"No buts," he said. "Once a week won't kill you."

"Of course I'll take her, you crazy. I only meant--"

"It isn't too much to ask. She isn't young or anything any more."

"But, Sweetie, I mean she's getting worse again. I mean she's so batty, it isn't even funny. I mean you're not in the house with her all day."

"Neither are you," he said. "And besides, she doesn't ever leave her rooms unless I take her out somewhere or something. " He leaned closer to her, almost sitting off the edge of the bed. "Virginia, once a week won't kill you. I'm not kidding."

"Of course, Sweetie. If that's what you want. I mean."

The young man stood up suddenly. "Will you tell cook I'm ready for breakfast?" he asked, starting to leave for somewhere.

"Give us a teeny kiss first," she said. "You ole soldier boy."

He bent over and kissed her wonderful mouth and left the room.

He climbed a flight of wide, thickly carpeted steps, and at the top landing turned to his left. He rapped twice at the second door, on the outside of which was tacked a white, formal card from the old Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York: Please Do Not Disturb. There was a faded notation in ink, written in the margin of the card: "Going to Liberty Bond rally. Be back. Meet Tom for me in lobby at six. His left shoulder is higher than his right and he smokes a darling little pipe. Love, Me." The note was written to the young mans mother, and he had read it when he was a small boy, and a hundred times since, and he read it now: in March, 1944.

"Come in, come in!" called a busy voice. And the young man entered.

By the window, a very nice-looking woman in her early fifties sat at a fold-leg card table. She wore a charming beige morning gown, and on her feet a pair of extremely dirty white gym shoes. "Well, Dickie Camson," she said. "How did you ever get up so early, you lazy boy?"

"One of those things," said the young man, smiling easily. He kissed her on the cheek, and with one hand on the back of her chair casually examined the huge leather-bound book opened before her. "How's the collection coming?" he asked.

"Lovely. Simply lovely. "This book--you haven't even seen it, you terrible boy--is brand new. Billy and Cook are going to save me all theirs, and you can same me all yours."

"Just canceled American two-cent stamps, eh?" said the young man. "Quite an idea." He looked around the room. "How's the radio going?"

It was tuned to the same station he had had on downstairs.

"Lovely. I took the exercises this morning."

"Now, Aunt Rena, I asked you to stop taking those crazy exercises. I mean you'll strain yourself. I mean there's no sense to it."

"I like them," said his aunt firmly, turning a page in her album. "I like the music they play with them All the old tunes. And it certainly doesn't seem fair to listen to the music and not take the exercises."

"It is fair. Now please cut it out. A little less integrity," her nephew said. He walked around the room a bit, then sat down heavily on the window seat. He looked out across the park, searching between the trees for the way to tell her that he was leaving. He had wanted her to be the one woman in 1944 who did not have someone's hourglass to watch. Now he knew he had to give her his. A gift to the woman in the dirty white gym shoes. The woman with the canceled American two-cent stamp collection. The woman who was his mother's sister, who had written notes to her in the margins of old Waldorf Please Do Not Disturb cards. . . .Must she be told? Must she have his absurd, shiny little hourglass to watch?

"You look just like your mother when you do that with your forehead. Yes. Just like her. Do you remember her at all, Richard?"

"Yes." He took his time. "She never used to walk. She always ran, and then she'd stop short in a room. And she always used to whistle through her teeth when she was drawing the blinds in my room. The same tune most of the time. It was always with me when I was a boy, but I forgot it as I got older. Then in college--I had a roommate from Memphis, and he was playing some old phonograph records one afternoon, some Bessie Smiths, some Tea Gardens, and one of the numbers nearly knocked me out. It was the tune Mother used to whistle through her teeth, all right. It was called 'I Can't Behave on Sundays 'Cause I'm Bad Seven Days a Week.' A guy named Altrievi stepped on it when he was tight later on in the term, and I've never heard it since." He stopped. "That's about all I remember. Just dumb stuff."

"Do you remember how she looked?"

"No."

"She was quite a package." His aunt placed her chin in the cup of one of her thin, elegant hands. "Your father couldn't sit still, like a human being, in a room if your mother had left it. He'd just nod idiotically when someone talked to him, keeping those peculiar little eyes of his on the door she'd left by. He was a strange, rather rude little man. He did nothing with interest except make money and stare at your mother. And take your mother sailing in that weird boat he bought. He used to wear a funny little English sailor hat. He said it was his father's. Your mother used to hide it on the days she had to go sailing."

"It was all they found, wasn't it?" asked the young man. "That hat."

But his aunt's glance had fallen on her album page.

"Oh, here's a beauty," she said, and she held one of her stamps up to the daylight. "He has such a strong, bashed-nose face. Washington."

The young man got up from the window seat. "Virginia told Cook to fix breakfast. I'd better go downstairs," he said. but instead of leaving he walked over to his aunt's card table. "Aunt Rena," he said, "give me your attention a minute."

His aunt's intelligent face turned up to him.

"Aunt--Uh--There's a war on. Uh--I mean you've seen it in the newsreels. I mean you've heard it on the radio and all, haven't you?"

"Certainly," she snorted.

"Well, I'm going. I have to go. I'm leaving this morning."

"I knew you'd have to," said his aunt, without panic, without bitter-sentimental reference to "the last one." She was wonderful, he thought. She was the sanest woman in the world.

The young man stood up, setting his hourglass flippantly on the table--the only way to do it. "Virginia'll come to see you a lot, Kiddo," he told her. "And she'll take you to the movies pretty often. There's an old W. C. Fields picture coming to the Sutton next week. You like Fields."

His aunt stood up, too, but moved briskly past him. "I have a letter of introduction for you," she announced. "To a friend of mine."

She was over at her writing desk now. She opened the topmost left-hand drawer, positively, and took out a white envelope. Then she went back to her stamp-album table again and casually handed the envelope to her nephew. "I didn't seal it," she said, "and you can read it if you like."

The young man looked at the envelope in his hand. It was addressed in his aunt's rather strong handwriting to a Lieutenant Thomas E. Cleve, Jr.

"He's a wonderful young man," said his aunt. "He's with the Sixty-Ninth. He'll look after you, I'm not at all worried." She added impressively, "I knew this would happen two years ago, and immediately I thought of Tommy. He'll be marvelously considerate of you." She turned around, rather vaguely this time, and walked less briskly back to her writing desk. Again she opened a drawer. She took out a large, framed photograph of a young man in the high-collared, 1917 uniform of a second lieutenant.

She moved unsteadily back to her nephew, holding the picture out for him to see. "This is his picture," she informed him, "This is Tom Cleve's picture."

"I have to go now, Aunt," the young man said. "Good-by. You won't need anything. I mean you won't need anything. I'll write to you."

"Good-by, my dear, dear boy," his aunt said, kissing him. "You find Tom Cleve now. He'll look after you, till you get settled and all."

"Yes. Good-by."

His aunt said absently, "Good-by my darling boy."

"Good-by." He left the room and nearly stumbled down the stairs.

At the lower landing he took the envelope, tore it in halves, quarters, then eighths. He didn't seem to know what to do with the wad, so he jammed it into his trouser pocket.

"Sweetie. Everything's cold. Your eggs and all."

"You can take her to the movies once a week," he said. "It won't kill you."

"Who said it would? Did I ever once say it would?"

"No." He walked into the dining room.

Personal Notes of an Infantryman.

J.D. Salinger.

He came into my Orderly Room wearing a gabardine suit. He was several years past the age--is it about forty?--when American men make living-room announcements to their wives that they're going to start going to gym twice a week--to which their wives reply: "That's nice, dear--will you please use the ash tray? That's what it's for." His coat was open and you could see a fine set of carefully trained beer muscles. His shirt collar was wringing wet. He was out of breath.

He came up to me with all his papers in his hand, and laid them down on my desk. "Will you look these over?" he said.

I told him I wasn't the recruiting officer. He said, "Oh," and started to pick up his papers, but I took them from him and looked them over.

"This isn't an Induction Station, you know," I said.

"I know. I understand enlistments are taken here now, though."

I nodded. "You realize that if you enlist at this post you'll probably take your basic training here. This is Infantry. We're a little out of fashion. We walk. How are your feet?"

"They're all right."

"You're out of breath," I said.

"But my feet are all right. I can get my wind back. I've quit smoking."

I turned the pages of his application papers. My first sergeant swung his chair around, the better to watch.

"You're a technical foreman in a key war industry," I pointed out to this man, Lawlor. "Have you stopped to consider that a man your age might be of greatest service to his country if he just stuck to his job?"

"I've found a bright young man with a 1-A mind and a 4-F body to take over my job," Lawlor said.

"I should think," I said, lighting a cigarette, "that the man taking your place would require years of training and experience."

"I used to think so myself," Lawlor said.

My first sergeant looked at me , raising one hoary eyebrow.

"You're married and have two sons," I said to Lawlor. "How does your wife feel about your going to war?"

"She's delighted. Didn't you know? All wives are anxious to see their husbands go to war," Lawlor said, smiling peculiarly. "Yes, I have two sons. One in the Army, one in the Navy--till he lost an arm at Pearl Harbor. Do you mind if I don't take up any more of your time? Sergeant, do you mind telling me where the recruiting officer is?"

Sergeant Olmstead didn't answer him. I flipped Lawlor's papers across the desk. He picked them up, and waited.

"Down the company street," I said. "Turn left. First building on the right."

"Thanks. Sorry to have bothered you," Lawlor said sarcastically. He left the Orderly Room, mopping the back of his neck with a handkerchief.

I don't think he was out of the Orderly Room five minutes before the phone rang. It was his wife. I explained to her that I was not the recruiting officer and that there was nothing I could do. If he wanted to join the Army and was mentally, physically, and morally fit--then there wasn't anything the recruiting officer could do either, except swear him in. I said there was always the possibility that he wouldn't pass the physical exam.

I talked to Mrs. Lawlor for quite a while, even though it wasn't a strictly G.I. phone call. She has the sweetest voice I know. She sounds as though she'd spent most of her life telling little boys where to find the cookies.

I wanted to tell her not to phone me any more. But I couldn't be unkind to that voice. I never could.

I had to hang up finally. My first sergeant was ready with a short lecture on the importance of getting tough with dames.

I kept an eye on Lawlor all through his basic training. There wasn't any one call-it-by-a-name phase of Army life that knocked him out or even down. He pulled K.P. for a solid week, too, and he was as good a sink admiral as the next one. Nor did he have trouble learning to march, or learning to make up his bunk properly, or learning to sweep out his barrack.

He was a darned good soldier, and I wanted to see him get on the ball.

After his basic, Lawlor was transferred to "F" Company of the First Battalion, commanded by George Eddy, a darn' good man. That was late last spring. Early in summer Eddy's outfit got orders to go across. At the last minute, Eddy dropped Lawlor's name from the shipping list.

Lawlor came to see me out it. He was hurt and just a little bit insubordinate. Twice I had to cut him short.

"Why tell me about it?" I said. "I'm not your C. O."

"You probably had something to do with it. You didn't want me to join up in the first place."

"I had nothing to do with it," I said. And I hadn't. I had never said a word to George Eddy, either pro or con.

"Then Lawlor said something to me that sent a terrific thrill up my back. He bent over slightly and leaned across my desk. "I want action," he said. "Can't you understand that? I want action."

I had to avoid his eyes. I don't know quite why. He stood up straight again.

He asked me if his wife had telephoned me again.

I said she hadn't.

"She probably phoned Captain Eddy," Lawlor said bitterly.

"I don't think so," I said.

Lawlor nodded vaguely. Then he saluted me, faced about, and left the Orderly Room. I watched him. He was beginning to wear his uniform. He had dropped about fifteen pounds and his shoulders were back and his stomach, what was left of it, was sucked in. He didn't look bad. He didn't look bad at all.

Lawlor was transferred again, to Company "L" of the Second Battalion. He made corporal in August, go his buck sergeant stripes early in October. Bud Ginnes was his C. O. and Bud said Lawlor was the best man in his company.

Late in winter, just about the time I was ordered to take over the basic training school, the Second Battalion was shipped across. I wasn't able to phone Mrs. Lawlor for several days after Lawlor was shipped. Not until his outfit had officially landed abroad. Then I long-distanced her.

She didn't cry. her voice got very low, though, and I could hardly hear her. I wanted to say just the right thing to her; I wanted to bring her wonderful voice up to normal. I thought of alluding to Lawlor as being one of our gallant boys now. But she knew he was gallant. Anybody knew that. And he wasn't a boy. And, in the first place, the allusion was labored and phony. I thought of a few other phrases, but they were all on the long-haired side, too.

Then I knew that I couldn't bring her voice up to normal--at least not on such short order. But I could make her happy. I knew that I could make her happy.