“Just one more for now, Mary. The kid with your daughter.”
“With Debbie Ann? Oh, that was Rob Raines, a local lawyer. They practically grew up together.”
“You notice lawyers get younger every year? Doctors too. You want old guys, full of dignity and wisdom. So you get a kid looks like a batboy, and how can he have had time to learn enough? There was one guy who treated Buttons …”
A familiar bitter twisting of his heart stopped him, and he sipped the coffee, chewed savagely on a Triscuit, and out-stared an optimistic gull who was walking back and forth ten feet away with all the assurance of a city pigeon, staring at him with alternate eyes.
“You try to be casual and it doesn’t work,” she said gently.
He could not look at her. “Also,” he said, “you don’t expect anybody to understand at all. And when they do, just a little, you resent them, maybe. The special arrogance of grief, Mary. You know. I hurt worse than anybody ever did.”
“Mike, I wanted you to come down, very much. Troy and I talked it over. There was never any question. But I don’t want you to think that I expect that you have to … sing for your supper by talking about private things. But if you ever want to talk …”
He overrode her with a heavy insistence. “I was talking about the one guy that treated her. A kid, you would think. But old around the eyes in the special way the good ones have. And he leveled with me. I appreciated that. None of that mighty-mystery-of-medicine jazz. He gave me time to brace myself by saying—no hope. And I never could lie to her and get away with it, so she got the message too, and had time to brace herself, so toward the end in that hospital—well, like a big airline terminal where the flight is a couple weeks late and you got time for ways to say good-by in all the little ways, and nobody is too surprised when they announce the flight.”
“Mike,” she said.
He could look at her then, and see tears standing in her fine dark eyes and manufacture a fake Hemingway grin and say, “Knock it off, lady.”
“Mike, it fades. It really does. Oh, it always comes back, but not as sharp.”
“They keep telling me that. How long ago was it for you?”
“Seven years. 1952. I was thirty-five and Debbie Ann was sixteen. Haven’t you got a boy about that age?”
“Close. Micky is seventeen and Tommy is fifteen. And three years later you married Troy?”
“Yes. And we’ve had four wonderful years.”
He stared at her until her chin came up a little, in a small motion of pride and defiance, and then he said, “Until when?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Mary, Mary. I know the guy. Five years I didn’t see him. Does he turn into somebody else? I’m not so wrapped up in my own sorrow I suddenly get dense about people.”
“It has nothing to do with you. Excuse me, but it has nothing to do with you. You’re here because you’re Troy’s best friend. And because it’s good for you to be here at this time.”
“You said to me if I ever want to talk … Okay, I give you the same deal.”
She looked angry for a moment, then suddenly smiled. “All right, Mike.” Just then an old car came clanking and chattering up the Key from the south and turned into the Jamison drive. Mary stood up and shaded her eyes against the sun. “That’s Durelda already. Oscar brings her. She works a half day on Sunday. I should go up and get her straightened away on the food. Sunday is a vague day around here, Mike. People come and go, and pick their own indoor and outdoor sports. I do absolutely no hostessing. The only standard item is a big brunch-lunch-buffet deal by the patio pool, from noon to three. Eat when you please and make your own drinks. Introduce yourself to anybody who looks interesting. When you’re finished would you put the tray in the cottage?”
“Sure.”
She walked toward the house, pausing to pick up her towel and beach bag from the cabaña steps.
Mike was left alone in the morning sun, thinking about Troy’s second wife, and Troy’s first wife, and how you always knew when the flavor of marriage was not just right. This one was not just right, and it could be permanent wrong or temporary wrong. He hoped it was temporary. They can’t fool you. Not with the love words and the affectionate gestures, because there’s always that bitter aura, that little stink of coldness, the tension-edge of love gone awry.
A hundred feet offshore a black monster, flat as a plate, burst high out of the water, seemed to pause at the top of the leap, then fell back with a resonant crack of leathery wings against the water. Taken completely by surprise, Mike’s first thought was, I’ll tell Buttons about that.
And he knew immediately that Buttons had been in the ground since the second day of March. Something happened inside him that was like tumbling down stairs, and he caught up a fistful of sand and squeezed it until his knuckles popped.
Who do you tell?
The coffee was gone. He carried the tray into the cabaña and placed it on the countertop beside the sink and rinsed the cups.
He went out and swam again, then lay prone in the sun on the white towel, his eyes clenched against the dazzle, while he walked back through the corridors of memory to the time when he had first met Troy Jamison.
It had been late in 1942, and he could well remember the completeness of the miracle of being clean, of being between coarse white sheets in a hospital bed, and hearing the voices of women after too many lifetimes on the island. He was twenty-three and he had all his hair, a permanent ring of quinine in his ears (they had atabrine but in limited supply), the gray pallor of island warfare (as opposed to the cinema bronze of Errol Flynn in Burma), some ugly ulcers on his legs, and a peach-sized piece of meat missing from his left thigh—high and on the outside, not affecting important mechanical parts—but bitching up the muscle just enough so the slight limp lasted three years.
He was twenty-three, and he had felt he couldn’t ever get any older or any wiser, and Micky had been in the world almost a month but the news hadn’t caught up. And he couldn’t seem to get enough sleep.
As one of the combat correspondents assigned to the First Marines, Rodenska had rated officer accommodations in the hospital just outside Melbourne, one bed in a twenty-bed ward, with windows to let in morning sun. It seemed appropriate that near the end of the year it was spring in south Australia. The whole world was screwed up that year.
There were all kinds in the ward, and some of them were very bad off, and on the third day when the major on his left died of his head injury without ever regaining consciousness, Second Lieutenant Troy Jamison was put in that bed. Nobody felt conversational. It was a kind of wariness. The dialogue, what there was of it, was inadvertent Hemingway. You really didn’t want anybody to detect how perfectly, wonderfully, overwhelmingly, goddamn glad you were to get off that island.
But when they were awake at the same time they picked up the essential information about each other. They were both twenty-three. Jamison was with the First. He’d got his field commission on the island. He felt uneasy about being an officer. He’d graduated from Syracuse University, and he’d been working in an advertising agency in Rochester when the war came along. He had a smashed shoulder. He was a big underweight blond, sallow skin pulled tight across high hard cheekbones, green eyes set slanty in his head.
Mike couldn’t remember seeing him on the island, but he had spent twelve days with Baker company of Jamison’s battalion, and that made a link. And he had spent six months on the Times-Union, so that made him familiar enough with Rochester to make a second link.
But Troy didn’t warm to him. Mike found he liked Jamison, and he knew the reason for the reserve. He knew he could break it down, but he didn’t want to sound like a horse’s ass while doing so. Finally, when he had his chance, he said, “I belong to the club, Lieutenant.”
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t drop a typewriter on my foot. I had seventy-one days on that island, and the morning banzai meant work for everybody.”
So Troy had studied him and then given him a slow grin and said, “That’s against the Geneva convention, boy.”
“They didn’t give me a copy written in Jap. You’re not trade school anyhow. At heart you’re a crummy copywriter.”
So Troy had loosened up some and a little later, when Captain Irely arrived with a foot missing, and full of noisy lies about Fearless Rodenska, the poor man’s Pegler, Troy loosened up the rest of the way.
By the time they were permitted to draw a vehicle from the hospital pool for visits to Melbourne, they had become very close. They had both spent too much time with brave men who, if you tried to talk about a play, a book, a painting or a philosophy, would look at you with utter blankness which would crystallize to contempt. They told each other how many times they had come close to cracking. It took a little time before they could talk about the island. They got steaming drunk on Australian ale. Mike told Troy all about Buttons and how he met her and how she got her name. “It was kid stuff. Bring your hobby to school. She was maybe eight, and she collected buttons and brought them, hundreds of them, in a box to school and the bottom fell out of the box. Buttons all over hell. And the name stuck.” Troy admired the pictures of big-eyed Buttons and seemed to take almost as much pleasure in the pictures of Micky as Mike did.
Troy had a girl in Rochester. Her name was Bonita Chandler, called Bunny. They wrote faithfully. Troy said he was going to marry her, and he called himself a damn fool for not marrying her before he left, in spite of her parents’ opposition.
They talked about women in wartime, and how being unfaithful to girl or wife was so damn easy it was really a unique accomplishment to be true. Certainly unique in the Corps. But all that talk of virtue was before running into Marty and Liz. They were hearty, wholesome sisters of twenty-five and twenty-seven, with the typical buoyancy and easy laughter and sturdy bodies and bad teeth of most young Australian women. They were both from Broken Hill, and their men were in the African desert, and their kids—one belonging to Marty and two to Liz—were in Broken Hill with their parents while the girls did war work in Melbourne, clerical work connected with the port. They lived in a small apartment, and, on one Sunday afternoon, on their way to a date, they were energetically annoyed by two tipsy Marines in a small park. Troy put the fear of God into the Marines, and then the four of them sat in the park for a little while and talked, and then the Henderson sisters decided not to show up for their date and they all went back to the apartment.
They were two good-tempered healthy women lonely for their men, and they were two lonely men with more islands in their future. The arrangement lasted through the remainder of the hospital time, and through the rest of camp time, right up until they returned to duty, Mike first and, as he found out later, Troy two weeks later.
It was an indication of their special rapport that after the involvement with Marty and Liz had begun they did not talk with each other about either faithfulness or guilt. They accepted the situation. Troy had more time with the girls. Mike was by then writing color pieces on the Melbourne scene and wangling them through censorship, while Troy jeered at him, calling him a beaver.
On the night before Mike was returned to duty Marty’s tears dropped hot on his throat in the bedroom darkness, but not many and not for long. She cried without making a sound. He was back in Melbourne eight months later, but somebody else was in the apartment. They knew the girls had gone back to Broken Hill. The husband of one of them had been killed, but the couple in the apartment did not know which one.
In 1943, Mike got back to the States for three weeks, and when Tommy was born he was back in the islands, but that was 1944 and it was a different kind of war because by then you knew how it would end. You couldn’t be certain you’d live to see the end of it, but you did know how it would end. He knew he’d very probably see the end of it, barring some air-transport foul-up, because it was no longer necessary for him to prove to himself the things it had been important to prove in the beginning. He had learned that he could react adequately, though not brilliantly, to utter and desperate emergency. He had been to the well. And there was always a sameness about the well. And so he was able, without feeling any self-contempt, to start taking better care of the pitcher. And he had long since gotten over the juvenile affectation of trying to look like a combat type despite the correspondent insignia. It was the newcomers who had something to prove—more to themselves than to others. So he could prop up a bar, as neat as if he were on Pentagon duty, and be mildly and not unkindly amused by the hairy affectations of the new ones.
But he could not keep himself from taking childish pleasure in moments of inadvertent revelation.
Like at Naha, a couple of weeks before Hiroshima. He’d been at the officers’-club bar talking with two of them. He’d listened while they were being very profound about kami-kazis and island warfare. One was from a little string of Texas papers, the other from a slick magazine.
“You been out here long, son?” the fat one asked him.
“Quite a while.”
The thin one looked him over and said, “You’ll learn it’s a hell of a lot different than Stateside.”
“I guess it is,” Mike said. They wore helmet liners, canteens and trench knives.
And just then Colonel Billy Brice, the Corps artillery specialist, wearing only the important bits of fruit salad, came barreling up, scowling like thunder, and gave Mike a punishing smack on the biceps and said, “If I’d known what you were going to send off Saipan, you son of a bitch, I’d have shot you myself.”
“Always a pleasure to write up one of my heroes, Colonel, sir.”
Brice gave him a tight grin. “Or maybe you could have saved me the trouble on the Canal, zigging instead of zagging. Say, I got an old drinking buddy of yours on my staff. Jamison. I took him off the line three months ago. He’d had his share.”
“Where is he?”
“Stick around. He should show.” Brice strode off.
“Isn’t that Billy Brice?” the fat one said.
“Yes.”
“I don’t think I caught your name,” the thin one said hesitantly.
“Mike Rodenska.”
“Bell Syndicate?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus Christ!” the fat one said. “I thought you’d be older. You been out here since the Crusades. Was I telling you all about island warfare? Jesus Christ.”
It was one of the pleasurable moments in a long war.
Captain Troy Jamison arrived about twenty minutes later. By then the club had gotten too noisy for coherent conversation. They walked down and sat on the docks in the chilly night, with a bottle to keep the chill off. They talked half the night. Troy had seen more than his share. He was no longer ill at ease about being an officer. He had lost a lot of his people. It had rarely been his fault. And he had protected and saved a lot of his people, and that had always been his design, within the range of his orders.
It was, Mike thought, a narrow maturity, an encapsulated and forced version which left the eyes old and the mouth still young. He had seen a lot of it, and seen it in death when the eyes were merely empty, and the mouth forever young.
“One last island,” Troy said in the night, “the biggest one of all, and that ends it. I feel so goddamn remote. Once upon a time I wrote a hell of a lot of copy about a new shopping center. And kissed a girl named Bunny. Hell, Mike, I’ve got to go back into that and it’s got to become important again. That’s the deal. Is it going to become important?”
“For nearly everybody.”
Troy offered the bottle, then killed it and hurled it into Naha Bay. “I wanted a lot. But in a dreamy half-assed way. Now I’m going to want a lot—more than my share. And one damn way or another, I’m going to get it. What do you want?”
“I didn’t have the same war you did, Cap.”
“What the hell do you want?”
“Mom’s apple pie.”
“Screw you, Rodenska.”
“Twice
on Tuesdays. I’m a newspaper bum. All I want is my byline. And Buttons. And beer. Alliteration.”
“Now without drama, Mike. Listen. Some of the guys I had, they’ll never even begin to find their way back. And there are some who’ll have no trouble at all. I can see them, but I can’t see me. I’d just like to know how I’m going to be.”
“You’re going to be fine.”
They were on the same dock with another bottle early in the evening when word came that it was over. Within a half hour the six hundred ships in the area and most of the shore installations were hurling bright hardware into the sky. By then they had a bottle apiece and they crawled under a Navy warehouse. Twenty-one men died that night when the fragments of celebration fell out of the sky and down on their joyous heads. There were a million men on the island, all suddenly technologically unemployed.
“You seem to be breathing,” the girl said. Mike, startled, rolled up onto one elbow and stared at her. She sat cross-legged in the sand beside his towel, wearing a yellow swim suit. He had been so far away it took him several sun-bleared moments to remember where he was and identify her as Debbie Ann, Mary’s pretty daughter.
“Hello. Slow reaction time. I was fighting an old war.”
“That’s where you and Troy got to know each other?”
“That’s right.” He could not avoid an instinctive wariness where Debbie Ann was concerned. He knew she was twenty-three, but she managed to look fifteen. Her voice was thin and high and childish, and he suspected that the effect was intentional. She had been Deborah Ann Dow, and then she had, without adequate warning to her mother or stepfather, left Wellesley to become Mrs. Dacey Hunter of Clewiston, Virginia, for two years. Troy had told Mike about her on the drive down from Tampa. Debbie Ann had her own money from Bernard Dow’s estate. Last August she had come back to stay with them and, six months later, in accordance with the Florida divorce laws, she had become Mrs. Deborah Dow Hunter.
But she looked fifteen, and she was very pretty, and she looked like trouble. She was a little girl, with rusty-blond hair and delicate, rather pointed features. She had a flavor of wanton mockery about her, of sexual cynicism. She gave an erroneous impression of plumpness, despite her obvious—at a distance—slenderness.
Slam the Big Door Page 2
