“Nah, you got it all wrong,” Trumbull said, grinning at Nelson’s head, which looked like a huge red cabbage among the clutter of glasses and siphon bottles. “I want to be a proper guy, a solid, taxpaying citizen. I’ll wear tweeds and a yellow vest in my playroom, and I’ll smile with my friends about my life as a bum in Spain. Ah, but there’ll be an ache in it, though,” he said, lowering his voice in a soft, theatrical whisper. “The bullfight posters on the wall, the banderillas Dominguin nailed into that Muira in Pamplona, the empty goatskins on the walls, dry and withered as an old scrotum, all symbols of irreverent youth and feckless gaiety.”
“Stop it, stop it!” Nelson said, his voice thick and hollow beneath his folded arms.
“But my wife will understand,” Trumbull said with a great heavy sigh. “She will be the lovely and rich Walpurgis Trumbull, nee Glockenspiel, and her huge brown eyes will puddle with sympathy as I stare into my drink and dream of these dead golden days.”
Everyone was laughing when he finished, and Nelson went unsteadily to the bar to see about the drink order. Trumbull asked Beecher if he were going to Don Willie’s party, and Beecher said no.
“Silly question, eh?” Trumbull said. “He never crept into your heart, did he?”
“How about you?” Beecher asked him.
“Well, I can’t go to his party after writing that poem about him. He’s probably never seen it, but that doesn’t make any difference. Also, I think I’d be happier buying my own drinks. But I may weasel to the extent of going down to the beach and watching his fireworks.”
Beecher finished his drink in one long swallow. “Is this idea of going home pretty sudden?”
Trumbull shook his head. “I gave myself two years and they’re up. Now I’m going home and go to work. I could have had a dozen pretty good jobs when I got out of school. Engineers are prime targets for Du Pont and GM and so forth. Hell, they offered us our pick of the country, north, south, east, west, you name it. And transportation, and homes, and pension plans. They’d have installed brides in the homes, too, if we’d asked for them.”
“What was wrong with it?”
“I wasn’t dry behind the ears. I’m no expatriate, don’t let the smart-aleck talk fool you. I want to live and work in America. But I wanted these two years to, well, get my breath. Maybe it won’t make me any more valuable in an engineering department, but it’s made me more valuable to myself.” He paused to smile at Nelson who was talking with heated good humor to the waiter. “It’s the same with him. He’s expending a lot of nonsense over here in a fairly innocent way. But he’s going home in a couple of months. He wants to teach, and I’ll bet he’s a better teacher for this mixed-up sabbatical he’s taken.”
“Probably,” Beecher said, and waved for another drink.
They were all so damn young, Beecher thought, and felt an unpleasant stab of self-pity; Nelson and Trumbull, and the dozens like them he’d known in Spain, galloping about like happy colts, taking wild and irresponsible leaps at every fence they came to. But it was okay for them, as Trumbull had pointed out; it was good for them. They wouldn’t forget who they were in this bewildering old complex of Europe and Africa. They had their initials sewn tightly onto Brooks Brothers shirts, and they could always take a peek if things got confusing. At their age nothing changed, least of all themselves; they were fixed and permanent qualities. They could squander time like millionaires. Life waited on them, tolerant of their youth. In the far-off unreal future the realities were waiting; jobs and wives, homes and children, but they had oceans of time to cross before they came to these responsibilities.
“You going to stay here for good?” Trumbull asked him.
“I don’t imagine so,” Beecher said. He had oceans of time, too, he thought bitterly. Oceans of time to do nothing in; at thirty-eight no one was clamoring for his services, and baiting their offers with homes and pension plans. There was no reason for him to go home. Nothing to do, no one to be close to except his kid sister, Bunny, who still thought of him with adolescent pride and respect.
There had been a girl named Alison around for a long time. She had been waiting when Beecher returned from his first war. Not for him particularly, but for any deserving veteran with his feet on the ground and his shoulders braced to support mortgage payments, dental bills, and education insurance. She seemed a wise and happy girl, with round clear eyes, and a snug welcoming body; the answer to prayers that popular magazines had put in the mouths of returning soldiers. This was what the fighting had been all about; not just the chance to boo the umpire and enjoy Mom’s apple pie. His family and Alison’s agreed on this completely. Only Bunny had dissented, he remembered; she had religion and the Air Force combined in a heady adolescent metaphysic, and she had wanted him to become a flying missionary. But he had played tennis and golf with Alison, and put in two unmarked years acquiring “experience” in a brokerage firm. By then their names had become hyphenated in their little crowd. Mike-and-Alison. Mike-and-Alison drank rum Collins. Mike-and-Alison went to ball games. Mike-and-Alison went to parties and got drunk and necked in the driveway of Alison’s home. It took Korea to break it up. Beecher’s training and instincts required him to express resentment over his recall. But he finally got tired of pretending, tired of Alison’s brave face at farewell parties, and tired of her father’s talk of duty and sacrifice and the Hun. The old man didn’t seem to have any clear notion of where the hell the war was, or what it was all about.
But he wasn’t alone in this confusion. At any rate, Beecher had told Alison one night that he was glad to get back to flying. She had reacted with a spunk and spirit which seemed to flow fittingly from her father’s cloudy jingoism.
“I wouldn’t respect you one minute if you didn’t, Mike Beecher. I’ll wait for you, darling, don’t worry.” And they had slept together that night for the first time.
Alison was comfortably married when Beecher returned from Korea three years later. She had him to dinner and fluttered proudly about her thin smiling husband. As Beecher left, he had a moment alone with her in the hall. She wanted to explain about sleeping with him; it had been the times, the frenzy and madness. It was symbolic; a smile and a wave to all gallant soldiers. Nothing personal. There hadn’t been much smiling when they went to bed, he remembered; it had been full of tears and guilt. But he let it go the way she wanted it.
After Korea the Fifties seemed to shoot past him; men he’d been to school with were graying at the temples and griping about taxes and “pressure.” Beecher’s father and mother died, and he salvaged enough from the big house to see Bunny through school without dipping into his savings. His friends advised him about jobs. He sat in their offices and listened to talk about the “team.” They told him his business background was “light.” The wartime flying, eight years of it, was more a liability than an asset. As a friend in a personnel department put it, he was “excitement-prone.” “Any guy with your background, there’s always the risk he enjoys rocking the boat.” And there was little need for boat-rockers in the business world. Beecher had sold space for a sports magazine; worked for nothing on a city-planning commission; tried the brokerage business a second time and lost five thousand dollars playing the market. This defeat scared him; with his track record, how the hell could he advise anyone?