In Caroline's mind, Charley's language was too loaded with vulgarisms. A dirty mouth was certainly understandable, she knew, considering his background. But for his own good, now that he was an officer, he should clean it up. Since he did not like to hear her use bad language (except in bed, which was something else), she had settled on doing that as the means to shame him into polishing his own manners.
Every time he said something like "bullshit," she came back with "fuck." He really hated that; and so words like bullshit and asshole were coming out far less often now than they did not quite four months before, when they first met.
At that time Caroline had been divorced for not quite five months. It was far from a glorious marriage, of course; but it ended more or less satisfactorily, as far as she was concerned.... In other words, she came out of it, as she put it, "with all four feet and the tail," meaning that she got the house in Jenkintown, the cars, and almost all of the bastard's money. Her prosperous stockbroker husband had an understandable reluctance to reveal in court that the person he'd been having an affair with also wore pants and shaved.
During the divorce process, she had scrupulously followed her lawyer's advice to do nothing "indiscreet," correctly interpreting that to mean she should keep her legs crossed.
When she met Charley Galloway, then Technical Sergeant Galloway, she had been chaste for more than eighteen months.
He had flown into Willow Grove Naval Air Station, outside Philadelphia, in a Marine version of the Douglas DC-3 transport, acting as both pilot-in-command and instructor pilot to two young Marine aviator lieutenants, one of whom, Lieutenant Jim Ward, was her nephew.
Jim had called from the airport, and Caroline had driven out to Willow Grove to fetch him and the others home. The moment she saw Charley Galloway, she knew he might be just the man to break her long period of celibacy. After all, she would probably never see him again.
Until she met him, she had come to believe-after all manner of sobering, painful experience-that the real love of her life was a delightful, wholly improbable fantasy. But what happened between them, the very first time, told her that that very delightful and improbable fantasy had landed six hours before at Jenkintown.
It wasn't long after that before she started worshiping him.
Jimmy Ward worshiped him, too, which had been at first rather difficult to understand. Enlisted men are supposed to worship officers, not the other way around. But when she asked him about it, Jimmy explained that Charley probably would have been an officer-he had all the qualifications- if it hadn't been for what he'd done a few days after Pearl Harbor.
He and another sergeant had put together a fighter plane from parts of others destroyed by the Japanese. Charley had then flown it out to the aircraft carrier Saratoga, then en route to reinforce Wake Island. Half of Charley's squadron was on Wake Island. Charley was riding, so to speak, to the sound of the guns.
The reinforcement convoy was ordered back to Pearl Harbor. And so an act that was to Jimmy's mind heroic-dedication worthy of portrayal on the silver screen by Alan Ladd and Ronald Reagan-became quite the opposite. An enlisted man had made flyable an airplane commissioned officers, in their wisdom, had concluded was beyond repair. He had then had the unbridled gall, against regulations and policy, to decide all by himself to take the airplane off to war.
The only reason that they hadn't court-martialed him, Jimmy Ward told her, was that the witnesses were either dead or scattered all over the Pacific and could not be assembled.
So what they had done was take him off flight status and return him to the States for duty as an aircraft mechanic. It was only a critical shortage of pilots that had found him- the very morning of the day Caroline met him-back in a cockpit. The Marines were demonstrating parachute troops to the press and couldn't run the risk of having a less than fully qualified pilot fly the plane.
After their first night together, Caroline couldn't have cared if Charley was a PFC. Or what anyone thought about her taking up with an enlisted man eight years younger than she was.
On the twelfth of June, ten days before Caroline and Charley were driving into San Francisco, she went to Quantico to be with him. But he wasn't there.
And then two days later he showed up as Captain Galloway, USMCR, having been pardoned and commissioned by the Commandant of the Marine Corps himself. There was a price, however. He had five days leave, plus travel time, to report to San Francisco, there to board a plane for Hawaii, and there to assume command of a newly activated Marine fighter squadron.
Caroline decided she didn't give much of a damn what anyone-God included-thought about her traveling across the country with a man to whom she was not joined in holy matrimony. She was going with him.
And given a little more time, she thought, she would have been able to clean up his vocabulary so that even the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Philadelphia could have found no fault with it.
Unfortunately, there was hardly any time left at all. And then there was the matter of finding a room to make time in.
" 'Conspire' is the word you were looking for," Caroline said. "We are going to 'conspire' our way into the Andrew Foster Hotel."
"You think it would really work?" Charley asked.
"They make mistakes," Caroline said. "Everybody does.
All we have to do is make them think they made one with us, and we get a room."
"Sound like bull-aloney to me," Charley said.
"Better," she chuckled, "better."
"This hotel is important to you, isn't it?" Charley asked. "What did you do, stay there with your husband?"
"No," Caroline lied, easily. "With my parents."
My conscience, she thought, is clear. I don't want him in there thinking of me being there with Jack. All I want him to remember about the Andrew Foster Hotel is the luxury, and the food, and the two of us together in one of those lovely beds. Or together in one of those marvelous marble-walled showers with all the shower heads. I don't think Charley has ever seen anything like that. I want him to remember us there.
"And you think that would work?"
"Yes, I do," Caroline said, trying to put more conviction into her voice than she felt.
"OK, Baby," Charley said. "If that's what you want, we'll give it a shot."
"Good," she said.
"We'll have to pull over somewhere and get a tunic and a tie out of my bag," Charley said. "I can't walk in a fancy hotel wearing a flight jacket. I wish I could shave. I feel as cruddy as the car."
The light oak bodywork of the 1941 Mercury station wagon was covered with five days and several thousand miles of road grime. They had driven practically nonstop from Quantico, Virginia. There had been a light rain during the night, and the half-moon sweep of the wipers showed by contrast just how dirty the rest of the vehicle was.
"Well, when we get to our room, Mommy will wash your ears," Caroline said. "Or anything else you think needs it."
"I told you to knock off that 'Mommy' shit," Charley said, coldly. "I don't think it's funny."
Caroline did not respond with a dirty word of her own. She was wrong, and she knew it.
Why did I say that? I know it angers him. There's probably something Freudian in that Mommy shit. Obviously. We both know I'm thirty-three and he's twenty-five. There is probably a hint somewhere in there of perversion, too. Charley can't understand why I stayed married to Jack for so long after I learned that he was homosexual. First she was married to a fairy, he thinks, and now she's shacked up with a Marine eight years younger than she is and doesn't give a damn who knows it. Obviously, there is something strange about that dame. Strange is not all that far from perverse.
Charley pulled off the highway and stopped.
"I won't say that again, Baby," Caroline said.
And now he will take affront at 'Baby'! Why did I say that? What the hell is the matter with me?
"Forget it," Charley said, and smiled at her. "My bag will be the one on the bottom, right?"
"Probably," she smiled. "Would you like me to drive? I know where the Andrew Foster is."
"Go ahead," he said.
He got in the back and she slid behind the wheel.
There were four men behind the marble reception desk of the Andrew Foster Hotel, flagship of the forty-one-hotel Foster chain, atop San Francisco's Nob Hill. Three wore formal morning clothes, wing collars and tailed coats. The fourth man, older than the others, wore a double-breasted gray coat and striped trousers and had a rose-bud pinned to his lapel.
"Madam, I'm terribly sorry," one of the men in formal clothing said to Caroline McNamara. "I just don't seem to be able to find any record of your reservation."
"Well, as long as you can put us up, I suppose no harm is done," Caroline said.