Once an Eagle

  “When they become articles of issue to the enlisted men I’ll wear them,” he’d replied firmly. “And not until.” They’d had two subsequent discussions on the subject but he would not give in; he kept his good pair shined to a terrifying luster; but they were still puttees buckled over shoes …

  He was standing on his head, his feet braced against the wall; while she watched, thrilled and irritated, he lowered himself onto his neck, his legs flexed—then with a sudden, powerful thrust snapped himself up onto his feet.

  “—God, you’re so energetic,” she groaned.

  “No, I’m not.” He was doing bicycles now, chin doubled against his chest, legs in the air churning soundlessly. “I’m tired as all get-out.”

  “Then what do you do it all for, then?”

  “Only way to keep in shape. Eternal diligence—is the price—of agility …”

  She sighed crossly, and flopped over on her side. There were times when his eternal diligence was enough to drive her out of her mind. He made her chafe with remorse. She ought to be up and about, demure and enticing in a blouse and skirt, offering a cooling drink, a motor trip, her love—what on earth was the matter with her? She was bound here, a lump of swollen flesh, on this sagging, dreary cot. Why couldn’t the Army give its married couples a double bed? was that too damned much to ask?

  He was watching her with concern now; he came over and sat on the edge of her cot. “How are you feeling, honey?”

  “Oh—thick and greasy and thoroughly unappealing.” She smiled wryly. “I can’t bear the sight of food, I guess it’s the heat. And then I’m swept with visions of coquilles St. Jacques—remember the coquilles St. Jacques at Chez Félix?—or water chestnuts or truite aux amandes or caviar or God knows what loony delicacies I have or haven’t eaten. And then next minute I feel revolted at the very thought of it. I ought to have been born a satrap or a padishah or something, and then I could have a horde of little Nubians offering me things and I could kick them or kiss them, depending on my mood …” She broke off; she sounded like a hysterical spinster—one of those fierce, narrow women, popeyed and with corded throats, she had feared all through her childhood. She’d better get herself in hand. “I’m sorry about last night,” she murmured. “I really am, darling.”

  “So am I,” he said. “I ought to have had more sense.”

  “No, it was my fault, I know it was. I can’t seem to get caught up with myself …”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know.” She chafed her neck. “I keep feeling if I could have two weeks—just two weeks in which nothing at all was going to happen—I could get rested up and ahead of the house and feeling chipper again. But instead it’s the other way round, time’s going faster than I am—and pretty soon I’ll be a month behind, and then two … Silly, isn’t it?”

  “Poor honey-lamb.” His rough hand passed over her forehead and back through her hair. “It’s no fun at all, is it?”

  “No. It’s no fun … I guess I thought it would be. You know—the way they put it in the soupy junk impressionable romantic young girls always read: and with the magic passage of the months her tread grew heavier, her eyes soft with the tender thrill of promise. Baloney. You want to yerk all morning long and your feet hurt and you feel like a damn penguin.”

  “I know … I wish I could get you away somewhere.”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice? Waikiki, or Como, or maybe I could swim in the Arctic Circle, like that sexy Elise dame. God, I’d like to shiver for about ten minutes steady. You know what I did this afternoon?”

  “What?”

  “I put on that cotton dressing gown of yours and took a cold shower and lay down here wringing wet.”

  He looked alarmed and took her hand in both of his. “Honey, you shouldn’t have done that—it’s dangerous …”

  “Nonsense. I was completely dry in twelve minutes. By my watch. Anyway, it amused me for a while.” She took a deep breath and said: “Well. And what kind of a day did you have?”

  “So-so.” He put his hands together and began to pick at the edge of his thumb, another habit she felt was proletarian although she hadn’t told him so. “Actually, we got some unpleasant news.”

  “Oh?” She felt bound in a kind of soft panic. What now? she wailed inwardly. What new indignity, imposition, betrayal—what new sacrifice have they decided to ask of us? She forced herself to lie perfectly still.

  “There’s been another reduction.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Congress. They’ve cut the authorized strength again.” He put a cigarette between his lips and left it there unlighted. “By one hundred twenty thousand men, five hundred officers. All promotions stopped.”

  She stared at him. For the merest second she didn’t know what to feel—elation or wrath or despair. She studied his face, which didn’t seem to tell her anything. “What are you going to do?” she asked after a pause.

  “Nothing much I can do, sweet. That’s what the country wants, I guess: no more foreign entanglements, no more armies, no more taxes—no more nothing but rumble seats and bootleg gin and business as usual.”

  “—But you can’t stay in,” she burst out.

  His expression was merely inquiring, mildly surprised. “Why not?”

  “Because what’s the sense in it if there’s no future for you here …” She heaved herself to her feet—she had never been able to think clearly lying down—and began tramping around the airless little room, her hands at her belly. “You’ll be dropped, won’t you?”

  “Not unless I resign. Pete Lovewell’s going to—he’s so mad he won’t even talk about it.”

  “I should think so. What about the Age-in-Grade bill?”

  “I don’t know. CO says they’ll never pass it.”

  “They’ll demote you again,” she declared.

  “No, they won’t.”

  “Move you down another thousand files on the list, that’s just what they—”

  “No, look, honey …”

  “No—you look!” All at once she was wild with rage. She had promised herself she wouldn’t blow off, after last night especially she had sworn she’d hold herself in line. But the heat, the wind and dust and this wretched wooden shack with its low ceilings and ridiculous plumbing and silly sticks of furniture, the seven-foot-high sunflowers along the back line with their swaying idiot eyes, all gripped her like a vise. She was lonely, she was pregnant and helpless and now this latest decision of the elected representatives of the nation struck her as the final, supreme insult. The whole thing was impossible, impossible!

  “What has to happen to you, Sam?” she cried. “How much do you have to take? Really? Do they have to bust you to PFC and maroon you for life on Easter Island before you’ll see the light?” She clenched her hands at her sides. “They don’t want us, they don’t care about us, we simply don’t exist for them. Why do you go on beating your head against a wall? The wall’s a lot harder, I can tell you that … What are you trying to do—!”

  He was gazing at her, troubled, frowning. What in God’s name was the matter with him? How could he sit there looking so calm and unmoved and insanely indomitable? Couldn’t he see what was in the wind—?

  “Tommy,” he was saying quietly, “your Dad wouldn’t let—”

  “Never mind Poppa—stop invoking Poppa all the time! Do you think he has any more brains than you do? letting them bust him down, and deep-six him with China duty?”

  “The Fifteenth—”

  “I know all about the Fifteenth—their esprit and their discipline and the beauty of their wives and everything else. What has that got to do with the price of tea? Bitter tea, too. You think I don’t know about Army politics just because I’m always knocking the system? It was a sop and a butt detail all in one. What Poppa ought to be is a Deputy Chief of Staff, or in Plans—at the very least he ought to be teaching at the War College. But no—those creeps in the Munitions Building hate him because he’s got more guts a
nd intelligence, more sheer ability than they’ll ever have if they live to be a thousand …”

  He was nodding at her grimly. “Yes, I’ll sign that,” he muttered.

  “You bet. And it’s the same thing with you. Look at Marden, look at that sniveling phony Townsend. They hate you because you’re too good for them, because you’re better than any of them could ever be, and they can’t forgive you for that and they never will! Their hands are against you, Sam—”

  He gave a somber smile. “My record’s got in my way.”

  “That’s a miserable way to have to put it. What kind of mystical order do you all think you belong to, anyway? My God!” She flung an arm at the cracked ceiling, the flaking walls, aware that the gesture was hysterical, melodramatic and pointless—and not caring. “Look at us! Look at us! It’s indecent. It’s degrading! …”

  That was all she had to say. It seemed. No terms she knew could improve on them. There was a brief silence while with trembling fingers she lighted a cigarette, contrary to Dr. Terwilliger’s orders, and puffed at it savagely while Sam sat on the bed and looked at her.

  “What do you want me to do, Tommy?”

  “I don’t know. Get out, get out of this—!” She bent toward him. “There are any number of ways to live like a human being, just any number, like running a freak show at a carny, or raising chinchilla, or eating cocktail glasses—anything sane …”

  “Tommy,” he said in a patient, weary tone that set her teeth on edge, “if we’re going to sit down and talk about this—”

  “—then let’s be serious. Swell. Great. All right—let’s. What’s so silly about admitting one’s mistakes, giving up this monkey-suit, monkey-shines existence as a bad job and going on to something else?”

  “Such as.”

  “Well …” The idea had been stirring in the back of her mind for some months, off and on, but she wanted to present it as if it had just occurred to her. “Well … what about Dex?”

  “Who?”

  It infuriated her that he didn’t recall the name instantly. “Sterling Poindexter, from Cannes, you remember. He offered you a job in his father’s brokerage firm …”

  Sam grinned. “And then retracted the offer.”

  “Oh, that didn’t mean anything—that was only his kind of sophistication. I’ll bet he’d give you one in a minute.”

  “The world of business.” His upper lip curled.

  “What’s so terrible about that? That’s what the world’s doing, isn’t it?—the sane, intelligent world, I mean: the one that’s getting something out of life …”

  “Honey, I couldn’t do that. Sitting in an office with a lot of telephones, talking about stocks and bonds—that’s no kind of life for a man. Hell, they aren’t even real—they’re just a lot of gilt-edged paper, they don’t even stand for anything—”

  “They stand for money,” she cried shrilly, “—that’s what they stand for! …”

  “Please try to keep your voice down. Skip came home the same time I did.—Tommy, I’m no sweet talker, I couldn’t con a bunch of people into handing over their dough.”

  “It isn’t conning them, it’s convincing them. Of course you could, your beloved troops believe you, don’t they?—when you tell them what they ought to do …”

  He smiled wryly. “They haven’t got a whole lot of choice.”

  “Don’t be silly, they idolize you, I’ve heard them. ‘He’s rough but he’s square, he’s straight, he’ll go to bat for you any day of the week if you’ve got a solid beef.’ I’ve heard them, they think the absolute heaven-sent, shining-glory world of you—!”

  And to her surprise and anger she was weeping. She gave up then and sat down on the cot with a bump. The hell with it: the completely bloody hell with it anyway. She couldn’t even argue a point satisfactorily anymore. His arms were around her now, he had pressed his face against her hair and was talking to her, murmuring gently, and she slumped against his protective strength like an exhausted child, not really listening to what he was saying, feeling spent and soothed.

  “Honey,” he was saying, “honey-girl, you’re all worn out from the heat and carrying the baby and you’re all worked up and distraught, and you’ve got everything blown up out of all proportion.”

  She rubbed her forehead against his neck and wondered if she had. Maybe it was all nerves. She didn’t think so, she didn’t think that at all: but it was possible, of course.

  “Honey, I know this is bleak duty right now, but it won’t last, you’ll see, I’ll get a change of post soon, I’m sure I will. And things will be better. Sweet, maybe this isn’t the sun and moon and all the stars, this life, and there’s a lot of ritual and repetition in it, I know that too, but there’s ritual and repetition in everything, it’s always there. Here it’s out in the open more, that’s all.” His hand held her easily: it felt so big. “The thing is, I believe in what I’m doing. This outfit of mine, they look to me for—well, for help and advice, how to be better soldiers, better men in general. Tommy, they count on me, is what I mean … If I went into business it would be just to fill in time, go through the motions: I wouldn’t believe in what I was doing. And pretty soon I wouldn’t be any kind of man at all. I’d begin to despise myself for it, and then you’d begin to despise me too, and you’d be right; because there wouldn’t be anything there to respect. Don’t you see, Tommy, a man has to do what he can think well of himself for doing, or he’s nothing. It might be all right for some of them to go into business, but it wouldn’t be for me—if only because I was at Soissons and the Argonne. And alongside everything I saw there, nothing in the business world is very real. Do you see what I mean? The businessman goes for his profits and most of the time he doesn’t see where it’s leading; and things go from bad to worse, you remember how it was, and he pulls the country along with him, the politicians and the churches and the newspapers and everyone else, and finally somebody says the word, the terrible word there’s no going back from—and the businessmen go right on piling up their profits, and the politicians rant on and on about that last full measure of devotion … but it’s the little guy—the clerk and the farm boy and the carpenter—who’s left hanging on the wire with his guts all over his knees. And I’m the one, Tommy. I’m the one who has to lead him into that filthy, endless horror and try to bring him out of it again. I know I’m the one.”

  She turned her head. His face looked older and sadder than she’d ever seen it, even on the dove battlements of Le Suquet: the lines around his nose and mouth etched deep, his eyes dark with a steady, angry sorrow. Sad Sam Damon, she’d heard a few of the soldiers call him: Sad Sam. Because of his initials, but it was more than that—it was because of this unspoken, constant tenor of concern that underlay even his humor, his skepticism—and which she’d scarcely guessed at. He was always siding with the enlisted men, fighting for them; he’d been on the carpet over them twice already. He was always saying they ought to have a club of their own on the post, and a canteen that sold beer, and a better-looking fatigue uniform; one night at the club he advanced the idea that the enlisted man would never have complete faith in Army justice until he was allowed to serve on courts-martial—a thought greeted by an embarrassed and impervious silence and a rather tart rebuke from Colonel Lomprey. She would wake at night to see him hunched up under the dented gooseneck lamp, his baseball cap tilted forward to shield his eyes, studying French, or ballistics, or reading Jomini or Clausewitz, or even Trevelyan and Gibbon and Thucydides.

  “Darling,” she would call softly, “It’s late—you’ll ruin your eyes …”

  “Just a few minutes more.”

  He read like a starving man in a granary, and he retained what he read. He said he had to catch up, he’d missed out on so much that the Pointers and the older men already knew, there were so many fields he had to master; and always, studying late or sitting calmly attentive during the courtesy calls or singing at the piano with the others at the post hops after the rank had left, there was
that persistent little current of preoccupation, like voltage moving along a cable—a sense of preparation, of holding himself in readiness for a day of sudden exigency and trial. But he didn’t look like that now: now the anguish, the naked appeal in his eyes seemed boundless.

  … He’s suffered, the thought came to her with a rude, small shock; he’s suffered terribly, more than I could ever have realized. It was hard to think of Sam as having suffered deeply—it was like so many aspects of him she could not put together. She could never believe he could have done the fierce and terrible things he had—storming machine guns, holding out against waves of Germans, carrying men forward on the force of his own ardor and tenacity—somehow she could never reconcile all that with the gentle, unassuming man who was her husband. But he had done those things, and he had paid the price of them; and that had made him what he was … Shocked, humbled, she put her arms around his neck.

  “—I want to be a good wife, Sam,” she said softly. “I want to be everything a woman can be to a man. I mean it. I just got—down in the dumps. All this excess weight I’m lugging around.” She hugged him hard. “Just a momentary lapse, darling. I’m going to take a brace, as of right now. That’s a promise.”

  He was murmuring some reply, some demurral but she hardly heard him. He was right, she saw: bound fast in death, in violence he had come upon a hard and anguished truth about this world, and it had brought him to the edge of complete despair—and then he had come back from that, and resolutely built his life around that most unwelcome truth … And if it had served him this well, it ought to be good enough for her.

  “Disregard these hysterical nothings,” she said aloud. “It’s just a legacy from the years with Ramon at Vezelay.” She smiled, and dried her eyes and blew her nose on the huge red handkerchief he always wore in his hip pocket when he was in the field. “Disregard them. I’m all right now.” She shook her hair back. Now remember, she told herself fiercely. This moment now: remember it, and don’t let him down. “What would you like for supper? Lamb stew, lamb goulash, or cold lamb?”