The Heavenly Table

16

LIEUTENANT VINCENT BOVARD of the newly formed 343rd Machine Gun Battalion stepped out onto the porch of the long, low building he shared with two dozen other junior officers at Camp Pritchard. He had just finished another pile of asinine paperwork, and was looking forward to his first smoke of the day. It was still morning, but already the August sun was beating down upon the flat, treeless army base with the same harsh relentlessness that Colonel Garland Pritchard, the obscure, half-crazed Union commander for whom the camp was named, had led his guerrilla forces across the South in the shadow of Sherman’s great march to the sea, supposedly doing cleanup, but mostly taking potshots at anything that had been lucky enough to survive. Settling into a rattan chair, Bovard looked about with satisfaction. Though the construction was still going on from sunrise to sunset, the sweltering air filled with the sounds of hammering and sawing, the cantonment already resembled a well-designed town. And to think that just a couple of months ago there had been nothing here but cornfields and cow patties. Being even a small part of such a vast operation was something to be proud of.

For a brief moment, though, as he sat in his scratchy uniform listening to the racket going on around him, Bovard almost wished he was sipping a glass of ice tea at the Sandcastle Inn on the breezy Atlantic seashore, or lying in a shady hammock at his parents’ summer cottage in the Adirondacks. But then he heard Sergeant Malone’s hoarse voice in the distance screaming obscenities at a couple of unlucky privates. No, he reminded himself, this was exactly where he wanted to be, among men preparing to go to war. The old life of soft, mindless pleasures was over with. From here on out, he would take his comforts in the mess halls and barracks and trenches smelling of sweat and burned coffee and gun grease. It was his destiny, he could see that as clearly as he had seen anything in his twenty-two years of living.

Even so, it had taken him several weeks to get used to Camp Pritchard. At six foot two, with wavy brown hair and sea-green eyes flecked with tiny blue deposits and a perfectly straight nose passed down from his great-grandfather, a minor French aristocrat who had been lucky enough to escape to America with his head during the Reign of Terror, Bovard stood out among the crude Midwestern farmers and store clerks and mill hands that made up the bulk of the camp’s troops like a polished stone sitting atop a pile of coal clinkers. A large part of his initial problem with handling the harsh realities of camp life was owing to his education. Trained in classics, he had entered the military with abnormally high expectations, but unfortunately, the men he had encountered so far were a far cry from the muscle-bound sackers of Troy or the disciplined defenders of Sparta that he had been infatuated with since the age of twelve. Still, even though the draftees had been a sore disappointment, both physically and mentally, he had quickly learned to deal with them. It was simply a matter of lowering one’s standards to fit the circumstances. After all, how could one expect any of these poor, awkward, illiterate brutes to have even heard of Cicero or Tacitus when at least half of them had difficulty comprehending a simple order? In just a matter of days, he went from trying to form a Latin reading club to thinking that a lowly private who still had most of his teeth and could name the presidents was practically a paragon of good breeding and sophistication.

Stretching out his legs, Bovard pulled a small leather case from his pocket and took out a cigar. His father had sent him a box of them last week, along with a carved walking stick and the last known copy of Colonel Pritchard’s memoir, a musty tome called A Great Man Looks Back, which he’d found completely unreadable and had passed on to the camp library. He cut off the end of the golden brown Cuban with a small pair of snips and reached for a match. He still found it hard to believe that just three months ago he was sitting in a hotel room in Columbus, Ohio, drunk and filled with self-loathing, mulling over the best way to kill himself. As he puffed, he thought again about the initial cause of his despair, his former fiancée, Elizabeth Shadwell. Just as he was finishing his degree at Kenyon College, and turning his thoughts to their upcoming wedding, she had suddenly jilted him, explaining in her Dear John letter that she had fallen in love with somebody else, an attorney already moving up in a well-respected firm in New York that worked chiefly on behalf of several major industrialists with war contracts amounting to millions. Looking back on it now, Bovard knew that he shouldn’t have been so surprised at her desertion. Ever since he had left Harvard at the end of his second year to go study at Kenyon with Professor Hubert Lattimore, a world-renowned expert on ancient Greek and Roman board games, Elizabeth had hinted that she was having doubts about his choice of study, even referring to it on several occasions as nothing more than “a frivolous pastime.” To think that he had worked himself half to death to become one of the only five people on the planet who understood the convoluted and seemingly nonsensical rules of divide et impera, only to have her call it a hobby! “Again, I am sorry,” she had added in a postscript to that last missive, “but I have to think of the future. I wish you the very best of luck with whatever you finally decide to do with your life.” He had sensed her oil tycoon father’s influence behind the entire thing, it being no secret that Bernard Shadwell was revolted by his potential son-in-law’s apparent lack of interest in moneymaking. And so, in just a few lines of delicate script, Elizabeth had violently altered the course of his life, a life that seemed, in the immediate aftermath of her betrayal, to have been wasted on ancient ideals and traditions that couldn’t even begin to compete with the ego-driven, cannibalistic forces of twentieth-century capitalism.

Though he had put on a brave front when his parents arrived from Philadelphia for his graduation ceremony, as soon as he saw them back onto the train, he’d packed a bag and fled to a hotel in nearby Columbus. After ordering a case of brandy brought up to his room, he had stripped down to his underwear and proceeded to get completely soused, his plan being to slit his veins open in the bathtub upon finishing the last bottle, just as the noblest of Romans had done. However, near the end of his third day, something began to bother him. Perhaps it was some vague sense of manly completeness he was after, or, more likely, just plain old revenge, but he suddenly felt the need to lose his virginity before committing himself to the Great Beyond. With a faithfulness that now seemed downright comical, he had kept himself pure for his wedding night, but now there would be no such night. How many times, he drunkenly wondered, as he cracked open another bottle, had that little slut been untrue while he walked around the Kenyon campus at two in the morning with a throbbing pair of blue balls?

But how to go about it? He knew nobody in Columbus except a distant aunt, and the only thing he remembered about that overly pious woman was that she owned a vast collection of hair shirts and was allergic to sunlight. Too, he wanted to get the matter over with as quickly as possible, and hated the thought of wasting time on wining and dining and drawn-out seductions. Of course, there had to be prostitutes about; according to some of his school chums, such women were everywhere, even in the dreariest sectors of the Corn Belt. Drawing the window blinds, he lay down on the bed and entertained images of a sophisticated, dark-eyed Italian courtesan tapping shyly on his door. Their one night of passion would be so intense that later, unable to bear the thought of living without him, she would weigh herself down with stones and throw herself off a bridge into one of the muddy, carp-infested rivers that flowed through the Buckeye State in the same ponderous way sap seeps from a tapped maple. Then things got fuzzy, and after a time, he passed out again.

In the end, after being holed up in the hotel room for over a week, he offered a slatternly, red-haired Irish chambermaid fifty dollars to sleep with him. Although she readily agreed to the exchange — after all, it was probably more money than she earned in a month — to his surprise, the little hussy had the audacity to insist on certain conditions. Studying him with eyes that resembled cold, green marbles, she said, “First off, ain’t nothin’ happens till the ol’ mouse is warmed up good and proper.”

“Excuse me?” Bovard said, a puzzled look on his unshaven face. “The mouse?”

“Me privates,” she said, rolling her eyes at his ignorance. “I love a man’s tongue on my puss, but my old man, he’s too old-fashioned for it. Says it always make him feel like a hog eatin’ from a trough.”

“Good God!”

“And I’d need a nice lunch before we get down to the bizness.”

Completely rattled, Bovard reached for a bottle on the nightstand and took a long drink.

“And cake and ice cream for dessert,” she went on. “I crave the sweets even more than a good screw.”

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” Bovard said in a faint voice, more to himself than to the maid.

“And another thing, too,” she said, waving a finger in the air. “The fifty don’t count for anything extra.”

“Extra?”

“Yeah,” she said. “If’n, say, you force me to swaller your wad, or you get the notion to poke me in the bunghole. Each of them filthy acts is another fiver.”

The maid said all of this without the slightest embarrassment, and the full extent of Bovard’s reversal of fortune struck him just then like a knife in the pit of his queasy stomach. To think that a fortnight ago he was engaged to one of the most beautiful and sought-after young women in Philadelphia, and now here he was, about to surrender his virtue to a gutter-minded domestic with a bubbly rash on her neck and a smear of what appeared to be egg yolk on her pointy, somewhat bristly chin. But he was growing afraid that he would lose the nerve to kill himself if he kept putting it off. She would have to do. He picked up the phone and ordered the lunch.

When the desk clerk, a beer-bellied, liver-spotted sad sack, knocked at the door, the maid rushed to the closet and hid. Just pushing the cart into the room, loaded with enough food to feed a family of six, seemed to leave the poor bastard exhausted, and an uncomfortable minute or two went by while he leaned one hand against the wall and panted. Finally, after recovering from his labors and making sure everything was to Bovard’s satisfaction, he started out, but then turned and asked in a wheezy, apologetic voice, “Beg your pardon, sir, but you haven’t seen Myrtle around, have you?”

“Myrtle?”

“Yes, sir, the maid who takes care of this floor.”

“No,” Bovard said hurriedly, “I haven’t seen anyone.”

“I was just wondering, sir. She’s left her things right outside your door.”

“Her things?”

“Yes, sir, her mop and linens and such.” The man glanced at the closet, then started to step out into the hall. “That’s all right, sir,” he mumbled, as he closed the door. “She was having tummy troubles this morning, so she’s probably gone off to the terlet.”

As he listened to the maid chomp and chew and slurp — he’d turned away toward the window when she dipped a fat, green pickle into the gravy boat and then licked it clean — Bovard wondered, with more than a little trepidation, what he had gotten himself into. After consuming half a chicken and a mound of mashed potatoes and a relish tray and four buttered rolls, she heaped a pint of chocolate ice cream on top of a three-layer coconut cake and did her best to finish it off, too. For several minutes, she sat looking a bit nauseated, but then grabbed the brandy bottle Bovard was nursing. She took a long swig and belched forth a thunderous, full-throated yawp, such as an enraged donkey might make. He shuddered, thinking again of his former fiancée. In all the years he had known her, not once had Elizabeth ever emitted such a gross sound in his presence. Why, he doubted very much if she had ever passed a whiff of gas outside the privacy of her water closet. He was just about to tell the maid that he’d changed his mind when she stood and quickly shucked off her uniform and undergarments, all of which were stained and tattered beyond description. Then, with a long, lazy sigh, she laid back on the bed and parted her stubby, purple-mottled legs. She looked over at him and patted the place beside her, smiling with teeth that reminded him of kernels of decayed Indian corn. It was too late to back out now without hurting her feelings, he told himself, and he was too much of a gentleman to do that, even to such a vile and loathsome creature. He got up from the chair by the window and staggered toward her.

After a few clumsy, halfhearted caresses on his part, the maid quickly took over, displaying the same unbridled zeal for lovemaking that she had shown for eating. She forced his head between her thighs with her red, callused hands and ground her thickly thatched privates, the orange hair as rough as a wire brush, against his face. Five minutes of this and she exploded like a water balloon, squalling like a mashed cat and filling his mouth with what she referred to in a gasp as her “nectar.” Then she twisted around and pushed him back on the bed. She chewed on his knob and tickled his balls and tugged on his shaft until it was raw, but alas, he remained as soft as a sock in a laundry basket. Finally, after employing every trick she could think of — and it seemed to Bovard that the woman knew every dirty one in the book — she raised up and gave him a knowing look. “I could send a boy up, guvner, if that’s the problem,” she said. “Long as I still get me fifty, that is.”

“A boy!” Bovard yelled, frustrated beyond measure with his cock’s lack of response. “You dirty whore! What do you think I am?”

“I got no idy,” she said, rolling off the bed, “but a regular man you’re not. And who do you think you are anyway, callin’ me a whore? I got half a mind to send me old man up to kick the shit out of ye.”

“Oh, so your husband is hanging around here somewhere, is he? What, lurking in a closet? Hiding under some bed? What is he, your pimp?”

“No, he works the desk downstairs,” she said matter-of-factly.

Bovard stared at her for a second, a puzzled look on his face. “Him? The old fellow who brought up the cart?” Oh, God, he thought, could this frightful mess get any worse? What a mistake he’d made.

“Ol’ Taylor might not look like much,” she said, “but at least he knows what to do when the hinges is greased and the door’s ready for entry. Why, he’s like a young bull when it comes to—”

“Out!” Bovard screamed. “Get out!”

“Would ye like your sheets changed before I leave?”

“No, damn it to hell.”

“There’s a lad I know who—”

Bovard lurched from the bed with a look of insane fury on his face, and the maid grabbed her uniform off the floor and the money from the dresser and ran out of the room, slamming the door behind her. He stopped and stared into the mirror hanging over the mahogany dresser. There he stood, twenty-two years old and naked except for a crusty nightshirt, the sour taste of some scullery maid’s unwashed vagina in his mouth, his tongue blistered and quite possibly bleeding, his manhood shriveled with shame and defeat, his brain soaked with alcohol, at the end of his tether in a hotel room in the middle of Ohio, when he realized with a jolt the awful truth about himself. And the truth was that he, Vincent Claremont Bovard, had never had any more interest in the female body than a woodchuck has in learning the particulars of Latin verb conjugation. Feeling himself getting sick, he stumbled into the bathroom and retched up the sliver of chicken the maid had pushed down his gullet in a playful mood. Then he went back into the room and flopped down on the bed. How could he have been so blind? So ignorant and full of self-denial? After all, his revered Greeks and Romans had written so much about it. Buggery. Pederasty. Homosexuality. Tears began to run down his face. Thank God Elizabeth had called off their engagement. Cold chills ran over his body as he thought about the embarrassing fiasco the wedding night might have been. Then he leaned over and vomited again, this time on the braided rug, before falling into a fitful, nightmarish sleep.

The next afternoon, after deciding that leaving this world unsullied by lust was the more honorable thing to do after all, he looked by chance out the window and saw, down below on High Street, a military parade made up of Spanish American veterans showing their support for the war and carrying a banner advertising Liberty Bonds. He reached for a bottle and sat down to watch. Citizens of all ages were lined up on the sidewalk waving paper flags, tossing flowers and confetti. Though his head was fairly pounding, it was the most soul-stirring scene he had witnessed in ages, brimming over as it was with patriotism and excitement and the feeling that something world-changing was about to take place. Something much bigger and important than he, anyway.

It was that moment that he was thinking of now, as he sat on the porch smoking and looking out over the camp. To die on the Western Front, he had realized that day as he watched the old soldiers marching by, would be a far better way to leave this world than slitting his wrists in a tub of hot water. Once the procession passed and the crowd began to drift away, he had dozed off again and awakened the next morning filled with energy and purpose. After a bath and a shave, he packed his trunk and took a cab to the nearest armory. Though the draft hadn’t officially started yet, he was quickly sent, for no other reason than he had a college degree, to the Plattsburgh Barracks in New York for officer training. And now here he was, back in Ohio and on the verge of realizing his true destiny. War-ravaged Europe, with its inbred rulers and long-standing prejudices, was going to provide him, Lieutenant Vincent Bovard, with a death worth fighting for.