The 40s: The Story of a Decade

by The New Yorker Magazine

  “Sweetish, actually. Actually awful.”

  “Was Satan jealous of George when he was a baby?”

  “Frightfully,” Mrs. Talbot said. “Call Satan!” she shouted to her husband, who was up by the little house. He had found a rat hole near the ravaged lady slippers and was setting a trap. He called the dog, and the dog went bounding off, devotion in every leap.

  While Mrs. Talbot was telling Arnold how they found Satan at the baby’s crib one night, Duncan, who was playing only a few yards away with George, suddenly, and for no apparent reason, made his younger brother cry. Mrs. Talbot got up and separated them.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t time for your nap, George,” she said, but he was not willing to let go of even a small part of the day. He wiped his tears away with his fist and ran from her. She ran after him, laughing, and caught him at the foot of the terrace.

  Duncan wandered off into a solitary world of his own, and Arnold, after yawning twice, got up and went into the house. Stretched out on the bed in his room, with the Venetian blinds closed, he began to compare the life of the Talbots with his own well-ordered but childless and animalless life in town. Everywhere they go, he thought, they leave tracks behind them, like people walking in the snow. Paths crisscrossing, lines that are perpetually meeting: the mother’s loving pursuit of her youngest, the man’s love for his daughter, the dog’s love for the man, the two boys’ preoccupation with each other. Wheels and diagrams, Arnold said to himself. The patterns of love.

  · · ·

  That night Arnold was much less bothered by the crowing, which came to him dimly, through dreams. When he awoke finally and was fully awake, he was conscious of the silence and the sun shining in his eyes. His watch had stopped and it was later than he thought. The Talbots had finished breakfast and the Sunday Times was waiting beside his place at the table. While he was eating, John Talbot came in and sat down for a minute, across the table. He had been out early that morning, he said, and had found a chipmunk in the rat trap and also a nest with three bantam eggs in it. The eggs were cold.

  He was usually a very quiet, self-contained man. This was the first time Arnold had ever seen him disturbed about anything. “I don’t know how we’re going to tell Kate,” he said. “She’ll be very upset.”

  Kate came home sooner than they expected her, on the bus. She came up the driveway, lugging her suitcase.

  “Did you have a good time?” Mrs. Talbot called to her from the terrace.

  “Yes,” she said, “I had a beautiful time.”

  Arnold looked at the two boys, expecting them to blurt out the tragedy as soon as Kate put down her suitcase, but they didn’t. It was her father who told her, in such a roundabout way that she didn’t seem to understand at all what he was saying. Mrs. Talbot interrupted him with the flat facts; the bantam hen was not on her nest and therefore, in all probability, had been killed, maybe by the rat.

  Kate went into the house. The others remained on the terrace. The dog didn’t snap at the ducklings, though his mind was on them still, and the two boys didn’t quarrel. In spite of the patterns on which they seem so intent, Arnold thought, what happens to one of them happens to all. They are helplessly involved in Kate’s loss.

  At noon other guests arrived, two families with children. There was a picnic, with hot dogs and bowls of salad, cake, and wine, out under the grape arbor. When the guests departed, toward the end of the afternoon, the family came together again on the terrace. Kate was lying on the ground, on her stomach, with her face resting on her arms, her head practically in the ducklings’ saucer of milk. Mrs. Talbot, who had stretched out on the garden chaise longue, discovered suddenly that Mr. Rochester was missing. She sat up in alarm and cried, “Where is he?”

  “Down my neck,” Kate said.

  The duck emerged from her crossed arms. He crawled around them and climbed up on the back of her neck. Kate smiled. The sight of the duck’s tiny downy head among her pale ash-blond curls made them all burst out laughing. The cloud that had been hanging over the household evaporated into bright sunshine, and Arnold seized that moment to glance surreptitiously at his watch.

  They all went to the train with him, including the dog. At the last moment Mrs. Talbot, out of a sudden perception of his lonely life, tried to give him some radishes, but he refused them. When he stepped out of the car at the station, the boys were arguing and were with difficulty persuaded to say goodbye to him. He watched the station wagon drive away and then stood listening for the sound of the wood thrush. But, of course, in the center of South Norwalk there was no such sound.

  July 7, 1945

  Irwin Shaw

  “Present it to him in a pitiful light,” Olson was saying as they picked their way through the almost frozen mud toward the orderly-room tent. “Three combat-scarred veterans, who fought their way from Omaha Beach to…What was the name of the town we fought our way to?”

  “Königstein,” Seeger said.

  “Königstein.” Olson lifted his right foot heavily out of a puddle and stared admiringly at the three pounds of mud clinging to his overshoe. “The backbone of the Army. The noncommissioned officer. We deserve better of our country. Mention our decorations, in passing.”

  “What decorations should I mention?” Seeger asked. “The Marksman’s Medal?”

  “Never quite made it,” Olson said. “I had a cross-eyed scorer at the butts. Mention the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, the Croix de Guerre with palms, the Unit Citation, the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

  “I’ll mention them all.” Seeger grinned. “You don’t think the C.O.’ll notice that we haven’t won most of them, do you?”

  “Gad, sir,” Olson said with dignity, “do you think that one Southern military gentleman will dare doubt the word of another Southern military gentleman in the hour of victory?”

  “I come from Ohio,” Seeger said.

  “Welch comes from Kansas,” Olson said, coolly staring down a second lieutenant who was passing. The lieutenant made a nervous little jerk with his hand, as though he expected a salute, then kept it rigid, as a slight, superior smile of scorn twisted at the corner of Olson’s mouth. The lieutenant dropped his eyes and splashed on through the mud. “You’ve heard of Kansas,” Olson said. “Magnolia-scented Kansas.”

  “Of course,” said Seeger. “I’m no fool.”

  “Do your duty by your men, Sergeant.” Olson stopped to wipe the cold rain off his face and lectured him. “Highest-ranking noncom present took the initiative and saved his comrades, at great personal risk, above and beyond the call of you-know-what, in the best traditions of the American Army.”

  “I will throw myself in the breach,” Seeger said.

  “Welch and I can’t ask more,” said Olson.

  They walked heavily through the mud on the streets between the rows of tents. The camp stretched drearily over the Reims plain, with the rain beating on the sagging tents. The division had been there over three weeks, waiting to be shipped home, and all the meagre diversions of the neighborhood had been sampled and exhausted, and there was an air of watchful suspicion and impatience with the military life hanging over the camp now, and there was even reputed to be a staff sergeant in C Company who was laying odds they would not get back to America before July 4th.

  “I’m redeployable,” Olson sang. “It’s so enjoyable.” It was a jingle he had composed, to no recognizable melody, in the early days after the victory in Europe, when he had added up his points and found they came to only sixty-three, but he persisted in singing it. He was a short, round boy who had been flunked out of air cadets’ school and transferred to the infantry but whose spirits had not been damaged in the process. He had a high, childish voice and a pretty, baby face. He was very good-natured, and had a girl waiting for him at the University of California, where he intended to finish his course at government expense when he got out of the Army, and he was just the type who is killed off early and predictably and sadly in moving pictures about the
war, but he had gone through four campaigns and six major battles without a scratch.

  Seeger was a large, lanky boy, with a big nose, who had been wounded at St.-Lô but had come back to his outfit in the Siegfried Line quite unchanged. He was cheerful and dependable and he knew his business. He had broken in five or six second lieutenants, who had later been killed or wounded, and the C.O. had tried to get him commissioned in the field, but the war had ended while the paperwork was being fumbled over at headquarters.

  They reached the door of the orderly tent and stopped. “Be brave, Sergeant,” Olson said. “Welch and I are depending on you.”

  “O.K.,” Seeger said, and went in.

  · · ·

  The tent had the dank, Army-canvas smell that had been so much a part of Seeger’s life in the past three years. The company clerk was reading an October, 1945, issue of the Buffalo Courier-Express, which had just reached him, and Captain Taney, the company C.O., was seated at a sawbuck table which he used as a desk, writing a letter to his wife, his lips pursed with effort. He was a small, fussy man, with sandy hair that was falling out. While the fighting had been going on, he had been lean and tense and his small voice had been cold and full of authority. But now he had relaxed, and a little pot belly was creeping up under his belt and he kept the top button of his trousers open when he could do it without too public loss of dignity. During the war, Seeger had thought of him as a natural soldier—tireless, fanatic about detail, aggressive, severely anxious to kill Germans. But in the last few months, Seeger had seen him relapsing gradually and pleasantly into the small-town hardware merchant he had been before the war, sedentary and a little shy, and, as he had once told Seeger, worried, here in the bleak champagne fields of France, about his daughter, who had just turned twelve and had a tendency to go after the boys and had been caught by her mother kissing a fifteen-year-old neighbor in the hammock after school.

  “Hello, Seeger,” he said, returning the salute with a mild, offhand gesture. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Am I disturbing you, sir?”

  “Oh, no. Just writing a letter to my wife. You married, Seeger?” He peered at the tall boy standing before him.

  “No, sir.”

  “It’s very difficult.” Taney sighed, pushing dissatisfiedly at the letter before him. “My wife complains I don’t tell her I love her often enough. Been married fifteen years. You’d think she’d know by now.” He smiled at Seeger. “I thought you were going to Paris,” he said. “I signed the passes yesterday.”

  “That’s what I came to see you about, sir.”

  “I suppose something’s wrong with the passes.” Taney spoke resignedly, like a man who has never quite got the hang of Army regulations and has had requisitions, furloughs, and requests for courts-martial returned for correction in a baffling flood.

  “No, sir,” Seeger said. “The passes’re fine. They start tomorrow. Well, it’s just—” He looked around at the company clerk, who was on the sports page.

  “This confidential?” Taney asked.

  “If you don’t mind, sir.”

  “Johnny,” Taney said to the clerk, “go stand in the rain someplace.”

  “Yes, sir,” the clerk said, and slowly got up and walked out.

  Taney looked shrewdly at Seeger and spoke in a secret whisper. “You pick up anything?” he asked.

  Seeger grinned. “No, sir, haven’t had my hands on a girl since Strasbourg.”

  “Ah, that’s good.” Taney leaned back, relieved, happy that he didn’t have to cope with the disapproval of the Medical Corps.

  “It’s—well,” said Seeger, embarrassed, “it’s hard to say—but it’s money.”

  Taney shook his head sadly. “I know.”

  “We haven’t been paid for three months, sir, and—”

  “Damn it!” Taney stood up and shouted furiously. “I would like to take every bloody, chair-warming old lady in the Finance Department and wring their necks.”

  The clerk stuck his head into the tent. “Anything wrong? You call for me, sir?”

  “No!” Taney shouted. “Get out of here!”

  The clerk ducked out.

  Taney sat down again. “I suppose,” he said, in a more normal voice, “they have their problems. Outfits being broken up, being moved all over the place. But it’s rugged.”

  “It wouldn’t be so bad,” Seeger said, “but we’re going to Paris tomorrow. Olson, Welch, and myself. And you need money in Paris.”

  “Don’t I know it?” Taney wagged his head. “Do you know what I paid for a bottle of champagne on the Place Pigalle in September?” He paused significantly. “I won’t tell you. You wouldn’t have any respect for me the rest of your life.”

  Seeger laughed. “Hanging is too good for the guy who thought up the rate of exchange,” he said.

  “I don’t care if I never see another franc as long as I live.” Taney waved his letter in the air, although it had been dry for a long time.

  There was silence in the tent, and Seeger swallowed a little embarrassedly. “Sir,” he said, “the truth is, I’ve come to borrow some money for Welch, Olson, and myself. We’ll pay it back out of the first pay we get, and that can’t be too long from now. If you don’t want to give it to us, just tell me and I’ll understand and get the hell out of here. We don’t like to ask, but you might just as well be dead as be in Paris broke.”

  Taney stopped waving his letter and put it down thoughtfully. He peered at it, wrinkling his brow, looking like an aged bookkeeper in the single, gloomy light that hung in the middle of the tent.

  “Just say the word, Captain,” Seeger said, “and I’ll blow.”

  “Stay where you are, son,” said Taney. He dug in his shirt pocket and took out a worn, sweat-stained wallet. He looked at it for a moment. “Alligator,” he said, with automatic, absent pride. “My wife sent it to me when we were in England. Pounds don’t fit in it. However …” He opened it and took out all the contents. There was a small pile of francs on the table in front of him when he finished. He counted them. “Four hundred francs,” he said. “Eight bucks.”

  “Excuse me,” Seeger said humbly. “I shouldn’t’ve asked.”

  “Delighted,” Taney said vigorously. “Absolutely delighted.” He started dividing the francs into two piles. “Truth is, Seeger, most of my money goes home in allotments. And the truth is, I lost eleven hundred francs in a poker game three nights ago, and I ought to be ashamed of myself. Here.” He shoved one pile toward Seeger. “Two hundred francs.”

  Seeger looked down at the frayed, meretricious paper, which always seemed to him like stage money anyway. “No, sir,” he said. “I can’t take it.”

  “Take it,” Taney said. “That’s a direct order.”

  Seeger slowly picked up the money, not looking at Taney. “Sometime, sir,” he said, “after we get out, you have to come over to my house, and you and my father and my brother and I’ll go on a real drunk.”

  “I regard that,” Taney said gravely, “as a solemn commitment.”

  They smiled at each other, and Seeger started out.

  “Have a drink for me,” said Taney, “at the Café de la Paix. A small drink.” He was sitting down to tell his wife he loved her when Seeger went out of the tent.

  Olson fell into step with Seeger and they walked silently through the mud between the tents.

  “Well, mon vieux?” Olson said finally.

  “Two hundred francs,” said Seeger.

  Olson groaned. “Two hundred francs! We won’t be able to pinch a whore’s behind on the Boulevard des Capucines for two hundred francs. That miserable, penny-loving Yankee!”

  “He only had four hundred,” Seeger said.

  “I revise my opinion,” said Olson.

  They walked disconsolately and heavily back toward their tent.

  Olson spoke only once before they got there. “These raincoats,” he said, patting his. “Most ingenious invention of the war. Highest saturation point of any modern fabr
ic. Collect more water per square inch, and hold it, than any material known to man. All hail the quartermaster!”

  · · ·

  Welch was waiting at the entrance of their tent. He was standing there peering excitedly and shortsightedly out at the rain through his glasses, looking angry and tough, like a big-city hack driver, individual and incorruptible even in the ten-million colored uniform. Every time Seeger came upon Welch unexpectedly, he couldn’t help smiling at the belligerent stance, the harsh stare through the steel-rimmed G.I. glasses, which had nothing at all to do with the way Welch really was. “It’s a family inheritance,” Welch had once explained. “My whole family stands as though we were getting ready to rap a drunk with a beer glass. Even my old lady.” Welch had six brothers, all devout, according to Welch, and Seeger from time to time idly pictured them standing in a row, on Sunday mornings in church, seemingly on the verge of general violence, amid the hushed Latin and the Sabbath millinery.

  “How much?” Welch asked loudly.

  “Don’t make us laugh,” Olson said, pushing past him into the tent.

  “What do you think I could get from the French for my combat jacket?” Seeger said. He went into the tent and lay down on his cot.

  Welch followed them in and stood between the two of them. “Boys,” he said, “on a man’s errand.”

  “I can just see us now,” Olson murmured, lying on his cot with his hands clasped behind his head, “painting Montmartre red. Please bring on the naked dancing girls. Four bucks’ worth.”

  “I am not worried,” Welch announced.

  “Get out of here.” Olson turned over on his stomach.

  “I know where we can put our hands on sixty-five bucks.” Welch looked triumphantly first at Olson, then at Seeger.

  Olson turned over slowly and sat up. “I’ll kill you,” he said, “if you’re kidding.”

  “While you guys are wasting your time fooling around with the infantry,” Welch said, “I used my head. I went into Reems and used my head.”

  “Rance,” Olson said automatically. He had had two years of French in college and he felt, now that the war was over, that he had to introduce his friends to some of his culture.