Built more like a tortoise than a hare, the Tiger could make seventeen knots on smooth seas but was far more comfortable at twelve or thirteen, so that we averaged barely three hundred nautical miles per day. We were scheduled to make Cherbourg in eleven days, calling at Plymouth just before. Our progress was steady when the seas were glass, which, thank God, they mostly were. But when on two occasions the winds were up enough to raise and churn the waves, our gallant Tiger groaned, wallowed, pitched, and rolled. Some of the passengers were seasick some of the time, many were sick most of the time, and a few seemed affected not at all. Tish took everything in stride, packing in breakfast, lunch, and dinner without missing a beat. I was queasy two or three times but never sick. But Harvard and Princeton were miserable day and night. The problem was the ship’s motion was far worse topside than in the ship’s bowels, where the hammocks were stretched. But down below, the stench was virtually unbearable, no matter how hard the sturdy crew tried to mop and clean.
After the first difficult day—day four, as I recall—when hammocks turned into stretchers and the youthful above-deck exuberance that had marked our first three days out suddenly disappeared, I had, after a brief trip below to make sure my male charges were still alive, decided to abandon those foul depths for the rest of the voyage.
I had done my senior English thesis at UNC on Hemingway, and like Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls I kept waiting for the earth to move. But how could it, when beneath us the sea was constantly stirring, if not roiling? Perhaps in the instance I should have looked for the earth to stand still.
Also on board was another Hemingway, Patrick by name, a gangly youngster of about nineteen with whom I struck up a conversation our second day out. An art history major, he was on his way to visit French and Italian museums and to hook up with his brother, who was in Rome. He was interested to hear about the Chambon work camp, and I saw his eyes light up when I told him after Le Chambon I’d be in Paris on an American Field Service fellowship. “My father was in the AFS during World War I,” he said, “on the Italian front,” and suddenly I realized that this pleasant, unassuming young man was Ernest’s son. If the heavy legacy of his famous father affected him in any way, it was nowhere apparent. Did he have literary aspirations of his own? I asked, and he laughed, almost wickedly, and said, with an emphatic shake of his head: “Absolutely none.” Math was a favorite subject, and when I told him about my mathematics mano a mano with young McIntosh, he roared. “I probably would have throttled him,” he offered, but the gentle look in his eyes suggested he was incapable of throttling anyone. I had always pictured bigger-than-life Papa with a constant swagger, but with Patrick there was none. Shy, diffident, he seemed to want the world to know he was not using Papa’s name to clear him a patch in life. Only when he talked about painting and art did he become passionate, and I wondered aloud whether he might end up the curator of a major museum. He pooh-poohed the idea. Something far more exciting than that, he said, though exactly what he wasn’t sure. Maybe Africa, a possibility he owed to his father.
I finally had to confess that I had done my senior thesis on his father. “Do you have a copy with you?” he asked. “I’d love to read it.”
I did, though I cautioned him that this was an undergraduate work with few pretensions. “It did, however, force me to reread all of his work, from the Nick Adams stories onward.”
“They’re great, aren’t they?” Patrick said.
“The best,” I agreed. “But you’ll see from my essay that I’m a pretty big fan.”
After reading the piece, which I had called “Ernest Hemingway: The Good Inner Feeling”—the subtitle taken from his definition “what is moral is what you feel good after”—Pat handed it back to me and said he thought it a damn good job, though he disagreed with my assessment of For Whom the Bell Tolls, my least favorite of the opus. “You should send it to my father,” he said. “I’m sure he’d like it.”
Pat gave me Papa’s address in Cuba, with the request I not give it out in turn. I promised I wouldn’t. Back in Paris in the fall, I reread what I’d written, found I liked it far less than I remembered, and never sent it on. I probably should have, for at one-and-twenty I had a boundless, probably excessive, admiration for the man and his razor-lean prose, but I have always found communication with famous people difficult. My problem. Oddly, several years later, when my new Paris friend George Plimpton, another Papa fan, read a shortened version of the piece in Sindbad Vail’s Points, his first reaction was “You should send this to Papa.” Later, George interviewed Hemingway for The Paris Review, and the two became friends. In another life, I’ll put such reluctance behind me and steam boldly forward, as George did instinctively, as if it were his birthright—which it doubtless was.
* * *
At dawn on the eleventh day, virtually all of us were topside as we approached the shores of France. Gentle hills of green rose up to touch the lowering clouds, inviting undulations were speckled with black-and-white dots that, as we drew nearer, became herds of cattle. Onshore, despite the early hour, there were already hundreds of blue-clad longshoremen loading and unloading the dozen ships tied up there. A tug eased us into the dock, and we quickly disembarked and headed for the customs shed.
My plan was to walk. Wherever I went, through field and forest, village and town, vestiges of the war remained. Burned trees stood stark and lonely in farmers’ fields, in which burgeoning stalks of wheat and corn now rose, peaceful and uncaring. Whole apple orchards, of which there were many, were scorched, and yet on the far side of the road others might stand unscathed. Stone walls were pocked in places, totally decimated in others, the debris scattered for hundreds of yards. I could almost hear the sharp rattle of the machine guns, the howitzer’s roar, the scream of the bullets back and forth, one side inching forward, the other retreating, slowly but surely. I had read and seen newsreels of those first chaotic days and weeks, units dispersed or lost, paratroopers landing in the flooded marshes, tanks creaking forward without clear knowledge of their destined goal.
What had made me take this lonely trek? To atone for my absence here on D-day? I had been twelve when the war started, fourteen at Pearl Harbor, eighteen when it ended. More than once I overheard my mother say to Father how deeply happy she was that I was too young to be caught up in this new war.
At seventeen, I announced I was joining the navy. Mother protested that I was too young, that I should wait at least until I was eighteen. Father said, “Let the boy do what he wants,” which ended that conversation, and on April 22 of my senior year I went down to the local navy recruiting station and filled out the enlistment forms. I graduated on June 10 and three weeks later, on July 1, was inducted in Philadelphia, one of seventy or eighty youngsters swelling the navy’s ranks that Pennsylvania day, and immediately dispatched to boot camp. Apparently on the basis of my score on the navy exams I had taken in April, I was sent into an officers’ training program called V-12 (I never learned what either the V or the 12 stood for) in the South, first to the University of South Carolina in Columbia, an institution that clearly had seen better days, with its crumbling walls and peeling paint, offset by the Southern welcome the townspeople offered the thousand young sailors stationed there. Then, six months later, for no apparent reason, orders arrived sending me and a couple dozen others to the even deeper South: Howard College, a tiny Baptist institution in Birmingham, Alabama, so desperate to survive in these lean wartime years, when most of its former student population was now in uniform, that it had accepted the navy’s takeover of its premises without even inquiring whether any of these blue-suited young men who now roamed the campus were Baptists. Two semesters later I was shipped off again, this time to what, upon arrival, struck me as paradise: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The piney woods, the congenial surroundings, the first-rate teachers, the lofty oaks that lined the streets of the prim, neat town, whose every store and business was focused on serving the campus population—all combined
to make me feel immediately at home. The war was winding down, but UNC was still very much dominated by the military. Even at war’s end, in the summer of 1945, thousands of cadets still filled the dormitories and classrooms as the powers that be in Washington pondered how many of these rising officers would be needed to keep the peace and police the brave new world. But with the fall semester, a group of men and women who had fought the war began returning, under the auspices of a brilliant program that enabled young veterans to avail themselves of a college education, the GI Bill.
Finally, in the spring of 1946, the military decided most of us could be released, and I was discharged in July. Though I was only two years out of high school, I had been on the accelerated navy program and, again a civilian, was in my college senior year. In short, though I had worn the uniform for two years, I had really missed the war.
Now, in Normandy, embarking on this voluntary hike, was I trying to make amends for being a year or two too young? None of my high school classmates had died, though some had seen battle, but two classes above me, in my sister Joan’s class, there had been several wounded and one dead. Did I owe a debt to those who were not so lucky, who simply by their birth date, a grain of sand in time more than mine, paid the ultimate price, whereas here I was, walking sublimely in the gentle sunlight through the fields and farms where they had fought and died only cosmic seconds before?
That evening, my fourth in Normandy, clouds began to gather, growling on the western horizon, and I knew I was in for a wet night. Should I find an inn? Ask a peasant for shelter in his barn? Lightning, followed by thunder no more than thirty seconds away, convinced me that refuge was the better part of valor. I strode to the nearest farmhouse, a neat dwelling with a storybook thatched roof, and rapped on the door. Shuffle, shuffle from within. The latch came unbolted, the door squeaked open, and a wizened old man appraised me up and down.
“Soldat?” he said. A soldier? I was wearing khaki army-surplus clothes.
I shook my head. “Étudiant.” A student. I thought I saw a look of disdain flit across his face, but in fact he was inscrutable. “Il semble vouloir pleuvoir,” I ventured, poetic without intent, for I later learned that what I had said was, in essence: “It seems rain would like to come.” And for good measure, glancing backward at the fast-darkening sky, “Tonnerre,” I said. “Éclair.” Thunder. Lightning.
He laughed. “Anglais?”
“Non, Américain.”
“Ah!” his head arched back, and his mouth opened wide to reveal an almost toothless interior: only two upper teeth, one left, one right, premolars, I believe they’re called. I had no idea whether this was a good sign or bad. “Entrez,” he said. “Entrez!” And, half turning, he shouted over his shoulder, “Marie, viens, on a un visiteur.” Marie, do come, we have a visitor. Thus it was, by a roll of the dice, I spent my fourth night in France, my first as a guest, at the home of the Massans, Marie and Jean-Luc.
I asked for use of the barn; they insisted I sleep in the big double bed in the room next to theirs. I said that I had my rations for food; they insisted I share their frugal dinner. That night I learned the French definition of “frugal.” We began with a hearty French vegetable soup, followed by a rabbit stew and small potatoes cooked crisp, then a green salad such as I—in America used to a thing called iceberg lettuce—had never tasted. The dressing, a subtle mixture of oil and vinegar spiced with finely cut garlic, was also a revelation. And for dessert an apple tart—for this, I learned, was a region of apples, which were transformed into hundreds of dishes and liqueurs. All this washed down by a bottle of local red wine. By my later standards, it was doubtless ordinaire, un gros rouge, but for me then, for whom the taste of wine had been limited to the chalice at Communion, and that years ago, it was a giddy experience. Later, my host insisted I taste some Calvados, the local apple brandy.
During dinner, most of the talk was of the war, in which Jean-Luc and Marie had lost their younger son Pierre, a few scant months before the end of the occupation. He had been in the Maquis, the Resistance movement, not here in Normandy, no, but down in the Cévennes in central France, where he and several of his comrades had gone to join the Resistance. Seven boys, all friends. Caught by the Boches. Shot by the Boches. Cold-blooded bastards! They knew the war was lost. Why did these boys have to go gallivanting so far from home? War is terrible, terrible, nothing good has ever come of it, and nothing ever will. Death. Death and destruction, that’s all. And in a few years nobody will remember what it was all about. Just you wait and see.
On the far side of the table, Marie was knitting fiercely, but I could see that she was both angry and fighting back tears. Angry at her husband for talking so much to this unknown American, tearful at the resurgent memory of their irretrievably lost son.
He was only eighteen when he died, Jean-Luc was going on.
“Père,” Marie said softly, not looking up, “you go on too long. These are things our visitor can’t know about or understand.”
It was true that I was getting only part of the thread, the monologue provoked by my presence, my army fatigues, this American who reminded them of the countless others who had pushed on through these parts only four years before, but I did get the gist, and understood about their son.
“Yes,” I said, “war is terrible. But weren’t we all—French and Americans and British—fighting because we had to, because Hitler was a madman who had to be crushed, écrasé, éliminé.” I knew my grammar was far from perfect, but hoped the point I was trying to make got through.
Jean-Luc shook his head. “War,” he insisted, “has no justification. None! Only people who have never gone through it can think otherwise!”
Over our glass of Calvados—that the Massans had made themselves—I asked naively if the manufacture of alcohol in France was government controlled. Jean-Luc gave me a look halfway between disgust and disdain. “In principle, yes,” he responded, “but we do not too often follow what the government tells us to do. Especially in such matters. We make our own not for sale to others but for our own use. No one can argue that.”
It was no tiny tasting glass he offered but a good eight ounces in a thick water glass filled to the brim. It was slightly harsh to my untutored palate but immediately warming when it hit the belly. The problem was, fifteen minutes later, with barely half the glass downed, the weathered wooden beams, the already-uneven stones of the tall kitchen fireplace, the windows themselves began slowly to revolve in a clockwise direction. Or was it counterclockwise? Try as I might, I couldn’t get the damn room to stop. By dint of will I forced it to slow, but then it would speed up again at every sip. For God’s sake, Seaver, don’t get sick. Please, dignity before all. The pride of a nation is riding on your formerly teetotaler shoulders. How would Hemingway have handled it? I wondered. Tossed the first glass off, doubtless asked for another, then donned a pair of gloves and gone six rounds with the farmer’s six-foot son.
Somehow I made it upstairs, knapsack and all, having thanked my hosts with a profusion of French I did not know I possessed, some of which they seemed to understand, and slept so soundly that Marie had to tap discreetly on my door at eight o’clock—late for them—and announce that coffee was ready.
I said I would be taking a bus to Caen, and they offered to take me to the nearest stop, a couple of kilometers away, but I knew that under normal circumstances Jean-Luc would already have been in the fields a good two hours before, so I politely declined. Although we had known each other less than twelve hours, they insisted on sending me on my way with more ham and cheese, a fresh baguette, and a half liter of Calvados, which, they said, they were delighted to learn I had enjoyed. They also insisted on kissing me on both cheeks, Jean-Luc’s two- or three-day bristles grating me like Gallic sandpaper. They carefully noted down my name, my address in the Cévennes, where I had promised to go see the family who had sequestered their son in 1944, and made me promise to return in the fall when I was back in Paris.
At the road, I
turned and waved goodbye. My last image was of them standing there stock-still, looking for all the world like a version of The Gleaners. Only the pitchfork was missing.
* * *
Just before eleven the bus swayed into sight, packed to the gills both inside and out, for the roof was filled with a disarray of crates and baggage, none too stoutly tied, that shifted and jostled with every bump in the road, of which there were many. The heavy rains of the night before had created dangerous patches of the road, so this top-heavy monstrosity bearing down upon me looked far more drunken than Rimbaud’s boat. Surely it would be better to walk than risk death aboard this rattletrap farting its way toward me. Even in my blissful ignorance of French vehicles, it had to date from World War I.
The Tender Hour of Twilight Page 12
