The Captains (49 page)

They finally made love about nine thirty, but it wasn't what it had been in Korea, and she threw him out, saying that despite what he'd done, Derek might want to shoot the next day. That meant she would have to get up at half past four and needed her sleep.

“When are you going to be finished with this movie?”

She told him. Six weeks, maybe seven. When she saw the look on his face, she asked if something was wrong.

“I was hoping you would go to Germany with me in a couple of days.”

“Germany? Why do you want to go to Germany?” And then she remembered. “Oh, yeah. Your little boy is there. I forgot about him.”

They put a good face on it. They discussed it calmly and logically. He would go to Germany and do what he had to do about the little boy. And by that time, the picture would be nearly done, or maybe, if nobody else ducked Derek's head in a fire bucket, finished. And then they would have some time to be together and really talk things over.

But they both knew when he walked out of her door at a quarter past ten on his first night home that they had both been kidding themselves.

(Three)
Walter Reed U.S. Army General Hospital
Washington, D.C.
16 February 1952

Sharon and Sandy had been expecting Craig ever since the flowers had arrived. The flowers were fifty dollars' worth of carnations, stuck into a five-foot chicken-wire horseshoe, and with the gilt letters spelling out
GRAND OPENING
glued to a purple six-inch-wide sash. It took up a whole corner of Sandy's private room.

He arrived the following Saturday, about four o'clock in the afternoon, in a pink-and-green uniform, complete with all his decorations. Sandy was surprised to see that. Lowell normally wore only his Expert Combat Infantry Badge. He was struck again with the realization that Lowell looked the way an officer was supposed to look.

“You little bastard,” Lowell greeted him, “I thought I had taught you how to duck. What happened to you, anyway?”

“I thought the man said ‘stand up,'” Felter said. “So I stood up. And here I am.”

The men shook hands. Sharon stood beside Lowell, and very naturally, Lowell put his arm around her shoulders. Sharon leaned against him.

“I didn't know,” Lowell said. “I ran into MacMillan at Knox. He told me.”

Felter nodded.

“So how are you doing?” Lowell asked, awkwardly.

“I'm in what they call physical therapy,” Felter said. “Once in the morning, and once in the afternoon, they give me a bath, and then they torture me.”

Sharon suddenly shook loose from Lowell and went to the bedside table. Sandy was embarrassed.

“Look,” she said. She handed him a lidded leather box six inches by three. Lowell opened it, looked down at the Distinguished Service Cross, and then unfolded the copy of the citation.

Lowell folded the citation and put it back in the case, and then snapped the case shut.

“Well,” Lowell said, “at least they gave you the leaf. You can spend that.”

“That's a terrible thing to say,” Sharon flared. “That makes you sound as if you're jealous, Craig!”

“Why should he be jealous?” Felter said. “Look close, honey. He's got one of his own.”

“I don't care if he does or not,” Sharon said. “You shouldn't make fun of a decoration.”

“Oh, I'm proud of him,” Lowell said. “MacMillan told me all about it.”

“You're kidding,” Felter said.

Lowell, beaming at him, shook his head, “No.”

“Damn him!” Felter said. “He knows better than that.”

“He has this odd notion, Sandy, that we're on the same side.”

“That has nothing to do with it,” Felter said, and threw both hands in the air.

“Well, I guess you could write him a letter of reprimand,” Lowell said.

“You know what he did, Craig?” Sharon asked.

“Certainly, I do,” he said. “I'm a major in the U.S. Army. They tell me everything.”

“Then you tell me,” she said. “Sandy won't. All I know is that he wrote and told me he was running a radio station, and the next thing I know, Colonel Hanrahan came to the house and told me he was here.”

“Well, Sharon—” Lowell said.

“Goddamn it, Craig!” Felter interrupted.

“First of all, Sharon,” Lowell said, “he did a fine job of cutting the VD rate among the troops.”

Sharon blushed. “Oh, Craig!” she said.

“And then he got everyone in the unit to make a contribution to the Red Cross. The army is really interested in a hundred percent contribution rate to the Red Cross.”

“So tell me about you,” Sandy said.

“How's P.P.?” Sharon asked.

“With his grandfather,” Lowell said. “I spent thirty days in Marburg.”

“How is he?”

“Surrounded by kraut aristocrats,” Lowell said, “who will probably, in time, be able to forgive him for being half-American.”

Sharon looked disturbed, and Lowell saw it.

“There's a whole family there, aunts and uncles, cousins, second cousins twice removed. Most important, women. How the hell could I care for him?”

“Sandy and I talked about that,” Sharon said. “If you could see your way clear to letting us have him. You know we love him, Craig.”

“Jesus, you know what that means to me,” Lowell said, emotionally. “But I think the thing to do with him is what's being done. You've got your own kids, and I don't know what the hell I'm going to be doing. And they are his family. They're making sure that he doesn't forget how to speak English. I guess what I'm saying is that they're taking good care of him.”

“I understand,” Sharon said. “Maybe, when you get remarried…”

“You seem pretty sure about that,” Lowell said, making a joke of it.

“You're even younger than Sandy,” Sharon said. “You'll get married again.”

“I put you on warning, lady, that if you start matchmaking…”

“I'm not impressed,” Sharon said. “You should get married again.”

“I don't think so,” Lowell said, surprisingly firmly. Sharon let it drop after saying, “I'd love to see him again. Have you got a new picture?”

While she was looking at P.P. in the arms of his father, Sandy said: “I asked before, what are you doing?”

“You will be delighted to hear, Major, that I am on my very good behavior—you will note the medals—and trying very hard to make the right impression on my peers and superiors.”

“What are you doing?”

“Killing time until I get out,” Lowell said, “at the Advanced Officer's Course.”

“I thought you put in for regular army?” Sandy asked. “What did you do, change your mind?”

“It was changed for me,” Lowell said. “The application hasn't come back yet. They are probably trying to find the right words to reject it.”

“Why would they reject it?”

Lowell said, obviously quoting verbatim, “‘While this officer has demonstrated outstanding ability at command at the company level, it is obvious that he sometimes acts impulsively and without adequate consideration of all factors concerned. It is to be hoped that as he matures, he will acquire the stability of personality necessary for command at the battalion level. In the meantime, however, the undersigned cannot in good conscience unreservedly recommend him for such command.'”

“Who did that to you?” Felter asked, disturbed.

“That's the efficiency report I got from His Excellency, the IX Corps commander.”

“What did you do? Did it have something to do with your friend's court-martial?”

“You don't want to talk about this,” Lowell said.

“What did you do?” Felter pursued.

“I got up in a general court-martial and testified that I could indeed see circumstances in which an officer is justified taking another officer out of a situation,” Lowell said. “The corps commander had decided that he wanted to put my friend in jail. He was piqued when the court let him go, and blamed it on me.”

“I heard he was acquitted,” Felter said. “But no details. What happened to him?”

“He's at Knox with me,” Lowell said. “Captains and lieutenants who have heard very few guns go bang in anger are teaching us how to command tank companies by the book.”

“That's obviously a waste of your time,” Felter said. “But I don't suppose there's anything you can do about it.”

“Not that I can think of,” Lowell said dryly.

“So you withdrew your application for the RA? Is that what you meant when you said you were killing time until you can get out?”

“No. I figured I'd let them squirm trying to turn me down. I meet every single criterion, and then some. I'm not even giving them a chance to say that I've been a wise-ass in class. I'm getting 4.0's, which is more difficult than I would have believed.”

“You never had any trouble with school,” Felter said.

“We had an interesting class problem last week,” Lowell said. “A brand-new one. It seems that when the Eighth Army in Korea broke out of the perimeter, a reinforced tank company was sent as a task force to disrupt the enemy's lines of communication and eventually to effect link-up with X Corps. It was rather a challenge to offer constructive criticism, to improve the operation. I thought it was done right the first time.”

“You're kidding,” Sharon said.

“Oh, no,” Lowell said. “But, just to prove how cooperative I am, I came up with a long list of improvements to the way it was done. If I had done any of them, I would still be tied-down fifty miles from Pusan, attempting to coordinate liaison with supporting arms and services.” He paused, and chuckled, adding, “Especially if I had waited for confirmed intelligence to give me the strength of assaulted units.”

“It's something out of Franz Kafka,” Sandy said sympathetically. “Well, what
are
you going to do?”

“I can only answer that negatively,” Lowell said. “I'm not going to go back to the bank. Aside from that, I really don't have plan one.”

“When do you get out?”

“In five months,” Lowell said. “Now, what happens to you?”

“I've been selected for the War College,” Sandy said.

“I thought you had to go to Command and General Staff first,” Lowell said.

“Sandy made that on the five percent list, too,” Sharon said, proudly. “Major and the War College on the five percent list.”

“I took C&GS by correspondence,” Sandy said. “In Korea. It was either C&GS or a course in how to upholster your own furniture.”

“And then what?”

“Here,” Sandy said. “We bought a house in Alexandria. A hundred dollars down and a hundred dollars a month for the rest of our natural lives.”

“What are you going to be doing here?”

“The same sort of thing I've been doing,” Sandy said, uncomfortably.

There came a light in Lowell's eyes, and Sandy Felter was sure he knew what it was. Lowell was going to apply for Intelligence.

They let the subject drop, talked of other things.

 

Two months later, shortly before he was to be released from the hospital on limited duty, an agent of the Counterintelligence Corps showed up at Walter Reed, flashed a badge, and said he was conducting an investigation into the character of one Major Craig Lowell, who had given Major Felter as a reference.

“Could you, without reservation, recommend him for a position of great trust and authority?”

“I could, and do,” Felter said. “But I think I know what this investigation is really all about, and the answer to the real question, ‘Would Craig Lowell be any good as an intelligence officer?' is ‘No, he would not.'”

“That's pretty strong, Major,” the CIC agent said. “What do you base that on?”

“The one thing an intelligence officer cannot be is impulsive,” Felter said. As the words came out of his mouth, he felt like a hypocrite. He had several times acted impulsively. Who was he to criticize Lowell?