The Last Supper (13 page)

Alice lifted Wolkowicz’s large hairy hand and shook it. “Did you really walk all the way across Asia?”

Wolkowicz nodded. “I don’t remember much about it. My father was with me,” he said. “We didn’t walk the whole way. There were trains.”

“All the same,” said Alice, “it sounds like a lot of effort. But what luck for Waddy. He’s always wanted to meet a real Russian. He’s the family Red.”

— 2 —

That evening, Christmas Eve, Alice insisted that all the men wear uniform to dinner. “It gives the party exactly the hectic wartime flush I want,” she said.
“Who knows when there’ll be another Hubbard Christmas at the Harbor?”

Alice was speaking to Wolkowicz. Waddy Jessup joined them. His eyes were bright, his speech a little slurred. “Why shouldn’t there be any more Christmas parties?” he asked.
Waddy had a weak head for liquor and he had already drunk three glasses of Scotch.

“You’re all marching off to war,” Alice said. “Elliott has been learning to parachute. I’ve never seen him so happy. You’re
all
happy. It’s this
Outfit you all belong to. What is it?”

“You mustn’t ask.”

“Why not? Why doesn’t it have a number, like everybody else’s outfit? How can Army, Navy, and Marines be all mixed together? Why is a forty-year-old sailor like Elliott jumping
out of airplanes?”

Waddy Jessup put a finger to his lips. “It’s oh, so secret,” he said.

Alice gave him a look of bitter annoyance. “God, men are clumsy,” she said. “It’s a good thing you only have secrets in time of war. Women live by secrets all the time;
we
have
to in order to inhabit the same planet with men. You can’t be trusted with the facts.”

Waddy was not listening. His eyes were fixed on Paul, and he wore a look of amused calculation, like a rake noticing for the first time that a friend’s daughter has grown breasts.

“Handsome young man, Hubbard’s boy,” he said. “What are his interests? Give me an icebreaker.”

“An icebreaker? You’ve known him for years.”

“I want to know him better. What are his interests?”

“Girls; he always seems to have one. He reads German poetry for relaxation.”

“German poetry! Just my thing.”

Waddy gave Alice a bright smile and crossed the room to Paul. He put a hand at the small of Paul’s back. “ ‘
Werd ich zum Augenblicke sagen
,’ ” he said,
“ ‘ “
Verweile dock! Du bist so schön!
” ’ ”

“Hello, Waddy,” Paul said.

“They say you spoke German even as a very small child,” Waddy said. “What did I just say?”

“Were you speaking German?”

“Of course I was speaking German. I was quoting Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the immortal bore. I can’t remember what it means.”

Paul translated: “ ‘If I say to the moment, “Stay now! You are so beautiful!” ’ ”

“That’s it! The immortal Goethe.” He beckoned to Wolkowicz, who left Alice and joined them. “Here’s the immortal Wolkowicz,” he said. “What’re you
drinking there, a boilermaker?”

“No, sir, a Rob Roy.”

“A Rob Roy? Is it your first? Do you like it?”

“It’s very good, sir.”

“Drop the ‘sir,’ Barnabas. Call me ‘you.’ It’s Christmas. WOJG Wolkowicz hails from Youngstown, Ohio,” Waddy said to Paul. He pronounced
WOJG
, the
abbreviation for Wolkowicz’s rank, warrant officer junior grade, as if it were a word:
wojjig
.

“They drink boilermakers in Youngstown, Ohio,” Waddy continued. “I knew a fellow at Yale who grew up in Youngstown, Ohio. His family owned a steel mill that made sheets and
tubes. After a hard day of putting sheets and tubes into the blast furnace and taking them out when they were done, everybody would go down to the tavern and have a boilermaker. My pal didn’t
say anything about Rob Roys.”

Waddy handed Wolkowicz his glass. “Why don’t you have another Rob Roy? Bring me a boilermaker,” he said. “Paul, what do you have there?” He drank from Paul’s
glass. “Plain soda water!” he said. “You must have crystalline piss, like mineral water. You can write your name invisibly in new-fallen snow—in Mary Lou’s
handwriting, of course.”

Waddy kept Paul’s glass, sipping from it, until Wolkowicz returned with a fresh drink for him—not a boilermaker, but three fingers of Scotch whisky, neat. Waddy tossed off the Scotch
and gave Paul back his soda water.

“What I think you ought to do, Paul,” he said, “is
verweile doch.
It’s not too late to get out of the Marines. They’ll just get you killed, you know.
That’s what Marine second lieutenants are for—to show the troops how to die.”

Waddy put an arm around Paul’s shoulders and his other arm around Wolkowicz’s shoulders and drew them close. A few drops of whisky dribbled out of his glass and stained the shoulder
of Wolkowicz’s uniform.

“
Force Jessup
,” Waddy whispered. “I want you for Force Jessup. Isn’t Elliott your godfather? He can fix us up.”

“Force Jessup, Waddy? What’s that?”

“Crack outfit, soon to go into action—expert killers, linguists, very advanced in woodcraft. Wolkowicz will do the shooting, you’ll do the German poetry, and I’ll do the
leading. Stealth and cunning behind the Jap lines, that’s our game.
Much
better than hitting the beach with a bunch of pimply Marines on some godforsaken atoll.”

Alice joined the group and took Waddy by the arm. “Supper is ready,” she said. “I want you to sit with me, Waddy.” She led her brother away.

Wolkowicz, holding Waddy’s dirty glass in his hand, watched him go. His eyes were as colorless as rain.

After dinner, in another room, Wolkowicz examined an old spinet. It was a lovely instrument: rosewood case, ivory keys the color of candle flame.

“Someone always plays the spinet on Christmas,” Alice said. “It’s more than two hundred years old. The first Hubbards brought it up from Connecticut on an oxcart. Have
you ever heard a spinet?”

“Yes, I have,” Wolkowicz replied.

“Really? Most people haven’t. There are quills inside that pluck the strings.”

Wolkowicz touched a key and a note sounded.

“Time for the gifts, but you must play for us later,” Alice said.

Elliott handed out the packages. Paul got the last gift under the tree, a long tube wrapped in white paper.

“You may want to open that when you’re alone,” Hubbard said.

“I’ll do it now.”

Paul left the room, taking his present with him, and walked through the house. Some of the rooms were heated by stoves and fireplaces; others were not. The house was made of pine and hemlock,
wide boards whipsawed from huge virgin trees, and it murmured and squeaked as it moved in the winter wind; it had a scent like no other house: old lumber that had captured two hundred years of
weather, wax, sachet, and woodsmoke.

The bedroom Paul used had been Hubbard’s room, and the walls were hung with photographs of Hubbard’s dead mother and father. Paul had added pictures of Hubbard and Lori and Paulus
and Hilde. There was a large drawing of Berwick and a shelf of Hubbard’s books, bound in blue goatskin. Alone in this room, Paul unwrapped the tube, removed the picture it contained, and
spread it out on the bed. It was Zaentz’s drawing of Lori in her pregnancy, a smiling girl, carrying him within her body. Lori had been younger than he was now when this drawing was made.

The latch lifted. Paul heard the door open and turned around. Hubbard had joined him. Paul held out the drawing and Hubbard took one edge of it while Paul held the other.

“How did you get it back?” he asked.

“It’s not the original,” Hubbard said. “Zaentz did this from memory. He lives in New York now.”

“From memory? It’s exactly the same.”

“Yes. Just as I remember the two of you.”

They went downstairs together through the cold house. The strains of the spinet, quavering like an old voice, grew louder as they opened door after latched door and drew closer to the old
parlor. They paused and listened to the music. The player finished the piece and in the silence Hubbard and Paul once again heard the wind, also like an aged voice.

“I’ve always felt, when I find myself alone in this house,” Hubbard said, “that they’re all here, the Hubbards and the Mahicans, all of them.”

“Only the Hubbards?”

“Only the dead. Not your mother, Paul.” Hubbard paused. It was very cold in this room, which had no stove or fireplace, and his breath was visible. “She
is
alive,”
Hubbard said.

On the other side of the door, the player struck the keys of the spinet again. Paul lifted the latch. The room beyond was dim, lit by one small lamp and a few candles.

Barney Wolkowicz, drab army blouse wrinkled across his broad laborer’s back, his thick hairy fingers spanning the keyboard, was playing a Bach fugue. The notes were so lovely, and so
perfectly struck, that it seemed to Paul that they ought to be visible in the flickering warm atmosphere of the room.

Hubbard stood stock-still, his eyes fixed on Wolkowicz. When the last note had been played, he put his arm around Paul’s shoulders.

“You see?” he whispered, as if it could just as well have been Lori who smiled at them from the spinet, instead of Wolkowicz; and indeed it was just as likely that Paul’s
mother should have come back to them, as young and lovely as she was in Zaentz’s drawing, as that this ugly man should have such music in him.

Wolkowicz

— 1 —

Captain Wadsworth Jessup was obsessed by elephants. He lay on a hilltop in Burma above the Shweli River, gazing through binoculars at an outpost of the 56th Division of the
Imperial Japanese Army. Half a mile away, in a clearing in the dense rain forest, the Japanese were building a fortified position for a light tank at the junction of two trails. Three elephants
worked steadily, piling huge logs around a pit gouged out of the bright brown earth.

“
There
, my dear Barnabas,” said Waddy Jessup, “are Force Jessup’s elephants.”

Barney Wolkowicz crouched on the spongy floor of the jungle next to Waddy. Twenty Kachin tribesmen, the men of Force Jessup, as Waddy called this band of guerrilla fighters operating behind the
Japanese lines, were deployed in the undergrowth. Some of the Kachins, slim cheery men hardly larger than American grammar school boys, were armed with muzzle-loading fowling pieces; Waddy had
heard that these weapons were highly prized by the Kachins because it was easy to make ammunition for them, and he had brought along a half-dozen when he and Wolkowicz had parachuted into Burma a
month earlier.

Waddy himself was armed with a Thompson submachine gun and a samurai sword he had bought from one of the Kachins. He wore an Australian bush hat and a Yale track shirt. The Japanese were all
around them in thousands; bands of Kachin guerrillas led by American and British officers harassed the Japanese; Communist bandits struck at the enemy from camps just across the border in the
Yunnan Province of China. Waddy was feverishly excited by the atmosphere of danger and murder. Since landing in Burma he had talked in a British accent, calling Wolkowicz “my dear
Barnabas” and treating him like a manservant.

The rain forest was a stinking green haze in which the human eye could see no more than twenty feet. Anything might lie in wait, silent and murderous, beyond the impenetrable curtain of
vegetation six paces away. The Kachin tribesmen were brave and well trained. Under Waddy’s command, however, they had seen little action. No longer did Waddy prowl the narrow trails that
threaded through the rain forest. On his first patrol, he had marched around a bend in a trail and come under fire from a Japanese machine-gun position. Three of his Kachins had been killed. As a
squad of bowlegged Japanese soldiers rushed down the trail, dropping every few paces to fire their rifles, Waddy had led his patrol into the forest, ordering Wolkowicz to cover the retreat with
fire from a Browning automatic rifle.

Wolkowicz drove off the enemy. Then, his ammunition exhausted, he fell back into the trees, expecting to find the rest of Force Jessup waiting for him. But the others, Waddy and his Kachins, had
vanished. Wolkowicz was alone. He had rations for one day and water for half a day. He carried a compass, but no map. Only Waddy, the commander, carried maps; this minimized the possibility of
their falling into enemy hands and revealing the secret location of Force Jessup’s base.