The Lieutenants

by W. E. B Griffin

  “I’m prepared to trust you, as one gentleman to another,” Lowell said, smiling at his grandfather. “But if you insist on having it in writing…”

  “By God, you have grown up,” his grandfather said, smiling back at him. “I’ll have it in writing, though, since you don’t mind.”

  “If you can’t trust your own grandfather, who can you trust?” Lowell asked, in mock innocence. The Old Man laughed.

  “It’s a pleasure doing business with you, sir,” he said, and laughed. Then he said: “It will take a couple of weeks. I’ll look into it.”

  “All it takes is for us to show up the judge’s chambers. I want it done this week,” Lowell said.

  There was one more locking of eyes. Then his grandfather shrugged his shoulders.

  “If it’s that important to you,” he said, “I’ll start the wheels rolling as soon as I get to the office.”

  Lowell thought that this confrontation between them was very different from their last. At that time, when an appeal to emotion had failed to achieve the desired result, the Old Man had resorted to shouts, arm-waving, and a threat that Lowell had known was empty (he’d seen his father’s will) to cut him off without a dime. He would not be the only young man who had ever thrown away the advantages to which he had been born to die in the gutter, his grandfather had shouted.

  Obviously the Old Man wanted something this time. What it was came out over the Brie and crackers with which they ended their meal. His grandfather told him that Andre Pretier was good for Craig’s mother. She was off the bottle, he reported with surprising candor. She wasn’t on pills. There had been few “incidents,” and he wanted it kept that way. The way the Old Man put it, Lowell thought, it had been rather ungentlemanly of him to have caused the notification team to go to the apartment on Fifth Avenue and upset his mother.

  The limousine was waiting for them at the curb when they went back out onto 43rd Street. Lowell had always wondered how the chauffeurs managed it, considering the traffic and the other limousines that had passengers at the same place.

  “I can get a cab out to the Island,” Craig said.

  “Nonsense,” his grandfather said. “Besides, you’re going to stop at Dunhill’s and get cigars.”

  “I would hate to have anything get in the way of your little chat with your legal counsel, Grandfather.”

  The Old Man chuckled. Then, seeing a cab, he put his fingers in his mouth and gave out with a whistle that pierced the noise and bustle of midtown Manhattan. The cab pulled to the curb, and his grandfather got in.

  Then Lowell got into the limousine.

  “Dunhill’s and then Broadlawns, is it, sir?” the chauffeur asked.

  Three weeks ago today, Lowell thought, I was living in a sandbagged hut in the mountains of Greece.

  And three weeks ago today, Little Craig nearly got his little ass blown away.

  “Please,” he said to the chauffeur, and then reached for another of his grandfather’s cigars.

  (Nine)

  Gardeners were at work wrapping the shrubbery in anticipation of the first frost when the Packard rolled through the gates of Broadlawns. The house itself was not visible from the road. He didn’t see anybody in the gate house, but there must have been someone there, for his mother was standing on the veranda in front of the long, rambling, two-story brick house when they got there. Obviously expecting him. With a tall, rather elegant man standing beside her.

  Andre Pretier. His mother’s husband. Well, if she had to buy a husband, she had bought a good-looking one, a gentlemanly type.

  When the chauffeur had to help him out of the car, his mother put her hand to her mouth. Her hair was solid gray, worn short. She had a ragged cashmere sweater over her shoulders.

  “Oh, darling!” she said, when he walked up to her. “Are you all right?” She gave him her cheek to kiss. He remembered the smell of her perfume.

  “Is that the best you can do?” she asked.

  He embraced his mother somewhat gingerly. She had been drinking—he could smell the gin—but she was not drunk, and that was an improvement. She looked healthier, too.

  “And this is Andre,” she said.

  Pretier gave him his hand.

  “Welcome home, Craig,” he said. “I hope that we can be real friends. I’d really like that.”

  “Thank you,” Craig said.

  “Let’s get inside before we catch a cold,” Craig’s mother said.

  A tall, light brown butler stood inside the door.

  “Welcome home, sir,” he said. “May I take your bag?”

  “Thank you,” Lowell said.

  “I expect Craig would like a drink,” Pretier said. “Come on in here,” he said, gesturing toward the sitting room. “We’ve had a fire laid. First of the year. I always like a fire, don’t you?”

  Very handy, Lowell thought, to warm your shaving water.

  The butler wheeled up a cart.

  “What will you have to drink?” Pretier asked him.

  “Ale, please,” Lowell said.

  “I don’t believe we have any ale, sir,” the butler said.

  “We’ll have to have some in the future,” Andre Pretier ordered.

  “Scotch and soda, please,” Craig said.

  “We have your little jeep,” his mother said. “Andre went to Brooklyn and picked it up for you himself. That and your trunks.”

  “That was very nice of you,” Craig said to Andre Pretier. “Thank you very much.”

  “I was happy to do it,” Andre Pretier said. “I want you to feel welcome here, Craig.”

  “Thank you,” Lowell said again, taking the drink from the butler.

  He didn’t recognize any of the servants. When she had been at the sauce, or on the pills, or both, she had run off a lot of servants. These were West Indians, blacks who spoke a British-accented English.

  Lowell wondered if Andre Pretier knew that he wanted Craig to feel welcome in his own house. Lowell’s father’s will had given his mother use of the house for her lifetime, or until she remarried, whereupon it would pass to the Aforementioned Trust for the Benefit of Craig W. Lowell, together with all furnishings. She had married Pretier, and now all this was his.

  “Well,” Andre Pretier said. “As the Spanish say, my house is your house.”

  Craig looked at him, wondering if he meant what he was saying, and if so, why he had brought it up the moment he had walked in.

  “You just let us know what you want, and we’ll do our best to provide it,” Pretier went on. “If you’d like to just lie about and do nothing, or if you’d rather get together with your friends, a party or a dinner or whatever, just speak up.”

  “We want you to be happy, dear,” his mother said. “We’re so glad to have you back after your accident.” He was looking at Pretier when she said that, and Pretier winked at him. The message was clear. Let her think you had an accident.

  “Thank you,” Craig said.

  “Did Grandpa give you lunch?” his mother asked.

  “Yes,” Craig said.

  “Would you like something to eat now? A sandwich and a glass of milk?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Would you like a cigarette, Craig?”

  “I’d like a cigar,” he said. “Grandpa got some for me, from the humidor at Dunhill’s.”

  “Oh, I’m afraid my baby is gone for all time,” his mother said brightly. “Smoking cigars.”

  “We kept the boat, the power boat, in the water,” Andre Pretier said. “I thought you might feel up to using it. Some of the days are really quite warm.”

  “What boat?”

  “My boat,” Andre Pretier said. “I had her brought down from Bar Harbor.”

  “That would be very nice,” Craig said.

  “I’ve become quite the sailor,” his mother said. “Haven’t I, darling?”

  “Yes, my darling, you have,” Andre Pretier said.

  When the butler handed him his scotch and soda, Craig said, “There w
as a package of cigars from Dunhill’s in the car. Would you get me a box, please?”

  “I’ve sent someone for them, sir,” the butler said.

  “I hope you’re not smoking too many of them,” his mother said.

  “I understand that they’re supposed to be better for you than cigarettes,” Andre Pretier said.

  “Don’t be silly, darling,” his mother said. “How could they be?”

  Andre Pretier did not press the point.

  “I don’t mean to cast a pall on your welcome, Craig,” he said, “but what are the arrangements for medical treatment?”

  “I’m going to go into New York,” Craig said. “To Governors Island. Tomorrow.”

  “Do you have to?” his mother asked. “There are perfectly good doctors we can call here.”

  “Craig is a soldier, darling,” Andre Pretier said. “Soldiers do what they’re ordered to do.” He smiled at Craig. “I’ll tell the chauffeur,” he said. “Have him stand by, so to speak.”

  “You know, even with him sitting there in his soldier suit,” his mother said, “I really can’t believe that he is a soldier.” She smiled at her son. “Do you have to wear it all the time?”

  “No,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I’d like to change out of it right now.”

  “I’m sure you would,” she said. “But finish your drink, first.”

  The butler held out an open box of cigars to Craig. After he had taken one, the box was placed on the coffee table. Andre Pretier bent over him and held out a match.

  “That’s vulgar, darling,” his mother said, when he bit the end off and spat it out. “Grandpa has a little knife he uses. If you’re going to smoke cigars, you really should get one of those little knives.”

  “They call them cutters, I think,” Andre Pretier said.

  “You should have gotten one when you were at Dunhill’s,” his mother said. “Why didn’t you think of it?”

  Craig drained his drink.

  “I think I’ll change clothing,” he said. “Will you excuse me?”

  “We’ve put your things in your old room, darling. Remember?” his mother said.

  “Yes, of course,” he said.

  He walked up the thickly carpeted stairway to the second floor, and down a wide corridor toward his old room, actually two rooms, at the end of it. A maid was vacuuming the carpet. She shut the machine off and smiled at him shyly until he passed. He had a mental image of Ilse kneeling by her scrub bucket in the 97th General Hospital.

  He went into the bedroom of the small suite and took the sling off very carefully. Then he took off his jacket and his necktie and his shirt and pulled off his T-shirt. The shirt stuck to dried whateveritwas leaking from the bandage at his elbow.

  He rang for a servant.

  The butler came right away. Craig told him to bring bandages and gauze and Mercurochrome.

  When the butler came back, Andre Pretier was with him.

  “Your mother thought I might be able to help,” he said. When he saw the bandages, he said, “I’d rather your mother didn’t see that.”

  “Me, too,” Lowell said. He pulled the adhesive tape loose and held his arm out for the butler to rebandage.

  “They said that if there was suppuration, they would probably keep me in the hospital on Governors Island for a couple of days,” Craig said. “How do you want to handle that?”

  “Why don’t you just say you’re spending a couple of days with friends?” Andre Pretier said. “That way she won’t worry.”

  “Why don’t you tell her I called and said that?” Craig said.

  “I think that would be best,” Andre Pretier said. “And now I’ll go down and tell her that Kenneth is perfectly capable of helping you.”

  When Pretier had gone, Craig asked Kenneth to pack a bag for him, enough clothing for a week or ten days, one uniform, the rest civilian clothing, and to put it into the car he would be using in the morning.

  He had breakfast alone the next morning. The Master and Madame, Kenneth told him, seldom rose before ten; and then they had breakfast in their room. After he had breakfast, he walked out the front door where the chauffeur was waiting, holding open the rear door of an ornately sculptured automobile Craig didn’t recognize.

  “What is this thing, anyway?” Craig asked.

  “It is a Delahaye with a body by Fortin,” the chauffeur said. “It is Mr. Pretier’s automobile.”

  “Very nice,” Craig said. “Have you been with Mr. Pretier long?”

  “Oh, yes, sir.”

  Well, that seemed to confirm it. Pretier had money of his own. He had not married Craig’s mother for her money. He wondered why he had married her.

  “I want to go to the Morgan Guaranty Trust on 53rd Street first,” Craig said. “And then to the Federal Building.”

  “And then to Governors Island, sir?”

  “No. After the Federal Building, we’re going to Newark,” Craig said.

  (Ten)

  In Newark, after they’d driven past the Old Warsaw Bakery on the corner of Chancellor Avenue and Aldine Street and he knew he’d found what he was looking for, he told the chauffeur to drop him at the corner and that he wouldn’t need him anymore.

  There was a line of people waiting to buy bread and rolls; and two pictures of the Mouse were over the cash register, one in his cadet uniform, one in pinks and greens. Two little American flags were crossed proudly above them.

  He set his bag down on the tile floor and after a moment sat on it. He waited there for about five minutes until the line went down. Then the slight, pleasant-faced, shy-appearing woman with her black hair in a bun, dressed in a too-large white baker’s smock saw him for the first time.

  She looked at him very strangely, and then she came from behind the glass display cases and walked up to him. He stood up.

  “Craig?” she asked.

  “Sharon?”

  Sharon Lavinsky Felter stood on her tiptoes and kissed Craig Lowell on the cheek.

  “Sandy wrote you’d come,” she said. “I’m so glad you did.”

  A couch in Felter’s flat over the bakery opened up into a double bed, and he slept in that.

  Three days later, he took a cab from the Felters’ flat back into New York, although Mr. Felter had offered to drive him anywhere in the world he wanted to go.

  He met his grandfather at the Borough of Manhattan Court House, where a judge took about five minutes to declare him an adult in the eyes of the law. Next he went to the Federal Building and picked up his passport, then to LaGuardia Airport where he caught Trans-World Airlines Flight 307, a Lockheed Constellation, New York-Paris, with a stopover at Gander Field, Newfoundland.

  He told the captain in the embassy in Paris who handled entry permits for the American Zone of Occupied Germany that he was a student who wished to visit his aunt, Major Florence Horter, at the 97th General Hospital in Frankfurt. The captain telephoned Major Horter to verify his story. She met him at the Hauptbahnhof in Frankfurt. She was alone.

  “I wasn’t sure that you were going to get away with this,” she said. “And I didn’t want Ilse to get upset.”

  “I said I’d be back in about a month,” he said. “It’s twenty-six days. I’m back. And anyway, Ilse’s pretty tough.”

  “Ilse’s four months’ pregnant,” Major Horter said. “Chew on that for a while, Sonny boy.”

  (Eleven)

  Craig W. Lowell and Ilse von Greiffenberg were married by the pastor of St. Luke’s Protestant (Lutheran) Church in Frankfurt am Main, with Major Florence Horter as their only attendant.

  The pastor had mixed feelings about the whole thing. For one thing, the groom’s great good spirits were at least partially inspired by alcohol. The bride was obviously pregnant. He had serious doubts if they had considered all the ramifications of marriage, temporal and spiritual.

  But they seemed to be in love; and at least the American was trying to do the right thing. There were literally thousands of girls bearing the children o
f American soldiers who would not marry them.

  After the wedding, the newly married couple went to Oberursel. There after a long and frustrating search, Ilse and Major Horter had found a small, but clean, apartment where Ilse would wait until her immigration papers were processed. The groom undressed, and Major Horter changed his dressings while the bride looked on, making little noises of sympathy.

  Then Major Horter left the couple with her wedding gift to them, three bottles of Moët champagne, and a book, So You’re Going To Have a Baby?

  Before she left, Major Horter and Lieutenant Lowell went shopping in the Frankfurt post exchange for all the things Ilse would need while she waited to go to America. Ilse was a German national, and German nationals were prohibited by regulation from entering post exchanges. She waited in the car, nervously twisting the four-carat diamond ring on her finger. She knew it couldn’t be real—where would Craig get that kind of money?—but she thought that it was beautiful anyway.

  IX

  (One)

  Student Officer Company

  The United States Armor School

  Fort Knox, Kentucky

  30 October 1946

  Student Officer Company, The Armor School (SOC-TAS) was a collection of two-story wooden barracks painted yellowish white with green shingled roofs. They were spread out to conform to the contours of the low hill on which they had been built, and were generally centered around a two-story administrative building and a single-story orderly room. The latter was two standard orderly rooms built together. A standard mess hall capable of seating 750 troops had been converted to form slightly more luxurious dining facilities for officers (instead of twelve-man plank tables, there were four-man tables covered with oilcloth). It was placed on the edge of the cluster of buildings overlooking the classroom buildings built on the flat land below.

  Each of the student BOQs was identical. They were slightly longer than standard enlisted barracks. There were six suites on each side of a corridor running down the center of the buildings. Each suite contained two bedrooms, each furnished with an iron bed, a chest of drawers, a desk, a straight-backed chair, and an armchair. A bath, consisting of a water closet, a double sink, and a tin-walled and concrete-floored shower, connected the two rooms of each suite. In each barrack, one of the two-room suites had been set aside for use as a “recreation room,” which was a euphemism for bar.