"It happened," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"The X-ray?"
"Didn't show anything, I guess." His voice was remote and calm.
"Did you tell them?" she asked. "About the last time?"
"No."
She wanted to ask why not, but she stopped herself, because in a confused, intuitive way, she knew.
"You didn't tell them that you had a defence job, either, did you?"
"No."
"I'll tell them," she said loudly. "I'll go down myself. A man with scars on his lungs can't be…"
"Sssh," he said. "Sssh."
"It's silly," she said, trying to talk reasonably, like a debater.
"What good will a sick man do in the Army? You'll only crack up. It'll just be another burden for them. They can't make you a soldier…"
"They can try." Noah smiled slowly. "They sure can try. The least I can do is give them a chance. Anyway," and he kissed her behind the ear, "anyway, they've already done it. I was sworn in at eight o'clock tonight."
She pulled back. "What're you doing here then?"
"Two weeks," he said. "They give you two weeks to settle your affairs."
"Will it do any good," Hope asked, "for me to argue with you?"
"No," he said very softly.
"Damn them!" Hope said. "Why don't they get things straight the first time? Why," she cried, addressing the draft boards and the Army doctors and the regiments in the field and the politicians in all the capitals of the world, addressing the war and the time and all the agony ahead of her, "why can't they behave like sensible human beings?"
"Sssh," Noah said. "We only have two weeks. Let's not waste them. Have you eaten yet?"
"No," she said. "I'm washing my hair."
He sat down on the edge of the tub, smiling wearily at her.
"Finish your hair," he said, "and we'll go out to dinner. There's a place I heard about on Second Avenue where they have the best steaks in the world. Three dollars apiece, but they're…"
She threw herself down at his knees and held him tightly.
"Oh, darling," she said, "oh, darling…"
He stroked her bare shoulder as though he were trying to memorize it. "For the next two weeks," he said, his voice almost not trembling, "we will go on a holiday. That's how we'll settle my affairs." He grinned at her. "We'll go up to Cape Cod and swim and we'll hire bicycles and we'll eat only three-dollar steaks at every meal. Please, please, darling, stop crying."
Hope stood up. She blinked twice. "All right," she said. "It's stopped. I won't cry again. It'll take me fifteen minutes to get ready. Can you wait?"
"Yes," he said. "But hurry. I'm starved."
She took the towel from her head and finished drying her hair. Noah sat on the edge of the bath and watched her. From time to time Hope got glimpses of his drawn, thin face in the mirror. She knew that she was going to remember the way his face looked then, lost and loving as he sat perched on the porcelain rim, in the cluttered, garishly lit room – remember for a long, long time.
They had their two weeks on Cape Cod. They stayed at an aggressively clean tourist house with an American flag on a pole on the lawn in front of it. They ate clam chowder and broiled lobster for dinner. They lay on the pale sand and swam in the dancing, cold water and went to the movies religiously at night, without commenting on the newsreels to each other, without saying anything about the charging, tremulous voices describing death and defeat and victory on the flickering screen. They hired bicycles and rode slowly along the seaside roads and laughed when a truckload of soldiers passed and whistled at Hope's pretty legs, and called to Noah, "Pretty soft, Bud. What's your draft number, Bud? We'll see you soon!"
Their noses peeled and their hair got sticky with salt, and their skins, when they went to bed at night, smelled ocean-fragrant and sunny in the immaculate sheets at the shingled cottage in which they lived. They hardly spoke to anyone else, and the two weeks seemed to stretch through the summer, through the year, through every summer they had ever known, and all time seemed to go in a gentle spiral on sandy roads, between scrub firs, in a gleam of summer light on brisk waves and under the stars of cool summer evenings stirred by a holiday wind that came off the Vineyard and off Nantucket and off a sunny ocean disturbed only by gulls and the sails of small boats and the plash of flying fish playing in the water.
Then the two weeks were up and they went back to the city. The people there seemed pallid and wilted, defeated by the summer, and they felt healthy and powerful in comparison.
The final morning, Hope made coffee for them at six o'clock. They sat opposite each other, sipping the hot, bitter liquid out of the huge cups that were their first joint domestic investment. Hope walked with Noah down the quiet, shining streets, still cool with the memory of night, to the drab unpainted shop that had been taken over by the draft board.
They kissed, thoughtfully, already remote from each other, and Noah went in to join the quiet group of boys and men who were gathered around the desk of the middle-aged man who was serving his country in its hour of need by waking early twice a month to give the last civilian instructions and the tickets for the free subway ride to the groups of men departing from the draft board for the war.
Noah went out in the shuffling, self-conscious line, with fifty others, and walked with them the three blocks to the subway station. The people in the street, going about their morning business, on their way to their shops and offices, on their way to the day's marketing and the day's cooking and moneymaking, looked at them with curiosity and a little awe, as the natives of a town might look at a group of pilgrims from another country who happened to pass through their streets, on their journey to an obscure and fascinating religious festival. Noah saw Hope across the street from the entrance to the subway station. She was standing in front of a florist's shop. The florist was an old man slowly putting out pots of geraniums and large blue vases of gladioli in the window behind her. She had on a blue dress dotted with white flowers. The morning wind brushed it softly against her body in front of the blossoms shining through the glass behind her. Because of the sun reflecting from the glass, Noah could not tell what her face was like. He started to cross the street to her, but the leader that the man at the draft board had assigned to the group called anxiously, "Please, boys, stick together, please," and Noah thought, what could I tell her, what could she tell me? He waved to her. She waved back, a single, lifting gesture of the bare brown arm. Noah could see she wasn't crying.
What do you know, he said to himself, she isn't crying. And he went down into the subway, between a boy named Tempesta and a thirty-five-year-old Spaniard whose name was Nuncio Aguilar.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE red-headed woman he hadn't kissed four years ago leaned over, smiling, in Michael's last dream and kissed him. He awoke, warmly remembering the dream and the red-headed woman.
The morning sun angled past the sides of the closed Venetian blinds, framing the windows in a golden dust. Michael stretched.
Outside the room he heard the murmur of the seven million people walking through the streets and corridors of the city. Michael got up. He padded over on the carpeted floor to the window and pulled up the blinds.
The sun filled the back gardens with an early summer wealth, soft and buttery on the faded brick of the old buildings, on the dusty ivy, on the bleached, striped awnings of the small terraces filled with rattan furniture and potted plants. A little round woman, in a wide orange hat and old wide slacks that clung cheerfully to her round behind, was standing over a potted geranium on the terrace directly opposite Michael. She reached thoughtfully down and snipped off a blossom. Her hat shook sorrowfully as she looked at the mortal flower in her hand. Then she turned, middle-aged and healthy, in her city garden and walked through curtained french windows into her house, her cheerful behind shaking.