by Herbert Gold
On that sleepy, still afternoon in Hamilton Hall, a crucial discovery was opened to me, and with it, I also made my first close college friend. Professor Campbell, looking out over the dozen of us slouched around a table, talking about time and time's end, life and mortality, suddenly remarked to this solemn crew, “I was dead once, but I came back. I was dead and I remember it.” He had had a heart attack; he had gone under; then he had returned. “I was dead. I still remember.” The words were ordinary, but in the act of uttering them, he suddenly forgot to speak. He put his head down and remembered. Thick gray eyebrows, a heavy, handsome old head. A look of withdrawal, a look of the deepest seriousness possessed him. There was an uneasy silence in the room.
Ahead of my first risk in the war, ahead of my first dangerous illness, ahead of the first death of someone close to me, I had a premonition of what death might mean, beyond the drama of grief and mourning. My own heart stopped. There was the excitement of discovery and a terrible loneliness.
At that moment, and perhaps just as Professor Campbell began to speak once more of Lucretius, I noticed a fellow student, Marvin Shapiro. Purplish hickeys stood out in the pallor of his face. He was stunned by this reminiscence of death, as I had been, and he too felt that premonitory grief and loneliness. And then he flushed as the blood returned.
After class, I approached and we talked. We cut the rest of our classes that day, strolled the campus, ate ice cream, circled the track, told our stories, listened to our stories, and finally got around to the subject of girls. This led naturally to pitchers of beer at the West End Tavern on Broadway. By closing time we had decided we were lifelong friends, and so we were. Marvin was a skinny boy with bad skin, a deep voice, a surcharged Adam's apple, and a love of beautiful women. I shared the latter ambition, but aimed at poetry and philosophy as the means to the end of perfect love, perhaps many perfect loves. I also told him (me from Lakewood, Ohio) that he was my first Jewish friend. Marvin looked at me as if I must be crazy. He was from Avenue K in Brooklyn. He knew nothing about Lakewood, Ohio.
Expanding our horizons, we organized expeditions to eat eggplant parmigiana on First Avenue and fish sandwiches at Joe's on South Street near the market. We were voyeurs who stopped at every doorway. After peeking, we discussed what it all meant—that's what philosophy was supposed to be. We shambled through the fish market and saw a child idly paddling his hands in a barrel of shrimp, a boy of eight or nine in a corduroy jumper jacket. He had a bored, sallow, pretty Italian face, and he was dipping his hands into the crisp pink shells and letting them spill through his fingers like doubloons in a pirate movie. He was watching the stand for his father. One withered leg was encased in a paraphernalia of shiny metal braces. Marvin's eyes filled with tears. He was shaking his head and tears were rolling down his cheeks. “What's the matter?” I asked him.
“That kid'll never get laid.”
Like most young men in those days, we had a handy solution to all our problems with family, college—administrators wanted us to attend classes—and girls, the debris of childhood still cluttering our path. In the war, we were sure to be heroes. Professor Campbell's eyes looking downward, looking inward, had only begun to do the job of education. A few days earlier, cutting classes again, we had seen a dead man propped against a wall near St. Mark's Place. Reality intended to infect us with the imagination of death.
Despite the intoxication of a sudden friendship between adolescent boys, there were still rivalries and family dramas to be played out. After a period of silence ambling past St.-Mark's-in-the-Bouerie, which was not in the Bowery, my friend punched me and sang, “Mama git the hammer, there's a fly on baby's head.”
“All she did was she just swatted me, that's my mother,” I said. “We're polite in Lakewood, Ohio,” and punched him back.
His Adam's apple on the skinny neck seemed to wobble. “Howsoever and nevertheless, as we say in Brooklyn, New York.” He stopped. “You deserved a hammer, and so do I, but my mamaleh—that's Brooklyn for Mommy—she doesn't swat…” He tried to shake off the thought. “Looks hurt. Looks hurt at Dad, too. I hope this war doesn't stop till I get myself some medals.”
He recounted in blazing detail his future destruction of Nazi fliers and had the knack of making it seem to Barnard girls like history, not plan. I envied him. He met and conquered girls in subway crowds, on campus walks, wherever he deigned to point his ardent, demanding eyes, his shiny beak, and his disturbed, acne-bothered face. He would take her for a stroll on Riverside Drive and an ice cream at the Columbia Chemist and not get back to Hartley Hall until after his first morning class. Unless he lurked outside, imagining my envy all though the grimy New York night, I had to assume that he figured out someplace to go with the lady besides the balcony of the Apollo on Forty-second Street.
To even things out, he envied me, too—my lack of “nervousness.” He envied me my year of hitchhiking, driving for drunks, working as a busboy on Key Largo, making my getaway from the Ivy League, as he called it, somehow including Brooklyn. No wonder I was calm, he told me; life had not passed me by. All he had to his credit was satisfied lust.
Poor Marvin. I was nervous enough. I would have given up the life that had not passed me by for one, two, or three—as many as the genie allowed me—of the girls who strolled with him. I would offer them deep feeling, each and every one. He shrugged. They couldn't resist him, he admitted, but so what? They just liked Marvin and his cheerful rubbing.
It only seemed to be mere cheerful rubbing. He needed them, he really needed and wanted girls, this one and that one, each one in particular during her moment. He was born for women. We walked around Van Am Quad in front of our dorm, a little space of brick and grass, endlessly turning in the damp midnight, while he explained, “Some people are ambitious. You wake up and write your poems at dawn —”
“I'll kill myself, I'm so horny —”
“Shut up. I wake up and I know I'll die if I can't squeeze her beautiful body.”
“Whose, Marvin?”
“So the next day I take the subway ride at rush hour. I find someone. I sniff her out and wiggle in, sometimes we never even look at each other's face—sometimes we just go to her place…”
“What do you talk about?”
He fixed me with a Brooklyn stare, the sort of look to shrink an innocent from Lakewood, Ohio. “Words are just a way of saying things. Button it, kid.” He grinned in the darkness. “I tell her how much I need her. I love her. I treasure her. I adore her. I'll do anything for her, more than anything. When I talk like that, lemme tell you, they always listen closely.”
“It's not the words?”
“It's the sincerity.” The bust of Van Am glistened in the diffused gray of a globe lamp. There were blackout curtains on the dormitory windows nearby, and lights where the V-12 program Navy boys were doing calculus and navigation problems. We talked round and round. Marvin contained a famine that he offered up in tribute to womankind. He didn't hide his need. Skinny, pimply, and ardent, he surrounded women with the gift of his hunger. He gave it freely; they forgave everything. He was an alchemist with a large Adam's apple and a deep voice who knew how to convert desperation into sincerity. Girls could save him and celebrate his future heroism. He climbed the fire escape and crawled through a window if she hesitated. Torn knees and a beaky smile explained all. They ended up grateful to be able to do so much for him. He responded with tenderness and whispers, and then slept like a child. Sometimes he forgot their names. At least that's what he told me.
Then he met Ellen, a Barnard student who wore black woolen dresses, had long black hair, a long maternal figure; she wept when he took her into the cold bushes, wept when he brought her out, and wept all the way to her parents’ apartment when they left it empty for the weekend. Marvin reported, somewhat worried, that she was still weeping when they emerged on a fine, sunny winter afternoon. He had enjoyed the love of a good woman, but he found it wet.
For my own reasons, partly the war, partly the
freshman midyear sag, partly my lack of the love of a good, bad, or in-between woman, I told Marvin I wasn't waiting till the end of the school year to go into the Army. He must have spent an unusually damp evening with Ellen, because his response was short and to the point: “Yeah!” The temptress on the jukebox at the West End was giving us an irrelevant command: “Get outta here and get me some money, too…”
The war solved the problem of late term papers, of the failures or successes with girls, general impatience with ourselves. We would enlist together and be heroes together. We didn't need to do right, as the jukebox taunt asked, by getting outta there and getting her some money—we could do right by joining the good war.
Before telling his parents, he asked me to spend a night with his family. I expected to be bored—parents—but instead, I was amazed. Although a lawyer, Mr. Shapiro was a jaunty man who wore a yachting cap indoors, drank, ate exotic foods, and fished in the nearby waters. He had his own boat. He talked about mizzens and fore and aft; I was learning Latin and French, but had no grasp of yachting. His face was weathered by Long Island Sound. I had never before met a sailing Jew. Mrs. Shapiro was a soft, sweet woman with a small, pretty, girlish face; she read books, listened to Mozart, and smiled at her husband's jokes. He did calisthenics on a bar above the bed in their room. It was a household unlike what I expected in that furniture-filled house on a leafy Brooklyn street. There was also another boy, younger than Marvin, to whom little attention was paid. The first son was the hope of the family. Mr. Shapiro was delighted by the wildness of a son who twisted and dodged in a way that would have hurt him at thirty; at eighteen, he was a charmer. Marvin had fun when I sought Meaning. Even now, when rubbing up against anonymous women in the subway does not seem very stylish, I carry the memory of a lively boy with a swollen Adam's apple, a deep laugh in a skinny body, doted on by his parents, allowing himself any appetite, all pleasures.
Marvin told them we were both in a hurry for the war. This announcement followed a discussion about Orientals in which we all agreed that there was something puzzling about the newspapers’ descriptions of how to tell the face of a Japanese—sneaky, yellow, totalitarian—from that of a Chinese. The Chinese face in those days was open, smiling, and democratic. Marvin's father had a wild, high, energetic laugh. He said the objective testimony of witnesses was often unobjective and inaccurate. He liked the way his son was beginning to think.
“Herb and me, we're going in next Monday,” Marvin said suddenly. “It's time. Before all the good jobs'll be taken.”
His mother dropped a spoon; it made a little chime against her foot. His father socked him on the back and said, “I knew it, why not? You'll rip ’em apart. They'll give up as soon as they get the news.” His eyes glittered with envy. Marvin's kid brother looked adoring and pleased. No one fretted about his mother's tears until he kissed her on the neck, and then she sobbed wildly.
The night before we climbed onto the bus to Camp Upton, we bought tickets for The Skin of Our Teeth, with Tallulah Bankhead. She wiggled and chanted just for us. If only she knew we were about to go off to die for our country, we both thought, she would have been absolutely indifferent to us anyway. Ellen was not indifferent to Marvin. I knew a girl from Lakewood, now at Wellesley, who felt about me as Tallulah Bankhead did, not as Ellen did about Marvin Shapiro. We shipped out, we were stripped naked, and we began to put on our new lives.
As with girls, so with the war. Marvin seemed to have all the luck. His reflexes and his eyes were sharp. He became what both of us had wanted to be, a fighter pilot. I went to the infantry, and then was assigned to learn Russian. In the periods between drill and study, in advance of providing liaison with our gallant Soviet allies, we deep Russian scholars continued real life by drinking, complaining, and chasing women at the USO. Most of us were successful at the first two projects, less so at the third. I corresponded with Marvin, with Ellen, and with Marvin's mother. He was in England, flying missions over the Continent. I was in wet white Maryland that next winter, doing maneuvers through an American landscape of barns, churches, apple orchards, all traced and spelled in Russian on our maps. O'er the steppes of Maryland I wandered like a wolf, carrying an M-1 rifle, a full pack, and a new vocabulary, prepared to announce to Soviet partisans: “I am an American soldier and your friend—please don't shoot.”
Marvin's mother wrote that she missed our coming out to Avenue K in Brooklyn to eat fish on Saturdays. Her husband spent his weekends in his sailboat, digging salt fish out of the salt sea. He was also doing civilian patrol work. She was worried about her son and wanted me to reassure her.
Ellen wrote that she was crazy in love, and he didn't write often enough. So she looked for letters from me, since I was his best friend.
Marvin wrote that English girls were peculiar but cooperative. He was now a first lieutenant, nice silver bars on his jacket. He didn't do it standing up in an alley in Piccadilly. Girls were willing to take him home. They liked PX chocolate, and he was learning to like tea. The girls also liked to rock with him as the bombs fell and the sirens shrieked. “You'd like London,” he said, “but it gets noisy.”
We were at the age when such matters needed to be shared. Bragging was his right, envy was mine. Marvin was collecting his reward for being a fighter pilot and a man. He dreamed of a girl in a flowing skirt, flowers and sunlight in a field, and also admired the technical skills of the wife of a Pakistani colonel, or perhaps it was an English colonel stationed in India. A detail, not relevant to the basic points of his letters: Get in this war before it's too late!
Poor Marvin's mother, whose innocent boy was practicing the rites of killing and lust.
Poor Ellen, who imagined him pining for her, far away and needing her.
Poor me, crawling around in Russian in the snowbanks and slushy mud of Maryland in winter. Our officers were combat kicked-outs—men so ineffective at actual fighting that they were sent back to train future intelligence officers.
The only one not to be pitied seemed to be Marvin himself, that charmer, his acne drying with spurts of adrenaline, collecting missions and medals and the wives of our allies. He made captain. The boy quick into the bushes of Riverside Drive was also quick in the sky against the stubby German fighters. Ellen, his mother, and I formed his audience against the backdrop of destruction, explosions and fire, brandy and good jokes. Seen from our distance, the garish light lit his face and made it angelic, made it devilishly smile.
One winter night the 22nd Class returned to Camp Ritchie, the intelligence training post in Maryland, after nearly a week of simulated war in marshes and orchards. We had been frozen and misled; we had been fired upon and tested; we had conducted a strange war among Maryland mountain people to whom we were not allowed to speak English. We needed shaves; we were jittery with stimulants; we smelled bad. Our mission had been a failure because our officer, who had been responsible for a fatal mistake at Anzio, still believed that his own sense of direction was superior to that of a compass. He knew the way; could a compass give him an argument? Consequently we had been lost for three days in a prickly, cutover pine desert. I felt as if ice had been packed into my ears. We had the usual gripes against officers. The nearer enemy became the real enemy. We stood in our long khaki overcoats against a camp stove, smelling the chicken-feather singe of the wool as we tried to get warm, slurping coffee from our mess kits and reading the accumulated mail. Our officer went to sulk because north was not where north used to be in the Alabama National Guard. I tore open my little stack of mail.
A letter from Marvin described a weekend in London. What fun in the blackout. A duke's daughter, he claimed; mentally I made him out a braggart, maybe a liar, but read on, envying. She loved him, she really did. He cared for her a lot, of course, but not that much. Ellen was writing him weepy letters, and he supposed he would have to close now in order to drop her a line.
Ellen wrote to ask if I had heard from Marvin. She was worried. He must be ill or something.
; The last letter, the most recent, was from his mother. He had been shot down over Germany; others in the squadron had seen his parachute open, but it was fired on. There seemed to be a hit in the air. Captain Shapiro was presumed dead.
I crawled outside into the snow. I heaved and gagged. I was too old to cry, and not yet old enough; later I might learn again. There was this churning turmoil like seasickness, like jealousy, like lust and dread. A green and brown puddle spread at my feet. The desire to run away, deny, refuse, was eating at the lining of my belly. This pool of sickness was a trivial response to death, I then thought and still believe, but it was all I could manage. The smell sent me lurching away. I remembered Professor Campbell, his head down, contemplating the Fact, and the awe at his silence Marvin and I had shared. I was feeling my own sickness, while Marvin was now feeling nothing. With shame I recalled Dostoyevsky's denunciation of Turgenev: When he watches a shipwreck, children drowning, he notices the hot tears running down his own face. And here I now had only myself. In the midst of this war for which I was merely preparing, I had lost the vividness of life, my friend. I was gagging in the deep, silent Maryland winter, with nearby slush piles, garbage cans, the debris of soldiering and, just beyond, a horizon of scrub and exhausted soil itching through the snow and a white winter sky. The earth was an ache. I saw Marvin's face—grinning, acne-pocked, delighted by life—under his parachute swinging down and then exploded in midair as he hung between heaven and hell. I've seen him there for more than sixty years, and so he will be always.
Like Dostoyevsky's Turgenev, I'm telling a selfish story. After grief, after washing the stink out of my mouth, how does the vain young poet survive? He writes a vain young poem, of course. It was a long elegy to the memory of Captain Marvin Shapiro (1924–1945) typed in the company orderly room at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, and mailed to The Atlantic Monthly, 8 Arlington Street, Boston, Massachusetts. Presently it was returned with a letter signed by a woman who praised… something; who was kind to the soldier. I haven't seen the poem since the war. I remember its shape on the page, not the words. Surely the editor wrote to me only because I was a soldier mourning a dead friend and there was a war on. Shortly afterward, I shipped out and lost the poem. I carried the letter from Marvin's mother with me.
