A Special Providence

  “Oh, dear,” she said when he had explained that the pass woudn’t give him time to get to New York and back. “Well, but do you think they’ll give you any leave from the other place? The one near here?” She meant Camp Shanks, New York, which was the port of embarkation and was said to be shrouded in secrecy.

  “No,” he said. “They don’t even let you make phone calls from there. But anyway, I’ll write. And listen, promise not to worry, okay? I’ll be fine.” The receiver was slippery with sweat in his hand.

  “All right, dear. But you will be careful, won’t you? I know that sounds silly, but I just—”

  “Sure I will. I’ll be fine. You just take care of yourself and – you know – promise not to worry. Okay?”

  When he’d hung up he had to sit quiet in the steaming booth for a few seconds, wondering why he had called her at all. And when he came out, stamping to arrange his pants over the boot tops, he found Quint waiting alone.

  “Where’s Sam?”

  “He took off. Ran into some friends of his who had a taxi, and he went along with them. Said he’d try to meet us later in town. You all set?”

  In the bewildering civilian disorder of Baltimore they found the hotel bar where Sam had said he’d try to meet them; but Sam wasn’t there, and their predicament was compounded when the bartender refused to sell Prentice a drink.

  “Oh, what the hell,” Quint said. “He’s in the Army, for Christ’s sake. He’s going overseas. What kind of bullshit is this?”

  “Watch your language, soldier. The law says twenty-one, and swearing don’t change it none. I serve him, I lose my job.”

  “Hell, go ahead, Quint; you have one anyway.”

  “No. The hell with it.” And they stood aimlessly near the bar for a while, gazing at tables full of civilians or of officers and girls, or of enlisted men and girls, until Quint said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  “To tell the truth,” he said when they were out on the street again, starting to walk without any idea of where they were going, “to tell the truth I didn’t really expect Sam to show up. I don’t think old Sam wants anything to interfere with the serious business of getting himself laid tonight.”

  And Prentice chuckled, but it disturbed him a little. He hadn’t fully dared to expect that they’d go to a whorehouse tonight, or pick up girls in a bar or whatever it was you did, but what else was worth the effort of doing on your last night of freedom in the States? Did Quint believe that only simple, “colorful” soldiers did things like that? Was it possible that Quint, for all his twenty-four years, was as shy of girls as he himself?

  Now they were in what seemed to be the garish, Times-Square part of the city; they were standing under the marquee of a burlesque theater, and Quint, with a frown and a shrug, said they might as well go inside. It was better than going to a movie, anyway; but the show was a disappointment. Most of the women didn’t look really desirable, and their stripping was a meticulous concession to police restrictions. The comedians weren’t funny, and the whole performance kept coming to a stop so that vendors could patrol the aisles with boxes of candy in which, according to the master of ceremonies, were secreted many valuable prizes including silver cigarette lighters and genuine leather wallets.

  “Well,” Quint said, when the tedious show was over and they were out on the freezing sidewalk again. “Hell, let’s get a drink somewhere. Maybe we can at least get a drink in this cruddy part of town.” And the first bar they tried served them bottled beer without a question. It was narrow and bleak, with green walls and a smell of disinfectant, and they settled themselves into a booth just as the jukebox rumbled into the opening strains of “I’ll Walk Alone.” Most of the other customers were old men lined up at the bar, several of them hawking and spitting on the floor, but there were other servicemen too, and in one of the booths two sailors sat with their arms around two very young-looking girls, the only girls in the place. The beer was stronger than the stuff Prentice was used to in the PX, and by the third bottle he was feeling pleasurably vague: he was ready to decide that this might, after all, be as good and memorable a way as any to spend his last pass, sitting in this strange, squalid bar while John Quint held forth on the larger social and historical aspects of the war. For Quint had broken his moody, pipe-smoking silence and begun to talk – more out of boredom, it seemed, than any real conversational impulse – about economics and politics and world affairs; he was becoming almost as eloquent as on the day of the I. and E. lecture back at Pickett, and the happy difference was that this time he was talking to Prentice alone and allowing Prentice to reply. It was like the old talks with Hugh Burlingame, at school.

  “Well, but look at it this way, Quint,” Prentice heard himself saying, impressed with the timbre of his own voice. “Look at it this way …”

  “… right. You’re absolutely right, Prentice.” And although Prentice could never afterwards remember what it was he had said, he knew he wouldn’t forget the solemn, nodding approbation in Quint’s face. “You’re absolutely right about that.”

  “ ’Scuse me for buttin’ in, fellas,” said a stranger’s voice through the veils of smoke, and they looked up to find a young, drunken sailor hanging unsteadily over their booth. “Here’s the thing. Me’n my buddy got these two li’l gals all loved up, only we gotta be back at the base in twenty minutes. Okay if we turn ’em over to you? I mean I figured you fellas looked kinda lonesome here.”

  Prentice looked at Quint for guidance, but Quint was intently picking the wet paper label off his beer bottle.

  “Tell you what,” the sailor said. “Just tell me your first names, so I can introduce you. I mean shit, whaddya got to lose?”

  Quint looked up at him with what struck Prentice as an odd mixture of contempt and bashfulness. “John,” he said.

  “Bob,” said Prentice.

  And in less than a minute, during which Prentice and Quint didn’t quite meet each other’s eyes, the sailor was back. This time he brought his buddy, a huge red-haired boy who seemed to be asleep on his feet, and the two girls. “Hey there, John,” he said heartily. “How’s it going? Hey there, Bob. Fellas, I’d like you to meet a couple friends. This here’s Nancy, and this here’s Arlene. Okay if we join you fellas a minute?”

  The next thing Prentice knew both sailors had gone and left them with the girls. The one called Nancy, plump and talkative with tightly curled black hair, sat chattering cozily beside Quint, and the one called Arlene was pressed into the tremulous circle of his own arm. She was very thin and dead silent, and she was heavily perfumed.

  “… no, but tell me one thing, John,” Nancy was saying. “One thing I still don’t understand. How come you’re friends with Gene and Frank when they’re in the Navy and you’re in the Army?” And Quint made some polite, inaudible reply. He had removed his glasses and was wiping them with Kleenex, blinking at Nancy with his small eyes.

  Then suddenly Arlene became talkative too. “You got a nickel, Bob?” she said. “I want to play that song again, ‘I’ll Walk Alone.’ I love that song.”

  He rose to do her bidding, stamping the pants around his combat boots, and he hoped she was watching as he made his way to the jukebox in his new walk. When he came back she sang the lyrics for him along with the record, sitting erect with her hands in her lap and staring straight ahead to let him admire her profile, which had an oddly sloping forehead and contained several powdered-over pimples.

  “They’ll ask me why,” she sang, “and I’ll tell them – I’d rather. There are dreams I must gather, dreams we fashioned the night – you held me tight …”

  While she sang he had time for some rapid, baffled speculations about these girls. Were they whores? Could it be that the sailors had already had them and taken off without paying the bill? No, no; the girls would never have let them get away. How old were they? Seventeen? But what kind of girls that age would be in a place like this, allowing themselves to be passed around like merchandise?

  “… I’ll
always be near you, wherever you are; each night, in every prayer. If you call I’ll hear you, no matter how far – just close your eyes, and I’ll be there …”

  And where had the sailors found them? Probably they were what the newspapers called “V-girls”; and here he was briefly troubled: would they be carriers of venereal disease?

  “… Please walk alone; and with your love and your kiss-es to guide me—” Arlene closed her eyes and allowed a little tremor of sentimentality to wrinkle her forehead at the climax of the song – “till you’re walk-ing beside me – I’ll walk alone.” Then she opened her eyes and took a dainty but deep drink of beer, leaving lipstick on the glass and foam on her lips. “God, I love that song,” she said. “Where you from, Bob?”

  “New York.”

  “You have any brothers and sisters?” This seemed wholly out of character for her: it was a standard conversation opener for the kind of girls who came to prep-school dances. He tried to put things on a more worldly plane by telling her that he and Quint were at Meade and due to go overseas any day, but that didn’t seem to impress her: she had evidently met a good many boys from Meade. Soon the conversation threatened to dry up altogether, and he looked across the table for help, but Quint was red-faced and cramped with laughter at something Nancy had said, and Nancy, laughing too, was wearing Quint’s overseas cap. Then suddenly Arlene squirmed closer and dropped her hand on Prentice’s thigh, massaging it in a light, rhythmic way that sent delightful waves of warmth from his knees to his throat. It was a very small, childish hand with bitten-down nails, and it wore a high-school ring.

  “Look,” she said. “It’s getting kind of late. You want to take me home?”

  She lived so many miles from the center of town that her home could be reached only by riding a bus for great, winding distances and then transferring to another bus. He was uneasy about finding his way back and made her repeat the directions several times, until she began to look tired and bored with him as they jolted along in the second bus. Her boredom made a light sweat break out inside the woolen slant of his overseas cap; he pictured her giving him one limp hand to shake at her door and saying something awful – “So long, stupid; it’s been real,” or something like that – and in an all-out effort to avert such a disaster he settled his arm more closely around her, bravely working his hand up and somehow around inside her open coat until it held the meager shape of her breast. This caused her to nestle against him with a little purring sound, rearranging her coat to hide his hand; and after bending to touch his lips to her powdery forehead, he rode on into the Baltimore night feeling like the very devil of a soldier.

  But his boldness fled him when they got off the bus at last to walk up a silent block of looming, close-set, ominously dark frame houses. “You live with your parents?” he inquired, and he suddenly hoped the evening might end in a family kitchen scene: a jovial father in suspenders who would want to tell him about the last war and a soft, smiling mother who would thank him for bringing Arlene home safely, who would wish him luck and kiss his cheek and send him on his way with a warm paper bag full of homemade cookies.

  “Yeah,” she said. “But it’s okay. My father works the night shift and my mother sleeps like the dead. Here, it’s this next one. Now for God’s sake be quiet.” She led him down an alley and through a side door, up a creaking flight of stairs, and down a linoleum hall to the door of her family’s apartment. Her key scraped in the lock, and then, saying “Sh-sh!”, she led him into a room and turned on a light switch.

  There was flowered wallpaper, an ornate sofa of green velvet, and a cold fireplace containing a clay-filament gas grill. There were several religious pictures on the walls, as well as a dark reproduction of “The Reaper,” and on the mantelpiece were a number of knicknacks including a paperweight model of the Trylon and Perisphere from the 1939 World’s Fair and a big kewpie doll with feathers. Arlene stepped out of her shoes and left him alone while she padded out another door, whispering that she’d only be a minute. He took off his overcoat and cap and sat experimentally on the sofa. He started to light a cigarette but decided against it: he would wait until she came back so that he could put two cigarettes in his lips, light them both and then slowly remove one and hand it to her, looking at her with narrowed eyes, the way Paul Henreid had done with Bette Davis in the movie called Now, Voyager.

  “It’s okay,” Arlene said, closing the door behind her. “She’s out cold.” And she came to the sofa bringing a quart bottle of beer and two glasses. “You got a cigarette, Bob?”

  He went carefully through the Paul Henreid trick, but she was pouring the beer and didn’t notice. “Thanks,” she said. “Here, let me put this thing on.” And squatting ungracefully she set a match to the gas fireplace, which popped and hissed. Then she turned off the lights and sat beside him in the soft orange glow.

  Could you just start necking with a girl, without saying anything first? He guessed you could, and he was right. Once he broke away to stand up and take off his stifling tunic, and when he came back he avoided her while he reached out and swigged at his beer, as if he were an interestingly jaded alcoholic who absolutely had to have a drink or else be bored to death with the whole idea of sex; then, having drained his glass, he tried the Now, Voyager business again with two more cigarettes, though their first two were lying almost untouched in the ashtray, but again she didn’t notice. She was unhooking her brassiere for him. He wondered if he could say, “Look, Arlene, let’s not; you’re too nice a girl for this,” and if she might then weep in his arms and say, “Oh, Bob, you’re the first boy who’s ever really respected me,” and if then they might cling romantically together at the door with tender goodbyes and promises to write. The trouble was that her tongue was in his mouth and her little naked breasts were in his hands, and her fingers, with their high-school ring, were expertly unfastening the buttons of his fly. Only then did he remember the pack of Army condoms that had ridden in his wallet for weeks; he struggled to get one of them out but wasn’t at all sure if he knew how to put the damned thing on until Arlene helped him. She helped him, in fact, to do everything else that was required: she positioned their two bodies on the sofa and gravely, carefully guided him into herself with both hands. He knew it was supposed to take a long time, but it was frantically over in almost no time at all.

  “You done already?” she asked, not exactly in irritation but in something dangerously close to it; and so by way of reply, instead of apologizing, he buried his face in her neck with what he hoped would sound like the deepest possible groan of satisfaction. And the surprising thing was that she then seemed as eager as he was to pretend it had been a success: she stroked his back and nibbled at his ear. Could it be that she was used to settling for this kind of performance? He could only hope so.

  Then they were sitting up, while she put her clothes and her hair in order. “God,” she said. “Look at all those cigarettes. Did you light all those cigarettes?”

  Quint and Sam Rand were heavily asleep when he crept back into the barracks, and he took that sleepily to heart as a point of pride, a suggestion that he’d made out better than either of them.

  But there was no chance to mention it in the morning, or even to drop sly hints about it, because it was their last morning at Meade and was filled with hectic activity: packing and inspections and roll calls by short-tempered noncoms.

  Well before noon they were marched out into the snow – many hundreds of them, well over a thousand – and herded into a northbound train. In the cramped, overheated day-coach Prentice had ample opportunity for letting it be known that he’d made out last night, but he couldn’t find the words and wasn’t at all sure he would say them if he could. He was afraid that Sam Rand might say something like, “Well, I guess that makes you a big man now, don’t it, Prentice?” And Quint might only draw his mouth to one side and shake his head in mild, derisive amusement. Maybe all Quint had done with the other girl, Nancy, was to pay for her beer and put her on the bus for hom
e; maybe that was all you were supposed to do with girls like that, if you had any pride. And now he allowed his mind to dwell on another, uglier aspect of the thing. Hadn’t the V.D. movies all made it clear that a rubber was never really enough protection? Shouldn’t he have gone to a pro station afterwards? He hadn’t even – Jesus! – hadn’t even taken a shower. He felt naked and tender under all the layers of winter clothing and long underwear, crawling with loathsome germs. And how long did it take for the first symptoms to show?

  Camp Shanks, deep in the woods northwest of New York, turned out to be a maze of long, low tarpaper huts whose air was heavy with coal smoke from pot-bellied stoves and with the sweet smell of cosmoline in which the factory-new rifles came embedded. Once you had cleaned and oiled your rifle at Shanks there was nothing to do but sit around and talk, or listen to the talk, and almost all the talk was of despair.

  “… hell, I wouldn’t mind if I was trained. Get your full sixteen weeks’ basic, join a regular outfit for your advanced training, get to know your job and your buddies, and then go over. I mean that’s soldiering, you know what I mean? This way, shit – grab your ass and throw you into the line with a bunch of goddam strangers and use you for cannon fodder; that’s all they’re doing. I don’t mind telling you, I’m scared shitless.”