Winds of War by Herman Wouk Read Free Book Online Page B

news that she wanted to drop out of college. The prospect of living with her dull aunt and duller uncle and twin cousins for two years was unbearable, she said.
    “But what can you do? Two years of college, and you keep failing courses,” Victor Henry said. “You can’t just lie around and read Vogue till you get married.”
    “I’d find a job, Dad. I can work. I’m just bored at school. I hate studying. I always have. I’m not like you, or Warren. I’m more like Byron, I guess. I can’t help it.”
    “I never liked studying,” Commander Henry returned. “Nobody does. You do what you must, and get it done.”
    Perched on the edge of a deep armchair, the girl said with her most winning smile, “Please! Let me take just one year off. I’ll prove I can do it. There are lots of jobs for girls at the radio networks in New York. If I don’t make good, I promise I’ll trot back to college, and -”
    “What! New York? Nineteen, and alone in New York? Are you nuts?”
    “Let me just try it this summer.”
    “No. You’ll go with Aunt Augusta to Newport, the way it’s been planned. You’ve always enjoyed Newport.”
    “For a week, yes. A whole summer will be a perishing bore.”
    “That’s where you’ll go. In the fall I’ll expect regular letters from you, reporting improved performance in college.”
    Madeline, slumping back in the armchair, bit noisily into an apple from a heaping bon voyage basket of fresh fruit, sent by Kip Tollever. Staring straight ahead, except for brief mutinous glares at her father, she gnawed at the apple until her mother and brother returned. Pug did his best to ignore the glares, reading a book on German steel-making. He did not like parting from his daughter on such terms, but her proposal seemed to him unthinkable.
    The Bremen sailed at noon. As Warren and Madeline left the pier, a band thumped out a merry German waltz. They took a taxi uptown, saying little to each other. Henry had set the uncommunicative pattern of the family; the children, after romping and chattering through their early years, had from adolescence onward lived separate, largely undiscussed lives. Warren dropped Madeline at Radio City, not inquiring what she intended to do there. They agreed to meet for dinner, go to a show, and take a midnight train to Washington.
    Madeline poked here and there in the huge lobby of the RCA building, gawking at the Sert murals and ceiling paintings. She found herself at the bank of elevators for NBC entertainers and employees. Many of these people, she noticed, showed no pass to the uniformed page, but smiled, waved, or just walked busily past the roped entrance. She sailed past too, trying to look twenty-five and employed. Squinting at her, the page held out an arresting hand. She dived into a crowded elevator.
    For an hour she wandered the inner halls of the broadcasting company, relishing the thick maroon carpets, the immense round black pillars, the passing trucks of spotlights and broadcast equipment, the flashing red lights outside of studios, the pretty girls and handsome young men hurrying in and out of doors. She came on the employment office and hung outside, peering through the open double doors like a child at a candy counter. Then she left and spent the day shopping in department stores.
    As for Warren, the taxi took him a few blocks further uptown. In Rumpelmayer’s, he met a good-looking woman of thirty or so with large sad eyes, a cloud of ash-blonde hair, and a clever soulful way of talking about novels, paintings, and music, subjects which did not greatly interest him. His majors had been history and the sciences. After an early lunch, he spent the day with her in a hotel bedroom. That did interest him.
    When he dined with his sister that evening, Madeline helped herself to a cigarette from his pack on the table, and lit and smoked it inexpertly. Her defiant, self-satisfied, somewhat pathetic air made Warren laugh. “When the cat’s away, hey?” he