Better Times Than These

  The lobby was a bedlam of gabbling faces, discarded raincoats and folding umbrellas. A few people stared at Holden’s dress blues, and he couldn’t decide whether it was because they simply didn’t know what the uniform was, or because they did, and felt uncomfortable about it. He hadn’t spent much time in New York since going on active duty, but he was more or less aware of a growing resentment here against the war that had not yet crystallized in other parts of America.

  Without stopping to check his cap, Holden brushed through the crowd into the huge ballroom, decorated in red and white crepe streamers and flowers. An orchestra was playing “Moon River,” and Holden lingered near the door for a moment among the fashionable, almost fashionable, semifashionable and a few unfashionable New York people who had come to drink and dance and talk and see and be seen at Cory’s debut. There was the smell of champagne and chafing dishes and roses and nothing at all to remind anyone of the war, except perhaps himself.

  He saw her in a corner, surrounded by half a dozen older men and women he didn’t recognize. Instead of going straight over, he headed for the bar, feeling slightly uneasy over wearing the uniform instead of tails. He ordered a Scotch and soda, standing beside a cluster of scraggly-looking undergraduates talking about Amherst. A couple of them gawked at him as though he had just landed from Mars. One whispered something to the others, who sniggered and turned the other way. He wasn’t sure it was about him, but he suspected it was, and it made him feel more uncomfortable in a situation in which he should have felt completely at home.

  Cory was laughing with the older couples, her long auburn hair piled high on her head, her suntanned face as lovely as ever. He decided to wait until she was dancing, then sneak up behind her and cut in. She loved that kind of little surprise from him, and he figured it would ease her disappointment that he had come in uniform.

  “Oh, Frank, don’t be tacky. Nobody ever wears a uniform to these things,” she’d protested when he’d mentioned it in a phone conversation the week before. “Mother will go through the ceiling. You know she wants to show you off; don’t embarrass her.

  “You’re just kidding, aren’t you?” she had asked, when he hadn’t said anything.

  “Of course I’m not kidding,” he teased. “Why should I have to go out and rent tails when I’ve got this grand uniform? You’ll love it, anyway—it’s got gold braid on the tunic, and the pants are light blue with a gold stripe down the sides, and—”

  “Stop it, Frank. It isn’t funny,” she’d said quietly.

  He’d said nothing, realizing for the first time she was actually embarrassed that he might come in his uniform to her party. Still, he didn’t see why he ought to be ashamed to wear the uniform of the United States Army in public. After all, Holdens had been wearing it in some way or other for more than two hundred years, and his father had been one of the most decorated officers in Europe, and after all, he’d paid one hundred sixty-five dollars for it . . .

  “You know you have tails up here,” she’d said. “You won’t have to rent them. You look so handsome in tails. Please, Frank, don’t kid me like this . . .”

  He hadn’t really planned to come in the uniform. He’d meant to stop at home and change into white tie; but they had been on the artillery range until nearly dark that day, and by the time he got back to the BOQ he had known he had better dress now for the evening; he would be just able to catch the last flight to New York, and there wouldn’t be time to change there after he arrived.

  Normally, the Old Man would have brought them in early on Friday; but three days before, they had gotten their marching orders. Within a few months they would be on the way to Vietnam to join the Division, and they were having to work extra hard to get ready. The little war nobody thought would happen was actually happening, and although no one knew exactly how bad it was going to be, they weren’t joking about it the way they had before.

  He had saved the news of the overseas orders to tell Cory and his parents in person, because he believed that was the way it should be done—in the big family room, not over a telephone. He had a vision of how it would be: he would call them together as his father had done whenever there had been a family event—except that this time he would do the calling. Everyone would sit down and he would break the news calmly, standing by the fireplace, explaining the particulars. He had planned to do it tonight, before the ball, but the late artillery business had spoiled that, and now he wasn’t sure how to tell them—do it here or wait. In either case, he was beginning to regret that he had worn the dress blues, because he knew Cory wouldn’t like it, and after all, she was his sister, and this was her big night.

  He walked along the edge of the dance floor, picking his way through the whirling couples so that he would come up behind Cory. She was dancing with a balding, fiftyish-looking man Holden recognized from his parents’ parties but whose name he couldn’t remember. He tapped the man gently on the shoulder and asked, “May I cut in?”

  The man quickly stepped away, nodding politely but looking Holden up and down.

  “Frank,” she gasped, “you—”

  “Hi, Button,” he said, not letting her finish, taking her gently with the music.

  “Frank, you wore it . . .”

  “Hey, listen, Button, I’m sorry, really I am, but we didn’t get off till dark. I was lucky to make it up here at all; I had the last flight.”

  “Oh, Frank, damn,” she said.

  “It’s all right, Button. Honestly. I don’t feel very comfortable in civvies anyway,” he said, whirling her while the orchestra played a tune from Cabaret.

  “Oh, well,” she said, “I guess it doesn’t matter . . . It’s just that . . .”

  “Just what?”

  “It’s so military,” she said.

  “Well, what the hell else could it be?” He laughed. “It is military. I am in the military.”

  “Yes, I know, but you know . . . the war and everything . . . killing people,” she said.

  “I’m not planning to kill anybody tonight,” he said good-naturedly.

  “It’s just that it reminds people of the war,” she said.

  “Well, they ought to be reminded of it. What do they think, they can get all dandied up and come here and there isn’t going to be a war?” He felt a twinge of testiness.

  “No, no, that isn’t it. But a lot of people are really against the war. Did you know that?”

  “Hell yes I know it, but that still doesn’t mean it’s going to go away, little sister. Anyway, the kinds of people who’re against it are sort of nutty anyway . . . actors and kids . . . what do they know about it? Huh?”

  “Oh, Frank, it’s more than that. Let’s don’t talk about it—it’s so stupid,” she said.

  “Sure, Button. I just hope I haven’t spoiled your evening.”

  “You haven’t. Of course you haven’t,” she said. “Oh, there’s Becky, let’s go over—don’t you want to?” Cory said, taking him by the hand and leading him to a table at the edge of the dance floor.

  He hadn’t seen Becky for three years. She had been so much younger then, a skinny seventeen-year-old with pageboy hair and plaid skirts and knee socks who came to visit Cory. He had always teased her about being skinny and not having any figure, and so he was totally unprepared for the fully blossomed young woman with a long black mane of hair he was walking toward now. She was anything but skinny. She was absolutely devastating in a low-cut green evening gown.

  “Becky, it’s Frank,” Cory said. He felt an immediate attraction to her that seemed out of place. It was hard to understand how this lovely creature had developed from such a bag of bones.

  “Hi, Skinny, how’s your butt?” he said, deciding to gain the upper hand with a question that had always gotten a rise before.

  “My butt’s fine. How’s yours?” she said smartly. Instantly he realized the tables had turned and he hadn’t the faintest idea how to proceed, except that he knew he couldn’t deal with Becky the way he had before—and d
idn’t want to anyway.

  She was sitting next to a craggy, fortyish-looking man immersed in serious conversation with a fat dowager who seemed to hang on his every utterance.

  “Frank Holden,” Becky said, tapping the man on his shoulder, “I want you to meet Richard Widenfield.”

  “Oh, how do you do?” Widenfield said, rising, shaking hands. “Holden—you’re Cory’s brother, then?”

  “Richard is in the Political Science department at Mount Holyoke,” Becky said. “Frank,” she said, “is in the Army.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” said Widenfield. “You were a big tennis player, weren’t you?—I think Cory told me. Brown, wasn’t it?”

  “Princeton,” Holden said.

  “Of course; sorry.”

  “He’s a big Army man now,” Becky said. “How does it feel to be a big Army man?” She was smiling, but he felt a certain antagonism in the question.

  “Not so big, I guess; just doing my time.”

  “What do you do in the Army?” Her green eyes flashed.

  “I’m with the headquarters of an Infantry brigade at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina.”

  “And what do they do?” she said.

  “I don’t know if I get you. It’s an Infantry brigade. We’re a line unit.”

  “You kill people, right?”

  “That’s what the Army’s for, kid—at least, sometimes. You always hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  Cory interrupted. “Frank went in because he would have been drafted, Becky—he’s only in for three years.”

  “I suppose you’re going to Vietnam and kill people,” Becky continued.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I am,” he said, the words coming out deliberately, but before he’d meant them to.

  “Frank, you aren’t!” Cory said. “When?” There was disbelief in her pretty, tanned face.

  “Sometime this summer.”

  “But you can’t! Why?” Cory looked as if she were about to cry. “Can’t you get out of it?”

  “Of course not, Button. I wish I could.”

  “You haven’t told Mother or Daddy?”

  “Not yet.”

  “It’ll kill them,” Cory said. “They’re against the war.”

  “I doubt it,” he said firmly.

  “So am I,” Becky said, “we all are—and you should be too—we haven’t got any business being there.”

  Holden took a swallow of his drink and looked her in the eyes. “Look, Becky, I don’t like it any more than anyone else, but I have to do what they tell me. That’s what the Army’s all about.”

  “No questions asked, huh? Just do it. That’s exactly what’s wrong with this whole thing,” she said sharply.

  Widenfield had turned in his chair and was watching with interest.

  “Well, of course you have questions. I have questions. But once you’re in the Army it doesn’t matter about that,” Holden said.

  “Look,” he said. “Maybe you don’t realize what’s going on over there. If we don’t stop this thing right now, it’s probably going to spread all over Asia—and then what? The North Vietnamese are very ruthless people . . . we’ve got commitments . . .”

  “Did you ever read Bernard Fall?” she said. “Nobody—not the French, not us, not anybody—is going to ‘save’ that country except the Vietnamese people themselves.”

  “Becky,” Widenfield said, but she waved him off.

  “And we’re just making it worse. Don’t you think Fall ought to know?” she said. “He’s been there for years.”

  “He doesn’t know anything now; he’s dead,” Holden said.

  “Are you suggesting,” Widenfield interrupted abruptly, “that people’s ideas die with them?’”

  “No, of course not,” Holden said, “but Fall only represents a point of view. It’s a good point of view, but he didn’t understand the capabilities of this country, our counterinsurgency program . . .”

  “There’s a new book called The Village of Ben Suc,” Widenfield said. “It gives a pretty clear picture of our ‘counterinsurgency’ program: burn everything to the ground and kill off every male between fifteen and fifty. Is that supposed to be the foreign policy of the United States?”

  “Well I haven’t read that book, but I’ve heard about it, and I don’t think—”

  “Let me commend it to you, then, Mr. Holden. It gives a very clear view of what’s going on over there. That bunch in Washington is getting us deeper and deeper into this thing, and the entire history of the situation suggests we can never win it,” Widenfield said. “You know Schlesinger—”

  “I’m in the Army, and there is a very different perspective in the Army,” Holden said.

  “God,” Becky demanded defiantly, “why are we talking this way? The whole thing isn’t about ‘winning’ anything, it’s why should we be killing people—any people!”

  “Why should the North Vietnamese be killing people?” Holden said, annoyed at himself for getting into this argument. The orchestra was playing “As Time Goes By,” and Holden suddenly saw himself blithely standing in the middle of ten thousand dollars’ worth of his father’s whiskey and champagne and caviar and finger sandwiches arguing with two girls eighteen and twenty years old and a bombastic academic who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, understand what he was trying to say. But he realized, grudgingly, that it was because he didn’t fully understand it himself.

  “. . . silly,” Becky was saying. “It’s a silly excuse to take over a country of poor people. You see us killing them on television, don’t you know?” she said bitterly.

  He gulped from the Scotch. “Look, I’m an officer in the Army—I don’t have any choice.”

  “That’s what the Germans said,” Becky declared triumphantly, as if she had been lying in wait for him to say it.

  “There’s a difference,” Holden said.

  “What difference?” she demanded.

  “We aren’t Germans,” he said, and he walked away.

  Cory followed him to the bar. “Oh, damn, Frank, see what I mean now? See how people feel?”

  “What people? Who cares?” he said. “So some twenty-year-old sophomore suddenly thinks she knows international politics. What else is new?” He ordered a drink.

  “She’s a junior. And besides, she isn’t the only one. Dad talks about it a lot. He thinks the war’s a big mistake.”

  “Yeah, well if he does, it’s for different reasons than Skinny-Butt does, I’ll bet,” he said.

  “What difference does it make?” Cory said. “You’re just showing off to everybody that you’re in the Army. Don’t you understand nobody cares about that?”

  “So I see,” he said.

  Holden made his way to the far side of the ballroom, looking for his parents, chatting on the way with a few old friends, all of whom commented on his uniform, even though the comments were mostly conversational. Nevertheless, it occurred to him that he couldn’t have attracted much more attention by appearing in the nude.

  He was about to go back to the bar, where he’d left his cap, when Becky came up beside him and touched his arm.

  “Hey, Frank, I’m sorry I gave you a hard time. I really didn’t mean it the way it sounded,” she said, steering him to an empty table.

  “Oh, hell, don’t worry about it, kiddo. Anyway, I probably deserved it for all that ribbing I used to give you.”

  “No, no that’s not it at all—that hasn’t anything to do with it. You see—”

  “Hey, let’s don’t get into it again, okay?”

  “But it all seems so wrong—all the hating and killing. I’m sorry, but it makes me sick,” she said.

  “Jesus, I wish I’d never worn this damned outfit,” he said. “I’m probably going to stay in some Staff job and fetch ice cream for the general anyway. I probably won’t even see a shot fired.”

  She smiled at him, and he was about to ask her to dance when Widenfield appeared and thrust a glass of champagne at her.

  “I thought you s
aid you wanted a drink,” he said impatiently.

  “Oh, thank you, Richard. I had to talk to Frank for a minute.”

  “I’ll see you at the table,” he said, and stalked off.

  “Who’s he?” Holden asked after a pause.

  “We go out sometimes,” she said. “Nothing big.”

  They were dancing, and the strangeness of holding Becky this way had already worn off. He was pressing her close, feeling her softness, breathing her earthy scent, which he recognized as Jungle Gardenia, a perfume he’d been enlightened about one night in the back seat of a car by a girl from Charleston who’d informed him that everybody in New York was wearing it.

  “Listen,” Holden said. “I know I don’t rate very high on your list, but I’ve got to be back Sunday and I’d like to see you again. Are you free tomorrow night?”

  “You rate very high on my list, Mr. Holden . . . but tomorrow I’m sort of committed to something.” She swept a wave of hair away from her face.

  “Oh,” he said, “well, uh . . .”

  “What are you doing Sunday afternoon?” She looked deliberately into his eyes.

  “Seeing you, I hope.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He pressed her close again and was surprised when she squeezed back tentatively. They whirled around that way for the rest of the song, and Holden felt warm and good and comfortable for the first time that day. Occasionally he looked beyond her for some sign of his parents. The room was very crowded, but even so, he was surprised he’d missed them. He tried steering Becky in a 360-degree circle during the last few bars of the song, hoping to catch sight of them, but his thoughts were mostly of her. The soft, comfortable warmth and perfume . . .

  Something he saw by the bar jolted him back to reality.

  Several of the scraggly Amherst undergraduates were standing stiffly at mock attention while one of them, who had taken Holden’s uniform cap from the bar and put it on his head, was parading up and down, his hand tucked inside the breast of his tailcoat like a German officer. He was berating his “troops” loudly with exaggerated military bearing, and the performance had commanded the interest of a few bystanders.