The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (59 page)

On their last evening, seated in what Edgar Todd had solemnly promised them was the finest restaurant in Los Angeles, she looked disconsolate as she picked at her crabmeat Imperial. “This is kind of dumb, isn't it?” she said. “Spending all this money when you'll be on the plane in a couple of hours anyway?”

“Doesn't seem dumb to me; I thought it might be nice.” He had thought too that it might be the kind of thing F. Scott Fitzgerald would have done at a time like this, but he kept that part of it to himself. He had tried for years to prevent anyone from knowing the full extent of his preoccupation with Fitzgerald, though a girl in New York had once uncovered it in a relentless series of teasing, bantering questions that left him with nothing to hide.

“Well, okay,” Sally said. “We'll sit here and be elegant and witty and sad together and smoke about forty-five cigarettes apiece.” But her sarcasm wasn't really convincing, because she'd met him at the office that afternoon wearing a new, expensive-looking blue dress that he could have sworn she'd bought in the hope of being taken to a place like this.

“Can't get over that dress of yours,” he told her. “I think it's just about the best-looking dress I've ever seen.”

“Thank you,” she said. “And I'm glad I've got it. Might be useful in helping me trap the
next
counterfeit F. Scott Fitzgerald who comes stumbling out to Movieland.”

Driving her home to Beverly Hills, he risked two or three glances at her face and was pleased to find it calm and reflective.

“I guess I've had sort of an idle, aimless life, when you think about it,” she said after a while. “Work my way through college and never use it, never do anything I could be proud of or even enjoy; never even adopt a child when I had the chance.”

And a few more miles of illuminated city went by before she moved close to him and touched his arm with both hands. “Jack?” she said shyly. “That wasn't just kidding around, was it? About how we can write a whole lot of letters to each other and talk on the phone sometimes?”

“Aw, Sally. Why would I want to kid around about that?”

He took her up to where the shallow steps of the pool terrace began and they got out of the car for their leave-taking: they sat together on a lower step and kissed as self-consciously as children.

“Well, okay,” she said. “Goodbye. Know something funny? We've really been saying goodbye all along, since the very first time I went out with you. Because I mean we've always known there wasn't much time, so it's been a saying goodbye kind of deal from the start, right?”

“I guess so. Anyway, listen: take care, baby.”

They got up quickly, in embarrassment, and he watched her make her way up onto the terrace—a tall, supple, oddly gray-haired girl in the best-looking dress he had ever seen.

He had just started back for the car when he heard her calling, “Jack! Jack!”

And she came clattering down the steps again and into his arms. “Oh, wait,” she said breathlessly. “Listen. I forgot to tell you something. You know the heavy sweater I've been knitting all summer for Kicker? Well, that was a lie—I'm pretty sure it's the only lie I ever told you. It was never for Kicker; it's for you. I took the measurements from the only ratty old sweater I could find in your place, and the whole plan was to get it finished before you left, only now it's too late. But I'll finish it, Jack, I swear. I'll work on it every day and I'll mail it to you, okay?”

He held her with what seemed all his strength, feeling her tremble, and said against her hair that he'd be very, very glad to have it.

“Oh, Jesus, I hope it'll fit,” she said. “Wear it—wear it in health, okay?”

And she was hurrying back up toward the door, where she turned to wave, using her free hand to wipe quickly at one and then the other of her eyes.

He stood watching until after she'd gone inside, and until the tall windows of one room after another cast their sudden light into the darkness. Then more lights came on and more, room upon room, as Sally ventured deeper into the house she had always loved and probably always would—having it now, for the first time and at least for a little while, all to herself.

“
WAIT A MINUTE
—wasn't that the same division you were in, Lew?” Betty Miller turned on her husband, almost spilling her drink, her eyes wide and ready for a priceless coincidence. She had interrupted Tom Brace in the middle of a story, and now everyone had to wait for Lew Miller's reply.

“No it wasn't, darling,” he told her, “I'm sorry. It was a pretty big army.” He put his arm around her slim waist and felt the pleasant response of her hand slipping around his own. What an awful bore this party was; they had been cornered for nearly an hour with the Braces, whom they knew only slightly—Tom Brace was an account executive in the advertising agency where Miller wrote copy—and there seemed to be no escape. The backs of Miller's legs had begun to ache from standing, and he wanted to go home. “Go on, Tom,” he said.

“Yes,” Betty said. “I'm sorry, Tom, please go on. You were just about to cross a canal, seven years ago this week.”

Tom Brace laughed and winked, forgiving the interruption, understanding about women and their silly questions. “No, but seriously, Lew,” he said, “what
was
your outfit?” Miller told him, and while Betty was saying, “Oh yes, of course,” Brace stared at the ceiling, repeating the numerals. Then he said, “Why, by God, Lew! You guys were right on our left in that very job I've been telling you about—the canal deal? March of '45? I remember distinctly.”

Miller had been vaguely afraid all along that it might turn out to be the same canal, and now there was nothing to do but agree that yes, as a matter of fact, that was right, in March of '45.

“Why isn't that marvelous,” Nancy Brace said, twisting her pearls with an elegant index finger.

Brace was flushed with excitement. “I remember distinctly,” he said, “you guys crossed the canal a good deal further north than we did, up to our left, and then we circled back and met each other in a kind of pincer movement a couple days later. Remember? Well, Jesus, boy, this calls for a drink.” He handed around fresh cocktails while the hostess's maid held the tray. Miller took a martini gratefully and drank off too much of it on the first swallow. It was necessary, now, for the two husbands to pair off briefly to discuss details of terrain and hours of attack, while the wives got together to agree that it certainly was marvelous.

Watching Brace and nodding, but listening to the women, Miller heard Nancy Brace say, “Honestly, I don't know how they lived through it—any of it,” and she shuddered. “But I never get tired of Tom's war stories; he makes it all so
vivid
for me, somehow—sometimes I feel I'd been over there myself.”

“I envy you,” Betty Miller said softly, in a tone that Miller knew was calculated for dramatic effect, “Lew never talks about the war.” And Miller realized uneasily that for Betty there was a special kind of women's-magazine romanticism in having a husband who never talked about the war—a faintly tragic, sensitive husband, perhaps, or at any rate a charmingly modest one—so that it really didn't matter if Nancy Brace's husband
was
more handsome, more solid in his Brooks Brothers suit and, once, more dashing in his trim lieutenant's uniform. It was ludicrous, and the worst part of it was that Betty knew better. She knew perfectly well he had seen almost nothing of the war compared with a man like Brace, that he'd spent most of his service at a public-relations desk in North Carolina until they transferred him to the infantry in 1944. Secretly he was pleased, of course—it only meant that she loved him—but he would have to tell her later, when they were alone, that he wished she'd stop making him a hero whenever anybody mentioned the war. Suddenly he was aware that Brace had asked him a question. How's that, Tom?”

“I said, how'd you have it going across? What kind of resistance they give you?”

“Artillery fire,” Miller told him. “No small arms to speak of; you see, we'd been covered by a good-sized barrage of our own, and I guess whatever German infantry there was had been driven back away from the canal before we got started. But their artillery was still working and we ran into plenty of that. Eighty-eights.”

“No machine guns up along that opposite bank?” With his free hand Brace fingered his neat Windsor knot and thrust his jaw up and out to free another inch of neck.

“No,” Miller said, “as I remember it there weren't any.”

“If there were,” Brace assured him, winking grimly, “you'd remember it. That was our trouble, right from the start. ‘Member how that canal was? Probably less than fifty yards wide? Well, right from the minute we climbed into those goddamn little boats we were covered by these two Jerry machine guns up on the opposite bank, maybe a hundred yards apart. They held their fire until we were out in the middle of the drink—I was in the first boat—and then they cut loose.”

“My God,” Betty Miller said. “In a
boat.
Weren't you
terrified
?”

Tom Brace's face broke into a shy, boyish grin. “Never been so scared in my life,” he said softly.

“Did you have to go in a boat too, darling?” Betty asked.

“No I didn't. I was just going to say, Tom, that up where we were we didn't need boats. There was this little footbridge that was only partly blown out, and we just used that and waded the rest of the way.”

“A bridge?” Brace said. “Jesus, that must've been a break. Get your vehicles and stuff across?”

“Oh no,” Miller said, “not on this bridge; it was only a little wooden footbridge, and as I say it was partly in the water. There'd been a previous attempt to cross the canal that day, you see, and the bridge had been partly destroyed. Actually, my memory of the bridge itself is very vague—it might even have been something our own engineers had tried to put up, come to think of it, although that doesn't seem likely.” He smiled. “It was a long time ago, and the fact of it is I just don't remember, Tom. I've got a pretty poor memory, to tell the truth.”

To tell the truth—but to tell the truth, Miller thought, would be to say, Poor memory, hell. I've forgotten only what I didn't care about, and all I cared about that night was running in the dark, first on the concrete of a road, then on dirt, then on boards that trembled underfoot, sloping down, and then in the water. Then we were on the other side and there were some ladders to climb. There was a great deal of noise. I remember that, all right.

“Well,” Tom Brace said, “if it was at night and you were under artillery fire I guess you weren't paying much attention to the damn bridge; I don't blame you.”

But Miller knew that he did blame him; it was inexcusable not to have remembered about the bridge. Tom Brace would never have forgotten a thing like that because too much would have depended on his knowing. He would have had a plastic-covered map stuck in his field jacket, under the grimy webbing straps, and when the men in his platoon asked breathless questions he would have known, coolly and without excitement, the whole tactical situation.

“What kind of a unit were you in, Lew?”

“Rifle company.”

“What'd you have, a platoon?” It was Brace's way of asking if he had been an officer.

“Oh no,” Miller said. “I didn't have any rank.”

“Yes you did too,” Betty Miller said. “You were some kind of a sergeant.”

Miller smiled. “I'd had a T-4 rating in the States,” he explained to Brace, “in public relations, but it didn't amount to anything when they kicked me into the infantry. I went over as a rifleman replacement, a pfc.”

“Tough break,” Brace said. “But anyway—”

“Isn't a T-4 the same thing as a sergeant?” Betty asked.

“Not exactly, darling,” Miller told her. “I've explained all that to you before.”

“Anyway,” Brace said, “you say somebody else had tried to cross the canal that day and been thrown back? And you guys had to make the second try at night? That must've been a sour deal.”

“It was,” Miller said. “As a matter of fact it was particularly sour because that afternoon we'd been put back in regimental reserve, our battalion was supposed to get a few days' rest, and just about the time we got our sacks unrolled we got word to move up to the line again.”

“Oh Jesus,” Brace said. “That used to happen to us all the time too. Wasn't that a bitch? So of course your men's morale was all shot to hell before you even got started.”

“Well,” Miller said, “I don't think our morale was ever very high anyway. We didn't have that kind of an outfit.” And to tell the truth would have been to say that the worst part of the afternoon was an incident about the loss of a raincoat. Kavic, the squad leader, scrawny, intensely competent, nineteen years old, had said: “Okay, everybody check their equipment. I don't want to see nothing left behind,” and with tired eyes and fingers Miller checked his equipment. But later, on the road, he was touched on the shoulder blade by Wilson, the assistant squad leader, a portly Arkansas farmer. “Don't see your raincoat there on your belt, Miller. Lose it?”

And there was nothing to say, after a moment's slapping of the cartridge belt, feeling the loss, but, “Yeah, I guess I must have.”

Kavic turned around from the head of the column. “What's the trouble back there?”

“Miller lost his raincoat.”