A Midnight Clear. William Wharton
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as dressed. The girl’s in a slip and crying. Gordon and I stand at the edge of the bed and listen. I’ll give a quick version of the story. It’s not what this book’s about anyway, or maybe it is.
Her name is Janice. She was engaged to a boy named Matt. Matt was killed in the Sicilian invasion. Janice only heard a week ago. She came down to see all the last places Matt had been in his short military life. She’s a junior at Penn State but isn’t going back to school. She’s twenty. She came down here to kill herself but didn’t have enough nerve; all she has now is a ticket back on the bus.
So what do you believe?
She and Morrie got to talking because they were embarrassed. They began kissing; then she was crying and that’s how it came out.
We wind up pushing the beds together into one big bed and start drinking the rest of our bourbon in the paper bag. Five people on two-thirds of a fifth. There might be some mathematical sense there, but it would be the only logical part of that night. It was like an X-rated version of a classic unmade war film starring Shirley Temple with Audie Murphy.
Janice has only made love with one person, Matt, just before he left. Now she’s volunteering herself to all of us. She’s insisting it’s what she wants to do.
Of course, this brings out the contemplative, cantankerous, contentious ASTPR in each of us. We’re also guilty, scared. This idea, this simple, lovely idea, must be subjected to every kind of spurious rationale. We wind down before dawn and sleep; tired, medium drunk, intimately wedded in our double-double bed. As the springing light of the new day grays the room, Janice comes, quietly, privately, half in our dreams, to each of us: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny. We cry and giggle, passing through the mythical barrier between boys and men, men and death.
Janice takes us with her.
At ten o’clock, after a luxurious mass breakfast in bed, Mel escorts Janice to the bus station. We don’t talk about what happened. I don’t think any of us can put it together with anything we’ve known.
I personally have always had an eerie feeling about my first sexual experience, masquerading as a dead boy named Matt. And I still, to this day, have the lingering sensation that any woman with whom I make love has some other ideal person in her heart and mind.
Once more we’re up against my weakness for the true but unbelievable. Mel and Janice correspond through the war. Mel goes back home and they marry. They have three children and are divorced after fifteen years. Perhaps because it was a mixed marriage, or maybe only an ordinary marriage, subject to the pressures of our times. Perhaps Matt could always have been there.
Shutzer and Gordon finish dancing. We haul in the rest of our supplies. I have Miller back our jeep with the fifty caliber up against one side of the château so its barrel can traverse the entire road along with the bridge. Our other jeep we bring around behind the château. I drag in the snowsuits, the whitening, a box of grenades and the 506 radio. Mother helps me with all the schlepping. I also break out the field telephones. Miller begins untangling them. I struggle out our two big reels of wire for the phones. They’re still caked with mud from when we pulled them up in the Saar.
When I’m finished, I stop to get my breath and look over the situation. From in front of the château, we look down across a series of terraced fountains almost to the stream. This is the stream under the bridge we drove over up to the château. There are statues of dolphins and different fish in the fountains, with verdigrised copper piping coming from fish mouths for spurting water. The statues look like cast cement: spotted black, green and yellow with clots of hardened moss. The basins of the fountains are filled with frozen leaves.
I decide I’ll set up two guard posts; one downhill on the other side of the fountains, behind a retainer wall to the right of the bridge; the other up on the side of the hill behind the château, just higher than the roofline. I scramble uphill to locate a spot where we’ll have a good overall view of the road, both directions, and still cover the lower guard post.
I can’t think of any way to protect this higher post from infiltration behind. Still, someone climbing on this steep slope in frozen leaves and dead branches isn’t going to have much luck sneaking up on anybody. It’d have to be a goodsized attack patrol charging in, and if anything like that happens we’re goners anyway.
I find just the right position and clear a space with my foot. I break off a branch from a tree and jam it in the cleared space. My innards seem to be behaving themselves, even after the climb uphill. Maybe just getting away from Ware, Love and all the chickenshit will help.
I slide downhill to the château and pick up one of the wire reels. I unhook the tie and knock off more mud.
The guard’s going to be a drag. Days, it’ll be one in a hole; that’s two on and four off. Nights will be tough. We’ll need two in each hole so that’ll be four on and only two off. We’ll have to do our sleeping daytimes. But I don’t see any other way. I could try it with only one guard post, up on the hill; it could cover everything. Maybe after the first few days, if nothing happens, that’s what we’ll do. Or maybe just one post down by the bridge. We’ll figure something; the squad will have ideas.
Mel comes out and helps me carry the reel of wire downhill to the bridge. I explain my idea for posts and he agrees. We find a perfect place about twenty yards right of the bridge. The retainer wall is shoulder high and makes an ideal firing parapet. With cover from the other post, it should be safe. That is, if anything is safe in a wood, in a war, with other people trying to kill you.
I tie the wire to a ring set in the wall and begin backing uphill to the château. Gordon says he’ll take the first guard and stays down there.
I struggle uphill, laying wire alongside the road and looking out at the hills around. I could be under observation by somebody out there. Some guy in field green could be sitting with a gun and a scope watching me.
I turn my head to see how much farther there’s still to go and start hurrying the wire, dropping it off in loops. I’m already shaking; laying wire isn’t all that hard; my nerves are just shot. When I get to the château, I run the wire through a window to the fireplace.
Mother is arranging rations and equipment. He’s started his homemaking routine already and this is some home he’s got to play with. I’m sure we’re all going to get lectures on the statues, the architecture, the wood walls, the fireplace; the whole thing. Wilkins can’t help but turn any place into a nest, and here he’s got a palace. He seems to be making it fine; just a little too tense, too conscientious.
Once, on a sixty-hour nonstop convoy from Rouen to Metz, Mother rigged a sleeping hammock in the back of his jeep. That was the jeep he and Jim Freize shared. It was named Linda, of course. I painted the name on it with a picture of a rabbit. Mother calls Linda Bunny sometimes. Nothing seems to embarrass Mother; it’s as if he’s immune to all the things he should be embarrassed about.
Mother also had a sort of altar along the front of that jeep next to the instrument panel. There was a picture of Linda and cutout phrases from some of her letters glued around it. Sometimes I used to think Jim was as in love with Linda as Mother was. He’d better have been, because with Mother that’s all you get to talk about.
When Hunt saw this whole affair, he blew his top and made them rip everything out. Hunt got ‘it’ near Ohmsdorf, under a cross by the side of the road. It was just into Germany; we had the distinction of being the first American troops to penetrate into what the Germans called German territory at that time. This lasted all of three days and we were pushed back. I tried smuggling a message home to tell where we were. I asked Joan, my sister, to give my love to Gertrude, Moe and Jack. I knew she’d figure it out and she did. I also knew Glendon, the assistant S2 who censored our mail, wouldn’t catch it, and he didn’t!
Hunt picked that cross for the platoon CP. Hunt was a noncom from the original Umpty-eleventh Regiment, and not very bright. Gordon insists guys like Hunt, Ware and Love are the real enemy; that is, if there is an enemy.
Inside the château I check how Miller’s doing with the phones. He has them untangled and we tie in the wire I’ve