The Last Mission

by William Kennedy

  It isn’t that I could have helped him. All the influence I had was in the business community. I could have gotten him into any number of firms or corporations that would have put him on some sort of entrance track and paid for him to complete college. Todd wouldn’t have lasted a week in a nine-to-five job, particularly if it favored a tie and jacket. He wanted something in the arts, an area where I had no clout whatsoever. And he wasn’t going to waste a lot of time in apprenticeship. He just assumed that he would cut a few records, they would sell, and his position of celebrity would enable him to advance social causes.

  He lived at home for the year it took him to write his first song, and then I put up the money for him to make his demonstration disk. I paid his rent for another year while he made contacts in the business and pushed his record. Then he struck out on his own. From then on, we seemed to speak only when he needed something. Usually it was money, which I was to consider an investment because he was on the verge of a breakthrough. Occasionally it was legal service, because the drug thing recurred now and again. To give him credit, he somehow always managed to appear for his mother’s birthday, always with a gift that brought tears to her eyes.

  His drug arrests, plus one occasion when he planned to sue a world-renowned singer for stealing one of his songs, had brought him together with Bob Bacon, my friend and attorney. It is Bacon whose office we enter to hear how Todd’s latest crime is to be handled and how much it is going to cost. We’re like a boy and his father going to meet with the school principal, only both of us are much too old.

  Bacon explains that we don’t have much of a defense. There were no defects in the arrest or the charge, and no basis for claiming entrapment. His best strategy is to plead guilty and ask the judge for a sentencing conference. “If you agree to go into rehab, we may be able to get probation instead of jail time. You’d have to agree to put yourself in the care of a clinic and to allow random testing. If you keep clean for a year, the rest of your sentence will be commuted. But,” the attorney cautions, “there’s no guaranty that the judge will be that lenient.” With the number of offenses that Todd has rolled up, there’s every chance that he’ll spend time in prison.

  Todd is shocked and visibly shaken. “A year for smoking a couple of joints? The fucking judge probably does more shit than I do.”

  Bacon listens to a brief tirade and agrees with everything Todd says. “The difference,” he points out patiently, “is that he’s the judge and you’re not. You got caught, and he didn’t.”

  Todd goes home to work on words he will use to throw himself on the mercy of the court. I have no idea whether his statement will grovel in humility or flash defiance. He could beg for another chance, but it’s just as likely that he will denounce hypocrisy. And I won’t know which for another week. All I can do is avail myself of Kit’s hospitality and try to get out from under her foot during the daytime. Probably I’ll commute into the city and do lunches with a few old friends. Instead of trying to find out what Detective Browning discovered and pick up the pieces of the old life I had abandoned, I’ll be back into reminders of the new life that I have actually lived. Once again, Todd has changed my plans.

  Then

  I could never recall the exact moment when I decided not to return to England. I was sent back to the States because there was an empty berth on a hospital plane that was bringing back the severely wounded. I had no priority. My ankle was broken and there were flesh wounds in my leg, all from the same piece of shrapnel. I would have healed anywhere, and without a great deal of medical attention. The others on the plane weren’t going to heal so easily. There were several with terrible burns, many amputees, and two men who had lost their sight. In their company, I felt like a deserter.

  Colonel Mast had called in a favor and cut a set of orders, and he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. “Don’t come back,” he snarled at me. “Unless there’s another piece of shrapnel stuck in your head you’ll be smart enough to take a training assignment in Florida or California—someplace where the weather is nice.” When they carried me out on a stretcher, he shook my hand for the first time since the day I had reported. “You’re a good man, Marron. I’d hate to lose you on your twenty-fifth mission.” On the plane, I looked at my personnel file and saw that he had put me in for the Silver Star.

  The hospital they sent me to was in Plattsburg, a sleepy city in upstate New York. We were in a building that had once been a convent, so with the exception of the view of Lake Champlain, the place was pretty cheerless. The walls were plain, decorated by shadows where the pictures of the saints had been taken down. The furniture was severe and the beds were painful. The only bright spot was the sheen on the wooden floors, hand-waxed and polished by a hundred years of postulants to the order.

  Officially, it was a convalescent center, which meant that there were no severely wounded. There were only a few doctors and nurses, a bunch of orderlies, and a lot of guys in bathrobes, walking on crutches. Most of us could have been home with our families, but I think the military was unwilling to waive their claim on our lives. I also think they were watching us closely for signs of madness. There was a study afoot to determine just how many head cases they could expect after the war. I hobbled down to the dining room for meals, over to the recreation room for poker, and up to my bed at night. Most of the day was spent sitting on the porch in a wheelchair and staring out over the lake. There was plenty of time for conversations with the other walking wounded, usually spent within a narrow range of topics.

  First was the universal agreement that we were all fortunate—even the aerial gunner who had lost a hand. Everyone had grim stories of friends who were blown to pieces by a cannon round, incinerated by a tracer bullet, or thrown out into the sky without a parachute, and everyone had been resigned to the inevitability of a similar fate. The longer you stayed in the lottery, the more certain it was that your number had to come up. Those of us who had escaped with minor wounds had gotten off cheaply. Absolutely no one had any intention of ever going back to rejoin his unit. One way or another, each of us had been told that “your war is over, son,” and no one cared to dispute the wisdom. There were thousands of behind-the-line troops and trainees who claimed to be itching for a chance at the enemy. Let them have a go at it.

  Another topic of preference was women. Most of us had been lifted out of our shy teenage years, dressed in the armor of heroes, then dropped into communities of abandoned young ladies. Each of us tried to outdo the others in tales of sexual triumphs and in graphic descriptions of the girl involved. The prevailing sentiment was that the war had given us plenty of practice, and now we were being sent back to our hometown girls. I had been uncomfortably quiet through a few days of this talk, then, in a momentary pause, someone called my name. “What about you Marron? Some of those farm girls around Whittingbridge must have had barns.”

  “Believe it or not,” I said, “I met a lovely young lady in a police station. In fact, we were introduced by a sergeant who was investigating a murder case.” That changed the subject to the investigation and the murder mystery and got me off the hook of talking about Angela. But my turn came up again in a few days. “So, come on, Marron. What was she like?”

  “Very nice,” I answered. “We used to go on picnics. Did I tell you guys how I happened to have a car?” Then I held the floor for hours, painting the piss-yellow Austin into a legend. It would have been embarrassing to admit that I was hopelessly in love with her, and I certainly wasn’t going to put her up on stage with all the rest of the dancing girls. What we had shared was for our eyes only, but I did at least acquiesce to the role of the experienced stud that had broken a few hearts in England. So perhaps I did begin to think of Angela as wartime companion.

  If I had suspected then that Angela had been conning American service men and had been foisted on me by a policeman, would it have made any difference? I would probably have thought differently about her, but I doubt if my feelings would have changed. At the time, it
didn’t matter how Angela had come into my life or where we were heading. All we had was now—our moment together—and my need to hold onto her if I was to survive the madness that surrounded us.

  A corollary of trivializing our relations with foreign women was a fawning over the American chapter of the sex. Again, there was a conversational competition for the finest woman who was at home waiting, with each one describing an incredible-looking girl. It seemed that all the girls we remembered were clones of our wartime pinups. Getting back to our old girlfriends was the prize for our good fortune in escaping the war. Again, the pressure to conform favored the girl I had left behind.

  During my two months in Plattsburg, I drafted dozens of letters. At first they were all to Angela, telling how I had been rushed off without warning and how I would certainly be coming back. I mailed the first, but I held the second, hoping to tell her when I would be coming back, and then the third, because it was obvious that I wouldn’t be coming back for a long time. There was always the chance that I would be sent to the other side of the world, where we had another war on our hands.

  Then I began drafting letters to Kay, exaggerating my wounds by way of explaining my long silence. I spoke of the emotional paralysis that went hand-in-hand with battle fatigue, and hinted at the need to bring something beautiful into my life. Twice I included references to Angela, trying to be newsy and noncommittal, but rewrote the page when the words didn’t work. I didn’t want to lie, nor did I want to put in a letter what I should say to her face. Not that Kay and I had ever made a formal commitment, but I guess we had gradually come to an expectation of commitment.

  Kay called me in Plattsburg, which was no easy task, given the shortage of telephone circuits at the time. In a cheerful voice she announced she was coming up to see me, which was a miracle, with wartime priorities. But that, I discovered, was what she had become in the nearly two years since I had seen her: determined, resourceful, and efficient. She had finished college and enlisted in the war effort as an executive secretary in Army headquarters on Governor’s Island. Kay had learned how to get things done.

  She arrived at the convalescent camp in the fashion of the time: slacks and a sweater, with a small scarf at her neck. Her hair was even more blond than I remembered, cut in a pageboy and held off her face by a hair band. You could tell that when she pulled off the band, her hair would hang close to her eye, like the pinup shots the Hollywood starlets were circulating. Kay was a very attractive young lady, made more desirable by her maturity. When we stepped out into the garden, I could feel every eye from the wheelchair troops on the balcony. I was walking with a cane that I didn’t really need, with Kay holding my arm. One of the nurses said that with me in my uniform and with Kay’s eyes shining with pride, we looked like a poster for war bonds.

  The conversation came easily because she had a great deal to tell me. Her college courses and grades, the doings of her friends and family, and of course her work with the Army. I think, too, that she was laboring under the impression that my experiences were too painful to discuss, part of the expectation that most of us would come home mad. She didn’t give me any great openings to talk about England. When she returned me to the lobby that evening, with a quick and efficient kiss, I had no doubt that she assumed we were engaged.

  My fellow patients were boisterous in coming to the same conclusion. “No wonder you didn’t do much in England, with something like that waiting for you,” one of them teased.

  “Why didn’t you bring her up and introduce us?” a comrade demanded.

  And then the answer, “Because he’s keeping her for himself.”

  “You could have pulled the curtain around your bed. We wouldn’t have bothered you.”

  “Sure, we’d just sit here trying to talk over the sound of your groaning.”

  “Hey, Marron, when she comes back tomorrow, the patriotic thing would be to share her with your buddies.”

  “Or at least let us watch.”

  I went along with the banter, insisting that none of them could possible satisfy her, but all Kay and I had ever done was hold hands in the movies and share a good-night kiss in her doorway. Before the war, that was the stuff marriages were made of.

  I lay awake late that night, rehearsing the words I would use to tell her about Angela. In one scenario it made her sound like an innocent accident: “So I was working with a lot of the locals in this public-relations assignment, and there was this police sergeant who wanted me to work with this girl…” In the story, we were forced into continuous close contact and became good friends. Then I tried stressing my vulnerability to another woman: “I was suicidal, so profoundly depressed that I would have clung to anyone. So when I met this English girl…” I even worked on a version where I pretended complete ignorance of any feelings between Kay and myself. “Hey, since we’ve always been best friends, I want you to be the first to know about this girl…”

  Nothing worked. There was an element of truth in each explanation, but there was also the element of deceit. The fact was that I had learned to love someone and realized that being in love was an experience I had never shared with Kay. Those were the honest words, but they were also the most hurtful words. At the time, they seemed too brutal to consider. So the next day we did a rerun of her description of college, career ambitions, and work with the brass on Governor’s Island. This time there were many opportunities for me to talk about England, but the words caught in my throat.

  When we returned to the lobby after a day outdoors, my friends were waiting. I introduced Kay, and even the ones who had been the most outrageous the night before were polite and subdued. There was a sense of dignity about her, or perhaps an aura of class. She was pleasant, but not gushing. She could be teased, but not trifled with. “Marry that girl before some hotshot at Governor’s Island beats you to it,” I was advised. After two days with her, that seemed like reasonable advice. If I had decided at that point that I wasn’t going back to Angela, I certainly didn’t know it. In fact, when the opportunity to propose to Kay was handed to me by her father, I let it pass.

  My new orders were exactly what Colonel Mast had predicted. I was assigned to the staff of a new radar bombing school in Homestead, Florida. Instead of joining the next wave of pilots to go overseas, I would be training them. My war was officially over. It seemed as if Colonel Mast had called in another favor.

  I had priority reservations on a train to New York City, a week’s leave, and a ride in a bomber from Mitchell Field on Long Island to Homestead. That gave me time to visit with my family, spend a few days around my Westchester County hangouts, and have a few evenings with Kay. On the train I wrote a long letter to Angela, detailing everything that had happened to me since I had seen her last. The events begged for a fervent expression of commitment. “The war can’t keep us apart forever, my dearest Angela. Wait for me. I promise that I will be coming back.” But I couldn’t mail it, because I wasn’t sure it was true. Maybe that’s when I decided I wasn’t going back to England—during my train ride down the Hudson Valley. If it was, I still hadn’t figured it out.

  My homecoming was the kind of embarrassing event that every returning soldier and sailor endured. My parents knew how to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, and religious and legal holidays, but they had no idea how to honor someone returning from combat—particularly someone who had been wounded—so they tried a little bit of everything.

  The house was decorated like a parade float with red-white-and-blue bunting everywhere. There was a cake in the shape of an airplane, with a pilot wearing a windblown scarf. Our pastor and two of our town’s selectmen were lined up next to my father. A few of my mother’s bandage-rolling companions were there in their Red Cross uniforms. There were all the trappings of a hero’s welcome, but there wasn’t a single visible reminder of the war. No newspapers, no magazines, no photographs, nothing that would call up the horrors I had experienced and which drove me into shell shock. I could just as well have been r
eturning from Boy Scout camp—except for the liquor. My father acknowledged my manhood by freshening up my drink every time the ice cubes melted. Kay and her parents were there, but were blurred in the forced merriment. We didn’t get to talk.

  The next evening, when the house was quietly recovering, she stopped over by herself, and I gave her the details of my new assignment. Mostly ground duty, I told her, referring to the amount of paperwork needed to process in trainees and process out aircrews. Maybe a bit of flying to share the benefits of my hands-on experience. And certainly time to get to the beaches. I made it sound completely upbeat, even though we were losing nearly as many planes to training flights as we were to bombing raids. I told her I would be living in the bachelor officers’ quarters, which I compared to a college fraternity house. That comment led to the fact that there was also housing for married officers and their families.

  We went out to a big-band casino the next evening, dancing as much as I could on a stiff leg, and then stopped off at her house for a nightcap. Kay talked about her future and I talked about mine, both of us sticking to the areas of career and education. There was no talk about our future. No hint of any shared master plan.

  The next morning my mother probed. Did Kay and I have a nice time? Did we remember how to dance together? Was it hard finding the subjects for conversation? What did we talk about? She was disappointed in my quick, uninformative answers. Later, I overheard her end of a telephone conversation with Kay’s mother. Apparently Kay hadn’t been any more forthcoming than I had been. What was apparent was that the unspoken understanding had spread to our families. Everyone had decided we were perfect for each other.