American Front (59 page)

The motorcar carrying Jacob Colleton kicked up a plume of red-brown dust as it came up the path toward Marshlands. “Is everything ready?” Anne Colleton demanded of Scipio, her voice harsh.

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered; she would have been astonished to hear him say anything else. “The room is waiting for him. Dr. Benveniste should be here momentarily, and we are prepared to do all we can.”

“All we can,” Anne echoed. There in the back seat of the motorcar sat her brother, stiff and pale as a mannequin. He’d be sitting or standing for a long time, maybe for the rest of his life. If he lay down, the telegram had warned her, the fluids in his gas-ravaged lungs were liable to choke him to death.

She opened the door as the motorcar jounced to a stop. Scipio rolled out the wheeled chair that had belonged to her great-grandfather after he started having strokes. But he’d been an old man. Jacob should have had a long, healthy life stretching ahead. It might still be long. The question was, did Jacob wish it would be short?

The Negro chauffeur (Anne wondered if he was the man who’d driven Tom down from Columbia, but who paid enough attention to Negroes to be sure?) opened the door so Jacob could get out of the motorcar. The effort of sliding over, getting out, and walking two steps to the chair set him coughing, and that set him groaning. He sighed when he sat in the chair, and that made him groan anew.

Anne gave the chauffeur two dollars. “Thank you, ma’am!” he exclaimed, tipping his cap. The grin was broad and white across his black face; she’d greatly overpaid him. She didn’t care. Her brother was worth it. The Negro climbed back into the automobile, put it in reverse so he could turn away from the mansion and the people who had come out of it, and drove off.

Jacob Colleton looked up at his sister. “Not quite the homecoming I had in mind when I went off to war,” he said. His voice was a rasping whisper, as if he were a hundred years old and had smoked a hundred cigars a day for every one of those years.

“You hush, Jacob. We’ll make you as comfortable as we can,” Anne replied. Her brother’s voice, so far from the vibrant baritone she remembered, made her grind her teeth at the inadequacy of what she’d just said. So did the purple circles under his eyes, almost the only color in his corpse-pale face. “You’re coming home a hero, the same way they did after the War of Secession.”

“A hero?” His laugh was a coughing wheeze. “I’d had two cups of coffee and I was on my way to the latrine when the damnyankees gassed us. Only fool luck my men took me with ’em when they fell back. Otherwise I’d be in a prison camp or a Yankee hospital. Not a damn thing heroic about it.”

Speaking so much gave him color, but not of a healthy sort; his whole face turned a leaden violet, as if he were being strangled. And so he was, from the inside out. He sounded much the way Tom had, too, utterly forgetful of the patriotism that had sent him rushing to join the fight against the USA.

“When we get you to your room, what can we bring you?” Anne asked.

“Whiskey,” Jacob answered. “Morphia, if you can lay hold of it.”

“Dr. Benveniste is on his way,” she said. “He’ll prescribe it.”
If he doesn’t, he’ll be sorry
. She nodded to Scipio. “Take him upstairs. We’ll discuss permanent service arrangements for him shortly.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the butler said, and then, to Jacob, “I’ll be as careful as I can, sir.”

Jacob let out a sound full of pain only once, when Scipio had trouble getting the chair smoothly over the threshold. Then, in the front hall, he had to stop, because Marcel Duchamp was standing there and would not move. The artist stared avidly at Jacob Colleton. “Modern man as defective part in the assembly line of war,” he murmured. “Or is it man as perfect part?—the end product of what war is designed to produce.”

He probably did not mean to be offensive; he must have seen Jacob not as Anne’s injured brother but as an inspiration for art. At that moment, she did not care what he meant. “Get out,” she said in a cold, deadly voice. “Pack your paintings and be gone from this house by tomorrow.”

“But where shall I go?” Duchamp exclaimed in horror, sweat beading on his forehead.

“You can go to Columbia. You can go to Charleston. Or, for that matter, you can go to hell,” Anne told him crisply. “I don’t care. You are no longer welcome here.” He tried to outstare her, to will her into changing her mind. Men had tried that with her before, and all of them had gone away defeated. So did Marcel Duchamp.

Then he tried for the last word: “You are not modern. You are only a rich atavism, playing with the new but belonging to the old.”

That held enough truth to hurt. Looking down at poor Jacob, Anne saw how important things like the ties of family truly were to her. If those things had a smaller place in the world Duchamp inhabited, she would turn her back on that world, or on the parts of it she did not care for. She let the Frenchman see none of that. “I’ll take my chances,” she said. “And what I told you stands. Now get out of the way, or I’ll throw you out this instant.”

“Should have thrown him out before he got here,” Jacob croaked; like Tom, he’d had no use for the exhibition of modern art. “But you don’t need to throw him out now on account of me. Far as I can see, he was right. That’s what war does: makes lots and lots of things just like me.”

“Take him upstairs, Scipio.” Anne didn’t directly answer her brother, but she was never one to change her mind once she’d made it up. Duchamp would go, or she would throw him out.

Dr. Saul Benveniste arrived a few minutes later: a short, dark, clever man who looked, she thought, as Confederate founding father Judah P. Benjamin might have looked were he as thin as Alexander Stephens. The doctor went upstairs and came down a few minutes later. “I’ve given him morphia,” he said. “I’ll leave a supply here so you can give him more whenever the pain is very bad. Past that—” He spread his hands and shrugged.

“Is there any treatment you can give?” Anne asked. “Something that will make his lungs better, I mean, not just something to relieve the pain.”

“I don’t know of any,” the doctor answered, his brown eyes mournful. “But then, nobody knows much about the business of poisonous gases, though I expect we’ll all learn. You have to understand—the tissue in there is burned. I can’t repair that from the outside. Breathing warm, moist air may help, and Marshlands has a good supply of that. He may heal some on his own, too. I can’t really offer a long-term prognosis. I’m too ignorant.”

“Thank you for being honest with me,” she said.

“I’ll do everything I can for him,” Benveniste said. “I don’t want you to get any exaggerated notions of how much that’s likely to be, though.”

“Thank you,” Anne repeated. Then she said, “He wants whiskey. Will having it make him worse?”

“His lungs, you mean? I don’t see why,” Dr. Benveniste told her. “Most of the time, I don’t have much good to say about drinking whiskey. Now, though—” He shrugged again. “If he hurts less drunk, is that so bad?”

“Not in the least,” she said. “All right, Doctor. I’ll call you as I need you.” Benveniste nodded and left. His Ford started up with a bang and a belch, then rattled away.

Anne went upstairs. Her brother was sitting up in bed, propped up by pillows. He had a bit more color than when he’d arrived at Marshlands. Nodding to Anne, he said, “Here I am, a relic of war,” in his ruined voice.

“Dr. Benveniste said they might come up with new ways to make you better before too long,” Anne told him. Dr. Benveniste hadn’t quite said that, but he had said he didn’t know much about treating poison-gas cases, so surely he and other medical men would be learning new things about them. And giving her brother hope counted a good deal, too.

“Best thing he could have done for me was shoot me through the head,” Jacob said. “Morphia’s the next best thing, though. I’m still on fire inside, but it’s not as big a fire.” He yawned; the drug was making him sleepy. Though his bedroom was rather dim, the pupils of his gray eyes were as small as if he’d been in bright sunshine.

He yawned again, then started to say something. The words turned into a soft snore. Without his seeming to realize it, his eyelids slid shut. The snore got deeper, raspier; Anne could hear the breath bubbling in and out of his tormented lungs, as if he had pneumonia.

She walked out into the hall and called one of the servants. “Julia!” When the Negro woman had come into Jacob’s bedroom, she said, “I want you to sit here and make sure my brother does not lie down, no matter what. If he starts to slump away from the pillows that are supporting him, you are to straighten him up. Someone will have to be here all the time when he’s asleep. I’ll make arrangements with Scipio for that. Do you understand what I’ve told you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Julia said. “Don’ let Mistuh Jacob lay hisself down, no matter what.”

“That’s right. You stay here till he wakes up or till someone takes your place.” When Julia nodded again. Anne went out of the room, half closing the door behind her. Quite cold-bloodedly, she decided to arrange for Jacob’s tenders to be chosen from among the younger, better-looking wenches of the household. She didn’t know whether, injured as he was, he would be able to do anything with them or have them do anything for him. If he could, she would give him the chance.

In her office, a few doors down from Jacob’s room, the telephone rang. She hurried down the hallway, the silk of her dress rustling around her ankles. Picking up the earpiece, she spoke into the mouthpiece: “Anne Colleton.”

“How do, Miss Anne?” The voice on the other end of the line had a back-country rasp to it: not a Carolina accent at all, and certainly not the almost English phrasing of her broker, who was the likeliest person to call at this hour and who came from an old Charleston family. She couldn’t immediately place who this caller was, though he did sound vaguely familiar. When she didn’t say anything for a few seconds, he went on, “This here’s Roger Kimball, Miss Anne. How are you?”

She needed a moment to place the name, even though he’d written to her more than once after their encounter on the train to New Orleans; the randy submersible skipper. “Hello, Lieutenant Kimball,” she said. “I’m well, thank you. I didn’t expect to hear from you. Where are you calling from?”

“Lieutenant Commander Kimball now,” he told her proudly, “though I reckon you know me well enough to call me Roger.” That was true in a biblical sense, but probably in no other. “Where am I at? I’m in Charleston, that’s where. Fishing over on the other coast is so bad, they moved a good many of us back here.”

“I wish you luck with your fishing,” Anne said. That was true. After what the damnyankees had done to her brother, she wanted every ship flying their flag to go straight to the bottom of the sea. True or not, though, she wished she’d phrased it differently. Kimball would think…

Kimball did think. “Since I’m so close now, I was figurin’ on gettin’ me some liberty time, and then comin’ up there and…” He let his voice fade, but she knew what he had in mind. Since she’d already given herself to him, he thought he could have her any time he wanted.

That she’d made a related calculation about Jacob and her serving women never once entered her mind. What did enter it was anger. “Lieutenant Commander Kimball, my brother just now came from the Western Kentucky front, suffering from chlorine in the lungs. I am not really in the best of positions to entertain visitors”—let him take that however he would—“at the present time.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that, Miss Anne,” the submariner said after a short silence.
Sorry to hear which?
Anne wondered.
That Jacob’s been gassed, or that I won’t let you lay me right now?
No sooner had the thought crossed her mind than Kimball continued, “That chlorine, that’s filthy stuff, by everything I’ve heard tell about it. I hope your brother didn’t get it too bad.”

“It isn’t good,” Anne said, a larger admission than she would have made to someone with whom she was socially more intimate. The physical intimacy she’d known with Kimball was of different substance, somehow; despite it, the two of them remained near-strangers.

“I really do hope he gets better,” Kimball said, and then, half to himself, “Nice to know there’s
somethin
’ in this war you don’t have to worry about aboard a submersible.” That brief bit of self-reflection done, he went on, “All right, I won’t come up there right away—you’ll be busy and all. Maybe in a few weeks, after I make a patrol or two.”

His arrogance was breathtaking, so much so that Anne, instead of going from mere anger to fury, admired the quality of his nerve He
had
been enjoyable, on the train and in New Orleans, a town made for enjoyment if ever there was one. Thinking about Jacob, she also thought she was liable to need relief from thinking about Jacob. She tapped a fingernail on the telephone case; indecision was unlike her. “All right, Roger, maybe in a few weeks,” she said at last, but then warned, “Do telephone first.”

“I promise, Miss Anne,” he said. She didn’t know what his promises were worth, but thought him likely to keep that one. He started whistling before he hung up the telephone. Anne wished she had any reason to be so happy.

George Enos set his gutting knife down on the deck of the steam trawler
Spray
, opened the ice-filled hold, and threw in the haddock and halibut he’d just finished cleaning. Then he went back to the latest load of fish the trawl had just scooped up from the bottom of Brown’s Bank.

The seaman who was helping him clean the fish, a fellow named Harvey Kemmel who spoke with a harsh Midwestern accent utterly unlike Enos’ New England dialect, wiped his face on his sleeve and said, “This here fishing for a living, it’s damned hard work, you know?”

“I had noticed that, as a matter of fact,” George answered dryly as he yanked another squirming halibut up off the deck, slit its belly open, and pulled out the guts. He tossed the fish into the hold and grabbed another one.

Patrick O’Donnell came aft, a mug of the Cookie’s good coffee clamped in his right hand. With his left, he slapped the side of the hold. “Nice the boat’s so much like the
Ripple
,” he said. “Means I don’t hardly have to think to know where things are at.”