by John Hersey
“Hey!” I said, protesting the stoppage, and the automatic fingers began to move again, and I realized that their warm friction was more important to me than all the bellyaches and gripes on earth. I gave up interest in our exchange and pressed my head against Daph’s resilient abdomen and half lost what she said next.
“You ought to know one of them.”
She meant Marrow, of course. So my Daphne, having already sized up my pilot, had dropped a hint about him, to which I wish I’d paid better attention. Had I thought through what she had said, had I not been transported, put half to sleep, by that stroking of my temple, I might have seen Marrow whole much earlier in my tour, and I might have been spared the full force of the disappointment, shock, and revulsion to which I was treated so near the end.
5/
Time glided along like an electric launch, and too soon we had to board our barge, and we rode downriver, and we were famished. There was supposed to be a five-shilling limit on the price of meals all over England, but Daphne knew of a place called the White Tower off Soho Square where, for a heap more than the limit, we could get some fine crackling bootleg roast mutton. (“Nothing like beating the system,” I said.) And afterwards, in mid-afternoon, we took a room at one of the best hotels, and when a stiff clerk asked where our luggage was, Daphne held up her purse, which was a big one with her nightgown and fixings in it, and without batting a lash the clerk said, “ ’Nk yaw,” on a rising inflection, meaning thanks, and didn’t even ask me to pay in advance, because of war and allies and all that, I supposed; perhaps he was thanking me for Lease-Lend. And I took time to think: Americans call it Lend-Lease, the English, Lease-Lend—a nice exercise all around in self-congratulatory self-deception.
A very old porter—for all the young men were otherwise engaged—with a single key on a huge ring led us to our room. “If you please, sir,” he said, standing by the door and pointing with his elbow (in order, I suppose, that only the gentleman would get it) at a sliding bolt with which one could lock the door from within. At that I tipped him too much, and when he was gone I loudly shot the bolt and Daphne and I, laughing, embraced.
The sack was superior. We were in it, awake most of the time, for twenty hours.
6/
Daphne had to go back to Cambridge on Sunday afternoon to be able to return to work on Monday morning, and I took her to the King’s Cross Station and then hopped a cab to join Marrow and the gang at the Dorchester, where they had said they would be. Marrow had a room, all right, but no one answered the house phone, and I bribed an old boy to take me up and let me in, and no one was home, so I lay on the bed and gave myself over to the best glow I’d ever experienced.
Daphne was really mine! When we had first approached each other, the previous afternoon, it had been with a deep shyness yet an overpowering yearning. What ensued seemed our first touching and joining, for this time Daphne truly gave herself to me, and I found that I had not been mistaken: deep in her there were surprises, storms of feeling, extraordinary furnace fires, bottomless spasms, tender places, changes, quiets.
At the end she had anxiously asked me, “Do you still love me?”
I had not made any formal declarations; I was not sure what love was. But I was sure that I was the king of the forest, and I was amazed at her question.
Then she had wept. She had sobbed in my arms, and I had been stirred all through, because I understood that her tears, her wrenching, heaving sobs, stood for an enormous gift to me—of her whole self. I understood that something that had happened to her in the past had made her want to hold back large parts of herself; she would allow herself, perhaps, to be more or less raped, as I had, I guess, violated her, with her acquiescence, the first time we had been together in Cambridge, but she would not dig deep and make, as the expression goes, love. But now she had done just that, and she wept out her overwhelming joy. I dried her tears with a new access of passion. All night and all morning we made new discoveries.
I fell into a sleep such as I had not had since our arrival overseas—a velvet blackness, a sleep of my innermost soul; but this healing rest was interrupted, because Marrow, half tight, came blustering in to take a shower before dinner. He got me up and recruited me for a pub crawl. It seemed that the mighty swordsman had nothing definite to do. We went out and moved from bar to bar. Marrow may have crawled; I floated. I was high. I didn’t need a drink. But I took one. And another. We lapped up wine; tried gin; had a Pimm’s; found some so-called whiskey. Sang down the Mall.
We tied up with some Dutch R.A.F. pilots in the Berkeley Buttery, where, through some inadvertence, we decided to have some chitterlings and champagne.
After we got talking, the Dutchmen started ripping Hitler’s stomach with vengeful hearts (“Daph! Daph!”—I kept floating off into reveries), and suddenly Marrow said to those two guys: “You know whose guts I hate?”
Marrow lit into John L. Lewis. The Dutchmen, who had lost homes, families, and livings to Hitler, were astounded at Marrow’s vehemence, for they didn’t even know who Lewis was. Marrow started by describing Lewis’ enormous head, and the great contempt-swollen flap of his upper lip; he gave a vivid picture of Lewis—and, oddly, of a physical being such as he, Marrow, might one day become: gross, aggressive, toad-like. At the end of April Lewis had taken his soft-coal miners out on strike in Alabama, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania; he had thumbed his nose at the War Labor Board; Roosevelt had had to seize the mines. Men were dying overseas! Marrow’s tirade began with animal epithets: skunk, pig, horse’s ass, and it moved through scatology into demonology, until it appeared that Hitler was only a petulant, troublesome urchin and John L. Lewis was the true scourge of the earth. Really, the Dutchmen began to look cross-eyed, and I must say that I was surprised by the virulence of Marrow’s invective; sergeants had never had it so bad from him. I wondered why. Perhaps the physical picture, or caricature, that he had drawn of Lewis was a clue, for there was surely some self in it; perhaps Marrow’s own long battle with cold and discomfort, back in March and April, which had involved him in that theft of coke from the stack for the enlisted men’s showers, was preying on his mind.
The Dutchmen went off shaking their heads, and pretty soon we got on the move again. In the Savoy we found Max Brindt hooked up with some fancy Army desk types in gabardine uniforms which they’d had made, they told us, in Savile Row. They were fighting a hard sartorial war; had to buy new uniforms all the time to keep the seats of their pants from getting shiny.
“Boman,” Marrow said while we were drinking with them, “what the f— has got into you? You look like you got a snoot full of hasheesh.”
I think that what bothered Buzz was my being, because of daydreaming about Daph, aloof; he demanded, and usually got, close attention.
I said, “Girl name of Daphne.”
Marrow said, “You gone soft in the head?”
One of the tailor’s dummies, slightly soused, said, “What’s a matter, big boy, don’t you like name Daphne?”
“Listen, Mr. Gabby Dean,” Marrow said, “I’ve screwed more women than you’ll ever shake hands with in all the Embassies and all the Duchesses’ palaces you’ll ever worm your way into, but I’m a flier! No woman is ever going to come between me and flying.”
Max, bless him, chimed in for me. “Who said Bo was going to quit flying?”
“Look at him!” Marrow said, holding a hand up toward my face.
“Captain,” the soldier said, “you sound like you can’t stand for anyone to get onto Topic A except yourself.”
This soldier-boy was too perspicacious for my comfort; I expected Marrow to blow sky high. Instead he said, benignly, “Listen, Mac, Topic A may be women in the suit-and-cloak branch of the service. In the Air Force, Topic A is flying. Topic B is s—, which is just another way of saying bombs, huh, Max? Topic C is women. Right, Boman?”
He had allied himself with me, with us. Fliers against t
he world.
We took off once more. We got around that night. At the Captain’s Cabin we wound up at a big table of Eighth Air Force staff johnnies with some Mayfair girls who were out slumming, and a funny thing happened to me. I got flirting with one of them, and I danced with her, and I felt all arrogant, and I damn near asked her to go to bed with me; I felt sure she would. Yet all I cared about in the whole world was Daphne. It was some kind of momentum in me, I guess, and the spirit of the crazy twilit zone we lived in.
I turned in at the Dorchester as a saffron dawn seeped in behind the barrage balloons to the east. The last thing I heard as I dropped off to sleep was the sound of some hard-heeled British boots striking the pavement outside our window, going away, echoing, fading.
7/
I slept some more of that innermost sleep until the middle of the following afternoon, when I got up and went out to an old-fashioned photographer’s studio and smirked like a man who has just won a war single-handedly while the widow who ran the shop ducked under a black cloth behind a big box camera, and squeezed a rubber ball, and I paid for the picture, sight unseen, and told the lady to send one copy to Daphne’s address and one to my mother’s.
8/
Our whole crew rendezvoused at King’s Cross to catch a train out to the base. As we were waiting, a cocky littly shunting engine kept puffing back and forth, and when it started up once, Marrow jumped aboard, and the mighty mite pulled out of the station altogether, going much too fast.
“Runway ain’t long enough to take that thing off,” Handown said.
Our train time approached. We began to worry about our pilot. About fifteen minutes passed. Then in came a crack express from the north, the Scottish Queen, or something like that, and the majestic black and red engine came to a stop and exhaled, with a contented cloudy hiss. A huge head, topped by a coal-dusty English engineer’s cap, poked out the cab window, the ugly mug split by a magnificent grin—Marrow’s, of course. Behind him in the cab we saw a dignified elderly English railroader in an Air Force cap with the wire ring taken out.
Marrow never would tell us how he had managed it.
9/
On the train on the way out to Pike Rilling (Marrow still in his new hat) we learned that during the leave Handown had attempted the worldly education of Junior Sailen, had procured for the tiny man a tiny woman and had rented for them a tiny room with a tiny bed in a tiny house, but at the last moment, as Handown was offering instructions for the tiny operation that was to ensue, Junior had put on a demonstration of unexpected spirit and had thrown Neg the hell out. It further developed that after bolting the door the ungrateful little bastard had poked some toilet paper into the tiny keyhole.
“How was it, Junior?” Marrow asked.
“Big,” said Junior, grinning in a fairly good imitation of his pilot.
10/
Back at the base, as we checked in, we took a lazy look at the C.O.’s bulletin board, and we saw a notice which read: “The intensity of operations has permitted an accumulation of various kinds of trash, waste paper, scrap lumber, and other debris on various parts of the airdome. Commanding officers of all units at Pike Rilling are warned that they will be personally responsible for the cleanliness of the areas they control.” Immediately under that information was another typed page: “A deplorable laxness in discipline, and especially in military courtesy, has been noted on the station. All personnel are advised to improve their personal appearance and to adopt a more soldierly standard of behavior. All officers and enlisted men will observe the ritual of the salute with the greatest possible precision and propriety.”
“The Colonel’s cracking up,” Marrow said. He meant Whelan, the Group C.O.
“S—,” Haverstraw said, “that’s just to depress us in case we had a good time on our leaves.”
But Marrow was dead serious. “No,” he said, “you watch. He’s off his chump. Any fighting man who gets the regulation book on the brain”—and Buzz kissed his finger tips and threw the kiss away.
For the next two days we were breaking off salutes as if they were wooden laths. After that we returned to normal.
11/
Having checked in I went to our room and had an hour alone there, because Marrow felt compelled, I guess, to go to the officers’ club and give a full (presumably invented) account of his ravishing of metropolitan womankind during the long stand-down. I thought I wanted to think about Daphne, but when I got to the hut and tossed myself on my bed, I found that all I wanted was to savor the familiarity of my room. The stove. The muslin blackout curtains, faded from black, in places, to yellow-green-gray by sun and dampness. The acrid smell of dirty Army blankets. Every detail of it was familiar to me. This was my home. I closed my eyes and visualized the contents of my metal locker, the crammed, rather orderly array—a place for everything and everything, if not in its place, at least accounted for. In time I was thinking about Marrow—the inanimate Marrow scattered around our room, disorderly, positive, maddening, distinctive. I despised and admired his sloppiness. He parked his towels, wet or dry, under his bed. He raided my locker often for socks or handkerchiefs just because he was too lazy to dig deep enough in his own tangled haberdashery to find what he needed, which would surely be there. He had the upper half of a human skull—said it was a woman’s—on the desk for an ash tray, and it always brimmed with cylinders of cigar ash. His eight-dollar pillow. Stringless ukulele. Pin-ups neatly covered with transparent talc: Danielle Darrieux, within reach; Paulette Goddard, twisting rear view, about to take everything off; Eleanor Holm, demonstrating her flotation mechanisms in a racing suit; Betty Grable (“She is able,” Marrow always said); Simone Simon, leaning dizzy-makingly forward. (“How do you suppose she squeezes that e in between those two See-moans?”) One Varga. One Petty. Only one nude—picture of a dame, said to be a starlet, named Carmen Lundquist. Swedish tits, Spanish ass, Marrow said. Strictly his. For a while he had a laundry shirt-cardboard hinged over Lundquist, so that he, and only he, could lift the flap and look at her when he felt the need. I remembered coming in the room the second day after we arrived in England, and finding Marrow at work nailing up these pictures. Where had he acquired them? He hadn’t had them during training, or in the phases…. On the desk there was a precariously balanced pile of Marrownesses: four cans of shoe impregnate—stuff we’d lugged halfway across the world to protect our feet against poisonous gases—which Marrow had found to be even better kindling than shoe polish for English so-called stoves; one pair drop-seat long underwear in readiness to take along when joy-riding nurses because (according to him) one of the three on his early joy ride damn near came down with frostbite of the nates; fire-fighting bucket of sand used as ash receptacle and cigar-butt douser; comic books and back issues of Stars and Stripes and Yank, not for perusal but for starting fires, wiping up spilled beer, and swatting the bees that kept getting in.
The Tannoy crackled outside, and I half sat up, then let myself down again when I heard the voice of the odd ball who called himself Kid Lynch.
“Now hear this,” the voice said, Navy-style. “Footnote on morale:
“Those that I fight I do not hate.
Those that I guard I do not love…
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds.
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds.”
He signed off: “Lieutenant Lynch reporting.” Those lines gave me a funny feeling; for some reason I thought of my mother. Lynch didn’t write those words, I thought; his stuff was doggerel. I dropped off to sleep in my clothes and slept right through till ten the next morning, something like sixteen hours.
12/
An irony: Having some point to my life made my days seem intolerable. I became bored, impatient, jumpy; wanted to fly and hated flying.
On the afternoon after my long sleep there was a s
hake-up in squadron commanders, because two of the three in the Group had completed their tours. Bins was promoted to lieutenant colonel and given one of the squadrons, and one of Marrow’s friends, Curly Jonas, was made Operations Officer of the Group. When these and some other promotions had been posted, Marrow went around with more than his usual swagger and bounce, but I sensed that he was feeling badly slighted, and indeed I myself felt hurt on his behalf. How could he have been passed over? New evidence that Colonel Whelan was off his trolley. Anyone with any gray matter knew that Marrow was the best flier of the bunch.
That evening in the enlisted men’s mess some civilian, a real sharpie, gave us an exhibition of card tricks, magic, and sleight-of-hand, but with a new twist: He showed us how the tricks were done. He explained “strippers”—decks of cards shaved to a very slight wedge shape for certain effects; other decks with tiny bits of ends off certain cards. Very slowly, so that the eye was faster than the hand for a change, he showed a dozen ways to lay out a crooked deal, and how easy it was for experts to fool suckers. Coming out afterwards, the padre, Major Plate, a bald, heavy-bearded man who had been a saxophone player in a jazz combination before he got the call, happened to be alongside Buzz and me, and he said, trying to be a funny joe, “Anybody for a couple rounds of poker?”
Marrow, who prided himself on his poker winnings, who was indeed famous in the Group as a steady winner, tugged me by the sleeve to slow me down; the chaplain walked on. Marrow was burned up. “That bastard padre,” he whispered. “He must think I cheat on ’em. God damn it, I’m shot full of luck.”
13/
The following day, May twenty-sixth, the weather was perfect, but we were stood down. The worst of it was that there was no advance notice of the free day; we didn’t get the word until ten in the morning, and I was fed up at Wing and at Batty Whelan because an announcement the night before would have given me a chance to arrange seeing Daphne. The whole station was on edge, and the core of the restlessness was the band of thirty-odd men who in recent days had completed their tours, the Happy Warriors, so-called, only they weren’t warriors any more and they certainly weren’t happy. I watched the try-outs for the Group ball team in the afternoon, and Marrow was shouting so raucously, so childishly, for Clint Haverstraw that Clint was almost cut off the squad, but Clint’s natural talent for scooping up grounders finally won out over the coach’s exasperation at Marrow’s rasping voice, and Clint was picked for the first club. You’d have thought Marrow preferred this choice to his own promotion to Squadron C.O. I felt stale and half nutty, and I was conscious of Marrow’s having made a spectacle of himself, and I decided to take a bike ride alone.
