Winds of War (53 page)

ME: None of your business. (
Jastrow not giving Slote any cards to play that she can help. Slote sunk even deeper in gloom
.)

SLOTE: Well, “
la coeur a ses raisons
,” and all that, but I truly don’t understand. He’s a boy. He’s very good-looking, or rather, charming-looking, and he is certainly courageous. Perhaps that’s assumed an outsize importance for you.

ME: (
ducking that sore topic; who needs trouble
?): He has other nice qualities. He’s a gentleman. I never knew the animal really existed outside of books any more.

SLOTE: I’m not a gentleman, then?

ME: I’m not saying you’re a boor or a cad. I mean a gentleman in the old sense, not somebody who avoids bad manners.

SLOTE: You’re talking like a shopgirl. You’re obviously rationalizing a temporary physical infatuation. That’s all right. But the words you’re choosing are corny and embarrassing.

ME: All that may be. Meantime I can’t marry you. (
Yawn
) And I
must
go to sleep now. I want to drive four hundred miles tomorrow, (
Exit Jastrow, at long last
.)

All things considered, he took it well. He calmly says we’re getting married once I’m over this nuttiness and he’s going ahead with his plans for it. He’s remarkably sure of himself, to that extent he remains very much the old Slote. Physically he’s like a stranger now. I never kissed him, and though we spent an hour in his apartment, very late, he never laid a hand on me. I wonder if the talk about gentlemen had anything to do with it. He never used to be like that, I assure you. (I daresay I’ve changed too!)

Maybe he’s right about me and you. I choose not to look beyond the present moment, or more truly beyond the moment when we stood by the fire in my bedroom and you took me in your arms. I’m still overwhelmed, I still love you, I still long for you. Separated though we are, I’ve never been so happy in all my life. If only you were here right this minute!

I said you see things too simply but on one point you were just plain right. Aaron should leave that stupid house, let it fall down and rot, and come back to this wonderful land to live out his days. His move there was stupid. His remaining there is imbecilic. If you can convince him of it - and I’m writing him a letter too - I’d feel a lot better about your coming back. But don’t just abandon him, sweetheart. Not yet. Wait till my plans jell a bit.

Happy New Year, and I hope to God that 1940 brings the end of Hitler and this whole grisly nightmare, and brings us together again.

I adore you.

Natalie

Three letters came straggling in during the next few weeks. The first two were shallow awkward scrawls:

I’m the world’s worst letter writer. . . . I sure miss you more than I can say . . . things are pretty dull around here now without you . . . sure wish I could have been there with you in Lisbon . . . Well, got to get back to work now . . .

She read Byron’s embarrassing banalities over and over. Here on paper was just the young featherweight sloucher she had first seen, propped against a red Siena wall in the noon sun. Even his handwriting fitted the picture: slanting, undistinguished, the letters small and flattened. The pathetically flourishing B of his signature stood out of the mediocre penmanship. All of Byron’s frustrated yearning to amount to something, to measure up to his father’s hopes, was in that extravagant B. All his inconsequence was in the trailed-off, crushed “. .
. yron
.” Poor Briny! Yet Natalie found herself dwelling on the artless empty scribblings as though they were letters of George Bernard Shaw. She kept them under her pillow. They contrasted most cruelly with her other preoccupation, for to pass the time she had hauled out her master’s thesis, already three-quarters written in French: “Contrasts in the Sociologismic Critique of War: Durkheim’s Writings on Germany, 1915-1916, and Tolstoy’s Second Epilogue to War and Peace, 1869.” She was giving thought to translating it, and enrolling in Columbia in or NYU in the fall to finish it off and get her degree. It was a good thesis. Even Slote had read sections with approval, if now and again with a thin Oxonian smile. She wanted not only to finish, but to revise it. She had started with the anti-French, pro-German bias of most American university opinion between the wars. Her experiences in Poland had inclined her to agree much more with Durkheim about Germany. These things were as far beyond the writer of the letters under her pillow as the general theory of relativity. It would give Briny a headache just to read her title. But she didn’t care. She was in in love.

Popular songs were sweetly stabbing her: songs about women infatuated with worthless men, whining cowboy laments about absent sweethearts. It was as though she had developed a craving for penny candy. She was shamed of gratifying her fancy, but she couldn’t get enough of these songs. She bought records and played them over and over. If Byron Henry wrote stupid letters, too bad. All judgments fell away before her remembrance of his eyes and his mouth and his arms, her delight at contemplating a few ill-written sentences because they came from his hand.

A much better letter came along: the answer to her first long one from Miami Beach, several pages typed with Byron’s odd offhand clarity. He somehow never struck a wrong key in his quick rattling, and his pages looked like a stenographer’s work.

Natalie darling:

Well, that’s more like it. A real letter. God, I waited a long time. I skipped all that stuff about the USA and Miami, to get to the Slote business, but then I went back and read it all. Nobody has to tell me how good the United States is, compared to Europe. I’m so homesick at this point, I could die. This is quite aside from my yearning for you, which remains as strong as if you were in the room downstairs. I’m beginning to understand how iron filings must feel around a magnet. Sometimes, sitting in my room thinking about you, the pull gets so strong, I have the feeling if I let go of the arms of my chair I’d float out of the window and across France and over the Atlantic, straight to your house at 1316 Normandie Drive.

Natalie was enchanted with this imaginative little conceit, and read it over and over.

Slote only thinks he’s going to marry you. He had his chance.

By the way, I’m more than one-third through Slote’s list of tomes about the Germans. Some of them aren’t available in English, but I’m slogging along with what I can get. There’s not much else to do here. The one reward of my isolation in this godforsaken town is the one-man seminar that A.J. is conducting with me. His view is more or less like Slote’s, and I’m getting the picture. The Germans have been the comers in Europe ever since Napoleon, because of their geographical place, their numbers, and their energy, but they’re a strange dark people. All of these writers Slote listed eventually come out with the pedantic destructiveness, the scary sureness that they’re right, that the Germans have been gypped for centuries, that the world’s got to be made over on their terms. What it boils down to so far for me is that Hitler is, after all, the soul of present-day Germany - which is self-evident when you’re there; that the Germans can’t be allowed to rule Europe because they have some kind of mass mental distortion, despite their brilliance, and can’t even rule themselves; and that when they try for mastery, somebody’s got to beat the living daylights out of them or you’ll have barbarism triumphant. A.J. adds his own notion about the “good Germany” of progressive liberals and the “bad Germany” of Slote’s romantics and nationalists, all tied in with geographical location and the Catholic religion, which sort of loses me. (Wonder if any of this will get past the censors? I bet it will. The Italians fear and loathe the Germans. There’s a word that passes around here about Mussolini. They say he’s the monkey that opened the tiger’s cage. Pretty good.)

Getting A.J. out of here seems to be a bit of a project, after all.

There was a minor technical foul-up in his naturalization, way, way back. I don’t know the details, but he never bothered to correct it. The new consul general in Rome is a sort of prissy bureaucrat and he’s creating difficulties. All this will straighten out, of course - they’ve said as much in Rome - but it’s taking time.

So I won’t abandon A.J. now. But even if your plans aren’t clear by mid-April, I must come home then and I will, whether A.J. does or not. Aside from my brother’s wedding, my father’s on fire to get me into submarine school, where the next officer course starts May 27. The course lasts six months, and then there’s a year of training in subs operating around Connecticut. So even in the unlikely event that I do enroll - I’ll only do it if the war breaks wide open - we could be together a lot.

Siena’s gotten real dumpy. The hills are brown, the vines are cut to black stumps. The people creep around the streets looking depressed. The Palio’s off for 1940. It’s cold. It rains a lot. But in the lemon house, anyway, the trees are still blooming, and A.J. and I still have our coffee there. I smell the blossoms and I think of you. I often go in there just to take a few breaths, and I close my eyes and there you are, for a moment. Natalie, there has to be a God or I wouldn’t have found you, and He has to be the same God for both of us. There’s only one God.

I love you,

Briny

“Well, well,” Natalie said aloud, as tears sprang from her eyes and dropped on the flimsy airmail paper. “You miserable chestnut-haired devil.” She kissed the pages, smearing them orange-red. Then she looked at the date again - February 10, and this was April 9 - almost two months for an airmail letter! There was no point in answering, at that rate. He might be on his way back now.” But she seized a pad and began writing. She couldn’t help it.

Natalie’s father was listening to the radio in the garden. They had just eaten lunch and her mother had gone off to a committee meeting. As Natalie poured loving words on paper, a news broadcast came drifting in on the warm air through the open window. The announcer, with rich dramatic doom in his voice, spoke words that arrested her pen:

“The phony war has ended. A fierce air, sea, and land battle is raging for Norway. NBC brings special bulletins from the war capitals that tell the story.

“
London
. In a lightning attack, without warning or provocation, Nazi Germany has invaded neutral Norway by sea and air, and German land forces have rolled into Denmark. Fierce resistance is reported by the Norwegian government at Oslo, Narvik, Trondheim, and other key points along the coast, but German reinforcements are continuing to pour in. The Royal Navy is moving rapidly to cut off the invasion. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, declared this morning, ‘All German vessels entering the Skagerrak will be sunk.’”

Putting aside the pad and pen, Natalie went to the window. Her father, sitting with his back to her in blazing sunshine, his grizzled head in a white cap tilted far to one side, was listening with motionless intensity to this shattering development.

“Paris.
In an official communiqué, the French government announced that the Allies would rally to the cause of democratic Norway, and would meet the German onslaught quote with cold steel unquote. Pessimistic commentators pointed out that the fall of Norway and Denmark would put more than a thousand additional miles of European coastline in German hands and that this would mean the collapse of the British blockade.

“Berlin.
The propaganda ministry has issued the following bulletin. Forestalling a British plan to seize Scandinavia and deny Germany access to Swedish iron ore and other raw materials, the German armed forces have peaceably taken Denmark under their protection and have arrived in Norway by sea and air, where the populace has enthusiastically welcomed them. Oslo is already in German hands, and the life of the capital is returning to normal. Scattered resistance by small British-bribed units has been crushed. The Führer has sent the following message of congratulations to . . .
”

Natalie came out into the garden to talk to her father about the shocking news, and was surprised to find him sleeping through it, his head dropped on his chest. The radio was blaring; and her father usually hung on the news broadcasts. The shadow from his white linen cap obscured his face, but she could see a queer expression around his mouth. His upper teeth were protruding ludicrously over his lip. Natalie came to him, and touched his shoulder. “Pa?” He did not respond. He felt inert. She could see now that his upper plate had worked loose. “Pa!” As she shook him his head lolled and the cap fell off. She thrust her hand inside his loose flowered sport shirt; there was no heartbeat under the warm clammy skin. In the instant before she shrieked and ran inside to telephone the doctor, she saw on her dead father’s face a strong resemblance to Aaron Jastrow that in his lifetime she had never observed.

She walked through the next weeks in a fog of shocked grief. Natalie had stopped taking her father seriously at about the age of twelve; he was just a businessman, a sweater manufacturer, a temple president, and she was then already a brash intellectual snob. Since then she had become more and more aware of how her father’s sense of inferiority to Aaron Jastrow, and to his own daughter, permeated his life. Yet she was prostrated when he died. She could not eat. Even with drugs she could not sleep. Her mother, a conventional woman usually preoccupied with Hadassah meetings and charity fund-raising, for many years completely baffled by her daughter, pulled out of her own grief and tried in vain to comfort her. Natalie lay in her room on her bed, wailing and bawling, almost constantly at first, and in spells every day for weeks afterward. She suffered agonies of guilt for neglecting and despising her father. He had loved her and spoiled her. When she had told him she wanted to go to the Sorbonne for two years, that had been that. She had never even asked whether he could afford it. She had felled him with her bizarre misadventures and had experienced no remorse while he was alive. Now he was gone, and she was on her own, and it was too late. He was unreachable by love or regret.