Byron, standing in the hall outside his brother’s room, smiled at a crude cartoon tacked to the door: Father Neptune, a lump throbbing on his pate, wrathfully rising from the sea ahead of an aircraft carrier, brandishing his trident at an airplane with dripping wheels, out of which the pilot leaned, saluting and shouting, “So sorry!”
“Come in!” Warren called to his knock.
“‘Wet Wheels’ Henry, I presume?” Byron quoted the cartoon caption.
“Briny! Hey! My Christ, how long has it been? Well, you look great! God, I’m glad you made it for the wedding.” Warren ordered more breakfast for his brother. “Listen, you’ve got to tell me all about that wild trip of yours. I’m supposed to be the warrior, but Jesus, you’re the one who’s had the adventures. Why, you’ve been bombed and strafed by the Nazis! My buddies will sure want to talk to you.”
“Nothing heroic about getting in the way of a war, Warren.”
“Let’s hear about it. Sit down, we have a lot to catch up on.”
They talked over the food, over coffee, over cigars, and as Warren packed they kept talking, awkwardly at first, then loosening up. Each was taking the other’s measure. Warren was older, heavier in the face, more confident, more than ever on top of the world and ahead of his brother: so Byron felt. Those new gold wings on his white dress uniform seemed to Byron to spread a foot. About flying Warren was relaxed, humorous, and hard. He had mastered the machines and the lingo, and the jokes about his mishaps didn’t obscure the leap upward. He still spoke the words “naval aviator” with pride and awe. To Byron, his own close calls under fire had been stumblebum episodes, in no way comparable to Warren’s disciplined rise to fighter pilot.
For his part, Warren had last seen Byron setting off to Europe, a hangdog slouching youngster with a bad school record and not a few pimples, already cooling off about a career in fine arts. Byron’s skin now stretched brown and clear over a sharpened jaw; his eyes were deeper; he sat up straighter. Warren was used to the short haircuts and natural shoulder lines of the Navy. Byron’s padded dark Italian suit and mop of reddish hair gave him a dashing appearance that went with his saga of roaming in Poland under German bombs with a beautiful Jewess. Warren had never before envied his younger brother anything. He envied the red stitch-marked scar on his temple—his own scar was a mishap, not a war wound—and he even somewhat envied him the Jewess, sight unseen.
“What about Natalie, Byron? Did she come?”
“Sure. I parked her at Janice’s house. That was decent of Janice, telephoning her last night. Did Dad put her up to it?”
“He just said the girl wasn’t sure she was expected. Say, that thing’s serious, is it?” Warren paused, suitcase hanger in one hand and a uniform jacket in the other, and looked hard at his brother.
“We’re getting married.”
“You are? Good for you.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Sure. She sounds like a marvellous girl.”
“She is. I know the religious problem exists—”
Warren grinned and ducked his head to one side. “Ah, Byron, nowadays—does it really? If you wanted the ministry—or politics, say—you’d have to give it more thought. Christ, with the war on and the whole world coming apart, I say grab her. I look forward to meeting that girl. Isn’t she a Ph.D. or something?”
“She was going for an M.A. at the Sorbonne.”
“Brother! I’d be more scared of her than of a carrier landing at night in a line squall.”
Byron’s grin showed possessive pride. “I was around her six months, and never opened my mouth, hardly. Then she up and said she loved me. I’m still trying to believe it.”
“Why not? You’ve gotten damned handsome, my lad. You’ve lost that string-bean look. You marrying up now, or after sub school?”
“Who the devil says I’m going to sub school? Don’t start that. I get enough from Dad.”
Warren deftly moved clothes from bureau to a foot locker. “But he’s right, Byron. You don’t want to wait till you get called up. If you do they’ll shove you around, rush you through, and you may not even draw the duty you want. You can pick your spot now and get decent training. Say, have you given naval aviation any thought? Why do you want to go crawling around at four knots, three hundred feet underwater, when you can fly? I get claustrophobia just thinking about subs. You might make a great flier. One thing you are is relaxed.”
“I got interested in subs.” Byron described Prien’s talk in Berlin on the sinking of the Royal Oak.
“That was a brave exploit,” said Warren. “A real score. Even Churchill admitted that. Very romantic. I guess that’s what attracts you. But this is an air war, Briny. Those Germans haven’t got that much of an edge on the ground. The papers keep talking panzers, panzers, but the French have more and better tanks than the Germans. They’re not using them. They’ve been panicked by those Stukas, which just use our own dive-bombing tactics.”
“That’s what got me, a Stuka,” Byron said. “It didn’t look that scary. Fixed wheels, single engine, medium size, kind of slow and awkward.”
Tossing Byron a large gray book, Warren said with a grin, “Take a look through The Flight Jacket. I’m there in Squadron Five, tying on my solo flags. I’ve got to pay some bills, then we’re off to church.”
Byron was still looking through the yearbook when his brother returned.
“Holy cow, Warren, number one in ground school! How’d you do that and court Janice, too?”
“It took a toll.” Warren made an exhausted face, and they both laughed. “Bookwork is never too tough when you organize it.”
Byron held up the yearbook, pointing to a black-bordered page. “These fellows all got it?”
Warren’s face sobered. “Yep. Frank Monahan was my instructor, and a great flier.” He sighed and looked around the barren room, hands on hips. “Well, I’m not sorry to leave this room. Eleven months I’ve sweated in here.”
Pensacola might look small and sleepy, Warren said as they drove into town, but it had perfect climate, great water sports, fine fishing, good golf and riding clubs, and up-and-coming industries. This was the real Florida, not that Brooklyn with palm trees called Miami. These rural western counties were the place to get a political start. Congressman Lacouture had had no competition. He had recently decided to run for the Senate in the fall, and his chances were considered excellent. Warren said he and Janice might well come back here one day.
“When you retire?” Byron said. “That’s looking far ahead.”
“Possibly before then.” With a side glance, Warren took in Byron’s astonishment. “Listen, Briny, the day I soloed, President Roosevelt fired the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet. Some dispute over policy for the Asiatic Fleet. Made him ambassador to Turkestan, or something, but actually just kicked him out. CinCus himself! In the Navy you’re just a hired man, my lad, right on up that big climb through the bureaus and the shore stations and the sea billets. Right to the top. Don’t ever tell Dad I talked like this. Janice is an only child and the La-couture firm does twenty million a year. Of course, as long as I can fly, that’s all I want to do.”
Inside the pink stone church topped by a square bell tower, two men in smocks were finishing up a huge flower display, and an unseen organist was rippling a Bach prelude. “Nobody can say I kept her waiting at the church,” Warren said. “Almost an hour to go. Well, we can talk. It’s cool in here.”
They sat halfway down the rows of empty purple-cushioned pews. The music, the odor of the flowers, the unmistakable childhood smell of church, hit Byron hard. He felt again what it was like to be a reverent boy, sitting or standing beside his father, joining in the hymns, or trying to follow the minister’s talk about the misty and wonderful Lord Jesus. Marrying Natalie, there would be no such wedding as this. What kind could they have? A church was altogether out of the question. What was it like to be married by a rabbi? They had not discussed that part at all. The two brothers sat side b
y side in a long silence. Warren was again regretting, in a fashion, last night’s indulgence, and making halfhearted pious resolves. The feelings of a bridegroom were coming over him.
“Briny, say something. I’m getting nervous. Who knows when we’ll have a chance to talk again?”
Byron wistfully smiled, and it struck Warren once more how good-looking his brother had become. “Long time since you and I went to church together.”
“Yes. Janice likes to go. I guess if these walls aren’t falling in on me now, there’s still hope for me. You know, Briny, all this may work out pretty well. If you do get into subs, you can put in for duty at Pearl. Maybe the four of us will end up there together for a couple of years. Wouldn’t that be fine?”
Natalie had often visited the homes of wealthy college friends, but she was not prepared for the Lacouture mansion, a rambling stone house on the bay, in a private section guarded by a mossy stucco wall, an iron-fenced entrance, and an iron-faced gatekeeper. Gentility, seclusion, exclusion, were all around her. The rooms upon rooms of antique furniture, Persian rugs, grandfather clocks, large oil portraits, heavy worn draperies, ironwork, gilt-framed big mirrors, old-fashioned photographs—the whole place unsettled her. Janice scampered to meet her in a fluttery pink housecoat, her blonde hair tumbling to her shoulders.
“Hi! So sweet of you to come on this short notice. Look at me. I didn’t sleep all night. I’m so tired I can’t see. I’ll never be ready. Let’s get you some breakfast.”
“Please, just put me in a corner somewhere till we go. I’m fine.”
Janice scanned her with weary but keen big hazel eyes. This happy girl, all pink and gold, made Natalie the more conscious of her own dark eyes, dark hair, wrinkled linen suit, and sad dowdy look.
“No wonder Byron fell for you. My God, you’re pretty. Come along.”
Janice took her to a breakfast alcove facing the water, where a maid brought her eggs and tea in old blue-and-white china on a silver tray. She ate and felt better, if no more at home. Outside, sailboats tacked here and there in the sunshine. Clocks struck nine in the house, one after the other, bonging and chiming. She could hear excited voices upstairs.
She took the letter from her purse, where it had seemed a lump of lead all the way from Miami: five single-space pages so faintly typed that her eyes ached to read them. Obviously A.J. was not going to learn to change a typewriter ribbon till he died.
It was a long tale of woe. He had a fractured ankle. With a French art critic, an old friend, he had gone on a tour of cathedrals the week after Byron had left. At Orvieto, mounting a ladder to look at an inaccessible fresco, he had slipped and fallen to the stone floor. To make matters worse, there was his mixed-up citizenship problem, which for the first time he was taking seriously.
He had “derivative citizenship” from his father’s naturalization around 1900; but because of his long residence out of the country, difficulties had arisen. There seemed to be conflicting records of his age at the time of his father’s naturalization. The man in Rome, a decent enough person to talk to but an obsessive bureaucrat, had pressed searching questions and demanded more and more documents, and Aaron had left Rome in deep confusion. Aaron wrote:
I may have made a mistake at that point, but I decided to drop the whole thing. This was in December of last year. It seemed to me that I was like the fly blundering into a spider web; the more I’d struggle, the tighter I’d become enmeshed. I didn’t really want to go home just then. I assumed that if I let the thing cool off and asked for the passport renewal later—especially if some other consul general were appointed meantime—I’d get it. It’s a question of a purple stamp and a two-dollar fee. It seemed unthinkable to me then, and still does now, that I could actually be denied permission to return to my own country, where I am even listed in Who’s Who!
During the spasm of alarm over Norway, he had once visited the Florence consulate. There a “shallow but seemingly affable crew-cut type” had conceded that these were all silly technicalities, that Dr. Jastrow was certainly an eminent and desirable person, and that the consular service would somehow solve the difficulty. Much relieved, Jastrow had gone off on the cathedral tour, fractured his ankle, and thus missed an appointment to return to the consulate two weeks later. The letter continued:
What comes next I still cannot understand. It was either incredible stupidity or incredible malevolence. Crew-cut wrote a letter to me. The tone was polite enough. The gist was that as a stateless person in wartime I faced serious complications, but he thought he had found a way out. Congress has recently passed a law admitting certain special classes of refugees. If I were to apply under that law, I probably would have no further trouble, being a prominent Jew. That was his recommendation.
Do you realize the full depth of the stupidity and the damage in his letter? I received it only five days ago. I’m still boiling. To begin with he wants me to abandon all claim to being an American—which I am, whether my papers are in order or not—and to enlist myself in the mob of clamoring Jewish refugees from Europe seeking admittance as hardship cases!
But that isn’t the worst of it. He put all this on paper and he put it in the mail.
I cannot believe that even such a dullard doesn’t know that a letter from the consular office to me would be opened and read by the Italians. I’ll never know why Crew-cut did it, but I’m forced to suspect a trace of anti-Semitism. That bacillus is in the European air, and in certain personalities it lodges and flourishes. The Italian authorities now know my problem. That alarmingly increases my vulnerability here.
I’ve been sitting in the lovely sunshine of the terrace day after day, in a wheelchair, alone except for Italian servants, growing more and more perturbed. Finally I decided to write to you, and give the letter to my French friend to mail.
Natalie, I have certainly been heedless about a serious matter. I can only plead that before the war these things seemed of no consequence. To you I’m sure they still don’t. You were born on American soil. I was born on the banks of the Vistula. I am getting a late lesson in the vast difference that makes, and in the philosophy of personal identity. I really should straighten my situation out.
Happily, there’s no desperate urgency in it. Siena’s tranquil, food’s plentiful again, my ankle’s healing, and the war is distant summer thunder. I am getting on with my work, but I had better clarify my right to go home. One can never know when or where the villain with the moustache will make his next move.
Now will you tell all this to Leslie Slote? There he sits in Washington, at the heart of things. A hangman’s noose of red tape can be cut by one word spoken in the right place. If he still has a shred of regard for me, let him look into this. I could write him directly but I know we’ll get faster action if you go to him. I beg you to do this.
Jastrow wrote a touching paragraph about Natalie’s father. He blamed their estrangement on himself. The scholarly temperament was a self-absorbed one. He hoped that he could treat her as a daughter, though a father’s place could never really be filled. Then came the passage about Byron which had prevented Natalie from showing him the letter.
Have you seen Byron yet? I miss him. He has a curiously charming presence—triste, humorous, reserved, virile. I’ve never known a more winning boy, and I’ve known hundreds. A young fellow in his twenties shouldn’t seem a boy, but he does. An aureole of romance plays about him. Byron might be all right if he had any talent, or a vestige of drive.
Sometimes he shows doggedness: and he has a way of coming out with bright flashes. He said Hegel’s World Spirit was just God minus Christianity. That’s commonplace enough, but he added it was much easier to believe in God’s sacrificing Himself for mankind, than in His groping to understand Himself through the unfolding of mankind’s stupidities. I rather liked that. Unhappily it was the one good thing amid many banalities such as, “This Nietzsche was just some kind of a nut,” and “Nobody would bother reading Fichte, if anybody could understand him.” If I’d
marked Byron for our seminar on the Slote Reading List, he’d have made a C minus.
Often I came upon him reading your letters over and over in the lemon house. The poor lad has a terrible crush on you. Are you at all aware of that? I hope you won’t inadvertently hurt him, and I rather wonder at your writing him so often.
For all my troubles, I’ve been a reasonably good boy, and stand on manuscript page 847 of Constantine.
A clock chiming the half hour brought Natalie back with a start from the terrace in Siena—where in her mind’s eye she could see A.J. sitting wrapped in his blue shawl, writing these words—to the Lacouture mansion on Pensacola Bay.
“Oh God,” she muttered, “oh my God.”
Feet trampled on a staircase; many voices called, laughed, chattered. The bride came sailing down the long dining room, wheat-colored hair beautifully coiffed and laced with pearls, cheeks pink with pleasure. “Well, I did it. Here we go.”
Natalie jumped to her feet, cramming A.J.’s pages into her purse. “Oh, you’re enchanting! You’re the loveliest sight!”
Janice pirouetted clear around on a toe. “Bless you.”
The white satin, clinging to flanks and breasts like creamy skin, rose demurely to cover her throat. She moved in a cloud of white lace. This blend of white chastity and crude fleshy allure was devastating; it shook Natalie with envy. The bride’s eye had an ironic gleam. After her wild pre-wedding night, Janice Lacouture felt approximately as virginal as Catherine of Russia. It didn’t bother her. Rather, it appealed to her sense of humor.