He said nothing but waited til I reached him. Nor did he make any move to obscure the damaged profile as he, faced me.
“Major Laird,” I began and impulsively thrust out my hand, “I’m Carla Murdock.”
His eyes narrowed angrily and he frowned; at least, one side of his face frowned.
“Is this some kind of a joke?” he snapped.
“No, no joke,” I hurried to say. “At least, not on you. If there is a joke, it’s on my father for having a girl and giving her the name he planned for his firstborn son, James Carlysle Murdock.”
I resisted the impulse, prompted by the disbelief on his face, to reach into my shoulder bag and drag out the dogeared birth certificate, the baptismal papers, and the sworn statement of the commandant of Fort Bragg, addressed to all draft boards, that I was legally James Carlysle Murdock and unequivocally female.
He stared intensely at me as I was sure he had stared at incompetent junior officers and privates. Only I had seen my father use this unnerving technique too often to dissolve into the nervous stammer of self-defense it usually provoked.
“You had your fun, didn’t you?” he said finally in a cold scornful voice. I knew he meant the letters he had written to an unknown boy. It would have been far more polite of me to have disabused him of his error immediately.
“And why this lie about going to Harvard?”
“I do go to Harvard. Radcliffe College is a college of Harvard University,” I retorted, stung out of remorse by his unfair accusation.
“Your mailing address .”
“I can’t live on campus with him.” I pointed at Merlin. He interpreted the gesture as a release and came over.
“That doesn’t excuse you from deliberately misleading me.”
“You misled yourself,” I snapped, trying to keep my teeth from chattering. “My father may have called me Carlysle but I’ll bet at some time or other he had to use the female pronoun. You just didn’t hear. You just didn’t think, mister. Most of all, you wouldn’t want to be guardian to a girl! Sweet suffering Pete,” I cried, “do you think I haven’t wanted to be a boy, if only for Dad’s sake?” He blinked as I unconsciously used a pet expression of my father’s.
I stood glaring at him and, despite the firmest clamp on my jaws, my teeth began to chatter. Merlin whined questioningly, licking his chops, shifting his paws restlessly on the snowy platform. Almost absentmindedly, the major held out a gloved hand for Merlin to sniff and as offhandedly patted Merl’s head.
“We can’t stand here all night. You’ll have to come with me now,” the major said. “I’ll decide what to do later.”
He pulled me around, a rough hand under my elbow, and pointed towards the blurred but unmistakable outline of a jeep in the parking lot.
“The jeep’s mine,” he said, bending to pick up my suitcases. I tried to take one from him but he glared at me fiercely. “I’m not crippled,” he said with a definite accent on the final word.
Rebuffed and feeling that perhaps frozen solitude was preferable to his present company, I trudged behind him to the jeep. He tossed the bags easily into the back before sliding into the driver’s seat. With cold fingers, I fumbled endlessly at the stiff handle on my side. With an exclamation of exasperation he reached over and opened the door. Merlin, without order, leaped into the backseat, sitting straight up, his tongue out, watching first me, then the major. It infuriated me that Merlin appeared to have accepted the major at first sniff.
Expertly the major backed the jeep in the treacherously drifted snow. He bisected old frozen ruts and crossed the railroad track as the jeep’s four-wheel drive found what traction there existed on the bad surface of the unplowed road. He waited patiently for the traffic light to change although there wasn’t anything else moving anywhere on the abandoned road.
The jeep must have been standing forever in the parking lot for inside the car it was colder than outside. The isinglass curtains were none too tight and gusts of frigid air lashed in particles of snow. I sat huddled with my arms hugging my sides, trying to make myself believe I was warm. I shivered spasmodically. Whatever reception I had anticipated, I had got more than I’d planned. Actually I never had gone beyond the first moment when the major discovered my sex. That’s the problem with daydreams. They are not the least bit practical.
In all honesty I had to admit that the major had more justice on his side. I had had fun deliberately encouraging his misconception. Based on his information, he had given good advice in suggesting that his ward join the army. Faced with an inevitable draft, it would be smart for a young man to volunteer. The Allies had broken out of the Belgian Bulge and were racing across Germany to meet up with the Russian forces. Undoubtedly the war in Europe would end by spring. Then the entire concentration of Allied military strength would sweep over the Japanese positions and end the Pacific campaign. A man joining the service right now would get through basic and probably have a short tour in occupation forces. Then he’d have the G. I. Bill to see him through college.
I now realized that the major had very carefully thought out that first letter of condolence to a boy suddenly orphaned. It had been a kind letter, if devoid of emotion. He had, bluntly it is true, described the fatal injury my father had received on a routine trip at night between his command post and a bivouac he wanted to inspect. The major had gone into detail about the brief ceremony in the little Lutheran cemetery at Siersdorf where my father had been buried. Every man in the regiment who was not on duty had crowded in. The description might have read like the orders of the day but the picture evoked had been equally clear. The major had gone on to ask me what my immediate expenses were and how much I would need to finish the term. I was not to worry about staying in college, if that was what I wanted. He hadn’t seen my father’s will yet but there would be enough in the National Service Insurance to see to my education. If I had damned the major for insensitivity to my grieving I had done him an injustice, for he had done the courtesy of assuming the boy was a man. I knew, now I had seen the major, that he would have written an entirely different letter had he known I was a girl.
However, neither of us had entertained the possibility that he too might be wounded or that I would work myself into ill health. Dad had been killed November 18, 1944. The major was critically wounded on December 7 in the Sportplatz near Julich. I hadn’t known of that until mid-January when he wrote me from an English convalescence camp. Neither of us had thought of meeting before the summer when he expected to have enough points to get home. Now here we were, thrust together in late March under the worst of conditions.
I like to think that had he not been wounded, had I not gotten ill, I would have soon told him the truth. It was spiteful of me not to have told him. Whatever excuse I might hide behind, the fact remained I had put myself in a very bad light. My egotism had inflicted hurt on someone already badly injured. I was deeply ashamed of myself and I could think of no immediate way of convincing the major of that.
How he found his way I do not know for the full dark of deep winter was further complicated by the wind-driven snow, lowering visibility to a point just a few inches beyond the slitted headlights. The jeep growled in low gear as he inched it along. We had the road to ourselves. There weren’t so much as tire marks from previous travelers to guide us for the wind swept continually over the road.
Major Laird didn’t swear to himself as Dad would have, driving under such conditions. Against the isinglass window his profile was silhouetted boldly, the disfigurement hidden in the gloom. It was a strong face, dominated by an aquiline nose and a sweeping jawline, the sternness alleviated by a sensitive mouth and a full, sensuous lower lip. He was a lot more man than what drifted around the campus at Harvard.