Brotherhood Of War: The Lieutenants Part 38

"I don't mean to cast a pall on your welcome, Craig," he said, "but what are the arrangements for medical treatment?"

"I'm going to go into New York," Craig said. "To Governors Island. Tomorrow."

"Do you have to?" his mother asked. "There are perfectly good doctors we can call here."

"Craig is a soldier, darling," Andre Pretier said. "Soldiers do what they're ordered to do." He smiled at Craig. "I'll tell the chauffeur," he said. "Have him stand by, so to speak."

"You know, even with him sitting there in his soldier suit," his mother said, "I, really can't believe that he is a soldier." She smiled at her son. "Do you have to wear it all the time?"

"No," he said. "As a matter of fact, I'd like to change out of it right now."

"I'm sure you would," she said. "But finish your drink, first."

The butler held out an open box of cigars to Craig. After he had taken one, the box was placed on the coffee table.

Andre Pretier bent over him and held out a match.

"That's vulgar, darling," his mother said, when he bit the end off and spat it out. "Grandpa has a little knife he uses. If you're going to smoke cigars, you really should get one of those little knives."

"They call them cutters, I think," Andre Pretier said.

"You should have gotten one when you were at Dunhill's," his mother said. "Why didn't you think of it?" Craig drained his drink.

"I think I'll change clothing," he said. "Will you excuse me?"

"We've put your things in your old room, darling. Remember?" his mother said.

"Yes, of course," he said.

He walked up the thickly carpeted stairway to the second floor, and down a wide corridor toward his old room, actually two rooms, at the end of it. A maid was vacuuming the carpet.

She shut the machine off and smiled at him shyly until he pa.s.sed. He had a mental image of Ilse kneeling by her scrub bucket in the 97th General Hospital.

He went into the bedroom of the small suite and took the sling off very carefully. Then he took off his jacket and his necktie and his shirt and pulled off his T-shirt. The shirt stuck to dried what ever it was leaking from the bandage at his elbow.

He rang for a servant.

The butler came right away. Craig told him to bring bandages and gauze and Mercurochrome.

When the butler came back, Andre Pretier was with him.

"Your mother thought I might be able to help," he said.

When he saw the bandages, he said, "I'd rather your mother didn't see that."

"Me, too," Lowell said. He pulled the adhesive tape loose and held his arm out for the butler to rebandage.

"They said that if there was suppuration, they would probably keep me in the hospital on Governors Island for a couple of days," Craig said. "How do you want to handle that?"

"Why don't you just say you're spending a couple of days with friends?" Andre Pretier said. "That way she won't worry."

"Why don't you tell her I called and said that?" Craig said.

"I ,think that would be best," Andre Pretier said. "And now I'll go down and tell her that Kermeth is perfectly capable of helping you."

When Pretier had gone, Craig asked Kermeth to pack a bag for him, enough clothing for a week or ten days, one uniform, the rest civilian clothing, and to put it into the car he would be using in the morning.

He had breakfast alone the next morning. The Master and Madame, Kermeth told him, seldom rose before ten; and then they had breakfast in their room. After he had breakfast, he walked out the front door where the chauffeur was waiting, holding open the rear door of an ornately sculptured automobile Craig didn't recognize.

"What is this thing, anyway?" Craig asked.

"It is a Delahaye with a body by Fortin," the chauffeur said.

"It is Mr. Pretier's automobile."

"Very nice," Craig said. "Have you been with Mr. Pretier long?"

"Oh, yes, sir." Well, that seemed to confirm it. Pretier had money of his own. He had not married Craig's mother for her money. He wondered why he had married her.

"I want to go to the Morgan Guaranty Trust on 53rd Street first," Craig said. "And then to the Federal Building."

" And then to Governors Island, sir?"

"No. After the Federal Building, we're going to Newark," Craig said.

(Ten) In Newark, after they'd driven past the Old Warsaw Bakery on the comer of Chancellor Avenue and Aldine Street and he knew he'd found what he was looking for, he told the chauffeur to drop him at the comer and that he wouldn't need him anymore.

There was a line of people waiting to buy bread and rolls; and two pictures of the Mouse were over the cash register, one in his cadet uniform, one in pinks and greens. Two little American flags were crossed proudly above them.

He set his bag down on the tile floor and after a moment sat on it. He waited there for about five minutes until the line went down. Then the slight, pleasant-faced, shy-appearing woman with her black hair in a bun, dressed in a too-large white baker's smock saw him for the first time.

She looked at him very strangely, and then she came from behind the gla.s.s display cases and walked up to him. He stood up.

"Craig?" she asked.

"Sharon?"

Sharon Lavinsky Felter stood on her tiptoes and kissed Craig Lowell on the cheek.

"Sandy wrote you'd come," she said. "I'm so glad you did." A couch in Felter's flat over the bakery opened up into a double bed, and he slept in that.

Three days later, he took a cab from the Felters' flat back into New York, although Mr. Felter had offered to drive him anywhere in the world he wanted to go.

He met his grandfather at the Borough of Manhattan Court House, where a judge took about five minutes to declare him an adult in the eyes of the law. Next he went to the Federal Building and picked up his pa.s.sport, then to LaGuardia Airport where he caught Trans World Airlines Flight 307, a Lockheed Constellation, New York-Paris, with a stopover at Gander Field, Newfoundland. He told the captain in the emba.s.sy in Paris who handled, entry permits for the American Zone of Occupied Germany that he was a student who wished to visit his aunt, Major Florence Horter, at the 97th General Hospital in Frankfurt. The captain telephoned Major Horter to verify his story. She met him at the Hauptbahnhof in Frankfurt. She was alone.

"I wasn't sure that you were going to get away with this," she said. "And I didn't want Ilse to get upset."

"I said I'd be back in about a month," he said. "It's twenty six days. I'm back. And anyway, Ilse's pretty tough."

"Ilse's four months' pregnant," Major Horter said. "Chew on that for a while, Sonny boy."

(Eleven) Craig W. Lowell and Ilse von Greiffenberg were married by the pastor of St. Luke's Protestant (Lutheran) Church in Frankfurt am Main, with Major Florence Horter as their only attendant.

The pastor had mixed feelings about the whole thing. For one thing, the groom's great good spirits were at least partially inspired by alcohol. The bride was obviously pregnant. He had serious doubts if they had considered all the ramifications of marriage, temporal and spiritual. But they seemed to be in love; and at least the American was trying to do the right thing. There were literally thousands of girls bearing the children of American soldiers who would not marry them.

After the wedding, the newly married couple went to Oberursel. There after a long and frustrating search, Ilse and Major Horter had found a small, but clean, apartment where Ilse would wait until her immigration papers were processed. The groom undressed, and Major Horter changed his dressings while the bride looked on, making little noises of sympathy: Then Major Horter left the couple with her wedding gift to them, three bottles of Moet champagne, and a book, So You're Going To Have a Baby? Before she left, Major Horter and Lieutenant Lowell went shopping in the Frankfurt post exchange for all the things Ilse would need while she waited to go to America. Ilse was a German national, and German nationals were prohibited by regulation from entering post exchanges. She waited in the car, nervously twisting the four-carat diamond ring on her finger.

She knew it couldn't be real-where would Craig get that kind of money?-but she thought that it was beautiful anyway.

IX.

(One) Student Officer Company The United States Armor School, Fort Knox, Kentucky 30 October 1946 Student Officer Company, The Armor School (SOC- T AS) was a collection of two-story wooden barracks painted yellowish white with green shingled roofs. They were spread out to conform to the contours of the low hill on which they had been built, and were generally centered around a two-story administrative building and a single-story orderly room. The latter was two standard orderly rooms-built together. A standard mess hall capable of seating 750 troops had been converted to form slightly more luxurious dining facilities for officers (instead of twelve-man plank tables, there were four-man tables covered with oilcloth). It was placed on the edge of the cl.u.s.ter of buildings overlooking the cla.s.sroom buildings built on the flat land below.

Each of the student BOQs was identical. They were slightly longer than standard enlisted barracks. There were six suites on each side of a corridor running down the center of the buildings. Each suite contained two bedrooms, each furnished with an iron bed, a chest of drawers, a desk, a straight-backed chair, and an armchair. A bath, consisting of a water closet, a double sink, and a tin-walled and concrete-floored shower, connected the two rooms of each suite. In each barrack, one of the two-room suites had been set aside for use as a "recreation room," which was a euphemism for bar.

Having been a.s.signed to Room 16-A of Building T-455, Second Lieutenant Craig W. Lowell lifted his luggage-a canvas Valu-Pak and a nearly new leather suitcase, stamped with his father's initials-from the back seat of a Chevrolet sedan.

He found Building T-455 and then, on the second floor, Room 16-A. He had some trouble making his key operate the lock on the door, but he finally managed to get it open. He walked into the room and looked around at the bed, the desk, and the armchair. He tossed the suitcases on the bed, and one by one unpacked them. He hung the uniform and the civilian clothing in the doorless closet, and then put his shirts and his linen in the chest of drawer's. When the suitcases were empty, he put the suitcases in the closet.

He opened the door, found the bath, urinated, and then, after a moment's hesitation, knocked on the door opening to the other room.

"Come!" a deep voice called.

He stepped inside, smiling. He was surprised to see a very large, very black man lying on the iron bed, dressed only in a pair of white jockey shorts.

"Surprise, surprise!" the black man said to him. When Lowell didn't reply, he added, "You're not in the wrong place, white boy; but then, neither am I."

"My name is Craig Lowell," Lowell said.

"And I know what you're thinking, Craig Lowell," the black man said to him.

"Do you?"

"h.e.l.l, they put me in with a dinge!" the black man said.

"What I was actually thinking was that you're the biggest c.o.o.n I've ever seen," Lowell said. "Excuse me, black boy." He pulled the door closed and went back through his room and outside. He got back in the Chevrolet and went to the PX and bought a Zenith Transoceanic portable radio to replace the one that had gotten blown away at No. 12 Company. That accomplished, he went through the PX scooping up things he thought he would need, from shaving cream to shoe polish to half a dozen paperbacks from the newsstand rack. He put everything in the car and then found the liquor store. He bought scotch and gin and vermouth and asked for ale, but there was none. Then he went back to the PX and bought a carton labeled, "A complete set of household gla.s.sware," and put it in the car.

Finally, he drove back to Room 16-A of Building T-455.

He put away the things he had bought, unpacked his complete collection of gla.s.ses, rinsed out one, and poured scotch into it. There was probably ice around somewhere, he thought, hut he decided against going to look for it. He had grown used to iceless whiskey in Greece. He diluted it with water from the bathroom and then unpacked the Zenith from its box. He put the empty gla.s.s carton and the empty radio carton in the hall and pulled the desk across the floor next to the bed, so he could put the radio on it. Then he plugged it in, went through the broadcast band, found nothing he liked, and finally got some cla.s.sical music, fuzzy, with static, but listenable, on the 20meter band. He lay down on the bed and picked up one of the paperbacks.

There was a knock at the bathroom door.

"Come," Lowell called.

The black man, still in his underwear, stepped inside the room.

"You aren't the biggest white boy I've ever seen," he said.

"But you're not actually a midget, yourself." Lowell said nothing.

"Phil Parker," the black man said.

"h.e.l.lo," Lowell said.

"I thought you went to ask for alternate accommodations," Parker said.

"I went to get booze," Lowell said. "You want scotch or gin, help yourself."

"Thank you," Parker said. He poured scotch in a gla.s.s. "you always drink it without ice?"

"I do when I don't have any ice," Lowell replied.

Parker picked up the pitcher which came with the complete set of household gla.s.sware and walked out of the room. When he returned the pitcher was full of ice.

"You are a man of many talents, Phil Parker," Lowell said, holding up his gla.s.s. "Where did you get the ice?"

"There's a rec room, read bar, down the hall," Parker said, dropping two cubes into Lowell's gla.s.s. He met Lowell's eyes.

"I would have gone to the Cla.s.s Six myself, except I thought common decency required that I stick around until someone moved in here. In case, for some reason, having seen me, he might want to move out."

"You want to go half on a refrigerator?" Lowell asked. "I don't want to keep running down the hall for ice like a bellboy, and I do like a cold beer sometimes."

Parker looked at Lowell for a moment before replying. The easiest thing to do was take him at face value as a man who wasn't a bigot. But he had been down that road before. A belief in racial equality sometimes was a fragile thing in the face of peer pressure.

He decided to take a chance. There was something special about this guy.

"There's something you should know about me," Parker said. "Before we become bosom buddies."

"What's that?"

"I'm going to be the honor graduate of this course," Parker said.

"Why in the world would you want to do something like that?" Lowell replied, astonished.

"I'm dead serious, Lowell," Parker said. "That's what you do, if you're colored, and a regular army officer," Parker said.

"You do better than the white guys, just to stay even with them."

"Regular army? Funny, you don't look stupid."

"Actually, I'm a near genius," Parker said. "But it may be necessary for me to study at night once in a while. I become violent when someone disturbs me when I am studying. I thought you should be forewarned."

"Do you know where we could buy a refrigerator?" Lowell asked. "The PX?"

"That's not the way it's done," Parker said.

"It's not?"