Let Me Finish

by Roger Angell

  It's my theory—a guess, rather—that martini drinking skipped a generation after Vietnam and marijuana came along. Many thousands of earlier suburban children, admitted to the dinner table or watching their parents' parties from the next room, saw and heard the downside of the ritual—the raised voices and lowered control—and vowed to abandon the cocktail hour when they grew up. Some of them still blame martinis for their parents' divorces. Not until their children arrived and came of age did the slim glass and the delectable lift of the drink reassert itself, and carry us back to the beginning of this story.

  I still have a drink each evening, but more often now it's Scotch. When guests come to dinner, there are always one or two to whom I automatically offer Pellegrino or a Coke: their drinking days are behind them. Others ask for water or wait for a single glass of wine with the meal. But if there's a friend tonight with the old predilection, I'll mix up a martini for the two of us, in the way we like it, filling a small glass pitcher with ice cubes that I've cracked into quarters with my little pincers. Don't smash or shatter the ice: it'll become watery in a moment. Put three or four more cracked cubes into our glasses, to begin the chill. Put the gin or the vodka into the pitcher, then wet the neck of the vermouth bottle with a quickly amputated trickle. Stir the martini vigorously but without sloshing. When the side of the pitcher is misted like a January windowpane pour the drink into the glasses. Don't allow any of the ice in the pitcher to join the awaiting, unmelted ice in the glass. (My friend likes his straight up, so I'll throw away the ice in his glass. But I save it in my own, because a martini on the rocks stays cold longer, and I've avoided the lukewarm fourth or fifth sip from the purer potion.) Now stir the drink inside the iced glass, just once around. Squeeze the lemon peel across the surface—you've already pared it, from a fat, bright new lemon—and then run the peel, skin-side down, around the rim of the glass before you drop it in. Serve. Smile.

  Permanent Party

  IN midsummer of 1942, a month after I graduated from Harvard, I got drafted and sent to Atlantic City for basic training. As a private in the Air Force (it was a branch of the Army back then), I roomed with four other similarly traumatized young men in a blacked-out oceanside suite at the Ritz Hotel, which had been co-opted as a barracks. Here, for three hot summer weeks, we memorized the Articles of War and learned how to stand at attention, how to salute, and, through training films, how to recognize the Japanese "Betty" bomber, the German ME-109 fighter, and the impartial, skulking gonococcus, all at a glance. We also learned how to march. At six in the morning, with the sun gleaming off the sea and our moving shadows lying long across the boardwalk, we marched from the Ritz down to a mess hall in another hotel, fell out and ate, fell in and marched back. Later that morning we fell out and formed up again, and, accompanied by the blocky dozens of other platoons, marched three miles up the boardwalk (tromp-tromp, sing out, "Onetwo!") to a dusty parking lot, where we did jumping jacks and other calisthenics. Then we fell in and marched sweatily back three miles for chow at the same mess hall. With the country newly at war, no rifles or sidearms or weapons training had yet come our way, but, boy, could we march.

  Late in August, one of many hundreds of rumors came true when we packed up and climbed aboard a troop train and began a journey to someplace—no one told us where. Eventually, we would be dropped off, car by car, at unmarked sidings close to the forts or fields where we would begin our technical training. We didn't know anything, not even which side would win this war. All of Europe still belonged to the Nazis, and the early news from a spot called Guadalcanal was grim.

  Days on end, stuffed into ancient, sooty Pullman cars, we rolled and clacked westward, while we dozed, played cards, talked, laughed, got depressed, wrote letters, and read endlessly. Unlike in the G.I. movies made about this time, no one sang. I had brought the Modern Library edition of The Brothers Karamazov with me, and had chugged along well into the Grand Inquisitor chapter, when a broken drinking fountain interrupted my studies, inundating a heap of blue barracks bags, including mine, in which I had stashed the gloomy Bros. for the moment. At night, we bunked three to a section, taking turns in the upper berth (a delicious single) or squalidly doubling up, head to foot, in the lower. I still recall waking up in the middle of my first night and slowly comprehending that I was staring at the pale toes of Private Pete Hoffman, a fireman from Jersey City.

  On our third day, I drew K.P.—the hated kitchen fatigue, but this time a welcome break in the dull, mysterious journey. In a converted mail car, we served up some kind of stew from big galvanized-metal barrels, ladling it into the mess kits of our fellow G.I.s, who complained unimaginatively but ate it all up, every scrap. We K.P.s worked late that night, scrubbing away at the massive pots and then sweeping and mopping the ridged, swaying floor. It was after eleven when the mess sergeant said we were done, and then someone rolled back the wide, boxcar-style doors, and the warm night air streamed in around us. With a couple of my companions, I sat down and lit a cigarette and watched Indiana slowly roll away under my dangling, booted feet. We talked a little, I think, and soon the rumble and creak of our car, the pleasing slither of wheels, and the sidewise-moving dark silhouettes of trees silenced us, yet no one got up and headed off to bed. We had a low moon for company, and the smell of fields and the coolness of the occasional stream or river we passed over (with accompanying bridge-rumble) and the smoothly presented and taken-away details of each small town—a silent station and an empty platform, a light on in somebody's upstairs bedroom, a Purina Chow billboard next to a street lamp, more trees—were hypnotic and lulling. Dozens of trains, it came to me, were at that moment carrying thousands of men like me to someplace new and strange, and eventually to the war itself, but just then, for the first time, I didn't mind at all. I had become a soldier.

  A day or two later, dropped off at our own destination during the night, we alighted from our abandoned lone Pullman car in the early morning sun and found ourselves on a straggly patch of prairie with a rim of tall mountains to the west. No one had a clue about where we were—"I think it's Oregon," somebody said—or what anyone had in mind for us. Birds twittered. Then a stubby locomotive slid into view from around the bend, hooked on, and pulled us into the future. We were armorers, it turned out, or about to be, and this was Lowry Field, outside Denver, where we would suck up thirteen weeks of intensive courses in small arms, electrical controls, chemical warfare, explosives and ammunition, bombs and bomb racks, and the like, and a main course in the Browning .30- and .50-caliber machine guns. As such matters were measured in 1942, the change in us from whatever we'd been before—students, for the most part—to tough, coveralled ground-crew maintenance noncoms ready for attachment to some imminently departing Pacific-bound P-47 fighter outfit or B-24 bombardment squadron in line to join the massively growing Eighth Air Force in England, was trifling. Direct combat would not be our lot, and though we knew enough to count ourselves lucky, we had no clear sense of the dimensions of what we'd missed: how our soldier's chance of experiencing everyday fear, with the risk of death or maiming ever at hand, had gone whispering by. And Denver, we'd already heard, was a country club: one of the few cities where the best bars and restaurants had been set aside for enlisted men, not the brass, and where overnight passes grew like clover. I had it made, it seemed. At the same time, the alteration of life and fortune that I and most of my American generation endured over these few months is not something that young men or women today—or so they keep telling me—can quite take in.

  Back among my fellow seniors on Commencement Day in Harvard Yard, with the tides of war almost visibly lapping at our toes, I'd run into a favorite professor of mine, Kenneth J. Conant, as he hurried past in full plumage, and took the chance to shake his hand. Three or four vivid courses with him in contemporary and medieval architecture had almost lured me away from my major in English, and when I'd seen him in May, while delivering a late paper to his office in the Fogg Museum, he'd taken a key and a flashlight out
of his desk and invited me down to a large room in the basement, where we spent half an hour circling a great table model of the classic dig he'd been engaged upon at the twelfth century Burgundian Abbey Church at Cluny—a work now suspended because the site was in the hands of the enemy. My last Harvard lecture, it turned out, was a private one, and when it was over, Conant, his eyes alight, said, "One of these days. Soon." He'd go back, he meant, and so he did. There's a Rue Conant in Cluny still, celebrating his grand feat of scholarship.

  I forgot about this moment in the shocking, boring surge of events after graduation, but one day in March of 1943, a bare nine months later, I thought of Professor Conant again, and wondered what he'd make of my new line of work. Since I'd seen him, I'd finished tech school, got married, become an instructor in machine guns and power turrets, picked up a couple of stripes, and had made Permanent Party at Lowry. Permanent Party! Connoting riotousness, it meant the opposite. I'd be in place, for a change, no longer subject to sudden orders or departures, a noncom citizen of Lowry at least for now, and allowed to take up a residence off the post. In G.I.-ese, I'd found a home.

  What I wanted Conant to come look at with me was the Browning Caliber .50 Machine Gun, M2—a lean, sixty-four-pound, five-foot-eight-inch automatic dispenser of destruction, with an interestingly perforated barrel jacket within which the barrel and complicated inner parts banged back and forth at blurry speed and with terrifying noise and smell. I didn't get to fire this weapon often—mostly in the malfunction sheds, where the guns, from fixed downward-tilting positions, fired (or failed to fire) their bursts into underground trenches, while groups of students, by threes or fours, observed and tried to figure out what was wrong with each cunningly botched gun, and how it could be fixed. Learning the Browning, I'd fallen in love with its dozens of slots and grooves and cams, its springs (some coiled within each other) and switches, its ejectors and extractors. In supporting roles were the accelerator, a beckoning forefinger at the front of the oil buffer body, which quickened the recoil; the breech lock, which froze things at firing, and its partnered, instantly-arriving breech-unlocking pin; and, as main player, the slim, pale steel bolt, which, nipping backward with a fresh round in its teeth, simultaneously knocked free the spent casing of the old round and, reversing, rammed the new projectile snug into the same chamber, ready for fire. All this was accomplished with such dispatch and precise, minute tolerances that it was not, as one supposed, the explosion of gunpowder but the heat of friction during extraction that rendered the ejected, clattering cartridge case piping hot to the touch. Professor Conant relished the inventive new as much as the medieval—he'd introduced me to the Mies van der Rohe–designed Tugendhat House, in Czechoslovakia; Frank Lloyd Wright's Johnson's Wax factory in Racine, Wisconsin; and more—and had we been standing together in this cluttered Lowry hangar, with the weapon before us on a tall table, he'd have run his fingertips across its silky metal surfaces and asked questions. "This?" he'd say, pointing inside the lifted cover. "Oh that's the belt feed lever," I'd say in return. "And see how this knob on the front end runs inside that hollowed-out angle, that path along the top of the bolt, and with recoil becomes a cam to pull over the next round. If you lift out this little round piece in the middle and then drop it back down facing the other way, the belt will feed from the opposite side. And this gizmo on the slide is the belt feed pawl, which sort of snaps over the top of each new round and grabs hold."

  "'The Belt Feed Pawl,'" Conant would repeat happily, making it sound like a name in Dickens.

  These imagined scenes helped pass the wearying and boring hours of repeated instruction, during which we had to present the exact same material each week to another incoming fresh class of students, but our central preoccupation, the Browning .50-caliber aircraft machine gun, still holds up in history. Amassed forward-facing in the wings and body of the new P-47 and P-51 fighter planes, and heavily distributed about each B-17 or B-24 heavy bomber—ten guns, working in pairs fore and aft and in turrets above and below, and singly on either side of the waist—it was the weapon, it could be claimed, that in cumulative numbers and after long bloody trial destroyed the German Luftwaffe and won that part of our war. Modern automatic guns are quicker and deadlier, but the Browning, which employed no electronics or gas-assisted movements, was a little apex of the late American industrial era: a whole New England factory of usefully moving and reciprocating parts slimmed into a narrow box and delivering its product eight hundred and fifty times per minute, at an effective distance of two miles.

  This fresh expertise helped stay any guilt over my favored status just then, away from the dirty and distant events of the war, but did not dispel doubts I felt about my value as a teacher. I'd had a .22 rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun as a boy back home, and knew how to use them, but any affinity in me for this sort of work came as a surprise when it surfaced in a mechanical aptitude test I took in my first week in the service. If the Air Force had shoved me into the right place somehow, it showed genius in keeping me on as an instructor, instead of sending me along to employ this stuff on the line, where I would have been instantly lost. Many of the Idaho high school kids and Arkansas rice farmers and Louisville cab drivers and Brockton plumbers who filled up the stuffy, newly thrown-up classrooms at Lowry seemed to take in the workings of the Browning after a couple of peering glances inside the lifted cover or with one finger running down beside the exquisitely rendered drawings in the manual. They knew how Dodge truck engines and Motorola radios and John Deere reapers and family Electroluxes actually worked and where they could go wrong. I knew how to listen to a complicated lecture and effectively throw back the same stuff in an exam. Listening to me gabbing away in front of a blackboard or pointing up inside a Martin 250 CE electrical turret on a platform, they maintained a lidded ennui, a dislike that matched their sour feelings for everything they'd encountered in the service so far. I was chickenshit, but given a chance they'd probably win this goddam war, if they had to.

  It was a near thing at that. When I entered the armament school, about half our section had gone to college, with a couple of grad students thrown in; everyone else had finished high school. By the time I began teaching, six months later, there were no college guys in the incoming groups, and over the next eight months—before the Army mysteriously converted me, overnight, into a historian—the class I.Q. plunged downhill. When fewer and fewer of the students seemed able to pass the weekly tests, tests were abandoned. When it was noticed that half the students were falling asleep in their chairs, the chairs were removed, and we lectured on, six hours at a stretch, to G.I.'s sitting cross-legged on the floor or out on their feet, with elbows propped in a window frame. Some of them didn't know the difference between the numbers ten and zero. We instructors, smoking together during the ten-minute break at the end of each hour, talked about this in low tones and wondered whether the service rosters were going to be good enough to carry us to the end. We'd seen the bottom of the barrel.

  Evelyn Baker and I got married at ten-thirty on a Saturday night in October, an hour or so after my last Lowry class let out. Eleanor Emery, a Bryn Mawr classmate of my mother's who lived in a square, porched house on Washington Street, filled in—along with her jovial husband and mostly grown children and neighbors—as family. There was candlelight and cake and champagne, and a new service friend of mine, Dan Rapalje, from New Jersey, stood up for me as best man. Rearrangements of this sort were the common thing in these makeshift times, and were appreciated. My mother was there, having made the two-day trip out on the crowded wartime trains, as did Evelyn's father, Roland (Tweaker) Baker, a Republican cotton broker from Boston. This side of the war, an extemporary and exuberant making do, is largely overlooked in the annals. I missed all the arrangements, being on duty, but a half hour or so before the ceremony Mr. Baker took me aside to say that my wife to be had just hit him up for some money. He'd braced himself while Evelyn consulted a little list she'd made up. "How about five dollars?" she said.

&nb
sp; She and I had been together for four years, starting just before my arrival at college. Her parents were freshly divorced, and she and her mother and three younger sisters were staying on in their suburban house in Weston, an easy forty-minute bus trip away from Harvard Yard. Her mother, Mary, vague and charmingly prone to malapropism, ran things with a frazzled good will, and the three lively and variously gifted girls turned to Evelyn—and then to Evelyn and me—for direction and entertainment. Here, at home inside a Jane Austen novel, I passed my college weekends, carving Sunday roasts and getting the station wagon serviced, explaining the double finesse in bridge, lacing up ice skates, sharing by radio the fall of Paris and the night bombings of London, giving the horselaugh to Wendell Willkie, teaching the racy lyrics from "Pal Joey," and picking up the dogs at the vet after their shots, having fallen not just in love but into a family.

  Evelyn, thin and brown-haired, with a strong chin, was tougher than anyone I'd met before. A full-scale diabetic since the age of six, she ran her case without fuss or complaint, shooting each day's doses of insulin into her thigh, and backing away from nothing in life. Once in a while she'd unbalance and begin to slide into the daze of an insulin shock, and her mother or I would have to grab her waving hands and make her take some orange juice or bites of a Hershey bar in response. The early diagnosis of her disease had come only a few months after the discovery of insulin, and her first specialist, the godlike Dr. Eliot Joslin, of Deaconess Hospital, took her as a young child into a ward of recent amputees and said, "Take a look—this will happen to you if you don't take your shots." Enraged more than cowed, she became a model case, cited in the journals, who lived to eighty without losing her limbs or her eyesight. Her father, another bully, saw an absent son in her. One Saturday in our first autumn together she stationed me next to a high stone wall at the foot of a hill in Framingham, and told me she'd come by here shortly on her horse. Tweaker was a fox hunter, and though the local hunt had run out of foxes they made do with drag races instead, with decoy sacks of meat towed around the woodland course in advance, to lure the hounds. On this day, all played out as advertised—the baying hounds, the tootling horn, the scattered, rushing riders in pink or black habits, the thick sounds of hoofs on green turf. There was Tweaker, on his white hunter Feathers. And here suddenly came Evelyn, yards above me in the air on her enormous, gasping animal, her face white and excited as she cleared death by an inch or two and flew away up the hill. She scorned and hated this, I knew, and soon afterward told her father the hell with it, he'd have to break his neck on his own.