Chapter VI: Part 6

They toasted Roosevelt. They drank rounds to the annihilation of Hitler, of Goering, and of Goebbels. When Flannagan left them to catch a train for Dobbs Ferry, Larry felt the floor slide under his feet. Bemrose sprawled in the chair, his face bathed in a colossal contentment. He didn’t look like a man who had been squared off in a uniform a few hours before.

Larry thought of Arthur’s offer to loan Flannagan money. One more drink and he’ll offer me some dough to take care of Bessie if I come in with him.

The fool. The crazy, lonesome, patriotic fool. Larry felt sorry for the loneliness of all men, for Arthur’s hankering to have a brother with whom he could go to war, for his own fatal dependence on the warmth of Bessie, for Tom’s loneliness in the child-cluttered house at Dobbs Ferry. It was the loneliness of those who stayed and those who went to war. He knew the ones who went would be lonely in the midst of ten thousand others. Years after it was over they would feel bereft, missing the special loneliness that had bound them to those other lonely thousands.

“I told you she dreamed it out of her head,” Bemrose said irrelevantly. “I followed through on it just to be sure, but I knew all the time----”

Larry read the telegram Bemrose handed him, signed by the F.B.I. in Washington. The message read: RICHTER CASE CLOSED STOP UNABLE TO TURN UP FURTHER EVIDENCE.

“Right out of her head,” Arthur repeated. “Some of them have the damndest imaginations.” He tore up the telegram and scattered the bits in a dirty green ash tray. “I thought she was different. I thought she stuck to the facts.”

“I ran into Steve Holmes,” Larry said. “He told me she’s back from the Coast. Holmes must be seeing a lot of her.”

“Old friend of hers from Kansas,” Bemrose said affably. “Are you going to see her someday?” He seemed slap-happy satisfied to settle for Major, glad to forget about his woman trouble and pretend the War was an answer.

“Holmes mentioned getting together with them----”

Bemrose raised an important finger. “Tell her she dreamed it up. Tell her you read the official telegram.” He let the finger join his hand which dropped loosely beside the chair. “There’s not a thing wrong with that fellow Richter. Not a thing. Female fantasy. Ask the F.B.I. They say it’s fantasy. Remember that word when you see her,” he instructed Larry. “How about a drink on getting into the Air Force? How about celebrating?”

Arthur’s contentment with things as they had become expanded like rising yeast. It was as though Larry could see the fleshy cells of satisfaction multiply. The radius of Arthur’s delight ringed the next table. Quietly he leaned toward a gray-haired man and, rocking on the legs of his chair, toasted him. The stranger, seduced by Bemrose’s show of fellowship, automatically responded. Arthur swung his mellow light back to Larry and let it soften the air between them. “I want to do right by her,” he said proudly.

“By Janice?”

Bemrose nodded. “I always meant to. Mistake, walking off. I should have said why. She’s a good, smart girl. I should have had a talk with her. Meant to the other day at the office. Slipped my mind.”

Larry nodded encouragement while Bemrose mowed through his pockets for change.

“If you really think you bitched things up--I can find out where she is from Holmes. You ought to have a talk. She wants to tell you something about why she went to Sweden. It was a misunderstanding, Arthur. You both went off half cocked.” Larry pointed to a pay telephone on the wall. “Shall I try Holmes?”

“When I come up from Maxwell Field. Not now,” Bemrose said. “When I find out what they’re going to do with me. I’m only going to be around New York another twenty-four hours.”

Larry must have looked unhappy.

“When I come home on leave,” Bemrose promised.

Larry’s fingers followed the ridges in his forehead. “She may be in China by then! If you _want_ to talk to her----”

“Let’s pay and get out of here,” Bemrose said soothingly. “When I get back, we’ll have a long, long talk. She’s a smart girl, and she’ll understand when I tell her--” He settled his hat deep over his eyes with the extra caution of a man who had confined himself to double Martinis. “Don’t you worry, Larry.” He soothed him with his voice.

“But she may do something screwball, like marrying Holmes.”

“Not a thing to that.” Arthur took his arm. “Just an old friend from Kansas. Don’t you worry. Someday we’re going to have a good long talk, and then it’ll be all right.”

Larry crowded into a compartment of the revolving door with Bemrose, and they wheeled sideways into the dark rumble of the street.

_Chapter 13_

For the dinner he arranged with Lucy and Janice, Larry picked the Orangerie at the Astor where the atmosphere would be weighted on Lucy’s side. At a more exclusive spot like the Marguery, Janice would hold the aces, and Lucy, who was likely to be self-conscious anyway around Janice, might blur out.

The Astor was a slice of small-and-big town America, the crowded front porch of Broadway. It was the city’s cracker barrel on the main stem where all were welcome to gather round. They came by cab, on foot, in trolleys and busses, through the ample doors into a murky plush lobby where they waited. The timid shrank gratefully against camouflaging columns. The bold kept a hawk’s eye on the door, alert to select their prey from the damp, moving stream at the entrance.

The fickle March evening had alternated between rain and snow, and Larry called for Lucy. She had been living at the Daughertys’ the past six weeks. He hoped on the way over that the weather wouldn’t button her into those ugly tweeds Bemrose had selected for her in the fall, and was glad to see that she had the good sense to wear a well-cut black coat instead. It formed a solid pedestal for her gray-blonde softness.

Janice was too busy to be called for. He had tried to arrange for the dinner two weeks ago, but Janice was in Washington, and until six o’clock tonight, wasn’t sure of being able to make it. _Everett’s_ had assigned her to do a profile of a Major-General who shifted his headquarters every few days. Yes, she’d love to meet Larry for dinner if she could leave right afterward. If Arthur’s wife weren’t formal and would understand. If--well, Steve Holmes might join them later and see that she got to the General’s. If Larry were sure he didn’t mind about Steve. If he understood that her evenings weren’t her own, and she had to work. If she could come just as she was without going home to change. If he really thought it was a good idea for her to meet Mrs. Bemrose. If he’d buy her a couple of drinks before dinner because she was going to need them, and if he didn’t mind her cough. She had caught it on an air-conditioned train, and her voice sounded awful.

Larry told her he’d like to have her come.

With Lucy beside him he waited a damp twenty minutes in the Astor lobby, bone chilled from a draft that blew through the doorway. Janice arrived at last dripping ten dollars worth of Schiaparelli’s _Shocking_ and a new mink coat. Her blonde suède gloves were crushed at the forearms. Her hair was fresh from Elizabeth Arden’s, and the scratchy throat had evidently been restored by an otolaryngologist. Larry was glad to see her. He forgot the crick in his neck from watching people walk through the door, and patiently auditioned her excuses. Quite a few other people waiting for late dates seemed glad to see her too.

Upstairs in the citrus lighted dining room Larry saw at once it was the wrong tone for Janice’s mustard-colored dress but did nice things for Lucy’s skin. The Orangerie transformed her from the slender, inconspicuous woman who had followed Janice’s minks up the marble stairway to her own soft blonde harmony. When she slipped out of her coat, a simple black dress with draped neckline set off the pallor of her gray eyes.

Janice, evading Lucy at first and hesitating to take a real look at her, chatted to Larry of her troubles with the General’s public relations officer and complained about the dullness as a rule of military men. No first-class writer should be assigned to them, she maintained. While Janice pecked her harmless complaints at Larry, a clear, clean light seemed to emanate from Lucy. It was like viewing a morning glory which had just opened.

Janice turned toward her. “How does Arthur like the Army? I’ve been meaning to write and congratulate him on his commission.”

The quiet confidence growing in Lucy sent color to her cheeks. “He’s going to Miami Beach to help organize an Air Force Training Center, one of the biggest new schools in the country for officers.”

“What do you think of that?” Larry asked with the respect of a civilian for someone who does well in the Army. “He’s only been in a few weeks. How did he manage----?”

“He’s been promised a promotion so that they can make him director of one of the schools,” Lucy added.

The skin tightened across the bridge of Janice’s nose, and the dark eyes went cold.

“He says they can’t make him director of the school unless they do promote him,” Lucy explained.

“The T.O. must call for a lieutenant colonel,” Janice said.

“T.O.?” Larry asked.

“Table of organization. It tells an outfit how many officers of each rank it’s entitled to have,” Janice explained. “This officer I have to interview got a second star because his new post calls for a Major-General. If not for that, he would probably still be a one star general.”

“It’s wonderful recognition for Bemrose,” Larry said. “Wonderful.”

“Order me a drink, will you, Larry?” Janice asked.

He called a waiter. “Did Arthur say when he will leave Maxwell Field for Miami?” he asked Lucy.

“Tonight or tomorrow. Before the end of the week.”

“Not a bad spot, Miami. You can count on Arthur to pick the right place.” He looked at Janice. “Sounds all right, doesn’t it?”

“It’s all right,” Janice conceded. “It’s certainly good for the Air Force. They’re getting rid of the brass hats and that’s a good sign. Arthur’s going to be good for the Air Force, all right.” Her fingermarks showed on her water goblet where she had gripped it. “He’ll earn every cent they pay him. He’d earn it if they decided to make him a lieutenant _general_ instead of a lieutenant colonel.”

“What’s the matter then? Isn’t it going to be good for _him_?” Larry asked.

Janice looked tentatively at Lucy. “I don’t know. What do you think, Mrs. Bemrose? A lot of men couldn’t take all the success he’s had. Now in six weeks a military success and all kinds of authority--it takes a strong man to stand up to that.” She shrugged. “Maybe Arthur can swing it.”

Lucy meticulously sipped her clear consommé, her eyelids steady.

A party brushed past their table and as Janice watched them cross the room, she recognized someone with a birdlike forty-year-old face under snowy hair. Excusing herself, she followed them. “That’s Ward Oliver of the State Department,” she explained hastily. “He’s just back from China after being away for years. I missed him in Washington. He’s one of my oldest and best friends.” A look of affectionate warmth came into her eyes.

Larry sent Janice’s soup to the kitchen until she returned, and kept watch at the same time on Lucy. She lifted the dark eyebrows that made her eyes look paler, and a question shadowed them. “Have they known each other long?” she asked.

“Not very long.”

“But well.”

“She’s been around,” Larry agreed. “She knows how to hurry through the preliminaries. Have some more soup while we’re waiting?”

Lucy shook her head. “Do _you_ think this new job--” The gray eyes appealed to Larry.

“Janice always worries about people being able to handle power when they get it,” Larry explained. “I don’t think she’s particularly concerned about Arthur, but--well, she worries. She’s scared to death that when this country has pitched in and won the War, we’ll come out drunk with power and start throwing our weight around. We won’t be satisfied to let other people go back and live their own way. That’s the kind of thing she’s afraid of.”

Lucy listened audibly. It was her gift. “So is Arthur afraid of people misusing power,” she said.

“Janice goes way beyond him,” Larry explained. “I don’t think she would trust any man with power. Not unless he were elected to it, and could have it voted away. She’s particularly against personal power, the kind that doesn’t show.”

“They should have gotten along,” Lucy said. “If they think alike----”

“They’re both suspicious by nature. I’m not sure Arthur trusted her any more than she would trust him.”

“She acted as if there were something wrong about Arthur being promoted. He didn’t ask to be promoted.”

“Of course not. And he didn’t pull strings to get his commission. Anyone else with his record on Lend-Lease-- I can’t see it hurting him or inflating him too much. If I were you, I’d forget what she said.”

Janice slipped back into her chair. “Ward Oliver feels pretty black about the picture out there. He says there’s no hope of saving Java.” Her mouth was rigid. “The Indies are as good as gone, too, and the Australians are scared to death of an invasion. Ward stopped in Melbourne on his way home. There’s not much for us to do right now except take it. We can’t fight Hitler and move an Army out there at the same time. Ward says--” Janice stopped short, and her lips thinned to a knife edge. “Sorry, it may have been confidential--I’d better not repeat it.”

“Everybody’s pushing for us to pitch in,” Larry complained. “Strike here. Strike there. That’s all they know.” He motioned the waiter to serve Janice her dinner.

“Uncle Ed keeps saying we ought to take it easy and feel our way gradually,” Lucy said.

“The only trouble with that is, it won’t win the War,” Janice replied. “Someone high up in the State Department seems to be pushing for an offensive on the Continent right away,” she added. “There’s one group that thinks we’re prepared and could get away with it.”

“People are restless. They want to get into action,” Larry pointed out. “It’s three months since Pearl Harbor, and we still don’t feel like we’re at war. People want to get going. To do something. If they could tighten their belts a notch, they’d feel better.”

“My friend, Oliver, is close to the Generalissimo,” Janice said.

Larry started at the mental jump from one war to another.

“The Generalissimo told him a month ago that he was going to appoint Stilwell.”

“It was only in the paper yesterday,” Lucy said, smoothing a fluff of hair from her cheek. “I miss Arthur. He used to tell me what was going on. I don’t get as much out of the papers when I have to read them alone and he isn’t around to answer questions for me.”

Inscrutably Janice studied her, and the skin seemed to tighten over her cheekbones.

* * * * *

Larry walked with Janice as far as the elevator at the St. Regis and tried to say goodnight. The evening had been somewhat of a strain. During coffee he looked at his watch several times, hoping that Janice would leave for her appointment with the General, or that Steve Holmes would arrive and take over, but instead she phoned the General’s aide and found they had put her off again.

Janice and Lucy seemed to bring out the worst in each other. It was like a grainy enlargement of a photograph which magnified every blemish. Larry knew something about photography, and had seen negatives develop grain no matter what developer was used. The scratches, the bits of dust that marred the film showed up worse than they should. The emulsion began to swell and add defects of its own to the picture. A similar chemical reaction seemed to take place between Janice and Lucy. He began to think it was a bad idea to have brought them together. He hoped Bemrose wouldn’t mind if Lucy wrote him about the evening. After all, Bemrose had wanted Larry to keep in touch with both of them, and if he had stayed in New York, he would have invited Janice to the house sooner or later. It was just as well for Lucy to meet her casually this way through him instead of through Arthur.

When they reached the lobby of the St. Regis where Janice was staying, she pulled Larry into the gold elevator car with her. They had dropped Lucy uptown.

In her hotel sitting room Janice poured two jiggers of Scotch and downed hers before she took off her hat. “What made him do it? I thought Steve Holmes was exaggerating. For Christ’s sake, what made him do it?” Janice plucked at the amethyst brooch that glowed dully against the brighter gold of her dress.

“She never says for Christ’s sake.” Larry sat down next to a table littered with typewritten pages and reference books on China.

Janice paced the room, her shoulders tilted forward. “You think he wanted someone he could depend on to have nice manners?”

Larry planted his stubby hands on her shoulders. “Take it easy. She’s not as bad as all that.”

He poured her another drink from the cut glass decanter on her desk. “If you want me to tell you why he married her, I can’t. I’m not smart enough. Besides, I like her.”

“There’s nothing to dislike about her,” Janice agreed.

“I’m not sure Arthur thinks so. Does that make you feel better?”

She slumped in the tapestry wing chair. “He wasn’t happy before he was married. I didn’t make him any happier.”

“Maybe he enjoyed his misery more.”

The tears rolled down her cheeks disconnected from her emotions like water pouring from a mechanical doll.

She pointed to the books about China on the table next to him. “I’m going out there to work. _Everett’s_ has an assignment for me.”

Larry didn’t say anything this time about her running away.

“He’s going to Florida. Didn’t you hear his wife say he was?” She moved her shoulders hopelessly.

“Trains run to Miami. It’s not like trying to take a train back from China,” Larry said. “This war is going to be tough enough. I wouldn’t complicate things----”

“They’re simple now, aren’t they?” she asked bitterly. “What will I tell him? That I think he made a mistake?”

“Why not give _him_ a chance to do the talking? You’re so used to running the show your way. You don’t give other people a chance.”

“How do I know my agent won’t ring me tomorrow and tell me I’m on my way out there?”

“Grow up, Jan! You’ve overworked that one.”

The steel-like structure of her chin gave way and her lips trembled.

“You’ll feel better after you see him,” Larry promised.

He was standing in front of her, and she took hold of her knees, pressing her head against his legs. “When you have an address, let me know. I’ll manage something,” she promised.

The muffled loneliness of her voice stayed with Larry all night and came back in the muted rhythm of the train that took him to Florida three weeks later.

_PART III_

_Chapter 14_

Arthur had been taken ill suddenly in Miami. All that Larry knew about it was what Major Graystone, a reluctant Army doctor, had been willing to tell him by long-distance telephone. The major said that Colonel Bemrose had exhausted himself working long hours and was in the hospital. It sounded like a heart attack to Larry. He decided to go right down to Miami and promised to wire Lucy as soon as he learned the details.

Larry settled back against the dusty plush of the Pullman seat and closed his eyes. The call from Lucy had reached him that morning ten minutes after he arrived at the office. It took him an hour to locate Major Graystone by telephone, and the rest of the morning to put his cases in the hands of another lawyer. Bessie had his bag packed when he reached home, and she rode with him to Penn Station where crowds of service men jammed the concourse waiting for trains.

It was unusually muggy for April. Moisture beaded Bessie’s lip as they waited in the crowd for the gate to open. Her cheeks showed brightly under her rouge. She unbuttoned the coat of her gray sharkskin suit and fanned her hips with it. Larry saw that she looked worried.

He had kept himself from worrying all day by tending to the details of the trip. Now he wanted to sleep before dinner. If he speculated on Bemrose’s illness, he might think of it as more serious than it was. The important thing right now was to get some rest. Fortunately he had the section to himself and stretched his stubby legs on the seat opposite, noting that his dark green socks didn’t go with the red tie he had on.

At Trenton a shuffling in the aisle and angry voice woke him.

“We’ve been back there, and there ain’t none,” a tired blond sergeant explained to the conductor. “Last night was the same thing. We had our tickets, and no seats. We’re too tired to stand.”

The conductor’s oak leaf nose curled thin and long. He examined the tickets which the sergeant and his friends handed him. “These are coach tickets,” he said in a high, strangled voice. “You can’t sit in a Pullman with these.”

“There ain’t no coach seats. We been back there,” the sergeant wearily repeated.

Larry moved toward the window and motioned the boys to sit down. The conductor grudgingly returned their tickets. “Okay, but when the folks with this space turn up, you’ll have to clear out.”

Joe, the sergeant, sat next to Larry, and the other three crowded into the seat opposite.

“Joe’s still got ’em. He can’t take a chance riding backward,” grinned a skinny corporal with buck teeth.

A feckless smile hovered around the sergeant’s lips.

“You boys have a rough night?” Larry asked.

“The vestibule wouldn’t have been bad if we had along our field gear,” the one in the middle replied. “I slept anyway. I guess I can sleep standing.” Guiltily he eyed the sergeant. “It was nice and cool out there.”

Before the train reached North Philadelphia, Larry knew all about it. Dark-eyed Gerry, short for Geramina, did most of the talking. Occasionally the sergeant inserted an anemic word, and the aisle and window occupants endorsed the details with a vigorous, “You said it!”

They had been shipped from Boston after eating a fish dinner that gave them dysentery. A fellow could sit down with dysentery, they explained, but wasn’t much good on standing. They had coach tickets for the trip from Boston. The train was jammed, and there were no seats. After remaining vertical as long as they could, they went to the diner for a late supper. The sight of food didn’t appeal to them, but they had to find an excuse to sit down. They had a couple of beers and got acquainted with the dining car steward who had a nephew in the Philippines before Pearl Harbor. When they told him about last night’s fish, he brought them boiled rice to wash down with the beers. Rice was supposed to be good for the trots. It was nine o’clock when they finished eating, and they made a deal with the steward to sleep on the diner floor. In an hour, he told them, the car would be clean and everyone out. They brought their blue barracks bags back with them for pillows and had just settled down for the night when the conductor came through and kicked them out. The s.o.b. didn’t just tell them to go. He waited there until he saw them leave. They had to lug the bulky bags back five cars to the coaches, bumping through the aisles and knocking against people who were undressing behind curtains. Pulling and tugging luggage didn’t do much for their condition, and when they reached the coaches, one whiff of the smoke-fouled air was plenty. They headed for the outside vestibule, and spent the night retching, trying meanwhile to keep their balance on the shifting platform. Someone gave up on the sergeant’s bag; so he stood all night and was feeling shot today.

Larry took a good look at the kids who seemed young enough to be put to bed by their mamas. They had gone through a tough training period, and in another few months would be making juicy targets for the Nazis. They needed their sleep, and while civilians like himself stretched out in clean berths, they rode in a grimy train vestibule all night. It didn’t make sense.

Larry reached for his wallet and handed his pink sleeper reservation to the sergeant. Joe thanked him but said he was getting off soon and wouldn’t need a berth. Larry tried to persuade the kid to let him have it made up now so that he could sleep a few hours before he got off the train, but Joe didn’t want the others to stand. Then Larry tried to buy them all a drink, but they were afraid of going to the club car and having another argument with the conductor.

At North Philadelphia a mob, heavy with luggage, crowded from the station platform into the cars. Larry watched to see whether the ticket holders for his section put in an appearance, but the kids were in luck. Not only the space in Larry’s section but some seats across the aisle remained empty. The train jogged past the Philadelphia streets filled with their red and white houses, announcing that in a democracy things are sometimes uniform as well as equal, and eased into the lower level of Thirtieth Street station. Three more soldiers wandered in, and were greeted by Gerry and the boys. They belonged to the same outfit and had been looking for a place to sit down since Trenton. Joe pointed to the empty seats across the aisle, and the new crowd started to move in.

“You boys got Pullman tickets?” It was old Leaf Nose.

“Coach.”

“You can’t sit here.”

A baby-faced private first-class with pink cheeks and a lone stripe wistfully pointed to the boys sitting with Larry.

“They got to go back to the coach, too,” the conductor decided.

“They’re sick boys, and they had to stand up all night,” Larry protested.

Old Leaf Nose clucked, his voice plated with sarcasm. “That _still_ don’t give ’em seats. This company ain’t in charity, it’s in business.”

“I guess you want to lose your pension rights,” Larry squeezed the words through a corner of his mouth. “This story will look good on the front page of my paper.”

“They ain’t entitled to sit here without tickets.”

Larry took out a pencil and used the back of an envelope to make notes. “How do you spell your name? I want the readers of the paper in New York to spot a patriotic citizen.”

A corny gag, but it seemed to work. The conductor nervously plucked the rubber bands on his black leather book.

“I’d let ’em sit here if they had reservations.” Cautiously he moved down the aisle.

“Your initials,” Larry threatened. “People ought to find out how the Company is helping the War.”

“Okay, _you_ take the responsibility.” Old Leaf Nose shuffled away.

“It worked!” Larry rubbed his knees delightedly.

“What paper y’ on?” Gerry smiled.

“I’m a lawyer.” Larry felt good, and they grinned their appreciation.

He needed a smoke and left them griping about some detail they had been handed at the last barracks. The sergeant hoisted his bag to the seat, spit on his handkerchief, and went to work on the memoirs of the night before.

They were good kids. It was easy to see how Bemrose might have overdone it, working with them. Larry pushed aside the thought of Bemrose and grabbed the moving curtains of the men’s room entrance. He slid along a black leather bench next to the window.

When he woke with a crick in his neck and the smell of a fifteen cent cigar in his nostrils, night showed under the green window shade. Larry rubbed his broad nose in his palm and, rousing himself, dug in his pocket for a cigarette. A man in a torn undershirt was splashing water on his beard. Larry decided that some cold water wouldn’t hurt him either, and got up to wipe his face with a damp towel.

“I hope the Statler saves a room for me. You going to Washington?” asked a hawk-faced traveler of two hundred pounds with hard gray eyes. He moved over on the bench to make room for Larry. “They’re sleeping in the men’s room down there.” His middle quivered with the joke. “If you’re lucky, they’ll rent you a can in the men’s room for only five bucks.”

“I’ve been to Washington twice, and I’m goin’ again. They refuse me a priority this time, and I’m out of business,” said a man in blue serge at the water cooler. “Lamp shades are my line,” he said helplessly, waiting for a thin trickle to fill the paper cup.

“You can’t tell whether you’re in or out of business,” the hawk-faced man agreed. “One minute they hand you an A-A-1 priority, and the next minute they grab back the stuff for parachutes.”

“You in lamp shades, too?” The man at the cooler looked surprised.

“Wholesale silks, but you watch and see. They’ll have us _making_ the damned ’chutes next instead of selling them the material.”

“One of those bright professors down there screwed up our priority.” As the train lurched, the man in serge grabbed the basin edge. “They promised us plenty of rayon if we compromised with them and made our frames of plastic. We switched, and now I don’t know. This teacher running the show in Washington says we’re non-essential.”

“I suppose _he’s_ essential.”

“After taxes a fellow won’t be able to make a decent profit, priority or no priority,” said the lamp manufacturer.

“Profits? Who worries about profits? I’m trying to figure out how to meet the payroll.”

Like hell you are, Larry edited silently. You’re not thinking about those kids in the next car, or the profits they’ll collect either--profits like a couple of shells in the shoulder. Fellows like Bemrose are knocking themselves out while you eat yourselves up over your lousy take. Go on, criticize. That’s what you know how to do. You’re experts.

A train jolt knocked over a heavy metal ashstand, and it fell on the size twelve shoe of the silk manufacturer. He yowled, and Larry was pleased, silently admiring the wisdom of inanimate objects.

Joe, the sergeant from back in the car, pushed through the curtain, and saw with relief, the metal tab marked “vacant.”

While he was inside, Larry told the rest of them about the kids being sick. The ashstand victim stopped nursing his foot long enough to mutter, “It’s a rotten shame.”

“What do you expect with the stinking way they run things?” The man who had changed to plastic frames looked at the dark, cool field out the window as though he’d like to crawl there and stay.

The sergeant came out of the toilet and smiled sadly in answer to Larry’s “Doing all right?” His shoulders fell forward as he pushed through the green curtain.

“Wait and see, they’ll screw things up in the Army, too,” someone said when he had left.

“A few Army guys must know the score. They’re taking some good men,” Larry pointed out.

“You wait. They won’t have the say.”

Bemrose probably won’t, Larry thought, if he’s sick as that major made him sound over the phone. Bemrose had known the score when ninety-nine percent of the others, including himself, were insulated. He knew the score by heart--about the petty bureaucrats like Old Leaf Nose who were pulling an inflated importance out of the War, and about the smoking-room commandos who talked priorities and worried about profits. Backwards and forwards Bemrose knew them, and had figured that fellows like him better see things were done right. Personally. Larry himself was a delayed-action Joe. He had to be exposed first-hand to conditions, but now he was beginning to wake up.

Chimes sounded in the passage, and the others filed out for dinner. Larry stayed with the cold black leather of the smoking room. He thought of Bemrose in the Army hospital. What if the Army gave him a discharge? Bemrose, dependent and helpless, was a skyscraper without utilities, a river cut from its source. Bemrose leaning on others, would be a cliff twisted and bent toward the river, a bleeding stone shaft. Others might welcome dependence, but Arthur had always resisted it. His was a giving philosophy, almost a warped giving. Bemrose, the Provider. The fixed vision of working for others that unfitted him for easy living with them. A twisted dream, but what became of Bemrose if it were snuffed? That’s what troubled Larry.

He decided to go to the diner. On his way to the rear, he checked in with the kids. They were playing stud poker on their barracks bags and wanted to deal him into the game, but he refused and had the porter bring them a table. A stack of match stems in front of Joe had picked him up like benzedrine. Wide awake from winning, there was color in his yellowish skin.

The littered floors of the cars, as Larry walked through, promised further wartime neglect. Already the old train equipment creaked and groaned. Larry grabbed a dirty window bar in the passage outside the diner and took his place in line. The lumpy procession advanced slowly toward the doorway a foot or so at a time.

As Larry waited to approach the entrance of the diner, he diverted himself by thinking of Lucy, and her frail kind of beauty, wondering what strength lay behind it, and whether it would stand up in the not-so-good days that threatened ahead.

_Chapter 15_

The headline on the station newsstand read: CALIFORNIA WEATHER HITS MIAMI. Larry ducked into a cab, and asked the driver to recommend a hotel. At a crawling twenty miles an hour the cab rocked from the wind. Sheets of rain curtained the windshield, and while Larry was conscious of traffic, the downpour isolated his taxi so that he couldn’t see another moving vehicle. They crossed Biscayne Bay to Miami Beach, turned into Collins Avenue, and pulled up in front of a white stucco hotel that reminded Larry of the model houses at the New York World’s Fair. When he opened the cab door, a sudden sharp squall wrenched it out of his hands. Shouting apologies to the driver, he dashed for the lobby.

A friendly clerk whose brother practiced law in New York offered him a temporary hotel room, explaining that the Army might take over before tomorrow. They were snapping up places so fast that a hotel man didn’t know from one day to the next whether he was in business. He warned Larry not to turn on any lights at night since the Beach was blacked out, and the Army and Navy were stationed there by the thousands. The Army Air Force ran a basic training center for selectees and enlisted men in Miami, an officers’ candidate school for ground force commanders, and an officers’ training school quartered in style at the Roney-Plaza up the street. It was for technical and business experts, mostly older men, whom the Air Force had commissioned in a hurry out of civilian life. These older guys went through calisthenics over at the golf course just like the youngsters. Some of them had gray hair and must be sixty, but they’d be out there sweating and bending like the kids, trying to get rid of their pot bellies. And knocking themselves out, the clerk added.

In the elevator to his room, Larry heard an Air Force wife with poinsettia cheeks complain to her companion, “They _promised_ him a pass to stay overnight, but I’ve been here a month. All I see of him is forty-five minutes a day. He studies, studies, studies. I’m sorry I came.”

“Don’t you go to the beach?” the other asked.

“The water’s full of seaweed. It’s like bathing in hot vegetable soup.” She crinkled her nose.

Larry decided it had been smart of Lucy to stay home, although maybe if she had been around, Bemrose would have had to take it easier.

The hotel room was surprisingly pleasant, with simple furniture of light wood, and raspberry colored tiles in the bathroom. Outdoors the palm trees hissed in the wind and rain, and the strip of beach below lay muddy and beaten by the storm.

Larry phoned Major Graystone who agreed to see him at the hospital after lunch.

The rain had quit by the time Larry finished shaving and went out. On Collins Avenue he passed men in khaki counting “Hup, hoop, heep, horp” as they swung along, their brown leather hitting the pavement. They had light blue notebooks firmly in hand. These must be the officer candidates, kids in their early twenties who looked as if they meant business. Around the corner Larry passed a squadron in shirts and shorts fresh from calisthenics. They ran in double time and sang the rollicking R.A.F. song, “I’ve got sixpence, pretty little sixpence.” It climbed to high C which the kids hit squarely. “Happy as the day when the airman gets his pay, as we go rolling, rolling home.”

Larry passed some of the big hotels that used to charge guests twenty-five dollars a day. Soldiers instead of doormen guarded the entrances, and a quick look through glass doors showed the lobbies stripped of carpets, furniture, and potted palms. A few slip-covered chairs symbolized the new look of clean, grim efficiency. Night clubs had been converted by the Army into daytime classrooms, and watching more men in khaki troop out of them, Larry remembered the old horse-racing and roulette Miami. He wondered how long before it would come back.

A captain walking ahead of Larry said to his wife, “Until you came down I couldn’t tell which were pretty and which I only thought were pretty. I’ve been committing mental rape.”

She laughed and clung tighter to his arm.

At the hospital Major Graystone had left word for Larry to meet him in his “office” at a nearby hotel. It turned out to have a desk, ladies’ dressing table, some bedroom chairs brightly upholstered in yellow silk, and a wall mirror. Major Graystone, a bulky man with white hair and chest expansion, looked incongruous in the pre-war setting.

“You’re the friend of Colonel Bemrose I talked to over the phone?” Tense lines divided his eyebrows. His wiry hair stood in stubborn points around a massive head. “We try to teach them to take it easy--the School hands out salt tablets and orders them to quit exercising the minute they feel it’s too much, but a lot of them keep on until they drop.”

“You mean he went in for drill?” Larry asked. “I thought he was down here with Colonel Lowell organizing the school.”

“He was, and he worked at it seventeen hours a day,” Graystone said. “Don’t you know the story? They came in on a Monday and took over the Roney-Plaza Hotel. They had it organized and running when their first group of men came in on Wednesday. It was a magnificent job. Staggering.” His small nose twitched. “Bemrose signed up for the athletic program on the side, as a volunteer, in addition to his administrative work. If he’d come to see me first--” The major fretfully scribbled on a pad next to him.

“Is it his heart?”

“No, it’s a nerve trouble, something called multiple sclerosis.”

Only nerves. Larry felt relieved. Bemrose could take it easy for a few months and pitch in again.

“Not ordinary nerves,” the medical officer explained. “It’s a disease of the central nervous system where the myelin sheaths encasing the nerve fibers degenerate, just like insulation on electric wire wearing off in spots. The nerve impulse goes through about eighty percent, and the worn areas are eventually replaced by scar tissue. These lesions can hit almost anywhere. They affect one part of the body, then another. We don’t know what causes them, and there’s no efficient treatment. Some doctors think the trouble comes from a spirochete, and they use malaria and typhoid vaccine to fight it, but so far their results have been only fair. The condition is quite rare in older--how old is Colonel Bemrose?”

“Forty-four.”

Major Graystone drew together his forehead. “I went into his history pretty thoroughly. No infections, no traumatism, just this period of extreme exhaustion before he was stricken----”

“Is he very sick?” Larry asked.

“He’s not in pain, and he won’t be. The chances are he’ll have a remission.”

He saw that Larry didn’t understand. “A period of recovery when he seems to be all right,” the major explained. “Remissions are characteristic of the disease, but then the trouble almost always returns. He can carry on,” the doctor reassured Larry. “I’ve seen patients go along for twenty years with it, keeping up most of their regular activities.”

“What are his symptoms?” Larry asked.

“His walking and his speech are affected. There’s a loss of muscle coordination. We call it an intention tremor. His arms and hands shake. His walking will be the worst----”

“He’ll need crutches?”

“I don’t know. That has to be worked out. Some of them use a cane. We have him in bed now.”

“Has he tried to walk? Is he unsteady on his feet?”

The major nodded. “Can’t coordinate,” he said. “He’ll have trouble getting around at first, but after a while he’ll learn.”

“How does he talk? Thick? Is it like a stroke?”

“He pauses between words, what we call scanning speech.”

“But anyone can understand him?”

“Oh, perfectly.”

Larry smiled. As long as Bemrose could talk, he’d be able to practice law and try cases. The walking and the tremor didn’t matter too much.

“I guess he’ll be getting out of the Army,” Larry speculated.

“We’ll have him retired. There’s nothing much we can do for him medically. Someone should watch the condition all the time, a good neurologist. When he’s back home and settled, see that he locates one.” Graystone continued to scribble triangles and wavy lines on the pad in front of him.

“When can I see him?” Larry asked. “I’d certainly be grateful, Major, if you----”

The officer picked up his phone. “Arrange for Lieutenant Willoughby to take Mr.--” He covered the mouthpiece. “Mr. Frank to visit Colonel Bemrose in H building.”

He wrote out a pass and handed it to Larry. Lifting his weary bulk, he stood up and shook hands. “He asked if you could take him home.”

“I’ll stay down until he’s ready to go.”

“If there’s anything else you want to know about his condition before you leave--” the major offered.

“Do I have to act any particular way when I see him?” Larry asked, admiring this quiet man whose voice was burned out with fatigue.

“Let him know that you’re sure he’s going to be all right. Act as confident as you can.”

Larry gripped Major Graystone’s hand. “Thanks for taking time to go over the details. I’ll wire his wife. She’s waiting to hear.”

Silently he followed the lieutenant who had been assigned to him. They passed the flawless jade pool of the Shelborne Hotel where deeply tanned officers the color of their swimming trunks were shouting to each other and tossing a volley ball. They walked by pink-blooming oleanders and hedges of fluffy sea grape. Outdoors it was warm and friendly. Larry shivered slightly as they entered the medicinal hush of H building.

The lieutenant showed the pass to a soldier at the desk. He signed it and said, “It’s the fifth floor. Give this to the nurse on duty.”

“I don’t think I’ll go up,” Larry decided abruptly. “Do you know where I can find Colonel Lowell?”

“Sure, at the Vanderbilt,” the lieutenant said. “I’m going back that way. Come on, I’ll show you.”

Larry wiped a sweaty palm on the lining of his trouser pocket. He wasn’t quite up to seeing Bemrose.

Outside the hospital his lungs reached gratefully for the moist, humid air. “Hope I didn’t put you out,” he apologized. “My friend worked for Colonel Lowell. I better talk to him first.”

The lieutenant eyed him as if civilians were a species apart. “No trouble. I can always use the exercise.”

“I understand they kill you with it down here,” Larry said. “Don’t you get up at five-thirty to drill?”

“Not me, I’ve had my basic. This is my third year in.” He pulled in his stomach self-consciously. “The only exercise I get is pushing papers on my desk.”

“Why did you sign up so long ago?” Larry asked.

The officer grinned, and he hunched his shoulders. “Figured the job had a future in it.”

There was a fifteen minute wait at the Vanderbilt outside Colonel Lowell’s office. When the adjutant showed him in, Lowell, a short, quick-moving man in his late forties, jumped up to shake hands. Larry was conscious of an oversized flag behind the desk and stiffened his spine against a chair as he sat down.

The colonel was a machine-gun talker who rapped out an account of Bemrose’s negotiations for the transfer of Miami hotels, stores, and restaurants to the Army. Colonel Bemrose knew how to handle the press and the townspeople, Lowell said. Hard feelings had been avoided, and the deals went through on the split second. No officer had contributed more to the smooth running of the school. In a few months Bemrose had chalked up a record that many a regular Army man would envy. Larry figured the colonel was West Point.

He told Larry that they still had plenty of headaches. They had the problem of putting older men, the civilian experts, in top-notch physical condition. It meant hardening them up, taking off fat, teaching personal hygiene, even giving them a voice training course so that they learned to sound like officers. Not only the men, but their women made trouble. They ran down here, hysterical, and hung on like leeches when the men needed the time for study. If they could drown the women, it would increase the efficiency of the school. Colonel Lowell nailed Larry with his intensity. He explained that he had counted on Bemrose to help him solve some of the problems. It was bad luck, having him crack at this time when things were beginning to get under way. He couldn’t understand how Bemrose had passed his physical. He must have been stringing along on low energy for years. A man doesn’t crack up from overwork unless his resistance is down to start with.

Larry began to feel guilty under the colonel’s accusations. “I haven’t seen him yet. I wanted to talk to you,” he broke in.

The colonel’s small bright eyes turned solemn. “You won’t like what you see. It isn’t a pretty sight.”

“I wondered if his retirement could be postponed.” Larry suggested. “He’s heart and soul in this thing. Maybe he’ll recover. Maybe in another few weeks--” He fumbled aimlessly in his coat pockets. “It means everything to Bemrose, being in it. If he thinks that he’s washed up-- It’s hard to say what effect it would have on a man like that to think he might be useless.”

“He can return to his law practice,” Lowell said.

“Right now the War is the only thing that interests him,” Larry explained. “He’s a one-tracked person. When he used to be busy with the law, that was the beginning and the end of everything.”

Lowell rapped his desk sharply. “I’d like to keep him. God knows I can use him! I haven’t the say. The medical officer----”

“Major Graystone?”

Lowell dismissed him by rising and extending his hand. “Damned fine record. Damned shame he cracked. The general was going to put him in for full colonel. Get in touch with me when you get home with him. Let me know how he stood the trip.”

The colonel’s clipped sentences stung in Larry’s ear as he rode into Miami on the bus, crossing the causeway behind a line of Army trucks past the leaden tankers in the bay. The man next to him pointed to a shipyard across the water and said it was working full tilt on mosquito boats for the Navy. A British cruiser lay at anchor next to a converted pleasure yacht, renamed War Emergency II. There were plenty of tankers and freighters down here, the man explained to Larry. You saw them come into the harbor almost every night, escorted by subchasers. Sometimes when there was a flash at sea, you couldn’t tell whether it was lightning or gunfire. Chances are, though, it was gunfire. The other morning some wreckage had been found on a hotel beach. It probably came from a ship that was torpedoed. The man had seen columns of fire several hundred feet high out at sea. He described them with his hands. No question about it, they came from torpedoed tankers.

Across the street the man pointed to a sign in front of a hotel that had been taken over: “Civilians keep out!”

They rode through a noisy business section of the city. “This is Jew Town,” he told Larry in the disinterested voice of a tourist guide.

In the seat behind two women gossiped. “We’ll never be able to handle them after the War. Not after their families stand out on the parade ground Sundays and see ’em drillin’ with white troops. They got the notion already they’re equal.”

As the women’s shrill voices ripped on, the dazzling white buildings that lined the thoroughfare seemed to turn a dirty yellow. Larry decided that the prejudices of the townspeople were something the Army hadn’t been able to take over.

He got off the bus, found a Western Union office, and wired Lucy to open the house and have it ready for their return. He waited at a dingy intersection for the light to change and realized that he needn’t have come miles out of his way to send the telegram. His hotel would have transmitted it. Then he remembered that he hadn’t eaten since an early breakfast on the train, and stopped at a delicatessen restaurant. He ordered a tongue omelette, but decided he wasn’t hungry when the waiter put it in front of him. Swallowing some weak coffee from a lipstick-marked cup, he got up to pay his check.

A lanky form was draped over the cashier’s desk. Larry recognized the sandy head and ugly yellow tweeds and laid a timid hand on Steve Holmes’ shoulder, not sure that the rough, awkward frame would be there the next minute.

“Oh, hullo!” Steve’s red face came to life, and his big head indicated the swinging door. “Let’s get out of this pig pen.”

They walked toward the lavish, streamlined shops of Lincoln Road. Steve told Larry he was down on a job for _Everett’s_. They had assigned him to do oil paintings of the commanding general and of a Navy man. If Jimmie Doolittle showed up, Steve was going to try and do him on his own. He had always liked that tough little so-and-so. He got the assignment because Janice had introduced him to the art editor of the magazine. It was a swell break. There was healthy money in the work.

Larry listened halfway, and refused Steve’s offer of a drink.

“Still worried about that guy?” Steve’s head twisted sharply toward him.

“This time there’s really something to worry about.”

Larry reported his talk with the medical officer, and Holmes accelerated his gait. Larry, trotting beside him in the pure white heat of early afternoon, felt a salty swamp collect inside his belt.

“Jesuschris’, that’s lousy.” Holmes’ bony shoulders lunged forward. “Have you seen him?”

“I’m on my way up there.” Larry grabbed Steve’s arm. “Say, won’t you----”

“I’d just as soon skip it for now.” Holmes slowed down. “Maybe in a day or so if you say it’s okay. Want me to walk you up?” he offered.

“Do you think I should phone Janice and let her know?” Larry asked. She could drop whatever she was doing and come down. If anyone would make Arthur feel better, she would: They could tell him that _Everett’s_ had sent her down to write the captions for Steve’s paintings.

“Phone her?” Steve looked at him. “She’s on her way to China. She left San Francisco Friday.”

“That’s the second lousy break,” Larry said.

“The third.” Steve pulled at his bulky knitted tie, the red one he had worn at Arthur’s reception. “She turned me down again, and she meant it this time.”