“You won’t try?”
“No, darling,” she said firmly.
After a little while, without another word, he started the car up again. She told herself it didn’t make any difference. She told herself that the faint restraint in his manner was all imagination.
Three days later the next batch of merchandise was ready. They lighted up and slammed off into a sky of incredible blue.
The first day was never as bad as the ones that followed, somehow. There was no sense to it, actually. It just never seemed as bad. Liz spent an aimless day, and part of another, and then she did as she had known in her heart that she was going to have to do: she called on Jackie Genelli.
It was mid-afternoon. Jackie took so long coming to the door of her small house that Liz had begun to hope that she wasn’t in. Then Jackie opened the door and stood there, very young, very pretty. She wore no makeup, her red hair was tangled, her denim playsuit spotted across the halter.
“I’m Mrs. Heifer. Liz Heifer.”
“I know,” the girl said. She stood, unmoving, in the doorway.
“Could I come in, Jackie?”
“If you want.” The tone of voice gave no quarter.
Liz followed her into the small cluttered living-room. Jackie pushed magazines off a chair. “You can sit there.” She crossed the room and sat on the couch, legs pulled up under her, her eyes watchful.
“I understand you’re from New Orleans, Jackie.”
“Don’t start so far away. It will take longer to get to the point.”
“Why are you being rude?”
“I’m not — I’m just being surly. I’m a surly type. Now just give me a delicate little hint about the proprieties, Mrs. Colonel Heifer, and I’ll promise to be a good girl.”
Liz made up her mind in a fractional part of a second, then tipped her head back and laughed, hoping she was doing a good job of it.
Jackie watched her, unsmiling, sullen. “What’s funny?”
“I’m a committee of one, Jackie. You guessed that right. But I don’t care what you do. I really don’t.”
“And, Mrs. Colonel Heifer, I don’t think I care what you say. I hate it here; I hate the whole bloody awful business. They’re making Gidge fly too much and too often. Oh, it’s all right for you and the rest of the biddies around here. You’re used to it; you don’t turn a hair. You’re not human. I don’t think you’ve got any imagination left.” Jackie slipped off the couch, went to the window and stood with her back to Liz, breathing hard. She had a very nice figure, Liz decided.
“Did you have a nice three days with Gidge?” she asked.
“Oh, just dandy!... I can’t take it. I told him I can’t.”
“Was he a flyer when you met him?”
“Yes, but I didn’t know it would be this way. God, to think of the picture I had of myself! Waving him off with a. tear in my eye! I never got any further than waving him off. I didn’t think of day after day and night after night when you don’t hear a thing except the sirens on those crash wagons. I... I just haven’t got the guts for it.”
“Is Gidge going to ask to be grounded?”
Jackie’s response was a derisive snort. “Him?”
“Turn around, dear. I want to talk to you.”
“Tell me to keep a stiff upper lip? Tell me to be brave? Pat me on the head a little?”
“No.”
“I love the guy. Maybe you’ve forgotten what that’s like.”
“I hardly think so. But Lieutenant Gidge Genelli is going to keep on flying in my husband’s group. That’s where I come in. That’s what is important to me, Jackie. Ben and I, we’re a pair of antiques; I sweated out the last war while Ben did over a hundred missions out of England.”
“And so this is nothing compared to that?”
“This is quite a thing, Jackie. Quite dangerous. Very unpleasant. But at least Ben is with me.”
“That’s worse. Every time Gidge comes back I can’t be right with him because of thinking of the next time.”
“Never mind that for a moment, Jackie. In 1943 Ben was a captain, flying a fighter plane. His wing man was Whitey Jensen. Whitey started getting the wrong sort of letters from his wife: whining letters — letters saying she couldn’t take it. Even one that said she might kill herself — that is, if he didn’t get out of the air. It may have seemed odd to Whitey that Laura couldn’t take it, while he was forcing himself to button up his ship for every mission. Whitey got very jittery. He lost the edge of his flying. And one morning, taking off, Whitey wallowed over and jabbed his wingtip into Ben’s tail-section. Ben kept his head and managed to get altitude. He had no rudder, but with the ailerons, tabs and elevators he could make a very gradual turn. By the time he brought his ship in, they had what was left of Whitey and his ship off the runway.”
“Why are you telling me a ghastly thing like that? Do you think that just because I—”
“I’m telling you, Jackie, because your husband flies with my husband. If Gidge worries so much about you that he uses bad judgment in the air, it may affect, to some slight degree, Ben’s safety. And I want Ben to have every possible margin of safety. I want so badly for him to have it, that when he comes home, I try to make it just as though he’d come home from an office. I didn’t do so well this last time. So I have to do better next time. He has too much on his mind to spare any room for my — my petulance.”
Jackie looked down at her linked fingers, white-knotted. “I wouldn’t want to make Gidge... fly badly.”
“Did he leave here at peace with himself and with you?”
“No, but I want him to stop.”
“And if he shouldn’t come back, Jackie? If he makes one of those five-hundred-mi lean-hour errors of judgment?”
“Don’t say a thing like that!”
“You don’t have to shout at me, Jackie. I don’t care if you spend all your time while Gidge is gone rolling up and down the street, or getting your stomach pumped. But I don’t want you putting a man in the air who could endanger Ben. Just as I won’t send Ben away in a frame of mind that might endanger your husband.”
Liz walked out unhurriedly. She shut the front door quietly behind her and walked down the station street by the neat small houses. It was as though she had visited her own past, had visited the Liz of 1942. She felt incurably tired, as though emotional exhaustion were a disease she could never escape.
On the fifth day, at ten in the morning, the black phone said, “Mrs. Heifer? ETA is thirteen-thirty hours. Full roster.”
“Thanks a lot, Timmy,” she said.
She stood by the phone a moment, then looked in the mimeographed station book and found Jackie Genelli’s number.
“Jackie? Liz Heifer. Just got the word: They’re all back at one-thirty this afternoon.”
There was a little time of silence on the line; then Jackie said, her voice light, quick, controlled, “Thanks a lot, Liz.”
There was no need to hear any more. Liz hung up, stood with her eyes shut, her fingertips on the edge of the phone table for long moments. Jackie would make it. Most of them could. A pathetic few couldn’t.
Suddenly there seemed to be a million last-minute things to do. She whistled, out of key, as she worked. For her man there would be a little time of ease, of rest, of love. It was all she could do — a small thing, but desperately difficult.
