The Magic Maker

by Susan Cooper

  . . . folk songs, lieder, oratorio, opera, Gilbert and Sullivan, madrigals, Christmas carols, symphonies, piano concertos, hymns, and scales! It’s amazing how much I have forgotten — I who pride myself on never forgetting a song once I’ve learned it. The voice seems as good as ever, though.

  Then they were at sea again. In October they reached their real destination, the Philippines, for the invasion of the mountainous island of Leyte, which would begin the Battle of Leyte Gulf. It was the largest amphibious operation so far in the Pacific, involving 714 ships of the U.S. Seventh Fleet and the Royal Australian Navy, and two corps of the U.S. Sixth Army. Jack was part of the 96th Infantry Division, splashing ashore under fire on the east coast of Leyte, and then struggling through swamps in a three-day battle to capture a hill from which the Japanese were firing on landing craft. He wrote home, from his tent on a cold beach:

  I came through the campaign without so much as a serious scratch. . . . The ear of Carol’s lamb is still in my first aid kit. Sergeant Maclean, who is now my platoon sergeant, went through the battle with his baby girl’s first little shoe tied to the barrel of his rifle. . . .

  Disease, however, hit almost as many men in the Pacific as bullets; before long Jack was in a field hospital, first with dysentery and then with yellow jaundice. From his bed he wrote an enormous letter to his brothers, warning them of the horrors and necessities and tactics of jungle war.

  Then he was struggling back to his company through the rainy mountains, and writing again in late November from a tent pitched “in soft, odorous mud, ankle deep when it’s not raining.” There were five of them in the tent, with two quarts of 190-proof medicinal alcohol for nightcaps. He reported that he was filthy but “feeling fine,” though sickness and casualties had taken thirteen of his platoon of forty-three men. “One of my noncoms was hit in the head by a sniper’s bullet yesterday afternoon. Oh, I prayed so for him, as I sat there by him as he was dying.”

  The conditions gave him tropical ulcers, and a month later he was back in the field hospital, fuming. He spent Christmas there, writing nostalgic images of home, and lists of the people he wanted to remember him.

  Last night I dreamed that I had come home at last and found Carol playing on the floor alone — we talked and played together for quite a while there as we got to know each other again — my, she was a big and beautiful girl! I went to the piano and played and sang some scales for the first time in two years, then I called up an excellent firm in town and ordered three cases of the best sparkling burgundy, a hundred champagne glasses, and pounds of shortbread. Carol and I took a cab, picked up all this stuff at the caterer’s and went to 39, arriving there at the stoop just as you all were bursting into ‘Adeste Fidelis [sic].’ We took all the things we had brought for the party in to Allie, and then I went upstairs to join you all in the music by candlelight with little Carol atop my shoulders singing. I cried — and that was the end of it.

  He went back into the field with his platoon, holding a mountain pass against Japanese troops trying to retake it. “Leeches really give me the willies,” he wrote. Asked to sing to the men before an outdoor movie, he sang “By and By” but couldn’t remember the words of any other song they called for. He wrote home about the sensation of going over the side of a landing craft under fire; it had something in common with the nervousness before a concert, but, he wrote, “In battle I found my fear took the form of mad anger, usually.”

  Then jaundice put him back in the Leyte field hospital, so he missed his platoon’s next landing craft mission — the invasion of Okinawa. When the battalion steamed north from the Philippines, Jack was left behind — and he wrote forlornly, “A young lieutenant commissioned in the field has taken over my platoon.” But by mid-April of 1945 he too was on a ship, and by May he was in the front lines on Okinawa. “I seem to have a fine full-strength platoon,” he wrote more cheerfully. Though May 7 was VE Day, when hostilities ended in Europe, he wrote that Okinawa “is hell — fighting’s like ‘Europe,’ only the Nips don’t surrender, at all!”

  He was writing, he said, on blank air letter forms they had found “on two Japanese we shot just outside our hole last night.”

  This campaign has Leyte beat for fierceness and horror. I have the first platoon of K company at present — most of the men are youngsters, willing fellows, just out of IRTC. . . . We have been living in the midst of crackling rifle fire, pounding mortars, and endless whistling and banging of artillery night and day.

  And although he was itching from fleas, with the stench of decaying Japanese and American bodies all around him, he wrote from his foxhole about plans for his musical future.

  Escamillo in Carmen, Scarpia in Tosca, Valentine in Faust, Figaro in Barber. I’d like to study them with Stanley Pratt, for dramatics, and with Hans Wohlmuth for dramatics and operatic interpretation; and possibly with Herbert Graf for operatic tradition. Quite an order, eh what? . . . Later, Stanley Pratt would be wonderful for Verdi’s Iago and Falstaff. You are right, I do want to work hard to attain a good foundation and the highest quality to my voice and music before launching out publicly. And so the more mature and difficult roles will also come in time, later, the Mozart ones, the Wagnerian — Strauss, and a few others. At the same time I feel that —

  And the letter broke off, who knows why.

  A week later, after an attack, he wrote that he was cooking up cereal and a cup of “our old standby Nescafé — let’s never have it around again after this.” He was longing for the end of the war.

  The air smells clearer and fresher than I’ve smelled for a long time now, this morning — the dead have been pretty well disposed of by bulldozers in this area, and the torrential rains must have washed the stench away. This cool morning freshness makes me homesick for the hills of Choate.

  By early June 1945 he had twenty-six men left in his platoon, out of forty-one. He wrote home from the ruins of a farmhouse, in whose shelter they were making some coffee until dusk, when they would stand guard in their foxholes up the hill. They had just performed a mercy killing.

  When we got here this afternoon I found a small Okinawan child (about nine or ten) lying under a blanket, wounded, in a thatched-roof manger, with only a couple of scrawny, crying goats with him. He had a very deep and serious shrapnel wound in his chest and in his leg — must have lain there, all alone, for a couple of days, because gangrene had set in, and the open wounds were crawling with maggots. . . . He was so pathetic and helpless looking, as I stared down at him, that my blood boiled to see what the waging of war did to innocent children — no matter what race. I opened my biscuit can and fed him the crackers and candy; he looked so grateful for it; then I couldn’t understand what he was trying to tell me in a weak foreign whisper, until he kept looking toward an old wooden gourd hanging in the straw, and opening and closing his parched lips; I took the ladle, and got him water from the nearby well — not a whimper did he make, so we felt morphine was unnecessary. Our battalion aid station was about two miles to our rear still, and it was impossible to get him back then, for sniper fire was still covering the area we had had to dash across — and so I didn’t want to endanger any man’s life. He got pretty bad this evening, just as we were about to try to get him back to the medico — we had done all we could, put some sulpha powder about the openings, and applied sterile dressings; but there was no hope, as he suddenly grew much worse. We have just finished him off with a double dose of morphine — he is in a sound and final sleep, and out of his misery. Poor child! — God damn this war!

  A week later he wrote a letter mixing anguish and trivia in the way that is produced only by war.

  The men are all feeling pretty low today — we were in a hell of a position last night, out in front, and after the perimeter was set in, I gave orders to stay put and fire at anything that moved; we got quite a handful of Japs during the night, but three of my men got a little careless in their foxhole, I guess, and one of our own men shot at them — killing two of the b
oys, outright, and wounding the other in the neck. It is one of those tragic things; and although it quite upsets us for a while, the man that did the shooting is in no way to blame (I’ve had a terrible time with him today, he is so broken up over it.)

  Don’t you think Ken resembles General Eisenhower in this snapshot — not very good of Carol though. I wonder if you could get me a jacket like Ken’s; we have not been issued them over here, they must be quite comfortable.

  This was his last letter from the front. The next day, being a good soldier, he did something he had warned Ken and David never to do. (“Remember, a platoon commander is not there to do the job of a scout — one of our own officers got it between the eyes, when he left his men, and went out ahead to do some scouting.”) Apparently a superior officer was visiting the platoon under Jack’s command and wanted an overview of the field. This didn’t seem a good idea, but you don’t argue with a superior, so out they went, and Jack was shot.

  He nearly died. The bullet smashed through his shoulder blade into the chest cavity and through a lung, breaking six ribs and embedding bone fragments in the other lung. He lost a lot of blood. In the field hospital he was set down among the cases that seemed hopeless, but a doctor named Gaynor had him moved, feeling he could be saved. A week later Jack dictated a letter for his family at the hospital; characteristically, he tried so hard to reassure them that for months they had no real idea of the severity of his wound.

  I am unable to write at this time so one of the Red Cross workers has been kind enough to help me out.

  On June 16, just a few days before the conclusion of our campaign a Jap 90 Mortar sailed into me and here I am in a field hospital.

  The War Dept. may notify you so I am writing you so you’ll have no anxiety.

  My shoulder was broken. I banged up a few ribs, they have me in good care, but life is terribly boring.

  Apart from the fact that his wound had been caused by a gunshot, not a mortar shell, the most notable thing about this description is its extreme understatement. In the first weeks after he was shot, the complications of his massive chest wound were kept in check largely by the efforts of Dr. Gaynor, who had rescued him the first day and who turned out to be a chest specialist. (“A fine chap and a crackerjack doctor,” Jack said.) He ran a high fever, and the infection was hard to control.

  My deepest difficulty is trying to sleep at night — I try to think of pleasant things — going home, playing with little Carol, of refreshing baths or a comfortable bed, New England, the music I will do, of good food (cold), but all I do is have half-awake nightmares, of Okinawa all over again.

  But he had on his side, as he had written home earlier in the campaign, “my determination, my enthusiasm, and my faith in God — and my will to live!” Gaynor wanted to send him to a notable chest surgeon named Woodruff, who was at the General Hospital on Guam, 1,400 miles away, but the Air Corps had a rule against carrying chest patients. So Jack had to be put into a large “traveling cast” and shipped in the hot, swaying sick bay of a troop transport to Guam. Major Woodruff, like Gaynor, was the right person in the right place at the right time.

  I am very keen about him as a doctor and have complete confidence in him. As a person he is a fine fellow and a real gentleman — a little older than Capt. Gaynor was. He took me right in hand, had them remove the clumsy and tight heavy cast, which enveloped the entire upper part of my body, and put my broken arm in a much more simple, light, and comfortable brace. Then a few days ago he operated on me, removing one rib and draining out a tremendous amount of pus and accumulation from the lung and chest cavity. Then he inserted a rubber tube through my back, into the chest cavity, so now whatever is left in there is slowly draining out day and night through this hose.

  He was still being fed intravenously and had been given transfusions of eleven pints of blood; he weighed less than a hundred pounds. Soon he was back in another large cast. “It would be wiser for you not to bring Carol to see me when you come to visit me for the first time in the hospital,” he wrote, or rather, dictated.

  He added hopefully that his vocal cords were fine. “But it will take a little time for the right lung to expand to its full natural capacity.” His mother, busy with travel and still not fully informed, wrote to him, “I understand you are still ‘flat on your back.’ That must be exceedingly tiresome for you, dear. I hope by now you are raised up a little.” Ken, who had only just managed to have the Army send him overseas, flew to Guam to visit Jack, and at first barely recognized him.

  Eventually, at the end of September 1945 — after the dropping of what he called “this diabolical atomic weapon” and the end of World War II — Jack was flown via California to Walter Reed Hospital, where he would have several more operations. While he was in California, he did something to prove that whether or not his wife figured in his letters to his family, she was certainly still very much present in his heart, his mind, and his life.

  In his brief pause in California, he wrote to the Pacific Union Club on Nob Hill in San Francisco. His letter, and its result, was reported in a news magazine two or three weeks later, on October 15, 1945 — and the magazine found it so touching that the story was plucked from the archives and reprinted in 2006. In the original issue, the correspondent wrote that Jack sent his letter in “late September, 1945, from the debarkation hospital at Hamilton Field.” He then described the moment two years earlier when Jack proposed to Diane — who is not named — on the Nob Hill park bench, and the photograph they subsequently took of the bench with their shoes lined up beneath it. After that, he went on to report most of the contents of Jack’s letter, and the effect that it had on the recipients.

  It read: “Dear Sir: This letter may seem to hold . . . a strange request . . . but I am in earnest. I am an infantry line officer . . . wounded at Okinawa. I am anxious to buy one of the green benches in . . . the little park adjoining the . . . club. A couple of years ago I became engaged to a New York girl one evening while sitting on [it]. We were later married and before I went overseas I . . . got to know a small daughter. I have always promised myself that I would try to get the bench for our garden in our home in New York. I hope you understand . . . John Langstaff, 1st Lieut., Infantry.”

  Enclosed was a sketch of the park, an X designating the bench.

  Transactions of this nature are seldom handled in the Pacific Union Club. And anyhow, the park belongs to the city. Nevertheless the club’s manager asked club member Lewis Lapham, the mayor’s son, to do something about it. Lapham took the letter to the city Park Commission.

  The commissioners engaged in a decent interval of protest and speech. Finally, beaming, they agreed to send the bench, and even (despite Langstaff’s insistence on paying for it) to give it and pay the cost of shipping themselves. Then they discovered that the bench had been removed from the park. They organized a search, discovered it, among some discarded machinery, in Golden Gate Park.

  Last week, disassembled and crated, it was on its way east to be installed in Lieut. Langstaff’s tiny yard on Manhattan’s East 62nd Street. And in both the Pacific Union Club and the City Hall a casual visitor might have been puzzled to observe a fleeting and apparently inexplicable smile on the faces of some solid, civic, and all-too-graying men.

  It’s a most endearing story, particularly if it all happened in the reported time frame of two or three weeks. In Esther Langstaff’s letter books, which often included family memorabilia as well as letters, there is, however, no mention of it, nor indeed any reference to the fact that Jack and his wife and daughter had a house in New York. There is only an account of the Langstaff family’s traditional Christmas carol party for 1945, written by Esther to Ken and David, who were both still away in the Army. After three months in Walter Reed Hospital, Jack had been allowed to go to New York for Christmas. If Diane and small Carol Langstaff were there in Brooklyn Heights at the party, they are not mentioned.

  Jack, Marshall, and John Woodbridge arrived in Carol Morton’s ca
r . . . Jack in ribbons and uniform. . . . He sat during all the singing until he came to the final one, which he sang over by the harp, and it was unbelievably beautiful and moving and his voice was very firm, clear, and resonant and he did look so darling, standing up there and looking out over us all.

  Asurviving 1945 Christmas card from Jack, Diane, and Carol Langstaff, at 244 East 62nd Street, New York, is inscribed “Christmas Eve together, 1945.” It has a photograph of toddler Carol in her pajamas, gazing pensively into an open fire above which hang a man’s dark sock, a woman’s silk stocking, and a little white sock. But the three of them can’t have been together for long, since Jack had been released from Walter Reed Hospital only for two weeks, and went back to D.C. on January 6, 1946. Though he had sung at the Christmas party, he said later, he’d had to breathe after every two measures.

  Altogether he was in Walter Reed for about a year, for a sequence of operations. They told him afterward that he might not have recovered so well if his lungs hadn’t been abnormally developed, from his life as a singer — so it was his dedication to his voice that brought the voice back to him. His marriage, however, didn’t survive.

  It’s impossible to chart precisely what happened to Jack and Diane. The protagonists and closest witnesses are no longer alive, and Carol was too young to remember. Like so many hasty wartime unions, the marriage proved to have no resistance to the less dramatic but more persistent pressures of peacetime — particularly, in the beginning, Jack’s long absences in the hospital. Diane was probably much too young and volatile to handle life with a husband who was no longer the healthy, romantic young lieutenant but a thin, damaged veteran desperate to find his voice again. The stresses on both sides must have been considerable. What’s more, after his rush into marriage with a girl he scarcely knew, by 1947 Jack was finding himself increasingly drawn to someone else.