“Of course I like Pamela,” Henry managed to say as the father opened the car door and thrust him in.
“Pam, look whom I bagged outside the press room!”
“Why, how wonderful.” She took a hand off the wheel and clasped Pug’s, smiling familiarly as though not a week had passed since their parting in Berlin. A small diamond sparkled on her left hand, which before had been bare of rings. “Tell me about your family,” she said as she drove out of the White House grounds, raising her voice over the slap of the wipers and the drumming of the rain. “Is your wife well? And what happened to that boy of yours who was caught in Poland? Is he safe?”
“My wife’s fine, and so’s Byron. Did I mention to you the name of the girl he travelled with to Poland?”
“I don’t believe you did.”
“It’s Natalie Jastrow.”
“Natalie! Natalie Jastrow? Really?”
“Knows you, she says.”
Pamela gave Henry a quizzical little glance. “Oh, yes. She was visiting a chap in your embassy in Warsaw, I should think. Leslie Slote.”
“Exactly. She went to see this fellow Slote. Now she and my son intend to get married. Or so they say.”
“Oh? Bless me. Well, Natalie’s quite a girl,” said Pamela, looking straight ahead.
“How do you mean that?”
“I mean she’s extraordinary. Intelligence, looks.” Pamela paused. “Willpower.”
“A handful, you mean,” Pug said, remembering that Tudsbury had used the word to describe Pamela.
“She’s lovely, actually. And ten times more organized than I’ll ever be.”
“Leslie Slote’s coming to this party,” Tudsbury said.
“I know,” Pamela said. “Phil Rule told me.”
The conversation died there, in a sudden cold quiet. When the traffic halted at the next red light, Pamela shyly reached out two fingers to touch the shoulder board of Henry’s white uniform. “What does one call you now? Commodore?”
“Captain, captain,” boomed Tudsbury from the rear seat. “Four American stripes. Anybody knows that. And mind your protocol. This man’s becoming the Colonel House of this war.”
“Oh, sure,” Pug said. “An embassy papershuffler, you mean. The lowest form of animal life. Or vegetable, more exactly.”
Pamela drove skillfully through the swarming traffic of Connecticut and Massachusetts Avenues. As they came to the embassy, the rain was dwindling. Late sunlight shafted under the black clouds, lighting up the pink banks of blooming rhododendron, the line of wet automobiles, and the stream of guests mounting the steps. Pamela’s streaking arrival and skidding halt drew glares from several Washington policemen, but nothing more.
“Well, well, sunshine after the storm,” said Tudsbury. “A good omen for poor old England, eh? What’s the news, Henry? Did you hear anything special at the White House? Jerry is really riding hell for leather to the sea, isn’t he? The teletype says he’s knocked the French Ninth Army apart. I do think he’s going to cut the Allied line right in two. I told you in Berlin that the French wouldn’t fight.”
“They’re supposed to be counterattacking around Soissons,” Pug said.
Tudsbury made a skeptical face. As they went inside and fell into the long reception line extending up a majestic stairway, he said, “The bizarre thing to me is the lack of noise over Germany’s invasion of Belgium and Holland. The world just yawns. This shows how far we’ve regressed in twenty-five years. Why, in the last war the rape of Belgium was an earth-shaking outrage. One now starts by assuming total infamy and barbarity in the Germans. That gives them quite an edge, you know. Our side doesn’t have that freedom of action in the least.”
At the head of the wide red-carpeted stairs, the guest of honor, a skinny, ruddy man of fifty or so, in a perfectly cut double-breasted black suit with huge lapels, stood with the ambassador, shaking people’s hands under a large painting of the King and Queen, and now and then nervously touching his wavy blond hair.
“How are you, Pam? Hullo there, Talky,” he said.
“Lord Burne-Wilke, Captain Victor Henry,” Tudsbury said. Pamela walked on, disappearing into the crowd.
Duncan Burne-Wilke offered Pug a delicate-looking but hard hand, smoothing his hair with the other.
“Burne-Wilke is here to try to scare up any old useless aeroplanes you happen to have lying around,” said Tudsbury.
“Yes, best prices offered,” said the ruddy man, briefly smiling at the American, then shaking hands with somebody else.
Tudsbury limped with Pug through two large smoky reception rooms, introducing him to many people. In the second room, couples shuffled in a corner to the thin music of three musicians. The women at the party were elegantly clad, some were beautiful; men and women alike appeared merry. It struck Victor Henry as an incongruous scene, considering the war news. He said so to Tudsbury.
“Ah well, Henry, pulling long faces won’t kill any Germans, you know. Making friends with the Americans may. Where’s Pam? Let’s sit for a moment, I’ve been on my feet for hours.”
They came upon Pamela drinking at a large round table with Leslie Slote and Natalie Jastrow. Natalie wore the same black suit; so far as Pug knew she had come to Washington in the clothes she stood up in, with no luggage but a blue leather sack. She gave him a haggard smile, saying, “Small world.”
Pamela said to her father, “Governor, this is Natalie Jastrow. The girl who went tootling around Poland with Captain Henry’s son.”
Slote said, rising and shaking hands with Tudsbury, “Talky, you may be the man to settle the argument. What do you think the chances are that Italy will jump into the war now?”
“It’s too soon. Mussolini will wait until France has all but stopped twitching. Why do you ask?”
Natalie said, “I’ve got an old uncle in Siena, and somebody should go and fetch him out. There’s nobody in the family but me to do it.”
Slote said, “And I tell you, Aaron Jastrow’s quite capable of getting himself out.”
“Aaron Jastrow?” said Tudsbury with an inquisitive lilt. “A Jew’s Jesus? Is he your uncle? What’s the story?”
“Will you dance with me?” Pamela said to Pug, jumping up.
“Why, sure.” Knowing how much she disliked dancing, he was puzzled, but he took her hand and they made their way through the jam toward the musicians.
She said as he took her in his arms, “Thanks. Phil Rule was coming to the table. I’ve had enough of him.”
“Who is Phil Rule?”
“Oh—he was the man in my life for a long time. Far too long. I met him in Paris. He was rooming with Leslie Slote. He’d been at Oxford when Leslie was a Rhodes Scholar. Phil’s a correspondent, and an excellent one, but a monster. They’re much alike, a pair of regular rips.”
“Really? Slote’s the brainy quiet type, I thought.”
Pamela’s thin lips twisted in a smile. “Don’t you know they can be the worst? They have pressure-cooker souls, those fellows.” They danced in silence for a while; she was as clumsy as ever. She spoke up cheerily. “I’m engaged to be married.”
“I noticed your ring.”
“Well, it was a good job I didn’t wait for that Navy flier son of yours, wasn’t it?”
“You didn’t give me any encouragement, or I might have worked on it.”
Pamela laughed. “Fat lot of difference that would have made. And Natalie really has your other boy, has she? Well, that’s the end of the available Henrys, then. I made my move in good time.”
“Who is he, Pamela?”
“Let’s see. Ted’s rather hard to describe. Teddy Gallard. From an old Northamptonshire family. He’s nice-looking and rather a lamb, and a bit mad. He’s an actor, but he hadn’t got too far when he joined the RAF. He’s only twenty-eight. That makes him fairly ancient for flying. He’s in France with a Hurricane squadron.”
After another silence Pug said, “I thought you didn’t like to dance. Especially with Americans.”
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“I don’t. But you’re so easy to dance with and so tolerant. The young ones are now doing an insane thing called the shag. One or two have got hold of me and fairly shagged my teeth loose.”
“Well, my style is straight 1914.”
“Possibly that was my year. Or should have been. Oh dear,” she said, as the music changed tempo and some of the younger couples began hopping up and down, “here’s a shag now.”
They walked off the dance floor to a purple plush settee in the foyer, where they sat under a bright bad painting of Queen Mary. Pamela asked for a cigarette and took several puffs, leaning an elbow on her knee. Her low-cut dress of rust-colored lace partly showed a small smooth white bosom; her hair, which on the Bremen had been pulled back in a thick bun, hung to her shoulders now in glossy brown waves.
“I have a yen to go home and enlist in the WAAFs.” He said nothing. She cocked her head sideways. “What do you think?”
“Me? I approve.”
“Really? It’s rank disloyalty, isn’t it? Talky’s doing a vital service to England here.”
“He can get another secretary. Your lucky RAF man is there.”
She colored at the word lucky. “It’s not that simple. Talky’s eyes do get tired. He likes to dictate and to have things read to him. He keeps weird hours, works in the bathtub, and so forth.”
“Then he’ll have to indulge his eccentricities a bit less.”
“But is it right just to abandon him?”
“He’s your father, Pamela, not your son.”
Pamela’s eyes glistened at him.
“Well, if I actually do it, we shall have Tudsbury in Lear, for a week or two. ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is, to have a thankless child!’—I think the governor will rather enjoy throwing himself into the part, at that. Perhaps we should return to him now, Captain Henry.”
He said as they stood and walked to the main reception room, “Why not call me Pug, by the way? Everybody does who knows me.”
“Yes, I heard your wife call you that. What does it mean?”
“Well, at the Naval Academy, anybody named Henry usually gets called Patrick, the way a Rhodes gets labelled Dusty. But there was a ‘Patrick’ Henry in the class above me, and I was a freshman boxer, so I got tagged Pug.”
“You boxed?” Her glance travelled across his shoulders and arms. “Do you still?”
He grinned. “Kind of strenuous. Tennis is my game, when I can get around to it.”
“Oh? I play fair tennis.”
“Well, good. If I ever get to London, maybe we can have a game.”
“Are you—” She hesitated. “Is there any chance of your coming to London?”
“It’s not impossible. There they are, way down there,” Pug said. “Gosh, this room’s mobbed.”
“Natalie seems miserable,” Pamela said.
Pug said, “She just lost her father.”
“Oh? I didn’t know that. Well, she’s grown more attractive, that’s sure. Definitely marrying your boy, is she?”
“It seems so. Maybe you can give me advice on that one. I feel she’s too old for him, too smart for him, and just about everything else is wrong with it, except that they’re crazy about each other. Which is something, but not everything.”
“Maybe it won’t come off. There’s many a slip,” Pamela said.
“You never have met Byron. You’d see in a minute what I mean, if you did. He’s really still a baby.”
She mischievously glanced at him and tapped his arm. “You do sound fatherly at that.”
Tudsbury and Slote were in a lusty argument, with Natalie looking sombrely from one to the other.
“I’m not talking about anything he owes England. That’s beside the point,” Tudsbury said, striking his empty glass on the table. “It’s his responsibility to the American people as their leader to ring the alarm and get them cracking, if they’re to save their own hides.”
“What about the Chicago quarantine speech?” Slote said. “That was over two years ago, and he’s still trying to live down the warmonger charges. A leader can’t dash ahead around the bend and out of sight. The people still haven’t gotten over their disgust with the First World War. Now here’s another one, brought on by stupid French and British policy. It’s not the time for singing ‘Over There,’ Talky. It just won’t work.”
“And while Roosevelt watches his timing,” said Tudsbury, “Hitler will take half the world. Pamela, be a love and get me another drink. My leg’s killing me.”
“All right.” Pamela docilely walked to the bar.
Tudsbury turned to Henry, “You know the Nazis. Can Roosevelt afford to wait?”
“What choice has he? A few months ago Congress was fighting him just on selling you guns.”
“A few months ago,” Tudsbury said, “Hitler wasn’t overrunning Belgium, Holland, and France, and directly facing you across the water.”
“Lot of water,” said Pug.
Slote slowly beat two fingers with one, like a professor. “Talky, let’s review the ABC’s. The old regimes are simply not competent for the industrial age. They’re dead scripts, molted skins. Europe’s made a start on replacing them by a lot of wholesale murder—the usual European approach to problems, and that’s all the First World War was about—and then by resorting to tyrannies of the left or the right. France has simply stagnated and rotted. England’s played its same old upper-crust butterfly comedy, while soothing the workers with gin and the dole. Meantime Roosevelt has absorbed the world revolt into legislation. He has made America the only viable modern free country. It was a stupendous achievement, a peaceful revolution that’s gutted Marxian theory. Nobody wholly grasps that yet. They’ll be writing books about it in the year 2000. Because of it, America’s the power reserve of free mankind. Roosevelt knows that and moves slowly. It’s the last reserve available, ‘the last best hope.’”
Tudsbury was screwing all his heavy features into a mask of disagreement. “Wait, wait, wait. To begin with, none of the New Deal issued from this great revolutionary’s brain. The ideas flooded into Washington with the new people when the administration changed. They were quite derivative ideas, mostly copied from us decadent butterflies. We were a good deal ahead of you in social legislation.—Ah, thank you, Pam.—Now this slow moving can be good politics, but in war it’s a tactic of disaster. Fighting Germany one at a time, we’ll just go down one at a time. Which would be a rather silly end to the English-speaking peoples.”
“We have theatre tickets. Come and have dinner with us,” Slote said, standing and stretching out a hand to Natalie, who rose too. “We’re going to L’Escargot.”
“Thank you. We’re dining with Lord Burne-Wilke. And hoping to inveigle Pug Henry into joining us.”
Slote bought Natalie as luxurious a dinner as Washington offered, with champagne; took her to a musical comedy at the National Theatre; and brought her back to his apartment, hoping for the best. In a common enough masculine way, he thought that if all went well he could win her back in one night. She had once been his slave; how could such a feeling disappear? At first she had seemed just another conquest. He had long planned a prudent marriage in his thirties to some girl of a rich or well-connected family, after he had had his fun. Natalie Jastrow now put him in a fever that burned up all prudent calculations. Leslie Slote had never wanted anything in his life as he wanted Natalie Jastrow. Her distracted lean look of the moment was peculiarly enticing. He was quite willing to marry her, or do anything else, to have her again.
He opened his apartment door and snapped on lights. “Ye gods, a quarter to one. Long show. How about a drink?”
“I don’t know. If I’m to search around tomorrow in New York courthouses for Aaron’s documents, I’d better get to bed.”
“Let me see his letter again, Natalie. You mix us a couple of shorties.”
“All right.”
Removing his shoes, jacket, and tie, Slote sank in an armchair, donned black-rimmed glasses, a
nd studied the letter. He took one book after another from the wall—heavy green government tomes—and drank, and read. The ice in both drinks tinkled in the silence.
“Come here,” he said.
Natalie sat on the arm of the couch, under the light. Slote showed her, in a book, State Department rules for naturalized citizens living abroad more than five years. They forfeited citizenship, but the book listed seven exceptions. Some seemed to fit Aaron Jastrow’s case—as when health was a reason for staying abroad, or when a man past sixty and retired had maintained his ties with the United States.
“Aaron’s in hot water on two counts,” Slote said. “There’s this joker about his father’s naturalization. If Aaron actually wasn’t a minor at the time, even by a week or a day, he isn’t an American, technically, and never has been one. But even if he was, he has the five-year problem. I mentioned this to him once, you know. I said he should go back to the United States and stay a few months. I’d just seen too many passport messes crop up on this point, ever since the Nazis took over Germany.” Slote picked up the glasses, went to his kitchenette, and mixed more drinks, continuing to talk. “Aaron’s been a fool. But he’s far from unique. It’s unbelievable how careless and stupid Americans can be about citizenship. In Warsaw a dozen of these foul-ups turned up every week. The best thing now—by far—is to get the Secretary of State to drop a word to Rome. The day that word arrives Aaron will be in the clear.” Padding to the couch in his stocking feet, he handed her a drink and sat beside her. “But trying to unravel any technical problem, however small, through channels scares me. There’s a monumental jam of cases from Europe. It could take Aaron eighteen months. I therefore don’t think there’s much point in your digging around in Bronx courthouses for his alien registration and his father’s naturalization records. Not yet. After all, Aaron’s a distinguished man of letters. I’m hoping the Secretary will shake his head in amusement at the folly of absent-minded professors, and shoot off a letter to Rome. I’ll get on this first thing in the morning. He’s a thorough gentleman. It ought to work.”
Natalie stared at him.