Once an Eagle

  They were borne back to their table on waves of congratulation and hilarity. Everyone was talking at once. Ben had grabbed Sam’s hand and was pumping it up and down. “I knew it. I knew it!” he crowed. “It had to happen, it just had to, didn’t I tell you that? It’s wonderful.”

  “You might congratulate me,” she chided him. “After all, I’m the one who said yes …”

  “When did all this happen?” Poindexter demanded.

  “Just now.”

  “Just now—he proposed? He proposed to you—and you accepted?” She nodded at him happily. “Well, of all the suicidal moves—”

  “Do I get to kiss her now, Sam?” Ben was saying. “Do I get to kiss the bride now?”

  “Keep your shirt on, buddy.” Sam had left the ring clamped to his nose, which gave him a barbaric, vaguely threatening air.

  “Well—on account.”

  “On account of what?”

  “On account of I’m so beaucoup zeegzag.”

  Poindexter was still looking at her reproachfully, shaking his head. “Felicitations,” he said hollowly. “I hope you’ll remember, when you’re scrubbing his shirts in a tin tub at the bottom end of Agony Row, you had the world at your feet …”

  “I’m placing the world at her feet,” Sam retorted.

  “You are so sentimental, Dex,” Elise said with imperious ennui. “And so dishearteningly naïve. Why did you tell him you would make him a millionaire if you didn’t want him to propose to her?”

  “That offer is withdrawn,” Poindexter barked, and drained his glass. “You can have the girl or the job, but not both.”

  “Too late!” Ben chortled.

  “Don’t be a bad loser,” Sam said broadly. “Isn’t that what they teach you at New Haven—to lose gracefully?”

  “I flunked that course. And while drinking my champagne, too. Haven’t you two any sense of propriety at all?”

  “Dex,” Tommy pleaded, “you wouldn’t want me to ignore the calling of my heart, would you?”

  “Calling of your heart—it’s just all that damned tinsel and bric-à-brac. Tommy, I’m—I’m actually disappointed in you.”

  “I think it’s delicious,” Elise said in her indefinable accent. “Every woman should yield to every mood, every adventure—psychological, sexual, geographic—”

  “—oceanic,” Ben put in.

  “Why not? I have lived with nine different men, and each experience was more exciting than the one that preceded it.”

  “Have you really, Elise?” Arlene Hanchett said eagerly. “Nine different men?”

  The Empress sighed wearily. “You Americans. You are so circumscribed. Does one choose to eat boiled potatoes every day of one’s life?”

  “How about the Red Sea, baby?” Dex said.

  “Yes.” She turned her dense, smoky eyes on him and nodded. “Briefly. At Aqaba.”

  “Oh, well—if it was only briefly …”

  Later they left the others and took an open carriage through the sleeping town, along La Croisette and out to Golfe Juan, where the pines made a crouching canopy, hissing in the sea wind. The air was fresh and cold in their faces and full of salt, and to Tommy the thop-clop of the horse’s hoofs was indescribably merry. The stars too seemed very near. It was curious: a moment caught you up and you did something, took some action—and all the constellations of sensation and desire shifted. She had been lonely for so long; now, cast adrift at the end of this pitiless war she wanted with all her heart to be a part of someone, bound to someone indissolubly. Beyond the point they were night-fishing, the lights playing over the inky purple water, turning it, like one of Claude Guétary’s sleights, into dazzling little patches of topaz and emerald. She huddled against the rough cloth of Sam’s overcoat and turned her face up to his.

  “Are you happy?”

  “I’ve never been happier,” he answered. “Truthfully. Never in my life … I feel I can lick the world with one hand.” He squeezed her powerfully. “Oh, we’re going to have a wonderful life, Tommy,” he exulted. “Full of—oh, I don’t know. Love, and all kinds of adventures. Castles and sultans and coral lagoons …”

  “You’ve had too much champagne.”

  “Yes. But it isn’t that. It’s you. All I want is you.”

  She felt a stealthy fear—what if I should fail him?—followed swiftly by delight, and a passionate need to be loved, to be taken, invaded, and made complete.

  “Oh kiss me,” she murmured. “Kiss me. Now.”

  His lips were rough and warm, his arm forced the breath up into her throat; the world rocked and hummed around her, stars rained in white tumult down the Mediterranean sky. She was filled with a glad terror—she thought her heart would burst out of its shell.

  “Oh Sam,” she said, laughing at the thought even as she uttered it, “promise me it’ll always be like this.”

  “I promise.”

  “Never any quarrels or misunderstandings …”

  “Never a one.”

  “Good.—Poppa will be pleased,” she said after a moment.

  “I hope so.”

  “He will. He thinks the world of you.”

  “He’s the finest American soldier in France. And you’re the loveliest girl.”

  His lips were moving above her eyebrow, along the line of her cheek; she shivered in a tender agony of happiness and pressed against him.

  “Are you cold?” he asked.

  “No. No, I’m not cold.”

  Over at Nice across the water the lights glowed like a sprawled necklace of blue diamond brilliants, trivial below the stars; the waves washed timidly against the shore.

  When she put her hand in his overcoat pocket to warm it she felt the little papier-mâché baton.

  3

  CHAPARRAL

  1

  “We’re a close-knit little community, you’ll find,” Edna Bowers said. With a blued, arthritic hand she smoothed the front of her print dress. “We have to be. Living out here on the Plains.”

  Desert is the word, Tommy Damon said to herself. Gobi Desert without end, amen. Carefully she poured tea from the cracked pot whose top was chipped so that the lid sat on it drunkenly, tilted toward the snout.

  “Of course, ma’am,” she said aloud. “I’d offer you lemon but I’m sorry to say we haven’t any.”

  “Don’t mention it, dear. If you haven’t any you haven’t any, and that’s all there is to it.” Edna Bowers was the wife of the regimental quartermaster. She was a thin, bony woman in her late forties, with pale gray-green eyes that were continually narrowing into a fierce squint; it was said she was very nearsighted and refused to be fitted for glasses. Originally she came from Idaho; but that had been a long time ago. Now she sipped at the tea, and her mouth quivered. “That’s the strangest tea I ever tasted. Where’d you get it?”

  “It’s Darjeeling. A British officer in ordnance, a friend of my father’s, gave some to us in Cannes. Sam’s very fond of it.”

  “Oh. Indian tea. I might have known.” She sipped at it again and her lips puckered, as if to burn this evil taste indelibly into her tongue. “Well”—she brightened, and set the cup down with a clack—“I know how it is on your first post. We started out at Sill. That was long before the New Post, of course. And the conditions were trying at times.”

  “Yes,” Tommy murmured. “I can imagine.” She pulled her blouse together—the buttons were too small for the buttonholes and it kept popping apart—and tried surreptitiously to tuck it into her skirt at the back. She had been gluing down the cracked and curling linoleum in the bathroom floor when the Major’s wife had stopped by for what was obviously a friendly and prolonged little chat. She straightened her spine in the rickety rattan chair and tried to suppress her annoyance. “Yes, I remember, ma’am,” she responded. “We were at Sill when I was nine.”

  “Were you?” Mrs. Major Bowers said. “Then you must recall some of it. We knew your father and mother at Kearney. You were just a baby then. Mrs. Caldwell.” The f
aded eyes narrowed. “What was her first name?”

  “Cora.”

  “Cora. Poor thing.” The Major’s wife sipped bitterly at the tea. “She was always poorly. Tubercular, you know. They never last. She wasn’t built for service life. She tried hard, of course. But George had his hands full, I can tell you.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “The things that man put up with! Why, I remember Liza Courtiss told me when she was at Oglethorpe …”

  Tommy inclined her head, an expression of pleasant inquiry frozen on her face. With the wives of rank you spoke softly, you smiled in agreement, you listened, and listened, and listened; and agreed. Even if what you were hearing happened to be a morass of lies and prejudices and misinformation. Mrs. Bowers was a busybody, and a gossip. There were even those who called her—privately—a mean old bitch; but she was the wife of a major. She—Tommy Damon—had been the wife of a major, too—not long ago: now he was only a first lieutenant, though very senior in grade. Whatever that proved. Her father had been a brigadier and was now a lieutenant colonel—though very junior in grade. She bit down on her lower lip. In civilian life you were demoted—fired or let go or transferred to the boondocks or put down in one way or another—if you were obviously incompetent, if you drank or were insubordinate or made grave mistakes, jeopardized the function of the firm. In the Army you were demoted for being ardent and competent and loyal: in short, for being a good soldier. Being a certain kind of good soldier was out of style now.

  After Cannes, after Paris and New York and Trenton, Fort Hardee had been a rude shock. Following a confused three-day visit with Sam’s family they had driven south from Nebraska across the endless, blowing prairies, the second-hand LaSalle Sam had insisted on buying in New Jersey, thus depleting their already meager savings (“We’ll save money in the long run, honey—we’ll beat train fare, and it’ll give us mobility, you’ll see”), jolting and shuddering in the corduroy ruts, mile after dusty mile. She remembered the country—she’d seen enough of it as a little girl—but even so she was unprepared for Fort Hardee. It lay in a sea of withered grass, its baked, barren parade ground flanked by ancient faded frame structures and the even more dilapidated enlisted men’s barracks. A detail—it looked like two or three forlorn squads—was doing close-order drill in the middle of the field; their figures shimmered and wobbled. When they stopped at the main gate the heat closed around them like the breath from a brick kiln. Gasping she glanced at Sam, who was looking at her inquiringly.

  “Are they tedious, your Great Plains?”

  She made herself smile. Mustering a trace of her French accent she murmured, “But how enchanting to escape those cold, draughty salles at Vezelay! …”

  “Good girl.” He slapped her knee lightly in approval and put the car in gear. She sat very still in the heat, pulling her satin blouse away from her skin and fanning her face with a section of the Omaha Herald, while he reported in. He was gone a long time. Compose your soul in patience: her father’s line. Had her mother gone through this? Probably. Undoubtedly. She got out of the car, but the early afternoon sun made her giddy, faintly sick to her stomach; rings began to form in front of her eyes, coiling out in red-and-black distending bands. She got back in the car again. The metal sill was too hot to touch. Four dejected figures in floppy hats and fatigues, with the big white P stenciled on their backs and trouser legs, staggered along carrying two huge cans, followed by an MP whose shirt was soaked through between the shoulder blades. She watched them sadly, filled with the old, remembered sympathy: punishment in the Army was so harsh, so final. Why should a man who had done wrong be made such an outcast? Well, presumably they knew what they were doing. Presumably. From far away there came the hollow, drawn out whoooom of something exploding, a sound premonitory and disquieting; she shifted in the seat and passed her wringing-wet handkerchief over her face. What in God’s name was taking him so long?

  When he did finally come out, however, he was smiling. “Twenty-eight C,” he said, elated. “I told you they’d have quarters. A real break. Fellow just transferred out.”

  “… Before the war,” she permitted herself to say, “the commanding officer used to come out and escort a newly arrived officer and his bride to their quarters on the post. Or if he was otherwise occupied the post adjutant did the honors.”

  “Oh, that—that was the ooooold Army,” he chided her. He seemed positively gleeful and it filled her whole sweltering, suffering soul with resentment. “You’d ordered the band alerted, a regimental march past? Dreadfully sorry, old cock.” He went into the British intonation he had picked up in Cannes. “CO has decided on a coronation ceremony instead. Westminster Ca—”

  “Oh, shut up!” He glanced at her, startled. “I’ve been cooking out here in this car,” she protested, “for hours and hours …”

  “I’m sorry.” He squeezed her arm. “Didn’t mean no harm. It wasn’t exactly empyrean in there, either; twiddling my thumbs. They weren’t all that overjoyed to see me. Trouble is, they don’t know what to do with me. They don’t know what to do with everybody. There’s too many of us, all of a sudden.”

  “Charming.”

  “Adjutant seems to feel the fields of glory have passed him by.”

  “And no wonder. The whole place looks right out of Beau Geste. You’re quite sure we haven’t got the wrong desert? You’re sure this isn’t the Sahara, and we only wanted the Painted one?”

  “I guess it’s no prize.” Sweat had formed in a little bubble under his chin—he seemed oblivious of it and it irritated her. “Maybe it isn’t as rugged as it looks. Let’s go see what we drew.”

  They crept down the row, past the handsome old fieldstone building that undoubtedly was the commandant’s, past the yellow homes of the field grades with their porches and brick walks; on down the row, the houses becoming progressively older and shabbier. She looked down at her fingernails and told herself, I will not be upset; I will not, no matter how disappointing it is, he needs the cheerful support of a loving wife and I am a loving wife; he needs—

  “I guess this is it, honey.”

  She got out of the car without looking and followed him up the parched earth and into the building.

  The sills were rotting. The walls were a hideous dirty caramel and the paint had been laid on too thick and carelessly, so that it had run down in buttery rivulets and built up on the molding in long shiny lumps and blotches. The floor had been shellacked a wild oak shade long ago, but now it had peeled; it was scuffed and scarred, and there were large brown water stains. In a far corner of the room stood a pair of officer’s riding boots, their leather cracked; one boot had toppled over, and was split at the heel. In another corner there was a little cairn of beer bottles, old newspapers and stationery and discarded odds and ends of clothing.

  “You’re sure, Sam,” she said. “You’re quite sure these are our quarters?”

  “Yep. Twenty-eight C,” he repeated. “That’s what the man said. Besides,” and he gestured vaguely, “the place is—pretty empty.”

  She made no answer, merely hurried from room to room in growing consternation, her heels snapping on the worn bare floors. The bedroom was tiny and airless and was painted a violent shade of green. Everywhere paint was curling off the ceilings like lichen. The toilet had an overhead tank of blond oak, from which water dripped sullenly on the brown linoleum. The kitchen had a wood stove like a wounded black battleship; the sink was fearfully chipped, and leaning out from the wall uncertainly. One of the faucets was covered with a great dirty fist of adhesive tape and twine and it too was dripping. Two of the windows had broken panes. There was virtually no furniture: a chest of drawers, a chair with a broken back, a deal table in the kitchen, and that was all. Débris was everywhere—old clothes and playing cards and children’s toys and magazines and shiny black bits of phonograph record; in a corner stood a ukulele with its neck broken and only one string.

  “You’d think they could have hoed the place out,” Sam wa
s saying. “It certainly is in poor shape.”

  “Poor shape—!” she burst out. “It’s a wreck! A shambles …” She glared at him. “Do they honestly expect two human beings to live in this—?”

  “Well, if the—”

  “Where’s the furniture? the wherewithal?”

  “Honey, look, you know they don’t—”

  “I don’t mean Tabriz carpets or Louis Quinze escritoires, for God’s sake, I mean the damn rudiments of existence!” Her voice was pitched too high, she knew it; she was ranting. Damn. Not three minutes in their first post together and she was shouting like a fishwife; but she couldn’t help it. After the wedding in Paris, the months in Coblenz and the turbulent weeks in New York and Trenton, after all the festivities and hopes and bright resolves, this was too much, too much. “What kind of a lash-up is this, anyway?” she cried. “Is anyone really supposed to live here? or is it just a joke in rotten taste?”

  “Sweet, they’re converting …”

  “Converting from what—from nomads to cave dwellers? I never saw such a filthy, battered pigsty in all my life! What did they do in here—drag anvils around? Look at the floors!” She caught her foot in a man’s service shirt, a smelly mass of khaki rags—kicked it into a corner in petulant rage. “They specialize in demolitions here, do they? Well, they ought to start off by jamming a satchel charge under this pitiful piece of junk …!”