by John Hersey
Marrow promptly made a joke of it. “What you doing, Brag, testing your death pact with Jughead?”
Bragnani was absolutely enslaved to Farr from that time onward.
We were all depressed after that mission. Gross-Error Brindt was so hacked about the bad bombing that he began to say that the whole heavy-bombing campaign was a farce, and that the Allies were losing the war. Marrow valiantly teased us, to keep us game. But when Marrow learned that Kowalski had serious frostbite and would have to be grounded indefinitely, Marrow himself became morose. “The stuff those sergeants get away with,” he said.
After supper a stand-down was announced for the following day, and I called Daphne, and, though she did not sound particularly excited to hear my voice, she agreed to meet me at noon, at the Bull.
“Will your friend come, too, Captain?”
“Marrow? He’s all tied up tomorrow. By the way, I’m only a lieutenant. Leftenant to you.”
“Couldn’t matter less,” she said.
5/
The next day was the second of May, and the sun arrived in a brand-new sky as cheerful and strident as a milkman. I waited for Marrow to leave the hutment before I got slicked up, and afterwards I went to the PX and drew hospitality rations—one of the parcels of G.I. goodies with which we were allowed to spread among our English cousins the ill-will arising from gratitude. I hopped a liberty bus at ten, and driving across the base in the glorious morning we passed first a rectangular place where workmen were laying down four tennis courts, and then the five plowed acres of the station’s agricultural project, the dream and stubborn fixation of a patriotic major from Ohio in Group Headquarters who wanted us all to eat good American golden-bantam corn in summertime, if it would only grow in this lousy rainy swamp of a country. I felt completely engulfed by the life of the Group, and I was sharply struck by the intermittency of my war: high hell at noon, a warm familiar sack at midnight; briefing at three in the morning, tennis-anyone at three in the afternoon. One day the sight of poor Kowalski’s dead-looking hands; the next the sight of Daphne’s delicate fingers lighting a cigarette. Braddock had gone on one raid in his dress uniform under a flying suit so he wouldn’t be late for a date in London that night. My war was only in the air. I felt, as a shudder, my luck that I was not a foot soldier forced to sleep on the ground night after night, never able to get clean, my Daphne an impossible fantasy; my luck that at this moment I could deny with all my heart the existence of danger. I had only one idea: to go to bed with a girl I liked.
There she was, before I knew it, in the dusky lobby, in a printed cotton dress with a sweater over her arm.
“How come you got the afternoon off?” I asked.
“My dear auntie”—a very broad a—“in Bury St. Edmunds is ill.”
I laughed with her, and a question went lickety-split through my mind: If she’d lie for me, would she lie to me? Then I held the parcel out to her.
“Oooh!” she said. “Snacks?”
I nodded.
“Then we must picnic.” Her delight was unaffected and sincere. “We’ll go out along the river.”
“You ought to save that junk,” I said. “We can eat somewhere fancy. I’m loaded.” I put a hand in my pants pocket and jingled the bulky half-crowns and florins and pennies there. I guess I was playing the rich American to the hilt, and I got my come-uppance.
“Why save?” she said. “To feast alone?”
She flooded me with a sense of the importance of that single day—a feeling I was to get often from Daphne. Sometimes she would speak freely of the past, but she seemed to prefer the present. Talk of the future made her secretive, taciturn, gloomy.
We went on foot through a soft noontime across Christ’s Piece and Midsummer Common to a raised footpath along the Cam, opposite a row of boathouses, and soon we were in a countryside of lanes, coming down to the river, that Constable might have painted, where firethorn and viburnums had spread out their linens, and cattle broke the greenness, and the shade was bluish close at hand. Daphne was evidently elated at the way I stared at her. I could think of nothing except touching her, and though her body walked sedately on the riverside path, her mind moved like the feet of a child playing hopscotch. I couldn’t follow what she was saying; she didn’t seem to care.
We came to a meadow full of daisies, and I spread my tunic for Daphne, and we opened a can of I forget what and tasted it. “Should have brought some beer,” I said. We couldn’t eat.
For some crazy reason I talked about Janet, my so-called fiancée. “She’s on the chubby side,” I said, “and she’s got a very long tongue, she can touch the end of her nose with her tongue. Also, double-jointed thumbs.” I told Daphne that Janet had been the most—what should I say?—libidinous girl, judging by appearances, in Donkentown, and I got the habit of going around with her, even after I found out that appearances could be deceptive, and if there hadn’t been a war I might have gone ahead and married her.
“Did you love her?” Daphne asked.
“With an adolescent tomcat love,” I said. Janet and I were at loggerheads from the start, though, because I wanted her to be Ingrid Bergman, and she wanted to be Virginia Woolf, and we were both stuck with her being Janet Spenser. She was a tease. She’d lead you on, and then, whammo! Put it on the basis that That Was Sacred To Marriage. I kept coming back for more and never could figure out why we argued so bitterly—whether Vivien Leigh made a good Scarlett O’Hara, and whether a third term for F. D. R. was a good idea, and whether the British pavilion at the New York World’s Fair was stuffy. I mean, we really fought. I recalled one time with her at a Robin Hood Dell concert while I was at Penn, when we shouted at each other all through one of those Stokowski transcriptions of Bach; around us the shushes were louder than the music.
“I’m finished with her,” I said. “When I got over here she wrote me two letters in two weeks, and the second accused me of being unfaithful to her—when, hell’s bells, I hadn’t had a chance to figure out the best way to walk through the mud from our hutment to the officers’ mess—and then she quit writing. Haven’t heard another word. You know what I think? I think she’s come as close as she can to being unfaithful to me. I was sore for a while, but to hell with her.”
The marvelous warm sun made me drowsy.
“You look ninety years old,” Daphne said. “Here. Put your head here.” She patted her lap.
I gladly took her suggestion, and I slept like a baby for two solid hours.
I awakened grumpy, perhaps somewhat humiliated that I had put Daphne’ patience to such a severe test on our first outing—bored her with Janet and then folded on her. She was tranquil; she waited out my bad humor. “Big deal for you today,” I said. “Bet you wish you were back in Section B.” But she wasn’t going to indulge my self-pity, and she silently stood up and brushed off her dress, and then, with the first tiny pain in my chest in her honor, I recalled the feel of her thigh under my cheek. “Where’s the fire?” I said.
When we started back, however, I felt refreshed. We struck out across country through tawny green fields and into a shadowy woodland, along a tiny path, and, with a last stab of my bad mood, I thought: How come Daphne knows about this path? How many guys has she led along it? So quickly, so subtly had she taken possession of me by making me feel possessive of her.
As we walked along, with the sunlight drawing a fragrance of renewal out of the damp earth, I remembered a vivid mood I had had just before I had fallen asleep with my cheek on Daphne’s leg, the back of my head pressing against her ungirdled abdomen—a mood of restlessness and dissatisfaction with myself, for I had thought of a few of the many things I’d left unfinished back in Donkentown, of the books I’d planned to read some day, the artifacts I’d intended to make. Next time. There’d never be a next time. If I lived, I’d be older, different. “We must come back to our meadow some time,” I said.
“Love
to,” Daphne said. “It’s wizard out here, isn’t it?”
“I’ll bring a couple beers next time.” But I knew we’d probably never return, and if we did, we’d be different: we wouldn’t be total strangers, anyway, trying by random words and apparently casual touch to find the other’s innermost secrets.
We dined at the University Arms on the dull fare of English austerity: whatever it was, it was breaded and cooked as if cooking were a type of punishment. And we asked about each other in a rather challenging way, almost saying: What’s the matter with you? There was something here about being foreign to each other, our ideas at variance and our goals for life, though unexplored, probably far apart. But on my side there seemed to be more: I wanted to know why Daphne had preferred me to Marrow, yet I could not ask, and I wondered whether, now that she knew me, she really did, or would, and I had begun to doubt my intention of taking her to bed. Of all this I said not a word. I see now that perhaps we were both steeling ourselves to unnatural and immodest animal haste, for I suppose we both could see that no matter how strong my doubts, I would surely try to go to bed with her before the evening was over. I guess I assumed that my risking my life as an aviator gave me the right to do that.
This certainty produced a curious perversity in me. I did not try to be as attractive as possible; to the contrary, I ran myself down.
I told her I’d been a boxer at Penn, had become Eastern intercollegiate runner-up in the one-hundred-thirty-eight-pound class. I told her I’d hated it; I’d stayed with it, I guessed, in order to prove something to Janet and to myself about a man of my small stature—although I’d always done all I could to avoid being a typical cocky shorty. I’d never hit anyone hard enough to knock him out, never really roughed it up, partly, I suppose, because I’d used to play the piano, and I was concerned about what my mother had always called my “piano hands,” and I was also worried about my ugly nose, whose shape I wanted no worse than it already was, but also because I didn’t enjoy hurting people, and I’d come to see that to be a good boxer one really had to enjoy dealing out pain. I stressed to her that I had always been a runner-up; a co-pilot.
Daphne asked me what had been my field of interest in college.
I kept right on depreciating myself; said my sole interest had been dean’s-list marks, which I’d achieved by writing long essays in such a scrawly, semi-legible hand that the instructors had thought there must be something hidden in that underbrush. “History. I was hot for everything remote. Want to hear an example of my examination prose style? ‘The Merovingian dynasty, ruling iron-fisted over the Franks, helped Actius stem the barbarian wave at the battle of Mauriac, on the Catalaunian fields, the Frankish foederati under Meroveus gnashing in the forefront of the fray.’ ”
“Gracious,” Daphne said.
“That’s me,” I said.
I even went to the trouble of dragging Marrow into the conversation. “Funny guy,” I said. “He talks about new pilots being rookies and he’s only been on three missions himself.”
Daphne, I was discovering, was tactful in a painfully feminine way: She took a position only after finding out exactly what yours was. Her answers often took the form of questions. “Is he a good flier?” she asked.
“The best,” I sourly said, and dropped the subject, lest it become interesting.
After dinner she asked me, with a direct look in my eyes, if I wanted to go with her to her room.
The answer to the question was obvious, but I had to say, “How does your landlady feel about your having visitors?” I couldn’t even say what I meant but had to use a sardonic euphemism: visitors.
“Mrs. Coffin? As I told you in my note,” Daphne said, playing upon my churlishness with an absolute innocence of expression and tone, “she takes a dim view of Yanks.”
“You make the traffic sound pretty heavy,” I said.
“Not really,” she said, and she put it directly—but there was a sadness in her eyes as she spoke. Pitt?
What a heel I felt! I was gratuitously giving a hard time to this girl whom I barely knew, almost calling her names—for what reason? Maybe to justify my having gone to the PX to buy those condoms before I had even learned where she lived.
6/
The first thing Daphne did when we reached her room—Mrs. Coffin may have heard my heavy shoes on the stairs, but she didn’t make herself known—was to close the door and shoot the bolt. She sat down with the oddest expression before a mirror on a tiny single-drawered dressing table she had, for her face seemed to say, “Look at me! Did you ever see such a clever girl?” She seemed uncommonly pleased with herself.
Then that expression passed, and she began brushing her hair, and sitting on the edge of the bed I was struck again by her obvious liking of herself. It was almost as if she were sneaking hungry looks at herself while she pulled the brush through her hair.
The packet of hospitality rations was on the edge of her table, and she began taking the things out, one by one, and when she came to a bottle of hard candies she behaved like a child. She jumped up and brought it to me and asked me to open it, and while I made a show of being strong, she jiggled impatiently in front of me. She popped a sourball in her mouth, and, speaking thickly, asked me if I wanted her to tell me a secret. She was like a kitten. She sat on the opposite side of the bed from me, pulled her legs up, threw her shoes on the floor. I said, sure, I’d like to know all about her. This secret was an embarrassing tale, told with the too-big candy in her mouth, about Major Silg, who had showed his appreciation for her at an earlier dance on the base in a distinctly unorthodox way. “You’re the only person I’ve ever told,” she said. “Swear you won’t repeat it to anyone.” I solemnly swore, and a week later I heard the same story from Stebbins at the bar of the officers’ club. The bottom almost fell out of my stomach when I heard Steb begin to describe Silg’s pathetic technique of attack; then I realized that Stebbins might have had the account from Pitt, and I felt better.
I asked Daphne about Pitt, and it was obvious that she had overestimated him. But she said, perhaps as a comfort to me, “He wasn’t really right for me.”
During this time I was torn, for Daphne’s face, as she talked, was suffused with a pinkish warmth, and I was drawn toward it with a painful yearning; but at the same time I was more and more impressed with her air of child-like innocence, and I had a queer feeling that I must not take advantage of her.
It was a foregone conclusion that my desire, the deep, lonely hunger of a death-risking man for the life-giving act, would triumph over my scruples, which were dissolving. In the back of my mind, no doubt, as a goad, was the thought of what Marrow would be doing while I sat there talking.
Somehow, at any rate, I decided to compromise, to experiment—to see if I could kiss her a bit and then opt what to do. I thought I was leaving myself a free choice!
As my desire grew stronger and I came closer and closer to touching her, I began to feel a need to be attractive and I began to experience powerful and painfully sweet emotions, akin to those of my adolescent years, and suddenly I was talking about those years. “In the eighth grade I was a good boy, I was Class Monitor, and that meant I had an important job—clapping the erasers at the end of the day.” The clouds of fragrant dust, the hoarfrost on my sweater. I told Daphne about Miss Davis, who wore short sleeves and had fascinating ambushes of hair up them. In Assembly we sang under the direction of a Czech refugee, and I recalled my brilliant tenor swipe, “in the mo-o-o-orning,” in Do Ye Ken John Peel? I took great interest in Marion Swienkoski, a tall girl at the next desk, who was said to be fast. No luck; I was unable to bring myself to speak to her. I described basketball knee pads to Daphne, and I told her how embarrassed I had been about the shape of my hands, which were stubby; I used to try to spread my fingers on my own thigh in a sophisticated, relaxed manner. The steel legs of my desk in class were like those of an old-fashioned Singer Sewing Machine; I w
ished for a treadle. Civitas, civitatis, civitate, civitatem, civitate. Was that right? I remembered, walking home, Mr. Watkins’ cherry tree completely covered with cheesecloth to keep the birds out. The workbench in my room was cluttered with strips of cardboard, ready to be assembled into a model, let’s say, of Melvin Vaniman’s peculiar triplane. Already hanging by threads from the ceiling were the Wrights’ primitive kite, the Spirit of St. Louis, the Winnie Mae, Bellanca’s Columbia, a Gee Bee Sport Racer….
I shifted my weight, to quite a clanking and squeaking of the brass-framed bed, and I put my cheek against hers. She did not draw away; to the contrary, she moved as if slowly melting. This soft, yielding acquiescence, on top of her many other signs of acceptance of me, stirred an overpowering flood of feeling in me, and I took her in my arms.
7/
I was eased yet unfulfilled. Never in my young life had I experienced anything like what this extraordinary girl had given me, yet I was far more aware of what she had withheld. There had been no resistance, no difficulties. What I had seen of her delight in being admired, her pleasure at being hungrily watched by many men at the dance, had had its counterpart in something that had made her, here in her yellow-walled room, seem readily conquered. I felt I had been treated to the easy surrender of very much. This was not a cheaply used girl. Yet instead of feeling like a lion, arrogant, boastful, and exultant, I felt, instead, somehow embarrassed and locked out. She had sweetly given in, but she had yielded only her shell, not her self, for I sensed that she still wanted to be fought for and truly conquered, and that she still awaited her defeat at my wooing hands in joyful agitation. This had not been what she wanted. It had not been what I wanted, either. I had great obstacles to overcome before I would have access to the enormous treasures I now knew were deeply secreted in Daphne.
