Winds of War (62 page)

Slote said, “And I tell you, Aaron Jastrow’s quite capable of getting himself out.”

“Aaron Jastrow?” said Tudsbury with an inquisitive lilt. “
A Jew’s Jesus
? Is he your uncle? What’s the story?”

“Will you dance with me?” Pamela said to Pug, jumping up.

“Why, sure.” Knowing how much she disliked dancing, he was puzzled, but he took her hand and they made their way through the jam toward the musicians.

She said as he took her in his arms, “Thanks. Phil Rule was coming to the table. I’ve had enough of him.”

“Who is Phil Rule?”

“Oh - he was the man in my life for a long time. Far too long. I met him in Paris. He was rooming with Leslie Slote. He’d been at Oxford when Leslie was a Rhodes Scholar. Phil’s a correspondent, and an excellent one, but a monster. They’re much alike, a pair of regular rips.”

“Really? Slote’s the brainy quiet type, I thought.”

Pamela’s thin lips twisted in a smile. “Don’t you know they can be the worst? They have pressure-cooker souls, those fellows.” They danced in silence for a while; she was as clumsy as ever. She spoke up cheerily. “I’m engaged to be married.”

“I noticed your ring.”

“Well, it was a good job I didn’t wait for that Navy flier son of yours, wasn’t it?”

“You didn’t give me any encouragement, or I might have worked on it.”

Pamela laughed. “Fat lot of difference that would have made. And Natalie really has your other boy, has she? Well, that’s the end of the available Henrys, then. I made my move in good time.”

“Who is he, Pamela?”

“Let’s see. Ted’s rather hard to describe. Teddy Gallard. From an old Northamptonshire family. He’s nice-looking and rather a lamb, and a bit mad. He’s an actor, but he hadn’t got too far when he joined the RAF. He’s only twenty-eight. That makes him fairly ancient for flying.

He’s in France with a Hurricane squadron.”

After another silence Pug said, “I thought you didn’t like to dance. Especially with Americans.”

“I don’t. But you’re so easy to dance with and so tolerant. The young ones are now doing an insane thing called the shag. One or two have got hold of me and fairly shagged my teeth loose.”

“Well, my style is straight 1914.”

“Possibly that was my year. Or should have been. Oh dear,” she said, as the music changed tempo and some of the younger couples began hopping up and down, “here’s a shag now.”

They walked off the dance floor to a purple plush settee in the foyer, where they sat under a bright bad painting of Queen Mary. Pamela asked for a cigarette and took several puffs, leaning an elbow on her knee. Her low-cut dress of rust-colored lace partly showed a small smooth white bosom; her hair, which on the
Bremen
had been pulled back in a thick bun, hung to her shoulders now in glossy brown waves.

“I have a yen to go home and enlist in the WAAFs.” He said nothing. She cocked her head sideways. “What do you think?”

“Me? I approve.”

“Really? It’s rank disloyalty, isn’t it? Talky’s doing a vital service to England here.”

“He can get another secretary. Your lucky RAF man is there.”

She colored at the word lucky, “It’s not that simple. Talky’s eyes do get tired. He likes to dictate and to have things read to him. He keeps weird hours, works in the bathtub, and so forth.”

“Then he’ll have to indulge his eccentricities a bit less.”

“But is it right just to abandon him?”

“He’s your father, Pamela, not your son.”

Pamela’s eyes glistened at him.

“Well, if i actually do it, we shall have Tudsbury in Lear, for a week or two. ‘
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is, to have a thankless child
!’ - I think the governor will rather enjoy throwing himself into the part at that. Perhaps we should return to him now, Captain Henry.”

He said as they stood and walked to the main reception room, “Why not call me Pug, by the way? Everybody does who knows me.”

“Yes, I heard your wife call you that. What does it mean?”

“Well, at the Naval Academy, anybody named Henry usually gets called Patrick, the way a Rhodes gets labelled Dusty. But there was a ‘Patrick’ Henry in the class above me, and I was a freshman boxer, so I got tagged Pug.”

“You boxed?” Her glance travelled across his shoulders and arms. “Do you still?”

He grinned. “Kind of strenuous. Tennis is my game, when I can get around to it.”

“Oh? I play fair tennis.”

“Well, good. If I ever get to London, maybe we can have a game.”

“Are you -” She hesitated. “Is there any chance of your coming to London?”

“It’s not impossible. There they are, way down there,” Pug said. “Gosh, this room’s mobbed.”

“Natalie seems miserable,” Pamela said.

Pug said, “She just lost her father.”

“Oh? I didn’t know that. Well, she’s grown more attractive, that’s sure. Definitely marrying your boy, is she?”

“It seems so. Maybe you can give
me
advice on that one. I feel she’s too old for him, too smart for him, and just about everything else is wrong with it, except that they’re crazy about each other. Which is something, but not everything.”

“Maybe it won’t come off. There’s many a slip,” Pamela said.

“You never have met Byron. You’d see in a minute what I mean, if you did. He’s really still a baby.”

She mischievously glanced at him and tapped his arm. “You do sound fatherly at that.”

Tudsbury and Slote were in a lusty argument, with Natalie looking sombrely from one to the other.

“I’m not talking about anything he owes England. That’s beside the point,” Tudsbury said striking his empty glass on the table. “It’s his responsibility to the American people as their leader to ring the alarm and get them cracking, if they’re to save their own hides.”

“What about the Chicago quarantine speech?” Slote said. “That was over two years ago, and he’s still trying to live down the warmonger charges. A leader can’t dash ahead around the bend and out of sight. The people still haven’t gotten over their disgust with the First World War. Now here’s another one, brought on by stupid French and British policy. It’s not the time for singing ‘Over There,’ Talky. It just won’t work.”

“And while Roosevelt watches his timing,” said Tudsbury, “Hitler will take half the world. Pamela, be a love and get me another drink. My leg’s killing me.”

“All right.” Pamela docilely walked to the bar.

Tudsbury turned to Henry, “You know the Nazis. Can Roosevelt afford to wait?”

“What choice has he? A few months ago Congress was fighting him just on selling you guns.”

“A few months ago,” Tudsbury said, “Hitler wasn’t overrunning Belgium, Holland, and France, and directly facing you across the water.”

“Lot of water,” said Pug.

Slote slowly beat two fingers with one, like a professor. Talky, let’s review the ABC’s. The old regimes are simply not competent for the industrial age. They’re dead scripts, molted skins. Europe’s made a start on replacing them by a lot of wholesale murder - the usual European approach to problems, and that’s all the First World War was about - and then by resorting to tyrannies of the left or the right. France has simply stagnated and rotted. England’s played its same old upper-crust butterfly comedy, while soothing the workers with gin and the dole. Meantime Roosevelt has absorbed the world revolt into legislation. He has made America the only viable modern free country. It was a stupendous achievement, a peaceful revolution that’s gutted Marxian theory. Nobody wholly grasps that yet. They’ll be writing books about it in the year 2000. Because of it, America’s the power reserve of free mankind. Roosevelt knows that and moves slowly. It’s the last reserve available, ‘the last best hope.’”

Tudsbury was screwing all his heavy features into a mask of disagreement. “Wait, wait, wait. To begin with, none of the New Deal issued from this great revolutionary’s brain. The ideas flooded into Washington with the new people when the administration changed. They were quite derivative ideas, mostly copied from us decadent butterflies. We were a good deal ahead of you in social legislation. – Ah, thank you, Pam. - Now this slow moving can be good politics, but in war it’s a tactic of disaster. Fighting Germany one at a time, we’ll just go down one at a time. Which would be a rather silly end to the English-speaking peoples.”

“We have theatre tickets. Come and have dinner with us,” Slote said, standing and stretching out a hand to Natalie, who rose too. “We’re going to L’Escargot.”

“Thank you. We’re dining with Lord Burne-Wilke. And hoping to inveigle Pug Henry into joining us.”

* * *

Slote bought Natalie as luxurious a dinner as Washington offered, with champagne; took her to a musical comedy at the National Theatre; and brought her back to his apartment, hoping for the best. In a common enough masculine way, he thought that if all went well he could win her back in one night. She had once been his slave; how could such a feeling disappear? At first she had seemed just another conquest. He had long planned a prudent marriage in his thirties to some girl of a rich or well-connected family, after he had had his fun. Natalie Jastrow now put him in a fever that burned up all prudent calculations. Leslie Slote had never wanted anything in his life as he wanted Natalie Jastrow. Her distracted lean look of the moment was peculiarly enticing. He was quite willing to marry her, or to do anything else, to have her again.

He opened his apartment door and snapped on lights. “Ye gods, a quarter to one. Long show. How about a drink?”

“I don’t know. If I’m to search around tomorrow in New York courthouses for Aaron’s documents, I’d better get to bed.”

“Let me see his letter again, Natalie. You mix us a couple of shorties.”

“All right.”

Removing his shoes, jacket, and tie, Slote sank in an armchair, donned black-rimmed glasses, and studied the letter. He took one book after another from the wall - heavy green government tomes, and drank, and read. The ice in both drinks tinkled in the silence.

“Come here.” he said.

Natalie sat on the arm of the couch, under the light. Slote showed her, in a book, State Department rules for naturalized citizens living abroad more than five years. They forfeited citizenship, but the book listed seven exceptions. Some seemed to fit Aaron Jastrow’s case - as when health was a reason for staying abroad, or when a man past sixty and retired had maintained his ties with the United States.

“Aaron’s in hot water on two counts,” Slote said. “There’s this joker about his father’s naturalization. If Aaron actually wasn’t a minor at the time, even by a week or a day, he isn’t an American, technically, and never has been one. But even if he was, he has the five-year problem. I mentioned this to him once, you know. I said he should go back to the United States and stay a few months. I’d just seen too many passport messes crop up on this point, ever since the Nazis took over Germany.” Slote picked up the glasses, went to his kitchenette, and mixed more drinks, continuing to talk. “Aaron’s been a fool. But he’s far from unique. It’s unbelievable how careless and stupid Americans can be about citizenship. In Warsaw a dozen of these foul-ups turned up every week. The best thing now - by far - is to get the Secretary of State to drop a word to Rome. The day that word arrives Aaron will be in the clear.” Padding to the couch in his stocking feet, he handed her a drink and sat beside her. “But trying to unravel any technical problem, however small, through channels scares me. There’s a monumental jam of cases from Europe. It could take Aaron eighteen months. I therefore don’t think there’s much point in your digging around in Bronx courthouses for his alien registration and his father’s naturalization records. Not yet. After all, Aaron’s a distinguished man of letters. I’m hoping the Secretary will shake his head in amusement at the folly of absentminded professors, and shoot off a letter to Rome. I’ll get on this first thing in the morning. He’s a thorough gentleman. It ought to work.”

Natalie stared at him.

He said, “What’s the matter?”

“Oh, nothing.” The girl drank off half her drink, all at once. “It certainly helps to know a man who knows a man, doesn’t it? Well! If I’m to hang around Washington till the end of the week, we’ll have to get me a hotel room, Leslie. I’m certainly not going to stay here after tonight. I feel damned odd even about that. I can still try a few of the hotels.”

“Go ahead. I was on the phone for an hour. Washington in May is impossible. There are four conventions in town.”

“If Byron finds out, God help me.”

“Won’t he believe that I slept on the couch?”

“He’ll have to, if he finds out. Leslie, will you get me permission to go to Italy?”

He compressed his mouth and shook his head. “I told you, the Department’s advising Americans to leave Italy.”

“If I don’t go, Aaron won’t come home.”

“Why? A broken ankle isn’t disabling.”

“He just will never pull himself together and leave. You know that. He’ll dawdle and potter and hope for the best.”

Slote said with a shrug, “I don’t think you want to go there to help Aaron. Not really. You’re just running away, Natalie. Running away, because you’re in way over your with your submarine boy, and shattered by losing your father, and actually don’t know what on earth to do next with yourself.”

“Aren’t you clever!” Natalie clinked the half-full glass down on the table. “I leave in the morning, Slote, if I have to stay at the YWCA. But I’ll make your breakfast first. Do you still eat your eggs turned over and fried to leather?”

“I’ve changed very little, altogether, darling.”

“Good-night.” She closed the bedroom door hard.

Half an hour later Slote, dressed in pajamas and a robe, tapped at the door.

“Yes?” Natalie’s voice was not unfriendly.

“Open up.”

Her faintly smiling face was pink and oily, and over a nightgown she had bought that afternoon she wore a floppy blue robe of his. “Hi. Something on your mind?”

“Care for a nightcap?”

She hesitated. “Oh, why not? I’m wide awake.”

Humming happily, Leslie Slote went to the kitchen and emerged almost immediately with two very dark highballs. Natalie sat on the couch, arms folded, face shiny in the lamplight.