The Majors Read online

  When Phil replied, he said nothing whatever about Lowell’s idea. He wrote that he had been granted a Special Instrument Ticket, which meant that he was his own clearance authority. If he figured it was safe to fly, he could take off. Lowell had grown used to being replaced by an old-timer the moment the clouds looked threatening.

  Lowell told himself that Phil was flying fixed wing. There was no such thing as instrument flight in helicopters, so it meant nothing. But then he realized that it did mean something: if they were given an instrument flight capability, rotary wing aircraft would be even better rocket launching platforms. He would have to check that out, too.

  While Major Craig W. Lowell spent as much time at the controls as he could, as well as long hours working on his rocket-armed helicopter idea, and as much time as possible with his son, he did not enter into a life of dedicated monasticism. He was twenty-six, in perfect physical condition. The juices of life flowed.

  There were a number of single American women around Augsburg, service club hostesses, civilian secretaries, and specialists of one kind or another at Seventh Army Headquarters, and he worked his way through them, bedding some of them, being refused by others, never letting it get serious.

  He had no desire to remarry. He really hadn’t met another woman with whom the idea of sharing his life had any appeal. But it was not true, as the O Club gossip had it, that he worked his way through each and every female at Seventh Army. There wasn’t time for that many women in his life, even if being in his life meant squiring them to the Seventh Army officer’s club and little more. After a while, too, the word got around among the women that all the aviator major wanted was somebody in his sack, and that marriage was the last thing on his mind. Dating Major Lowell painted them before other eligibles (even if the other eligibles weren’t generally field grade and possessors of a red Jaguar automobile) as girls who had been tried and found either willing or undesirable.

  His fluent, unaccented German, acquired from one of a long line of governesses who had acted in loco parentis for his “ill” mother, and perfected when Ilse had been alive, came back quickly, and that opened two other sources of females: the girls who hung around the military (these were not, despite their reputation, all semipro hookers looking for a meal ticket, but in many cases young women who simply found Americans more attractive than their German contemporaries) and the Germans in the Augsburg and Munich upper crust, to whom he was known as the widowered son-in-law of Generalmajor Graf von Greiffenberg.

  While he didn’t score nearly as frequently as the stories went, he scored enough so that his reputation preceded him. If he appeared with a redhead on his arm for the Tuesday Standing Rib Special at the officer’s mess, you could bet that there would be a blond or a brunette the following week.

  God only knows where he goes every weekend he can get off, went the talk. It was the general consensus that he used his weekends to diddle the married women whom discretion demanded he diddle at least one hundred miles from the flagpole. It became known that the sonofabitch had a Mercedes 280, with kraut plates, stashed in town.

  This suspicious behavior came to the attention of the Counterintelligence Corps. A somewhat disappointed CIC agent, who had really felt that he was onto some sonofabitch on Moscow’s, or at least Karlshorst’s, payroll, reported that the automobile in question was the property of Generalmajor Graf von Greiffenberg of the Bundeswehr, and that a check of the subject’s records indicated that Generalmajor Graf von Greiffenberg was the subject’s father-in-law, and had been named guardian of the subject’s minor child in the event of his death.

  Only the CIC knew that Lowell was spending his weekends and his three-day VOCOs with his son and the Baroness Elizabeth von Heuffinger-Lodz, who was P.P.’s adoptive mother in everything but law. Otherwise, everyone but Lt. Col. Edgar R. Withers preferred to think his weekends were spent in carnal abandon with one straying wife, or oversexed secretary, or another. And the CIC is in the business of investigating people, not issuing character references. Lowell quickly earned a reputation as a swordsman, first class.

  The thought of something happening between Lowell and Elizabeth had occurred to both of them and had been weighed and found, in the balance, absurd. They became friends instead.

  Although he had passed the Bad Nauheim arrows on the autobahn every time he drove to and from Marburg, Lowell had never turned off for a look at the town where he had met Ilse, where he’d lived with her, where he had made her pregnant. He didn’t, he admitted to himself, have the balls.

  Elizabeth von Heuffinger-Lodz was responsible for him finally going back. When he arrived at Schloss Greiffenberg to spend Christmas, Elizabeth said she had heard that the army theater in Bad Nauheim was going to have a special Christmas program of cartoons and Walt Disney’s Fantasia for dependent children, and could he arrange to take them? They could also visit the PX and get Peter-Paul things unavailable at any price on the German economy.

  There was no way to refuse. He told himself that he was being foolish, anyway. That was all a long time ago. Sometimes, especially around Elizabeth, whose soft white skin and long, slim legs had their effect on him, he had difficulty even remembering what Ilse looked like.

  When Elizabeth asked for the car, the chauffeur misunderstood, and was waiting in the courtyard, all dressed up in his livery, holding open the back door of the 280 for Frau Baroness, Herr Major, and den süssen kleinen Peter-Paul. It was easier to let him drive than to make a scene.

  The chauffeur elected to take them into Bad Nauheim past the Bayrischen Hof.

  It was a bright, crisp winter day, and as the Mercedes drove past the park where Ilse had spent that first night, a jeep came the other way, and a young girl jumped out, legs flashing under her skirt, and ran into the hotel.

  Lowell’s heart leapt, and he just had time to be amused at that, when a mental image of Ilse lying naked under him, when he took her virginity, filled his mind. She had trusted him, given him her body, given him P.P., when she didn’t have a pot to piss in. And here he was, with P.P., in a goddamned chauffeur-driven Mercedes, and she was rotting in her grave. It was so goddamned unfair!

  Tears came without warning, his heart went leaden, and it was all he could do to keep from sobbing out loud. He looked away. His eyes fell on P.P., standing up on the back floor, looking out the window. He got control of himself, and let his breath out very slowly.

  “She was here with you, wasn’t she?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Right in there,” he said, and met her eyes, not caring that she could see his tears.

  “And you loved her very much, didn’t you?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Yes,” Lowell said, surprised at the depth of his emotion. “Very much.”

  “And you loved who, Papa?” P.P. asked.

  “Your mother, P.P.,” Lowell said.

  P.P. was not interested in his mother, whom he only very faintly remembered.

  “And now you love Tante Elizabeth?” P.P. asked.

  “Right on the button, Squirt,” Lowell said.

  “Right on the button?” P.P. asked, confused.

  Elizabeth took Lowell’s hand in her gloved one, and held it tightly.

  After they had taken P.P. to see the Christmas program, and then through the PX to buy him what Lowell later thought of as one each of everything in the toy department, they had dinner in the officer’s open mess. Elizabeth was willing to acknowledge that only the Americans really knew how to make a steak, even if there were few other American accomplishments worth mentioning.

  On the way home to Marburg, Lowell, convinced that he was now in charge of his emotions, directed the chauffeur to the farmer’s house where he had lived with Ilse.

  “What are we doing here?” P.P. demanded to know, looking at the small farmhouse.

  “This is where you come from, Squirt,” Lowell said.

  “Oh, no, I don’t either!”

  “This is where your mother and I decided to have you,” Lowell said.


  “That must have been a long time ago,” P.P. said. “Can we go in?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lowell said. “Somebody else lives there now.” He gestured for the chauffeur to start up.

  P.P. fell asleep on the secondary highway to Marburg, lulled to sleep by the swaying of the softly suspended large car. Elizabeth pulled him over her and propped him up in the corner, and then slid over beside Lowell. She took his hand.

  “I used to feel sorry for Ilse,” she said. “Now I’m a little jealous.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “You loved her,” she said. “That’s more than Kurt and I had.”

  Without really knowing that he was doing it, Lowell put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her closely, affectionately, to him. And then, without thinking about that, either, he kissed her. First a gentle kiss, between friends. Then it became less than innocent, gentle. It was, for some reason, highly exciting.

  “This is dangerous,” he said.

  “What harm can one night do?” she whispered.

  He kissed her again, and was not at all surprised when her tongue darted at first teasingly, and then hungrily, into his mouth, or when she violently twisted her body around so that she could press her breasts against him, or when her hand dropped to his crotch.

  But that night was the only time it happened. She didn’t come to his room again over the holidays, and the next time he got to Marburg, three weeks later, she made it plain within the first couple of minutes that what had happened between them was a freak happenstance, and that it would never happen again.

  But they remained friends. The other relatives said they were like brother and sister and privately talked among themselves how fortunate it was that Ilse’s American seemed to understand how far better it was for Peter-Paul to remain with Elizabeth, and wasn’t it a shame that they hadn’t, you know, felt that way about each other?

  Lowell was personally disappointed when his initial utilization tour was over and he remained assigned to the Seventh Army Aviation Detachment. He had hoped for assignment to one of the divisions, where his rank would demand he be given a staff position. That was obviously the reason he remained assigned to the detachment as an aviator; they didn’t want to give him a responsible assignment.

  He used his rank to insist that he be checked out in the new, fourteen-passenger Sikorsky H-34 helicopter, and he was the first of the new breed in Seventh Army to be allowed to fly it as pilot in command. That special privilege was generally recognized to be because the Seventh Army aviation officer had heard good things about Major Lowell from Colonel Bill Roberts, while he was in TDY in the States.

  He also used his rank to have himself sent to Sonthofen for a ten-week cross-training course in fixed wing flight. He was now what they called dual rated, and sent a copy of his orders to Phil Parker in Alaska. Being dual rated made things more even between them, catching up with Phil now that Phil had the coveted Special Instrument Ticket. Parker responded with a Xerox of his flight log. He had gotten himself checked out, incredibly, by the air force in C-119 Flying Boxcars and C-47s on skis. Parker sent him a photograph in which he was kissing a stuffed polar bear. Lowell sent him a photograph, his head on Rommel’s body, of himself as a field marshal, and then had Elizabeth pick out something really nice to send Captain and Mrs. Parker for their first baby, a girl.

  VI

  (One)

  Clayhatchee Springs, Alabama

  17 January 1955

  Darlene Heatter cleaned up the kitchen as soon as John went to work, washing the dishes, wiping the table clean, even mopping the floor. Then she made the bed and dusted the living room, and then she dressed the kids. Finally, she got dressed, a nice dress, not a Sunday dress, but nice all the same. She didn’t like to go to the church, even when there weren’t any services, unless she looked nice.

  Darlene was an attractive woman, a few pounds shy of being plump. She had brown hair and brown eyes, and every once in a while she fantasized about having her hair bleached. She had been blond as a child, but then, when she was just starting high school, it had started to turn dark.

  She’d put peroxide on her hair to keep it blond, but her mother caught her doing it and told her that only tramps and women who hung around beer joints bleached their hair. “If you want to look loose,” she’d said, “you’ll have to wait until you get married and leave home. As long as you live under my roof, you won’t bleach your hair, or do anything else to make yourself cheap.”

  She’d thought about that encounter years later, when she actually did get married, and thought about being free to bleach her hair, but she hadn’t done it. She told herself that she was now a young Christian married woman and no more free to look like a tramp than she had been in her freshman year of high school.

  Darlene collected the kids and put them in the old pickup. The old pickup was a ’47 Ford, red, with the back window gone and a crack in the front one, and pretty well rusted out in the bed from the fertilizer, which just about ate metal. The new pickup was a Ford. It wasn’t really new, but it had belonged to the Hessia Peanut Mill supervisor, who hadn’t really used it as a farm pickup, so it was the next best thing to a new one. Not worn out or eaten up by rust or anything.

  She’d talked John into buying it, without turning the old pickup in as a down payment. They weren’t going to give him anything for it, she told him (and that was true, they wouldn’t have given him what it was worth, considering all the time he’d put in on it fixing it up and rebuilding it) and he really should have something to use as a spare. You never could tell what would happen, she said.

  John was back out at Camp Rucker, thank sweet Jesus for that, and not only as a fireman, GS-2, but as a fire equipment vehicle operator, GS-3. It wasn’t really a promotion, just that he was qualified for the higher job because of his experience and seniority. What it was, officially, was that he had applied for a new job instead of just getting his old one back.

  It was sort of funny, he told her, because now that he was a fire equipment vehicle operator, GS-3, there weren’t any fire equipment vehicles. Not real ones. They’d auctioned off the old fire engines (some man from Chicago had made the high bid and come all the way down to take them away) when the post was supposed to be closing down for good. The new equipment hadn’t come yet, although the army had issued the purchase order for them, and they were supposedly being built. All the fire department at the post had to fight fires with until the new equipment was delivered were some regular trucks with water pumps on the back, and some regular water trucks, regular army trucks. John and some of the others had gone to Georgia, to Fort Benning, to get them. It was the first time John had ever ridden in an airplane.

  When she arrived at the Clayhatchee Springs Church of God, a white frame building set on brick piers, nobody was there. She hadn’t expected anybody to be there, and would have been disappointed and maybe even a little embarrassed if there had been. She got the door unlocked and turned her kids loose in the nursery and asked them please not to tear anything up. Then she went into the church office.

  When she got to the door, it occurred to her for the first time that maybe they locked the office. She had keys to the church and even the food cupboards in the kitchen (because she was on the Hospitality Committee and the Ladies Altar Guild), but if they locked the office door, she would have been out of luck. She had no reason to have keys to the office.

  The office door was open. And there was the typewriter, right on top of the pastor’s desk, with an oilcloth cover over it.

  A month before, right after John had gone back to work, Darlene had been in the post office to send some wrong-sized corduroy overalls for Johnnie back to Sears and Roebuck, and she saw the civil service announcements on the bulletin board next to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Criminals posters.

  Fort Rucker was hiring typists, clerk-typists, and typist-stenographers on a competitive examination, and you could write for application blanks or call a number somebody had w
ritten in the notice with a Magic Marker. There were vacancies from GS-1 through GS-5 for something they called secretary (stenotyping).

  So she called, and the lady in the personnel office said that all you had to do to get taken on as a typist, GS-1 or GS-2, was be able to type. If you typed twenty-five words a minute, you could get hired as a GS-1. If you typed thirty-five words a minute, you could get yourself hired as a GS-2. They would teach you whatever else you had to know once you were on the payroll.

  Darlene had given it a lot of thought. John had been a GS-2 before they closed the post, and they’d had all the money they needed. If she could get a job as a GS-1, now that he was a GS-3, that was probably the same thing as two GS-2 pay-checks. That was all the money in the world.

  The only trouble was that John probably wouldn’t want her to work. He would tell her that she should be home with the kids. And she couldn’t type; there was that little problem, too.

  Darlene Heatter sat down at the pastor’s desk and pulled the oilcloth cover off his typewriter. Then, from her purse she took a package of typing paper, wrapped in cellophane, for which she had paid twenty-nine cents in the Piggly Wiggly Superette, and a battered book, bound at the top, which she had borrowed from the Choctawhatchee regional library book-mobile: Typing the E-Z Way.

  She put a piece of paper in the typewriter and lined it up. She’d already read the first part of the book, and understood what she was to do.

  Darlene Heatter put her fingers on the keyboard, and very slowly but with firm strokes, she began to type: aaa lll aaa lll aaa lll alal alal alal lala lala la.

  (Two)

  The U.S. Army Ground General School

  Fort Riley, Kansas

  23 February 1955

  ROUTINE

  HQ DEPT OF THE ARMY WASH DC

  0905 21 FEB 55

  TO: CG USA GGS AND FT RILEY KANS