He nodded. Yes, he was unsurprised. “And how’s your girlfriend there?”
“That’s what I’d like to find out, sir. She, ah, she doesn’t write much,” Rudel said. In point of fact, Sofia didn’t write at all. He’d never told her not to, but she knew getting love letters-or any letters-from a Mischling wouldn’t be good for him.
Colonel Steinbrenner nodded. “That may not be the worst thing in the world,” was all he said, but it told Hans-Ulrich he not only knew about Sofia but also about her racial makeup.
If they wanted to make a case against me, they could. The weight of the Knight’s Cross on his neck felt most reassuring to Rudel. But that kind of thing wouldn’t stop them if they decided you were disloyal. It might slow them down, but it wouldn’t stop them. The only thing that would stop them was obvious, unswerving loyalty to the Reich and to National Socialism. Hans-Ulrich had it, in abundance. He also had a half-Jewish girlfriend. Would that make them doubt the other? All he could do-if he didn’t want to give Sofia up, and he didn’t-was hope not.
You explain how you messed up. You promise not to do it again, and you mean what you’re saying from the bottom of your heart. After that, the sun’s supposed to come out and everything’s supposed to be wonderfuclass="underline" just the way it was before. It’s straight out of a Hollywood script.
Peggy Druce was discovering that real life didn’t work out the way movies did. It was nothing she hadn’t suspected before. But, despite confessions, she and Herb couldn’t seem to go back to the way they’d been before she sailed for Europe in late summer 1938. They could talk about forgiving each other. Meaning it was harder-harder than she’d ever expected.
It wasn’t anything showy or dramatic. He didn’t haul off and belt her one. She didn’t smash crockery over his noggin. They still enjoyed each other’s company, at the dining-room table and even in the bedroom. They weren’t going to end up in divorce court. Nothing like that.
But all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again. Peggy felt the lack, the way she’d felt it when she woke up from the ether without her wisdom teeth. She could still go back there with her tongue and remember when she’d had them. She could remember this other thing that was missing now, too.
They’d given her codeine to keep the extractions from hurting so much. She wished there were also a pill for this. She tried bourbon, but that seemed to make matters worse, not better.
Herb was drinking more these days. He wasn’t drinking what anybody would call a lot, but he was drinking more. Peggy wondered if she should say something about it: at least let him know she’d noticed. In the end, she kept her mouth shut. She also wondered whether she should have done that about their adventures while apart.
She didn’t think so. This was better than the looming thing in the room with them that neither had wanted to admit was there. The trouble was, she’d thought that better would turn out to be the same thing as what kids called all better. Nope. And the difference between the one and the other was enough to tempt her back toward the Old Grand dad bottle again.
Then one dreary, rainy, early-darkening afternoon Herb came through the door with more bounce in his step than she’d seen since she got back from Europe. “Ha!” he said as he hung his topcoat on a peg so it would drip on the tile floor.
“Ha?” Peggy asked.
“Ha!” He said it again, even more emphatically. For good measure, he added, “Hoo-hah!” Then he lit a cigarette.
“Okay, now I get it,” Peggy said. “You’re all excited because Glenn Miller just took you on as a scat singer.”
He coughed, blowing out ragged puffs of smoke. “Don’t do that,” he wheezed. “You’ll make me choke to death.”
“Sorry.” She did her best to sound properly contrite. It wasn’t easy; she still wanted to laugh. “Maybe I wouldn’t need to if you’d tell me what’s really going on.”
“Well, I was going to.” Herb took another, cautious, drag on the coffin nail. This time, he didn’t try to explode when he exhaled. “Needed more finagling than I ever thought it would, but I finally did it.”
“That’s nice,” Peggy answered. “Did what?”
“Persuaded Uncle Sam I could do something that would help give the war effort a kick in the pants.” Her husband looked proud enough to bust the buttons on his vest.
And well he might have. He’d been trying to do something for the country ever since Japan attacked the Philippines and tried to hit Hawaii the January before. The trouble-or at least part of the trouble-was, the government was deluged with middle-aged men offering their services. Most of them were too old and too far from war service to be worth anything with weapons in their hands. Getting men to fight and giving them the tools they needed to fight with had to be Washington’s top priority.
Even that wasn’t going so well as people wished it would. Stories about waste and inefficiency and fraud and profiteering showed up in the papers almost every day and in the news magazines almost every week. But the War Department’s worries about everything else ran only a distant second-when they ran at all.
“What will they want you to do?” Peggy asked. It might have been Will I ever see you again? That wasn’t even close to fair, not when she’d gallivanted all over Pennsylvania and beyond, telling eyewitness tales of how nasty Fascism was, so prosperous people-and those not so prosperous-would fork over the cash to let the government take care of whatever it decided needed taking care of.
“Make things run smoother,” Herb said. “Efficiency expert, is what it boils down to. Only they’ll pay me more than a run-of-the-mill efficiency expert, ’cause I won’t be dealing with stuff on the shop floor. I’m supposed to make whole factory systems run better.”
“How much is ‘more’?” was Peggy’s natural next question. Herb named a number. She whistled softly. That was pretty good, all right. Then she asked, “Are they going to draft you so you can do it?”
“Unh-unh.” He shook his head. “They’d have to make me a colonel or something to give me enough clout to do the job, and they don’t want to make colonels out of guys who were corporals the last time around and got out of the Army as fast as they could afterwards. Can’t say I blame ’em, either. So I’ll be a civilian with a fancy letter from the Secretary of War-or maybe from the President; dunno yet-that says I have the power to bind and to loose.”
Peggy looked suitably impressed. “Wow! Can I touch you?” She reached out as if to tap him gently with the very tip of her forefinger.
He grabbed her and squeezed her. “You darn well better, babe.”
She squeezed back. She liked being in his arms. It felt like the right place to be. She only wished there weren’t that little something in the back of her mind. Once upon a time, Gladys the clerk-typist had been in his arms, too. And, once upon a time, Peggy herself had wound up in that American diplomat’s arms.
None of that would happen again. If she hadn’t been sure of it, she wouldn’t have liked being in Herb’s arms any more. All the same, the shadow lingered.
Countries in Europe remembered slights and defeats at the hands of their neighbors that went back centuries. Sometimes, even in this day and age, they chose their allies-and their wars-on account of them. That had always struck a sensible, no-nonsense, apple-pie American like Peggy as insane. Once something was over, it was over.
Wasn’t it?
Well, as things turned out, that depended. She and Herb were finding out for themselves that memories weren’t always so easy to shove aside. And if people who loved each other had trouble doing it, how much harder was it for countries that hated and feared and mistrusted one another?
Peggy started to tell Herb that all at once she understood why European nations went off the rails every generation or two. But she didn’t go ahead and do it. It would have involved reminding him they’d gone off the rails themselves. They were both doing their best to forget that. Whose fault was it that their best didn’t seem to be good enough?