The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [121]
"Oh, we had lots of that too," Dove inserted eagerly. "I couldn't go back to Washington with Jane, because there're so many girls there, if I should meet one of them with her, well, it wouldn't be so good. Jane's a hell of a swell kid, wonderful wife, but you know she takes her church seriously, and she'd be awfully upset."
Lieutenant (sg) Dove. He had been assigned to the division as an interpreter at almost the same time Hearn had come in, and with amazing, with startling naïveté he had announced very carefully to everyone that his rank was equivalent to captain in the Army, and that the responsibilities of a lieutenant sg were greater than those of a major or a lieutenant colonel in the Army. He had told the officers this in officers' mess on Motome and had been loved accordingly. Conn had not spoken to him for a week. But to the impedimenta that kept true love apart, or the poem went something like that. In any case, they were delighted with each other now. Hearn remembered Dove's saying to him once when he first came to the division, "You know, really, Hearn, you can appreciate this because you're an educated man like me, but do you know there's sort of a coarser element in the officers in the Army. The Navy's more careful." Apparently, Dove had made the sublime effort; he accepted Conn now.
They all accepted one another in time, with of course all the gossip requisite to acceptance. Dekes under the skin. Even Conn and he had made up. They hated each other, of course, but that was conveniently forgotten. A week after their quarrel he had passed Conn in the G-2 tent, and Conn had cleared his throat forcibly and said, "Looks like it's gonna be cooler today."
"Yes," Hearn had said.
"I got a lot of work today, I appreciate it cooler," Conn had added, and after that they made a point of nodding to each other. Today on the beach he had been talking to Dove, and Conn had come over.
"Yes, sir," Conn repeated, "many's the party we've had. You talk about that whisky and dandruff gag, what was his name, Fischler, any relation to Commodore Fischler?"
"I don't think so."
"The Commodore's a good friend of mine. Anyway I remember one time when Caldwell got a woman over and by God if she didn't drink her liquor in. . ."
"Lord, you'd think she'd burn herself to death," Dove exclaimed.
"Not her. That was her specialty. Caldwell almost bust a gut laughing. He liked his good time, Caldwell."
Dove was visibly shocked. "I can't say I've ever seen anything like that. God, isn't it disgusting, you're out in the open air like this, and the chaplain's probably giving his services now."
"Well, we really shouldn't be talking like this on Sunday," Conn agreed, "but what the hell, we're all men." He lit a cigarette, and speared the match in the sand. The crack of Dalleson's carbine sounded again, and a few shouts came from the water where some officers were having a water fight in the shallow surf. "I've made a study of parties," Conn said, "and there's just two ingredients to have a good one, enough to drink and some willing slits. Ready, willing, and able."
Hearn squinted along the sand. You could reduce it probably to four kinds of parties. There were the ones that made the newspaper society columns with the senators and the important representatives, the industrialists, the high brass, the foreign dignitaries, even his father had gone to one of them once, and been miserable no doubt. But then they all were miserable there. It was the highest flowering of an industrial capitalist culture, and a good time was segregate from the social forms, the power swappings, the highly elaborated weather talk. Everyone hated everyone else as a matter of course, for if they came to do business they found they could not, and if they came as snobs bearing gifts they were contemptuous of the men who had the power and lacked the