From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [69]
“I’ve not been feeling well the last few days,” Karen told him, truthfully, trying hard not to be defensive, and looking at this boy who in one short year had become his father, thinking with a kind of sickness that his long-jawed beefy face, once round and merry, had grown inside her flesh, feeling again the old revulsion. Looking at the boy, there was suddenly no guilt inside her for the man hiding in the closet, there was only a dull anger at the furtiveness like the slipping around corners of youths in school going to their first whorehouse.
“I’m going over to the Company this afternoon,” the boy said, looking at her from across the battlements of the besieged city that is childhood. “I want my uniform.”
“Did you ask your father if it was all right?” Karen said, feeling tears rising behind her eyes at the prospect of what was before him, wanting suddenly to put her arms around him and explain so many things to him. “He isnt there today, you know.”
“Who said he was?” the boy said. “He’s never there in the afternoon. He dont care if I go over to the Company. Long as I dont get familiar with the men, he said. You got no right to keep me home just because you hate the Company.”
“Good God, child,” Karen said. “I dont want to keep you home. I dont hate the Company. I just wanted . . .”
“I dont care what you say anyway,” the boy said, cramming his fists down in his pockets. “I’m going anyway. Dad said I could go and I’m going.”
“I wanted to be sure it was all right with your father,” Karen said. “You always ask him first.”
“He went to town this noon,” the boy said. “If I had to ask him, I’d have to wait till tomorrow morning, probly. You talk like we had company.”
“All right,” Karen said, wondering if she was being bitchy, so many of them took their bitchiness and anger at their husbands out on the defenseless children; it was one thing she had promised herself that she would never do. “If you were going anyway, why did you even bother to come home and tell me?”
“I didnt come home to tell you,” the boy said. “I came home to get my uniform to wear and you have to help me put it on.”
“Go get it out then,” she said. At least there was one thing she could still do; anyway she could do it when Dana wasnt home. In the last two years his education in both school and life had been taken from her hands, along with all the other things. She felt herself slipping back into the old habit of indifference, and thinking pleasantly about Milt there in the closet. At least there was one way left for a woman to express herself, she thought distastefully, now that the chastity belts were outlawed, now that the stocks and ducking chairs were gone, although the condemnation still was just as bad.
“Well come on,” the boy said impatiently. “I’m in a hurry. I’m going to help Sergeant Preem cook supper tonight and eat with them.”
“Is that all right with Sergeant Preem?” she said, getting up to follow him.
“It has to be, dont it? If he’s my Dad’s mess sergeant. Come on, I’m in a hurry.”
In the little room he had for himself Karen helped him shuck off his clothes, staring wonderingly at the small naked agility, surprised again that this foreigner and stranger was her child to love and cherish the way all the books on childcare said. Here were bones and nerves and ligaments from her body, a photographic replica his father had made of himself, using the sensitized plate that had been Karen Jennings of Baltimore, Md., as a man might use an old box camera, for the pictures it would take, not caring about the technique of the using.
Now I’ve borne the heir, she thought. The film is taken out, the negative made, the picture in the process of development. And the crumbling shredding rotting leathered box is put back on the shelf. Useless now. The mechanism of its dark interior having been accidentally