Sloan Wilson - Ice Brothers

When Paul approached his father-in-law’s driveway, he was surprised to see a lot of cars there. The old Plymouth station wagon owned by his older brother-in-law, Mark, had been left on the edge of the lawn, where no one was supposed to park, and the new Buick convertible which his younger brother-in-law had just bought stood at the end of a line of vehicles in which he recognized those belonging to a variety of uncles and aunts. The thought occurred to him that Sylvia might still be so angry at him that she was thinking of leaving him and that a whole family conference had been called to consider the situation, as had been done when Mark’s wife left him. Certainly his differences with Sylvia were nowhere near that drastic, but Paul still felt nervous as he got the yellow hat out of the trunk and approached the front door. After all, if Sylvia was feeling hurt, and if her relatives had gathered for whatever reason, she would be unable to resist the temptation to get sympathy and support from them. She would tell her version of their arguments, which would have very little to do with the issues as he perceived them.

When Paul gloomily opened the front door, holding the yellow hat, he was surprised to see what appeared to be a large cocktail party in progress, and he was completely astonished when Sylvia, looking beautiful as ever and much more excited by his arrival than usual, rushed up and embraced him, hugging him with more fervor than she had displayed in weeks. He left the hat on an umbrella stand by the door and forgot it.

“Oh, Paul! ” she said. “We’ve been trying to get in touch with you!”

“What’s happening?” he asked.

“My God, haven’t you heard?” Mark said, coming up to offer him a martini. “The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. We’re going to war, buddy boy! We’re off!”

That was an incredible moment, one he was to try to analyze many times for years afterward. Sylvia and a lot of other people were trying to talk to him all at the same time, but suddenly they seemed as voiceless as actors in a silent movie. The fight he had been having with Sylvia suddenly appeared ridiculous, the causes and issues entirely forgotten. He had a sense of everything being swept away, this house full of excited people, his college, the boat on which he had been working, and most of all, Sylvia herself, who now stood with her arms around him as though she expected to dance. Already they all had been torn from his life, and in their place was this new thing, war. As Mark had said, they all were going to go to it, as though it were a dance of some kind. They were off. Soon, perhaps in a few weeks, he would be dressing up in a uniform. He didn’t know anything about war, except what he had read in All Quiet on the Western Front , descriptions of horses trying to run on shattered legs and men trying to hold in their intestines with their hands. The thought terrified him, but of course he wouldn’t be in the army, he would be in the navy. He then had a quick vision of himself as the captain of a destroyer in the act of torpedoing a battleship. This was followed by a sense of absurdity and futility — since he had dropped out of the naval reserve to get married and to make money in the summers instead of going on training cruises, he probably would be unable to get a commission. For him the war would be swabbing decks and saluting classmates who had had enough brains to stick with the ROTC. And before that, war would mean being shipped off to some training camp. War would mean saying good-by to Sylvia for years, maybe forever. Then he had a vision of himself returning to her, his sleeves covered with gold braid, his chest bedecked with medals. He knew this fantasy was ridiculous but his errant mind kept elaborating on it. His gaunt face would be tanned and scarred just a little at the corner of his mouth. He would explain that he got that scar while ramming a Japanese aircraft carrier, and she would kiss him with the intensity he always hoped for and rarely got. Absurd, absurd! War is hell, Sherman had said, and he was sure that it wouldn’t turn out to be a movie starring him like Enrol Flynn. He had the sensation of sinking in a cold sea, being dragged down by a sinking destroyer.

“You won’t have to go right away,” Sylvia was saying. “They said on the radio that students will probably be allowed to finish college.”

After hugging him, she stood holding his arm as though to prevent his being whisked away. He resented the news about being allowed to finish college. He might be able to accept war either as death or as a chance to become a hero, but finishing college seemed an anticlimax. He had an urge to enlist immediately, not as an act of patriotism so much as a dramatic necessity. Absurd or not, he wanted to be a hero now . By leaving Sylvia he would win her. A devoted Sylvia was the prize offered by war. This was crazy, of course. He accepted a drink.

“Hell, I bet the whole damn thing will be over in six months,” Mark said. “Those little yellow bastards can’t fight!”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Erich, Paul’s father-in-law, said from the back of the room, where he was sitting hunched over a radio. Turning the machine off, he stood up. “Don’t forget,” he said in his deep voice, “that we will also be fighting the Germans.”

“Hell, they’re so busy fighting the Ruskies that they don’t know where they are,” Mark said.

“Maybe,” Erich said. “Perhaps this is not the time to remind you, but everyone in this family has German blood. The only pride I have left in that is the knowledge that Germans are never easy to beat. Get ready for a long war.”

“I, at least, am German only on my father’s side, and his father left Germany because he saw that everyone was going crazy there,” Lucy, Sylvia’s mother, said. “We’re all Americans now, thank God.”

Erich did not answer. Slowly he sat down and hunched over the radio again.

“I think I’ll go upstairs,” Paul said, sounding oddly normal to himself. “I have to get washed up.”

He started toward their apartment on the third floor, hoping that Sylvia would follow. She did. Their private war forgotten, they hurried to bed, and never before had the love-making been so good. War in its very first stage, at least, was not exactly hell.

Long after she had gone asleep, Paul sat staring at the curtains which moved slightly in the draft from the window, as though someone were standing behind them. The north wind whistled around the eaves of the old house, and rattled the shutters. He wondered what a storm like this would be like aboard a ship at sea. Since boyhood he had prided himself on being good with boats, but he was only a summer sailor, he suddenly realized, and had no idea what the North Atlantic in December could be. The more he thought about it, the less he wanted to find out. At heart he was probably a coward — everyone was afraid, he had read, and bravery consisted in the ability to conquer fear. Whether he had this ability he could not guess. The moaning of the wind grew more and more mournful, more terrifying when he pictured what it must be like on the open sea. He put his arm around the warm shoulders of his wife and hugged her closer. Never before had he been bold or thoughtless enough to start making love to her when she was asleep, but the rules of peacetime were already disappearing and he did not restrain himself. When he realized that she was helping, the world, however briefly, was his. Despite his exhaustion, he still could not sleep when it was over. Suddenly the first real meaning of the war to him became clear: there would be an end to love-making. Erich was undoubtedly right when he said it would be a long war. His mind was suddenly full of a newsreel he had seen which had shown pictures of young German sailors marching in a training camp. A superior race, the Nazis called themselves, and it made him feel really odd to think that his blood was just as “Nordic” as theirs. If they were superior, he was too, but he didn’t feel very superior as he thought of all those Germans who were now training to shoot at him. Millions of them had already been fighting for years and must be pretty good at it by now. But he would be good at it too, if they didn’t kill him too soon — despite his fears, he had some inner certainty of that. And despite the abject loneliness that he was sure he would feel as soon as he left Sylvia, he realized that he was eager to enlist, to get on with this whole enormous drama which had just begun for him. With all the experience he had had on boats, and his two years of ROTC, maybe he could find a way to wangle a commission in the navy or the Coast Guard, which in time of war was just about the same thing. It would take years, of course, but maybe he actually could get command of his own ship before the war ended. Why was that so important to him? Did he still think he could end up the hero of some crazy war movie?