Winds of War (6 page)

The gold letters B R E M E N stretched across the curved black stern of the steamship, high over the cobbled waterfront street. Above the letters, an immense red flag rippled in the cool fishy breeze off the Hudson, showing at its center a big black swastika circled in white.

“Glory be, it all really exists,” Madeline said to Warren as she got out of the taxicab.

“What really exists?” Warren said.

“Oh, this whole Hitler business. The Nazis, the
Sieg
Heils
, the book burnings - when you read about it in the papers, it all seems too ridiculous and crazy to be real. But there’s the swastika.”

Victor Henry glanced up at the Nazi flag, wrinkling his whole face. Rhoda was briskly giving the porter orders about the luggage. “I had to get special permission to ride this bucket. Let’s hope the German language practice proves to be worth it. Come aboard with us and have a look at the ship.”

In a first-class stateroom panelled in gloomy carved wood, they sat making melancholy small talk amid piled suitcases and trunks, until Rhoda restlessly jumped up and took Warren with her for a walk around the
Bremen
. Madeline chose the moment to jolt her father with the news that she wanted to drop out of college. The prospect of living with her dull aunt and duller uncle and twin cousins for two years was unbearable, she said.

“But what can you do? Two years of college, and you keep failing courses,” Victor Henry said. “You can’t just lie around and read
Vogue
till you get married.”

“I’d find a job, Dad. I can work. I’m just bored at school. I hate studying. I always have. I’m not like you, or Warren. I’m more like Byron, I guess. I can’t help it.”

“I never liked studying,” Commander Henry returned. “Nobody does. You do what you must, and get it done.”

Perched on the edge of a deep armchair, the girl said with her most winning smile, “Please! Let me take just one year off. I’ll prove I can do it. There are lots of jobs for girls at the radio networks in New York. If I don’t make good, I promise I’ll trot back to college, and -”

“What! New York? Nineteen, and alone in New York? Are you nuts?”

“Let me just try it this summer.”

“No. You’ll go with Aunt Augusta to Newport, the way it’s been planned. You’ve always enjoyed Newport.”

“For a week, yes. A whole summer will be a perishing bore.”

“That’s where you’ll go. In the fall I’ll expect regular letters from you, reporting improved performance in college.”

Madeline, slumping back in the armchair, bit noisily into an apple from a heaping bon voyage basket of fresh fruit, sent by Kip Tollever. Staring straight ahead, except for brief mutinous glares at her father, she gnawed at the apple until her mother and brother returned. Pug did his best to ignore the glares, reading a book on German steel-making. He did not like parting from his daughter on such terms, but her proposal seemed to him unthinkable.

The
Bremen
sailed at noon. As Warren and Madeline left the pier, a band thumped out a merry German waltz. They took a taxi uptown, saying little to each other. Henry had set the uncommunicative pattern of the family; the children, after romping and chattering through their early years, had from adolescence onward lived separate, largely undiscussed lives. Warren dropped Madeline at Radio City, not inquiring what she intended to do there. They agreed to meet for dinner, go to a show, and take a midnight train to Washington.

Madeline poked here and there in the huge lobby of the RCA building, gawking at the Sert murals and ceiling paintings. She found herself at the bank of elevators for NBC entertainers and employees. Many of these people, she noticed, showed no pass to the uniformed page, but smiled, waved, or just walked busily past the roped entrance. She sailed past too, trying to look twenty-five and employed. Squinting at her, the page held out an arresting hand. She dived into a crowded elevator.

For an hour she wandered the inner halls of the broadcasting company, relishing the thick maroon carpets, the immense round black pillars, the passing trucks of spotlights and broadcast equipment, the flashing red lights outside of studios, the pretty girls and handsome young men hurrying in and out of doors. She came on the employment office and hung outside, peering through the open double doors like a child at a candy counter. Then she left and spent the day shopping in department stores.

As for Warren, the taxi took him a few blocks further uptown. In Rumpelmayer’s, he met a good-looking woman of thirty or so with large sad eyes, a cloud of ash-blonde hair, and a clever soulful way of talking about novels, paintings, and music, subjects which did not greatly interest him. His majors had been history and the sciences. After an early lunch, he spent the day with her in a hotel bedroom. That did interest him.

When he dined with his sister that evening, Madeline helped herself to a cigarette from his pack on the table, and lit and smoked it inexpertly. Her defiant, self-satisfied, somewhat pathetic air made Warren laugh. “When the cat’s away, hey?” he said.

“Oh, I’ve been smoking for years,” Madeline said.

* * *

The three blasts of the ship’s horn, the pier girders moving outside the porthole, the band far below crashing out “The Star-Spangled Banner,” touched a spring in Rhoda. She turned to her husband with a smile such as he had not seen on her face for weeks, threw her arms around him, and gave him an aroused kiss, opening her soft familiar lips.

“Well! We made it, Pug, didn’t we? Off to Deutschland. Second honeymoon and all that! Mmm!”

This mild pulse of sex in his hitherto preoccupied and cross wife was like a birthday present to the monogamous Pug. It augured well for the crossing, and possibly for the entire sojourn in Berlin. He pulled her close.

“Well!” Rhoda broke free, with a husky laugh and shiny eyes. “Not so fast, young fellow. I want a drink, that’s what I want, and I don’t care if the sun isn’t over the yardarm. And I know just what I want. Champagne cocktail, or two, or three.”

“Sure. Let’s have it right here. I’ll order a bottle.”

“Nothing doing, Pug. This will be a nice long crossing. We’re getting out of here and going to the bar.”

The ship was clearing the dock and hooting tugs were turning it south, as the deck started to vibrate underfoot.

A crowd of tired-looking jocund voyagers already filled the bar, making a great noise.

“I thought there was a war scare,” Rhoda said. “Nobody here seems to be worried.”

They found two stools at the bar. Rhoda said, holding up her champagne cocktail, “Well, to whom?”

“The kids,” Pug said.

“Ah, yes. Our abandoned nestlings. All right, to the kids.” As she polished off the champagne, Rhoda talked excitedly about the fine accommodations of the
Bremen
. She felt very adventurous, she said, sailing on a German ship these days. “Pug, I wonder if there are any Nazis right here in this bar?” she prattled.

The fat red-faced man sitting next to Rhoda shifted his glance to her. He wore a feathered green hat and he was drinking from a stein.

“Let’s take a walk on deck,” Pug said. “See the Statue of Liberty.”

“No, sir. I want another drink. I’ve seen the Statue of Liberty.”

Pug made a slight peremptory move of a thumb, and Rhoda got off the stool. When anything touched his Navy work, Pug could treat her like a deckhand. He held open a door for her, and in a whipping wind they walked to the stern, where gulls swooped and screeched, and passengers clustered at the rails, watching the Manhattan buildings drift past in brown haze.

Pug said quietly, leaning on a patch of clear rail, “Look, unless we’re in the open air like this, you can assume anything we say on this ship will be recorded, one way or another. At the bar, at the table, or even in our stateroom. Have you thought of that?”

“Well, sort of, but - in our stateroom too! Really?”

Pug nodded.

Rhoda looked thoughtful, then burst out laughing. “You mean - you don’t mean day and night? Pug? Always?”

“That’s what this job is. If they didn’t do it, they’d be sloppy. The Germans aren’t a sloppy people.”

Her mouth curled in female amusement. “Well, then, mister, keep your DISTANCE on this boat, that’s all I can say.”

“It’ll be no different in Berlin.”

“Won’t we have our own house?”

He shrugged. “Kip says you get used to it and don’t think about it. I mean the loss of privacy. You’re just a fish in a glass bowl and that’s that. You can never stop thinking about what you say or do, however.”

“Honestly.” A peculiar look, half-vexed, half-titillated, was on her face. “I can’t imagine why I didn’t think of that. Well! They say love will find a way, but - oh hell. It really couldn’t be less important, could it? Can I have my other drink?”

An engraved card, slid under their cabin door shortly before dinner, invited them to the captain’s table. They debated whether Pug should wear a uniform, and decided against it. The guess turned out to be correct. A German submarine officer at the table, a man as short and as taciturn as Victor Henry, wore a brown business suit. The captain, a paunchy stiff man in gold-buttoned blue, heavily joshed the ladies in slow English or clear German, blue eyes twinkling in his weathered fat face. Now and then he flicked a finger, and a steward in full dress jumped to his side. The captain would crackle a few words, and off the steward would bustle with a terrified face, gesturing at the waiters, long tailcoat flapping. The food was abundant and exquisite, the bowl of white and purple orchids spectacular. The parade of wines worried Pug, for when Rhoda was excited she could drink too much. But she ate heartily, drank normally, and delighted the captain by bantering with him in fluent German.

The submarine man’s wife sat on Henry’s left, a blonde in green low-cut chiffon that lavishly showed big creamy breasts. Pug surprised her into warm laughter by asking if she had ever worked in films. At his right sat a small girl in gray tweed, the daughter of Alistair Tudsbury. Tudsbury was the only real celebrity at the table, a British broadcaster and correspondent, about six feet two, with a big belly, a huge brown moustache, bulging eyes, a heavy veined nose, thick glasses, bearish eyebrows, booming voice, and an enormous appetite. He had arrived at the table laughing, and laughed at whatever was said to him, at almost everything he said himself. He was a very ugly man and his clothes did little to mitigate the ugliness: a brown fuzzy suit, a Tattersall shirt and a copious bow tie. He smoked cigarettes, tiny in his sausage-fat fingers; one expected a pipe or a long black cigar, but the cigarette was always smoldering in his hand, except when he was plying a knife and fork.

For all the forced badinage, it was an awkward meal. Nobody mentioned politics, war, or the Nazis. Even books and plays were risky. In long silences, the slow-rolling ship squeaked and groaned. Victor Henry and the submariner exchanged several appraising glances, but no words. Pug tried once or twice to amuse Tudsbury’s daughter at his right, eliciting only a shy smile. Over the dessert, turning from the blonde - who kept telling him how good his German was - he made one more effort. “I suppose you’re on vacation from school?”

“Well, sort of permanently. I’m twenty-eight.”

“You are? Hm! Sorry. I thought you were about in my daughter’s class. She’s nineteen.” The Tudsbury girl said nothing, so he kept talking. “I hope you took my stupidity as a compliment. Don’t women like to be thought younger than they are?”

“Oh, many people make that mistake, Commander. It comes of my travelling with my father. His eyes are not very good. I help him with his work.”

“That must be interesting.”

“Depending on the subject matter. Nowadays it’s sort of a broken record. Will the little tramp go, or won’t he?”

She took a sip of wine. Commander Henry was brought up short. The “little tramp” was Charlie Chaplin, of course, and by ready transfer, Hitler. She was saying that Tudsbury’s one topic was whether Hitler would start a war. By not dropping her voice, by using a phrase which a German ear would be unlikely to catch, by keeping her face placid, she had managed not only to touch the forbidden subject, but to express a world of contempt, at the captain’s table on the
Bremen
, for the dictator of Germany.

* * *

Half a dozen early-morning walkers were swinging along, looking preoccupied and virtuous, when Pug Henry came out on the cool sunlit deck, after a happy night second honeymooning. He had calculated that five turns would make a mile, and he meant to do fifteen or twenty turns. Rounding the bow to the port side he saw, far down the long deck, the Tudsbury girl coming toward him, pumping her arms and rolling her hips. She wore the same gray suit. “Good morning.” They passed each other with nods and smiles, then on the other side of the ship repeated this ritual. At the third encounter he said, reversing his direction, “Let me join you.”

“Oh, thank you, yes. I feel stupid, preparing to smile forty feet away.”

“Doesn’t your father like to walk before breakfast?”

“He hates all forms of exercise. He’s strong as a bull and nothing he does makes much difference. Anyway right now poor Talky has a touch of gout. It’s his curse.”

“Talky?”

Pamela Tudsbury laughed. “His middle name is Talcott. Since schoolboy days, he’s been ‘Talky’ to his friends. Guess why!” She was moving quite fast. In flat shoes she was very short. She glanced up at him. “Commander, where’s your wife? Also not a walker?”

“Late sleeper. Not that she’ll walk to the corner drugstore if she can drive or hail a cab. Well, what does your father really think? Will the little tramp go?”

She laughed, a keen look brightening her eyes, evidently pleased that he remembered. “He’s come out boldly to the effect that time will tell.”

“What do you think?”

“Me? I just type what
he
thinks. On a special portable with oversize print.” She gestured at three deep-breathing German matrons in tailored suits marching by. “I know that I feel queer sailing on a ship of theirs.”

“Didn’t your father just publish a book? I seem to remember reviews.”