W.E.B. Griffin - The Corps 03 - Counterattack

"Flowers, candy, and whiskey," Steve said. "Is that all right?"

"It’s unnecessary," Daphne snapped, and was sorry. "What are you doing here?"

"I came to tell you how sorry I am about your husband getting killed," Steve said.

"And you drove all the way out here to do that?"

"It’s only two hundred and eighty-six miles," he said. "I just checked. And that includes me getting lost twice."

It never even entered his stupid American mind that he might be intruding here; he wanted to come, so he just got in his sodding car and came!

"I really don’t know what to say to you," she said.

"You don’t have to say anything," he said. "I just wanted you to know I’m sorry."

Is that it? Or did you maybe think that now that I’m a widow, you could just jump into my bed?

What the hell is the matter with me? He‘s just stupid and sweet. Except that I know he’s not really as stupid as I first thought Naive and sweet, rather than stupid,

"That’s very kind of you, Steve, I’m sure. Thank you very much."

Steve Koffler relaxed visibly.

"It’s OK. I wanted to do it."

But my mother is not going to understand this. Or John’s mother. Or anybody. They’re going to suspect that this boy and I are... what? Something we shouldn’t be. That that is absurd won’t matter. That’s what they’re going to think.

And I can‘t just send him packing, either. Not only would that be cruel of me, but by now everyone has seen the car and will be wondering who it is. What thehell am I going to do?

"I suppose you must think I’m terrible," Daphne Farnsworth said to Steve Koffler as the Studebaker turned onto the bridge over the Murrumbidgee River, "lying to my family like that."

"No. I understand," he replied, turning his head to look at her.

"Well, I feel rotten about it," she said. "But I just couldn’t take any more. I was going to scream."

After quickly but carefully coaching Steve in the story, she had led him up to the big house and introduced him to her family. She had told them that her officer, Lieutenant Donnelly, had learned that the American Marines were sending a car to the Wagga Wagga airfield. The lieutenant had arranged with a Marine officer to have Steve, the driver, whom she referred to as "Corporal Koffler," stop by the station and offer her a ride back to Melbourne. Her "death leave" was up the next day anyway. It would save her catching a very early train, and a long and uncomfortable ride.

It sounded credible, and she was reasonably sure that no one had questioned the story. They had been effusive in their thanks to Steve for doing her a good turn. All of which, of course, had made her feel even worse.

"I’m just glad I decided to come," Steve Koffler said.

They rode in silence for a long time, while Daphne wallowed in her new perception of herself as someone with a previously unsuspected capacity for lying and all-around deceit, the proof of which was that she felt an enormous sense of relief at being able to get away from people who shared her grief and would, quite literally, do anything in the world for her.

Steve Koffler broke the silence as they reached the outskirts of Wangaratta, fifty miles back into Victoria.

"Would it be all right if I looked for someplace I could get something to eat? I could eat a horse."

"You mean you haven’t eaten?"

He nodded.

"You should have said something at the station," she said. "There was all kinds of food . . ."

He shrugged.

"On condition that you let me pay," Daphne said. "I really do appreciate the ride."

"I’ve got money," he said.

"I pay, or you go hungry."

He smiled at her shyly.

As he wolfed down an enormous meal of steak and eggs, Daphne asked, "Tell me about your family, Steve. And your girl."

"There’s not much to tell about my family. My mother and father are divorced. I live with her and her husband. And I don’t have a girl."

"I thought Marines were supposed to have a girl in every port."

"That’s what they say," he said. "I know a bunch of girls, of course, but there’s no one special. I’ve been too busy, I suppose, to have a steady girl."

He’s lying. That was bravado. He’s afraid of women. Then why did he drive all the way out to Wagga Wagga? For the reason he gave. He felt really sorry for me. Whatever this boy is, he is no Don Juan. He’s just a sweet kid.

When they were back on the road, she found herself pursuing the subject, wondering why it was important.

"There must have been one girl that. . . stood out. . . from all the others?"

From his reaction to the question, she sensed that there had not only been a girl in Steve Koffler’s life, but that it had not been a satisfactory relationship. "Who was she, Steve?" Why am I doing this? What do I really care? Over the next hour and a half, Daphne drew from Steve, one small detail after another, the story of Dianne Marshall Norman. By the time she was sure she had separated fact from fantasy and had assembled what she felt was probably the true sequence of events, she had worked up what she told herself was a big-sister-like dislike for Diane Marshall Norman and a genuine feeling of sympathy for Steve.

Women can be such bitches,she thought, getting what they want and not caring a whit how much they hurt a nice kid like Steve Koffler.

(Seven)

U.S. Navy Element

U.S. Army General Hospital

Melbourne, Australia

1705 Hours 6 June 1942

Soon after they met, Commander Charles E. Whaley, M.D., USNR, told Ensign Barbara T. Cotter, NC, USNR, that he had given up a lucrative practice of psychiatry in Grosse Point Hills, Michigan, and entered the Naval Service in order to treat the mental disorders of servicemen who had been unable to cope with the stress of the battlefield. He was happy to do so.

But he had not entered the Naval Service, he went on to tell Ensign Cotter, to administer to the minor aches and pains of the Naval brass gathered around the headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief, Southwest Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur, and especially not to cater to their grossly overdeveloped sense of medical self-protection. And he had absolutely no intention of doing so.

He specifically told Ensign Cotter, who was in his eyes an unusually nice and bright kid, that he had no intention of making a goddamned house call to the "residence" of some Navy brass hat named Pickering. This guy had apparently heard somewhere of a battery of rare tropical diseases. Since, for some half-assed reason, he felt threatened by those diseases, he wanted himself immunized against them. At his quarters.

"I think I know where this goddamn thing started, Barbara," Dr. Whaley said. "I have never even seen a case of any of these things-and I interned and did my residency in Los Angeles, where you see all sorts of strange things-but this morning there was a Marine officer in here, armed with a buck slip from an admiral on MacArthur’s staff, ordering that he be immediately immunized against them. They had to get the stuff from the Australians to give it to him.

"Then I get a message-if I’d been here to take the call, I would have told him what I thought-from this Captain Pickering, ordering me to come to his residence prepared to give the same series of shots to at least one other person. What I think happened is that this sonofabitch Pickering heard about the Marine and decided he wasn’t going to take the risk of coming down with something like this himself. No, Sir. I mean, why should he? I mean, after all, here he is, far from the Army-Navy Club in Washington, risking his life as a member of MacArthur’s palace guard."

Barbara chuckled.

"What would you like me to do, Doctor?"

"If I go over there, Barbara, I’m liable to forget that I’m an officer and a gentleman and tell this Pickering character what I think of him specifically and the Naval Service generally. So, by the power vested in me by the Naval Service, Ensign Cotter, I order you to proceed forthwith to"-he handed her an interoffice memorandum-"the address hereon, and immunize this officer by injection. See if you can find a dull needle. A large one. And it is my professional medical judgment that you should inject the patient in his gluteus maximus."