Winds of War (43 page)

“Why do you suppose the invasion’s flopping on its face?” Warren said.

“Oh, do you believe the capitalist newspapers?” said Bozey, with a broad wink.

“You think the Russians are really winning?”

“Why, all this nonsense about the Finnish ski troops in white uniforms makes me ill,” Bozey said. “Don’t you suppose the Russians have skis and white uniforms too? But catch the
New York Times
saying so.”

“This is a lovely stew,” Janice said.

“I used too many cloves,” Madeline said, “Don’t bite into one.”

Warren and Janice left right after dinner to go to the theatre. He was on a seventy-two-hour pass from Pensacola, and Janice had come up from Washington to meet him; dinner with Madeline had been a last-minute arrangement by long-distance telephone. When they left, Madeline was cutting out her dress and Bozey was washing the dishes.

“What do I do now?” Warren said, out in the street. The theatre was only a few blocks away. It was snowing and cabs were unobtainable, so they walked. “Get myself a shotgun?”

“What for? To put Bozey out of his misery?”

“To get him to marry her, was my idea.”

Janice laughed, and hugged his arm. “There’s nothing doing between those two, honey.”

“You don’t think so?”

“Not a chance. That’s quite a gal, your little sister.”

“Jesus Christ, yes. The Red Flame of Manhattan. That’s a hell of a note. And I wrote my folks I was going to visit her. Now what do I say?”

“You just write your parents that everything’s peachy with her. Because it is.”

They walked with heads bent, the snow whirling on the wind into their faces.

“Why are you so quiet?” said Janice. “Don’t worry about your sister. Really, you don’t have to.”

“I’m thinking how this war’s blown our family apart. I mean, we used to scatter here and there,” Warren said.

“We’re a service family and we’re used to that, but it’s different now. I don’t feel there’s a base any more. And we’re all changing. I don’t know if we’ll ever pull back together again.”

“Sooner or later all families change and scatter,” said Janice Lacouture, “and out of the pieces new families start up. That’s how it goes, and a very lovely arrangement it is, too.” She put her face to his for a moment, and snowflakes fell on the two warm cheeks.

“The imperialist struggle for foreign markets,” said Warren. “Jehosephat! I hope she’s rid of that one by the time Dad gets back. Otherwise he’ll lay waste to Radio City.”

Chapter 19

“BYRON!”

Dr. Jastrow gasped out the name and stared. He sat as usual on the terrace, the blue blanket over his legs, the gray shawl around his shoulders, the writing board and yellow pad on his lap. A cold breeze blowing across the valley from Siena fluttered Jastrow’s pages. In the translucent air the red-walled town, with its black-and-white striped cathedral atop the vineyard-checkered hills, looked hauntingly like the medieval Siena in old frescoes.

“Hello, A.J.”

“Dear me, Byron! I declare I’ll be a week recovering from the start you’ve given me! We were talking about you only at breakfast. We were both absolutely certain you’d be in the States by now.”

“She’s here?”

“Of course. She’s up in the library.”

“Sir, will you excuse me?”

“Yes, go ahead, let me collect myself - oh, and Byron, tell Maria I’d like some strong tea right away.”

Byron took the center hall steps three at a time and walked into the library. She stood at the desk in a gray sweater, a black skirt, pale and wide-eyed. “It is, by God! It
is
you. Nobody else galumphs up those stairs like that.”

“It’s me.”

“Why the devil did you come back?”

“I have to make a living.”

“You’re an imbecile. Why didn’t you let us know you were coming?”

“Well, I thought I’d better just come.”

She approached him, stretched out a hand uncertainly, and put it to his face. The long fingers felt dry and cold. “Anyway, you look rested. You seem to have put on some weight.” She backed off awkwardly and abruptly. “I owe you an apology. I was feeling beastly that day in Königsberg, and if I was rude to you, I’m sorry.” She walked away from him and sank into her desk chair. “Well, we can use you here, but surprises like this are never pleasant. Don’t you know that yet?” As though he had returned from an errand in town, she resumed clattering at the typewriter.

That was all his welcome. Jastrow put him back to work, and within a few days the old routines were restored. It was as though the Polish experience had never occurred, as though neither of them had left the hilltop. The traces of the war in these quiet hills were few. Only sporadic shortages of gasoline created any difficulty. The Milan and Florence newspapers that reached them played down the war. Even on the BBC broadcasts there was little combat news. The Russian attack on Finland seemed as remote as a Chinese earthquake.

Because the buses had become unreliable, Dr. Jastrow gave Byron a lodging on the third floor of the villa: a cramped little maid’s room with cracking plaster walls, and a stained ceiling that leaked in hard rains. Natalie lived directly below Byron in a second-floor bedroom looking out on Siena. Her peculiar manner to him persisted. At mealtimes, and generally in Jastrow’s presence, she was distantly cordial. In the library she was almost uncivil, working away in long silences, and giving terse cool answers to questions. Byron had a modest opinion of himself and his attractions, and he took his treatment as probably his due, though he missed the comradeship of their days in Poland and wondered why she never talked about them. He thought he had probably annoyed her by following her here. He was with her again, and that was why he had come; so, for all the brusque treatment, he was as content as a dog reunited with an irritable master.

When Byron arrived in Siena, the Constantine book was on the shelf for the moment, in favor of an expanded magazine article, “The Last Palio,” In describing the race, Jastrow had evoked a gloom-filled image of Europe plunging again toward war. A piece startling in its foresight, it had arrived on the editor’s desk on the first of September, the day of the invasion. The magazine printed it, and Jastrow’s publisher cabled him a frantic request to work it up into a short book, preferably containing a note of optimism (however slight) on the outcome of the war. The cable mentioned a large advance against royalties. This was the task in hand.

In this brief book, Jastrow was striking an Olympian, farseeing, forgiving note. The Germans would probably be beaten to the ground again, he wrote; and even if they gained the rule of the earth, they would in the end be tamed and subdued by their subject peoples, as their ancestors, the Goths and Vandals, had been tamed to turn Christian. Fanatic or barbaric despotism had only its hour. It was a recurring human fever fated to cool and pass. Reason and freedom were what all human history eternally moved toward.

The Germans were the bad children of Europe, Jastrow argued: egotistic, willful, romantic, always poised to break up faltering patterns of order. Arminius had set the ax to the
Pax Romana
; Martin Luther had broken the back of the universal Church; now Hitler was challenging Europe’s unsteady regime of liberal capitalism, based on an obsolete patchwork structure of nations.

The “Palio” of Europe, wrote Jastrow, the contest of hot little nationalisms in a tiny crowded cockpit of a continent, a larger Siena with the sea for three walls and Asia for a fourth, was worn out. As Siena had only one water company and one power company, one telephone system and one mayor, instead of seventeen of these in the seventeen make-believe sovereignties called Goose, Caterpillar, Giraffe, and so forth, so Europe was ripe for the same commonsense unification. Hitler, a bad-boy genius, had perceived this. He was going about the breakup of the old order cruelly, wrongly, with Teutonic fury, but what mattered was that he was essentially correct. The Second World War was the last Palio. Europe would emerge less colorful but more of a rational and solid structure, whichever side won the idiotic and gory horse race. Perhaps this painful but healthy process would become global, and the whole earth would be unified at last. As for Hitler, the villain of the melodrama, he would either be hunted down and bloodily destroyed like Macbeth, or he would have his triumph and then he would fall or die. The stars would remain, so would the earth, so would the human quest for freedom, understanding, and love among brothers.

As he typed repeated drafts of these ideas, Byron wondered whether Jastrow would have written such a tolerant and hopeful book had he spent September under bombardment in Warsaw, instead of in his villa overlooking Siena. He thought “The Last Palio” was a lot of high-flown irrelevant gab. But he didn’t say so.

* * *

Letters were coming to Natalie from Leslie Slote, one or two a week. She seemed less excited over them than she had been in the spring, when she would rush oft to her bedroom to read them, and return looking sometimes radiant, sometimes tearful. Now she casually skimmed the single-space typed pages at her desk, then shoved them in a drawer. One rainy day she was reading such a letter when Byron, typing away at the Palio book, heard her say, “Good God!”

He looked up. “Something the matter?”

“No, no,” she said, very red in the face, waving an agitated hand and flipping over a page. “Sorry. It’s nothing at all.”

Byron resumed work, struggling with one of Jastrow’s bad sentences. The professor wrote in a spiky hurried hand, often leaving out letters or words. He seldom closed his s’s and o’s. It was anybody’s guess what words some of these strings of blue spikes represented. Natalie could puzzle them out, but Byron disliked her pained condescending way of doing it.

“Well!” Natalie sat back in her chair with a thump, staring at the letter. “Briny-”

“Yes?”

She hesitated, chewing her full lower lip. “Oh, hell, I can’t help it. I’ve got to tell someone, and you’re handy. Guess what I hold here in my hot little hand?” She rustled the pages.

“I see what you’re holding.”

“You only think you do.” She laughed in a wicked way. “I’m going to tell you. It’s a proposal of marriage from a gentleman named Leslie Manson Slote, Rhodes Scholar, rising diplomat, and elusive bachelor. And what do you think of that, Byron Henry?”

“Congratulations,” Byron said.

The buzzer on Natalie’s desk rang. “Oh, lord. Briny, please go and see what A.J. wants. I’m in a fog.” She tossed the letter on the desk and thrust long white hands in her hair.

Dr. Jastrow sat blanketed in the downstairs study on the chaise lounge by the fire, his usual place in rainy weather. Facing him in an armchair, a fat pale Italian official, in a green and yellow uniform and black half-boots, was drinking coffee. Byron had never seen the man or the uniform before.

“Oh, Byron, ask Natalie for my resident status file, will you? She knows where it is.” Jastrow turned to the official. “Will you want to see their papers too?”

“Not today,
professore
. Only yours.”

Natalie looked up with an embarrassed grin from rereading the letter. “Oh, hi. What’s doing?”

Byron told her. Her face sobering, she took a key from her purse and unlocked a small steel file by the desk. “Here.” She gave him a manila folder tied with red tape. “Does it look like trouble? Shall I come down?”

“Better wait till you’re asked.”

As he descended the stairs he heard laughter from the study, and rapid jovial talk. “Oh, thank you, Byron,” Jastrow said, breaking into English as he entered, “just leave it here on the table.” He resumed his anecdote in Italian about the donkey that had gotten into the grounds the previous week, laid waste to a vegetable patch, and chewed a whole chapter of manuscript. The official’s belted belly shook with laughter.

In the library Natalie was typing again. The Slote letter was out of sight.

“There doesn’t seem to be much of a problem,” Byron said.

“That’s good,” she said placidly.

At dinner that night Dr. Jastrow hardly spoke, ate less than usual, and drank two extra glasses of wine. In this household, where things were so monotonously the same day after day, night after night, the first extra glass was an event, the second a bombshell. Natalie finally said, “Aaron, what was that visit about today?”

Jastrow came out of an abstracted stare with a little headshake. “Strangely enough, Giuseppe again.”

Giuseppe was the assistant gardener, whom he had recently discharged: a scrawny, lazy, stupid old drunkard with wiry black hairs on his big knobby purple nose.

Giuseppe had left open the gate through which the donkey had entered. He was always committing such misdemeanors. Jastrow had lost his temper over the destroyed chapter and the ravaged vegetable beds, had been unable to write for two days, and had suffered bad indigestion.

“How does that officer know Giuseppe?” Byron said.

“That’s the odd part. He’s from the alien registration bureau in Florence, yet he mentioned Giuseppe’s nine children, the difficulty of finding work nowadays, and so forth. When I said I’d rehire him, that ended it. He just handed me the registration papers with a victorious grin.” Jastrow sighed and laid his napkin on the table. “I’ve put up with Giuseppe all these years, I really don’t mind. I’m rather tired. Tell Maria I’ll have my fruit and cheese in the study.”

Natalie said when the professor was gone, “Let’s bring the coffee to my room.”

“Sure. Great.”

Never before had she invited him there. Sometimes in his room above he could hear her moving about, a tantalizing, faint, lovely noise. He followed her upstairs with a jumping pulse.

“I live in a big candy box,” she said with a self-conscious look, opening a heavy door. “Aaron bought the place furnished, you know, and left it just the way the lady of the house had it. Ridiculous for me, but -”

She snapped on a light. It was an enormous room, painted pink, with pink and gilt furniture, pink painted cupids on a blue and gold ceiling; pink silk draperies; and a huge double bed covered in frilly pink satin. Dark Natalie, in the old brown wool dress she wore on chilly evenings, looked decidedly odd in this Watteau setting. But Byron found the contrast as exciting as everything else about her. She lit the log fire in the marble fireplace carved with Roman figures, and they sat in facing armchairs, taking coffee from the low table between them.