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The smell of the gas grew stronger. She began to feel giddy. She took her head out of the oven and turned the gas off. There was no rush.
She went into the living room, mistress of the house. There was a faint smell of gas in the small room, with the four wooden chairs arranged geometrically around the square oak table in the center of the worn, reddish carpet. She sat down at the table, took a pencil out of her pocket and looked around for some paper, but there was only the student’s exercise book in which she kept her daily accounts in the bakery. She never wrote letters and never received any. She tore several sheets of paper out of the back of the book and began to write on the ruled paper.
“Dear Gretchen,” she wrote. “I have decided to kill myself. It is a mortal sin and I know it, but I can’t go on any more. I am writing from one si
“There is a curse on this family. On me, on you, on your father and your brother Tom. Only your brother Rudolph may have escaped it and perhaps in the end he too will feel it. I am happy that I will not live to see that day. It is the curse of sex. I will tell you now something I have hidden from you all your life. I was an illegitimate child. I never knew my father or my mother. I ca
“I am guilty, I suppose. I have been weak and I have permitted your father to drive me from the Church and to make heathens of my children. I was too worn out and beaten down to love you and protect you from your father and his influence. And you always seemed so neat and clean and well-behaved that my fears were put to sleep. With the results that you know better than I do.”
She stopped writing and read what she had written with satisfaction. Finding her mother dead and this address from the grave on her pillow would poison the whore’s guilty pleasures. Each time she allowed a man to put a hand on her, Gretchen would remember her mother’s last words to her.
“Your blood is tainted,” she wrote, “and it is now plain to me that your character is tainted too. Your room is clean and dainty but your soul is a stable. Your father should have married someone like you. You would have been fitting partners for each other. My last wish is for you to leave the house and go far away so that your influence ca
There was a confused sound of music and cheering growing stronger outside. Then she heard the trumpet, and recognized it. Rudolph was playing beneath the window. She got up from the table and opened the window and looked out. There he was, at the head of what looked like a thousand boys and girls, playing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” up to her.
She waved down at him, feeling the tears start. Rudolph ordered the boys with the ca
She went in and sat down at the table, sobbing. He has saved my life, she thought, my beautiful son has saved my life.
She tore up the letter and went into the kitchen and burned the scripts in the soup pot.
V
A good many of the soldiers were drunk. Everybody who could walk and get into a uniform had fled the hospital without waiting for passes as soon as the news had come over the radio, but some of them had come back with bottles and the common room smelled like a saloon as men in wheel chairs and on crutches reeled around the room, shouting and singing. The celebration had degenerated into destruction after supper and men were breaking windows with canes, tearing posters down from the walls, ripping books and magazines into handfuls of confetti, with which they conducted Mardi-gras battles amid drunken whoops of laughter.
“I am General George S. Patton,” shouted a boy to no one in particular. He had a steel contraption around his shoulders that kept his shattered arm sticking out above his head. “Where’s your necktie, soldier? Thirty years KP.” Then he seized Gretchen with his good arm and insisted on dancing with her in the middle of the room to the tune of “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” which the other soldiers obligingly sang for him. Gretchen had to hold the boy tight to keep him from falling. “I’m the greatest, highest-class, one-armed, 105-millimeter ballroom dancer in the world and I’m going to Hollywood tomorrow to waltz with Ginger Rogers. Marry me, baby, we’ll live like kings on my total disability pension. We won the war, baby. We made the world safe for total disability.” Then he had to sit down, because his knees wouldn’t support him anymore. He sat on the floor and put his head between his knees and sang a verse of “Lili Marlene.”
There was nothing Gretchen could do for any of them tonight. She kept a fixed smile on her face, trying to intervene when the confetti battles became too rough and looked as though they would become real fights. A nurse came to the door of the room and beckoned to Gretchen. Gretchen went over to her. “I think you’d better get out of here,” the nurse said in a low, worried voice. “It’s going to be wild in a little while.”
“I don’t really blame them,” Gretchen said. “Do you?”
“I don’t blame them,” the nurse said, “but I’m staying out of their way.”
There was a crash of glass from the room. A soldier had thrown an empty whiskey bottle through a window. “Fire for effect,” the soldier said. He picked up a metal waste basket and hurled it through another window. “Put the mortars on the bastards, Lieutenant. Take the high ground.”
“It’s a lucky thing they took their guns away from them before they came here,” said the nurse. “This is worse than Normandy.”
“Bring on the Japs,” someone shouted. “I’ll beat ’em to death with my first-aid kit. Banzai!”
The nurse tugged at Gretchen’s sleeve. “Go on home,” she said. “This is no place for a girl tonight. Come early tomorrow and help pick up the pieces.”
Gretchen nodded and started toward the locker room to change, as the nurse disappeared. Then she stopped and turned back and went down the corridor from which the wards angled off. She went into the ward where the bad head and chest wounds were cared for. It was dimly lit here, and quiet. Most of the beds were empty, but here and there she could see a figure lying still under blankets. She went to the last bed in the corner, where Talbot Hughes lay, with the glucose dripping into his arm from the bottle rigged on its stand next to the bed. He was lying there with his eyes open, enormous and feverishly clear in the emaciated head. He recognized her and smiled. The shouting and singing from the distant common room sounded like the confused roar from a football stadium. She smiled down at him and sat on the edge of his bed. Although she had seen him only the night before he seemed to have grown ominously thi