Once an Eagle

  “Boys will be boys.” Jack Cleghorne was looking at her and she made a face at him. With his slouch hat and cavalry mustaches he looked fearsome, much more masculine. Curiously, most of the women looked less imposing with their masks removed. Mae Lee, dressed as a Confederate belle, had looked mildly seductive; now, unmasked, she had reverted to her confused, ineffectual self. She was thinner and bonier, if anything, than she’d been back at Fort Dormer—she was like a child playing in cast-off grownups’ clothes.

  In spite of Alec Thompson’s admonition the men went on talking of war, of invasion. On the brink: the world was hanging on the brink. Italy had invaded Ethiopia, Germany had invaded Czechoslovakia, Japan had invaded China, everyone under the sun had invaded Spain. It was the new international game, invasion. And here they sat, laughing and singing and playing games and talking about the CMTC as a viable cadre for a citizen army, the inadequacy of the Canal Zone defenses, the devilish intricacies of the Maginot Line, and what the Japanese were or were not going to do—

  “You haven’t been listening to a solitary word I’ve been saying,” Jack Cleghorne’s voice came, sonorous and plaintive, “but I don’t care. Long as I can just sit here and gaze into the stagnant pools of your eyes …”

  “You’re just saying that to flatter me off my feet,” she replied. “I heard every golden word.”

  “What’d I say, then?”

  “You said …” She gave it up with a giggle. “Sweetie, be my hero and get me a drink.”

  Jack went off toward the bar. Young Tom Wilcher, fresh out of VMI, came by their table and began to argue with Mayberry. Courtney, sitting on her left side, was staring moodily out at the night, where the palms and mango trees now and then flared into shaggy, swaying masses in the distant blued dance of lightning. Wilcher was laughing, his head thrown back, his throat looking white and vulnerable. They were going to be sacrificed: all of them sitting here, drinking and chortling in their outlandish costumes. War was coming, and they would be overrun by the little yellow men with the exquisite manners and brutal, suicidal impulses. All of them. She thought with a fierce little tremor of Donny, in school up at Baguio—thrust the image away. Why in God’s name had she stayed on here? She could be in San Francisco right now, or in Washington, or at Oglethorpe with Poppa if she’d chosen. What was the matter with her—did she have suicidal impulses, too?

  Jack came back with her drink and she downed half of it in a gulp. The hell with it. All these years of wretched living quarters and scrimping and saving, of poor pay and no promotions—and what had he done but take it into his idiotic head to go traipsing off through the wilds of China, dodging Japanese patrols and eating rice out of the communal bowl (and doubtless picking up all kinds of nefarious diseases in the process), playing Halliburton and Lord Byron and T. E. Lawrence and Christ alone knew who else, while she sat here in the heat, waiting for it to rain cats and dogs; waiting to be captured and raped by the Japanese. Jesus God. He’d already been reported killed once and kidnaped twice. And his letters, that firm, concise hand on disheveled bits of paper, were hardly what one could call reassuring …

  And as though the mission weren’t enough, the sheer outlandish absurdity of wandering off into a perfectly barbaric land where almost no observers civilian or military had ever gone at all, to stay on for month after interminable month; in addition to being tabbed as a post Bolshevik, a guardhouse lawyer and the self-appointed messiah of the EM—in addition to all that he was going to be dubbed an eccentric, a crank, an Oriental screwball. “Poor old Damon.” She could hear them in the clubs, in the regimental offices, in the bivouacs, showering down after a day in the field. “Poor old Sam. Gone off the deep end now for sure.” The idiot, the idiot! She felt a hot rush of anger against him. The night air was heavy as water, still as smoke; for a long, tense moment she wanted to put her head in her arms and weep.

  The band was playing again: “It’s Been So Long.” Jack Cleghorne told a funny story and she laughed, shaking her head. She’d had too much to drink and she didn’t care. She was abandoned here on this rock, in the arms of this Great Big Happy Family, close quote—all right, then: that was all there was to it. Jack asked her to dance with him and she did, slowly, sensuously, putting her body into the beat, gliding and swaying, her eyes closed, enjoying herself; enjoying the moan and thump of the music, the bright clink of glasses and the shivery, empty laughter of girls, and under it all the sullen barrel-rumble of the approaching storm. She would let the night roll open like a play revealed, she would give herself to it, and let come what may. She danced with Court after that, then with a pilot from Clark named Prentiss, watching over his shoulder the few remaining dancers, the die-hards, the noblest of them all, who dipped and capered in the soft light. La Garde meurt, mais ne se rend pas. At the Grand Ball at the Duchess of Richmond’s in Brussels they danced like this, two days before Waterloo, swirling in their gaudy circles …

  The band had gone away again. She was at the piano, gathered around Chink Hammerstrom, singing with the others: Meadowlark Walters, with his soulful beagle eyes, who sang tenor, and Mayberry’s wife Jean, and Mae Lee; and Ben Krisler, dear Ben, dressed outrageously as one of Sherman’s bummers, with a torn blue uniform blouse, trousers chopped off above the knees, and a crushed top hat that had slid forward onto the bridge of his nose. He had one arm around her and one around Mae Lee, and was carrying the tune lustily.

  “Never knew the night could be so lonely and long,

  Never knew the blues would be my favorite song,

  Now I know—

  Wish I could tell you so—

  All I hear is your good-bye …”

  When they had finished they all applauded one another.

  “Oh doggone,” Ben was saying sadly, “that’s Sam’s song. Damn it all, Sam ought to be here tonight.”

  “Yes, he should,” Mae Lee cried. “Tommy, what would he have worn?”

  “God alone knows.”

  “If Sam was here he’d be dressed as a Lexington farm boy with his powder horn and ramrod,” Ben said.

  “His ramrod!”

  “Sure, his ramrod—you don’t expect him to be without his ramrod, do you?”

  “You’ve got ramrods on the brain,” Meadowlark told him. His beagle’s eyes opened and closed as if a child were manipulating some lever behind the lids.

  “Damn right,” Ben proclaimed. “I’m never without my ramrod. Or my powder horn.”

  “Yes, well, you keep your powder dry,” Mae Lee retorted.

  “You’re inebriated,” Meadowlark rebuked him. “D’you know that?”

  “True. But that’s a lot better than being drunk.”

  This set them all off into gales of laughter; they swayed back and forth, their arms interlocked, paralyzed with mirth. Below them Chink kept playing blues chords, like sea bells, like horns, like lonesome prairie trains.

  “I love a night like this,” Ben was saying to her, his face animate and intense. “It breaks it up, shuffles all the cards. You know?”

  She nodded, smiling. If I had a brother I’d want him to be Ben, she thought; and after that: And then Poppa would have had his son and I wouldn’t have been named Tommy and—what else wouldn’t have happened?

  “If only old Sam were here,” Ben was saying lugubriously. “That’d make it perfect.”

  “Well, he isn’t,” she retorted, “and it’s a damned good thing.”

  “What?” They were looking at her, startled. “Oh, don’t say that …”

  “I will! If I want …” She felt all at once furious with Sam; bereft and bitter and raging.

  “Don’t say that, Tommy.”

  She laughed savagely. “Is that a direct order? or an indirect one?”

  “What? No, look. No, Sam’s the finest guy that ever wore the uniform of the old U S and A.” Ben turned to the other men belligerently. “And I’ll fight any son of a bitch here that says he isn’t.”

  “Oh, shut up, Ben,” Tommy cried. “You sound
like Tom Swift!”

  “—But sweetie … ” He looked at her, blinking in consternation. Gazing angrily at his homely, bony face, the deepset, passionate eyes clouded now with hurt and confusion, she thought: He’s going to die. Violently. She knew it beyond a doubt. His body shattered and eviscerated in a welter of smashed weapons and tentage and papers … The vision sickened her, made her still more savage; she wrenched away from him.

  “Loyalty from the bottom up,” she hissed at him. “I despise it, you hear?—I’m sick to death of it!” And while they watched her, goggle-eyed, she brought her hand sharply to her pelvis and cut it away, the obscene parody of a salute she remembered from her childhood at Fort Sam. “Give me—give me treachery from the top down!” She walked off in a fury.

  “Come back,” they called, pleading. “Tommy, please don’t be sore … Tommy—hey, we’ll sing ‘Liza’ again, just for you!”—and that almost stopped her; but she went on from room to room, bound in the perverse, black pounding of her heart. She let Mandrake, still playing magician, skillfully draw a jack of diamonds from her bodice; someone handed her a pair of dice and crouching, shaking them high over her head, talking to them softly as she knew you should, she threw; the dice rolled up against the dark, burnished baseboard and galloped back. She had another drink and got into an argument with Marge Krisler about a novel she hadn’t read—and found herself without any perceptible transition engaged in a low, intense conversation with Courtney Massengale.

  “Self-delusion,” he was saying. “That’s the leitmotif of our era. Look at our advertising, our manners, our popular songs.” His face was very near hers; his eyes seemed to shift from amber to gray and back again in the splashes of scarlet and saffron light. “We have no capacity for seeing ourselves with any perspective.”

  “Yes,” she declared. “We’re a joke, all of us. And nobody sees it. Absurd—a herd of forked animals shuffling around in a maze, bumping into one another. And yet we condemn ourselves to pretending it’s all one fine, long regimental review …”

  His eyes had darkened again, he was watching her in surprise. “You see that, then,” he murmured. “You really see it … ” There was a heavier drum roll of thunder, as though the storm had just brought its biggest guns into position, and the corners of the tablecloths flipped stiffly in the gusts of wind. “That’s what’s unique about you—you want to plunge beneath the surface, get into the murky substance of things … ”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m sick of living on parade.”

  He nodded. “You want grandeur. The real grandeur, not the ruffles and flourishes that content most women. You want dimension—to measure yourself against. Don’t you?”

  She nodded silently. Yes, that was it: she wanted with all her heart to move—if only once!—across the greatest stage. She felt that old pull toward him, the dense surge of her blood. “A sense of windy mornings”—he’d told her she had that quality about her, long ago, the night she’d danced with Black Jack Pershing; and now here he was talking to her with an almost violent intensity about petty, undisciplined minds who succumbed to the emotional trappings of a world besotted with its own sentimentality …

  That was fun, and strange; but nothing was quite so entrancing now as dancing with Jack Cleghorne in the dim deserted room behind the long verandah to the tune Chink Hammerstrom was playing, hunched there over the piano like a consumptive barrelhouse entertainer, a cigarette drooping from his lips, his fingers flicking darkly over the keys.

  “I wander for hours on the docks in the rain,

  Then find myself headed for France in a plane;

  My eyes fill with tears at a split of champagne—

  That’s the awful trouble with love …”

  “You’re ravishing,” Jack was saying in his fine, deep baritone.

  “I am,” she answered. “I am ravishing, aren’t I?”

  “Come away with me.”

  “All right. Where to?”

  They went into a dip, he bent her back, back, the mahogany paneled walls reeled. “To Cebu. To Palamangao.”

  “Been there. Years ago. Centuries ago.”

  “Iloilo, then. I’ll get rooms at the Princesa.”

  “Fine,” she answered, “just give me time to pack an overnight bag.”

  “Will you, Tommy? Will you? You can take the steamer—I’ll meet you there, I’ll be off weekend after next.”

  She raised her face then and saw he was serious: completely serious. She stopped dancing. “Jack,” she said. “Jack …”

  “Oh, hell,” he said. “Listen—”

  “Jack, this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.”

  “You’re wonderful, Tommy, you are …”

  “I’m not. I’m a dull, dumb bunny.”

  “Ever since Dormer,” he murmured; his hand was broad and insistent on the small of her back. “Ever since Dormer I’ve dreamed of us, just the two of us, someplace off by ourselves—”

  “Jack,” she pleaded; she’d begun to tremble a little. “Jack, for one thing there’s Mae Lee—”

  “The hell with Mae Lee.”

  “You don’t mean that. You know you don’t. We’d better forget this. Jack. All right?”

  “Oh, hell,” he said, and dropped his hands. “God damn the bloody service—why can’t we live like human beings?”

  “We are: we’re living like human beings. All kinds. Let’s forget this, Jack. Please?”

  “Sure,” he muttered. “I know. All the lovely people we don’t want to let down.”

  “Well …” she said lamely. “Well …”

  “Sure. Hell, yes.”

  He was gone, stalking off through the long room like a scene out of John DeForest. Outside, the approaching storm muttered and rumbled; the room flared into bright daylight and vanished again, and a door bumped twice. “Not within ten miles of the post flagpole,” she murmured, and laughed shakily. It was war, the threat of war that was making everyone act like this. Wasn’t it? Or was it she herself, floating free and unattached through this cloistered little world? A disruptive influence—

  She hurried into the next room like a freezing man moving toward a fire—stopped in the doorway to hear Klaus saying:

  “Where does he think it’ll get him?”

  Ben turned and faced him with deliberate menace. “Oh, I’m sure he’d be a lot better off pulling wires for himself back in D.C.”

  They’re talking about Sam, she thought with a rush of despair, of rage.

  “For God’s sake, Krisler,” Courtney said sharply. “Think it out, will you? What concrete objective will it accomplish?”

  “I don’t know what it’ll accomplish—the point is he’s had the guts to go out there and see for himself.”

  “It’s a matter of relative values.”

  “Relative values,” Krisler echoed sarcastically.

  “Yes. Precisely. Any idiot can figure that out for himself.”

  “Well, this idiot—”

  “The problem is force: patterns of force. That’s what determines the course of events—not hole-and-corner Jacqueries at the bleak ends of the earth. When war comes it’s the grand dispositions that matter, not the picturesque little sideshows.”

  Ben walked up to the table where most of the others were sitting and put his fists on the edge. “When war comes,” he said tightly, “Sam and I will be on our picturesque little bellies in the boondocks, that’s where we’ll be—and you’ll be on the first available Clipper to Alameda …”

  There was a sharp, stunned silence. Someone gasped; Tommy heard Marge cry, “Ben!” and then Alec Thompson’s voice cutting through everything:

  “Lieutenant, that is an entirely offensive remark. Insubordinate and offensive. You will withdraw it instantly.”

  “Is that right,” Ben said. “How about—”

  “Instantly!” Thompson cried in his parade voice. “You will withdraw that remark and offer apology in full to Major Massengale—or you can reply by endorsement tomorrow at o
h-eight-hundred hours! Do you hear?”

  Ben came slowly to attention—a fantastic scarecrow figure in the battered opera hat and sawed-off breeches: his eyes glittered in the dulled saffron light. The only sounds were a harsh burst of laughter in the bar, and the treble patter of the piano. Tommy realized she was holding her breath.

  “Is that a direct order, sir?”

  “Lieutenant, it is!”

  “Very good, sir.” Ben was standing at perfect attention now, but his eyes were blazing. “If that is a direct order—” The rest of his words were lost in an ear-splitting crash of thunder that seemed poised directly above their heads, as though the entire island had been detonated. At the same instant Court was on his feet.

  “It’s all right, Alexander,” he said to Thompson, his voice carrying clearly on the void left by the thunderclap. “My courage has never been called in question, and I don’t think it is now.” Taut with dread, Tommy couldn’t believe her eyes. Court was smiling!—a smile neither patronizing nor vindictive but simply benign, at ease with things. “These are days of tension. Tempers are bound to run high.” He ran his eyes along the ring of silent, watchful faces. “I think we’re all of us in the habit of making too hard and fast a distinction between the staff and the line. It’s an outmoded position, and inadvisable. Our finest leaders have served in both capacities. Let’s not forget that essentially we are one arm, all of us—and it’s the strong right arm of a great nation.” He paused briefly, and the smile broadened a bit more. “We’ve all made quite an evening of it. Let’s more or less forget this, shall we?” Moving up to Ben he gave him a soft clap on the shoulder, and walked off into one of the adjoining rooms.

  The group broke up then, in a flurry of release. Marge Krisler had hold of the ragged collar of Ben’s GAR tunic and was saying tearfully: “Oh Ben—what’s the matter with you? What kind of a thing to say is that?”

  “Nothing less than the truth,” he muttered.

  “Now you stop! No more for you tonight. You’re going home … Why do you have to fight with the whole blasted world?”