“Herb!” Peggy let out a squeal of her own. She might have been a bobby-soxer getting all excited about the latest skinny crooner from Hoboken, not a respectable woman of middle years running toward a prosperous gent in a gray pinstriped suit and a fedora whose band and brim told the world it wasn’t quite the latest style.
“Peggy!” He squeezed the breath out of her. He wasn’t usually one for public displays, but then she didn’t usually get stuck in the middle of a world war. He smelled of aftershave and American cigarettes-good smells, familiar smells, she’d almost forgotten about in her crowded time overseas. And he smelled of himself, which was even better and even more familiar.
“Oh, Lord!” she said when they got done kissing out there in front of everyone like a couple of newlyweds. “I missed you so much!”
“Well, I’m not exactly sorry to see you back, either, sweetheart.” That sounded more like Herb. He might not have majored in understatement at Villanova, but he sure must have minored in it.
He took a pack of Pall Malls from a jacket pocket, tapped one against the palm of his left hand, and stuck it in his mouth. As he was lighting it, Peggy said, “For God’s sake give me one of those, will you? I’ve been smoking like a chimney-I mean like a steel-mill chimney- since I got back to New York. What they use for tobacco in Europe shouldn’t happen to a dog.”
“Here you go.” He lit it for her. She smoked greedily. She hadn’t been kidding, not even a little bit. Herb let her take a few puffs. Then he said, “Come on. Let’s rescue your suitcase, and then we’ll go home.”
“You have no idea-I mean, darling, you have no idea-how good that sounds.” Peggy charged toward the baggage car like a panzer on the attack. Thinking of it in that particular way told her she wasn’t the same person she had been when shells started falling around Marianske Lazne.
Herb tipped a redcap to carry the suitcase out to the Packard. When they got to the station door, the man said, “Suh, this here’s as far as I’m supposed to go.”
Without missing a step, Herb handed him another fat silver half-dollar. “I didn’t hear a word you said. Did you hear anything, Peg?”
“Who, me?” she said. The porter’s grin showed a mouthful of gold teeth. He lugged the bag out to the car and waved when he trotted back toward the station.
Philadelphia traffic took getting used to. So did everything else about the city. It didn’t look shabby. People in the street weren’t nervous or fearful. Or, if they were, it was from personal, private concerns, not because they worried that dive-bombers would scream down out of the sky and blow them into ground round.
There was so much in the shops! Gasoline was so cheap, and so many cars used the roads. “You don’t know how lucky we are,” Peggy said. A cop at a street corner was directing traffic. That was all he was doing. Peggy pointed his way. “Look! He isn’t asking people for their papers.”
“They’d spit in his eye if he did,” Herb answered. “And who needs papers, anyway? Unless you’re going overseas, I mean.”
“I was mighty glad to have my American passport. Oh, Jesus, was I ever,” Peggy said. As for the rest of it, though, her husband had the straight goods. If you lived in a free country, why did you need anything that proved who you were? Wasn’t your word good enough? Peggy pointed again, almost at random. “No soldiers! No uniforms! Not one, except for the policeman.”
“Well, who needs ’em?” Herb said.
She remembered Germany, where everybody this side of ragpickers put on an outfit that let him show off who he was and what he did and why everybody else should salute him. And she wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if the Reich had mandated rank badges so people could tell a Ragpicker First Class from a lowly Ragpicker Second.
They lived not far from the Main Line, on a street that had been lined with elms till Dutch elm disease killed them. They had more house than they needed most of the time.
Herb parked the car in front of the place. Was he grayer than he had been the last time she saw him? And was he wondering the same thing about her? A year and a half! Lord!
“You don’t know how good it is to have you back,” he said.
“You don’t know how good it is to be back!” Peggy said. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “You have no idea. And count yourself lucky you don’t.”
“Maybe I do, a little,” Herb answered, and left it right there.
Peggy started to tell him he was talking through his hat. She didn’t do it, though. Maybe making it to middle age meant she thought before opening her big trap. Sometimes, anyhow. Herb had gone Over There in 1918. He’d seen combat; Peggy knew that much. Even after all these years, she knew very little more. Whatever he’d seen and done in France, he’d never talked about it once he came back to the States. This was almost the first time he’d suggested he might have run into an unpleasantness or three while working for Uncle Sam.
And so, instead of laughing at him, Peggy said, “I could use a drink-and if you want to spell that with a U, I don’t mind.”
“Motion seconded and passed by acclamation.” Herb got out of the Packard, came around, and opened the passenger door for her. The suitcase stayed on the back seat. Peggy didn’t need anything in it right away, and nobody would steal it, not in this eminently respectable neighborhood.
Herb opened the front door. He took half a step to one side so Peggy could walk into the foyer ahead of him. When she did, she was greeted by shouts of “Surprise!” and “Welcome home!” and enough cheers for a Sunday doubleheader at Shibe Park. Everybody she’d ever met seemed to be crowding the house.
She rounded on her husband. “ You did this!” she said-half accusation, half delight.
“Darn right I did,” he answered. “You don’t come back from a war every day.”
“I’m going to have that drink, or maybe that drunk, any which way,” Peggy declared.
“Good. I’ll help,” Herb said briskly. She did, and so did he.
Vaclav Jezek put a helmet on a stick and cautiously raised it up above the level of the trench in which he crouched. That was probably the oldest sniper’s trick in the world, which didn’t mean it didn’t work. The German lines were most of a kilometer away, separated from his position by mines and barbed wire. All the same, a rifle shot rang out over there.
The helmet rang, too, like a bell. He jerked it down. It was a French model. Now it had a bullet hole a centimeter or two above the French crest soldered onto the front.
Sergeant Benjamin Halevy eyed that precisely placed hole. “Well, you were right,” he said. “Fucking Nazis have a sniper of their own running around loose.”
“Happy day,” Vaclav said morosely. “I’ve done this before. I don’t want to do it again, goddammit.” When a sniper annoyed the enemy enough, he did his best to get rid of the annoyance. Vaclav had already won a couple of duels with a German sharpshooter. Now the Landsers were back for another try.
“They must have noticed when you murdered that mortar guy and the armored cars,” Halevy said.
“Happy day,” the Czech repeated, even more gloomily than before. The pile of dirt and ore and whatnot where the mortar crew had set up was behind the line now, not in front of it. Clearing all the Germans away from it had cost more lives than it was worth. And the boys in field-gray still had plenty more of those industrial hillocks to use as firing positions.
“Maybe a shell from a 105 will blow that son of a bitch right out of his marching boots,” Halevy said.
“And then you wake up,” Vaclav said, fumbling in his tunic for a pack of Gitanes. He was wearing a French one; the Czech tunic he’d had for so long had finally gone the way of all fabric. The pockets weren’t in the right places-they weren’t where his fingers automatically went, anyhow. Once he had the cigarette going, he added, “You can afford to be cheerful. The bastard isn’t trying to put one in your earhole.”
“He wouldn’t turn me down if I did something stupid,” Halevy said.