The Young Lions Part 51

He thought of all the girls he might have had, whom, for one reason or another, he had abstained from. Helen, ten years ago, tall and blonde, who had significantly touched knees with him in a restaurant and who had whispered to him when her husband had gone to get a cigar. But her husband had been Michael's best friend in college, and Michael, half-shocked, half-n.o.ble, had pulled away. He thought of the tall, full body of his friend's wife, and moved agonizedly in the dark. Florence, who had come to him with a letter from his mother, because she wanted to go into the theatre. Florence had been very young and awkwardly blunt. Michael had discovered she was a virgin, and had felt, sentimentally, that it was not just that a virgin should give herself so casually to a man who did not love her and would never love her. He thought of the slender, slightly awkward girl from his home town, and twitched sorrowfully under the barracks bag.

Then, the modern dancer with the pianist husband, who had pretended to be drunk and had fallen into his lap at that party on 23rd Street, but Michael had been occupied then with a schoolteacher from New Roch.e.l.le. And the girl from Louisiana, who had three enormous brothers, of whom Michael was frankly afraid; and the woman who had looked back with calm invitation on 11th Street, on the winter night in the Village, and the wide-hipped young nurse from Halifax the time his brother broke his leg, and ...

Michael thought despairingly of all the fair, offered, declined flesh, and gritted his teeth under the wet canvas, mourning for the insane fastidiousness of days gone by. Ignorant, he thought, oh, you ignorant, pompous b.a.s.t.a.r.d!

And then the girls he had gone to bed with, and then neglected-Katherine, Rachel, Faith, Elizabeth-all the dear hours of lightly lost pleasure, never to be found again. He moaned miserably and seized the barracks bag with clutching, furious anger.

Still, he comforted himself, finally, there had been quite a few he hadn't declined. In fact, when you looked back on it this way, you were ashamed there were so many others, but you were glad that you hadn't been ashamed then, and had not let it stand in your way.

Still, when he got back, if he got back, he was going to change. That part of his life was over. Now he wanted an orderly, decent, well-run, faithful, valuable life. Margaret. He had avoided thinking about Margaret for a long time. Now, in the damp, rough hole in the ground, with the shrapnel raining softly down; he couldn't help but think about her. Tomorrow, he decided, I will write her. I don't give a d.a.m.n what she's doing now. When I get back, we must get married. He convinced himself swiftly that Margaret would swing back to her old affection for him, marry him, they would take a sunny apartment downtown, have children, and he would work hard, stop wasting his life. Perhaps get out of the theatre. He probably wasn't going to amount to a h.e.l.l of a lot in the theatre, if he hadn't yet. Perhaps politics. Maybe he had a talent for it. Finally do something useful, useful for himself, for the poor devils dying on the crust of the front lines tonight, for the old men and women lying on the straw in the church at Caen, for the despairing Canadian, the moustached Captain behind the bagpipes who had roared, "Lovely day, isn't it?", for the little girl who had asked for sardines ... Maybe a world in which the common element was not death, a world in which you did not live among the growing cemeteries, a world not governed finally by the Graves Registration Sergeant.

Still, if you wanted to be listened to later, you had to earn that right. You could not merely spend the war being a chauffeur for a Civil Affairs Colonel. Only the men who had come back from the frightful, sickening crust out in front of him would be able to speak with authority, with a sense that they had really paid for their opinions and owned them, irrevocably, once and for all ...

Must ask Pavone tomorrow, Michael thought drowsily, to have me transferred, must ask. And must write Margaret, she must know, she must prepare ...

The guns stopped outside and the planes droned back toward the German lines. Michael slipped the barracks bag off his chest and rolled the helmet away from his groin. Ah, G.o.d, he thought, ah, G.o.d, how long is this going to last?

Then the guard he was to relieve poked his head into the tent and pulled Michael's toe under the blankets.

"On your feet, Whitacre," said the guard. "You're going for a walk."

"O.K., O.K.," Michael said, pus.h.i.+ng back the blankets. He s.h.i.+vered and hurriedly put on his shoes. He put on his field jacket and picked up his carbine, and, s.h.i.+vering badly, stepped out into the night It had clouded over and a fine drizzle was falling. Michael reached into the tent and got out his raincoat and put it on. Then he went over to the guard, who was leaning against a jeep, talking to another sentry, and said, "All right, go on back to sleep."

He stood leaning against the jeep, next to the other guard, s.h.i.+vering, feeling the drizzle filtering in under his collar and rolling down his face, peering out into the cold wet darkness, remembering all the women he had thought about during the raid, remembering Margaret, and trying to compose a letter, a letter so moving, so tender and heartbreaking and true and loving, that she would see how much they needed each other and would be waiting for him when he got back to the sorrowful, chaotic world of America after the war.

"Hey, Whitacre," it was the other sentry, Private Leroy Keane, who had already been on duty for an hour, "do you have anything to drink?"

"No," said Michael. He was not fond of Keane, who was garrulous and a scrounger, and who had, to boot, the reputation of being an unlucky man to be with, because the first time he had left camp in Normandy, his jeep had been strafed and two of the men in it had been wounded, and one killed, although Keane had not been touched. "Sorry." Michael moved away a little.

"Have you got any aspirin?" Keane asked. "I got a terrible headache."

"Wait a minute." Michael went back to his pup-tent and brought back a small tin of aspirin. He gave the tin to Keane. Keane took six of them and tossed them into his mouth. Michael watched, feeling his own mouth curl in distaste.

"Don't you use water?" Michael asked.

"What for?" asked Keane. He was a large, bony man of about thirty, whose older brother had won the Congressional Medal of Honor in the last war, and Keane, trying to live up to the glory of the family, put on a very tough front.

Keane gave Michael the aspirin box. "What a headache," Keane said. "From constipation. I haven't been able to move my bowels for five days."

I haven't heard anybody use that expression, Michael thought, since Fort Dix. He walked slowly beside the line of pup-tents along the edge of the field, hoping Keane wouldn't follow him. But there was the clumsy scuffle of Keane's boots in the gra.s.s beside him and Michael knew there was no escaping the man.

"I used to have a perfect digestion," Keane said mournfully. "But then I got married."

They walked in silence to the end of the row of pup-tents and the officers' latrine. Then they turned and started back.

"My wife stifled me," said Keane. "Also, she insisted on having three children, right away. You wouldn't believe it, that a woman who wanted children like that was frigid, but my wife is frigid. She can't bear to have me touch her. I got constipated six weeks after the wedding day and I haven't had a healthy day since then. Are you married, Whitacre?"

"Divorced."

"If I could afford it," Keane said, "I would get divorced. She's ruined my life. I wanted to be a writer. Do you know many writers?"

"A few."

"Not with three children, though, that's a cinch." Keane's voice was bitter in the darkness. "She trapped me from the beginning. And when the war began, you don't know what a job I had getting her to allow me to enlist. A man from a family like mine, with my brother's record ... Did I ever tell you how he won the medal?"

"Yes," said Michael.

"Killed eleven Germans in one morning. Eleven Germans," Keane said, his voice musical with regret and wonder. "I wanted to join the paratroopers, and my wife threw a fit of hysterics. It all goes together, frigidity, lack of respect, fear, hysteria. Now look what I'm doing. Pavone hates me. He never takes me out with him on his trips. You were at the front today, weren't you?"

"Yes."

"You know what I was doing?" asked the brother of the Medal-of-Honor winner bitterly. "I was sitting here typing up rosters. Five copies apiece. Promotions, medical records, allowances. I'm really glad my brother isn't alive, I really am."

They walked slowly, in the rain, the water dripping from their helmets, the muzzles of their carbines held low, pointing groundward, to keep the wet out.

"I'll tell you something," Keane said. "A couple of weeks ago, when the Germans nearly broke through here, and there was talk about our being set up as part of a defensive line, I'll admit to you, I was praying they would break through. Praying. So we would have to fight."

"You're a G.o.dd.a.m.n fool," Michael said.

"I could be a great soldier," Keane said harshly, belching. "Great. I know it. Look at my brother. We were full brothers, even if he was twenty years older than me. Pavone knows it. That's why he takes a perverted pleasure in keeping me back here at a typewriter, while he takes other people out with him."

"It would serve you d.a.m.ned well right," Michael said, "if you got a bullet in your head."

"I wouldn't care," Keane said flatly. "I wouldn't give a d.a.m.n. If I get killed, don't give my regards to anyone."

Michael tried to see Keane's face, but it was impossible in the dark. He felt a wave of pity for the constipated, brother-and-hero-haunted man with the frigid wife.

"I should have gone to OCS," Keane went on. "I would have made a great officer. I'd have my own company by now, and I guarantee I'd have the Silver Star ..." His voice went on, mad, grating, sick, as they walked side by side under the dripping trees. "I know myself. I'd have been a gallant officer."

Michael couldn't help smiling at the phrase. Somehow, in this war, you never heard that word, except in the rhetoric of the communiques and citations. Gallant was not a word for this particular war, and only a man like Keane would use it so warmly, believing in the word, believing that it had reality and meaning.

"Gallant," Keane repeated firmly. "I'd show my wife. I'd go back to London with the ribbons on me and I'd cut a path a mile wide through the women there. I never had any luck there before because I was a Private."

Michael grinned, thinking of all the Privates who had done spectacularly well among the English ladies, knowing that Keane could arrive any place, with all the ribbons in the world, and stars on his shoulders, and find only frigid women at all bars, in all bedrooms.

"My wife knew it," Keane complained. "That's why she persuaded me not to become an officer. She had it figured out, and then when I saw what she'd done to me, it was too late, I was overseas."

Michael was beginning to enjoy himself, and he had a cruel sense of grat.i.tude to the man beside him, for taking his mind off his own problems.

"What's your wife like?" he asked maliciously.

"I'll show you her picture tomorrow. Pretty," Keane said. "Very well formed. She looks like the most affectionate woman in the world, always smiling and lively when anybody else is around. But let the door close, let us be alone, and it is like the middle of a glacier. They trick you," Keane mourned in the wet darkness, "they trick you, they trick you before you know what's happening ... Also," he went on, pouring it out, "she takes all my money. And it's awful here, because I just sit around and I remember all the things she did to me, and I could go crazy. If I was in combat I could forget. Listen, Whit-acre," Keane said pa.s.sionately, "you're in good with Pavone, he likes you, talk to him for me, will you?"

"What do you want me to say?"

"Either let him transfer me out to the infantry," said Keane, and Michael's mind registered, This one, too, and for what reasons! "or," Keane went on, "let him take me with him when he leaves camp. I'm the sort of man he needs. I'm not afraid of being killed, I have nerves of steel. When the jeep was strafed and the other men were hit, I just watched them as coolly as if I was sitting in a movie looking at it on the screen. That's the sort of man Pavone needs with him ..."

I wonder, Michael thought.

"Will you talk to him?" Keane pleaded. "Will you? Everytime I start to talk to him, he says, 'Private Keane, are those lists typed yet?' And he laughs at me. I can see him laughing at me," Keane said wildly. "It gives him a distorted pleasure to think that he has the brother of Gordon Keane sitting back in the Communication Zone, typing rosters. Whitacre, you've got to talk to him for me. The war will be over and I will never be in a single battle if someone doesn't help me!"

"O.K.," Michael said. "I'll talk to him." Then, harshly and cruelly, because Keane was the kind of man who invited cruelty from everyone he spoke to, "Let me tell you, though, if you ever get into a battle, I hope to G.o.d you're no place near me."

"Thanks, Boy, thanks a lot," Keane said heartily. "Gee, Boy, it's great of you to talk to Pavone about me. I'll remember you for this, Boy, I really will."

Michael strode off ahead of Keane and for awhile Keane took the hint and stayed behind and they did not talk. But near the end of the hour, just before Keane was due to go in, he caught up with Michael, and said, reflectively, as though he had been thinking about it for a long time, "I think I'll go on sick call tomorrow and get some Epsom salts. Just one good bowel movement and it may start it, I may be a new man from then on."

"You have my heartiest best wishes," Michael said gravely.

"You won't forget about talking to Pavone now, will you?"

"I won't forget. I will personally suggest," Michael said, "that you should be dropped by parachute on General Rommel's Headquarters."

"It may be funny to you," Keane said aggrievedly, "but if you came from a family like mine, with something like that to live up to ..."

"I'll talk to Pavone," Michael said. "Wake Stellevato up and turn in. I'll see you in the morning."

"It was a great relief," said Keane, "to be able to talk to someone like this. Thanks, Boy.".

Michael watched the brother of the dead Medal-of-Honor winner walk heavily off toward the tent near the end of the line where Stellevato slept.

Stellevato was a short, small-boned Italian, nineteen years old, with a soft dark face, like a plush sofa cus.h.i.+on. He came from Boston, where he had been an iceman, and his speech was a mixture of liquid Italian sounds and the harsh long a's of the streets adjoining the Charles River. When he served as a sentry, he stood in one place, leaning against a jeep hood, and nothing could make him move. He had been in the infantry in the States and he had developed such a profound distaste for walking that now he even got into his jeep to ride the fifty yards to the latrine. Back in England he had fought the entire Medical Corps in a stubborn, clever battle to convince the Army that his arches were bad and that he was not fit to serve any longer on foot. It was his great triumph of the war, one that he remembered more dearly than anything else that had happened since Pearl Harbor, that he had finally prevailed and had been a.s.signed to Pavone as a driver. Michael was very fond of him and when they were on duty together like this they both stood lounging against the jeep hood, smoking surrept.i.tiously, exchanging confidences, Michael digging into his mind to remember random meetings with movie stars whom Stellevato admired hungrily, and Stellevato describing in detail the ice-and-coal route in Boston, and the life of the Stellevato family, father, mother, and three sons in the apartment on Salem Street.

"I was havin' a dream," Stellevato said, slouched into his raincoat, with all the b.u.t.tons torn off, a squat, unsoldierly silhouette with a carelessly held weapon angling off its shoulder, "a dream about the United States when that son of a b.i.t.c.h Keane woke me up. That Keane," Stellevato said angrily, "there's somethin' wrong with him. He comes over and smacks me across the s.h.i.+ns like a cop kickin' a b.u.m off a park bench, and he makes a h.e.l.luva racket, he keeps sayin', loud enough to wake up the whole Army, 'Wake up, Boy, it's rainin' out and you got some walkin' to do, come on, wake up, Boy, you got to walk in the cold, cold rain.'" Stellevato shook his head aggrievedly. "He don't have to tell me. I can see it's rainin'. He enjoys makin' people miserable, that feller. And this dream I was havin', I didn't want it to break off in the middle ..." Stellevato's voice grew remote and soft. "I was on the truck with my old man. It was a sunny day in the summertime and my old man was sitting on the seat next to me, sort of sleeping and smoking one of those crooked little black cigars, Italo Balbo cigars, maybe you know them?"

"Yes," said Michael gravely. "Five for ten cents."

"Italo Balbo," said Stellevato, "he's the one who flew from Italy. He was a big hero to the Italians a long time ago and they named a cigar after him."

"I heard of him," said Michael. "He got killed in Africa."

"He did? I ought to write it to my old man. He can't read, but my girl, Angelina, comes over and reads the letters to him and my old lady. Well, he was smokin' one of these cigars," Stellevato's voice fell back into the soft Boston summertime of the dream, "and we was goin' slow because we had to stop at every other house, and he woke up and he said, 'Nikki, take twenty-fi' cents' worth up to Mrs. Schwartz today, but tell her she gotta pay cash.' I could hear his voice just like I was back on the truck behind the wheel," Stellevato murmured. "So I got off the truck and I picked up the ice, and I went up the stairs to Mrs. Schwartz, and my father yelled after me, 'Nikki, come on ri' down. Don't you stay up there with that Mrs. Schwartz.' He was always yelling things like that at me, and then he would go off to sleep and he wouldn't know if I stayed up there for the matinee and evening performance. Mrs. Schwartz opened the door, we had all kinds of customers in that neighborhood, Italian, Irish, Polack, Jewish, I was very popular with everybody, and you'd be surprised all the whiskey and coffee cake and noodle soup I got in a day's work on that route. Mrs. Schwartz opened the door, a nice fat blonde woman, and she patted my cheek and she said, 'Nikki, it's a hot day, stay and I'll give you a gla.s.s of beer,' but I said, 'My father is waiting downstairs and he's wide awake,' so she said come back at four o'clock, and she gave me the twenty-five cents and I went downstairs and my father looked sore, and he said, 'Nikki, you gotta make up your mind, are you a businessman or are you the farmer's prize bull?' But then he laughed and said, 'As long as you got the twenty-fi' cents, O.K.' Then somehow, everybody was in the truck, the whole family, like on Sunday, and my girl Angelina, and her mother, and we were comin' home from the beach, and I was just holding Angelina's hand, she never lets me do anything else, because we're going to get married, but her old lady is a different story, and we were sitting down at the table, everybody was there, my two brothers, the one that's in Guadalca.n.a.l and the one that's in Iceland, and my old man pouring a bottle of wine he made and my old lady bringing a big plate of spaghetti ... And that's when that son of a b.i.t.c.h Keane hit me across the s.h.i.+ns ..."

Stellevato fell silent for a moment. "I really wanted to come to the end of that dream," he said softly, and then Michael knew that he was weeping.

Tactfully, Michael said nothing.

"We had two General Motors trucks. Painted yellow," Stellevato said, his voice echoing with homesickness for the yellow trucks, for his father, for the streets of Boston, for the weather of Ma.s.sachusetts, for the flesh of Mrs. Schwartz, and the touch of his fiancee's hand, for the wine of his home and the clamor of his brothers' voices over the Sunday-night spaghetti. "We was expanding. My father started out with a eighteenyear-old horse and a secondhand wagon when he arrived from Italy, and by the time the war began we had two trucks and we were thinking of buying another one and hiring a man to run it. Then me and my brothers were drafted and we had to sell the trucks and my old man went and got another horse, because he can't read or write and he can't run a truck. My girl writes he loves the horse, it's a spotted one, very young, only seven years old, but it's no General Motors truck. We were really doing all right. Right on my route I had fourteen different women I could visit any time I wanted to between the hours of nine in the morning and four in the afternoon. I'll bet, Mike,". Stellevato said, his voice youthfully proud, "you never had anything like that in Hollywood."

"Never, Nikki," said Michael gravely. "There was never anything like that in Hollywood."

"When I get back, though," Stellevato said soberly, "that's all changed. I'm going to marry Angelina or somebody else if Angelina's changed her mind, and I'm going to raise some kids, and it's going to be one woman for me and that's all, and if I ever catch her cheating, I'll put the ice forks through her skull ..."

I must write this to Margaret, Michael thought, the fourteen women on one route all forsworn and the single love firmly established in the war-weary heart.

Michael heard the sound of a man climbing out of his tent near by. He saw a shadowy figure approaching.

"Who's there?" he asked.

"Pavone," a voice said in the darkness, then, as a hurried afterthought, "Colonel Pavone."

Pavone came up to Michael and Stellevato. "Who's on?" he asked.

"Stellevato and Whitacre," said Michael.

"h.e.l.lo, Nikki," said Pavone. "Having a good time?"

"Great, Colonel." Stellevato's voice was warm and pleased. He was very fond of Pavone, who treated him more as a mascot than as a soldier, and who occasionally traded dirty jokes and stories of the old country in Italian with him.

"Whitacre," said Pavone, "are you all right?"

"Dandy," said Michael. In the rainy darkness there was a sense of friendliness and relaxation that never could exist between the Colonel and the enlisted men in the full light of day.

"Good," said Pavone. His voice was tired and reflective as he leaned against the jeep hood beside them. Carelessly, he lit a cigarette, not hiding the match, his eyebrows s.h.i.+ning dark and heavy in the sudden small flare: "You come out to relieve me, Colonel?" Stellevato asked.

"Not exactly, Nikki. You sleep too much anyway. You'll never amount to anything if you sleep all the time."

"I don't want to amount to anything," Stellevato said. "I just want to get back to my ice route."

"If I had a route like that," said Michael, "I'd want to get back to it, too."

"Did he tell you those lies about the fourteen women, too?" Pavone asked.

"I swear to G.o.d," Stellevato said.

"I never knew an Italian who told the truth about women," said Pavone. "If you ask me, Nikki's a virgin."

"I'll show you some of the letters they write me," Stellevato said, his tone injured.

"Colonel," Michael said, emboldened by the darkness and the joking, "I'd like to talk to you for a minute. That is, if you're not going back to bed."

"I can't sleep," said Pavone. "Sure. Come on, let's take a walk." He and Michael took two or three steps together. Pavone stopped and called to Stellevato, "Watch out for paratroopers and husbands, Nikki."

He took Michael's arm lightly as they walked away from the jeep. "You know something," he said softly, "I believe Nikki's telling the absolute truth about that ice route." He chuckled. Then his voice grew more serious. "What's on your mind, Michael?"

"I wanted to ask a favor." Michael hesitated. Here, again, he thought irritably, the endless necessity of decision. "I want you to have me transferred to a combat unit."

Pavone walked quietly 'for a moment. "What is it?" he asked. "Brooding?"

"Maybe," said Michael, "maybe. The church today, the Canadians ... I don't know. I began to remember what I was in the war for."

"You know what you're in the war for?" Pavone laughed dryly. "Lucky man." They walked ten paces in silence. "When I was Nikki's age," he said, finally, surprisingly, "a woman gave me the worst time of my life."

Michael bit his lips, annoyed at the manner in which Pavone had ignored him.

"Tonight, lying there in my tent, during the air raid, I kept remembering it," Pavone said reflectively. "That's why I couldn't sleep. I was nineteen years old and I was running a burlesque theatre in New York. I was making three hundred dollars a week and I kept a girl in an apartment on Central Park South. A beautiful girl ..." In Pavone's voice, soft and full of memory and longing, the beauty of the girl in the apartment on Central Park South so many years before was sorrowfully celebrated. "I was crazy about her. I spent all my money on her, and I used to think about her all day long. When you're nineteen years old and as funny-looking as I am, your grat.i.tude can unhinge your mind. You don't see the plainest thing that every elevator operator and colored maid understands the first time they clap eyes on you and the girl together. She had a friend. A girl from Minneapolis who worked in the same night club. I used to take them both out to dinner almost every night. They used to make me feel like a big man, laughing at my jokes, giving me silly presents they'd buy for me ... Shaking their heads and worrying about my drinking too much and smoking too many cigars. Two women like that can make you feel more important than the President of the United States. At the age of nineteen, I thought I was one of the most promising and unique specimens ever to show up on Manhattan Island. Then one afternoon, I came home early and I found them in bed together." Pavone stopped and pulled thoughtfully at a loose piece of canvas on a weapons carrier that was parked under a tree. "I'll never forget the way they looked at me when I came into the room. Cold, wild, despising me ... Then my girl giggled. I remember the first thing that came into my head, 'They're laughing at me because I'm a Wop.' I went after them. I beat them till I couldn't raise my hands any more. They tried to run away from me, but they never opened their mouths. They didn't scream or beg or anything, they just kept running around the apartment, naked, falling, not making a sound, until I quit and left. When I went downstairs into the street I was sure everyone knew all about me, everyone in the city, that I was a fool, that I was no good as a man ... I couldn't stand it. I went down to the office of the French Line and I got pa.s.sage on the Champlain for the next day. I stayed drunk all the way over and I arrived in Paris with forty dollars to my name ... I've been running away from that bedroom ever since ... G.o.d," he said, looking up at the dark, rainy sky, "twenty years later, in a hole in the ground, in the middle of an air raid, I wake up feeling myself blush from head to toe, thinking about it. Thanks for listening to me," Pavone said brusquely. "If it's dark enough, or I'm drunk enough, I can tell the story. It helps considerably. I'm going back to bed."

"Colonel," Michael began, "I started to ask you a favor."