One morning, in late August 1945, will serve as an example for all our other such days. The apartment was so small that we shared a bed, Kate and I; we shared it with modesty but affection, and this enabled me to watch out for her during the night, to keep an eye on her moods, and to calm her if she grew distressed in her sleep.
Did I wish that matters could proceed beyond such a platonic and fraternal status? Of course I did, but I knew not to try just yet, and I also knew that long thoughts and patience must surely serve me best.
When we heard the foghorn’s boom, and she said, “Another promise!” and we hurried from the building, and we saw the others on the street taking the same direction, the life of that day began. By this I mean that all other events—our jobs such as they were, she in a laundry, me in a bar and then a retail store, and then multiple other places—existed only to serve this scurry to the banks of the Hudson.
The New York authorities had set up an area where the waiting people could stand and watch the disembarking soldiers. Sometimes, using barriers, they moved this “waiting pen” up or down the docklands, and, for half a morning or so, people wandered around confused. But always someone stood on hand to help in that fraught place of high expectations and higher emotions.
On the calmer days, when the waiting pen had been in the same place for weeks, and people knew where to go, I always surveyed the throng—which, of course, grew thinner as more and more troops came home.
Women comprised almost all the waiting crowds. Many of the wives looked a good deal younger than thirty years old, especially the G.I. brides whom the military had brought in from countries such as France, England—and Ireland. They had applied, had been given tickets of passage from their countries of origin, and by and large had an indication of the dates when they could expect their husbands home.
Mothers stood there too, and sisters, and sweethearts, and fathers and brothers; I have never been in a place of greater collective expectation, and then release.
That morning, so typical, three distinctive small groups disembarked early from the gray troopship. First came the stretchers, and if I ever think of the New York docks these days, I automatically see the Red Cross symbol. Like the briefest of telegrams, it told those of us watching that all was not well, that for the loved ones of those accompanied by people wearing that Red Cross, life would be different from now on, and generally not easy.
Their appearance reduced that gathering—often several hundred people—to a silence, a stony and fear-filled quiet, in which I often heard only the slap of the river’s wash against the hull of the ship.
As the stretchers came up the dockside toward the waiting pen, and thus closer to being recognized, the cries began. They began as sobs, a loud catching of breath, then turned into small screams—and it has to be said that some of the people thought to turn away instead of going forward.
After the stretchers came the men on crutches or walking sticks, sometimes accompanied by a helper carrying their knapsacks and duffels. Many had lost a limb; their formerly young faces had developed new muscles to accommodate the grimaces they had been making, as they accustomed themselves to their new physical conditions.
In among them, also accompanied by the Red Cross nurses, walked the men who had neither crutch nor walking stick, but whose faces wore bandages. These great white hoardings sometimes obscured most of the face, sometimes covered an eye or merely bandaged a heroic forehead. At the sight of these walking wounded, these slow, hurt young creatures, even the cries faded for a moment, and the waiting pen grew as respectful as a funeral.
Then the babble arose once more, as those waiting rushed forward to their new lives and trepidations. They couldn’t yet reach the men to hug them, and I couldn’t say which side of the barriers witnessed the greater distress. Directly in front of me that morning, I saw a young man who had lost several fingers and still wore a vast dressing on his right hand; and I heard him say to his wife, in all her colored print skirt, her white blouse, her yellow frizzy hair, and her earnest, welcoming, anxious, excited face, “Honey, I lost three fingers. I’m sorry.”
There is nothing—and I mean nothing, zero, nil—that you can say when you hear something like that, especially when you’ve known and have experienced some of the context.
As the waiting people greeted these walking wounded, I watched for the next batch to stomp down the gangway. That morning too, I saw something that many ignored, or saw but didn’t perceive. Still accompanied by the Red Cross in all its squared, crimson, and starched reassurance, came a separate, quiet group of men. About thirty of them appeared that day; I had seen their kind before; some people called them “the Silent Ones.”
They never spoke. They didn’t look anywhere for anyone. They walked straight ahead, without marching formation, without military clip of any kind, faces mostly cast down or, if not, eyes so inward in mood that they might have been closed.
These were the men whose wounds didn’t show, who typically—as on that morning—carried no physical marks, yet might never recover. They had suffered shell shock, the feared “war strain” that had first been identified as an actual syndrome in the ghastly massiveness of the previous European hell.
Today we call it “post-traumatic stress disorder.” It amounts to a horrible dis-anchoring of the soul, a dismembering of the power of rational thought and response. Many of these men coming down those gangways heard voices, they saw again the awful sights of war that unhinged them in the first place; they whimpered in their minds by the minute. For them, each day was forever night.
Most were taken from the dockside in transports or ambulances to clinics and rehabilitation centers scattered across the states nearest New York. For weeks and months and maybe years, they would live there, vacant in their minds and spirits, staring at the ceiling, or out of an unseen window, bursting into unexplained and inexplicable tears, unknowingly waiting for a day when their senses might return, and they could stop trembling and find new thoughts and hopes coming to them like birds returning in springtime.
Every morning, I watched these men with extra attention. From what I’d gleaned about the kind of soldier Charles Miller had had to be, and the things he must have had to do, I didn’t see how he could have escaped severe damage to his soul. He was, after all, a man so capable of tender intimacy that Kate Begley searched deep inside a war to find it again. If he hadn’t been wounded physically, what must have happened to his mind?
About this kind of experience I knew a great deal. On the night they took Venetia from me, my heart broke away from its moorings inside my chest. I felt it come loose, I felt it work free of the veins and arteries that held it, and I felt it rattle around inside me, as hollow as a stone in a tin can.
It took years for it to reattach itself to any tissue whatsoever, and that, I knew, is what had happened to these men, too. I hadn’t seen invisible things—but I had heard Venetia’s voice, over and over. Whether in my bed or on the shore or deep in the fields digging a ditch, she spoke to me, and that’s how I knew and recognized the Silent Ones.
When they had passed, I turned to watch for the final disembarkation—those soldiers, still able-bodied, who trudged down the gangplank and, in march time, turned their exhausted bodies up toward the bright city and the eager waiting faces.
Kate Begley looked to these and to these only. She never sent a glance in the direction of the three previous groups, the stretchers, the crutches, the opaque. I felt bothered by this. Surely it might have occurred to her that an injury might have caused the delay in which she so believed.
Were psychology as advanced in those days, I should have known what to call her avoidance of them—another denial. Or maybe her faith in Miller’s survival simply overwhelmed her. I can vouch for the fact that she never tried to communicate with any of the men in the first three troop sections, and yet she tapped so many passing arms in the main group of soldiers and in a voice of cellophane asked her question. “Was there a Captain Miller on your
ship?”
Once again, I could hear my heart cracking, drifting loose, this time in pain for her. Every day, we did the same things. She dressed like an American war bride—merry patterns, bright colors, a welcome as pleasant as a summer morning for her man coming home from the war. She did her hair. She bought bobby pins, Kirby grips—I know the terms only because she told me. She painted on lipstick, tried several shades of red, and she was indeed the fairest of them all.
And every day she came away disappointed—but you’d never know it to look at her, unless you knew her well enough to know where to look.
And every night, at some moment, I would feel her heave a sigh, and then I would feel the trembling in her body beside me, in its long white chaste nightdress, as she began to cry like a child that misses her father. Sooner or later, she would turn to me without a word, take one of my arms, wrap it around her shoulder, and press her face into my chest.
My habit of insomnia returned in those New York months, as I helped Kate Begley breathe life into the dream of the man she had married, even though I was the only person in New York who knew and acknowledged what had happened to him.
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September replaced August; the fall replaced the summer; winter replaced the fall, and we stood there every day, until we learned from the port authorities that the schedule of troopships had been so reduced they would now remove the waiting pen.
This brought us closer to the very point where the returning heroes first stepped on American soil, only now they arrived not on troopships but on ordinary vessels—ocean liners, and even freighters, and they arrived not in thousands or hundreds, but in tens and fives, sometimes in ones and twos.
Likewise, the waiting lines thinned, to around a hundred, and then fewer and then fewer still. Came a day when no more than a dozen people stood there; and came a day, New Year’s Eve 1945, with 1946 about to dawn, when Kate and I stood alone, waiting for a liberty ship, as they were called.
It arrived as promised and scheduled, but it contained only refugees from Germany and the Low Countries, many of them Jewish, hoping to reunite with their relatives who had been lucky enough to get to the United States before the war. Or had come in from Spain during hostilities.
The weather that day proved too inclement for anyone to wait long or at all; nevertheless, Kate and I stood there until every last person—passenger and crew—had come ashore. Still bright and still breezy, she turned us for home and another night of dreadful hope. On Monday we went back to our jobs, in hotels or factories or bars or wherever we were working that week—or day.
Months later, on Easter Sunday, she and I planned to walk down and greet a new ship. She had not shared with me whence came her information. I believed that she had a contact in some military authority office attached to or under the aegis of the City of New York. We woke early, she in the path of the sun in that wide flat bed. I heard her stir and watched her. She sat upright and stared at the window, the sunlight all over her face and hair, which had now returned to its loveliest; after the depredations of Europe she’d had it all shorn off.
As I watched, she shook herself, a dog’s shudder, and she hunched her shoulders as though swept by a sudden cold wind. She closed her eyes, and I knew that she hadn’t closed them against the sun—she loved the early light, loved it more than I did; it didn’t sting her eyes as it did mine.
Watching from my pillow, I waited for the mood to pass, and when I saw her shoulders go soft again, I said, “Good morning.”
She turned, smiled, and tugged my hair a little.
“Sleepyhead.”
“The sun’s up,” I said, and she said, “It’s Easter Sunday and we never saw it dance.”
“Never have,” I said. “Have you?”
She said, “Oh, millions of times.”
“Liar,” I said.
An Irish legend, attributed to some monk somewhere, said that ever since Christ’s resurrection the sun danced just after dawn on Easter morning, danced across the sky, then back into its slot again, and continued to climb.
“How would you know?” she said. “You’ve never been awake early enough. But those of us who work for a living …” She left the sentence unfinished. “Come on. The boat’s in at nine.”
“From?” I’d forgotten the port of origin, didn’t need to remember, Kate knew every one, and the embarkation times there, and the disembarkations in New York.
“Hamburg,” she said. “And this one’s a full troopship.”
She began to stretch, her body now restored to the greater roundness she’d had before Germany and Belgium.
I said, “Kate?”
“What?”
“How many ships, how many times—”
“I don’t want to hear,” she said. “Ben, I don’t want to hear.”
“But—” and she interrupted.
“Ben, are you my friend or are you not?”
I said, “I am your friend, Kate.”
“Are you my dear friend?”
“That’s not the point. It’s because you’re my friend that I’m asking—”
She jumped from the bed. “You’re not coming with me today. You just are not. I’m not going to let you.”
Without a brush to her hair, without washing her face in the tiny corner vanity, she grabbed clothes and disappeared.
How did I spend the day? Without my constant companion? New York felt as festive as a carnival. Bells rang everywhere; every church had a service of joy—the first Easter after the war had ended and things were settling down. Stores had stuffed their windows with merchandise; this spring, more than the earth was awakening—the soul of Man was coming back to life.
I lingered outside churches and watched the congregations emerge with the young soldiers in their uniforms being welcomed, thanked, and applauded. If there had been a band playing, the people would have danced in the streets.
Back in the apartment, and still alone, I listened to the radio and heard a news announcer mention the names “Malmédy” and “Peiper” and “Dachau.” As I remember it, my note to Kate told her, “I’ll be gone for a while.”
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May 1946
The Malmédy Massacre, as it’s now known, became one of the most infamous atrocities of war. Neither side, Allies or German, consisted wholly of angels, but in the age-old systems of conflict, “our” atrocities are better known than any of the incidents “they” suffered.
We had indeed heard the massacre, Kate and I. At least I’d heard it—I don’t know if she was hearing anything at that moment, except the blood rushing through her own brain and the roaring of her life in her ears.
I knew that something awful had happened. First, a shout echoed up to us. A harsh voice smashed the high air. A gunshot came next; the single middleweight crack echoed. Another shout, a second shot. Then silence. Next, a scream. Then, gunfire stuttered for longer than I want to tell, death with a metal stammer.
My groin tightened into a knot. Kate stared. At me. Not down the valley. Too afraid.
The machine gun stopped. And now it got worse. For the next five, ten, fifteen minutes, the old folds of the Ardennes echo to pistol shots. One at a time.
I remember a mental image, an impression—that a stream of slime and liquid filth had been poured on my head and had begun to slide down my bare face and naked body like a veil. Was I wearing clothes in this vision? I can’t tell and it doesn’t matter. My ears were telling me that I was listening to something particularly revolting, and that’s how my imagination responded.
Everybody knows the facts of Malmédy—how Peiper’s colleagues took hundreds of American prisoners of war. The deliberate confusion of authenticity had done some work, and the Allied soldiers weren’t quite sure what was going on, who was American and who wasn’t.
Before we got there, Peiper’s soldiers, the ones we’d been with, saw what turned out to be a small unit of an American artillery battalion, which, carrying only small arms, was trying to link up with a lar
ge U.S. division coming through from the River Meuse. The Germans opened fire, took out the vehicles at the front and the rear of the American column, and the Americans surrendered.
By then, Peiper himself (it was said in his defense) had moved on, just as his officers herded their newly taken prisoners into a field, where they joined other American servicemen who had been captured a few hours before.
In the freezing cold, the Americans stood there, unaccustomed in any way—militarily, culturally, emotionally—to defeat or prisoner-of-war status. One of them made a run for it. A German soldier shot him down. Disturbance bordering on panic spread through the American boys, and in their movements they gave the impression that they were all about to make a run for it. The Germans opened fire.
Most of the Americans went down under heavy machine-gun fire from close quarters. A few individuals escaped through the woods—they told their story when they got through the enemy lines to their own camps.
Eighty or so men had been in the group shot at close quarters; not all died, some played possum, trying to look dead in the snow. When the heavy firing died down, individual German officers and soldiers moved through the prone bodies and put a bullet into every head.
That night, the heaviest snow of the winter came in, to a height of some feet, and covered all the bodies. As you’ve seen, I know about that snow. But I can still hear the shots and when I first read of the massacre at Malmédy, I was able to reconstruct the pattern of gunfire in my head. That awful music still played in my brain when I went to Peiper’s trial at Dachau in May 1946.
I didn’t go into the carnage yards of the camp itself; I couldn’t, didn’t have the emotional muscle at that moment. Besides—and this is the excuse I made to myself—the cleanup gangs were still working there. Instead, I did what I had come to do—I went and sat in those spiritless rooms where they held the military courts.
The Matchmaker of Kenmare Page 34
