To the End of the War (15 page)

This was not the answer Riley expected. “Will you have to have any more operations?” she asked with composure.

“Probably,” said George sullenly. “Probably several. They say there’s another piece of bone has to come out. The last three operations I’ve had have been the ‘final’ one. This one will be the final one, too.”

“Why, I didn’t know they were as bad as all that,” Riley smiled indulgently. “I’d understood the army had the very best doctors.”

Riley’s open indulgence irked George and he laughed harshly. “Sure,” he said. “The army has all the best food, too. Just try and eat it. There’s a helluva lot more to the army than you people read in the newspapers and magazines.”

Riley was non-plussed but not enough to lose her poise. “Oh, I think we get a pretty fair picture of how things are, back here,” she said with sweet composure. She felt it best to overlook George’s breach of courtesy, although he ought to know that talking rudely would do no good to anybody. It was unlike George to be nasty about things, and complaining. He had always been the type of man who took things as they came and turned them to his own use. It was one of his traits that she most admired.

“Yeah?” said George truculently. “I know a guy who got court-martialed and is doing six months, for refusing to have a minor operation. I wonder if you folks back here ever heard about that one? And there’s plenty more I could mention.” George was a little frightened by his own vehemence; he had no desire to talk to Riley like this. He loved her—more than anything, but she made him squirm by her calm assurance with something she didn’t know anything about. Why didn’t she get off the army and drop it?

“No,” Riley said. “I haven’t heard about it, but I imagine the man did something meriting punishment if he was court-martialed. Even the army can’t be as injust as all that,” she laughed lightly.

George looked at her with quick anger. “That’s what too many people think,” he said slowly, in an effort to control his sudden anger. “You ought to do six months in the army. Then give me your opinion. . . . Let’s forget the army,” he said shortly.

“All right,” said Riley genially. She refused to show that George had hurt her. “You’ll get over it in time,” she smiled sympathetically.

“I hope not,” George said.

It was better to discuss another subject for a while, Riley thought. He really couldn’t be blamed for being biased in his position; at the same time, that was not an excuse for being openly rude. A bitter discourteous husband would certainly not fit in with her plan. George would have to be made over into a gentleman once more.

“What are you wearing to the dance?” Sandy switched to banalities hopefully.

Under his closed lids, Eddie let his eyes run over George’s face. He knew that stubborn, more a sullen look that Riley was having trouble with. It would take a lot more than a conversation to rehabilitate George. He had spent all last night with that wild look of sullen reproach. Eddie’s head ached, and he hoped this battle of undercurrent forces so thinly gilded over with conversation would let up now. He had that old feeling of being in a locked meeting: both sides fighting, both sides demanding, neither willing to concede one inch to the other. If he’d been in one labor-capital meeting like that, he’d been in a thousand, always trying to be the mediator. This was Sunday!

No, he thought, George wouldn’t get over it very soon. And it was a bad thing; it was that bitter frustration and lack of being understood that made fellows go criminal. It was a pity that that sense of protest could not be retained and the bitterness lost. But if one went, the other followed. How many thousands of men had come home from the last war, feeling like George? They stayed bitter just long enough to cause heartache at home, and then they changed. How many came home saying: “By God, this world is screwed up, and I, for one, am going to see that it is changed”? There must have been millions. But when the bitterness left them “in time,” the sense of protest and injustice went toe. Too bad, Eddie thought, too very bad. And now they all, except perhaps a very few, now they all went to American Legion conventions, they got drunk, they gave the “little woman” the slip for a “cutie.” We’ll put over your reforms, the Legion told them, so they joined up. And in a year, the reformer ideas died of their own lack of power. Instead, they get drunk; they went back into the old game of business: “Let the other guy look out for himself.” It was a pity that men always seemed to forget oppression so easily. The Legion, like the unions, got one or two big “executive type” men guiding the reins, and all its political power was used to swing votes for this or that, but never for what the men had originally intended, and the men were too busy getting drunk with “cutie” to bother about it. It seemed that any big organization always always got a “potential capitalist” at the head of it. Those were the kind of men that always headed everything, whether the CIO or General Motors. They had the will and the energy; the dreamer seldom had the energy to make it stick. And if he did, there were always too many forces to break him down.

You “hope not” now, George, Eddie thought; but there’ll come a day when you’ll have a paunch and you’ll slap all the vets on the back and talk about your old outfit as if it was heaven, paradise lost. Leave it up to the younger generation to change the world. You’ll forget what you told me last night; you’ll forget your indignant anger when you were ordered to dump a shipload of fine hams in the California ocean, useless destruction of food your own company would have been glad to have; you’ll forget how you were refused passes and furlough for a whole year, after you got on the shit list for offering suggestions; you’ll forget all those things, George, because you won’t be oppressed anymore. You’ll forget the vomiting hell of combat, the fear, the death, the privation. You’ll forget it all, George, and join the Legion—or whatever they call the vets organization after this war. Poor George. You’ll work and maybe make money.

Eddie felt sad and wished he could get out of this place for a while to rest his aching head.

A man needs to find his work, he mused, rubbing his temples. He thanked God he had found his work. A man’s work is more than the money he makes out of it; he needs to feel it is good, that it helps the things he believes in. Or else the satisfaction is not there. And all the Georges coming home would forget their work needed that.

I told Sandy before she invited you down that I wasn’t going. And I’m not.”

“Don’t be silly,” Riley said soothingly. “I remember you as a man who went his own way and didn’t care what anybody thought.”

“Yeah?” said George defensively. “Well, I still am. And my way is to not go to no goddamned dance. I’m not going out where people are supposed to dance and sit on my can like a damn fool.”

“Really, George,” Sandy said, trying to rectify her error. “You don’t know our dances. Most people go to them and never stir from their chairs in the Grille. They go to drink and have a good time, not to dance.”

“Look, darling,” Riley said. “People like you; you’re a hero to them. They don’t think anything about your leg. You’re acting more adolescent than Jimmy.”

This remark offended George’s dignity. He remembered Riley as a woman who understood him and who wanted to help him. Her letters had certainly never sounded like this.

Eddie listened silently while the two women strove to mollify George and finally succeeded in quieting him. He remembered George’s remarks last night. The women of America, like those of France, had always been the power behind the men, although the American women were much more subtle about it. Eddie was aware of how little he would ever have accomplished had it not been for Sandy’s strength behind him. But the women were going to find it much harder to manage these strangers who came home to them from the war. It might be a good thing, or it might not. But there was going to be a great gulf that would have to be bridged, and it would probably require more patience than most women were used to exerting.

“You’re going to have to learn to live in the world, darling,” Riley was saying with the calm self-assurance of one who has already learned. “There will be lots of fellows worse off than you. I have my life to think of, too, you know. You are going to have to meet my friends. You can’t always be self-conscious about your leg. Nobody likes a man who pities himself.” Riley spoke kindly and with what to her was sincere understanding. After the abatement of her first gust of emotion, she was genuinely taken aback by the change in George. She was glad she was not inclined to be emotional like Sandy and jump right into things.

Eddie with a feeling of discomfiture was remembering that that was what they had told them after the last war: There were always plenty worse off than you were. But it hadn’t helped much. And nobody ever found the man that somebody else was not worse off than. When you called upon a man’s pride to shame him into keeping his mouth shut, you still didn’t take away the source of the trouble; indeed you may have made it worse. When they came home after the last one, they had lived in chicken coops and abandoned shacks, city jails, old boxcars—there was no place for them—and always they were told to remember that there was someone worse off yet than they. The real hero, they were told, the men who had really been there just couldn’t bear to discuss it. So, it naturally followed, anyone who bitched just hadn’t been there and didn’t deserve consideration. There was a tremendous power of vote behind so many voices, but it had been successfully hushed in various ways. Would it be the same after this one? Eddie wondered.

However, love triumphed here, helped by the fact that young Jimmy came back in the house to be near George. And the conversation was dropped, and once more there was peace. It’ll all work out, Riley thought, looking at George with young Jimmy staring up at him adoringly.

“Listen, darling,” Sandy said to Riley. “You folks would like to be alone, I know. Eddie and I will drive out and see the man at the farm and find out when he is going to butcher again. Maybe we can get you some ham and tenderloin to take back to Chicago with you. I imagine it’s pretty short up there.”

“It certainly is,” Riley laughed. “Food’s the only thing I envy about you country gentlemen down here. You might ask about eggs, too, if you’d like.”

They left George and Riley standing in the door with their arms around each other’s waist with the small figure of little Jimmy standing beside them.

“That makes a wonderful picture,” Eddie said slowly. “Perfectly stylized and complete—on the surface. But there are always so many unacknowledged undercurrents that nobody recognizes.”

“It’s that way in every family though,” Sandy said. “I’m sorry I pulled such boners, like mentioning the dance. It’s better if we’re away. And I knew you wanted to get out and get some air. I wonder where it all will end?”

“I guess it won’t end,” Sandy answered her own question. “It will go on and on, always getting a little better, then sliding back a little. But oh, sometimes I wish I could . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“That’s right,” Eddie agreed with her first statement. “This war is only a catalyst that works on the usual forces people are subject to, and heightens them. Its total effect on an individual may be better or worse than without it. But those forces are what have to be kept in mind; it is on them that the work must be put.” He told her his own tale of last night, shaking his head a little ruefully.

Back at the house, Riley sent Jimmy outdoors again—to play. Then she sprang her plan. “I’ve been thinking about it a long time,” she said delightedly. “And I’ve figured out the best plan in the world for us. As soon as you’re discharged, you come into my office. We’ll make a swell business partnership. I’ve got a grand business, especially now, and between us we can run it perfectly. It’s the perfect answer to your problems.”

George was not delighted. “I can’t do that,” he said earnestly. “Don’t you see, honey? I’m a contractor. I don’t know anything about real estate. I like contracting building, not selling houses. I like to work with things, not just sell stuff to people. Besides, that’s your business. You built it and made it. How would it look for me to just meekly take over and work for you.”

“But you wouldn’t be working for me,” Riley protested. “You’d be a partner. The kind of partner anybody’d want in their business. You see, you’d be an addition. Nobody can appraise a house as well as a person who builds them.”

“Yes, but it would amount to working for you. That’s the way everybody would see it. I don’t want to be called Mr. Riley Stafford.”

“Oh, you’re being silly. You sound like a melodrama.”

“I’m not being silly,” George said with an earnest frown, trying to make Riley understand. “And anyway, I don’t want to live in Chicago. I want to live where there’s more trees and air and not miles of streets. If I take this job in Vincennes I’ve been offered, I’ll have enough dough to buy a farm in a few years. I want a farm to live on.”

“We can buy one now,” Riley said. “We could live in the suburbs and commute into town to work. I’ve got a deal for a perfect place, one that you’d love, near Glencoe. I’m willing to adjust in every way.”

“Jesus Christ!” George said. “What the hell? You don’t have to adjust to me. All you have to do is marry me. I don’t need sympathy,” he added belligerently.

Riley refused to become angry. This was not only important to her; it was also important to George. “But you must consider my life, too, darling. I’ve got my own circle of friends and business acquaintances. I don’t want to give them up. I don’t want to subordinate my whole personality to your whims.”

“When a woman really loves a man, that’s what she wants to do,” George persisted.

Leaning on his crutches, he took Riley into his arms again and kissed her. Riley was a little weary with the whole thing; emotion would not substitute for common sense.

“But it’s silly,” she said, squirming free of the embrace. Even Riley’s squirming was done with assurance and poise. “A woman has a right to her own life as much as a man. Besides, I’ve got the business, the necessary connections for success, the capital to work from. It’s silly not to use it; it isn’t good business, even. Just to throw it all away because you are worried about what people will say. No businessman would disregard all those assets.”