Authors: Howard Fast
At eleven o'clock, they had taken the bluff. There were only two German machine guns, but it had cost Adam twenty-two more men out of his company. Exhausted, he lay there on the top of the bluff, staring at the green Normandy countryside, the neat rows of trees, the farmhouses in the distance. Fifty, sixty yards away, a mortar shell exploded.
"Let's dig in," he said to Califino. "What time is it?"
Califino looked at his watch. "Eleven."
"God, all I want to do is lay down and sleep."
Barbara's plane stopped at Benghazi to take on passengers; it developed engine trouble during the takeoff, turned around, landed again, and was laid over for repairs. She had a two-day wait before an empty seat turned up on one of the Air Transport planes out of Cairo. She couldn't sit still—she wanted so desperately to be up and on her way—and she talked herself into the loan of a jeep from the motor pool and drove out to the Graveyard. For months, she had heard of the thing they called the Graveyard. When the fighting in North Africa was over,
especially after the great battles that had swirled around Benghazi, the army had gathered all the wrecked vehicles, and the place where they were gathered together was called the Graveyard. It was a few miles outside of Benghazi, and the road that led to it ended on a hillock a few hundred feet above the surface of the desert.
Barbara drove out there, came to the end of the rocky road, and halted her jeep. In every direction, almost as far as she could see, the desert was covered with an unbroken carpet of ruined vehicles, tanks and trucks and gun carriers and self-propelled artillery and jeeps and command cars and halftracks, thousands and thousands of the products of man's civilization and ingenuity and insanity. All she had heard of this place paled into insignificance against the fact. It beggared description. There, in that lonely, barren desert, it was a silent, voiceless commentary on a society, a world gone mad.
For at least a half-hour Barbara sat in her jeep, listening to the silence, watching the vultures swoop and wheel over the sea of metal, still searching for scraps of dried flesh; then she drove back to Benghazi.
The following day, she flew to Casablanca; then from Casablanca, in a big, four-motor transport, to the Azores; and then from the Azores to Newfoundland, where the plane dipped down and landed, in midsummer, between banks of unmelted snow eight feet high. Shivering with pleasure, Barbara took handfuls of snow and rubbed it over her cheeks. The tall, dark pines were like a benediction, the air sweet and cold and clean and biting. When the plane took off again, her eyes were wet, and she said to herself, "What a foolish, emotional creature you are!" Five and a half hours later, the big C-54 dipped down and landed at La Guardia Airport in New York City.
Somehow or other, by calling her paper in San Francisco, Bill Halliday, her publisher, had gotten word of her landing time; and he was at La Guardia with Hildy Lang, the head of promotion, to ease her through Customs and to bring her into New York in an enormous, hired black limousine.
"This time, this time, my dear Barbara," he pleaded, "don't run out on me. Just give us a few days."
They had crossed the Triborough Bridge and were rolling down the East River Drive. In the park beside the drive, women in summer dresses played with their children, who laughed and raced thoughtlessly, and no one looked up
a
t the sky. It was unbelievable and impossible, and it seemed to Barbara that only hours before she had been looking at the sleeping street in Calcutta, or watching the trucks roll by with the bodies of the soldiers killed in Burma piled like cordwood, or walking across the blazing white sand of Saudi Arabia, or staring over the Graveyard in Benghazi—and it was impossible, a compounding of the insanity.
"Barbara?"
"Yes," she said slowly, "I'll stay here for a while."
It turned into two weeks, and thus Barbara missed the occasion in San Francisco when her father received his presidential award. As a matter of fact, when she spoke to Dan on the telephone he failed to mention it, and she only knew about it when she read the details in the New York
Times.
Bill Halliday had saved all her dispatches from overseas, and for most of the two weeks Barbara worked at revising them, rewriting and connecting them. In the course of those two weeks, she spoke to Dan and to her mother, learning that her brother, Joe, was well and stationed on Guam, and that Joshua Levy had died in action in the Pacific.
On July 20, 1944, the Democratic Convention was convened in Chicago, and under pressure from the party politicians, President Roosevelt abandoned Henry A. Wallace, the incumbent vice president, and selected Senator Harry S
Truman
of Missouri as his running mate. Deciding that
Truman
should have every opportunity for national exposure, Roosevelt chose him to go to San Francisco and award the presidential citations to the West Coast shipbuilders. While the invited guests were gathering in 'he main ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel, Truman and his
a
ides met with the shipbuilders in
a
private suite where, Admiral Land made certain, the whiskey was good and the cigars pure Havana.
Truman shook hands with Dan enthusiastically, and ban in turn regarded the small, bespectacled man somewhat dubiously. "So this is Dan Lavette," Truman said.
'You
're a legend, Dan. You don't mind if I call you Dan? *%t on the podium, of course. My notes tell me that Wre the quarterback of one of the best damn teams out
here. You don't mind the designation? Colorful, but ap.
propriate, I think."
"I'm not a quarterback," Dan said coldly. "I'm not a football player. I build ships. That's about it."
Admiral Land pulled him away. "What the hell was going on there?" he whispered.
"Who is that little squirt, Truman?"
"Lavette, I swear to God I don't believe you. That's Harry Truman, candidate for the vice presidency, and he's a damn good senator."
"I haven't looked at a newspaper in months," Dan said. "The
Chronicle
sends me my daughter's dispatches from overseas, and that's all I read. When did they have their damn convention? Why does Roosevelt bother?"
"You are the most painful sonofabitch I ever dealt with. Can you stop hating the world for the next hour or two? Anyway, I'm glad to see you own a tuxedo. It's an improvement over those jeans you wear."
"I don't own it. I rented it. Why in hell don't you get me some engineers who know their asses from their elbows instead of bothering me with these idiotic awards? I shaved this morning for the first time in three days and left the island in the worst mess we've had in months with those lousy Victory ships of yours. I have to get back there tonight."
"And suppose you don't? What's going to happen? You have the smartest bunch of engineers of any shipyard out here. Give them their head. The world won't come to an end. What's it to you, anyway? You hate the war, you hate Roosevelt, and I'm not sure you don't hate me."
Dan allowed himself a thin smile. "Whether I hate you or not, Admiral, you have more balls than anyone else in this outfit, and I wish to God you were out there in the Pacific running this thing."
Dan didn't return to Terminal Island that night. The ceremonies were over, and he was standing at one end of the speakers' table, trying with some embarrassment to unfasten the decoration that had been pinned onto his dinner jacket, when a voice said, "If you'll hold still, I'll do that for you, Danny."
He looked up and saw Jean—the first time he had seefl her in the three years since May Ling had died. She had not changed a great deal, nor was she denying her fifty-fou
r
years. Her hair was streaked with gray, but worn without dye in a tight bun at the back of her neck, and she made no attempt to conceal the wrinkles. The eyes were still very blue, and her figure was still very much as it had been when he first met her. He noted her simple gray suit with approval, but then, he had never disapproved of Jean's taste in clothes.
"Hello, Jean," he said quietly.
She had unfastened the decoration, and she held it out to him. He noticed that she wore no rings, no jewels of any kind. He stuffed the decoration into his pocket and asked her how she had gotten there.
"Roger Lapham invited me. You remember him, don't you? He's the mayor now. Or didn't you know that?"
"Damned if I did! So he's the mayor?"
"He does it very quietly. Our table was at the back of the hall."
"Where is he now?"
"I told him to leave me on my own. I wanted very much to see you. When I wrote to you after May Ling's death and got no answer—"
"I couldn't answer any of the letters."
"I think I understood that, so I waited. But it's been three years."
"Almost—yes. Look, Jean, I couldn't eat any of the slop they served here tonight. I'm hungry. Let me talk to the people who are waiting to tell me that they always knew Dan Lavette would make it back, and then, if you want to, we'll go somewhere and eat?"
"I'd like that, Danny."
It took half an hour for Dan to disentangle himself from the crowd of old friends and acquaintances who came up to the speakers' table to say that they had missed him, that San Francisco had not been the same without Dan Lavette, and to congratulate him on his presidential citation. Jean sat at a table a little distance away, watching the tall, heavyset, gray-haired man who had once been her husband. If she had not changed too much in appearance, Dan had changed a great deal indeed. He had lost weight; his body had become even more lean than before, his heavily muscled shoulders sloping and uneasy in the dinner jacket, his face deeply lined, his dark eyes sunken under his shaggy brows. He was still an imposing and handsome man, but so different from the big, tough, swaggering, cocky waterfront fisherman she had met thirty-five years before that it was almost impossible to connect the two and make of them a single person. And yet, as she watched him, her thoughts kept going back to the boy, the boy who had sat at the dinner table in the Seldon mansion on Nob Hill, waiting for cues, eyeing the array of knives and forks and spoons so warily, following her lead, looking sideways at her as no one had ever looked at her before. Well, it was all long, long ago, and the Seldon mansion had long since gone the way of the other mansions on Nob Hill, and the boy was this somber, unsmiling man who in four years had become one of the biggest shipbuilders the world had ever seen.
He finished with the well-wishers and walked over to her. She rose, and he took her arm. The very movement was gentle, like the gait of a wild horse subtly broken. They walked out into the cool, bracing night air.
"Are you hungry?" he asked her.
"I couldn't eat, Danny. I hardly touched the food," she replied, not adding that the evening had been a very emotional and difficult one for her.
"There's a place on Jones Street, down near the wharf, an Italian place called Gino's."
The name touched her memory. Long ago, when she had once hired Pinkerton detectives to follow Dan, they reported that Gino's was the place he often met May Ling.
"That would be fine, Danny."
"Cab?"
"I'd rather walk, if you don't mind. It's not too far."
"And downhill, thank heavens. Each year, these hills become steeper and more impossible. God Almighty, do you remember when I used to run up them?"
"I do indeed. I remember running with you."
They walked on in silence for a while. Downhill still had its pitfalls, and when she stumbled once, Dan grasped her arm and steadied her. She took courage from that and grasped his arm; the swell of his biceps under her fingers was good and comforting, and it was good to be close to him, to feel him against her. They could see the bay beneath them, with the fog rolling in, and they could hear the mournful hooting of the ships. The wonderful, woeful old sound brought a lump into Dan's throat. He had been bereft of emotion for a long time; now it filled him and choked him. His voice was thick as he told Jean that he was due back at Terminal Island this same night.
"But can you make it, Dan?" "The hell with it."
Gino embraced him. Gino had become an old 'man. "Hey, Danny, Danny,
mio caro figlio,
so long, so long." "This is Jean," Dan said.
Gino bowed, said something to Dan in Italian, and then took them to their table.
"What did he say?" Jean asked. "He said you're a lovely woman." "He doesn't know who I am?" "No, I guess not."
Dan ordered linguini, with olive oil and garlic, and after that a veal cutlet and salad. Jean said she'd have the same thing. A bottle of red wine. Gino brought the wine and poured it. Jean raised her glass. "To the war's end, Danny. Soon." "Yes. Soon."
They drank the toast and sat quietly, watching each other. Finally, Jean said, "You miss her terribly. You never got over it, did you, Danny?" "I miss her."
"You live alone?" Jean asked. Dan nodded. "In the house in Westwood?" "No. I sold the house." "Then where?"
"On Terminal Island. I have a room next to my office. A bed and a bathroom. That's all I need." "Oh, no." "Why not?"