Night Soldiers

Followed by a year of assumptions on her part which he found, in his general malaise, difficult to resist. Of course they were engaged-thus the way was cleared for an encore of the summer lovemaking-of course the wedding would be in June. Suddenly, it seemed to have gone long past the point where he could say that they weren’t quite right for each other. Long past. She would scream, she would weep, she would be so terribly hurt. That he’d used her. No, he couldn’t face it. He would marry and have it over with. What was he waiting for? The Walker clan had money, he’d be rid of Bister. The sobering responsibilities of family life would brace him up, steady him down-one couldn’t stay single forever. And his own family would surely approve.

He glanced at the calendar on the wall. December 5. Friday. Friday? Friday! Suddenly, his joy was crushed by an ominous shadow that filled the opaque green glass panel beside the open door to his cubicle. That could only be Mr. Drowne, who liked to loom up above his victims before he pounced.

“Say Bob?” He leaned his upper half around the door frame.

“Yes, Mr. Drowne?”

“Got that Deems copy all tied up?”

“Working on it, sir.”

“Read me what you have there.”

“Uh, I’m only, ah, formulating here.”

“Bob …”

“Brush your teeth with Deems, Your smile needs those gleams!” The affected perkiness in his voice sounded shrill and desperate.

Mr. Drowne shook his head mournfully. “You’re not selling smiles, Bob. You’re supposed to be selling taste. Mint. Remember mint?” He reached over and picked up the open tooth powder can and rapped it twice on the desk. A little cloud of minted smoke puffed up through the holes.

“I’ll keep after it, Mr. Drowne.”

“Plans for the weekend, Bob?”

“I’m going to the football game on Sunday. Giants versus Dodgers, at the Polo Grounds.”

“Yes, well, enjoy yourself, but do make certain that finished copy is on my desk when I come in Monday. Okay? If that means a little elbow grease on the weekend, well …”

“I’ll get it done, sir.”

Mr. Drowne produced his usual departure sound-the sigh of the oft-betrayed man-then trudged off to his next victim.

Out the window, the snow drifted down onto the Christmas shoppers hurrying along Lexington, carrying green and red parcels. The shop windows had wreaths and little silver bells on granular snow. Above the glass panel in front of his desk, the face of Bister rose slowly, like a sea monster. “Formulating, Bob?” His eyes glowed with spite.

Eidenbaugh grabbed for a weapon, and Bister disappeared instantly with what could only be described as a chortle. He looked down at his hand and saw that he’d picked up the desktop name-plate that had been a gift from his parents on the occasion of his graduation from Columbia University, seven years earlier. ROBERT F. EIDENBAUGH, it said. Fitting, he thought, very fitting. An intended symbol of his success in times to come, it now mocked him and his too-long tenure as a copywriter. Bister was right. He wasn’t going up. He wasn’t going anywhere.

His father had been a captain in the American Expeditionary Forces, arriving in France in 1917 and fighting in the battle of Chateau-Thierry. It had been a hellish experience, one he did not speak of easily. Yet he had fallen in love with France, and in 1921, when his oldest son was eight and the youngest three, he had taken the family off to live first in Paris, then in Lyons, finally settling, six months later, in a small rented villa on the outskirts of Toulon, the Mediterranean port just east of Marseilles. Arthur Eidenbaugh was a naval architect and was able to find a position-a minor one, initially, little more than a drafting clerk-with an engineering firm associated with the Toulon shipyards. Elva Eidenbaugh was formerly a schoolteacher from Wiscasset, Maine, and no stranger to hardship. She made the money stretch and set the tone of family life-which was to be a permanent adventure, with all setbacks perceived as challenges to character and sense of humor.

They were a tight, sunny family, denying each other consolation as a matter of course. A bad cold or a bad mood simply made life difficult for everybody, so best take your lumps and move ahead, sympathy was not on the schedule. As for France, they attacked it, led in the charge by Mrs. Eidenbaugh. They made forays into boulangeries and patisseries, picnicked at the slightest provocation, and descended en masse on museums, carrying away every crumb of available culture. Mr. Eidenbaugh worked long hours, deflected credit to his French colleagues, and was soon enough raised to a position commensurate with his ability and education.

As a family, they liked being different, enjoyed the notion of living abroad, and their cheerful optimism seemed to draw pleasant experiences their way. Robert could not remember a time when somebody or other-postman, merchant, parents’ acquaintance-wasn’t ruffling his hair. With his new position, Mr. Eidenbaugh was able to engage a maid to care for the children, and in this way they picked up the language naturally and effortlessly. At home, they spoke a curious mixture of French and English. “Where can I have put l’adresse?” his mother would say. “I’ve looked and looked, but it seems toute a fait perdue. “

Robert went to French schools, learned the rudiments of soccer, dressed in a uniform of blue shorts and white shirt, and allowed the requisite Catholic instruction to roll effortlessly off his Presbyterian soul. Family roots went back into Scotland, Wales, and Germany, on both sides, with the first Eidenbaughs reaching America in the mid-nineteenth century and settling on the coastlines of southern New England, where they engaged themselves in the building of ships.

In 1930, with the United States struggling in the Depression and Europe’s economy falling apart, Mr. Eidenbaugh’s firm won a large contract that called for the refitting of an entire naval battle group, a contract that was to support the firm throughout the early thirties. Thus, that same year, Robert was able to return to the United States to attend Columbia University, majoring in English literature with indifferent success. He was bright enough, but most of what he read seemed distant and remote and he had none of the scholar’s passions. On graduation, in June of 1934, he returned to France for two years, working at a succession of small jobs, first around Toulon, later in Paris. He translated business correspondence, taught at small private schools, fell in love with wearying frequency, skated on the edge of Parisian bohemian life, and took to smoking a large, curved pipe.

In 1936, bored with aimlessness, he returned to New York and found a job with the J. Walter Thompson Company in the copy department. With war clearly on the way in Europe, the rest of the family returned in 1938, Arthur Eidenbaugh finding employment at a Boston firm of naval architects with long connection to French shipbuilding interests in Canada.

On Sunday morning, Eidenbaugh met Andy Van Duyne for breakfast at a Schrafft’s on the Upper West Side. Surrounded by West End Avenue garment manufacturers taking their families out for brunch, they set to work demolishing a basket of soft yellow rolls. The basket was periodically replenished by stern Irish waitresses in black uniforms, who also kept their coffee cups full as they awaited their scrambled eggs.

Andy Van Duyne was his single surviving friend from Columbia. His family owned a petrochemical brokerage associated with Standard Oil and had a season box for the Giants’ football games. Clients never seemed to use them, so Van Duyne and his friends had gotten into the habit of making a day of it on fall Sundays, starting with a late breakfast.

Van Duyne looked like an owl, a tall, spindly one, squinting out at the world through round spectacles with thick lenses. At college, he’d been a reliable source for decent bootleg and the occasional real thing, smuggled in from Canada. His family’s vacation house on Long Island had a particularly private and convenient beach, it seemed, and, in return for looking the other way, they would at times discover the odd case left behind on the sand-clearly an appreciative offering. Van Duyne had gained some considerable prominence as a college prankster, using a rhinoceros-foot waste-paper basket he’d got hold of somewhere to make tracks in the snow leading up to the Central Park reservoir. This resulted only in a rather tentative news story, never really setting off the rhinoceros-in-the-drinking-water! panic he’d imagined, though there were some who swore they could taste it for weeks thereafter. Van Duyne had barely scraped through college and was now ensconced in an oakpaneled office at Morgan Guaranty, where he’d taken to reading Slade Rides to