The 40s: The Story of a Decade (110 page)

John Talbot lingered outside the little house. Something had been burrowing in the lily-of-the-valley bed, he said, and had also uprooted several lady slippers. Arnold suggested that it might be moles.

“More likely a rat,” John Talbot said, and his eyes wandered to a two-foot espaliered pear tree. “That pear tree,” he said, “we put in over a year ago.”

Mrs. Talbot joined them. She had shampooed not only Kate’s hair but her own as well.

“It’s still alive,” John Talbot said, staring at the pear tree, “but it doesn’t put out any leaves.”

“I should think it would be a shock to a pear tree to be espaliered,” Mrs. Talbot said. “Kate’s ready to go.”

They all piled into the station wagon and took Kate to her party. Her too-short blond hair looked quite satisfactory after the egg shampoo, and Mrs. Talbot had made a boutonnière out of a pink geranium and some little blue and white flowers for Kate to wear on her coat. She got out of the car with her suitcase and waved at them from the front steps of the house.

“I hope she has a good time,” John Talbot said uneasily as he shifted gears. “It’s her first dance with boys. It would be terrible if she didn’t have any partners.” In his eyes there was a vague threat toward the boys who, in their young callowness, might not appreciate his daughter.

“Kate always has a good time,” Mrs. Talbot said. “By the way, have you seen both of the bantam hens today?”

“No,” John Talbot said.

“One of them is missing,” Mrs. Talbot said.

· · ·

One of the things that impressed Arnold whenever he stayed with the Talbots was the number and variety of animals they had. Their place was not a farm, after all, but merely a big white brick house in the country, and yet they usually had a dog and a cat, kittens, rabbits, and chickens, all actively involved in the family life. This summer the Talbots weren’t able to go in and out by the front door, because a phoebe had built a nest in the porch light. They used the dining-room door instead, and were careful not to leave the porch light on more than a minute or two, lest the eggs be cooked. Arnold came upon some turtle food in his room, and when he asked about it, Mrs. Talbot informed him that there were turtles in the guest room, too. He never came upon the turtles.

The bantams were new this year, and so were the two very small ducklings that at night were put in a paper carton in the sewing room, with an electric-light bulb to keep them warm. In the daytime they hopped in and out of a saucer of milk on the terrace. One of them was called Mr. Rochester because of his distinguished air. The other had no name.

All the while that Mrs. Talbot was making conversation with Arnold, after lunch, she kept her eyes on the dog, who, she explained, was jealous of the ducklings. Once his great head swooped down and he pretended to take a nip at them. A nip would have been enough. Mrs. Talbot spoke to him sharply and he turned his head away in shame.

“They probably smell the way George did when he first came home from the hospital,” she said.

“What did George smell like?” Arnold asked.

“Sweetish, actually. Actually awful.”

“Was Satan jealous of George when he was a baby?”

“Frightfully,” Mrs. Talbot said. “Call Satan!” she shouted to her husband, who was up by the little house. He had found a rat hole near the ravaged lady slippers and was setting a trap. He called the dog, and the dog went bounding off, devotion in every leap.

While Mrs. Talbot was telling Arnold how they found Satan at the baby’s crib one night, Duncan, who was playing only a few yards away with George, suddenly, and for no apparent reason, made his younger brother cry. Mrs. Talbot got up and separated them.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t time for your nap, George,” she said, but he was not willing to let go of even a small part of the day. He
wiped his tears away with his fist and ran from her. She ran after him, laughing, and caught him at the foot of the terrace.

Duncan wandered off into a solitary world of his own, and Arnold, after yawning twice, got up and went into the house. Stretched out on the bed in his room, with the Venetian blinds closed, he began to compare the life of the Talbots with his own well-ordered but childless and animalless life in town. Everywhere they go, he thought, they leave tracks behind them, like people walking in the snow. Paths crisscrossing, lines that are perpetually meeting: the mother’s loving pursuit of her youngest, the man’s love for his daughter, the dog’s love for the man, the two boys’ preoccupation with each other. Wheels and diagrams, Arnold said to himself. The patterns of love.

· · ·

That night Arnold was much less bothered by the crowing, which came to him dimly, through dreams. When he awoke finally and was fully awake, he was conscious of the silence and the sun shining in his eyes. His watch had stopped and it was later than he thought. The Talbots had finished breakfast and the Sunday
Times
was waiting beside his place at the table. While he was eating, John Talbot came in and sat down for a minute, across the table. He had been out early that morning, he said, and had found a chipmunk in the rat trap and also a nest with three bantam eggs in it. The eggs were cold.

He was usually a very quiet, self-contained man. This was the first time Arnold had ever seen him disturbed about anything. “I don’t know how we’re going to tell Kate,” he said. “She’ll be very upset.”

Kate came home sooner than they expected her, on the bus. She came up the driveway, lugging her suitcase.

“Did you have a good time?” Mrs. Talbot called to her from the terrace.

“Yes,” she said, “I had a beautiful time.”

Arnold looked at the two boys, expecting them to blurt out the tragedy as soon as Kate put down her suitcase, but they didn’t. It was her father who told her, in such a roundabout way that she didn’t seem to understand at all what he was saying. Mrs. Talbot interrupted him with the flat facts; the bantam hen was not on her nest and therefore, in all probability, had been killed, maybe by the rat.

Kate went into the house. The others remained on the terrace. The dog didn’t snap at the ducklings, though his mind was on them still, and
the two boys didn’t quarrel. In spite of the patterns on which they seem so intent, Arnold thought, what happens to one of them happens to all. They are helplessly involved in Kate’s loss.

At noon other guests arrived, two families with children. There was a picnic, with hot dogs and bowls of salad, cake, and wine, out under the grape arbor. When the guests departed, toward the end of the afternoon, the family came together again on the terrace. Kate was lying on the ground, on her stomach, with her face resting on her arms, her head practically in the ducklings’ saucer of milk. Mrs. Talbot, who had stretched out on the garden chaise longue, discovered suddenly that Mr. Rochester was missing. She sat up in alarm and cried, “Where is he?”

“Down my neck,” Kate said.

The duck emerged from her crossed arms. He crawled around them and climbed up on the back of her neck. Kate smiled. The sight of the duck’s tiny downy head among her pale ash-blond curls made them all burst out laughing. The cloud that had been hanging over the household evaporated into bright sunshine, and Arnold seized that moment to glance surreptitiously at his watch.

They all went to the train with him, including the dog. At the last moment Mrs. Talbot, out of a sudden perception of his lonely life, tried to give him some radishes, but he refused them. When he stepped out of the car at the station, the boys were arguing and were with difficulty persuaded to say goodbye to him. He watched the station wagon drive away and then stood listening for the sound of the wood thrush. But, of course, in the center of South Norwalk there was no such sound.

July 7, 1945

“P
resent it to him in a pitiful light,” Olson was saying as they picked their way through the almost frozen mud toward the orderly-room tent. “Three combat-scarred veterans, who fought their way from Omaha Beach to…What was the name of the town we fought our way to?”

“Königstein,” Seeger said.

“Königstein.” Olson lifted his right foot heavily out of a puddle and stared admiringly at the three pounds of mud clinging to his overshoe. “The backbone of the Army. The noncommissioned officer. We deserve better of our country. Mention our decorations, in passing.”

“What decorations should I mention?” Seeger asked. “The Marksman’s Medal?”

“Never quite made it,” Olson said. “I had a cross-eyed scorer at the butts. Mention the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, the Croix de Guerre with palms, the Unit Citation, the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

“I’ll mention them all.” Seeger grinned. “You don’t think the C.O.’ll notice that we haven’t won most of them, do you?”

“Gad, sir,” Olson said with dignity, “do you think that one Southern military gentleman will dare doubt the word of another Southern military gentleman in the hour of victory?”

“I come from Ohio,” Seeger said.

“Welch comes from Kansas,” Olson said, coolly staring down a second lieutenant who was passing. The lieutenant made a nervous little jerk with his hand, as though he expected a salute, then kept it rigid, as a slight, superior smile of scorn twisted at the corner of Olson’s mouth. The lieutenant dropped his eyes and splashed on through the mud. “You’ve heard of Kansas,” Olson said. “Magnolia-scented Kansas.”

“Of course,” said Seeger. “I’m no fool.”

“Do your duty by your men, Sergeant.” Olson stopped to wipe the cold rain off his face and lectured him. “Highest-ranking noncom present took the initiative and saved his comrades, at great personal risk, above and beyond the call of you-know-what, in the best traditions of the American Army.”

“I will throw myself in the breach,” Seeger said.

“Welch and I can’t ask more,” said Olson.

They walked heavily through the mud on the streets between the rows of tents. The camp stretched drearily over the Reims plain, with the rain beating on the sagging tents. The division had been there over three weeks, waiting to be shipped home, and all the meagre diversions of the neighborhood had been sampled and exhausted, and there was an air of watchful suspicion and impatience with the military life hanging over the camp now, and there was even reputed to be a staff sergeant in C Company who was laying odds they would not get back to America before July 4th.

“I’m redeployable,” Olson sang. “It’s so enjoyable.” It was a jingle he had composed, to no recognizable melody, in the early days after the victory in Europe, when he had added up his points and found they came to only sixty-three, but he persisted in singing it. He was a short, round boy who had been flunked out of air cadets’ school and transferred to the infantry but whose spirits had not been damaged in the process. He had a high, childish voice and a pretty, baby face. He was very good-natured, and had a girl waiting for him at the University of California, where he intended to finish his course at government expense when he got out of the Army, and he was just the type who is killed off early and predictably and sadly in moving pictures about the war, but he had gone through four campaigns and six major battles without a scratch.

Seeger was a large, lanky boy, with a big nose, who had been wounded at St.-Lô but had come back to his outfit in the Siegfried Line quite unchanged. He was cheerful and dependable and he knew his business. He had broken in five or six second lieutenants, who had later been killed or wounded, and the C.O. had tried to get him commissioned in the field, but the war had ended while the paperwork was being fumbled over at headquarters.

They reached the door of the orderly tent and stopped. “Be brave, Sergeant,” Olson said. “Welch and I are depending on you.”

“O.K.,” Seeger said, and went in.

· · ·

The tent had the dank, Army-canvas smell that had been so much a part of Seeger’s life in the past three years. The company clerk was reading an October, 1945, issue of the Buffalo
Courier-Express
, which had just reached him, and Captain Taney, the company C.O., was seated at a sawbuck table which he used as a desk, writing a letter to his wife, his lips pursed with effort. He was a small, fussy man, with sandy hair that was falling out. While the fighting had been going on, he had been lean and tense and his small voice had been cold and full of authority. But now he had relaxed, and a little pot belly was creeping up under his belt and he kept the top button of his trousers open when he could do it without too public loss of dignity. During the war, Seeger had thought of him as a natural soldier—tireless, fanatic about detail, aggressive, severely anxious to kill Germans. But in the last few months, Seeger had seen him relapsing gradually and pleasantly into the small-town hardware merchant he had been before the war, sedentary and a little shy, and, as he had once told Seeger, worried, here in the bleak champagne fields of France, about his daughter, who had just turned twelve and had a tendency to go after the boys and had been caught by her mother kissing a fifteen-year-old neighbor in the hammock after school.