She was no longer interested in Moby Dick. “But now you like the Russian better. Are you a Communist?”
“It’s so human,” Pops said. He was thinking that he could introduce her to literature, be her teacher, educate her. She clearly had curiosity, and curiosity was a sure sign of intelligence. He could be a Socrates in his own Meno for what could well be the last two or three weeks of his life. “War and Peace takes place during the Napoleonic Wars in Russia.” He lay back down, considering this new idea, thinking that then she would always remember him, the doomed young sailor who changed her life. “So it’s early nineteenth century. It has an incredible cast of characters, all levels of society, all kinds of people, a wonderful hero—two heroes, actually—and one of the most interesting heroines—”
“Don’t tell me,” her voice interrupted him. He thought she must be bored, and probably wasn’t ready for a project the size of War and Peace, which logged in at about 1,400 pages in his Modern Library edition at home. He wondered where to begin with her—Thucydides? Pride and Prejudice? The Scarlet Letter? He didn’t think he himself ever wanted to read Gone with the Wind, but for her that might make a good first step. But did he have time to waste on such a first step? Not Shakespeare. Huckleberry Finn? Not Aeschylus. Little Women? He heard his own voice saying, “Little Women, have you read that? It’s a bible for all the girls I know.” His voice sounded to him as if it were from a distance, babbling. “My sisters loved it, my female cousins, all their friends.”
When Pops awoke, the sand was cool under the blanket, and the eastern rim of the world, off at the ocean’s distant edge, was fading from pearly gray to pink. He had no memory of the night, as if he had slept the unbroken sleep he only remembered these days: the kind of sleep he hadn’t enjoyed since his last summer on the Cape, the summer of 1941; the kind of sleep the anxiety of senior year and then the anxiety of his time in history had made impossible. Rolling over, seeing the girl silhouetted at the water’s edge, looking out, he didn’t think it was sex that had granted him such a sleep. Sex like that, he would have to remember it, wouldn’t he? Because he hadn’t had anything to drink, had he?
Rida, that was her name. She seemed to sense his awakened state and turned from the horizon to approach him. The rising sun backlit her windblown hair, and he stood up. “What are you doing here?” he asked her.
“You fell asleep,” she told him.
“I know that.”
“Do you know any place you could get me a breakfast? Because I ate my picnic for lunch yesterday and by now I’m really hungry,” Mumma said. “The bus leaves at noon and I haven’t packed, so I have to get back. Now that you’re awake,” she reproached him.
He walked her to her quarters, carrying the red bag, apologizing for his ignorance of all-night eateries, promising that he would find her some breakfast, somehow, and he’d be back ASAP with food. She told him that the USO troupe was leaving that day on a ten-day tour of the islands. He discovered that hunger made Mumma snappish, so he gave up trying to talk to her. He left her at the steps to the women’s barracks, and by the time he got back she had packed, changed into khaki coveralls for the journey, and was in a fine bad temper.
“Is that beer still buried in the sand?” he asked, offering first a banana, then a milk bottle, being sure to wait until she had bitten into her second doughnut before he took anything for himself.
“I never drink,” she said, and glared at him, daring him to contradict. “You can go back for it, if you want it so badly. But you drink too much.”
Pops didn’t argue and he didn’t make excuses. Having nothing better to do, he walked her over to the camouflaged bus, into which girls carrying duffel bags climbed. They waited for the driver, also female but older than the USO girls, and the WAC officer in charge of getting the show to the airport.
“Where will you be performing?” he asked.
“The walls have ears,” she answered, “but I’ll be back.”
He knew—although he didn’t say it—that in two days’ time she would have forgotten him. After ten days, he would have become one of a mass of uniformed young men, all faceless.
Mumma seemed to read his mind. “You can take me to dinner my first night back. Six o’clock, a week from Thursday.”
“If we’re still in port.”
“You will be,” she told him.
They stood face-to-face by the bus, waiting for the final call. “You can kiss me goodbye,” she told him. So he did, bending over because she was so short, and as they kissed she placed a warm palm softly against his cheek. He drew up at the end, feeling bemused and oddly satisfied. Also, distinctly eager to kiss her again. She looked up at him, her mahogany eyes sparkling. “You love me.”
“No I don’t. I can’t, really, you know. There’s a girl, back home.” He realized that for the last fourteen hours he had forgotten Abigail as thoroughly as he had forgotten his own imminent death, although when you propose to a girl because you’re confident that you won’t live to marry her, it’s the kind of engagement a man might easily forget. “I’m engaged.”
“That’s all right,” Mumma said. “I am too. With the ring to prove it. In fact”—she laughed softly, reaching up to touch his cheek again in a gesture he found more intimate and seductive even than the willing softness of her mouth—“I’ve got four of them. Rings, I mean. I mean, I have the fiancés too.” And then it was time to get on the bus, and she left him with a careless backward wave of her hand.
• • •
Immediately, Pops started to accept the fact that he’d never see her again, which was actually—now that he thought clearheadedly about it—something of a relief. She disturbed his equanimity. She undermined the stoicism he had worked so hard to achieve. And she thought he drank too much. Also, she had—by her own admission—four fiancés, four men she had encouraged enough to propose marriage, each of whom she had accepted. And she had never—also by her own admission—even heard of Moby Dick. He could almost hear his mother asking, “Is she really your kind of girl, Spencer? This—what did you say her name was? Something melodramatic, rather affected, don’t you think? Rida? Not your type at all, I’d think. Oh, but,” the voice growing indulgent, “I should remember that you’re at war.” His mother’s was the voice of reason, the voice of his better self, and that voice gently inquired, “You haven’t forgotten the promises you made to Abigail, have you? But I know you’ll do the right thing, Spencer. You’ve been brought up to do the right thing.”
Pops spent the next ten days alone—or, perhaps more accurately, apart from Mumma, because one of the most discouraging things for a man like Pops about being in the service was the lack of solitude, so he was not ever alone, as he remembered it, as he told the stories. Low-ranking young officers shared living quarters with other low-ranking young officers, and unlike the prospects in the two other branches of the military, a battlefield promotion to a rank offering more private quarters wasn’t likely, since his particular field of battle tended to go down with all hands.
Pops filled those ten days with drink and dread in the relentless company of his fellows, checking in supplies and stores, making sure the radio room was outfitted for the ship’s upcoming tour of duty. He forgot about Mumma, her return and their dinner date, until another lieutenant j.g. announced at morning mess that the USO girls were giving a show on Saturday and that he for one intended to be at whatever they were using for a stage door, with whatever he could find by way of flowers with which to attract to himself the companionship of whoever was available to him. Pops was nursing a relatively minor hangover, so it wasn’t until the words “USO girls” penetrated his consciousness that he remembered his date, and the girl Rida. But it all happened in time for him to bow out of the poker game and be waiting at the foot of the stairs when she emerged from the wooden barracks, wearing a sky-blue dress splotched with yellow flowers, her bright red hair in its usual disorder.
“Hi there,” she said, holding out her hand to shake
his as if they had never kissed and she had never touched his cheek in that way, which was in fact the same seductive way she later sometimes touched the faces of her daughters, saying “What a little face,” as she cupped it within her palms, delighted that it was just that particular little face she was looking into.
“Good tour?” he asked, shaking the offered hand.
“I read the whole thing.” She tucked her left hand under his right arm to walk off with him.
“The whole what thing?” He couldn’t help noticing that she wore a ring on every visible finger of the hand that had wrapped itself around his arm.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked. “Because I’m real hungry. I hope it’s got good food.”
“War and Peace?” he guessed.
“What did you think? And it was a good thing that the prince died, wasn’t it? Because otherwise Natasha wouldn’t have been able to marry the count, who makes a much better husband. Did you think, when you read it, that there are some men—like you—who are destined not to die in whatever war is going on? Like that count, even though he was pretty stupid about risking his own life.”
“You read all of War and Peace?”
“You didn’t tell me how long it is. You could have warned me. But it’s okay, I’m a fast reader.”
He took her to the Officers’ Club, where she seemed pleased to talk—and dance—with anybody who came by. His shipmate Rob pulled a chair up to the table for two that Pops had booked and invited himself to join them for dinner.
“Spence is a pretty limited conversationalist,” Rob told Rida, who listened with interest. Pops could tell she thought Rob was amusing, which he was, a born comedian. “He’s a Gloomy Gus, which can’t be much fun for a girl like you.”
“Like me meaning what?” Mumma asked.
“Meaning a real live wire. Now, I’m a talker. I’m good at talking, and Marty”—a second chair was pulled up and they were joined by the second young officer, who greeted Rida like an old friend even though he’d met her only once, and briefly—“Marty dances like a dream. Like Fred Astaire.”
“And you’ve got that Ginger Rogers look about you,” Marty added, a comparison particularly appreciated by someone like Mumma, someone with short and not shapely legs, however delicate her ankles. “I’m right, aren’t I? You do like dancing?”
“Who doesn’t?” Mumma riposted. She sipped at her ginger ale, then asked, “What about him? What’s special about Spencer, unless you can only talk about yourselves? What’s he got to offer a girl?”
“You’ve got me there,” Marty said, and grinned at Pops, while Rob suggested, “Looks?” and Marty realized, “He’s nice, you know, a nice guy.”
“Between the three of us, we make one perfect man,” Rob announced. “If you don’t mind there being three.”
Mumma laughed, delighted.
“Like Cerberus,” Pops suggested.
“Who’s Cerberus when he’s at home?” Mumma made a joke of it.
“That’s what I mean by gloomy,” Marty remarked, and Rob agreed.
“But I can learn things from him,” Mumma told them. “I get smarter every time I talk to him.” (“They were falling in love with me and I didn’t want them to get their hopes up,” she told us.) “Spencer’s educated.”
“We’re all educated,” Marty protested.
“But he’s really interested in it, he really likes it, and you two think—You think education is like some suit of clothing, if you pay for it you have it, and the more expensive it is the more you can be sure it’s better than anybody else’s. But education’s not like that, it’s like a meal, you have to eat it to have it. Except, really, education is like a smile. I mean, a good smile. A good smile makes people smile back at you, and if you’re educated, when you talk to people, you make them smarter. But you don’t care about education, it’s just something somebody bought for you,” Mumma told Marty. “I bet you’ve never read…oh, War and Peace. No, I didn’t think so. Or Moby Dick either I bet. I don’t think any the less of you, I promise. And I surely do love to dance.” She covered the back of Marty’s hand with one of hers, the one bearing all the rings, adding, “and I am a big talker,” as she covered the back of Rob’s hand with the other. She raised her face to smile at Pops. “So who is this Cerberus?”
Much later in the evening, Mumma and Pops went to a bar so small it didn’t even have room for tables. They set two chairs side by side on an open patio, facing across the sand to black water that surged onto the shore like some great blind animal in the throes of death, or of birth, struggling for breath just beyond their sight. Over the water, stars crowded the sky, in the dark of the moon.
“You’re a flirt,” Pops said to Mumma. The statement was in part the result of observing her all evening with Rob and Marty, but even more it concerned her several engagements. All evening, these had been worrying him. He had decided that she didn’t know what moral peril she had put herself in. As the evening went on, he had determined to help her toward a clearer position vis-à-vis men, and herself, and also her life. “You’re a terrible flirt.”
“No I’m not.” Mumma had ordered a stinger, arguing—when Pops reminded her that she said she never drank—that something so sweet was dessert, not drinking. And who was he to complain at her about drinking anyway? She’d been counting; he’d had too many. “In fact, I’m pretty good at flirting. It’s not as easy as it looks, you know. I bet you think it’s easy, but I notice you don’t even try.”
“Who are these fiancés?” he asked. “How can you have four of them?”
She held out her left hand, for both of them to admire. “I never wear just one of the rings. I always wear all four if I wear any. I don’t like to play favorites.”
He didn’t know how to respond. Was she joking? Should he laugh? Or if he laughed, would she just get insulted, and if she were to feel he’d insulted her, what would she do? What would a girl like this do, if she thought you were laughing at her? This unpredictable girl, this Rida. He almost wanted to try to insult her to find out. A sudden curiosity on this subject burned in him, but he couldn’t think of how to go about it, so he stuck to his point. “Who are they?”
She told him, name, age, service, rank.
“And every one of them said he wanted to marry you? And loved you?”
“Of course.”
“And you in turn told every one of them you’d marry him? I mean,” he paused to give more weight to the point, “you said yes to each one when he proposed?”
“Of course.”
“You promised that you’d be faithful to him, in your heart, and,” Pops struggled to express his sense of the weightiness of betrothal, “not flirt, for one thing, with anyone else. Not kiss anyone else. Not fall in love with anyone else.”
“Of course not. Why would I promise any of those things? I never promised anything like that. I only said yes I’d marry them. I write to them, at least once a week, or every ten days sometimes, and each one gets his own different letter, not just the same letter sent to four different places.”
“Do they know about one another?”
“Of course.” She could see that he was confused, so she explained. “Each one does think he’s the real one, that’s only human nature. But they’re just boys, and they’re going to war.” She looked at him measuringly. “You aren’t going to think badly of me, are you?” Then she smiled. “No, you won’t. Because you love me, so you don’t want to, so you won’t. Probably you’re jealous.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Pops said.
In the shadowy light from the low candles, she peered into his face for a long time. “No, you never would be jealous, would you.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Is your fiancée the jealous type?” Mumma asked. “Because I know some girls aren’t. I’m not. What’s her name? You should tell me her name. I feel sorry for her, you know?”
“Why would you feel sorry for Abigail?”
“Becaus
e I’m guessing she’s like that Hélène. Remember her? With the shoulders?”
Pops remembered. “Abigail’s not…sexy.” He hesitated, wondering if that was an acceptable word to use with this girl, but she seemed unoffended by it. Then he started to wonder why she wasn’t offended, but he got distracted by what she’d just implied about him. “That would make me Pierre.”
“Hélène isn’t sexy either, she just looks like it and besides, it’s not just sexy women men fall in love with. You know that. Anybody knows that. Men aren’t so dumb as everybody says.”
“I don’t think I’m as muddle-minded as Pierre,” Pops said, although he would have to admit that he might be as clumsy. “Tell me more about your fiancés.”
Happy to talk, Mumma started with Tony because, “We’ve been engaged the longest, almost a year.”
The next evening Pops took her out again, and then they spent the weekend in each other’s company, from morning until late at night. During the days Pops spent with Mumma, he had no time to think about his forthcoming death and his implacable fears. He had, for one thing, these men, these fiancés, to get her to do right by. If she wanted to insist to him that he was in love with her, he would deal with that misapprehension later, after he’d helped her clear up this mess she had made.
They talked about other things, too. Of course. She asked him about the schools he went to and no sooner had he recited their prestigious names than she informed him that she wasn’t sure she liked the sound of a family that sent its children away at such a young age.
He thought that perhaps her orphaned state was the root cause of her inability to turn down suitors. “If I asked, you’d probably get engaged to me, too.”
They were on the beach, in bathing suits. No Rita Hayworth, Rida did not appear to advantage in her one-piece suit. She looked round, and soft, like an overripe pear, but she seemed unaware of this. And in fact to Spencer Howland she was plump and delicious, a succulent pear. She was also easy to be with, and fun, and lively. She kept surprising him and making him laugh, and letting him forget where he was, and why. She supported Roosevelt and admired Eleanor, although she “didn’t blame him a bit for the other women because what man wants to always be talking about everything that’s going wrong in the world? He loves her, though. Anyone can tell. I’m not so sure about her, though. What do you think—do you think she really loves him? You know this kind of people, don’t you? I don’t—how could I? Although, I tend to think people are pretty much the same, no matter how much money they have. But don’t go thinking I’m a Communist. I expect to take care of myself.”