief of Staff had surprised Massengale. He had been certain Drum would get it—but of course Craig had been on Pershing's staff, too, as well as an old favorite of Hunter Liggett's. His moment had come, he'd seized it; but what had been the precise confluence of obligation and influence that had led to it? Hugh Johnson had the President's ear now, he knew that much; and Johnson had been a lieutenant in Craig's first cavalry troop. He sighed. In any event the balance was shifting. The Pacific was where the power lay now: Drum in Hawaii, MacArthur here putting the Philippine army together, Haz-litt down in Palamangao …

“How about a game?” he asked. “Feel up to it?”

“Fine, Major, if you do.”

Ramon brought in the chess set and a bottle of Grand Marnier and glasses and they began to play as darkness fell, and the cries of Manila drifted up to them faintly. You could tell so much from a game of chess. If a man was rash, if he was smug or laggard or unimaginative or timid—there it all lay before you, revealed in the space of an hour, as surely as if you had put your hand on his inviolate soul. Massengale liked to launch an overwhelming attack out of the traditional Ruy Lopez, sending up his knights and bishops in unorthodox ways, pressing unusual variations that would open up vast areas of assault; or to lie back behind the dense intricacies of the Sicilian or the Dutch Defense and then explode with devastating effect on either flank, watching his adversary's mounting consternation through half-closed lids.

Damon usually denied him these pleasures; he never panicked, he never succumbed to easy pawn grabbing or wildly speculative diversions. He took his risks, but soberly, and when he forced exchanges it was with a judicious care—decision tempered with reluctance, as though he were always conscious of the worth of the pieces he had sacrificed. Above all he was imaginative, and tenacious beyond belief; he never lost sight of the main objective.

Their games followed a fairly consistent pattern: an early onslaught by Massengale which resulted in a minute positional advantage; resourceful defenses by Damon, and then a fierce, attritional struggle that ended in a close victory eked out by one or the other—or, more commonly, a draw. Tonight the same pattern emerged, but the exchange with Tommy had unsettled Massengale, filling his mind with conflicting speculations.
You haven't got one at all,
she'd said, her eyes full of wonder, the reflected light from the candles glinting in them; tiny saffron points. Little she—or anyone else—knew. Well, that was
his
Tashkent; everyone had one. Even Hugh Drum. Schuyler had written him that there was great opposition to Drum in high places, that he'd never get it; they were looking elsewhere, among the younger men. “In any event the solution is political, not military.” Schuyler liked to salt down his letters with rather pompous generalizations. Pershing was no longer listened to as he had been—there were those who said he was becoming a senile, tiresome old man. Massengale smiled faintly. They could accuse the Old Man of a lot of things, but senility was not one of them: what he thought he had good reasons for thinking. But perhaps his day was done. The rumor was he'd given Drum his blessing, and now Drum was on Oahu, raging and scheming …

In any event the solution is political, not military.

Damon had moved again. He bent forward over the board, pursuing the possibilities, his mind running on two levels at once. As a result of the exchange of knights Samuel had succeeded in advancing a knight's pawn to the fifth, and had supported it deftly.

He translated a bishop and sat back again, relaxing his mind—watched beyond the screens the lights in the palace flaring through the dense stands of acacia. He loved Manila: Manila was bold and wild, a barbaric white citadel all tangled up in pagan and Christian attitudes, a torrid arena where Malay and Igorot and Chinese and Moro swarmed, vying with one another. On nights like these, with the stars sweeping near in great silver globes and rowels, he could feel his senses dilate as if under the influence of some potent drug. There was so much that could be done—so very much. Long vistas swung open into the future—he could almost put his finger on the boundary stones of his future achievements, triumphs, glories. In a sense his life had started here, in these islands: it would find its culmination here as well. All the tumultuous dreams of years trailed through his mind, burgeoning, demanding solution …

He had been raised in a huge Federal stone house with white pillars, overlooking the Hudson. The front parlor—no one ever went in it except for serious occasions—was sedate and still, cool under the drawn shades; there was an Empire sofa of horsehair with a carved back, and slender marquetry chairs and a rosewood organ with porcelain stops. On the center wall was a full-length portrait of his father in dress uniform, holding a sword; and in a glass case on the lowboy was the medal he'd won at Bamolos in '98, in those very hills out there beyond the palace. “A glorious victory, Courtney. Captain Pershing himself told me it was the most valiant action of the entire campaign.” His mother's voice: high, like the upper register on a cello, but more insistent; she had been slender and pretty, with her hair in loose, brown waves over her temples, and her eyes rested on his with a soft, implacable ardor. “You must live up to him, Courtney. In every way. So that he would be proud of you.”

The sword was in another case; it had been brought back by a brother officer a few years later. He had taken it out one afternoon, secretly, and drawn it from the scabbard. A slender, blued blade adorned with the most delicate leafy scrolls, still bluer; the tassel on the hilt had tickled his wrist as he'd raised it to the salute. His father's eyes watched him from the wall, animate and commanding.

In every way.

There were ponies he rode, and the great downward sweep of dun fields to the river where he swam in the lazy July afternoons, when the elms drooped in the sultry heat, and even the birds were still; there were lawn parties where people came in carriages and automobiles and stood around holding tea cups and chatting, the great hat brims of the ladies bobbing gently as they moved. His mother and his Aunt Harriet took him to the stiff French Renaissance palais of the Capitol at Albany, and looking down he listened to the voices of the legislature thundering like the voices of gods; and later his Uncle Schuyler, who was a state senator, had smiled at him and shaken his hand and asked him if he wanted to go into politics when he grew up. The men talked politely with the ladies, and stroked their mustaches; their watch chains bristled with little gold charms. He had said nothing, but standing there holding his mother's hand he knew that one day he would rise and speak in that great hall.

In a year it was gone. All gone. He was only nine but he remembered the hushed, feverish consultations, the cries of consternation, the huddled conferences and hasty departures. And then his mother had come to him, her face distraught and dark with fatigue. “Courtney. A dreadful thing has happened, Courtney. You must listen carefully to Mother.” It had something to do with investments, with things that had defaulted, papers that had once been valuable but were valuable no longer. (Later he understood it all too clearly.) It was very serious. That winter Grandpa Massengale died: he remembered moving up to the long, dark coffin—and then the shock of his grandfather's face, looking little and pinched and mean; not his grandfather at all. He had burst into tears and his mother had taken him outside, into the white, stinging cold.

They were poor. Well, they were not exactly poor, like the Briards or the Lauchmans in that dilapidated farm on the edge of the river; but their lives were different. They still lived in the old house—the parlor and several of the upstairs rooms were closed now, permanently—but all the land down to the river was not theirs anymore; there were no more lawn parties, or trips to Newport or Boston. They were “in straitened circumstances,” his mother said. As the years went by he was to find out it was worse than that: to be without means among the wealthy is a very special kind of poverty.

Aunt Harriet, his mother's sister, had come to live with them. In the winter nights, up in his father's study with a blanket around his knees doing his algebra or history, he would watch the snow flung like rice against the window and listen to the murmur of their voices by the fireplace in the kitchen. They were planning for him; he knew it. Now and then, overcome by curiosity, he had crept partway down the stairs and heard snatches. He was to go to West Point: Uncle Schuyler had the connections to get him the appointment, the education itself would cost nothing; then he would choose the Corps of Engineers and go forth to do great deeds in the service of his country, like that wonderful Colonel Goethals down in Panama.