Winds of War (59 page)

“Oh God,” she muttered, “oh my God.”

Feet trampled on a staircase; many voices called, laughed, chattered. The bride came sailing down the long dining room, wheat-colored hair beautifully coiffed and laced with pearls, cheeks pink with pleasure. “Well, I did it. Here we go.”

Natalie jumped to her feet, cramming A.J.’s pages into her purse. “Oh, you’re enchanting! You’re the loveliest sight!”

Janice pirouetted clear around on a toe. “Bless you.”

The white satin, clinging to flanks and breasts like creamy skin, rose demurely to cover her throat. She moved in a cloud of white lace. This blend of white chastity and crude fleshy allure was devastating; it shook Natalie with envy. The bride’s eye had an ironic gleam. After her wild pre-wedding night, Janice Lacouture felt approximately as virginal as Catherine of Russia. It didn’t bother her. Rather, it appealed to her sense of humor.

“Come,” she said. “You’ll ride with me.” She took the Jewish girl’s arm. “You know, if I weren’t marrying Warren Henry, I’d give you a run for that little Briny. He’s an Adonis, and so sweet. Those Henry men!”

Rhoda arrived at the hotel in a flurry, and frantically bathed and dressed, pulling cosmetics from one valise, underwear from another, her new Bergdorf Goodman frock from a third. Dr. Kirby had chartered a small plane and had flown down with her and Madeline. “He saved our LIVES!” trilled Rhoda dashing about in a sheer green slip. “The last plane we could get from New York didn’t leave us a MINUTE to finish shopping. Your daughter and I would have come to this wedding in OLD RAGS. This way, we had a whole extra afternoon and, Pug, you never SAW such fast shopping. Isn’t this a cunning number?” She held the green frock against her bosom. “Found it at the last second. Honestly, a small plane is such FUN. I slept most of the way, but when I was awake it was GREAT. You really know you’re flying.”

“Damn nice of him,” Pug said. “Is Fred that rich?”

“Well, of course, I wouldn’t hear of it, but then he said it was all charged to his company. He’s taking the plane on to Birmingham today. Anyway, I wasn’t going to argue too much, dear. It was a deliverance. Fasten me up in back. Pug did Briny really bring that Jewish girl here? Of all things. Why, I’ve never even laid eyes on her. She’ll have to sit with us, and everybody’ll think she’s part of the family.”

“Looks like she will be, Rhoda.”

“I don’t believe it. I just don’t. Why, how much older is she? Four years? That Briny! Just enjoys giving us heart failure. Always has, the monster. Pug, what’s taking you so long? My land, it’s hot here.”

“She’s two years older, and terrifically attractive.”

“Well, you’ve got me curious, I’ll say that. I pictured her as one of these tough Brooklyn chickens who shove past you in the New York department stores. Oh, stop fumbling, I’ll finish the top ones. Mercy, I’m roasting! I’m perspiring in RIVERS. This dress will be black through before we get to church.”

Natalie knew in thirty seconds that the handsome woman in green chiffon and rose-decorated white straw hat didn’t like her. The polite handshake outside the church, the prim smile, told all. Pug presented Natalie to Madeline as “Byron’s sidekick on the Polish jaunt,” obviously trying with this clumsy jocularity to make up for his wife’s freeze.

“Oh, yes, wow! Some adventure!” Madeline Henry smiled and looked Natalie over. Her pearl-gray shantung was the smartest outfit in sight. “I want to hear all that, some time. I still haven’t seen Briny, you know, and it’s been more than two years.”

“He shouldn’t have rushed down to Miami the way he did,” Natalie said, feeling her cheeks redden.

“Why not?” said Madeline, with a slow Byron-like grin. It was strange to see echoes of his traits in his family. Mrs. Henry held her head as Byron did, erect on a long neck. It made him seem more remote. He wasn’t just himself any more, her young companion of Jastrow’s library and of Poland, or even the son of a forbidding father, but part of a quite alien group.

The church was full. From the moment she went in, Natalie felt uncomfortable. Cathedrals gave her no uneasiness. They were just sights to see, and Roman Catholicism, though she could write a good paper about it, was like Mohammedanism, a complex closed-off structure. A Protestant church was the place of the other religion, the one she would be if she weren’t a Jew. Coming into one, she trod hostile territory. Rhoda didn’t make quite enough room for her in the pew, and Natalie had to push her a little, murmuring an excuse, to step clear of the aisle.

All around, women wore bright or pastel colors. Officers and air cadets in white and gold abounded. And Natalie stood at a May wedding in black linen, hastily selected out of a vague sense that she was still in mourning and didn’t belong here. People peered at her and whispered. It wasn’t her imagination: they did. How charming and fine the church was, with its dark carved wooden ceiling arching up from pink stone walls; and what stunning masses of flowers! How pleasant, comfortable, and normal to be born an Episcopalian or a Methodist, and how perfect to be married this way! Perhaps A.J. was right, and encouraging Byron had been irresponsible. Leslie Slote was an arid bookish pagan like herself, and they had even talked of being married by a judge.

The robed minister appeared, book in hand, and the ceremony began.

As the bride paced down the aisle on the congressman’s arm, moving like a big beautiful cat, Rhoda started to cry. Memories of Warren as a little boy, memories of her own wedding, of other weddings, of young men who had wanted to marry her, of herself - a mother before twenty of the baby who had grown into this handsome groom – flooded her mind: she bowed her head in the perky hat and brought out the handkerchief. For the moment she lost her awareness of the melancholy Jewish girl in black beside her, and even of Palmer Kirby towering above people three rows back. When Victor Henry softly took her hand, she clasped his and pressed it to her thigh. What fine sons they had, standing up there together!

And Pug stood slightly hunched almost at attention, his face sombre and rigid, wondering at the speed with which his life was going, and realizing again how little he allowed himself to think about Warren, because he had such inordinately high hopes for him.

Standing up beside his brother, Byron felt many eyes measuring and comparing them. Warren’s uniform, and the other uniforms in the church, troubled him. His Italian suit with its exaggerated lines, beside Warren’s naturally cut whites, seemed to Byron as soft and frivolous as a woman’s dress.

As Janice lifted her veil for the kiss, she and Warren exchanged a deep, knowing, intimately amused glance.

“How are you doing?” he murmured.

“Oh, still standing up. God knows how, you dog.”

And with the minister beaming on them, they embraced, kissed, and laughed, there in the church in each other’s arms, over the war-born joke that would last their whole lives and that nobody else would ever know.

* * *

Cars piled up in front of the beach club, only a few hundred yards from the Lacouture house, and a jocund crowd poured into the canopied entrance for the wedding brunch.

“I swear, I must be the only Jew in Pensacola,” Natalie said, hanging back a little on Byron’s arm. “When I walk through that door, I’m going to set off gongs.”

He burst out laughing. “It’s not quite that bad.”

She looked pleased at making him laugh. “Maybe not. I do think your mother might be a wee bit happier if a wall had fallen on me in Warsaw.”

At that moment, Rhoda, half a dozen paces behind them, was responding to a comment by a Washington cousin that Byron’s girl looked striking. “Yes, doesn’t she? So interesting. She might almost be an Armenian or an Arab. Byron met her in Italy.”

Champagne glass in hand, Byron firmly took Natalie around the wedding party from room to room, introducing her. “Don’t say I’m your fiancée,” Natalie ordered him at the start. “Let them think what they please, but don’t let’s get into all that.” She met Captain Henry’s father, an engineer retired from the lumber trade, a short withered upright man with thick white hair, who had travelled in from California and who looked as though he had worked hard all his life; and his surprisingly fat brother, who ran a soft-drink business in Seattle: and other Henrys; and a knot of Rhoda’s kin, Grovers of Washington. The clothes, the manners, the speech of the Washington relatives set them off not only from the California people, but even from Lacouture’s Pensacola friends, who by comparison seemed a Babbitty lot.

Janice and Warren came and stayed, joking, eating, drinking, and dancing. Nobody would have blamed them, in view of their limited time, for vanishing after a round of handshakes, but they evinced no impatience for the joys of their new state.

Warren asked Natalie to dance, and as soon as they were out on the floor, he said. “I told Byron this morning that I’m for you. That was sight unseen.”

“Do you always take such blind risks? A flier should be more prudent.”

“I know about what you did in Warsaw. That’s enough.”

“You’re cheering me up. I feel awfully out of place here.”

“You shouldn’t. Janice is as much for you as I am. Byron seems changed already,” Warren said. “There’s a lot to him, but nobody’s ever pressed the right button. I’ve always hoped that someday a girl would, and I think you’re the girl.”

Rhoda Henry swooped past, champagne glass in hand, and gathered them up to join a large family table by the window. Possibly because of the wine, she was acting more cordial to Natalie. At the table Lacouture was declaring, with relish for his own pat phrases, that the President’s request for fifty thousand airplanes a year was “politically hysterical, fiscally irresponsible, and industrially inconceivable.” Even the German air force didn’t have ten thousand planes all told; and it didn’t have a single bomber that could fly as far as Scotland, let alone across the Atlantic. A billion dollars! The interventionist press was whooping it up, naturally, but if the debate in Congress could go on for more than a week, the appropriation would be licked. “We have three thousand miles of good green water between us and Europe,” he said, “and that’s better protection for us than half a million airplanes. Roosevelt just wants new planes in a hurry to give to England and France. But he’ll never come out and
say
that. Our fearless leader is slightly deficient in candor.”

“You’re willing to see the British and French go down, then,” Pug Henry said.

“That’s how the question’s usually put,” said Lacouture. “Ask me if I’m willing to send three million American boys overseas against the Germans, so as to prop up the old status quo in Europe. Because that’s what this is all about, and don’t ever forget it.”

Palmer Kirby put in, “The British navy’s propping up our own status quo free of charge, Congressman. If the Nazis get hold of it, that’ll extend Hitler’s reach to Pensacola Bay.”

Lacouture said jovially, “Yes, I can just see the
Rodney
and the
Nelson
right out there, flying the swastika and shelling our poor old beach club.”

This raised a laugh among the assorted in-laws around the table, and Rhoda said” “What a charming thought.”

Victor Henry said, “This isn’t where they’ll come.”

“They’re not coming at all,” Lacouture said. “That’s
New York Times
stuff. If the British get in a jam, they’ll throw out Churchill and make a deal with Germany. But naturally they’ll hang on as long as they think there’s a chance that the Roosevelt administration, the British sympathizers, and the New York Jews will get us over there.”

“I’m from Denver,” said Kirby, and I’m Irish.” He and Victor Henry had glanced at Natalie when Lacouture mentioned the Jews.

“Well, error is contagious,” said the congressman with great good nature, “and it knows no boundaries.”

This easy amused war talk over turkey, roast beef, and champagne, by a broad picture windows looking out at beach umbrellas, white sand, and heeling sailboats, had been irritating Natalie extremely. Lacouture’s last sentence stung her to say in a loud voice, “I was in Warsaw during the siege.”

Lacouture calmly said, “That’s right, so you were. You and Byron. Pretty bad, was it?”

“The Germans bombed a defenseless city for three weeks. They knocked out all the hospitals but one, the one I worked in. The wounded were piled up in our entrance hall like logs. In one hospital a lot of pregnant women burned up.”

The table became a hole of quiet in the boisterous party. The congressman spun an empty champagne glass between two fingers. “That sort of thing has been going on in Europe for centuries, my dear. It’s exactly what I want to spare the American people.”

“Say, I heard a good one yesterday,” spoke up a jolly-faced man in steel-rimmed glasses, laughing. “Abey and his family, see, are driving down to Miami, and about Tampa they run out of gasoline. Well, they drive into this filling station, and this attendant says, ‘Juice?’ And old Abey he says, ‘Vell, vot if we are? Dunt ve get no gess?’”

The jolly man laughed again, and so did the others. Natalie could see he meant no harm; he was trying to ease the sober turn of the talk. Still she was very glad that Byron came up now and took her off to dance.

“How long does this go on?” she said. “Can we go outside? I don’t want to dance.”

“Good. I have to talk to you.”

They sat on the low wall of the terrace in blazing sun, by stairs leading to the white sand, not far from the picture window, behind which Lacouture was still holding forth, shaking his white-thatched head and waving an arm.

Byron leaned forward, elbows on knees, fingers clasped together. “Darling, I think I’m getting organized here. I may as well fly up to New London today or tomorrow and take that physical, so that – what’s the matter?”

A spasm had crossed her face. “Nothing, go on. You’re flying to New London.”

“Only if you agree. I’ll do nothing that we don’t both concur on, from now on and forever.”

“All right.”

“Well, I take the physical. I also check the situation, and make very sure that a married applicant has a chance, and that if he’s admitted he gets to spend time with his wife. That takes care of our first few months, maybe our first year. I’ll eventually go to one submarine base or another, if I get through, and you’ll come along, the way Janice is doing. We all might end up a Pearl Harbor together. There’s a university in Hawaii. You might even teach there.”