Prisoner's Dilemma

by Richard Powers

  No, Eddie had for years been her only current event, and for that she was almost grateful. She loved the threatening thrill that unemployment brought twice every decade. She cared little for security or money, and could have made do on occasional ten-dollar gift certificates from friends. She gladly traded steady income for a cause. Ed’s expulsion required of those nearest him only that they sacrifice small amenities—security, comfort, a life in common with the rest of the precinct—in order to regain the lost capacity to know and feel. And as much as she hated to see the least anxiety shade her children’s faces, this continuous domestic disaster, at least, gave them something tangible. Crisis, at least, was real.

  She never spoke of her great, unpublished discovery. His worsening bouts denied interpretation. He coughed up solid mass and remarked, clinically, “Ah! Blood.” He was upstairs disintegrating. There was no lesson. If Hobson’s sickness was Ailene’s one harbor, his refuge refused her altogether. She took the pencil tip out of her mouth and wiped it dry. She added to her shopping diary:

  Just around then, he started Hobstown. Or maybe just before. I should have written it down as it happened. I can’t remember sequence anymore.

  She tried to imagine the project that had taken him over, the one hobby he still enjoyed. She knew little about the place, but linked it with the disastrous Christmas party that night so long ago. First one had happened, then the other. And ever since, her husband periodically removed himself from here to build this other place, the last monastic in the age of community. Every move he made was a Protestant’s bid for Blessed Saint of Indifference. And Hobstown was his hermitage, reliquary, shrine, his chapel to the virtues of doing without.

  Three decades back, when she had just gotten used to marriage, her husband produced a pair of pinking shears, a bridal-shower gift from a girlfriend Ailene had long lost track of, and relieved her of her hard-won credit cards with a few deft snips. Not that Eddie questioned her least expense. She, if anyone, pulled the pursestrings. Every cent of cash he had he gave her willingly. He simply could not live under the umbrella of credit, owning the unpaid for. Ailene, with a sense of wonder that grew daily, found she had married the last man in America who couldn’t owe money. That was his golden rule: no one deserved to draw on what wasn’t there to begin with. Everything that Edward practiced, the table talk, the pedagogical riddles, the banter, the bluster, the evasive employment pattern, even the passing out: everything preached one and the same thing. Hobstown was the only sovereign state ever to practice the principle of complete self-sufficiency: sacrifice everything, pare it away until all that’s left is the unencumbered mystery of getting along with, for, and by yourself.

  The only thing she knew for certain about her husband’s endless sessions with the tape machine was that her favorite rule of thumb about things being simpler than people made them out simply did not apply. And if it didn’t apply to her husband’s model town, it did not apply to him. And if not to him, then her own home could burn down at any moment, sacrificed to the bonfire of complexity.

  She put the possibility out of her mind. She had narrowly escaped that danger. For today, things had changed. The tapes, the evasion, would be put away. Soon, his sickness would become material, hard stuff under the touch, properly attended to. Soon the doctor would hold up in front of her the unintelligible film collage of X-ray grays and point out, “Here. This spot here is wrong.” Soon the violation of his sick chest would become harsh and definite, stark contrast to the regular and newsless days.

  For today, Eddie had vowed to take the cure, go public. Perhaps no treatment, at this late a date, could interfere with or improve the course of the disease. But the tests, medications, and prognoses themselves, each a narrative with pacing, drama, character, and denouement, were worth their weight in secondary symptoms to Ailene. Soon she would have a word for what was wrong with Edward. She would have the experts’ name, the name in the medical manuals. And then she could translate the agreed-on term into Hobson dialect. The Hobsons, who had their own words for everything, their private language, a tongue that excluded eavesdroppers, defined club membership, condemned one another to intimacy, would soon have to accommodate a new term.

  Years before, when the world still smelled of well-floured hands, Ailene had compromised with the kids. Wanting to squeeze the most use out of the few hours allotted them between their release from school and consignment to dinner, they refused to keep to the backyard and insisted on ranging the neighborhood. Her working agreement with them extended the Hobson grammar: three shrill blows on a metal drill whistle, rescued from Ed’s lifeguard stint at Aptos, meant they had five minutes to get back, scrub, and be seated at table. She could still recall the sound: six P.M. on a summer’s evening, brrilll three times from the back stoop, and through every plate-glass front room on the street, in each neighborhood child’s heart in no matter how distant a sandlot or park, most of all in the blood of the children to whom the whistle dictated, there registered the idea she now wrote down:

  The Hobsons are speaking to themselves.

  What this whistle no longer obliged in her children, Ailene could reclaim by Latinizing the disease. A new word could call them in and remind them: blood. The old mystery of sacrifice and connection needed a name. They had learned the watchword sacrifice from the man. Could they not now teach him new vocabulary?

  She carefully inverted the pencil and touched the eraser to the paper. After a last look, she rubbed until the whole brief history she had written that evening dispersed, returning the sheet to its white simplicity. She flipped the paper over and looked at the other list, the groceries: her way back to the golden rule.

  Ailene stood up, walked over to the refrigerator, and attached her shopping list to it with a free magnet. She opened the fridge, which Edward, stubborn thirties holdover, still insisted on calling the Ice Box. Inside, she thumbed the dial down from 7 to 6. The machine lumbered to a halt, cut down in its freon prime. She straightened and switched off the radio, which had drifted just wide of the nondescript station she had set it to. For the last few minutes, it had sprayed a fine mist of static into the room without her hearing. Then she walked stoveward and flicked off the range fan which had been going since dinner, drawing off the suspended fats and airy colloids and storing them, inoculated, in internal hidden reservoir.

  Silence sprang up, thunderous silence, stripped of the background tracks that had accompanied her evening. In the audible silence, Ailene committed to memory today’s date. Today, Eddie had made a historic concession.

  She left the forty-watt bulb on over the sink, in the event that her children might wander down at night. Children needed something to see by, as a rule of thumb. After one last worldly inspection, she gave the kitchen a final salute before taking the trip upstairs.

  Safe in the bedroom, she moved silently in the dark, so not to wake the invalid. She went to the back of the closet where all the important papers hid, extricating a folder marked “Keep.” She read, by closet light, behind closed door, Eddie’s trail of long untouched insurance documents, to see if any still applied. For he had given her the green light. Her trust had been returned with trust. Tonight, they had arrived at a place she had never, for three decades of marriage, doubted. Every reef connected underneath. Tonight, she had news. Ailene knew her husband’s every spell was elaborate Hobson lingo for “Nurse me.” And now she would.

  Spring. 1942

  Eddie Hobson’s local urgency scrapes up against the Big Picture in February 1942, two months after the Japs bomb Pearl Harbor and we enter the war. The collision of inside and out begins unnoticeably. The world around him mobilizes, but Eddie’s life is unchanged. He goes to silly matinees. He dances the Lindy and the Big Apple. He sings his sixteen-year-old waiter’s heart out on the Hudson. Sings with a swing.

  He joins scrap metal, paper, and rubber drives. He turns in used toothpaste tubes. He lives his life around his parents’ ration stamps. He polices his neighbors’ minor violations o
f home-front thrift by repeating the popular refrain, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” But in America, the one untouched, enchanted island in a world submerged in bloodletting, the war is not always obvious. Only the occasional State Department telegrams to newly minted gold-star mothers affirm it. And in early 1942, these have not yet begun to come home in earnest.

  Consumer hardships aside, the biggest impact of the war in ’42 is the awakening of American exuberance, the delight in the fight. Neighborhoods take to the conflict with violent enthusiasm, aggressive confidence that shocks the world. The country’s spring cleaning, dusting away musty isolationism, rumbles its dormant strength, announces the arrival of its hour. It celebrates its jazz-age boundlessness, its Copeland fifths performed by backwoods brass choirs. These things waited for the attack. Now they break loose.

  Its very cigarette packages go to war. Its March of ’42 fashion magazines ask “What’s New?” The answer is Elizabeth Arden sporting service cap and monkey wrench, a two-page cartoon spread on the consequences of drafting women, and a buyer’s guide to refrigerators, although no new refrigerators can be had at any price. “Our charming young model goes backstage at the Imperial Theatre to sell a Defense Bond to Danny Kaye. . . . For this big moment, she chooses a two piece faille suit in a new high shade. . . . $19.95.” We join this epochal shoot-out, but on our terms.

  We wake up. We will buy this victory. Boys will win it with scrap drives. Myrna Loy will win it by sassing Hitler. Thomas Hart Benton already paints the victory celebration, complete with dusty fiddles. We’re flexing in Motor City on the armaments line. Flexing at Hollywood and Vine and on the family farm. For the first time it’s okay, even fun, to be coarse—coarse Oakie, coarse Rocky Mountain, coarse Lower East Side. Coarse will come out of this conflict leading the world. And everyone else on the block will have to learn to play by our rules. The rules of the Empire State spire, Iowa Corn Boil, Appalachian Spring, Broadway Boogie Woogie.

  The Depression is finally sealed. The Dust Bowl becomes Ma Joad, who in turn becomes Jane Darwell. Two months after the sneak attack, it seems as if we were itching for it, daring the enemy to do it. Now we set out on a global enterprise, ebullient, charged with energy. The war is not about civilian bombing, torture, deportation, people hiding in shelters or burned out of foxholes. The war is about righting wrong with unprecedented industrial production, Tit for Tat.

  But before we can fully celebrate our strength, we must address the fact that the Arizona has gone down, and the Oklahoma, with at least fourteen other ships sunk or badly damaged at Pearl alone. We have no navy to speak of between our coast and the Japs. That’s enough to turn what is still called national sentiment toward defense at any cost. In February 1942, our national exhilaration explodes against the Japanese, all Japanese, even Japanese of our nationality. A spontaneous outcry, both among administrative higher-ups and ordinary, government-issue citizens, insists our national interests are threatened by those eighth-of-a-million Japanese Americans living up and down our now unprotected West Coast.

  This untested element, sitting on the vulnerable Pacific rim, might take the opportunity to do guerrilla work or reconnaissance for the Imperial Army. Then again, they might remain forever as blameless as they are at this moment. But national sentiment, the disgrace of peace-with-honor sympathies, and the stakes involved in guessing wrong, make it impossible, so goes public reasoning, to gamble on good behavior and lose.

  How endangered is California? Could we really be attacked? What threat these AJAs—Americans of Japanese Ancestry—really represent is never spelled out. But the general alarm centers on the possibility of beacons from church steeples, and the like. FDR puts through a proposal in mid-January: all aliens must register with the U.S. government.

  On February 20, 1942, Dr. Win-the-War writes another prescription, stronger but just as silently mandated. Roosevelt approves of a plan to round up more than one hundred thousand of these Japanese Americans—two thirds of them American citizens. They are forcibly removed from their homes and shipped inland for safe internment. The government builds concentration camps in Colorado, Montana, Utah. There is no other good name for these prison villages, surrounded by barbed wire and manned by armed guards. They are built for the express purpose of imprisoning our internal enemy.

  By rough calculation, 90 percent of all Americans of Japanese extract are rounded up. This includes not just issei, or foreign-born Japanese nationals, but also more than 60,000 nisei, first-generation American citizens empowered with every constitutional right enjoyed by the FBI agents who come to arrest them. Altogether, more than 112,000 civilians are herded off to the camps and kept there for the next three and a half years.

  Among their number are UCLA graduates to whom kanji is Greek, whose idea of preserving their heritage is wearing a kimono to the costume party following the Bruins’ homecoming game. Fathers, mothers, and little children end up on opposite sides of wire fences. Some are kept in animal stalls until space opens up in the permanent camps. Students at Hollywood High, sons and daughters of directors and starlets, come to class one morning to find that their buddies, sons and daughters of studio executives and scriptwriters, are mysteriously absent.

  The emergency-evacuation project is smoothly and adeptly administered. People who have committed no crime and who are not charged with any must sell everything they own at fire-sale prices, strip down to two suitcases, and hop flatbed trucks to relocation centers. People are arrested in evening dress, coats and ties, work aprons and blue collars. Many are issued prisoners’ clothing: denim with stenciled numbers. Each receives an internee’s record they must keep with them: name, roundup date, and places of internment. Some sheets are on government stationery printed with the message, “KEEP FREEDOM IN YOUR FUTURE WITH U.S. SAVINGS BONDS.”

  It’s a messy business. Earl Warren, making a brief stop as California attorney general on his way to the U.S. Supreme Court ten years later, adamantly backs the roundup. Some suggest he’s pressured by protectionist interests, eager to remove the Japanese small businessman from the land of free competition. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. Can we afford to take a chance and see? Once sabotage is done, it’s too late to admit mistakes. When, two days after Roosevelt’s approval of the internment, a Jap sub shells a Santa Barbara oil refinery, opposition to the idea collapses. A few fire balloons explode on the Oregon coast, making the move seem increasingly prescient, albeit ugly and indiscriminate. Better alive and compromised, say most, than virtuous and overrun.

  But when weeks go by and no more attacks against the mainland materialize, no one thinks about the matter again until too late. Nobody takes up arms to oppose the measure. The arms have already been taken up in other operations, other countries. Besides, what can anybody say? To oppose what everyone else deems a necessary evil is to be a collaborationist.

  The mass imprisonment is one small and mostly overlooked step in the largest and fastest mobilization the world has ever seen. One sacrifice in a time of nationwide sacrifice. Everybody does his or her bit, however indirect, for the collective cause. Some people are shot out of the sky, some people work the USO, some people go to camps. Housewives save fat and Ford converts to manufacturing aircraft. Old men go back to work; women smelt iron and build ships. Girls raise victory cabbage. Boys who do nothing but dim lights and keep their lips sealed contribute to the fight.

  All industries, even the frivolous, do their part. Hollywood enlists en masse. One fifth of Tinsel Town dons uniform. Some see actual combat. Others do the invaluable work of spelling out the ethos. Several hundred of the movies’ most talented are recruited by the Signal Corps for their own film unit. The pictures they make fuel, define, and sustain this national awakening.

  Disney already has ideas for any number of films: morale raisers, cartoons conscripting Mickey, Donald, and the gang into the war effort. They can put Minnie to work raising yams in a victory garden, if that’s what it will take to win the vast showdown. His studio is occupied
by an antiaircraft unit for eight months until the panic over impending invasion dies down. (In case of air raid, goes the L.A. joke, go directly to RKO: they haven’t had a hit in years.)

  When he gets the call from Stimson, Disney promises to turn his studio into one of the most powerful weapons for winning the home front. More than a third of his prewar personnel are conscripted, but are returned when the importance of their work is made clear to the local draft board. The unofficial slogan circling the animation office runs: “They also serve who only can the bait.”

  After several secret sessions in D.C., impassioned presentations by the government, Walt flies back to L.A. and enters a flurry of production. His staff puts a hundred short subjects into the pipeline. Among the first are twenty films teaching spotters how to identify enemy airplanes. Next comes a trailer called The Winged Scourge, with a cameo by those seven model citizens, Snow White’s dwarves. The film is not about the Luftwaffe but about how the average foot soldier can guard against malaria. There’s also Chicken Little, an anti-Nazi condemnation of mass hysteria, and The New Spirit, in which everybody’s favorite, irascible duck learns to pay his income tax so that the country can stay solvent long enough to purchase the triumph. Nobody uses the term propaganda, but that’s what the films are.

  Technically, Disney’s great achievement of these months commences with Victory Through Air Power, begun in the spring of ’42. The work is a tour de force, combining live action and animation, of extreme tactical and strategic value, produced by the team that created Bambi, five years in the making. Victory is done in a little over eight months, even though its script is rewritten throughout production as its predictions come true and become outdated. The finished product so impresses Churchill that he asks FDR, at the Quebec conference, why the latter has never seen it. Roosevelt has no answer, so a special print is flown up by fighter plane from New York. The president is so excited by Disney’s aircraft choreography that he forces the Joint Chiefs to see it. Only this way do the Allies ensure adequate air protection for the Normandy invasions in June of ’44.