"Don"t be a horse"s a.s.s," major Horter exploded. "He"s a nice kid, that"s all."
"And that"s why you"re taking him off on a weekend pa.s.s?
Two days after you tell me, and I TWX the surgeon general, that he shouldn"t be airlifted for at least a week?"
"How"d you find out about that?" she asked, curiously, "It doesn"t matter," he said. "What the h.e.l.l is going on?"
"OK. He"s got a girlfriend. Or he had one. He can"t find her, and we"re going to look for her."
"A girlfriend, or a fraulein?"
"Both," she said.
"The policy of this command is to discourage emotional involvements between troops, especially officers, and frau1eins."
"Tom," Major Horter said. "This boy is going to go look for that girl whether or not the army likes it. You want to get involved with an A WOL charge?"
"I can call him in here and scare him a little," the hospital commander said.
"He won"t scare," Major Horter sad. "Not only is he a boy who thinks he"s in love, but he"s a real hard-nose."
"Where are you going to look for the fraulein?"
"Bad Nauheim," she said.
"OK, Flo," he said. "But for Christ"s sake, remember he"s got friends in high places."
"I don"t think he"s got a friend in the world, except maybe me and this fraulein," she said. "You"re forgiven for that May and December crack, Tom."
"What the h.e.l.l was I supposed to think? All of a sudden, you start acting like a. ."
"Maybe a frustrated mother, Tom," she interrupted him.
"Leave it at that."
Major Florence Horter had a brand-new 1946 Packard Clipper two-door sedan. When she drove it up the curved road to the main entrance of the 97th General Hospital, Craig Lowell was standing there waiting for her, his arm in a sling, his Ike jacket worn over his shoulder. She thought again that he looked very, very young. Maybe not thirteen anymore. But his age. Nineteen was still a boy.
She dreaded what he was likely to find in Bad Nauheim.
It wasn"t that she blamed the German girls for jumping into bed with these kids. Under the circ.u.mstances, that was to be expected. s.e.x was all they had to get by. It wasn"t the first time in history that had happened, nor would it be the last.
It was just that this d.a.m.n fool of a young man really believed that he had found the exception that proved the rule. That his fraulein had been a virgin-he"d even told her that, and he obviously believed it-and that she was different from all the others. What he was liable to find, if he found her at all, was that she had simply subst.i.tuted some other young jacka.s.s for him, and that if she was everything he said she was, she had the new jacka.s.s convinced that he had been the first and that she was in love with him. Again, she didn"t blame the girl. If she was one of these German kids who had lost everything in the war, and couldn"t find a job, a young American officer with a ticket in his pants to the land of the big PX would look pretty appealing to her, too.
She just didn"t like to think what being forced to face facts would do to Craig Lowell. She didn"t care if Lowell was a personal friend of Harry S Truman himself, the bottom line was that he was the loneliest kid she" had ever met and that he was betting his entire emotional bank account on one h.e.l.l of a long shot. An impossible long shot. This race had been fixed, and Lowell had a ticket on the wrong horse.
When they got to Bad Nauheim, he directed her to the outskirts of town and down a dirt road to a farmer"s house.
She went with him to the door. She didn"t speak German, but she understood enough to understand what the farmer and his wife told him. The girl was gone, had been gone for a long time, right after he had left, and they didn"t know where she had gone.
Then they went back into Bad Nauheim, to the provost marshal"s office. The provost marshal Craig Lowell was looking for was long gone. No one he asked had ever heard of a frauline called Ilse Berg. Then they drove across Bad Nauheim to one of the BOQs, and they sat in the lobby and waited until the bar Opened so he could ask the bartender. The bartender was new, and he couldn"t remember a fraulein with that name-h.e.l.l, he never got their names or meeting the description Lowell gave him.
"There"s one more thing we can try," he said, when they were in the Packard again. "She was from Marburg. She was always trying to get me to go to Marburg, and see the house she lived in before the war. She said it was a castle."
"Haven"t you had enough?" Florence Horter said. "You"re kicking a dead horse."
"I want to try it," he said. "If you don"t want to take me, "Why don"t you just take me to the railroad station?" They drove to Marburg, and put up in a transient officer"s hotel right in the middle of the medieval city. A smart-a.s.s sergeant asked them if they wanted adjoining rooms.
In the morning, a sympathetic sergeant at military government called the German police, who told him there was no Berg family with a daughter named IIse in Stadt, Land, or Kreis Marburg. Then he went to the military government files and came up with a 1940 city register. There were seventeen Bergs, none of them with a female child named IIse. And there was no castle named Berg. All castles, or most of them, anyway, were called "Berg Something."
"Like the Administration Building for the Kreis," the MG sergeant said. "That"s Schloss Greiffenberg."
"Thanks a lot," Lowell said. "I really appreciate your courtesy."
"How"d you hurt your shoulder, Lieutenant?" the sergeant asked.
"You know what they say, Sergeant," Lowell said, bitterly.
"It"s not s.e.x that"s bad for you. It"s the running after it that kills you."
They started back to Frankfurt am Main. He didn"t say anything at all until they were back on the autobahn; and when she stole looks at him, she saw that he was really thinking this whole mess through. The proof came when he told her about some little Jewish lieutenant in Greece, who had not only saved his a.s.s on the hillside, but who had given him blood later.
"He was like you, Major," Lowell said. "He had my fraulein pegged and didn"t know if he should tell me or not." He put a cigar in his mouth, and lit it with the cigarette lighter. He laid his head back against the seat and blew smoke rings. He looked, for a while, as if he might cry.
"She wasn"t the first girl in your life," Florence Horter said.
"She won"t be the last."
"As a matter of fact," he said, "she was the first. But she won"t be the last." He sat up, and jammed the cigar defiantly in the comer of his mouth.
"Now, don"t go off half shot, chasing every skirt in sight just to prove you"re a man," Florence Horter said.
He gave her a dirty look, and she thought she was about to be told off. He had to be mad at somebody, she decided, and it might as well be her.
But he surprised her. He chuckled.
"C. Lowell," he said, raising the arm in the sling. "One armed broad chaser." Then he cursed. He had moved the arm too far.
"Watch the sutures, d.a.m.n it," Major Horter said.
"Yes, ma" am," Lowell said. "Major, sir."
When they got to Frankfurt, a little after five thirty, and saw the curved white bulk of the I.G. Farben Building looming out of the rubble, Major Florence Horter took her hand from the wheel and pointed at the building which housed Headquarters, U.S. Forces, Europe Theater.
"How would you like to buy me a steak in the 0 Club?"
"I would be honored, ma"am," he said.
"If you stared soulfully into my eyes," she said, "and maybe held my hand a little, it"d give everybody something to talk about. " They attracted more than a little attention when they walked into the officer"s club dining room, a large, gla.s.s-walled, high ceilinged room. For one thing, she thought, Lowell was a rather spectacular sight with his arm in a sling and his Ike jacket worn over his shoulders like a Hungarian cavalryman. Even without that, he would have attracted attention simply for being a tall, handsome, muscular young man. And finally, here he was in the company of a frumpy field-grade nurse, nearly old enough to be his mother.
He was, she saw, totally oblivious to the looks they got.
She didn"t like it when he gulped down the first scotch and water, and then had two more before he even opened the menu, but then she decided that maybe he was ent.i.tled to "get a little drunk; and in his condition, she didn"t think it would take much.
booze.
It took a lot more to get him high than she thought it would, and something else surprised her. He did not, as she expected, start either to feel sorry for himself about his fraulein or to get nasty about her. He ran off at the mouth a little, but there wasn"t one self-pitying word about the fraulein.
They stayed in the officer"s mess until it closed at midnight, and then drove back to the 97th General Hospital compound. "It was only after she had dropped him in front of the main entrance that she remembered that his pa.s.s had expired at 2400. The door would be locked, and the OD would have to let him in and take his name. She figured she could talk the OD out of writing him up, but decided the h.e.l.l with it. By the time it worked its way through channels, Ilse would have been evacuated to the States. She parked her car and went to her room.
The duty officer had taken a chance and gone to bed right after midnight; and so he was annoyed to see the young second lieutenant standing outside the locked gla.s.s doors. He gave the kid verbal h.e.l.l as well as writing him up for being A WOL.
When he handed Lowell his copy of the delinquency report, Lowell asked, very politely, whether he had been born chickens.h.i.t, or whether it was something he had learned in the army.
The OD s.n.a.t.c.hed the delinquency report from Lowell"s hand.
"You will consider yourself under arrest, Lieutenant," he said.
"f.u.c.k you," Lowell said, cheerfully.
The OD called the sergeant. of the guard, a middle-aged sergeant-technician, and told him to "escort this officer to his ward and" inform the nurse on duty that he is under arrest."
"Will you come with me, please, Lieutenant?" the sergeant asked, kindly.
"Certainly." Lowell said. "Anything to oblige." When they were out of sight of the OD, the sergeant asked him what had happened.
"That wasn"t too smart, Lieutenant," the sergeant said after Lowell had told him. "But I"m glad somebody finally told that sonofab.i.t.c.h off." They walked up the wide, curving stairs to the mezzanine and the bank of elevators.
The German night maintenance force-the gnomes, as they were known-were scrubbing the marble floors on their hands and knees. They made Lowell uncomfortable. There was something degrading about it. He walked quickly to the elevators to avoid looking at them.
"Craig?" a soft voice asked hesitantly, disbelieving. He paused, but didn"t completely stop walking. "Craig," the voice said. "Oh, my G.o.d, you"ve been hurt!"
He stopped and turned.
"Yeah, I"ve been hurt," he said.
"Craig!" It was a wail now, of anguish.
Ilse was kneeling, erect, but kneeling, behind a bucket. She had a scrub brush in her hand. She was wearing a shapeless black smock of some kind, and there was a faded blue rag wrapped around her head.
"I"ll be a sonofab.i.t.c.h," Craig Lowell said, unaware he had said it.
IIse got awkwardly to her feet, putting the scrub brush in her bucket. She wiped her hands on her dress.
"I am happy to see you again," she said. "I didn"t know that you were here, or perhaps 1 would have asked per. ."
"Oh, Jesus Christ," he said, and it came from the depths of his soul. "What are you doing with that f.u.c.king bucket?"
He ran toward her, his eyes filled with tears, and he was drunk, and he slipped on the slippery wet marble and went crashing to the floor. He got the st.i.tches in his chest and in his shoulder, and as he felt the blood warm his skin, he thought. They won"t be able to put me on that f.u.c.king air evac plane now.
IIse screamed and a nurse came running and took one look at him and said, "You opened your G.o.dd.a.m.ned st.i.tches."
Other people came running, a wardboy, and another nurse and a doctor.
When they got him onto a wheeled cart, he reached for Ilse"s hand, and held it. She looked so terrified he was afraid she would faint.
The doctor said, "What"s that all about?"
"This is my girl," Lowell said.
"She can"t come with you now," the doctor said. "You"re bleeding like a stuck pig."
"She either comes," Lowell said, "or I will wake up everyone in the f.u.c.king hospital."
"OK, Romeo," the doctor said. "If that"s the way you want it." They were rolling him down the hospital corridor now, toward the elevator. "What were those st.i.tches put in there for, anyway?" the doctor asked.
"1 was. .h.i.t in Greece," Lowell said.
"Oh, you"re the multiple shrapnel case," the doctor said.
"I"ve heard all about you." They were in some kind of an emergency room now, and they stopped the cart and Lowell looked up at Ilse, who was crying and smiling at once, and he felt a pin p.r.i.c.k and the next thing he knew he was in the hospital bed, with Major Florence Horter looking down at him. She was still in her Cla.s.s "A" uniform skirt and khaki shirt.
"You"re disaster p.r.o.ne, you know that?" she said. "A walking accident."
"I found my girl," he said. "She was here all the time, G.o.dd.a.m.nit. Scrubbing your G.o.dd.a.m.ned floors."
Major Florence Horter just nodded. She didn"t trust herself to speak.
(Eight) HEADQUARTERS WALTER REED US ARMY HOSPITAL.
Washington, D.C.
SPECIAL ORDERS NUMBER 265.
27 Sept 1946 EXTRACT.
41. 2ND L T LOWELL, Craig W FinC (Det Armor) 0-495302, "Det of Patients, WRUSAH, is pled on CONV ALES CENT LEAVE (not chargeable .as Ord Lv) for pd of thirty (30) days, and WP Home of Record, 939 Fifth Avenue, New York City NY. Off auth per diem.
. Off auth tvl by personal auto. TCS. TDN. Off will report as req to U.S. Army Hosp, Governor"s Island, New York, NY as nee for outpatient treatment. AUTH: VO, The Surgeon General.
FOR THE HOSPITAL COMMANDER James "C. Brailey Colonel, Medical Service Corps Adjutant Lowell rode in a taxicab from Walter Reed to the station.
His right arm was still in a sling, but he could bend it and get it into the sleeves of his shirt and Ike jacket. The wound on his chest had stopped suppurating, and while there was still some suppuration from the wound on his arm near the elbow slimy, b.l.o.o.d.y goo-all he had to do to it was to keep putting fresh bandages on it to keep it clean. He was to exercise it every day.
He had five twenty-dollar bills, crisp new ones, in the breast pocket of his jacket. No one seemed to know where his records were, so they had given him a partial payment and told him that he could get another from the finance officer on Governors Island by showing his orders and his ID card. He had a canvas bag from Frankfurt, bought with the partial pay Florence Horter had arranged for him at the 97th General.