As a college boy thinks about fame, and an exile about going home, this Navy captain of forty-nine once in a while mused on what a romance with the young Englishwoman might be like; but it was the merest daydreaming. He remained devoted to his wife, in his fashion. Rhoda had received her husband back with a puzzling mixture of moods—demonstrative affection, and even lust, alternating with spells of heavy gloom, coldness, and loud irascibility over her move back to Washington from New York. She levelled off to a low-temperature detachment, busying herself with Bundles for Britain and her old-time music committees, and making numerous trips to New York for one reason or another. She sometimes mentioned Palmer Kirby, now one of the chairmen of Bundles for Britain, in a most casual way. Rhoda went to church with Pug, and sang the hymns, and relayed gossip about unfaithful Navy wives, all exactly as before. She was plainly disappointed when Pug went back to War Plans instead of getting a command at sea. But they settled back into their old routines, and Pug soon was too preoccupied to worry much about Rhoda’s moods, which had always been jagged.
News about their children intermittently drew them together. Byron’s offhand letter about his hasty marriage in Lisbon was a shock. They talked for days about it, worrying, agonizing, comforting each other, before resigning themselves to live with the fact. Warren as usual sent the good news. His wife was returning to Washington to have her baby, and he had been promoted to lieutenant.
Pug turned fifty on a Sunday early in March. He sat in church beside his wife, trying, as he listened to the choir sing “Holy, Holy, Holy,” to shake off a sense that he had missed all the right turns in life. He counted his blessings. His wife was still beautiful, still capable of love; if she had failings, what woman didn’t? His two sons were naval officers, his daughter was self-supporting and clever. Perhaps his career had gone off the rails, but he was serving in a post where he was doing some good. He could not really complain.
Rhoda, as she sat there beside him, was thinking mainly about the fact that her husband, for the first time since his return from abroad, would soon be meeting Palmer Kirby face to face.
A snowstorm clogged the capital on the night of Rhoda’s dinner party. By quarter past seven her guests, including Kirby, had straggled in, brushing and stamping off snow, but the dinner was still stalled. Pug was missing.
In the cramped hot kitchen of an elegant little furnished house on Tracy Place, rented from a millionaire bachelor who was now the ambassador to Brazil, Rhoda made a last-minute check of the dinner and found all in order: soup hot, ducks tender, vegetables on the boil, cook snarling over the delay. She sailed out to her guests after a scowl in the hallway mirror and a touch at her hairdo. Rhoda wore a silvery dress molded to her figure; her color was high, her eyes bright with nervous excitement. In the living room, Kirby and Pamela Tudsbury were talking on the big couch, Madeline and Janice had their heads together in a corner, and on facing settees before a log fire, Alistair Tudsbury and Lord Burne-Wilke were chatting with the recently elected Senator Lacouture and his wife. It was a hodgepodge company, but since it was only for a hurried dinner before a Bundles for Britain concert, she was not too concerned. Pug’s meeting with Kirby was the chief thing on her mind.
“We’ll wait ten more minutes.” Rhoda sat herself beside the scientist. “Then we’ll have to eat. I’m on the committee.”
“Where is Captain Henry?” Pamela said calmly. Her mauve dress came to a halter around her neck, leaving her slim shoulders naked; her tawny hair was piled high on her head. Rhoda remembered Pamela Tudsbury as a mousy girl, but this was no mouse; Rhoda recognized Kirby’s expression of lazy genial appetite.
“I’m blessed if I can say. Military secrecy covers a multitude of sins, doesn’t it?” Rhoda laughed. “Let’s hope he’s working on defense, and not a blonde.”
“I very much doubt that it’s a blonde,” said Pamela. “Not Captain Henry.”
“Oh, these goody-goody ones are the worst, my dear. That’s a divine dress.”
“Do you like it? Thank you.” Pamela adjusted the skirt. “I feel all got up for a pantomime, almost. I’ve been in uniform day and night for weeks.”
“Does Lord Burne-Wilke drive you that hard?”
“Oh no, Mrs. Henry. There really are masses of things to do. I feel so lucky at being in Washington, that I guess I work off my guilt with the late hours.”
“The Waring Hotel then would be the best bet, Pamela?” Kirby’s tone took up the conversation Rhoda had broken into.
“If they’ve repaired the bomb damage. By now, they should have. The Germans went after Buckingham Palace very hard, and the whole neighborhood took quite a beating, but that was back in October.”
“I’ll shoot a cable to the Waring tomorrow.”
“Why, Palmer, are you going to London?” said Rhoda.
Kirby turned to her, crossing his long legs. “It appears so.”
“Isn’t that something new?”
“It’s been in the works for a while.”
“London! How adventurous.” Rhoda laughed, covering her surprise.
Mrs. Lacouture’s voice rose above the talk. “Janice, should you be drinking all those martinis?”
“Oh, Mother,” said Janice, as the white-coated old Filipino, a retired Navy steward hired by Rhoda for the evening, shakily filled the glass in her outstretched hand.
“That baby will be born with an olive in its mouth,” remarked the senator. The two Englishmen laughed heartily, and Lacouture’s pink face wrinkled up with self-satisfaction.
“So, you did see Byron,” Janice said to Madeline. “When was this?”
“A couple of weeks ago. His submarine put in at the Brooklyn Navy Yard overnight. He took me to dinner.”
“How was he?”
“He’s—I don’t know—more distant. Almost chilly. I don’t think he likes the Navy much.”
“Maybe he doesn’t like being married much,” Janice said. “I never heard of anything so peculiar! A couple of days of whoop-de-do in Lisbon, and back she goes to Italy, and off he chugs in his little S-boat. Why on earth did they bother to get married?”
“Well, possibly a Jewish girl would insist,” Madeline said in arch tones.
Janice laughed shortly. “That may well be. Ill say this, she’s a mighty bright and pretty one.” She grimaced, moving her large stomach under her flowing green gown, trying to get more comfortable. “Ugh, what a bloated cow I am. This is what it all leads to, honey. Never forget it. And how’s your love life?”
“Oh dear. Well—” Madeline glanced toward her mother. “You remember that trombone player? With the big sad eyes, the one who dressed all in brown?”
“That Communist? Oh, Madeline, don’t tell me—
“Oh, no, no. Bozey was an utter drip. But I went with him to this peace rally at Madison Square Garden. It was really something, Jan! Packed, and this gigantic red, white, and blue sign stretching clear across the Garden—THE YANKS ARE NOT COMING”—Madeline waved her hands far apart—“and all these Loyalist Spain songs, and these mass chants they do, and novelists and poets and college professors making red-hot antiwar speeches and whatnot. Well, there was this other fellow in our box. He writes horror programs. He’s very successful, he makes about five hundred dollars a week, and he’s handsome, but he’s another Communist.” Madeline sneezed, blew her nose, and looked slyly at Janice. “What do you think would jolt my family more, Byron’s Jewish girl or a Communist? Bob comes from Minnesota, he’s a Swede at least. He’s awfully nice.”
Janice said, “What about that boss of yours?”
“Hugh Cleveland? What about him?”
The two young women regarded each other. Wry knowing wrinkles turned up the corners of Janice’s mouth. Madeline colored under the rouge and powder on her pallid face. “Yes? Why the grin, Janice?” She drank most of her martini.
“Oh, I don’t know. You keep taking up with one impossible fellow after another.”
“If you mean am I lying in wait for Mr.
Cleveland,” Madeline said with her father’s briskness, “you’re about as wrong as you can be. He’s a paunchy pink-haired freckled man, ten years older than I am, and personally I regard him as a snake.”
“Snakes have the power to hypnotize, dear.”
“Yes, rabbits and birds. I’m neither.”
Rhoda went to a small Chinese Chippendale desk to answer the telephone. “Oh, hello there,” she said. “Where are you?… Oh, my gawd… of course… yes, naturally. Okay. I’ll leave your ticket at the box office. Yes, yes, they’ve been here for hours. Right. Bye, dear.”
She hung up, and fluttered her long pale hands at the company. “Well, let’s drink up. Pug sends apologies. He’s at the White House and he doesn’t know when he can get away.”
In Washington, when the absent diner is at the White House, the empty chair is not an embarrassment. Quite the contrary. Nobody asked what Victor Henry was doing at the executive mansion, or indeed commented on Rhoda’s words. She put Burne-Wilke on her right and the senator on her left, saying, “After all these years protocol still baffles me. How do you choose between a United States Senator and a British lord? I’m favoring our foreign guest, Senator.”
“Absolutely proper,” said Lacouture.
Alistair Tudsbury said, “Lord Burne-Wilke will gladly yield you his seat on this occasion, Senator, if he can take yours when Lend-Lease comes to a vote.”
“Oh, done, done,” exclaimed the air commodore, whose bemedalled dress uniform dazzled Rhoda.
Everyone laughed, Tudsbury loudest of all. “Haw haw haw!” The correspondent’s belly shook under a vast expanse of wrinkled waistcoat, spanned by an enormous suspension of gold chain. Rhoda said, “Well, what good spirits! I was half afraid our English friends would eat Senator Lacouture alive.”
The senator wrinkled his eyes. “You British aren’t that hard up for meat yet, are you?” He added after the laugh, “No, seriously, Rhoda, I’m glad you brought us together. Maybe I’ve convinced our friends that I’m not a Nazi-lover, but just one fellow out of ninety-six, with my own point of view. I certainly don’t go for this talk of Senator Wheeler’s, that Lend-Lease will plow under every fourth American boy. That’s way out of bounds. But if Roosevelt wants to send England arms free of charge, why the devil doesn’t he come out and say so, instead of giving us all this Lend-Lease baloney? It insults our intelligence.”
“I went to a peace rally in New York,” Madeline piped up. “One speaker told a good story. A tramp stops a rich man on the street. ‘Please, mister, give me a quarter, I’m starving,’ he says. The rich man says, ‘My dear fellow, I can’t give you a quarter. I can lend you or lease you a quarter.’”
Senator Lacouture burst out laughing. “By God, I’ll work that into my next speech.”
From across the table, Palmer Kirby said, “Are you sure you want to draw on a Communist source?”
“Was that one of those Commie meetings? Well, a story’s a story.”
“It’s so crazy,” said Janice. “I got stuck in a taxi on Pennsylvania Avenue this afternoon, in front of the White House. We just couldn’t move. The newsreel people were there, taking pictures of the pickets. Communists with signs marching round and round in a circle, chanting, ‘The Yanks are not coming,’ and next to them a mob of women kneeling and praying, right there on the sidewalk in the snow, The Christian Mothers of America. They’ll pray there round the clock, my driver said, until Lend-Lease is defeated or vetoed. Honestly! Coming from Hawaii, I get the feeling the country’s going mad.”
“It just shows how broad the opposition to this thing is,” said the senator. “Cuts across all lines.”
“On the contrary,” put in Kirby, “both extremes seem to be against helping England, while the mass in the middle is for it.”
Senator Lacouture waved a flat hand in the air. “No, sir. I’ve been a middle-of-the-roader all my life. You should hear some of the quiet talk in the Senate dining room. I tell you, if they didn’t have to worry about the big-city Jews—and I don’t blame the Jews for feeling as they do, but this issue can’t be decided on any parochial basis—there’d be twenty more votes on my side of the fence right now. I still think they’ll end there. The nose count changes every day. If the ground swell continues for another week, we’ll lick this thing.”
The street door opened and closed. Victor Henry came into the dining room, brushing flakes of snow from his blue bridge coat. “Apologies to all hands,” he said, doffing the coat. “No, no, don’t get up, I’ll just join you, and change my duds later.”
But the men were all standing. Victor Henry walked around the table for handshakes, and came last to Palmer Kirby. “Hello,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”
“Sure has. Too long.”
Only Rhoda knew the scientist well enough to note that his smile was awkward and artificial. At this moment, which she had been dreading for a couple of weeks, Rhoda had a surprising sensation—pleasure and pride that two such men loved her. She felt no trace of guilt as her lover clasped hands with her husband of twenty-five years. Kirby was more than a head taller than Captain Henry, and in the columnar black and white of full dress he was a magnificent fellow. Yet Pug was impressive too: erect, short, thickset, his tired eyes in deep sockets very shrewd and alive, his whole bearing charged with energy—her own husband, just back from the White House. Rhoda felt lucky, beautiful, desired, pleasantly confused, and quite safe. It was actually one of the nicest moments in her life, and it went off like a dream. Pug took his seat and began eating shrimp cocktail.
“Say, it’s a bit late for this,” he remarked to Kirby, “but I sure want to thank you for driving Rhoda up from New York last summer to see Byron at sub school. That was a long way.”
Kirby spread his big hands. “Why, it was great to get a look at a submarine base. Your friend Captain Tully really gave us the ten-dollar tour.”
“Red Tully is 4.0,” Pug said. “I sort of suspect he nudged Byron through that school. However, I’ve asked no questions.”
It was exciting as a play for Rhoda, that the two men were actually talking straight off about that fateful trip. She said gaily, “Oh, Pug, you’re always selling poor Briny short. Red told us he was the champion of his class in the training tank. Caught on to the lung right away, and did his escape perfectly the first time cool as a fish. Why, when we were there they had him instructing in the tank.”
“That’s self-preservation, not work. Briny’s always been good at that.”
“That’s a talent, too,” said Pamela Tudsbury.
Pug looked at her with a trace of special warmth. “Well, Pamela, one can’t get far without it, that’s true. But it’s the talent of a turtle.”
“Honestly! Did you ever?” Rhoda said to Lord Burne-Wilke. “What a father.”
Mrs. Lacouture uttered a little shriek. The old steward was offering soup to Lord Burne-Wilke, and distracted by the Englishman’s medals, he was tilting the tray. The open soup tureen went slipping toward Rhoda, and her silver dress was seconds away from ruin. But as the tureen came sliding off the tray, Rhoda, who had a watchful eye for servants, plucked it out of the air, and with the quick controlled movements of a cat in trouble, set it on the table, not spilling a drop.
Pug called out over the gasps and laughter, “Well done.”
“Self-preservation runs in the family,” Rhoda said. Amid louder laughter, Alistair Tudsbury started a round of applause.
“By God! Never have I seen anything so neat,” exclaimed Senator Lacouture.
Everybody had a joke or a compliment for Rhoda. She became exhilarated. Rhoda loved to entertain. She had the ability to nail down details beforehand, and then breeze airily through the evening. Rhoda told stories of mishaps at dinner parties in Berlin, and began to reminisce with sharp satire about the Nazis. Forgotten was her former friendliness to the Germans; she was now the Bundles for Britain lady, partisan to the core. Palmer Kirby, getting over his stiffness in Pug’s presence, threw in his exper
iences at a Nuremberg Parteitag. Pug offered an account of the slide at Abendruh, making the women giggle. Then Lord Burne-Wilke gave jocular anecdotes about the arrogance of captured Luftwaffe pilots.
Senator Lacouture interrupted him. “Lord Burne-Wilke, were you people ever really in trouble last year?”
“Oh, rather.” The air commodore told of the dwindling of planes and pilots through July and August, of the week in September when the count of pilots fell below the survival minimum, of the desperate pessimism in the RAF all through October, with London burning, civilians dying in large numbers, no night fighters available, and the Luftwaffe still coming on and on, setting fire to residential districts and bombing and spreading the fires, trying to break the city’s spirit.
Lacouture probed with more questions, his pink face growing sober. The RAF, the air commodore said, was anticipating a new, larger onslaught in the spring and summer. The submarine sinkings, at their present rate, might ground the British planes for lack of fuel. An invasion would then be in the cards. “Mind you, we hope to weather all this,” he said, “but this time, Hitler may have the wherewithal. He’s expanded his armed forces massively. We haven’t been idle either. But unfortunately a lot of our stuff is ending up these days at the bottom of the Atlantic.”