NOAH stood among the patriots, waiting his turn to be interviewed by the recruiting officer. He had taken Hope home late and it had been a bad time when he told her what he was going to do, and he had slept poorly, with one of his old dreams about being put up against a wall and machine-gunned, and he had risen in the dark to go down to Whitehall Street to enlist, hoping to be early enough to avoid getting caught in the crowd he was sure would be besieging the place. As he looked around at the others he wondered how the draft had missed them all, but that was almost the limit of speculation his weary mind could manage at the moment. In the days before the attack he had tried not to think it out, but, remorselessly, his conscience had made the decision for him. If the war began, he could not hesitate. As an honourable citizen, as a believer in the war, as an enemy of Fascism, as a Jew… He shook his head. There it was again. That should have nothing to do with it. Most of these men were not Jews, and yet here they were at six-thirty of a winter's morning, the second day of the war, ready to die. And they were better, he knew, than they sounded. The rough jokes, the cynical estimates, were all on the surface, embarrassed attempts to hide the true depths of the feeling that had brought them to this place. As an American, then. He refused to put himself at this moment into any special category. Perhaps, he thought, I will ask to be sent to the Pacific. Not against Germany. That would prove to them that it wasn't because he was a Jew… Nonsense, nonsense, he thought, I'll go where they send me.
A door opened and a fat sergeant with a beery face came out and shouted irritably, "All right, all right, you guys. Stop spittin' on the floor, this is government property. And stop shovin'. Nobody's goin' to be left behind. The Army's got plenty of room for everybody. Come in, one by one, through this door, when I give you the word. And leave your bottles outside. This is a United States Army installation."
It took all day. He was shipped to Governor's Island in an Army ferry that had a General's name on it. He stood on the crowded deck, his nose running with the cold, watching the harbour traffic on the slate waters. He wondered what obscure act of heroism or flattery the General had done in his day to deserve this minute honour. The Island was busy and thronged with soldiers who were grimly carrying guns, as though they expected to have to repel a landing party of Japanese marines at any moment.
Noah had told Hope he would try to call her at her office some time during the day, but he didn't want to lose his place in the slow line that went past the bored, short-tempered doctors.
"Christ," the man next to Noah said, looking down the long line of naked, scrawny, flabby aspirants to glory, "is this what's going to defend the country? Christ, we've lost the war."
Noah grinned a little self-consciously, and threw his shoulders back, measuring himself secretly in his nakedness against the others. There were three or four young men who looked as though they had played football, and one enormous man with a clipper in full sail tattooed on his chest, but Noah was pleased to see that he compared favourably with most of the rest. He had become acutely conscious of his body in the last few months. The Army, he thought as he waited to get his chest X-rayed, will probably build me up considerably. Hope will be pleased. Then he grinned. It was an elaborate, roundabout way to put yourself in condition, to have your country go to war against the Empire of Japan.
The doctors paid little attention to him. His vision was normal, he did not have piles, flat feet, hernia, or gonorrhoea. He did not have syphilis or epilepsy, and in a minute-and-a-half interview a psychiatrist decided he was sane enough for the purposes of modern warfare. His joints articulated well enough to please the Surgeon General and his teeth met in an efficient enough manner to ensure his being able to chew Army food, and there were no scars or lesions evident anywhere on his skin.
He dressed, glad to get bis clothes on once again, thinking, tomorrow it will be a uniform, and went up, in the slow-moving line, to the sallow, harassed-looking medical officer who sat at a yellow desk, stamping 1A, Limited Service, or Rejected, on the medical records.
I wonder, Noah was thinking, as the doctor bent over his record, I wonder if I'll be sent to some camp near New York so I can see Hope on passes…
The doctor picked up one of the stamps and tapped it several times on a pad. Then he hit Noah's record and pushed it towards him. Noah looked down at it. REJECTED was smeared across it in blurred purple letters. Noah shook his head and blinked. It still said REJECTED.
"What…?" he began.
The doctor looked up at him, not unkindly. "Your lungs, son," he said. "The X-rays show scar tissue on both of them. When did you have T. B.?"
"I never had T. B."
The doctor shrugged. "Sorry, son," he said. "Next."
Noah walked slowly out of the building. It was evening now, and the wind was cruel and full of December as it swept off the harbour across the old fort and the barracks and parade ground that stood guard over the sea approaches to the city. The city itself was a clot of a million lights across the dark stretch of water. New levies of draftees and volunteers came pouring off the ferries, shuffling off to the waiting doctors and the final purple stamps.
Noah shivered and put his collar up, clutching the sheet of paper with his record on it pulling at his hand in the wind. He felt numb and purposeless, like a schoolboy deserted among the dormitories on Christmas Eve, with all his friends off to celebrations in their homes. He pulled his hand inside his coat and inside his shirt. He touched the skin of his chest and felt the firm skeleton of his ribs. It felt solid and reliable, even with tips of cold wind whipping at it through his opened clothing. Tentatively he coughed. He felt strong and whole.
He moved slowly to the ferry and stepped aboard, past the MP with the winter hat with the earmuffs and the rifle. The ferry was almost empty. Everybody, he thought dully, as the ferry with the dead General's name painted on it slid across the narrow black stretch of water towards the looming city, everybody is going the other way.
Hope wasn't home when he got there. The uncle who read the Bible was in the kitchen, reading, and he peered ill-naturedly at Noah, whom he did not like, and said, "You here? I thought you'd be a colonel by now."
"Is it all right," Noah asked wearily, "if I stay and wait for her?"
"Suit yourself," the uncle said, scratching himself under the arm, above the Book, open at the gospel according to Luke on the table before him. "I don't guarantee when she'll be home. She's a girl who's developed some mighty fast habits, as I write her parents in Vermont, and the hours of the night don't seem to make much impression on her." He grinned nastily at Noah.
"And now her fellah's goin' in the Army – or leastwise, she thinks he is – she's probably out scoutin' out some new ground, wouldn't you say?"
There was some coffee heating on the stove and a half-filled cup before him, and the smell was tantalizing to Noah, who had had nothing to eat since midday. But the uncle made no offer and Noah wouldn't ask for it.
Noah went into the living-room and sat down in the velour easy-chair with the cheap lace antimacassar on it. It had been a long day and his face smarted from the cold and wind, and he slept, sitting up, not hearing the uncle shuffling loudly about the kitchen, banging cups and occasionally reading aloud in his nasal, scratching voice.
The noise of the outside gate being opened, one of the deep familiar noises of his world, woke him from his sleep. He blinked his eyes and stood up just as Hope came into the room. She was walking slowly and heavily. She stopped short when she saw him standing there in the middle of the living-room. Then she ran to him and he held her close to him.
"You're here," she said.
Her uncle loudly slammed the door between the kitchen and the living-room. Neither of them paid any attention to the noise. Noah rubbed his cheek in her hair.
"I was in your room," Hope said. "All this time. Looking at all your things. You didn't call. All day. What's happened?"
"They won't take me," Noah said. "I have scars on my lungs. Tuberculosis."
"Oh, my God," Hope said.