W.e.b. Griffin - The Corps II - CALL TO ARMS

There were a number of nice things about being rich, she told herself, and one of them was not needing a job so badly that she would have to spend her time thinking up appealing ways to sell Kotex-by-another-name and rubbers.

And then Ken McCoy had come along. And the best-laid plans of mice and men, et cetera.

The call she was taking from her father right now came about as a result of a call he had made to her the day after Thanksgiving. You were not supposed to make or receive personal calls at JWT, and rumor had it that there was official eavesdropping to make sure the rule was obeyed. No one had ever said anything to Ernie Sage about her personal calls.

"Honey, am I interrupting anything?" he'd said that Thanksgiving Friday.

"Actually, I'm flying paper airplanes out the window," she'd told him, truthfully. The way the air currents moved outside her window, paper airplanes would fly for astonishingly long periods of time.

"Has Pick called?"

"Any reason he should?" she'd replied. "I didn't even know he was in town."

Malcolm "Pick" Pickering had grown up calling her father "Uncle Ernie." Ernie Sage knew that sometimes her father wished she had been born a boy, since there was to be only one child. But since she was a girl, there was little secret that everybody concerned would be thrilled to death if Pick suddenly looked at her like Clark Gable had looked at Scarlett before carrying her up the stairs.

"He is," Ernest Sage had said. "He's at the Foster Park."

"He called you?" she had asked.

"He left a message on the bulletin board at the Harvard Club," her father had said.

"Why didn't he just call?" she had asked. "Wouldn't that have been easier?"

"He didn't leave a message for me," her father had said, as realization dawned that he was having his leg pulled. "Don't be such a wise-ass. Nobody likes a wise-ass in skirts."

"Sorry," she'd laughed.

"He's having a party."

"I thought he was in Virginia playing Marine," she'd replied.

"I don't think he's playing Marine," her father had said, more than a little sharply.

"Sorry," she'd said again, this time meaning it.

"He's giving a party," her father had said. "Cocktails. I think you should go."

"I haven't been invited," she'd replied, simply.

"The thing on the bulletin board said 'all friends and acquaintances.' You would seem to qualify."

"If Pick wanted me, he knows my phone number," she'd said.

"I just thought you might be interested," her father had said, and from the tone of his voice and the swiftness of his getting off the line, she knew that she had hurt his feelings. Again.

Several hours later, sitting in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel with two girls and three young then as they debated the monumental decision where to have dinner and go afterward, she had remembered both Pick's party and her father's disappointment. And the Foster Park Hotel was only a block away.

Doing her duty, she had taken the others there. Penthouse C, overlooking Central Park, had been crowded with people, among them Ken McCoy, in a uniform like Pick's. He'd been sitting on a low brick wall on the patio, twenty-six floors above Fifty-ninth Street, looking as if he was making a valiant effort not to spit over the side.

That had turned into a very interesting evening, far more interesting than it had first promised to be. Instead of catching a cab uptown to some absolutely fascinating restaurant Billy had discovered, she'd ridden the subway downtown with Platoon Leader Candidate, McCoy, K. After he had taken her to a tiny Chinese restaurant on the third floor of a building on a Chinatown alley, she had taken him to her apartment, where she gave him a drink and her virtue.

Quite willingly. This was all the more astonishing because she had ridden downtown on the subway a virgin. More than willingly given it to him, she subsequently considered quite often; she'd done everything but put a red ribbon on it and hand it to him on a silver platter.

And he had not been humbly grateful, either. He'd been astonished and then angry, and she'd thought for a moment that he was about to march out of the apartment in high moral outrage. He didn't in the end. He stayed.

But as he and Pick drove back to Quantico, Pick had told him about her family. Until Pick opened his fat mouth, Ken McCoy had thought she lived in the small apartment in the Village because that was all she could afford.

The result was that her letters to him had gone unanswered. And when she sent him a registered letter, it had came back marked REFUSED. At the time, she'd been firmly convinced he was ignoring her because he was a Marine officer, and Marine officers do not enter into long-term relationships with young women who enthusiastically bestow upon them their pearl of great price two hours after meeting them.

"Wham, bang, thank you, Ma'am," of course. But nothing enduring. The Marine Corps equivalent of "We must lunch sometime. I'll call you."

At first she'd been angry, then ashamed, then angry and ashamed, and then shameless. And on The Day That Will Live In Infamy, after hearing from her mother, who'd heard it from Pick's mother, that Pick had been commissioned and was in Washington, she'd gone down there to ask Pick to help.

There Pick had explained that it was not her freedom with her sexual favors that was bothering Ken McCoy; it was her money.

"What's that got to do with anything?"

"After a lot of solemn thought," Pick had replied, "I have concluded that he is afraid that you regard him as an interesting way to pass an otherwise dull evening."

"That's just not so!"

"That the minute he lets his guard down, you're going to make a fool of him. There was a woman in China who did a pretty good job on his ego."

"A Chinese woman?"

"An American. Missionary's wife. He had it pretty bad for her, the proof being that he was going to get out of the Marine Corps to marry her. For him, the supreme sacrifice."

"What happened? What did she do to him?"

"What he's afraid you're going to do to him," Pick told her. "Humiliate him."

"Goddamn her," Ernie had said. And then: "Pick, it's not that way with me. I've got to see him."

"It'll be a little difficult at the moment," Pick had said. "He's in Hawaii right now, on his way to the Philippines."

"Oh, God!" she'd waited.

"But he'll be back," Pick had said. "He's a courier. Sort of a Marine Corps mailman."

"When?"

"A week, maybe. Ten days."

"You'll let me know when he's back?"

"I will even arrange a chance meeting under the best possible circumstances," Pick had said. "Here. He's living here with me. You can be waiting for him, soaked in perfume, wearing something transparent, with violin music on the phonograph."

"You tell me when," she'd said. Things were looking up.

When she'd walked through the lobby of the hotel, on her way to the station, NBC was broadcasting the bulletin that the Japanese had attacked the U.S. Naval Station at Pearl Harbor.

And a week after that, Pick had called her and told her that there had been word from the Philippines that Second Lieutenant Kenneth J. McCoy, USMCR, was missing in action and presumed dead.

Ernestine Sage's reaction to that was not what she would have thought. She had not screamed and moaned and torn her hair. She hadn't even cried. She'd just died inside. Gone completely numb.

And then, a week later, Pick had called again, his voice breaking. "I thought you might like to know that our boy just called from San Francisco. As Mark Twain said, the report of his death is somewhat exaggerated."

She'd been waiting in Pick's suite at the Foster Lafayette Hotel when McCoy returned. Not soaked in My Sin, or wearing a black negligee, which had been her intention; but, because he was an hour early, she was in a cotton bathrobe with soap in her ears and her hair shower-plastered to her head.