Battleground

by W. E. B Griffin

  She took a sip, and then a second, larger sip, and then she exhaled audibly.

  God, I wish he was here!

  The door bell went off. It was one of the old-fashioned, mechanical kind, that you “rang” by turning a knob.

  She looked at the clock on the wall. It was quarter to nine.

  Who the hell can that be?

  Did that damned fool somehow not go? Did the airplane turn back for some reason and land at Newark again? If that happened, he would just have time to come back here now.

  She went to the door, just reaching it as the bell rang again.

  She opened the door to the length of the chain and peered through the crack and saw the last person in the world she expected to see, Howard P. Hawthorne, Jr.

  “It’s me, Barbara,” Howard said, quite unnecessarily.

  “So I see,” she said, instantly hearing the inanity in her voice.

  “May I come in, or ... have you guests?”

  She closed the door, removed the chain, and opened it fully.

  “Come in, Howard.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “I’m having a drink,” she said. “Would you like one? What do you want?”

  “Scotch would be fine, thank you.”

  “You’re welcome to a scotch, but that’s not what I meant to ask.”

  “Oh. Yes, I see. I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Well, come in the kitchen while I make your drink. We can talk there.”

  “Thank you,” Howard said, and then asked, “I’m not interrupting anything am I? Interfering with your plans?”

  “My plans are to go to bed,” she said. “I’ve had a busy day.”

  She poured whiskey in a glass and handed it to him. With the familiarity of a husband, he turned to the refrigerator, found ice, and then squatted looking for the little bottles of Canada Dry soda habitually stored on the lower shelf.

  His bald spot is getting bigger.

  He opened the soda bottle, mixed his drink, and stirred it with his index finger. Then he raised his eyes to hers.

  “I know,” he said. “I was here earlier.”

  “Cutesy-poo think of something else of mine she wanted from the house?”

  “I was worried about you,” he said.

  “I’m touched, but there is no cause for concern. I was visiting friends in Jersey.”

  “I know about him, Barbara,” Howard said evenly.

  Oh my God!

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said I know about you and the—young soldier.”

  Not very much. John is a Marine, not a soldier.

  “And I said, ‘I beg your pardon?’ ”

  “Honey ...”

  “Don’t you call me ‘Honey,’ you sonofabitch!”

  “Sorry.”

  He took a swallow of his drink.

  “Barbara, you’re well known in Philadelphia,” he said. “You must have known that someone would see you, recognize you ...”

  Great, now I will be known as the Whore of Babylon as well as Poor Barbara, whose husband dumped her for young Cutesy-poo.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Who saw me? What soldier?”

  “The young one,” he said. “The one you had dinner with two nights ago in the restaurant in the Warwick.”

  “God,” she heard herself say, “people have such filthy minds!”

  “I don’t understand that,” Howard said.

  “I’m guilty, Howard. I did have dinner in the Warwick two nights ago. But he’s not a soldier. He’s a Marine.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “In this case, the difference is I’m nearly old enough to be his mother.”

  “You’re not that old,” he said. “You’re thirty-eight.”

  Thirty-six, Goddamn you!

  “I had dinner with Bill Marston’s nephew, Johnny Moore. He’s a sergeant in the Marines and about to go overseas, since you seem so hungry for the sordid details. And if I had had him when I was eighteen, I would be old enough to be his mother. He’s eighteen. Or maybe nineteen.”

  “How did that come about?”

  “I don’t even know why I’m discussing this with you,” Barbara said. “You have given up any right to question anything I do. I would love to know who carried this obscene gossip to you, though.”

  “Friends,” he said.

  “Some friends!”

  “The same friends who have been telling me all along that I was making an ass of myself with Louise,” Howard said.

  She met his eyes.

  “Tell me about this ... young man, Barbara.”

  “I’ll be damned! What if I said, ‘tell me about Louise, Howard’?”

  “Then I would say it’s all over,” he said.

  “Since when?”

  “Since about nine o‘clock this morning,” Howard said. “I told her I was going to see you, and she said if I came over here, it was all over between us. And ... here I am.”

  “You’ve been trying to find me all day?”

  He nodded.

  After a moment, Barbara asked, “What did you think you were going to do here?”

  “I realize that I’ve hurt you, Barbara ...”

  “Huh!” she snorted.

  “I didn’t want you to hurt yourself.”

  She exhaled audibly.

  “With ... my young man, you mean?”

  He nodded.

  “Bill Marston found out that Johnny’s father was—I don’t know how to put this—fooling around with Johnny’s trust fund.”

  “His father? Who’s his father?”

  “The Reverend John Wesley Moore,” Barbara said. “He’s with that Methodist Missions thing. What do they call it? The Harris Methodist Missions to the Unchurched, something like that.”

  “The missionaries, right? In the Orient someplace?”

  “Right.”

  “What about it?”

  “Bill Marston found out that Johnny’s father had not turned over a trust fund from his grandparents to the boy. So, since the boy is on his way overseas, he decided he had to tell him. And did.”

  “The father, the minister, was stealing the kid’s money?” Howard asked.

  He’s interested. More important, he believes me.

  “I don’t know if ‘stealing’ is the right word, but he didn’t turn it over to him when he should have.”

  “I’ll be damned!” Howard said, outraged.

  He’s really angry. Why am I surprised? Before Cutesy-poo came along, he never did anything dishonorable.

  “So the boy was upset, obviously,” Barbara said. “He’s really very sweet. He’s on a home leave before going overseas, and he couldn’t even go home.”

  “That’s absolutely despicable!”

  “So I felt sorry for him. And had dinner with him. And took him to the movies.”

  “Where was the boy staying?”

  “Bill got him a room in the Union League.”

  “And that’s where you heard about this?”

  “Yes. I met Bill on Broad Street. He was with the boy. And he insisted I have a drink with them ...”

  “In his cups again, I suppose?”

  “Don’t be too hard on Bill, Howard. It was a terribly hard thing for him to have to do.”

  “I’ve always liked Bill Marston. He just can’t handle the sauce, that’s all.”

  He’s not at all suspicious. He wants to believe what I’m telling him. He’s a fool. Obviously. Otherwise Cutesy-poo couldn’t have got her claws into him the way she did.

  “Where’s the boy now?”

  “On his way to the Pacific. That’s what I was really doing in New Jersey today, Howard. Putting him on the plane. Bill couldn’t get off ...”

  “That was very kind of you, Barbara.”

  “He had nobody, Howard. I have never felt more sorry for anyone in my life.”

  “I should have known it was something like this. I’m sorry, Barbara.”

 
; “It’s all right.”

  He smiled at her.

  “I’m sorry things ... didn’t work out between you and Louise.”

  “And I would expect you to say something like that,” he said. “It could have been worse. I could have actually married her.”

  “And it’s really all over?”

  “It’s really all over.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  He looked at his watch and drained his glass.

  “I don’t really know. Except that right now, I’m going to leave here and see if I can catch the 9:28 to Swarthmore,” he said.

  “You’ll never make the 9:28,” Barbara said.

  “There’s another train at 10:45.”

  “You left some things here. Shirts and underwear. Why don’t you stay here?”

  “Barbara—”

  “What?”

  “That’s very decent of you.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “But where would I sleep? There’s only one bed in this place.”

  “I know you don’t think I’m very smart, Howard, but I really can count,” Barbara said.

  (Five)

  THE ANDREW FOSTER HOTEL

  SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  22 JUNE 1942

  The tall, long-legged blonde shifted on the seat of the station wagon so that she was facing the driver. Her fingers gently touched the beard just showing on his upper jaw, and then moved to trace his ear. When he jumped involuntarily, she laughed softly.

  “I learned that from my husband,” Mrs. Caroline Ward McNamara, of Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, said to Captain Charles M. Galloway, USMCR, whose home of record was c/o Headquarters, USMC, Washington, D.C.

  Mrs. McNamara was wearing a pleated plaid skirt, a sweater, a string of pearls, and little makeup, all of which tended to make her look younger than her thirty-three years. Captain Galloway, who was wearing a fur-collared horsehair leather jacket, known to the Supply Department of the U.S. Navy as “Jacket, Fliers, Intermediate Type G1,” over a tieless khaki shirt, was twenty-five. He was a tanned, well-built, pleasant-looking young man who wore his light brown hair just long enough to part.

  The jacket was not new. It was comfortably worn in; the knit cuff on the left sleeve was starting to fray; and here and there were small dark spots where oil or AVGAS had dripped on it. Sewn to the breast of the jacket was a leather badge bearing the gold-stamped impression of Naval Aviator’s Wings and the words CAPT C M GALLOWAY, USMCR. The leather patch was new, almost brand-new. The patch had replaced one that had identical wings but had designated the wearer as T/SGT C M GALLOWAY, USMC.

  Captain Galloway had been an officer and a gentleman for just over a month. Before that, since shortly after his twenty-first birthday, in fact, he had been an Enlisted Naval Aviation Pilot (all Marine fliers are Naval Aviators), commonly called a “Flying Sergeant.” He had been a Marine since he was seventeen.

  “You learned that from your husband?” Charley Galloway asked, turning to Caroline McNamara. “How to play with his ear, or how to bullshit your way into a hotel?” The hotel they had in mind was the Andrew Foster, one of San Francisco’s finest, and therefore also probably already stuffed to the brim with people who had thought to make reservations.

  Her fingers stopped tracing his ear.

  “Well, fuck you,” Caroline said, very deliberately.

  “Oh, Christ,” he said, sounding genuinely contrite. “Sorry.”

  In Caroline’s mind, Charley’s language was too loaded with vulgarisms. A dirty mouth was certainly understandable, she knew, considering his background. But for his own good, now that he was an officer, he should clean it up. Since he did not like to hear her use bad language (except in bed, which was something else), she had settled on doing that as the means to shame him into polishing his own manners.

  Every time he said something like “bullshit,” she came back with “fuck.” He really hated that; and so words like bullshit and asshole were coming out far less often now than they did not quite four months before, when they first met.

  At that time Caroline had been divorced for not quite five months. It was far from a glorious marriage, of course; but it ended more or less satisfactorily, as far as she was concerned.... In other words, she came out of it, as she put it, “with all four feet and the tail,” meaning that she got the house in Jenkintown, the cars, and almost all of the bastard’s money. Her prosperous stockbroker husband had an understandable reluctance to reveal in court that the person he’d been having an affair with also wore pants and shaved.

  During the divorce process, she had scrupulously followed her lawyer’s advice to do nothing “indiscreet,” correctly interpreting that to mean she should keep her legs crossed. When she met Charley Galloway, then Technical Sergeant Galloway, she had been chaste for more than eighteen months.

  He had flown into Willow Grove Naval Air Station, outside Philadelphia, in a Marine version of the Douglas DC-3 transport, acting as both pilot-in-command and instructor pilot to two young Marine aviator lieutenants, one of whom, Lieutenant Jim Ward, was her nephew.

  Jim had called from the airport, and Caroline had driven out to Willow Grove to fetch him and the others home. The moment she saw Charley Galloway, she knew he might be just the man to break her long period of celibacy. After all, she would probably never see him again.

  Until she met him, she had come to believe—after all manner of sobering, painful experience—that the real love of her life was a delightful, wholly improbable fantasy. But what happened between them, the very first time, told her that that very delightful and improbable fantasy had landed six hours before at Jenkintown.

  It wasn’t long after that before she started worshiping him.

  Jimmy Ward worshiped him, too, which had been at first rather difficult to understand. Enlisted men are supposed to worship officers, not the other way around. But when she asked him about it, Jimmy explained that Charley probably would have been an officer—he had all the qualifications—if it hadn’t been for what he’d done a few days after Pearl Harbor.

  He and another sergeant had put together a fighter plane from parts of others destroyed by the Japanese. Charley had then flown it out to the aircraft carrier Saratoga, then en route to reinforce Wake Island. Half of Charley’s squadron was on Wake Island. Charley was riding, so to speak, to the sound of the guns.

  The reinforcement convoy was ordered back to Pearl Harbor. And so an act that was to Jimmy’s mind heroic—dedication worthy of portrayal on the silver screen by Alan Ladd and Ronald Reagan—became quite the opposite. An enlisted man had made flyable an airplane commissioned officers, in their wisdom, had concluded was beyond repair. He had then had the unbridled gall, against regulations and policy, to decide all by himself to take the airplane off to war.

  The only reason that they hadn’t court-martialed him, Jimmy Ward told her, was that the witnesses were either dead or scattered all over the Pacific and could not be assembled.

  So what they had done was take him off flight status and return him to the States for duty as an aircraft mechanic. It was only a critical shortage of pilots that had found him—the very morning of the day Caroline met him—back in a cockpit. The Marines were demonstrating parachute troops to the press and couldn’t run the risk of having a less than fully qualified pilot fly the plane.

  After their first night together, Caroline couldn’t have cared if Charley was a PFC. Or what anyone thought about her taking up with an enlisted man eight years younger than she was.

  On the twelfth of June, ten days before Caroline and Charley were driving into San Francisco, she went to Quantico to be with him. But he wasn’t there.

  And then two days later he showed up as Captain Galloway, USMCR, having been pardoned and commissioned by the Commandant of the Marine Corps himself. There was a price, however. He had five days leave, plus travel time, to report to San Francisco, there to board a plane for Hawaii, and there to assume command of a newly activated
Marine fighter squadron.

  Caroline decided she didn’t give much of a damn what anyone—God included—thought about her traveling across the country with a man to whom she was not joined in holy matrimony. She was going with him.

  And given a little more time, she thought, she would have been able to clean up his vocabulary so that even the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Philadelphia could have found no fault with it.

  Unfortunately, there was hardly any time left at all. And then there was the matter of finding a room to make time in.

  “ ‘Conspire’ is the word you were looking for,” Caroline said. “We are going to ‘conspire’ our way into the Andrew Foster Hotel.”

  “You think it would really work?” Charley asked.

  “They make mistakes,” Caroline said. “Everybody does. All we have to do is make them think they made one with us, and we get a room.”

  “Sound like bull—aloney to me,” Charley said.

  “Better,” she chuckled, “better.”

  “This hotel is important to you, isn’t it?” Charley asked. “What did you do, stay there with your husband?”

  “No,” Caroline lied, easily. “With my parents.”

  My conscience, she thought, is clear. I don’t want him in there thinking of me being there with Jack. All I want him to remember about the Andrew Foster Hotel is the luxury, and the food, and the two of us together in one of those lovely beds. Or together in one of those marvelous marble-walled showers with all the shower heads. I don’t think Charley has ever seen anything like that. I want him to remember us there.

  “And you think that would work?”

  “Yes, I do,” Caroline said, trying to put more conviction into her voice than she felt.

  “OK, Baby,” Charley said. “If that’s what you want, we’ll give it a shot.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “We’ll have to pull over somewhere and get a tunic and a tie out of my bag,” Charley said. “I can’t walk in a fancy hotel wearing a flight jacket. I wish I could shave. I feel as cruddy as the car.”

  The light oak bodywork of the 1941 Mercury station wagon was covered with five days and several thousand miles of road grime. They had driven practically nonstop from Quantico, Virginia. There had been a light rain during the night, and the half-moon sweep of the wipers showed by contrast just how dirty the rest of the vehicle was.