The Major's Daughter (18 page)

Amy led them upstairs. The temperature in the house seemed to rise the higher they went. It was a poor house, August thought, but clean. He had always wondered what the inside of an American home looked like, and now he knew. They were constructed of wood, unlike the homes in Austria, and they felt insubstantial as a result.

Marie's mother met them at the door to the sickroom. She looked vexed that Collie had not brought Dr. Shepherd.

“Where is he?” the mother asked, referring to the doctor.

“He's over near Littleton, delivering a baby,” Collie said. “I'm sorry, but this kind man has agreed to take a look.”

“He's a German!” the woman said violently.

“Yes, Mama,” Amy said, “but he is a medical man.”

“I won't let a German touch my daughter. I don't care what it brings.”

“You're tired, Mama, and not thinking carefully,” Amy said. “Dr. Shepherd will not get here until midmorning at the earliest. That's our guess. This man . . . Herr Schmidt . . . he has kindly offered to do what he can.”

“I don't want Germans in my house,” the mother said. “Get them out. Get them out now. I never agreed to this.”

“It's for Marie,” Collie said. “Think about Marie. Whatever can help her . . .”

Then Schmidt, to everyone's surprise, slowly reached into his vest pocket. Carefully, so as not to ruin it, he held out a photograph toward Amy's mother. August glimpsed it briefly; it was a portrait of a young girl.

“My daughter,” he said in broken English, holding the picture so that the woman might examine it. “She died in the first weeks of the war . . . in bombardment. . . . Death has no friends.”

August watched the mother deliberate. Eventually she nodded and stepped away to let them enter the room.

“Be done before my husband returns,” she said, “or there will be hell to pay.”

 • • • 

Estelle waited for George to come around and open her car door. The Duck Pond Country Club looked festive in the evening air. Through the windshield, she watched couples moving toward the front door, their calls and greetings merry and filled with promise. When George popped open her door, music met her. It came as a bright, happy sound, drifting out over the eighteenth hole of the golf course and filling everything with rhythm. She recognized the song as something by the Andrews Sisters, though she could not remember its precise name. She wished for a moment to have the intrepid Marie by her side, because Marie knew every song that tumbled out of the radio. How Marie would love the sparkle of the country club, the white pillars, the trimmed hedges, the glint of automobiles coming to discharge their passengers! Estelle made a mental note to write her and tell her all the details. Marie had already written twice, and Estelle, in her painful self-occupation, had been too blasé to answer back. She promised to change that tomorrow.

George held out his hand.

“The place is hopping!” he said, smiling. “Soldiers are coming back, and the young folks are taking over.”

“It sure looks lively.”

He tried to steal a kiss. Just like that. He leaned in, trapping her between the door and his arm, and he kissed her. It was all she could do not to pull away, so she stood rigidly and let him rub his lips against hers. Then he smiled.

“You look like you're taking medicine you don't like,” he said.

“I hadn't expected to be kissed.”

“Loosen up, Estelle. Tonight's about fun.”

“Yes, of course,” she said, and when he ducked in for a second kiss she forced herself to meet his lips squarely. His hand brushed discreetly over her hip and up toward her left breast. She broke off the kiss and pushed him gently away.

He held out his arm for her to take, and she did, glad to have fresh air after the staleness of the automobile. George, Eternal George. As children they had danced together at this club; they had escaped the summer heat in the pool, and, yes, she had kissed him plenty of times before. Several times as teenagers they had petted while lying in sand traps, or on the hills leading up to greens. He was within his rights to expect a kiss or two, but she wished she felt more in return. He was George, Eternal George, a solid, dependable wheelbarrow of a man. He squeezed her arm several times with his elbow as they approached the front door, like a rider, she thought, spurring on a horse to greater speed.

But the club did look wonderful, she admitted. The dance committee had brightened the entranceway with flowers and decorative pennants. Someone had dreamed up a nautical theme—there was always a theme, however dreadful—and Estelle imagined they were supposed to be coming aboard as they entered. How strange, she thought, that they should be playing at going to sea while their countrymen pushed onto foreign soils and risked drowning in the seas that carried them. But that was a gloomy thought, not appropriate for the evening, and she turned to let George slip off her wrap and hand it to the check girl. As usual the dining room had been turned into a dance floor, and she looked down the lobby and past the men's grill to see dancers twirling past, the light and music stirring them into an eager broth.

“This place is jumping and jiving,” George said, scanning the room, obviously happy to be out on a Saturday night.

“It looks very jolly,” Estelle agreed. “Babs Walker was in charge of the dance committee, wasn't she?”

“You should get on one of those committees,” George said, taking her hand and walking her toward the dance floor. “The best social sets . . .”

“I was away,” she interrupted, choosing not to hear him about social sets or making the right connections. A flash of Mr. Kamal—what he would make of such a dance, how he would appear stepping through the door, nodding to acquaintances—came to her, and she forced it away as too absurd to entertain.

“Drink or dance?” George asked when they finally made it to the dining room where the couples whirled past.

“I think a drink, please.”

“Now you're talking. See that Puerto Rican fellow on the horn? He can wail.”

Estelle nodded. George bent close and winked. She had no idea what that meant, but she did not want to rain on his happiness. He grabbed her hand and led her around the dancers, finally pushing through the French doors that opened onto the patio overlooking the eighteenth green. The nautical theme had been extended even here, and the bar—with Apples, the old colored bartender, standing behind a papier-mâché boat wheel—had been transformed into a pirates' deck. Apples wore a French admiral's hat; beneath the hat his face, as usual, remained set in a stoic frown. Estelle wondered how she had never noticed as keenly before the casual mockery they made of Apples, a man who had served them all for many years. She knew Mr. Kamal would resent it—he saw all men as equal and did not care a moment for skin color—but to George, Apples was merely part of the decorations.

“Two sidecars, my good Apples,” George said. “I like that hat, Apples.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You look like you're out of
Mutiny on the Bounty
.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You should take that hat off if you don't like it,” Estelle could not keep herself from saying. “If it gets in the way of your work.”

“Miss Walker asked me to wear it,” Apples said, his hands busy with brandy and lemon and orange liqueur.

“He looks like Napoléon,” George said.

Before the drinks came, and before George could say anything else, an avalanche of partygoers came off the golf course. They had obviously been enjoying cocktails at someone's house and had walked across the course; the women carried their shoes, and the men played piggyback with one another, wrestling and shouting, yelling
giddyup
as if they had mounted horses. Estelle recognized almost everyone at a glance; it was the familiar crowd, running perhaps on more alcohol than usual, but the old gang poured up off the eighteenth fairway and came into the bright patio area.

“Whale ho!” Robert Tailor, a ginger-headed man known to them all as Polly, shouted at the sight of the bar, perhaps, though Estelle couldn't say. “Libations all around!”

“Apples, you look positively regal!” Missy Kent exclaimed, her quick little feet nibbling like mice as they came onto the patio stones. “Hello, Georgie Porgie! And there's Estelle. I didn't know you were back, or I would have insisted you come to the trough for drinks this evening.”

“Doesn't Apples look like Napoléon?” George asked the crowd. “Doesn't he really?”

George took charge of their drinks and passed one to Estelle. He raised his glass in a mock toast.

“At Dirty Dick's and Salty Dans, we drank our whiskey straight, and some went upstairs with sweet Marleen, and some, alas . . .”

“With Kate!” the others shouted in a merry explosion.

“Is that that little Puerto Rican I hear playing?” someone asked.

Estelle could not see who asked; she took a drink and smiled.

“Like Gabriel blowing his horn!” Polly said, his voice on the edge of hilarity. “A dark Gabriel, you understand. Not the shining blond-hair version.”

“Apples, we're parched!” Missy Kent said, sliding into her heels. “You could strike a match on the back of my throat.”

“Who's got a cigarette? I need a cigarette,” Kenny Lindsey said.

He had just let his rider slide off his back, and he came onto the patio, straightening his jacket and running his hands over his hair. He was tall and lanky and played tennis at the Duck Pond, where he had twice won the club championship. He was a lean lefty whose serve, people said, was illegal in seventeen states.

Estelle stepped back from the bar. She didn't believe for a second that Missy hadn't known about her return; it had been a deliberate snub, but one, Estelle granted, that she probably deserved. George, in fact, would normally be included in any of the group's shenanigans, but by asking Estelle to the dance he had made himself an outcast at least for the night. Estelle understood all that. In a sense, she should be grateful to him, but she didn't feel that way.

“To our men in arms!” Polly said when he at last had his drink. He raised his glass and the others followed.

“Vive la France!” Missy Kent said.

“It won't be long now until they have Hitler on the run,” Polly said, his voice carrying over the fading embers of a song ending. “The Kraut bastard.”

“Polly!” Martha Guthberson said, her voice hiding a laugh.

She was as tall and lanky in her own way as Kenny Lindsey was in his, and people linked them together whether they liked it or not. Estelle always mused that they were as suited as livestock for each other, sure to make terrific babies who'd grow up to play basketball and could reach anything on a high shelf. Martha wore a long string of pearls, an accent reminiscent of flappers, and it didn't quite work for the type of evening they had in store for them.

George dripped his hand around Estelle's waist. She smiled at the sensation, though she imagined it was a tight, steady smile, like a person wading into cold water. He slid his hand down in a quick movement and cupped her rear end for a moment before whisking it back up to her waist. No one saw his grab and he kept his eyes straight ahead. She took a drink. She decided that she needed several drinks.

Then the dance floor emptied. The French doors swung open and the dancers hurried out, their faces flushed, while the band members slowly descended from their stand. A second bartender, a colored man Estelle did not recognize, came to help Apples behind the bar. The man wore a white sailor's cap, and he was young and appeared slightly frightened. Apples spoke to him in a low voice, Estelle saw, but she could not pick up the words.

“Get me another drink, would you, George?” she asked, shaking the ice in her glass. “Keep them coming.”

“I say,” he said.

“Don't say anything,” she said. “Just find me a drink.”

Chapter Fourteen

M
oonlight ran across the snow. On another night, for another purpose, Collie would have found the vision of the snow beneath the green pines a perfect wonder. The snow rested like a white sleeve on the side of the hill, its frigid center causing the air around it to feel damp and heavy. August had known its location from his work with the cutting teams, and she had hiked beside him, along with the young guard, Jules, each of them carrying an empty rucksack. Now she knelt beside the snow and held the top of her rucksack open, while August employed a short, military shovel to fill the interior with snow. Jules already stood with his pack filled; August's pack waited, its sides bulging. Snow for Marie, Collie thought. Snow to fight a fever.

“Nearly finished?” Jules asked impatiently.

Jules, Collie knew, felt uncomfortable without his rifle. Hiking into the mountains with a German and a woman had been a difficult proposition for him. Collie glanced at him. He was a slow, cautious boy, she observed, with a wild creature's mistrust of things threatening him.

“Ya,” August said, then asked softly in German, “will this be too heavy?”

Collie shook her head. August poured two more shovelfuls into the interior, then held the pack steady while she cinched the top. He told her to turn around, then lifted the rucksack onto her back. The cold passed through her body and took hold of her ribs. She felt her lungs contract and she had to open her mouth to breathe. It was heavy, too; the weight pushed down on her shoulders and made her knees weak.

“Let's go,” Jules said, then addressed August. “You go first.”

“We're coming,” Collie answered.

August swung his pack onto his back and started down.

It
was
beautiful, she admitted. She had never hiked at night, and the trail—a twist of soil among rocks—ran like a pale stream down the side of Bald Mountain. She followed Jules. She understood he wanted to be near August in case August made an escape attempt; Jules walked with his hand perched on his sidearm. It was foolishness, but she had promised to abide by Jules's rules; that was the only way he had agreed to accompany them to the snowfield. Regardless, he could not insulate them from the beauty that surrounded them. Clouds threw curtains across the moon and the light fell like smoke or river fog across the mountain's shoulders. The cold pack dripped down her back and legs.

Her mind spun as she walked. She pictured Marie in her thin white shift, her poor, exhausted face twisted in anguish. She pictured Marie's mother, grim and accepting, as she watched Herr Schmidt take the child's pulse against the stopwatch Amy found for him.

“How is the weight, Collie?” August called back to her.

“It's heavy, but I'm all right.”

“How about for you, Jules?” August called, kidding him, Collie knew. “Not too much?”

“No. Keep walking.”

It was not far. A half mile at most, Collie calculated. The snowfield hung this far into the summer due to its position on the northern slope, not from altitude alone. Pines provided shade. Those thoughts and observations worked into the rest of Collie's troubled imaginings. She felt she had no filter for her inner workings, could not fasten to one specific thing. She concentrated instead on the weight of the backpack and its cold pressure against her spine. The town and camp came into view as a haze of lights, and she walked toward it, bending forward like a miner carrying a hod of coal to the surface.

Herr Schmidt met them on the back porch. He dotted out his cigarette when he saw them. He did not appear confident. When he spoke, he whispered.

“
Gut
,” he said. “It's critical now.”

“How is she?” Collie asked.

“Floating,” he said in German. “We must bring her back to earth. Come with me and we will put her in the bathtub. Her sister is ready to help.”

Collie shrugged out of the backpack and left it on the porch. August said he would mind it. Collie looked at him in passing. He nodded and touched her hand.

She followed Herr Schmidt upstairs. Amy sat on one side of the bed, her mother on the other. Collie bent close and kissed Marie. Marie's skin felt warm and dry as sand. She looked tiny in her bed. Her lips sometimes moved as if she tasted something the rest of them could not detect.

“We're here,” she whispered to Marie. “We're going to make you well, but first you must endure a little cold.”

“We will put her in the tub and pack her with snow,” Herr Schmidt said, turning to Marie's mother. “With your permission.”

“I don't know . . . ,” the older woman said, her voice shaky with indecision. “We should wait until her father returns. These are the kinds of things he decides.”

“Her fever . . . is too hot,” Herr Schmidt said in his broken English. “Her brain . . .”

He looked to Collie, then explained it quickly in German. If the fever was not brought down, the protein in the brain would bubble and dry. She risked being brain-damaged if the fever could not be controlled. He was not certain the snow would work, but he was certain doing nothing would bring about her eventual death. Collie translated his words to Marie's mother.

“It's time to try something, Mother,” Amy said. “She won't last this way. She's being burned from the inside.”

“How do we know he's telling the truth?” her mother asked. “He's a German.”

“What could he gain by lying? He's not a monster, Mother, he's just a man trying to help us.”

“We need to wait for your father.”

With those words, Amy's mother stood and smoothed the sheet over Marie. Collie felt paralyzed and could barely manage to look at Amy. Herr Schmidt turned and stepped into the hallway. Collie smoothed back Marie's hair. The poor lamb, she thought. How could such vitality, such joy and merriment, turn so quickly to such a fragile state? It seemed impossible. Collie wanted to argue for the ice, but she did not know for certain that Herr Schmidt was correct. If they insisted on the ice, and Marie failed anyway, it would be a catastrophe. Marie, Collie knew, possessed unbounded energy and a great, seething love for life, and she imagined the young girl would resist and fight until she recovered if anyone could. She wished, for a moment, that her father would arrive, although matters of sickness and medical procedures rested outside his purview.

She had not had time to advance in her thinking before she heard a gruff voice speak from the hallway. Collie knew instantly that Marie's father had returned. She turned from the bed and stepped into the hallway only to discover Marie's father holding a kitchen knife leveled at Herr Schmidt. Father McIver, a young priest from Littleton, stood at Mr. Chapman's shoulder, his eyes darting back and forth from the knife to Herr Schmidt.

“You filthy slime,” Mr. Chapman said to Herr Schmidt, “what are you doing in my house?”

“Easy,” the priest said. “Let's all slow down.”

Herr Schmidt did not look afraid, Collie noted. That was a remarkable thing. He stood with his shoulder brushing one side of the hallway, his body slack and relaxed as if he had confronted many men in his life and this was merely one more. The priest, on the other hand, appeared panicked and uncommitted to any course of action. Collie felt empty and weak, but she did not duck back into the bedroom. Her main thought was for Marie, and now these men had come and suddenly nothing felt clear. The knife reminded her of a snake, its body undulating in Mr. Chapman's hand.

“I am here to help your daughter if I can,” Herr Schmidt said in German.

“He's here to help Marie,” Collie translated from habit. “Dr. Shepherd is unavailable.”

“I want Dr. Shepherd,” Mr. Chapman said. “I don't want this Kraut bastard.”

“I asked him to help us,” Collie said, “for Marie's sake.”

“I'll stick this knife up his ass and twist it until I have his liver. Tell him that in your Kraut talk.”

“He'll leave if you want him to leave,” Collie said. “He hasn't given her any treatment. He simply gave advice and took her pulse.”

“He's escaped from camp and it's my duty to kill him. Your own father would tell you as much.”

“He's trying to help!” Collie said sharply, then beseeched the priest. “Tell him, Father. If we don't bring down her fever, she won't survive. We have snow from the mountains to pack around her if you'll only give your permission.”

Mr. Chapman waved the knife. No, it was not a snake after all, Collie realized, but an eager cat's tail whisking across the floor in anticipation of a rodent's dash for safety. As she thought it, Mr. Chapman stepped forward and the priest put a hand on his shoulder. Mr. Chapman brushed the hand away and advanced.

Before he took a second step Mrs. Chapman and Amy appeared, Marie's frail body balanced between them. Collie moved aside. How small Marie looked, Collie realized. How sweet and gentle and kind. The two women shuffled slowly, moving their feet in unison so as not to disturb Marie more than necessary. Collie watched Marie's tiny hand drifting like a flower in the air below her. For a dreadful moment, she believed her friend had died.

“Kill him or let us tend to her,” Mrs. Chapman said to her husband, her voice strained with desperation, “but don't stand about and make a nuisance of yourself, Harold. We're going to put her in the tub and then pack her with ice and then we'll pray to God to have mercy on her sweet spirit. If you have a better idea, then speak it now, because I will not stand here and watch my child die while you fight a man you've never met before.”

“Father, come with us,” Amy added.

And they carried Marie down the hallway, past Mr. Chapman and the priest, and turned in quarter steps to bring their patient into the bathroom, her pale skin red with heat and trying.

 • • • 

Estelle felt her head spinning and she clung to George for balance. She was aware he might mistake the tension of her arms for interest; he had twice groped her, leading her to dark places off the patio where he could wrestle away something necessary for him, something juvenile and naughty, his breath like insistent pops in her ear. She understood she should be firmer with him. He was like a young dog in that respect, mindful only when he was brought up short. The liquor had made her soft and supple, she comprehended, but that knowledge was, in its turn, also dull and hazy. She let him paw at her and kiss her neck, and she responded only enough to encourage him not to think her a complete prude. He knew she had limits. That had been established long ago, and when she took his hand and led him back to the dance floor he went without protest, his face flushed with liquor and excitement, his demeanor grateful for such a visit.

Now she danced. The music had taken on a late-night plaintive quality that she found irresistible. The French doors remained open and cool air from the golf course swept in and made the dining room tolerable. The Puerto Rican horn player was marvelous, just as George said, and he seemed to anticipate the cool winds that passed through the club, a dark-skinned Pan calling them all to a midsummer frolic. Around her men and women danced in tilted pairs, their bodies leaning together, their faces conspiring over some plan, or emotion, between them. George, for his part, held her tight and released her only when a song ended, or when another couple floated into view and he felt the need to smile and acknowledge them.

Then suddenly Babs Walker announced that the dance was finished, she didn't want the police to close them down, drive safely, Godspeed, a last round of applause for the dance committee, thanks to the great band, everyone pitched in, thanks, thanks, and she received a large bouquet from her date, Alan Bremen. Everyone applauded, and everyone booed when the band broke into “Auld Lang Syne.” Estelle began to cry. She didn't know why. Or, rather, she knew a thousand reasons why. The music struck her as incredibly touching. Good-bye to everything, she thought. That's what the music made her feel. Good-bye to all the brave boys dying in Europe, and good-bye to Mr. Kamal, and good-bye to gracefulness and summer nights, and even poor doltish Georgie, Georgie Porgie, who held her in his arms and danced her nobly around the floor. It was the liquor's fault, she knew. That's what had made her emotional, and when the band finally ceased, closing with a gentle, quiet completion, she accepted her wrap and followed George out to the car.