From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [439]
“I said he’d be all right,” Alma said sharply. “Just leave him alone. Ignore him. Come on and help me fix supper; we’ll have to put up the blackout curtains in a little bit.”
They fixed coldcut sandwiches with Durkee’s Dressing, of which Alma was very fond, and one of those cellophane bags of chopped salad that were just beginning to come out in the stores with French dressing. They poured glasses of milk and put the Silex hourglass on for a pot of coffee, and then they went to draw the blackout curtains that Alma had fixed to hang open like black drapes in the daytime, back when they had had the practice blackout alerts.
“You’d better come inside,” Alma told him crisply, when she got to the glass doors onto the porch. “We’re putting up the blackout curtains.”
He came in, without saying anything, and went on across the living room and sat down on the divan still holding the nearly empty bottle in his left hand and the cocktail glass in his right.
“Don’t you want to eat something?” Alma said. “I fixed some sandwiches for you.”
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
“I’ve made some for you anyway,” Alma said. “In case you want them later.”
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
“I’ll wrap them in waxed paper so they’ll stay fresh,” Alma said.
Prew poured himself another drink and did not say anything, so she went on back out into the kitchen, after she had drawn and fastened the blackout curtains over the glass doors.
When they came back out with their coffee after they had eaten, he was still on the divan. He had opened a new bottle. In all, he drank over two full fifths of Georgette’s scotch whiskey in that one day. The first bottle had been a little over half full, and he had finished that one, and the whole second bottle, and half of the third.
They sat for a while and tried to listen to the radio, but the reports were repetitious now, and the obdurate presence sitting silently on the divan finally drove them to bed and they left him sitting there, not drunk and not sober, not happy and not unhappy, not conscious and not unconscious.
He stayed that way for eight days, never what you could really call drunk, but certainly never anywhere near sober, and always with a bottle of Georgette’s expensive scotch in one hand and a glass in the other. He did not talk at all except to say “Yes” or “No”, mostly “No”, when confronted with a direct question, and he never ate anything when they were there. It was like living in the same house with a dead person.
When they got up Monday morning, he was asleep on the divan in his clothes. The bottle and glass were sitting on the floor beside him. The two sandwiches Alma had wrapped in waxed paper and left in the kitchen were gone. Neither one of them went to work that day.
Honolulu tapered off quickly from the first great rush of emotion in the next several days. The radio began to have musical programs and commercials again, and outside of the soldiers putting up barbed wire on Waikiki Beach and the helmeted sentries outside the vital installations such as the radio stations and the governor’s mansion, and the few wrecked buildings such as the Kuhio Street house and the drugstore at McCully and King, the city did not seem to be greatly changed by the metamorphosis of having passed through the crucible.
Apparently businessmen were keeping a stiff upper lip and the Provost Marshal’s office was advising business as usual, because Mrs Kipfer phoned the house on the third day and told Alma to report for work at ten in the morning next day, rather than the old time of three in the afternoon. Georgette’s boss at the Ritz Rooms phoned her later with identical instructions. Because of the sundown curfew instituted by the Martial Law, after which no person without an authorized pass was allowed abroad, all business had to be transacted during the hours of daylight.
Business, it turned out, had fallen off drastically at both Mrs Kipfer’s and the Ritz. And apparently this was true all over. The Army and Navy were not yet issuing passes to their personnel, and the girls ended up by playing rummy and casino for most of their working hours. A number of them were already securing themselves passage home on one of the ships being used to evacuate Officers’ and Enlisted Men’s wives and children back to the mainland.
Mrs Kipfer had, however, re