by P. F. Kluge
“I want you to tell these people how you saved my life.”
“Oh. That.”
“When Griffin and me got back from seeing Juan Olmos, General Contreras was waiting for us at the spiffy new hotel he uses for headquarters. He had flunkies all around him, and bar girls, and bottles. I don’t know about the bar girls, but he sure as hell had gotten into the bottles. He was looking meaner than cat shit.
“ ‘You’ve seen Juan Olmos,’ he says. ‘You know my secret. You know that General Nestor Contreras, heir apparent to President Marcos, has a massacre in his past.’
“ ‘You didn’t set it up,’ says Griffin. He sounds half assed and wishy-washy to me. ‘Besides, you were young . . .”
“. . . and ambitious and charming,’ Contreras fires back. ‘Just an eager-to-please Filipino lad who wanted to improve his English. No I didn’t set it up. No, I didn’t shoot anybody. All I did was betray my best friend. All I did was listen to Wingfield’s plans. I knew it was coming and I watched it come. I watched some of the best fighters this country’s ever had be butchered. Don’t dance around the truth, Mr. Griffin. Don’t tell me what’s been bothering me these years shouldn’t bother me at all.’
“ ‘I think you wanted to tell this story,’ Griffin says. ‘I think you always wanted to tell it.’
“ ‘So? So what?’ Contreras isn’t exactly flattered by George’s sensitive understanding of his need to get things off his chest. `I told you. That doesn’t mean I want you to tell the world. No. I think I’m going to have to put you in the ground.’
“ ‘Just a damn minute,’ I say. It was my turn now. ‘I know I don’t count for nothing here, but when I see a pissing contest turn into forty days and forty nights of rain, I get worried. What’s all this about, General? Forty years ago you helped put some Reds away. Maybe they were good men. So what? You think that’s gonna hurt you with America? This America? Shit, we’re talking Communists! Enemies of our way of life, yours and mine. Enemies of . . .’
“I wave at the golf course, the gardens, the bottles, the bar girls, the new casino-hotel that would be needing customers.
“. . . enemies of all this. They’re gonna love you in the States. You saved the Philippines back then. You made it safe for democracy and elections and tourists and military bases and our whole way of life. You did it once and you by God can do it again, that’s what they’ll think. You’re a hands-on, shirt-sleeves-up, can-do, no-bullshit, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am kind of guy . . .’
“ ‘You think so?’ Contreras said. That’s when I knew we had him. All it took was a little common sense.
“ ‘I know so. Take my word for it, General. You got nothing to apologize for. You’re a winner. Winners don’t need to apologize to losers. Winners don’t apologize to anybody . . .’
“Contreras looks at Griffin, looks at me. He pours a drink, raises it to his lips, halfway swallows it, and busts into a laughing fit that sprays George and me with a fine mist of ice and Johnny Walker scotch. He flushes beet red. He chokes. He jumps out of his chair and dances. He keeps laughing. Finally he turns and he says, ‘Get out of here.’ Which we gladly do.”
CHAPTER 48
There was nothing left to say. No thanks or congratulations, no verdicts, no applause. What had happened had happened and then it was time for the ones who knew, Griffin and the rest, to join the ones who didn’t know or care, the people who were partying out on the Corregidor parade ground. Cadillac Bill resumed pursuit of his guerrilla extra: her torn uniform excited him. Hugh Beaumont had a plane to catch and Larry Wingfield needed to make some long-distance phone calls. Cecilia Santos looked as though she might have lingered, but Eddie Richter swept her off to meet a party of newcomers, Italian film producers interested in a project that had Vietnam MIA’s imprisoned by South China Sea pirates. Griffin watched her, the way she held herself while being introduced: Miss Fire and Ice. Welcome to the Philippines. And even as he stared at her, Cecilia Santos looked back at him and rolled her eyes as if to say, Here we go again. She was terrific. And so—in her own way—was Susan Hayes, standing at the edge of the party.
“Waiting for me?” Griffin asked.
“Or my car. Whichever came first.”
“Susan? Thanks for coming.”
“Congratulations. You worked hard, George, and it shows. If I helped you out, I’m happy. And if I slowed you down at all, well, I’m sorry.”
“The helping went much further than the other stuff.”
“How will the book do?”
“You mean, do I think it’s a best seller? Will I ever have to work again?”
“I wouldn’t put it quite as crassly but . . .”
“I aim to keep working. See, Susan, I’m like you.”
She smiled and nodded and Griffin felt that something connected them now. Then she glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to go,” she said.
“Now? Tonight?”
“There’s something in the air at the embassy. Involving me.”
“Something good?”
“I think so.”
“That can’t wait until tomorrow? Come on, Susan.”
“It can wait,” she said. “But I can’t.”
He watched her climb into a movie company car that would take her down to the hydrofoil dock. He wondered if he would ever get to know her. Then he realized he already had.
At the end, it came down to Eddie Richter. It ended where it began and that was further proof—as if any were needed—that endings and beginnings were illusions: everything went on forever. It came down to Eddie and George walking through the party, past the bombed-out movie theater and the commandant’s ruined house, out to the Pacific War Memorial, where all —well, some—of the war’s great battles were carved in stone. The place was deserted, shining in moonlight. They walked straight to the edge, and moonlight was all over the sea too.
“You never let go of him, did you Eddie? Not from the morning you took that photograph in San Leandro . . . not from then till now.”
“You picked up on that, huh?”
“Why? Did you love him? Did you hate him?”
“I could never decide about Harding. After I took that group picture, I wandered around, trying different things. Remember, I was going to be a famous photographer. I was behind the school when I saw the troops coming up. I saw it all. I saw Wingfield standing there . . .”
Eddie stopped. He covered his face with his hands.
“I heard Wingfield got upset when the shooting turned to beating,” said Griffin. “He even objected.”
“Sure, sure,” Eddie countered bitterly. “What’d he do, the grand old man? Belch?”
“Sorry.”
“I saw Harding standing there. MacArthur’s Ghost. The man who made promises. Well, his men were being killed in front of him. I don’t mean killed. I mean stomped and kicked and gouged. Tortured. Shat on. Laughed at. And his woman was out there too, don’t forget. And there he stood, tied up, tugging, screaming, vomiting. But you know what? It wasn’t enough.”
“What—what did you want?”
“I wanted him to remember. For one thing. Remember the promises he made. His buddies got put in the fucking ground. I’m not saying we should have handed the Philippines over. But to kill them, no way, kid. They deserved to live. They deserved to be a part of whatever happened, win, lose, or draw. They deserved a future. You know me, George. I don’t care about politics. I don’t have any recipes for this place. But I hate what happened that day. And you know something? Those people who died, they’re the real ghosts. From that day on, this became a spooked country. Because they can hold all the elections they want, they can rotate presidents in and out of Malacanang, change one sonofabitch for another, but it’s a hollow game. I know it. You know it. Contreras, too, I guess.”
“And Harding. Right, Eddie?”
“They came in because of him. They put down their guns on his account. They got butchered and put in the ground. That was Wingfield’s phrase. ‘Put i
n the ground.’ “
“And you never forgot that.”
“Never,” Eddie said. “I’m not saying I thought about them every day, or even every week. That was all right. I’d made a promise. It’s not just big shots who make promises, George. ‘I shall return.’ Not just them. Sometimes a squirt like me makes a promise while nobody’s listening and he keeps the promise while nobody’s watching. It just takes a while longer. Life gets in the way. But the older you get, you concentrate on what matters. When I retired down to Florida, selling condo time shares, I got busy. Beaumont and Wingfield think this movie was their idea. I got news.”
“So you brought them Harding.”
“Yeah. I’d kept in touch with him, on and off. Just praying he wouldn’t die before I got my act together.”
“What do you think of him now?”
“I think . . . oh hell!” Eddie Richter broke off and looked away, as if he’d just gotten interested in something out to sea. “I think I’m losing touch. Ten years ago, I could’ve told you exactly what I thought of him. A snappy answer. . .”
“And now?”
“Okay. He had a memory. And a conscience. And a heart. Which—alright, already!—got broken. You want me to come right out and say it? He was a better man than I thought he was. And now we’re passing out medals, I might as well say it: so were you.”
“And you, Eddie.”
“Oh, cut it out. So we’re all splendid guys. Tell me, does it make a difference, with assholes running the world? Did it ever make a difference?”
“We’ll see,” Griffin said. “It keeps coming back to me. Something Felipe Olmos said. Things die down. They don’t die out.”
“You believe it?”
“I think I do.”
“Well. They can do a lot of things to you. They can make you do a lot of things. But they can’t make you forget. And if enough people remember, well . . .” The tanned old-timer reached up and tweaked Griffin’s ear. He threw a haymaker at the sky. He stared out across the Pacific. “Maybe we’re all immortal.”
A Preview of ALMA MATER
Chapter One
ADMISSIONS
Every time I travel this way, driving north from Columbus, coming in off the interstate highway, I feel that I’m entering another country and that somewhere along these winding roadkill roads, somewhere among these small farms with Mail Pouch chewing tobacco signs splashed on rickety barns, somewhere near a sleepy, white-clapboard Ohio town like Homer or Brandon, there should be a guardhouse and a gate across the road, customs and immigration agents checking passport and visa, shots and tickets, before waving me on toward Kenyon College, a dozen miles away.
“Where you headed?” I imagine one guard asking, while his partner walks around the back, peering at boxes of books, suitcases, food, and spices I won’t be able to find at Kroger or Big Bear. Both men have the tired, spavined walk of a failed farmer kicking through a field of stubble. Everyone who works around here looks like a farmer doing something else on the side, delivering mail, cutting hair, whatever.
“Up the road to Gambier,” I say. “Kenyon College.”
“Uh huh . . . you a professor?”
“Part-time, sort of,” I say, glancing over at my wife. “I write and I teach.”
“A writer. You written anything I might have . . .”
“Herm,” the second guard interrupts, pointing into the back of our jeep. “Got something here you should maybe look at it.”
He reaches in and lifts up a jar filled with decaying vegetables swimming in orange-flecked fluid that might be formaldehyde.
“It’s kim chee,” I protest. “Cabbage that’s aged . . . and soaked in peppers and . . . Koreans eat it.”
“You in the Korean Department at Kenyon?” He sounds suspicious.
Word is out, I guess. There are all kinds of departments at Kenyon these days.
“English,” I say. That calms them both, it seems. They’ve heard of the Kenyon English Department, by God.
“Hope you know what you’re getting into,” Herm says, waving me through.
“I hope so, too,” I answer, pulling away, but not so rapidly that I fail to hear one of them saying to the other: “It’s okay. He’s not tenure-track.”
The miles of garden apartments and shopping malls, ranchettes and golf courses around Columbus have finally dropped away, though every year it takes longer to lose them. Now we move through a downbeat, abandoned-feeling country where weeds grow in railroad tracks that lead to rusted trestle bridges left behind from an America that used to be. It’s as though all these towns were once connected to something larger but they got unplugged fifty years ago. Trains connect. Roads bypass. Or obliterate.
If it is not another country that I am coming into, it is a particular place. Sometimes I think of it as an island, with all the island qualities: a sense that everything is connected, nothing is ever over, and everything that happens ought to be taken personally. The kind of place that, on its good days, can feel like the heart of the universe, the perfect center of a well-spent life. On other days it’s simply nowhere, it’s nowhere squared: not just a small college but a small rural college, a small rural college in the Midwest, a lightly endowed, wrist-slicingly isolated college with English roots and eastern airs, national and international aspirations, some wishful, some warranted, a college poor but proud, less conservative than old-fashioned, less elitist than peculiar, not a pushy, voguish college, not this one, but a college that stands at the edge of the party and waits and waits politely, sometimes it seems like forever, to be recognized and remembered and appropriately introduced: Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio. A place I sometimes love, with a history that rolls like the seasons, down through the years, and moods that change like the weather.
It’s not your typical college. With fewer than 1,500 students, it’s smaller, far smaller, than most. It’s also far more expensive: Kenyon costs around $20,000 per year. Eighty percent of American college students attend public institutions; Kenyon is private. Still, chances are that when you picture a college, you see a place like Kenyon. For here in Gambier, Ohio, is the very image of a college—the college of memory and dream, out of Hollywood movies and Plato’s cave, a college that is a confluence of people and place, of character and fate, architecture and landscape, college as a personal style, a way of life, college as a place where history matters and people remember, an island in space and time. Also, my alma mater.
I should begin by telling you something about my parents. They are both naturalized citizens, having been born in Germany and come here in the 1920’s. My father is a machinist and his father was a tinsmith. . . . I have lived in “Suburbia” all my life.
My application to Kenyon College, dated November 20, 1959, shows a snapshot of someone I have trouble acknowledging; bad haircut, big ears, black knit tie, solemn but inexperienced face. Spaces are filled, “in ink” as instructed, in a handwriting that barely resembles what I write this morning. I see the New Jersey address I called home till Kenyon came along, and I see a phone number that I haven’t dialed for years, except in memory. I listed Pop as a machinist foreman. They didn’t ask what Mom did. Reading on, I discover the awkward, unformed kid I was, earnest and sweet and clueless, proud of being a newspaper editor, a Key Club member, a National Honor Society inductee, who listed “foreign service work or foreign correspondence” as his life’s goals. Early failure faces me when I note that I was a Boy Scout, a junior assistant scoutmaster, a member of the Order of the Arrow, and yet just a Life Scout, never an Eagle. I went for soft, nerdy merit badges, things like World Citizenship, Soil and Water Conservation. Physical Fitness daunted me: those impossible, non-negotiable chin-ups.
My minor interests, which may or may not interest you, are taking walks, looking at sunsets, and humming to myself. I don’t suppose any of my “ideas” would strike you as particularly original or profound. I’ve done a lot of watching, listening, and reading, and am beginning to get an idea of what “beauty”
and “good” and “truth” are like. My thoughts still remain vague, but are generally becoming clearer. I hope that with the benefits and encouragement of a college education they will become clearer still.
I smile and wince at all this, at the odd blend of high seriousness and utter naïveté, blended shyness and arrogance I can still find in myself. No doubt about it, I was a child of the fifties, a scholarship kid and, any way you looked at it, a virgin. When it came to college, we all were virgins, the whole family, that whole generation of immigrant parents who wanted their kids to have the chances they’d never had, not that they knew where that might lead.
I won’t pretend that I come from an extremely poor family—I don’t. I have always had enough to eat and wear. But my parents, already in their mid-fifties, are approaching old age and have never been rich. I will not impoverish my parents and risk their well being in old age in order to go to college. Bluntly, I cannot attend Kenyon or any college of a similar caliber without substantial scholarship aid.
True believers, my parents operated on faith about the value of an education, never imagining what it was like to have a son who was an English major. Who knew from colleges? Colleges were an unknown America, something about success and happiness, however they combined. I was “college material,” school counselors had warned them. And someone told us that a small college was a good place to be. That must have appealed to our immigrant caution: Sure, a small college, that sounds about right for Freddy. Start small. Kenyon, Wesleyan, Hamilton, and, for insurance, Rutgers. Free-agent style, we would let the money decide, the scholarship money, and, when it turned out they all offered the same amount, I chose the last place I’d visited. I’d seen the others in winter when they were bleak and daunting. I made my first trip to Kenyon in April when the quads were green, when arching maples turned Middle Path into an arcade, when ancient classrooms exhaled dark-wood wisdom and there were violets coming up in the grass outside the chapel. It was beautiful then. And with forty faculty, five hundred students, all male, it was small. It was plenty small, all right, a small and improbable place: an English campus surrounding a rickety Appalachian village, perched on a hill in the middle of Ohio. Almost the last hill. Ahead, west, lay thousands of miles of corn belt plains. The East was a day’s ride behind, that whole twinkling, magic coast I soon learned to miss, high school girlfriends, daily newspapers, bread with a crust, all gone. The nights were dark in Gambier, the stars bright. Did Pascal say he worried about the distance between the stars? I was concerned about the hundreds of turnpike miles that divided me from home. I pondered the distance between radio stations, those horrifying, staticky silences, broken only by hog belly and Bible quotes.
