War and Remembrance (98 page)

“Does the Army know what we’re doing?”

“Hell, yes. We gave them their uranium hexafluoride to start with. But the Army thinks thermal diffusion is for the birds. Too slow, and the enrichment is too low-grade. Their assignment is to beat Hitler to a bomb. A prudent notion, that. They’re starting from the ground up, with untried designs and new concepts that are supposed to be shortcuts, and they’re doing it on a colossal industrial scale. Nobel Prize heavyweights like Lawrence, Compton, and Fermi have been supplying the ideas. The size of the Army effort really staggers the mind, Anderson. They’re commandeering power, water, land, and strategic materials till hell won’t have it. Meantime we’ve got enriched U-
₂₃₅
in hand. Low enrichment, not bomb material as yet, but a first stage. The Army’s got a lot of big ideas and big holes in the ground. Now if the Army falls on its face it’ll be the biggest scientific and military bust of all time. And then —just conceivably, mind you — then it could be up to the Navy to beat the Germans to atomic bombs, right here in Anacostia.”

“Wow.”

Parsons wryly grinned. “Don’t hold your breath. The Army’s got the President’s ear, and the world’s greatest minds working on it, and they’re outspending us a million dollars to one. They’ll probably make a bomb, if nature was careless enough to leave that possibility open. Meantime well keep our little tinpot operation cooking. Just keep the other remote contingency in your mind, and pick up your orders at BuPers tomorrow.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

By candlelight Rhoda’s face was like a young woman’s. As they ate cherry tarts she had baked for dessert, Pug was telling her, through a fog of
fatigue, about his stop in Noumea on his way home. They were on their third bottle of wine, so his description of the somnolent French colony south of the equator, overrun by the carnival of American war-making, was not very coherent. He was trying to describe the comic scene in the officers’ club in an old fusty French hotel, of men in uniform clustering four and five deep around a few Navy nurses and Frenchwomen, captains and commanders up close, junior officers hovering on the outer edges just to stare at the females. Pug was so weary that Rhoda’s face seemed to be blurrily wavering between the candle flames.

“Darling,” she interrupted quietly and hesitantly, “I’m afraid you’re not making very good sense.”

“What? Why not?”

“You just said you and Warren were watching all this, and Warren cracked a joke —”

Pug shuddered. He had indeed been drifting into a doze while he talked, fusing dreams with memory, picturing Warren alive in that jammed smoky Noumea club long after Midway, holding a can of beer in his old way, and saying,
“Those gals are forgetting, Dad, that once the uniform comes off, the more stripes, the less action.
“ It was pure fantasy; in his lifetime Warren had never come to Noumea.

“I’m sorry.” He vigorously shook his head.

“Let’s skip the coffee” — she looked concerned — “and put you to bed.”

“Hell, no. I want my coffee. And brandy, too. I’m enjoying myself, Rhoda.”

“Probably the fire’s making you sleepy.”

Most of the rooms in this old house had fireplaces. The carved wooden mantelpiece of this large dining room, in the flicker of light and shadow from the log fire, was oppressively elegant. Pug had grown unused to Rhoda’s style of life, which had always been too rich for him. He stood up, feeling the wine in his head and in his knees. “Probably. I’ll take the Chambertin inside. You deploy the coffee.”

“Dear, I’ll bring you the wine, too.”

He dropped in a chair in the living room, by the fireplace heaped with gray ashes. The bright chandelier gave the trimmed Christmas tree a tawdry store-window look. It was warm all through the house now, and there was a smell of hot dusty radiators. She had put up the thermostat with the comment, “I’ve gotten used to a cool house. No wonder the British think we steam ourselves alive like
SEAFOOD.
But of course you’ve just come from the tropics.”

Pug wondered at his macabre waking vision of Warren. How could his dreaming mind have invented that wisecrack? The voice had been so recognizable, so alive!
“Once the uniform comes off, Dad, the more stripes, the
less action!”
Pure Warren; neither he himself nor Byron would ever have said that.

Rhoda set the bottle and glass at his elbow. “Coffee will be right along, honey.”

Sipping at the wine, he felt he could fall into bed and sleep fourteen hours without moving. But Rhoda had gone to so much trouble, and the dinner had been so good: onion soup, rare roast beef, baked potatoes with sour cream, au gratin cauliflower; her new form-fitting red silk dress was a stunner, her hair was done up as for a dance, her whole manner was loving and willing. Penelope was more than ready for the returned wayfarer, and Pug didn’t want to disappoint or humiliate his wife. Yet whether because he was aging, or weary, or because the Kirby business lay raw and unresolved, he sensed no stir of amorousness for her. None.

A shy touch on his face, and he opened his eyes to see her smiling down at him. “I don’t think coffee’ll help much, Pug.”

“No. Most discouraging.”

Getting ready for bed half-woke him. Coming from the bathroom, he found her, fully dressed, turning down his twin bed. He felt like a fool. He tried to embrace her. She fended him off with the laughing deftness of a coed. “Sweetie pie, I love you to little pieces, but I truly don’t believe you’d make it. One good night’s sleep, and the tiger will be back on the prowl.”

Pug sank into bed with a sleepy groan. Softly she kissed him on the mouth. “It’s good to have you back.”

“Sorry about this,” he murmured, as she turned out the light.

Not in the least put out, rather relieved than otherwise, Rhoda took off the red dress and donned an old housecoat. She went downstairs and cleaned up every trace of the dinner, and of the day gone by; emptied the living room ashtrays, shovelled the fireplace ashes into a scuttle, laid a new fire for the morning, and put out the ashes and the garbage. She enjoyed the moment’s breath of icy air in the alley, the glimpse of glittering stars, and the crunch of snow under her slippers.

In her dressing room, with a glass of brandy at hand, she ran a hot bath and set about the dismantling job under glaring lights between large mirrors. Off came the rouge, the lipstick, the mascara, and the skin makeup which she wore down to her collar bone. The naked woman stepping into the vaporous tub was lean, almost stringy, after months of resolute starving. Her ribs unattractively showed; but her belly was straight, her hips slim, her breasts small and passably shaped. About the face, alas, there was nothing girlish. Still, Colonel Harrison Peters, she thought, would find her desirable.

To Rhoda’s view desirability was nine-tenths in the man’s mind, anyway; the woman’s job was to foster the feeling, if she detected it and if it suited her purpose. Pug liked her thin, so she had damned well gotten thin
for this reunion. Rhoda knew she was in trouble, but about her sexual allure for her husband she was not worried. Given Pug’s dour fidelity, this was the rock on which their marriage stood.

The warm water enveloped and deliciously relaxed her. Despite her outer calm she had been taut as a scared cat all evening. In his gentleness, his absence of reproach, his courteous manner, and his lack of ardor, Pug had said it all. His silences disclosed more than other men’s words. No doubt he had forgiven her (whatever that might mean) but he had not even begun to forget; though it seemed he was not going to bring up the anonymous letters. Adding it all up, she was not unhappy with this first day. It was over, and they were off the knife-edge, on a bearable footing. She had dreaded the first encounter in bed. It could so easily have gone wrong, and a few silly minutes might have exacerbated the estrangement. Sex as pleasure, at this point, mattered to her not at all. She had more serious concerns.

Rhoda was a woman of method, much given to lists, written and mental. The bath was her time for review. Item one tonight was nothing less than her marriage itself. Despite Pug’s kind letters, and the wave of reconciling emotion after Warren’s death — now that they had faced each other, was it salvageable? On the whole, she thought so. This had immediate practical consequences.

Colonel Harrison Peters was amazingly taken with her. He was coming to Saint John’s Church on Sundays just to see more of her. At first she had wondered what he wanted of her, when
(so
she had heard) plenty of round-heeled Washington girls were his at a push. Now she knew, because he had told her. She was the military man’s lady of his dreams: good-looking, true, decorous, churchgoing, elegant, and brave. He admired the way she was bearing the loss of her son. In their moments together — she was keeping them infrequent and public, having learned her lesson with Kirby — he had gotten her to talk about Warren, and sometimes had wiped away his own tears. The man was tough and important, doing some highly secret Army job; but when it came down to cases, he was just a lonesome bachelor in his mid-fifties, tired of fooling around, too old to start a family, but wistful to settle down. There the man was for the having.

But if she could hold on to Pug, that was what she wanted. He was her life. She had worked out with Palmer Kirby her romantic yearnings. Divorce and remarriage were messy at best. Her identity, her prestige, her self-respect, were bound up with remaining Mrs. Victor Henry. Moving to Hawaii had proven too difficult and complicated; but maybe it was just as well that time had passed before a reunion, and the newest wounds had somewhat healed. Pug was a real man. You could never count Pug Henry out. Why, here was the White House calling him again! He had had a rotten run of luck, including her own misconduct; but if ever a man had the stuff to
weather it, he did. In her way Rhoda admired and even loved Pug. The death of Warren had enlarged her limited capacity for love. A broken heart sometimes stretches when it mends.

The way Rhoda now sized matters up, soaking in her tub, it appeared that after a touch-and-go reconciliation they would make
it.
After all, there was the Pamela Tudsbury business; she had something to forgive too, though she
did
not know just what. When they had talked of Tudsbury’s death at dinner she had carefully watched Pug’s face. “I wonder what Pamela will do now,” she had ventured. “I saw them when they passed through Hollywood, you know. Did you get my letter? The poor man gave a
BRILLIANT
speech at the Hollywood Bowl.”

“I know. You sent me the speech.”

“Actually, Pug, she wrote it. So she told me.”

“Yes, Pam was ghosting a lot for him toward the end. But he gave her the ideas.” No surprising the old fox, tired or not; his tone was perfectly casual.

Not that it mattered. Rhoda had digested Pamela Tudsbury’s astounding revelation in Hollywood more or less in this wise: if a passionate young beauty like that one — who by the look of her knew plenty about men — could not snag Pug right after poor Warren’s death, when he was far from home, vulnerable, estranged by the Kirby affair, and no doubt drunk every night, then the marriage was probably safe. Colonel Harrison Peters, all handsome
six
feet three of him, could go hang if she could keep Pug. Harrison’s admiration was like an accident insurance policy. She was glad she had it, and hoped she would never have to fall back on it.

In the dim glow of the bedroom nightlight, the grim lines of Pug’s face were smoothed by sleep. An unwonted impulse came to Rhoda’s mind: should she slip into his bed? She had seldom done this down the years; mostly a long time ago, after too much to drink or an evening of flirting with someone else’s husband. Pug took her rare advances as great compliments. He looked handsome and sweet. Many a breach between them had quickly closed with lovemaking.

Yet she hesitated. It was one thing for the modest spouse to yield to a yen for her man back from the war. For her — on probation, seeking forgiveness — wasn’t
it
something else; a bribing use of her body, a hint of coarsened appetite? None of this was articulated by Rhoda, naturally. It raced through her mind in a sort of female symbolic logic, and she got into her own bed.

Pug snapped awake, the alcohol wearing off and his nerves jangling an alarm. Rhoda, dead to the world, wore a wrinkly cap on her hair. No use turning over. He would have to drink more or take a pill. He found the warmest bathrobe in his closet, and went to the library where the movable
bar was. On the antique desk lay a big leather-bound scrapbook, with Warren’s photograph worked into the cover over gold-stamped lettering:

Lieutenant Warren Henry, USN

He mixed a stiff bourbon and water, staring at the album as at a spectre. He walked out of the room, snapping off the light; then he went back, groped to the desk, and lit the reading lamp. Standing drink in hand, he went through the scrapbook leaf by leaf. On the inside front cover, bordered in black, was Warren’s baby picture; on the inside back cover, his obituary in the
Washington Post,
with a blurry photograph; and facing this, the citation for his posthumous Navy Cross, boldly signed in black ink by the Secretary of the Navy.

In this album Rhoda had marshalled their firstborn son’s whole short life: the first attempt at lettering —
MERRY CHRISTMAS
— in red and green crayon on coarse kindergarten paper; the first report card in Grade One of a school in Norfolk — Effort A, Work A+, Conduct C; pictures of children’s birthday parties, pictures at summer camps, honor certificates, athletic citations, programs of school plays, track meets, and graduations; sample letters, with penmanship and language improving from year to year; Academy documents and photographs, his commission, promotion letters, and transfer dispatches, interspersed with snapshots of him on ships and in the cockpits of airplanes; half a dozen pages devoted to pictures and mementos of his engagement and marriage to Janice Lacouture (an unexpected photograph of Natalie Jastrow in a black dress, standing beside the white-clad married pair in the sun, gave Pug a turn); and the last pages were full of war souvenirs — his squadron posing on the deck of the
Enterprise,
Warren in his cockpit on deck and in the air, a jocular cartoon of him in the ship’s newspaper reporting his lecture on the invasion of Russia; and finally, centered on two pages, also bordered in black, his last letter to his mother, typed on
Enterprise
stationery. It was dated in March, three months before his death.