A Special Providence (14 page)

There were three of them on the detail – Logan, Prentice, and another runner whose name was either Conn or Kahn. They started out three abreast, and Prentice was dimly amazed that the others seemed to have no trouble finding their way back through the ruined town. But what amazed him even more was that they were able to walk so fast. He began to fall behind almost at once, stumbling and coughing; the distance between them lengthened to as much as ten feet, and then it was more like ten yards.

“Come
on
, Prentice.”

Walking on rubber legs, hating Logan with all his heart, he watched the two of them get smaller and smaller as they moved inexorably ahead in the thin yellow light of late afternoon. They turned a corner, going out of sight, and then they disappeared around another corner just when he’d found them again. He knew that if he didn’t find them this time he’d be lost, unable to
get back to the cellar
or
the schoolhouse: he would go on stumbling alone through these heaps of rubble all night, until he fell among the dead. Only once did he find himself in a familiar place – the square where the knocked-off church steeple was, and where the litter bearers had dumped their corpse – and he caught a glimpse of Logan and the other man vanishing down one of the streets at its opposite end. Gathering all his strength he took lumbering, running steps across most of the square; then he had to walk again, and it was some seconds before he could see anything clearly through a red fog that went thin and thick, thin and thick in cadence with the beating of his heart.

At last, toward the end of one more impossibly long street, he saw the overturned French halftrack. He had his bearings on the cellar now; all that remained was to stay on his feet and keep them lifting and falling, like a man on a treadmill, and he would somehow close the distance.

In the gloom of the cellar he found Logan squatting over a pile of overcoats, counting them. Conn or Kahn was tying up the corners of a blanket into which he’d dumped all the K rations, and there was also another load to carry: half a dozen bottles of wine and a great many tall mason jars of fruit preserves that they’d looted from the shelves of the place. Prentice looked with longing at the armchair he had used last night – surely it would be all right to sit down, just for a minute – and in creeping through the shadows toward it he almost fell over two bodies. They were lying asleep on mattresses – Owens and the gray-haired man, Luchek – and only now did he realize that he hadn’t seen either of them all day. They had both complained about their bowels last night: could it be that they’d simply stayed behind this morning? Then why the hell hadn’t he done the same? Another, empty mattress lay not far away, and Prentice sat in his armchair, looking down at it.

“Owens,” Logan was saying.
“Owens
. God damn it, will you lift your feet?” He was pulling at an overcoat that had become entangled with Owens’s legs. “You’ve been goofing off here all day,” Logan told him, wresting the coat free. “The least you can do is move your God damn feet.”

Owens’s eyes came open. “Blow it out your ass, Logan,” he said. “Don’t tell
me
about goofing off, you shithead.” Then, with no change in tone and certainly without a trace of humility, he said, “Listen. Will you find out what happened to the medics? They were supposed to send up for us, hours ago.”

Prentice expected Logan to answer this with something like: “Maybe they got more important things to do,” or “Tough shit” – but all he said, wearily, was: “Okay. I’ll put in another call. Hey
Prentice. Take
this stuff.”

And Prentice struggled out of the armchair, slinging his rifle; but he wasn’t wholly on his feet before Logan flung a load of six or seven overcoats into his arms, which knocked him back. Very slowly he managed to force his way up out of the chair again, carrying the coats, and to take three steps toward Logan, the rifle sling slipping from his shoulder.

“And here,” Logan was saying. “Take these too, and these …” He was planting mason jars firmly on top of the load of coats, building them up against Prentice’s chest like cordwood. Conn or Kahn was already heading for the door, hauling an immense burden, and Logan was nimbly picking up his own share of the load, a stack of coats slung over one shoulder and a burlap bag bulging with food and wine in the other hand. “Okay,” he said, turning away. “Let’s go.”

And that was when Prentice gave up. He moved his feet, but instead of going forward they went back – three tottering steps – and he was sprawled in the armchair again with the load on his lap, his helmet coming down hard on the bridge of his
nose. One of the mason jars slid off and rolled away across the floor with a dull, gritty sound.

“Logan,” he tried to call, but no sound came. “Logan …”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Logan’s voice was very far away. “What
now?
”

“I’m sorry, I – listen. Tell the lieutenant I can’t – I can’t make it. I’m—”

“And who the fuck do you think is going to
carry
all that?”

“I’m sorry. Tell the lieutenant I—”

“Shit.” There was a distant clink and thump as Logan set his own load down, and then Prentice felt the weight on his lap decrease as the jars and overcoats were angrily snatched away. When his trembling arms were free he reached up and tipped off his helmet, letting it fall to the floor with a terrible crash. Then he slumped forward out of the chair on one knee, his head hanging, and used his rifle stock as a staff to help him walk on his knees across the swaying floor to the edge of the mattress, where he crawled and squirmed his way into total collapse.

Logan was still there, moving around somewhere above him, probably still chewing him out, but he could no longer hear the words. He knew, though, that there was one final thing he had to say, and that it would have to be said if it took his last breath.

“I know—” he croaked. “I know you think I’m goofing off, Logan. But get this – get this straight. If I’d wanted to goof off, I’d have – done it – a week ago.”

There was no way of telling whether Logan made any reply to this, or even whether he’d heard it, or even whether he was still in the room.

Then there was nothing but a silent, spinning darkness; and soon there was a dream in which his mother appeared, saying: “Just rest, now, Bobby. Just rest.”

Sometimes in dreams there are visions of the past. For that reason Alice Prentice had always welcomed sleep, but she suffered an insomniac’s dread of the time just before sleeping, the act of falling asleep itself, the perilous twilight of semi-awareness when the mind must struggle for coherence, when a siren or a cry in the street is the very sound of terror and the ticking of the clock is a steady reminder of death.

Now, with Bobby gone in the Army, she had found that whiskey was a great help. Under its protection she could allow her memory free rein: she could dwell without chagrin on the tenderest, most painful times in her life and draw comfort from the belief that nothing was ever as bad as it seemed – that everything, somehow, worked out for the best.

She could even remember Bethel, Connecticut – the long, bleak time after coming home from Paris, when it seemed every day and every night that she couldn’t possibly be more lonely. Her fine old colonial house was a pleasure – at least it would have been a pleasure if she’d had a man to share it with – and she had made a studio out of the old barn behind it, where she was managing to get a good deal of work done. But she couldn’t work all the time. In the evenings after Bobby was asleep she would listen to the radio – the big floor-model
Majestic that had been her one great extravagance since coming back from France – but even the most entertaining programs were seldom enough to divert her from the knowledge of what she was really doing: she was waiting for the telephone to ring.

On the increasingly rare occasions when it did ring it was most often her sister Eva, calling precisely because she knew how lonely Alice was. An old maid, six years her senior and forever bossy and meddlesome and condescending, with the best of intentions, Eva was the only other member of her family to have fled the Middle West: she was a nurse in a New York hospital and seemed to have nothing better to do with her free time than to pester Alice with kindly disapproval. She had disapproved of her marriage to George and then disapproved of the divorce; now she wasn’t at all sure if she could approve of Alice’s new way of living.

“But you’re so remote out there,” she would say. “There can’t be very much for you in the way of – well, social life. Really, dear, I can’t help being concerned.”

And Alice would try, unsuccessfully, to explain that no concern was warranted. It was after one of these dismal conversations that Alice began to toy with the idea of calling up some of the people she and George had known in New Rochelle. The trouble was that everyone they’d known there was happily married – or almost everyone. When she first thought of Harvey Spangler, the doctor who had brought Bobby into the world, she knew at once that she ought to know better. Harvey Spangler was married, but that had never kept him from enjoying a reputation as a ladies’ man around New Rochelle – nor had that reputation kept Alice from confiding in him more than once. It was in the privacy of Harvey Spangler’s office, in fact, that she’d first breathlessly poured out the news of her
intention to leave George and go to Paris; and Harvey, calm and solicitous, had seemed to understand.

Still, it would be indiscreet to call him now, and so she didn’t. She waited until several days later, when she called him at his office to inquire, in as neutral a way as she could manage, if he could recommend a general practitioner in the Bethel area.

“Well,
Alice,
” he said. “It’s good to hear from you.”

And the very next evening, his voice enriched with what she suspected was several drinks too many, he called her back to ask if he might drive out to see her.

She knew it was a mistake to say yes, and that was only the first of her mistakes. Bustling around the house to make it ready for him, taking a bath and changing her clothes, tiptoeing into Bobby’s room to make sure he was asleep, bringing out a bottle of whiskey on a tray with two glasses, waiting for the sound of his car – oh, there was no excuse for it; no excuse at all.

She had no one but herself to blame when he took her in his arms almost at once, and when he took her impatiently and almost roughly to bed. And that was only the beginning: he stayed all night, which meant that she had to find some acceptable way of dealing with him in the morning.

She let him sleep while she fixed Bobby’s breakfast, and she was careful to keep Bobby quiet so as not to disturb him. Even so, she knew there would be an awkward confrontation when he came downstairs, and there was. He came into the kitchen wearing his wrinkled gaberdine suit with the vest unbuttoned and held together with his watch chain. His hair was combed but his shirt was wilted and he hadn’t shaved; he looked weak with hangover and badly confused.

“Good morning,” she said, and she was aware that Bobby, looking up from his Cream of Wheat, had fixed him with a malevolent stare.

“Well,” Harvey said. “Who’s
this
big fella?”

“Say good morning to Dr. Spangler, dear,” she said, and then, “I guess he doesn’t remember you.”

“He looks fine, Alice.” Harvey was clearly grateful for a chance to dispense a professional opinion. “Little underweight, but otherwise fine.”

“What would you like for breakfast, Harvey?”

“Oh, just coffee’ll be fine for now.”

And the three of them were seated at the table, if not quite companionably at least in a state of truce.

“Mind if I smoke a cigar?” Harvey inquired, withdrawing one of the White Owls that crowded his vest pocket, and Bobby watched with mixed fascination and distaste as he filled the kitchen with its acrid smoke.

“Isn’t it a wonderful day?” Alice said. “They said it was going to rain, but it’s just lovely – the sky is so blue and clear. Bobby, if you’re finished why don’t you run outdoors for a little while?”

“I don’t feel like it.”

“But it’s too nice a morning to stay indoors. Don’t you want to go and see what the other children are doing?”

“No.”

Eventually, though, he slid down off his chair and sidled out of the kitchen, pausing to look back at Harvey Spangler with suspicion.

“He really does look well, Alice,” Harvey said when he was gone. “Looks like you’re taking good care of him.”

“He’s wonderful. I don’t know what I’d do without him.”

Thoughtfully stirring his coffee, Harvey ventured to ask a delicate question. “Does George get to see much of him?”

“Of course he does. As often as he wants to. He had him just last weekend – three whole days at Atlantic City.”

“Atlantic City? That must’ve cost a lot.”

“I suppose it did. It was his idea, not mine.”

That was the only time they mentioned George, though they sat talking for another twenty minutes or so. Or rather, Alice talked, while Harvey Spangler listened and nodded and seemed to be waiting only for a decent chance to leave. Why couldn’t she stop talking? Did all lonely people have that problem? She was telling him about Paris, trying to make it sound exciting but fully aware from the clumsy, hesitant way she pronounced French names that she was betraying how confused and unpleasant a time she’d had there.

“… And you see there are two railroad stations with names that sound almost exactly alike,” she was saying. “One is the Gare de Lyon and the other is the Gare d’Orléans, clear over on the other side of the city; only I didn’t
know
that. So if it hadn’t been for that taxi driver I might have ended up goodness knows where.”

And Harvey Spangler managed an appropriate chuckle, examining the ash of his cigar.

Then with relief she left off talking about Paris and asked him to admire the unusual width of the floorboards: she wanted to point out features of the house that she hadn’t had time to show him last night. “Only the real pre-Revolutionary houses have floorboards like that,” she said. “And do you see the old pegheads? Instead of nails? And did I show you my wonderful old Dutch oven? In the fireplace? Come and look. Careful of your head, now.”