Pug put all other mail aside, and stared at the curious communication from the curious man whom he had once soaked with salt water, who was now his Commander-in-Chief, the creator of the New Deal (of which Pug disapproved), the man with perhaps the best-known name and face on earth except Hitler’s. The cheerful banal scribble was out of key with Roosevelt’s stature, but it very much fitted the cocky young man who had bounced around on the
“Aye aye, sir. There’s a Mister Slote asking to see you, but I can -”
“Slote? No, hold on. I’ll see Slote. Let us have coffee.” The Foreign Service man looked rested and fit, if a bit gaunt, in his freshly pressed tweed jacket and flannel trousers. “Quite a view,” Slote said. “Is that huge pink pile the new chancellery?”
“Yes. You can see them change the guard from here.”
“I don’t know that I’m interested in armed Germans on the move. I have the idea.”
Both men laughed. Over the coffee the commander told Slote something of Byron’s four-hour gush of narrative.
The diplomat listened with a wary look, running his fingers repeatedly over the rim of his lit pipe. “Did he mention anything about that unfortunate business in Praha?” Henry looked puzzled. “When we had a girl in the car, and found ourselves under German shellfire?”
“I don’t believe so. Was the girl Natalie Jastrow?”
“Yes. The incident involved the Swedish ambassador and an auto trip to the front lines.”
Pug thought a moment. Slote watched his face intently. “No. Not a word.”
With a heavy sigh, Slote brightened up. “Well, he exposed himself to direct enemy fire, while I had to take the girl out of the car and find shelter for her.” Slote baldly narrated his version of the episode. Then he described Byron’s water-hauling, his handiness in making repairs, his disregard of enemy planes and artillery shelling. “I’d be glad to put all this in a letter, if you wish,” Slote said.
“Yes, I’d like that,” Pug said with alacrity. “Now, tell me something about this Jastrow girl.”
“What would you like to know?”
Victor Henry shrugged. “Anything. My wife and I are slightly curious about this young female who got our boy into such a jam. What the hell was she doing in Warsaw, with all of Europe mobilizing, and why was he with her?”
Slote laughed wryly. “She came to see me. We’re old friends. I thought she was out of her mind to come. I did my best to stop her. This girl is a sort of lioness type, she does what she pleases and you just get out of the way. Her uncle didn’t want her to travel alone, what with all the war talk. Byron volunteered to go along. That’s as I understand it.”
“He went with her to Poland as a courtesy to Dr. Jastrow? Is that the size of it?”
“Maybe you’d better ask Byron.”
“Is she beautiful?”
Slote puffed thoughtfully, staring straight ahead. “In a way. Quite a brain, very educated.” Abruptly he looked at his watch and stood up. “I’ll write you that letter, and I’m going to mention your son in my official report.”
“Good. I’ll ask him about that incident in Praha.”
“Oh, no, there’s no need. It was just an instance of how he cooperated.”
“You’re not engaged to the Jastrow girl?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Well, I hate to get personal, but you’re much older than Byron, and quite different and I can’t picture a girl who bridges that gap.” Slote looked at him and said nothing. Pug went on, “Where is she now?”
“She went to Stockholm with most of our people. Good-bye, Commander Henry.”
Rhoda telephoned Pug around noon, breaking into his work on the letter to Roosevelt. “That boy’s slept fourteen hours,” she said. “I got worried and went in there, but he’s breathing like an infant, with a hand tucked under his cheek.”
“Well, let him sleep.”
“Doesn’t he have to report somewhere?”
“No. Sleep’s the best thing for him.”
Complying with the President’s orders to write chattily, Pug closed his letter with a short account of Byron’s adventures in Poland. Plans were growing in his mind for official use of his son’s experiences. He filed the letter for the diplomatic pouch, and went home uneasy at having bypassed the chain of command and wasted a workday. He did also feel vague pride in his direct contact with the President, but that was a human reaction. In his professional judgment, this contact was most likely a bad thing.
Byron was reclining in the garden, eating grapes from a bowl and reading a Superman comic book. Scattered on the grass beside him were perhaps two dozen more comic books, a patchwork of lurid covers. “Hi, Dad,” he said. “How about this treasure? Franz collects them.” (Franz was the butler.) “He says he’s been panhandling or buying them from tourists for years.”
Pug was stupefied at the sight. Comic books had been a cause of war in their household until Byron had gone off to Columbia. Pug had forbidden them, torn them up, burned them, fined Byron for possession of them. Nothing had helped. The boy had been like a dope fiend. With difficulty Pug refrained from saying something harsh. Byron was twenty-four. “How do you feel?”
“Hungry,” Byron said. “God, this is a great Superman. It makes me homesick, reading these things.”
Franz brought Pug a highball on a tray. Pug sat silently with it waiting for the butler to go. It took a while, because Franz wiped a glass-top table, cut some flowers, and fooled with a loose screen door to the tennis court. He had a way of lingering within earshot. Meanwhile, Byron read the Superman through, put it on the pile, and looked idly at his father.
Pug relaxed and sipped his drink. Franz was reentering the house. “Briny, that was quite a tale you told us yesterday.”
The son laughed. “I guess I got kind of carried away, seeing you and Mom again. Also Berlin had a funny effect on me.”
“You’ve had access to unusual information. I don’t know if there’s another American who went from Cracow to Warsaw after the war broke out.”
“Oh, I guess it’s all been in the papers and magazines.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. There’s a lot of arguing between the Germans and the Poles — the few Poles who got away and can still argue — about who’s committed what atrocities in Poland. An eyewitness account like yours would be an important document.”
Byron shrugged, picking up another comic book. “Possibly.”
“I want you to write it up. I’d like to forward your account to the Office of Naval Intelligence.”
“Gosh, Dad, aren’t you overestimating it?”
“No. I’d like you to get at it tonight.”
“I don’t have a typewriter,” Byron said with a yawn.
“There’s one in the library,” Pug said.
“Oh, that’s right, I saw it. Well, okay.”
With such casual assents, Byron had often dodged his homework in the past. But his father let it go. He was clinging to a belief that Byron had matured under the German bombing.
“That fellow Slote came by today. Said you helped out a lot in Warsaw. Brought water to the embassy, and such.”
“Well, yes. I got stuck with the water job.”
“Also there was an incident at the front line with the Swedish ambassador. You climbed a tower under German fire, while Slote had to hide this Jastrow girl in a farmhouse. It seems to be very much on his mind.”
Byron opened
“Why does Slote dwell on it?”
“Well, it’s about the last thing that happened before we left Warsaw, so I guess it remained in his
