Call to Arms Read online

  Just over a year later, Patricia Pickering had come to Elaine’s room at Presbyterian Hospital and cooed and oohed over precious little Ernestine.

  “Well,” Patricia had said then, “the next thing we have to do is get the two of them together.” That had been a running joke over the years, but not wholly a joke or a preposterous idea. It would have been nice, but it wasn’t going to happen.

  What Pick Pickering had been looking at from the bay window of the breakfast room was Ernestine Sage standing by the duck pond at the far side of the wide lawn. She was standing with another Marine officer, and he had his arm around her. Twice, they had kissed.

  “What rouses you from bed at this obscene hour?” Pick Pickering asked Ernie Sage’s mother.

  “You could say I am just being a gracious hostess,” she replied.

  Pick Pickering snorted.

  “When I went to bed last night,” Elaine Sage said, “I went to Ernie’s room. I was going to tell her…following the hoary adage that the best way to get rid of your daughter’s undesirable suitor is to praise him to the skies…how much I liked your friend out there.” She bent her head in the direction of the Marine who was holding her daughter.

  Pickering looked down at her, his eyebrows raised.

  “She wasn’t in her bed,” Elaine Sage said.

  “If she wasn’t, Aunt Elaine,” Pick Pickering said, “it was her idea, not his.”

  “Ken McCoy frightens me, Pick,” Elaine Sage said. “He’s not like us.”

  “That may be part of his attraction,” Pickering said.

  “I’m not sure he’s good for Ernie,” Elaine Sage said.

  “I think he’s very good for her,” Pickering said. When she looked at him, he added: “Anyway, I think it’s a moot point. She thinks he’s good for her. She thinks the sun comes up because he wants it to.”

  Ernestine Pickering and Second Lieutenant Kenneth J. McCoy had turned from the duck pond and were walking back to the house. He had unbuttoned his overcoat and she was half inside it, resting her face on his chest.

  “You will forgive me for not being able to forgive you for introducing them at your party,” Elaine Sage said.

  “I didn’t introduce them,” Pickering said. “Ernie picked him up. She saw in him someone who was as bored with my party as she was. She walked up to him, introduced herself, and shortly thereafter they disappeared. I found out the next morning that he’d taken her to a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. Where, apparently, he dazzled her by speaking to the proprietor in Chinese, and then won her heart with his skill with chopsticks.”

  Elaine Sage chuckled.

  “For what it’s worth, Aunt Elaine,” Pickering went on, “he didn’t know she had a dime.”

  “Love at first sight?” she said. “Don’t tell me you believe that’s possible?”

  “Take a look,” he said. “You have a choice between love at first sight or irresistible lust. I’m willing to accept love at first sight.”

  “They have nothing in common,” she protested.

  “I don’t have a hell of a lot in common with him, either,” Pickering said. “But I realized some time ago he’s the best friend I’ve ever had. If you’ve come looking for an ally in some Machiavellian plot of yours to separate the two of them, you’re out of luck. I think they’re good for each other. My basic reaction is jealousy. I wish someone like Ernie would look at me the way she looks at McCoy.”

  “I wish Ernie would look at you the way she looks at McCoy,” Elaine Sage said.

  There was a rattling sound behind them. They turned and saw a middle-aged, plump woman in a maid’s uniform rolling a serving cart into the breakfast room.

  “Do you suppose that she was looking out the window, too, for the return of Romeo and Juliet?” Pickering asked dryly. “Will it be safe for him to eat the scrambled eggs?”

  “I am placing what hope I have left in the ‘praise him to the skies’ theory,” Elaine Sage said. “Poison will be a last desperate resort.”

  Ernestine Sage and Second Lieutenant Kenneth J. McCoy, USMCR, walked onto the broad veranda of the house, disappeared from sight, and a moment later came into the breakfast room. Their faces were red from the cold. McCoy was not quite as large as Pickering, nor as heavily built. He had light brown hair, and intelligent eyes.

  Ernie Sage was wearing a sweater and a skirt, and she wore her black hair in a pageboy. She was, both her mother and Pick Pickering thought, a truly beautiful young woman, healthy, and wholesome.

  “Mother,” Ernie Sage said, “you didn’t have to get up.”

  “All I have to do is die and pay taxes,” Elaine Sage said. “I’m up because I want to be up. Good morning, Ken. Sleep well?”

  “Just fine, thank you,” McCoy said. His intelligent eyes searched her face for a moment, as if seeking a reason behind the “sleep well?” question.

  “I’m starved,” Ernie Sage said. “What are we having?”

  “The cold air’ll do that to you every time,” Pickering said dryly.

  “We’d better start eating,” Elaine Sage said. “I asked Tony to have the car ready at half-past six. The roads may be icy.”

  Ernestine Sage looked at McCoy.

  “If we’re really ahead of time at Newark,” she said, “you can ride into Manhattan with us and catch the train there.”

  “What time is your plane?” Elaine Sage asked Pickering.

  “Half-past eleven,” he said. “I’ve plenty of time.”

  “He said he’ll catch the bus at the airlines terminal,” Ernie Sage said.

  “Don’t be silly,” Elaine Sage said. “You might as well use the Bentley.”

  “The bus is easier,” Pickering said, as he went to the serving cart and started lifting silver covers. “Thanks anyway.” He lifted his eyes to Elaine Sage. “Take a look at these scrambled eggs,” he said. “Don’t they have a funny color?”

  Both mother and daughter went to examine the eggs.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the eggs,” Elaine Sage said.

  “Well, if you’re sure,” Pickering said. “There’s supposed to be lot of poisoned eggs around.”

  “Honey,” Ernie Sage said. “You just sit, and I’ll serve you.”

  “‘Honey’?” her mother parroted. McCoy flushed.

  “It’s a sticky substance one spreads on bread,” Pickering said.

  “It’s also what I call him,” Ernie Sage said. “It’s what they call a ‘term of endearment.’”

  “Gee, Aunt Elaine,” Pickering said. “Ain’t love grand?”

  “Ginger-peachy,” Elaine Sage said. “I understand it makes the world go round.” She smiled at Ken McCoy. “We get the sausage from a farmer down the road,” she said. “I hope you’ll try it.”

  McCoy looked at her; their eyes met.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Intelligent eyes, she thought. And then she amended that: Intelligent and wary, like an abused dog’s.

  (Two)

  Pennsylvania Station

  New York City

  0925 Hours, 6 January 1942

  When the buses from the Navy Yard reached Penn Station, the recruits had been formed into two platoon-sized groups and marched into the station and down to the platform by the corporals. Koznowski and Zimmerman walked to one side. Commuters coming off trains from the suburbs had watched the little procession with interest. Some had smiled. The nation was at war; these were the men who would fight the war.

  Two coach cars had been attached to the Congressional Limited, immediately behind the blue-painted electric locomotive and in front of the baggage car and railway post office, so that they were effectively separated from the rest of the train.

  On the platform there, Staff Sergeant Koznowski had delivered another little lecture, informing the group that under the Regulations for the Governance of the Naval Service, to which they were now subject, anyone who “got lost” between here and Parris Island could expect to be tried by court-martial not for AWOL
(Absence Without Leave) but for “missing a troop movement,” which was an even more severe offense.

  They were to sit where they were told to sit, Staff Sergeant Koznowski said, and they were not to get out of that seat for any reason without specific permission from one of the corporals. He also said that there had been incidents embarrassing the Marine Corps where recruits had whistled at young civilian women. Any one of them doing that, Staff Sergeant Koznowski said, would answer to him personally.

  He had then stood by the door and personally checked the names of the recruits off on a roster as they boarded the cars. When the last was aboard, he turned to Sergeant Zimmerman.

  “Let’s you and me take a walk,” he said. “Fucking train ain’t going anywhere soon.”

  It was more in the nature of an order than a suggestion, so Sergeant Zimmerman nodded his agreement, although he would have much preferred to get on the car and sit down and maybe put his feet up. The malaria had got to him, and while he no longer belonged in the hospital, he was still pretty weak.

  What Koznowski wanted to do, it immediately became apparent, was look at the young women passing through the station. Zimmerman had nothing against young women, or against looking at them, but if you were about to get on a train, it seemed futile. And he was tired.

  They had been standing just to the right of the gate to the platform on which the Congressional Limited of the Pennsylvania Railroad was boarding passengers for about twenty minutes when Koznowski jabbed Zimmerman, painfully, in the ribs with his elbow.

  “Look at that candy-ass, will you?” he said softly, contemptuously, barely moving his lips.

  A Marine officer, a second lieutenant, was approaching the gate to the Congressional Limited platform. He was very young, and there was a young woman hanging on to his right arm, a real looker, with her black hair cut in a pageboy.

  The customs of the Naval Service proscribed any public display of affection. The second lieutenant was obviously unaware of this proscription, or was ignoring it. The good-looking dame in the pageboy was hanging on to him like he was a life preserver, and the second lieutenant was looking in her eyes, oblivious to anything else.

  Zimmerman was uncomfortable. It was his experience that the less you had to do with officers, the better off you were. And what the hell, so he had a girl friend, so what? Good for him.

  Staff Sergeant Koznowski waited until the second lieutenant was almost on them, if oblivious to them.

  “Watch this,” he said softly, his lips not moving. Then he raised his voice. “Ah-ten-hut!” he barked, and then saluted crisply. “Good morning, sir!”

  He succeeded in his intention, which was to shake up the candy-ass second lieutenant. First, the second lieutenant was rudely brought back to the world that existed outside the eyes of the good-looking dame in the black pageboy. Then, his right arm moved in Pavlovian reflex to return Staff Sergeant Koznowski’s gesture of courtesy between members of the profession of arms, knocking the girl on his arm to one side and causing her to lose her purse.

  Staff Sergeant Koznowski coughed twice, very pleased with himself.

  But the second lieutenant did not then, as Staff Sergeant Koznowski firmly expected him to do, continue through the gate mustering what little dignity he had left, and possibly even growing red with embarrassment.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” the second lieutenant said, as he looked at Staff Sergeant Koznowski and Sergeant Zimmerman. And then he walked toward them.

  “Oh, shit!” Staff Sergeant Koznowski said softly, assuming the position of “attention.”

  The second lieutenant had his hand extended.

  “Hello, Ernie,” he said. “How the hell are you?”

  Sergeant Zimmerman shook the extended hand, but he was speechless.

  The good-looking dame in the black pageboy, having reclaimed her purse, walked up, a hesitant smile on her face.

  “Honey,” the second lieutenant said, “this is Sergeant Ernie Zimmerman. I told you about him.”

  There was a moment’s look of confusion on her face, and then she remembered.

  “Of course,” she said, and smiled at Zimmerman, offering her hand. “I’m Ernie, too, Ernie Sage. Ken’s told me so much about you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Zimmerman said, uncomfortably.

  “Stand at ease, Sergeant,” the second lieutenant said to Staff Sergeant Koznowski.

  The conductor called, “Bo-aard!”

  “You’re on the train?” the second lieutenant asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Zimmerman said.

  “Save me a seat,” the second lieutenant said. “I’m going to be the last man aboard.”

  The good-looking dame chuckled.

  “We had better get aboard, sir,” Staff Sergeant Koznowski said.

  “Go ahead,” the second lieutenant said.

  Staff Sergeant Koznowski saluted; the second lieutenant returned it. Then, with Zimmerman on his heels, Koznowski marched through the gate and to the train.

  “Where’d you get so chummy with the candy-ass, Zimmerman?” Koznowski asked, contemptuously.

  “You ever hear of Killer McCoy, Koznowski?” Zimmerman asked.

  “Huh?” Staff Sergeant Koznowski asked, and then, “Who?”

  “Forget it,” Zimmerman said.

  When they were on the train, and the train had rolled out of Pennsylvania Station and through the tunnel and was making its way across the wetlands between Jersey City and Newark, Staff Sergeant Koznowski jabbed Zimmerman in the ribs again.

  “Hey,” he said. “There was a story going around about some real hardass in the Fourth Marines in Shanghai. That the ‘Killer McCoy’ you were asking about?”

  Zimmerman nodded.

  “Story was that he cut up three Italian marines, killed two of them.”

  “Right.”

  “And then he shot up a fucking bunch of Chinks,” Koznowski said.

  Zimmerman nodded again.

  “True story?” Koznowski asked, now fascinated.

  “True story,” Zimmerman said.

  “What’s that got to do with that candy-ass second lieutenant?” Koznowski asked.

  “That’s him,” Zimmerman said.

  “Bullshit,” Koznowski said flatly.

  “No bullshit,” Zimmerman said. “That was Killer McCoy.”

  “Bullshit,” Koznowski said, “How the hell do you know?”

  “I was there when he shot the Chinks,” Zimmerman said. “I shot a couple of them myself.”

  Koznowski looked at him for a moment, and finally decided he had been told the truth.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” he said.

  (Three)

  Tony, the Sages’ chauffeur, had parked the Bentley on Thirty-fourth Street, in a NO PARKING zone across from Pennsylvania Station in front of George’s Bar & Grill. Ten minutes after Ernestine Sage had gone into the station with Second Lieutenant Kenneth J. McCoy, a policeman walked up to the car, rapped on the window with his knuckles, and gestured with a jerk of his thumb for Tony to get moving.

  On the second trip around the block, they saw Ernestine Sage standing on the curb. Tony tapped the horn twice, quickly, and she saw the car and ran to it and got in.

  “Just so you won’t feel left out,” Ernie Sage said to Second Lieutenant Malcolm Pickering, “I will now put you on your airplane.”

  “Where to, Miss Ernie?” Tony asked, cocking his head to one side in the front seat.

  “My apartment, please, Tony,” Ernie Sage said, and turned to Pickering. “I’ll make you a cup of coffee.”

  “The Foster Park, Tony,” Pickering ordered. “She makes a lousy cup of coffee.”

  They were stopped in traffic. There was a chance for Tony to turn to look into the backseat. Ernestine Sage nodded her approval.

  Tony made the next right turn and pointed the Bentley uptown.

  “You’re not going to work?” Pickering asked. When she shook her head no, he asked, “What happened to Nose to the Grindstone?”

/>   “When we get there,” Ernie Sage said, “I will call in. I will say that I have just put my boyfriend-the-Marine on a train, that I am consequently in a lousy mood, and will be in later this afternoon.”

  “Patriotism,” Pickering said solemnly, “is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

  She laughed, and took his arm.

  “He’s only going to Washington, Ernie,” Pickering said.

  “He ever tell you about a Marine named Zimmerman?” Ernie asked. “When he was in China?”

  Pickering shook his head. “No.”

  “The one who had a Chinese wife and a bunch of children?”

  “Yeah,” Pickering said, remembering. “Why?”

  “He was in the station, by the gate,” Ernie said. “With another Marine. A sergeant. Another sergeant.”

  “Really?”

  “They looked like Marines, Pick,” she said. “I mean, they were Marines. And they saluted Ken and stood stiff…what do they call it?”

  “At attention,” he furnished. “And?”

  “I can’t really understand that he’s really a Marine officer…or you either, for that matter.”

  “I’m not so sure about me,” Pickering said, “but you better get used to the idea that that’s what Ken is. Hell, he’s already been in the war, and it’s hardly a month old.”

  “He was shot before the war, when he was in China, with Zimmerman,” she said. “He told me about it. It’s not that I didn’t believe him, but it wasn’t real until just now, when I saw Zimmerman. It wasn’t at all hard to imagine Zimmerman with a gun in his hands, shooting people.”

  “The fact of the matter, Ernie, is that your boyfriend is one tough cookie. He may look like he’s up for the weekend from Princeton, but he’s not. What are you doing, having second thoughts about the great romance? Are you just a little afraid of him?”

  “For him,” she said, and then corrected herself. “No. For me. Oh, God, Pick, I don’t want to lose him!”

  “For the moment, Ernie, you can relax,” Pickering said. “He’s only going to Washington.”

  “Yeah, but where does he go from Washington?” she replied.

  The Bentley turned right again onto Fifty-ninth Street, and halfway down the block pulled to the curb before a canvas marquee with THE FOSTER PARK HOTEL lettered on it.