Glory Boys. Harry Bingham

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СКАЧАТЬ hundred grand: so a million became eight hundred thousand. And what would Willard live on? In Hollywood he had spent more than a hundred thousand bucks a year. Eight hundred grand would run through his hands in six or seven years, maybe less. And after that, what? To most people, a million dollars would have seemed like the vastest fortune in the world. To Willard, it felt a hair’s breadth from poverty.

      But the second reason was the bigger one. He didn’t know how to put it into words. It had to do with pride, with Willard’s sense of himself.

      From earliest childhood, he had understood this much: he was the son, the only son, the natural inheritor of the family kingdom. It had always been hard to convey to outsiders the intensity of that feeling. The name for one thing. No one in the family ever called the family business by its name, Thornton Ordnance. It was just the Firm, one word, implicitly capitalised. Willard’s great-grandpa had made it. His grandpa had nourished it. His father had expanded it. It was Willard’s destiny to do the same, to follow in their footsteps, to prove himself worthy of the family name.

      And that pointed to a deeper reason still. Willard’s father. Junius Thornton might speak as though it were entirely up to Willard whether or not he joined the Firm, but both men knew that was a lie. It mattered entirely, completely, utterly. If Willard had chosen not to fight for his place at the Firm, Junius wouldn’t have excommunicated his son, but any respect would have vanished completely. Willard already knew too well how bruising his father’s savage, iron-bound silences could be. A lifetime of such silence would have been too much to bear.

      And so, as Willard picked up the pen that would sign away his freedom, somewhere in his deepest consciousness he understood this: that everything he was about to do, he was doing for his father.

13

      The Lundmarks’ home had a double door. A screen door closed shut against evening insects and a green-painted wooden door that was folded back inside the room. Inside, the room was lit by a single oil lamp. What with the wire mesh and the dim light, Abe hadn’t been able to see very much of the interior. He knocked at the door, but out of politeness only, to let the folks inside know he was there. Without waiting, he went on in.

      And he saw this: the kid, Brad, staring at him with those big wide-open eyes.

      And this: the mother, Sal, her face and neck violently disfigured by red burn marks, her reddish hair growing thin and patchy through the burns on her scalp. And her eyes: pale blue, pretty, and completely blind.

      And finally this: a photo on the mantelpiece, framed and spotlessly clean. It showed a man’s face, nice looking and strong, Brad’s father. Beneath the photo, an inscription: Stanford G. Lundmark, A Hero of Independence, 1881–1923.

      Right away, Abe knew the nature of the storekeeper’s game – a game perfectly calculated to change Abe’s mind, if anything could. Muttering darkly, Abe assumed a smile and advanced. Sal Lundmark had dinner ready. She asked Abe to say grace, which he did, stiffly and out of practice. ‘Let us thank the Lord for these His gifts of goodness. Amen.’ Abe used the grace his father used to say, but finished wondering whether Sal had been expecting something longer and more ornate.

      ‘Thank you, Captain.’

      The conversation began awkwardly. Sal Lundmark had some kind of idea that Abe had to be treated a little better than royalty, maybe not quite as well as a procession of angels. She asked him if it were true that he’d met President Wilson – which he had. She asked him if the Prince of Wales had been as handsome in real life as he looked in his pictures – Abe said he had. She asked what the food had been like the time he’d been a guest of the French Prime Minister.

      At that point, Abe had put his knife and fork down.

      ‘Ma’am, I did a little flying in the war. Right afterwards, I met a few people, got given some medals, had a big fuss made of me. And you want to know something? I hated it. I like my airplane, I like any place that has airplanes in, and I like places that feel like home.’

      There was a pause.

      When Sal wasn’t using her hands to eat, she rested them on the edge of the table so she could keep her orientation in the room. ‘And your home,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Your home, I guess…’

      ‘The place I grew up was a little farmhouse in Kentucky.’ He looked around the cluttered room, which was about thirty feet long by fifteen wide. ‘I’d say it was a little bit smaller than this, and we didn’t have that fancy lean-to affair at the back. But don’t worry,’ he added, ‘although this place feels kind of grand, you’ve made it homey. It’s a pleasure to be here.’

      She laughed. Abe laughed. Brad laughed with pleasure at seeing the ice broken. The conversation ran easily after that. Stanford Lundmark had worked as a carpenter and, when work was hard to come by, a farm labourer. Abe knew plenty about farming from his childhood, and they talked about good harvests and lousy employers.

      Little by little, Sal opened up to speak about her husband’s death. He’d been one of the men who had first reported the Marion mobsters to the police. Their house had been burned to the ground, blinding Sal and almost killing her. Stanford had rebuilt the house, plank by plank. For a time things had been quiet, but then there had been more unprovoked assaults on Independence. Lundmark had had enough. He’d ridden down into Marion, aiming to sort things out, ‘once and for all’. He’d got his wish, in a manner of speaking. He was gone for two days, before he was found with his head smashed in down among the cornfields on the north side of town.

      ‘He must have been a hell of a man,’ Abe murmured softly.

      Sal nodded. Her eyes couldn’t see, but they could still cry. There was a short silence.

      ‘You must have been very proud,’ he said.

      She nodded. ‘Very.’

      Abe let the silence run a little longer, then changed subject. He asked Brad if he had collected any flying stuff other than the photo of Abe. He might as well have asked the Pope if he had an interest in prayer books. In an instant, the kid ran upstairs and came down with a whole boxful of photos, news stories, scrapbooks, pages torn from boys’ magazines, movie posters.

      Abe laughed. ‘Sal, you know your son is a bit of an obsessionist?’

      She smiled and wiped her eyes, but Brad was impervious to irony. He had a small mountain of material relating to Abe; vastly more than Abe had ever wanted to keep himself.

      ‘And that’s your Croix de Guerre,’ said Brad, slapping down one photo. ‘And that’s your Légion d’honneur –’ another photo ‘– And that’s your Congressional, no, wait, that’s your Distinguished Service Cross, the first one, three oak leaves, then I should have – yes – the Glory Boys piece. Boy! I used to know that article by heart.’

      Brad dropped a newspaper article on the table. The article was a syndicated reprint of a piece that had first appeared in the New York Times. Abe had been asked to do an interview with a war correspondent. Abe hadn’t wanted to do it – he didn’t like or approve of the way the press treated the war – and he had given a grudging thirty-minute interview to the journalist in question. That had been all. He’d forgotten the whole thing within five minutes. But then the article had appeared, splashed beneath a huge photo of Abe, ‘Captain Rockwell of the Glory Boys’. The piece had caused a sensation. Nothing in it was untrue. Abe couldn’t even claim that his words had been twisted or distorted. But СКАЧАТЬ