Once an Eagle

  She was panting in the heat, half-running. She must be calm. Calm, if nothing else. She counted the squares of concrete that rolled up toward her, chipped at the corners. It didn’t matter. Figures glanced at her, figures on sticks of legs with plates for faces. Mechanical toys, they drew near and vanished behind her. There was no plan. Nothing mattered anymore but cruelty: cruelty and ambition, those were the fuels the world ran on, there were no others. The stronger ate the weaker, and increased. Why didn’t everyone see it? It was there, for all to see—

  A woman in a floppy flowered hat glanced at her sharply; she threw her a look of unutterable hatred and hurried on, reached Dupont Circle. Pigeons swirled in a tight, flickering pattern, rising, their wings a taut, dry whistling in the slant sunlight. At Benning he’d kept pigeons in a loft Sam had made by screening in part of the attic floor of the set, and the low, liquid crooning had driven them all half-crazy nights. He had cared for them religiously, feeding them, changing their water, scraping out the droppings and keeping entries on the broods. He’d known them all by name. On the title page of the notebook was the phrase: All About Pigeons. One morning he’d told her, “I dreamed I was flying, Mom. Really flying! Out over the roofs and pine trees, just soaring and soaring on and on. It was like being in heaven …”

  A bar, on her left: blue grotto gloom with the icy, festal glint of glasses. The air was cool and raw. She shivered, slid on to a stool near the door and said: “Gin, please. Over ice.”

  The bartender’s eyes slid up to hers mildly. “Just ice?”

  “That’s right.”

  She reached into her purse for money, saw the torn pieces of the letter and closed the purse again, looked around her blankly. When he was eleven he’d torn up a drawing he’d made of musketeers fencing on a parapet; he’d torn it up by mistake and had been inconsolable. While he’d been at school she had gone through the trash barrel on the back stoop until she’d found the drawing, smoothed it out and pasted it together for him. His eyes had gone wide with joy. “Oh Mom, that’s wonderful—oh, that changes everything!” He’d flung his arms around her; his cheek had been warm against hers. So smooth and warm—

  Count the bottles, read the labels. Teacher’s Highland Cream, Four Roses, Old Grand-Dad. The officious, admonitory radio voice had returned—the bartender was tuned to the same station the Millmans had been. He brought her drink and she listened numbly. The Russians had recaptured Karkov. Allied planes had bombed rail centers and airfields at Naples, Foggia and Rome; Army ground forces were encountering fierce Japanese resistance on Lolobiti, but had secured Sibolán on New Lorraine.

  Odd. How odd to be sitting here in this chilly air-cooled bar thinking of Sam out there on Lolobiti. She could see him—conferring, giving orders, moving around, watching everything with that steady, stolid, maddeningly resolute gaze, kicking some and kissing others, getting on with it. Yes. Getting on with it. He was a major general now, two stars, he had his own division. It was monstrous. One of the solvers, he couldn’t help it. Solutions and systems. And of course this was his chance—his chance to prove his worth, serve his country, put all the years of maneuvers and range work and nocturnal study to use, he was finally given rank and responsibility commensurate with his abilities—and it was all dependent on battle, the killing of fathers and husbands and lovers and sons—

  The gin burned coldly, like medicine, like varnish, like new-cut pine branches. He’d hated to take medicine, he would close his eyes and wrinkle up his forehead, once he pretended he was well to get out of taking any. That other time at Benning when he had a fever and said his neck and the back of his head hurt and they’d been afraid it was polio—

  Two sailors were at the end of the bar, hats shoved forward over their eyes, their faces red and harsh, burned by wind. She watched them idly. Big, powerful men. Gunner’s mate second, she saw the sleeve of the shorter of the two, who strolled back to the phone booth in the rear of the room and sank inside; his bell-bottom trousers stuck out whitely. The bigger man called something to him, a piece of advice. His arms were folded: the biceps pressed against the smooth duck. She looked away again at the ranks and rows of bottles. They did look military; she’d never felt it before. An empty liquor bottle was called a dead soldier. “That soldier’s done his duty,” Poppa used to say when he threw out an empty.

  Poppa, she thought, and her eyes filled with tears. Oh, nothing was as cruel as this. Condemned to sit here at this bar while the radio went on and on, adding up the ledger of battles, bombings, the count of dead and captured. Man eats man. That was the only truth. Man eats man, on a platter of steel.

  My son. I saved my son once. Shot and killed a rattlesnake and saved my son’s life, so that he could be burned to death in a foreign war … Closing her eyes she remembered the flat desert light, the hot, dry wind in her face, the great dead weight of the automatic pistol and her quaking fear. Guns. Shep Thorndyke had shot himself at Beyliss, very late one night. The short, hollow crump sound like a paper bag popping but denser somehow, more sinister. Sam had been on his feet before she’d raised her head from the pillow. Sam had gone over, barefooted in his pajama trousers, and found him. Outside. He’d gone outside on the lawn, as though he hadn’t wanted to soil the set. That had been Shep all over: quiet, unassuming, self-effacing. The best battery commander he’d ever seen, Sam said. Olive hadn’t been there, Olive had been in Hadley with Prinz, that arrogant Prussified fascist son of a bitch who loved to bow over your hand and tell you Hitler had the right idea, that international Jewry were at the bottom of all the world’s problems, that the Republican party were sentimental fools, putting up namby-pamby do-gooders like Hoover and Landon; what the country needed was a strong man who would really take over the reins, put an end to all the mollycoddling and clean out that pack of Bolsheviks and dreamers and wastrels who were turning the USA into a sinkhole of decadence. Insufferable. Everyone on the post had known but Shep. Old Maitland had actually called Prinz in and talked to him about it. Man to man, don’t you know. But he hadn’t reckoned with Olive. Why? When she had a wonderful, considerate man like Shep had she turned to that icy monster? And then Shep had found out somehow. She’d seen him that evening at some CMTC function, standing at the edge of a group; pleasant, diffident, self-effacing. Good old Shep. And the next time she’d laid eyes on him he was a corpse. Buried with full military honors and now Prinz was on the staff at COSSAC in London. Sexual infidelity. God, what a farce, what a supreme absurdity to do away with yourself over—the brief, wet straining of flesh—when there were a thousand thousand things that could rend the very—

  “Where you from, sugar?”

  The sailor was standing beside her, the big one. Foot on the rail, elbow on the bar, drink in his hand. His face looked less brutal when he smiled. She stared at him silently.

  “You look just like a girl I used to know in Henderson,” he said in his easy, soft drawl. “That’s near Memphis. Ever been down there?”

  A pickup. He wanted to pick her up. Right like this. She did not know what her face looked like. The radio talk had stopped, there was music again. She went on gazing at him, listening to the deep, lazy voice. Yesterday she would have been flattered, enraged, amused. Yesterday she—

  It was too much. Too much. That she should be sitting here today, in this place, and a gunner’s mate second class should actually be hanging over her with genial complicity—

  “I—” she started to say. “Do you realize I’m—” But her voice failed her. All she could do was shake her head back and forth. Tears began to run down her cheeks; she could feel her face trembling.

  “What’s the matter, sugar?” His face was hard and flat again, indistinct.

  “—No,” she said. And again: “No. I’m—I’ve got trouble—”

  “You have? What kind?”

  “The worst,” she said. “Oh, the worst there is. Believe me. In this world …”

  The bartender was speaking, she didn’t hear the words. The sailor was bac
king away, his eyes clouded and unsure. “Gee, I’m sorry, lady, I’m right sorry, now I am …” He walked back to his companion softly, rocking forward on the balls of his feet as though the floor were very slippery.

  “Nothing.” She pushed a bill across the dark, burn-scarred wood.

  “Do you need help, ma’am?” The bartender was watching her, a stem glass and a neat white towel in his hand.

  She shook her head. But she couldn’t stop crying. “No. I’m all right. Thanks.”

  “You’re sure, now …” His face was round and grave, his eyes were strangely piercing. “I could get you a cab in ten minutes.”

  “No, it’s quite all right.”

  “You be—careful, now. Won’t you?”

  “Yes. I will.”

  Outside it was cooler. Or no, hotter, but the air had lifted, instead of weighing upon her throat and shoulders it now held aloof, licking at her gently, like the air at the edge of the sea. His room at Princeton had no pennants on the walls, that was considered juvenile and rah-rah, he’d explained; but in the corner of the mirror above the dresser there was a theater bill from the Martin Beck and on the dresser a champagne cork and a snapshot of several kids eating hamburgers and drinking beer and laughing in the hollow of a sand dune. “Cape Cod. Kid stuff. It was fun, though.” Sprawled in a fashionably decrepit easy chair, wearing a cashmere pullover and flannel slacks and loafers, his hair flung forward over his brow in a loose brown lock. It was impossible that this relaxed, handsome, broad-shouldered young man could ever have been the excited little boy who came racing out of the pine woods at Benning calling, “A butterfly!—I saw a butterfly, so blue…!”

  The cars. Count them. Buick, Chevrolet, Ford, another Ford, a roadster—convertibles, they called them now—the canvas torn and faded and full of stains. At Myrtle Beach he ran barefooted all the first day, in a breathless ecstasy, his first sight of the ocean, and that evening he sat on the cabin steps crying, furious at the pain of the sunburn while she patted cocoa butter on his insteps—

  She had stopped, was leaning against a high iron gate that smelled of rust. Nobody could stand this. Could be expected to. Nobody. She could feel her heart turn on itself. High above the trees the Monument followed her like a harsh stone finger of God. She stopped and peered up at it. Shep Thorndyke had used his service pistol. In the bottom of Sam’s footlocker was a German Luger wrapped in a white undershirt. A boy named Raebyrne had given it to him. Was it loaded? Probably not. Or perhaps it was, there was no knowing.

  But she could not do that. Could she?

  She walked on, feeling faintly sick and light-headed, blinking at the circling storm of pigeons, the parade of cars; forcing herself to look at people’s faces, signs. At the street she knew she turned left and counted the doors, stopped before one and climbed the steps and rang. There was no answer. Why should there be? She rang again, feeling her soul thrust against the bell. But he had to be here: he had to be. If she didn’t see Court, if she couldn’t see someone she could talk to in another few minutes she did not know what she would do. She could not go along this way, remembering.

  The bell rang hollowly through the still hallway. No one. She peered vaguely into the soft gray gloom behind the glass panels; then sat down on the low, wooden chest from China, black and ugly with its carving of vines and dragons, felt the thick ridges press against her buttocks. There was Peggy, she thought with curious detachment; she’d have to get in touch with her soon. Very soon.

  … It was China, she told herself savagely, gripping the smooth, soapy wood with her nails. That was what had done it. When Sam had taken off and left her there alone in Manila to contend with the schools and the household and the heat. What the hell did he care? New worlds to conquer and away he went, looking like a kid with a secret bar of candy in his pocket …

  She was shivering, overwarm and trembling in every limb. She needed a drink: but that was absurd—she’d had far too much to drink already and she knew it. She wanted to leap to her feet screaming obscenities, race off down this stately, shaded street smashing the glass in all the cars with a stick; then the impulse receded, leaving her dulled and weepy. No, it wasn’t his fault, he’d made his choice and God knows he’d stuck to it. It was her own fault, she’d destroyed herself just as surely as if she’d lain down before a locomotive. Did everyone? At Benning—or no, before that, at Dormer when she knew it was all bitter tea and she’d done nothing—or even back at Hardee when she’d lain in the shrouded, stifling room and felt the first astonishing tug and thrust, deep in her body—

  Someone on the steps. The outer door swung open. Emily Massengale, a bag of groceries in her arms; looking at her very steadily, without surprise. Tommy recoiled in a flash of fright. She realized she’d had no thought whatever of seeing Emily.

  “Tommy! How nice to see you.”

  “Hello, Em. I thought you were in Boston.”

  “I was. Have you been waiting long?”

  “I don’t know. No. Not long.”

  Emily was groping sightlessly for her key. “Marion left—that’s the third girl since last fall—so I thought I’d try to do it myself for a while.” She thrust the door back with her knee. “Come on in. I’ve been over at the library most of the afternoon.”

  “The library …”

  “Yes.” Emily glanced at her—that wintry Boston look. “There are still a few books around. Not that anybody reads them, of course.” Holding the door open with her shoulder, she turned. “Come on up.”

  “Well no, Em—I was just passing by—”

  “Oh, come on. You haven’t anything better to do with your time. Don’t pretend you do.”

  “All right.” She didn’t know, then. Tommy moved down the long, cool hall, her eyes fastened on Emily’s back, hating her with all her might. The house—the Massengales had bought it while Court was at the War College—was stately and calm. The mélange of furnishings from Paris and Manila and Tientsin disposed themselves in a kind of outlandish ease with the teak couch and leather chairs, the marble cocktail table. The dining room held the great refectory table from the Garfield days; in the living room were the lacquered end tables and the Spanish chest and the incredible Han Dynasty vase Jinny had smashed to pieces and which they’d had to have reconstructed, at terrific expense.

  “Look,” she said, “I’m sorry, Em—I shouldn’t have come, really—”

  “Why on earth not? I’ve hardly seen a soul since I’ve been back. I’ll put on some tea. Or would you rather have a drink?”

  “No.” She swayed toward the door. “I can’t.”

  Emily was gazing at her earnestly. “You’re ill, Tommy …”

  “Yes. No. I’m not.” She could not stay here. Or anywhere. Say au revoir. But not good-bye. This elegant room, this pale-faced, middle-aged woman standing there regarding her with slow alarm had no meaning—it was all, like the world outside, bars and cabs and shaded circles, a dolorous stupid trance. A revolving screen and only one thing had truth. A terrible truth. Only one event, one—

  “Tommy … Tommy, what’s the matter?—have you heard something?”

  She really didn’t know, then. No. She couldn’t have known and be that frightened. Watching crookedly the snub-nosed, wrinkled face, the badly set hair, Tommy almost smiled in sympathy. She shook her head; then again—still again, for the twentieth time that afternoon—tears were pouring out of her eyes, turning her weak and defenseless. Treason tears. But it wasn’t any use: nothing was.

  “Ah, Em,” she said. Then she was in the other woman’s arms, sobbing hoarsely, maudlin and desolate. “Ah Emmy, I’ve lost him—I’ve lost him, ah he’s gone …”

  Emily’s face was ugly with dread. “—Sam?” she whispered.

  She threw back her head, glaring at Emily wildly, flung her hand away. “No—my Donny, my Donny—he’s been killed! Ah, the worst …” She tried to stop herself and couldn’t. “The worst thing has happened to me. The one thing I’ve feared, lain awake and feared more th
an anything else—oh, if you knew how I feel! If you could only know …”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Emily was saying gently, “I am. So very sorry, dear … Come now, and sit down.”

  “No.” But she was seated on the lovely teak couch she secretly envied; she had a glass in her hands. Pale roseate swirling. Emily knew she always drank gin-and-bitters. “I’m drunk now,” she muttered. “I guess.” She started to her feet in a burst of unfocused agitation. She couldn’t sit here. She couldn’t sit anywhere. Oh Christ. Emily had hold of her by the arms, was speaking to her softly; but she couldn’t stay here, all the same. “I’ve got to go, Em. Yes. I must.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know—! Jesus God, how should I know? Save, salvage and survive—”

  “Tommy, you’ve got to get hold of yourself …”

  She threw back her head and laughed savagely. “Oh yes,” she shouted, hearing her voice crack and waver, “—oh Christ, that’s rich!—and feel time rotting in every flock of pigeons, soaked in fire—”