what stings is justice. Was that why his mood was so wounded and angry? Because there was justice in Barbara’s position? So let’s get this the hell over with, he thought. As Patton said, a pint of sweat can save a gallon of blood. . Don’t think; act.
“I think we’ve wasted too much time and energy in accusations,” Luther Boyd said to Barbara. “Do you want a divorce?”
He stood with his back to her at the windows of the long drawing room, staring at but not seeing the golden glow of the last sunlight in the crowns of towering elms and maples in the park.
Barbara was at the bar making herself a drink. Because his question terrified her, made her feel lonely and shaken, she managed a defiant smile and said to him, “Can I fix you a touch, Luther?”
“I’m trying to be serious, Barbara.”
“You don’t have to
“What about it? Yes or no?”
She was frightened at the thought of leaving him, but she was determined to do it, simply because she couldn’t bear his leaving her again and again and again. . She had been alone when Kate was born. She had been alone when the wire had come that Buddy was dead. She had been alone on too many nights when her body ached for his love. And she had been alone with him too often when he sat in the same room with her with his thoughts lost in the history of centuries-old campaigns and wars.
He would always leave. The flags on the horizon, the distant thunder of artillery, the challenge of decisions and battles were magnets he couldn’t resist.
And she didn’t want him to leave her. But there was no word from her, no cry, no appeal that had the magic of the lures that streamed like plumes from his concepts of honor and duty, and yes, she thought bitterly, yes, always, the fire-engine excitement of armies on the march. .
She put her drink down on the bar, walked across the room, and stopped behind her husband.
“Luther, at the risk of boring you out of your mind, can I try to explain one more time why I’ve come to this decision?”
Boyd turned and looked steady at her. “Of course,” he said patiently.
“This is truly important to me, Barbara.”
While she was trying to collect thoughts that scattered around in her head like mice, there was an excited yelping from the corridor, and Harry Lauder burst into the room, tugging at the leash in Kate’s hands.
Kate ran to her mother and gave her a hug and a kiss while Harry Lauder circled them both with yapping enthusiasm.
Kate knew that her mother and father were being what people called “civilized” about their problem, but she thought it was grossly unfair that she wasn’t allowed to talk to them about it, that she was expected to be just as “civilized” as they were.
“Mommy, I’ll only be gone ten or fifteen minutes. Will you wait here for me?”
“Of course I will, darling.”
“Remember the ground rules, Kate.”
She repeated them in a singsong but cheerful voice. “Stay on the east side of Fifth Avenue, in your own block where Mr. Brennan can keep an eye on you.”
“Right,” Boyd said.
In the lobby, Mr. Brennan pulled on a heavy blue overcoat decorated with gold epaulets and went outside with Kate and, standing under the canopy, looked with affection after the girl who was skipping down the block with her little Scottie.
The wind was fresh and cold on her cheeks and sent strands of her silken blond hair streaming behind her like pennants.
Across the street the same winds played in the big trees of Central Park. Leaves were blown high in the air to spin with errant thermals and finally to drift down into the thick shrubbery bordering the sidewalk along this block of Fifth Avenue. There was a fall fragrance in the air, threaded with the delicate, smoky tang of roasting chestnuts. The elderly vendor had positioned his cart a block south of Kate’s building and was stamping his feet against the cold, his breath hoary in the deepening twilight winds.
Kate, at the opposite end of the block, north of her building, was snug against the weather in small sturdy boots, a blue jump suit, and a red quilted ski jacket with decorative zigzag stitchings on the collar and sleeve. She also wore her green suede shoulder bag because there was a dollar bill in her wallet, and she wanted to buy a bag of hot chestnuts before she went back up to her apartment.
Traffic was light on the avenue. Harry Lauder began barking at something or someone in the bushes across the street in Central Park.
“No, no, no,” Kate said, and pulled him back from the curb. She walked south toward her building then, giving Mr. Brennan a wave and a smile.
She called a greeting to the chestnut vendor, who returned it with a bobbing nod. He was a mute, but his hearing was unimpaired, and he seemed to enjoy the traffic and activity of the street and his limited exchanges with the little blond girl and her Scottie.
Rudi Zahn was a precise and orderly man who took his exercise seriously. He did not stroll through Central Park idly cataloguing birds and trees and flowers, but instead strode the pathways with long, decisive strides, almost as if marching to the cadence of distant martial music. It had rained in the late afternoon that day, a miniature autumn squall, which had had the positive effect of rinsing the air and leaving it as clear and bracing as winds over freshwater lakes.
Rudi was thinking about Crescent Holloway, which in turn led him to remember the pale and ravaged face of Ilana, one of the four survivors from a dozen-odd families who had been deported from Rudi’s village in Bavaria to concentration camps in Poland. At age five Rudi had adored Ilana, who had been a slim, vivacious eight-year-old, charged with tomboyish energies and excitements and graced with a buoyancy of spirit that seemed indestructible to everyone who knew and loved her. She was everyone’s pet, and when the soldiers came, it seemed somehow a special and dreadful outrage that Ilana should be taken away with the other seventy-four Jews of the village.
Rudi’s parents and his older brother and sister had been in that group of seventy-four Jews. But even that had not seemed as incredible and horrifying as the violation of Ilana.
Rudi had been spared through the intervention of the parish priest, who-having been a longtime friend and chess opponent of the rabbi-gave the little boy sanctuary in the basement of the church until the crowded trucks with their wailing cargo had rolled out of the village.
The gray and frightful years had gone by like slow, ominous shadows, and then the Americans came and after them, the survivors, liana and three other children, the only ones left from the dozen families who five years before had charged the streets and shops of the village with their exuberant energy.
And one day an American Army captain, second cousin to the mother of one of the exterminated families, had come to the village in a jeep with a driver and a large American sergeant who wore three rows of campaign ribbons on his Ike jacket and a.45 automatic on his cartridge belt.
The four survivors and Rudi had joined the captain and the sergeant in a cold room to drink American coffee and to eat American chocolate while Ilana told the captain, who was small and wore bifocals and whose name was Adler, what had happened to the people of the village, including the captain’s relatives.
Ilana was now thirteen, shrunken and destroyed, but still beautiful to Rudi, with despairing, haunted eyes which seemed to him the most dreadful symbols of what had been inflicted on her and all the others.
Ilana spoke in German with occasional lapses into Yiddish, and Captain Adler translated her words into English in a voice that was racked by emotion and broken on occasion with stifled sobs.
“There were two lines,” Ilana said, and Captain Adler translated the words to the American sergeant. “One was for the healthy who could work; the other was for the old and sick and crippled, no matter how young they were. That line went into the gas chamber.
The two lines were only six feet apart, separated by soldiers. My mother was walking to the gas chamber. I was in the other line.
When the soldiers were not looking, I got into the line with my mother. I wanted to die with her. I told her that, and she said she would help me. She put her coat around me so the soldiers wouldn’t see. She was crying, and I could feel her heart beating very fast.
