The Golden Cup by Belva Plain
“Deep inside.” Hennie began to speak rapidly. “Out there, down the street, you know where they’re building? I watched those men on the beams with their hammers, or whatever those things are. Ten stories above the street they work, on a narrow piece of steel, with nothing to hold to. I think, I’m amazed: How can they do it? It would be impossible for me. And what you expect of me is impossible too.”
“I don’t expect much. Just that after all these years you might try to remember—”
“I remember all too well! Don’t you see that’s the trouble? Oh, it’s so sad. Everything is so sad. I had so much love and tenderness to give you, Dan.”
“You did, and you gave it.”
She could hear that he was very tired.
“But I should have been stronger. And wiser. Because one is always alone.”
For the first time she looked up at him. When he was old, he would still be strong. His hair would be thick and white. People would talk of how handsome he must have been when he was young.
“I must understand, I do understand,” she repeated, “that one is really alone.”
“That’s not true. If you can’t think that way of me just now, think at least of your son.”
“I can’t. He’s a grown man. He’ll have his own life when he comes back. If he comes back. I can’t do anything about that either.”
“Hennie, won’t you try, really try, not to be angry at me?”
“It’s not anger. I wish it were only anger. It’s far, far deeper.” She threw up her hands. “I can’t describe it. I want to go away.”
“Go away? Where to?”
“Out of here. I can’t live with you anymore. These conversations don’t do any good. They go nowhere. The atmosphere here is bad and the child is bound to feel it. I want to go.”
Dan whispered, “If anyone’s to leave, I will.”
“All right, then. Let it be you.”
“You don’t mean it, Hennie. You can’t mean it.”
“I do. You and I can’t stay here together.”
She wanted to go down so far that there could be no more coming back up. She had no will for anything, wanted only to be left alone.
“Hennie, you can’t mean it?”
“Yes. Go away, Dan. Go away.”
3
It seems to Paul that he has been here forever, as if years must have passed since the blizzard winds and icy mud of the winter, yet it is only the following summer. At any rate, it is hot, except now in the hour before dawn, when it can be so shiveringly cold before the day’s heat starts to blister.
Officers and men are at stand- to on the fire step with weapons ready. A little less than half a mile away, in the German front-line trenches, men are doing the same, each side waiting to detect the smallest movement on the other side. When first light comes, a blurry penciled line on the horizon, all will step down and no head will show itself over the embankment.
If there should be no long bombardment or no attack today, they will get some sleep. All through the night they have labored; patrolling, raiding, and repairing wire in no-man’s-land; digging trench extensions, shoring up the ever-crumbling earth walls of the trenches, scurrying like ants or moles through this underground world to bring up ammunition, timber, sandbags, mail, and food from the rear.
At least this had been a “peaceful” night without bombardment, when the red sky burns and rockets flare, as on some Fourth of July gone deadly mad and magnified a thousand times over.
Hugging his shoulders against the chill, Paul has a moment of recall: the fresh shock of dawn when he rose to go fishing on a silent lake, or in an Adirondack stream crowded with trout, where the shoals flicker in the mottled shade …
The recall is gone. Silence here is only an exhausted pause before the air will shake again with hellish noise. There are no words for what has happened yesterday and all the days before.
He begins to think of all he has to do today. He’ll check the men’s cleaning of their weapons. He’ll send back to the reserve trench for supplies. He’ll write letters of condolence. A first lieutenant should be not only literate but literary, he thinks ironically; these letters are a dread to write. Dear Mother, your son died—how? (Died screaming your name, weeping out of his blinded eyes.) What is he supposed to say? They want to know something! Dear Newlywed Wife, your husband died—(He never knew what struck him, blown into a thousand pieces, maybe more, and lies shredded over the mud.)
A mist is rising in little white puffballs over the dark land. Soon it will be light enough to reveal the distant hill behind the German lines. There is no leaf nor blade of grass; it is as though the very concept of green has been forgotten.
At Belleau Wood it took a week to beat the Germans and cost fifty-five men out of every hundred, so it is rumored. Paul’s own platoon is filled now with replacements. He himself is relatively new, having come to replace a previous first lieutenant, lost just before Belleau Wood. Next week or tomorrow there may very well have to be a replacement for him.
There is nothing happening on the German front, so perhaps it really will be a quiet day. Now comes the first pink light, and at the same moment, two birds fly overhead, calling; their cries are pure and clear as that first light.
The men step down, splashing into calf-high water at the bottom of the trench; dispersing in groups of two and three, they come forward for the breakfast that has been brought up from the rear.
“Sir?”
It’s Koslinski, the sergeant.
“Sir, shouldn’t we bring up another pump? We’ll soon be up to our asses in water.”
The tone is respectful, yet there is something mocking in it; the eye contact is bold. He is thinking—saying, really—that Paul ought to have thought about the pump. As a matter of fact, Paul has, and has been about to order it as soon as the men finish eating. Koslinski merely wants to embarrass him.
Koslinski doesn’t like Paul. Paul knows that he and a couple of others have “sized him up”; they think he’s finicky, superior, and probably not dependable. Paul is puzzled by this, because he has always thought himself to be a democratic, friendly type; nevertheless, there must be something about him that offends men like Koslinski, and he is sorry about it, but can’t worry about it, either.
It’s almost impossible to keep the trenches dry. You can get used to standing in water, but you can’t get used to the rats that come with it, big black rats that feed on dead flesh, on the corpses that tumble down from the parapet, and on the parts of bodies that float. Paul shudders, declining breakfast. It’s the thought of the rats that has made his stomach heave.
“Sir?”
Paul turns at the whisper.
“Sir? What do you think? Will they attack today?”
It is McCarthy, just arrived this week. He’s very young, about nineteen and looks younger as he frowns up at the rectangular strip of sky, which would be what you would see if you were lying at the bottom of a grave.
“Maybe not today,” Paul answers, understanding that McCarthy knows that he can’t know.
He heaves aside a sandbag that has fallen from the parapet.
“You could be bringing more bags,” he says, giving the boy something to do.
The trenches are continually being constructed and repaired. You’d think, Paul says to himself, we were building a house. The master builder, he thinks, irony being a kind of weapon for self-defense.
Some of the men are still asleep. Rumpled and filthy, they lie cramped or sprawled in temporary escape. Others, awake, are bare-chested; they have pulled off their shirts to pick lice out of the seams. They’re of any age from eighteen to maybe twenty-five, he guesses; they seem like children compared with his twenty-nine. One of them, named Drummond, was a salesman in a Madison Avenue haberdashery; it is very possible, they both think, that Paul and he may have met in that other life. Paul touches the man’s shoulder.
“You got a bunch of mail yesterday, didn’t you?” he says. “Everything good at home???
Pleased, Drummond tells him. “The twins were three last month. My wife sent pictures of their birthday, blowing out the candles.”
“Fourth birthday, you’ll be there,” Paul says cheerfully. It’s one of his responsibilities to be hopeful for his men.
Now, for a while, there is nothing to do but wait. He goes below to the officers’ dugout and sits down, leaning his head against a timber prop, and closes his eyes. He should write home, hasn’t written in a week; they mustn’t be made to worry any more than they already do, but he is suddenly too weary to think of doing it now.
Marian—here in this place he thinks of her as Marian, not Mimi, a name too lighthearted for this place—writes to him every day. Her letters come in packets and he thinks of them as medicine, as tonic. She writes descriptively, so that he can see the flags flying over the marquees at Fifth Avenue department stores; he sees his parents at dinner and the circle of light making a pink stain on the plum-colored rug; he hears the crickets on Uncle Alfie’s porch; he sees Marian’s pen moving over the fine-grained paper, Crane’s best, light gray with her monogram in dark blue: M-M-W, with the larger W in the middle, as is proper.
She sends snapshots of herself with his parents, or again at Uncle Alfie’s; Alfie is holding a cigar, a Cuban, the best, of course. Paul chuckles. There’s Meg in tight braids, poker-faced. She sends a snap of Hennie, standing in a city doorway, probably the settlement house; of Uncle David, to whom she has brought a box of goodies, at the home; of herself in Red Cross uniform; of herself, taken by an itinerant photographer on the street; she is standing in bright sunshine and he has caught her at her best, better than in many a portrait photograph; she’s wearing a summer suit he thinks he recognizes, a cream-colored linen, worn with a pale straw hat. She is smiling, and is so slim and elegant and feminine and gentle.… “All my love,” she has written at the bottom.
She is never effusive, she never overburdens him in her letters with her fears for his safety, as so many women do to their men here, or with laments about loneliness.
“I am thinking of the hour when you come home,” she writes, “and of your being here when I wake up the next morning, and of the beautiful days we’ll have together after that.”
She is always cheerful; she has style. From this distance he can see her more clearly than ever; he is a lucky man and he knows it, when he listens to other men talking, sometimes about their wives and sometimes about their women who are not their wives.
He knows he has the average desires of any young, healthy man. Yet, on leaves, he has almost never been tempted by the prostitutes who sit around the bars in Paris. He wants a woman—oh, yes, he wants and he needs one! but not their kind.
One he wanted so badly, it was like fire.… He winces at the image of the name that now forms behind his eyelids: Anna. It’s a long time since he has thought about her. He conjures her up now, wearing a velvet dress, which is certainly strange, since surely she never owned one. In thin, cool silk, then, blue-green as the August sea? No, not blue-green; that’s Mimi’s color. What about white? It would be like snow against that bright hair. And he remembers the floating dresses that women wear in quiet rooms a million miles away from here. She stands near a tall window with a book in her hand; he has surprised her and she smiles in delight; she puts the book down and comes to him, all warm, desirous, eager …
She’s a married woman. She married the sober young man in the cap and jacket, don’t you remember? The somber, overworked young man. He had no gaiety, poor fellow, not enough to fit Anna.…
Oh, how can you make such judgments after a minute’s encounter? You want to think he’s all wrong for her.
But she didn’t love him: she married him without loving. There’s no doubt of that.
He wondered how many men or women, if you could get the truth out of them, would admit that they married without love. His parents? How can one tell? They almost always are agreeable to each other, considerate and attentive, but is that love? He can’t be sure.
Aunt Hennie and Uncle Dan, now—of them one can be sure. It’s in her eyes when she looks at him, in his voice when he boasts of her, in the very air around them. Yes—and in spite of Dan’s idiotic flirting—yes, there’s love there, without a doubt.
He breaks off, sits up straight, and opens his eyes. Fantasizing again! Well, it’s to be expected, isn’t it, living from minute to minute as we do? Every man overseas, even the generals safe in some château fifteen kilometers to the rear, with sixteenth-century boiserie and topiary gardens, must have their fantasies, which would evaporate as soon as they got home again.
Mine will, anyway, Paul thinks, because they’re foolish. They were never meant to be.
Or else they would have been, wouldn’t they? Isn’t that so?
What is meant to be, what exists and waits for him, is his library at home, with his mosaic of books from ceiling to floor, with the fireplace and the glorious Matisse, a field of white and yellow butterflies, hanging above it. And the dining room table set for late breakfast on a Sunday morning, with Marian sitting across from him, wearing the marabou negligee. She butters a piece of toast for him and speaks in her pleasing voice; past her shoulder he can look out toward Central Park; maybe it’s a fall day and they’ll get dressed later for a walk under the drifting leaves. These are real, these are what wait for him.
And he thinks too: a child will be real. A son. Two or three sons. To think that Freddy has one, a boy he’s never seen! Suddenly he wants one badly, so badly … They’ll wear sailor suits, they’ll have merry faces; he’ll take them to the park, buy toy sailboats, fine big ones with mahogany hulls, and they’ll sail them on the pond and he’ll stop thinking about Anna; he’ll be husband and father—
Crash! Oh, Jesus Christ, here it is again!
A roar like an express train passing through, and then the crash, ten locomotives colliding, Vesuvius erupting, a 150-mile-an-hour hurricane smashing through a town. The men dive for the dugouts. Paul can go below to his own dugout command, but he wants to stay above. It could be a light shelling, soon over. Maybe.
Crash! Another, a close one, and he is knocked to the ground by the impact; it was really close, that one, doesn’t do your eardrums any good! And he remembers the time a few months back when he was terrified that he’d been deafened, actually was deaf for hours afterward. He makes himself small on the ground, flattening shoulder and hip against the wall, hugging the earth, wanting to crawl into it. Now come some small ones; these whistle before they crash; they’re coming in low. Mechanically he counts: ten, twenty, thirty seconds and a roar—that’s a big one—crash! and silence. Ten, twenty, thirty seconds, a roar, another big one—crash! and silence. Ten, twenty—it’s getting heavier and louder, they’re coming faster and closer.
He crawls to a dugout and huddles again. The … he … Fritz is preparing an attack. No doubt of it. Mentally, Paul counts, trying to remember how many grenades he ordered from the quartermaster in case, God forbid they should get that close. Must keep them at least forty yards back. And he has a picture of them coming, sees their pointed helmets near, nearer, until their faces appear, mad with hate and fear, as human and as inhuman as our own must be. He’s been hand to hand only once and doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to remember himself using a bayonet; never thought he could; he had to and he did.
The terrible thud and roar, the whine and thunder, go on. From where he lies, he can see McCarthy vomiting. Saliva collects in Paul’s mouth at the sight. This shelling is to soften us up, then they’ll be coming, he thinks again, and hopes that their own machine gunners behind them won’t aim short and get them instead. It’s happened, God knows it has. In spite of the incessant pounding, he tries to think, then tells himself there’s really nothing to think about, nothing for him to do but wait for the jangle of the field telephone with orders. So far, none.
Then he does think: This shelling’s bound to knock out that jungle of barbed wire we’ve laid down ahead. T
He jumps up to the periscope. It’s foolhardy, but he has to see what’s going on. Far in the distance he sees explosions, our shells cutting the German wire. So, then, the offensive that’s been rumored, along with a hundred rumors that haven’t come true, is true. Tomorrow, probably. His heart pounds. He’s gone over the top once before, the time he got to use the bayonet. Leading the men, that’s his job; he’s left some good men on the field, dead or better off if they were dead. He came through untouched, with them falling behind him. He won’t be that lucky again. Not possible.
Far off now, he sees a tree explode. It rises, splits, falls apart, and sinks. It’s like a slow-motion moving picture. Queer.
One of the men is sobbing. Koslinski curses him. It’s Daniels, a good man, but he’s reached his limit, standing up and banging his head against the stony wall. Paul puts both hands on Daniels’s shoulders.
“Take it easy. Lie down again and plug up your ears with your fingers, it’ll help.” His own ears are almost bursting.
“The noise,” Daniels gasps.
“I know. Stick your fingers in your ears. Do it! Close your eyes. Come on, now,” he says quietly and firmly between explosions; too much sympathy won’t help the man and besides, Paul has none to spare. “You’re in for the duration. We all are. You can stand it. I know you can.”
Daniels lies down in the dugout, crying softly.
How long? Two hours now. Three. It may last all day. This fearful, god-awful noise may last all day. It lasted four days once. Last month, that was. Four days of this. Your head splits.
There’s another sound. They’ve brought new heavy artillery, in the rear. That means, surely, we attack. Maybe not even tomorrow. Later today?
He can’t contain himself. Again he jumps up and goes to the periscope. He sees—does he really? He sees … a thin gray line, thin as a wave at low tide. No. Yes. It is. They’re climbing out of the trenches. They’re coming.
“Up! Up!” he cries, and the men leap to the fire steps.