Chapter One

Soldiers from England sang a song in the estaminets of northern France in 1916, and they had sung it too in the public houses, I have no doubt, of the Wiltshire I came to invade. They sang then that "Old soldiers never die; they simply fade away." That is of course what Douglas MacArthur said before a joint session of Congress, shortly after Harry Truman relieved him of his command. He was fired in April of 1951, the same month Hilary Pennels' father was captured when the Chinese came across the Imjin River in Korea. MacArthur went home a hero, and had to decide between retiring a sacked commander or accepting the nomination for President. My father, in Korean prison with Hilary's, came home to face an American jail term. My mother divorced him after three years. I remember that I later recalled some smooth-voiced man on the radio singing, "Hey, there, you with the stars in your eyes" while my mother told me what she could about this person in prison in Kansas. I kept seeing a stranger, no expression on his face, and metal five-pointed stars over his eyes. I think I remember such a vision. I later saw a photo of the U.S. Government's Bronze Star medal in Time magazine--I was in law school by then--and sat up with a jolt to realize that whoever "you" was, with the stars in his eyes, those were the stars I had envisioned.

The journey to the cathedral city of Salisbury, Wiltshire, in the soft, flat south of England, began with me and my mother in a bright blue kitchen sitting near a wide white plastic radio about as big as an oven. Hey, there, you with the stars in your eyes. The actual commencement of motion had to start in an Illinois town outside of Cairo, near the Mississippi, famous for nothing, or for its mayor, whose collection of Chevrolet Corvairs was said to be the largest in the Middle West. I flew into Chicago and rented an air-conditioned Dodge and drove to where my mother and her husband lived, near a proud accumulation of the most dangerous cars in America. I called him Bert, he called me Pete, I called Mom Mom, and we sat in the slick-skinned swelter of a Midwestern night in September, our forearms sticking to the red-checked oilcloth atop the kitchen table--chromium legs and white formica top, all shine and rounded edges--at which my mother and I had sat while my father was in Federal prison on a number of charges that included giving aid and comfort to the enemy during a time of war.

My stepfather was a huge man. His belly lay folded over the narrow belt of his dark blue gabardine pants, and his navel showed through the puckered buttoned front of his seersucker short-sleeved shirt. He had just come home from the bar he ran, taking a short night in honor of me. My mother was also tall, though small compared to my stepfather or me, and she looked younger now, in her middle fifties, than she had when she and Bert Bass had moved her household goods from Putnam County, outside of New York City, to Belle Plaine, Illinois. Mom wore lipstick and face powder, she smelled of the same toilet water she had always worn in hot weather, and her seersucker housecoat seemed to match Bert's shirt.

We had a snack of hamburgers fried up with onions, and bottles of icy Hamm's beer. Mom and Bert laughed while they complained about running the bar, though Bert slapped his hip above the wallet suggestively, letting me know that he did all right. Their house was cooling off now because it was after midnight, and the windows admitted something like a breeze. Still, we sweated, and we drank our beer and ate our greasy burgers and we laughed. It was a fine night, and my mother, who rarely telephoned, preferring to send postcards from the bar--BERTS IN BELLE PLAINE, they said in fancy script--on which she scribbled about good health and wishes for cheer in the life of her only son, kept smiling and banging Bert or me on the arm as she drank more beer.

So I hated to tell her, when Bert, with his usual delicacy that came, each time he displayed it, as such a surprise (like graceful fingers on a fat hand), excused himself, banged me on the shoulder blades a few times, and went to sleep in their air-conditioned bedroom. Mom was wiping her mouth with a paper napkin, and I was declining a fourth beer. She stood at their enormous refrigerator, which dispensed ice cubes through a gizmo at the door, and then she shrugged, took another bottle for herself and said, "Pete, what the hell. I haven't seen you for six months--more? What the hell. I deserve one more." Her voice was hoarser from cigarettes, and from who knew what she threw down during the day at Bert's, when she tended bar and made the coarse and cheerful conversation I had come to know more after her remarriage, while I was in college, than when I'd been a kid. "What the hell, baby," she said. "It's good to see you. It's always good to see you. What a hell of a big man you turned out to be. Skinny at the shanks, but nice shoulders. And I'm so damned glad you didn't grow one a those mustaches all the sissies wear. Guy wears a business suit and a cowboy mustache and all he looks like is a sissy, you know? Tell me, huh?"

"Mom," I said.

She stood at the door and rubbed her loose throat. Her eyes, inside the increments of flesh, looked as young as the eyes I'd grown up looking into. "You got a problem, baby?"

"Mom. I've been reading about Korea."

She closed her eyes, then opened them--it was her equivalent of a shrug, that slow-motion blinking--and she said, right away, as if she'd rehearsed it, "Baby, I can't stop you. I never tried to, did I?"

"Nope. You were always--you always left me alone."

"So I'm gonna do the same thing now, right? I mean, you didn't expect me to holler and wail, huh? Is that my style? Hey, you know me, I know you. You never forget. You never forgot. Jesus, baby, you never even knew to forget and you never forgot! So: you read some more about your father. You read about him, you worried about him, I don't know, it's natural, I guess, for a kid to think about his father. Okay. What can I do to help you? Didn't I tell you everything I knew? Baby, I only knew the guy four years outa my life."

"There's more data. You know how slowly the government produces things, its military histories. And I ran into some stuff about England, English soldiers--there was an officer I read about who was also in Camp Twelve. Where the Peace Fighters were recruited."

"Baby, I don't wanna know."

"Sorry."

"But you came out here to tell me, `Mom, I'm goin' to take my vacation in England in September.' Go ahead. Tell me."

"It's busy at the firm. The court calendars aren't cooperating."

"They'll fire you?"

"No. I'm good. I bring in business. I get decisions. No. But they don't love me for it."

"Yeah. I love you. You know? And I don't love you for it."

"I wanted to tell you. I would have told Bert too."

"You're a sweet boy, but you're crazy. I'll tell him. You gonna stay a while?"

I shook my head and smiled. She didn't smile back. She didn't look at me. Whatever she saw was private. I stood--the jealous baby boy--and interrupted her by kissing the top of her head and tip of her nose.

She said, "Poo. You smell like a club car. You smell like a locker room. Poo. Peter, go wash , for Chrissakes."

She cried and I put my arms around her and hugged. "Aw, Mom," I said.

I was also hugging her bottle of beer, and it dug into my armpit. She said, "Tell me about Aw Mom, will ya."

"Guilt," I said.

She stepped back, as if my face or voice had changed. "Guilt? We--Jesus, Percy, not us ."

"I feel like I did something wrong. I can't help it. I get other people off. Why can't I spring me?"

"All you did was get born, Pete!"

"And all my father did was--"

She put her beer down heavily. Her lips went thin as she pressed her mouth hard. She shook her head.

I said, "I want to get whole."

"Did I leave you in pieces, kid? Did he? Listen." She took a long swallow of beer and swallowed a belch. Her eyes were wet with tears. "Pete. Baby. Guilt's for the Jews and the Germans. Never touch it."

I was swimming in it. And at thirty-five, unmarried, a reasonably successful attorney who specialized in the pleading of criminal law, a man who might be called pleasant if not pretty, bold if not heroic, needful if not distraught, I flew into Heathrow and into strangers' lives at the end of September in 1984. Nothing I did would make that month or year the best of times.

In London I rented a small Ford that shivered and bucked in third, but went on into fourth and fifth and traveled in a straight line. I had two canvas bags and a wrinkled blazer, and the sure sense, as I left London, that I didn't know what I would do if I found Miss Hilary Pennels, or whatever her married name might be. How do you do. My father committed treason in Korea at about the same time your father, terribly wounded, was saving the lives of his men and distinguishing himself in the eyes of history forever. I just wondered if my father might have done anything to, er, kill yours? Hurt him? Betray him? Hello. My name is Pete Santore and I think we might have Korean connections. Hello. Hello.

The land quickly flattened out on the A30 past Staines. I drove sedately and did so, I realized, because, now that I was close, I was frightened of arriving. My mission was pointless. It had always been simply to be in the same town as the child of the hero of a moment during which my father had distinguished himself by turning coat. I drove into Salisbury disappointed at how brief the drive had been--not much more than two hours at moderate speed. I think I'd wanted to have to fight my way through dense bush to arrive at some outpost on a physical frontier. That's where you should have to go to visit extremities, I think I thought. Instead, I drove past pretty pubs and Tudor cottages and little brown council houses, and I saw the giant needle of the cathedral spire over cobbled streets and macadam, and buildings that were hundreds of years old, most either plaster-and-beam or flint-and-stone. The flow of traffic in Salisbury took me around and around the market square--it was not a market day, and so the square was used as a car park--and when I finally figured how to sidle out of the traffic and stop, all I could see were little streets and shops and a Westminster bank. It wasn't the setting for cowardice or heroism, or a confrontation between the heirs of each. Where, I wondered, should a war story--more extreme yet, a civilian story--be set?

I found the Red Lion Hotel, drove under an ancient stone arch into a cobbled courtyard just as coaches drawn by horses three hundred years before had done. Because I was an American, a tourist, uncertain of how long I'd stay (and therefore potentially a spender) they put me in what they called "the historical old section." It was old. The bed was on a platform, and when I stepped up to it, I saw ancient scars and carvings on the bedstead. The bathroom was up two steps, and there was something royal, to me, in stepping up and then sinking down, sighing, in hot water and lavender soap. I lay back in water to my chin. I fell asleep, slid down into the water, and gagged myself awake. Which reminded me of a man named Marino, an entrepreneur of real estate, whom I had defended against his children's charges that he, another stepfather in my life, had murdered the children's mother by drowning her. They based their claim on the only bruise on her drowned body, a livid mark above her nose. He had strong fingers, they claimed, because he had for years been a bricklayer. I tried to bring in witnesses with strong fingers who performed hard physical chores and who weren't murderers. The judge laughed at me, and disallowed the witnesses. The District Attorney's office laughed too. So, in fact, did my client. The judge, in a cleared courtroom, at a conference at the bench, had said, "Santore, are you trying to give the finger to the law?"

It was late, and the captain in the dining room was reluctant to even hint to his waiters and staff that I was there to be fed a full meal. He cordially walked me down the hall to a narrow sitting room of leather furniture and Oriental carpets and a fireplace I found too hot, and while I sat with the diners who had taken coffee and brandy there, a tray bearing a bottle of Château Clarke and two sandwiches, ham in one, roast beef in the other, was brought to me with dignity and dispatch. The waiter spoiled the ceremony by spilling the wine as he poured it, but I waved him off, as Americans always wave off servants, and I wiped at the bottom of the short-stemmed wineglass with my linen napkin. A woman who sat with an older man--he was telling her about the cognac she drank--had watched the proceedings. She giggled. I shrugged. I don't know how red I became, but she flushed straight up her face, mouth to hairline. I raised my wineglass. She motioned barely, with her snifter. She had deep-socketed blue eyes, a noble long nose, a lot of crinkly hair, a wide mouth. Her companion, who kept dabbing at the outside corners of his eyes with a handkerchief, stared.

I thought I heard him say, "Ping ping" or "Ping-Pong"--or Pyongyang, which was the name of the city near which several North Korean prison encampments were sited. I decided to settle for Ping-Pong and concentrated on finding a waiter who might bring me more sandwiches and then a pot of coffee, but only after I had worked at the wine for a while. The couple near me left, he with his hand in the pocket of his green twill suitcoat, she--tall, slender, heavy of shoulder and breast, self-consciously careful above her almost flat-footed step--gave me a quick smile as she passed. I started to raise my glass again, but she was gone by the time I had lifted it. Hello.

In the soft pudding of my Red Lion mattress, in my very old bed in the very old historical wing, I dreamed bad dreams and woke myself by crying out, and in the morning could remember nothing except dreaming in fright. It was Wednesday, a market day at the square, I had read, and after tea in bed--Santore, going native--I put on a sweater and khakis and went outside to scout the hero's hometown.

The market square had been emptied of cars and filled with vans. Each had an open back, or open sides, and anything I'd heard of was up for sale--horse brasses and books, watercolors, etchings, old gout stools, new French goblets, as well as hot sausages, potatoes, fried fish, and a hundred varieties of sweet. Traffic roared its circle about the square, and the smell of fish fresh from Bournemouth and flowers from St. Malo rose with the sound of the cars grinding gears. Above everything, the thick brown tower of the Salisbury Cathedral rose, tapering to a dark needle, pinning the stupendously wide bright sky to the earth--or holding it close, at least, to where we milled and roared, bought and sold.

I was always aware of the sky there. It lay so wide over the world in Wiltshire, and often--as from the country cottage I came to know, and surely from the monumental fields and hills I soon was visiting--I found myself stilled to staring, to searching as I stared, for some word to carry with me that would re-create in months or years (for instance: now) the truth of how broad the land was, how deep and broad above it the sky that seemed more like a sea. I stood at the bottom of that ocean, then, and then I ducked my head. My shoulders were still up, and only beginning to relax, because over the surge and clatter and market day cries I had heard a hollow crisp Crump! It had seemed like something aimed at me. I forced my shoulders down, but heard it again-- Crump! --in spite of all the noise, and this time I saw a set of glassware move as if in response. The woman who sold fire irons and wineglasses and ivory-handled meat forks looked at me and nodded, smiled with red fat cheeks that looked chapped, with yellow-brown teeth I came to call English, and she said, merrily, nodding, "Porton."

"What?"

"Porton Downs," she said.

"I'm sorry. I don't know what that means."

"American? Well. Hereabouts we have someplace named Porton. It's where the armed forces, kind of, test all their guns and all. Porton Downs, we call it. The proving ground. You can find it on a map. They shoot off guns of a weekend, from time to time. It makes the earth shake. I'm told the spire itself on the cathedral will move. Did it frighten you?"

"Startle," I said. "It startled me. I thought we were going to war."

She laughed and laughed as if I had told a fine joke. I thanked her, praised her forks, thanked her again, and moved on.

I saw an oilcloth of red and white checks that seemed identical to what Bert and my mother had covered their dinner table with. A sign called it American cloth, and I loved the connection. At a stall that said ANTIQUARIAN BOKS, I browsed among old green Penguin thrillers about wily lascars. The stall next to it had books, with finer-looking bindings, by Thackeray and Trollope and Kingsley, people I didn't read. There were curious books I did find interesting, and I was looking at something that studied, among other things, the amounts of protein found in night soil (the book called it) in Bethnal Green as compared to the wastes of Belgravia.

The proprietress said, "He was Charles Dickens's brother-in-law."

It was the woman from the coffee room of the Red Lion. She wore what I later learned was a Provençal print skirt and a white shirt that looked too large. It was tied at the waist, rolled up to the elbow, open to the navel, and lined with a cotton tee shirt, almost the color of her skin, that made me think of skin. Her feet were in espadrilles, her hair was pinned high, but it kept filling, and her face, as well as what I could see of her chest above the scooped neck of the tee shirt, was freckled. She was in her thirties, and she blushed like a younger girl. I was in them too, and I too belied my age by blushing. So we were onto something, we knew we knew.

I said, "Peter Santore. Hello. I'll take the book."

"It's fifteen guineas, and you couldn't care less about the pollution of The Smoke in 1856--no, I lie: 1857. You don't look like a Victorian scholar. My name is Hilary Pennels. I own the shop. Well. This isn't the shop, of course. The shop's near the close on the--you wouldn't know. I'll show you one day, shall I? I also own these books, naturally, since they're from the shop as well. And I wouldn't dare sell you fifteen guineas' worth of book you don't want. Hello."

I did not say to her freckles and her smile and long legs that I had traveled from Manhattan to the center of America and over the Atlantic to London to the market square of Salisbury, to see her on a mission of ignorant need. The shelling at Porton proving ground had begun again. I said, "This is like meeting in wartime. If I said, Hilary: we've only got a few hours--you know, the way they do in the movies? What would--"

She laughed a loud guffaw. "They don't dare say that sort of rubbish anymore, Peter. They used to. I watch those old black-and-whites whenever they're on. Do you? I call them weepers. I watch them and I start in shaking me shoulders and blowing me nose before they say their first word. Waterloo Bridge is best. Do you know it? Ah, sweet suicide...."

I had stuck my hands in my pockets, and could feel a strain at my shoulders. I realized that I was standing as if under rain because my body felt under fire. I forced my shoulders down, and they ached.

I looked about, then said, with a kind of social desperation I hadn't felt since my boyhood, "There's an O missing in your sign."

"Yes," she said. "Some wretched boy stole it off me when I trundled us over to Winchester. They'd a sort of antiquarian books fair this summer. A terrible botch. Everyone bought Winchester thyme bangers, and no one bought a book."

"Time bangers?"

"Sausage made with thyme? What do you Americans say, `thighme'?"

"Oh," I said. "No. We say thyme too."

"Time to what, Peter?"

It was showy and silly and like a gathering of law students, that banter, but it was also thrilling because duplicitous--if I wasn't flying under false colors, exactly, I still hadn't shown my colors at all--and she was charming, seemed as innocent as all Americans like to fancy rural English people are (except for the horse-jumping set who keep being killed in country houses in films); and I was aware that she was aware that my body reacted to hers. We stood in the Crump! that I pretended not to hear, and then it stopped, and I felt as if the blood had returned to the muscles at the back of my neck.

"Did you sleep wrong?" she said. She reached around and rubbed twice at the muscle between my shoulder and neck.

"What would you define as wrong, Hilary?"

She did not say Alone or I'd have probably been in trouble: would have had to borrow or buy a bike so I could ride the edges of the square with no hands, calling her name. Instead, she smiled, a good, broad, handsome smile that included me as a source of itself and she patted my shoulder--like a sister, or a wife, but not like a new romance--and she told me to wander a while and have a nap and meet her later on at The Chough.

Which is where we sat that early evening, drinking whiskey and telling stories--hers about the shop, mine about the law--and feeling, I would say, awfully good. Something exciting could happen, I thought. I kept wishing that she hadn't been the woman I'd wanted to meet. I kept knowing that she was, and that I would labor to use her as well as I could, as soon as I knew for what.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from WAR BABIES by Frederick Busch. Copyright © 1989 by Frederick Busch. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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War Babies Novel

9780811211031

0811211037

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