“Is there, Mark?” She looked up, and he saw that her eyes were filled with tears.
“Why are you crying?” he asked.
“I can’t help it.” Her voice was almost inaudible, and she did not move back but seemed to cling to him for strength. She held him for a moment longer, then said, “Oh, Mark, be careful!”
He looked down at her and kissed her again, this time gently, then he simply held her as she put her head on his shoulder. They clung together without speaking for a long time, both of them knowing that this might be the last time anything like this would ever take place in their lives.
16
A SURPRISING EVENING
Mark Stevens’ introduction to the Marine Corps began with a sergeant whose rich, blasphemous oath shocked him to the core. He was a man of middle age with a pot belly that spoiled his posture. He wore the Marine dress blues and over this a regulation, tight-fitting overcoat of forest green. As the sergeant spoke, Mark had the thought that blue and green were the two colors his mother told him did not match, but the Marines had decreed otherwise, and later on, the gaudy dark and light blue of the Marine dress seemed to blend in well with the soothing green.
“When you get to Parris Island,” the sergeant was saying, “forget you ever had any other life. You will anyway by the time they get through with you over there. You’re going to hate them,” he said. “Your sergeants, your officers, and maybe even each other. You’ll think the officers are the stupidest, rottenest bunch of men who ever lived, but if you want to save yourselves a headache, listen to me—do what they tell you and keep your big mouths shut!”
Mark was to remember the sergeant’s words. He remained silent all the way on the trip to Parris Island, joined by Marine recruits from all over the country. They were crammed into passenger cars pulled by a diesel, and comfort was left behind in Washington. As the train moved through the darkness to the clickety clack of the wheels over the joinings of the rails, Mark realized that somehow this business of becoming a marine was already having a vital impact on him. He had heard of boot camp and knew that the Marines believed in the toughest of all training, and the man who had it the roughest was the most admired.
When they arrived at Parris Island, they tumbled off the train, became a training platoon, were assigned a number, and given into the cruel hands of the drill instructor, who began bellowing at them instantly.
Mark felt his ears blistered by the profanity, and he studied the sergeant carefully, for he knew that his fate would be in his hands. He whispered to the man next to him, “He’s not as big as a freight car—but he’s not a whole lot smaller either.”
Sergeant Tippit’s voice was as big as his body. It seemed to reach out and physically embrace the squad, and Mark felt the rough sound of it down into his very bones. He loved drills, Sergeant Tippit did, and Mark forever carried a picture in his mind of the sergeant striding a few feet apart from his men, arms stretched out, hands clenched, head canted back, and his whole body ceaselessly bellowing out the drill.
Mark quickly learned that a naked man has no pride, no identity, no past, and no future. When he was stripped at the quartermaster’s, defenseless and not knowing what was coming next, he somehow lost his character with his clothing. The quartermaster swarmed over the recruits with a tape measure, and then the clothes seemed to be thrown at him from all angles: caps, gloves, socks, shoes, underwear, shirts, belts, pants. Mark emerged with a number, surrounded by sixty other human beings, but somehow the parts seemed to have no meaning except in the context of a whole. Glancing around he saw they all looked alike, and when they passed through the barbers and emerged with their heads as naked as marbles, they had lost one other portion of their identity.
Constantly they were screamed at and told that they were half baked, that they were no longer civilians, that they would never make Marines and would probably die during the training.
When they were not being screamed at, drawn up at attention, they were marching. Everywhere, always marching. To the sick bay, to the water racks, to the marching grounds. Mark grew accustomed to the sound of thousands of feet slapping the packed earth, grinding to a halt, rifle butts clashing. He seemed to have the sound of Sergeant Tippit’s voice in a small tape recorder that had been implanted in his skull. “Right—right shoulder ahms!” Slap! Slap! “Start your pieces, hear me? Start your pieces, you hear? I want noise, blood! Present ahms!”
No one cared about anything but discipline, or so it seemed to Mark. He had expected talk of the war, of how to survive in Vietnam, but they heard no fiery lectures about killing the gooks. The drill instructors were like sensualists, who feel that if a thing cannot be eaten, or drunk, or taken to bed, it does not exist, and all Sergeant Tippit cared for was drill, drill, drill. Once he marched Mark’s platoon straight into the ocean, and when some men faltered, his screams could be heard a mile away. “Who told you to halt! I give the orders here! Nobody halts until I tell them to!”
Mark, fortunately, had continued marching until the water was up to his chest, and when he was directed to about-face found it very difficult to do underwater. Nevertheless, he and a few others who had continued marching straight into the sea thought they saw a glint of approval in the eyes of the gigantic sergeant.
As the training went on, Mark found that he could endure the hardship of marches, the obstacle field, the blistering sun, the screaming constantly in his ear. What he found most difficult of all was the lack of privacy. There was no such thing as privacy. Everything was done in front of a hundred or more men. Rising, waking, writing letters, making beds, washing, shaving, bathroom functions—all were done in full view of a thousand eyes. Mark had vague memories of those times when he would be by himself for hours, and days, and if he missed any part of civilian life, this was the element that he most longed for.
Mark’s finest hour came on the firing range. He had always been an expert shot, and he seemed to have a natural flare for it. With the gunner instructor at his elbow, he shot bull’s-eye after bull’s-eye and qualified without difficulty for an Expert Rifleman’s Badge, which added five dollars a month to his twenty-one-dollar regular pay. After five weeks of basic, Mark Stevens had been made over. The change had taken place. He was a veteran. One day he passed a group of incoming recruits still in civilian clothes looking cheap, shoddy, and unkempt, and he had joined the squad, who cried with one voice, “You’ll be sorreee!”
When they were ready for the second phase of their training, the members of the squad were classified. The enlisted man who interviewed Mark was bored out of his skull, obviously. He asked questions rapidly—name, serial number, rifle number—and then asked, “What did you do in civilian life?”
“Newspaper reporter.”
“Okay, you’re in the First Marine Division. Go out and tell the sergeant.”
“Some aptitude test.” Mark grinned at Speed Carswell, a tall, lanky Kentuckian who was also an expert rifleman.
“I guess being a newspaper reporter qualifies you to kill VCs,” Carswell replied.
Mark and Carswell joined a few others from the squad as they moved to the second phase of their training. Along with Carswell, he formed a friendship with several more. All the time, during this period, his company became like a clan, or a tribe, of which the squad was the important unit of a family group. Each squad differed from the other because the members were so different. Mark noticed that they had no “inner conflict,” as the phrase goes. They knew soon that they would be in the jungles, and that their lives would be in each other’s hands. This, Mark thought, tends to make a man want to get close to his buddies.
The days sped by, and Mark trained, and drilled, and learned to read maps, and listened to lectures. He wrote letters home now, and received some too, living for them. He got more than most and wrote more than most. While the others were going into town partying, getting drunk, and chasing the young women who inhabited the saloons and dives, he kept a journal and used his tape recorder, for
he knew that one day forgetfulness would come and wipe the things out of his mind that he was experiencing. He sent the tapes home to Prue, asking her to file them but not listen to them, for some of the things were rough, and he knew she would be shocked. He determined to keep a journal, as one man had done in World War II; Guadalcanal Diary had revealed the heart of a young warrior better than a thousand stories could.
He wrote down not only what happened outwardly but what was happening on the inside: how he was being made into a killer, which he hated, but which was necessary. You could not fight the Vietcong with a law book, or a medical diploma, or a typewriter. They had to be stopped with the weapons forged by war, and as the weeks dragged on Mark felt himself becoming that kind of individual who could be trained to point a rifle at an enemy and blow his brains out.
At long last, almost imperceptibly, the day came, and Mark found himself with thousands of other men on board a troop carrier. He recorded the instances and experiences of the voyage, and when he first set foot in that far country where men were dying every day, something closed about his heart like a fist, and a coldness swept over him. He looked at the faces of the veterans waiting to take the transport back and saw a stark despair; he wondered if he would come back in this condition—if he, in fact, came back at all.
He moved forward as the officers barked commands, and as they moved toward the dark green jungles that lay just off the beach, his thoughts were of his home, of his parents, and of Prudence Deforge. And then, as a man folds a treasure up, puts it in a strongbox, and locks it, he put these memories away, and holding his rifle advanced toward the crucible of battle.
For a long time Prudence stood before the painting that she had been working on for weeks, staring at it with a hopeless droop to her shoulders. “It’s just not right,” she said, staring at the half-done painting. The painting itself was a scene from her past, a picnic out by the Buffalo River, where she had gone with her Sunday school class. There had been a baptizing connected with it from her church, and she had seen the pastor, Brother Crabtree, waist deep in the bubbling waters of the river, his hand resting on the back of a young girl’s head and holding her folded hands with his other. She had wanted to catch the immediacy of that moment, for it remained in her mind as clearly as if it were a picture. The young girl about to be baptized was her friend, Amy McPherson, who had been converted at a revival meeting at the church. Amy had been frightened of water all her life, and she had confided to Prue that “I’ll just die! I know I will! He’ll let me drown!”
Prudence could almost hear Amy’s voice after all these years, and she had hoped to catch something of that fear in the young girl’s face, but it had proved impossible. Even the scene itself did not seem exactly right. The water did not express the rushing flow of the spring torrents that the Buffalo had. The canoe in the background with the two fishermen looked stilted and artificial, like a picture on a calendar in a funeral home somehow. With a sigh she shook her head, took the painting down, and moved across the room. Other students were there now, and one of them, a short, well-shaped young girl from Ohio named Kim Kelly, said, “No luck, eh?”
“Just couldn’t do it.”
“It goes that way sometimes.” Kim shrugged. She herself had absolutely no talent and had been at the Institute for three years. No one could ever convince her, and she had withstood the most blistering lectures from her instructors with apparently no effect. Now she continued to smear paint recklessly on the canvas, and Prue could barely identify the subject, which appeared to be a thick-legged horse out in a pasture with grass that was blue-green with touches of yellow.
Prue tried to think of something pleasant to say, and said, “That’s an interesting color, that grass, Kim.” Then she moved on, having made the young woman happy, for she got few compliments.
It was almost four o’clock, and the fingers of her right hand were stiff, but no more stiff than her emotions. She was tired inside as well as out, and after cleaning up, she pulled her coat from the rack and headed for the door. “You’re leaving early.” She turned to find Kent Maxwell standing there, his eyes showing disapproval. “Let me see the picture.”
“It’s not worth looking at!”
“I’ll decide that,” he said coolly. He stared at her so straightly that she shrugged and said, “All right, but you won’t like it.” She moved back through the room, Kim giving Maxwell a brilliant smile as he passed and asking, “How do you like this, Mr. Maxwell?”
“It’s terrible. Is that supposed to be a horse, or a moose, or an elephant?”
Kim laughed and said, “Anything you want it to be.”
“Fool girl!” Maxwell muttered under his breath as they arrived at Prue’s painting. When she put it on an easel and stepped back with resignation, he stared at it. “Why don’t you like it?”
“It doesn’t do what I wanted it to do.”
“It’s not bad,” Kent said. “Just not up to your usual standard.” He began to make a few critical comments and then turned to face her. “You know what I think?” he asked.
“What?”
“I think you’re tired. Remember, I told you once that you could get too much art? That you need to come to it fresh instead of as a chore that has to be done? Well, I think you’ve reached that point.”
The hum of talking filled the large room, and the light filtered down through the north glass. The smells were as familiar to Prue as anything by now, so that this studio had become her medium. She lived here, or at her apartment, with a few brief excursions outside. Now she shook her head, saying wearily, “You may be right. I’m awfully tired.”
Abruptly Maxwell said, “Let me get cleaned up. We’ll go out and uncoil a little bit.”
“Oh, I’d rather not. I just want to go home.”
“Well, I won’t let you. Wait until I get ready.”
An hour later they were sitting in a Chinese restaurant named The Bamboo Palace. Kent had ordered for them both, for he discovered that she had rarely eaten in a Chinese restaurant. Soon their plates were filled with succulent vegetables, sweet and sour pork, moo goo gai pan, delicious crab cakes, and spicy fried rice, and he was instructing her, “Put just a little of this mustard on there. Not too much.”
Prue took the spoon and put a generous dollop of mustard on her fried rice, then took a bite of it. For a moment, it seemed that the top of her head was being blasted off, and she could only stare open-eyed, unable to get her breath.
Kent grinned. “I told you to use a little. It’s pretty potent stuff.”
Prue grabbed the glass of water before her, drank half of it down, then gasped. “That stuff’s the hottest thing I’ve ever tasted.”
She continued eating cautiously, avoiding the hot mustard, and the soft Chinese music seemed exotic and strange to her ears. “All those songs they sing,” she said once, “sound just alike.”
“I imagine those we sing sound alike to them. You know we Caucasians think all Orientals look alike, but I don’t imagine they do to each other.” He was watching her carefully now, his eyes half hooded, noting the fatigue in her features. He continued to talk gently, hoping that she would relax. “I have a Chinese friend who told me once, when we have a baby we know what we’re going to get. Dark hair, and dark eyes, and yellow skin. When you Americans have them, you don’t know what you’ll get. Blond hair, brown hair, red hair—blue eyes, green eyes, brown eyes.” He grinned and said, “There may be something in that.”
As the music jangled on with its eerie rhythm, so different from that of the Western world, Kent began to speak of art. “You remember the poem of Browning, Prue? The one about the faultless painter?”
“‘Andrea del Sarto’?” Prue nodded. “Yes. I got a copy of Browning. I’ve read that poem over and over. Some of his poems I don’t understand, but that one is a good one.”
“Have you read ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’?”
“No. I haven’t gotten to that one yet.”
“You’ll like it,” Ken
t nodded. “I don’t have it with me, but I’ve almost got it memorized. It’s another poem about a painter. Browning was a lover of art and culture, and he knew more about the nature of art and the philosophy of art than most of the modern critics, all of them, I might say.”
“‘Fra Lippo Lippi.’ What kind of a name is that?”
“Italian,” Kent said. He took a bite of sesame chicken, dipped it in sweet and sour sauce, and put it into his mouth. “This is good,” he said. “I wish I could have it every day.” Then he shrugged, saying, “The poem is about a young Italian boy, a beggar, who is taken off the street. He’s an orphan and has to make his own way and almost dies of starvation. The monks want to take him in and make a monk of him. There’s one portion where he speaks of the kind of eye that I think that an artist has to have—quick, and sharp, and looking in the very heart of things. In any case, they took the boy in and found out that he could paint.” He laughed then and looked pleased.
“What’s funny about that?” Prue asked.
“Well, back in those days, in the Renaissance, painting was all very ethereal. You’ve seen pictures of where the Virgin, and Joseph, and the baby look like plaster saints? No reality at all.”
“Yes, I always thought that was odd.”
“It was the way they did it back then. Lippi didn’t want to do that. When he first painted, and the priests came to look at it, and the prior, they were shocked. How does it go? Let’s see:
“How? what’s here?…
Faces, arms, legs, and bodies like the true.”
Prue laughed. “That must have been quite a shock for those monks to see real arms, and legs, and flesh and blood bodies.”
“It was, but the lines that I want you to underline I think you’ll like.” He quoted the line softly:
Dawn of a New Day Page 18
