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.