Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(113)
Now Frangie is left to pick out words and phrases and try to piece them together, make some kind of sense of them. But her mind is at sea, lost and confused.
“You have anything to say other than yassuh, nosuh?”
“No, sir,” she says.
“At ease.” He twirls the paper toward her. She makes a grab at it but misses and has to stoop to pick it up off the floor.
“Take that and get your black ass off my base. Dismissed.”
Frangie flees the room, and the building, and finding no transportation waiting, begins the long, chilly walk back to the hospital on her aching leg. She waits until she is well clear of the HQ estate, clear off the manicured grounds, out onto the hedge-lined road with the sun dropping fast and the shadows lengthening before she tries, at last, to read the paper.
It is a set of orders for her.
It takes her several tries, starting, stopping, and restarting, to make sense of the official language.
She is to take the earliest available transportation to HQ First US Army Group (FUSAG) at Dover, United Kingdom. There is some detail—a unit, an officer she’s to report to—but still Frangie can make no sense of it until she sees two words:
Silver Star.
She stops walking. Stops breathing, as she reads:
The President of the United States, authorized by act of Congress, has awarded the Silver Star to:
And then, centered on the page, her name and her rank.
And below that, what is labeled as the citation, which begins:
Corporal Francine Marr distinguished herself for gallantry . . .
It goes on to describe how she had crawled beneath the tank. And then it talks about the day she was wounded in action and “Despite her own severe wounds, and with indifference to the enemy fire directed at her, Corporal Marr continued to treat injured soldiers . . .”
This last part baffles Frangie. She has a vague memory of trying to close a man’s stomach wound after she’d been injured, but the citation makes it seem she’d done more than that. Apparently she had treated three soldiers, saving one from almost certain death, before succumbing to her injuries and being evacuated.
“Well,” Frangie says to no one but a horse standing in the field. “I wonder what Harder will make of this?”
36
RAINY SCHULTERMAN—NAPLES, ITALY
Colonel Jon Herkemeier comes to see her every day. Sometimes he takes his lunch with her in the room they’ve given her all to herself. She has a balcony wide enough to accommodate a table and two chairs and, weather permitting, Rainy likes to be out of doors. Today, however, will not be an al fresco day. It is raining steadily and, like everyone else who thought Italy was always warm and sunny, Rainy has long since been disabused of that notion.
Rainy’s quarters are as luxurious as a five-star hotel. The room has high ceilings framed in massive wooden moldings. There are oil portraits on the wall, mostly gloomy, dark things showing various Italian notables in Renaissance tights and early-nineteenth-century uniforms. But one has caught her eye, a portrait of a thirtyish man with a bulbous nose and protruding eyes and an expression that suggests he is inclined to be amused. In fact he looks as if he is preparing a witty remark and will deliver it just as soon as the artist leaves him alone. It’s said to be a genuine Antonello da Messina, not an artist Rainy has heard of, but evidently somewhat famous.
She has taken to talking to the portrait at times when she needs distraction. She calls the man Pip, for no real reason except that he looks like a Pip, and she enjoys saying the word with its two percussive Ps.
“Well, Pip, I don’t think I like the weather in your country. Say what? With a name like Rainy I should love this weather? Say what, old Pip?”
She has been given no duties, she is on R and R, rest and recuperation. Military Intelligence has better facilities for such things than regular GIs would get—no villas for regular GIs, and there was a time that might have bothered her, but she doesn’t have the energy for fairness. Her days are spent reading books from the villa’s library. She’s already worked her way through Machiavelli’s The Prince, an Italian translation of The Great Gatsby, and most of Dante’s Divine Comedy in the original Italian.
When not reading books she reads and rereads letters from home with all their worry about her and all their relief that she is well. Aryeh has even managed to write, though reading between the lines, Rainy fears he is having a hard slog in the Pacific. Curse words have started to slip into his speech, and snide remarks about “our lords and masters with the stars on their shoulders.”
She has the freedom of the villa but rarely ventures out. Her face is no longer swollen, but her bruises are still in evidence, and while she is recovering her strength, she tires easily and walks hunched like an old woman, holding on to the marble rails as she goes up-or downstairs. Her hair is just starting to grow back in. Her appearance causes people to stop working and stare after her with sober, concerned expressions.
So she mostly stays in her room and is able to have her meals brought to her there. Breakfast with Pip. Lunch with Herkemeier. Suppers with Pip and a book. Day after day.
Now she goes to her balcony, staying under cover so the rain sheets just in front of her face. She closes her eyes and savors the chilly mist. And when she opens her eyes again she sees Colonel Herkemeier hurrying through the garden, his briefcase held above his head to shield himself from the downpour.