MASH 13 MASH goes to Montreal Read online

  The moment Josephine saw him, she felt her heart go all aflutter, even though her professional restauranteur’s eye told her that the handsome chap in the paratrooper uniform had drunk far too long and well from the neck of the bottle of bourbon he clutched in his right hand. She remembered, exactly, the very first words he ever said in her hearing. Raising the bottle in her general direction, he said to the two paratroopers with him:

  “Screw Mom’s apple pie. That's what I’ve been fighting for. A big-boobed blonde in a low-cut dress!”

  He said this loudly enough to attract the attention of Max Morgenblum. While Max absolutely forbade intoxication on the premises, and while he had been known to chase more than one of Josephine’s suitors with a meat cleaver, the young paratrooper before him posed something of a problem. Here was a wounded hero (Max recognized the Silver Star and the Purple Heart ribbons) fresh from the Korean War, and wearing the beloved insignia of Max’s own beloved 82d Division.

  Her concern for her father’s reaction immediately became a moot point.

  Holding the bottle on high, the paratrooper said, “Don’t go away, honey, I think I love you!” and then crashed to the floor.

  Max Morgenblum quickly ordered that the young paratrooper be put to bed in one of the rooms of the Morgenblum Mountain Chalet Motel, and then had a heart-to-heart talk with his daughter.

  “You must not judge that young man too harshly, liebchen. He has just come from the war. His friends tell me that he was given a battlefield commission. And he’s a paratrooper. As I’ve told you before, liebchen, we paratroopers are not like other people.”

  Josephine had nodded her head and blushed furiously.

  "Liebchen, don’t blush,” Max said. “He said … what he said ... as a compliment.”

  “Oh, I know, Poppa!” Josephine had replied. “Poppa, you told me, when I was just a little girl, that when Mr. Right came along, I would hear the sound of heavenly music....”

  “Maybe a little Strauss,” Max said. “So?”

  “So I heard it, Poppa, the moment I saw that young man. Even before he said what he said.”

  Max Morgenblum questioned her carefully, to make sure that she was certain, and then made his decision.

  “In that case, liebchen,” he said, “we’ll have to make sure that he don’t get away. Good paratroopers are hard to find. If things go all right, I’ll start him out in the kitchen, and he can work his way up to a position where I can turn the business over to him.”

  “Oh, Poppa,” she said, and hugged and kissed him.

  And so it came to pass that when 2d Lt. Burton Babcock III woke up the next morning, he saw the smiling face of Josephine Morgenblum looking down at him. Over her shoulder, he saw the benign face of her father.

  “How do you feel?” Josephine asked. “Did you mean what you said last night?”

  “What did I say last night?” he replied. “We’re not married or anything, are we?”

  “Not yet,” Josephine said.

  He looked at her suspiciously. “Why would you want to marry me?” he asked.

  She blushed. He blushed. Their minds, he realized, if nothing else, ran along parallel paths.

  “But you don’t know anything about me,” he said. “I may not have a dime to my name.”

  “Poppa will give you a job in the kitchen to start out,” Josephine said.

  “Why should he do that?”

  “We ol’ troopers got to stick together,” Max said, and began to sing “Blood on the Risers,” which is the unofficial anthem of the 82d Airborne Division.

  “You’re a former member of the 82d Airborne All-American Division?”

  “You bet your ... elbow I am,” Max said, proudly.

  “You’d let your beautiful daughter marry a stranger, a penniless stranger, simply because he happened to be a paratrooper of the 82d Airborne Division?”

  “What else do I need to know about you?” Max said, deprecatingly.

  “In that case, I accept,” 2d Lt. Burton Babcock said, raising his head to be kissed.

  “That can come later,” Josephine replied, averting her head. “Your breath would stop a clock.”

  “I’ll call Chappie Wood right now,” Max Morgenblum said.

  “Chappie Wood, the legendary Reverend George Wood, D.D., wartime chaplain of the 82d Division?” Burton Babcock asked, in awe. “The chaplain’s chaplain?”

  “Certainly,” Max said. “Nothing is too good for my little Josephine.”

  Six hours after Josephine Morgenblum had been joined in holy wedlock to 2d Lt. Burton Babcock by the Reverend Dr. Wood, the bride called her father from the nuptial chamber.

  “Poppa, have I got news for you!” Josephine said. “Good news.”

  “Good news? How can you tell so soon?”

  “Poppa, you’ll never guess where I am!”

  “I’m afraid to ask,” Max replied.

  “The Presidential Suite of the Carolina Ritz-Biltmore,” Josephine said. “The nation’s most exclusive and expensive resort hotel!”

  “When I slipped him a hundred bucks for the honeymoon,” Max replied a little sadly, “I didn’t think he’d blow the whole thing in one night.”

  “You can’t rent a closet for a hundred bucks a night in this place,” Josephine said.

  “What are you trying to tell me, liebchen? You’re not married six hours and already I should send you money?”

  “Burton owns it, Poppa!”

  “Owns it? Owns it? Don’t be silly. Everyone knows that the Carolina Ritz-Biltmore is owned by Southern Hotels, Inc., which is in turn owned by Babcock Land & Timber . . . He’s that Burton Babcock III?”

  “You got it, Poppa,” Josephine said. “How many Burton Babcock III’s do you think there are?”

  “That’s what happens when a girl trusts her father,” Max had replied, with satisfaction.

  “I gotta go, Poppa,” Josephine had replied. “The waiters are starting to bring in the caviar and the champagne. Burton Darling tells me it’s very difficult to have it flown in on such short notice from Iran.”

  The union, which Josephine thought of as short but blissful, was shortly (fourteen months) afterward blessed with fruit, specifically a bouncing eight-pound fourteen- ounce boy named Burton Babcock IV.

  And a year after that, Burton Babcock III was swept overboard to an untimely watery grave from his racing yacht, the 168-foot Josephine, thirty miles off Bermuda. Josephine refused to pay any attention at all to the nasty stories circulated that her husband had been in his cups at the time. Certainly, she should know far better than anyone that Burton sailed better drunk than anyone else could sober, and that if he went over the side, he’d been caught by a wave, or knocked overboard by the boom. Booze had nothing to do with it.

  At the reading of the will, it came out that he had left the entire estate, less a minor ($250,000) bequest to the Framingham Theosophical Foundation of which he had been a fellow, to his wife and child.

  She saw it then, at that moment, that her divine destiny in life was not only to raise her poor fatherless child as his father would have wished him raised (with certain obvious exceptions) but to assume herself the full responsibility for the Burton Babcock & Company corporate empire.

  She acceded to the posts of chairperson of the board and presidentress immediately and divided her life from that moment between raising Precious Babykins and running the affairs of the company. The idea of remarriage never entered her head. After her beloved Burton, it would have been anticlimatic.

  Chapter Three

  Precious Babykins (known generally as Bubba) grew up as normally as could be expected under the circumstances. Like his grandfather and his father before him, that is to say, against the violent objections of his family, he enlisted in the army and, in due time, earned the coveted wings and shiny boots of the paratrooper.

  But there the similarity ended. Grandfather Max, it will be remembered, had to be physically pushed out of the C-47 aircraft whenever a jump was
required. Burton Babcock III, were the truth known, had volunteered for the airborne forces in the belief he was applying for transfer to the air force. His distinguished service with the 508th Airborne Regimental Combat Team in Korea had been a result of his signing what he thought at the time was a request for relief from parachute duty. Despite a general belief that he was referring to the North Korean enemy when he made the often-quoted remark on waking up in the 4077th MASH following his being wounded, “Thank God, I’m alive; now I can kill the bastards,” he was in fact referring to the officers who had led him to believe he would shortly be transferred to the air force.

  Bubba, on the other hand, since the age of seven, had wanted nothing more out of life but to float godlike from the heavens under a nylon canopy. He had gone with his mother, at that tender age, to Fort Bragg for the unveiling of the 2d Lt. Burton Babcock III Memorial,* and there had been, to mark the occasion, a demonstration parachute jump.

  (* The 2d Lt. Burton Babcock III Memorial, located at the intersection of Smoke Bomb Hill Avenue and Division Avenue at Fort Bragg, is a larger-than-life-sized bronze statue executed by Gugliemo Gugliemi, the sculptor. It shows the bandaged hero, his head swathed in bandages, a .30-caliber carbine in one hand, a bayonet in the other, rising from a hospital bed. On a bronze plaque mounted on the Canberra-marble base of the statue are cast his immortal words, "Now I can kill the [expletive deleted].")

  He went to parachute school at Fort Benning, Georgia immediately after basic training and was three weeks later graduated summa cum laude from that hallowed institution. He applied for and was accepted by Special Forces, and spent the balance of his enlistment as a Green Beret HALO technician, a period he was evermore to remember as the happiest of his life.

  HALO is another of the army’s little acronyms, standing for High Altitude, Low Opening, and it refers to the parachute technique of jumping out of an airplane at a high altitude (thirty thousand feet and more) and falling like a stone to a low altitude (one thousand feet or so) before opening the parachute.

  “Mama,” Bubba had said to his mother on his first leave, “there is no feeling in the world that can possibly compare with falling twenty-nine thousand feet like a rock through God’s fresh air!”

  “I’m sure there isn’t, Precious Babykins ...”

  “I’ve asked you not to call me that anymore, Mama. I’m a Green Beret HALO technician now, and Precious Babykins is very inappropriate, to say the least.”

  “I’ll try to remember, dear,” she said. “What I was about to say was that while I’m sure falling like a rock, as you say, is a truly exhilarating experience, I hope you’ll believe your mother when she tells you there are certain other physical sensations with which, when you’re a little older, you will become familiar, which will please you even more.”

  “You are speaking, Mother, I gather, of girls? Or, to be somewhat less than tactful, of the physical relationship between men and women?”

  “As a matter of face, Prec . . . dear, I was thinking somewhat along those lines. You’re getting to be a big boy now …”*

  (* Bubba had been getting to be a big boy for some time now. When this conversation took place, he was nineteen years old. He was then six-foot-three, weighed 215 pounds, and had a forty-eight-inch chest.)

  “Mother, to spare you any further embarrassment, let me state succinctly that, as a Green Beret, I am not entirely unaware of the desires of the opposite gender. Our motto, as you know, is ‘De Oppresso Liber’ which, roughly translated, means To Free the Oppressed.’ And we take it very seriously. Every Wednesday night, and every other Saturday night, girls are bussed in from Fayetteville and, on a roster basis, we men of the Green Berets take turns freeing them of their oppressions. While I have found one or two of these encounters not entirely unpleasant, let me assure you that it can’t compare with falling like a rock from thirty thousand feet.”

  “One day,” she said, “believe me, Precious Babykins, you will hear the sound of heavenly music, signifying that Miss Right has come along, and then you’re just not going to care about your parachute any longer.”

  “Fat chance!” Bubba had replied, and changed the subject.

  Josephine hoped, of course, that when his enlistment was over, and he came home, he would be ready not only to assume his proper role in the Burton Babcock & Company corporate structure, but to give up what she privately thought of as his damn fool parachuting. She was to be disappointed on both counts. Bubba returned from military service with the announcement that he had, indeed, as the recruiting sergeant had promised, seen the whole wide world and, having seen it once, wished to see it no more.

  “I have learned to appreciate the simple things in life, Mama,” he said. “To identify that which is important, and that which is not. I intend to become a simple and happy tiller of the soil, more specifically, to devote my life to the oldest of the noble pursuits, animal husbandry.”

  “You want to race horses?” she asked. “Why not? We own a couple of hundred thousand acres in Kentucky, and I’m sure that by asking around, we can find someone who would be delighted to see that you get started on the right foot. If you’d like, Precious Babykins, Mama will buy you Churchill Downs as a welcome-home present.”

  “What I’m going to do, Mother,” he said, rather coldly, “is raise pigs right here in North Carolina.”

  “Pigs?”

  “They’re quite bright, you know. Far smarter than dogs. And horses, Mother, are rather far down the list, intelligence-wise.”

  “Your mother wants you to be happy, dear,” Josephine said, biting off the reply that came to her lips. “If you think you’ll be happy raising pigs, well, then raise pigs and be happy.”

  “I’m glad you understand, Mother,” he said.

  “And I’m sure that you will find pig raising every bit as satisfying as you did jumping out of airplanes,” she added.

  “You used the past tense, Mama,” Bubba had replied. “Indicating your erroneous supposition that I have given up parachuting.”

  “But you have, haven’t you? I mean, you’re out of the army now.”

  “I’m surprised that you could even raise the question,” he said. “I am, after all, the son of 2d Lt. Burton Babcock III. I’m in the Reserve, of course, and will maintain jump proficiency. That’s why I intend to raise my pigs here in North Carolina. It’s so conveniently close to Fort Bragg.”

  “I suppose it’s too much to hope for,” Josephine replied. “But you haven’t heard any strange music lately, have you? Heavenly music, perhaps?”

  “You’re not going to start that nonsense again, are you, Mama?” he replied. “I’m far too young to think of marriage, and if you will excuse my indelicate language, I am sick and tired of being nothing but a sex object, from whom women want just one thing, without considering my desires and hungers. It’s getting so that someone like me can’t even go to the beach without being whistled at and, yes, even pawed, by hordes of shameless females.”

  “Your father had the same problem, Bubba,” she said. “You’ll just have to learn to live with it.”

  Josephine told herself that his disinterest in the gentle sex was probably a good thing. For one thing, the world was full of young women who would like nothing better than to get their hands on the Babcock fortune, not to mention Bubba Babcock, and it was entirely possible that she could sort of steer the right kind of girl at him when the time came. And Bubba was right about that, too. The time had not yet come; she was far too young to be a grandmother.

  She did her best over the next year to keep Bubba aware of what was happening in the executive suite but, with one exception, he displayed a near-total lack of interest. He cared only for his pigs and for his weekends, which he passed at Fort Bragg jumping out of airplanes.

  The one exception, the one thing in which Bubba showed any interest at all, was what Josephine thought of privately as the goddamned bean, and which is known biologically as soja hispida Babcockisis.

  The gove
rnment, of course, was responsible for the problem. It had once again struck its nose into the free enterprise system, trying yet again to throttle it on the altar of consumerism.

  Soja hispida Babcockisis, a variant of the common soybean, had been around as long as the tobacco plant itself. It was not, as the government insisted, a ‘noxious weed.' The proof of that was obvious. Herbicides that would kill it would also kill tobacco plants, which, in a sense, was the root of the problem.

  Soja hispida Babcockisis grew, prospered, wherever tobacco plants grew and prospered. For two hundred years, Burton Babcock & Company (and its predecessors) had, in fact, considered it as sort of tobacco. Without one word of complaint from smokers, the centuries-long tradition had been to simply grind it up and otherwise process it with the tobacco and forget it.

  Josephine Babcock, who prided herself on her fairness, was perfectly willing to admit that she (that is to say, Burton Babcock & Company) and just about everyone else in the tobacco industry had gone a little too far vis-à-vis their interpretation of exactly what constituted tobacco.

  There is more to the tobacco plant than the leaves, just as there is more to the corn plant than those succulent little kernels. Tracing what had happened was simplicity itself and, God knows, the corn processors had done it long before the tobacco people had. They had set the example by chopping up the whole corn plant, stalk, leaves, shuck and ears, and feeding it to cattle. It obviously hadn’t hurt the cattle one little bit.

  With that example before them, the tobacco industry could hardly be blamed for doing the same thing to the tobacco plant. Certainly, as Josephine frequently pointed out, since the ultimate consumer was going to set it on fire rather than eat it, the potential for harm was even lower. What had happened was that first the fibrous center of the tobacco leaf, which had at one time been cut out and discarded, was roasted, toasted and otherwise processed along with the leaf itself. From that it had been a natural evolutionary step to include the branches and, ultimately, the stalk itself.