“I wish he would, too, dears,” Sylvia said, and wondered just how much she meant that. No time to worry about it now. “Come on, both of you. We have to get you to Mrs. Coneval, or I’ll be late for work.”
They followed her down the hall to Brigid Coneval’s apartment. Several other children were in there already, and making a racket like a bombardment on the Maryland front.
“A fine mornin’ to you, Mrs. Enos,” Mrs. Coneval said after she’d opened the door. “I’ll see you tonight. Come in, lambs.”
Sylvia went downstairs and headed for the trolley stop. Newsboys hopped up and down on their corners, trying to stay warm. The sun wouldn’t be up for a little while yet, and the air had a wintry snap in it, though Indian summer had lingered till only a few days before.
Nobody was shouting about great naval battles in the Atlantic, nor about a destroyer lost at sea. With the war now in its third year, Sylvia knew how little that meant. A sunken destroyer was the small change of war, hardly worth a headline. Anything might have happened to the Ericsson, and she wouldn’t know about it till she found the paragraph on page five.
If she bought a paper at all, that is. These days, she didn’t do that every day, as she had when George was serving on the river monitor. She walked past the newsboys today, too, and stood waiting for the trolley without a Globe.
“Men,” she muttered as the streetcar clanged up to the stop. She threw a nickel in the farebox. An old man stood up to give her his seat. She thanked him, hardly noticing he was of the sex she’d just condemned for existing.
She wished George had been either a better person or a better liar. She would have preferred the first, but the other might have done in a pinch. For him not to have the need to visit a whore (and a nigger whore at that, she thought, appalled by his lack of taste as well as his lack of judgment) would have been best. If he had gone and done it, she wished she’d never found out.
Actually, he had gone, but he hadn’t quite done it. That didn’t make things any better. How was she supposed to trust him now? (That he wouldn’t have been worth trusting if he hadn’t told her about going to the whore never occurred to her.) When he wasn’t in her sight but was ashore, what would he be doing? “Men,” she said again.
She was so lost in her angry reverie, she almost missed the stop in front of the canning plant. The trolley was about to start up again before she leapt from her seat and hurried out the door. The driver gave her a reproachful look. She glared at him. He was a man, too, even if he had a white mustache.
She punched in and hurried toward her machine. Isabella Antonelli was already at hers. “Good morning, Sylvia,” she said with a smile that did not match the mourning she still wore.
“Hello, Isabella,” Sylvia answered as she made sure the machine had plenty of labels in the feeder and the paste reservoir was full. That done, she really noticed the smile she had seen, and smiled back at her friend. “You’re looking cheerful this morning.” Her own smile was mischievous. “Did you put a little brandy in your coffee before you came to work?”
The capitalists who ran the canning plant hadn’t spent any more than the bare minimum on lamps. The ceiling was high, the bulbs dim. And Isabella Antonelli was as swarthy as any other Italian, which made her seem very dark indeed to fair-skinned Sylvia. Nevertheless, she blushed. It was unmistakable.
Sylvia waggled a finger at her. “You did put some brandy in your coffee.”
“No such thing,” Isabella said. Maybe she hadn’t. Sniffing, Sylvia couldn’t smell any brandy, but they weren’t standing face to face with each other, either, and the whole plant reeked of fish anyhow. But Isabella Antonelli had done something or other. What? How to find out without embarrassing her further?
Before Sylvia could come up with answers to either of those questions, the production line, which had shut down for shift changeover, started up again. Here came the cans. They came fast enough, nothing else mattered. Sylvia began pulling the three levers that carried them through her machine, gave each one a couple of girdling squirts of paste, and put on the label bearing a fish that looked much more like a fancy tuna than the mackerel the cans contained.
Pull, step, pull, step, pull, back to the beginning, pull, step…It was going to be a good day. Sylvia could feel that already. A good day was a day she got through barely noticing she’d been at the plant at all. On bad days, her shift seemed to last for years.
Here came Mr. Winter, limping up the line, a cigar clamped between upper and lower teeth. “Good morning, Mrs. Enos,” the foreman said, almost without opening his mouth. “How are you today?”
“Fine, thank you,” she answered, politely adding, “And you?”
“Couldn’t be better,” Mr. Winter said. His mouth still didn’t open wide, but its corners moved upwards. He was happier than she’d seen him in a good long while. After a moment, he returned to business: “Machine behaving?”
“Yes-see for yourself.” Sylvia hadn’t missed a lever while talking with the foreman. “The action feels smoother than it has.”
“They oiled it last night. About time,” he said. After a brief pause, he went on, “Hope your husband’s all right.”
“So do I,” Sylvia answered, despite everything more truthfully than not.
“God’s own miracle he was saved off the Punishment,” Mr. Winter said.
“I suppose that’s true.” Sylvia had all she could do not to laugh in the aging veteran’s face. George had gone up on the riverbank to get drunk and commit adultery. The God she worshiped wasn’t in the habit of manufacturing miracles of that shape.
“God’s own miracle,” the foreman repeated. He, of course, didn’t know all the details. Sylvia wished she didn’t know all the details, either.
Nodding to her once more, Mr. Winter went on up the line to see how Isabella Antonelli and her machine were. Over the noise of the line and of her own machine, Sylvia couldn’t hear much of what the two of them said to each other. She could see, though: could see the foreman’s hand rest lightly upon Isabella’s for a moment, could see the way the widow’s body bent toward his as a flower bends toward the sun.
Sylvia automatically worked her machine. She stared at her friend, stared and stared. She was not a blind woman. When things went on around her, she noticed them. If Mr. Winter and Isabella Antonelli weren’t lovers, she would have forfeited a week’s pay.
I should have known what kind of smile that was, she thought, annoyed at herself for not recognizing it on Isabella’s face. She’d worn it often enough herself, when things with George had been good. Mr. Winter’s smile wasn’t quite the usual large male leer, but the cigar would have fallen out of his mouth if it had been.
Pull, step, pull, step…She wanted to see if Isabella would say anything at lunch. All of a sudden, the day that had been moving swiftly ceased to move at all. At half past twelve, the line finally stopped. The weather was too raw for Sylvia and Isabella to eat outside, as they had earlier in the year. They sat down together on a bench not too far from one of the handful of steam radiators the factory boasted.
Isabella solved Sylvia’s problem for her by speaking first. She blushed again as she said, “I saw you watching me.”
Sylvia’s face heated, but she nodded. “Er-well, yes.”
“He is not a bad man. I have said this since he and I were only friends.” Isabella Antonelli tossed her head, as if defying Sylvia to make something of that. Sylvia only nodded again. That seemed to mollify her friend, who went on, “He has been lonely for years now, since his wife died. I know what being lonely means-Dio mio, how I know. Believe me when I tell you not being lonely is better.”
Sylvia imagined lame old Mr. Winter touching her, caressing her. She didn’t know whether to be revolted or burst out laughing. But she was lonely herself a good deal of the time these days, with George aboard the Ericsson…and when he had been home, had she been anything more than a piece of meat for him, a more convenient piece of meat at the moment than a Negro harlot?
Did she want him to love her, or to leave her alone? For the life of her, she didn’t know.
And so, very slowly, she nodded. “You may be right after all, Isabella,” she said. “You may be right.”
Jonathan Moss had reached that pleasant stage of intoxication where his nose and the top part of his cheeks were going numb, but he was still thinking clearly-or pretty clearly, anyhow. As he generally did at such times, he stared into his whiskey glass with bemused respect, astonished the amber fluid could work such magic on the way he felt.
Dud Dudley stared around the officers’ lounge. “What we need here,” he declared, “are some women.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Moss said, and did. “They ought to bring some up from the States, as a matter of fact. All the Canuck gals treat us like we’re poisonous.” That wasn’t strictly true; every now and then a pilot would find a complaisant young woman in Ontario. Moss never had, though.
His flight leader nodded vigorously. “There’s an idea!” Dudley said. “They can call them something that sounds as if it’s military supplies, so the bluenoses won’t have conniptions. ‘Tool mufflers,’ maybe. Yeah, tool mufflers. How do you like them apples?”
It seemed funny and then some to Moss. “We ought to give Hardshell a requisition for ’em, start it going through the Quartermaster Corps. ‘Yeah, Fred, we need another couple dozen tool mufflers on the Toronto front.’” He spoke into an imaginary telephone. “‘Split ’em even between blondes, brunettes, and redheads.’”
He would have gone on embroidering that theme for quite a while, but an orderly poked his head into the officers’ lounge, spotted him, and brightened. “Lieutenant Moss, sir?” he said. “Major Pruitt needs to see you right away, sir.”
“I’m coming.” Moss got to his feet, a process that proved more complicated than he’d expected. “I’m coming. Lead on, Henry.”
Henry led on. As Moss left, Dudley called after him: “Requisition a couple extra redheaded tool mufflers for me, pal.” They both laughed. Henry the orderly grinned in a nervous sort of way, not getting the joke.
Major Shelby Pruitt raised an eyebrow when he saw the state Moss was in. That was all he did. The weather was too lousy to let aeroplanes get off the ground, so the pilots had little to do but sit around and drink. The salute Moss gave him was crisp enough, at any rate. “Reporting as ordered, sir.”
“At ease,” Pruitt said. He passed Moss a little velvet box with a snap lid. “Here. As long as you’re celebrating, you can have something to celebrate.” Moss opened the box. Two sets of a captain’s twin silver bars sparkled in the lamplight. He stared at them, then at Pruitt. The squadron commander grinned at him. “Congratulations, Captain Moss.”
Moss said the first thing that popped into his head: “What about Dud, sir?”
He made Hardshell Pruitt smile. “That does you credit. His are in the works. They should have come in with yours, but there’s some sort of paperwork foul-up. I’d have saved yours to give them to the both of you at the same time, but I can’t. You’re both getting shipped out, and to different places, and they’ve laid on a motorcar for you in an hour. As soon as you leave here, go pack up what you have to take with you. The rest of your junk will follow you sooner or later, maybe even by the end of the war.”
Things were moving too fast for Moss to follow. He thought-he hoped-they would have been moving too fast for him to follow had he been sober. “Sir, could you explain-?” he said plaintively.
“You’re a captain now.” Pruitt’s voice was crisp, incisive. He used it as a surgeon uses a scalpel: to slice through the fat to the meat. “You’ll be a flight leader for certain, maybe even a squadron leader if casualties keep on the way they’ve been going.”
“We keep flying Martins against these Pups, sir, we’ll have a lot of casualties,” Moss said with conviction.
“I understand that,” Major Pruitt answered. “Well, it just so happens the Kaiser’s come through for us. Wright is building a copy of the Albatros two-decker; a German cargo submarine finally made it across the Atlantic with plans and with a complete disassembled aeroplane. The orders detach you to train on the new machine.”
“That’s-bully, sir,” Jonathan Moss breathed. “Can we really fight the limeys in this new bus?”
“Everybody seems to think so,” the squadron leader answered. “The copied Albatros isn’t quite as fast as the Pup, but it’ll climb quicker and it’s just about as maneuverable. And we’ll have a hell of a lot more of them than the limeys and Canucks will have Pups.”
“Good-we’ll make ’em have kittens, then,” Moss said. When sober, he was sobersided. He wasn’t sobersided now.
Hardshell Pruitt also grinned. “Go pack your bags, Captain. Pack the undowithoutables and don’t worry about anything else. I want you back here at 2130, ready to move out for London. Here are your written orders.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Moss looked at the pocket watch he wore strapped to his wrist. Like a lot of fliers, he’d started doing that because of the difficulty of groping for a watch while wearing a bulky flight suit. Learning at a glance what time it was had proved so convenient, he wore the watch on a strap all the time now. “See you in forty-five minutes, sir.”
He seemed to float several feet above the muddy ground as he made his way back to the tent he shared with Dudley and with Phil Eaker and Thad Krazewski, who’d taken the place of Orville Thornley, who’d taken the place of Tom Innis. A match got a kerosene lantern going. The space around his cot was as full of junk as more than a year’s settling in and an easygoing view of military regulations would allow.
One green-gray canvas duffel bag didn’t seem enough. He wondered if he could lay hands on a White truck, or maybe two. He shrugged. He’d manage, one way or another. And whatever he left behind wouldn’t go to waste. Some would, as Major Pruitt had said, follow him wherever he went. The other fellows in the flight were welcome to the rest.
He heard Eaker and Krazewski coming. Eaker said, “Jonathan’ll be glad we sweet-talked the cook out of a corned-beef sandwich for him. I’ve never seen anybody as keen for the stuff as he is.”
The two young fliers came into the tent and stared. Grinning, Moss said, “I will be glad for the sandwich, boys. It’ll give me something to eat while they take me wherever I’m supposed to go.”
“Sir?” they said together, twin expressions of blank surprise on their faces.
Moss wanted to tell them everything. The whiskey in him almost set his mouth working ahead of his brain. He checked himself, though. Saying too much-saying anything, really-wouldn’t be fair to Dud Dudley, who had to stay a while longer because of his botched paperwork.
What Moss did end up saying was, “They’re shipping me out. I’m going into training on a new aeroplane.”
“That’s wonderful, sir,” they exclaimed, again in unison. Krazewski clapped his hands together. With his wide cheekbones, blue, blue eyes, and shock of wheat-blond hair, he would have made a gorgeous woman. He made a hell of a handsome man, and the Canucks and limeys hadn’t managed to kill him yet. He asked, “Does Lieutenant Dudley know, sir?”
That’s Captain Dudley, Moss thought, but Dud doesn’t know it yet. “I’ll tell him as soon as I finish packing,” Moss said. He didn’t say anything about all the stuff he wouldn’t be able to pack. His tentmates would go through it soon enough, almost as if he’d died.
He had intended to head for the officers’ lounge as soon as the duffel bag was full. That didn’t happen, because Dud Dudley came in when he was trying to stuff a tin of shaving soap into a bag already full to the point of seam-splitting. “A fine day to you, Captain Moss!” he exclaimed in a voice to which whiskey gave only part of the glee.
He’s heard, Jonathan realized. Hardshell must have decided he couldn’t keep it a secret. “A fine day to you, Captain Dudley!” he returned. The two men solemnly-well, not so solemnly-shook hands while Eaker and Krazewski gaped all over again.
“Too damn bad we’
re going to different aerodromes to train,” Dudley said, which reconfirmed Moss’ guess. The flight leader slapped him on the back. “I’ll miss you, you son of a bitch. We’ve got to look each other up if we both come through this stinking war in one piece.” He scrawled his name and address on a scrap of paper. “Here. This is me.”
Moss found his own scrap and borrowed Dudley’s pen. “And this is me. I’ll miss you, too, Dud. And I’ll miss these two sorry ragamuffins-” At that, the pilots who would stay behind gave him a pair of raspberries. He shook hands with both of them, too, then slung his duffel bag over his shoulder. He mimed collapsing under the weight, which wasn’t far from being true, and tramped back toward Major Pruitt’s tent.
A Ford was waiting there for him, the motor running. The driver took the duffel, gave him a reproachful stare at its weight, and tossed it into the automobile. “Hop in, sir,” he said. “Off to London.”
The drive was less than a delight. The Ford’s headlamps were taped so they gave out only a little light; the enemy’s aeroplanes would shoot up anything that moved at night. The road would have been bad even had the driver been able to spot all the potholes. Not spotting them meant he and Moss got to fix several punctures along the way. They didn’t do better than ten miles an hour, which made a hundred-mile journey seem to take forever.
Dawn was breaking when they finally reached the aerodrome. No one seemed to be expecting Moss, which, after the time he’d had getting there, didn’t surprise him at all. “Well,” a sergeant said doubtfully, “I guess we’ll put you up in Tent 27. Basler!” A private appeared, as if by magic. “Take Captain Moss to Tent 27. He’ll fit in there, one way or another.” The noncom’s face bore a strange sort of smile.
Moss, who hadn’t managed to doze in the automobile, was too worn to care what a sergeant thought. The private led him to a green-gray tent distinguishable only by the number stenciled on its side. “Here you are, sir.”
“Thanks.” Moss went inside. Sure enough, there was a cot with no belongings nearby. The three officers in the tent, who were readying themselves for the day, looked him over. One of them, a tall, thin, good-looking fellow, exclaimed, “Jonathan!”
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