When he found it, he exclaimed, “I’ll be a EXPLETIVE DELETED!!! I’m not going to EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Sunny Lakes, or any other EXPLETIVE DELETED!! place in the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Midwest! I’m going to Berlin! Berlin, Germany! Not the Berlin in EXPLETIVE DELETED!! New Hampshire!”
“Watch your mouth, Corporal!” a stern voice chided him.
Phil turned to see that he was being addressed by a second li
eutenant who was wearing the identification badge of a CIC agent in training.
“You’re in the CIC now,” the second lieutenant went on. “We of the CIC do not use obscene language such as ‘EXPLETIVE DELETED!! New Hampshire,’ which is one of the United States we are sworn to defend from undue Soviet and other unfriendly curiosity.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. I will endeavor to remember that.”
“See that you do!”
—
Over the next few days, as he waited for the administrative wheels of the CIC Center to slowly turn, Phil wondered if his assignment to Berlin was possibly a sub-rosa award for his having been a member of the Fort Holabird Skeet Team, which not only had kicked the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! out of the Navy Intelligence Skeet Team the very week he had joined it, but on other occasions during his time as a student had inflicted similar defeats upon the skeet teams of the National Park Service and the Pentagon Police Force in Washington, D.C., and the security forces of the National Center for the Control of Venereal Diseases in Baltimore.
In the end, he decided it was just a coincidence, as he had been told again and again there was no room for personal favoritism in the CIC.
—
As soon as he got the $350 check to buy civilian clothes, his new passport—which identified him as an employee of the U.S. Government—and his airline tickets, Phil started to faithfully execute the orders laid out in Par. 17 above.
Well, maybe not faithfully.
If he executed them absolutely faithfully, he would have gone on leave—he was headed for New York—at his own expense.
Ten days later—if he faithfully followed his orders—he would have taken the train back from New York, again at his own expense, and upon his arrival in Baltimore gone to Baltimore-Washington Airport and taken an Eastern Airlines flight to Newark using the Army-provided ticket. From Newark he would have taken the shuttle bus (ticket provided) to JFK Airport, where he would board the Pan American flight to Frankfurt.
He decided it would make more sense to skip the Go Back To Baltimore et seq elements of this agenda, and instead take a cab to JFK from his father’s apartment in Manhattan when his leave was over.
In the club car of the train carrying him to New York City, to which, having no civilian attire, he was traveling in uniform, he picked up a discarded copy of the Sunday edition of The New York Times.
In it was a society section story informing the world that Mr. and Mrs. T. Jennings Black III of New York City and Rowayton, Connecticut, announced the marriage of their daughter Alexandra to Mr. Hobart J. Crawley IV, son of Mr. and Mrs. H. J. Crawley III of New York City and Easthampton. The story went on to relate that the ceremony had taken place in the Yale Club of New York City, with the Reverend K. Lamar Dudley, D.D., of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, presiding, and that the groom was at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, where the couple would reside following their return from their wedding trip to Bar Harbor, Maine.
Phil was understandably distraught.
Alexandra had married another.
After all of my efforts, she married a EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Yalie!
And that EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Yalie was going to get—by now probably had gotten—her EXPLETIVE DELETED!! pearl of great price.
Which leaves me not only desolate but the last EXPLETIVE DELETED!! seventeen-year-old EXPLETIVE DELETED!! virgin in the world.
He decided he would drown his sorrows.
He caught the waiter’s eye.
“Bring me a double Famous Pheasant, no ice, please.”
The waiter leaned close to him.
“No EXPLETIVE DELETED!! way,” the waiter said softly, so that no one else would hear him. “How old are you, boy? Eighteen?”
Following the theory that when all else fails, tell the truth, Phil shrugged his shoulders and confessed, “Seventeen,” and then blurted, “The love of my life has married a Yalie.”
He held up The New York Times as proof.