Some experiences and memories have seemed to me to be a good substitute for material possessions. They may tarnish like old silver and require occasional polishing, but they never take up room, and they are seldom around when you don’t want them. You have to pay for them, of course, by giving a part of your life away to the people or places from which they were acquired. Though this is not always a good bargain, your acquisition is sometimes worth the price, and certainly better than nothing, and above all, beyond the realm of conscious choice. If some such exchange as this took place with me on that Atlantic flight in the last winter of the war, it must have taken place with Dottie, too. Without intending it, perhaps we both gave something of ourselves to each other, and consequently that day and night will probably for a long while retain a permanence for both of us.
I do not mean by this that any ultraromantic element entered into our experience, although we both may have been aware that such a thing might happen and possibly would not have minded if it had. It had been a long while since I had been in love with Dottie Peale, if ever, and the same was true with her. We both of us must have realized previously that falling in love with each other would have been a harrowing and unsuccessful procedure which would have spoiled a more useful sort of competitive relationship. At any rate, that was our relationship on the plane. We were critical and at the same time fond of each other, and it did not matter whether or not we called a spade a spade.
“By God,” Dottie said, “it’s nice to talk to an obvious bastard like you, darling, and nice that we can see everything in the same way without anything’s ever getting anywhere. I’m awfully sick of relationships that inevitably end up in bed.”
“That’s a lovely way of putting it,” I said. “You make me see exactly what you mean.”
“Well, we might end up that way,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind particularly.”
“That’s very sweet of you,” I said, “but don’t let it worry you, Dot.”
“Don’t be so God-damned complacent, darling,” Dottie said. “I could make you fall in love with me any time I wanted. Any woman can do that to any man if she has any sexual awareness, and you know it, especially racketing around on a junket like this. God, what a lot of freaks there are on this plane!”
This was the sort of conversation in which Dottie excelled. She always loved to spread her influence over people like a blanket.
There was not much time to talk to Dottie, what with all the attention I had to pay to the other freaks. They were all stirred up by the Great Adventure and they wanted to know all about future details, and I could see that this annoyed Dottie, because wherever she was, she always wanted some man for her especial property. This all took care of itself, however, because when we reached Gander at about dusk, there was a big fuss made over the Important People, with cocktails and a very special supper before the take-off, and I was able to withdraw a while with the pilot and the rest of the crew, who had the bad luck to be assigned to us all the way. We had coffee together before I had to round up the passengers, who were being taken to the PX after supper to buy toothpaste and cigarettes just in case there weren’t any in Europe, and we had a chance to discuss the implications of the trip. There was a chance to say that it was a hell of a way to win the war—taking a lot of freaks around in a crate. There was a chance also to be drawn together by a mutual sense of frustration.
When the passengers climbed up the steps in the frigid dark and the door was slammed shut and they were told to make themselves as comfortable as they could, and that there would be a blackout after the take-off, I was delighted to see that they all understood at last the stress and strain of war, not that they were not all brave about it and very debonair. I found Dottie a seat over the wing, and after the flight engineer and I had arranged blankets and safety belts before the take-off, I took the seat beside her. While the lights were still on, she applied lipstick, efficiently and savagely, like someone preparing to die in the grand manner. She looked at me furiously when I told her that it was not on straight, and I felt rather sorry for her, because no matter how inured one may be to air travel, a take-off over a large body of water like the Atlantic is always a solemn moment. When the plane made its run, her fingernails bit into my hand, and I knew she was thinking what a fool she had been to come, but when we were air-borne, her grip relaxed. The motors made a reassuring drone in the dark.
“Does everything sound all right?” she asked.
“Hell, yes,” I said. “Everything sounds fine, and now you’d better go to sleep.”
“Sid,” she said, “do you mind if I tell you something? I keep thinking we’re going to die.”
“All right,” I said, “if you want it that way, but you could be wrong.”
“Don’t be so God-damned superior. I can think what I want, can’t I? I’m not afraid to die.”
“Well, plan your last words,” I said, “and go to sleep. A special effort is being made to keep you alive.”
“Oh, shut up,” she said. “God damn it, it’s made me sick all day, watching you showing off.”
We did not speak for a while, and at last I thought she was asleep.
“Sid,” she said, “I wonder what everything’s been about.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Are you still dying?”
“Suppose I am,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to amount to something, and that’s more than you ever have.”
“Well,” I said, “I’ve tried to get along.”
“But you’ve never cared. Why don’t you ever care?”
“About what?”
“About amounting to something. If you’d ever had any ambition, we might have been married. I could have done a lot for you. I really could have. Oh, God, I wish I’d ever been able to find a man!”
“Well, you’ve done a certain amount of investigating,” I told her, “and you did find Henry Peale.”
“There you go,” she said, “and I know what you think. You think I married Henry for his money.”
“Yes,” I said, “that’s exactly what I think.”
“Well, maybe you’re right,” she said, “but Henry was awfully sweet. He understood me. You never understood me.”
“You’re damned well right I did!” I said. “I understood that I didn’t have anything you wanted.”
“Darling,” she said, “you had plenty of things I wanted. I have often thought about them, but you didn’t have ambition. You were possible in so many other ways, but I didn’t want to have all the ambition.”
Instead of answering, I listened to the motors. Though it was a time one could say anything one wanted, I did not want to say too much.
“I told you not to go over to Paris,” she said. “I told you the Paris Bureau was the kiss of death. You didn’t really think I’d wait around for you, did you, after you went to Paris?”
“No,” I said, “not for a single minute.”
“Well, at least we’ve always been honest with each other.”
“You’re damned well right,” I said.
“Well, darling, we did have a lot of good times together.”
“Yes,” I said, “we had quite a lot of fun.”
“Well, don’t say it in such a disagreeable way. It wouldn’t have worked.”
“What’s the use in going over it, Dot?” I asked. “We’ve always known it.”
Everyone was asleep except the crew up forward, and the knowledge that only she and I were awake somehow made the darkness heavy and palpable. There was nothing to Dottie in the dark except the intensity of her slightly husky voice and the pretentious scent of the Chanel Five she used and had used even when she was working for forty dollars a week, and except also an aura of physical cleanliness and resilience. Without seeing her at all, you could feel her strength and her unbroken confidence.
“All right,” she said, “all right. Maybe I have done some investigating. Who hasn’t? You can’t help learning a lot about men when they are always making swan dive
s at you, darling, but it’s all a little discouraging. I’ll tell you what I’ve learned about men.”
“Don’t,” I said, “or I’ll tell you what I’ve learned about women.”
I found myself sitting up straighter and listening. One of the port motors had missed, but then it picked up again. It had been nothing, and she had not noticed it.
“You never learned anything about women from me that didn’t make you disagreeable and conceited,” she said, “but I’ll tell you about men. Most men are stupid and incompetent. You aren’t stupid, darling. You’ve always been a smarty pants, but you’re incompetent.”
“Well, it’s nice I have a high IQ,” I said.
“You know you’re incompetent,” Dottie said, and her voice blending with the motors sounded like my own conscience speaking. “You were never able to write as good a news story as I could, and you can’t handle people. God, I wish I could ever have found a man!”
I found myself growing annoyed, but I had to admit she was partially right. She had one of those restless retentive minds that could read and assimilate everything. She had an instinct for order and organization and an insatiable desire to influence everyone around her. She should have been a man and not a woman.
“You’ve never wanted a real man,” I said. “You’ve always wanted someone you could push, and then you get tired of him as soon as you find he’s pushable.”
“Darling,” she said, “you’re so damned exasperating when you oversimplify. Of course I like to compete with men and of course I’ve had to in the publishing business, but I’ve always wanted a man who can do better than I can. That’s all any woman ever wants—someone she can always respect, and someone whom she can do things for and who will listen to her.”
“Well,” I said, “that’s quite an order, considering what you are, Dot.”
“All right,” she said, “what do you think I am? Please tell me, darling.”
“I think you’re a type,” I said, “common in any matriarchal civilization.”
“Oh, darling,” she said, “do you think I am all of that? I told you you were awfully bright.”
“You’re an ambivalent type,” I said.
“All right,” she said, “maybe I am, but at least I know exactly what I want.”
“You want everything,” I said, “and you won’t give anything up. That’s why you’re out in this crate tonight, because you want everything. First you wanted money and you got it, and then you wanted authority and you got it, and now you want to be General Eisenhower or something, and now you’d better forget about yourself and go to sleep.”
“Darling,” she said, “you’re the only man who ever tells me what he really thinks about me. You’re wrong, of course, but it’s heavenly. Do you think we’ll see Eisenhower in England or France or somewhere?”
“Not unless he’s a damn fool, but I wouldn’t know,” I said.
“Oh well,” she said. “Now I lay me down to sleep.… Good night, darling.”
I was half asleep when she spoke again and I stayed half asleep while she went on speaking.
“I wish I weren’t always competing for something. It makes me so tired. I was such a simple little girl, Sid. Did I ever show you my school photograph? I was such a simple little girl in such a nice little Midwest town, but Father and Mother always made me compete … and those little bitches at Miss Shippin’s school who always had newer dresses … Did I ever tell you about Miss Shippin’s school?”
“Yes, you know you have,” I said. “Now let’s go to sleep.”
She did not want to go to sleep. That drive and ambition of hers must have come from her parents, who evidently had not wanted her to share their mediocrity and who had made prodigious sacrifices in her behalf. It was a worthy little story, but I knew without listening that Dottie would never get what she wanted. There would always be her discontent and her constant sense of unfulfillment, and yet she would never lose her high courage and desire. She would always be the center of some drama as long as she was alive.
Dawn was filtering through the windows of the plane when I awoke, and Dottie was fast asleep in the reclining seat beside me. Her eyes were closed, and her face, though tranquil, was somehow still alert. She awoke almost as soon as I stirred and unlike most people, she knew exactly where she was. She smiled at me as she rubbed her eyes.
“Is everything all right?” she asked.
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “If you like, I can get you some coffee.”
“Thanks, dear,” she said. “Didn’t we have a good time?”
“When?” I asked, and she laughed.
“Why, last night,” she said, “last night, talking.”
“Why, yes, we had a pretty good time,” I said. Dottie always was good company.
The trip must have received a blessing from the highest echelons, because the women were not required to wear any sort of uniform. Dottie was straightening her tailored jacket and arranging the eighteenth-century-looking frills around her throat and patting the plain but heavy gold pin that held them, not that any of this was necessary, because asleep or awake she was impeccably, aggressively trim, and she always despised sloppiness in dress or posture.
“It’s like spending the night on a park bench,” she said. “It’s disgusting,” but she would have looked as neat and fresh and competent even if she had been riding on bucket seats.
“Anyway, you can both take it and dish it out, Dot,” I told her.
Her nose tilted upward when she smiled, as it did when she was particularly happy.
“Darling, isn’t it nice being with each other again?” she asked.
“Again?” I repeated.
“I mean being on each other’s minds, the way we used to be once,” she said. “I haven’t got anyone else on my mind but you. It’s the way it was when you were a nice boy and I was quite a nice girl, but I wasn’t really nice, was I? Now button your coat and straighten your tie, and you should have shaved when you had the chance. You didn’t shave at Gander, did you?”
I was not flattered by her attention because it only meant that I was the only man available at the moment for her to put her mind on.
Just then the door to the crew’s compartment opened, and the mechanic caught my eye and beckoned. He wanted me to help awaken the passengers because we were beginning to let down from nine thousand feet. We were not going direct to Prestwick because of a weather front. Instead we were landing in Iceland and we would start off to Scotland again in about two hours. I was too busy after that to converse any further with Dottie. It was cold and blustery on the sub-Arctic air strip, not a tree in sight, only rock ledges and a few sparse clumps of heather and overhead a leaden, threatening sky. As we climbed out of the plane and started to a group of Nissen huts for breakfast, I had a glimpse of Dottie on the level surface of the runway, hanging back from the rest of the passengers with her mink coat draped carelessly over her shoulders, alone, as all of us would be in the last analysis. She was standing straight with the breeze whipping at her hairdo but never pushing it out of place, staring aloofly at the stormy land. Yet she looked as much at home as though she were on Park Avenue waiting for a taxicab, and I was sure she would have done very well in Iceland, had she been obliged to remain there permanently.
V
The Army Couldn’t Have Been Sweeter
Some months before this junket with the VIPs I had been assigned the task of conducting three or four newspaper correspondents to the front in Normandy. This was in the summer of 1944 during the build-up before the breakout near Saint-Lô, and it was here that I first met Major General Melville A. Goodwin. General Goodwin was commanding a division known as the Silver Leaf Armored, and the word was that he was somewhat of an authority on mechanized warfare, though he was not a personality with news interest. Besides, he was too busy to be bothered by correspondents except to meet them briefly, thus obeying the directive not to be disagreeable to the press. He only favored me with his personal attentio
n because he wanted to make it very clear that I was to get those people the hell out of his sector as soon as possible. Then it had occurred to him that as long as we were going back I might not mind carrying back with me several personal letters he had written, and he took me with him to his dugout to get them. On our way a mortar shell landed near us, causing us to dive side by side into a ditch, not a friendship-cementing experience but something that did make us remember each other. He seemed to take the incident quite personally, I remember, acting as though it were a reflection on his own management that I should have rolled in mud, but finally he had said it was something that I could tell my grandchildren, and it would serve as a lesson to me not to come monkeying around in places where I did not belong.
I was shaken enough by the exploding shell to answer him somewhat disrespectfully. I told him, I remember, that it was not my idea of fun, being up there, and that as far as I was concerned I hoped I did not have to play around with him any more. Sometimes if you spoke frankly to those people, they enjoyed it, and he warmed up sufficiently to ask me what in hell I was doing in this war anyway. I told him I was sure I did not know, but whatever I was supposed to be doing wasn’t useful. For some reason, this struck him as amusing, and he repeated it to his aide, who had come to brush him off. Then he said that I might as well have something to eat as long as I was there, and enough give-and-take had resulted so that he remembered me when I saw him again in Paris.
During the Battle of the Bulge in December, his division, the Silver Leaf Armored, had inflicted severe punishment on the crack German units that had endeavored to overrun it, but it had taken a bad pounding in the process, and in February it was being overhauled, and the General was in Paris on short leave. It was at just this time that I was there with that personally conducted tour, and General Goodwin himself was called in to help with the Very Important People.
By the time our literary caravan had reached Paris, various military echelons had succeeded in making the Very Important People who comprised our group feel that they amounted to more than they ever imagined previously—a phenomenon that was becoming quite common whenever the taxpayers’ money was freely laid out for public relations. Indeed a selective feeling of sensitivity had developed in our party by the time we reached Paris. The Very Important People were growing quick to recognize unintentional slights, casual receptions at airports, grade B means of locomotion, and hotel accommodations not wholly in line with their expanding conception of their position. They were even beginning to criticize the quality of wines and liquors supplied by hospitable rear-echelon headquarters, but only mildly, as I knew, since I was the recipient of these complaints. Actually, they were having a wonderful time. They were becoming old campaigners, face to face with war’s hardships, and entrusted with strategic secrets. They had been given the treatment reserved usually for visiting congressmen and perhaps a little more. They had been given wistful, brave and eloquent talks by the high-ranking officers best equipped to do this sort of thing. They had stood personally in the operations offices of bomber commands. They had watched paratroopers, had visited base hospitals and the interiors of tanks. Generals, who asked them to call them by their first names, had entertained them at delightful dinners, and they had been allowed on the whole to chat freely with the enlisted boys.
Melville Goodwin, USA Page 7
