Winds of War (133 page)

Thinking of what?

Seeing pictures generated by his return to Manila. Pictures of himself and Byron under a poinciana tree at the white house on Harrison Boulevard, working on French verbs; the boy’s thin face wrinkling, silent tears falling at his father’s roared exasperation. Of Warren winning a history medal, an English medal, and a baseball award at the high school; of Madeline, fairylike in a gossamer white frock, wearing a gold paper crown at her eighth birthday party.

Pictures of Rhoda crabbing about the heat and the boredom, getting drunk night after night in this club, falling on her face at the Christmas dance; of the quarrel that put an end to her drinking, when he coldly talked divorce. The smell of the club’s lawns and halls, and of the spicy Manila air, gave him the illusion that all this was going on now, instead of belonging to a past more than a dozen years dead.

Pictures of Pamela Tudsbury in Red Square. Of the dreary mud streets of Kuibyshev, the all-night poker games, the visits to farm communes, the stagnant slow passing of time while he waited for train tickets; then the two-week rail ride across Siberia; the beautiful Siberian girls selling fruits, flat circular bread, sausage, and hot chickpeas at tiny wooden stations; the single track of the railroad stretching backward from the last car, a dark straight line through a pink snow desert, pointing straight at a setting sun that flattened like a football as it sank to the horizon; the long stops, the wooden benches in the “hard” coach, the onion breaths and body smells of the local travellers, some white, some Mongol, in queer fur hats; the awesome three-day forest stretches; the ugly miles on miles of huts in Tokyo; the wretchedness of the Japanese, the hate you could feel in the back of your neck on the street, the war weariness and poverty so much worse even than Berlin; the half-dozen letters to Pamela Tudsbury he had drafted and torn up.

Through all these strange scenes Victor Henry had preserved a happy sense that he was moving toward a new life, a fulfilled life he had almost despaired of, a life delayed, postponed, almost lost, but now within grasp. When he thought of Rhoda it was usually as the effervescent Washington girl he had courted. He could understand falling in love with that girl and marrying her. The present-day Rhoda he pictured with detachment, almost as though she were somebody else’s wife, with dl her faults and all her charms seen clear. To divorce her would be cruel and shocking. How had she offended? She had been giving him an arid, half-empty existence - he now knew that - but she had been doing her best. Yet the decision evidently lay between being kind to Rhoda and seizing this new life.

He had written the letters to Pamela as he had written the one about the Minsk massacre – to get a problem on paper for a clear look at it. By the time he arrived in Tokyo, he had decided that letters were too wordy and too slow-travelling. He had to send one of two cables – COME, or DON’T COME. Pamela needed no more than that. And he had concluded that Pamela was wiser than he, that the first step should indeed be a love affair in which they could test out this passion or infatuation before wounding Rhoda; for it might never come to that. In bald fact the prescription was a shackup. Victor Henry had to face the novel notion - for him - that in some circumstances a shackup might be the best of several difficult courses.

In Tokyo he had actually hesitated outside a cable office, on the point of cabling: COME. But he had walked away. Even if it were the best course, he could not yet picture himself bringing it off; could not imagine conducting a hole-in-corner affair, even if with Pamela it did not seem a squalid or immoral idea. It was not his style. He would botch it, he felt, and weaken or tarnish his work as the new captain of the
California
. So he had arrived still undecided in Manila.

And in Manila, for the first time since his talk with Pamela Tudsbury in Red Square, an awareness of his wife Rhoda began to overtake him and the reality of Pamela to fade. Manila was saturated with Rhoda, the good memories and the bad memories alike, and with his own hardened identity. Red Tully, his classmate, a bald commander of all the submarines of the Asiatic Fleet; the Army-Navy game, in which he had last played twenty-eight years ago, when Pamela had been an infant a few months old; the dozens of young Navy lieutenants on the club lawn, with girlfriends Pamela’s age - these were the realities now. The wild Siberian scenery was a fading patchwork of mental snapshots. So was the incandescent half-hour on Red Square.

Was it really in the cards for him to start over, to have new babies learning to talk, little boys playing on grass, a little girl twining aims around his neck? Manila above all recalled to Pug the pleasure he had taken in his children. Those days he looked back on as the sweetest and best in his life. To do it all once again with Pamela would be a resurrection, a true second life. But could a rigid, crusty man like himself do it? He had been hard enough on his kids in his thirties.

He was very tired, and sleep at last overtook him in the chair, as it had in the Tudsburys’ suite in the Hotel National. But this time no cold caressing fingers woke him. His inner clock, which seldom failed, snapped him awake in time to drive out to Cavite and watch the
Devilfish
arrive.

Byron was standing on the forecastle with the anchor detail, in khakis and a lifejacket, but Pug failed to recognize him. Byron sang out, as the
Devilfish
nosed alongside the pier, “Holy smoke, it’s my father. You Dad!
Dad!
” Then Pug perceived that the slim figure with both hands in his back pockets had a familiar stance, and that his son’s voice was issuing from the lean face with the curly red beard. Byron leaped to the dock while the vessel was still warping in, threw his arms around Victor Henry, and hugged him hard. Kissing that scratchy hairy face was a bizarre sensation for Pug.

“Hi, Briny. Why the foliage?”

“Captain Hoban can’t stand beards. I plan to grow one to my knees. God, this is a monumental surprise, Dad.” From the bridge an officer shouted impatiently through a megaphone. Jumping back on the moving forecastle like a goat, Byron called to his father, “I’ll spend the day with you. Hey, Mom wrote me you’re going to command the
California
! That’s fabulous!”

When the vessel was secured alongside, the
Devilfish
officers warmly invited Victor Henry to lunch at a house in the suburbs which they had rented. Pug caught a discouraging look from Byron, and declined.

“I live aboard the submarine,” Byron said. They were driving back to Manila in the gray Navy car Pug had drawn from the pool. “I’m not in that setup.”

“Why not? Sounds like a good thing.”

“Oh, neat. Cook, butler, two houseboys, gardener, five acres, a swimming pool, and all for peanuts when they split up the cost. I’ve been there for dinner. They have these girls come in, you know, and stay overnight – different ones, secretaries, nurses, and whatnot - and whoop it up and all that.”

“Well? Just the deal for a young stud, I should think.”

“What did you do, Dad, when you were away from Mom?”

“Think I’d tell you?” Pug glanced at Byron. The bearded face was serious. “Well, I did a lot of agonized looking, Briny. But don’t act holier-than-thou, whatever you do.”

“I don’t feel holier than thou. My wife’s in Italy. That’s that. They can do as they please.”

“What’s the latest word on her?”

“She’s flying to Lisbon on the fifteenth. I’ve got a picture of the kid. Wait till you see him! It’s incredible how much he looks like my baby pictures.”

Pug had been poring over the snapshot in his wallet for two months, but he decided not to mention it. The inscription to Slote was an awkward detail.

“God, it’s rotten, being this far apart,” Byron exclaimed. “Can you picture it, Dad? Your wife with a baby you’ve never even seen, on the other side of the earth - no telephone, a letter now and then getting through by luck? It’s hell. And the worst of it is, she almost got out through Switzerland. She panicked at taking a German airplane. She was sick, and alone, and I can’t blame her. But she’d be home by now, if there’d been any other way to go. The Germans! The goddamned Germans.” After a silence he said with self-conscious chattiness, “Hot here, isn’t it?”

“I’d forgotten how hot, Briny.”

“I guess it was pretty cold in Russia.”

“Well, it’s freezing in Tokyo, too.”

“Say, what’s Tokyo like? Quaint and pretty, and all that?”

“Ugliest city in the world,” Pug said, glad for a distracting subject. “Pathetic. A flat shantytown stretching as far as the eye can see. Downtown a few tall modern buildings and electric signs, and crowds of little Japanese running around. Most of the people wear Western clothes, but the cloth looks to be made of old blotters. You see a few women dressed Japanese doll-style, and some temples and pagodas, sort of like in San Francisco’s Chinatown. It’s not especially Oriental, it’s poor and shabby, and it smells from end to end of sewage and bad fish. Biggest disappointment of all my travelling years, Tokyo. Moreover, the hostility to white men is thick enough to cut with a knife.”

“D’you think they’ll start a war?”

“Well, that’s the big question.” Victor Henry’s fingers drummed the steering wheel. “I have a book on their Shinto religion you’d better read. It’s an eye-opener. The ambassador gave it to me. Here are people, Briny, who in the twentieth century believe - at least some do - that their king’s descended from a sun god, and that their empire goes straight back two thousand six hundred years. Before the continents broke apart, the story goes, Japan was the highest point on earth. So she’s the center of the world, the divine nation, and her mission is to bring world peace by conquering everybody else - you’re smiling, but you’d better read this book, boy. Under the religious gibberish it’s exactly like Nazi or Communist propaganda, this idea of one crowd destined to take over the world by force. God knows why this idea has broken out in different forms and keeps spreading. It’s like a mental leprosy. Say, how hungry are you? Let’s look at the old house before lunch.”

Byron’s smile, framed in the neatly trimmed red beard, looked odd but no less charming. “Why, sure, Dad. I’ve never done that. I don’t know why.”

As they drove along Harrison Boulevard and approached the house, Byron exclaimed, “Ye gods, is that it? Someone went and painted it yellow.”

“That’s it.” Pug parked the car across the street and they got out. The unpleasant mustardy color surprised him too. It was all over the low stone wall and the wrought-iron fence, as well as the house - a sun-faded old paint job, already peeling. On the lawn lay a tumbled-over tricycle, a big red ball, a baby carriage, and plastic toys.

“But the trees are so much taller and thicker,” Byron said, peering through the fence, “yet the house seems to have shrunk. See, here’s where Warren threw the can of red paint at me. How about that? There’s still a mark.”

Byron rubbed his shoe over the dim red splash on the paving stone. “I had a bad time here, all in all. Warren laying my head open, and then the jaundice -”

“Yes, and that truck hitting you on your bicycle. I wouldn’t think you’d remember it pleasantly.”

Byron pointed. “That’s where we used to sit, right there under that tree, when you’d tutor me. Remember, Dad? Look how thick that trunk is now!”

“Oh, you recall that? I wouldn’t think that would be a pleasant memory either.”

“What not? I missed all that school. You had to do it.”

“But I was a lousy tutor. Maybe your mother should have taken it on. But in the morning she liked to sleep late, and in the afternoon, well, she was either shopping or getting her hair done, you know, or fixing herself up for some party. For all the times I lost my temper, I apologize.”

Byron gave his father a peculiar glance through half-closed eyes and scratched his beard. “I didn’t mind.”

“Sometimes you cried. Yet you didn’t cry when you got hit by the truck. Pain never made you cry.”

“Well, when you put on that angry voice, it scared me. But it was all right. I liked studying with you. I understood you.”

“Anyway, you got good marks that year.”

“Best I ever got.”

They looked through the fence without talking for a couple of long minutes. “Well, now we’ve seen the place,” Pug said. “How about lunch?”

“You know something?” Byron’s gaze was still on the house. “Except for the three days I had in Lisbon with Natalie, I was happier here than I’ve ever been in my life, before or since. I loved this house.”

“That’s the worst of a service career,” Pug said. “You never strike roots. You raise a family of tumbleweeds.”

The crab cocktail at the Army and Navy Club was still served with the same bland red sauce in the same long-stemmed cups, with one purposeless green leaf sticking up in the crabmeat. The roast beef from the steam table was lukewarm and overdone, much as it had been in 1928. Even the faces of the people eating lunch seemed the same - all but Byron’s. The thin little boy who had eaten with such exasperating slowness was now a bearded tall young man. He still ate too slowly; Pug finished his meat first, though he was doing nearly all the talking.

He wanted to probe Byron a bit about Pamela, and about Jochanan Jastrow. He described Jastrow’s sudden incursion into Slote’s Moscow flat, and his spectral reappearance in Spaso House out of a snowstorm. Byron exploded in anger when his father mentioned Tudsbury’s refusal to use the Minsk documents, and his guess that Jastrow might be an NKVD emissary. “What? Was he serious? Why, he’s either a hypocrite or an idiot! What he said about people not wanting to help the Jews is true, God knows. Hitler paralyzed the world for years by playing on that chord. But nobody can talk to Berel for five minutes without realizing that he’s a remarkable man. And dead on the level, too.”

“You believe the story about the massacre?”

“Why not? Aren’t the Germans capable of it? If Hitler gave the order, then it happened.”

“I wasn’t that sure myself, Byron, but I wrote to the President about it.”

Byron stared openmouthed, then spoke in a low incredulous tone. “You did
what
, Dad?”