Читать книгу The Committee - Sterling Watson - Страница 16

TEN

Stall had graduated from Williams College in 1943 at the age of twenty and finished a year of graduate school at the University of Virginia before his draft board back home in Greenville had decided that a minor spinal curvature should no longer delay his rendezvous with the German 88. Most of the soldiers he had trained with at Fort Dix were eighteen years old. Stall, at twenty-one, was called Pappy by the boys of his squad. Frank Vane had been younger than Stall when they’d gone to war. Vane, he later learned, had enlisted at seventeen.

And Stall remembered, as he walked through the blazing August afternoon toward University Avenue and the CI, that during the brief time when he had known Frank Vane, the younger man had seemed to look up to him, seemed to think of him as the more worldly, the more intelligent, of their accidental pair. But Stall hadn’t given this much thought. Even then, he had known that young men were creatures of wild enthusiasms and strong passions. They formed easy friendships and fierce loyalties, all of which could be broken at the hint of an insult or the twitch of a skirt. He had considered Vane a good companion, fine company on an exciting journey, nothing more than that. Stall remembered getting drunk with Vane on their first night in Paris and pledging eternal friendship. The Two Friends, they called themselves in broken French. Les Deux Copains. At that time, everyone in Paris was drunk and all were friends. The German Army had only been gone from the City of Light for four months. The best wines and cognacs that had been hidden in cellars all over the city had been resurrected and were being served in liberal portions to the American liberators, and every man in an American uniform was a hero.

On that first night in Paris, Stall and Vane had drunk their share, and in the morning, Vane had been too much the worse for his wine to leave his bed. After knocking on Vane’s door and hearing the sound of retching, Stall had gone in search of Paris without his young friend, and the Paris he had found was Brigitte. And after that, he had seen very little of Frank Vane. Neither had said much about Stall’s sudden departure from their happy twosome, Les Deux Copains, but Vane had known, Stall was sure, what was going on. Stall had found a girl. Soldiers did that. In the presence of death, life sought life. For all Stall knew, the army would soon declare him fit to return to the front, to the last bitter fighting that would end the war. The fighting later known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Stall, with four years of an English major behind him, knew the phrase carpe diem. Had even read some of Epicurus who had said, It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living a pleasant life. Vane, four years his junior and only a high school graduate, knew little Latin and less Greek, but must have felt as strongly as Stall did what all of the soldiers who crowded the streets of Montmartre felt. They were young, far from home, temporarily unrestrained by sergeants and lieutenants, and surrounded by the pleasantness of wine and women, many of them willing.

Stall opened the door of the CI, felt the blessed blast of air-

conditioning, heard the incessant jukebox playing the hit of the moment, “It’s Only Make Believe.” Conway Twitty. What an unlikely name, Stall thought, too strange to be invented. But a beautiful song, a song full of truth plainly stated. “My only prayer will be / Someday you’ll care for me. / But it’s only make believe.” Stall suddenly saw an image of himself on his knees before Maureen speaking the words of the song. Begging for her forgiveness, pleading with her to take him back.

He stopped just inside the door, smelled hamburger grilling behind the lunch counter to his left, and surveyed the large dining room. A man waved to him from a table in the far corner. A man with one arm.

Frank Vane stood when Stall approached the table, and Stall’s eyes could not help but go to the coat sleeve, turned up and sewn. What would Frank Vane be now, Stall asked himself as he tried to fit a smile to his lips? Thirty-two years old? The man who stood waiting for him looked older than that, looked a little weary, a little pinched around the eyes and the corners of the mouth, as though a lot of what he had tasted in the last thirteen years had been bitter. But his light-gray summer suit and regimental tie were fashionable and, Stall could see, expensive, and the look on his face was confident. Frank Vane extended his right hand for Stall to shake, and Stall thought, Lucky it was the left arm he lost. Vane’s grip was firm and brief.

When they were seated, Vane said, “I took the liberty of ordering coffee for us.” Then: “I went back to see her after you were sent home. Actually, not really to see her. I just went back to the pension where we spent a couple of days. I bet you don’t remember what it was called.” Vane waited, lifted his coffee cup to his lips and sipped.

Stall’s coffee was untouched on the table in front of him. He could not remember the name of the pension.

“It was Le Petit Cavalier. Like I said, I went back, about a month later, on my next furlough. You were already back in, what was it, Greenville?”

Stall nodded. He had been separated from the army because his fever never fell below 99.5 degrees. Another degree, a normal temperature, would have sent him back to the front. The army doctor who signed the papers that sent him home, a kindly, avuncular man who seemed to consider Stall an intriguing case, said, “I’d send you back to your squad, but your fever might spike and it’d take two men out of the fighting to haul you back here.”

The mathematics of war were usually merciless, but for Stall this time the numbers were mercy. He received his honorable discharge and his CIB, and later, in the mail came the black leather box with the blue felt lining that contained his Purple Heart.

He hung around Greenville for a while, staying with his parents and generally considering everything life offered him dreary and meaningless, and then he conquered what he later realized was a deep melancholia, and returned to the University of Virginia to finish his PhD in English. And it was there, in the library carrels and the classrooms, and in his grad student apartment with Maureen, that Stall had made up his mind. Despite all that had happened to him thus far in his young life, he would love the world. The choice was simple, one thing or the other, affirm life or deny it. It was sometimes a dirty world, but he chose to love it.

“Yeah, it was Greenville,” he said to Frank Vane, “and then on to UVA, and after that, here.”

“An enviable career so far, a good life.”

“So far.” Stall could not keep the grim note from his voice. “You were telling me about going back to Paris.”

“You’re thinking I looked for your girl, but I didn’t. I just wanted to stay in the place where we stayed. I knew you’d met someone, but I didn’t know who she was. I wanted to sleep in the same seedy little flop and see the sights again, see if I could hold my liquor a little better the second time around.”

“So how did you . . . ?”

“She came looking for me. Or rather for someone who might know you. The owners of the pension told her you’d been there with another GI. And when I showed up again, they called her. It was about a month after you . . . spent some time with her, and you know what a girl knows after a month goes by.”

“She told you she was pregnant with my child?”

Vane looked at Stall for a long time. “Imagine how tough that was for her, Tom. She was only fifteen. Did you know that when you got involved with her that way?”

What could he say? He had not known. She had seemed far older than her fifteen years and seven months. Maybe war, occupation, did that to young girls, made them look and act older than their years. Stall had seen boys in combat become old men in a few days. He said, “No, I didn’t know. I suppose I thought she was at least eighteen or nineteen.”

“And that would have been all right?”

Vane’s face was blank. Stall saw no reproach in his eyes and heard none in his voice. He said, “Yeah, I suppose so. In a foreign country. In wartime. The French were . . .”

“More sophisticated than we were?”

“Sure.”

“Not Brigitte.”

There it was. The first sign of Frank Vane’s anger. Something in his eyes that said he had known the girl well, the girl Stall had known for only two days. The girl Stall had loved for two days.

And yes, he had told Brigitte he loved her, and he had meant it. And when the army had ordered him home, he had promised himself he would see her again, had imagined it like a scene in a movie, getting off the train at the Gare du Nord and walking with his musette bag over his shoulder, the handsome veteran with the slight limp (actually, the only proof of his wound was a scar the size of a dime behind his thigh) making his way up the street to the little pastry shop where her parents toiled for a modest living, and surprising her there, the beautiful girl who had waited for him, had spurned all the blandishments of men to wait for him, and Brigitte looking up from the napoleons she was making and smiling with a dot of flour on her pretty nose.

And what happened then? What happened after the girl with the flour on her nose looked up and smiled? It was the question Stall could never answer. And it was the want of an answer that kept him from going back to find Brigitte, and as the years passed, it was the never going back that made him forget her little by little until the night when he asked himself, as he lay beside the sweetly sleeping Maureen, if he had ever really loved Brigitte, and the answer came whispering out of the darkness: I don’t know.

Frank Vane said, “Brigitte was not sophisticated. She was a kid trying to act more grown up than she really was, and she was caught up in all that excitement, all that freedom after four years of occupation. Didn’t you notice how thin she was, or was that something a man could ignore in the throes of passion?”