Captains and the Kings

  For the first time she became aware of what he had done. Startled fully awake now, she looked up at him, her eyes as wide as possible in all that flesh. She knew at once that he had not done this in mockery and contempt, as he had done other things when he had discovered certain secrets of hers, and had exposed them. Then, to her stunned amazement, as she held the glass reluctantly in her bloated hand, he actually drew a white and gold chair near to the bed and sat down in it, and she saw his face completely for the first time and she saw that it was the color of the whitish-gray in the russet of his hair and that his wide thin lips were as blue as huckleberries, and that every muscle in his face was as flat and stiff as ivory. A horrible feeling of impending disaster hit Bernadette. He was going to leave her. He was going to divorce her so he could marry that shameless Elizabeth Hennessey. He had given her the whiskey because as a last kindness to her he was softening the effects of his assault upon her very soul. "No, no," she groaned, her lips feeling thick and lifeless. "Oh, no." "Drink it," he said, and he was looking at her now not with his usual distant aversion, his murderous indifference, his open loathing, but with an expression she had seen but once before, when she had been little more than a child on the night her mother had died, and he had held her in the hall below and had tried to comfort her. She burst into tears, then afraid that he might newly despise her, she drank hurriedly, gasped, choked, drank again. He took the glass from her and put it on her bedside table, which was cluttered with lace handkerchiefs, bottles of perfume, a little dish of lozenges, a porcelain figure or two, and two or three rings. The heat of the room, with its closed draperies, was like the core of a burning coal and sickening with scent and the odor of a large wet body. The heat of the day had been too hot for Bernadette's usual enormous meals, and she had eaten only a roll and coffee for breakfast, and the strong whiskey immediately spread through her vitals, hot, yes, but comforting

  -consoling-deadening, bringing with it a mendacious courage and fortitude, all of which she had needed for the many years of her life with Joseph Armagh. She panted, looking at him with eyes like a mortally stricken and humble animal dying before a hunter, and said, "You are going away. Tell me." "I am not going away, Bernadette," he said, almost gently. He could not look at her eyes, so tortured, so pleading, so despairing-no, he could not look at them now. "It's just-I have bad news. It just arrived. Kevin-" Oh, God be thanked, he is not going to leave me! something cried joyously in Bernadette, and a glow came over her face. She put out her hand impulsively to her husband, and he actually took it, wet and swollen though it was, with deep fat dimples where the knuckles should have been, and he held it in spite of an almost uncontrollable revulsion. Then she remembered his last word. "Kevin? What about Kevin?" The glow was in her heart, too. He was not going to leave her. He would still be her husband. "Kevin?" she repeated. He had seen the glow and had accurately guessed its origin, but he could not detest her now or repulse her. "I've had a telegram," he said, and he felt the hoarseness and dryness in his throat. "Kevin-he was on a battleship, Texas, at Santiago, as an observer for his newspaper. He was-shot. On July twenty-eighth. I've had a telegram, from the admiral." He felt her heavy hand slowly grow cold in his and saw her stupefied face, her thick dropped mouth, her empty eyes. She was trying to speak, coughed, mumbled, but did not look away from him. "He," she could say at last in a voice so faint he could hardly hear her, "he wasn't a soldier. And, isn't the war over?" "Yes," said Joseph. There was still no real feeling in him, no real awareness of the news he was telling, only a shocked stillness such as a soldier might feel when the steel entered him and the pain had not yet begun. The pain would inevitably begin, he knew, for pain was an old familiar and he knew all its nuances, its stealthy approaches, its sudden overwhelming anguishes, its sudden incredulity and savage rebellion. But as yet it was only creeping in the darkness towards him on silent feet, letting its victim try to gather resisting but hopeless strength. "But, he was killed,", said Joseph to his wife. "Kevin," whispered Bernadette, stunned, incredulous as he was. "But he is only eighteen years old! It can't have happened to Kevin-he is only eighteen years old." Joseph could not speak. He had expected conventional weeping from the dramatic Bernadette, and he had expected to be forced to console her. But the stunned and awful shock in her eyes stunned him also, for now he knew that she loved her son, and he squeezed his own parched eyelids together and heard the first crackling of the enemy's approach to him. Then Bernadette screamed, tore her hand from Joseph's and clapped both her hands with a frightening noise to her cheeks. She screamed over and over, and her maid, in the next room, came running, aghast. "Send for the doctor," Joseph told her. "Mr. Kevin has been killed-in the war. Send for the doctor immediately." He was barely heard above that tearing sound Bernadette was helplessly making, her eyes wild and bulging, vivid as fire with pain. The doctor came-Joseph had not left his wife and had tried to calm her-and Bernadette was given a generous sedative. Only when it began to affect her did she cease her broken shrieking, her animal-like cries, her threshings on the bed, her calls upon God and her favorite Saints, her pleas to her husband that it must be a mistake, the war was over, it was some other mother's son; who would shoot Kevin, and why? and it was a nightmare, an error, the prank of an enemy, a wrong dispatch. Joseph must-must-. He had held her back on her pillows, had tried to give her 'more whiskey, but she had struck the glass fiercely from his hand and then had clutched him like a drowning woman, rolling her head on his shoulder, pushing him away for a moment as if he had attacked her and she was defending herself, then clutching him again and rolling her head on his shoulder and writhing against him. The doctor, the maid and Joseph waited beside her bed and slowly the screaming, that fearful screaming-hoarse and broken-had finally stopped. Bernadette lay on her pillows, drenched in her own sweat, a disheveled but pathetic lump of flesh in her stained pink silk, panting and muttering. Then, for the first time, she had begun to cry, and the doctor nodded with sympathetic satisfaction. Joseph held her hand, and it was quiet at last, though trembling. She saw only her husband. "There is a curse on us," she whimpered, and her eyes widened with horror. "Ann Marie. Your brother, Sean. Kevin. In one year, Joe, in one year. Who will be next? There is a curse on us. A curse on this family." Then her eyes closed and she fell asleep and instantly snored under the drug. The doctor said, with pity, "She should sleep for several hours. I am leaving these pills, for later, when she wakes up. It is best to keep her under sedation for a few days. I will return tonight." There were things to be done before the pain took over entirely. There was a telegram to Rory, to Charles Devereaux, to Timothy Dineen, to Harry Zeff. There were telegrams to Washington requesting the return of the body of Kevin Armagh, to be buried in the family plot. There were telegrams to senators, and other politicians. There were orders to the domestic staff in the house that no newspaper reporters were to be admitted. There was a message to the priest to come later to console Mrs. Joseph Armagh. There were so many arrangements to be made-before the relentless and terrible enemy pounced, bringing with it an absolute helplessness. The dire panoply of death began. After he had completed what he must do Joseph went to his daughter's rooms, the once pretty girlish rooms she had decorated herself, so sunlit and fresh in color, so simple and charming. They were none of these now. They had been converted into a hospital center, plain, functional, cleared of all but absolute necessities. One room held the three beds of the three constant nurses, and their paraphernalia. What had been the nursery but which had later been converted into a sitting room for Ann Marie, was a nursery again, filled with childish toys and other playthings, bright with nursery pictures on the walls and a table at which Ann Marie now ate all her meals, for no longer would the rooms downstairs know her and no longer would she run down those marble stairs. She would be assisted down them in the mornings for a short ride with a nurse or two, and then would be taken upstairs again for her babyish naps, her bland meals. She would be tucked into bed at night, a nurse singing lullabies beside her, and
she would sleep. Did she dream, ever? Joseph would ask himself. Were they the dreams of an infant, or the dreams of a woman? Sometimes she awakened, wailing, and all in the upper rooms heard that sorrowful sound, and shuddered, and waited until she was soothed and pacified into sobbing sleep again. Sometimes the sobbing was the weeping of a bereaved woman who could never be comforted, the weeping of a woman who asked only to die. On hearing that Joseph would think: I don't know how it is possible, but I believe she knew. Yes, I believe she knew. I believe that when she sleeps, sometimes, she knows again and can't bear it. The sun was still blazing, but low in the sky and reddening it, when Joseph went into those rooms which Bernadette rarely entered. Ann Marie had eaten her bread and milk and fruit pudding and had drunk her mug of cocoa, and was now sitting where she always sat, near the window, in a white-padded hospital chair. For she was frequently and serenely incontinent, like a young child, and with as little shame, and as naturally. She was dressed for the night in a white plain dimity nightgown and a flowered wrapper, and her long soft brown hair had been braided into tight silky braids on her shoulders and her face was the face of a pampered, loved, and contented child. Her slim body had reverted to the outlines of babyhood, also, so that she was plump and rosy and dimpled as she had been at the age of three. Her legs and arms and hands and feet were immature again, her face was flushed and round, her lips full and pink, her flesh shining, her eyes innocently questing and shyly smiling-those lovely sherry- colored eyes with their long aureate lashes. She had never had what Bernadette had called "a proper bust," and now what she had had was merged in the general softness of her child's body. "It is not often that we encounter such a reversion," the doctors had told Joseph in Switzerland and in Paris, "but it is not unknown. It is as if some deep unconscious will had decreed that childhood is safe and must never end, and that the soul must never know maturity again." A number of them had looked curiously at Joseph. "Has she had an unbearable shock to her sensibilities, some grief, some catastrophe, which makes present reality untenable to her, and unendurable?" To which Joseph had said, "No. She had only an accident." They had told Joseph that she might remain in this state to the end of a possible long life, full of infant health, or she might retreat even further into immaturity and finally be unable to leave her bed, and then she would die of inanition and atrophy. They did not know. They had advised institutions, but Joseph had refused. His daughter would live and die in her own home, as she would wish, herself. She would have nurses, and nursemaids to attend her and to play with her. She would never be unhappy or frustrated or reduced to tears. She would be a child for all her life, most probably, but she would be a happy child. "There are worse fates," said one of the doctors, shrugging. Now Joseph sat beside her and took one of her soft little hands and said to her, as he always said, "Who am I, Ann Marie?" "Papa," she said with triumph, and smiled that radiant smile of hers, affectionate and confiding. It was a nightly game. He looked into her eyes, and saw the healthily glistening whites of them, the lashes, the bright irises. He always looked deeply into them, hoping hopelessly for some sign of the soul of Ann Marie in them, some shadowy hint that the spirit had not left forever. But it was the infant Ann Marie who looked back at him trustfully, the child in her cradle, the child in her nursery bed. So much for the theory of growing and maturing souls, he thought, as he had thought a thousand bitter times before. So much for immortal souls, gaining knowledge and wisdom and awareness. What Ann Marie had learned in twenty-three years was gone, irradicated, blotted out, as if it had never been at all. There was a cloth doll in her lap, and now she took it in her arms and hugged it and uttered a gleeful little sound. "Kiss Pudgy," she told her father, and he dutifully kissed it, and closed his eyes against both the endless pain of his daughter's spiritual death and the pain that was threatening him. He said, "Ann Marie, do you remember Kevin?" She looked at him obediently. Only her voice was the voice of the woman she had been, clear, hesitant, hoping to please. "Kevin? Kevin?" She shook her head and pouted as if she had been rebuked. "Never mind, dear," said her father, and passed his dry hands over his drier face, which felt scorched. He took up the doll again and shook it at her playfully and she laughed and snatched it from him, and hugged it again. "My Pudgy," she said. "You can't have her, Papa." The nurse, the younger one, was sitting nearby in her white clothing, knitting, and she smiled as if at the prattlings of a child and said, "We were very good tonight, Mr. Armagh." She had heard the news of Kevin's death, but as Mr. Armagh, who terrified everyone, had not spoken of it she did not speak of it or offer her condolences. "We took our bath nicely, and tomorrow we'll go for a little walk, won't we, Ann Marie?" "And see the flowers," said Ann Marie, nodding. "The flowers. And the trees." She looked through the windows at the far distant house where Elizabeth lived. It could only have been Joseph's imagination-but was there a faint darkening and yearning on her full rosy face, a tightening into womanhood for an instant, a despair? He leaned forward, hoping and fearing both, but the haunting had gone and the placid serenity had returned. But his heart was jumping. He stood up and kissed his daughter good night, and left her, for there was so much to be done, so very much to be done and there was no time for pain as yet. He went into his wife's rooms again, and the sun was setting in scarlet majesty and the grounds about the house were peaceful and filled with shifting shadows of hot gilt and purple, and the tops of the trees were dancing in liquid gold. Joseph paused to look at all that which he owned, and the enemy crept nearer. "A curse on the family," Bernadette had wept. "There is a curse on us. Ann Marie, Sean, and now Kevin. A curse on us." The ancient Celt, the Druid tree-worshiper, the Celt who had known mysteries and occult darknesses, stirred in Joseph again like a man awakening from centuries of sleep. Nonsense, he thought, and there was a movement of sickness in him, a dread. The Bassetts were eliminated all the time, and the executioners never lost an hour of healthy sleep nor suffered one twinge. He thought of the faceless men in all the nations who planned and destroyed as a matter of course and expediency, with no qualms, no stirrings of primeval spirit, no atavistic incantations against pursuing vengeance. They were realists. Bernadette slept, stupefied, mouth open and drooling, and Joseph sat beside her and did not hear the muted dinner bell and did not go downstairs. He watched his wife until the room was dark and her maid began to light a lamp here and there. Then the pain came. Later, for the first time in his life, he deliberately got drunk.