Once an Eagle (52 page)

“And what about that mustang of yours? How's he getting along?”

“Oh, splendidly, sir! He's so enthusiastic …” She heard the trill in her voice, and was irritated by it. She hated women who fluttered and gushed around general officers—she remembered what her father had once said about Army wives always acting as though a general were going to exercise some eerie droit de seigneur at any moment. “It's just his whole life, and you can't say any more than that.”

“A fine lad. Fine. A fighter! The very spirit of the AEF. What a feel for troops! To lead, to
lead,
not to drive—there's the essence of command, my dear.”

“Yes, that's so true … The only trouble is, he keeps neglecting me.” And she smiled mischievously, to give him a clue.

“No! I'll have him on the carpet at oh-eight-hundred hours tomorrow. What are the charges and specifications?”

“He's forever studying on his own, nights and Sundays, when he hasn't got the duty. It's incredible—military history and ballistics, and do you know, he's taught himself French and Spanish all by himself? so he can read it and speak it?”

“Has he really?” The General beamed. “I worked nights to get my law degree when I was training cadets at Lincoln … Gad, I hope his French is better than mine. I remember at Bombon I tried to have a conversation with General DuMaurasque's little girl—she was six or seven—and I got off what I thought was a splendid sentence. She stared back at me without one glimmer of response. I bent down and said, ‘Comprenez vous, mademoiselle?' She shook her head and told me: ‘Non.'”

Tommy laughed: she could understand why women thought Black Jack Pershing attractive. But “Chérie” wasn't going to last forever. “No. Sam's steady as a rock, General. I'm the one that's worried, actually. I'm afraid I'm hurting his career.” This time she did not smile mischievously.

“Why's that, my dear?”

“Because of Poppa, sir. I'm afraid there's a lot of talk about Sam marrying me to further himself, and so on. Of course it's utter rot, but it can't help him any.”

The Iron Commander's eyes glinted. “I know. They said the same things when I married Helen. Let them talk. It keeps them busy when they get tired of pushing papers around. There's only one thing that matters anyway, and that's when the country is threatened.”

“I know, sir, if only it doesn't prejudice people against him. He deserves so much …” And then she decided to risk it. “He feels he's missed out on so much, General, not getting to the Point. He was accepted, you know, for the following year, but he was so anxious to get into the Army he enlisted, that was in '16—he was with you in Mexico, I guess you know that. But he feels he's missed so much in terms of schooling, the balance of theory and practice—the kind of thing that Benning would give him, the company commanders' course ….”

The General's eyes seemed to veil slightly—for a second she was afraid she'd gone too far; then he nodded, his mouth firm under the neatly trimmed mustache. “He ought to go to Benning. He certainly ought to go.”

“He'd really respond to it, sir. Not that he'd ever mention it himself, he's happy to be serving anywhere he's sent …”

The number was drawing to a close. Sergeant Kinch's horn was nicely weaving the plaintive little melody.

“Well,” Pershing said. “We'll have to give it some thought.—What's this I hear about you shooting a dozen rampaging diamondbacks with a forty-five?”

“Oh, that—that was strictly in line of duty, sir!”

The number ended. The First of the Doughboys stepped back and bowed and moved off in the direction of Harriet Jamieson; a member of his staff, a captain named Coleman, asked her for the next dance. She felt thrilled and overwarm and nervous drifting about under the orange petals of the lanterns—she was talking much too rapidly. I danced to “Chérie” with General Pershing, she thought; if nothing else ever comes of it, I can tell my grandchildren that.

 

Hours later, back
in their quarters, undressing, she said: “That fellow Massengale—he's extraordinary, isn't he?”

Sam was drawing off his puttees. “Yes, he's pretty impressive.”

“We danced two numbers. What's his background, do you know?”

“I'm not sure. Amherst, I think, or Williams—one of those exclusive rich men's colleges. Then the Point. Class of '17. Marv Hansen says he comes from a wealthy family in New York State.”

“How'd you meet him?”

He rubbed his eyes and yawned. “Oh, he was coming up with some changes in orders and he got lost. We were just coming out of the line.”

She watched him. “That was all?”

“Well, no.” He grinned at her. “Some of the boys were a little casual with him—or he thought they were, anyway, the staff often thinks the line doesn't show enough snap-to deference; and he got pretty fierce with them. I had to straighten him out a bit. When men have been in the line for days you don't talk to them that way. We were both captains then, fortunately.”

Her mind perched on this thought for a moment unhappily, then swooped on. “That's what you ought to be. An aide to General Pershing.”

“Me?” He smiled his slow, sad smile. “Honey, I'm a troop commander. I'm not a fancy dan, full of drawing-room charm and classical references and the right word at the right time and all that.”

“You could learn …”

“Maybe. I doubt it.” He chafed his naked shoulder with a thumbnail. “I'll tell you: I think you're either born with it or you're not. Like curly hair.”

Tommy started faintly—she'd just remembered Massengale's opening confession. Was that
his
divinely bestowed attribute? “You don't think he's learned it, then.”

“Oh, some of it, maybe. But not the charm, not the instinctive move toward the politic reply.” He paused. “Massengale will never make an enemy and he'll never have a friend.”

“Oh, he has lots of friends—”

“Not the kind I mean. Not the kind that'll stick by you in the clutch.”

“That's ridiculous.” She fought the deep pull of his mind. “How can you possibly know anything like that?”

“It's just a guess. An uneducated guess.” He grinned again. “A lot of the Chaumont crowd were like that. They sat back there and fiddled with their mosaics and gave the orders—they didn't have to be around when they got carried out.”

“You've said yourself General Pershing was a soldier's soldier …”

“He is.”

“Well, he ran things at Chaumont, didn't he?”

“Honey, every man in power finds himself surrounded by a coterie. That's in the nature of things. A few are unselfish and devoted, some are brilliant and ambitious in a broad sort of way, most of them are self-serving and ambitious in a narrow sort of way. You can't blame Pershing. His job was to get on with the business, using what material he had at hand.”

“You excuse anybody you want to,” she fretted; she felt rebellious, vindictive, full of disorder, she didn't know why. “He's going to go a long, long way,” she declared, pointing her finger. “Massengale. You wait and see.”

He studied her evenly. “You're absolutely right. He will.”

“He's got all the qualities needed.”

“All but one.” Sam tapped his heart with two fingers. “He doesn't care enough. About people. There's something lacking there, some funny little—lack.”

“How do you know
that?
”

He got up and went to the window, where the desert wind puffed the blue target-cloth curtains, faded now on their weather side to a pale azure. “He doesn't think people are important. Not desperately important, I mean. More important than thrones and symphonies and triumphal arches.”

“My God, Sam. You just said you only met him once before this …”

“That's all a man needs, most of the time.”

“Snap judgments.” She dropped the hairbrush on the bedside chest. “Old Mr. Dead-eye. Well, this time you're wrong. He has a fine sense of humor, a real natural warmth—I could feel it. You're wrong.”

He made no reply, and this upset her more than if he'd produced some sudden, annihilating refutation. She passed her hands over her hair, raised the mosquito net and slid into bed, tucking the net down around her tightly, pulling it taut against the T-bar at her head. “I had the strangest feeling,” she could not help saying aloud; she felt all at once light-headed and irresponsible in the sultry heat, the late hour, the slow, humming silence after all the fanfare and exhilaration expelled on the breath of power's passing. “I had the feeling you and he are tied together, somehow—that you're going to meet years from now in a tremendous crisis.”

Sam chuckled. “He'll be far beyond the likes of me.”

“Don't say that …”

“I don't begrudge him that. If that's what he wants.”

“Well anyway: you're going to. In some desperate emergency.”

“Lord, I hope not.” He was lying on the floor, naked except for his underdrawers, doing leg exercises; his body was lean and hard, with the ridges of muscle bright in the lamp's frail glow. “He'd be a formidable adversary, I know that much.”

“Yes, he would.” She lay perfectly still, watching his exertions. “But he's afraid of you.”

He stopped and looked toward her. “What makes you say that?”

“Nothing.” She laughed, and pumped her feet up and down in the bed like a little girl; she felt bound in excitement. “Two can play that psychic game of yours, you know.”

“You're pretty cranked up for a weary wife and mother. Singled out by old Black Jack himself for a turn around the floor. I hope it doesn't go to your head.” He rolled over on his stomach and began doing pushups. “What did you talk about with him all that while?”

“Oh—several things: we discussed Poppa, and my resourcefulness, courage and marksmanship; and what a superb dancer the General is.”

“Nothing more than that?”

“Oh, yes—you. We discussed you at length: your predilection for snap judgments, your stubbornness, above all your pigheaded, bone-headed recalcitrance about wearing your—”

He leaped to his feet, pulled the mosquito net out from under the mattress and reached in and kissed her; she gasped with surprise. She felt a swift shiver of dereliction mingled with covert glee. It was the first time in their marriage she'd lied to him in an important matter—it was the first time she'd schemed and maneuvered, tried to arrange something behind his back. Did he suspect something of it? She remembered Reeny Keller's face when she'd been dancing with the General: avid, almost imbecilic with guile … Had she herself looked like that, for all the world to see? Was she turning into a campaigner, then?—scheming, snatching at the propitious moment, one with that company of hard-jawed, ferret-eyed women she'd watched with such loathing all these years?

Sam was making love to her; her thoughts tossed themselves upward in dreamy fountains, dissolved in rainbow bands of pure sensation. It was fair enough, she thought falteringly, Sam deserves it if any soldier in the American Army does—and nothing may come of it, anyway, and I don't care—

She drew him to her, her blood thick with desire, her fingertips burning; it mingled hotly with the excitement of the dance, her moment, her daring, her folly. For one last moment she looked backward coolly. But I won't do it again, the thought stirred, and stopped. It will be my one wifely indiscretion: and there it will remain …

4

“It was genius,”
Ben Krisler said. He scrubbed his cropped black hair with his knuckles feverishly, his eyes snapping. “A moment of pure genius. Wasn't it, Sam?”

“What? What was genius?” Marge demanded.

“You tell it, Sam.”

Damon smiled at him; it was obvious Ben was dying to tell the story himself. “No, go ahead.”

“Well, all right.” Ben drained his glass and turned to his wife and Tommy. “Swanson started it all—you know Swanny, he taught half a semester at Alligator Bend Aggies or some place and he's never got over it—every time he opens his mouth it sounds as if he's revising a bloody dictionary—”

“He's a divine dancer,” Tommy broke in, “—which is a good deal more than you two clodhoppers can say.”

Ben blinked at her, suddenly crestfallen. “I wouldn't say we're all that bad …”

The girls looked at each other and laughed, and Tommy said, “Of course not, you're both Vernon Castles on wheels. Carry on gaily.”

“Well, Swanson gets on his feet and hems and haws around for a quarter of an hour, and then finally he pulls a long face and says, ‘If the Colonel will permit me to say so, it is my contention that the subject is too complex to be covered adequately in the time allotted.' Or some such dunderfunk. And Colonel Marshall's eyes got that curious pale gleam in them—you know that look, Sam—and he says: ‘You genuinely feel that, do you, Swanson?' ‘Yes, sir,' Swanny says, ‘in point of fact I do.' ‘Captain,' old Marshall says in his crisp way, ‘there is no military subject that cannot be covered adequately in
five
minutes, let alone twenty. It's simply a matter of compression—and a knowledge of what is important and what is extraneous.'

“Well, Swanson's mouth gave that funny smirking twitch, and a couple of muffinheads at the back of the room shifted their feet. And the Colonel, who doesn't miss one hell of a lot, gets a little twinkle in his eye and says: ‘I see we have some skeptics in our midst. All right. I will now demonstrate that any topic, of no matter what scope, can be successfully outlined in five minutes. Give me a subject, Captain.' Old Swanny blinks at him. ‘Any subject at all, Colonel?' ‘Any one at all.' There is a pause, and then Swanny says, ‘The Civil War,' and the whole class roars with laughter. ‘Very well,' says the Old Man with a grin. He nods at Sam and says, ‘Time me, Damon, if you will, please.' And Sam looks at his watch as if we're getting ready to jump off at Montfaucon and says: ‘Go.'”

Ben slapped his hands on his breeches. “And he did it! The whole works—early southern victories, inadequacies of command and discipline in the Army of the Potomac, then Shiloh and the Mississippi strategy of Grant and Sherman, the turning points at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, the breakthrough into Georgia and the Carolinas and the threatened encirclement of Lee's Army of Virginia. I've forgotten half of it. And he stops and turns to Sam and says, ‘Time?' and Sam says: ‘Four minutes, fifty-two seconds, Colonel.'”

“I think that's wonderful.” Marge Krisler sighed and wrinkled her nose. She was a plump, pretty blonde from Krisler's hometown of Menominee, Wisconsin, who had married Ben on his graduation from West Point in the spring of 1918. Essentially a farm girl, simple and good-hearted, she had an almost mystic reverence for things of the mind. “I think it's marvelous, being able to hold all those facts and—and philosophies in your head like that … ”

“They call him a stuffed shirt, some of them,” Ben said. “Well, if he is, that's exactly the kind of stuffed shirt I want to be. And he doesn't give a damn what anybody happens to think, either.”

“He gives more of a damn than you do, Benjy,” his wife replied mildly, “or he wouldn't have got to be colonel.”

“He's a great man,” Damon said, and sipped at his drink. “He's going to rebuild the Army.”

“If they don't bury him in Outer Mongolia first,” Tommy observed.

“Bury him?” Marge looked concerned. “Why should they do that?”

“Politics, politics, Margie my love. How did you think little soldier boys get to be Chief of Staff? It's the same old war between Peyton March and Pershing, only we're getting down to the second generation.” Tommy pressed out her cigarette in a big, ugly, green-glass ashtray. “MacArthur will get it. MacArthur hates him with a passion.”

“How do you know all that, Tommy?”

“A big bird told me. There's a power struggle going on in Washington right this minute. And MacArthur is in on the ground floor with that God damned permanent star of his. Wherever have you been, all these years?”

“Canal Zone,” Marge answered mournfully, and they all laughed.

The four of them were sitting in the Krislers' quarters, which were painfully adjacent to the Damons'—only the thickness of one-inch siding separated their sleeping offspring—after a forbidden meal of scrambled eggs and toast, cooked on a hot plate Tommy kept in a commode under a ragged serape. They had been to the post dance that evening and had observed all the amenities, drunk the innocuous punch and chatted pleasantly with the other officers and their wives. The rank had—mercifully—left early and they had spiked their drinks and danced furiously and long; and now they were back in their own two-family set for what Tommy called The Hour of Truth and No Consequences. The men had shed their blouses and the girls kicked off their heels. Ben had produced a label-less bottle filled with a cloudy fluid that tasted like burned pine needles but which he swore was topflight gin; and they were sipping at it and talking in an affectionate, desultory way of the things they'd wanted to talk about all evening. For Sam it was the nicest moment of the week—he loved these Saturday nights, listening to the lively exchanges between Tommy and Ben, and thinking of nothing in particular.

“Poppa knew Marshall on Palamangao when they were both shavetails,” Tommy was saying. “I remember he told a wonderful story about him. He was leading a patrol out in the jungle and they were wading across this river. There was a splash near them and someone yelled, ‘Look out for the bandy-flaking crocodiles!' and the whole bunch panicked and ran right over him and stomped him into the mud. He picked himself up and climbed the bank, called the detail to attention, gave them right-shoulder arms and marched them all right back down into the stream and then back out again. Then he inspected their weapons and carried on. And he never said another word to them about it.”

“I can just see him,” Ben chortled. “Perfectly impassive, all over gumbo and vines. Command presence.” He grabbed his big nose between thumb and fingers. “That's an interesting problem. How would you have handled that, Sam?”

“I'd have been out of that water fifty feet ahead of the nearest trooper. No crocodile is going to nibble
my
toes.”

“They say they go for the genitals every time.”

“Ben!” Marge said.

“Cold fact. Sort of an antipasto before the main course. Comes from the Sanskrit
krakalooloo,
meaning: ‘to castrate with one swift bite.'”

“That's enough,” Marge threatened him. To Tommy she said, “Honestly, it's embarrassing—he's always got his mind on his private parts.”

“That's right,” Tommy rejoined, “—and if it's not on his it's on yours.”

“What's more important?” Ben demanded in the general laughter. “You have five seconds to think up a happier alternative, all of you …”

“It's odd, isn't it?” Marge narrowed her large hazel eyes. “I mean thinking of Colonel Marshall as a young second lieutenant, all covered with mud.”

“You see?—there's hope for us yet, gal,” Damon offered. “One of these days Ben and I'll be leaf colonels running the Infantry School, imparting words of wisdom in all directions.”

“Fat chance,” Ben said, suddenly gloomy. “Sitting out in a rain forest in Mindoro, more likely.”

“Oh, no more tropics,” Marge protested, “—can't we keep out of the jungles for a while? Honestly,” she said to Tommy, “you should have seen the shape our set was in at Gaillard—all tangled in vines and thorns, the porch falling in and lizards running around the walls …”

“I've seen them,” Tommy said with feeling.

“Jesus, I'll tell you camp followers what
I'm
waiting for,” Ben declared, and his homely face contorted in a glare of comic outrage. “It's for that golden day when Joey grows up and graduates from the Point—and we can both be lieutenants in the
same company together!
Won't that scrape at your old heartstrings, though?”

“Cheer up, son,” Sam told him. “Just think—I may never live long enough to reach the rank I had in the spring of '19.”

“You both love it,” Tommy accused them. “You're both morbid, masochistic romantics and you love every minute of it, or you wouldn't put up with the whole idiot game … ”

Ben scratched his scalp furiously. “Maybe she's right, you know? Why
do
we put up with it?”

Damon set down his glass and grinned at Ben, liking him. The first student officer he and Tommy had laid eyes on after reporting in at the Infantry School had been Ben, crouched on his hands and knees in the red dirt and swearing at a yellow wicker baby carriage he was trying to repair. The two men greeted each other with wild enthusiasm. It had seemed like the greatest good fortune; and when they found they'd been assigned to the same set, it struck Damon as the hand of destiny.

Tommy had ridiculed the notion. “You mean because you had that drink together, the day I bamboozled you all over the place in Cannes? Don't be silly. The Army's like Times Square—everybody's always running into everybody else sooner or later. There's a diabolical little termite sitting in the AG's office gleefully moving the pegs around, just to fox credulous souls like you …”

All the same she'd been pleased, he could tell; she remembered Ben with affection, and she became fond of Marge. It was a happy arrangement: the two men ran together in the early morning to keep in shape, and now and then played a game of chess; the girls went shopping in the Damons' car or took the children—the Damons now had two, the Krislers four—to the pool. And Damon continued to regard it—surreptitiously—as the hand of destiny.

Ben was holding the bottle toward him again. “Have another snort and wash all your troubles away.”

“No more for me.” He shook his head. “I've got to get up early tomorrow.”

“What in hell for? On the seventh day even the Lord collapsed in the sack.”

“He's teaching himself German.” Tommy made a face. “Twenty-five words and one irregular verb a day. Zuvereingeschmashen haben worden sein. God, what a language.”

“You're learning
German?
” Ben gaped at them. “In addition to everything else?”

“Well you see, he wants to be ready for any contingency. For instance, if he's sent as military attaché to Berlin.”

Krisler shook his head. “By God, when I break out of this place I'm going where they've never heard of the printed word. I'm going to put in for Tahiti, and paddle around with armfuls of dusky maidens. And become the oldest, meanest lieutenant in the dogface Army.” For an instant he glowered at the little room with its meager furnishings—the motheaten sofa whose back was covered with a violent orange rebozo; the scarred oak chairs; the teakwood taboret surmounted by a cloisonné lamp—acquired, both of them, in the Chinese shops of duty-free Panama City—looking wildly incongruous in this rough company. “Consider this domicile. As a marble hall, I mean. As a real, five-alarm, ring-tailed wreck.” The girls both pounced on him for this, and he gave a quick, rueful grin. “I know, honey. Just shooting off my foolish mouth.” Humming, “Oh, we'll hoist Old Glory to the top of the pole,” he poured himself another drink.

“You're going to feel terrible tomorrow,” Marge warned him.

“Then let's live tonight. Right? Besides, tomorrow never comes.”

Ben was delightfully, distressingly mercurial. One moment he would be filled with soaring enthusiasm, the next with dour forebodings and violent imprecations against the powers that be. Actually he had—as Damon quickly saw—a lively imagination and a powerful sense of justice, which he tried to obscure through a harsh, peppery pugnacity. His name was synonymous with defiance. He had got in trouble down at Gaillard with his battalion commander over the inadequate medical facilities for the Puerto Rican enlisted men, and at the officers' club at Bragg he'd got into a row with a captain over the status of Negroes in the Army, and had asked him outside—an affair climaxed by replies-by-endorsement, office hours, and a demand for an apology Ben had refused to give.

“You're a born rebel and a troublemaker,” Marge would tell him with a strange mixture of rebuke and awe. “Whatever they've got, you're against.”

“Only ninety percent of it, honey,” he'd answer with his crusty grin. “The remaining ten percent I'm a solid conformist.”

For all that, he was a good soldier. In the tactical problems, where the instructors leaned toward vigorous and unorthodox solutions, he excelled; he was good with troops, and he knew weapons inside and out. His real failing was a deep dislike for bookwork—he had graduated from the Point as the class goat—and Damon had taken him under his wing, tutoring him now and then, calming him, steadying him down.

“Too much deadwood around,” he was saying now, his heels cocked on the table. “That's the good thing about Central America, Sam—every couple of years they throw themselves a real, bang-up revolution, and they line up all those superannuated bastards and bump them off and start over again with company grade types like you and me. It's good for a country to turn everything upside down, smash all the crockery and start fresh: prevents hardening of the brain pan.”