What time was it? Six-fifteen. Another five minutes in bed. This was going to be a kind of holiday today. No nervous thunder of the riveters, no wind on the scaffolds, none of the hiss and flare of the welders in the shipyard in Passaic. He had to go to his draft board today, and once more to Governor's Island to be examined.
Six-twenty. Time to get up. The doctors were waiting on the green island, the ferry with the General's name, the X-ray technicians, the rubber stamp with Rejected on it. What did they do in older wars? Before X-ray. How many men fought at Shiloh with scars on their lungs, all unknowing? How many men came to Borodino with stomach ulcers? How many at Thermopylae who would be turned back by their draft boards today for curvature of the spine? How many 4Fs perished outside Troy? Time to get up.
Hope stirred beside him. She turned to him and put her arm across his chest. She came slowly out from the backstage of sleep and ran her hand lightly, in half-slumbering possession, down his ribs and his stomach.
"Bed," she murmured, still in the grip of the last dream, and he grinned at her and gathered her close to him.
"What time is it?" she whispered, her lips close to his ear. "Is it morning? Do you have to go?"
"It's morning," he said. "And I have to go. But," and he smiled as he said it, and pressed the familiar, slender body, "but I think the government can wait another fifteen minutes."
Hope was washing her hair when she heard the key in the lock. She had come home from work and seen that Noah hadn't returned yet from Governor's Island, and she had pottered around the house, without switching on a lamp, in the summer twilight, waiting for him to get back.
With her head bent over the basin, and the soapy water dripping on to her closed eyelids, she heard Noah come into the big room.
"Noah," she called, "I'm in here," and she wrapped a towel around her head and turned to him, naked except for that. His face was sober and controlled. He held her loosely, gently touching the base of her neck, still wet from the rinsing.
"It happened," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"The X-ray?"
"Didn't show anything, I guess." His voice was remote and calm.
"Did you tell them?" she asked. "About the last time?"
"No."
She wanted to ask why not, but she stopped herself, because in a confused, intuitive way, she knew.
"You didn't tell them that you had a defence job, either, did you?"
"No."
"I'll tell them," she said loudly. "I'll go down myself. A man with scars on his lungs can't be…"
"Sssh," he said. "Sssh."
"It's silly," she said, trying to talk reasonably, like a debater.
"What good will a sick man do in the Army? You'll only crack up. It'll just be another burden for them. They can't make you a soldier…"
"They can try." Noah smiled slowly. "They sure can try. The least I can do is give them a chance. Anyway," and he kissed her behind the ear, "anyway, they've already done it. I was sworn in at eight o'clock tonight."
She pulled back. "What're you doing here then?"
"Two weeks," he said. "They give you two weeks to settle your affairs."
"Will it do any good," Hope asked, "for me to argue with you?"
"No," he said very softly.
"Damn them!" Hope said. "Why don't they get things straight the first time? Why," she cried, addressing the draft boards and the Army doctors and the regiments in the field and the politicians in all the capitals of the world, addressing the war and the time and all the agony ahead of her, "why can't they behave like sensible human beings?"
"Sssh," Noah said. "We only have two weeks. Let's not waste them. Have you eaten yet?"
"No," she said. "I'm washing my hair."
He sat down on the edge of the tub, smiling wearily at her.
"Finish your hair," he said, "and we'll go out to dinner. There's a place I heard about on Second Avenue where they have the best steaks in the world. Three dollars apiece, but they're…"
She threw herself down at his knees and held him tightly.
"Oh, darling," she said, "oh, darling…"
He stroked her bare shoulder as though he were trying to memorize it. "For the next two weeks," he said, his voice almost not trembling, "we will go on a holiday. That's how we'll settle my affairs." He grinned at her. "We'll go up to Cape Cod and swim and we'll hire bicycles and we'll eat only three-dollar steaks at every meal. Please, please, darling, stop crying."
Hope stood up. She blinked twice. "All right," she said. "It's stopped. I won't cry again. It'll take me fifteen minutes to get ready. Can you wait?"
"Yes," he said. "But hurry. I'm starved."
She took the towel from her head and finished drying her hair. Noah sat on the edge of the bath and watched her. From time to time Hope got glimpses of his drawn, thin face in the mirror. She knew that she was going to remember the way his face looked then, lost and loving as he sat perched on the porcelain rim, in the cluttered, garishly lit room – remember for a long, long time.
They had their two weeks on Cape Cod. They stayed at an aggressively clean tourist house with an American flag on a pole on the lawn in front of it. They ate clam chowder and broiled lobster for dinner. They lay on the pale sand and swam in the dancing, cold water and went to the movies religiously at night, without commenting on the newsreels to each other, without saying anything about the charging, tremulous voices describing death and defeat and victory on the flickering screen. They hired bicycles and rode slowly along the seaside roads and laughed when a truckload of soldiers passed and whistled at Hope's pretty legs, and called to Noah, "Pretty soft, Bud. What's your draft number, Bud? We'll see you soon!"