The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [112]
Sunday at the beach. It was a little incredible. If you added a few striped beach umbrellas, the average quota of women and children, this would be indistinguishable from any of the more exclusive beaches at which his family had bathed one summer or another. Perhaps a sailboat should be substituted for the landing craft, and Dalleson could be fishing instead of shooting pebbles, but it was really close enough. Completely incredible. Out of decency, perhaps, they had retreated for this beach party to the extreme tip of the peninsula, twenty-five miles from the base where the front-line troops were patrolling this Sunday morning against the Toyaku Line. Go, my children, and God bless you, the General had said in effect. And of course the guards along the road, and the detail of quartermaster troops who were bivouacked on the beach and were responsible this morning for patrolling the fringes of the jungle near where they were bathing would hate them for it, and as Cummings had said, would fear them even more.
He shouldn't have come along, Hearn decided. Yet the headquarters bivouac would have been deadly this morning with most of the officers gone. The General would want to talk to him, and it was important to stay away from the General now. Besides, he had to admit it was pleasant here. It had been a long time since he had felt the sun's heat relaxing his body, absorbing and melting his tensions.
"The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety," the General had said.
Then twentieth-century man was also a sunbather. Very neat. Hearn kneaded a stiffened cake of sand into powder between his fingers.
"Oh, I have to tell you this," Dove was saying now. "We had a party once at Fischler's place in the Wardman Park Hotel, Lieutenant Commander Fischler, an old sidekick of my brother's at Cornell, hell of a swell fellow and knew a lot of VIPs, that's how he got the room in the Wardman Park, but he gave this party, and in the middle of it he started wandering around pouring a couple of drops of liquor in everybody's hair. Good for dandruff, he kept saying. Oh, it was wonderful." Dove giggled remembering it.
"Yeah?" Conn said. "Yeah?"
Hearn stared at Dove. Lieutenant (sg) Dove, USNR. A Cornell man, a Deke, a perfect ass-hole. He was six feet two and weighed about a hundred and sixty pounds, with straight ash-blond hair cut close, and a clean pleasant vacuous face. He looked more like a Harvard clubman, varsity crew.
Conn fingered the red bulb of his nose, and said in his husky assured voice, "That's right, many's the good time I've had in Washington. Brigadier General Caldwell and Major General Simmons -- do you know them? -- old friends of mine. And there was that Navy feller, Rear Admiral Tannache, got to be good friends with him too. Damn fine man, he was a good officer." Conn surveyed his paunch, which projected in sharp curved lines just beneath his shorts, like a football inflated inside him. "We've had some wild times between us. That Caldwell is hell on wheels when it comes to women. We've had some times between us would singe your back hair."
"Oh, we had lots of that too," Dove inserted eagerly. "I couldn't go back to Washington with Jane, because there're so many girls there, if I should meet one of them with her, well, it wouldn't be so good. Jane's a hell of a swell kid, wonderful wife, but you know she takes her church seriously, and she'd be awfully upset."
Lieutenant (sg) Dove. He had been assigned to the division as an interpreter at almost the same time Hearn had come in, and with amazing, with startling naïveté he had announced very carefully to everyone that his rank was equivalent to captain in the Army, and that the responsibilities of a lieutenant sg were greater than those of a major or a lieutenant colonel in the Army. He had told the officers this in officers' mess on Motome and had been loved accordingly. Conn had not spoken to him for a week. But to the impedimenta that kept true love apart, or the poem went something like that. In any case, they were delighted with each other now. Hearn remembered Dove's saying to him once when he first came to the division, "You know, really, Hearn, you can appreciate this because you're an educated man like me, but do you know there's sort of a coarser element in the officers in the Army. The Navy's more careful." Apparently, Dove had made the sublime effort; he accepted Conn now.