War and Remembrance (43 page)

Through a gap in the crowd, Victor Henry could see Pamela and Aster
at the bar, still in merry converse. All right, Pug thought. Suppose this able officer, back from a brilliant war patrol, likes Pam and she likes him? What’s objectionable in that? What claim have I on her, and how would I propose to execute a claim if I had one?

“Sure, ask him, by all means. If you find yourself a nice girl, ask her.”

“I’ve got one.”

“Fine! And on second thought, bring me a rum Collins with some hair on its chest.”

“Now you’re talking.” Byron gave his father a one-armed hug, and startled Victor Henry to his bones by muttering indistinctly, “I love you,” or “God love you.” The father wasn’t sure which.

Off Byron lurched toward the long bar under the striped tent, where Janice was talking to an Army general with thick white hair. Pug saw her wave excitedly to Byron. Beside her Pamela and Aster were laughing into each other’s eyes. Victor Henry smiled at his own ridiculous pain; then he realized that the white-haired Army man was Senator Lacouture. He strode to the bar. “Hello there, General! Welcome, and congratulations.”

“Why thanks, Pug.” The brigadier general’s uniform was bandbox new, the brass buttons too bright. The senator’s plethoric face radiated good humor. “Yes, I’m still getting used to it! Why, General Richardson’s driver met me at the airport, and zoom! —whisked me straight to this party. I think I’m going to like the Army, ha ha!”

Byron said to his father in a flat frigid sober voice, “She’s not on that boat.”

“What!”

“They detained her and Jastrow. She’s still in Siena. All the other Americans are coming home but not her.”

“Yes, but don’t worry, young man,” said Lacouture cheerily. “Somebody at State slipped up, not to notify you by cable. Sorry I had the wrong information. It’s a temporary snag, so State assured me, a matter of weeks at most, some problem involving Italian journalists in Brazil.”

“Senator, two very beautiful ladies here are absolutely dying to meet you,” General Richardson called.

Lacouture hurried away.

“One rum Collins with hair on its chest,” said Byron calmly, his face ashen. “Coming up, Dad.”

“Byron —”

Byron’s back was to him, pushing through the brown Army crowd at the bar.

The main dining room of the Moana Hotel was a kaleidoscopic whirl of brass-buttoned uniforms and colored frocks, crowded to the walls and tumultuous
with talk and brassy jazz. Young officers, mostly from the SubPac rest center in the nearby Royal Hawaiian Hotel, were spinning excited girls around and around in the Lindy Hop. The band’s singer, in a strapless red dress that exposed billowy bosoms, was wriggling, jiggling, and howling
“and the boogie-woogie washerwoman washes away”
to an audience packed at tables around the dance floor; at which tables military uniforms predominated, and pretty laughing girls, bejewelled, bepainted, and dressed in splendid half-nude evening finery. Elderly civilians at a few tables, by their look wealthy and retired, were gazing wistfully at all this amorous wartime dazzlement, lit by a sinking sun through open windows. Though it was still day, the restaurant fizzed like a ballroom at midnight because the revelry, off” to an early start, had to end at ten. The ten o’clock curfew had teeth.

Pug had reserved a large table by the dance floor. Carter Aster sat there alone. As Pug came into the room with the Tudsburys, the submariner jumped to his feet.

“Where’s Byron?” Pug asked.

“Sir, I thought he must be with you. I couldn’t find hide nor hair of him at the party.” Aster pulled out a chair for Pamela with a gallant flourish. “I even went looking inside the governor’s mansion. I figured he must have caught a ride with you.”

“He didn’t.”

Dancing past them, Warren called, “Where’s Briny, Dad?”

Pug turned up his hands.

“And
the boogie-woogie washerwoman washes away
…” Warren was blocked from sight by josding dancers. Aster and Pamela fell at once into animated chatter. Pug thought that at this rate he might never get to talk to her. The Cincpac conference was scheduled for ten.
The
fleet was sailing for Midway in the morning. In the car Tudsbury had held forth without cease on Singapore, the Russian front, Rommel, the Japanese advance toward India, and such cheerful matters. Meantime Pamela had sat in the back seat mum as a fish. Now, putting his mouth almost to Pug’s ear, Tudsbury began badgering him again for inside dope on what was brewing. “The Boogie-Woogie Washerwoman” gave way to total gibberish bawled by the gelatinously shaking singer.
“Hut-Sut rawlson on the tiller-ah and a braw-la, braw-la soo-it”
were the approximate noises Pug heard. With this
Gôtterdümmerung
babble at one ear, with Tudsbury’s pesky questions yelled into the other, with Aster and Pamela getting up to dance, with worry about Byron’s disappearance plaguing him, with an ever-growing sense of the Japanese fleet’s approach, Pug Henry was not having much fun.

Byron came in view, carrying a large brown envelope and leading a girl. “Hi, Dad. Hi, Mr. Tudsbury. This is Ursula Thigpen. Remember Ursula, Mr. Tudsbury? You gave her your autograph. Don’t you think Ursula’s a pretty name?”

Ursula plumped down in the chair beside the correspondent before he could reply. “Now, that’s
Thigpen,
Mr. Alistair Tudsbury.” She tapped his arm with a stiff little pink finger, spelling, “T-ft-t-g-p-e-n! Thigpen! Not ‘Pigpen,’ see? Just in case you do broadcast about me. Hee hee!”

“Well, well, Briny, so you surfaced,” said Aster, returning with Pamela. “Where the hell did you get off to?”

Warren and Janice came back to the table. “Like dancing in a subway rush,” Warren said.

“Hut-Sut rawlson on the riller-ah…” Ursula inquired whether either Janice or Pamela cared to press their shoelaces. Byron had been driving her all over the island, she said. He had even brought her aboard the
Devilfish,
but there was no little girls’ room on submarines. “My back teeth are floating,” she elaborated.

Janice took her off, wondering why Byron had this imbecile in tow. While fixing her makeup in the powder room Ursula spilled a condòm from her vanity case and unblinkingly put it back, tittering that in Hawaii you never knew when it was going to rain, did you? “Although frankly, your brother-in-law doesn’t seem exactly the type,” she said. “He’s cute, but strange.”

“What were you doing in the submarine?”

“Oh, he went to fetch a big wooden box. It’s out in the jeep. Getting it up those ladders was a problem, but nothing like
my
problem, honey. Why, those awful submarine sailors! They could see everything. And they sure looked! I’ll bet they’ve got eyestrain, the lot of them.” Ursula chortled about this all the way back to the table, where a waiter was serving drinks.

Out on the floor Byron was now doing a Lindy Hop with Pamela, who, keeping him at arm’s length, was observing his elegant antics with a half-dismayed, half-amused look.

Warren said to Janice, “Briny’s flying to San Francisco tonight. He’s brought his footlocker. At nine thirty we take him to the NATS terminal, he says, and pour him on board the plane.”

Janice said to Aster, “But have you detached him?”

“There are his orders.” Aster made a limp resigned gesture at the envelope on the table. “I’ve just signed them.”

“What about air priorities?”

“He got himself an air priority. Byron does these things.”

“Byron has two gaits,” remarked his father, “a snail’s crawl, and the speed of light in a vacuum.” He was watching Byron dance, doing the best jitterbugging in sight, shaping the faddish angular prances and wild twirls of the Lindy Hop into fluid motions charming to watch. Pamela Tudsbury’s sedate careful stepping-about, with her outstretched hand barely touching his, made a ludicrous contrast.

“Ursie Thigpen!” A fat perspiring lieutenant whose dolphins were green
with sea tarnish wrapped a thick arm around her waist. “Good old Ursie! How about a dance, Urs? Will you excuse her, folks?” And away they gyrated.

Holding out a hand to Janice, Warren jumped up. “Well, let’s go, anniversary girl. Tonight’s your night.”

“These damned Lindys!” bubbled Janice. “Don’t they play anything for old married folks?”

“It’s hopeless,” Pamela said to Pug, dropping into a seat beside him, patting at her forehead with a wisp of gray handkerchief. She smiled up at Byron. “You were a darling to put up with me.”

“I’m sorry you quit.” Byron went back to his place, drank off a tall rum Collins like a glass of water, and signalled at the waiter for another.

Aster and Tudsbury were in a low earnest colloquy quite drowned out by the music. Here was Pug’s chance to talk to Pamela. How to start? She was looking away from him toward the dance floor. He had thought so much about her that here at his side, in the flesh, she had an unreal quality that disconcerted him; a minor actress, as it were, not quite filling the stupendous Pamela role of his yearnings and visions. Her face seen this close was strained and older; her cheeks were darkly hollow, her lipstick was carelessly applied, and on her upper lip there was a trace of moist down. He touched her bare white forearm.

“I’m sorry to hear you’ve been ill, Pam.”

She faced him. Her tone was as low as his. “I do look it, don’t I?”

“I didn’t mean that. You look grand.” Bad beginning! He lurched awkwardly on. “You didn’t by chance get a letter I sent you from here, months ago?”

“A letter? No. I’ve never had a letter from you.”

“I received one from you.”

“Oh, did that missive actually reach you? Written in another epoch, wasn’t it?”

“I was very glad to get it.”

“How’s your wife?”

“She asked me for a divorce.”

Pamela stiffened, clenched her hands, and thrust her bare pale arms forward on the table, hectic eyes flaring at him. “How could she? You couldn’t have given her any cause.”

“Claimed she’d fallen in love with someone else.”

“How ghastly for you.”

“Well, she’s since expressed regret about it, in a fashion. It’s all up in the air.”

Looking straight at Byron, whose eyes were on them, she murmured, “Do your sons know?”

“They haven’t a notion.”

“I’m terribly sorry to hear this. And you lost your battleship, too.”

Victor Henry wanted to reply,
Now that you’re here it’s okay;
but her cool casual manner forbade it.

“How long will you and your father stay in Honolulu?”

“I’m not sure.”

Janice and Warren glided by, a straight-backed pair in the crowd of flailing prancing couples. “Didn’t you propose, on the
Bremen,
to match me up with a son of yours?”

“Oh, you recall that?”

“Warren, no doubt?”

“Yes. But meantime, Janice hogtied him.”

Pamela’s mouth wrinkled, and she shook her head. “Never. Byron, possibly. Though when you first told me about him and Natalie Jastrow, I confess I was surprised. I thought wow, Natalie, my contemporary, and a son of yours —
a son
—”

“I still think that.”

She contemplated Byron, slumped low in his chair over a second rum Collins, his dark red hair falling in his eyes. “Oh, I understand her now. Devastating charm. Quiet, effortless, lethal. As for Warren, he’s fine, but formidable. Are Natalie and her baby in real danger?”

“I suppose they’ll get out all right.”

“Why’s Byron going to the Atlantic? What can he do for them?”

“Don’t ask me.”

Waiters arrived with champagne bottles and shrimp cocktails. Ursula, holding down her skirt close by in an animated twirl, left her partner with a twiddle of her fingers. “Ooh, champagne, yum, yum! Bye-bye, Bootsie!” Byron ordered the champagne opened at once.

“Well, founder of the feast,” he said to Pug, “how’s for the first toast?”

“Okay. Raise your glasses. Janice, many happy returns. Of the day, and of your man. Warren, good hunting.”

Next Byron held up his glass. It happened that the music just then stopped. “Mom,” he said. The sharp clear word caught Victor Henry unaware.

Warren raised his glass. “And Madeline.”

Janice said, “Natalie and her baby, and their safe return.”

Byron gave her a dark glance, raised his glass to her, and drank.

Over the shrimp cocktails Pug lost Pamela to Aster. The submariner made some joke he didn’t hear, Pamela threw her head back in hearty laughter, and soon they got up to dance again. So did the others. He was left at the table with Tudsbury, who leaned over and jogged his elbow. “I say, Pug, how well do you know this submarine man? Does he enjoy leading one up the garden path?”

“Pamela can take care of herself.”

“Pamela? What the devil has she got to do with it? He’s just told me the most astounding story about his last patrol.”

“To what effect?”

Tudsbury shook his head. “Come up to our suite after dinner, won’t you? Some things can’t be bawled over music.”

Thinking of the Cincpac conference, Pug said, “I will, if there’s time.”

More champagne arrived with the roast chicken. Pug wondered by what legerdemain Byron had lined up these scarce bottles of California wine. A frenetic spirit was animating and jamming the dance floor as nine o’clock approached. The waiter had trouble getting through to their table with the cake. In the white icing, a blurry blue aircraft trailed red skywriting:
Janice and Warren.