Rhoda went to a small Chinese Chippendale desk answer the telephone. “Oh,
She hung up, and fluttered her long pale hands at the company. “Well, let’s drink up. Pug sends apologies. He’s at the White House and he doesn’t know when he can get away.”
In Washington, when the absent diner is at the White House, the empty chair is not an embarrassment. Quite the contrary. Nobody asked what Victor Henry was doing at the executive mansion, or indeed commented on Rhoda’s words. She put Burne-Wilke on her right and the senator on her left, saying, “After all these years protocol still baffles me. How do you choose between a United States Senator and a British lord? I’m favoring our foreign guest, Senator.”
“Absolutely proper,” said Lacouture.
Alistair Tudsbury said, “Lord Burne-Wilke will gladly yield you his seat on this occasion, Senator, if he can take yours when Lend-Lease comes to a vote.”
“Oh, done, done,” exclaimed the air commodore, whose bemedalled dress uniform dazzled Rhoda.
Everyone laughed, Tudsbury loudest of all. “Haw haw haw!” The correspondent’s belly shook under a vast expanse of wrinkled waistcoat, spanned by an enormous suspension of gold chain. Rhoda said, “Well, what good spirits! I was half afraid our English friends would eat Senator Lacouture alive.”
The senator wrinkled his eyes. “You British aren’t that hard up for meat yet, are you?” He added after the laugh, “No, seriously, Rhoda, I’m glad you brought us together. Maybe I’ve convinced our friends that I’m not a Nazi-lover, but just one fellow out of ninety-six, with my own point of view. I certainly don’t go for this talk of Senator Wheeler’s, that Lend-Lease will plow under every fourth American boy. That’s way out of bounds. But if Roosevelt wants to send England arms free of charge, why the devil doesn’t he come out and say so, instead of giving us all this Lend-Lease baloney? It insults our intelligence.”
“I went to a peace rally in New York,” Madeline piped up. “One speaker told a good story. A tramp stops a rich man on the street. ‘Please, mister, give me a quarter, I’m starving,’ he says. The rich man says, ‘My dear fellow, I can’t
Senator Lacouture burst out laughing. “By God, I’ll work that into my next speech.”
From across the table, Palmer Kirby said, “Are you sure you want to draw on a Communist source?”
“Was that one of those Commie meetings? Well, a story’s a story.”
“It’s so crazy,” said Janice. “I got stuck in a taxi on Pennsylvania Avenue this afternoon, in front of the White House. We just couldn’t move. The newsreel people were there taking pictures of the pickets. Communists with signs marching round and round in a circle, chanting, ‘The Yanks are not coming,’ and next to them a mob of women kneeling and praying right there on the sidewalk in the snow, The Christian Mothers of America. They’ll pray there round the clock, my driver said, until Lend-Lease is defeated or vetoed. Honestly! Coming from Hawaii, I get the feeling the country’s going mad.”
“It just shows how broad the opposition to this is,” said the senator. “Cuts across all lines.”
“On the contrary,” put in Kirby, “both extremes seem to be against helping England, while the mass in the middle is for it.”
Senator Lacouture waved a flat hand in the air. “No, sir. I’ve been a middle-of-the-roader all my life. You should hear some of the quiet talk in the Senate dining room. I tell you, if they didn’t have to worry about big-city Jews — and I don’t blame the Jews for feeling as they do, but this issue can’t be decided on any parochial basis — there’d be twenty more votes on my side of the fence right now. I still think they’ll end there. The nose count changes every day. If the ground swell continues for another week, we’ll lick this thing.”
The street door opened and closed. Victor Henry into the dining room, brushing flakes of snow from his blue bridge coat. “Apologies to all hands,” he said, doffing the coat. “No, no, don’t get up, I’ll just join you, and change my duds later.”
But the men were all standing. Victor Henry walked around the table for handshakes, and came last to Palmer Kirby. “Hello,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”
“Sure has. Too long.”
Only Rhoda knew the scientist well enough to note that his smile was awkward and artificial. At this moment, which she had been dreading for a couple of weeks, Rhoda had a surprising sensation — pleasure and pride that two such men loved her. She felt no trace of guilt as her lover clasped hands with her husband of twenty-five years. Kirby was more than a head taller than Captain Henry, and in the columnar black and white of full dress he was a magnificent fellow. Yet Pug was impressive too: erect, short, thickset, his tired eyes in deep sockets very shrewd and alive, his whole bearing charged with energy — her own husband, just back from the White House. Rhoda felt lucky, beautiful, desired, pleasantly confused, and quite safe. It was actually one of the nicest moments in her life, and it went off like a dream. Pug took his seat and began eating shrimp cocktail.
“Say, it’s a bit late for this,” he remarked to Kirby, “but I sure want to thank you for driving Rhoda up from New York last summer to see Byron at sub school. That was a long way.”
Kirby spread his big hands. “Why, it was great to get a look at a submarine base. Your friend Captain Tully really gave us the ten-dollar tour.”
“Red Tully is 4.0,” Pug said. “I sort of suspect he nudged Byron through that school. However, I’ve asked no questions.”
It was exciting as a play for Rhoda, that the two men were actually talking straight off about that fateful trip. She said gaily, “Oh, Pug, you’re always selling poor Briny short. Red told us he was the champion of his class in the training tank. Caught on to the lung right away, and did his escape perfectly the first time cool as a fish. Why, when we were there they had him instructing in the tank.”
“That’s self-preservation, not work. Briny’s always been good at that.”
“That’s a talent, too,” said Pamela Tudsbury.
Pug looked at her with a trace of special warmth. “Well, Pamela, one can’t get far without it, that’s true. But it’s the talent of a turtle.”
“Honestly! Did you ever?” Rhoda said to Lord Burne-Wilke. “What a father.”
Mrs. Lacouture uttered a little shriek. The old steward was offering soup to Lord Burne-Wilke, and distracted by the Englishman’s medals, he was tilting the tray. The open soup tureen went slipping toward Rhoda, and her silver dress was seconds away from ruin. But as the tureen came sliding off the tray, Rhoda, who had a watchful eye for servants, plucked it out of the air, and with the quick controlled movements of a cat in trouble, set it on the table, not spilling a drop.
Pug called out over the gasps and laughter, “Well done.”
“Self-preservation runs in the family,” Rhoda said. Amid louder laughter, Alistair Tudsbury started a round of applause.
“By God! Never have I seen anything so neat,” exclaimed Senator Lacouture.
Everybody had a joke or a compliment for Rhoda. She became exhilarated. Rhoda loved to entertain. She had the ability to nail down details beforehand, and then breeze airily through the evening. Rhoda told stories of mishaps at dinner parties in Berlin, and began to reminisce with sharp satire about the Nazis. Forgotten was her former friendliness to the Germans; she was now the Bundles for Britain lady, partisan to the core. Palmer Kirby, getting over his stiffness in Pug’s presence, threw in his experiences at a Nuremberg Parteitag. Pug offered an account of the slide at Abendruh, making the women giggle. Then Lord Burne-Wilke gave jocular anecdotes about the arrogance of captured Luftwaffe pilots.
Senator Lacouture interrupted him. “Lord Burne-Wilke, were you people ever really in trouble last year?”
“Oh, rather.” The air commodore told of the dwindling of planes and pilots through July and August, of the week in September when the count of pilots fell below the survival minimum, of the desperate pessimism in the RAF all through October, with London burning, civilians dying in large numbers, no night fighters available, and the Luftwaffe still coming on and on, setting fire to residential districts and bombing and spreading the fires, trying to break the city’s spirit.
Lacouture probed with more questions, his pink face growing sober. The RAF, the air commodore said, was anticipating a new, larger onslaught in the spring and summer. The submarine sinkings, at their present rate, might ground the British planes for lack of fuel. An invasion would then be in the cards. “Mind you, we hope to weather all
