The Young Apollo and Other Stories (12 page)

"I can't say that I rise as high as that," was Linda's comment. "But I readily admit that Trollope has got me through some rough times in the Canal Zone."

"Well, of course, I'm fortunate in having the daily drama at the embassy before me," Stuart put in with his customary condescension. "Keeping an eye on the devilish international intrigues of Latin America provides a shelf of whodunits for me. Some may think we're a remote post in this war, but the German agents are everywhere."

Conrad had a jeep at his service and took Linda back to her hotel after dropping Stuart off.

"War was made for the Stuart Frasers of this world," he told her, but in a tone devoid of spite. "They can enjoy every minute of it, and when it's over and we've won, can't you see His Excellency Ambassador Fraser telling off one minor Latin dictator after another? Oh, Stuart will always be magnificent. Some men have to develop an air of greatness to go with their achieved importance. Stuart will develop greatness to go with his already achieved air of it."

"I didn't imagine you were the best of friends."

"Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm very fond of Stuart. He's a friend from boyhood, and we always have special tolerances for such. Besides, he's basically well-meaning. But I like to take him in small doses. Not the way I like to take you, Mrs. Griswold."

"Linda, please."

"Unlike you, Linda. May I see you again? For dinner? I know you're married, and I'm sure happily married. I wouldn't be such a silly ass as to think I could cause even a ripple on that. But just a friendly dinner?"

"You're not married, I take it."

"No, my wife, like Henry VIII in Shakespeare's last play, found 'metal more attractive.'"

"She had little taste, then. Of course I'll have dinner with you."

"Not just to keep the navy happy?"

"Well, that too."

In the following fortnight they dined together four times, always in the same little restaurant chosen by him. They avoided the Union Club and Stuart Fraser; nor did they see fit to tell him of their meetings. The embassy secretary had ceased to exist for them. The bond they shared was a past, a past of blessed things that, brought up in lively but nostalgic discussions, seemed to illuminate a dreary war-torn world. It was not, for either of them, so much the past that had immediately preceded Armageddon; it was rather the past of childhood and the loss of innocence, which now seemed almost the loss of everything. Linda's husband, for example, despite her long acquaintance with him, figured as a near stranger to her reminiscences; it was as if this beautiful and pensive and mildly melancholy submarine lieutenant had been the sole companion of those days of yore.

"My wife used to say I was Peter Pan," he confessed. "And she didn't mean it kindly, either. She hated my being a schoolteacher. She had taken for granted when we were married that I would eventually have a job in my father's brokerage house. But when I got that sudden offer to teach at Saint Jude's and jumped at it, she accused me of crawling back into the nursery. Perhaps I was."

"And she hated Saint Jude's?"

"
Hated
isn't strong enough. She didn't last there a year. She bolted and shed me and married an old beau of hers who
had
gone into Daddy's firm. And I have to be fair to her. The happiest days of mine
were
my schooldays at Saint Jude's. It was there I met Shelley and Keats and, of course, Shakespeare. I loved the friends and the sports and the lovely green campus and the tower of the Gothic chapel. Oh, I was like that poem of Matthew Arnold's, 'Rugby Chapel'! I even had a religious phase."

"How I see it!" she exclaimed. "I was that way at Saint Timothy's. The springtime of life! We should have known it couldn't last. Maybe you
did
know. For you'll never be a poet, Conrad. An unhappy childhood is an essential preliminary to great art."

"You're so right!" he retorted with a laugh. "Happiness is fatal." He looked at her for a quiet moment. "And I'm happy right now."

What saved him from any diminution in her eyes was a nostalgia that she recognized as even greater than her own; what guarded his masculinity from the least tint of weakness was the only too obvious fact that he was a warrior who had been tried and tested in combat, that he was able to master the complicated machinery of an undersea vessel, that if he had ever known fear, it must have been largely overcome. At night she shivered even in the Panamanian heat at the suffocating sense of being trapped in that cigar-shaped tube deep below the surface as depth charges detonated around it. Yet he never talked about it, nor did she presume to ask.

After their second dinner, she knew she was in love with him and felt not the smallest twinge of guilt or the least pang at her disloyalty to Thad. What she was going through was so utterly her own affair that it seemed to have nothing to do with the past, or even, for that matter, with the future. It was an interlude, an elating interlude, and she was determined—well, perhaps not so much determined as re-signed—to let it have its full sway over her.

She was hardly surprised on their third evening together when he said suddenly, "Of course, I'm in love with you. How could I not be? But you needn't worry. Nothing is going to come of it. Your husband is never going to get a 'Dear John' letter as a result of anything I do or don't do. And don't feel you have to comment on this. I just had to let you know, that's all. And that's bad enough of me. Now let's talk about anything else. How long, for example, you plan to stay in the Canal Zone."

Linda, her heart full of joy, knew she could take him at his word. He was too much a gentleman to extract from her the avowal of a love of which he was only too well aware. She took a long sip of her wine and then replied, in the flattest voice she could muster, "Pretty soon, I think. But not, certainly, before you sail."

He nodded slowly as he took this in. "Thank you, my dear. But that should be any day now."

And it was. On their fourth evening he announced that his vessel was due to sail on the morrow. But she was ready for it.

"Then this is our last night together. Do you have to spend it onboard?"

"No. Everything's ready. I have till eight tomorrow morning."

She had rehearsed her lines. "Then there's something I think you and I ought to do. It may be our last time together."

He reached across the table to take her hand. "You're sure?"

"Of course I'm sure. Aren't you?"

"On one condition only. If you can promise me it won't break up your marriage."

"It has nothing to do with my marriage!" she exclaimed, almost with a note of shrillness. "Oh, I know people say that. But it still can be true!"

He closed his eyes for a silent moment. "I can't fight this," he said simply. "Let's go to your place."

It was, God knew, if God were watching, a simple enough and common coupling, but it was still unlike anything she had imagined, and certainly unlike her unions with Thad. Nor did she feel the least shame or regret afterward, when he had left her; it was almost—however odd this might seem, and indeed it seemed very odd—as if she had been to church. She didn't regret that he hadn't come into her life before, that he had not been her husband. She felt only a fierce gratitude that he had come at all.

Linda stayed on in the Canal Zone for several months after the departure of Conrad's submarine. She had been earnestly persuaded by her boss to remain at her post, and besides, the war was coming to a conclusion. She and Conrad had agreed not to correspond; it was part of their resolution—or at least part of
his
—that they would do nothing more that would tend to break up her marriage, and she thought a period of continued isolation in Central America might help her to adjust her spirits to taking up her life again with Thad when peace came.

Thad's letters had been cheerful and newsy; he had been taken off convoy duty when the submarine threat had eased and assigned to shore duty as the executive officer of a naval section base in one of the English Channel ports. He wrote a good deal about Britain and some of his new British friends; he was still apparently his old tolerant and accepting self. She wondered if going back to her old life wouldn't be like awakening to a rather dull and routine but certainly not disagreeable existence after a blissful but fantastic dream.

And then one morning Stuart Fraser, calling on the Admiral on official business, stopped by her desk on his way out.

"Do you remember Conrad Vogt, Linda? The submarine officer we dined with some months ago at the Union Club?"

She stared; her heart seemed to stop. "I remember him," she half whispered.

Stuart noticed nothing unusual in her response. "His submarine was lost off the coast of Okinawa. Blown up, of all things, by a kamikaze that caught it on the surface."

"He's lost, then?"

"Oh, yes, with all on board. Horrible, isn't it? But then everything in this war is horrible. Thank God it'll soon be over. Would you be free for dinner some night this week?"

"I'll see," she muttered. "I'll call you." And he left.

She didn't plead illness and flee to her quarters. She simply sat dumbly at her desk for the rest of the afternoon. Fortunately it was not a busy day; her boss was in conference, and she was left to the silent entertainment of her agony. She kept saying over and over to herself that at least she had had that night, that single night; she clenched her fists as if she were holding their time together tight. There was that, only that. The rest of the world, the rest of her life, was something altogether separate. But she knew that the crash of a hissing sea as it burst over a stricken vessel was never to be muted in her inner ear.

***

When Thad came back to New York, released from the navy, she had already reoccupied and redecorated their old apartment. Their reunion had its awkward, its inevitably stiff moments, but both had the intelligence to recognize that many of their friends were undergoing the same experience, and on the whole the thing was managed pleasantly enough. He professed to find her unchanged—"as beautiful as a movie star," as he rather tritely observed—and she found in him some of the old exuberance, but a bit chastened. He was thinner and paler and inclined to sudden silences. They agreed to take their time before renewing old intimacies. They would not, for example, sleep together for the first few nights.

And then one evening he told her, almost solemnly, that he had booked a table at a very expensive French restaurant. "I have something to confess to you that needs the best of food and wine."

"Some limey gal, I suppose," she retorted with what she intended to be a sophisticated shrug. "I've seen what you men were up to in Panama. Don't worry. The war has taught me a perhaps excessive tolerance."

"Well, you'll see," was his enigmatic reply.

She wondered whether this might not be the time to tell him about Conrad. Wouldn't it be something of a fraud to conceal from the partner of her life—as Thad was destined now to be—that a substantial part of her soul and being did not, and never could, belong to him? That even if she were forever faithful and became the mother of his children, it still behooved her to build their joint lives upon a declared truth? But she would hear him first on the subject of his limey hussy or hussies. As if she cared!

At their table in a secluded alcove, with a bottle of Haut Brion and two martinis apiece already consumed, Thad slowly and with difficulty told his tale.

An English woman serving as his secretary at the section base in Falmouth, whose husband was serving with the Royal Navy in the Indian Ocean, had become his right hand in administration, then his close friend, and at last his mistress. She had broken off their relationship abruptly when her spouse had been unexpectedly invalided out of the service and came home and had passionately vowed never to see him again. Nor had she. The break had been final.

"The reason I'm telling you this, Linda, is that it was no fly-by-night affair. I was in love. Deeply in love. It was unlike anything that ever happened to me before. Now it's over. But it was a part of me that I thought you ought to know about. If you choose to leave me now, I'll make it easy for you, financially and legally. But my hope is that we might build a new life together."

Linda was so startled by the clash of emotions within her that for several moments she felt almost dizzy. It was as if she had walked into her old life and collided with a stranger. Under her surprise was a kind of muffled anger, a resentment that he could so complacently tell her of his wonderful experience. Resentment of the English woman? Not in the least. The woman had no reality to her; she could hardly be jealous of a wraith. No, it was resentment that he—the likes of
him
—should aspire to something as precious as she had had with Conrad! That he should intrude himself in the same heaven as her! For if Thad could have such a love in his life, couldn't anybody? Was her one exquisite night with Conrad to lose its unique magic in the desert of her wartime disillusionment? Would it have to take its place with all the Canal Zone couplings, with all the scatological chatter at the bars and barracks, with the appalling nothingness of military stagnation?

"Are you totally disgusted with me?" Thad asked. "I can't blame you if you are."

"No, it's not that. It's just something I need a little time to adjust to. Perhaps I should even be glad that you had something like that to make up for what the war has done to all of us. Perhaps it is right that
everyone
should have the blessing of love. Only there has to be a part of me that begrudges it to you."

"I'm glad of that part, Linda. Very glad. It gives me a ray of hope for our future."

"Because you think it shows I care?"

"Well, mightn't it? Just a little? I know I can care for you a great deal if you can care for me the least bit."

He reached for her hand, and she allowed him to take it.

"And now," he pursued, "do you have anything to tell me?"

Again she was silent for several moments. But she knew now that she was never going to tell him about Conrad. She was sure, with a sudden spasm of conviction, that the only way to preserve that throbbing memory alive within herself—and maybe even to live on it—was to share it with no one. Oh, maybe one distant day with a beloved and sympathetic daughter—who knew? Did that mean it was too frail to subject it to the common stare? Perhaps. What of it? Frail things can be precious.