Free Sayonara by James A. Michener Page A

agreement. She wanted to knock me into shape, once and for all. When I saw her closing in on me, trying to make me apologize for what I had done in good faith, I sensed pretty clearly that she saw herself fighting her daughter’s marriage battle. Years before she had taken on young Mark Webster in just such a fight and she had been victorious and the entire Army knew she had won and from that time forth she had molded and marched Mark Webster into a one-star generalship that he could never have attained by himself. Now she was going to teach her daughter how to march me into four or five stars.
    She frowned and said, “If you expect to make a name for yourself in service, Lloyd, you can’t offend the proprieties. You can’t insult generals.”
    I got mad and said, “I’ve made a pretty good name for myself so far. Shooting down MIGs, not worrying about social life.”
    She gasped and put her hand to her mouth as if she had been slapped. With profound rage she cried, “You’re an insolent little upstart.” Immediately she was ashamed of herself and tried to recover by saying something halfway sensible but fury was upon her and she stormed ahead, “You’re like your insufferable father.” I knew that Mark Webster was afraid of my father—he was deathly afraid of anyone who had more stars than he—and I was surprised that Mrs. Webster should have launched an assault on someone who might be in a position to affect her husband’s career, but she was trembling mad and didn’t care what she said. She added, “You ought to be careful you don’t grow up to be a second Harry Gruver.”
    She sounded exactly like her daughter and I recalled with a sense of shock that almost every time I had seen Eileen’s picture in the society columns of towns where she had lived, she was invariably with her mother. They were like sisters, shoulder to shoulder against the world.
    My father had commented on this once and had said he knew there were two kinds of Army marriages, his where the wife stayed home and Mark Webster’s where the wife tagged along. He told me he would honestly have preferred the latter, but he observed that it usually did hard things to the wife. “She’s always on the move and her children are always on the move. So the women folk band together in tough little cliques. I can honestly say I never feared the Japanese or the Germans but I do fear such cliques of Army women.”
    I heard Mrs. Webster saying bitterly, “I should think Eileen would be ashamed and disgusted.”
    I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even say that I was sure she would see to it that Eileen became disgusted. Instead I looked at her very carefully and when I saw her clean, handsome, hard face with not a wrinkle out of place I thought of Joe Kelly’s Japanese girl whom I had kissed that morning, and all at once I caught a glimmering of what the American secretary must have meant when she said, “These damned Japanese girls have a secret.” I had an intimation of their secret: they loved somebody—just simply loved him. They weren’t going to make him a four-star general or they weren’t going to humiliate him over some trivial affair for which he had already apologized. They just got hold of a man and they loved him.
    I had now seen two American marriages at close hand: my parents’ where people got along together in a respectful truce, and the Websters’ where there was an early surrender followed by a peace treaty without vengeance. But I had never witnessed a marriage where two people loved each other on an equal basis and where the man ran his job on the outside and the woman ran her job at home and where those responsibilities were not permitted to interfere with the fundamental love that existed when such things as outside jobs and inside housekeeping were forgotten.
    Mrs. Webster said acidly, “Eileen asked me to tell you she’d be at the hairdresser’s.”
    I thanked her, held her chair as she rose and showed her to the