My Detachment My Detachment

by Tracy Kidder

  ON A VISIT HOME, I STOPPED IN AT MR. BERNSTEIN’S STORE, WHERE MY mother had always bought my clothes. Mr. Bernstein had followed my life’s progress with his measuring tape while cracking jokes. But when I came in that day, to present myself, a finished product now, this old friend of my youth was subdued. Leaning an elbow on a pile of chinos, he said that Oyster Bay had just lost its first boy in Vietnam. “He was a nice kid. A good-looking kid,” he said, gazing out his store window. “A thirty-four waist, thirty-one leg.” I thought I’d remember that line, for a story. I didn’t hear much of anything about Vietnam for months after that.

  In the fall of 1964, Cambridge was still more a town than a university’s metropolis, and its present seemed firmly connected with its past. Many stores and restaurants around Harvard Square were pleasantly unkempt: the Hayes-Bickford and the grubby Waldorf cafeteria, where you could go for a snack late at night; Felix’s newsstand, where you could get a shoeshine and in the back room buy a girlie magazine. At the Wursthaus, you could have a lunch of heavy breaded meat with your visiting father, as I did with mine and as he had done with his father twenty-five years before. The rules at Harvard hadn’t changed much. A student could still be expelled, for instance, if he was caught with a girl in his room outside of what were called “parietal hours.” In the spring of freshman year, I had wandered down to the banks of the Charles River to join a student protest. The upperclassmen had taken up this chant: “Two-four-six-eight, let the sycamores foliate.” The city had planned to cut down some of the trees along the river. A dean arrived and told the crowd to break it up, and we obeyed.

  The large antiwar protests hadn’t begun, and not much accurate reporting was coming yet from Vietnam. To the students who cared about politics, what seemed to matter most just then was civil rights, and many leaders of that movement still kept a discreet silence on the war. Styles were changing, of course, but one still had to wear a jacket and tie to eat at one’s house or social club. Girls wore stiff, nubbly, high-necked dresses to mixers. The Beatles had long hair, but long hair then merely impinged on the ears. I was very surprised when a student acquaintance of mine grew a beard. “Why would you want to have one of those things?” someone asked him at lunch.

  He put up a spirited defense. “I think you have to be lacking basic curiosity not to wonder how you’d look in a beard,” he said.

  Most of my roommates were former prep school boys, and most of the other students I knew belonged to the A.D. Club, one of Harvard’s social clubs. The A.D. was less prestigious than the Porcellian, Harvard’s rough equivalent of Skull and Bones at Yale, but it was old and some of its student members were already millionaires. I was invited to join my sophomore year, probably by mistake. A few months later, one of the older undergraduate members had told me, “You’re the wrong Kidder.” That is, my family wasn’t part of the Wall Street brokerage.

  The exclusivity of clubs was denounced by some students and faculty, who were of course snobbish in their own ways—this was Harvard after all. One other club at least seemed to care about the criticism. They were about to admit a black member. “I think it’s a good idea,” an elderly classics professor, a graduate member of the A.D. Club, said one day at lunch. He smiled. “But I’m glad it’s they who are doing it.” He used to stop in regularly, especially during the “punching season” (the period when new members were considered), and he’d recommend certain students he’d been keeping an eye on, always former public school boys. He felt the club should always have a few of those.

  I was pretty sure a writer shouldn’t belong to an organization like the A.D. Usually I hesitated and looked around to see who might be watching before I turned my key in the door and passed from a narrow side street of Cambridge into the spacious clubhouse. It had a Picasso on one wall, and many wood-paneled, tall-ceilinged, leather-upholstered chambers, and a poolroom, where under the inscription HE WHO LOSETH HIS LIFE SHALL FIND IT hung old photographs of former clubmen in World War I uniforms. Opposition to the Vietnam War didn’t run high there. I think most of us assumed that whatever the ruling class of America did was essentially correct, for the simple reason that we belonged to that class. I don’t remember hearing any talk about deferments from the draft; all college students were still deferred.

  Anyway, I was preoccupied. I kept expecting Mr. Fitzgerald to read a story of mine to the class again. I gave him one I knew he’d like. When I came into his office for a private conference, he was puffing on the stub of a cigarette. He’d put himself on short rations and was making each one last. He had a copy of the Iliad opened on his desk. Looking up from it, he said, “I should never have tried to do both the Odyssey and this. It’s too much for an old man.”

  I thought, You aren’t old! But I didn’t dare to say so. Anyway, I wanted to hear about my story. I asked him, in a voice already exulting at his answer, “How did you like that story of mine, Mr. Fitzgerald?”

  He performed his ritual of the reading glasses, pulling them an inch down his nose and looking at me over the the rims. “Not much,” he said.

  He was right. I wasn’t performing well, though not for lack of trying or, God knows, desire. I had become self-conscious about writing. I started a novel. I wrote twenty pages or so, but the most interesting parts were the comments and little drawings I made in the margins, and created with greater care than anything in the actual text, imagining my biographer’s delight in finding them. All of the stories I wrote in my room late at night, and the pastiches I wrote in class, came back with brief comments such as “Okay but no flash,” in an elegantly penned script. Mr. Fitzgerald had talked to us about something he called “the luck of the conception.” Now I knew what he meant. Several times that fall I had a dream in which I’d come upon the perfect story. The dream didn’t contain the story itself, just the fact that I possessed it. It was a dream suffused with joy, and I awoke from it with the same kind of sorrow I felt when I thought of Mary Anne.

  I dreamed about her, too. In one of those dreams, another Harvard guy came up to me and said, “Mary Anne? Everyone knows her.” I woke up feeling that I’d been sent a message. She’d been too busy to go out with me. Back then people spoke of “playing the field.” Mary Anne wouldn’t have used that phrase, but it described what she was doing, I believed.

  I often went to the A.D. Club to drink away my sorrows. One evening a couple of older members sat down with me. After several glasses of bourbon and water, I declared, “I’m the best goddamn writer at Harvard.”

  I remember scornful smiles. “Are you aware of the works of Voltaire?” one of them asked me. “And of a certain character named Candide?”

  I hadn’t read Voltaire, so I didn’t get his reference. I claimed that I had read it. Then they quizzed me, and proved I hadn’t. I punched one of them in the face. A brief scuffle followed. We knocked over the grandfather clock and broke a lot of glasses. In the aftermath, during the reconciliation, I explained to the other young man, the one I hadn’t punched, that my girlfriend had dumped me. He said, of the undergraduate I’d just fought with, “Yes, well, his mother died two months ago.” Then I felt chastened. His grief was probably just as keen as mine.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1965, BEFORE MY JUNIOR YEAR, I’D DRIVEN TO MEXICO with some Harvard friends. I told Mary Anne before I left that I planned to get a job with a newspaper there and forgo college for a year. I liked the way this sounded. I could imagine the young Hemingway doing something similar. I asked Mr. Fitzgerald to write a letter of recommendation that I could carry with me. “Mr. Kidder is competent to report on a variety of subjects,” it read. But I didn’t know anyone in Mexico. My Spanish didn’t work as well there as it had in classrooms at Andover. I wouldn’t have known even how to ask for a job. I came back embarrassed, but to my relief Mary Anne didn’t seem surprised. “I guess you were worried about the draft,” she said.

  In fact, I hadn’t thought about the draft. And I didn’t think about it again for months. Gradually, though, as junior year wore o
n, I began to worry in a more general way. I would graduate in only a little more than a year. What would I do then? What was I supposed to do?

  At the A.D. Club, a visiting graduate member had told us, “We like to think that we do not forget our young graduates, when they begin their business careers.” The promise of a future that I didn’t want but could always fall back on gave me a certain comfort when I was inside the clubhouse. A steward, cook, and waiter served hot, savory lunches to undergraduate members in a dark, medieval-looking room with leaded glass windows, around a great table, elegant and heavy, solid as a Boston fortune dating from the China trade. After lunch one afternoon in the early spring of 1966, I sat down in a leather armchair at the front of the building, beside windows that looked out over Massachusetts Avenue and across it toward Harvard Yard. I liked to sit there. It was like the view from the windows of a train rolling through a city, a glimpse of other lives from a comfortable seat. My friend Jock sat in a leather chair, facing me.

  He always wore beautiful clothes and seemed perfectly at ease in them; whereas even that handmade suit I’d bought didn’t seem to fit me right. Jock was one of those people who seem genuinely friendly around everyone, and curious about everyone, too. I asked him what he planned for the year after next, after graduation.

  He smiled, a slightly mischievous smile, a little like Mary Anne’s. He sang a snatch of the old tune “I’m in the Army Now.”

  “You joined the Army?”

  He uncrossed his legs and leaned toward me. “They have a brand-new, one-year ROTC program. You go to basic training this summer and the summer after graduation. You take ROTC courses senior year, and …” He smiled. “That’s all! They make you an officer. You have to go in the service anyway. Who wouldn’t rather be an officer?”

  Then one of my roommates told me he, too, was joining up. So were others from the clubs. I had no better plan. My father would approve. I hadn’t read the great antiromantic books of World War I, All Quiet on the Western Front, Goodbye to All That. I doubt they would have made as much sense to me as Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway himself had volunteered.

  OUT THE WINDOWS OF THE ARMY BUS THAT TOOK US FROM THE AIRPORT TO Fort Knox, the landscape suddenly became geometrical. I saw a land of straight, paved streets and rectangular, yellow buildings; paths bordered by round stones painted white; and perfect rows of boys in olive drab jogging down the sidewalks. A man in a wide-brimmed Smokey Bear hat met us at the bus’s door, and in a moment he was bellowing, almost in a marching cadence. “If you cadets can’t get your heads outa your assholes! Reach down and grab your ears! And see if you can’t pull them out! Far enough to hear me! Get in a fucking line!”

  There were times during those eight weeks when I’d be marching in the ranks and feel swept up. The voice of the drill instructor, six-foot-six-inch Sergeant Fisher, calling, “You had a good home but you left.” My voice and all the others responding, “You’re right!” I felt vigorous, the vigor of a healthy young animal outdoors. A purely physical pleasure; if you thought about it, you’d spoil it. It was like the thrill one can feel in churches when all voices are lifted—the sound of the cadence, two dozen pairs of boots all hitting pavement at once. And there was this feeling: we are formidable, we. I didn’t care for much of the rest of basic training, though. For the shaved-to-the-scalp haircuts and group punishments that made all of us the same. The assignment of KP and other unpleasant chores according to the location of your surname in the alphabet, which gave the W’s and Z’s a slight, unfair advantage. Mornings in formation in front of mustard-colored barracks, the drill instructor bellowing in my face, “I didn’t ask you fo’ no weather report, cah-det. Gimme twenty-five!” When all I’d said was “Good morning, Sergeant Fisher.”

  I regretted having joined the Army then, and also in the fall of 1966, when I came back to Harvard, with my shaved head still recovering. No one in Cambridge could have ignored the existence of the war in Vietnam that fall. Once a week we ROTC students had to put on dress-green uniforms and bus driver–type hats with little brass eagles on them, and walk across the campus to the ROTC building. Occasionally, other students would knock off cadets’ hats or call us baby killers. So far I’d avoided confrontations by hitching rides with Jock, who had a car. Then one day I couldn’t find him. I left my room in uniform alone and took a side street, skirting Harvard Yard, the brim of my hat pulled down so that I couldn’t see the faces of people I was passing, and so that they, I hoped, could not see mine. Once a pair of legs stopped in front of me, but I walked quickly around them. I never missed my ride again.

  Sometime that year I heard that several ROTC cadets from my class had gotten discharged by feigning mental illnesses. But I couldn’t imagine getting away with that, and I didn’t dare quit outright. Someone told me that you lost your student deferment if you did.

  FOR THREE YEARS I’D GONE OUT WITH OTHER GIRLS, WISHING EACH WAS Mary Anne, but now, at the start of senior year, she became my steady girlfriend. In the years since then I have met people who possess convictions impervious to any assault, and the way I understand this is by recalling the way I felt about her. I didn’t notice what clothes she wore. Whatever they were, they were perfect, because she was wearing them. I had never liked being teased, but from her any form of attention was thrilling. I spent at least a week of senior year visiting antique jewelry stores in Boston, looking for a golden comb that she might wear in her hair. The dealers didn’t know what I was talking about, and neither did I. Did I mean a tiara? No, that didn’t sound right.

  She had, I suppose, all the physical qualities that women claim for themselves in personal ads nowadays—slim, curvaceous, athletic. But I hardly noticed her separate qualities. When we were apart, I could hear her voice anytime I tried—often laughing, often slightly mocking, calling me Tray-Tray, or “my master,” answering boastfulness and pretension with “bi-ig man,” and “touch you,” and when I’d ask if she’d go somewhere with me, “Maybe I will, and then again …,”with her eyebrows lifting. At any moment, I felt, she might skip away, waving over her shoulder. I made her stand for so much else besides herself, for childhood and the seacoast and my sense of glorious, unnamed purpose, that I wonder if I ever saw her as she really was, and not just as an idea of mine, like that perfect story I dreamed of possessing.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the other men who might be in her life, and the ones she might be about to meet. I was so afraid of saying the wrong thing in her presence, and then of having just said the wrong thing, that I rarely stopped talking. When she got a chance to speak, I was usually busy planning my next attempt to be impressive, so I rarely listened carefully. In retrospect, her patience seems amazing. It did have limits, though.

  One evening she was supposed to meet me at my room in Adams House. She came early. When I arrived, she’d already read the latest entries in the journal I’d been keeping. It contained the beginnings of several aborted short stories, but also, lately, descriptions of the way I would feel if I lost her—“the loneliness, like a light vapor winding around me inside”—and the desperate acts I’d commit—shoot myself in the woods beside my childhood home, drive off a bridge, volunteer for combat in Vietnam.

  Actually, I’d left the journal in plain sight. I knew she was interested in my writing; she always encouraged me. I thought for a moment of feigning outrage that she’d invaded my privacy, but in fact I was delighted that she had. I just wished her eyes had fallen on different passages.

  “You want me to feel sorry for you,” she said.

  Of course I did, but that wasn’t half of what I wanted her to feel. “No! That was fiction,” I said.

  She wasn’t buying that, of course. Later that night I looked through the journal. At the end of one of my unfinished stories, she had written, “Blah!”

  I graduated from Harvard and went through eight more weeks of basic training at Fort Devens, an hour west of Boston. Mary Anne came to the commissioning ceremony, which wasn’t much
, just another parade. I put the second lieutenant’s gold bar on my collar, and once we’d driven a few miles from the post, I asked her to pull over. I took off my uniform shirt and put on a civilian one. “Poor Tray-Tray,” Mary Anne said, but without irony this time.

  A few months later, we broke up. Mary Anne said she was in love with someone else. I’d written my honors thesis on F. Scott Fitzgerald. Studying The Great Gatsby, I had at times imagined myself in the title role. I suppose I could have rehearsed the scene in which Gatsby acknowledges that the woman he loves obsessively might once have loved another man, then quoted him to myself and said, “In any case, it was just personal.” But books could transport me only so far. My world turned olive drab in feeling, and then it did in fact.

  BRAVE LIEUTENANTS

  THE ARMY HAD ALLOWED US ROTC CADETS TO CHOOSE OUR BRANCH of service, and I had picked Intelligence, because it sounded interesting. A new Army intelligence officer got trained as an infantry officer first, on the theory that he should know what intelligence was for. So I was ordered to Fort Benning, the huge home of the Infantry, encircled with car lots selling fast Pontiacs on the installment plan to young men made reckless by orders for Vietnam. Paratroopers were trained there. Groups of soldiers trotted by in formation, singing,

  I wanna be an airborne ranger.

  I wanna live a life of danger.

  I wanna go to Vietnam.

  I wanna kill some Vietcong.

  The war began to seem nearby at Fort Benning. It was prefigured in the person of the pleasant young life insurance salesman who visited our motel-like officers’ barracks, it was celebrated in some of the country-and-western songs that popped up from all over my clock radio’s dial, and it was freshly recollected and its dangers and thrills exaggerated by our instructors and by the several former infantry sergeants who had received battlefield commissions in Vietnam and were being put through the Officer Basic Course along with us rookies. We learned about muzzle velocities and killing radiuses and plastic explosives. “You tie a cord of this nice shit around Charlie’s neck and walk along behind him with a detonator, and I guar-untee he ain’t gonna lose his head and run.” In our war games, we brought smoke on Charlie and ruined Charlie’s whole day, and we learned how Charlie would get us if we were careless and wandered into a dreaded L-shaped ambush or a thin trip wire. Sardonically smiling veterans sang us this lullaby, to the tune of the pop song “Poison Ivy”: