The Winston Affair

by Howard Fast

  Howsoever, each time he dreamed he made the same mother for Gabowski, until she became so familiar and real that he half believed in her, and wondered whether or not Gabowski had shown him a picture of the woman. If Gabowski had shown him such a picture, Adams could not recall the occasion; but this did not surprise him. He knew that he had developed the ability to forget things he did not desire to remember.

  On four different occasions Barney Adams had received letters from Mrs. Gabowski, and each time she had begged him not to tell Gabowski that she was writing to his company officer. She knew about her son’s sensitivities, and was as careful as she could be not to cause him embarrassment. She wrote a painful scrawl, was a poor speller, and did strange things with a language she had not been born to, but with all this there was somehow in her letters an almost courtly grace and perception that moved Adams deeply. Each letter ended with a little blessing and prayer for Captain Adams’ health and happiness. In the first letter, Mrs. Gabowski apologized for her presumption in offering the prayer, for she was a Catholic and she knew—perhaps in her mind she classified all commissioned officers so—that Captain Adams was a Protestant. But when Adams wrote back thanking her for the prayer, she made no further reference to the matter.

  It was not until the fourth letter, evidently, that Mrs. Gabowski felt sufficiently comfortable in their acquaintance to bring up the matter of the vitamins. She informed Barney Adams, with many apologies, that she had taken the great liberty of sending to him, under separate cover, a bottle of 500 Unicaps. Her handwriting became even worse as she begged him to do something she had no right to ask, to see that Gabowski took a vitamin tablet every day. She explained how much this would mean to both herself and her son, and she also explained that it would have done her no good to have sent the bottle directly to Gabowski. He would be ashamed to carry a bottle of vitamins with him, and he would throw it away first chance he had.

  Barney Adams knew that this was so. Gabowski was a round-faced, pink-cheeked boy of nineteen years. He was short, chubby, and gentle as a lamb. Where the other men grew respectable black and brown and red whiskers in the rain and mud and foxholes, Gabowski put forth a colorless, soft stubble. Where the other men smoked whatever they could lay hands on, Gabowski went into a fit of coughing every time he lit a cigarette. And the one time Gabowski got drunk on red wine, he passed out and had to be carried back to the company area.

  Adams was trapped. There was no way out Day after day, bound by the silence of honor and duty beyond the call of duty which a woman had placed upon him, he had to find Gabowski and, with threats and rank, force him to take a vitamin pill.

  There was the night in Italy when he crawled up to Lieutenant Jacob’s position and said, “Where in hell’s name is that God damned Gabowski?”

  Adams guarded a secret that was no secret at all. The lieutenant kept a straight face as he told Adams that their line to artillery had been cut somewhere, and Gabowski and Winnaker had gone out along the line to repair it.

  “They’ll be back in a few minutes, I think, sir. Why don’t you wait?” the lieutenant asked.

  “I’ll go along the line,” Adams said, and he started off, bending low, running the line through his gloved fingers. The vitamins bulged in his pocket.

  It was very quiet at first. Adams was moving back, and he had just decided to walk upright when some shelling began. He dropped to his face. There were only four rounds. Then he crawled along the wire and his outstretched hand touched a face. He knew it was Gabowski’s face, and it was upside down, as if Gabowski were standing on his head.

  Adams began to tremble. He pulled off a glove, but his hand was shaking so that he could hardly put it into his pocket to get out his lighter. When the lighter flared, he saw the wet red stump of Gabowski’s neck, the head imbedded in the mud on its silky yellow hair.

  When he dreamed, it was at this moment that he awakened, leaving this final recollection etched sharply and precisely. Now, under the mosquito netting, he rolled over onto his stomach, put his face in the pillow, and began to cry.

  Saturday 8.40 P.M.

  At the mess barracks, Barney Adams said to Corporal Baxter, “Do you have a date tonight, Corporal?”

  “I got a sort of tomato at Conga Flats. She’s good for tonight.”

  “Take the jeep and enjoy yourself.”

  Baxter protested. He had developed a half-protective attitude toward the captain, and wanted to know how Adams would get home.

  “I’ll pick up a ride. Take off.”

  The barracks was brightly lit, the tables rearranged to form a good-sized dance floor. The four-piece combination from back home was very good indeed, and when Barney Adams entered, it was playing “South of the Border.” The song had always produced a sentimental reaction in him; it was like hearing “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding,” which went much further back but touched him the same way.

  For a while, Adams stood just inside the big screen doors, watching the officers enter with their dates, Red Cross women and nurses and a sprinkling of girls from the British families in residence. He had the lonely and restive feeling of a man who comes alone to a dance and knows that he will be alone through the evening, and he had half made up his mind to stay no more than fifteen or twenty minutes and then leave. He nodded and spoke a few words to officers he had been introduced to and to men he knew by sight from the Makra Palace.

  One or two of them said, “I’ll buy you a drink, Captain.”

  He nodded and put it off. There was no real bar, but a great bowl of gin-spiked punch had been set up on a table at the other end of the room, and already it held its own circle of earnest drinkers. A dozen or so couples were on the floor; because of the heat, they cut the time in two as they moved.

  Behind him, a woman said, “Good evening, Captain Adams.”

  Nothing could have astonished Barney Adams more. He turned and saw the nurse who had berated him in Major Kaufman’s office the day before. She had added make-up to her dress uniform and she was smiling. It made a difference.

  “You have a nice smile, Lieutenant,” he said.

  “So have you, Captain Adams. My name is Kate Sorenson—so please don’t call me Lieutenant.”

  “Very well, Miss Sorenson. My name is Barney Adams.”

  “So I understand.”

  “Well—yes. Of course.” He stood there and looked past her.

  “I have no date tonight, if that’s what you’re looking for. A group of us came up from the hospital. I came along. I’m surprised to find you here, I will say that.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just didn’t think you would be here.”

  “I’m surprised to hear that you thought about it at all.”

  “Well, there you are.” She shrugged. “I hope it’s a pleasant surprise for both of us.”

  “It’s very pleasant for me,” Adams said. “I was beginning to feel sorry for myself. I don’t like to feel sorry for myself.”

  “You don’t permit yourself much sentiment, do you, Captain?”

  “Only what I can handle, Miss Sorenson.”

  “And do you have contempt for people who lose their temper—as I did yesterday?”

  “No—no, I don’t,” Adams replied reflectively. “I’m sure you had good reason to defend Major Kaufman. He’s an extraordinary man.”

  “What are you trying to say, Captain?” she asked sharply. “Do you think I’m his girl?”

  “I didn’t say that, did I?”

  “Let me make it plain that I am not.”

  “Please, I didn’t mean to offend you. Understand me—I don’t care what relationship exists between you and Major Kaufman.” He shook his head then. “No, that’s not it. This is a bad night for me, Miss Sorenson. I felt lonely and miserable before you said hello to me. I wanted to hear what you just said.”

  “A nurse sometimes has a peculiar kind of hero worship,” Lieutenant Sorenson said. “When you work with a man like Major Kaufman, you can
become involved with him—but not that way. I’m not talking about myself. He just wasn’t having any.”

  “It’s none of my business.” He looked at her suspiciously. “What changed your feeling about me, Miss Sorenson?”

  “He did.”

  “I brought him trouble,” Adams said.

  “He had trouble. Maybe you brought him something else.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  She was watching him searchingly, and he wondered: What does she see and what is she thinking? Do I show her how much I need someone to be with and talk to tonight?

  “I read all about you,” she said simply. “It was in today’s paper. I read that you were one of the heroes of the North African campaign, and that you are a brave and honorable man.” She said this with no note of scorn or sarcasm, but directly, as if she knew quite well how old-fashioned and embarrassing her statement was.

  “There aren’t any heroes,” he answered, almost sorrowfully.

  “What did you do to make the man who wrote about you feel the way he did?” she asked. “His name is Sundar Jatee, and he has a reputation for cynicism and clever hatred when it comes to the British or us.”

  “I asked him to sit down,” Adams remembered.

  Saturday 10.45 P.M.

  They had been dancing, and Adams was hot and wet and a little tight from five glasses of the punch. Kate Sorenson had matched his drinking, but she held it well. She took him by the arm, firmly, and led him out into the gardens behind the barracks. A sweet, pungent smell was thick as honey in the air.

  “What am I smelling, Kate?” he wanted to know.

  “Jasmine.”

  “I was out here after lunch but there was no smell.”

  “You only smell the jasmine at night. It gives off its odor then, but I don’t know why.”

  They sat down on an old stone bench. There was a yellow moon in the sky. The faintest whisper of a breeze cooled them a bit. From behind the screen doors, the four-piece combination was playing a medley from The Student Prince.

  “They wouldn’t play numbers like that stateside,” Sorenson remarked. “I guess they learned somewhere that they get a big hand for nostalgia.”

  “My father and mother saw the show. When my father had a leave, they’d go to New York and buy tickets for everything that was playing. If it was a musical, my mother would buy the sheet music. Then she’d work it out on the piano. It took a lot of patience because she wasn’t the world’s best pianist, but I remember that I would sit and watch her and be convinced that she was. We would sing the songs together.”

  “You must have had a happy childhood, Barney.”

  “I suppose so. It seems ordinary when I look back. I was an only child. I wanted to measure up to what my father expected and I never felt that I did.”

  “What did he expect?”

  “It wasn’t what he expected. It was what I thought he expected. I was always afraid of him. Look at the moon, Kate.”

  “Oh, the hell with the moon and this stinking jasmine! The hell with you, too, Barney! What kind of a damn fool am I to be sitting here and waiting for you to romance me?”

  “I don’t know,” he shrugged. “There are all kinds of damn fools, Kate—your kind, my kind.”

  “Why don’t you make a pass—or do you time things? When is the proper moment? Don’t sit there with your mouth full of teeth, like a damn collar ad! This is it. We’re at war, and all that West Point and warm, sweet childhood and mother at the piano picking out the melodies will now pay off. You’ll be a general if it lasts long enough.”

  “Who are you defending now?” he asked quietly.

  “Myself.”

  “All right—if you have to.”

  “Yes, I have to.”

  “Do you want to tell me why?”

  “Don’t pull the sympathy act, Barney. You don’t know a damn thing—not one damn thing. What does war teach you—how to die? It’s more important to know how to live. I’m as lonely as you are, but it doesn’t warm the cockles of my heart to sit here and listen to your happy childhood and think about what a fine, clean-cut American boy Barney Adams is. My mother came here from Sweden in 1916, and I was born two months after she arrived. Mr. Sorenson never came. My mother was a cleaning woman in the biggest office building in Minneapolis, and I was knocked over and laid when I was fifteen years old. I became a nurse the way Max Kaufman became a doctor, by cutting a little piece of my heart out each day and depositing it at the First National Bank, and I always felt I was rich until now.”

  Barney Adams was watching her. She sat unmoving and fixed in her own woe. Like that, the two of them sat there, and minutes went by, until at last she whispered, “Get in your jeep, Captain, and go home.”

  “I sent the jeep away, Kate,” he said matter-of-factly. “They gave me this Corporal Baxter as a driver, and at first I just felt that I would like to see him bleed to death slowly, because he was that kind of a guy. But then I got kind of fond of him, and he had a date tonight. So I told him to take the jeep.”

  “You’re noble. You’re so damned brave and noble.”

  “If I’d known that I’d have a date,” he said apologetically, “I wouldn’t have been so noble.”

  “You don’t have a date. Go home.”

  “No. You see, the trouble with people like Kaufman and yourself is that while you put up a great front about being sorry for yourselves, you’re not sorry at all. In fact, you are as imperious as hell and you look down on anyone who has been handed anything. I had a top sergeant in my company who was the biggest bookie in Philadelphia before he became a sergeant. He was a good infantry sergeant, with imagination and resourcefulness, but because he had made it before he was thirty years old, he treated his men with contempt and trusted them no further than he could throw them. I had to break him from his rank, but that only fixed his opinion of people like me. Well, you—”

  “Stop that!” she cried.

  “I was only trying to explain why I’m not going home. You can’t send me away, Kate.”

  He put an arm around her shoulder, and she said, “Make your pass, soldier. A nurse is open season. Haven’t you heard of nurses who banked fifty grand in areas where women were in short supply?”

  “I hear all kind of things, Kate.”

  Then she put her head down against his shoulder and remained silent.

  Sunday 12.20 A.M.

  The moon had turned silver and flooded the sleeping city with its light. The rickshaw boy moved at a slow trot that was almost a walk, and the scent of the night lay on them. The whole feeling of Barney Adams was of being alive; he had never been alive like this before, inside and outside, aware of himself and his soul and being and beginning and end, but without fear or the trouble of time; and also aware of the woman who sat next to him. He knew how good it was to be alive, how gracious and sweet.

  He savored the smells of the night. The city was full of smells, jasmine carried on the wind and the smell of burnt charcoal and the smell of decay and the smell of man and the smell of the jungle and the salty far-off promise of the monsoon. He savored all the smells and used them as a part of his being. His being alive was a part of his will and urgency—and he sensed that the whole world was for man to know and use and comprehend.

  “Haven’t you a girl at home?” she asked him softly.

  “No.”

  “Half of the world is women. Why didn’t any of them love you?”

  “Because I didn’t love any of them, I suppose. Because I wasn’t looking for love.”

  “I don’t believe that two people can fall in love like this. Not two people as far apart as you and me.”

  “If it happens, it doesn’t matter whether or not you believe it.”

  “I can’t live in a dream.”

  “I’ve been living in a dream,” Adams said. “I woke up tonight. I know who I am and I know who you are.”

  “Who are we, Barney?”

  “We’re people. We’re filled with li
fe and compassion—and we’re connected with all the time that was and all the time that will be.”

  “Oh, you’re a strange man,” she said. “You say things that no one else would say, and you’re untroubled. I never knew anyone as untroubled as you are, Barney Adams. When I was in training, I met boys who looked like you. I hated them. They were empty.”

  “I was empty,” he said.

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “I knew I was empty. That made a difference.”

  “I don’t understand that.”

  “I know. I’m trying to say a lot of things tonight that I never said before, and I don’t know how to say them. I haven’t had any practice. Look”—he pointed to the rickshaw boy—“can’t we walk? I can’t sit here and talk and have him pulling me like that. How far is it?”

  “Not far. Less than a mile.”

  They stopped the rickshaw and paid the man. Then they walked through the night, Barney Adams holding her hand.

  When they came to the hospital, she turned to him and said, “Everything else is all right, and I guess I’m as happy as I have ever been in all my life, but don’t say that you’re in love with me. You don’t have to say that—I swear you don’t. Because you’re not in love with me, and I am not in love with you. You can have me or any part of me or anything that I own. That’s the way I am. I’m not like the girls you knew over stateside—like the girls at the West Point Ball that you were telling me about.”

  “What are they like, Kate?”

  “You know—it has to be signed, sealed and delivered. Jesus. Christ, Barney, stop playing games with me!”

  “I’m not playing games with you, Kate.”

  “Barney, Barney,” she whispered, “why are you making it so hard for me? I don’t want anything. I’ll take tonight. And tomorrow night, if you want it that way. When it’s done, it’s done.”

  “You want it that way? Tell me why, Kate.”

  “Because there isn’t any other way.”

  “You don’t believe I love you?”