QB VII (16 page)

But what Samantha witnessed most was the uncertainty, the drain, the emotional downs, the exhaustion. Those times he did not have the strength to eat or undress himself.

David Shawcross stood in the wings, a happy man knowing exactly when to make Abe turn it off with a blast in London. A roaring drunk. A flushing out, and a return to the blank sheet of paper. He told Samantha that Abe had within him the key to greatness on one major premise. He was aware of his weaknesses as a writer as well as his strengths; Shawcross said few writers had the ability of introspection because they were too vain to admit weakness. This was Abraham Cady’s power, and he controlled his second novel. He was in his twenties and writing like sixty.

The Jug
(a nickname for the P-47 Thunderbolt) was a simple and classical story of men at war. The hero was Major General Vincent Bertelli, a second generation street fighter of Italian-American descent. An officer in the early thirties he rose quickly in the war that had become air oriented. Bertelli was a relentless and apparently heartless driver who was ready to take heavy losses in dangerous raids on the thesis that “war was war.”

The general’s son, Sal, flew as a squadron commander in his father’s command. The deep love between them is camouflaged by what appears to be father/son hatred.

General Bertelli orders a raid and places his son’s squadron in a suicide position. The news of Sal’s death is delivered by Barney, the sole survivor in the squadron.

Bertelli listens without emotion and is spat upon by Barney.

“You’re tired,” the general said, “I’ll forget about this.”

Barney turned on his heel. “Barney!” the general commanded and he halted. Bertelli wanted desperately to show his son’s transfer order and to tell him he pleaded with Sal to quit. His boy had refused despite everyone knowing he had flown himself into exhaustion.

“Never mind,” General Bertelli said.

And suddenly Barney knew. “I’m sorry, sir. He just had to go on proving himself, like he had no choice.”

“It’s a fucking war,” the general answered, “people are going to get hurt. Get some rest, Barney. You’re going up again in a few hours. Big target. U-boat pens.”

The door closed. General Bertelli opened the top drawer of his desk and swallowed a nitroglycerin tablet for the attack that was coming on. “Sal,” he said, “I loved you. Why couldn’t I tell you.”

“The end,” Abe’s hoarse voice rasped. He stood behind Samantha and watched her type those two beautiful last words.

“Oh, Abe,” she cried, “it’s lovely.”

“I need a belt,” he said.

When she left he took her place at the typewriter and pecked out with stiff fingers, “Dedicated to Samantha with love,” and then the words ... “will you marry me?”

9

L
ITTLE BY LITTLE FULL
use of Abe’s hands returned. An eye patch covered his deformity. Abraham Cady was a one-eyed, broken winged eagle, but an eagle, nonetheless. After his discharge and with his book,
The Jug
, selling well, he signed on with United Press in London.

London was a vital place, the heartbeat of the free world building up to burst upon the European Continent aware fully of its own importance and rife with the colors of Allied and Empire troops and those of governments in exile. The smoke of German incendiaries had long died out in the gutted center of London. The nights in the tubes were over but there were still queues, the eternal British queues and sandbags and balloon barrages and blackouts and then the buzz bombs.

Abraham Cady joined a fraternity of those men charged with the mission of telling the story and in these days in London it was a legendary roll call from Quentin Reynolds to Edward R. Murrow on their news beats from the American Embassy to Downing Street to BBC House to the great press artery of Fleet Street.

The Linsteads had traditionally kept a small town house in London in Colchester Mews off Chelsea Square. The mews were once carriage houses and servants quarters behind the stately five story homes bordering London’s green squares. After the First World War, when horses faded from the scene, the mews were converted into doll house quarters that were particularly attractive to writers, musicians, actors, and visiting squires.

Abe and Samantha moved into the mews after their wedding at Linstead Hall, and he went searching for a part of the war.

At a time and place that distinguished journalism was commonplace Abe Cady was able to carve a distinctive niche as the flyer’s correspondent.

From those first floundering days of the Battle of Britain, all of England became a massive airfield. The British owned the night and the American Eighth Air Force mastered the European skies by day with raids deep into Germany now escorted by swarms of Mustang fighters.

Abe flew with the Halifaxes by night and Flying Fortresses by day, and he wrote of a sort of fairyland war of seemingly harmless puffs of smoke down “flak alley” and the great swirling ballets of the dogfights. He wrote of the blissful numbness of total exhaustion to the lullaby of five thousand droning engines. And blood. A tail or belly gunner cut in half and men struggling to free him from his prison. Of long streams of smoke and crippled birds struggling in a place out of their element to find the earth again. And sentimental songs around the bars, of silent stares at the empty bunks. Of varnished officers poring over blown-up maps of Germany with a crisp detached vernacular. And the view from the sky as their loads of death rained down on miniature sets that were the cities of Germany.

WE’LL BE OVER BERLIN IN A HALF HOUR. THE ARMADA OUTSIDE HAS BLACKENED THE SKY LIKE A SWARM OF LOCUSTS. WE ARE CLOAKED WITH FIGHTER PLANES OF THE WOLF PACK FLYING RAMROD TO ESCORT THE BOMBERS.

A STARTLED COMMUNICATION. “LOOK OUT, TONY, MESSERS AT SEVEN O’CLOCK.”

A SHORT, WILD DOGFIGHT BELOW US. A SCARLET-NOSED MUSTANG BELCHES SMOKE AND SPIRALS EARTHWARD WITH A MESSERSCHMITT ON HIS TAIL. OUR KID MUST HAVE BEEN GREEN. THE MESSERS ARE NO MATCH FOR THE MUSTANG. THE KRAUT HAD TO BE GOOD TO HAVE SURVIVED THIS LONG. THE MUSTANG ERUPTS. IT’S DONE. NO PARACHUTE.

LATER I LEARNED HE WAS A SECOND YEAR ENGINEERING STUDENT AT GEORGIA TECH. WHAT WILL IT BE LIKE TOMORROW IN ATLANTA WHEN THE CABLEGRAM ARRIVES AND THE LIVES OF A DOZEN PEOPLE FALL TO A GRIEF-STRICKEN WHISPER. HE WAS THE ONLY MALE HEIR. THE ONE WHO WAS GOING TO CARRY THEIR NAME INTO THE NEXT GENERATION.

THE KRAUTS HAVE BEEN BEATEN OFF. IT COST FOUR MUSTANGS AND TWO BOMBERS. BOMBERS DIE SLOWER. WRITHE IN AGONY, TWIST AND ROLL HEAVILY. DESPERATE MEN TUG AT CANOPIES. AND THEN, DISINTEGRATION.

TENSING UP AND ALERT AS WE NEAR BERLIN. ALL EXCEPT THE CO-PILOT ASLEEP TWISTED LIKE A PRETZEL THAT ONLY A YOUNG MAN COULD MANAGE. I’M INVITED TO TAKE THE CONTROLS.

MY HANDS ITCH WITH JOY AS I TAKE THE CONTROLS. THE BOMBS FLOAT DOWN SLOWLY, DESCENDING LIKE A MANTLE OF BLACK SNOW AND THEN GREAT GUSTS OF ORANGE BILLOW FROM THE TORTURED CITY.

I AM SICK AT MY OWN ECSTASY AS OUR BATTERED FLEET LIMPS BACK. WHY DOES MAN PUT HIS GREATEST ENERGY AND TALENT INTO DESTRUCTION?

I AM THE WRITER. I MAKE IT ALL A MORALITY PLAY. WE’RE WHITE UP HERE, LIKE ANGELS. THEY’RE BLACK DOWN THERE LIKE DEVILS. DEVILS, ROAST IN HELL!

AND THEN I WONDER WHO I KILLED TODAY. AN ENGINEER LIKE THE BOY FROM GEORGIA, A MUSICIAN, A DOCTOR, OR A CHILD WHO NEVER EVEN HAD A CHANCE TO ASPIRE. WHAT A WASTE.

Samantha set the receiver down and grunted down-heartedly. Her pregnancy had made her ill. She had been queasy all day. She made her way up the narrow stairs to the tiny bedroom where Abe lay in sprawled exhaustion. For a moment she considered ignoring the phone call, but he would be very angry. She tapped his shoulder.

“Abe.”

“Uhhhh.”

“We just got a call from Wing Commander Parsons at Breedsford. They want you there by fourteen hundred.”

I smell it, Abe thought. Ten to one they’re going for the ball bearing works outside Hamburg. It will be one hell of a show. The night raids were more vivid in their sharp black and white contrasts. And after their pass, the carpet of red fires on the burning from the target. Abe popped off the bed and read his watch. Time for a shave and a bath.

Samantha appeared piqued and drawn. Her whiteness was even more apparent in London. “You mustn’t be late,” she said, “I’ll draw your bath.”

“You’ll be all right, won’t you, honey. I mean, about taking you out tonight. This raid must be a big one or Parsons wouldn’t call.”

“As a matter of fact, I’m not all right. Decent of you to ask, though.”

“O.K., let’s have it,” Abe snapped.

“I’d rather you wouldn’t speak to me as if I were on the carpet before the colonel’s desk.”

Abe grunted and tied on his robe. “What’s wrong, honey?”

“I’ve been sick every morning for two weeks, but that’s to be expected, I suppose. To escape the confinement of these four walls I get to stand in queues for hours on end or dive into the tube for my life ahead of the buzz bombs. And after living on scraps I’m jolly well homesick for Linstead Hall. I suppose it would be bearable if I saw anything of my husband. You crawl in, write your story and fall flat until the phone rings for the next raid. And those rare evenings you are in London you seem obsessed with shooting the breeze all night with David Shawcross or in some Fleet Street Pub.”

“Finished?”

“Not really. I’m bloody bored and unhappy, but I don’t think it means very much to you.”

“Now, just hold on, Samantha. I happen to think we’re goddam lucky. With fifty million men and women separated by this war we’re plenty lucky to have a few hours together.”

“Perhaps we would be if you weren’t on a crusade to make every bombing mission out of England.”

“That’s my job.”

“Oh, they all say you love your job. They say you’re the best bomber jockey in both air Forces.”

“Come off it. They let me take the controls once in a while as a gesture.”

“Not according to Commander Parsons. It’s got to be a sign of luck if the old one-eyed eagle leads them in. Steady Abraham, he was known far and wide.”

“My God, Samantha! What in the hell is so hard for you to understand. I hate fascism. I hate Hitler. I hate what the Germans have done to the Jewish people.”

“Abe, you’re shouting!” Samantha stiffened, breaking off the assault and quivering and sobbing to blunt male logic. “It’s the loneliness,” she cried.

“Honey, I ... I don’t know what to say. Loneliness is the brother of war and the mother of all writers. He asks his wife to endure it graciously because she will come to know that her ability to endure it can be her greatest gift.”

“I don’t understand you, Abe.”

“I know.”

“Well, don’t act as if I’m some kind of clod. We have gone through a book together, you know.”

“I didn’t have hands so you owned me. Your possession of me was complete. When I had no sight and we made love you were your happiest because your possession was complete then, too. But now I’ve got my hands and eyes and you don’t want to share me or understand what your end of this bargain consists of. It’s going to be like this till the end of our lives, Samantha. It will always demand sacrifice and loneliness of both of us.”

“You’re great at twisting things to make me look very little.”

“We’re just starting out together, honey. Don’t make the mistake of standing between me and my writing.”

Samantha returned to Linstead Hall. After all, she was pregnant and life in London wasn’t easy. Abe assured her he understood and then he went on with his war.

On D-Day, Ben Cady was born at Linstead Hall. His father, Abraham, wrote at the navigator’s desk of a B-24 Liberator sent up from Italy for a saturation raid in conjunction with the invasion.

10

T
HERE ARE NO
J. Milton Mandelbaums, Abe thought. He’s only a fiction from a bad Hollywood novel. He’s only trying to act like a J. Milton Mandelbaum.

Mandelbaum, the young producing “genius” of American Global Studios, arrived in London to stir the hearts of man and produce the greatest aviation film of all times based on Abraham Cady’s novel,
The Jug.

He pitched tent in a three bedroom suite at the Savoy, the Oliver Messel Suite wasn’t available at the Dorchester because of all the goddam brass and royalty in exile and that crap.

It was stocked to the gunnels with booze and broads and the kinds of things Englishmen had not seen in five years of war.

A 4-F in the draft (ulcers, eye astigmatism, psychosomatic asthma) he conned himself a “technical war correspondent’s” rating and had a Saville Row tailor do him up a half dozen officer’s uniforms.

“After all, Abe,” he explained, “we’re all in this thing together.”

Abe suggested that if that was the case it would be good for Milton to fly a few bombing missions for first hand insight.

“Somebody’s got to hold the old fort down here and get the old production rolling,” Milton explained in passing on Abe’s kind offer.

Milton always mentioned his own film first, the one which won an Oscar, somehow overlooking the fact it was based on a Hemingway story with the best director and screen writer in Hollywood working on it, and during most of the production he was in the hospital with an ulcer. An assistant (who was fired shortly after the film for disloyalty) had truly done the producing.

There were lengthy dissertations by him on his creative ability, his sincerity, his importance, the women (among them most of the
NAME
actresses) he had banged, his immaculate taste in all matters, his astute story instinct (if the studio would only get off my back I’d go back to writing. You and me are writers, Abe, we know the importance of the story), his house in Beverly Hills (pool, broads, limo, broads, sports cars, broads, servant, broads), the number of suits he owned, the extravagant gifts (he charged to the studio), his piousness (when I put up a window in the synagogue for my beloved father, I gave the temple an extra five thou), the people he knew by first name, the people who knew him by first name, the way the studio leaned on him for milestone decisions and his high ethical standards and his prowess at gin rummy and, of course, his modesty.