Loon Lake

42

Images of falling through space through sky through dreams

through floor downstairs down well down hole downpour.

Birds that fall into the sea as a matter of lifestyle include

kingfishers canvasbacks gulls heron osprey pipers tweaks.

Birds that fall most prominently into fresh water are loons

a type of grebe. Sixteen lakes in the Adirondack Mountains

named Loon Lake. The cry of loons once heard is not forgotten.

Clara has time to think, the space to realize her thinking mind. Never in her life has her life been so uncrowded, something she never before realized consciously how crowded her life was how people from her infancy had always been in her eyes, how the sounds of them had always been in her ears, how their presence moved in her their wills directed her even insofar as she created opposition she had been crowded by them their wills their voices their appearance directing her their cars and trucks the rumble of the elated horns horses pulling wagons splatting dung in the street, peddlers pushing their carts the stone blasting out of the rock of Manhattan tying in the girders with rivets, slapping in the stone, every manner of machine whining growling rumbling roaring in its own pitch, and all the gangsters of menace all the pain, others and her own, and the sound of fear in her, her own fear which she hated most of all because it was the loudest noise in the universe, the nuns at their prayers, kids shouting down the street, the muttering of murderous intention, and every square inch of space in her eyes blocked out by stone and tar and moving metal, by dark stairs and painted apartment walls, by overstuffed furniture by cots and pots and sinks and roaches and tin plates and later by phony butlers and the pretensions of the earth’s scum, there was nothing left in her eyes for a bee gravid with being bending a flower to the earth, or for simple blue skycolor unpenetrated by the spires of skyscrapers, or for something small and lovely to be contemplated for its own seriousness, like a comb or a hand mirror or a goldfish in a bowl, there was no chance, nothing reflected, nothing gave back from the contemplation of it, even her dreams were pure shit they did nothing for her, they were her days all over again, filled with the same people the same things in different arrangements or proportions but the same the same. So she stands quietly after some days molecularly reassembled widely spaced in her own density and watches through some branches and some leaves which have interest in themselves and pay her for the most marginal attention as she watches between them the lake water flung like a cast of silver grain in the gray day, two wakes widening behind the pontoons of the airplane finally losing the chase like porpoises turning back underwater as the green-and-white plane exchanges one environment for another and rising slowly turns, twists in the air rising turning its wings concentrating to a point then flaring out the plane falling swiftly away into the sky losing its color finally its shape and becoming possibly a speck of dust in her eye and when she blinks it is gone altogether, made of cloud made of sky gone even the sound of it gone, and she stares at the silver-scattered lake, the green leaves at her eyes, the branches and the big important journey of the ant along the twig.

So she’s alone with him at Loon Lake and finds that still there is no intimacy and the mysteriousness of this fact begins to interest her. This is the way the rich do things. Getting herself dressed, she marches downstairs defiantly accepting it all and sits down for breakfast on the terrace overlooking the lake and waiting till they came out to see what she wants and eating a half grapefruit sitting in its silver shell in ice and daring anyone Bennett included to look at her the wrong way.

But nothing has happened, the schedule is unaltered, the drinks at certain hours, the meals at certain hours, the morning a certain time in a certain place, the afternoon and evenings all timed, the past between them unacknowledged, the past ignored, personal reactions forsworn, you-naughty-girl forborne, every breath in its good time and Bennett keeps his distance with the utmost courtesy and only sees her at the times planned for seeing, at table, or on the tennis court her lesson or riding on the trail and she is left alone at her wish and settled into the timed ordered planned encounters of the rich in their family life who dole out time in carefully measured amounts to each other, they even sleep in separate rooms so as not to wear out their lives on each other, so as to avoid anything like the fluid mess of most people’s lives, and those who are closest to each other are as timed to be apart as anyone else. So at last she understands what wealth is, the desire for isolation, its greatest achievement is isolation, its godliness is in its isolation and that’s why never in her life before, her days and nights of time, has she enlarged this way, has her mind enlarged to the space this way, and has this voice been heard this way in reflection of herself. And the point is that she is growing to the environment, beginning to match it, and it is all beginning to make proportional sense, the timed encounters, the ceremony of courteous meetings, the space between people sharing space, the great distance to be traveled even in an obvious situation like this, so crudely obvious as to outcome, the aloneness of the two of them now, not the ironic wife not the fat poet sharing the fifty thousand acres, even now the isolated distance will have to be traveled before he can allow himself to put his hands on her. And that makes her smile. Because now she will know when that time is too, it will match her awareness and nothing will shock her or surprise her because the distance he must travel is the function of his wealth, as separative as it is powerful, and she waits in grim amusement knowing that by the time something happens he will have become recognizable to her, her familiar, and their intimacy will be all that’s possible for her, so natural she will wonder what it ever was that enraged her when her gangster left her sleeping and took the private train.

But it was all in my mind, it was the furthest thing from everyone’s mind except mine. She had not come back, he had not thought of bringing her back, the world had gone on and only I, like Warren Penfield, mourned its going. The ant on the twig was at my eye and I saw no plane and in fact knew I wouldn’t, in fact felt the wolfish smile of secret satisfaction on my face, a simple mindless excitement just being back at this place, redballed home in comprehensive correction of my life, more comprehensive than the wild hope of seeing Clara again or the desire to take revenge. No simple motive could fill the totality of my return.

Following job description fall into sea: fighter pilot naval

bomber pilot naval, navigator bombardier gunner naval

carrier-based Pacific Fleet World War Two

with or without parachute drowned strafed dead of exposure

or rescued one thousand and eight six.

This is apart from individuals going down in their aircraft

shot down or deprived of carrier landing

from attack of Divine Wind or heavy seas

collapsing their landing gear or snapping constraint cable

or sailing into lower deck amidships or

otherwise stippling the sea like rain like the hammers of sculptors.

I thought oddly of eviction, a city street miniaturized in one cell of the remembering brain, a cityscape of old cheap furniture piled on the sidewalk and an old woman sitting on one of the chairs looking at old photographs of Paterson in an album. The chair arm had a doily. She showed me the picture she was looking at, herself as a girl, and she smiled. She smelled of urine, her hands were frighteningly swollen and twisted, she was totally unashamedly in residence on the sidewalk with her furniture, in some state of dreamy peace, careless of the cold, the first snowflakes came down toward evening and there was no derision from the tough kids on the street because she didn’t weep or bow her head or display grief or fear in her misfortune and so not misfortune itself, but sat and thought her chin in her hand, her elbow propped on the armchair doily, while the snow turned her hair white. What frightened them off was the triumph of her senescence, only a stickler for custom would demand that such a lady of property be required to have four walls around her a ceiling above her a light in the lamp and tea in her cup.

I had this same mind, unhoused but triumphant coming off the streets through the dogs up the mountain to Loon Lake. And I greeted him like a complicitor while he stared at me quite astonished and then turned nodding as if he understood and continued to make his lunch in the spring sun. I was given Penfield’s old room. That night I heard the sound of surging power, some transformed connection, an electric pungency and pop, and everywhere around all the houses of the compound great flood-lights came on, over every bit of space, the courts, the boathouse, the staff house, the stables. And a while later I heard the dogs but they came this time on leashes pulling three men with shotguns broken in one hand and leash straps in the other woven like reins, a dozen yelping matched hounds and uniformed guards with Sam Browne belts and boots.

I read the Penfield papers at his window from this outside light a peculiar bright amber night, and I heard the Poet’s voice and saw his large debauched pleading eyes and tried to understand his death, what it was, what was terminated, if the voice and the face remained, if the presence lay in the rooms, and the faint winy redolence of his being was sniffed on my every breath. A wineglass still sat on the mantel, the dregs evaporated to a glazed scab in the bottom of the petal.

I mourn all change even for the better and in the days of my return I measured what I had known as the injured intruder against what I saw now as the sole guest. I mourned the absence of terror, the absence of hopeless desire, the absence of betrayals still to come.

I thought of Sandy James asleep in the train coach, curled on the seat and from the wrist under her cheek the trembling droop of her five-and-ten charm bracelet, a tiny tarnished lady’s shoe, a tiny tarnished bottle, a tiny tarnished steam engine.

Bennett had changed too, he was in an interesting derelict state of mourning. A gray stubble grew on his face and he wore the same plaid flannel shirt day after day. The white hair of the careful shining pompadour was uncombed, shocked forward over his forehead and suggesting from a flash of boyishness what he might have been had he not been a Bennett — a farmer perhaps, a logger, or heavy-chested stevedore of some honest life. We took our meals together, the two of us alone, with a manservant serving heated canned food. All the women of the light green were gone, as if having lost Lucinda Bailey Bennett he wanted the race expunged. A couple of the outside men were now doing the household work and the cooking. In the kitchen the dishes were piled unwashed. I saw roaches going along the floor. It was as if the establishment was in some accelerating state of decrepitude, beginning with Bennett’s heart and working outward. The grounds were immaculate as ever, Loon Lake was groomed for its spring. The stables were clean and horses shining and fit. But if he went on like this, the men of dark green too would be sent away and the boats would sink in their berths, the earth around the dolmen would grow back and the fence around the tennis court would fall and the clay court would crack like the surface of a blasted planet. Mourning had illuminated the natural drift of his life to isolation, and if it was not corrected it would go on, outward in all directions, spreading out over the universe in some infinite looming reclusiveness.

But his eyes were curious when they lit on me for a moment or two at each measured meal. And the days were, after all, timed just as they had been, the hours appointed for drinking and eating, and naps, and exercise. He looked at me as if he were waiting. I met him each day in a renewed wonder of my own. I had seen his kingdom and I appreciated him almost more for the distracted humanity he displayed, broken as easily as anyone by simple events. For men all over the country he was, finally, a condition of their life. Yet he wandered about here in his grief, caring for nothing, barely raising his head when the phone rang. He moved slowly, almost listlessly, which brought out the natural lurch of the short-legged top-heaviness of him.

In the mornings I heard the horses stomping in the stable, and looking out the window, saw Bennett come out galloping, having spurred his horse from the very portal.

At noon we took lunch on the terrace if the day was fair and he’d glance at the sky over the lake as if expecting a plane to appear.

At night while the guards in their belted uniforms walked the floodlit grounds with their dogs I heard him playing his phonograph records, his favorites, I heard the song of the night of my arrival.

I know why I’ve waited

Know why I’ve been blue

Prayed each night for someone

Exactly like you.

He began to talk of Lucinda Bennett, imparting confidences that at first excited me inasmuch as I was there on the terrace in the sun at Loon Lake, in all the world the only one privileged to receive them. His voice lacked regret, his delivery was thoughtful, he chose his words as someone does who wants in as orderly a way as possible to impart information. So I hoped he was giving these thoughts to me, as instruction, and I trusted that his reasons would be forthcoming, that he had some plan, and that by being patient and attentive I would eventually learn what it was. Then I wondered if the confession itself was the gracious means by which I would pass through some subtle imperceptible moment of assumption from being something to being something else. But he went on, and the obsession of the subject became so apparent to me, and the confidences so intimate, I couldn’t believe he was aware that I listened or that he would seriously divulge them if I did not lack all importance to him. Day after day I listened. I watched the white clouds disembowel themselves in the high pines across the lake. His man served canned soup, canned spaghetti, canned peaches. Bennett grew shaggier and smellier, looking more like a troll every day. I watched his beard grow. While I waited for a place in his mind I tested my status with the staff. I rode a horse one day with the stableman beside me showing me the elementais. I went upstairs to the storerooms that the maid Libby had shown me so long ago and took several outfits for myself, white ducks already cuffed, argyle sweaters, saddle shoes, shirts, ties, a pair of boots. I had the man in the boathouse bring out the mahogany speedboat and hold the line while I boarded her. I got the hang of it soon enough. I cruised around looking at the beaver lodges, the islands where the loons made their nests, and saw from the water the concrete ramp and hangar where Mr. Penfield and Mrs. Bennett began their round-the-world flight.

“She was a student when I met her. She was then, and remained, the most handsome woman I had ever seen. I secured a divorce to marry Lucinda. And in the years as they went by, no matter what passed between us, whenever she saw fit to spend time with me I was pleased to see her, I mean that no matter what the state of our affections I was always pleased when she came into a room. If she came into a room I had to look at her. I could not not look at her.

“I respect character in a man but I revere it in a woman. I am done in when I find it in a woman. That little doxie had it in a cheap sort of way. But in Lucinda it tested like the best ore, through and through, in the bones and in the beam of the eye.

“Long ago she lost the pleasure of — what? — the engagement. And I was able to appreciate her character in the depth of her withdrawal from me. And then how I wished she had less of it! Less pride, less distaste for — surprises. Less neatness of soul. I told her she liked the sky because it was clean. She liked to go up in rain. I never flew with her because I sensed that it was her realm. But everyone told me what a wonderful pilot she was. How cool. How capable. And then she began to pull down the prizes and I knew it was so.

“I was very proud of her. I bought her whatever she needed. She may have fallen in love with a fellow, some mail-service pilot, one of those adventurer types, and I was going to have it looked into. But when I thought about it I knew Lucinda would never permit herself an affair. It was not something to which she would give rein. And gradually she ceased to mention him. If it were possible for Lucinda to exist without a body she would have chosen to. Her body was of no interest to her. She did not like it … handled. She was a very orderly woman, Lucinda. If you look upstairs in her apartment you will see the order of her mind. She did everything with precision, and so was she affectionate with precision.

“She flew planes but her tastes were very delicate and refined. She knew art, she knew music. She had small bones as befitting a fine mugwump family. They none of them liked me. I took great relish in that. It was one of those things. I have no taste of my own but I could recognize the quality of hers. She could look at something for a long time, a painting, a piece of porcelain. Then I knew it was fine. I envied her vulnerability — that she could be transfixed by something that was beautiful. She became pregnant just once and immediately took measures to have it rescinded. We had no children. I have one child by my first marriage but he is an incompetent, I mean legally, a macrocephalic, he has water in the head, and he lives in a home in Sweden. They take too good care of him. By all rights he should have been dead years ago.

“Lucinda went once to see him. Thereafter she sent him thoughtfully chosen gifts, toys, tins of cookies, picture books appropriate to his mental age. She always sent him things. She liked helpless beings. I don’t mean that the way it sounds. I mean she had a heart for people. It was she who saved Penfield a jail sentence. Penfield was from the working class and he decided to come here in the late twenties to assassinate me. You knew that of course. Well, the fellow was pathetic but she kept him on as a sort of a cause in personal rehabilitation. A sort of one-woman Salvation Army, except without the prayer. Lucinda was not religious except perhaps in some vague pantheistic way. She decided the poor man was a poet. I got to like him myself. He read aloud very well, he probably should have been an actor. He read Wordsworth and Keats, all that kind of thing. He was a sort of house pet she kept on and I indulged her. But then of course I did something I shouldn’t have. I took Penfield’s own verses to the president of the New York Public Library and asked him his opinion. In turn he called on a professor who was an expert in the field of literature. Oh my. And I showed Lucinda this fellow’s letter. She perceived, accurately, that the opinion didn’t matter so much as my malice in having asked for it. She threw the letter in the fire. She was a wonderful woman. She was not a prey to fashion, didn’t give a damn for it. She always looked smart by looking herself. She always wore her hair the same way, cut short and brushed back from her temples. I thought it was most seemly. She had a thin, fit body. Thin waist. Ribs showed. She had good hands, small and squarish, nails trim, cut close. She would not paint her nails or wear make-up. I liked her mouth, a generous mouth. Sweet smile. A light came into her eyes when she smiled. She had almost no bosom. Just a slight rise there with good thick nipples. She told me once if I liked her body I must really like boys.”

He paused. “You’ve come here to kill me too, I suppose.”

“What?”

“But you don’t have the guts for it — anymore than he.”

“What?”

“See? I’m not even carrying my gun.”

He pushed his chair back from the table and held out his arms.

The room empties. They have gone to make the call. I walk back and forth shaking a fist in the air. The fuckers! By my wits I have done this thing and the stupid sons of bitches have gone for it. But why not? They will hear him laugh, they’ll hear him say, Yes, let him go. My heart fills with a passionate conviction. He and I are complicitors. We’re both against them. As if, having made this up, I cannot make it work unless I believe it myself.

And I am released. And I strut out of that room bone-cracked, skin-stitched and betrayed and I glare at them all as I lead her by the arm out the door. I take my time. I think the illusion will endure only if I do not break and run. I sleep in Sandy James’ parlor. I sleep eighteen hours. I take her money, buy a truck. I hire two men to load it. In the rear-view mirror I see only a black industrial cloud where Jacktown was. I press the accelerator. Cars turn on their lights, the red lights of moving cars ahead of me. The furniture shifts and bangs against the tailgate. The heavy furniture rises in the air on the bumps. I am in transit on the road, the child bride beside me, bracing herself with her knee against the dashboard and holding her baby tightly. I open the window for the cold air. I want the wind to blow these feelings out of my eyes, blow them away, leave me without memory or love, leave me to myself.

“If you thought I would want to kill you,” I said, “why did you tell them to let me go?”

“What?”

“When the police called from Jacksontown,” I said to him. “With that message.” I was smiling like a fatuous idiot.

“What message? I don’t know what you’re talking about. From whom?”

I choked on the answer. Bennett got up and stood at the parapet. He stood looking over the lake with his hands in his pockets.

That night we steal upon a station of the Tokaido and purchase disguises. We are a country lord and his serving boy. She wears bloused trousers. We travel in this humble manner because my mission is clandestine. Soldiers of the daimyo eye us warily. We book rooms in a modest inn where, to avoid suspicion, I call for a woman. She is a tired fat artiste who responds to the humor of the situation. The two of us climb all over her, I with ordinary lasciviousness, my young ward with the affection of a child for her mother. Of course the old whore is terribly moved. She reaches into the child’s pantaloons, and my hand, like a band of steel, clamps around her wrist. If she discovers my serving boy is a girl, all is lost. Even so the situation is difficult. I use all the sexual arts of which I am capable to divert the old bag. But in the midst of passion I intuit that the more undone she becomes, the more shrewd. It is actually interesting. At the moment of her release she is totally withdrawn and quietly aware that we are not what we appear to be. But her tongue is extended. I grab the tongue and impale it to the polished floor with an awl. I shout and stamp about and raise an uproar. The innkeeper comes to the door. Other travelers come running. I berate the innkeeper for the poor quality of his house. He is abject. The woman moans, rump up, head on the floor, eyes glazed like a pig to be served. I put my foot on her back and behead her. The innkeeper begs my pardon.

At dawn we continue our journey. The sky is pink. We climb the trail alongside an amazing stream, so rock-strewn that the water, broken into millions of drops, falls like the sound of hail and bounces like steel pellets. I scrape the bark from a small pine tree tortured by the wind to grow like sunrays toward the earth. This lime-green powdery moss I allow to dry for four minutes in the palm of my hand. I then lick this powder from my palm and immediately my young love becomes a giantess looking down at me with amazement. I trip her and she falls backward, quaking the earth, I run into her vulva and by that means continue my lifelong search for the godhead. It is some sort of gland somewhere. The way becomes slippery. In this viscous darkness I use my knees and my hands like a water spider. The way becomes narrower. Soon I am flattened, drawn like a mote toward some powerful brilliantly lit eye. I feel myself enlarging. The light is blinding. I become my own size and break her open like an egg.

You are thinking it is a dream. It is no dream. It is the account in helpless linear translation of the unending love of our simultaneous but disynchrous lives.

Data linkage escape this is not emergency

Come with me compute with me

Coupling with me she becomes a couplet

Lovers leap in the sea

A drop of sunlit pee between two lips

Substitute a priapic navigator

I see inappropriate behavior

I recall Father Damien seeing his own pale blue eyes

Regarding him from a face resembling his own enlarged redblue heart

It is a woman, a leperess, expressing his sentiments.

I refer to the paired animals going up the ramp of the ark

Leopard leopard aardvark aardvark porpoise porpoise inchworm inchworm

The story of Noah is the religious vision of cloning.

Scientists tweeze pollen eyedrop spermatozoa

Dispatch flights of sexy sterile white moths to eliminate specie

They notice human lovers commonly resemble each other

Test it at home looking at their wives friends friends wives

Or if not each other then each other’s brother or sister

But in any event that love conducts a shock of recognition

Question haven’t I seen you somewhere before answer yes in the mirror

Given wars before wars after wars genocides

and competition for markets cloning will eliminate all chance

and love will be one hundred percent efficient

No Sturm und Drang German phrase no disynchronicity

but everyone having seen everyone else somewhere before

we will have realized serenity of perfect universal love

univerself love uniself love unilove

until the race withers and blows away like the dried husks

of moths but who’s complaining

They had either believed me or not believed me. If they had believed me I had been so effective, so frighteningly effective that they did not want to confirm what I told them, they were afraid to. If they called, he would want their names. So they had let me go.

If they had not believed me, then my desperation was so patent or my cravenness so truly loathsome that they didn’t have the heart to go on with it. Perhaps there were moral operations in this world that transcended the individual responsible for them and threatened to ruin everyone. Was that it? Was I perceived as a leper who threatened to contaminate them?

In either case the result was the same, wasn’t that so? I had been released thinking I’d made contact with Bennett and I had not.

That night I lay in Penfield’s bed and stared at the amber windowpanes and listened to the watchdogs baying. I tried to compose my terrible shame into something I could deal with, I tried to comprehend the weird sick brokenness I felt, the sense of irreparable damage I had done to myself the catastrophic discomposure of everything but the small light in my mind. It was most difficult.

Sandy James asleep forever on the coach seat amid the pilgrims: I take a few dollars out of my wallet and tuck the fat wallet with her death benefits under her chin she does not wake the train begins to move the small flaked tarnished charms of her charm bracelet swing in their arc the train picks up speed I jump hit the embankment the cinders imbedding themselves in my knees.

Compare the private railroad car of the Meiji emperor the imperial beloved, as it makes its way through the sunlit valley of the Bunraku province. It moves slowly and from the populated fields no closer than a mile thousands of little children wave paper flags in time to the small white puffs of smoke rising from the engine. The children are well behaved. Their parents kneel beside them and hold their shoulders. Their grandparents lie prostrate on the ground not even daring to glance toward the distant train where the line of mounted imperial guardsmen cantering at the base of the embankment alongside the dark green imperial car give it the look of a lampshade with a rippling fringe.

The man resisted all approaches he was stone he was steel I hated his grief his luxurious dereliction I hated his thoughts the quality of his voice his walk the way he spent his life proving his importance ritualizing his superiority his exercises of freedom his arrogant knowledge of the human heart I hated the back of his neck he was a killer of poets and explorers, a killer of boys and girls and he killed with as little thought as he gave to breathing, he killed by breathing he killed by existing he was an emperor, a maniac force in pantaloons and silk slippers and lacquered headdress dispensing like treasure pieces of his stool, making us throw ourselves on our faces to be beheaded one by one with gratitude, the outrageous absurdity of him was his power, his clucking crowing mewing shouting whistling ridiculousness is what stunned us into submission but not this boy, I know what to do about this pompous little self-idolator, I’m going to put the fucker where he belongs I swear oh my Clara I swear Mr. Penfield I swear by the memory of the Fat Lady I know how to do it, I know how to do it and I have the courage to do it and it will be a beautiful monumental thing I do I will testify to God that he is a human being, that is how, I will save him from wasting away, I will save him from crumbling into a piece of dried shit, into a foul eccentric, you see, I will give him hope, I will extend his reign, I will raise him and do it all so well with such style that he will thank me, thank me for growing in his heart his heart bursting his son.

And in the morning the whole spring of the earth has come forth and Loon Lake is a bowl of light. A sweet blue haze hangs in the trees. The sun is shining, a filigree of pale green leaf laces through the evergreens across the water. I run down the hill to the lake side pulling off my clothes as I go. I stop to remove my shoes. My feet thump along the boathouse deck. I stand poised on the edge and dive into the water. With powerful strokes learned in the filth of industrial rivers Joe swims a great circle crawl in the sweet clear cold mountain lake. He pulls himself up on the float and stands panting in the sun, his glistening white young body inhaling the light, the sun healing my scars my cracked bones my lacerated soul, the sun powering my loins warming them to a stir. I toss my hair back, smooth it back, shake the water from my arms, open my eyes. Up on the hill Bennett stands on his terrace, a tiny man totally attentive. He has seen the whole thing, as I knew he would. He waves at me. I smile my white teeth. I wave back.

Herewith bio Joseph Korzeniowski.

Born to a working-class family Paterson New Jersey August 2 1918.

Graduated Paterson Latin Grade School 1930.

Graduated Paterson Latin High School 1936. Voted by classmates

Best Shape of the Head. Hobbies: Street hockey, petit larceny.

Roustabout Hearn Bros. Carnival, summer 1936.

Aka Joe of Paterson, Loon Lake NY autumn 1936.

Employed Bennett Autobody Number Six, headlight man, winter 1936.

Enrolled Williams College September 1937. Letters in Lacrosse,

Swimming. Graduated cum laude, honors in Political Science, 1941.

Voted by classmates Captain ROTC and Most Likely to Succeed.

Commissioned Second Lieutenant U.S. Air Corps.

Legal name change Joseph Paterson Bennett, June 1941.

Assigned newly formed Office of Strategic Services 1942

parachuting into France in black sweater flight jacket trousers

black boots false passport black wool cap black parachute

pockets of francs four thousand feet into windy void

face blackened teeth blackened, heart blackened dropping into blackness.

Awarded Bronze Star with oak leaf cluster 1943.

Awarded Silver Star with oak leaf cluster 1944.

Decommissioned 1945 rank of Major, Office of Strategic Services.

Appointed organization staff Central Intelligence Agency 1947.

Married Dru Channing Smith 1947, divorced 1950; no issue.

Married Kimberly Andrea Kennedy 1951, divorced 1954; no issue.

Continuous service Central Intelligence Agency to resignation

1974. Retiring rank Deputy Assistant Director.

Retired US State Department rank of Ambassador 1975.

Chairman and Chief Operating Officer Bennett Foundation.

Board of Directors James-Pennsylvania Steel Corporation.

Board of Directors Chilean-American Copper Corporation.

Trustee Jordan and Naismith colleges, Rhinebeck NY.

Trustee Miss Morris’ School for Young Women, Briarcliff Manor NY.

Member Knickerbocker, Acropolis, New York; Silks, Saratoga Springs;

Rhode Island Keel, Newport.

Master of Loon Lake.