Winds of War (52 page)

“Captain Henry, you can’t possibly do me and my wife a greater kindness. I hope you will buy something.”

Rosenthal put a card in his hand and melted into the blackout. When Pug got home Rhoda was dressing for the chargé’s dinner, so there was no chance to talk about the offer.

The embassy’s Christmas party had none of the opulence of an Abendruh banquet but it was good enough. Nearly all the Americans left in Berlin were there, chatting over eggnogs and then assembling at three long tables for a meal of roast goose, pumpkin pie, fruit, cheese, and cakes, all from Denmark. Diplomatic import privileges made this possible, and the guests grew merry over the unaccustomed abundance. Victor Henry loved being back among American faces, American talk, offhand open manners, laughter from the diaphragm and not from the face muscles; not a bow or a clicked pair of heels, not a woman’s European smile, gleaming on and off like an electric sign.

But trouble broke out with Rhoda. He heard her raising her voice at Fred Fearing, who was sucking his corncob pipe and glaring at her far down the table. Pug called, “Hey, what’s it about, Fred?”

“The Wolf Stöllers Pug, the loveliest people your wife has ever met.”

I said the nicest Germans,” Rhoda shrilled, “and it’s quite true. You’re blindly prejudiced.”

“It’s time you went home, Rhoda,” Fearing said.

“And just what does that mean?” she snapped back, still much too loud. At Abendruh Rhoda had loosened up on her count of drinks, and tonight she appeared to be further along than usual. Her gestures were getting broad, she was holding her eyes half-closed, and her voice tones were going up into her nose.

“Well, kid, if you think people like Wolf Stöller and his wife are nice, you’ll believe next that Hitler just wants to reunite the German folk peacefully. About that time you need to go back for a while on American chow and the
New York Times.
”

“I just know that Germans are not monsters with horns and tails,” said Rhoda, “but ordinary people, however misguided. Or did one of your fräuleins show up in bed with cloven hoofs, dear?”

The crude jibe caused a silence. Fearing was an ugly fellow, tall, long-faced, curly-headed, with a narrow foxy nose; upright idealistic, full of rigid liberal ideas, and severe on injustice and political hypocrisy. But he had his human side. He had seduced the wife of his collaborator on a best seller about the Spanish Civil War. This lady he had recently parked in England with an infant daughter, and he was now - so the talk ran - making passes at every available German woman, and even some American wives. Rhoda had once half-seriously told Pug that she had had trouble with Freddy on the dance floor. All the same, Fred Fearing was a famous, able reporter. Because he detested the Nazis, he tried hard to be fair to them, and the propaganda ministry understood this. Most Americans got their picture of Nazi Germany at war from Fearing’s broadcasts.

Victor Henry said, as amiably as he could, to break the silence, “It might be easier to navigate in this country, Rhoda, if the bad ones would sprout horns or grow hair in their palms or something.”

“What Wolf Stöller has in his palms is blood, lots of it,” Fearing said, with a swift whiskeyed-up pugnacity. “He acts unaware of it. You and Rhoda encourage this slight color blindness, Pug, by acting the same way.”

“It’s Pug’s job to socialize with people like Stöller,” said the chargé mildly, from the head of the table. “I propose a moratorium tonight on discussing the Germans.”

Colonel Forrest was rubbing his broken nose, a mannerism that signalled an itch to argue, though his moon face remained placid. He put in, nasally, “Say, Freddy, I happen to think Hitler just wants to reorganize central Europe as a German sphere, peacefully if he can, and that he’ll call off the war if the Allies will agree. Think I should go home, too?”

Fearing emitted a column of blue smoke and red sparks from his pipe. “What about
Mein Kampf
, Bill?”

“Campaign document of a thirty-year-old hothead,” snapped the military attaché, “written eighteen years ago in jail. Now he’s the head of state. He’s never moved beyond his strength.
Mein Kampf
’s all about tearing off the southern half of Russia and making a German breadbasket of it. That’s an old Vienna coffeehouse fantasy. It went out of the window once and for all with the pact. The Jewish business is bad, but the man’s doing his job with the crude tools at hand. That unfortunately includes anti-Semitism. He didn’t invent it. It was big on the German scene before he was born.”

“Yes, time for you to go home,” said Fearing, gulping Moselle.

“Well, what’s your version?” Now plainly irritated, the military attaché put on an imitation of the broadcaster’s voice. “That Adolf Hitler the mad house painter is out to conquer the world?”

“Oh, hell, Hitler’s revolution doesn’t know where it’s going, Bill, any more than the French or Russian revolutions did,” exclaimed Fearing, with an exasperated wave of his corncob. “It’s just racing along the way those did and it’ll keep going and spreading till it’s stopped. Sure he moves peacefully where he can. Why not? Everywhere he’s pushed in there have been welcoming groups of leading citizens, or traitors, you might say. In Poland they swarmed. Why, you know that France and England have parties ready right this second to cooperate with him. He just has to strike hard enough in the west to knock out the ins and bring in the outs. He’s already got Stalin cravenly feeding him all the Russian oil and wheat he needs, in return for the few bones he threw him in the Baltic.”

With swinging theatrical gestures of the smoking pipe, Fearing went on, “By 1942, the way things are going, you may see a world in which Germany will control the industries of Europe, the raw materials of the Soviet Union and armies of England and France. Why, the French fleet would go over to him tomorrow if the right admiral sneezed. He’ll have a working deal with the Japs for exploiting Asia and the East Indies and ruling the Pacific and Indian oceans. Then what? Not to mention the network of dictatorships in South America, already in the Nazis’ pocket. You know, of course, Bill, that the United States Army is now two hundred thousand strong, and that Congress intends to cut it.”

“Well, I’m against that, of course,” said Colonel Forrest.

“I daresay! A new bloody dark age is threatening to engulf the whole world and Congress wants to cut down the Army!”

“An interesting vision,” smiled the chargé. “Slightly melodramatic.”

Rhoda Henry raised her wineglass, giggling noisily. “Lawks-a mercy me! I never heard such wild-eyed poppy-cock. Freddy, you’re the one who should go home. Merry Christmas.”

Fred Fearing’s face reddened. He looked up and down the table. “Pug Henry, I like you. I guess I’ll go for a walk.”

As the broadcaster strode away from the table, the chargé rose and hurried after him, but did not bring him back. The Henrys went home early. Pug had to hold up Rhoda as they left, because she was half-asleep, and unsteady at the knees.

The next pouch of Navy mail contained an Alnav listing changes of duty for most of the new captains. They were becoming execs of battleships, commanding officers of cruisers, chiefs of staff to admirals at sea. For Victor Henry there were no orders. He stared out of the window at Hitler’s chancellery, at the black-clad SS men letting snow pile on their helmets and shoulders like statues. Suddenly, he had had enough. He told his yeoman not to disturb him, and wrote three letters. The first expressed regret to the Stöllers that, due to unforeseen official problems, he and Rhoda would not be coming back to Abendruh. The second, two formal paragraphs to the Bureau of Personnel, requested transfer to sea duty. In the third, a long handwritten letter to Vice-Admiral Preble, Pug poured out his disgust with his assignment and his desire to go back to sea. He ended up:

I’ve trained twenty-five years for combat at sea. I’m miserable, Admiral, and maybe for that reason my wife is miserable. She’s falling apart here in Berlin. It’s a nightmarish place. This isn’t the Navy’s concern, but it’s mine. If I have been of any service to the Navy in my entire career, the only recompense I now ask, and beg, is a transfer to sea duty.

A few days later another White House envelope came with a scrawl in black, thick, slanting pencil. The postmark showed that it had crossed his letter.

Pug -

Your report is really grand, and gives me a helpful picture. Hitler is a strange one, isn’t he? Everybody’s reaction is a little different. I’m delighted that you are where you are, and I have told CNO that. He says you want to return briefly in May for a wedding. That will be arranged. Be sure to drop in on me when you can spare a moment.

FDR

Victor Henry bought two of Rosenthal’s Oriental carpets and a set of English china that Rhoda particularly loved, at the prices the man named. His main motive was to cheer her up, and it worked; she gloated over the gains for weeks, and never tired of saying, truly enough, that the poor Jewish man’s thankfulness to her had been overwhelming. Pug also wrote the Stöllers about this time that, if the invitation held, he and Rhoda would come back to Abendruh after all. If his job was intelligence, he decided, he had better get on with it; moreover, the moral gap between him and Stöller seemed to have narrowed. Notwithstanding Rosenthal’s pathetic gratitude for the deal, his possessions were
Objekte
.

Chapter 23

New Year’s Eve

Midnight

Briny dear -

I can’t think of a better way to start 1940 than by writing to you. I’m home, typing away in my old bedroom, which seems one-tenth as large as I remembered it. The whole house seems so cramped and cluttered, and God, how that smell of insecticide wipes away the years.

Oh, my love, what a marvellous place the United States is! I had forgotten, completely forgotten.

When I reached New York, my father was already out of the hospital - I learned this by phoning home - so I blew two hundred of my hard-earned dollars on a 1934 Dodge coupe, and I drove to Florida! I really did. Via Washington. I wanted to see the Capitol dome and the Monument. Yes, I wanted to see Slote too. More of that later, but let me assure you that he got little comfort out of the meeting. But so help me, Briny, I mainly wanted to get the feel of the country again. Well, in dead of winter, in lousy weather, and despite the tragic Negro shantytowns that line the roads down South, the Atlantic states are beautiful, spacious, raw, clean, full of wilderness still, exploding with energy and life. I loved every billboard, every filling station. It’s really the
New World
. The Old World’s mighty pretty in its rococo fashion, but it’s rotten-ripe and going insane. Thank God I’m out of it.

Take Miami Beach. I’ve always loathed this place, you know. It’s a measure of my present frame of mind that I regard even Miami Beach with affection. I left here a raging anti-Semite. It jars me even now to see these sleek Jews without a care in the world ambling about in their heavy tans and outlandish sun clothes - often wearing furs, or pearls and diamonds, my dear, with pink or orange shirts and shorts. The Miami Beachers don’t believe in hiding what they’ve got. I think of Warsaw, and I get angry, but it passes. They’re no different in their obliviousness to the war, from the rest of the Americans.

The doctors say my father’s coming along fine after a heart attack that all but did him in. I don’t like his fragile look, end he doesn’t do much but sit in the sun in the garden and listen to the news on the radio. He’s terribly worried about Uncle Aaron. He never used to speak much of him (actually he used to avoid the subject) but now he goes on and on about Aaron. My father is terrified of Hitler. He thinks he’s a sort of devil who’s going to conquer the world and murder all the Jews.

But I guess you’re waiting to hear about my little chat with Leslie Slote – eh, darling?

Well - he was definitely not expecting the answer I brought back to his proposal. When I told him I’d fallen head over ears in love with you it literally staggered him. I mean he tottered to a chair and fell in it, pale as a ghost. Poor old Slote! A conversation ensued that went on for hours, in a bar, in a restaurant, in my car, in half a dozen circuits on foot around the Lincoln Memorial in a freezing wind, and finally in his apartment. Lord, did he carry on! But after all, I had to give him his say.

The main heads of the dialogue went something like this, round and round and round:

SLOTE: It’s just that you were isolated with him for so long.

ME: I told Briny that myself. I said it’s a triumph of propinquity. That doesn’t change the fact that I love him now.

SLOTE: You can’t intend to marry him. It would be the greatest possible mistake. I say this as a friend, and somebody who knows you better than anyone else.

ME: I told Byron that too. I said it would be ridiculous for me to marry him, and gave him all the reasons.

SLOTE: Well, then, what on earth have you in mind?

ME: I’m just reporting a fact to you. I haven’t anything in mind.

SLOTE: You had better snap out of it. You’re an intellectual and a grown woman. Byron Henry is a pleasant light-headed loafer, who managed to avoid getting an education even in a school like Columbia There can’t be anything substantial between you.

ME: I don’t want to hurt you, dear, but (
this is the way I walked on eggs for a while, but in the end I came flat out with it
) the thing between Byron Henry and me is damned substantial. In fact by comparison, just now, nothing else seems very substantial. (
Slote plunged in horrid gloom
.)

SLOTE: (
he only asked this once
): Have you slept with him?