Charity sat up in bed.
“I’ve been pretending that we’re in Bala-Cynwyd… ,” she said.
“Where?” he asked, chuckling.
“It’s a suburb of Philadelphia,” she said.”… and that the alarm clock has just gone off, and that you’re going to get up and put on a suit, and that when you have had breakfast you’ll kiss the children. And then I’ll drive you to the station, and you’ll get on the commuter train and go in to your office in Philadelphia…”
“What kind of an office?”
“You’re a lawyer, like my father,” she said.
“Why a lawyer?”
“Because when lawyers leave their loving wives and adoring children to go to their offices, they know they’ll be coming home that same night, not going off to some impossible island nobody ever heard about….”
“Stanley’s a lawyer,” Douglass said.
“Damn you, come back to me,” Charity said.
“I’ll have to, to make you an honest woman,” he said.
“And to give the baby a name,” Charity said.
“What baby?”
“The one I think we made last night,” Charity said.
“Last night, or ten minutes ago?” he replied.
“I hope we did. Whenever,” Charity said.
“How do you like them apples, Colonel?”
“Hey, is this the right time to discuss something like that? “Douglass asked.
“The best time,” Charity said.
“If a man doesn’t believe that a woman loves him after she says she wants his baby, he’ll never believe it. I want you to know it, Doug.”
He stopped in the act of pulling his shorts on and went to the bed and sat on it.
“Me, too,” he said.
“That’s close,” Charity said.
“I love you,” he said.
“Correct,” she said.
“That wins you your choice of a trip to the sunny and romantic Adriatic isle of Vis, a cement bicycle, or whatever else your little heart desires. Me, for example.”
“Jesus, honey, they’re waiting for me.”
“I thought RHIR” “It does,” he said.
“Puck ’em, let ’em wait.”
”
“em? ’em?”” Charity asked.
[SIX]
There was now some official stationery available to Headquarters, U.S. Forces in the Philippines. It was a good-quality, twenty-four-pound watermarked bond paper, with an engraved letterhead. The letterhead read,
THE DOLE CORPORATION
Pineapple Plantation Three “There Are None Finer” Mindanao, Territory of the Philippine Islands
Headquarters, United States Forces in the Philippines used the blank side of the paper, but only for important official documents. After some thought,
General Fertig decided that it was necessary to maintain certain files, and to use his available stock of stationery (one and one half boxes, totaling precisely 741 sheets of paper) to do so USFIP had acquired some other desperately needed supplies from the mountainside cottage of the manager of the Dole Corporation’s Pineapple Plantation Number Three The cottage, some miles from the plantation itself, had been the manager’s private retreat. It had somehow escaped Japanese attention, and so it had held a dozen sets of bed linen–which USFIP converted into bandages, a Winchester single-shot, bolt-action 22-caliber rifle and three and a half boxes of.22 shells, a motley collection of inexpensive tableware and pots and pans; a mixed assortment of condiments and canned delicacies (such as Planter’s Peanuts, martini olives, and miniature onions); a Zenith portable radio, and a Smith-Corona “Student’s” portable typewriter with a nearly new ribbon.
General Fertig had his staff prepare copies for the record of the several pronouncements he had made as Commanding General, USFIP; the commissions he had bestowed upon certain members of his staff; and memorandums of record of the money issued by the Provisional Government of Misamis Occidental Province and which he had borrowed for USFIP And he instructed his cryptographic officer, Capt. Horace B Buchanan, to assume personal responsibility for the Smith-Corona and the stock of stationery, and, aside from making copies of outgoing and incoming messages, to make sure that no one used either paper or typewriter in a manner that could by any stretch of the imagination be considered profligate.
When Capt. Buchanan went to General Fertig’s quarters with the two messages that had come in within five minutes of each other, the General was having his evening cocktail Second Lieutenant (ex-chief petty officer, USN) Ellwood Orfett, whom Fertig had placed in charge of a deserted coconut oil mill, had revealed another talent. He could convert mashed pineapple meat into alcohol, producing a lethal-smelling transparent intoxicant with the kick of a mule, but which, when mixed with pineapple juice, didn’t taste half bad.