War and Remembrance (66 page)

“What on earth!” Rhoda exclaimed. “Why suggest that?”

“He made an anti-Semitic remark to Lenny Spreregen.”

Rhoda blinked in surprise. “What? Why, the man’s a fool, all he said —”

“Forget it, Mom,” Byron said. “I’ll come along.”

A gigantic yellow banner printed in red swayed above the main entrance to the Hollywood Bowl:

THE YANKS ARE NOT COMING TOO LATE.

Cars were streaming inside, and from nearby streets hordes of people on foot were converging toward the Bowl. But, although the entrance appeared mobbed, the audience in the big amphitheatre was sparsely clustering near the stage shell, below the tier of boxes. On the upper slope, slanting sunlight reddened rows upon rows of empty seats. Over the shell, which was draped with three large flags — the British ensign, the Stars and Stripes, and the red flag with its yellow hammer and sickle — huge cutout letters arched:

Alistair Tudsbury, in a bulging seersucker suit and an eye patch, awkwardly got to his feet and kissed Rhoda when she came to the box. Pamela’s smile was agreeable, but her eyes were puffy, her face was sagging and unpainted, and she was almost unkempt; she looked, Rhoda thought, as though she did not much care whether she lived or died. Madeline came dashing into the box. Grand panic backstage! Two stars had pulled out of the show, a third had laryngitis, and a frantic rearrangement of the program had placed Tudsbury in the closing spot, after the mass chant. Was that all right? Tudsbury agreed, remarking only that his talk would not be a high note.

“Oh, it will, it will. You have
authority,”
Madeline said. “Sorry we didn’t pull in more of an audience. Charging admission was a mistake.” She scampered off.

It was a tedious patchy program, part singing and dancing to two pianos, part speech-making, with some labored comedy. The hit of the evening was a song, “The Reactionary Rag,” in which actors dressed as paunchy nabobs in high hats and cutaways, with dollar signs on their white-waisted bellies, capered about expressing their sympathy with the Soviet Union, but finding funny reasons not to send military help. The mass chant was a business of many voices speaking up from all over the amphitheatre — a steel worker, a farm laborer, a schoolteacher, a nurse, a Negro, and so forth — each demanding a second front
now;
these solo declamations were punctuated with solemn unison readings from mimeographed sheets by the entire audience of quotes from Pericles, Shakespeare, Lincoln, Booker T. Washington, Tom Paine, Lenin, Stalin, and Carl Sandburg, while the orchestra softly played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The climax was a wildly syncopated audience shout, repeated in crescendo to the accompaniment of trumpets:

Open up that second FRONT

Open up that second FRONT

Open up that second FRONT

NOW! NOW! NOW!

It all ended in great applause and cheers.

Introduced by Leonard Spreregen, Tudsbury limped onstage to a standing ovation.

“On June 22nd, 1941, as you no doubt recall,” his voice boomed on the loudspeaker over the great half-empty amphitheatre, now in twilight under a pale moon, “Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

“On June 23rd, 1941, my column in the
London Observer
bore the heading,
’Open Up a Second Front Now.
’”

This brought the crowd to its feet again. But the Bowl grew very quiet as he talked. Military realities, he began, were not easy to grasp or to face. He had had to spend several months in Moscow during the worst of the German onslaught, a month in falling Singapore, and a week in Hawaii before and after the battle for Midway atoll, before he had gotten a grip on this global war.

A major assault on the French coast in 1942 was, he now knew, utterly out of the question. Only a trickle of green American forces had as yet arrived in England. The U-boats remained a formidable and merciless barrier to a rapid buildup of these forces. Mastering that menace was a long-range struggle. A cross-Channel attack now would have to be all-British. Britain was already spread far too thin. Singapore had proved that! Any British action in France would so weaken the China-Burma-India theatre that the United States would have to take over there — at once, and massively — with whatever forces it could get past the Japanese fleet. For if India or Australia fell to Japan, the defeat of Nazi Germany would not win the war, nor assure the survival of the Soviet Union.

“Eastern Asia is the center of gravity of the war, my friends,” Tudsbury declared in weary firm tones. “World War Two started there at the Marco Polo Bridge, not in Poland. China has been fighting the war longer than anybody. If Japan wins there, Russia faces catastrophe. Japan will mobilize the incredible resources of India, China, and the East Indies against the Soviet Union. A new Golden Horde will storm across the Siberian border, armed with tanks, with Zeroes, and with manpower and natural resources outweighing the West ten to one. The China-Burma-India theatre is the true, the forgotten second front. We must hold it if civilization is to survive.”

Several catcalls rose from the audience at this point.

“The long-range prospects are
good,”
Tudsbury defiantly boomed. “Our soldiers who died in Singapore, and yours in the Philippines, did not die in vain. They upset the Japanese timetable for seizing India and Australia. The crux of the war now is a fight for time. Your country’s productive power is
awesome, but slow to gear up. I’m surprised to find so little interest here in your victory at Midway. Had your Navy lost that battle, you might be fleeing California this evening. Your fliers and sailors who died there gave their lives for all mankind.”

Coughing was spreading in the amphitheatre, and people were yawning and looking at their watches.

“A second front in France? Yes, I’m warmly for it, too. The plight of the Soviet Union grows worse and worse. But the Russians are strong. They will hold on. It’s delightful to visualize millions of stalwart Anglo-American troops storming across the English Channel
now.
But it’s a pipe dream. We will overwhelm the Axis in good time with a cataract of men and firepower. Till then, we fight for time, and for the turn of the tide on many fronts, including the home front. My final word to this home front is,
Believe in the honor of your leaders, and trust them. They are great men, and they are fighting a great war.
”

As he limped off the stage, feeble brief handclapping ensued, with more catcalls. The crowd began dispersing, in a muttering mood. A loud bald man in a loud jacket was saying to a pretty girl as they left the box beside Byron’s, “Still trying to hang on to their Empire, aren’t they? Just pathetic.”

Returning to the box with Madeline, Tudsbury said cheerfully, “Well, wasn’t that a resounding flop!”

“Well done,” Byron said.

Rhoda jumped up, kissed him, and said tremulously, “I’ll never forget your words about Midway. Never.”

“You made good sense,” Madeline fumed. “This crowd doesn’t change, and never will. Maybe it penetrated a thick skull here and there. I must go and pick up the pieces.”

Pamela stood up as Madeline scurried off. “Was it fun, Talky?”

“It was, actually, watching them gradually realize that I wasn’t one of them, but just another Limey snake in the grass. I quite enjoyed it.”

“So courageous,” said Rhoda. “Pug would have talked like that — without your lovely command of language, of course.”

“Pug would have stayed away, and so should I have done,” said Tudsbury. “However, we wanted to see you, Mrs. Henry, so let’s have a drink now at our hotel, shall we? Pamela and I fly on to New York tomorrow.”

As they walked out, the press of the crowd thrust Rhoda alongside Pamela, who spoke low fast words. “Mrs. Henry, may I have breakfast with you tomorrow — just the two of us?”

They faced each other next morning on the lawn beside the pool over melons, toast, and coffee on a wheeled linen-covered table. It was a perfect California day: hot sun, pellucid blue sky, scents of grass and palms, a
cool breeze stirring the gaudy red flowers of the hibiscus hedges. Two youths and three girls dove and swam and laughed in the pool, their brown skins gleaming, their jokes as merry and simple as the mating calls of birds. Pamela looked better today, her face carefully made up, her hair falling behind her ears in long glossy waves. The sleeveless gray dress showed the cleft in her pale bosom. Rhoda recalled that this odd young woman, who fluttered in her father’s wake like a gull behind an ocean liner, had a way of shifting between mousiness and allure. Perhaps, Rhoda thought, she was on her way this morning to meet a man. She gave the impression of very taut nerves.

As they idly chatted, Rhoda said she wished she had a copy of Tudsbury’s speech to send to Pug.

“Nothing easier. I’ll see that you get one.” Pamela quickly replied in her educated British accent that so impressed and charmed Rhoda. “I wrote it.”

“Why, it was his style to the life.”

“Oh, yes, I fake for him when he’s indisposed or lazy.”

“Why the eye patch, Pamela?”

“That eye is ulcerating. He needs an operation. We’d be in London by now, but Madeline did mention that you were coming west, so we stayed. I desperately wanted to talk to you.”

“Really? What about?”

“About your husband. I love him.”

Rhoda yanked off her sunglasses and stared at the English girl, who sat up straight, her head high, her eyes wide and combatively shiny. Rhoda’s first coherent thought, through the fog of amazement, was that Pamela was a formidable rival if Pug really liked her. Let her have her say, she thought, reveal what she would reveal. Rhoda played with the glasses and drank coffee, just eyeing her.

“I know that you wanted a divorce,” Pamela said, “and that he’s asked you to reconsider.”

“I have reconsidered!” Rhoda leaped at the opening. “Long since. That’s all over with. He’s confided in you, it seems.”

“Oh, yes, Mrs. Henry,” Pamela replied gloomily. “He’s confided in me.”

“Have you had an affair with my husband?”

“No.” Their glances met in mutual search. ”
No,
Mrs. Henry. He’s remained faithful to you, worse luck.”

Rhoda saw truth in Pamela’s eyes. “Indeed? You’re terribly
PRETTY.”

“He’s been an ass.” Pamela turned off the compliment with a hitch of her shoulder. “It would have been heaven. What’s more, honors would now be even between you two.”

The tone and the words stung. Rhoda said acidly, “But isn’t my husband much too OLD for you?”

“Mrs. Henry, your husband’s the most attractive man I’ve ever met in every way, including his loyalty to you, which has defeated me.”

The passion in her voice alarmed Rhoda. She could see the difference between Pamela’s young skin and hers, admire the sweet slim form of Pamela’s upper arms — Rhoda now had to conceal her own because of a growing, revolting limp bagginess — and could envy that bosom. A small voice within her said that Pug had indeed been an ass, though she blessed him for it. “Did you see him after — after Midway?”

“Yes, I saw a lot of him. Through all his agony he kept worrying about you, about how you were taking it, about what he could do to console you. He even considered asking for emergency leave. He packed me off, though I tried to stay. He’s a family man to the bone. If you can get to Hawaii, do it. He needs you. If there ever was a chance for me, the death of your son has ended it.”

Touching a handkerchief to her eyes, Rhoda barely articulated, “Poor Pug.”

“You were foolish to risk losing him. I can’t understand you, I think it was terribly stupid of you, but don’t do it again.” Pamela gathered up her purse. “You say all that’s over with.”

“Yes, yes. Absolutely and forever.”

“Good. You have a well-wisher who’s written your husband several anonymous letters about you and this man. If you have no better reason to straighten up, there’s one.”

“Oh, God,” Rhoda groaned. “What did the letters say?”

“Guess!” It was a scornful snap. In a softer tone Pamela said, “I’m sorry to hurt you in your bereavement, but I don’t want you hurting him any more. That’s why I’ve talked to you. I’ll send the speech text to you by messenger. Our plane leaves in a couple of hours.”

“Will you promise never to see my husband any more?”