"We are divorced," Michael said.
"Divorced!" the chairman said. "Why did you hide that fact?"
"Look," Michael said, "I'm going to save you a lot of time. I'm going to enlist."
"When?"
"As soon as the play I'm working on is put on."
"When will that be?" a little fat man at the other end of the table asked in a sour voice.
"Two months," said Michael. "I don't know what you have down on that paper, but I have to provide for my mother and father, and I have to pay alimony…"
"Your wife," the chairman said bitterly, looking down at the papers before him, "makes five hundred and fifty dollars a week…"
"When she works," Michael said.
"She worked thirty weeks last year," the chairman said.
"That's right," Michael said wearily. "And not a week this year."
"Well," said the chairman, with a wave, "we have to consider the probable earnings. She's worked for the last five years and there's no reason to suppose she won't continue. Also," he glared down once more at the papers in front of him, "you claim your mother and father as dependants."
"Yes," said Michael, sighing.
"Your father, we have discovered, has a pension of sixty-eight dollars a month."
"That's right," said Michael. "Have you ever tried to support two people on sixty-eight dollars a month?"
"Everybody," said the chairman with dignity, "has to expect to make some sacrifices at a time like this."
"I'm not going to argue with you," said Michael. "I told you I'm going to enlist in two months."
"Why?" said a man down at the other end. He peered glitteringly through pince-nez glasses at Michael, as though ready to ferret out this last subterfuge.
Michael looked around him at the seven glowering faces. He grinned. "I don't know why," he said. "Do you?"
"That will be all, Mr Whitacre," the chairman said.
Michael got up and walked out of the room. He felt the eyes of all seven men on him, angry, resentful. They feel cheated, he realized suddenly, they would have much preferred to trap me into it. They were all prepared.
The people waiting in the outside room looked up at him, surprised, because he had come out so quickly. He grinned at them. He wanted to make a joke, but it would be too cruel to the taut, harried boys waiting so painfully.
"Good night, darling," he said to the ugly girl behind the desk. He couldn't resist that. She looked at him with the unbreakable superiority of the person who will not be called upon to die over the man who may.
Michael was still smiling as he started down the steps, but he felt depressed. The first day, he thought, I should have gone in the first day. I shouldn't've exposed myself to a scene like that. He felt soiled and suspect as he walked slowly through the mild late-winter night, among the strolling couples oblivious to the tattered, shabby war being fought between one soul and another, in their name, in the dirty loft over the Greek restaurant half a block away.
Two mornings later, when he went down for his mail, there was a card from his draft board. "As per your request," it read, "you will be reclassified as 1A on May 15." He laughed as he read it. They have salvaged victory out of the ruins of their campaign, he thought. But he felt relieved as he went upstairs again in the lift. There were no more decisions to be made.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
NOAH opened his eyes in the soft dawn light and looked at his wife. She sleeps, he thought, as though she were keeping a secret. Hope, he thought, Hope, Hope. She must have been one of those grave little girls, walking through that white clapboard town, always looking as though she was hurrying to some private destination. She probably had little caches of things stuffed away in the odd corners of her room, too. Feathers, dried flowers, old fashion-plates from Harper's Bazaar, drawings of women with bustles, that sort of thing. You didn't know anything about little girls. Would be different if you had sisters. Your wife came to you out of a locked vault of experience. Might just as well have come from the mountains of Tibet or a French nunnery. While he was smoking cigarettes under the roof at Colonel Druids Military Academy for Boys, We Take the Boy and Return the Man, what was she doing, walking gravely past the churchyard with all the Plowmans tucked in under the old turf? If there was a plan in anything, she was preparing for him then, preparing for this moment of sleeping beside him in the dawn light. And he had been preparing for her. If there was a plan. Impossible to believe. If Roger hadn't somehow met her (how did he meet her?). If Roger hadn't half-ironically decided to have a party to find him a girl. If Roger had brought one of the dozen other girls he knew, they wouldn't be lying here together this morning. Accident, the only law of life. Roger. "You make time and you make love dandy, You make swell molasses candy, But, honey, are you makin' any money? That's all I want to know." Caught in the Philippines, Bataan, if he had lived that long. And here they were in Roger's room, in Roger's bed, because it was more comfortable. Noah's old bed slanted to the right. It all started when he reached up for the copy of Yeats's The Heme's Egg and Other Plays on the Public Library shelf. If he had reached for another book, he wouldn't've bumped into Roger and he wouldn't have lived here and he wouldn't've met Hope and she probably would be lying in another bed now, with another man watching her, thinking, I love her, I love her. If you thought about it you stared into the pit of madness. No plan to anything. No plan to loving or dying or fighting or anything. The equation: Man plus his intentions equals Accident. Impossible to believe. The plan must be there, but cleverly camouflaged, the way a good playwright disguises his plot. At the moment you die perhaps everything is clear to you, you say, oh, now I see, that's why that character was introduced in the first act.
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.