Chapter 15
The headline on the station newsstand read: CALIFORNIA WEATHER HITS MIAMI. Larry ducked into a cab, and asked the driver to recommend a hotel. At a crawling twenty miles an hour the cab rocked from the wind. Sheets of rain curtained the windshield, and while Larry was conscious of traffic, the downpour isolated his taxi so that he couldn’t see another moving vehicle. They crossed Biscayne Bay to Miami Beach, turned into Collins Avenue, and pulled up in front of a white stucco hotel that reminded Larry of the model houses at the New York World’s Fair. When he opened the cab door, a sudden sharp squall wrenched it out of his hands. Shouting apologies to the driver, he dashed for the lobby.
A friendly clerk whose brother practiced law in New York offered him a temporary hotel room, explaining that the Army might take over before tomorrow. They were snapping up places so fast that a hotel man didn’t know from one day to the next whether he was in business. He warned Larry not to turn on any lights at night since the Beach was blacked out, and the Army and Navy were stationed there by the thousands. The Army Air Force ran a basic training center for selectees and enlisted men in Miami, an officers’ candidate school for ground force commanders, and an officers’ training school quartered in style at the Roney-Plaza up the street. It was for technical and business experts, mostly older men, whom the Air Force had commissioned in a hurry out of civilian life. These older guys went through calisthenics over at the golf course just like the youngsters. Some of them had gray hair and must be sixty, but they’d be out there sweating and bending like the kids, trying to get rid of their pot bellies. And knocking themselves out, the clerk added.
In the elevator to his room, Larry heard an Air Force wife with poinsettia cheeks complain to her companion, “They promised him a pass to stay overnight, but I’ve been here a month. All I see of him is forty-five minutes a day. He studies, studies, studies. I’m sorry I came.”
“Don’t you go to the beach?” the other asked.
“The water’s full of seaweed. It’s like bathing in hot vegetable soup.” She crinkled her nose.
Larry decided it had been smart of Lucy to stay home, although maybe if she had been around, Bemrose would have had to take it easier.
The hotel room was surprisingly pleasant, with simple furniture of light wood, and raspberry colored tiles in the bathroom. Outdoors the palm trees hissed in the wind and rain, and the strip of beach below lay muddy and beaten by the storm.
Larry phoned Major Graystone who agreed to see him at the hospital after lunch.
The rain had quit by the time Larry finished shaving and went out. On Collins Avenue he passed men in khaki counting “Hup, hoop, heep, horp” as they swung along, their brown leather hitting the pavement. They had light blue notebooks firmly in hand. These must be the officer candidates, kids in their early twenties who looked as if they meant business. Around the corner Larry passed a squadron in shirts and shorts fresh from calisthenics. They ran in double time and sang the rollicking R.A.F. song, “I’ve got sixpence, pretty little sixpence.” It climbed to high C which the kids hit squarely. “Happy as the day when the airman gets his pay, as we go rolling, rolling home.”
Larry passed some of the big hotels that used to charge guests twenty-five dollars a day. Soldiers instead of doormen guarded the entrances, and a quick look through glass doors showed the lobbies stripped of carpets, furniture, and potted palms. A few slip-covered chairs symbolized the new look of clean, grim efficiency. Night clubs had been converted by the Army into daytime classrooms, and watching more men in khaki troop out of them, Larry remembered the old horse-racing and roulette Miami. He wondered how long before it would come back.
A captain walking ahead of Larry said to his wife, “Until you came down I couldn’t tell which were pretty and which I only thought were pretty. I’ve been committing mental rape.”
She laughed and clung tighter to his arm.
At the hospital Major Graystone had left word for Larry to meet him in his “office” at a nearby hotel. It turned out to have a desk, ladies’ dressing table, some bedroom chairs brightly upholstered in yellow silk, and a wall mirror. Major Graystone, a bulky man with white hair and chest expansion, looked incongruous in the pre-war setting.
“You’re the friend of Colonel Bemrose I talked to over the phone?” Tense lines divided his eyebrows. His wiry hair stood in stubborn points around a massive head. “We try to teach them to take it easy—the School hands out salt tablets and orders them to quit exercising the minute they feel it’s too much, but a lot of them keep on until they drop.”
“You mean he went in for drill?” Larry asked. “I thought he was down here with Colonel Lowell organizing the school.”
“He was, and he worked at it seventeen hours a day,” Graystone said. “Don’t you know the story? They came in on a Monday and took over the Roney-Plaza Hotel. They had it organized and running when their first group of men came in on Wednesday. It was a magnificent job. Staggering.” His small nose twitched. “Bemrose signed up for the athletic program on the side, as a volunteer, in addition to his administrative work. If he’d come to see me first—” The major fretfully scribbled on a pad next to him.
“Is it his heart?”
“No, it’s a nerve trouble, something called multiple sclerosis.”
Only nerves. Larry felt relieved. Bemrose could take it easy for a few months and pitch in again.
“Not ordinary nerves,” the medical officer explained. “It’s a disease of the central nervous system where the myelin sheaths encasing the nerve fibers degenerate, just like insulation on electric wire wearing off in spots. The nerve impulse goes through about eighty percent, and the worn areas are eventually replaced by scar tissue. These lesions can hit almost anywhere. They affect one part of the body, then another. We don’t know what causes them, and there’s no efficient treatment. Some doctors think the trouble comes from a spirochete, and they use malaria and typhoid vaccine to fight it, but so far their results have been only fair. The condition is quite rare in older—how old is Colonel Bemrose?”
“Forty-four.”
Major Graystone drew together his forehead. “I went into his history pretty thoroughly. No infections, no traumatism, just this period of extreme exhaustion before he was stricken——”
“Is he very sick?” Larry asked.
“He’s not in pain, and he won’t be. The chances are he’ll have a remission.”
He saw that Larry didn’t understand. “A period of recovery when he seems to be all right,” the major explained. “Remissions are characteristic of the disease, but then the trouble almost always returns. He can carry on,” the doctor reassured Larry. “I’ve seen patients go along for twenty years with it, keeping up most of their regular activities.”
“What are his symptoms?” Larry asked.
“His walking and his speech are affected. There’s a loss of muscle coordination. We call it an intention tremor. His arms and hands shake. His walking will be the worst——”
“He’ll need crutches?”
“I don’t know. That has to be worked out. Some of them use a cane. We have him in bed now.”
“Has he tried to walk? Is he unsteady on his feet?”
The major nodded. “Can’t coordinate,” he said. “He’ll have trouble getting around at first, but after a while he’ll learn.”
“How does he talk? Thick? Is it like a stroke?”
“He pauses between words, what we call scanning speech.”
“But anyone can understand him?”
“Oh, perfectly.”
Larry smiled. As long as Bemrose could talk, he’d be able to practice law and try cases. The walking and the tremor didn’t matter too much.
“I guess he’ll be getting out of the Army,” Larry speculated.
“We’ll have him retired. There’s nothing much we can do for him medically. Someone should watch the condition all the time, a good neurologist. When he’s back home and settled, see that he locates one.” Graystone continued to scribble triangles and wavy lines on the pad in front of him.
“When can I see him?” Larry asked. “I’d certainly be grateful, Major, if you——”
The officer picked up his phone. “Arrange for Lieutenant Willoughby to take Mr.—” He covered the mouthpiece. “Mr. Frank to visit Colonel Bemrose in H building.”
He wrote out a pass and handed it to Larry. Lifting his weary bulk, he stood up and shook hands. “He asked if you could take him home.”
“I’ll stay down until he’s ready to go.”
“If there’s anything else you want to know about his condition before you leave—” the major offered.
“Do I have to act any particular way when I see him?” Larry asked, admiring this quiet man whose voice was burned out with fatigue.
“Let him know that you’re sure he’s going to be all right. Act as confident as you can.”
Larry gripped Major Graystone’s hand. “Thanks for taking time to go over the details. I’ll wire his wife. She’s waiting to hear.”
Silently he followed the lieutenant who had been assigned to him. They passed the flawless jade pool of the Shelborne Hotel where deeply tanned officers the color of their swimming trunks were shouting to each other and tossing a volley ball. They walked by pink-blooming oleanders and hedges of fluffy sea grape. Outdoors it was warm and friendly. Larry shivered slightly as they entered the medicinal hush of H building.
The lieutenant showed the pass to a soldier at the desk. He signed it and said, “It’s the fifth floor. Give this to the nurse on duty.”
“I don’t think I’ll go up,” Larry decided abruptly. “Do you know where I can find Colonel Lowell?”
“Sure, at the Vanderbilt,” the lieutenant said. “I’m going back that way. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Larry wiped a sweaty palm on the lining of his trouser pocket. He wasn’t quite up to seeing Bemrose.
Outside the hospital his lungs reached gratefully for the moist, humid air. “Hope I didn’t put you out,” he apologized. “My friend worked for Colonel Lowell. I better talk to him first.”
The lieutenant eyed him as if civilians were a species apart. “No trouble. I can always use the exercise.”
“I understand they kill you with it down here,” Larry said. “Don’t you get up at five-thirty to drill?”
“Not me, I’ve had my basic. This is my third year in.” He pulled in his stomach self-consciously. “The only exercise I get is pushing papers on my desk.”
“Why did you sign up so long ago?” Larry asked.
The officer grinned, and he hunched his shoulders. “Figured the job had a future in it.”
There was a fifteen minute wait at the Vanderbilt outside Colonel Lowell’s office. When the adjutant showed him in, Lowell, a short, quick-moving man in his late forties, jumped up to shake hands. Larry was conscious of an oversized flag behind the desk and stiffened his spine against a chair as he sat down.
The colonel was a machine-gun talker who rapped out an account of Bemrose’s negotiations for the transfer of Miami hotels, stores, and restaurants to the Army. Colonel Bemrose knew how to handle the press and the townspeople, Lowell said. Hard feelings had been avoided, and the deals went through on the split second. No officer had contributed more to the smooth running of the school. In a few months Bemrose had chalked up a record that many a regular Army man would envy. Larry figured the colonel was West Point.
He told Larry that they still had plenty of headaches. They had the problem of putting older men, the civilian experts, in top-notch physical condition. It meant hardening them up, taking off fat, teaching personal hygiene, even giving them a voice training course so that they learned to sound like officers. Not only the men, but their women made trouble. They ran down here, hysterical, and hung on like leeches when the men needed the time for study. If they could drown the women, it would increase the efficiency of the school. Colonel Lowell nailed Larry with his intensity. He explained that he had counted on Bemrose to help him solve some of the problems. It was bad luck, having him crack at this time when things were beginning to get under way. He couldn’t understand how Bemrose had passed his physical. He must have been stringing along on low energy for years. A man doesn’t crack up from overwork unless his resistance is down to start with.
Larry began to feel guilty under the colonel’s accusations. “I haven’t seen him yet. I wanted to talk to you,” he broke in.
The colonel’s small bright eyes turned solemn. “You won’t like what you see. It isn’t a pretty sight.”
“I wondered if his retirement could be postponed.” Larry suggested. “He’s heart and soul in this thing. Maybe he’ll recover. Maybe in another few weeks—” He fumbled aimlessly in his coat pockets. “It means everything to Bemrose, being in it. If he thinks that he’s washed up— It’s hard to say what effect it would have on a man like that to think he might be useless.”
“He can return to his law practice,” Lowell said.
“Right now the War is the only thing that interests him,” Larry explained. “He’s a one-tracked person. When he used to be busy with the law, that was the beginning and the end of everything.”
Lowell rapped his desk sharply. “I’d like to keep him. God knows I can use him! I haven’t the say. The medical officer——”
“Major Graystone?”
Lowell dismissed him by rising and extending his hand. “Damned fine record. Damned shame he cracked. The general was going to put him in for full colonel. Get in touch with me when you get home with him. Let me know how he stood the trip.”
The colonel’s clipped sentences stung in Larry’s ear as he rode into Miami on the bus, crossing the causeway behind a line of Army trucks past the leaden tankers in the bay. The man next to him pointed to a shipyard across the water and said it was working full tilt on mosquito boats for the Navy. A British cruiser lay at anchor next to a converted pleasure yacht, renamed War Emergency II. There were plenty of tankers and freighters down here, the man explained to Larry. You saw them come into the harbor almost every night, escorted by subchasers. Sometimes when there was a flash at sea, you couldn’t tell whether it was lightning or gunfire. Chances are, though, it was gunfire. The other morning some wreckage had been found on a hotel beach. It probably came from a ship that was torpedoed. The man had seen columns of fire several hundred feet high out at sea. He described them with his hands. No question about it, they came from torpedoed tankers.
Across the street the man pointed to a sign in front of a hotel that had been taken over: “Civilians keep out!”
They rode through a noisy business section of the city. “This is Jew Town,” he told Larry in the disinterested voice of a tourist guide.
In the seat behind two women gossiped. “We’ll never be able to handle them after the War. Not after their families stand out on the parade ground Sundays and see ’em drillin’ with white troops. They got the notion already they’re equal.”
As the women’s shrill voices ripped on, the dazzling white buildings that lined the thoroughfare seemed to turn a dirty yellow. Larry decided that the prejudices of the townspeople were something the Army hadn’t been able to take over.
He got off the bus, found a Western Union office, and wired Lucy to open the house and have it ready for their return. He waited at a dingy intersection for the light to change and realized that he needn’t have come miles out of his way to send the telegram. His hotel would have transmitted it. Then he remembered that he hadn’t eaten since an early breakfast on the train, and stopped at a delicatessen restaurant. He ordered a tongue omelette, but decided he wasn’t hungry when the waiter put it in front of him. Swallowing some weak coffee from a lipstick-marked cup, he got up to pay his check.
A lanky form was draped over the cashier’s desk. Larry recognized the sandy head and ugly yellow tweeds and laid a timid hand on Steve Holmes’ shoulder, not sure that the rough, awkward frame would be there the next minute.
“Oh, hullo!” Steve’s red face came to life, and his big head indicated the swinging door. “Let’s get out of this pig pen.”
They walked toward the lavish, streamlined shops of Lincoln Road. Steve told Larry he was down on a job for Everett’s. They had assigned him to do oil paintings of the commanding general and of a Navy man. If Jimmie Doolittle showed up, Steve was going to try and do him on his own. He had always liked that tough little so-and-so. He got the assignment because Janice had introduced him to the art editor of the magazine. It was a swell break. There was healthy money in the work.
Larry listened halfway, and refused Steve’s offer of a drink.
“Still worried about that guy?” Steve’s head twisted sharply toward him.
“This time there’s really something to worry about.”
Larry reported his talk with the medical officer, and Holmes accelerated his gait. Larry, trotting beside him in the pure white heat of early afternoon, felt a salty swamp collect inside his belt.
“Jesuschris’, that’s lousy.” Holmes’ bony shoulders lunged forward. “Have you seen him?”
“I’m on my way up there.” Larry grabbed Steve’s arm. “Say, won’t you——”
“I’d just as soon skip it for now.” Holmes slowed down. “Maybe in a day or so if you say it’s okay. Want me to walk you up?” he offered.
“Do you think I should phone Janice and let her know?” Larry asked. She could drop whatever she was doing and come down. If anyone would make Arthur feel better, she would: They could tell him that Everett’s had sent her down to write the captions for Steve’s paintings.
“Phone her?” Steve looked at him. “She’s on her way to China. She left San Francisco Friday.”
“That’s the second lousy break,” Larry said.
“The third.” Steve pulled at his bulky knitted tie, the red one he had worn at Arthur’s reception. “She turned me down again, and she meant it this time.”
Larry looked his sympathy.
“We got drunk one night, and she told me she was still in love with him,” Steve said. “It kills her that he married that girl. It kills her, and it gives her hope. She doesn’t see how it can last.”
“Why didn’t she stick around then?” Larry asked.
“The Air Force ordered the story on China and got her a top priority.”
“Did you think she was going to accept you on the rebound?”
Steve pocketed his thick knuckles. “I guess I thought so, but it’s no use. She’s got him in her protoplasm. Part of her is marked ‘Bemrose.’”
“Now that he’s sick she might give up the idea of having him,” Larry said. “It looks as if his marriage will have to last now, whether or not——”
“Might as well try to take an acorn away from a squirrel when he has his teeth fixed sharp in it,” Steve predicted. “She’s not giving up.”
“He might be a cripple the rest of his life.”
“Won’t faze her. Not Janice. She’ll hang on harder. That’s the kind of suffering she enjoys. You’ll see. She’ll prove she wasn’t wrong about him, and she’ll prove to him that she can take it. I think she’s crazy, but—” Steve shrugged.
They were around the corner from the hospital. “Sure you won’t come up with me?” Larry asked.
“There are a couple of girls at the hotel who look as if they’d eat dinner. I’m going to call for them. Join us later,” Steve offered.
Larry refused for the evening, but promised to give Steve a ring the next day and jotted down the number of the hotel. He watched Steve’s clumsy frame disappear along the crisp, sun-baked thoroughfare, sorry for Holmes, for Janice, for himself, but sorriest of all for Bemrose.
Following the walk kept immaculate by the Army, he reached wearily for the cool glass door of H building, hoping when he saw Arthur that he’d remember what Major Graystone had told him and be able to act as if he didn’t notice anything was wrong.