Command Decision (6 page)

“You know about Helen, of course, Casey?”

“Sure. Any news yet?”

“Not when I left but she’s due any minute. Ted shouldn’t be flying missions at all, let alone just now.”

He knew that Garnett himself knew better than this. Yet he couldn’t help resenting the intimation that he himself had not thought of that. He spoke more curtly than he intended.

“He gets paid to. General Kane, have you any further need of Captain Jenks?”

Whatever Prescott had whispered to Kane had restored his composure somewhat. He was speaking again to Jenks and with more confidence.

“And after the terrible strain of yesterday you felt unable to take the responsibility of flying a crew again…. You were under shock?”

Jenks got it instantly. “We were all under shock, sir. Two days running beyond fighter cover when you had practically promised us…”

“That’s not exactly what I said.”

Jenks checked quickly. “Well, sir we all knew
you’d
never ask a thing like that, just to make a record. When we learned you’d released the Division to General Dennis and then this came up everyone was shocked.”

“Everyone else went,” said Dennis.

Kane cleared his throat. “General,” he said, “as you know I pride myself on never interfering with the functioning of my subordinate echelons. But in a matter that touches one of our combat boys I know you will forgive an older commander’s concern. With your permission I should like to talk to Captain Jenks alone.”

Dennis dismissed Evans and invited Garnett and Prescott into the Ops room with him, but Kane stopped them. He himself would go into the anteroom with Jenks.

“That civilian’s out there, sir,” said Dennis.

Kane’s voice was tart. “Brockie is my friend, General, and he has a very long head.”

He led Jenks to the anteroom and, with an afterthought, beckoned Prescott to follow them. Dennis shrugged. There was no help for it. He tried to make himself smile cordially as he faced Garnett and waited for some more dirty linen.

Garnett, however, had understood his earlier rebuke. On everything except this lamentable family trouble he was a man of delicacy and perception. Recovering his normal urbanity now, he opened with some remarks about Dennis’s own family. He had made a point of calling on them the day before he left. It was a normal courtesy but it was the kind many men overlooked. His consideration and the fresh letters he now delivered disarmed Dennis.

“They’re fine, Casey, fine, and terribly proud of you.”

Dennis judged that Garnett might be using this as a cover for whatever official business had brought him over, but he was grateful for the chance to forget official business momentarily. The thought of Cathy and his children, especially in such inevitable contrast to poor Ted’s troubles, took him for a minute out of that bleak room. He asked some further questions and warmed himself in Garnett’s ringing reassurances. It was decent of Cliff to have driven way out into Maryland in all the haste and turmoil of his departure. And Cliff genuinely did like his family.

“Lucy carries a picture of you in a cellophane case she made herself, Casey.”

“Yeah?” He was embarrassed but greedy, too. “How’s the kid?”

Garnett smiled. “Young William Mitchell gave me special orders. You’re to destroy all of Germany except one little piece which he wants saved for his first bomb. He means it, too, Casey. He asked me if I thought you could do it.”

Dennis could feel the very thought of that freckle-faced bundle of trouble renewing him. But he could no more share with Cliff than he could with anyone except Cathy the way he felt about his kids. He tried to make himself sound impersonal.

“What did you tell him?”

“Well, I told him with war you never know.”

It was a typically guarded Garnett answer but it shattered the serenity Dennis had momentarily regained. Every time Ted took the Division he reminded himself sternly that it wasn’t as bad as if young William Mitchell were doing it, but the margin was too thin for comfort. He spoke almost to reassure himself.

“Seven and a half years would be pretty bad even for the United Chiefs, Cliff.”

Garnett tensed a little. “Don’t be bitter, Casey. They have their troubles, too.”

Then, sensing Dennis’s instant contrition, he moved immediately to the inevitable topic.

“Helen is worried about Ted, Casey.”

“Is she?”

“Very. You know that always was the real trouble.”

“Was it?”

“Yes. In the early days, especially when you and Ted were testing, she got so she couldn’t even answer the phone. That was why she wouldn’t have kids then. She had no security, even for a day ahead.”

He knew that Garnett realized as well as he did that none of the other girls had had any more security. It was the thing that made him so sensitive about it, so desperate to change it somehow, by talk. But it was past the help of talk and Dennis wanted only to drop the whole subject.

“No?”

“Oh, I know she left him, Casey, but think of her side of it….”

***

Dennis had known from the first that he would never be able to think of her side of it fairly. He had known Helen Garnett since the days when she used to come to Academy Hops. The Garnett size and looks had been designed for men but Helen had the carriage for them and the Garnett habit of authority. Dennis danced with her punctiliously, once at each Hop, as he did with most of the sisters of his classmates. In those days neither Helen nor Cliff encouraged intimacy from Middle Westerners and Dennis did not regret it.

Thereafter he had seen more of her, at closer quarters, on her occasional visits to outlying posts. Dennis and Cathy both liked Cliff’s wife, Natalie; army life forced propinquity upon them and they had exchanged dinners, played cards, alternated in the hospitality of the weekly movies, and loaned and borrowed food and bathtub gin on a dozen dreary fields from Clark to Bolling. Helen’s visits always touched these exiles, for the girls at least, with the fleeting metropolitan glamour of new clothes and hair styles. To the married men she brought the Washington gossip, shrewdly assessed and evaluated by the insight of three generations of family table talk on military politics.

***

To the young bachelor officers who thronged the houses during her visits she brought the gaiety of visiting royalty, brief, bright dreams of a powerful connection and an expert facility for terminating these hopes without undue pain. Even they seemed to understand and approve the Garnetts’ tacit assumption that Helen belonged to a brighter world than the services offered. For all of his normal acuteness Dennis had been a little surprised the first time Cathy had privately pronounced her cold-blooded.

In time the Garnetts and Dennises drifted apart to different posts on different assignment. It was following one of these separations that the Dennises had been ordered, as unexpectedly and inconveniently as always, to Washington during the summer while Cathy was having William Mitchell. The orders were only temporary and had caught them in what was even for them a financial crisis. The sweltering, cockroach-ridden little flat on H Street was one of their few unhappy memories.

By then Ted Martin had become practically a member of the family. With the relative opulence of a bachelor on flying pay he had his own flat in Georgetown, a new car, and an expanding address book which did not run to dowagers. He had come over to the Dennis flat one Sunday with an offer to drive them out of the city heat for dinner just as Cliff was telephoning to ask them across the river for a julep. Cliff had cordially included him in the invitation.

Two of the previous Generals Garnett had married prudently.

While Garnett’s Tree was not a mansion the big hall was cool with the river breeze coming in across the terrace and the old Georgian brick wore the languorous charm of its generations with shabby grace. They had stepped from dazzling sunlight on the blue stone drive into a serene antiquity, just as Helen burst into the opposite terrace door, her black hair vivid against a summery white dress.

She had greeted Cathy and Dennis warmly enough but with the slight inattentiveness she always accorded married people. She had been turning away from her introduction to Ted before the echo of his name caught in her consciousness and she had repeated, as people had begun to repeat that name:

“Not
the
Lieutenant Martin…? Why, Cliff never told me he knew you.”

On the terrace Cliff had introduced them with evident satisfaction to Helen’s fiancé, a prosperous-looking middle-aged stockbroker who sighed amiably over his julep.

“You fellows have all the fun. What are you two going to do next, Captain Dennis?”

They had spent a pleasant afternoon over Cliff’s excellent juleps and departed over Helen’s vociferous insistence that they remain for pickup supper. On the way down the river Cathy had kidded Ted about Helen’s obvious interest in him. Ted had replied indifferently that the brassiere had not yet been made which could keep her from being anything but another Garnett stuffed shirt.

The next morning Helen had called Cathy to ask for Ted’s address and phone number. It happened that that week he had been flying something to Sacramento. In the eight days of his absence Helen had called Cathy three times more.

Ted had been back about six weeks when Garnett came out from the War Department to the hangar one morning to ask Dennis bluntly what he knew about this Lieutenant Martin. The question had astonished Dennis. He had begun to explain what he had very early perceived and now the whole service, in fact the whole country, was beginning to realize about Lieutenant Martin when Garnett cut him short impatiently.

“I know all that. Casey, Helen’s broken her engagement to Morton Collins.”

The connection seemed to him incredible. Ted had not mentioned Helen since that Sunday. He told him this but Garnett only shook his head and then blurted:—

“It’s not as if he’d been at the Point with us. Does he understand
all
the rules, Casey?”

All
the rules meant the unwritten but explicit one that propinquity and boredom had established to protect peacetime tedium: all the brothers were valiant, all the sisters were virtuous. The equally explicit corollary to this rule was that all exceptions to it must be conducted three miles from the flagpole.

He had reassured Garnett as delicately as he could. He knew that Cliff’s judgments were apt to be superficial and in this case probably not untinged with envy. Even by then the experts were trying to dismiss the foundations of the growing Martin legend with the simple explanation of Martin luck. Dennis knew better. There was far more than luck in the perfection of that flying, far more than an aviator in the complexity of the man himself.

Women generally apprehended this more quickly than men. Even as an obscure youngster Martin had always had a wide choice of diversion and had accepted it with the casual, detached amusement he seemed to accord everything except flying itself. Yet Dennis doubted that any woman had ever touched the capacity for thought and feeling locked up in the pilot below the troublesome and insubordinate young lieutenant. He could scarcely tell Cliff that Helen seemed the last woman in the world to do it. He could and did tell him privately that he knew Ted was happily preoccupied in half a dozen other directions.

Garnett had thanked him and gone off glumly. Dennis had forgotten it until in the privacy of their bedroom that night Cathy had remarked that they saw little of Ted lately. She had looked around from her hair combing indignantly as he told her of Cliff’s visit that day.

“Ted indeed! Why doesn’t he teach Helen the rules?”

“Helen?”

“Casey! She had rape in her eye that afternoon.”

He had protested, more to himself than to her; in the first place he didn’t believe it. If it were true, Ted had survived other encounters with that peril.

“No wonder you two can fly blind! Don’t you realize she’d playing for keeps?”

“Well, I don’t know what we can do… Ted’s of age…”

“And she’s three years older. Casey, can’t you order him somewhere?”

He had explained to her that newly created captains did not order people anywhere. Later in the week they accepted a hasty dinner invitation from the Garnetts with foreboding. Ted’s car was in the driveway as they arrived. In the hall Ted and Helen greeted them arm in arm, Ted’s face stiff with an unnatural smile as Helen announced the engagement to them.

The trouble came fast. Three months later Ted had driven into the hangar and the first sight of him told Dennis that he was unfit to fly. Instead of pretending he had beckoned Dennis into the car and slammed the door for privacy.

“Casey, is there any station where officers can’t take wives?”

Dennis had known by then, they had all known, that it was going badly. The finality of this shocked him. It was the first time Ted had spoken of it to him and he fell back on their old habits; they did not beat around the bush with each other.

“Look, Ted; these things adjust themselves in time. And you’ve got the kid to think of…”

“There isn’t any kid,” said Ted. “There never was.”

***

With an effort he pulled his attention back to Garnett, who was still talking.

“…five years in boardinghouses on gold-bar pay… the morning he made first he had to call his C.O. a goddamned fool to his face and get busted before lunch. That afternoon he turned down twelve thousand a year from the best airline in America. What would you have thought?”

It was like an old, old record caught in one groove, repeating again and again a fragment of an unhappy tune. He didn’t mean to sound unsympathetic but what was there to say?

“I’ve always thought he was a rare guy, Cliff.”

“She’s realized that, Casey. She did go back to him.”

“Cliff, what’s all this leading to?”

“Does Ted think she just came back to him and is having that kid because he is pretty secure now?”

“You’ll have to ask Ted what he thinks. It’s his business.”

“Ted and I were never very close,” persisted Garnett. “You know what he thinks of you.”