The Eternal Wonder (23 page)

She grew suddenly serious. “Have you any idea inside yourself, Rannie? Of what you want to do—and be?”

“No, except that I don’t want to work for anyone. I don’t want to be part of a corporation or in any organization I can’t control. I want to work by myself, for myself. It’s the only way to ensure my independence. I know, of course, that whatever else I do, I will also write. It’s already sort of a compulsion in me.”

She looked at him with troubled eyes. “You’re taking a great risk, aren’t you?”

“But on myself,” he said.

They were silent for a moment. He piled pancakes on his plate again. His appetite was enormous.

“Eat,” she always said. “You have a big body and very little flesh on your bones.”

“Well,” she said now, “you’re lucky in one way, at least. Your grandfather left you all he had. We won’t know yet just how much it is, but he wrote me that you wouldn’t starve, and that you would always be comfortable if you were careful.”

“He wrote that?”

“Yes, before you came home. I think he knew he hadn’t much time.”

“We liked each other, Mother—though I didn’t know what to make of him.”

He hesitated and then told her what he had not planned to tell her.

“You don’t know it—but he married again, after Grandmother died.”

He watched her face and suddenly it grew hard. “It was never a marriage. She simply moved in—Serena Woolcotte. Oh, there was some sort of civil ceremony but not a proper marriage. We knew about her.”

“We?”

“My aunt and I.”

“But he never told—”

“There are things one doesn’t need to be told. Everyone knew Serena.”

“What was she?”

“A woman whose father had too much money and too little time and left her to meddle in men’s lives.”

“Mother!”

“Well, she did!”

“But that doesn’t tell me anything—meddle in men’s lives!”

“She had nothing else to do and that’s why I warned you against your Lady Mary!”

He stopped short, not wanting to talk about his Lady Mary. He got up from the breakfast table. He had been notified to report for induction, and this was the day.

SEVERAL MONTHS LATER HE WAS IN KOREA
, stationed at a base on the line between north and south. Behind him lay the crowded miles of South Korea. In front of him were the mountains of North Korea. A bridge toward the left as he faced north was connection and prevention. If he crossed that bridge, he would be shot down. He had no intention of crossing it; indeed, he had a horror of it. At night he woke himself out of the nightmare that unwittingly he had crossed it. Day after day he patrolled the line between north and south, he and others with him, a dull, dangerous, mechanical task from which there was no relief or recreation—or at least recreation that attracted him.

“Get yourself a girl,” the nasal-voiced sergeant had drawled the first night his company had arrived at the base camp. “Don’t pick up with these broads that talk English. They’ve been around a lot and they’re rotten with disease. You’ll have to fight ’em off, though. They’re bold as brass—walk up to you and pull down your zipper before you know it! Naw, you find yourself a nice little country girl and shack up with her. She’ll look after you—they all know how, these little gooks!”

He had not taken up with anyone. He had simply watched the other fellows, laughing, shamefaced, apologetic, boasting as they found girls. He had no desire to imitate them. In a way he could not explain, he now comprehended that Lady Mary had instilled in him a certain good taste. At least they had made love in beautiful surroundings. She herself had been fastidious, clean, and perfumed. Now it was impossible for him to imagine lying with one of these crude Korean whores, unwashed and stinking of garlic, or even the girls in Seoul, whither he had gone on his first three-day leave. He saw them in bars and recreation rooms, aping the garb and the mannerisms of Hollywood stars of an earlier generation, and he could scarcely be courteous when one and another coaxed and wheedled as he sat apart and alone.

“You, nice boy! Lonesome, maybe? You dance, please? I like dance very much.”

“Thanks, no. I’m just here for a nightcap.”

“Nightcap?”

“A drink before I go to bed.”

“Where you sleep, big boy?”

“I am staying here in the hotel.”

“What room number?”

“I—forget.”

“Look your key.”

“I—left it at the desk.”

“I think you not liking girls. Maybe you only liking boys.”

“Certainly not!”

“Why you not dance, big boy?”

“Not tonight.”

One by one they tried and one by one they went away and he was alone and yet not lonely. That was the strange element of his life—he was never lonely because he was beginning to write. He had discovered that in communing with his own mind he was in communication with life. There was a certain permanence in putting down words on paper even in his letters to his mother. They were there in the morning, his thoughts of the night before. He was relieved of inward pressure. He could endure the stupidities of his life in this wild, strange country where he had no business to be. The people were like none he had ever known, basically a nomad people although they lived in villages centuries old. He found books about them in an English bookshop in Seoul and with his insatiable desire to learn and to know, he became absorbed in the mere comprehension of the Korean people. From learning he began to write his private conclusions: “They have never ceased to be nomads at heart, these Koreans! They began as a nomad people long ago in Central Asia and they wandered in search of a place to rest, being persecuted by warrior tribes. This explains their coming finally to this tail end of land, this peninsula, hanging between China, Russia, and Japan. There was nowhere to go from here, except to push northward into Russia, and across the Bering Strait, which then was a land bridge to what is now Canada and thence southward, who knows how far? It is no accident that Americans and Koreans are so much alike. Indeed today when the Korean mess boy was cleaning the tables he muttered something about one of the fellows being Choctaw, and when I asked what that word meant, he said ‘too-short man.’ Whereupon I remembered that we have a tribe of American Indians, the Choctaw, who are short men. Coincidence? There is more than coincidence.”

And again, on a hot August night: “Today I was on border duty. I marched for hours on our side of the line, gun on my shoulder and staring into the sullen face of the North Korean guard on the other side. One step toward him, one step across the line, and he would have shot me. One step over the line toward me and—would I have shot him? No—I’d have thrown him back where he belongs. What absurdity! He is about my age—not a bad-looking fellow. I wonder what he thinks about while he is staring at my white face. Perhaps he is wondering what I am thinking about him. There is no possible communication. Yet under ordinary circumstances, were we not enemies we would have many questions to ask each other. Now we’ll never ask them. That is what I hate most about this war game. It cuts off communication between peoples. We cannot ask questions and so we cannot get answers.

“Tonight there was a breakthrough. Three North Koreans in the dark of the moon crossed the border. We caught them at once, but not before I shot one of them. Thank God I did not kill him—only a shoulder wound, but it bled horribly. Of course he was taken to the hospital here at the base. I suppose he will be turned over to the Korean command—probably shot after he is patched up. I can’t think about these irrationalities.”

And again, after his next period of rest and recreation: “I can’t understand, in spite of my own clamoring flesh, how our fellows can penetrate the bodies of these worm-ridden, germ-infested Korean girls! There must be decent girls but we don’t meet them, of course. I don’t want to meet them—any of them.”

And still later: “Today I met the general’s wife. She happened to be in his office unexpectedly. I have been appointed his aide as of last week and it was the first time I had seen her. She is between forty and fifty and still kittenish. I don’t know what to make of her. Fortunately, I don’t have to make anything of her, but she kept looking at me—bluntly put, at my crotch. Whereupon I looked above her head.”

The next day after this meeting the general sent for him. He stood before the desk and saluted smartly.

The general threw an order over his shoulder while he sorted papers. “A senator on a fact-finding trip arrives day after tomorrow. As if we didn’t have enough to do with meetings now every few days with these damned Reds! My wife called me to send you to our quarters today—she needs some sort of help about something—better go over there for an hour or so and see what it is she wants.”

“I will, sir,” he said.

When he reached the general’s bungalow, however, there seemed little for him to do and, vaguely uneasy, he left as soon as he could.

The next day the general invited him to a dinner party being given for the senator and he attended, feeling he must accept an invitation from the general. The night after the dinner party he wrote:

“Am I imagining this nonsense? I swear I am not. The general’s wife put me at her left at the dining table tonight. The senator, a lanky fellow from some western state, sat at her right. She said to me, laughing when I hesitated to sit down, ‘I’m putting you where you’ll be handy in case I need something.’ So I sat down. The table was crowded and her left knee touched my right knee under the table. I moved immediately, but in a few minutes I felt her foot pressing between my feet, her leg against mine. I could not believe it. I moved again, and again she moved against me. And all the time she was chattering to the senator. But as I moved she turned her head toward me and gave me a coy little smile and pressed her foot further between my feet, her leg almost over my knee. I moved my chair and was out of reach. She did not speak to me again. It’s nothing, but I don’t like it.”

The next morning he was on duty in the general’s office. When he entered, the general gave him a frosty look. He saluted and stood at attention, awaiting orders as usual.

“At ease,” the general said.

He dropped his hand and stood waiting.

“Sit down,” the general said.

He sat down, surprised.

“I’ll be frank with you,” the general said abruptly. “I like you. I’ve counted on you. You’re old for your age. You’re officer material. Have you ever thought of a military career?”

“No sir,” he said.

“Well, think of it, because I’m going to kick you upstairs, Colfax. I’m going to see that you get promoted.”

“I’m quite happy as I am, sir,” he said.

“I’m going to promote you anyway,” the general insisted.

He was a kindly man, his blue eyes friendly under his graying hair, a handsome man, his face, the features clean-cut, was kind yet somehow sad in unsmiling firmness. He went on speaking, leaning back in his chair, his left hand playing with a silver paper knife, its handle studded with Korean topaz.

“I have to move you out on my wife’s demand, but I’ll move you up, at least.”

Rann was astounded. “But what have I done, sir?”

The general shrugged. “I understand, of course—you young men are here for months on end and nothing but these Korean girls around—you are men, after all—” The general paused, flushing slightly, and pressed his lips together. The silver paper knife slipped from his fingers, and he took it up again and gripped it in his right hand.

“But I still don’t understand,” he said, bewildered.

The general put down the paper knife. “Bluntly, Colfax, my wife told me that last night you made obscene gestures to her under the table during dinner.”

“I? Obscene—” He broke off, the blood rushing to his head.

“Don’t apologize—or even explain,” the general said. “She’s still a pretty woman.”

Silence fell between them, intolerable silence. He could not endure it.

“Be silent,” the general commanded. “You will get your orders tomorrow.”

“Yes sir.”

The next day, as the general had told him, Rann received his orders. He was distressed that he had been unable to argue the accusation made by the general’s wife, but to argue with a superior would have been to lose, and perhaps it was best to take his orders and let matters rest. He had been promoted and transferred to Ascom, a base southwest of Seoul, and was put in charge of the supply station there. It was the main supply station for the American military forces in South Korea and his position was responsible and detailed enough that it kept him busy for a few weeks until he discovered all that was expected of him. Then he found he had even more time than before for pursuing his own unquenchable thirst for knowledge.

He began to speak Korean, a strange guttural language, unlike anything he had ever heard or spoken before, unlike even the little Chinese he had learned from Stephanie. He asked questions of all Koreans he came in contact with during his daily work, and read books on Korean history long into each night. He began to realize how little Americans knew of these strange people in their geographically strategic country and how, unknowing, his own people had seriously affected their history, indeed were affecting it now, with the American military in South Korea and the truce, American-imposed, at the 38th parallel. He had watched the UN group, including American and South Korean delegates, at the peace talks as they read long lists of infractions of the truce agreement at the meetings there, and had watched the North Korean delegates and their Chinese advisors completely ignore all that was said. Indeed, more than once he had seen these enemy delegates, with their haughty bearing, sit and read comic books throughout the entire proceedings.

In his job in supply he became aware, also, of the well-organized black-market operations, with some Americans getting rich passing out supplies to Koreans to sell on the black market long before the supplies could reach his own warehouses. Rann saw all of this and much more. He saw the American men, many of them officers, involved with Korean girls and he saw the inevitable children who were born. Beautiful children, half-American, and yet doomed to live on the lowest level of Korean society because of their racial mixture. He had never heard of any of this before he came to Korea though he had read the daily newspapers and all of the newsmagazines.