The Winds of War

unfocussed expression. She went on: “That’s one thing. Besides, frankly, I think Aaron’s rather wonderful. Don’t you? Horribly crotchety and self-preoccupied and all that, but this Constantine book is good. My father is a warm, clever, goodhearted man, but he’s the president of his temple and he manufactures sweaters. Aaron’s a famous author, and he’s my uncle. I suppose I bask in his glory. What’s wrong with that? And I certainly enjoy typing the new pages, just watching the way his mind works. It’s an excellent mind and his style is admirable.” She gave him another quizzical look. “Now why you’re doing this, I’m far less sure.”

“Me?” Byron said. “I’m broke.”

Early in March Jastrow accepted an offer from an American magazine for an article about the upcoming Palio races. It meant he would have to put off his trip to Greece, for the race was run in July and again in August; but the fee was too absurdly fat, he said, to decline. If Natalie would watch the races and do the research, he told her, he would give her half the money. Natalie jumped at this, not perceiving — so Byron thought — that her uncle was trying to stop, or at least delay, her trip to Warsaw. Jastrow had once flatly said that Natalie’s pursuit of Slote was unladylike conduct and bad tactics. Byron had gathered that Slote did not want to marry Natalie, and he could see why. For a Foreign Service man, a Jewish wife at this time would be disastrous; though Byron thought that in Slote’s place he would cheerfully give up the Foreign Service for her.

Natalie wrote to Slote that same day, postponing her trip until after the August Palio. Watching her bang out the letter, Byron tried to keep joy off his face. She might go, he was thinking, and then again she might not! Maybe a war would come along meantime and stop her. Byron hoped that Hitler, if he was going to invade Poland, would do it soon.

When she finished, he went to the same typewriter and rattled off the famous letter to his parents. He intended to write one sheet, and wrote seven. It was his first letter to them in months. He had no idea that he was picturing himself as an infatuated young man. He was, he thought, just describing his job, his employer, and the charming girl he worked with. And so Pug Henry got needlessly worked up, and wrote the solemn reply, which startled and amused Byron when it came; for he was no more thinking of marrying Natalie Jastrow than of turning Mohammedan. He was just head over ears in love, with a young woman as near as his hand and as remote as a star; and for the moment it was enough to be where she was. He wrote again to set his father straight, but this letter arrived in Washington after the Henrys had left for Germany.

Chapter 3

In all her years as a Navy wife, Rhoda had never become reconciled to packing and moving. She could do it well enough, compiling long lists, remembering tiny details, waking in the middle of the night to scrawl notes, but she became a termagant. The angry voice rang in the house from dawn to midnight. Pug spent the days in the Office of Naval Intelligence, boning up on Germany, and ate most of his meals at the Army and Navy Club. Still, on the short notice given her, Rhoda accomplished everything: stored the furniture, closed the house and put it up for rent, paid the bills, packed her clothes and Pug’s heavy double wardrobe of civilian dress and uniforms, and moved Madeline to the home of her sister.

The gold letters B R E M E N stretched across the curved black stern of the steamship, high over the cobbled waterfront street. Above the letters, an immense red flag rippled in the cool fishy breeze off the Hudson, showing at its center a big black swastika circled in white.

“Glory be, it all really exists,” Madeline said to Warren as she got out of the taxicab.

“What really exists?” Warren said.

“Oh, this whole Hitler business. The Nazis, the Sieg Heils, the book burnings — when you read about it in the papers, it all seems too ridiculous and crazy to be real. But there’s the swastika.”

Victor Henry glanced up at the Nazi flag, wrinkling his whole face. Rhoda was briskly giving the porter orders about the luggage. “I had to get special permission to ride this bucket. Let’s hope the German language practice proves to be worth it. Come aboard with us and have a look at the ship.”

In a first-class stateroom panelled in gloomy carved wood, they sat making melancholy small talk amid piled suitcases and trunks, until Rhoda restlessly jumped up and took Warren with her for a walk around the Bremen. Madeline chose the moment to jolt her father with the news that she wanted to drop out of college. The prospect of living with her dull aunt and duller uncle and twin cousins for two years was unbearable, she said.

“But what can you do? Two years of college, and you keep failing courses,” Victor Henry said. “You can’t just lie around and read Vogue till you get married.”

“I’d find a job, Dad. I can work. I’m just bored at school. I hate studying. I always have. I’m not like you, or Warren. I’m more like Byron, I guess. I can’t help it.”

“I never liked studying,” Commander Henry returned. “Nobody does. You do what you must, and get it done.”

Perched on the edge of a deep armchair, the girl said with her most winning smile, “Please! Let me take just one year off. I’ll prove I can do it. There are lots of jobs for girls at the radio networks in New York. If I don’t make good, I promise I’ll trot back to college, and -”

“What! New York? Nineteen, and alone in New York? Are you nuts?”

“Let me just try it this summer.”

“No. You’ll go with Aunt Augusta to Newport, the way it’s been planned. You’ve always enjoyed Newport.”

“For a week, yes. A whole summer will be a perishing bore.”

“That’s where you’ll go. In the fall I’ll expect regular letters from you, reporting improved performance in college.”

Madeline, slumping back in the armchair, bit noisily into an apple from a heaping bon voyage basket of fresh fruit, sent by Kip Tollever. Staring straight ahead, except for brief mutinous glares at her father, she gnawed at the apple until her mother and brother returned. Pug did his best to ignore the glares, reading a book on German steel-making. He did not like parting from his daughter on such terms, but her proposal seemed to him unthinkable.

The Bremen sailed at noon. As Warren and Madeline left the pier, a band thumped out a merry German waltz. They took a taxi uptown, saying little to each other. Henry had set the uncommunicative pattern of the family; the children, after romping and chattering through their early years, had from adolescence onward lived separate, largely undiscussed lives. Warren dropped Madeline at Radio City, not inquiring what she intended to do there. They agreed to meet for dinner, go to a show, and take a midnight train to Washington.

Madeline poked here and there in the huge lobby of the RCA building, gawking at the Sert murals and ceiling paintings. She found herself at the bank of elevators for NBC entertainers and employees. Many of these people, she noticed, showed no pass to the uniformed page, but smiled, waved, or just walked busily past the roped entrance. She sailed past too, trying to look twenty-five and employed. Squinting at her, the page held out an arresting hand. She dived into a crowded elevator.

For an hour she wandered the inner halls of the broadcasting company, relishing the thick maroon carpets, the immense round black pillars, the passing trucks of spotlights and broadcast equipment, the flashing red lights outside of studios, the pretty girls and handsome young men hurrying in and out of doors. She came on the employment office and hung outside, peering through the open double doors like a child at a candy counter. Then she left and spent the day shopping in department stores.

As for Warren, the taxi took him a few blocks further uptown. In Rumpelmayer’s, he met a good-looking woman of thirty or so with large sad eyes, a cloud of ash-blonde hair, and a clever soulful way of talking about novels, paintings, and music, subjects which did not greatly interest him. His majors had been history and the sciences. After an early lunch, he spent the day with her in a hotel bedroom. That did interest him.

When he dined with his sister that evening, Madeline helped herself to a cigarette from his pack on the table, and lit and smoked it inexpertly. Her defiant, self-satisfied, somewhat pathetic air made Warren laugh. “When the cat’s away, hey?” he said.

“Oh, I’ve been smoking for years,” Madeline said.