Clemmie (3 page)

And he went up the narrow stairs to the empty bed.

On the night he had too much to drink at the Burneys, he went to sleep very quickly. When the alarm went off he found he felt as bad as he had expected. Maybe a little bit worse. After he had breakfast in a diner, he left the car off at the garage and took a taxi out to the plant on the other side of the river.

It was a day when every possible thing went wrong. When he left at six-thirty, the other offices were empty, and he had forgotten he didn’t have a car. The bus was nearly empty. He ate a tasteless dinner six blocks from home and walked back through the lingering summer twilight, back to the empty house.

It always seemed far emptier by daylight. There were dust motes in the last flat rays of the sun. With his fingertip he made an X in the dust on the top of the gateleg table. “X marks the spot,” he said aloud, and his voice had an empty, eerie sound in the house. All hermits end up talking to themselves, he thought.

He wrote a letter to Maura. He had intended to make it a long letter, but at the end of the second page there didn’t seem to be anything left to say. He told her about the Burneys and managed to make it sound like a pleasant evening. He tried a humorous account of the evil day at the plant, but when he reread it, the humor sounded forced and flat. He was tempted to destroy the letter and try again, but he suspected that the second attempt would be no better. He rolled the envelope into the battered portable he had owned ever since the Wharton School and typed her address:

It was a damn long way away, and half an hour before midnight there—she and the kids would be asleep. He propped the letter where he would see it in the morning.

For a half hour he read a magazine that had come in the mail. Then he tried the five available television channels and found nothing that seemed worth looking at. Five minutes of nine seemed a strange time to go to bed, but there was no one to chide—or care. He made one stiff highball and realized that if he wanted to keep on having ice through the summer, he would have to keep the refrigerator on.

After he was in bed, he found himself thinking again of the Burneys. He imagined they had been glad when he had finally left. And, judging from Alice’s heavy-headed look, the air of dragging languor that had come over her late in the evening, it had not taken them long to hurry to bed after he left. He thought of them and speculated on how she would be, quite idly at first, and suddenly, with both self-disgust and coarse amusement, he realized that he had all the physiological symptoms of strong and immediate physical need.

He turned on his side, trying to compose himself for sleep. He knew he did not want Alice Burney. She was not a type to appeal to him. Rather, he felt the need of anonymous flesh, of an unknown and uncaring warmth
beside him, of an episode where there would be no remorse, regret, guilt or responsibility.

This, he thought, is entirely too trite. My wife has gone to the country, hooray. So I am nervous, restless, jumpy, and perhaps itching for trouble. The Burneys try to be nice, so I find them unspeakably dull.

As he thought of them there came another heavy surge of the curiously uncontrollable desire. It exasperated him, and he decided that the best way to short-circuit the nerve impulse was to think of some dreary problem. Money was easy to think about.

He could remember the bull sessions back in 1938, in the fraternity house on Woodland Avenue. What was the name of the little blond guy? Langer. Bucky Langer. “All you Wharton hotshots aiming for the big buck give me the cramps. Me, I’ll settle for five-thousand bucks a year forever. A nice clean hundred a week.”

There had been many who had agreed with him. It was a nice clean sum. You could see living on it and having a family and getting alone all right. Fifteen thousand would have been gaudy riches. Genuine luxury.

And here I am, he thought. Fourteen-thousand, five-hundred dollars a year. And there’s nothing very gaudy about it. Taxes bring it down to twelve five. Then take out mortgage payments, food, car, insurance, clothes, medical, and there is astonishingly little left. Look how long it took us to save the money for Maura’s trip with the kids. We thought we could make it the summer before last, and then we were positive we could do it last summer, and the only way we could handle it this summer was by cutting corners wherever we could.

They had decided that Maura should visit her people and take the kids. Since their marriage it had become increasingly obvious that her parents would not be able to visit the states. Her father, George Thatcher, had to stop work in 1948 after a heart attack. He had owned and operated a repair garage and automobile agency in Long Melford. The business had been sold. There was a small government pension, plus the income from the proceeds of the sale. Neither George Thatcher nor Maura’s mother felt that he should risk the strain of travel. They had a comfortable home, a garden, a quiet and apparently satisfying
life. Maura’s two sisters were both married and both living in London.

It seemed right that Penny and Puss should see England while they were at the age when they would absorb impressions and remember vividly. At first it had been planned that Craig would fly over for his three-week vacation, but it had not been financially feasible. He would wait out the long, hot summer and they would come back to him, and she would write often.

In the very beginning it seemed to them a miracle that they had found each other, because the very fact of their meeting had depended on so many coincidences, so many variables. Of course the meeting of any two persons who fall in love could be described in the same way, but in their case the coincidences seemed to have a curious drama of their own. But in 1944, of course, drama was not in short supply.

Craig had been a production chaser in the Camden Drop Forge Division of U.S. Automotive on December 6th, 1941. He enlisted on Monday, December 8th, thinking himself both quixotic and noble, refusing to admit that one major aspect in the decision was a boss with whom it seemed impossible for anybody to get along—a man of vile humor and unpredictable rages.

After basic training, because he was rangy, rugged, eager and reasonably well-educated, he had been selected for infantry O.C.S. After graduation he was sent to the Tank School, then assigned to an armored division that was shipped west to train in the California desert.

During those days he sensed that the uniform suited him well. He was baked brown and lean, and the tilt of the cap went nicely with the slight heaviness of his features, the hollows in his cheeks. The deep tan made his eyes bluer and more reckless. And there was the girl named Kath, the nice, tailored, broad-shouldered girl of good family, whom he had picked up in Los Angeles and, after delicate maneuvering, managed to install in an airy room in a small hotel in Riverside. Kath, of inky-black hair, inexplicable tears, and frank and joyous hungers.

It was like a strange marriage, where they had overworked the word love, and agreed that marriage for real
would be unfair to both of them. He could remember being beside her while her sleep was deep, and wondering if he would ever see any of the war, and what would happen to him if he did. Her last name had been MacCullough or MacCullen. He could not remember which.

The division saw action in North Africa. Craig Fitz, First Lieutenant, AUS, Ser. 0-776557, saw ten minutes of the shooting war. He was in the lead tank and they were unbuttoned because combat intelligence reports had indicated they were five miles from trouble. But some stuff had sneaked through in the night and it was in a draw. When the first .88 hit between the bogie wheels, the M3A1 medium tank bloomed into junk and Fitz was blown up out of the unbuttoned hatch, scraping meat from the top of his thighs. He landed with his legs afire and he scrambled away from the furnace that had been his vehicle, and put out the fire with sand. After the action had moved away from him, he lay in the hole he had scooped with his hands and wept from pain, humiliation and shock. The broken tanks cooked and there was a horrid meaty crackling in the heart of the flames. A long time later they came and got him.

First was the field hospital, then the station hospital and then the general hospital—a big ward where burns were a specialty and pain was of a uniquely savage brand. The legs were not too bad with the exception of the deep burn behind the knee of the right leg and some tendon damage.

He had time to think, and to wonder that he had been able to think of this war in the juvenile terms of the sports field, or the cheap movie. The good guys and the bad guys. It wasn’t like that. And he didn’t want any more of it. Not in this lifetime. The first shot his crew had heard had fried them.

After weeks of the excruciating exercises designed to stretch the pinched tendons to their normal length, he was returned to limited duty and assigned to the casual officers’ pool in a replacement depot. In time he was reassigned to staff duty in London. He reported, thin and tanned and tired, with a slight limp, three ribbons and a small black and arrogantly bushy mustache.

He was given undemanding work in Theatre G-4, in the Armored Vehicles Section of the Theatre Ordnance Officer.
He would work two or three hours a day for a week or two, and then have to work twenty hours straight on a priority report. He lived in a small, ancient and incredibly uncomfortable hotel, sharing a room with a fat, bald Lieutenant named Schiffler who kept odd hours and was very uncommunicative. Those first months in London were unreal. He felt gray and soured and out of touch with existence—half alive. He drank, but it made him feel more remote. He did not feel the need of friends or women.

Then, in November—the month the Russians retook Kiev and the Marines took Tarawa—Craig met Maura. One of the British intelligence groups sent over some classified material by courier. He had to sign for it. The courier was a blonde girl named Yeoman Thatcher, and she was wearing one of the most extraordinarily ugly uniforms he had ever seen. It was of coarse, lumpy gray wool with a dingy red piping, with a beret that was curiously shapeless and had a wilted red pompon on top. Her stockings were white and heavy, and her shoes were black and sensible.

But under the uniform was girl. Undeniable girl. She snapped into one of those prolonged, vibrating British salutes. Her round young face had clarity and loveliness, gray eyes wide-set, brows heavy and two shades darker than her blonde hair, color blooming in her cheeks, lips pink as a child’s. She swung her arm down and clapped her hand smartly against her young thigh, and it seemed to him there was something extraordinarily touching about her, an awkward youngness. Under the ugliness of the wool her breasts were high and round, her waist narrow, her hips hearty, her long round legs balancing the pelvic basket neatly and delicately. She was, he guessed, about twenty, and she had the solemnity of a child playing an adult game. He wondered if the faint glint of mockery in her eyes was imagined.

She took the documents from the battered dispatch case she wore slung on a shoulder strap and handed them to him along with the receipt. After he had signed it, she stepped back and gave him that monstrous salute again. He wanted to keep her there for a time.

“Please sit down while I look these over. I may have a message to go back.”

She hesitated, then sat on the edge of a chair, ankles
and knees together, back straight, hands resting in her lap. He was completely aware of her there as he read through the documents. He put them aside and said, “I’m afraid I don’t know that uniform, Yeoman.”

“I’m a fanny, sir,” she said quite distinctly.

“I beg your pardon!”

“F. A. N. Y. First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, sir. But we haven’t done any nursing since the Boer War. Now we work at—this sort of thing.” Her voice had a precision, pitch, and clarity that he found most charming.

“Did you inherit the uniform from the Boer War?”

She smiled ruefully and touched her sleeve. “Horrid, I know. Makes me feel rather like a wash hamper.”

“Been in it long?”

“Two years and a bit, sir. Is there a chit to go back? They’ll wonder what kept me.”

“No message, Yeoman. Is that what I call you?”

She stood up. “Right, sir. If I should be sent again and you find it odd to say Yeoman, you might call me Thatcher. That is correct, also.”

Again came the great, sweeping, quivering, incredible salute, and she spun about and was gone. It was some time before he could get back to work.

It took him two weeks to arrange to see her again. He made contact through a Captain Hallowell who lived in the same hotel and had been seen with a girl in the same uniform, regularly. After he made friends with Hallowell, the man agreed to check on Yeoman Thatcher for him. He came back with a detailed report.

“Maura Thatcher, her name is. She’s twenty. From Suffolk. Ella says she’s very nice. Sound, middle-class background. She’s been with the outfit for two years. She’s unattached. She was in love with a Lancaster pilot who copped it in the Cologne do in May last year, and Ella says she’s still broody about it. No dates. The other gals wish she would date somebody nice. But they’re wary of us Americans. With reason. I gave you the big buildup. Ella is going to try to fix it up.”

Hallowell reported later that Ella had talked to Maura and Maura had remembered him and agreed to go out. The date was set. They picked up the two girls at the FANY billet and took them to a small supper club. The girls were not in uniform. Ella was a flashing and decisive
brunette in her middle twenties. Maura was lovely in pale blue. It seemed to require a conscious effort for him to stop looking at her. She seemed shy and subdued, answering when spoken to, but never initiating any comment. When he looked at her round arms, at the good lines of her shoulders, at the softness of her throat dropping away to the bodice of the blue gown, he felt flushed and breathless. Her conversation during the evening was so automatic, so uninspired, he would have thought her dull had he not caught, from time to time, a quickness of the gray eyes, sudden glances at him that were perceptive and alive.