The War Lover by John Hersey

Author:John Hersey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

11/

Having checked in I went to our room and had an hour alone there, because Marrow felt compelled, I guess, to go to the officers’ club and give a full (presumably invented) account of his ravishing of metropolitan womankind during the long stand-down. I thought I wanted to think about Daphne, but when I got to the hut and tossed myself on my bed, I found that all I wanted was to savor the familiarity of my room. The stove. The muslin blackout curtains, faded from black, in places, to yellow-green-gray by sun and dampness. The acrid smell of dirty Army blankets. Every detail of it was familiar to me. This was my home. I closed my eyes and visualized the contents of my metal locker, the crammed, rather orderly array—a place for everything and everything, if not in its place, at least accounted for. In time I was thinking about Marrow—the inanimate Marrow scattered around our room, disorderly, positive, maddening, distinctive. I despised and admired his sloppiness. He parked his towels, wet or dry, under his bed. He raided my locker often for socks or handkerchiefs just because he was too lazy to dig deep enough in his own tangled haberdashery to find what he needed, which would surely be there. He had the upper half of a human skull—said it was a woman’s—on the desk for an ash tray, and it always brimmed with cylinders of cigar ash. His eight-dollar pillow. Stringless ukulele. Pin-ups neatly covered with transparent talc: Danielle Darrieux, within reach; Paulette Goddard, twisting rear view, about to take everything off; Eleanor Holm, demonstrating her flotation mechanisms in a racing suit; Betty Grable (“She is able,” Marrow always said); Simone Simon, leaning dizzy-makingly forward. (“How do you suppose she squeezes that e in between those two See-moans?”) One Varga. One Petty. Only one nude—picture of a dame, said to be a starlet, named Carmen Lundquist. Swedish tits, Spanish ass, Marrow said. Strictly his. For a while he had a laundry shirt-cardboard hinged over Lundquist, so that he, and only he, could lift the flap and look at her when he felt the need. I remembered coming in the room the second day after we arrived in England, and finding Marrow at work nailing up these pictures. Where had he acquired them? He hadn’t had them during training, or in the phases…. On the desk there was a precariously balanced pile of Marrownesses: four cans of shoe impregnate—stuff we’d lugged halfway across the world to protect our feet against poisonous gases—which Marrow had found to be even better kindling than shoe polish for English so-called stoves; one pair drop-seat long underwear in readiness to take along when joy-riding nurses because (according to him) one of the three on his early joy ride damn near came down with frostbite of the nates; fire-fighting bucket of sand used as ash receptacle and cigar-butt douser; comic books and back issues of Stars and Stripes and Yank, not for perusal but for starting fires, wiping up spilled beer, and swatting the bees that kept getting in.

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