by Herbert Gold
His body was never recovered. He had written to me that it was odd to have the H initial on his dog tags, Hebrew, when he might need to parachute into Germany; but he kept the initial. Anyway, he was destroyed in the sky.
The Columbia College class of ’46 returned to begin again as twenty-one-year-old sophomores. We counted our losses and secretly watched out of the corners of our eyes those with missing limbs or pink, still-healing scars. Some were in line for plastic surgery; some were outpatients; many were on partial disability pensions. Our hairlines had changed. Moony faces were lean and loony. There was confusion, the G.I. Bill, and a host of baby eighteen-year-olds who claimed to be college students, too. No more dormitory living for me. I rented a room on West 113th Street off Broadway and thought to enter adult life after the years of murderous limbo. Our bodies twitched with unfulfilled destruction. How dare we live, how dare we not live. On behalf of world peace and understanding, a friend and I jumped a thuggish heckler at a street-corner Henry Wallace rally. We formed a kleptobibliomaniacal society, stealing books, cheese, things small and large that we could use or give away. We called it the Book Find Club. Our motto was: Steal four books and get a fruitcake free from the A&P. We initiated our girlfriends into the club. In their own confusion they thought the war heroes must know what they were doing. They thought we were heroes and nervous. We were more nervous than heroic.
The mere babies who were our classmates could dress in their Ivy League tweed jackets from J. Crew, their rep ties from wherever rep ties were striped; proudly we flaunted our khakis, our field jackets, and our paratroop boots if we'd been able to liberate them. Some veterans earnestly took up the pursuit of sensible jobs and family life, skipping late adolescence in favor of midcentury adulthood, oncoming gray flannel suits. Another cohort, bruised or merely defiant, ran wild through Manhattan, keeping the chip on our shoulders carefully balanced. This wildness, after all, was that of college boys on the G.I. Bill.
Besides world peace and understanding, I practiced the stealing of books from chain bookstores, war profiteer bookstores, evil capitalist bookstores, and then stealing them onto the dusty shelves of a bookseller whose kind face I liked—I deigned to approve of him. Among the weak and distressed, the confused and resentful—and there I was, along with other pre-beatnik beatniks—playing God was an act we enjoyed. It was our right and duty. I've lost track of my vinyl 78 rpm record, “Hitler Lives!” of a country western song by a genius I remember as Red River Dave. In an angry twang he snarled, “Hitler lives if you turn a vit-run from your door… Hitler lives!”
To be a tragic sophomore at age twenty-one did not give me the moral right to adopt Red River Dave's anthem as mine. It was not an instance of Nazi oppression to be grabbed by the shoulder by a security guard on the crowded sidewalk outside the Scribner's bookshop on Fifth Avenue. Under my U.S. Army field jacket I was hiding a copy of The Place of Value in a World of Fact by a profound German thinker who may have been Austrian or Swiss. The Puerto Rican security guard, emphasizing my guilt, magnifying my punishment, didn't let me buy the book. But despite vengeful security guards and adverse registration in the now-defunct Scribner's bookshop records, I sincerely wanted to find the place of value in the factual world.
When an innocent non-veteran asked Moochie, one of the Book Find Club crew, if Moochie was a girl's name, it would have been enough to say, “No, it's mine.” But instead he kicked the questioner in the crotch and inquired, “A girl ever do that to you?” I suggested he call himself Moocher instead—a more manly suffix.
Along with my thoughts of Marvin, on whose behalf I was taking revenges against the world, whose habits I was some-times imitating, I came gradually to think of his mother, his father, and Ellen. Busy installing myself in bohemian student days, sullen, selfish, and arrogant, I didn't know how to deal with the grief of others. But finally, as the months went by, I decided to visit Marvin's family. I telephoned Mrs. Shapiro and she reminded me of how to get to Avenue K by subway. I used to know the way. My ears felt different in the roar of the tunnel.
At the subway entrance I began to think of the smoked eel I had eaten for the first time at their house. He had said, bragging, “We have eels all the time—crabs, lobsters, oysters, shrimp. Snails. Clams.”
“Do you eat pork?” I asked.
“Feh, unclean,” he had said.
I remembered pausing at the newsstand to pick up a copy of PM. It was the same guy with the stacks of papers, fret on his face, hair in his ears, waiting out his time.
I expected the house to be dark with mourning. Instead, it was light and sunny, curtains pulled back and winter sunlight filling the rooms. But it seemed empty. Even some of the furniture was gone. It was emptied of its men. After his death, Marvin's father had enlisted, not as a lawyer, but as an expert sailor, and had commanded a landing craft and had fought as an overage captain through southern France. At the end of the war, he simply didn't return. Mrs. Shapiro, smiling, told me that he met a girl in Marseilles. I couldn't imagine what a Brooklyn lawyer would do in Marseilles—Jean Gabin yes, Mr. Shapiro no—and I saw him in a corduroy cap, on the waterfront, a handsome, stocky, middle-aged settler with a young, high-breasted Fifi with wooden soles on her shoes and a black market Pall Mall hanging from her lips. Mrs. Shapiro said simply, “It broke up our family. We were a good family, I think, but we needed Marvin.” Her other son was now at Yale, very white-shoe, probably in a J. Crew or Brooks jacket, rep tie.
She made tea. We talked about Marvin. Tea, raisin toast, orange marmalade, chocolate cookies. I thought of Marvin's hickeys—“zits,” the freshmen now called them. She told me a little about her marriage and, I knew, would later want to tell me more. My need for a community of mourning gave way to embarrassment. I could not be husband and son to her, and when I slipped out into the deep early night, I tried to feel sadness and sympathy. I felt sympathy and sadness, and relief to escape. Marvin was my friend in the past. What community I sought could not be built from nostalgia.
Still, I wanted to find Ellen. When I finally met her again, she was also in mourning, wearing an ugly, shapeless woolen dress and flat shoes, her hair untended, smelling of pain and poor caring. She was a graduate student with a reputation for persistent moping. Never a pretty girl, she had been a sweetly attractive one. Now at age twenty-three, she looked ravaged, left out in bad weather. I had a bit more patience with her than with Marvin's mother. We took coffee and meals together near campus. She wanted to drink at the West End because she had gone there so often with Marvin and me. Three times, I think. She imagined for herself the history of a great love; she imported it backward into time; she imagined widowhood. At first I shared the play, stunned by her conception of him, which seemed so much deeper than my own. They had been truly in love, they had been profound true lovers; it was not just wrestling in the grass of Riverside Drive, it was not couch work in her parents’ apartment on Central Park West, it was an immortal passion. Her hero had been blasted out of the skies by malevolent fate and she would treasure his memory forever. Marvin and Ellen stood in the great tradition of doomed lovers. She was a graduate student in literature.
After a few immersions in her dream of the past, I began to feel discomfort and then resentment. Marvin had been my best friend, and memory of him made me ache. But the person I knew slipped away in the tumult of Ellen's ardent dream. I found new resources of coldness in myself. I would watch impatiently for her to finish her beer and then deliver her to her room on Amsterdam Avenue. Once when she managed to order another beer, I felt ready to groan with boredom. And when she wanted me to come to her room, tiptoeing past the other rooms, past the common kitchen, I felt as if I were being led into a trap. Suddenly there were wet, beery kisses. I twisted away and cried out, “You're lying to yourself! Never cared about you! He had girls everywhere, England, Brooklyn, everywhere!”
She started to run down the darkened hall. I caught her at the door, held her in my arms as she struggled, and pointed out that i
t was not my room that she was running from, but her own. She should stay and I should go. Make sense, please. I'm sorry, but it's the truth.
I believed myself to be rational, logical, surgical, but also I was breathing the stench of a woman's hysteria for the first time in my life. Little popping explosions of rage and hatred were going off in my arms. “You think you can play God! You think you're God and my judge!” she shrieked at me.
The practice of playing God and judge sometimes exhausts itself with time. I have the disease worse than most (Ellen, wherever you are).
I dragged her back to her room. Invisible ears were pressed to the shut bedroom doors. Community kitchen, community crises. Shush, shush, I said. The stringent, leaping sobs subsided; she was simply weeping; I put her in bed with her clothes on, covered her, and sat stroking her hand. Toward dawn she fell asleep. Cold-eyed I felt. I tiptoed out.
Back on the street, I saw a metal case of milk at the door of a short-order restaurant. For the first time in my life—not the last—I had spent a night trying to calm a woman made mad by something I had said. And for the last time in my life I felt that, well, it wasn't my fault at all, I was right, I had done the right thing, I was right. So I told myself. So I told myself again. Still insisting, I believed that I had committed an obscenity. I stood at the doorway of the diner: CLOSED. GO AWAY.
They had no right to be rude. I was hungry and thirsty. I was a veteran. They were turning a veteran from their door.
The metal case of milk glittered in the early light. I bent to the bottles. My hand felt a sensual coolness, like touching a loved woman. It would be sweet to drink long, cool swallows and then heave the bottle into the street. I was thirsty and hungry and cold and feverish, and I decided not to steal a bottle of milk.
I stood there, squinting at the metal case. I would leave it in a moment. I would leave without a bottle for myself. This was a new decision. The night had brought me much that was new.
When next I saw Ellen, she had changed her hair, cut it stylishly, and her clothes seemed to be freshly dry-cleaned. She was a handsome twenty-three-year-old woman. She was going with someone. She had a friend. We met as acquaintances, students who used to know each other. She made it clear that I had sacrificed our friendship. She smiled and inquired about my doings. I had little to say to her. Our life together was all in the past. I had projects for the future. She was married within the year, gave up graduate work, got pregnant, left New York. Though I insisted to myself that I had done the right thing, she made me uncomfortable. It was much easier not to see her on campus.
Now the years have passed, and I think of my friend who died when he and I were mere children. The event still seems real when I remember it, but like a reality glimpsed through thick glass.
Sometimes, however, when an immediate grief breaks the glass of memory, Marvin comes tumbling free and alive again under his parachute. The distancing of history is reversed. I am accustomed to his death. And yet, when I needed an occasion to express grief at something else, at something happening to me, in my own life, I found Marvin waiting like a boy, ready to play. I told his story to a friend who was an infant when he flew over Germany. “He was dead before he had time to lose his acne.” I had no tears for Marvin's mother or Ellen, but now, telling it, I struggled for control of myself.
My friend reminded me coolly, “Ellen's a grandmother by now. Marvin's father, do you think he's still in Marseilles? No more eels for that one. His mother must be gone, too. His kid brother…”
“A retired prof, I heard.”
“So,” she said. “So it was a long time ago.”
Yes, child, that was mere history. There are always new wars for which we must prepare ourselves, and I am still ready. I'm also ready to join the company of O. J. Campbell, remembering my own deaths.
5
The Norwegian Captain
One of the ephemeral predators who ruled Haiti, a colonel self-promoted to general, also a self-credentialed philosopher in his tailored white uniform with glorious philosopher epaulets, medals, and braid, commented from the height of the mountain of murders over which he presided: “Haiti is a land where life is more terrible than death.” The distinctions others felt about life and death left Colonel-General-Philosopher-Coup-Leader Cedras with a stoic indifference, although he seemed to enjoy his own scuba diving and dominion over eight million souls.
Foreigners, it seemed, had the luxury of taking life and death seriously. The man at the ironwork balcony might have looked like a handsome sea-stained old Viking—white fringe of beard, stalwart hairy nose and ears—but the Norwegian captain was a mere annoyance as far as my buddy Whitley, the art dealer, was concerned. Just stationing himself at the Pension Croft in Jacmel, just taking his morning coffee and bread in the lobby, spending the day looking down toward the market or out toward the Caribbean Sea from the balcony of his room, just doing nothing at all, day after day after day—not even seizing the chance to pick up some Haitian art at a good price from Whitley—the Norwegian captain was a total violation of the proper order of things. The old bore displayed too much cartilage and too much gloom.
Why come to Haiti, Whitley asked, unless you buy a Haitian primitive painting or two? Why lurk about this dysparadise with no fun in your heart, no spending of money on genuine folk art that could almost be guaranteed to increase in value?
He tried to remedy the situation. The Norwegian captain resisted the remedy. For Whitley, there developed a distressing condition of pissed-off impasse as he showed various canvases and promised they could be packed and wrapped for easy handling on the captain's eventual flight back to Oslo. “Look, flowers and mountains… look, stand back a step, the characteristic flat perspective, the spirit of this island, but also a certain ebullience —”
“Ebullience?” asked the captain.
“Joie de vivre,” said Whitley, wondering if this was a concept that existed in Norway.
“Thank you so much, but why?” the captain asked. He stood with the cautious dignity of a man guarding against old-age confusion, that combination of deafness, slowed reflexes, the world distorted by sore back and worried brain. “What would I do with such a painting?”
“Show it to your friends.”
“Who?”
“Put it on your wall.”
“Where?”
Whitley was losing patience. “You must live someplace. You must have friends. What about cousins? Or maybe a…” And he used an odd word for a son or daughter: “A descendant? You've got some of those?”
“Who?” asked the captain. “Where?”
I guessed that he was a man who spent much of his time on the sea, and was home long enough to have children but perhaps did not, and expected an old age with a wife who would wait patiently for history to fulfill itself, giving them each other forever. And when it didn't work out that way, he traveled to Haiti, along with others whom history had deceived. And when even Port-au-Prince wasn't far enough from home, he found his way around the island to the village of Jacmel, where ships used to load coffee and sisal, but now the harbor had filled with silt and ships stopped only to let the naked stevedores wade out to offload rice or canned milk and sometimes a narcotics trafficker or a lost soul in search of a redeeming Strange. To be alone in faraway ports was an old habit for the Norwegian captain.
He stood watching us from the narrow ironwork balcony of the Pension Croft as we hoisted a bag with sandwiches and water into the jeep.
History had brought Whitley to the island for different reasons. It was the place where he could work out his dreams and evade the expectations of his parents and nanny. A kid from Princeton (family trusts well past their peak, capital eroded), a marginal littérateur but a first-rate tennis player, he very wisely settled on a niche life in tropical Haiti. There was year-round good tennis and no stooping or chasing for balls. There were dollar-a-day ball boys. The available sex before the time of AIDS was an additional plus. He developed an expertise in the emerging culture o
f primitive art. He got in on the ground floor. With his good Princeton manners, plus the kind of ear filter that prevented registering complaints about his behavior, he got away with buying Haitian art cheaply, touting the artists he had picked, writing little articles in alumni and art magazines, then unloading his inventory to collectors. He wanly emulated in the art trade the techniques of the stock-promoting forebears to whom he was indebted for his trust fund.
When he couldn't sell a painting, he could sometimes give it to a museum—especially local and college museums stimulated by his authoritative articles on folk art—at tax valuations set by the art-dealing equivalent of his tennis service in the back court. He was an expert.
During a period of spousal support stress, a tragic fire consumed most of his personal collection. Some of the lost paintings were lively, funny, touching, lovely, no matter how exaggerated their valuations for insurance purposes. My unkind suspicions about the fire convinced me that he didn't even much care for the art about which he was an expert. It was just something to do.
Perhaps I have already revealed that I wasn't fond of him. When we played tennis, he could never manage to serve from behind the baseline.
Once I asked Whitley about accepting the loan of a jeep and a driver from Papa Doc, President-for-Life Dr. François Duvalier, and then writing a magazine article about the brutal dictatorship in which he declared that Dr. Duvalier was at last giving voice to the poor of Haiti who had always been oppressed by the mulatto elite.
