Once an Eagle

  He smiled, then. “Cold lamb would be fine, honey.”

  He leaped from the running board of the truck before it had stopped and ran up the short rise toward the post infirmary, his holstered pistol flopping at his thigh. Squatting in the gray, pitiless dawn light the old building, with its mustard-colored clapboards and tall narrow windows, looked like anything but a hospital. He went in on the dead run, flinging the door wide ahead of him. There was no one at the desk. He hesitated, started down the corridor—then saw Dr. Terwilliger coming toward him.

  “There you are, my bucko.” Captain Terwilliger—known as the Tweaker to his intimates—was a short, wiry man in his early thirties with a soft, plump face and bushy, taffy-colored eyebrows that turned up unexpectedly at the ends, giving him an air of mock ferocity. Beaming, bristling, he advanced on Damon; with his surgical gown billowing above his putteed calves, his turquoise eyes sparkling, he looked like a jovial little satyr. Catching the look on the Lieutenant’s face he threw back his head. “Fie, Damon! A soldier, and afear’d?”

  “Doc, Colonel Lomprey let me ride a truck in early—”

  “That was noble of him. Noble. Even so, you’re too late.”

  “What—”

  “Look at you! A sight. Out playing hide-and-seek amid the heliotrope—or is it prisoners’ base this time? Ah, you happy children of Mars.” Eying Damon in amusement, he laughed. “Composure, composure, my dear Angst-laden Leutnant! Where is the bearing that terrified both furious Frank and fiery Hun?”

  Damon blinked at him. Dirty, unshaven, his uniform blanched with dust and dried sweat after three days and nights of maneuvers, he was too weary to respond to Terwilliger’s sallies. He licked his lips stupidly and said: “How is she?”

  The Tweaker clapped him on the shoulder and bowed. “Let me end the suspense, the hideous tortures of nescience. Let me be the first, the very first to congratulate you on the arrival of a son and heir. That’s speaking in purely euphuistic terms, of course. Right now he looks like neither son nor heir.”

  “A boy?” Damon stammered, “—a baby boy?”

  “What did you expect: —an arachnid? a cephalopod? Medical science can work wonders, it’s true—but certain metamorphoses still escape us.” He clapped his hands and proclaimed: “Weight seven pounds nine ounces, length twenty-two and five-eighths inches …”

  “How is she? Tommy?”

  Terwilliger glared at him. “Your wife! We don’t care about the wives, Damon. This is the New-Old Army: what we’re after is cannon fodder: bring forth men-children only; for thy undaunted mettle should compose … ever read any Shakespeare? No, you wouldn’t have. Oh, the military parts, sure—Othello’s agony, and Harry at Harfleur … ”

  “Doctor—”

  The Tweaker relented then, and jammed his hands in his breeches pockets. “She’s fine. Racked and battered, but she’s fine. I don’t mind telling you, it was a struggle. Our Tommy is a very brave girl, and an obedient one, but her pelvic girdle is not an obstetrician’s dream. For a while it looked as though I’d have to resurrect my ancient skill with the forceps.”

  “Doc, how about letting me see her …”

  “Anon, anon. The girl needs rest. Do you wish me to curtail my saga of trial and triumph, torn as I was between conflicting loyalties? Who will write my citation if I do not? At three eighteen I was summoned down the hall to the side of Columbine Crawford, consort of our revered Second-in-Command, who was writhing and tearing at the bedclothes. ‘I don’t care who’s in labor, I’m a desperately sick woman!’ ‘Where does it hurt?’ I queried. You’d have thought I had just attempted her chastity. ‘Here—and here!’ Clutching with beringed fingers at her lineae albae, her recti abdominis, her pubic crest. ‘If you haven’t the brains to know what it is then I can tell you—I happen to be suffering from eclampsia!’” The Tweaker smote his forehead. “Eclampsia! Where did she come by that word? None of the symptoms whatever. But it sounds ferocious, you see—it smacks of cramps and iron pincers and Greek classical horrors, and that’s all she needed.” He shook his head, his eyebrows flaring. “Pure fiction. Menopausal jimjams. And some sort of psychic competition with your beloved I won’t attempt to diagnose without a witches’ cauldron.”

  “You mean you left Tommy and went—”

  “Rank Hath Its Pressures, oh prince of Night Clerks. You will be familiar. In any event I gave La Crawford a sedative and patted her fanny—figuratively speaking—and hastened back to your helpmeet, who was now nearing her moment of truth. Ever take up bullfighting?”

  “Doc, look—”

  “Hush. At four forty-seven, while Mrs. D and I were grappling with the very mystery of life itself, came a high old ruckus from Number Seven and I was informed Queen Columbine absolutely commanded my presence, under threat of court-martial. I returned word I was quite willing to stand trial before a kangaroo court armed with knouts and bamboo rods the following day—but not until; and I told Mitchell, who’s a good sort even if she is a touch deferential—to keep her pinned down.” He drew his lips back from his teeth in a ferocious snarl. “No—dice. In a matter of minutes Her Majesty was screaming that the pain was driving her mad—and before you could whisper Krafft-Ebing she’d begun to trip the light fantastic up and down the hall, fulminating with threats and vituperation. ‘The Surgeon General!’ she hollered. ‘The Surgeon General will be notified of a medical officer who is unable to distinguish between a routine matter and a genuine, critical illness!—who can’t even show a decent respect for rank, the common courtesies of the service—’

  “‘Go back!’ I roared at her. ‘I am in command here! Go back to your bed!’ Her face went blank with fright—an expression I must confess I’ve never seen there before. It felt so good I said it all again. Before she could recover, Mitchell and I bundled her into bed, where I socked her with an injection of sodium pentobarbital, enough to knock out a Percheron in its prime—and then returned to the Grand Struggle. And after a series of gyres and ululations there’s no point in going into here, your better half gave forth a shriek that rent the welkin, I bore up and she bore down and voilà!—a lusty babe with the eyes of a poet and the body of a raw worm, roaring with rage at this great stage of fools … ”

  He glanced at his watch, gazing mildly at Damon’s impatience. “There. My song is ended. You can go in and see her.” He sighed, and Damon saw that he was very tired. “She was a good girl. A very good girl.”

  “She’s all right, then, Doctor? really all right?”

  Terwilliger nodded. “But it was a difficult business, I’ll tell you that much.”

  Damon took his hand. “Thanks,” he said. “I can’t thank you enough, Doctor.”

  “Of course you can. Everyone can. Go ahead in … No more than ten minutes,” he said, his voice suddenly sharp with authority. “You got that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I don’t want you hanging around in there for hours, the way some of them do. She’s a very tired young woman; she needs all the rest she can get.” The Tweaker pulled at his eyebrows, whose ends stood up still more fiercely. “Now I’ve got to wait until Dame Columbine comes around.” His face beamed like a satanic cherub’s. “Maybe the old bat’ll get a one-in-a-million reaction—maybe she’ll be in a suspended state for decades. Think what a blessing that’d be!”

  Damon went down the hall, feeling dizzy and nerveless. Tommy was lying perfectly still, one arm behind her head; her whole body had that peculiar inertness of the spent—as if it wanted to be part of the bed, the olive-drab coverlet. He was on the point of going back to ask Mitchell if it was all right to disturb her when he saw that she was looking at him. Her face was white, with deep fatigue lines like bruises under her eyes; she looked like a thin little invalid sister of Tommy Damon.

  Hesitantly he moved up to the bed, her eyes following him, and said: “Hello.”

  “Hello, darling.” Her voice was faint, a little tremulous.

  “Honey, I got back as quick as I could. I’
m sorry I wasn’t here when—when it was going on.” He bent over and kissed her—then saw all at once the baby crooked inside her right arm. He started, fascinated, watched the gnomelike face, eyes squeezed shut, contort in displeasure, the arms and legs slowly pumping, little barrel body straining in a mighty, writhing effort, as if it sought to change its very state. Then the face turned placid, the eyes opened: they were Tommy’s, green and piercing. Tommy’s boy. He reached down and touched the tiny hand; it closed on his forefinger with minute ferocity, gripped and gripped. His son, too. His own son. The solemn magic of the moment filled him with gratitude and wonder, made him tremble.

  “… I’m sorry you had a bad time of it.”

  “No,” she said. “I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds. Not for worlds.” There was a ring of assertive calm in her voice he’d never heard before. “I mean it. I did something. On my own.” She smiled then—a wan, triumphant smile. “Look at him. Isn’t he tremendous?”

  “All there and a yard wide,” Damon said. He felt foolish standing there beside the bed: clumsy and inconsequential.

  “What a time you gave me.” She rubbed the point of her chin softly against his pink round head. “What a time … I’m going to name him Donny,” she declared.

  “Donny? Why?”

  “I like the name.”

  “But—after whom?”

  “Nobody. He just looks as if he ought to be named Donny.”

  “Donald Damon.” Thoughtfully he considered the name; he couldn’t say he really liked it. “All right. If you want to. I’d sort of hoped—”

  “No,” she said firmly. “We’re not naming him for Poppa. We’ve been through that, remember? He’s not going to have things hanging over his head. Things to have to measure up to all the time. No more of that.”

  “Well …” He could not keep his eyes off the baby: he wanted to pick him up, crush him in his arms, run all over the post with him, shouting like some crazy kid. “Well, could we call him Donald Caldwell Damon?”

  She smiled. “You’re incorrigible. All right.” She straightened in the bed. “Ooh, I hurt.”

  “Where?” he murmured anxiously.

  “Everywhere.” She gestured. “Down there, mostly. Old Columbia made a scene of it. I could hear her ranting up and down the hall outside. I remember, at the worst part—it was like being in a barrel of pain, a revolving barrel, you know?—I remember I saw the whole thing, clear as day. I wanted to yell, ‘Oh shut up, you mean old bitch! You’re just jealous!’ Maybe I did. I was actually laughing. The things that go through your mind at such times. You know what I thought of, Sam?”

  “What?”

  “That young viscount or whatever he was on the promenade of the Casino at Cannes. With the crippled old man. Remember? The way the boy made fun of him. How amused he was!—and indifferent. The old man had all that wisdom and no strength; and the boy …” She brushed back her hair with her hand, a gesture insuperably weary. “What a long journey. So long—I never had anything last so long … For a while there I thought I was going to die—tear all apart and die. And I thought, What a mistake life is: you’re never ready for each thing that happens to you. And then I thought, No, that’s the marvel of it—if you were ready there’d be nothing to it at all, it would be like frogs in a pool, eating and propagating and swimming around endlessly, nothing more than that … Pain makes you think, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes. For a while.”

  “I know. And then it gets worse and you can’t think anymore, you only know something. Like a very bright tiny light. You aren’t even afraid anymore, there’s no place for it … And then I went whirling along out of that part of it, too, there was just this thing I wanted to do more than anything else, no matter what. No matter what. And I did. It almost killed me but I did it.”

  She looked up at him, her eyes glowing softly. “I even wanted to laugh at the Tweaker, because he didn’t think I could. He’d begun to get panicky, I could tell—he’d stopped glaring and hunching his shoulders the way he usually does: he was talking nervously to Mitchell, I couldn’t get anything he was saying, but I could tell by his voice … And then I did it—I won!” She gave a quick, gusty sigh. “All that—all that struggle. That’s what life is, isn’t it? Struggle. Struggle to breathe, to grow, to learn, to be good. Look at him!…” Her voice was faint but sharp with triumph: she looked fragile and powerful, full of pride. At that instant he wanted her so badly his legs trembled. The baby twisted toward her blindly and she cradled him with an almost automatic gesture; a lioness enfolding one of her cubs with a protective paw. She was so altered—like boys after their first battle, in their shy hilarity reaffirming their glorious corporeality, offering thanks the only way they knew for being spared. Gazing at his son he thought of that afternoon on the bank beside the Marne, the still, silver water, of Reb and Tsonka and big Kraz and Brewster and Dev—ah God, Dev—and all the others, and his eyes filled with tears. This was for them, this boy: for their dreams, their passion, their tremulous mortality. They were not dead, they still lived on in memory, and in the promise of this boy—

  “What’s the matter?” Her face was searching, troubled.

  “Nothing,” he answered. “Just thinking.” He bent over and kissed her tenderly. “You’re a very lovely girl, Tommy. To give us a son like this.”

  “Sweet.—How are the maneuvers going?”

  “Oh—so-so. We did some things well, some not so well.”

  “You look like the wreck of the Hesperus.”

  “Yes. Well, it’s pretty dusty out there.” He paused. “I had to get tough with a couple of them—they wouldn’t take it seriously. They don’t want to behave as though it’s the real thing.” He smiled faintly. “Which of course it isn’t.”

  “Sam.” Her eyes shot up at him, very bright and hard.

  “Yes?”

  “You’ve got to promise me something. Right now.”

  “All right. What’s that?”

  “You’ve got to promise me you won’t let him go into the Army. Donny.”

  He grinned, looking at his dirty, sweat-laced uniform. “You picked the perfect morning to bring that up.”

  “No. I’m serious.” She raised her free hand as if to warn him. “He’s got to do something—more meaningful; more rich and vital and rewarding, somehow. Don’t you see? Not so lonely and barren … Don’t you see?” Soberly he nodded; they watched each other a moment in silence, thinking their own thoughts. “Promise me that, Sam. Please.”

  He hesitated. “But if the boy shows an aptitude—”

  “No!” She struck the coverlet with her fist. “That’s just what I mean. You know how kids are influenced, even if nothing is said. They don’t know anything about themselves, and you’re such a strong personality. You can make anyone do what you want—all of us …”

  “—Don’t say that,” he protested fearfully. He had the eerie sense that she’d been following his thoughts for the past few minutes.

  “But it’s true, darling. You know it is. Any boy would want to do what you’re doing. No—you’ve got to promise me you’ll do everything in your power to steer him away from the service. From all—that …”

  A bugle had just broken in on her, playing mess call—that most inane of all summonses in its staccato reiteration, the call he knew she hated so she could hardly stand it; there came the sound of voices, running feet, hoots and cries, and a distant clash of pans. Soupy-soupy-soup. He looked around him at the mean little room with its cheap wooden partitions greasy with shellac, the stains in the ceiling wallboard, the facing cot—mercifully empty this morning—with its chipped white frame and frayed sheets, the bedside lamps with their dented shades … this whole straitened world caught in a web of duty and national neglect and self-denial. What a dungeon to immure one’s love in! He felt all at once unpardonably guilty—as though he had jilted Tommy, or married her under false pretenses, or callously philandered. She hated this world, she’d known it ever since childhood and
hated it with all her might; she had gone back into it for his sake, because she loved him. He passed the back of his hand across his forehead. And everybody wants a better life for his child, he told himself, a better, fuller life than he’s had, it’s natural enough …

  Her eyes had not left him. She seemed to be prepared to wait for a lifetime for this reply; and he was ready enough to give it. He thought of Sherman running into Grant on the streets of St. Louis that dismal autumn of 1857, one old soldier bankrupt and jobless, the other almost a drunk, eking out an existence selling cordwood. What had Sherman written his wife about the service? “It is too full of blind chances to be worthy of a first rank among callings.” Well, it looked a good deal like that, all right.

  And yet Vicksburg had been only six years away …

  “Of course,” he said aloud, aware that the silence between them had grown too long. He reached out and took her hand in both of his. “Of course I promise, honey. I’ll do anything reasonable in my power to dissuade him from a military career.”

  “No matter what the circumstances?”

  He nodded. “No matter what the circumstances. I give you my word.”

  “Thank God,” she breathed, as if a tremendous burden had been pushed away from her heart. He smiled at the soft fervor in her voice; and catching it, she laughed once. “Well, it’s true. I was more afraid of that than anything else. You don’t know what that bugle can do to a kid. Colors and retreat … Maybe only an army brat can.”

  He kissed her lightly. “The Tweaker told me ten minutes: I don’t want to outstay my welcome around here. You ought to get some sleep, honey.”

  “Yes. I could sleep for three days and three nights. What are you going to do?”

  “Right now I’m going to send a cable to your dad.”

  She laughed and shook her head. “Poor Poppa. The boy he always wanted. Well, at least we won’t have to give him a girl’s name …”

  He walked down the steps and out into the cool, flat air, feeling light-headed from lack of sleep. The post looked curiously deserted; he had that stealthy, footless delight that comes from having legitimately evaded a duty one’s companions are still saddled with. He considered walking to mess, realized he couldn’t show up looking the way he did. He didn’t want to go back to their quarters and start coffee and eggs all by himself. He paused a moment, then turned toward the enlisted men’s mess hall. Sergeant Swicka, who caught for the company ball team, would give him an unofficial handout; and he had to tell somebody. He was a father, for God sake! The father of a seven-pound, nine-ounce boy. They’d have a party when Tommy came home—Skip and Liza and the MacDonoughs and Tom and Meg Warren, just a few friends, he’d rustle up some booze from that shady character in Hazlett with the scar at the edge of his mouth; he’d get Moose Schultz to bring his accordion and they’d have a sing; and Tommy could wear that lovely lemon-yellow dress again, and she and Skip would stand on the ammo boxes doing imitations and they’d all try to guess who they were …