A Midnight Clear. William Wharton
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for a globe of the world. Most of Europe on it is German. The floor is carpeted and there’s oak wainscoting up about three feet. I pull aside the curtains on the fourth wall, open a window and push out the shutter. I’m looking down from the front of our château and see Mother by the bridge.
Maybe I should make the upper guard post in here; be a hell of a lot more comfortable. But somehow it seems wrong, turning a beautiful room like this into a guard post. Wilkins probably wouldn’t let me anyway. Also, if anything happened, whoever was up here would be trapped.
I go around looking at the books. They’re all French or German, no English. I’m not exactly sure which country we’re in; could be Belgium, Luxembourg, France or even Germany; we’re at a place where they more or less come together. I don’t know what time it is, what day or what country. I’m not even sure of my own name. Next thing they’ll be making me a general.
The other rooms are bedrooms, five of them. There are furniture marks on the floors but the rooms are empty. The biggest room has full-length mirrors along one wall, the wall away from the windows. God, we’re ugly; dirty, gangling, baggy; shuffling in a hunching crouch like animals. We’re walking, talking Bill Mauldin cartoons or van Gogh potato eaters. We look as if we’re holding things in, at the same time, keeping things out; a permanent state of negative expectation.
I stop in front of one mirror, straighten, try to recognize myself; who is this, who am I?
Gordon’s up close to another mirror, inspecting his teeth. Miller and Shutzer are laughing, posing; pointing at each other. Shutzer gives himself the finger. I don’t think we’ve been seeing ourselves the way we look in these mirrors; it’s hard to accept. We look like the enemy.
At the end of the hallway are two doors. One opens onto a gigantic bathroom with more mirrors along the walls. In the center of the room is a strange-looking copper bathtub shaped like a giant shoe. It looks something like the house for the old lady who didn’t know what to do. It also looks like the kind of bathtub Claudette Colbert would use to take a bath with lots of bubbles, steam and Clark Gable. She knew what to do.
Miller wants to make a bucket chain, haul water from the well and take a bath. But it’s so cold there’s frost on the insides of windows and the mirrors are steaming up with our breath and the heat of our bodies. There are closets behind the mirrors, all empty; and in one corner is a sink without water. There’s also something like a footbath, which I now know was a bidet.
We go out and open the other door in the hall. It leads onto a narrow turning staircase. We tromp up in a row. At top is a small door; Miller gets it third try.
The attic’s divided into small rooms and these rooms are stuffed full with furniture. Things are piled King Tut tomb-style, helter-skelter. It’s fantastic: musical instruments, rugs, satin-covered chairs, beds, paintings in big gilt frames. We poke our way around. Wilkins is going to go ape exploring all this. He’ll probably be cataloguing the whole shootin’ match before he’s finished.
But we have some needs right now. We carry down four mattresses and satin quilted covers. The second squad of the regimental I and R platoon, Umpty-eleventh Infantry, Eighty-tenth Division, will be living in luxury for a few days.
Downstairs, we square our mattresses around the fire and spread the quilts over them. We put fart sacks on top. We’ll always have at least two on guard so this should work fine. I spread out on one and enjoy the softness; it’s been a long time since I’ve slept in an honest-to-God bed.
Shutzer, our kosher gourmet, hungering for the smell of fish, opens a sardine can with his bayonet. Miller, the man who has everything, even a corkscrew, works the cork from a bottle of wine. This could well be the coup de grâce for my stomach, perhaps my entire digestive system, top to bottom. We pass the wine and sardines around; wine’s sour but cold, sardines float in thick oil; some writing on the can’s in German. Maybe this is the German secret weapon; maybe we’ll all wind up in some nice American field hospital with a gaggle of Purple Hearts, victimized by the terrible Huns and their secret weapon, poisoned sardines.
I sit there trying to work out bridge hands for the maniacs. Soon as I’m on duty, it’ll be Gordon, Shutzer, Wilkins and Mundy locked in mortal combat. Concocting hands is more fun than playing. Sometimes I watch and count tricks. For me the game is guessing what the contract will be and if the hands will make. Each day, I’m getting better at playing this inside-out, bass-ackwards kind of bridge. The secret is making the hands as Machiavellian as possible.
Before that Saar patrol, the squad usually played ordinary duplicate bridge. Once a week at Shelby, we’d nominate a team to play against the first squad, Edwards’s squad. We always won. If you don’t count Wilkins, Morrie and Gordon were our best players. At Shelby, Wilkins would never play; now he only plays once in a while to make an emergency foursome. Morrie, Fred and Jim were regulars, too. Max Lewis would play sometimes. Now, when the maniacs want a really good game, they beg Wilkins to sit in; but poor Mundy’s stuck with it most of the time. He never played before he joined the squad and he’ll never be any good. He’s not devious at all, and doesn’t care enough about winning. It drives Shutzer mad.
When we lost half the squad, we also lost our only decks of cards. They were on Morrie, and he was back with the medics before he could pass them to any of us. We weren’t thinking much about bridge right then.
He died in the field hospital. With his right hand gone and his face the way it was, I don’t think he tried hard to stay on. I wouldn’t. Gordon and I wrapped him; it looked as if his eyes were empty; the side of his head was spongy soft.
We’re continually writing home for playing cards, candles, pencils and dictionaries but not one of us has gotten any. We get warm, hand-knit socks, too thick for our boots, or boxes of cookies mashed into crumbs. Corrollo used to get hot Italian peperone sausages and hard Italian cookies uncrushed. Corrollo also would steal sausage off dead Germans. He said it was good but not so good as he got from home.
Father Mundy’s mother packs each of her cookies in a separate wrapping of waxed paper, then stuffs shredded newspaper tight around them. She’s been sending packages to relatives in Ireland for years, so she knows how.
Father considers those cookies an act of love. They are. He’s the one guy we never hound for seconds but he passes them out anyway. It’s almost as if he’s giving communion; one at a time, carefully unwrapped and handed to you directly. They’re usually tollhouse, with lumps of real chocolate and deep in butter. One of Mundy’s mom’s cookies is something to be eaten slowly with much concentration, almost worth reconverting for.
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