The Magic Maker

by Susan Cooper

  “The fluctuations between hot and cold, harshness and sweetness, in your personality are really too much for one to stand and develop normally,” wrote Ken. “Reason it for yourself — you’ll see it’s true, and Esther will be only too willing to play the game with you — she’s got a level head and can understand.”

  “Terry got short shrift from my mother,” Jack said once. “She used to call her the dividend. ‘I’ve got three boys — oh, and a daughter.’”

  But the eldest of the three boys had spun out of his mother’s orbit now. Esther was a persuasive and persistent lady, and Jack inherited and employed those same gifts tirelessly in later years, but from this point on even she could no longer influence his life. He was a soldier. In August 1942 he went to Infantry Officer Training School in Fort Benning, Georgia, and there were far fewer mentions of singing in his letters home. Music was overtaken by the need to learn other skills, like digging foxholes and using a bayonet.

  Three months later he graduated as “marksman” with an M1 rifle, “second-class gunman” with a heavy machine gun, “expert” with a light machine gun. He wrote to his father that he failed to make “sharpshooter” with the M1 because he had been hungover that morning on the range. At twenty-one, he was — like most Americans and all Europeans in 1942 — facing the hardest time of his life. His company commander told him he was one of the youngest, most inexperienced, and most sheltered of all the men there. Jack wrote home that he felt he needed “more of a display of forcefulness in my leadership.”

  He graduated, in due course, and after a visit home he was flown across the country to Camp Roberts in California, north of San Luis Obispo, where he would teach recruits. In a bare tree outside the camp he found mistletoe growing; he climbed up and picked some, and mailed it home for the Christmas carol party.

  On Christmas Eve 1942, his twenty-second birthday, he went to the post’s Field Artillery Chapel and led the Carol Sing after the midnight service: “And was I pleased,” he wrote, “to find some of the soldiers calling out for such as ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘In Dulci Jubilo’ among their requests for favorites.”

  The comment on his sheltered background bothered him: how could he forearm the brothers who had shared that background, and who would soon face this drastically altered future? On Christmas Day 1942 he began writing an earnest letter: “To my dear brothers: It has been long my intention to write you both now that you are about to join us in the service.”

  Then he was interrupted, and broke off. But when Ken and David were really on the brink of joining the army a month later, he became even more anxious to try to warn them what to expect, and he sat down to finish his letter on the night of January 25, 1943.

  Jack wrote that he was duty officer that evening, appointed to make hourly inspections of the whole camp until six AM. “The cooks just brought me over a big GI pitcher full of strong coffee and a whole pumpkin pie — both are sitting on the radiator in readiness for my midnight feast!” After this reminder of boarding school, he then tried to explain to his brothers the things that he had learned about, and from, the men in his charge — men who came from the world outside 39 Garden Place, Brooklyn Heights, and whose mothers were not acquainted with musicians or generals.

  I have men who don’t know or have never learned what it is to take baths and keep themselves clean; good and fine men who have not had any education beyond the second grade (and some of ’em old enough to be my father — think of that, if you will!); men who cannot write their own names but have to make their ‘mark’; men who are eating the best food they have ever had in their lives and who are more warmly clad than they were ever able to be before. They are getting a chance, anyway, at a little education . . . they are learning first aid, hygiene, sex hygiene, history, geography, and even courtesy. They are more fit than the day they landed here. . . .

  Are not all these things — if we can instill them in these men to last — going to make far better citizens in a future world and give them a chance to raise our country’s standards of ethics among a large group of hitherto uneducated people? Mind you, though, when I say ‘uneducated’ I mean nothing more, for you will find, too, that many of the uneducated have a common sense that is far above a lot of us who got ours out of a book; and you will also find the fine points in simple people that make them just as loyal and trustworthy as any former school chum.

  If he had felt his world expanding as a boy when he listened to “simple people” singing songs inherited from their forebears, he was learning a great deal more than that in the army. He wasn’t about to reject the virtues of his own privileged background, however. His letter went on to admonish his brothers not to “degenerate into a simple and much too limited vocabulary” common in the army, and to go on reading in their free moments:

  Just remember this, Ken and Dave: don’t ever lose your sense of values — your standards — keep ’em as they are!

  Choose your friends for their humanity, he said to them, not for their background. You don’t have to aim at being an officer.

  But noncom or officer, there are two words, two points that you will have to bring forcibly to both your characters — believe me, sincerely, in this — aggressiveness and initiative.

  And after this echo of his company commander, he went on to make them an impassioned plea for learning, in particular, the techniques of using the bayonet and the hand grenade — “especially when you stop to realize what the sword and the knife stand for, in proficiency, with our slant-eyed enemy.”

  It was all a very long way from oratorio.

  The jarring words “our slant-eyed enemy” were uncharacteristic of Jack, but they were commonplace in the America of 1943. For everyone in the United States, Pearl Harbor and its aftermath had demonized everyone and everything connected to Japan; government posters showing grinning, slit-eyed enemy faces were everywhere, and almost 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent were forced into internment camps for the duration of the war. Like most other Americans, Jack recovered from his xenophobia after hostilities were over, though perhaps it’s not accidental that his lifelong fascination with the music and folklore of other cultures never made any major connection with the Far East. In January 1943, he was simply intent on being a good American soldier.

  So he mailed his long, admonitory letter to his brothers, a month after its interrupted Christmas Day beginning. They knew, by then, the reason for the interruption. Shortly after Christmas, Jack had found himself engaged to be married.

  Since his time at Curtis, there had been three romantic interests in Jack’s life, all of them to some degree friends of the family. “There was Jeanne, there was Judy Taylor, a wonderful girl I used to dance with, and there was Diane Guggenheim, who was very young. Carol Preston said to me, ‘I’m not going to advise you about any one of them.’”

  Diane was not only the youngest of the three but clearly the most impulsive. She was eighteen years old and still a high-school student at the Brearley School in New York; Esther’s family letter books include, as noted earlier, one from fifteen-year-old Diane inviting Jack’s youngest brother, David, to a dance. She also came from the complicated Guggenheim family, and carried more subconscious emotional baggage than Jack may have imagined.

  Diane was the daughter of Harry Guggenheim, third-generation patriarch of the rich, beneficent Jewish family whose fortune had come initially from silver and copper mining. The formidable, domineering Harry had degrees from Yale and Cambridge, and was an aviation pioneer and pilot who fought in both world wars. He was also a die-hard Republican, and in 1929 President Hoover appointed him U.S. Ambassador to Cuba for four years. By then Diane, daughter of his second wife, Carol, was four years old. Carol was Caroline Morton Potter, daughter of Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of the Navy, and both she and Harry had divorced their former spouses in order to marry in 1923. They each had two teenage daughters, though the only one of these who had chosen to live with them was Harry’s daughter Nancy, nine years older th
an Diane. Born in 1924, Diane was their only child together.

  Diane’s childhood, in Cuba and then New York and the family’s Long Island mansion, Falaise, was tempestuous; perhaps its only stable point was a beloved Irish nanny better able to show love than her parents were. Her mother, Carol, was dreamy and unstable, drank heavily, and eventually took up with the sin-obsessed, sex-avoiding Moral Rearmament movement of the time. Her half sister Nancy was in a state of constant rebellion against Harry’s mania for control — and when Nancy married George Draper in 1939, they moved to California, George said, “To get as far away as we could from our families.” The Guggenheim household was not peaceful.

  In 1937 Carol left Harry for a New York apartment of her own, taking thirteen-year-old Diane with her. Two years later they were divorced. By then Diane was a day student at the Brearley School (which had declined to admit Harry’s older two daughters in 1924 because “the definite quota of Jewish children . . . had been made up for the year”). She was a pretty girl, and loved music, but apparently she made her mother’s life so difficult that Harry often had to intervene, even though he was by now involved with Alicia Patterson, the feisty lady who was to become his third wife. Alicia was thirty-one, sixteen years younger than Harry, and beautiful; she had been a reporter, and like him she knew how to hunt, fish, and fly a plane. They married in 1939 as soon as they divorced their second spouses — just as Harry and Carol had done — and flew off in a two-seater plane for their honeymoon. Shortly thereafter, Harry bought a newspaper for Alicia to run, which became Newsday. None of this endeared Alicia to his teenage daughter.

  Diane bitterly resisted the new marriage, despite calming efforts from her stepsisters, but there was nothing she could do about it. Now she had not only a troubled relationship with her mother but a stepmother whom she deeply resented. It’s hard to resist the feeling that Jack, for Diane, was not just a wonderfully attractive young man but also a wonderful chance for escape.

  Harry Guggenheim nearly always commanded a family gathering at Christmas, but in 1942 he, like Meredith Langstaff and his sons, was bent on becoming involved in the war. Though he was fifty-two, he managed to reactivate his commission in the naval air arm and was posted to air bases first in Queens and then in New Jersey. This may have been one reason why nobody prevented teenage Diane from flying to San Francisco at Christmas 1942, nominally to visit her half sister Nancy and family in Northern California.

  Jack had told his parents that he planned to spend his Christmas leave in San Francisco, 180 miles from his base, and to go to a concert. “Perhaps I can pick up Diane’s sister to go with me if she is free.” He duly saw Nancy; Nancy called Diane; Diane announced that she was flying out. “What a time we would have, just in case it does work!” Jack wrote home.

  They did indeed. As in the case of Meredith and Esther Langstaff twenty-five years earlier, the peril of war is a great promoter of matrimony. Jack and Diane went out together and ended the evening sitting on a bench on Nob Hill, in the little park next to the Pacific Union Club. He proposed, and she accepted him. The next day they came back to the park in the sunshine, took off their shoes and lined them up under the slats of the bench, and took a picture of it.

  So Jack was engaged to be married, to an eighteen-year-old high-school girl. He wrote home, “There is much that Diane and I have to learn, that I know. But it is my hope that you will do what you can for her there at home; and so she will come to know our family and the things we love.” But this wasn’t your average schoolgirl; it was Diane Guggenheim, impulsive by nature and not patient with deprivation. Two weeks later Jack wrote another letter to his parents, long and incoherent, on January 14, 1943.

  Dearest Mother and Dad:

  I write you both, at this time, for some immediate advice — perhaps I have no right bothering my own parents with this great problem of mine; but I do want them to be understanding and give me their opinions, anyway.

  Diane has just called me. I got her call five minutes after I came in from the field this evening at seven. She doesn’t want to wait — she wants us to be together now, as soon as possible; certainly before I go overseas. (She wanted to come out here to me immediately!)

  Then he thought aloud for several pages, about whether Diane should finish high school, about where and when they should marry, about money, about how soon he might be able to “get into things over there.” And the request for advice had a characteristically disarming finale:

  Always remembering how my father and mother came to be married — and what they did with their lives, and for us. What could be a better, or more inspiring, example for Diane and me?

  Please let me hear some word from you immediately.

  Faithfully, Your Jack

  Esther preserved no words of reply in the letter books, but before long she and Diane had started to plan a huge Guggenheim/Langstaff wedding to be held in Grace Church. They were ambitious, elaborate plans; there might be as many as a thousand guests, with Dr. Bowie conducting the service, Ernest Mitchell at the magnificent organ, and the Wagnerian tenor Uncle Arthur singing with the full boys’ choir.

  Lt. John Langstaff was still teaching recruits at Camp Roberts, California. In February, he gave an orientation lecture called “Our National Effort 1939–1943” to his entire battalion of a thousand officers and men, and another to the volunteer officer candidates on jungle warfare. Then he was given ten days’ leave to go back east and get married.

  The big wedding became in the event a small one, since there had been a recent death in the Guggenheim family and it seemed no time for a gala. Dr. Bowie married Jack and Diane in the Grace Church chantry, with young Terry as a bridesmaid, Ken and David as ushers, and Meredith as best man. Harry Guggenheim gave his daughter away. Uncle Arthur didn’t sing, but Ernest Mitchell played the big church organ (“which is far better than the pip-squeak organ in the chantry,” Esther had written), and they could all hear it through the open chantry doors. The families’ joint invitation list of 1,050 had been ferociously cut, since even with standees, the chantry held only 130 people.

  Carol Preston wrote to Esther Langstaff, “I do hope and pray that she is just the girl for him, for he is so fine and so loyal that things go deep with him.”

  Diane left Brearley without graduating and went back to California with Jack, to live in what he described as a “farmhouse” that he had rented in Atascadero, near the camp. By May, she was pregnant. By July, both Ken and David were in the Army, and Jack had a letter from his first commander, General Gage, telling him to be patient even though he was chafing to go and fight. “This is going to be a long war,” wrote the general, “especially in the Pacific.”

  Esther came out to visit, and Jack reported on “a wonderful weekend in Santa Barbara with Mother and Diane.” Then he was posted to the Northwest, to the 96th Division based at Fort Lewis. He and Diane had acquired “a wreck of a car” and they drove up through the redwoods to Camp Adair, Oregon, where 75,000 soldiers would be on maneuvers for the next six months before being shipped out to the Pacific.

  And Diane Carol Langstaff was born on December 28, 1943, in Medford, Oregon, twenty-three years and four days after her father.

  By June of 1944 Jack was “a rifle platoon leader in a line outfit” scheduled to go to Camp Beale, California, and then overseas. Diane was in New York; she must have brought the baby — known henceforth as Carol — east from Oregon earlier in the year. Jack too came to New York in June, for six-month-old Carol’s christening. “Jack looked well though rather thin,” Esther reported in a letter. Then he went back to Camp Beale, north of Sacramento, California, and was shortly shipped out on a convoy bound for the war in the Pacific. They were told they were going to the island of Yap, a Japanese air and naval base in the Caroline Islands, between the Philippines and Guam.

  Whether by design or accident, the family letter books contain, from this point on, amazingly few references to Jack’s wife. Esther amiably describes washing diapers, and repor
ts on time spent in Southampton, Long Island, with young Esther, Carol, and Allie. In a sequence of letters to the “Home Front,” Jack sends messages to Carol but never to Diane, and even though he must also have been writing Diane regular private letters, the lack of references to her is striking. In July, from a ship “somewhere in the Pacific” he asks Esther to “kiss my little girl good night for me,” and she in return sends him a little woolly ear that Carol has pulled off a toy lamb. It’s as if Diane had never chosen, or been allowed, to become part of the close, charmed circle of the Langstaff family. Either that, or in the making of the books, much later, she was edited out. She must certainly have been having a difficult time herself, as a nineteen-year-old mother surviving the whirlpool of her own powerful, daunting family.

  Alone at night, Jack wrote home from the ship.

  I sang over many songs in my mind, as I looked out over the moonlit waters. . . . Then I said my prayers, for you all, and for us all, and then went below to bed — after finishing censoring my men’s mail.

  He was a second lieutenant now, and on his way to battle. His convoy reached Hawaii, and in September he wrote of having a couple of hours completely to himself, in some remote spot. So he sang. All on his own in the Pacific sunshine, he sang nonstop, for the whole two hours: