“Maybe use it on her bed. As a spread. In memoriam of her father.”
“Whatever other traits she might have, I seriously doubt that sentiment’s part of Sarah’s sensibility. Besides, the flag isn’t the size or shape to fit even a double bed, should Sarah not always be sleeping alone. You’ve heard of people wrapping themselves in the flag, haven’t you? It would be a teasingly dramatic way of disrobing, to use a polite word.”
“What an imagination you have!”
“But, you know, Gwen, I have to admit to wishing that rather than coming between Goneril and Regan, Aunt Bess had let them fight it out.”
“Physically? Beside their father’s bier? Nonsense, although I know you’re indulging in hyperbole.”
“After the performances we’ve just seen, how can anything be hyperbolic?”
“Well, then, you’re flirting with titillation. But you still haven’t answered my question. What amused you the most?”
“The way the shouting and laughing of the kids in the school yard drowned out the minister and triumphed over the silence that death asks for was really extraordinary. To be honest, at the risk of also being somewhat blasphemous, I thought it wasn’t just happenstance but was divinely ordained. Did you notice how the Bible-thumper went slinking off after the naval show?”
“I did. And also found it gratifying. But you’re holding back. What really took the gold, as they say?”
“Well, if I must. Though I sense that you just want to hear me say what you already know. I confess that without a grain of exaggeration never in my life have I had the good fortune to behold anything that measures up to the coffin-side struggle over the ring. In his eighties, lying down in a box, lifeless as he was, the Ancient Mariner fought courageously for what he knew was his by right of possession. That scene will go with me to the grave, so to speak.”
“Did you happen to see how the undertaker finally got it off?
“Easily. Three-in-One.”
“Those the odds for or against Uncle Oscar?”
“No, no, no. Not odds. Oil.”
“What?”
“Lubrication liquidated Oscar’s last bastion of defense. His mighty knuckle had to knuckle under. A couple of squirts of Three-in-One oil made it smooth and slick as an eel, a dead eel.”
“Good Lord. How crude! Oiling a corpse?”
“Worse than the bad form, it was downright unfair. Oscar was no more able to defend against oil than an eel just pulled from the water. But in my judgment the Ancient Mariner won a battle more magnificent than any of those triumphs on the field or at sea he never tired of describing. Call it a moral victory. You’d give Oscar the gold too, now wouldn’t you?”
“Of course. But…”
“No buts about it. It made me hear and understand the f-u-n in ‘funeral’.”
“You’ve got it, said the last word: Fun-eral. Amen.”
ANSWERING FIRE
Lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen.
—Deuteronomy 4:9
She was no more than five feet tall. A Walking Stump. Her steps were tiny and brisk. When she'd wiggled her little body into the upholstered chair in the inglenook at the far end of the barroom, the feet on her club legs scarcely touched the floor, although she leaned back, making her look tentative, out of place. Beneath a dull brown skirt that fell halfway between her knees and ankles, she seemed to have a single thigh. Everyone else in the place was part of either a couple or a foursome. She was the only person without a drink.
The bartender, craggy-faced Yorkshireman who was as dour as a highland Scot, paid her no attention. Once situated, she laid her petite hands on her lap, one on top of the other, as if trying to conceal something. Daniel was sitting close enough to see her eyes darting around to take in all they could without turning her head. As they were about to land on Alma and him, he quickly looked away.
"Having another?" he asked.
"Sure, if you are," Alma replied.
Standing at the bar, half-facing the woman while waiting for the bartender to refill their empty glasses, he noticed that the small woman's hands now were squeezed between the of the chair and the outside of her thighs. As he carried the second martinis back to where Alma was sitting, he hoped the woman would notice and come to understand the custom of the inn. He walked slowly, so as not to spill a drop and walked closer to the woman than was necessary. When directly in front of her, he pulled back the corners of his lips and crinkled his eyes ever so slightly. She could decide whether he was or wasn't directing a smile at her. Her face remained as expressionless as a death mask.
The headwaiter dame striding in from the dining room. Tall, broad-shouldered, straight-backed, wearing a black serge suit with gold buttons, he must have appeared intimidating to an ill-at-ease foreigner. He distributed menus, in large maroon covers, to everyone in the bar. When the woman unfolded hers, her faced disappeared behind it. Her hands were chunky, with stubby fingers. She was short-armed.
"Dan, have you noticed the woman sitting alone beside the fireplace?" Alma asked without opening her menu. She must be Japanese or Korean. Maybe even Chinese, now that Nixon opened the country up. His one good deed."
"No," he lied. Why he didn't quite know.
"Well, I've been watching her. She hasn't had a drink."
"Maybe she doesn't want one."
"Why else would she come into the bar?"
"God knows. Perhaps she just blundered in."
"And sat down? When she could see everyone else had a glass in hand? My guess is she can't figure out the procedure. Remember how puzzled we were our first time her. We felt like intruders. I'll bet she doesn't know what to make of the menu"
"Could be she has fluent English.
"I'm going to see whether she needs help"
"How's your Japanese?"
"No better than your Korean, Mandarin, or Cantonese."
As he watched Alma, still slender and straight-backed at seventy five, approach the short squat woman, he sipped his martini. While trying not to, he couldn't help overhearing the verbal thrust and parry as the couple beside him went at it.
"With or without the U. N. the cowboy's going in, with guns blazing."
"But Saddam is a threat."
"Not to us or the Americans,"
"He has weapons of mass destruction."
"They're not aimed at us."
"He could ignite the whole Middle East."
"Georgie lad has not more sense of history than does the pony he rides."
"Sadam Hussein's a madman. Suppose his uranium or chemicals land in the hands of terrorists? Remember nine eleven."
"We learned from Afghanistan. Twice. As well as in Iraq after World War I."
"Ancient history."
"What happened to the Russkies in Afghanistan is recent history."
"His father and Maggie ought to have bone all the way in '91."
"Bush will have a tiger by the tail. You'll see."
"Until Saddam's gone there's no hope of cleaning up the Israeli-Palestinian mess."
"Blair ought to know better than to hitch his wagon to a falling star."
"Well, whenever I have a chance I'll wave the dear old Union Jack and now's the time."
This last from a woman in late middle age with a tallowy face and a jaws that swiveled rather than dropped when she spoke, words of the man, presumably her husband, sounded as if they were being ground out by his teeth. To taunt him she broke into the chorus of "Rule, Britannia." Last evening he'd heard them spatting just as vigorously over whether it was more proper to pout tea into the cup before milk, his position, or after, hers.
Back home in the States the drums of war were being beaten so loudly and insistently and dismayingly that Alma and Daniel had cut and run— to be away for a while, settled into a lovely North Yorkshire village, which they visited many times. Yet here "it" was, following them into the bar of their favorite inn, infiltrating his ear— and mind. At least Danie
l told himself consolingly, it was being blared out on the evening news. No teleys in the bars here.
"Well, I was right," Alma purred, with a bit of self-satisfaction, as she rejoined him. As if he'd seriously questioned her surmise. "The poor woman is baffled. Sol explained the process, how things work in the bar and that we order dinner here from the menu the headwaiter brings. She does understand and speaks English well enough to bed understood. Should we ask her to join us in the lounge after dinner? I forgot to explain that's the convention. I'm rather certain she'd Japanese."
While they were eating he could hear the beating of war drums across thirty-five hundred miles of ocean.
The woman left the dining room while they were eating dessert. On her table he could see an empty win glass.
#
"Have your heard the news on the telly this morning?" The little crown of white lace perched on top of the gray-haired head of their waitress brought back the nineteenth century. A white apron over a black dress constituted the rest of her uniform. Always pleasant and chatty, she was, they'd found out on one of their early stops at the inn, the wife of the sternly laconic bartender. The balance of opposites had held for many a year.
"Why no," Alma replied. "Should we?"
"We've come to get away from the news," Daniel growled, taking care to sound like a good-natured dog awakened from a nap rather than a threatening grizzly.
"Oh, but this is such news as you'll be wanting to know. They've bombed Baghdad, you Americans have, and Saddam and his sons have all been killed. It was fearsome, we're told. Our royal troops have gone in too. God willing, it will soon be over."
As they made their way out of the dining room, they passed the Japanese woman who was sitting at a table just inside the French doors. Facing the rest of the breakfasters, she ate with her head down.
#
"Have you heard the Japs have just bombed Oahua?" My, sister and I are having lunch in a restaurant close to a downtown hospital, in which on the eleventh floor my father is pacing his room like a caged tiger. He's being driven by the anxiety generated by what his doctor has called a nervous breakdown. Why all of a sudden at forty-nine he's been plunged into irrational fear and hopeless despair neither he nor we can understand.
I've never heard of Oahu.
"Our ships and the barracks at Pearl Harbor have been hit by Jap planes," the waitress goes on, "and lots of our sailors and soldiers have been killed."
With doll-like prettiness and blond hair she wears pageboy, like a movie star named June Allyson, she's not much older than I am. IF my mother weren't here, I'd try to find the courage to ask her for a date.
When the three of us have gone out onto Broad Street after hurriedly finishing lunch, I buy a newspaper from a boy yelling "Extry Extry! Japs attack Hawaii! Roosevelt declares war!"
"Oh, what this will do to your poor father in the state he's in," my mother half sobs. "The poor man imagines more troubles of his own than he can bear."
The next time I visit him I can see that my father has no emotion to squander on the war.
#
"Early this morning, Near Eastern time, American forces struck Baghdad with three dozen Tomahawk missile carrying one-thousand pound warheads. They were fired from naval units in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. A Pentagon spokesman has announced intelligence has learned that senior Iraqi leadership was inside three targeted buildings at the time of the attack. According to a Defense Department official, one identified target was more important than the other two. He went on to report that, after the missiles struck their targets, a pair of F-17 fighter dropped four two-thousand pound bunker-destroying bombs on an underground facility beneath one of the leveled buildings in which Saddam Hussein and two of his sons, Uday and Qusay, were said by a reliable source to be hiding. According to a later Defense Department report, the targets were obliterated and some, if no tall, the Iraqi leadership was Killed. A C .1. A. intelligence report cited witnesses who saw the body of Saddam Hussein being carried from the rubble on a stretcher.
"Subsequent attacks by Tomahawk missiles fired from warships by hundreds of U. S. planes have delivered a staggering blow to the Iraqi regime. According to White House officials, the coordinated operation is intended to shock and awe the government and war machine of Saddam Hussein into a state of collapse. 'Shock and Awe' is the phrase we keep hearing his morning out of Washington.
"Meanwhile here in London the War Department has reported that Royal Army troops, including the famed Desert Rats, along with four thousand Royal Marines and units of the First Armoured Division, have joined the U. S. Marines' First Expeditionary Force. Landing from the Persian Gulf, they are rapidly closing in on the strategically important city of Basra in southeast Iraq. Major General Robin Brims, in command of all Her Majesty's forces in the region, including the First Amoured Division, had announced..."
"Do you mind?" Daniel asked as he clicked off the television set in their room. Considering that Alma had tuned into BBC news despite the mutually agreed upon reason for their being in this Yorkshire inn at this time, he felt that his mild irony along with his unilateral action was justified.
"I was hoping the Brits might hold out, along with France and Germany, and insist on U. N. inspectors go back..."
"Not a chance. Look, we knew the dogs of war were about to be unleashed. Since there's nothing we can do about it, let's not let it get to us. No more TV news, what say?"
"Of course you're right. No point having out noses in what we've already sniffed. No more television for the duration of... our temporary escape."
"Agreed. Here's hoping BBC will take time out from the destruction of Baghdad to offer some footage of the test match in Melbourne."
#
When they entered the bar before dinner that evening, the Japanese woman was sitting in the same chair she had the evening before. She had a drink in her hand. Noticing Alma smile at her, he nodded at the woman noncommittally. The woman, lifting herself by pushing on the chair arms, responded by half rising and bowing, then holding up her drink like the torch of the statue of liberty.
"Don't you find it rather strange," Daniel began after they'd in with their martinis, "an Far Eastern woman halfway around the world from home, alone?"
While watching the dance of the dance of the gas-fed flame in the fireplace beside the woman's chair, the choreography of whose programmed flares he'd studied and diagrammed in his head, he was forcing himself not to hear what he knew would be the conversation of his near neighbors.
"On the face of it, yes," Alma agreed. "Though when you consider how the world has changed since the end of World War II, maybe not so strange. Not only women in the West have been liberated, you know."
"True enough. But what can she be doing in a village on the edge of the North Yorkshire moors, where we're hiding out, you might say? It's not exactly London or Stratford-upon-Avon. Or Paris or Rome. Remember the hordes of Japanese we ran into in Stratford? Clicking their cameras and flashing light bulbs and posing. What on earth can they do with all those photographs and slides? Send them to friends and relatives who toss them away, as we do? Have slide show evenings, which we find excuses not to go to?"
" ‘Hordes'? Of Japanese? Genghis Khan was a Mongol."
"Touche."
"They have a right to revere Shakespeare in their own way."
"Still, I think I'm on the right track. With Stratford-upon-Avon."
"Not sure what you mean."
"Our little friend's a teacher. No matter where she's from, you see a woman traveling alone, wearing sad-looking clothes, skirt halfway down her calf, hair in a double knot, you can be pretty damn certain you're looking at a schoolteacher."
"Oh my! More stereotyping. Every bit as bad as 'hordes.' Your notion of schoolmarms must be a carry-over from your childhood, which was, let me see, rather a few decades ago."
"Okay. I'm benighted. Hopelessly. No point in trying to enlighten me. Still, I'm convinced the lady is a teacher. Forge
t about her being an old maid because she's traveling alone. And about her self-presentation. Something emanates from her that says 'Japanese schoolteacher.'"
"From bad to worse. You've gone from stereotyping and fixation to clairvoyance."
"What'll you bet?"
"Though I have no strong feelings about her national origin, I'll take the bet. She's not a Japanese schoolteacher. For you, with your self-assurance, to win, she must be both. Winner chooses the restaurant in London the evening before we fly home. Price, no consideration. The tab goes on your credit card."
"No. On yours."
"You are sure. But actually I meant the generic 'your.' Whatever, how to find out? We can't just go up to her and ask. And she seems rather ill-at-ease to be forthcoming about herself."
"Leave it to me."
He was puzzled by his own certainty. And couldn't account for the attention he was giving the woman.
She'd finished her drink and, having ordered from the menu, had gone into the dining room before he and Alma had started on their second martini.
#
As they were passing through the hallway outside the bar, Daniel said, "Why not ask the lonely lady to have coffee with us, after dinner in the lounge, as you suggested last evening. You can explain the way it's done here, which you forgot to then. Remember? Maybe she's already figured it out. She seems to have caught on to procedures quite quickly. For an old maid schoolteacher from Japan."
"So, you're really determined to prove you're right. More to yourself than to me, it seems. Or maybe there's a glitzy restaurant in London you've had a secret hankering to dine in. Though you just might find yourself taking me to the Indonesian place near the Marble Arch that you dislike and I love. But why should I do the inviting? Why not you?"
"It was your idea to make her feel cozy in the first place. And if it's a woman thing, she'll feel more comfortable. She might think I'm coming on to her."
"No doubt, no doubt. A middle-aged schoolteacher young enough to be your daughter."
"Okay then. I'll ask her." He was surprised by his ready capitulation.
After entering the dining room, he broke away from Alma and went up to the table just inside the doorway.
"Good evening, madam." To address her formally and bow slightly seemed called for. Still he felt as if he were playacting. "May I invite you to join my wife and me for coffee in the lounge after dinner?"