The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [75]
A flip of the blonde hair heralded the answer. "There's no room for me to move up in the squadron, is there. I'm always going to be Tail End Charlie."
Cass lifted her hands from the table and let them fall back.
"I'm not kicking about that, understand," Della hastened to say. "It's the way things are, seniority is something I can't do anything about. Buy you a drink, to show there are no hard feelings?"
The Alaska vodka lesson staying with him, he sipped cautiously as Adrianna steered the conversation.
"TPWP is sort of hush-hush, isn't it." She treated this as though it were a secret between just the two of them. "You have your own code—it's off-limits to us."
"Mysterious are the ways of Tepee Weepy, I'm the first to agree."
"Tepee Weepy," she laughed low in her throat, "oh, that's funny. We have all kinds of those insane abbreviations in Washington. My father gets a charge out of saying the government is nothing but one big pot of alphabet soup."
Ben glanced now at that senatorial father, still holding forth to the other half of the room as inexhaustibly as if he were filibustering. Sharp-cornered old devil. To look at him, you'd never know he's busy shopping for a son-in-law. Right there in the fray, feeding the occasion in more ways than one, was the zealous hostess of all this. Ben had the passing thought that his mother should be the one writing a movie script. Mr. Touchdown Goes to Washington, by Cloyce Carteret Reinking.
Uncountable down through the terms in office—like a canine's, a politician's years measured differently—these home-state gatherings out away from that company town, Washington, were part campaign ritual and part self-schooling for the Senator. In the crisscross of conversations loosened by a bit of booze, he often picked up matters of interest that might otherwise surface unpleasantly on election day. He himself was a restrained drinker at these, as was Sadie, Adrianna a little less so. At the moment the daughter they had so fondly adopted and raised was, to his understanding eye, a sailor on leave, chatting up the pick of the evening, Cloyce and Bill Reinking's prize son. He and Sadie had needed to learn that Adrianna was rapid in her affections—at Thanksgiving it had been the Free French naval attaché. One of these times, something would have to come of these acquaintanceships sparked by the war. Gazing around the living-room party in apparent benevolence, the Senator marked Ben Reinking as one would a passage in a book worthy to return to.
The drink offer was the only good thing Cass had heard out of Lieutenant Maclaine since she plopped down at the table. "Can't. Going on duty at midnight." Which, she figured, Della well knew when she volunteered to buy. Why the hell can't she strut her stuff when it counts? "It's a shame, though," Cass said as if the words were too stubborn to keep in. "You throwing away your wings." Messing up the squadron just when I was finally starting to get you straightened out.
Della checked her for sarcasm. "What do you mean, a shame?"
"Don't you remember?" Cass waved accusingly in the general direction of Texas. "From day one at Sweetwater, those bald old coots who called themselves flight instructors said that about us. 'Most of you women won't stick around in that pilot seat,'" she mimicked their seen-it-all drawl. "'Something will git on your nerves and you'll take up being a pedestrian again.'"
That set off a blonde flare in the chair opposite. "Cass, that is in no way fair. My nerves are perfectly fine and I am not most women."
"It's rough," Cass led into, "to be low schmoe on the totem pole, I know. I've been there." She drained the last of her lonely drink and took a quick look at the clock. "But lack of seniority doesn't last forever, if you keep on breathing." She mulled how to say the rest of this, knowing