“I’ve never once thought this war wasn’t worth fighting,” I said. “Have you?”
Michael looked out over the water. Very softly, he said, “I was seared to death. All the time. Every minute. I kept thinking it’d catch up to me. I kept thinking it had to catch up. I kept thinking my grandfather got out of the Spanish-American War alive, and my father got out of World War I alive, but I wouldn’t get out of this one, I wouldn’t make it, Will, the world’s fucking idiocy would overtake me at last.” He sighed deeply then, and turned to me again, and I looked at his face in the light of the street lamps, and knew why I had not known him in the bar, and wondered suddenly what had taken him so long to recognize me.
“Look,” I said, “why don’t we go upstairs, huh? Might be a good party after all, what the hell. Come on, Michael, what do you say?”
“Sure,” Michael answered. He grinned suddenly, the old hell-raising grin I remembered, and linked his arm through mine and cheerfully said, “Off we go!” and together we turned from the river and walked directly into the building, past the doorman who called behind us, “Excuse me, gentlemen, whom did you wish to see?”
“Lieutenant Douglas Prine,” Michael answered.
“Yes, sir,” the doorman said, “that’s apartment 14B.”
In the elevator, a pimply-faced operator said, “You fellows just back from overseas?”
“Just back,” Michael said. “How can you tell?”
The elevator operator shrugged. “You can tell guys who’re just back. You see any action?”
“A little,” Michael said.
“Fourteen,” the elevator operator said.
She had hazel eyes and brown hair, and she came into the party at about one a. m., wearing a gray Persian lamb she had undoubtedly borrowed from her mother. Our host, Douglas Prine, a black patch over his right eye, helped her off with her coat, and then kissed her on the check and shook hands with her escort, a sallow-faced kid of seventeen or eighteen who stood awkwardly shuffling his feet and gazing into the living room, where all us grown-up soldiers and dolls were drinking and dancing and laughing. Michael Mallory was unconscious on the sofa, his head in the lap of a buxom brunette who huskily sang “Long Ago and Far Away” while idly running her fingers through his hair. The record player was indifferently spinning the cast album of Carousel, June bustin’ out all over the room as couples tried to dance to the hardly rhythmic beats of a Broadway orchestration. As I watched from a vantage point near the piano, the new girl said goodnight to her escort, who pecked her self-consciously on the cheek and then sidled out the front door. She stood hesitantly in the entrance to the living room as though trying to decide whether she should join the party, and then smiled and turned on her heel and started up the staircase leading to the second floor of the duplex. I bounded out of the living room.
“Hey!” I said.
The girl turned. She looked at me with vague bemusement, head tilted, brown hair falling loose over one eye à la Veronica Lake, the opposite eyebrow raised in imitation of God knew how many other movie queens. I had a sudden feeling of prescience, I thought I knew for one insane moment exactly what dumb thing she would offer in response, and I hoped against hope that she would not say it, but she lifted her eyebrow impossibly higher, and in a very young and hopelessly affected voice said exactly what I knew she would, “Hay is for horses.”
“Oh shit,” I answered, and snapped a smart salute at her, and then executed a military about-face, and marched into the living room. She came in directly behind me, but I didn’t know she had followed me until I turned from the bar, where I was refilling my glass, and found her standing at my elbow.
“Would you like to apologize?” she said.
“For what?”
“For what you just said.”
“What did I say?”
“You know what you said.”
“Okay, I apologize.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Goodnight.”
“Hey, hold it a minute.”
“What do you want?”
“You live here?”
“I live here.”
“Who are you?”
“Dolores Prine.”
“Oh. Is the guy with the patch your brother?”
“Yes.”
“How old are you?”
“Why?”
“I like to know how old people arc.”
“I’m almost eighteen.”
“Which means you’re only seventeen.”
“If a person is almost eighteen, why yes, I guess that does mean she’s only seventeen, how clever of you.”
“Where’re you running to?”
“I’m going to bed.”
“Why?”
“I’m tired.”
“Big night on the town with your pale little boyfriend?”
“Yes, big night on the town.”
“Radio City Music Hall?”
“No, the Roxy.”
“What’s the Roxy?”
“It’s a theater. You mean you don’t know the Roxy?”
“I’m not a New Yorker.”
“Where’re you from?”
“Chicago.”
“Foo.”
“What do you mean foo? It’s a good city.”
“It’s not as good as New York.”
“Have you ever been there?”
“No. But no city in the world is as good as New York.”
“How about Ocracoke, North Carolina?”
“Never heard of it.”
“Would you like a drink?”
“A drink? I’m only seventeen.”
“You’re almost eighteen.”
She was only seventeen and still attending the McKeon School. I felt somewhat like Lazarus the following Monday waiting outside the building as little girls in uniforms came skipping down the steps into a New York April gilded with sunshine. “Aren’t you going to carry my books?” she asked, and I sensed that she was kidding me, but I took them anyway because I hadn’t yet learned to decipher the meaning in her hazel eyes, my mother’s own green with an overtint of the palest brown, flecked with pure cat’s-eye yellow, remarkable eyes that claimed complete attention whenever she spoke.
It was, of course, her youth that attracted me, though I myself was not yet twenty, born on June the sixth, nineteen hundred and twenty-five, A date to remember, my mother had often said when she was still alive, though generally she said it when I was being particularly abominable, fun in her eyes too, broad midwestern sarcasm, You don’t know how long we hoped and prayed, Will, you don’t know how your father and I longed for our first child, and then to be blessed with you, oh surely we were chosen, flinty green sparked with humor, and then a hug and a slap on the behind, I loved that woman, I loved her still.
Dolores Prine’s mother called her Dec, and her brother called her Lolly, and she asked me to call her one or the other because she hated the name Dolores, each diminutive sounding equally childish to my octogenarian cars, each reminiscent of a world I had left behind a long time ago, those walks home from Grace School in the afternoon, Michael Mallory cracking his dirty jokes and Charlotte Wagner bellowing her horse laugh in response, educated elbows and compliant breasts, ice cream sodas on Division Street, portable record players on the Oak Street Beach. The name Dolores conjured images of a tall Spanish lady, hair pulled back into a bun, mantilla falling in a lacy cascade from a high comb, eyes brimming with sorrow and pain, her walk erect and dignified, but each long stride so sensuous besides, a promise of surging passion under that long black skirt. But Lolly? Dee? Lolly was the child who skipped along beside me and prattled about the latest Woody Herman record, flicking her brown hair back and away from the eye it had been trained to cover, giggling unexpectedly, asking me if I ever killed a man, and then opening her hazel eyes wide (hand flicking at the falling brown curtain, fingernails revealed as bitten to the quick) when I said that I had been credited with four and a half enemy planes, “How can you shoot down only half a plane?” she asked. I explained to her that my wingman and I (it was amazing how I could mention his name without feeling pain any more), a fellow called Ace Gibson, from Reading, Pennsylvania, had shot down this one enemy airplane together, and therefore had to share credit for the kill, and she nodded in quick understanding and then said, “It must have taken guts,” and that was all. Lolly had become Dec in the crack of an instant, the girl child had become at least the adolescent and in the adolescent there was some promise of the woman. I wanted to put my arm around her narrow shoulders, wanted to hold her close and touch her breasts beneath the gray school jacket, green-gold crest over the left pocket, green tic separating the twin mounds under the white cotton blouse, so young, so very young. And yet Francesca could not have been much older, and I had done things to her, we had done things to her, so why did I feel so guilty now, why did I feel that if I touched this slender coltish thing beside me, I would be arrested and imprisoned for life? If she was only seventeen, then I was only nineteen; if I was almost twenty, then surely she was almost eighteen. I did not touch her. I carried her books like a tongue-tied oaf, discovering sunlight along the line down on her wrist where it jutted from the too-short sleeve of her jacket, and listened as she explained to me in all seriousness the tremendous sacrifices Clark Gable, James Stewart, and Tyrone Power had made for their country in wartime by giving up their profitable Hollywood careers and going off to fight. “It must have taken guts,” she said, and bingo, we were back in the third grade again, with little Lolly swallowing the linger paint and getting her frock all messy besides.