Hocus Pocus

22

I read about World War II. Civilians and soldiers alike, and even little children, were proud to have played a part in it. It was impossible, seemingly, for any sort of person not to feel a part of that war, if he or she was alive while it was going on. Yes, and the suffering or death of soldiers and sailors and Marines was felt at least a little bit by everyone.

But the Vietnam War belongs exclusively to those of us who fought in it. Nobody else had anything to do with it, supposedly. Everybody else is as pure as the driven snow. We alone are stupid and dirty, having fought such a war. When we lost, it served us right for ever having started it. The night I went temporarily insane in a Chinese restaurant on Harvard Square, everybody was a big success but me.

Before I blew up, Mildred’s old friend from Peru, Indiana, spoke as though we were in separate businesses, as though I were a podiatrist, maybe, or a sheetmetal contractor, instead of somebody who had risked his life and sacrificed common sense and decency on his behalf.

As it happened, he himself was in the medical-waste disposal game in Indianapolis. That’s a nice business to learn about in a Chinese restaurant, with everybody dangling who knows what from chopsticks.

He said that his workaday problems had as much to do with aesthetics as with toxicity. Those were both his words, “aesthetics” and “toxicity.”

He said, “Nobody likes to find a foot or a finger or whatever in a garbage can or a dump, even though it is no more dangerous to public health than the remains of a rib roast.”

He asked me if I saw anything on his and his wife’s table that I would like to sample, that they had ordered too much.

“No, thank you, sir,” I said.

“But telling you that,” he said, “is coals to Newcastle.”

“How so?” I said. I was trying not to listen to him, and was looking in exactly the wrong place for distraction, which was the face of my mother-in-law. Apparently this potential lunatic with no place else to go had become a permanent part of our household. It was a fait accompli.

“Well—you’ve been in war,” he said. The way he said it, it was clear that he considered the war to have been my war alone. “I mean you people must have had to do a certain amount of cleaning up.”

That was when the kid patted my bristles. My brains blew up like a canteen of nitroglycerin.

My lawyer, much encouraged by the 2 lists I am making, and by the fact that I have never masturbated and like to clean house, asked me yesterday why it was that I never swore. He found me washing windows in this library, although nobody had ordered me to do that.

So I told him my maternal grandfather’s idea that obscenity and blasphemy gave most people permission not to listen respectfully to whatever was being said.

I repeated an old story Grandfather Wills had taught me, which was about a town where a cannon was fired at noon every day. One day the cannoneer was sick at the last minute and was too incapacitated to fire the cannon.

So at high noon there was silence.

All the people in the town jumped out of their skins when the sun reached its zenith. They asked each other in astonishment, “Good gravy! What was that?”

My lawyer wanted to know what that had to do with my not swearing.

I replied that in an era as foulmouthed as this one, “Good gravy” had the same power to startle as a cannon shot.

There on Harvard Square, back in 1975, Sam Wakefield again made himself the helmsman of my destiny. He told me to stay out on the sidewalk, where I felt safe. I was shaking like a leaf. I wanted to bark like a dog.

He went into the restaurant, and somehow calmed everybody down, and offered to pay for all damages from his own pocket right then and there. He had a very rich wife, Andrea, who would become Tarkington’s Dean of Women after he committed suicide. Andrea died 2 years before the prison break, and so is not buried with so many others next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.

She is buried next to her husband in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. The glacier could still shove the 2 of them into West Virginia or Maryland. Bon Voyage!

Andrea Wakefield was the 2nd person I spoke to after Tarkington fired me. Damon Stern was the first. I am talking about 1991 again. Practically everybody else was eating lobsters. Andrea came up to me after meeting Stern farther down on the Senior Walk.

“I thought you would be in the Pavilion eating lobster,” she said.

“Not hungry,” I said.

“I can’t stand it that they’re boiled alive,” she said. “You know what Damon Stern just told me?”

“I’m sure it was interesting,” I said.

“During the reign of Henry the 8th of England,” she said, “counterfeiters were boiled alive.”

“Show biz,” I said. “Were they boiled alive in pub-

“He didn’t say,” she said. “And what are you doing here?”

“Enjoying the sunshine,” I said.

She believed me. She sat down next to me. She was already wearing her academic gown for the faculty parade to graduation. Her cowl identified her as a graduate of the Sorbonne in Paris, France. In addition to her duties as Dean, dealing with unwanted pregnancies and drug addiction and the like, she also taught French and Italian and oil painting. She was from a genuinely distinguished old Philadelphia family, which had given civilization a remarkable number of educators and lawyers and physicians and artists. She actually may have been what Jason Wilder and several of Tarkington’s Trustees believed themselves to be, obviously the most highly evolved creatures on the planet.

She was a lot smarter than her husband.

I always meant to ask her how a Quaker came to marry a professional soldier, but I never did.

Too late now.

Even at her age then, which was about 60, 10 years older than me, Andrea was the best figure skater on the faculty. I think figure skating, if Andrea Wakefield could find the right partner, was eroticism enough for her. General Wakefield couldn’t skate for sour apples. The best partner she had on ice at Tarkington, probably, was Bruce Bergeron—the boy who was trapped in an elevator at Bloomingdale’s, who became the youth who couldn’t get into any college but Tarkington, who became the man who joined the chorus of an ice show and then was murdered by somebody who presumably hated homosexuals, or loved one too much.

Andrea and I had never been lovers. She was too contented and old for me.

“I want you to know I think you’re a Saint,” said Andrea.

“How so?” I said.

“You’re so nice to your wife and mother-in-law.”

“It’s easier than what I did for Presidents and Generals and Henry Kissinger,” I said.

“But this is voluntary,” she said.

“So was that,” I said. “I was real gung-ho.”

“When you realize how many men nowadays dissolve their marriages when they become the least little bit inconvenient or uncomfortable,” she said, “all I can think is that you’re a Saint.”

“They didn’t want to come up here, you know,” I said. “They were very happy in Baltimore, and Margaret would have become a physical therapist.”

“It isn’t this valley that made them sick, is it?” she said. “It isn’t this valley that made my husband sick.”

“It’s a clock that made them sick,” I said. “It would have struck midnight for both of them, no matter where they were.”

“That’s how I feel about Sam,” she said. “I can’t feel guilty.”

“Shouldn’t,” I said.

“When he resigned from the Army and went over to the peace movement,” she said, “I think he was trying to stop the clock. Didn’t work.”

“I miss him,” I said.

“Don’t let the war kill you, too,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” I said.

“You still haven’t found the money?” she said. She was talking about the money Mildred had gotten for the house in Baltimore. While Mildred was still fairly sane, she deposited it in the Scipio branch of the First National Bank of Rochester. But then she withdrew it in cash when the bank was bought by the Sultan of Brunei, without telling me or Margaret that she had done so. Then she hid it somewhere, but she couldn’t remember where.

“I don’t even think about it anymore,” I said. “The most likely thing is that somebody else found it. It could have been a bunch of kids. It could have been somebody working on the house. Whoever it was sure isn’t going to say so.”

We were talking about $45,000 and change.

“I know I should give a darn, but somehow I can’t give a darn,” I said.

“The war did that to you,” she said.

“Who knows?” I said.

As we chatted in the sunshine, a powerful motorcycle came to life with a roar in the valley, in the region of the Black Cat Café. Then another one spoke, and yet another.

“Hell’s Angels?” she said. “You mean it’s really going to happen?”

The joke was that Tex Johnson, the College President, having seen one too many motorcycle movies, believed that the campus might actually be assaulted by Hell’s Angels someday. This fantasy was so real to him that he had bought an Israeli sniper’s rifle, complete with a telescopic sight, and ammunition for it from a drugstore in Portland, Oregon. He and Zuzu were visiting Zuzu’s half sister. That was the same weapon which would eventually get him crucified.

But now Tex’s anticipation of an assault by Hell’s Angels didn’t seem so comical after all. A mighty doomsday chorus of basso profundo 2-wheelers was growing louder and louder and coming closer and closer. There could be no doubt about it! Whoever it was, whatever it was, its destination could only be Tarkington!