The Young Lions Part 31

Noah saw her before she saw him. She was peering, a little short-sightedly, through the milling soldiers and women and dusty potted palms. She looked pale and anxious. The smile that broke over her face when he came up behind her and lightly touched her elbow and said, "Mrs. Ackerman, I presume," was on the brink of tears.

They kissed as though they were all alone.

"Now," Noah said softly, "now, now ..."

"Don't worry," she said, "I'm not going to cry."

She stood back, holding him at arm's length, and peered at him. "It's the first time," she said, "the first time I've seen you in uniform."

"How do I look?"

Her mouth trembled a little. "Horrible," she said.

Then they both laughed.

"Let's go upstairs," he said.

"We can't."

"Why not?" Noah asked, feeling a clutching sense of disaster.

"I couldn't get a room here. Full up. That's all right." She touched his face and chuckled at the despair she saw there. "We have a place. A rooming house down the street. Don't look like that."

They joined hands and went out of the hotel. They walked down the street silently, looking at each other from time to time. Noah was conscious of the polite, approving stares of the soldiers they pa.s.sed who had no wives, no girls, and were only going to get drunk that afternoon.

The rooming house needed painting. The porch was overgrown with grape vines and the bottom step was broken. "Be careful," Hope said. "Don't fall through. This would be an awful time to break your leg."

The door was opened for them by the landlady. She was a thin old woman in a dirty gray ap.r.o.n. She stared coldly at Noah, exuding a smell of sweat, age and dishwater. "This your husband?" she asked, her bony hand on the doork.n.o.b.

"Yes," said Hope. "This is my husband."

"Ummm," said the landlady, and did not smile when Noah grinned politely at her. The landlady watched them as they mounted the stairs.

"This is worse than inspection," Noah whispered as he followed Hope toward the door of their room.

"What's inspection?" Hope asked.

"I'll tell you," Noah said, "some other time."

Then the door closed behind them. The room was small, with one window with a cracked pane. The wallpaper was so old and faded that the pattern looked as though it somehow was growing out of the wall. The bed was chipped white iron and there were obvious lumps under the grayish spread. But Hope had put a small bunch of jonquils in a gla.s.s on the dresser and her hairbrush was there, sign of marriage and civilization, and she had put a small photograph of Noah, laughing, in a sweater, taken on a summer holiday, under the flowers.

They avoided looking at each other, embarra.s.sed.

"I had to show her our marriage license," Hope said, "The landlady."

"What?" Noah asked.

"Our marriage license. She said you had to fight tooth and nail to maintain a respectable establishment with a hundred thousand drunken soldiers loose on the town."

Noah grinned and shook his head wonderingly. "Who told you to bring the license down?"

Hope touched the flowers. "I carry it around with me," she said, "all the time, these days. In my handbag. To remind me ..."

Noah walked slowly over to the door. There was an iron key in the lock. He turned it. The clumsy noise of the primitive tumblers screeched through the room. "There," he said, "I've been thinking about doing this for seven months. Locking a door."

Suddenly Hope ducked her head. But she brought it up again quickly, and Noah saw she was holding a small box in her hands. "Here," she said, "I brought you something."

Noah took the box in his hands. He thought of the ten dollars for the gift, and the note at the bottom of his barracks bag, the ragged slip of paper with the sardonic "Tough" on it. As he opened the box, he made himself forget the ten dollars. That could wait until Monday.

There were chocolate cookies in the box.

"Taste them," Hope said. "I'm happy to say I didn't make them myself. I got my mother to bake them and send them on to me."

Noah bit into one of the cookies and they tasted like home. He ate another one. "It was a wonderful idea," he said.

"Take them off," Hope said fiercely. "Take off those d.a.m.ned clothes."

The next morning they went out for breakfast late. After breakfast they strolled through the few streets of the small town. People were coming home from church and children in their best clothes were walking in restless, bored dignity among the faded lawns. You never saw children in camp, and it gave a homely and pleasant air to the morning.

A drunken soldier walked with severe attention to his feet, along the sidewalk, glowering at the churchgoers fiercely, as though daring them to criticize his piety or his right to be drunk before noon on a Sunday morning. When he reached Hope and Noah, he saluted grandly, and said, "Sssh. Don't tell the MP's," and marched sternly ahead.

"Man yesterday," Noah said, "on the bus, saw your picture."

"What was the report?" Hope picked softly at his arm with her fingertips. "Negative or positive?"

"'A garden,' he said, 'a garden on a morning in May.'"

Hope chuckled. "This Army," she said, "will never win the war with men like that."

"He also said, 'By G.o.d, I'm going to get married myself, before they shoot me.'"

Hope chuckled again and then grew sober thinking about the last two words. But she didn't say anything. She could only stay one week and there was not time to be wasted talking about matters like that.

"Will you be able to come in every night?" she asked.

Noah nodded. "If I have to bribe every MP in the area," he said. "Friday night I may not be able to manage it, but every other night ..." He looked around regretfully at the shabby, mean town, dusty in the sun, with the ten saloons lining the streets in neon gaudiness. "It's too bad you don't have a better place to spend the week ..."

"Nonsense," Hope said. "I'm crazy about this town. It reminds me of the Riviera."

"You ever been on the Riviera?"

"No."

Noah squinted across the railroad tracks where the Negro section sweltered, privies and unpainted board among the rutted roads. "You're right," he said. "It reminds me of the Riviera, too."

"You ever been to the Riviera?"

"No."

They grinned. Then they walked in silence. For a moment Hope leaned her head on his shoulder. "How long?" she asked. "How long do you think?"

He knew what she was talking about, but he asked, "How long what?"

"How long is it going to last? The war ..."

A small Negro child was sitting in the dust, gravely caressing a rooster. Noah squinted at him. The rooster seemed to doze, half hypnotized by the movement of the gentle black hands.

"Not long," Noah said. "Not long at all. That's what everybody says."

"You wouldn't lie to your wife, would you?"

"Not a chance," Noah said. "I know a Sergeant at Regimental Headquarters and he says they don't think we'll ever get a chance to fight at all, our division. He says the Colonel's sore as can be, because the Colonel is bucking for BG."

"What's BG?"

"Brigadier General."

"Am I very stupid, not knowing?"

Noah chuckled. "Yep," he said. "I'm crazy about stupid women."

"I'm so glad," Hope said. "I'm delighted." They turned around without signaling each other, as though they had simultaneous lines to the same reservoir of impulses, and started walking back toward the rooming house. "I hope the son of a b.i.t.c.h never makes it," Hope said dreamily, after awhile.

"Makes what?" Noah asked, puzzled.

"BG."

They walked in silence for a minute.

"I have a great idea," Hope said.

"What?"

"Let's go back to our room and lock the door." She grinned at him and they walked a little faster toward their rooming house.

There was a knock on the door and the landlady's voice clanged through the peeling wood. "Mrs. Ackerman. Mrs. Ackerman, I would like to see you for a moment, please."

Hope frowned at the door, then shrugged her shoulders. "I'll be right down," she called.

She turned to Noah. "You stay right where you are," she said. "I'll be back in a minute."

She kissed his ear, then unlocked the door and went out. Noah lay back on the bed, staring through mild, half-closed eyes up at the stained ceiling. He dozed, with the Sunday afternoon coming to a warm, drowsy close outside the window, with a locomotive whistle sounding somewhere far off and lonely soldiers' voices singing, "You make time and you make love dandy, You make swell mola.s.ses candy, But, honey, are you makin' any money, That's all I want to know," on the street below. Drowsily, he knew he'd heard that song before. Then he remembered Roger and that Roger was dead. But before he could think much about it, he fell asleep.

He was wakened by the slow closing of the door. He opened his eyes a slit, smiling gently as he saw Hope standing above him.

"Noah," she said, "you have to get up."

"Later," he said. "Much later. Come on down here."

"No," she said, and her voice was flat. "You've got-to get up now."

He sat up. "What's the matter?"

"The landlady," Hope said. "The landlady says we have to get out right away."

Noah shook his head to clear it because he knew he was not getting this straight. "Now," he said, "let's hear it again."

"The landlady says we have to get out."

"Darling," Noah said patiently, "you must have gotten it a little mixed up."

"It's not mixed up." Hope's face was strained and tense. "It's absolutely straight. We have to get out."

"Why? Didn't you take this room for a week?"

"Yes," said Hope, "I took it for a week. But the landlady says I got it under false pretenses. She said she didn't realize we were Jews."

Noah stood up and slowly went over to the bureau. He looked at his smiling picture under the jonquils. The jonquils were getting dry and crackly around the edges.

"She said," Hope went on, "that she suspected from the name, but that I didn't look Jewish. Then when she saw you she began to wonder. Then she asked me and I said, of course we were Jewish."

"Poor Hope," Noah said softly. "I apologize."

"None of that," Hope said. "I never want to hear anything like that from you again. Don't you ever apologize to me for anything."

"All right," Noah said. He touched the flowers vaguely, with a drifting small movement of his fingers. The jonquils felt tender and dead. "I suppose we ought to pack," he said.

"Yes," said Hope. She got out her bag and put it on the bed and opened it. "It's nothing personal," Hope said. "It's a rule of the house, the landlady said."

"I'm glad to know it's nothing personal," Noah said.

"It's not so bad." Hope began to put the pink soft clothes into her bag, in the crisp folded way she had of packing anything. "We'll just go down the street and find another place."

Noah touched the hairbrush on the dresser. It had a worn silver back, with a heavy old-fashioned design of Victorian leaves on it. It shown dully in the dusty, shaded light of the room. "No," he said, "we won't find another place."

"But we can't stay here ..."

"We won't stay here and we won't find another place," Noah said, keeping his voice even and emotionless.

"I don't know what you mean." Hope stopped her packing and looked at him.

"I mean that we'll walk down to the terminal and we'll find out when a bus is leaving for New York and you'll get on it."

There was silence in the room. Hope just stood there, looking solemn and reflective, staring at the rosy underclothes tucked away in the bag on the bed. "You know," she whispered, "this is the only week I can get in G.o.d knows how long. And we don't know what will happen to you. You may be shipped to Africa, to Guadalca.n.a.l, any place, next week, and ..."

"I think there's a bus leaving at five o'clock," Noah said.

"Darling ..." Hope did not move from her sober, thoughtful position in front of the bed. "I'm sure we could find another place in this town ..."