Herman Wouk - The Winds Of War

by The Winds Of War(Lit)

  Madeline ran to the big drugstore across the street, where the soda fountain was jammed with secretaries and shoppers, talking and laughing over bowls of chili or soup. The usual sort of people were wandering through the aisles, and cheap clocks. A fat old buying toothpaste, lotions, aspirin, candy, blonde woman in an apron and cap quickly made up her sandwiches.

  "Well, honey, who's going to win the war?" she said sociably as she peppered the chicken.

  "Let's just hope Hitler doesn't," Madeline said.

  "Yes, isn't he something? Sieg Heil! Ha, ha. I think the man's crazy.

  I've always said so, and this proves it." She handed Madeline the sandwiches. "Well, honey, so long as we keep out of it, what do we care who wins?

  Madeline bought an evening paper that offered gigantic headlines but no fresh news. just to scan such a dramatic front page was novel fun.

  Though the war was happening so far away, Madeline felt a springtime quickening in her veins. A scent of freedom, of new action, rose from the headlines. The President had announced at once, very firmly, that America was staying out of it. But things were going to be mighty different from now on. That was inevitable! All her thoughts were about the letter she would write to her father, if only she could get this job.

  Cleveland, feet on his desk again, a flirtatious smirk on his face, was telephoning. He nodded at Madeline and-as he went on coaxing some girl, in his warmly rumbling voice, to meet him at Toots Sbor's restaurant -he wolfed the sandwich.

  "Why don't you eat the other one?" Madeline said. "I'm not hungry."

  "Are you sure? I don't want to rob you." He hung up and unwrapped her sandwich. "Ordinarily I don't eat much during the day, but with all this war talk-" He took a great bite and went on talking.

  "Thanks. I swear I'm as hungry as I get at funerals. Ever notice how famished you get at a funeral, Madeline? It's the sheer delight of being alive, I guess, while this Now listen, you want other poor joker's just been buried in a dingy hole. i e to work for me for three weeks, is that it? That'll be fine. It'll give me a chance to look over what's around in Personnel." He flourished a brown envelope at her. "Now then. Gary Cooper is at the Saint Regis, Room 641-this is a sample Who's in Town script. Take it to him. We may get him for Thursday."

  "Gary COOPER? You mean the movie star?" Madeline in astonishment zoomed words like her mother.

  'Who else? He may ask you questions about the show and about me.

  So listen and get this rundown in your head. We work inchwiatirhso,ubtoaonks auience in a little studio, very relaxed. It's a room with a rug, really nice, like a library in a home. It's the same room Mrs. Roosevelt uses for her show. We can do the script in extra big type, if he needs show runs an hour and a half.

  I started this 71

  that. He can take five minutes or fifteen. e whole '34 and did it there show in Los Angeles back in for three years. I called it 0-ver the Coffee then. Maybe he heard it. Of course he may be too busy to go into all that. Anyway, act as though you've been with the show for a while.Too dazzled and excited to talk, Madeline held out her hand for the envelope. Cleveland gave it to her, saying, "All set?

  Anchors aweigh. For Christ's sake, don't ask him for his autograph.

  Telephone me if there's any holdup. Don't fail to reappear.

  Madeline blurted, "You must have had some very stupid girls working for you," and hurried out.

  A maid opened the door of the hotel suite where Gary Cooper, in a gray suit, sat eating lunch at a wheeled table. The star rose, immensely tall and slim, smiling down at Madeline. He put on black-rimmed glasses, glanced over the script as he drank coffee, and asked questions. He was all business, the farthest thing from a bashful cowboy; he had the manner of an admiral. When she mentioned the Over the Coffee show he brightened. "Yes, I remember that."

  Almost at once, it seemed, she was out on the sunny street again, overwrought, thrilled to her bones. "England mobilizes!

  Hitler smashes into Polandi)) the news vendor at the corner hoarsely chanted.

  "Bless your little heart!" Cleveland said as she came into the office.

  He was banging rapidly at a typewriter. "Cooper just called. He likes the idea and he's in." Ripping the yellow sheet out of the machine, he clipped it with others. "He remarked on what a nice girl you were. What did you say to him?"

  "Hardly anything."

  "Well, you did a good job. I'm off to interview him now. There's tomorrow's script. Do a smooth copy of the red-checked pages, then get the whole thing to mimeo instanter. Room 309A." Cleveland stepped into his shoes, straightened his tie, and threw on a rust-colored sports jacket. He scratched his heavy blond hair, and grinned at her, raising thick humorously arched eyebrows. She felt she would do anything for him. He was charming, she decided, rather than actually handsome. There was something infectiously jovial about him, a spark of devilish amusement in his lively blue eyes. She was a bit disappointed to see, when he stood up, that though he could not be more than thirty-one or so, his stomach bulged.

  But it didn't matter.

  He paused at the door. "Do you mind working nights? You'll get paid overtime. If you come back here around eight-thirty tonight, you'll find Thursday's rough on my desk, with the Cooper spot."

  "Mr. Cleveland, I haven't been hired yet."

  "You have been. I just talked to Mrs. Hennessy. After you get that script to mimeo, go down and fill out your papers."

  Madeline toiled for five hours to finish the script. She turned it in, messy though her work was, hoping it would not end her radio career then and there. At the employment office she learned she was starting at thirty-five dollars a week. It seemed a fortune. She took her aching back to the drugstore, made a quick dinner of a chocolate drink and a bacon and tomato sandwich, and walked back to CBS. Over the tall black Madison Avenue buildings, checkered with gold-lit windows, a misty full moon floated in a sunset sky. This day when Hitler's war began was turning out the most delightful in Madeline Henry's life.

  On Cleveland's desk the interview with Gary Cooper now lay, a mass of crude typing, quick scrawls and red crayon cuts. The note clipped to it said: Try to copy it all over tonight. See you around ten.

  Madeline groaned; she was terribly tired.

  She put in a call to Warren at the bachelor officers' quarters of the Pensacola flying school. He wasn't there, but an operator with a Southern accent like a vaudeville imitation offered to track him down.

  In the smoky newsroom, girls kept crisscrossing with long teletype strips or paper cups of coffee, men were talking loud and fast, and the typewriter din never stopped. Through the open door Madeline heard contradictory rumors: Poland was already collapsing, Hitler was on his way to Warsaw, Mussolini was flying to Berlin, the French were pressing England for another Munich deal, Hitler was offering to visit Chamberlain.

  The telephone rang at ten dclock and there was Warren on the line, with music and laughter in the background. He was at the beach club, he said, at a moonlight dance on a terrace lined with palm trees. He had just met a Marvelous girl, the daughter of a Congressman.

  Madeline told him about the CBS job, and he seemed amused and impressed.

  'Say, I've heard Who's in Town," he said. "This fellow Hugh Cleveland has an interesting voice. What's he like?"

  "Oh, very nice. Do you think it's all right? Will Dad be furious?"

  "Matty, you'll be back at school in three weeks, before he even knows about it. Where will you stay?... Oh, yes, that's an all-women hotel, I know that one. Ha! Little Madeline on the town."

  "You don't oh ect?"

  "Me? Why, I think it's fine. just be a good girl, and all that.

  What's the word at CBS, Madeline? Is the war on? The scuttlebutt down here is that England is chickening out."

  "Nothing but rumors here too, a dozen an hour. Is your date really the daughter of a congressman?"P "YOu bet, and she is a dish."

  "TOugh life you're leading. How's the flying coming?"

  "I groundloo
ped on my second solo landing, but don't write Dad that. I'm doing better now. it's great." "Good, you're still here," Cleveland said, walking into the office a few minutes after this conversation. With him was a tall beauty in a black straw hat much Wider than Madeline's, and a gray silk dress. Her gardenia perfume was too strong for the small office. Cleveland glanced at Madeline's typed pages- 'Need a little practice, ehr "I warm up as I go along.- Her voice trembled. She Cleared her throat.

  "Let's hope so. Now look, do you by any chance know of an admiral named Preble? Is he some high muckymuck?" "Preble? Do you mean Stewart Preble?"Stewart Preble, exactly. Who is he?"

  "Why, he's the Chief of Naval Operations.)) "That's a big job, eh?"

  Madeline was used to civilian ignorance of the armed forces, but this shocked her. "Mr. Cleveland, there's nobody higher in the United States Navy." "Fine. Then he's our boy. I just found out he's at the Warwick. We keep tabs on the big hotels, Madeline. Now let's get off a letter to him."

  He leaned on the edge of the desk and started to dictate. The yawning beauty crossed glorious legs, lit a cigarette, and leafed the Hollywood Reporter. Madeline desperately tried to keep up, but had to plead with him to go slower.

  Don't you know shorthand?"

  "I can learn it quickly enough."

  Cleveland glanced at his watch and at the beauty, who drooped her eyelids contemptuously at Madeline. Madeline felt like a worm.

  Cleveland rumpled his hair and shook his head. "Look, you know these Navy characters. Write him a letter, that's all. Invite him to come on the Thursday morning show. Mention Gary Cooper, if you want to.

  Sign my name, and take it over to the Warwick. Can you do that?"

  'Certainly."

  "Fine. Wendy and I want to catch a ten o'clock movie. She plays a bit in it. Say, this Preble fellow, does he know your father? How about that, Wendy? This Idd's father is our Navy attache in Berlin."

  Wendy yawned.

  Madeline said coldly, "Admiral Preble knows my father." "Well, how about mentioning that, then?" He gave her his persuasive impish smile.

  'I'd really like to get him, Madeline. Admirals and generals are usually crappy guests. Too cautious and stiff to say anything interesting. But there's a war on, so for the moment, they're hot.

  See you in the morning. I go on at nine, you know, so get here not later than eight."

  As he had told Madeline, Warren was dancing away this first night of the war in moonlight, with a congressman's pretty daughter.

  The moon floats out in space, some thirty diameters of the earth away, shining on the just and the unjust as the cloud cover allows. It had lent dim but helpful light to the columns of young Germans in gray uniforms, miles and miles long, trudging across the Polish border. Now Europe had rolled into the sun, giving the Germans better illumination to get on with the work, and the same moon was bathing the Gulf of Mejdco, and the terrace of Pensacola's Harbor View Club. The German General Staff had carefully planned on the moonlight, but the silver glow fell on Warren Henry and Janice Lacouture by a pleasant chance.

  Everyone said it was the best club dance in years. The big headlines, the excited radio broadcasts, had created a pleasurable stir in flat quiet them more glamorous; war was in the air, and however remote the combat, Pensacola. The student aviators felt more important and the girls found these were warriors. The talk about the German attack soon gave way to homier topics, however: the horse show, the new base commander, recent flying accidents, recent romances. Der Fuhrer, for these happy people, remained the queer hoarse German of the newsreels, with the wild gestures and the funny mustache, who had managed to start up a European mess, but who could scarcely menace the United States just yet.

  Lieutenant (junior grade) Henry took a different view. The invasion really interested him, and that was how he first caught the interest of Janice Lacouture. At the Academy he had excelled on the subject of the World War. They sat in a far corner of the terrace in the moonlight soon after they met, and instead of talking aviation or making a pass at her, this student pilot told her about the Schlieffen Plan to capture Paris, and the way von Moltke had fatally tampered with it; about the feat of German railroading that had made the Tannenberg victory possible; about the strategic parallels of 1914 and 1939. He had begun with the usual aviator chitchat, which after years of Pensacola dating stupefied Janice.

  But once they began on the war and she allowed her own knowledge of history and politics to show, he turned serious. It had been an exciting talk, the sort in which lovers sometimes discover each other without speaking a romantic word.

  Despite the big Lacouture nose, a mark of French ancestry, and rather irregular front teeth, Janice was one of the belles of Pensacola. Her mouth, skin, and hazel eyes were lovely; her figure so striking that all men automatically stared at her as at a fire. She was tall, blonde, with a soft pushing voice, and a very lively manner.

  Her family owmed the largest house in the club estates. The L-acoutures were solidly rich, from two generations in the timbering that had destroyed the Gulf pine forests for hundreds of miles, and turned northern Florida into a sandy insect-swarming waste. Her father was a wonder in somnolent and self-satisfied Pensacola, the first Lacout'ure who had ever bestirred himself in politics.

  In Washington Janice had grown up farseeing and sober. She had majored in economics and American history at George Washington University, and she was about to start law school. She wanted to marry a public man; a congressman, a senator, a governor; with luck, why not a future President? This was hard on the young men who fell for her beauty and chic. Janice was out for big game, and she had acquired a reputation for frostiness which amused her. The last thing she had expected was to meet anybody worth knowing during her enforced summer in Pensacola.

  And of all people, a naval aviator! Nevertheless there was something different about Warren Henry. He was oddly appealing, with those pen ctrating eyes, bony ramshackle frame) gray-sprinkled hair, and easy smile, with its hint of shrewdness and immorality. He acted as though he knew women far too well for an Annapolis honor student.

  This did not trouble her; it added tang to Warren.

  They stopped talking after a while and danced close-hugged in the moonlight. The Pensacola onlookers began inquiring about the background of the lieutenant junior grade with the scar; for Warren's ground loop had given him a forehead wound requiring nine stitches.

  The naval aviators told each other with envy who the Lacouture girl was.

  When Warren returned to the bachelor officers' quarters he found two telephone messages from Mrs. Tarrasch. This was his Baltimore divorcie; the woman of thirty for whom he had risked expuwon from the Academy; the woman with whom he had spent the afternoon in bed the day his parents had sailed off to Germany. In his third Academy year, he had come upon her as the lady hostess in a tearoom. Responding to a bold remark, she had agreed to see him after the restaurant closed.

  She was a clever little woman, with a hard-luck story about two beastly husbands; she was a reader, a lover of the arts, and hungrily passionate. Warren had grown attached to her, and had briefly even thought of marrying her, when she had once roused his jealousy by going off with an older man for a weekend. Byron had talked him out of that, rendering him the greatest service in the power of a brother. Helene Tarrasch wasn't a bad woman, simply a lonely one. If young officer candidates are to be kept by law from marrying, then the lively ones win find one or another Mrs.

  Tarrasch. warren's worst mistake had been asking her to come to Pensacola, but he had been three years at sea. Now she was installed at the San Carlos Hotel as the receptionist in the main dining room.

  But how obsolete she suddenly was! Not only because of Janice Lacouture; Hitler's invasion of Poland had given the future a shape.

  Warren believed the United States would be at war within a year.

  The prosBut he was going to iqy in this war, pect glittered. He might get killed and if God allowed, he was going to get a good war rec
ord, Warren believed in God, but thought he must be much more broad-minded than the preachers made him out. A Being who could create something as Marvelous as sex was not likely to be priggish about it; Warren was fond of saying that God had clearly given a man balls not for beauty but for use. Sitting in his bleakly furnished room with the old-fashioned high ceiling, trying to ignore his room-mate's snores, Lieutenant Henry looked out of the window at the quiet moonlit lawn in front of the b.O.Q and allowed his mind to run to golden postwar fantasies.

  Politics attracted him. His avid history study had taught him that politicians were the leaders, military men only the mechanics, of war.

  Warren had closely observed politicians visiting the Academy and the fleet. Some were impressive men like his father, but more were gladbanders with worried eyes, phony smiles, and soft bellies. His father's ambition, he knew, was flag rank in the Navy. Warren wanted that, but why not dream of more? Janice Lacouture had brains. She had everything. A single day had transformed Warren Henry's life. In the morning the war had Opened up the future; in the evening the perfect partner for that future had come out of nowhere.