The Hellfire Club(72)
Winston Marder ran his tongue against his molars, seemingly more focused on stray bits of steak stuck between his teeth than his son’s concern over the damage done years ago to his psyche.
Charlie went straight from the Harvard Club to Pennsylvania Station, hoping to catch the first train back to Washington. He had refrained from drinking with his father, but he went to the club car of the Afternoon Congressional train and ordered a bourbon even before the locomotive lurched and jerked and commenced its southward trip. He checked his watch: 2:50 p.m. The lights in the car flickered as they proceeded under the Hudson River through the North Tunnel, chugging under Weehawken and Union City, emerging from the underworld via the portal in North Bergen.
They zoomed through the slums of Secaucus and Jersey City, crossing over the dingy Passaic River for a brief stop at Pennsylvania Station in Newark, then quickly moved off through Elizabeth, Linden, Rahway—the low-income apartments and one-story homes ran together, blurring the entire state into one giant, nebulous town you would never want to live in. The club-car bartender refreshed Charlie’s drink as he stood at the bar, staring out the window. He thought about the This Is Your Life investigation, the irony of his father sneering at him for not following orders with sufficient obedience when the only reason he was even in New York City was to steal NBC’s This Is Your Life investigation from his dad, a testament to his being all too willing to do what he had to do. He thought of the irony of the fact that though he had been obsessed with correct usage of the term irony as a young man, he had never truly experienced it until today. He thought of the irony of the fact that his father had been the one to drum into his head the proper use of the term after he had wrongly used it as a synonym for “coincidence,” and here he was betraying the man who had taught him what it meant. Or was that not in itself ironic? Charlie’s head began to ache.
He felt weighed down again. There were the issues that seemed minor in the grand scheme of things intellectually but still felt like bites of his integrity—stealing the NBC Strongfellow dossier, his failed Goodstone fight, guilt about MacLachlan’s death, the pending preposterous comic-book hearings, handing off the Boschwitz folder. A lifetime’s worth of selling out in just two months.
And then, of course, the young woman, his fears about what he must have done to have caused her death, though there was part of him that still couldn’t believe it. He assumed this was a defense mechanism and that sooner or later he would accept that he was behind the loss of a life, but he wasn’t there yet.
And underneath it all there was Margaret, or the absence thereof. Where was Margaret? God, how he needed her now.
Chapter Nineteen
Wednesday, March 10, 1954
Nanticoke Island, Maryland
From Charlie’s enlistment in 1942 until the end of the war, Margaret had tracked his journey on a map she tacked up next to her bed. Starting in Fort Meade, Maryland, pins were placed on the North Carolina–South Carolina border where Charlie next was shipped for practice maneuvers, then to Fort Benning in Georgia. In October 1942, Charlie and the 175th Infantry Regiment crammed into the ocean liner RMS Queen Elizabeth and set sail for England, where they were ultimately given temporary quarters at a former British military base, Tidworth Barracks.
She wrote to him every day; he wrote back as often as he could, although that became increasingly difficult as K Company got closer to the front lines. In his letters, Charlie described Tidworth Barracks as ascetic—just a dozen brick buildings with no central heat, each named for a battle the British had fought in India. The barracks had coal-burning fireplaces at each end, but Charlie’s bunk stood in the middle, so very little heat reached him throughout that cold, wet English winter.
Charlie deployed his usual comic detachment when he wrote to her, but Margaret thought the barracks and the daily training routines sounded miserable. The UK was being bombed constantly, so every night blackout conditions were in effect. Any rare moments of R and R were spent struggling with directions to a restaurant or pub without benefit of street or route signs, which the British had removed in case of enemy invasion. Charlie and his fellow troops conducted practice amphibious assaults on local lakes, rivers, and moors until K Company and the larger infantry regiment were transported to Devon to wait to board the tank landing ships in which they would be shuttled to the beaches of Normandy.
“Of everything we’ve experienced here in England,” Charlie wrote while waiting to ship out for France, in a rare moment of candor,
it wasn’t the bone-chilling cold of the desperate English winter that made me most miserable, though there was one night where I gladly would have traded a limb for a bucket of coal. And it wasn’t the constant threat of air assault marked by sirens, panic, confusion, and impotence. It was the moors—the dark, dank, foul, freezing, fetid swamps filled with bacteria and leeches and swarming with mosquitoes, a hundred pounds of gear strapped on our backs, pushing us down into the muck, while the slough tricked us with false floors, causing us to stumble and drink in the grime—the experience was akin to dunking my body into a pool of death, that’s the only way I can think of to describe it. I cannot say anything more about what we are doing next, but I am sure it will be worse. I don’t know if our times in the marshlands prepared us tactically or just barely introduced us to a taste of the horror that awaits on the mainland.