else. It was an iron rule among the combat men at Kilrainey about the ribbons, and the punishment for breaking it was instant and total derision from all sides. Nobody seemed to know from where the rule came, or what started it. But they all obeyed it. It was as though some bitter secret of contempt or disdain passed among the combat casualties and caused the rule to leap full-blown into existence, an absolute law. We don’t need your pats on the head, the attitudes seemed to say, we’ve been where you haven’t.
Landers’ date with Carol Firebaugh began well enough but ended up a strikeout. Landers had wanted to take her for dinner to the Plantation Roof on the top of the Peabody. “The Roof” was Luxor’s “Top O’ The Mark,” which, whatever it might have been before, was now hectic and full of uniforms and making money hand over fist, and the scene of so many service-connected seductions. There was a wild, wide-open quality about it, as though everybody was thoroughly enjoying the idea that four months from now everyone present might be dead. Landers had been there once with a couple of men from the company, without girls, and had wanted to come back and bring a girl there. Vaguely, he had thought about himself being able to talk to her; about himself, and about what had happened to him.
Instead, Carol Firebaugh, who didn’t like “The Roof,” suggested they have dinner at a restaurant she knew called Mrs. Thompson’s Tea Room.
It made a weird scene. For the first time in nearly a year and a half, except for one three-day pass back home in uniform, Landers found himself in a genuine homelike, non-Army, non-war atmosphere. Mrs. Thompson’s Tea Room was run by three elderly white Southern ladies who were widows apparently, helped by one old Negro gentleman who did part of the waiting on tables, and apparently did much of the organization. White couples and white parties of four sat at tables covered with snowy tablecloths in the genteel, uncrowded, middle-class atmosphere, eating leisurely dinners of excellent Southern-style cooking, and talking quietly. Every table had its brown-paper-sacked whiskey bottle, and drinks were served, but as adjuncts to the food, instead of as means to get drunk as quick as possible. Almost none of the men were in uniform and those who were, looked as if they were at home.
Landers had not been anywhere like this since leaving the university. This was like what he thought about when he thought of home. Despite his despair over his family. It was certainly not the place to carry through any seduction. But neither was it the place to try to talk to someone, anyone, about what had happened to him back on the hill ridge in New Georgia. Landers could only just barely formulate it in words to himself. How was he going to connect it to this kind of place? They were like two different worlds. There was no way to pull the two close enough together for any spark of understanding to bridge the gap. Quite suddenly he was furiously angry, outraged at all this false security of snowy white tablecloths and doddery old ladies serving food they had lovingly prepared themselves to appreciative diners. He was being disloyal to Winch and Strange and Prell and all the others by merely being here. Instead of talking, he became tongue-tied.
So they talked about Carol. Or she did. About her ambitions. About her frustrations. She had been going to Western Reserve to study acting and would be going back at midterm this year for her final semester. The war had kept her at home, with her brother gone. But she didn’t know whether she had the guts to strike out on her own and go to New York afterward, which was what you had to do. She was having parental problems. Her folks wanted her to stay here in Luxor and marry some nice young man with “prospects.” Some young attorney, or some smart young doctor. They would probably help her with money if she went to New York, but how long could she fight the system in New York? And there were all those producers you might have to sleep with.
Landers mostly listened and nodded, and fidgeted. Carol Firebaugh had a deliciously soft, deliciously uneven, deliciously attractive mouth, and when she looked at you with that slightly cocked eye of hers moving over your face as she kept refocusing, she