French Letters

June, 1965, Arlington, Virginia

"I've left them on your desk to look at, Junior . . . if you can read them. I can't. If they aren't something we need, destroy them, please." She had her face set in that "bring me no bad news" way she had about her.

"Yes, Mother. I'll take care of it."

I thought my mother was holding up very well, considering what his father had done. That she'd bring the letters up now, well into the reception at her Arlington house after my father's funeral, made me feel that they were not all that incidental. I wondered why she wanted me to look at them—why she didn't just toss the letters if she couldn't read them. They obviously were in some foreign language and I was a linguist, working at the UN now, in New York. She thought they were in French. If so, yes, I could read them.

I'd come home for the funeral and to stay with her until the notoriety had blown over. She was holding up well, considering, though. I could understand why she didn't want to stay in the house tonight—why she'd being going home with my sister, Susan, to the District, after the ordeal of the reception was over.

"I'm so sorry, Peggy. Please accept my condolences." Jordan—General Powell—was at our elbows. I'd seen him at Arlington National Cemetery and then earlier, in the house, moving around among the guest like a battleship among rowboats. I knew it was inevitable to see him here. It was what I was thinking about and dreading when I decided to attend the funeral—not for my father's sake, but for my mother's.

"Thank you, Jordan," she said, but added, in the same breath. "There are Denise and Tom; I suppose I must speak with them." And then she was gone, leaving the hint of her Channel No. 5 behind, leaving me with the general. She had been stiff with him. It was to be expected. Jordan Powell was my father's friend, not hers—there before her and in straits that she'd never had to experience with Dad. She suspected, I'm sure that he had a hand in all of this. So, I must admit, did I.

"Your mother seemed a bit distressed when I came over," the general said. "Something about letters?"

"French letters," I answered.

"Condoms?" he said.

I looked at him, confused. And then I gave a little laugh. I should have known. He—and my father—had been in the war together, in the European Theater. Condoms were called French letters among the soldiers there, in World War II, the war my father and General Powell had fought together, the war that had brought them so close and that had brought the general into our lives, so close into our family.

"No. Letters in French," I said. "She found them among Dad's things and can't read them. She wants me to look at them to determine if they should be kept."

"Yes, I suppose in the circumstances we need to do some backtracking and checking. We need to protect Edmund. Even now. Probably especially now. Have Dulles's people made an appointment to go through the house yet?"

"No, not yet," I said.

"French letters. So, they aren't the notes?"

"No. I'd found those already. I don't think either one of them ever found them. They were where I hid them. They've been dealt with."

"Good. I have been worried about that. Everything will be looked at now. I am sorry about your dad, Eddie."

"He didn't . . . you don't think he knew?"

"No, I'm sure he didn't. It wasn't about that. I'm sure of it. We were close even toward the end."

I didn't doubt that that was true. I think that's why Mother resented him—and why she had her suspicions.

"What your father did, what drove him to it, was something entirely different, I'm sure. It didn't have anything to do with you. That needn't, though—"

"No, please, general. This isn't the time for that."

"No, I suppose not. I'll be in the study."

And then he left me. Mother and Susan were at the door, Mother's signal to the well-wishers, I'm sure, that it was time to go. I knew that, with the general here now, she would be at the door, leaving as soon as she could. I don't think she'd stay here in the house long now, even though, with the exception of Dad's sunny, glass-walled study that he had spent so much time in, this was her creation, her world, which she formed and decorated and clung too. At least Dad had tried to do that much for her, but the summer house was still too close. At least he hadn't shot himself in the house. But why, if he didn't want to take this away from Mother, the world she had created and lived in in Arlington, couldn't he have gone farther away from here to do it?

All of the guests were gone now—with the exception of General Powell, who was in Dad's study, opening drawers, checking everything out, reestablishing his control. He wouldn't go until he was damn well ready to. This had been my mother's territory, but Dad had vanquished that, with a shot in the summer house. She and Susan were putting their coats on and saying good-bye to me. I had agreed to stay here in the house, to hold the fort down, and to be here when the military intelligence teams came in to dissect our lives—I would hope not before I could erase sections of it.

General Powell was in Dad's study, going through his papers and drawers. Mother had put the French letters in my old room, on the desk there, she said. I wonder if she had intentionally not left them in the study.

I wouldn't be missed for a while. I mounted the stairs to the bedroom level. I'd see what was in these letters an determine whether of not Allen Dulles's researchers needed to see them or if they needed to disappear.

* * * *

As he was undressing and fiddling around with the lube and the condom pack—the French letter, it came to my mind—I turned my head and looked at the wallpaper in my bedroom in the Arlington house. It had been years since I'd slept in here. When I did, as a boy, the wallpaper had always disturbed me and I hadn't been able to go to sleep until it was dark and I couldn't see the progression of clowns holding a barrage of balloons of different colors. I was frightened, not amused, by clowns. I'd tried to tell my parents the wallpaper in my room scared me, but they wouldn't pander to my fears.

"It's been a long time, Eddie," General Powell said, as he stood between my spread and bent legs and snapped the condom—the French letter in his wartime parlance—on his cock. He was a big-cocked man, and he was in soldier fit, even in his fifties. I was pretty fit too, and slim. I was able to look down the line of my chest and flat belly and observe him preparing between my spread and bent legs. My feet were pressed into the edge of the foot of my bed. It was just a twin bed, but even though Powell was a large man, we would manage. He would be on top of and inside me, displaying expertise of long practice.

"Yes, yes it has," I answered. Powell had been another thing I'd tried to tell my parents about—that he'd been fucking me since I was eighteen, but I never directly said it and neither of them wanted to believe it. Powell was a family friend. He'd brought Dad up through the ranks with him from the time they marched from Anzio toward Heidelberg together in World War Two, two decades earlier, the general, as a colonel then, making it to Heidelberg first because my father was wounded on the French-German border. But they'd been reunited in Heidelberg and had been together since, in military intelligence.

"I've missed you, Eddie," he said, as he stepped forward and inserted a finger in my ass, causing me to gasp and elevate my tail more to accept the invasion. He already had been kneeling below me, eating me out, preparing me for the cock as I moaned my surrender. I was ready for him to fuse with me and fuck me. Now he was hovering over me, capturing my eyes with his, inserting a second finger, stretching me for his need. I rocked on the finger, opening to him, not denying him anything. I didn't respond to his attempt to reconnect emotionally with me, but I couldn't say I hadn't missed taking his cock.

And then I was taking his cock. He was crouched over me, cupping my head in his hands once he'd put his cock in position, the bulb just inside the hole. He came in for a kiss on the lips and held me there, his tongue slipping between my lips, as I groaned and jerked a bit at the thickness of his entry.

"Tell me you want it," he whispered, giving me that "oh so superior" look of his.

"I want it," I whimpered, ashamed at wanting it but wanting it nonetheless.

He gave me most of the cock and held there, kissing me on the lips and throat as, panting and whimpering, I struggle to open to his demand. When I had, he rose his chest off mine, grasped my knees, and, as he liked to do, churned my bent legs in and out in synch with the in and out thrusting of his cock—pushing the knees apart with the inward thrust of the shaft and bringing them back into his hips with the withdrawal of the bulb almost to the entrance of my channel.

Yes, I wanted it!

He fucked me in long, deep, vigorous strokes—he was virile and vigorous for a man his age, all military precision and command. I gave him everything he demanded of me. I always had. As he fucked me, I stretched my arms out in a cruciform stance of surrender and turned my head sideways and counted the clowns holding balloons on the wallpaper next to the bed. I couldn't maintain the distance from this, though. This had never all been on him.

"Fuck, yes!" I cried out.

As the fuck got more intense, I clutched at his biceps with my hands, digging the fingernails in, and raised my head to his massive, hard-bodied chest, latching onto his nubs with my lips.

He was raising my pelvis to his angle of thrust with an arm encasing my waist and he got his other hand between us and was jacking me off. As we roared to the point of ejaculation, I arched my back and cried out again, "Yes, yes, fuck me hard. Give it to me!"

And he fucked me hard and gave it to me to our nearly mutual explosion. We'd always been good about coming off nearly together. After we'd come, he brought his lips down to mine to take me in a deep kiss. Coming out of that, he slapped me across the face, one way and then the other. I wasn't surprised. He was all about command. He wanted me to know who owned who.

Afterward, him lying on top of me, still inside me, and me, not telling him how heavy he was in nearly crushing me—heavier now than he had been five years earlier when he fucked me in the same summer house where my father had just recently blown his brains out—I thought again on the condom he was now sheathed with and had, no doubt filled the bulb of. Powell was a prodigious cum man, and when he'd first taken me, it wasn't with protection. Thinking on the condom brought the term "French letter" back to mind.

"General," I whispered. I thought it was telling that he called me Eddie—I was Junior to my dad's Edmund—but that I couldn't imagine calling him anything but general.

"Fuck, that was a great lay," Powell answered. "You are still a sweet lay. Always were."

That was the problem here. I was always just a lay to the general. It wasn't more than that. If it had been, I wouldn't have cared if it had all come out in the open. I would have followed him anywhere. Just as my father had.

"General," I repeated. "Who is Celestine? You were always with my father. Do you know who Celestine was?"

"Who?" he asked, but not fully convincingly. I had the feeling that the name meant something to him. I felt him tense up a bit.

"Celestine. Those French letters you heard Mother tell me about. I came upstairs and read through them while you were sanitizing my dad's study."

"Sanitizing?" he said, and he laughed.

"Yes, just that. I know you came here today to beat the intelligence guys to the study. You were protecting my dad, I know it." He was protecting himself too, I knew, but I wouldn't say that. "But Celestine. I know you know the name."

There was a pause. "You know that a sniper shot your dad in Alsace-Lorraine, on the French-German border as we were marching up from Anzio, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"Your father was in a hospital for several weeks before he could rejoin us in Heidelberg, where we end up."

"Yes, so?"

"Celestine was a nurse in the hospital."

"The letters. The French letters from this Celestine. They were love letters?"

"Yes, yes, they were," Powell said. "I would advise you to destroy those letters—and certainly before Dulles's men show up to tear this place apart. They will be looking for any evidence on why your father chose to end his life. I don't think you want them to pursue that path."

It was given more as a command than a bit of advice. But rather than saying anything else, he rose off me, and I lay there, legs still spread and bent, as he stood over me, rolling the spent condom—the French letter—off his cock, tossing the condom deftly into the wastebasket.

I lay there, completely open and vulnerable to him, both of us know that if he wanted another go at me, I was his to be had.

He wanted another go at me. Rolling on another, lubing it up, he barked a command. "Roll over on your belly. I want to doggie fuck you now."

I did and he did. As he held my hips between his hands and mounted and fucked me from behind, the old military cadence song floated through my head: "Roll me over, in the clover, roll me over, and do me again, do me again."

Although my face was turned to the wall again, I closed my eyes tight. I didn't look at the clowns and their balloons. His hand came over my mouth and nose. He would pleasure himself with controlling my breath in the fuck this time, listening to me gasping for air as he plowed me and moved to his release. That was what was important to the general now—his release. Only his release.

I don't know why I did it unless it was a subconscious gesture of rebellion against "he who must be obeyed," but I didn't toss the French letters. I took them back to New York with me and put them in my safety deposit box at the bank. I told my mother they were nothing important and that I'd burned them. She seemed satisfied and relieved—as if she may have known more about what they concerned than she had let on. If so, though, I don't know why she let me read them—unless she knew more about my relationship with the general than she was letting on too and gave them to me as a warning.

* * * *

August-September, 1944, Alsace-Lorraine, French-German Border

The American motorized infantry regiment under Major Jordan Powell slowed as it entered the village of Riquewihr on France's border with Germany in Alsace-Lorraine on the afternoon of August 14th. The major, in a jeep driven by Lieutenant Edmund Collier, stopped in the town square in front of an outdoor café. The town was deserted other than that residents could be seen peeking out of windows and doors here and there and a couple of old men and a waiter had been caught unaware at a table at the café and didn't have time to slink away before the Americans saw them and marked them as friend, neutral, or foe.

It wasn't exactly the reception that could be expected from a French village that was being liberated by the Allies a day and a half after the occupying Germans had pulled out and back into Germany. Powell's regiment had the Germans on the run and his instructions were to let them run as long as they were in France and not to engage them until they got on German soil. The French had seen enough of the war if that could be avoided.

Still, the residents of this village obviously were shell shocked and in confusion, not knowing who was conqueror and who was liberator. They would need time to absorb that the Germans were well on their way to being vanquished.

Signaling another jeep, driven by a Captain Jones, to pause beside his to check their maps, Major Powell, looking with hungry eyes at the café in the square said, "Lead the column to about here on map, Jim, and settle the men down there for the night. We'll cross into Germany tomorrow and speed up to engage whatever German troops running ahead of us we can reach. The men should get a good night's sleep before we hit the German homeland. I suppose I should ferret out the mayor of this village and tell him he's been liberated by the Americans. And he'll tell me how pleased he is whether he is or not."

As the last of the troop transports drove past the major's jeep and out of the square toward the border, the major's driver, Lieutenant Collier, said, "Where do you suppose we can find this mayor, Major Powell?"

"Fuck the mayor," Powell said. "I want to find out if this café serves real coffee."

Later, not far out of town, Powell said, "Pull over onto that track and park the jeep behind those bushes in that stand of trees."

"Have you seen something suspicious?" Lieutenant Collier asked.

"Just do it, Ed." And when the lieutenant had done it, the major said, "Come back here and suck me off. We haven't had an opportunity to do it for days."

Twenty minutes later, completely out of uniform, dog tags swaying on his bare chest, Lieutenant Collier was straddling the major's hips, the major bare-chested too, but still in his fatigue pants, unbuckled, unbuttoned, and fly flared, as he held the lieutenant's narrow waist between his hands and helped the younger man rise and fall on his buried cock.

"Take it, soldier. Take it hard!" the major barked, and his sex slave surrendered to whatever his master wanted.

Both of them heard the first misfired click of the old hunting rifle. Collier was the quickest to react, turning toward the threat from the branch of a tree, diving for his handgun, and coming up able to pick out the sniper with his eyes. But then he paused before firing. The rifle shot got him in the thigh. By that time Powell had freed his own weapon and shot. The boy fell out of the tree.

Collier's thought as he blacked out, explaining why he'd paused long enough to be the one shot, was that it was just a boy. He probably was just confused on who was friend and foe in the armies that had marched back and forth through his village, disrupting and threatening the lives of his family and friends.

When he woke, Lieutenant Collier was in a hospital bed in the larger town of Colmar on the French-German border after a painful stuffing back into his fatigues, the tearing of his pants to hide the fact he wasn't wearing them when shot, and a harrowing ride to the army encampment and then onward to better medical facilities. A doctor about ten years older than he was and a nurse about his own age were hovering over him. His regiment, under Major Jordan Powell, had moved on into Germany and had reached its destination in Heidelberg.

The leg wound had become infected. After more than a week of trying to save his life and then his leg, he had gotten beyond the danger. By then he was into a routine of nearly 27/7 care by a dedicated nurse, Celestine Langhorne, who looked after his every need, including sponging him off and putting him on a bedpan.

The two became very close, with Celestine able to understand what all of the needs of a twenty-five-year-old American soldier would be. As Collier's health was regained, with him only bedridden by the recovering leg wound, Celestine developed the routine of closing the curtain around the patient and sitting beside Collier, taken his erection in hand during the daily sponge bath, and giving him relief. As they became more and more comfortable and affectionate with each other, Celestine took the man's cock in mouth to give him relief. And there came the day when Celestine mounted Collier's hips and rode his shaft.

When the American officer was well enough to leave the hospital, albeit on a cane, Nurse Celestine continued to take care of him, having made the arrangements to move him to the house of the French doctor who had saved the lieutenant's leg.