A Special Providence (37 page)

“Hell no, you son of a bitch.
You’ll
find out when I’ve had enough.”

He went back, trying again and again for Walker’s mouth, but all his swings were wild and Walker was wholly in charge now, taking his time, ponderously landing blows to the belly and the head and the heart.

Prentice lost track of how many times he went down, sometimes only to sink to one knee for a rest, sometimes sprawling helplessly. The important thing was to keep on getting up. Then once, after getting up, he walked head on into the earth as if it were a wall, and he had to curl up and sit holding his head until the world came wheeling back to normal: grass beneath him, sky overhead, barn and trees over there, where they belonged.

He felt Walker’s hand closing around his arm and knew with a terrible mixture of outrage and relief that this meant the fight was over, but he pretended not to understand.

“Stick to your own fucking rules, Walker. Take your hands off me until I’m up.”

“No, look, listen. I don’t want to fight you any more.”
Walker was trying to help him to his feet, but he shook him off and made it by himself, swaying.

“You think I’m quitting now you’re crazy.”

“You’re not quitting.” Walker backed away and nursed the knuckles of one hand in the palm of the other. “I’m quitting. Far as I’m concerned it’s finished, that’s all. I’m satisfied.”

“So. Big deal. You’re satisfied. Well, I’m not. Put up your hands.”

And then the worst thing happened: Walker’s wide, unscarred face broke into a kindly smile. “Aw, come on, Prentice,” he said. “Cut it out.” He turned and walked away toward the barn where they’d left their equipment.

“Come on
back
here!” Prentice called after him. “You called me yellow, you bastard!”

And Walker turned around with infuriating friendliness. “Okay, then. I shouldn’t of said it. I take it back. Hell, you’re not yellow. Don’t you think you just proved that?”

No. He didn’t think he had proved anything. It was turning out like everything else since Quint’s death, like the ending of the war itself: no settling of accounts, no resolution, no proof.

“And what the hell did you expect, Prentice?” Quint would have said. “Do you think everything’s going to work out the way it does in the movies? Aren’t you ever going to learn?”

They were walking back down the hill, and Prentice didn’t know which was more humiliating: the way he had to keep wiping blood from his nose and mouth or the weight of Walker’s arm around his shoulders. And the worst part, as they came into view of a little cluster of men near the back door of the Second Platoon house, was that he found himself unable to keep from enjoying the picture they made: victor and vanquished, modest winner and plucky loser, a couple of good guys who’d gone up behind the barn and had it out. It was a sight to please Loomis’s
Hollywood heart, and there he was, sternly smiling in the middle of the group.

“You fellas can prob’ly still get some breakfast,” he said, “if you hurry on down.”

In the bathroom, washing up, he examined his face in the mirror and was glad of its distortions: swollen nose, split lips, and the beginning of what promised to be a black eye. There were also two open cuts on the knuckles of his right hand, and he rubbed them hard, trying to worsen the swelling and make them bleed more, hoping someone else would notice them too.

On the center of his bed lay a new letter from his mother.

He seemed to hear her voice in his head as he and Walker made their way out of the house and down to breakfast – a voice whose warm, soft, reassuring rhythms he had heard all his life and would probably never wholly escape. It was oddly similar to Walker’s voice as they sat forking down cold pancakes and jelly in the deserted mess hall: “I don’t mind telling you, Prentice, that
one
you clipped me with was a damn good shot,” and, later: “Listen. If we get passes to Brussels next week, you want to go together? You and me?”

No account ever really needed to be settled; nothing ever really needed to be proved. Everything would always come right in the end as long as a couple of good guys went up behind the
barn and had it out, as long as a mother fell on her knees and offered all her thanks to God and they played the Star-Spangled Banner on the radio. That was what these voices had to say; that was their lying, sentimental message, and it all went down as smoothly as the pancakes and jelly.

But it came up again the minute they were out of the mess hall; it came up all over the side of the factory wall while Prentice crouched and shuddered and heaved, hanging onto the wall for support, and while Walker hovered nervously in the background saying “You okay? You okay, fella? … Here, wait, I’ll get you a drink of water … Rinse your mouth out …” It all came up, and with it, in the final, painful spasms, came the last acrid bile of his self-hatred.

There was no more talk as they made their way back to the platoon house, and Prentice kept to himself as much as possible in the truck that took them up to the D.P. area.

For the rest of that bright, pleasant day, as he walked his rounds in the sunshine, he felt strangely purged and purified. Every face he passed, the Russians and the men of “A” Company alike, met his gaze with open goodwill, and that was the way he met theirs.

He had proved nothing, he had made no viable gesture of atonement, and he knew now that he probably never would. If he could have talked with Quint’s ghost now he could only have said: “I’m sorry; there’s nothing more I can do.”

And Quint, he knew, would have said: “Right; you’re absolutely right about that. And do you know what that is, Prentice? It’s tough shit, that’s what it is.”

How then could he feel so good? What possible right did he have to be at peace with himself?

He didn’t know. All he knew that day – and later that night, as he and Walker and Mueller sat half drunk in the upholstered
chairs of some German living room, each with a squirming Russian girl in his lap, and later still when he took his own girl by the hand and led her out to the privacy of a dark, fragrant field of grass – all he knew with any clarity was that he was nineteen years old, that the war was over, and that he was alive.

Alice was dreaming of Riverside. It was a leisurely dream: she and Bobby were walking down a long bright avenue of autumn trees – oak and stately poplar and monumental beech – and Bobby was talking in the high, eager voice he’d had at eleven or twelve.

“And you know what else she said? Miss Osborne? She said my pictures were the best in the whole class.”

“Why, that’s wonderful, dear.” Now they were moving out across the great expanse of lawn near The Big House, with the river and the Palisades in the distance, and the western sky was ablaze with sunset.

“Or not exactly the best,” Bobby said, “I guess she didn’t say that. She said they were the most imaginative. And she said probably the reason they were so imaginative was because of you being my mother.”

“Well! Wasn’t that nice.”

“And you know what else?”

She looked down into his happy, serious face and wanted to stop and reach out and gather him in a hug, holding him close. Instead she said, “What else, dear?” But the dream evaporated before he could reply.

It was a natural awakening – there was no alarm clock because
it was Sunday – and when her eyes came open to the sun she closed them again, turned over, and did her best to recapture the dream. For several seconds it seemed she was almost succeeding – she was able to call back the scene and the sound of Bobby’s voice, if not wholly able to hear what he was saying – but then it was gone.

She often dreamed of Riverside, and she guessed – getting up to accept the reality of this ugly bedroom, with its view of bricks and a fire escape – she guessed that this was because Riverside, of all the places she had ever known, was the one place in which she had felt she truly belonged.

Because it was Sunday she could move slowly through the apartment in her bathrobe, starting the water for coffee, taking her time in getting ready for church. Not until tomorrow morning would she again have to pull herself together in a frenzy of haste, rush downstairs and out into the street and down into the bleak, iron-smelling subway, there to be imprisoned in a grim ride that would end only in the nick of time for her to punch the clock at the lens-grinding shop.

This was a day of rest. While sipping her coffee she listened to a man on the radio who was trying to explain atomic energy. There had been any number of radio programs like that, and magazine articles too, since the ending of the war with Japan last fall. She did her best to understand but it was hopelessly confusing: all she knew was that the United States now possessed an explosive powerful enough to obliterate a city with a single bomb.

A picture postcard from Paris was propped on the kitchenette shelf beside the whiskey bottle: it was the last communication of any kind she’d had from Bobby, and it was a month old. It wasn’t like him not to write for so long.

And on the table, beside her coffee cup, was the unfinished letter she had written last night.

That was as far as the letter went, and now, thinking back, she couldn’t remember why she hadn’t finished it last night. All she had to do was end that sentence: “and I hope you will answer this letter soon.” She found her pen and wrote those words, and she concluded it with “All my love, Mother.”

She mailed it on her way to church. The long crosstown walk to St. Thomas Episcopal Church was one of the few pleasures of her week – it meant leaving the squalor of the West Side and heading eastward until she came to Fifth Avenue – and it was especially invigorating on this fine May morning. The flags, the soaring pigeons, the Gothic beauty of St. Thomas itself, and the lofty music of its tower chimes – these had come to represent a renewal of peace and hope each Sunday. It didn’t even matter that her black rayon dress was stained in several places and far from new, for she was wearing a neat, expensive-looking feathered hat, picked up as a bargain at Klein’s last week, and it gave her a sense of looking like a woman of substance, a distinguished person. She enjoyed mingling with the other worshippers at the front steps: all of them were plainly residents of the Upper East Side.

It was a Communion Sunday. She chose a shadowy pew toward the rear, as she usually did, and sat there with her head bowed in meditation as the organ filled the church with solemn preliminary chords in counterpoint to the high, distant pealing of the tower bells. She didn’t exactly pray – she didn’t form words and sentences in her mind with the salutation “Dear God”
– but she willed her mind to rid itself of all but humble, pious thoughts: she made herself ready for God’s mercy and God’s blessing. Then, inhaling the brown, dry, holy smell of the place, she allowed one deep and insistent plea to take shape in words: Oh God, let him come home soon.

She raised her head when the organ rumbled into the opening strains of the processional: she wanted to see it all. First came the crucifer, a boy only a little older than Bobby had been at Riverside, holding the shaft of the cross high as he led the singing choir. When the girls and women had passed, their soprano and alto voices making gooseflesh break out on her arms, she happily watched the men. And the most important of the men, the one who claimed most of her attention, was the tenor soloist. He was very tall and slim, something like Bobby, and his voice, even in the midst of all the other voices, was strong and clear and independent. It reminded her, always, of George Prentice’s voice long ago.

The minister, a gray little man who was much less inspiring than Dr. Hammond in Riverside, seemed pressed for time as he hurried through the first part of the service, and this was irritating: she wanted him to linger over each of the prayers and psalms and the General Confession, to make the ceremony last as long as possible.