Michael watched him walk out. He couldn't help smiling, and when he turned back to Peggy he was still smiling. "The Armed Services," he began, "makes confidants of every…" Then he saw she was crying. She sat straight on the high stool in her pretty brown dress and the tears were welling slowly and gravely down her cheeks. She didn't put up her hands to touch them or wipe them off.
"Peggy," Michael said quietly, gratefully noticing that the bartender was ostentatiously working with his head ducked at the other end of the bar. Probably, Michael thought, as he put out his hand to touch Peggy, bartenders get used to seeing a great many tears these days and develop a technique.
"I'm sorry," Peggy said. "I started to laugh but this is the way it came out."
Then the head-waiter came over in a little Italian flurry, and said, "Your table now, Mr Whitacre."
Michael carried the drinks and followed Peggy and the waiter to a table against the wall. By the time they sat down Peggy had stopped crying, but all the eagerness was gone out of her face. Michael had never seen her face looking like that.
They ate the first part of their meal in silence. Michael waited for Peggy to recover. This was not like her at all. He had never seen her cry before. He had always thought of her as a girl who faced whatever happened to her with quiet stoicism. She had never complained about anything or fallen into the irrational emotional fevers he had more or less come to expect from the female sex, and he had developed no technique for soothing her or rescuing her from depression. He looked at her from time to time as they ate, but her face was bent over her food.
"I'm sorry," she said, finally, as they were drinking their coffee, and her voice was surprisingly harsh. "I'm sorry for the way I behaved. I know I should be gay and offhand and kiss the brave young soldier off. 'Go get your head shot off, darling, I'll be waiting with a martini in my hand.'"
"Peggy," Michael said, "shut up."
"Wear my glove on your arm," Peggy said, "as you do KP."
"What's the matter, Peggy?" Michael asked foolishly, because he knew what the matter was.
"It's just that I'm so fond of wars," said Peggy flatly. "Crazy about wars." She laughed. "It would be awful if people were having a war and someone I knew wasn't being shot in it."
Michael sighed. He felt weary now, and helpless, but he couldn't help realizing that he wouldn't have liked it if Peggy was one of those patriotic women who jumped happily into the idea of the war, as into the arrangement for a wedding.
"What do you want, Peggy?" he said, thinking of the Army waiting implacably for him at six-thirty the next morning, thinking of the other armies on both sides of the world waiting to kill him. "What do you want from me?"
"Nothing," said Peggy. "You've given me two precious years of your time. What more could a girl want? Now go off and let them blow you up. I'll hang a gold star outside the ladies' room of the Stork Club."
The waiter was standing over them. "Anything else?" he asked, smiling with an Italian fondness for prosperous lovers who ate expensive lunches.
"Brandy for me," said Michael. "Peggy?"
"Nothing thanks," Peggy said. "I'm perfectly happy."
The waiter backed off. If he hadn't caught the boat at Naples, in 1920, Michael thought, he'd probably be in Libya today, rather than on 56th Street.
"Do you want to know what I want to do this afternoon?" Peggy asked harshly.
"Yes."
"I want to go some place and get married." She stared across the small, wine-stained table at him, angry and challenging. The girl at the next table, a full blonde in a red dress, was saying to the beaming white-haired man she was lunching with, "You must introduce me to your wife some day, Mr Cawpowder. I'm sure she's absolutely charming."
"Did you hear me?" Peggy demanded.
"I heard you."
The waiter came over to the table and put the small glass down. "Only three more bottles left," he said. "It is impossible to get any brandy these days."
Michael glanced up at the waiter. Unreasonably, he disliked the dark, friendly, stupid face. "I'll bet," he said, "they have no trouble getting it in Rome."
The waiter's face quivered, and Michael could almost hear him saying unhappily to himself, "Ah, here is another one who is blaming me for Mussolini. This war, oh, this sickness of a war."
"Yes, Sir," the waiter said, smiling, "it is possible that you are right." He backed away, trying to disclaim, by the tortured small movements of his hands and the sorrowful upper lip, that he had any responsibility for the Italian Army, the Italian Fleet, the Italian Air Force.
"Well?" Peggy said loudly.
Michael sipped his brandy slowly, in silence.
"O.K.," said Peggy. "I catch on."
"I just don't see the sense," Michael said, "of getting married now."
"You're absolutely right," Peggy said. "It's just that I'm tired of seeing single men get killed."
"Peggy." Michael covered her hand softly with his. "This isn't at all like you."
"Perhaps it is," said Peggy. "Perhaps all the other times weren't like me. Don't think," she said coldly, "you're going to come back in five years with all your medals and find me waiting for you, with a welcoming smile on my face."
"O.K.," Michael said wearily. "Let's not talk about it."
"I'm going to talk about it," Peggy said.
"O.K.," said Michael. "Talk about it."
He could see her fighting back tears as her face dissolved and softened. "I was going to be very gay," she said, her voice trembling. "Going to war? Let's have a drink… I would've managed, too, but that damned sailor… The trouble is, I'm going to forget you. There was another man, in Austria, and I thought I'd remember him till the day I died. He was probably a better man than you, too, braver and more gentle, and a cousin of his wrote to me last year from Switzerland that they'd killed him in Vienna. I was going to the theatre with you the night I got the letter, and first I thought, 'I can't go out tonight,' but then you were at the door and I looked at you and I didn't really remember the other man at all. He was dead, but I didn't remember very much about him, although at one time I asked him to marry me, too. I seem to have terrible luck in that department, don't I?"
"Stop it," Michael whispered, "please, Peggy, stop it."
But Peggy went on, the mist of tears barely held back in the deep remembering eyes. "I'm silly," she said. "I'd probably have forgotten him even if we had been married, and I'd probably forget you, if you stayed away long enough. Probably just a superstition on my part. I guess I feel if you're married and it's there, all settled and official, to come home to, you'll come home. Ridiculous… His name was Joseph. He had no home, nothing. So, naturally, they killed him." She stood up abruptly. "Wait for me outside," she said. "I'll be right down."
She fled out of the small, dark room with the little bar near the window and the old-fashioned maps of the wine sections of France hung around the smoky walls. Michael left some money on the table for the bill, and a big tip to try to make up to the Italian waiter for being rude to him, and walked slowly out into the street.
He stood in front of the restaurant, thoughtfully smoking a cigarette. No, he thought finally, no. She's wrong. I'm not going to carry that burden, too, or let her carry it, either. If she was going to forget him, that was merely another price you paid for the war, another form of casualty. It was not entered on the profit-and-loss balances of men killed and wounded and treasure destroyed, but it was just as surely a casualty. It was hopeless and crippling to try to fight it.