A month later I had my navy enlistment, the world having beckoned, although my feet were not flat. The sergeant had been right in all his estimates. Just a few John Hancocks here and there on the dotted.
The night before I left Lasch’s, as I prowled along the dim upper hallway of its men’s quarters, on my way to the bathroom after the late party they had given me, I met Delphine, making her way toward me from the women’s side. Since that afternoon, I had had no more of her confidences, although perhaps Schott had, his inquiring hand having been markedly permitted this evening, in the sight of us all. And Delphine, glossy with liquor, proclaiming herself a cork-smeller, had let herself dream audibly of where she would take herself on the competence left her by her grandmother, as soon as the war was over, even letting drop what she had never obtruded on us before, who her father had been, precisely what Smith. She did not tell us of her relationship, on the distaff side, to Lasch’s main backer. Perhaps Schott, compiling his Almanach de Gotha for America, already knew. As it was, she seemed to be handling things perfectly if she wanted to have him at least for a while. I had reason to know that his other habits had not changed.
As she came toward me, in a high-necked robe that glimmered like pink china, one hand bunched in front of her on the side where the brace was, I imagined with embarrassment that she might be bringing me a farewell gift, for the women never came here. She motioned me to lean down. The hand was empty. “Just think—” she breathed in my ear. There was no liquor on her breath. “Schott—” She let me lean back. “Schott wants me to sleep with him.” Her eyes, always shadowed like a tired child’s in summer, looked large as a dragonfly’s. They were impenetrable, their direction all-inclusive. Did she know that Schott was not in his room tonight? He made no secret of his ways of course, claiming that they made him the more attractive to women, but I thought now that, as with many Europeans of his type, his underestimations of Americans clung to him like a patchouli, obvious to them, in which he did not know he walked.
“And shall you?” It seemed to me that she had made her statement as a man might make it.
She didn’t smile back. “No. I’ll marry him.”
Years later I saw them together, at a party of their own. She still preferred, noticeably in a hostess, not to leave a room, a table, ahead of others, but now she carried it off like a vanity. Schott had faded to solidity, like so many preachers of the butterfly chance, once they alight. It was said that he adored her, that it had always been more his marriage than hers. And he was allowed to walk behind.
Now, she watched me, her eyes glaucous as a seer’s. Her mouth twitched, but I couldn’t be sure that its mood was the same bright “n’importe” of our other encounter. Stretching up, up, she put it on mine, where it warmed, strove.
Inflamed, feeling her brace against my leg, I pulled her closer, growing at once all the perversity I had disclaimed.
“Turn around.” She had withdrawn from me, motioning me to face away from her. She was smiling.
I did so. What on earth? Was it that she didn’t wish me to see her entering Schott’s room? If so, then she’d soon be out again. I could still feel her mouth, round plum wanting me belatedly to know its pulp. At first, I heard no movement from her. Then, waiting, I heard her step going slowly away from me, back to the women’s quarters, rock, rock.
In bed, liquor and the hilarity of doom kept me sleepless, like a man after his bachelor dinner. Time’s hurrying footstep was at my ear, making me proud. I dreamed with eyes awake of all the shocks and fancies to come in a world even subtler than I had imagined, where the women one did not want ran away, where only to perceive its contradictions proved one old. Finally I fell asleep, to dream that I nodded by the fire, an old man rich with experience and even more wondrous regrets, listening to the silent, Tanagra voices of all the women I had not had. I left for boot camp the next morning.
Toward evening, on December 20, 1946, a tall young lieutenant junior grade, USN, got off the incoming train from Boston to Grand Central, and followed the crowd pushing its way toward the main Forty-second Street entrance. “Haven’t seen it since the blackout,” said an army captain just in front of him, craning back to look at the dome. “God, how I love this station.” His wife, dragging on his arm, looking only at him, answered softly. “We had a brownout too, for a while.” Behind them, the lieutenant glanced up also, though he had passed under the same dome only yesterday morning. The lukewarm radiance shed there had always seemed to him too reflective for what went on below. Architect—Claude Bragdon, student of the Vedanta, spiritualist—but no one remembered that now; why should he? He shifted the one piece of luggage he carried, a large cardboard suit box, struck by the consideration that, although he had been “home” here six months, this was his first real return to thought civilian-style. He was not yet separated enough to find anything peculiar in the fact that in order to get processed out, a man stationed at that naval hub, “90 Church,” had had to go to Boston. Many had had to go farther.
Hailing a cab was useless. Car lights jostled him, tambourines begged, a searchlight played the chiming heavens, a multicolored rain dampened the city. It was the hour of assignation, and all Christmas was in New York. He boarded a Lexington bus, and for some thirty blocks studied the box—J. Press, Tailor—containing what he could have bought any time these six months, any time. When the bus reached the high Seventies, he got out and walked a block north, a block and a half over, to his own flat, rented on long term by a lucky break through the office, in the first few weeks back. Not many of the horde of his brothers, like him once more at the beginning, could claim his luck—no job as of now, but fourteen thousand and more in the bank, plus a flat worth hanging on to, and no ties. No ties, but an assignation of sorts, with someone he had not seen for a long time. In front of his house, a brownstone, he looked up at his own top floor. A light was burning there. He’d left one for the man he was to meet there, a sentiment surely permissible on this night. Turning, he glanced at the house opposite, no one he knew there, but its façade always pleased him, as much a part of his own flat as the silly sofa, left by the war widow who had preceded him, that never failed to cheer him of a morning. If he’d delayed buying what he now held in the box, he had not failed the man waiting there in the matter of books. A thousand or more, bought but not read, attended him.
The light from above shone down on his upturned face, on his flat hat with its rain protector, on his braid, on his blue. Despite the books and the sofa, he was not smiling. Up the stoop he went, key in hand. At the letter slots inside, he paused for a minute, on his face an obscure expression, then pushed the buzzer for a long, long ring. Nothing whatsoever answered him. But suddenly he nodded gravely, as if someone had. His own key opened the inner door. Swinging his package, he disappeared behind the door, and was never seen again.
An hour or so later, shaved and changed, drink in hand, he stood in front of the long mirror left behind by the widow, and regarded the man there. “J. Press” had sold him a brown herringbone and an Oxford gray “for more formal occasions”; since this was certainly that, he was wearing the gray. Behind him, on top of a trunk exhumed from Lasch’s basement, containing among other things the clothes that, twenty-pounds heavier, six years older, he would never wear again, lay uniform, flat hat, skivvies, like still another skin he had sloughed. From time to time he circled the booklined shelves, touching a book here and there, never taking one down. Though he had never been much of a one for mirrors, he kept returning to this one. Come time for the second drink, a third, he was still doing so. But since he’d always had a good head for liquor, his mind remained quite clear for his self-set task of remembering—as clear as mine is now, he, I and his image, in our hall of mirrors, all regarding each other. We speak. First I:
Going to war, then, had been my first great device for handling the world’s confusion, none the less successful because the idea wasn’t wholly mine. I found that out my second day at Great Lakes. One man, solitary i
n his first grown-up leggings, is Quixote, subject to all the sore-trials of broken running; six hundred of the same, standing on a plain—even an asphalt one near Chicago—are St. George. Giving up autonomy is the great prize. Something for everybody in a war, man or woman, and this is what it is. War is noble, being the only mass imitation we have of nobility for its own sake, for which even Christ, if he died for us, had no courage. Everyone I knew in the war emerged from it with something, their arms clasped round their deaths, their wounds, their books, the little gas station on disability pay in New Jersey, their livers and religions, their wives. Everybody bore away a piece of the prize. War, for the duration, took the place of providence, and nobody could be blamed. From late 1940 until 1946, then, I was a member of that enclosure, and wearing that best of stripes, I was almost invisible, like the rest. If any Great Confidant, leaning down from his cloud, had suddenly said “Tell me!” I could have answered at once, without an ounce of self-recrimination: “Leading a normal life, sir, the normal life of our times. Nothing personal to confess.” This was my reward, as it was for my semblable, the man next to me. For six years, barring minor details, he and I had the same, single story and knew it. Rocked in that cradle together, we saw the world.
My details being lucky ones, I pay them the bare grace of recording them. They kept me alive. For I still see life as the privilege; this is no suicide’s memoir. And I saw no suicides in the service—not enough distinction in it at the time. Life was the distinction—if we had a private romance, public love, it was that. My “details,” not always pleasant, required no extraordinary valor. Interest, always my good friend, carried me through them. They follow—from him:
“Out of Great Lakes, I was sent to San Diego as a yeoman striker, serving as clerk to a former bookkeeper, from whom I learned the fine art of posting—in a ledger, not on a horse. There’s no telling how high I might have risen as a noncom if I hadn’t been suddenly transferred to the navy yard outside San Francisco, to a reception unit for civilian specialists arriving in the first van of ordnance expansion. (We were at war now, the afternoon of December 7, 1941, having caught me, sometime back, on weekend leave, in a bookshop open for Sunday trade in North Beach.) Far as I know, I owe the turn in my affairs to one of these—and Debussy. Chafee his name was; remember that name. Mr. Chafee, chief engineer of an important company in Detroit, not yet in uniform himself or able to distinguish rank below commander, lolled in his chair of a morning as if we still lived in a democracy, reminiscing at large, fresh from his boardinghouse limbo, of the family breakfast table in Palmer Woods. The yard wasn’t up to his specifications either; some time-study man had installed a loudspeaker which boomed recorded music, frequently classical, from a tower above the clangor. ‘Good God in heaven,’ he said one morning. ‘It is, isn’t it? La whadyacall—my daughter plays it.’ A few desks down, I hadn’t been able to keep from laughing. He caught me at it, in the midst of the stiff office. ‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘It is. It’s La Mer.’ He had a son just my age—army, as he himself expected to be. During several dinners at his expense at the Fairmont, he told me what it was like to be at sea, he having just spent eight days on a destroyer, installing the mounts for a delicate bit of business that I might as well know was a thing called radar. Steak every day in the officers’ mess. In return, I gave him what confidential information was to be got from where I stood, including the tip that the insignia he was shortly to wear was known among some of the military as ‘the whirling douche.’ Weeks after he had gone, I was tapped for officer training, and I accepted. From then on, any Gilbertian tinge in my affairs declined—except for one last touch of it. Duly braced, commissioned, seaworthy, I was launched—back to Chicago, to a place called Tower Hall.
“Contrary to general belief, all intelligence officers don’t spend their time decoding messages, lurking in mufti at the cheaper waterfront hotels in hope of same. As frequently with me, however, certain lesser talents had been immediately discoverable—in this case a familiarity with the simpler forms of cryptogram and acrostic, a fondness for the mathematics of words. Tower Hall was an oddly dull depot over whose inertia and lack of starch a snooping Congressman would at once have raised an outcry—floor after floor of warehoused salvage, at each silent freight elevator a stalwart seaman wasting his time on guard duty. Two of these floors were sealed with iron plates fore and aft, concealing, the guards agreed, several tons of roller skates, back of which the officers locked themselves in to drink Haig & Haig. At the end of seven months there I finally was sent to sea. During my weeks on the transport, I sometimes tried to invoke the memory of a boy sailing with his mother from Portsmouth to Montreal. I never succeeded. By the time I took up my orders, on a ‘supply’ ship cruising in various Pacific waters, I had given it up.
“Such a ship as ours, under instructions to avoid action where possible, couldn’t always succeed at that either. From time to time we ‘saw’ it. Who can believe, until he sees it, the shattered liquids, Rorschach shapes a head can make, on its way to becoming what only the clean, desert voice of Ecclesiastes may call ‘dust’? Clearest, I remember—against a burning turret falling sideways slow as a paper hat—the tic that appeared like a sign on the perfect, uninjured cheek of the highest ranking officer left to us—a reserve commander, on board as an optics specialist. Name—Eckerman, worked for Bausch & Lomb, Rochester, New York. We sailed safe into port under his command, the tic remaining. After that, I saw some of the world by air.
“From the air, I learned, things often don’t look as they are. Along the coast of Okinawa, rock-creamed at the edge of that cruel jade and purple sea, there lay inlets, according to the major in the seat next to me, with beaches as tender for bathing as Malibu—this was now 1945. If we were allowed off limits, he would show me, along with the queer tumuli in which the Okinawans buried their dead. We were, but I never saw them, hearing, instead, the second we touched the strip, of yesterday in Hiroshima.
“My most informative flight—some months later, early 1946, over Cebu. No, said the pilot, those even green cones weren’t volcanic, but there were tricky air currents above them; in fact, his plane was a replacement for that other DC-3 went down here couple of months ago with all those bigwigs; I must be new to these parts, or I’d have heard. Overloaded, couldn’t pick up altitude. Pilot a friend of his too, just off the European run where they were used to the real heavy craft, big Swede—he’d been on leave with him in Amsterdam once. These little jobs, safe as houses, but on this run—one extra passenger and somebody’d have to ditch his shoes.
“‘Right about here,’ said the pilot ‘right about here.’ We were low enough to see the fuzzed trees. He’d known most of the passengers too, flown some of those generals all over Southeast Asia. He named several, among them one named Dobbin. Yes, he was sure. I asked for the first name. The pilot didn’t know that, but he knew the record. In for the war-trials deal, he thought, like the others, but not one of those stateside judge advocates, been through it all the way, starting out, the papers said, with that Quaker outfit even before we got in. And then to get it, after all that, when everything’s over. In a little ‘Three’ too, the safest thing up. Here—he even thought he’d saved the paper, left by a guy just in to Manila from home—but he hadn’t. Name of pilot, Herbert C. Tenney, Minneapolis. I asked him if he knew what rank Dobbin had died with. ‘Brigadier,’ he said, feeling his own shoulder. ‘Yep, I’m pretty sure of it, brigadier.’ I don’t know why I remember the ‘C’.
“So I was alone then, both in that hemisphere and the other, to which I would shortly be returned—‘out’. But the law seemed to wish to hang on to me. I’m due out, Eckerman wrote. At my age they can’t really hold me if I squawk. But they’re putting the pressure on. Discovered I once had a patents practice, and they have a mess of them to untangle. Means six to eight months more, but at least it’s in New York, where you could be looking around. So I joined him as aide, in that nest of sea lawyers known as ‘90 Church, New York.’”
He set down his glass next to the bottle and did not take it up again. Properly, he should smash the glass, having made his toast, so to speak, but that too required the audience which after six years he must learn again to do without. Already, like a man feeling his way along newly erected fence posts in the first dark afterward, he was recalling the margins that had to be set for solitariness, if one were prepared to be alone from now on. As it was, he couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t spoken aloud now and then, in the deadpan Choctaw that was good form for telling such experiences. But even in the telling, these had taken on the faint gilding which meant that they were sealed. And from now on, he would be his own audience. The rest was private, from now on.
He stood up, unaware how long he had been sitting in the room’s one easy chair. The absurd sofa, plumped up like the lap of a three-legged woman, he never sat in, reserving it in his mind for such feminine visitors as in the future might fancy themselves Récamiers there from time to time. Meanwhile, his few personal articles, ranged in the familiar two-by-two, were herded together in one corner, as if a sudden sway in the bowels of the old house might dislodge them. Demuth he thought, seeing the shoe by the shoe, that paired bachelordom, as for years now in a totally masculine society he had not stopped to see it—Demuth. Except for such minor sparks, he never thought now of that landscape down there—it too was sealed. And the city too, comfortable old sword-swallower of lives, had long since disposed of his former life here. On its streets, shaken like kaleidoscopes even as one trod them, he now felt as anonymous as anyone. Or, in his new clothes, soon would.
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