Sons

November

I felt like a spectator and a participant both.

From somewhere outside of myself, as if I were watching myself perform in the Friday night game films, I could see my own slow-motion image leaning into the huddle, sunshine splintering jaggedly from my helmet. Inside the shadowed huddle, dark and secret, the players’ faces took on a surrealistic look, foreshortened, faintly reflecting the green of the field, cheekbones smeared with grease, eyes narrowed in nothing less than murderous intent. Watching this from outside myself, seeing the homicidal glitter in the eyes of the team and in my own eyes too, I was almost tempted to laugh. But here, actually here in the huddle, the serious faces turned expectantly toward mine, the click of plastic as helmets touched and shoulders touched, there was nothing to laugh at, there was just a game to be won, although only against the junior varsity.

I whispered a Roger-Hook-Go, and we clapped out of the huddle, and rushed toward the line of scrimmage as the camera eye above me and outside of me somewhere panned the rows of naked sycamores flanking the field against a painfully blue sky. We lined up with the strong side on the left, Roger-Hook-Go calling for a fake pass to that side, with the right end cutting wide and fast on the outside instead, hooking around behind the cornerback’s block, and then running straight downfield to receive my long, accurate, touchdown pass, amen.

I crouched behind the center, seeing my own fanned expectant hands in huge closeup, as through the camera eye again, “One, two, three,” the ball was snapped. The j. v. were expecting a pass, the formation had told them that. I made no attempt to deceive them now, no attempt to fake a running play (seventeen-year-old Wat Tyler fades back in black-and-white slow motion, searching for a receiver, never once looking at his true receiver, a quarterback’s eyes are his own worst enemy), I turned to the left, faked a pass in that direction, with the weight on my rear foot, and then swung my left leg around, swiveling to locate the end just as he broke out of the hook and went sprinting downfield. The ball was level with my eyes now, fingers widespread over the laces, my right arm cocked and poised (Timing is essential to a passer, a voice says over the black-and-white film, he must lead his receiver and get the ball to him while he is still in the open). Turn, I thought, goddamn you, Frank, turn, and suddenly I was hit by two men, the right guard who had broken through, and a linebacker who had got in around the tackle. I tucked the ball in against my chest and allowed myself to go limp.

(In black-and-white, disrupted grass rises in soundless clods exploding on the air, rolling and tumbling slowly, Wat Tyler feels the weight of the linebacker shoving against his chest, the strong grip of the guard around his knees, relaxing, in black and white, he rolls with their force and hits the ground in cushioned unreality.)

The others had broken through the line now, I could feel the weight of additional bodies as they piled on, Yeah, get the quarterback, men, break his ass even though he’s our own school’s varsity quarterback, stomp him into the earth. I lay soft and still under the mound, the ball securely tight against my chest. My leg hurt, but I knew nothing had been broken, and the fear I always experienced before each tackle left with a rush as sweet and as clean as the November wind. I got to my feet, grinned, tossed the ball away, and ran quickly back to the huddle.

Something was wrong.

This was only a scrimmage between the varsity and the j.v., Friday afternoon’s warmup for the game against Greer tomorrow, having started at one p. m., and now only in its first quarter. But as I turned in mid-stride to glance at the high school’s white main building, sleekly rectangular on a knoll against the piercing sky, I saw far too many teachers and students coming down the steps and heading for the bleachers, why would a mere scrimmage be attracting such a crowd? Something was wrong, and yet the coaches paced nervously before the bench as usual, Mr. Cowley wore his long red muffler with usual affectation, the team was waiting as usual, but something was wrong.

(Wat Tyler leans into the huddle. Again, there is the click of plastic as white helmets join in muted strategy. “Same play,” he says, “Roger-Hook-Go, on two,” and ends with the word “Pass” — it is always advisable to end the call with the type of play, so that linemen missing the pattern will at least know whether the team is running or passing.)

We clapped out of the huddle (but something was wrong) and ran toward the line of scrimmage. From the corner of my eye, I could see Mr. Cowley talking to Miss Huber, who had come out of the school without a coat. The coach was not watching the play, he was instead nodding in serious attention, and now more students and teachers were coming out of Main, was it a fire drill? I spread my hands fanlike behind the center’s ass, “One, two,” I said, and the ball was snapped, and again I turned and ran directly back for five yards, wheeled, faked my eyes to the false receiver on the left, stepped to the right to avoid the opposing guard who had again come crashing through the line, ball back, the right end had hooked and was clear, I had about two seconds to get off the pass. The line was buckling, I was forced to go back deeper, and saw that my receiver was being double-teamed, the little j. v. bastards had second-guessed the repeat play. I looked far downfield for my alternate, found him covered man-for-man, and abruptly cut left to try a run through the strong side.

I was ganged before I covered three yards. They hit me from every possible direction this time, fear spit into my head, I thought they’d break every bone in my body. Pumping my legs wildly, I tried to break away, hands clutching at my jersey, “Oh God!” I heard someone say, and then I was falling. (The ground seems very far away this time, the sky wheels overhead, Hold the ball, he tells himself in litany against the fear, Hold the ball, and clutches it to him like a woman. A helmet smashes into his face guard, his neck snaps back, he thinks for a moment he has broken something in his spine, and then the ground hits him, and he is splayed flat against the unyielding earth by live hundred pounds of muscle and bone.)

The pile-on began.

I clung to the ball against my chest, I could smell the tumbled earth and grass, that’s right you little shits, I thought, kill your star quarterback, and smiled, and lay still and helpless, and thought suddenly of something Mr. Jarrel had said in American History I, about Giles Corey being pressed to death in Salem, Massachusetts, because he would not admit he was a witch, rock after rock being piled upon his chest, and all he ever said was, “More weight,” and had died for his refusal to betray his own conscience. I lay still and waited, my eyes squeezed shut. They were climbing off me now. I opened my eyes, saw an untangling scramble of cleats and muscles, fallen socks and grass-stained knee pads. Free, I got to my feet and grinned. I had read somewhere that Jim Brown always grinned when he got up after a tackle, grinned and walked slowly back to the huddle, no matter how hard he’d been hit.

An odd buzz hovered over the field. I thought I was hearing things at first, thought they had done something to my brain. I tossed the ball away and began sprinting back for the huddle.

There was no huddle.

Mr. Cowley was on the field, and he was whispering to the referee, and the guys were all talking at once, not standing with that patient hands-on-hips posture of football players waiting for a decision, but gesturing wildly instead. I could hear them saying, “The head, the head,” and I listened in bewilderment and fear because I was sure now that something terrible had happened to me, that they were all talking about my head, that maybe my neck was twisted at a funny angle, maybe there was a line of blood trickling from under my white helmet. The playing field was crowded with people now, what were they all doing on the field? The buzz was incredible, the referee finally blew his whistle to stop it, and a hush fell over the field, broken only by the keening of the November wind and the empty rattle of the sycamores lining the field.

Mr. Cowley cleared his throat. He seemed embarrassed.

“We’re calling the game,” he said.

“I cannot reconcile the events of this past week,” my grandfather said, tall and white-haired at sixty-three, sitting at the head of the table, the family patriarch, though I could sense my father’s displeasure with the old man for taking his usual seat. “To believe that in this day and age, in a country as sophisticated as America...”

“Is there any cranberry sauce?” one of the twins asked. She was my cousin, eight years old, the prettier of the two girls, though frankly neither of them was worth a glance, even in the third grade. She smiled at my grandfather because she knew she had interrupted him, and he reached over to touch her straight brown hair for just an instant before Aunt Linda said, “Your grandfather’s speaking, Mary. You can just wait for the cranberry sauce.”

“I’ll get it,” my mother said, and rose from the table.

“She can wait, Lolly.”

My mother’s name was Dolores, and the “Lolly” was a hangover from the days of her youth. I saw a small twinge of displeasure in her eyes as my aunt used the name now, but she recovered immediately and said, “I want to see how she’s doing, anyway,” referring to the new maid, a priceless gem from Georgia. She put down her napkin, and then left the dining room and went into the kitchen. The other twin, Marcia, yelled, “I want some, too, Aunt Lolly!” and my mother shouted, “Yes, Marcy!” from the kitchen, and Uncle Stanley said, “I want some, too, please, Aunt Lolly.”

“Please!” Marcy shouted to the closed kitchen door.

“The whole thing was a spectacle,” my father said. He said it very softly, I knew that voice, as if he hadn’t been patiently waiting through the twins’ nonsense for this moment when he could openly challenge Grandpa sitting in his place at the head of the table. Grandpa’s brows went up just a trifle. There was a glint of humor in his blue eyes. The two men squared off across two yards of white tablecloth. “That whole damn funeral was a theatrical production,” my father said.

“Well,” Grandpa seemed to agree, “there is something very theatrical about an assassination, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not to mention another murder following it,” I offered.

“I’m not talking about that aspect of it,” my father said.

“Are there any more yams?” Uncle Stanley asked.

“I’m talking about the funeral — the horses, the drums, all that overproduced crap.”

Aunt Linda shot my father a warning look: the children.

My father turned with a faint glance of annoyance, and then passed the candied yams to Uncle Stanley. Stanley was a heavy-set man with a bland open face, thinning blond hair, gold-rimmed spectacles, a Phi Beta Kappa key hanging on a gold chain across the front of his vest. He was wearing a brown suit (he always wore brown), a white shirt, and a brown tic upon which there were now several specks of gravy he hadn’t yet noticed. He accepted the proffered yams in the silver dish that had once been my grandmother’s, said, “Thank you, Will,” and promptly served himself the last two potatoes in the dish.

“Someone else may want some,” Aunt Linda said.

“I hate yams,” Mary said.

“I hate yams, too,” Marcy said.

“I’ll grant you,” my grandfather said, “that the Kennedy women have a certain flair about them, and that perhaps...”

“Even that annoys me.”

“What does?”

"That my father said. “The Kennedy Women!”’ He shook his head. “That’s for O’Hara novels, not real life.”

“The assassination was real life,” I said.

“I beg your pardon,” my grandfather said, turning to me with a small pleased smile, “but that’s where I disagree. That’s exactly my point, Walter, it’s exactly what I was trying to say.”

“Lolly, we need some more butter, please,” Uncle Stanley shouted to the kitchen.

“Coming!”

“I was trying to say that there is an air of total unreality to the events of this past week. The assassination itself, the television murder, the funeral, all of it. Unreal. Incredible.”

“The only unreality was the funeral,” my father insisted. “A play in three acts, produced and directed by Jacqueline Kennedy. The rest is only America.”

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“I mean that this concept of America as a sophisticated nation is all a lot of crap. We’re barely out of...”

“Oh, really, Will, I think...”

“... our infancy.”

“... America’s a pretty sophisticated country,” Uncle Stanley concluded, and stuffed a whole candied yam into his mouth. Aunt Linda shot my father another warning glance. She really looked a lot like him, I suppose, especially now when her blue eyes were flashing the same anger as his. They’d both inherited Grandpa’s high cheekbones and prominent nose, as well as the somewhat thin-lipped Bertram Tyler mouth — which I had also inherited — and which I felt looked more attractive on a man than on Aunt Linda, who always wore the look of a maiden lady about to peer under the bed, straight blond hair pulled into an old-fashioned bun at the back of her head, good breasts hidden in a high-necked blouse. “This is 1963, Linda,” my father said emphatically, half in response to Uncle Stanley, and half in reprimand to his sister for her prissy-assed ways.

“Yes, and we’re almost...”

“We’re less than two hundred...”

“... on the moon,” Uncle Stanley said.

“Are we ever getting that cranberry sauce?” Mary asked.

“Hush, Mary!”

My mother came from the kitchen. The new maid trailed behind her with a bewildered look, carrying hot bread and two butter dishes, as well as the celery and olives she’d forgotten to put on the table at the start of the meal. My mother put down the cranberry sauce, and then tucked a stray wisp of brown hair behind her ear, and smiled at me suddenly and radiantly when she realized I was watching her.

“Why, it’s one of the Tyler Women!” I said, and opened my eyes wide in fake astonishment.

“Yes, of course,” my mother said simply, smiling, and suddenly her eyes met with my father’s, her eyes clashed with the eyes of Will Tyler across those yards of white linen, and held, and I was reminded of the cold hard intelligent waiting eyes of a football team in a huddle, waiting for the play to be called, and my father mimicked in precise derision, “Yes, of course,” and it was as if the play had been called, and their eyes broke contact, I almost expected to hear the clap of hands as the huddle opened. I felt what I had felt last Friday, that something was terribly wrong. I almost expected to learn momentarily that yet another person had been killed. I guess I experienced in that instant an uncertainty I had never before known in my life, the rising fear that everything I’d learned to count on before then, a sane and ordered existence, an America comforting and secure, was rapidly crumbling all around me. And then I realized that the sharp crack of eyes across that Connecticut dining room table had been every bit as fatal as the rifle shots that shattered the Dallas stillness, and I knew further that my mother had been the victim.

“The only thing we’ve got to be thankful for this year,” my father said, “is that we’re still alive.”

December

It was almost midnight, it was almost 1943.

Michael had decorated the room with war posters, and I squinted at the one on the farthest wall, trying to read it like an eye chart, struggling under the slight handicap of having consumed twelve beers since the start of the party. The poster showed a workingman behind a riveting gun, and a soldier behind a machine gun, and the big lettering on the bottom of the poster read BOTH BARRELS, but I couldn’t make out the smaller type to the left of the workingman’s head. I rose unsteadily, navigated my way across the room and past the wilting Christmas tree, and peered at the full message: GIVE ’EM BOTH BARRELS. Very good, I thought, and remembered the barrel of beer in the kitchen, and thought it was time to have another little brew.

I was very depressed.

First of all, whereas Michael Mallory was a close friend of mine, I did not wish to be in his house this New Year’s Eve. I had been in his house last New Year’s Eve, and that had been depressing as hell because the Japanese had practically just finished bombing Pearl Harbor, and nobody was exactly in the mood for revelry and gay abandon. But this year’s party was turning out to be just as depressing as last year’s, so naturally I blamed my father. If he had given me permission to join the Air Force, I wouldn’t have been here in Chicago at all, but instead would be up there someplace in the wild blue yonder, being all of seventeen years old and five feet eleven inches bone-dry, which was old enough and tall too for a fighter pilot, so why wouldn’t he sign?

It was all quite depressing.

It was also quite depressing, believe me, that I had been flirting with a redheaded girl all night long, and she was now necking on the sofa with Matty Walsh. Walsh kept trying to sneak his sneaky little hand up under her skirt, but the girl had the good sense to pull it away each time, which certainly didn’t excuse my father. I remembered abruptly that tomorrow was his birthday, that at exactly 12:01 on the first day of January in the year 1900, my dear daddy, Bertram Tyler, had been brought into the world and the century, doubtless screaming his head off. I had already planned to call him after midnight. I would call at exactly 12:01 and listen to the phone ringing in the old house on East Scott Street, and when my father came onto the line, I would say, “This is Western Union, we have a message for Mr. Bertram Tyler, is he there please?” knowing full well he was of course there. And then I would sing “Happy Birthday to You,” and as a finale I would say, “Pop, this is Will. Can I please join the Air Force?”

I wondered why Walsh didn’t take the redhead into one of the bedrooms. It occurred to me in my foamy stupor that perhaps the redheaded girl did not wish Walsh to take her into one of the bedrooms, and thus emboldened I staggered across the room doing my imitation of John Wayne, found the record player, and with no little difficulty picked out ten or twelve very good records for dancing close to, all fox trots. I hesitated a moment before approaching Walsh and the girl, partially because they were at the moment kissing, and partially because I was trying to think of a good joke I could tell when I got over to the couch, but all I could think of was the one about the guy at the induction center with a hard-on, and I didn’t think I should risk that one with the girl, not having said two words to her all night long. So I shrugged and went into the kitchen instead. Russo and another guy were standing near the keg of beer, talking to two girls from Evanston.

“Hello, hello,” I said.

“What’s going on out there?” Russo asked.

“Walsh is necking,” I said, and heard the first of my records fall into place on the turntable, Jimmy Dorsey’s “Star Eyes.”

“Isn’t everybody?” the other guy said.

“We’re not,” the girl closest to the keg said, nor was it any wonder since she was possibly ugly as sin or worse, and since she immediately giggled after her funny remark and nudged her friend, who giggled too, a nice ugly pair of gigglers. They were both blondes, both wearing their hair in shoulder-length pageboys, both wearing navy blue taffetas with gold buttons down the front, flaring from the waist over thick legs, their beauty was so fantastic they had to duplicate it.

“Well,” I said, “I think I’ll have another brew.”

I opened the tap and poured myself a foaming glass of beer, and then chug-a-lugged it, aware of the no-doubt-admiring glances of the two ugly gigglers, and then looking toward the living room and wondering what was keeping the redhead. I figured maybe I would have to hit Walsh, but that was okay. He had no right trying to sneak his hand up under, sneaky little Jap. I wondered why my father wouldn’t let me join the Air Force. I opened the tap again. One of the gigglers said, “May I have one, too?”

“Sure,” I said, and handed her the glass I’d already filled.

“Why, thank you,” she said, and giggled again.

“Are you sure you’re old enough to drink?” Russo asked.

“I’m sixteen,” she answered, which meant she was fifteen, and which meant she was just as old as my kid sister Linda who was definitely not old enough to drink.

“She’s sixteen,” Russo said.

“Mmm,” I said.

“Yes, I’m sixteen,” the girl said again.

“That’s certainly old enough to drink,” Russo said.

“That’s certainly old enough for a lot of things,” the other guy said.

I didn’t say anything.

There was a momentary silence as “Star Eyes” cleared the record player, a click, and then the next record dropped, the tone arm moved into place, and Frank Sinatra began singing “Sunday, Monday or Always” with a choral background. I began thinking about musician’s union strikes and things like that, and started getting very depressed again, and just then the redhead walked into the kitchen. Her lipstick had all been kissed off, and she was very flushed from all that Walsh activity. Her hair was rolled up from either side of her head into twin pompadours, falling straight and free behind in a cascade around her shoulders, burnished copper against a black crepe dress, three rhinestone buttons over her bosom. She came directly to the beer keg and said, “Can I have a beer?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Will’s the bartender tonight,” Russo said, and laughed, I didn’t know at what.

“Looks that way,” I said, and smiled, not at Russo but at the redhead.

“Is that your name?” she asked. “Will?”

“That’s right.” I handed her the brimming glass. “What’s yours?”

“Marge.”

“That’s a good name for a redhead.”

“Is it?”

“Sure. All beautiful redheads should be named Marge.”

“Oh boy,” she said, “what a line,” and rolled her green eyes, and sipped at the beer.

I poured myself a fresh glass from the open tap. Russo and the other guy had moved toward the sink, the two gigglers following them. “What’s your connection with Walsh?” I asked.

“Who’s Walsh?” she said.

“The guy you were necking with on the couch.”

“No connection,” she said, and shrugged, and sipped some more beer.

“Did he bring you?”

“No.”

“Who did?”

“I came alone. Michael invited me, so I came.”

“How old are you?”

“How old do I look?” she asked.

“Fifteen.”

“Oh, come on, I’ll be eighteen in April.”

“Marge what? Did you say Marge?”

“Yes.”

“Marge what?”

“Marge Penner.”

“Wanna buy a duck?”

“No relation.”

“I’ll bet you hear that a lot, though.”

“No, this is only the ten thousandth time,” she said.

“I get the same thing,” I said. “My last name’s Tyler. Everybody always wants to know if I‘m related to the President.”

“To Roosevelt? I don’t get it.”

“No, to Tyler. John Tyler. He was the tenth president. Of the United States.”

“Oh,” she said. “Are you?”

“No, no. You want to dance?”

“Sure.”

“What about Walsh?”

“What about him?”

“Won’t he mind?”

“Who cares what he minds?”

“Not me, that’s for sure,” I said, and we went into the other room. Walsh was still on the couch. I gave him my John Wayne look, and then took the girl into my arms.

“Where do you live?” I whispered in her ear.

“On Halsted.”

“Halsted and where?”

“Halsted and Sixty-first.”

“Near the university?”

“Yes.”

“That’s very nice there.”

“Yes, it’s beautiful. You dance awfully close, do you know that?”

“So do you.”

“That’s only because you’re holding me so tight.”

“Do you mind?”

“Well... no. But don’t get the wrong idea.”

“What’s the wrong idea?”

“You know,” she whispered.

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, you just figure it out.”

“I’ll try.”

“Yes, do try,” she said.

Walsh was still watching us. There was only one other couple in the room and they were standing near the record player. Walsh glanced at them as though seeking their sympathy, but they were chattering about the poster hanging over the phonograph, a huge cartoon showing Hitler saying, “It is goot to hear Americans are now pudding 10 % of der pay into Bunds!” and Goebbels whispering to a glum Goering, “Hermann, you tell him it iss BONDS — not BUNDS!” Neither of them even noticed Walsh’s imploring look, and he seemed to take their indifference as a personal affront.

“How old are you?” the girl asked me.

“I’ll be eighteen in June. I may join the Air Force,” I said. “I want to fly. I want to be a fighter pilot.”

“Seems like everybody interesting is either already drafted or about to be,” the girl said.

“Oh? You think I’m interesting?”

“You’re okay,” she said indifferently.

Walsh came up off the couch in that moment, apparently having made his big decision. He walked directly to where we were dancing, and politely tapped me on the shoulder. I looked at his hand, and I said, “Sorry, no cutting in.”

“Who says so?” Walsh asked.

“Me.”

“Look, Tyler...”

“Yes, Walsh?”

“What’s the idea?”

“What’s the big idea,” I said. “You’re supposed to say ‘What’s the big idea?”’

“All right, what’s the big idea?” Walsh said.

“The idea is no cutting in,” I said. “That’s also the big idea.”

“Look, Tyler...”

“Yes, Walsh?”

“You know, Tyler...”

“Yes, Walsh?”

Walsh stood looking into my face, pained. I figured he didn’t know whether to press the issue or to retreat gracefully. He knew I could take him, but he also knew there were several close friends of his at the party, and yet he further knew I could take them, too. Besides, he knew I’d had a few beers, and he knew I could be terribly dangerous when I was John Wayne, but at the same time he wanted this girl, probably because he’d had such a promising beginning with her, his hand only having been removed from the hem of her skirt some sixty-four times in the length of a half-hour. So he stood in the center of the room, not wanting to walk away from a light, and yet hoping he would not have to fight. Realizing all this, I refused to make things easier for him. Instead of dancing the girl away and allowing Walsh to save face, I kept circling in the same spot, waiting for him to make his move.

“Aw, go fuck yourself,” he finally said cleverly, and went out into the kitchen.

“Nice fellow,” I said, and smiled.

“Charming.”

“You still want to dance?”

“What else is there to do?”

“I thought we’d explore the house a little.”

“What’s there to explore?”

“Well, the thing about exploration is you never know what you’ll be exploring until you start.”

“I’ve got a pretty good idea what we’ll be exploring,” the girl said. “Well, don’t be too sure.”

“Maybe we ought to keep dancing.”

“Sure, whatever you say.”

“Anyway, it seems as if too many people are already out exploring.”

“Oh, there’re always new worlds,” I said.

“What time is it?”

“Eleven-thirty.”

“At midnight, you know...”

“Sure, we’ll be back. What do you say?”

“Why not?”

I took her hand. I deliberately avoided going through the kitchen to the bedrooms at the back of the house, not wanting an encounter with Walsh, not now. Instead, I led her through the entryway and up a flight of steps to the second floor. A boy and a girl were necking in the hallway. They broke apart as we went by, and then began kissing again almost immediately. I had practically grown up with Michael Mallory, could in fact remember the time he had wet his pants in the first grade of the Norwood Park elementary school on West Pratt Avenue, and I knew of course that his bedroom was around the turn at the far end of the hall, out of sight, heh heh, unbeknownst except to people like myself who had been in and out of this house for the better part of ten years. I tiptoed down the hall and hoped that Michael himself wasn’t using the bedroom, because that would have been possibly the most depressing thing that could happen on this otherwise totally depressing night.

“Where are we going?” the girl whispered.

“Exploring,” I whispered back.

I tried the doorknob, and gently eased the door open. Wherever Michael was, he was not in his own bedroom. I led the girl inside, and locked the door behind me. When I turned, she was walking toward the bed, and I watched the black dress tighten across her ass as she moved in the semi-darkness, something about her deliberate walk as suddenly provocative as the whisper of a streetwalker on West Madison. The outside porch light was on, and it threw enough illumination into the room so that I could make out a framed picture of Michael on the table near the bed. He was smiling, his cherubic face retouched free of acne, his curly hair sitting on his head like a pile of wood shavings. The girl sat on the edge of the bed and crossed her legs. My heart was suddenly pounding. I looked at my watch. It was twenty minutes to twelve. I didn’t want to forget to call my father. “Western Union calling,” I would say.

I thought at first that she, this Margaret, Marge, or Margie Penner, this cotton candy concoction with bright red hair, would allow me to do whatever I had wildly imagined in my midnight bed, holding myself stiff and throbbing while my sister Linda slept in the room next door, would give herself to me as freely as the old year was giving itself to the new. There was no reluctance in her bold unfolding, she allowed me to take her breast in my hand, the way Michael had taught me to do one rainy afternoon in the basement of this selfsame house when we were both twelve years old and discussing all the things we’d never done to girls, permitted me to explore and exploit, offering her pink-white softness like a sacrificial maiden helpless in the grip of a greedy priest, allowing me the secret electric touch of all her silken underthings, and then opening to receive my hand. I was astonished by my own success, I had never before, she was wet and warm and suddenly entreating beneath me, suddenly transformed into something to tell the truth a little frightening. “Oh Jesus,” she whispered, “put on a rubber,” and I said, “I haven’t got one,” and she said, “Oh Jesus,” again and the stench of fear rose from her as overpowering as that other dizzying musk. Her hand expertly found me and she urged me against her belly in quick sharp jerks, while I begged, “Let me fuck you, let me fuck you,” and she answered now the cool determined mistress, “No, you’ll get me pregnant,” and I pleaded, “I’ll pull out, I swear to God,” and she said as Michael smiled in black and white beside the bed, “No, you won’t, you won’t, you won’t, you won’t,” and I came against her leg, spurting dizzily onto her thigh and her garters and the ribbed tops of her stockings.

Downstairs, I could hear the others in the living room. Someone had turned off the Victrola and put on the radio. An announcer was broadcasting from The Loop, describing the crowds of people in the street. I took out my handkerchief. She was lying crosswise on the bed, one arm up and folded, the back of her hand against her closed eyes. Her legs were still spread. I handed her the handkerchief, and she murmured, “Thank you, Will.”

She sat up then and clasped her bra, though I couldn’t remember having unclasped it, and then she turned for me to zip up the back of the black dress, and said, “Will, I hope you don’t think...” and I immediately said, “Of course not.” Downstairs, the announcer was saying it was four minutes to midnight. Someone had given out noisemakers and the kids were already beginning to use them as the redhead and I came into the living room.

Just after midnight, I went into the kitchen and dialed my home number. My father answered on the first ring. I didn’t even pretend I was Western Union with a message for Mr. Bertram Tyler.

“Pop?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Happy New Year. And happy birthday.”

“Thank you,” my father said.

January

Mama always said, “Bertram, we’ve only got two seasons here in Wisconsin, winter and the Fourth of July,” but I never minded the cold, and I didn’t mind it now. I was working late and alone in the forest because I’d taken an hour off that morning to ride one of the wagons into Eau Fraiche. With two thousand men working in the bush during cutting season, seven supply wagons made the trip to town every Friday, coming back loaded with beans and butter and coffee and potatoes and molasses and eggs and beef. Flour was still a problem because there’d been an epidemic of black stem rust in 1916, followed by another poor wheat season last year, and what with trying to keep France and England supplied with grain, there was a severe shortage all over the country, not only in Eau Fraiche. The same applied to pork and sugar, which the Allies desperately needed. I couldn’t remember having had a strip of bacon since I began working at the camp, and last year we were actually pouring corn syrup into our coffee to sweeten it.

I’d asked Hal, the head-chopper, if I could take a few hours off that morning because I had something to do in town. I didn’t tell him what it was I had to do, but I think he knew what I was up to because he just grinned and clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Sure, Bert, you just take all the time you need.” As it turned out, I hadn’t needed much time at all. In fact, I was able to catch the first loaded wagon back to camp. Still, I’d lost an hour’s work, and when you were cutting pulpwood, you got paid by how many cords of wood you cut, and not by how much time you spent in town. The standard cord was eight feet long, four feet high, and four feet wide. A scaler measured each pile of logs at the end of the day, figured out how many cords they added up to, and that way was able to tell how much pay you had coming. Anyway, I thought I might still be able to hit my quota if I could bring down the tree I’d been working on.

The tree was a huge spruce, probably there since the days of old Frenchy La Pierre, towering up against a sky brittle with dusk. I’d cleared a working space around the tree, clipping off the brush and saplings, holding the ax in one hand near the point of balance and cutting very close to the ground. I’d hung the ax myself because I never did trust factory-hung axes, and I’d also tapered the blade — a single-bit Michigan — on a wet grindstone, and then honed it razor-sharp, taking off the wire edges; a dull ax is much more dangerous than a sharp one, that was something you learned very quickly in the woods. I’d also cut off all the low-hanging branches to give me plenty of swinging room, and I’d checked the direction of fall, to make sure there weren’t any widow-makers on any of the surrounding trees. I was ready to start my undercut now, and as I moved around to the side toward which the tree would fall, I looked up at the sky and saw a pair of geese silhouetted against the deepening red, and saw my own breath blowing white out of my mouth, and I grinned and picked up the saw and began making the horizontal cut, and thought again of what I’d done that morning.

Nancy wasn’t going to like it, that was for sure. I couldn’t wait to tell her about it, and yet I was really sort of seared to tell her. She was five feet four inches tall, thinner than a rake handle, but when she got mad, thunder could boom out of those green eyes of hers. I knew all the arguments she’d give me (even though it was too late now) because I’d given myself the very same arguments all this past week before finally deciding this morning to go over to Eau Fraiche and get the thing done. There were some things a man had to do, that was all, but I guessed Nancy wasn’t going to understand that too well. All I knew was I was eighteen years old, and I was strong and healthy, and I wanted to do my part. It was as simple as that.

(When did you all of a sudden get so thick with Mr. Wilson? Nancy would ask. It was you who said Wisconsin should go all-out for Hughes, which we most surely did, and now you’re thick as the devil and the old green snake, how do you explain that, Bert?)

Well, there was no explaining it, I guessed. It was just something you had to do, that was all.

I freed the saw and picked up my ax. There was perhaps half an hour of light left, oh, maybe just a bit longer, and with luck I could have my notch cut in half an hour, and then I could start on my backcut. I was beginning to doubt I would get any bucking done before dark, but if I could at least get her felled and limbed, why then I could get to work with the bow saw in the morning, and cut her into log lengths then. I began to chop. She was a big tree, so I decided to make two smaller notches, working them eventually into a single large one. I worked with an easy steady swing, my legs widespread, my right hand just above the bulge at the end of the ax handle, sliding my left hand up close to the head on the upstroke, and then toward my right hand again on the downstroke. I kept one corner of the blade always free of the wood, giving it a slight twist each time to free the chip and release the bit. I put each stroke exactly where I wanted it, the chips falling away yellow-white and thick into the snow. I took off my jacket after twenty minutes of hard chopping, working in my sweater now, swinging the ax in long steady arcs, joining the two notches and making a big notch that slanted down at a forty-five-degree angle toward the saw cut.

The sky was streaked with purple, the trees looming high against it, the snow tinted a fainter lavender. From far away in one of the bunkhouses, I heard a lumberjack’s laughter cracking across the snowbound silence. A dog began barking and then was still.

I began my backcut.

Maybe I could help Nancy to see it my way. There was talk around, I’d tell her, that they were going to lower the age to eighteen by June, so what difference would a few months make? Wasn’t it better to get into the thing now, and help get it over with, so we could later go on with our normal lives? Wasn’t that better, Nance?

Bert, she would say, they can kill you clear up to your navel, is that what you want them to do?

I was using the bow saw for my backcut, but I was beginning to think I’d made a mistake, she was much too big to fell this way. What I needed was a crosscut saw with two men on it. At least, that’s the way it looked to me now, with darkness fast coming on and the bow saw sinking into the trunk far too close to its frame without getting anywhere near enough to my undercut. I needed only an inch or two of holding-wood to serve as my hinge when the tree fell, but here I was almost up tight against the frame of the saw now, and still three inches away from my undercut; nope, it wasn’t going to work. I eased the saw free and wondered what I should do. Suppose I left her this way, and a strong wind came along and toppled her over tomorrow morning when some poor fellow was out honing his ax and never suspecting somebody had left a tree hanging? I decided to try poling her over, and if that didn’t work, I’d head back for the bunkhouse and get some help.

I hadn’t even told my mother yet, that was going to be still another fracas. I could see us all sitting around the table Sunday after church, and Papa saying the blessing, while Harriet and Fanny and little brother John fidgeted and squirmed, and then Mama would come in from the kitchen carrying our usual Sunday meal — corned beef, boiled for almost two and a half hours, after which carrots, onions, turnips, cabbage, and potatoes were added to the pot to simmer in the meat juices for another half hour or so. Harriet would rise immediately to go into the kitchen for the freshly baked loaf of bread and Fanny would only reluctantly follow, coming back with the ironstone pitcher full of milk in one hand, and the butter urn in the other. We would eat silently and gratefully, the huge table (which Papa had made himself from an oak on our own land) clinking and clattering with the sound of silver and china, and me with a secret to tell. I’d probably wait until the girls and Mama had cleared the table and were bringing in the Queen’s pudding, which she would dish out to us from her place opposite Papa, ladling the pale tart lemon sauce onto each moist coconut-shredded mound. I would tell her then. There was nothing she could do about it: I was eighteen, and Papa had given me written consent.

The pole was twelve feet long, with a metal spike on one end. I planned my getaway and then braced the pole against my hip and began shoving. The tree wouldn’t budge. I didn’t know whether or not I had time to rig a killing, but it looked as if I’d need one, and I figured I ought to try before going back to the bunkhouse. I cut myself a long hardwood pole, the light fading fast now, a wolf howling somewhere off against the approaching night, notched one end of it and made a wedge point on the other end. I reached up as high as I could then, and cut a notch into the tree trunk with my ax. I’d left my peavy over by the bow saw, and I went to get it now, and then fitted the pointed end of the pole into the notch I’d just cut in the tree, and then braced the wedged end of the pole against the thick wooden handle of the peavy, just above the hinge. I shoved the pick end of the tool deep into firm ground, through the crusting layer of snow. My killig was ready. I shoved forward on the handle, just testing, seeing if I’d get enough leverage to fell her this way. She began to groan a little, and I nodded silently, the sun was all but gone now, the air seemed suddenly very cold. I shouted “Timberrrrrrr,” knowing I was the only soul in the woods, but remembering what Tiny, the camp’s wood butcher had told me about it being better to feel a little foolish yelling to nobody than to look around later and find a man squashed flat under the tree you’d just knocked down. I shoved forward on the peavy handle.

There was, as always, that moment when she seemed to resist, seemed to cling to whatever slender fiber still connected her to life. And then she trembled, and I could hear her groan again, almost as if she were in pain, and suddenly she began to topple, the weight of her upper branches pulling her down toward the earth. I dropped the peavy and ran back toward the cord of pulpwood, and behind it, and I heard the huge spruce whispering through the icy air, and then she hit the ground and snowdust billowed up from her branches and there was a long heavy shudder and then a hundred echoing crackings, and then there was silence.

There was never much doing in Eau Fraiche on a Friday night, except for the first Friday of every month, when a dance was held at the Grange Hall on Buffalo Street. Anybody who owned a car, though, usually drove into Eau Claire, twelve miles to the west, or preferably made the trip down to La Crosse, which was about sixty miles away due south, on the Minnesota border. The trip to La Crosse, figuring on a top speed of about thirty miles an hour on a road like Route 12, took at least two hours, but it was worth it once you got there. La Crosse wasn’t Madison either, but it was a darn sight more interesting than Eau Fraiche.

The main street of Eau Fraiche was called Chenemeke Avenue, and the name was supposed to have derived from an old Chippewa legend about an invisible bird messenger of the Great Spirit. I never did get the story straight, even though Nancy told it time and again, something about lightning flashing from the bird’s eyes, and retribution for deeds that were un-Christian — genuine Indian superstition sifted through her own Wisconsin background and temperament. In any event, Chenemeke (which we pronounced Chain-make; God knew how the Indians pronounced it) was a narrow street that cut a wandering path through the center of town. The railroad tracks were off to the east of Chenemeke, and beyond those and running parallel to them were the paper and pulp plants, the furniture factory, and the big rubber plant that covered two full city blocks and employed more than a thousand men at peak production. We had a state fish hatchery running along the base of the town’s southern bluffs, and off to the west there was a really good park named Juneau Park, with picnic grounds and tennis courts, baseball and football fields, and good swimming and boating off the peninsula. According to the 1910 census, there were 7000 people living in the town of Eau Fraiche, but I guessed that by now, in 1918, the figure was closer to 9000. Some of these people lived on the southern and eastern outskirts, but most of them preferred living right in town where, on a good day, you could see both the Eau Claire and the Chippewa Rivers from the upstairs bedroom of your house. Our own house, white clapboard and slate, was down near the peninsula overlooking Lake Juneau, which was a spring-fed body of water actually closer to Eau Claire than it was to Eau Fraiche, but nonetheless within the city limits.

There were two hotels in town, The United being the best of them, and there were at least a dozen very bad restaurants. The only halfway decent restaurant, in fact, was French, and was called Coin de Lorraine, which meant Corner of Lorraine. It was run by a man named Claude Rabillon, who used to be a cook at one of the big lumber camps. That was in the good old days when timber was truly a crop, and when fortunes were being made in the wilderness. Today, most of the sawmills had already packed up their machinery and moved to the West Coast, and we were cutting trees almost exclusively for the production of paper. Eau Fraiche used to be a livelier town when the industry was at its peak. In fact, the census for 1900 showed the town to be twice the size it later became in 1910, and most of those people were lumberjacks or people otherwise connected with timber — brawny two-fisted men who worked hard all day long, and then caught the wagons into town to drink half the night away. (You were still permitted to drink in Wisconsin, which continued to amaze many of us in Eau Fraiche, considering the fact that three-quarters of the states had gone dry, including nearby Iowa and everything west of the Mississippi — with the exception of California, where booze and bimbos were to be expected.)

The one movie theater in town was called The Chenemeke, and it was of course on Chenemeke Avenue. That week, it was playing Theda Bara in Cleopatra, which Nance and I had seen in La Crosse just before Christmas. There was another theater, called The Wisconsin, but it was strictly vaudeville. The Wisconsin was owned and managed by a Swede named Kurt Elfstrom, who was reputed to have earned four million dollars from his two theaters, the one here in Eau Fraiche and the other in Eau Claire. Personally, I couldn’t see how he’d made that much money, because whereas he charged some pretty good admission prices — a quarter for a box seat, and fifteen cents for an orchestra seat — he still had to pay his performers, didn’t he? And he booked some really good acts into the theater, too, considering the fact that this was just a dying little timber town in Wisconsin. I could remember my father taking me to see Charlie Chaplin, in person, in a thing called A Night in a London Club, even before Mr. Elfstrom renovated The Wisconsin and put in the red velvet seats. That must have been in 1912 or 1913, sometime around then, when I was still a little kid and before Chaplin got to be a famous movie star, of course. This week at The Wisconsin, Mr. Elfstrom was showing the Greater Morgan Dancers in a historical Roman ballet; Eddie Leonard & Co., who were blackface singers, dancers, and comedians; and Blossom Seeley with her “Jazz Melodical Delirium.” Nancy and I were keeping steady company, so I would probably take her there tomorrow night. Tonight, of course, was the monthly dance, and neither of us wanted to miss that. Besides, I had worked late at the camp (even though I’d never got close to starting my bucking), and it wouldn’t have paid to drive the tin Lizzie all the way down to La Crosse, not with the roads still pretty bad after the last snowfall.

There were, I guessed, about thirty Fords parked behind the Grange Hall, as well as one of the only two Pierce-Arrow touring cars in town, this one being yellow, which meant it belonged to Daniel Talbot, whose father owned the furniture company on Carey Avenue. Just to be perverse (and also so I’d be able to find the car again when I came out, all the other Fords being as black as my father’s), I parked directly alongside Mr. Talbot’s snazzy automobile, and then led Nancy carefully over the hard, rutted, frozen mud of the back lot, around to the front of the hall. There was music coming from inside the gray frame building, two bands having been hired as usual for the occasion; Red Reynolds’ local dance orchestra, and a colored jazz band from Chicago that called itself the “Original” something or other.

I still hadn’t told Nancy what I’d done that morning.

She looked about as pretty as a skyful of stars, her hair coiled at the back of her neck beneath a simple black velvet hat, glistening pale and gold above the high crushed collar of her coat. Picking her way delicately over the sidewalk, she skirted the patches of ice, one ungloved hand raising the hem of her skirt as she navigated the slippery pavement, her muffed hand resting on my bent arm. When we got inside, I checked our coats and then went into the main hall with her. Her dress was green, paler than her eyes, short, in keeping with the new fashion (Nancy got the Delineator from Chicago every month), its silk knotted fringe shimmering a good six inches above the floor.

The Grange was a fairly depressing place. Somebody had decided to paint it gray inside as well as out, so that you always had the feeling you were stepping into a smoke-filled room, even though smoking wasn’t permitted at any of the dances except in the men’s room down the hall. The window trim was supposed to be a sort of salmon color, I guess, but it looked more like a faded red which, together with the green window shades and the hanging red-and-green crepe paper decorations, gave the room the look of a discarded Christmas. There were eight windows on each long side of the room, and a tiny stage at the far end of the room, used by speakers whenever there was a meeting, but occupied now by Red Reynolds and his band. They were playing as we came in, but I recognized the tune as one of those new fox trots and I still didn’t know how to do that damn dance. I’d had enough trouble keeping up with Nancy and trying to learn all the steps that had come in with the war, as if everybody was trying frantically to dance away all the world’s troubles, a new dance every week: the bunny hug (Shall we bunny? No, let’s just sit and hug), the turkey trot (Everybody’s doin’ it), the grizzly bear, the snake, the kangaroo, the crab, and now the fox trot and the tango. What I wanted to know was what had happened to the waltz and the two-step which my older sister Kate had taught me to do before she’d run off with her Apache or whatever the hell he was? I was a very good waltzer, and a fair two-stepper, but this new stuff was all pretty much beyond me, and so I sat on my folding chair beside Nancy and took her hand in mine and began talking about the colored band which was getting ready to relieve Red’s boys on the stand. I asked Nancy if she knew where the expression “jazz” had come from, and she said she did not. So I told her it was originally a dirty expression, and she said, Bert, it was not. And I said, Really, Nancy, it was an expression used in Chicago, it was originally “jass,” spelled with a double-s instead of a double-z and she said Well what does jass mean, and I said It was an expression used in the red-light districts of Chicago, and she said What’s a red-light district? So I said It’s where, well, the prostitutes work, and Nancy said You’re making it up, and I said No, really, Nance, jass means to do it to a woman, and she said You always make up these things because you know they embarrass me.

The colored band came on about then and played something with a lot of clarinet and trumpet work intertwined, it was very difficult to keep track of the melody, I think it was “Tiger Rag” or maybe “Bugle Call Rag.” I couldn’t dance to the music they were making, either, so we sat through the next three or four tunes, and then Danny Talbot came over to say hello and to give Nancy the eye. Danny thought he was extremely handsome, which I guess he was, though I couldn’t stand the flashy way he dressed. Nancy didn’t pay him much attention, well not too much attention, though she did keep staring up at him all the while he told the latest Ford joke, which I’d only heard a thousand times already, the one about the man who was making out his will and insisting that the old Model T be buried with him when he died. “Jed,” his wife finally said, “why do you want the Ford buried with you, for land’s sake?” and the man answered, “Because I’ve never been in a hole yet but what that flivver couldn’t pull me out,” very funny, ha-ha, though Nancy did laugh more than politely, it seemed to me. Talbot finally wandered off, and I figured this was as good a time as any to tell her what I’d done that morning, but the jazz band stopped playing just then, and Red and his boys came back onto the stand, and began playing a waltz, thank God. So I asked Nancy to dance, and I led her out onto the floor and took her into my arms.

I got dizzy whenever I held that girl in my arms.

“Nancy,” I said to her, “there’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

“What is it, Bert?” she said, and then immediately said, “No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. It’s something terrible.”

“How can you know it’s something terrible?” I asked.

“Because the cream whipped stiff this morning,” she said.

“Oh now, Nancy...”

“That’s a bad sign,” she said.

“Well, this isn’t anything so terrible.”

“What is it?” she said. “No, don’t tell me.”

“I joined the Army this morning,” I said.

She was silent. Her hand tightened in mine, and she looked up into my face, her green eyes wide with shock and disbelief, and then she just sighed and rested her head on my shoulder and still didn’t say anything. I wished she would say something.

“When the clouds roll by I’ll come to you,” Red sang in his deep baritone, the megaphone throwing his voice out into the small hall as couples whirled by us, “Down in lovers lane, my dearie,” girls in velveteen and tricolette, frocks of satin veiled with chiffon, crepes and jerseys, brocades, young men in flannels and tweeds, a few uniforms here and there among the crowd, “So wait and pray each night for me, till we meet again.”

“Nancy?” I said.

“Why’d you do it, Bert?”

“It’s a changing world,” I said.

“Don’t you love me, Bert?”

“I love you, Nance, but it’s a changing world, everything’s changing. They’re talking about renaming Eau Fraiche, did you know that, Nance? They’re talking about calling it Freshwater.”

“What’s that got to do with your getting killed?”

“I’m not going to get killed, Nance.”

“But, Bert, why?” she insisted. “Why?”

“Because I have to do my part,” I said. “I owe it to America.”

“It’s no use,” she said, “men are but children of a larger growth,” using a tried-and-true family expression, handed down from generation to generation together with a trunkload of proverbs and maxims that Nancy pulled out every so often like cherished relics from another age. I loved her for it. I loved everything about her. I loved the way her hand rested so lightly on my shoulder now, trembling just the tiniest bit, I loved the curve of her waist where my fingers spanned the sash of her gown, I loved the sweet scent of her, and the solemn look of her, the deadly serious look on her face as she raised it to mine, never missing a step, her eyes filming, glittering, caught in the red and blue rotating lights of the hall, Red Reynolds’ voice behind her distorted through the megaphone.

“Don’t die,” she said. “Bert, please don’t die on me, promise me you won’t die.”

The band stopped playing.

I stood with Nancy my love in the middle of the floor. We didn’t say anything for the longest time, we just kept looking into each others’ faces, and finally there was music again, and I smiled at her, and pulled her close, and we danced.

February

I was at the center of all that sound, the sound buffeted me in successive electronic waves, I felt exhilarated and dizzy and confident, certain now that we’d win the battle. Standing behind my Farfisa organ, I banged out the chord progression of “Louie, Louie,” A, A, A, and D, D, and E minor, E minor, E minor, and D, and D again, and heard Nelson to my left crashing away at the cymbals in rising crescendo. The name of the group was lettered in a psychedelic circle on Nelson’s bass drum, dawn patrol, and the drumskin vibrated now with each successive thumping whap of Nelson’s right foot on the pedal. This group is flying tonight, I thought, we are flying high above it, that’s what this old group is doing, and exuberantly shouted “Haaaaaah,” as Rog went into the final chorus. The sound was incredible. Connie was working the volume on his amp, building the feedback so that he had it sounding like a fifth instrument, Rog whapping away with the fuzz tone up full, Nelson beating the drums to death. My own fingers felt sore and swollen as I struck chords on the organ, sprinkled organ dust into the harmony of lead and bass guitar, threw crashing organ blasts out into the crowd there milling around the school gym. I saw Cass Hagstrom from the corner of my eye, and zocked a big E minor straight at her, and then grinned, and hit the volume pedal as we went into the last four bars.

I was sweating like a pig when we finished. Nelson was wearing a wild flushed crazy look on his face, “I think we took them, Wat,” he said, “Jesus, we sounded great!”

Connie came over, unstrapping his guitar, his big round face broken in a toothy grin. “Hey, how about that?” he shouted, and slapped both me and Nelson on the back, almost sending poor skinny Nelson through his own bass drum. Rog meticulously turned off the amps, put his bass down on the seat of the folding chair, and walked over, looking very serious and pale and worried.

“What do you think?” he said.

“We sounded great,” I answered.

“You think so? I think The Four Ducks were better.”

“Never,” Connie said.

“I think so. They had a better mix.”

“Man, did you hear what I was doing with the feedback?” Connie said, still grinning, still very excited.

“Oh, man, that was tough,” Nelson said.

“Man, we don’t take first place...” Connie started.

“We’ve got to take first,” I said. “We don’t take first, the hell with any more battles. Who needs them?”

“We’ll take first,” Nelson assured us both.

“The Ducks were better,” Rog said solemnly, and then took a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his forehead. “Did I sound okay on ‘Rising Sun’?”

“You sounded great,” I said.

“There’s Mr. Jaegers,” Connie said.

“Shhh, shhh.”

Mr. Jaegers, the president of the Talmadge Lions’ Club, which had sponsored this battle of the bands, adjusted the microphone, blew into it, and then said, “Can you hear me back there?” One of the kids standing at the back of the gym shouted, “Yeah, we hear you!” and Mr. Jaegers said, “How’s that?” and a lot of kids this time shouted, “Great, crazy,” and Mr. Jaegers blew into the microphone again, and said, “Our three judges are now deliberating, but before we give you their results, I’d like to make a few acknowledgments. I want to thank, first of all, the ladies of the church Altar Society for providing tonight’s refreshments, and especially Mrs. Peggy Greer, who contacted the Coca-Cola Company and had them deliver the dispenser set up in the hall outside. I want to thank Mr. Teale, your principal, who gave the Lions’ Club every cooperation in making the school and the gymnasium available tonight for the battle. And I want to thank our three judges — Mr. Coopersmith, who, as you know, is in broadcasting, and who was kind enough to come over here tonight, and also Mr. Isetti of the Clef and Staff Music Shop in town, and our third judge, who like yourselves, is a teen-ager and a member of The...” Mr. Jaegers paused, consulted the slip of paper in his hand again, turned away from the microphone, and asked, “What docs this say?”

“The Butterfly Push,” I said.

“... a member of The Butterfly Push,” Mr. Jaegers said into the microphone, “that’s the name of his band. But most of all, I would like to thank Mr. Kevin Price of the Lions’ Club, whose idea it was to have this battle, and who worked so hard co-ordinating all the various elements that have gone into making it a success.”

“Come on, already,” Nelson whispered. “Who won the damn thing?”

“Now, to reiterate,” Mr. Jaegers said into the microphone, “and before our judges read off the results, there were five bands playing tonight, and they played for you in this order, first was Sound, Incorporated, second was Phase Nine, third was The Morse Code, fourth was The Four Dukes, and last, the band you just heard, was Dawn Patrol. Now, if Mr. Coopersmith will come to the stand, I’m sure we’re all anxious to know who the winners arc. Mr. Coopersmith?”

I waited patiently while Leon Coopersmith, who lived in madge and who was a radio executive in New York, his desk job there presumably making him an expert on rock and roll, what with rubbing elbows with Cousin Brucie and Dandy Dan Daniel and the like all day long; waited while Leon Coopersmith, whom I had seen drunk on many an occasion at parties in our own living room, waddled to the stage weighing two hundred and ten pounds bone-dry, clasped the microphone in a pair of meaty hands, backed away from the sudden feedback, big radio executive that he was, removed one hand from the mike to consult the slip of paper in his hands, cleared his throat, and said, “Okay, kids, want to quiet down for just a few seconds?”

A hush fell over the gymnasium. Out on the floor, I could see Scott Dundee putting his arms around Cass from behind. I watched, hoping she’d move away from him, but she didn’t move, she just let him circle her waist from behind, and then she folded her own arms over his, very cozy, I thought, while I played my brains out and my fingers to the bone.

“Taking third prize of twenty-five dollars,” Mr. Coopersmith who was in broadcasting said in his whiskey-snarled voice, “is The Morse Code, will a member of that group please come up to the stage to accept the check?”

“So far, so good,” Connie whispered.

There was applause from the kids, but not too much applause because The Morse Code was John Yancy’s group, and he lived over in Wilton and didn’t even go to Talmadge High. Yancy came up wearing a scrub beard and a bright red vest — all the guys in his group wore red vests, in fact, like Guy Lombardo or one of those big bands of the forties, though Kenton wasn’t too bad, I’d heard my father playing some of his Kenton collection on the hi-fi just the other night; pretty far out, I guessed, compared to the other stuff they were playing in those days. Anyway, I shouldn’t have been knocking my father’s taste, I supposed, since it was he who’d suggested the name “Dawn Patrol” when we were first starting the group. He’d initially come up with some names that were supposed to be comical, like The Sound and The Fury or The Intolerable Boils or The Noisemakers, horsing around when all the guys were seriously considering names for the group, making a pest of himself until he finally suggested Dawn Patrol, which none of the guys except Connie realized was a reference to a movie about World War I (Connie being a movie bull and also an avid watcher of old-time crap on television), but which all of us liked, anyway. “You mean I actually gave you an idea?” my father said. “Will miracles never?”

So Dawn Patrol it had been, and Dawn Patrol it still was, though many of the other groups changed their names constantly, like The Four Dukes, affectionately known far and wide as The Four Ducks. They once used to be called The Four Barons, nobly elevating themselves only after they’d been around for three months, and putting a sign up on their very next job, the sign reading THE FOUR DUKES, FORMALLY THE FOUR BARONS, which gave everybody but the illiterate Ducks a great big laugh.

Yancy was nodding and offering profuse thanks to everyone for the dubious honor of having placed third with his inept group. Mr. Coopersmith shook his hand with genuine enthusiasm, as though congratulating John Lennon, and Yancy finally sidled off the stage, all grins and embarrassment. Mr. Coopersmith gripped the mike again, leaned into it, and said, “In second place, winning a prize of fifty dollars...” He hesitated here, and I held my breath, figuring if we didn’t take second, we were sure to take first, and Mr. Coopersmith said, “In second place... Phase Nine!”

Nelson gave a short nod as the crowd burst into applause, confirming my surmise: we were sure to take first now. Only Rog looked his usual sallow gloomy self, chewing on his fingernails as Peter Drew come up to the stage to accept the fifty-dollar check for Phase Nine. There was more applause, and a few catcalls (“You got robbed, Pete!”) and Mr. Coopersmith clutched Drew’s hand in both his own meaty hands and grinned approval from that great big world of radio broadcasting, and then Drew looked at the check, and nodded, and folded it. and put it into his wallet, and walked off the stage to where Donna Fields was waiting for him. She gave him a big hug, and I automatically glanced out over the gym floor to see how Cass was doing with Dundee’s arms still around her, and Mr. Coopersmith held up one of his hands for silence again, and then said, “Now... before I announce the winner of the first prize. I’d like to tell you that the winning band’ll be playing for an additional half-hour, and I hope you’ll all stay around to listen and dance. So... in first place... for a prize of one hundred dollars...”

Again, Mr. Coopersmith paused. He grinned out at the audience. I glanced at Rog, who was busily chewing his fingernails.

“In first place,” Mr. Coopersmith said, “Sound, Incorporated!”

“Sound, In—” Nelson started, and then turned to me with an enraged look on his face, gripping my arm fiercely just below the elbow, and then turning to gape at Mr. Coopersmith, as though certain he had made some terrible mistake. Rog, expecting disaster all along, merely nodded his head knowingly. Connie sat abruptly in one of the folding chairs and slapped his hand to his forehead. The response from the teen-age audience was mixed, some of them cheering and applauding, some of them booing and shouting at the stage. Mr. Coopersmith, unperturbed in his broadcasting tower, waited blandly for Gerry Haig to come up onto the stage for Sound, Incorporated, and collect the group’s ill-gotten hundred bucks.

“That’s the last time,” I said. “I swear to God, that’s the last time we play a battle!”

“Sound, Incorporated!” Nelson exploded. “They’re the worst group here!”

“It figures,” Rog said gloomily.

“Let’s pack up,” Connie said.

“You want to congratulate the winners?”

“The winners suck,” Nelson said.

Angrily, convinced that there was no justice in the world, we began unplugging our leads, winding them up, covering the amps, taking our mike stands apart, unscrewing the organ legs, packing the guitars and drums. Danny Boll, who had been one of the judges, and who prior to this January had been the rhythm guitarist of the best group in the area, The Butterfly Push, most of whom were now away at college or in the Army, came up onto the stage while we were still packing. “If it’s any consolation,” he said, “I voted for you guys.”

“Thanks, Danny,” I said.

“You guys are really coming along fine,” Boll said. “I can remember when you first started, and there’s been a tremendous development.”

“Thanks,” Nelson said. “Thanks, Danny.”

“I mean it.”

“Thanks,” I said.

But we were still angry and bitter, especially me, because I had a few other choice items bugging me besides. My father, for example, had refused me permission to drive the station wagon that night, his point being that there’d be a lot of heavy equipment in it, and it was dangerous to be lugging two tons of amplifiers and instruments on a Friday night, when half the population of Connecticut would be drunk and zigzagging all over the roads. I personally could not see the difference between driving heavy equipment around during the day or driving it around at night, and I’d informed my father that I’d shuttled the loaded car all the way to Stamford just last weekend, with six kids packed into the damn thing besides, and I was a very careful driver, and what dire thing did my father expect to happen, would he mind telling me? (This isn’t a locker room, my father had said, watch your language.) I’d lost the battle with my father, and I’d lost the band battle, and now it looked as if I were losing the battle of Cass Hagstrom as well, to no less a hood than Scott Dundee, who ran around with a bunch of boozers, the dumbest asses in the school. How could you expect to ask- a girl if you could take her home when you knew your father would be waiting in the parking lot? What was the sense of taking Driver s Ed a whole damn six months, what was the sense of having night lights if your father never let you drive the damn car at night?

As I carried Nelson’s snare drum out to the loading ramp near the school commons, I heard Cass telling Dundee that she would just love to see Dr. Strangelove, she had heard it was a perfectly marvelous film, but she knew that Love with the Proper Stranger was playing in Westport, and Steve McQueen was her absolute favorite, so couldn’t they go there tomorrow night instead? “Hello, Cass,” I said as I went by, and she said, “Oh, hello, Wat, you were terrific.” and I said, “Yeah,” and walked off. Nelson was waiting outside on the ramp, the big bass drum in his hands.

“Where’s your father?” he asked.

“I don’t know, don’t you see him?”

“No.”

“Well, let’s get the rest of the junk,” I said. “He’ll be here.”

Cass was heading for the phone booth when I went inside again, undoubtedly to give her mother a ring, tell her she might be delayed as she had run into one of the school’s intellectuals and they wished to discuss the satirical content of Dr. Strangelove.

“Hey,” I said.

“Oh, hi,” she said, “did I tell you you were terrific?”

“Yeah, you told me,” I said. “What’s with Dundee?”

Cass shrugged. She was a slender, diminutive girl with straight blond hair falling to her shoulders, dark brown eyes, a frightened smile that tentatively budded on her mouth even when she was deliriously happy, as she seemed to be now. “He’s very nice,” she said, and I immediately said, “He’s a hood.”

“Well, I have to make a phone call,” Cass said. She was wearing a gray flannel jumper over a white turtleneck sweater, and she tossed her long blond hair now, and smoothed her skirt, and went clicking oft down the corridor to the phone booth while I glared at her with something less than masked hostility. Nelson helped me lift the organ, and we carried it together out to the ramp. The Ford station wagon was waiting at the curb, but my father was not behind the wheel. Instead, my mother was sitting there, staring straight ahead through the windshield.

“Hey, hi,” I said in surprise. “Where’s Dad?”

“Stuck in the city,” my mother said. “How’d it go?”

“We didn’t even show.”

“We got robbed,” Nelson said.

“You want to lower this back window, Mom?”

“Who won?”

“Sound, Incorporated.”

“Which group is that?”

“You don’t know them, Mom.”

“They stink, Mrs. Tyler.”

“I thought Rog was going to start crying,” I said from the tailgate of the wagon.

“We should have taken it, I mean it, Mrs. Tyler.”

“Am I dropping you off?”

“If it’s okay,” Nelson said.

“Sure.”

“Something wrong?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “No.”

“You seem...” I shrugged. “Give me a hand here, will you, Nelson?”

I could see the back of my mother’s head as we loaded the drums and organ into the car. She wore her brown hair short, the collar of her beige car coat high on the back of her neck. She was sitting very stiff and straight, staring through the windshield, puffing on a cigarette even though she’d given up smoking more than a month ago.

“I see you’re back on the weed again,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, “I just...” and didn’t finish the sentence.

“Shove the bass drum all the way back,” I said.

“Why don’t we put the organ in first? I’m getting out before you.”

“Good thinking, Maynard.”

We arranged the equipment with meticulous care, stacking it in tight to prevent it from sliding or bouncing on the rutted country roads. My mother sat silently smoking as we heaved and pushed and adjusted. The radio was on, classical music, QXR, I supposed, her favorite station. The engine was running, a bluish-gray exhaust rising lazily and steadily on the brittle air. At midnight, the news came on, and I listened vaguely as I worked, the words floating back through the heated car and out over the lowered tailgate, “... three months after the assassination of Diem and his brother, General Minh’s regime was itself overthrown tonight in a coup that took most Saigon citizens totally by surprise. Lieutenant General Nguyen Khanh, thirty-six years old, considered by United States military advisers to be one of South Vietnam’s ablest corps commanders...”

“Where’s that other mike stand?” I asked.

“I’ll get it,” Nelson said.

“We ought to mark them, you know? I’m always afraid somebody’ll walk off with them.”

“Yeah,” Nelson said.

“... five miles from the Cambodian border, inflicting the worst toll upon South Vietnamese troops to date: ninety-four dead, and thirty-two wounded. Three American advisers were also killed in the bloody battle.”

We shoved both mike stands in alongside the organ, wedging the heavy metal bases in solidly against the covered hump of the spare tire.

“You can roll it up,” I said to my mother.

“... won’t expire until March of next year. Mayor Wagner, though, apprehensive after New York’s 114-day siege, has already begun talks...”

The roads were deserted. The newscaster’s voice gave way to recorded music, Stravinsky, I guessed, though I wasn’t sure. We passed the university, where lights still gleamed in the new science building, and the three chapels sat like snow-cowled nuns, and then drove past the old campus on Fieldston Street, where buildings erected in 1876 rose in turreted stillness against a sky dusted with stars. On the other side of the wooden bridge near the university’s western gate, the car’s headlights illuminated a mole who stopped dead still for just an instant and then waddled clumsily to the side of the road. We climbed the hill over Corrigan and then took the short cut through Pleasant, my mother handling the wheel expertly around each hairpin turn, although she looked somewhat like a gun moll, with the cigarette dangling from her mouth that way.

“You’re going to lose that ash,” I said, annoyed.

“Thank you,” she answered, and took one gloved hand from the wheel, flicked the long ash into the ash tray, and immediately put the cigarette into her mouth again. She did not put it out until we were in Nelson’s driveway. I helped him unload the drums and then carried them in with him through the garage entrance.

“We rehearsing tomorrow?” Nelson asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll buzz Connie in the morning and let you know.”

“Okay,” Nelson said. He paused for a moment, idly worrying a pimple near his mouth. “We got robbed,” he said, almost to himself, and then from the open garage door called, “’Night, Mrs. Tyler. Thanks a lot.” In the idling automobile, my mother raised her hand in farewell. By the time I got back to the car, she had lighted a second cigarette. I glanced at it but said nothing.

She smoked silently as she drove, her face alternately illuminated by the green light of the dash and the glowing coal of the cigarette whenever she puffed on it.

“We should have taken it,” I said.

“Well,” she said, and gave a slight shrug.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“You seem down.”

“We were supposed to go to a dinner party. I had to cancel.”

“Oh.”

“I suppose I could have gone alone. They asked me to.” She shrugged again.

“How’d Dad get stuck?”

“The De Gaulle book,” she answered.

“They still working on that?”

“Apparently so.”

We were silent the rest of the way home.

My father must have been watching for the car. The minute we pulled into the driveway, the kitchen door opened, and he came out without a coat, grinning, walking swiftly to the driver’s side as my mother rolled down the window.

“Hi,” he said, and leaned through the open window to kiss her on the cheek, and then looked across to me and said, “How’d it go, Wat?”

“We lost,” I said.

“What docs Leon Coopersmith know about good music?” my father said. “You want a hand with that organ?” He was very excited. His eyes were glowing, and his face was flushed, and I knew he was bursting to tell us something, and I felt the energy of his secret flowing through the open window and suffusing the automobile. I loved him most when he was this way. He seemed to me in these moments to be very tall and powerful. I half-expected him to reach into the car and pick me up and hold me out at arm’s length and then clasp me suddenly to his chest, laughing, the way he used to when I was very young. I found myself grinning with him.

“Will,” my mother said, “I thought...”

“Man of surprises,” my father said, “man of surprises,” and kissed her again in punctuation, on the mouth this time. “Do you still want to go to that party?”

“Well, I...”

“Let me help Wat,” he said, and opened the door for my mother, and gave her a hug when she stepped out of the car, and then came to the tailgate with me. We carried the organ into the house, and then brought in the amplifier and the mike stands and the two speakers. My father kept putting down Leon Coopersmith all the while we worked, telling me he had a tin car, telling me the people who selected judges for these band battles should make certain they picked someone attuned to the sound of youth, all the while bursting with his own secret, but taking the time and the trouble to console me about Dawn Patrol’s loss. As we made our last trip inside, he said, “Well, you’ll win the next one,” and then shouted, “Dolores, do we have to go to that damn party?”

My mother, still looking bewildered, said, “I suppose not, I’ve already called to...”

“Then let’s forget it,” he said. “Let’s all go over to Emily Shaw’s and celebrate.”

“What are we celebrating?” my mother said. She was excited now, too. The energy he radiated was positively contagious. We stood by the kitchen sink, the three of us, grinning at each other idiotically, my father savoring the moment when he would tell us his secret, my mother and I relishing the suspense. When he finally revealed his coup — he had made arrangements with a French photographer named Claude Michaud to take a series of candid shots of De Gaulle, with the general’s permission and cooperation — it hardly seemed as important as the buildup had been, but we showered him with congratulations nonetheless, telling him how marvelous it was, and agreeing that we had good cause for celebration. My mother looked radiant. As my father spoke, her eyes never left his face. She listened to him intently, proud and pleased, shining with adoration.

“Okay.” he said, and jabbed a finger at me, “tie and jacket, on the double,” and then turned to my mother and said, “Do you know what they say in France?”

“What do they say in France?” my mother asked.

“In France, they say ‘This Will Tyler, he is one lucky son of a bitch!”” and burst out laughing.

“Hey, watch the language,” I said, “there are little kids around.”

“Who wants a drink?” my father asked. "I want a drink,” he said. “Dolores? Would you like a drink?”

“All right,” she said, “if you’re...”

“Hey!” he said, and snapped his fingers. “He knows Linda! "

“Who knows Linda?”

“Michaud. He met her and Stanley when they were in Paris last year. Do you think I should call her?”

“Sure, if you want to,” my mother said.

“The rates go down after six, don’t they?”

“Last of the big spenders,” I said.

“Ha-ha,” he said.

“Debating a phone call to Chicago.”

“Put-down artist,” my mother said to me, but she was grinning.

My father went to the telephone. “Come on, come on,” he said, “what’s everybody standing around for?”

“I thought I was getting a drink,” my mother said.

“I’ll bring it up, hon,” my father said, and lifted the receiver, and waited for a dial tone. My mother was watching him from the steps leading upstairs. “Hey,” he said to her.

“Mmm?”

“I love you,” he said.

My mother smiled and gave a brief pleased nod. Then she turned and went up the steps.

“Hello,” my father said into the telephone, “I’d like to make a person-to-person call to Mrs. Linda Kearing in Chicago. The number...”

March

It was my kid sister Linda, of all people, who clued me in. I had met her completely by accident outside the bio lab on the fourth floor, and casually asked what it was all about. To my surprise, she blushed and said, “I can’t tell you, Will,” and then went right on to tell me. That was when the bell sounded for the air-raid drill.

She made me promise upon pain of death and torture that I would never reveal my source of information, and I kissed her swiftly on the check and then raced back to my home room, which was what we’d been trained to do like robots whenever those three successive gongs sounded. A fire drill was a single steady repetitive gong, and an air-raid drill was three gongs in quick sequence, and then a long pause, and then three gongs again. For the fire drills, we always marched out of the school silently and solemnly and looked back at it from four blocks away, near St. Chrysostom’s Church, presumably to witness the old brick building crumbling in flames.

I thought of what my sister had told me outside the bio lab, and I began planning and scheming all the way back to home room about how I would break the news to Charlotte Wagner. This was, of course, the eighth period, which was the last period of the day. We had never had an air-raid drill in the history of Grace School that did not take place during the eighth period. The routine was unvarying. Sometime between three-thirty and four-fifteen, the successive gongs would sound sharply and insistently, and we’d all rush back to our home rooms, crouch under our desks, clasp our hands behind our heads, and wait in cramped silence for about ten minutes until the gong sounded for the all-clear. Our teachers would then dismiss us, since by that time the last period would be almost over, the school day practically ended. It was my theory that this imaginative approach to protection against enemy attack was based on secret information delivered to our city officials by the Japanese themselves, who had doubtless promised that any bombing of the school would come sometime during the eighth period.

It was no different this time, except that this time I knew what “Keep ’Em Flying!” meant. I could hardly wait. The whole thing with Charlotte Wagner had started about two weeks ago, on the way home from school. Charlotte, like myself, was a senior at Grace, which had not been named after God’s greatest gift to the soul, but merely after a man named Jeremiah Grace who had founded the school back in 1891. Grace was a private school, the nearest public school being Robert A. Waller High over on Orchard Street, which was quite a bus ride from the Gold Coast, where we lived. Our house was on East Scott, and Charlotte lived on Banks. Most of the other kids going to Grace lived in the immediate neighborhood, too, so we usually walked over to Division after school, for sodas. The only kid in our crowd who drove to and from school, in a black ’39 Buick, was a guy named Dickie Howell, whose father was supposed to be in “essential industry,” and therefore in possession of valuable C coupons which entitled him to an unlimited amount of gasoline. My father was in the paper industry, but Uncle Sam did not consider that essential enough to rate anything better than a B ration. Besides, he actually used the car to go back and forth to work at his mill in Joliet every day, and we only had the one car, so I couldn’t have driven even if I’d wanted to.

Actually, I enjoyed that walk home after school every day. Linda sometimes came with us, but I tried to discourage that because she was only fifteen and a lot of the jokes and kidding around were over her head. We were, after all, seniors. Michael Mallory had, in fact, enlisted in the Air Force just before his eighteenth birthday, and was expecting to be called right after graduation. His move, of course, was the only sensible one. Nobody in his right mind wanted to be drafted into the Army just then, because it was an almost certain bet that the Infantry would grab you, and you’d wind up in the invasion of Italy, which was definitely coming as soon as North Africa fell. Michael had thought of enlisting in the cavalry, having always been fond of horses, but then he’d learned that cavalry meant mechanized cavalry, which meant tanks, and we both knew a kid named Sal Brufani who had been burned to a crisp in a tank outside Bizerte, just before Christmas. Michael furthermore got sick even riding a boat on Lake Michigan, which eliminated the Navy as a possibility. So, unless he wanted to have his ass shipped to Italy or, worse yet, to the Aleutians or the Solomons, the only logical open choice (I convinced him) was the Air Force.

In any case, our language on the way home from school each day was inclined to get a bit salty, and I didn’t like Linda hearing such stuff. For example, just last week, Michael had come up with a new Confucius Say joke, which broke everybody up, but which made Linda — and me — very uncomfortable. He’d told it without any warning, just popping it out of the blue, “Confucius say, ‘Girl who marry basketball player get gypped; he always dribble before he shoot.’” Charlotte Wagner had thrown back her head and opened her mouth wide to let out one of her horse bellows, delicately feminine and designed to knock over the Wrigley Building. The other girls all followed suit, of course, except Linda. She started to laugh, and then quickly glanced at me, and blushed, and smiled only tentatively and in a frightened way, and then put on a very grave and serious look when she saw I wasn’t laughing at all. Sarah Cody had meanwhile knocked Michael’s books into the gutter and called him a dirty slob. He laughed wildly and said, “Who? Me? What’d I say?” and began wrestling first with her and then Charlotte, with a lot of indiscreet cheap feeling going on, and with Linda walking very silently beside me, her eyes lowered. I later warned Michael to be a little more careful with his language when my sister was around, and he promised he would.

I was surprised by what my sister had told me outside the bio lab, not because it was really so dirty, but only because she’d told me at all, though with a blush. As I crouched under my desk now and listened for our punctual eighth-period Japanese raiders, I thought of how much pleasure it would give me to break the news to Charlotte as soon as this drill was over. The whole thing had started about two weeks ago when Charlotte, climbing the steps of her house on Banks, had waved to the other girls and said, “Well, girls, keep ’em flying,” causing all the girls to burst into hysterical laughter which none of the boys understood.

“What’s so funny?” Michael asked.

“Oh, nothing,” Charlotte said breezily, and then turned to the girls again, and again said, “Keep ’em flying, girls,” and went up the steps and into her house. Nor had that been the end of it. Every day since, the girls had given each other the same mysterious farewell, “Keep ’em flying!” They were obviously delighted by our puzzlement, and the harder we pressed them for an explanation, the sillier they became, giggling and exchanging sly glances, and shoving at each other, and generally behaving as though they were carrying around the ultimate secret of the female universe. Up to now, or more accurately up to the minute Linda had let me in on the secret outside the bio lab, I had always thought the slogan was a patriotic reminder to the folks at home, urging them to do their share in the war effort by respecting rationing and the like, and buying war bonds, and keeping silent about troop shipments. But now I knew. And whereas the slogan had a great deal to do with the war effort, it had nothing to do with pilots (although the silk was probably needed for parachutes — that was, in fact, the point) but only to do with the selfless contribution busty Charlotte and her girlfriends were being asked to make in these trying times.

I could hardly wait to let her know I knew.

A single gong sounded into the stillness.

“Okay, kids,” Mr. Hardy said, “drill’s over. You can all go home.”

Outside the school, I looked for Charlotte. I found her just as she was climbing into Dickie Howell’s black Buick and, wouldn’t you know it, I didn’t get a chance to say a word to her.

The house we lived in was the third one we’d owned since I was born, each larger than the one preceding it. It was on a street of similarly old houses, most of them built around the turn of the century, when Chicago’s moneyed landholders were reconstructing after the Great Fire. The street ran from North State to the Drive, and had been surrounded for years by huge modern apartment buildings. It was my guess that the only thing sparing it now was wartime building restrictions. If we won the war — and I couldn’t conceive of our losing it — I was certain that within ten years’ time, East Scott would succumb to the bulldozer as well, and all these lovely old homes would give way to glass and concrete towers.

I loved that old house.

It reminded me, in style though not in grandeur, of what used to be the old Kimball mansion on Prairie and Eighteenth. My father said the Kimball house had been modeled after the Chateau de Josselin in Brittany, and had cost the old piano manufacturer a million dollars to build. Standing on the sidewalk and looking up at it one day, I could well believe it. The house was made entirely of Bedford stone, with turrets and gables everywhere, balconies and stone chimneys, a roof crowned with ornamental ironwork. There were more windows than I could count, flat windows and rounded windows, an oriel window on the north façade. A high fence of iron grillwork surrounded the entire house, and whereas I could have gone in, I suppose (it was then headquarters for the Architects Club of Chicago), I think I was too awed to move from my spot on the sidewalk. My father later told me there were beamed ceilings inside, walls paneled in oak and mahogany, onyx fireplaces in most of the rooms, and even onyx washbowls in the bathrooms, which were tiled from floor to ceiling.

Our house was built in the same French château style, but of course was neither as sumptuous nor as large. The entry hall and dining room were paneled in mahogany, but none of the other rooms were, and there were only three bedrooms in the house, not counting the maid’s room, which was on the ground floor behind the pantry. My father’s library was on the second floor at the top of a winding staircase with a banister Linda and I used to slide down daily. The top panel of our front door was made of frosted glass into which my father had had inserted a sort of Tyler family crest he’d designed, beautifully rendered in stained glass, leaded into the original panel: two green spruce trees towering against a deep blue sky. The doorknob was made of brass, kept highly polished by the succession of colored maids my mother was constantly hiring and firing. (My father said to her one day, “Nancy, you just don’t want another woman living here, now let’s face it.”) From the time I was seven, however, I don’t think we ever went for more than a month without a maid (and sometimes two) in the house. Whether this was at the insistence of my father or not, I couldn’t say. I did sometimes get the feeling, though, that my mother often longed for the simpler existence she had known in Freshwater, Wisconsin.

She was in the kitchen when I got home that afternoon, but she barely looked up when I came in, being very used to air-raid drills by now. Though, come to think of it, she’d hardly paid any attention to our first air-raid drill, either. That first one had been very exciting to me, because it had come about two weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and half the kids in the school thought the enemy was really over Chicago. The sense of impending disaster was heightened by the fact that the teachers sent us running home, none of that hiding under desks, just run straight home, they told us. So naturally we expected to see a Japanese Zero or two diving on the school, or perhaps a few Bettys unloading their cargo of bombs, it was all very thrilling. Coincidentally, a few Navy Hellcats from the training station winged in over the lake just as we were pouring out of the school, and this nearly started a panic, what with our high expectations for obliteration. I ran all the way home that day, and when I got into the kitchen, out of breath, my mother said, “What is it, Will?”

“The Japs are coming!” I said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.

“I saw them,” I answered. “Four of them in formation, flying in low over the lake!”

“On earth are no fairies,” my mother said calmly. “You probably saw some planes from the Navy base,” which of course was the truth, but which I wasn’t yet ready to accept. She was standing by the kitchen sink, shelling peas and listening to the radio on the window sill, and her attention never once wandered from her slender hands, a thumbnail slitting each pod, the peas — almost the color of her eyes — tumbling into the colander. The radio was on very loud. My mother was a little hard of hearing in her right ear, and she favored the other car now, her head slightly cocked to the side, as the trials and tribulations of “Just Plain Bill” flooded the kitchen the way they did every afternoon at four-thirty, the indomitable barber desperately trying to turn his lively daughter into a lady, while simultaneously fretting over her stormy marriage to the lawyer Kerry Donovan. I think if the Japanese had really been overhead, my mother would have waited till the end of that day’s installment before running down to the basement. I had never seen her rattled in my life, and she was certainly as calm as glass that day of the first air-raid drill. Honey-blond hair behind her ears, reading glasses perched on top of her tilted head, eyes gazing down at the tumbling peas, she said, “If the Japanese were in Chicago, I’d have heard it on the radio. They’d have interrupted the program. Where’s your sister?”

“On her way home,” I said dejectedly.

I kept watching her in fascination, admiring her calm in the face of certain destruction, yet resenting it as well. She was not a tall woman, five-three or five-four, but whereas I was almost six feet tall, I had the feeling I was looking up at her; it was very unsettling.

“They told us to come straight home,” I said ominously, but my mother went right on shelling peas.

We naturally had a maid living in at the time, a colored girl from the Washington Park section, but my mother never allowed her to prepare meals, mindful of a Wisconsin homily about two women in the kitchen being akin to a horse with a head on both ends, or something to that effect. My mother was a great one for proverbs. Sometimes, when she reeled off one of her homespun sayings, absolutely unsmilingly and with a sense of discovery (as if she hadn’t said the very same thing a hundred times before), my father would roll his eyes heavenward and sigh deeply, and I would remember that she had been his childhood sweetheart and that he’d probably been listening to her words of wisdom since almost the turn of the century. The thought was frightening. She had a proverb for every occasion, the same ones in fact for totally different situations, and I lived in fear of the day she’d come up with a new and entirely fresh one because I knew I’d die of a heart attack on that day and never get into the Air Force.

“Would you like some milk?” she asked me now.

“Another air-raid drill today,” I said, going to the refrigerator.

“I gathered,” she answered.

There was some leftover icebox cake on the second shelf, and I cut a small slice of it. Then I poured myself a glass of cold milk, and took everything over to the round kitchen table under the Tiffany lamp. We generally took breakfast with the fork (one of my mother’s expressions, translated from the English to mean a breakfast including some kind of meat, usually sausage), and since I didn’t get to school each day until nine o’clock, I wasn’t hungry enough to cat very much of the school lunch at noon. But neither did I dare eat anything substantial when I got home in the afternoon because dinner was at six-fifteen sharp and my mother was a stickler for eating everything put before you. So I usually just took the edge off my appetite with a little milk and maybe a chocolate pudding, or a few cookies, and then went into the living room to do my homework. We had a new Philco floor-model radio there, complete with push buttons, and as I worked I would listen first to “Terry and the Pirates” and “The Adventures of Jimmy Allen” in breathless succession on WENR, then a quick flick of the dial at five-thirty for “Jack Armstrong” on W67C, and then back to WENR for “Captain Midnight” at five forty-five. At six on the button. I’d hear my father’s key in the latch, and the front door would open, and he would call his customary greeting, “Hello, anybody home?”

At dinner that night, I decided to reopen the Air Force issue.

My father seemed to be in a very good mood. He was talking about a recent War Production Board memo that eulogized the paper industry and made the printed word sound as important to the war effort as bullets. I always listened in fascination when my father talked about paper. I could never visualize him doing anything but work of a physical nature; his lumberjack background seemed entirely believable to me. When he came home from work each evening wearing a gray fedora and a gray topcoat and a pinstriped business suit, I was always a little surprised that he wasn’t wearing boots and a mackinaw and a turtleneck sweater. He was a big man, still very strong at forty-three, with penetrating blue eyes and a nose I liked to consider patrician (since I had inherited it). The table in the paneled formal dining room was eight feet long without additional leaves, and whereas my father always sat at the head of it, my mother did not sit at the opposite end but instead took a chair on his right, closest to the kitchen. She refused to keep a bell on the table (“Never count the number a bell tolls, for it’ll bring you that many years of bad luck”) and would more often than not rise and go into the kitchen herself if the maid didn’t respond to her first gentle call. My sister Linda always sat on my father’s left, and I sat alongside her, which was not the happiest of arrangements, since she was left-handed and invariably sticking her elbow in my dish.

“Well,” I said, subtly I thought, “it looks as if Michael Mallory will be leaving for the Air Force soon.”

“And here I thought we were actually going to get through a meal without hearing Will’s enlistment pitch,” my father said.

“The wheel that docs the squeaking is the wheel that gets the grease,” my mother said. “Don’t you know that, Bert?”

“If I wait till my eighteenth birthday,” I said, unrattled, “and then get drafted, I’ll end up in the Infantry.”

“Let’s wait till your eighteenth birthday and find out, shall we?” my father said.

“Sure, I’ll send you letters from Italy. Written in the mud or something.”

“You spent six summers at camp without writing a single letter,” my father said. “I have no reason to believe you’ll be changing your habits when and if you get to Italy.”

“That wasn’t my point,” I said.

“Your father knows your point,” my mother said.

“I’ll be eighteen in June,” I said.

“We know when you’ll be eighteen.”

“Well, for crying out loud, do you want me to go into the Infantry?”

“I don’t want you to go anywhere,” my father said flatly.

“Well, that’s fine, Pop, but Uncle Sam has other ideas, you know? Whether you realize it or not, there happens to be a war going on.”

“Living in the same house with you, it’d be difficult not to realize that,” my father said, and picked up his napkin, and wiped his mouth, and then looked me in the eye and said, “What’s your hurry, Will? You anxious to get killed?”

“I’m not in any hurry,” I said.

“You sound like you’re in one hell of a hurry, son.”

My sister glanced up at him quickly; it was rare to hear my father using profanity, even a word as mild as “hell.”

“I’m only trying to protect myself,” I said.

“Yes, by rushing over there to fly an airplane.”

“Yes, which is a lot safer than...”

“No one’s safe in war,” my father said. “Get that out of your head.”

“Look,” I said, “can we talk reasonably for a minute? Can we just for a minute look at this thing reasonably?”

“I’m listening,” my father said.

“It’s reasonable to expect that I have to register when I’m eighteen, and it’s reasonable to expect I’ll be put in 1-A, and it’s reasonable to expect I’ll be drafted.”

“Yes, that’s reasonable. Unless the war ends before then.”

“Oh, come on, Pop, you can’t believe the war’s going to end before June!”

“It may end before you’re trained and sent overseas.”

“Okay, then you should be very happy to let me join the Air Force. It takes longer to train a fighter pilot than it docs an infantryman.”

My father was silent. I felt I had made a point.

“Isn’t that reasonable?” I asked.

“It’s only reasonable for my son to stay alive until he becomes a man,” my father said.

“You stayed alive, didn’t you?” I said.

“I was lucky,” he answered.

April

I didn’t know what I was doing on a troopship in Brooklyn. I wanted to be with Nancy. Instead, I was sitting in the blacked-out hold of a British vessel, on the edge of a bunk which was the bottom one in a tier of four, waiting to sail for Brest. I couldn’t believe it. Nor could I even understand how I had got here.

My father was fond of saying that all of America’s troubles had started with the assassination, a premise I couldn’t very well argue, since I was only a year old when McKinley got shot. And even though the shock of the murder seemed to sift down through the next ten years or more, as if the idea of something so primitive happening in a nation as sophisticated as America took that long to get used to, it was never more than a historical event to me, vague and somehow unbelievable. I was, frankly, more moved when the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife got killed. Not shaken to the roots, mind you (I was fourteen, going on fifteen, too old to be carrying on like an idiot) but frightened and excited by everything that happened in the month that followed: Austria-Hungary declaring war on Servia; Russia moving 80,000 troops to the border; Germany declaring war on Russia; Germany declaring war on France; Germany invading Belgium; England declaring war on Germany; everybody declaring war on everybody else — except the United States.

We were neutral.

We were sane.

To me, in Eau Fraiche, Wisconsin, the war was something that erupted only in newspaper headlines — I didn’t know where Servia was, and I couldn’t even pronounce Sarajevo. England was the only country with which I felt any real sympathy, but that was because both my parents were of English stock; my father, in fact, had been born and raised in Liverpool. But even then, I think my own attitude about the war in those early days was a reflection of what the rest of America was thinking and feeling, or at least the rest of America as represented by the state of Wisconsin. It wasn’t our battle. We were determined to stay out of it. We had headaches enough of our own — all that mess down there in Mexico which we still hadn’t resolved, and people out of work everywhere you looked, and southern Negroes causing even bigger job problems by moving in batches to the north and the midwest — we didn’t need any war. And anyway, even though Germany’s march into Belgium had caused us to sympathize momentarily with the underdog, it was really pretty hard to believe that people related to gentle Karl Moenke, who ran a dry-goods store in Eau Fraiche, could be even remotely capable of sacking Louvain, and shooting priests and helpless women there. The war for us was fascinating but remote. We didn’t want involvement. We said we’d remain neutral, and that was our honest intention.

And yet — there was something. There’s always something about war, a contagious excitement that leaps oceans.

I couldn’t look at the battle maps printed in the Eau Fraiche Record without visualizing gallant armies massed beneath those tiny flags:

By the nineteenth of August, the line stretched from Antwerp in the north to Mulhausen in the south, passing through towns with names like Charleroi and Bastogne and Bitsch (which gave me a laugh), but it was a fluid front that changed from day to day; you could follow it like a general yourself and discuss it with other generals — here’s where I’d break through, here’s where I’d try to outflank them. In addition, you could be a general for whichever side you chose, because in the months that followed each side certainly gave us reason to believe it was right and the other was wrong. If the Germans were cutting off the breasts of Belgian women and the hands of Belgian babies, then the French were firing on ambulances and killing doctors; if the English served coffee laced with strychnine to German prisoners, then the Huns were shipping corpses back home to be made into soap. We suspected both sides were lying, of course, but the Allies’ stories were more inventive and entertaining in a horrible way than the ones the Germans concocted, so I guess even then we were beginning to lean in their direction — though we had no real quarrel with Germany and, if anything, distrusted the French who, we’d been told, “fought with their feet and fucked with their face.” Wilson said in his address to Congress that year that this was “a war with which we have nothing to do,” and we believed him, I suppose, even though we were already singing “It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary” in the streets of Eau Fraiche, Red Reynolds’ orchestra having introduced the song in November — “the favorite of the first British Expeditionary Force,” he had proudly announced.

But if we identified (and I think we did) with the Tommies who were marching into France, we sure as hell did not appreciate what the British Navy was doing: seizing American ships and removing from their holds contraband items such as flour, wheat, copper, cotton, and oil; mining the North Sea; blacklisting dozens of American firms suspected of doing business with the Germans (none of England’s damn business, since we were, after all, neutrals); or even — and this really galled — raising the American flag on her own ships whenever German submarines were in hot pursuit. A lot of the German-American people in Eau Fraiche felt, and probably rightfully, that our diplomatic restraint in dealing with British violations of our neutrality merely indicated we weren’t neutral at all; we had, in effect, cast our lot with the Allies as early as the beginning of 1915. Well, maybe so. I myself was pretty confused, though I have to admit that by February, I began to lean toward the Allies again; that was when the Germans said they’d sink any enemy ship in the waters around the British Isles, and maybe a few neutral ships, too, if they couldn’t determine their national origin, which was sometimes difficult to do through the periscope of a submarine. Not only did they say they’d do it, but they actually did do it. and whereas searching ships and seizing merchandise was one thing, sinking them was quite another. I don’t think anybody in Eau Fraiche, not even those whose sympathies were with the Germans, condoned the actions of the U-boat commanders, who were already being pilloried in the press for their “wanton disregard of American life.”

I guess the sinking of the Lusitania could have been the last straw if President Wilson hadn’t kept his head. For me, it was the last straw; I was ready to go downtown with some of the other kids and smash Mr. Moenke’s store window (we had begun calling him “Monkey the Hun-kee” by then), but my father got wind of the scheme and told me if I left the house he’d beat me black and blue when I returned. I don’t know if it was my father’s warning or Mr. Wilson’s restraint that changed my mood of black rage to one of patience. In a speech on May 10, three days after the sinking, the President said, “The example of America must be a special example. The example of America must be the example not merely of peace because it will not fight, but of peace because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the world and strife is not. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right. There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.”

I liked what he said.

It reminded me of something my father had once said when I’d been having a lot of trouble with a skinny kid who was a head shorter than me. I told my father I was going to knock the kid cold the next time he said anything nasty to me, and my father said, “What pleasure will you get from killing a cripple?” So I never did fight with that kid because after that I felt sorry for him whenever he picked on me. I knew I could beat him up, and I realized my father was right; there’d be no pleasure at all in taking him apart. I didn’t know whether or not the United States could beat Germany (the idea of going to war with people who were cutting off babies’ hands was frankly terrifying) but it seemed to me nonetheless that President Wilson was correct in saying there was such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. If we knew that war was wrong, then we were only compounding the crime by reacting to warlike acts in a warlike manner. If we really believed the world had gone insane, then behaving insanely ourselves was no way to effect a cure.

Later, when Wilson’s exchange of notes with the Germans got stronger and Bryan resigned as Secretary of State, I didn’t know what to think. I admired Wilson, but now he seemed to be saying that he was ready to risk war if respect for human life was at stake. This seemed to me contradictory. If you respected human life, if you were protesting so strongly against the drowning of the 114 Americans who had sailed on the Lusitania (even after the Germans had taken out a newspaper advertisement warning they would sink any vessel carrying the flag of Great Britain or her allies), then how could you risk sending more Americans to die in a war which was none of our business in the first place? Wilson said he was for peace. Okay. But when Bryan refused to sign the President’s second strongly worded note to the Germans, he said “I cannot go along with him in this note. I think it makes for war.” All right then, Bryan was for peace. But the Eau Fraiche Record reprinted an editorial from the New York World which said that Bryan’s resignation was “unspeakable treachery not only to the President but to the nation.” Meanwhile, Teddy Roosevelt, who was for preparedness but also for peace, mind you, said, “No man can support Mr. Wilson without at the same time supporting a policy of criminal inefficiency,” and in almost the very next breath said, “I am sick at heart over the actions of Wilson and Bryan.”

I’m telling you, it was difficult to know what to think.

And to make matters worse, we Tylers began having a few internal problems of our own along about then. My older sister Kate had run off with a drummer from Arizona, a swarthy slick-haired character who everybody said was part Indian. The local opinion was that he had made her pregnant during the month of July while trying to sell tractor parts in town, and whether this caused my father’s heart attack or whether the suspicion that he was part Indian did it, I can’t say. The attack came in August, a massive pain knocking him to the forest floor as he brought back his ax, six smaller pains shuddering through his body as he tried to call for help. They got him over to the hospital in Eau Claire just in time, the doctors said, because the next two spasms would have killed him if he hadn’t been in bed and close to medication.

I was only fifteen and still in high school, but I was the oldest of the two boys in the family, my brother John being four at the time, so naturally I had to take a job. The doctors said my father needed at least six months’ rest (turned out to be eight months after all was said and done) but that afterward he could once again lead a “healthy, productive life” — those were their exact words. They took me on at the lumber camp immediately, even though I couldn’t tell a bow saw from a pile of sawdust; my father had been working for them for twenty years, and they were more than willing now to come to his assistance.

In the midst of everything that was happening in America and in the world, there was a tranquillity to those woods, a calming regularity to the monotonous chok of ax against trunk, the rasping of the saws, the laughter of the men, the chittering of the forest animals. At night, I would sit outside on the steps of the bunkhouse and, deprived of my helpful newspaper battle maps, try to sort out what was happening over in Europe; but I found I could hardly even sort out what was happening over in Eau Fraiche. I think that at that point in my life, fifteen years old and going on sixteen, there were only two things of any importance to me: the fact that I could step in and support Mama and my brother and sisters; and the fact that a girl named Nancy Ellen Clark was madly in love with me.

I had met Nancy on the Fourth of July, just about when my sister was getting herself pregnant, I suppose. The occasion was the opening of the first Dodge car agency in Eau Fraiche, on Buffalo Street. Anthony Clark, Nancy’s father, had moved his family to town in the middle of June, and then had spent the next two weeks getting his showrooms ready for a gala opening. And a gala it was! We had all heard about the new Dodge car, of course, and had studied pictures of it in the newspapers and magazines, but this was our first opportunity to actually see it. Mr. Clark had hung bunting over the entire front of the building, and three young girls wearing red, white, and blue in keeping with the spirit of Independence Day, were serving doughnuts and coffee at one side of the showroom. Mr. Clark himself was giving what amounted to an automotive lecture near the right front fender of one of the two new cars on display, a bright green beauty. The girls serving refreshments ranged in age from thirteen to seventeen; the one who caught my eye was the little blond in the middle, about my age, with eyes the color of the touring car Mr. Clark was describing.

“She’s a four-cylinder automobile,” Mr. Clark was saying, “with an L-head engine and a bore stroke of three and seven-eighths by four and a half inches...”

The blond girl with the green eyes looked at me.

“... thirty-five horsepower,” Mr. Clark was saying.

I looked back at her, and she blushed and dropped a doughnut.

“The piston displacement is two-twelve point three cubic inches, and she weighs twenty-two hundred and fifty pounds. The wheelbase is a hundred and ten inches...”

I walked over to where the three girls were serving. The stand had been decorated with red, white, and blue bunting, the same as the outside of the showroom. The girls were all wearing ruffled white hats on their heads, like Revolutionary ladies, white blouses with red silk sashes at the waists, and blue skirts.

“Is the coffee free?” I asked.

“Yes,” all three of them said together.

I looked directly at the one with the green eyes. “Is it free?” I asked her.

“Yes, it is,” she said, and again she blushed.

“... tire size is thirty-two by three and a half. Now here’s something you may not be able to discern with the naked eye...”

“My name is Will Tyler,” I said.

“I’m Nancy Clark,” she answered.

“Nancy Ellen Clark,” one of the other girls corrected.

“She’s my sister.” Nancy said, and smiled into my eyes.

“... first car in the history of America, in fact, the history of the world, to have an all-steel body. Now let me show you the upholstery...”

I thought of nothing but Nancy Ellen Clark all that winter and through the next year. Mr. Wilson’s policy with the Germans seemed to be working, and even Bryan supported him in the election of 1916, saying, “I agree with the American people in thanking God we have a president who has kept, who will keep, us out of war.” I myself favored Hughes, but I wasn’t old enough to vote, and anyhow I was in love. The election seemed remote, the war seemed remote, only Nancy danced through my head as I felled trees in those silent woods. In December, the Germans made a peace offer to the Allies, and the war seemed all but over. Besides, like a baseball game that had run into far too many extra innings, it had lost all interest for me. Even when President Wilson disclosed his plan for aiding the belligerents in securing peace, I couldn’t have cared less. Peace would be nice, yes, I certainly wanted peace — but more than anything else in the world, I wanted Nancy Ellen Clark.

And then, I don’t know what happened — it had all seemed so close, it had all seemed within reach — I don’t know what suddenly happened to change it. The Germans weren’t interested in Wilson’s assistance, it seemed, nor were the Allies interested in Germany’s peace offer. A few weeks after my seventeenth birthday, Wilson told the Senate all about his League for Peace and while in Wisconsin we were still talking about what he’d called “peace without victory,” in Berlin the Germans announced that beginning February 1, they’d once again pursue a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare.

In the woods, the days were short, the sun glared through leafless branches, glazing the crusted snow. Word trickled back to us day by day. The wagon crew would return from Eau Fraiche to report that Wilson had severed diplomatic relations with the German Empire; Wilson would soon ask that America arm its merchant vessels; a note from a German minister named Alfred Zimmerman had been intercepted and decoded, and it proposed to give Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to the Mexican people if they accepted alliance with Germany in a war with the United States — stories we half-believed, like the atrocity talcs back in 1914. But then the wagon came back one Friday with a story we knew was true, a story we did not want to believe because it was far worse than the sinking of the Lusitania had been: the Germans had sunk three American ships, and Wilson had asked for a special session of Congress to discuss “grave matters.”

We declared war against Germany on April 6.

I was seventeen years old and in love.

I wanted no part of it, I truly did not. And yet, less than a year later, I enlisted in the United States Army. If you’d asked me why at the time, I couldn’t have told you. Oh sure, I’d given Nancy a big patriotic recital that night of the Grange dance in January, man’s duty to his country, do my bit, make the world safe for democracy, all that, but I really hadn’t known why I was so anxious to get to where the lighting was. Now, not four months later, in the hold of a ship that would be sailing for Brest within hours, I thought I knew.

There’s a killing time.

There’s a time when you need to kill and must therefore kill.

That time had come for me early in 1918, and I had acted impulsively on the burning itch inside me, the desire to move into action, to strike, to hurt, to kill. Now, in April, the bloodlust was all but gone, and I knew only that I was leaving Nancy for God knew how long, maybe forever, and I wanted to weep.

Timothy Bear found me in the darkness and put his huge hand on my shoulder.

“How goes it, Bert?” he asked.

“Lousy,” I said.

“Ever think you’d see this day?”

“No,” I answered honestly.

There was comfort in his presence beside me in the darkness. I had known him all through sixteen miserable weeks of preliminary training, weeks of repeating the manual of arms, weeks of formation drills and setting-up exercises and recruit instruction, lectures on the care of clothing and equipment, military discipline and courtesy, orders for sentinels, personal hygiene and care of the goddamn feet, Articles of War, the obligations and rights of the soldier (all obligations, no rights!), weeks of inspections, drills, and more inspections. I had suffered with him through courses on rifle sighting, rifle nomenclature and care, rifle aiming, and trigger squeeze; I had endured first-aid drills with him, gas-warfare drills, grenade and bomb drills, waking at 5:45 each and every day of the week, eating swill my mother wouldn’t have allowed in her garbage can no less her kitchen, and tumbling exhausted into bed at ten each night, already dreading the sound of the bugle the next morning, damn Irving Berlin and his rotten song!

I think the company would have fallen apart in those sixteen weeks if it hadn’t been for Timothy Bear (his last name was really Graham, but somebody had dubbed him “The Bear” in the first few weeks of cantonment at Camp Greene, and the name had stuck). He was six feet four inches tall in his naked toenails, as wide across as any tree I’d ever felled in the woods north of Eau Fraiche, the Army uniform fitting him like a sausage skin strained to bursting across his powerful chest and shoulders. He could lift the rear end of a weapons carrier with his bare hands, unassisted, and his endurance was equally phenomenal; returning once from a twenty-mile forced march with full pack, Timothy Bear had wanted to go dancing in town. He never complained, not about anything, nor was his attitude faked — his face was as open as a child’s, his brown eyes totally guileless. He had blond hair which he’d worn straight and long back on his father’s Indiana farm, but which the Army barbers had cropped close to his head, heightening his resemblance to a big, affable grizzly. Lumbering, genial, inexhaustible, he became the kind of man and soldier we all wished we could be. He was eighteen years old.

Now, sitting beside me in the darkness, he understood my gloom, and reached into the pocket of his tunic for a folded sheet of paper which he handed to me. Shielding a flashlight with his cupped palm, he threw a beam of light onto the paper and said, “Have you seen this yet, Bert? A clerk from B Company ran some off on the ship’s mimeo. It’s from the Dodger.”

“The what?” I said.

“You know, the Camp Dodge newspaper.”

In the light of Timothy’s shielded flash, I unfolded and read the mimeographed sheet:

When I readied the bottom of the page, Timothy, who had been reading silently over my shoulder, began chuckling. I laughed with him. In the hold of a foreign ship waiting to sail across thousands of miles of ocean to a foreign battlefront, we laughed softly in the darkness, and I wondered if we’d ever in our lives see New York City again.

May

I loved that city.

It took an hour and a half to get there from Talmadge, but ever since we’d organized Dawn Patrol, one or another of us guys would go in almost every Saturday to shop Forty-eighth Street or to catch whichever of the groups were downtown in the Village. My mother said I was a native New Yorker, which wasn’t quite true in spite of the fact that I was horn in New York; at Lenox Hill Hospital, in fact, on Seventy-seventh and Park. At the time, my father was attending NYU on the GI Bill of Rights, and living with my mother in a run-down apartment in what was then considered a terrible slum but was now euphemistically called the East Village. With a little help from my grandfather (or perhaps from both my grandfathers, since Grandpa Prine was still alive at the time) my father started his own business in November 1946, at first publishing stuff like street maps and industrial pamphlets, and then bringing out a series of one-shot, newsstand exploitation magazines, and then finally moving into hardbound books. We moved to Talmadge just before Christmas that year, two months after I was born, to the same house we still lived in on Ritter Avenue. So I hardly felt honest calling myself a native New Yorker, although it was technically true. Nonetheless, whenever I went into that city, I felt as if I were going home.

I didn’t feel quite that way today.

I had come in to see my father because there was something important I wanted to discuss, and I had learned over the years that the best place to talk business with him was in his place of business. This was Wednesday, and Talmadge High was having teachers’ conferences, so I’d caught the 9: 34 out of Stamford, and was in the city by 10:19. I’d spent a half-hour in Manny’s on Forty-eighth, looking over some of the new Japanese amplifiers, and then I’d called my father to ask him if I could come up. He sounded surprised but pleased, which was at least one point for our side. Still, I was scared.

I walked over to Forty-second and spent an hour or so in Bryant Park, where a fag tried to pick me up. I never knew what to say when a fag approached me. This one looked especially sad and uncertain, as if it were the first time he’d ever done anything like this, though that was probably his style. Anyway, I just said “Sorry,” and got off the bench and walked away. I was unhappy about leaving the park because it had been a good place to think; I still hadn’t come up with an approach to my father. I stopped for a hot dog and a Coke in a place on Forty-fourth and Sixth, and then ambled down to Fifth Avenue as if I didn’t have a care in the world. It was a great day for walking.

We’d once had a man from California visiting us, a publisher my father was anxious to do business with, and he’d said the only time he really enjoyed New York City was “when they started taking their coats off.” This was that kind of a day, with a blue sky stretched tight between the buildings, and bright sunshine spanking the sidewalks, and people walking along with their coats off, grinning. By the time I reached the Doubleday’s on Fifty-seventh, I’d worked out a plan, so I immediately headed back for my father’s office on Forty-eighth and Madison.

All the way up in the elevator, I rehearsed my scheme.

He’s too smart to con, I told myself, though why I should even have to think of conning him is certainly a matter for speculation, considering the fact that I’ll be eighteen in October — well, suppose he says no? Well, he can’t say no if I get him to agree with me in principle first. Because if he concedes in principle, he can’t refuse permission on any valid moral ground, that’d be hypocritical, he certainly isn’t a hypocrite, whatever else he is. Anyway, I’ve never won a frontal assault against him in my life, why try now? Logic, that’s the thing. Get him to yield intellectually, and then zing in the fast ball. It should work.

I hope.

The elevator doors opened. I took a deep breath.

Tyler Press occupied the entire sixth floor of the building, and so the company colophon and the company receptionist were the first things anyone saw when stepping out of the elevator. Of the two, I infinitely preferred the colophon, my father’s taste in receptionists running rather toward the motherly type. This particular mother, one of a long line who had sat behind this selfsame desk since the company’s formation in 1946, was in her fifties, a gray-haired dignified lady with pleasant blue eyes and a warm, helpful smile, ample mother breasts in a white blouse, gold chain hanging, semiprecious purple stone cradled, “Hello, Wat,” she said, “how nice!”

“Hello, Mrs. Green,” I answered. “Is my father in?”

“Let me check,” she said, and smiled again, and lifted the telephone.

The company colophon was on the wall behind Mrs. Green’s desk, a circular blue disc upon which were three spruce trees of varying heights, their towering tops protruding from the upper rim of the circle. There was a strong sense of growth and tradition inherent in the colophon, and I felt oddly moved each time I looked at it. Whatever the Tylers were, we had all most certainly descended from my grandfather Bertram Tyler, the lumberjack, and this heritage was clearly the intent of the colophon. Studying it now, though, I wondered for the first time which of those three spruces represented me — the shortest one in the foreground, or the tallest one reaching for the sky.

“You can go right in, Wat,” Mrs. Green said.

“Thank you. Is he in a good mood?”

“Why, Wat dear, your father’s always in a good mood,” Mrs. Green said.

“Oh yes, certainly,” I said, and went past her desk into the corridor. A brunette secretary in a tight woolen dress swiveled out of one of the offices, smiling at me as she went by. Neck craning, I knocked on my father’s door.

“Come in,” he called.

I went into the office. My father was standing behind his desk, shirt sleeves rolled up, tic pulled down, desk top covered with photographs. His attitude of concentration seemed posed, as though he had hastily rushed behind his desk, rolling up his sleeves the moment he heard the knock on the door, anxious to present to his son an image of a working publisher. If such were truly the case, he needn’t have bothered; I’d always had enormous difficulty imagining my father at work, and each time I came to his office the task became perversely more difficult. I shouldn’t have expected Tyler Press to be a mirror image of our own house in Talmadge — a man was, after all, entitled to decorate his offices to suit his own taste. But the difference here was so startling that it was difficult to imagine the man Will Tyler being comfortable in either place.

Our house was an early eighteenth-century colonial, while clapboard and slate, paneled doors and chimney architrave, leaded casements and molded panels. My mother, presumably with my father’s assistance and blessing, had decorated in the style of the period, creating a warm and welcoming shelter that nudged the side of a hill from which you could sometimes see Long Island Sound. Crewel-embroidered curtains, blue-green with a touch of red, draped the living room windows. The walnut sofa was upholstered with blue-green damask, the cabriole-leg wing chair with tapestry. There was an oriental rug before the fireplace, which was flanked by two Hogarth-type side chairs and a tall-back wing chair, also done in red tapestry. The house was rich with brass and burled walnut, needlepoint and marble, the faint lingering aroma of woodsmoke.

In contrast, the first thing you saw when you entered my father’s office was the huge gray Formica-topped work desk dominated at its far end by a wooden piece he had bought in a First Avenue shop, an African mask resting on a stainless steel cube. Two walls were a pristine white, a third wall was covered floor to ceiling with bookcases, their jacketed spines adding a patchwork quilt of color to the room. The fourth wall framed a window view of New York City, mocha-colored drapes hanging at either side of the glass expanse. The chairs were upholstered in brown leather and tweed, the carpet was beige. Out of a bosky glen of plants in the corner opposite the desk, there rose like some metallic woodland sprite, a joyously leaping Giacometti imitation. On one of the white walls, there hung an original Larry Rivers, and on the other a Goodenough. The lighting was hidden in walnut coves, except for two hanging white globes. The over-all effect was hardly similar to that in our home, and it made me believe that perhaps there were two Will Tylers, neither of whom I understood or even came close to understanding.

I went behind the desk and kissed him on the cheek without embarrassment; I could never understand those guys who have hangups about kissing their own fathers. He said, “Hello, son,” and then spread his hands wide over the desk top. “What do you think of it?”

There were perhaps two hundred photographs of different sizes on the desk. All of them were of General De Gaulle, whom I had never considered a particularly photogenic subject, handsome though he may be.

“I thought it was further along than this,” I said.

“Well, this is the final selection. What do you think?”

“It’s hard to say. I mean, without any text...”

“Yes, but what do you think of the pictures?”

“Oh, they’re great,” I said.

“We’ll be laying it out sometime this week,” my father said. “Great. When’s publication?”

“God knows,” he said, and waved the question aside. “Have you had lunch?”

“I grabbed a hot dog,” I said.

“I thought...”

“Actually...”

“What time is it, anyway?”

“Close to one. Pop, the reason I stopped by...”

“I thought we were having lunch together. I purposely kept lunch free.”

“Well, I’ve got to get back, you know. We’re rehearsing this afternoon...”

“How come no school?” he asked suddenly.

“It’s teachers’ conferences.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, I’m not cutting or anything, if that’s what you thought.”

“Why would I think that?”

“Anyway, Pop, there’s something I’ve got to discuss with you.”

“Shoot,” he said, and sat in the brown leather Eames chair behind his desk. He took a cigar from the humidor near the African mask, sniffed it the way I’d seen Adolph Menjou do in a thousand old movies on television, lighted it with a wooden match, blew out an enormous cloud of poisonous smoke, laced his hands across his chest, and looked at me expectantly. I cleared my throat.

“Well,” I said, “as you know, I’ll be graduating this June.”

“Yes,” he said.

“And this is May,” I said, “and I thought I should be making some plans for the summer now. I mean, before it’s here, you know. Because I’ll be leaving for Yale in September, and I wanted to make some use of the summer, you know.”

“Where do you want to go?” my father said.

“Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Well, that’s what we’re doing is talking,” he said, and smiled, and puffed on the cigar, and said, “I have a feeling this is going to cost me money.”

“No, no,” I said, “no.” I cleared my throat again. “You see, these arc, you know, changing times in America, and I thought, you see, I didn’t want to just lay around on some beach all summer, though that would be nice, still...”

“You don’t want to come to Fire Island, is that it?”

“I love Fire Island, it isn’t that.”

“It’s some girl.”

“No, no, I’m not serious about anybody right now. But the idea of just laying around all summer isn’t too appealing to me right now. I want to do something.”

“Like what?”

“You agree these are changing times?” I said, figuring I’d start my buildup now, get him to agree in principle the way I’d planned it, and then ask him for permission.

“Yes, these are changing times,” he agreed.

“Okay,” I said, “I want to go south this summer and help with voter registration. Negro voter registration.”

My father puffed on his cigar.

“A guy I know from school is going,” I said, “and I want to go with him. They pay a salary. I can earn between fifteen and twenty-five dollars a week.”

“Is he colored or white?” my father asked.

“He’s colored,” I said. “His name is Larry Peters, I think you met him once.”

“I don’t remember meeting him,” my father said.

“After one of the dances. He was helping us load the wagon.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, that’s who, anyway. He’s leaving for Mississippi in July. If I’m going with him, I’ve got to sign up as a task force worker right away. That’s why I wanted to discuss it with you first.”

“A task forcer worker, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“And that’s why you came into the city today?”

“No, I looked at a new amp at Manny’s, too. But while I was in, I figured I’d call you and we could talk about it here. I haven’t told Mom yet, I wanted to dear it with you first.”

“She’ll say no.”

“Well, not if you’ve already given permission.”

“She’ll say no because it’s dangerous down there. You can get hurt down there.”

“Pop, you can get hurt crossing the street right here in New York.”

“Why do you want to go down there, anyway?”

“I already told you. These are changing times...”

“Yes, yes...”

“... and I want to help.”

“You can help right here. If you want to do something for the Negro, why don’t you get a job in Harlem this summer? At a playground or a youth center. Help them start a band, coach them in some sport, you’re good at those things, Wat, you could be very useful in an area like Harlem.”

“I can be more useful in the South.”

“Your friend can be more useful there.”

“No, I think it’s important that some while people go down there.”

“Why?”

“To show them we’re interested. I mean, Pop, this isn’t just their problem, it’s our problem, too. If we care enough about what the hell’s going on in this country.”

“All right, don’t get excited,” my father said.

“Well, this means a lot to me.”

“Did I say no?”

“You’re going to say no, I can tell.”

“I didn’t know you were a mind reader.”

“Anyway, I think I ought to tell you I’ll be eighteen in October...”

“July isn’t October. When did you say? You said July, didn’t you?”

“Well, when school ends.”

“That’s not October.”

“I know it’s not October. Anyway, I may not even need your 7 0 permission. I haven’t really looked into the requirements yet, but I think...”

“I would imagine you’d have to be eighteen,” my father said.

“Maybe and maybe not,” I said. “Larry has all the information, I’ll have to check...”

“If you’re so serious about this, why haven’t you checked already?”

“I am serious about it. I didn’t think I was going to get such static here, that’s all.”

“I wasn’t aware...”

“I’m not asking for your permission because I need it, Pop.”

“No? Then why are you asking?”

“As a goddamn courtesy.”

“This isn’t a locker room,” my father said.

“Okay, it isn’t a locker room.”

“I’m sure your mother wouldn’t want you traipsing all over the South where you can possibly get your head busted by some rednecked farmer!”

“The reason I want to go traipsing all over the South is so that people can traipse all over the South without getting their heads busted.”

“And if you run into trouble?”

“I won’t.”

“Suppose you do?”

“I can take care of myself.”

“That’s another country down there.”

“Is that supposed to be a pun?”

“What?” he said. “I’m telling you that’s a foreign country down there. I was there during the war, and it’s worse now. You’ll need a passport to get in, it’s a foreign country.”

“It’s America,” I said.

“Don’t give me any of that patriotic bullshit,” my father said.

“This isn’t a locker room,” I said, and tried a smile.

My father picked up his cigar and began puffing on it. He didn’t say anything. One of De Gaulle’s pictures caught his eye, and he moved it over next to another lovely shot of the general.

“Well,” I said, “how about it?”

“The answer is no,” he said flatly.

“I figured.”

“You figured correctly.”

“Why?”

“Because voter registration in the South is a dangerous occupation for a seventeen-year-old boy.”

“I’ll be eighteen in October.”

“Then go in October.”

“Pop, I have to be in New Haven on September fourteenth, you know that.”

“Right. So spend your summer on the beach, take it easy. You think Yale’s going to be a lark?”

“What about Larry?”

“Who the hell is Larry?”

“Larry, Larry, my friend. How can I spend the summer sitting on my ass when I know he’ll be down South fighting for his life!”

“Invite him to the beach.”

“Pop!”

“It’s not your battle,” my father said.

“Will you at least think about it?”

“I’ve already thought about it.”

“I’ll go without your permission, you know. If I have to be eighteen, I’ll lie about my age, I’ll get a phony draft card, there’re millions of them around.”

“Then why’d you ask me in the first place?” my father said. “Because I thought you’d be proud to say yes.”

I went out of his office and down the corridor to the elevator, angry as hell. Mrs. Green came from behind her desk and fluttered up to me.

“Oh, Wat,” she said, “your father told me about your being accepted at Yale, that’s just wonderful.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I guess you’re all excited about graduation.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Do you have something in mind?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“Something special?”

“What do you mean?”

“For graduation. A present.”

“Oh,” I said, and suddenly realized she was here on a specific mission, she had been told earlier that I’d be coming up, and had been instructed by my father to find out what I wanted as a graduation gift. In what she had doubtlessly considered a subtle manner, she had led the conversation to the point where she could pop the big question, and now she stood studying my face eagerly, hoping against hope that I would reveal my desire before the elevator arrived. I did not want to disappoint her. and yet I could not think of a single thing I wanted or needed. I began wishing that something extravagant would occur to me, but nothing did, and I stood in mute embarrassment as the approaching elevator whined up the shaft, feeling terribly sorry for Mrs. Green, but feeling even sorrier for my father, who could not personally ask his own son what he wanted most for graduation.

“There is something I want,” I said.

“Yes?” Mrs. Green said, nervously fingering the purple stone on her bosom. “What is it?”

“Get him to say yes,” I told her. “Get him to say I can go to Mississippi.”

June

My father said yes at the beginning of June, but Michael and I did not celebrate until the night before he left for Keesler Field, when we both went over to the colored section in Douglas. It was one of those rare Chicago nights, with a full moon hanging over the lake, and people swimming off the sand beach at Oak Street, portable radios going everywhere along the shore.

I don’t know what led us over to Douglas. I don’t think we intentionally started to go there, and we certainly weren’t looking for any trouble. There was rioting in Detroit that Sunday, we had heard all about it on the radio. But the trouble there was understandable because Negro sharecroppers had been coming up north by the hundreds of thousands, lured by the higher wages being paid by the wartime automobile industry, and the city just didn’t know how to cope with its new mixed population of two million people. A white man and a Negro had begun hitting each other, and before you knew it whites and Negroes were battling it out all over the city, and a cop got shot six times with his own gun, and dozens of other people, Negro and white, had been killed. I kept expecting it to spread to Chicago — we were only two hundred and seventy miles or so from Detroit, and we had a colored population of more than 275,000, most of which was clustered in Grand Boulevard, Washington Park, or Douglas. But nothing had happened. Nothing ever happened in Chicago.

The whole point of that Sunday, June twentieth, nineteen hundred and forty-three, was that I had been accepted by the United States Air Force, hallelujah! Moreover, it seemed likely that I’d be inducted sooner than I’d expected, in which case I might somewhere along the line just possibly catch up with Michael, who was set to leave Chicago tomorrow morning for five weeks of basic training in Mississippi. We had every reason to celebrate, and we began celebrating early that afternoon, there being three of us at the beginning of the spree that eventually led us into Douglas. Ronny Booth was a pain in the ass, but he was twenty-one years old and therefore entitled to buy alcoholic beverages in our antiquated state. Here were two red-blooded American boys, Michael and myself, who had already been accepted by the Air Force, but we weren’t permitted to drink in Illinois, right? On the other hand, Ronny Booth, who was 4-F because of a heart murmur (but who also happened to be twenty-one) was permitted to buy all the whiskey he wanted; which he had done the day before, and which the three of us now consumed happily on the edge of the lake while someone in a rowboat on the water strummed a guitar and lazily sang, “I’ll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time.”

Ronny Booth kept saying, “Men, we are getting drunk.”

He was a tall skinny guy with straight black hair and brown eyes that looked enormously offended. He had begun growing a mustache, doubtless to assert his manhood in defiance of his 4-F classification, but it was coming in patchy and sparse, and it gave him the appearance of a skinny, comic Hitler.

“Ja, Adolf,” Michael said, “ve are getting plastered.”

“Please don’t call me Adolf,” Ronny said.

“Jawohl, Adolf,” Michael said.

“I have seen more hair on a strip of bacon,” I said, and Michael laughed.

“Men,” Ronny said, “I tell you we are getting drunk.”

“Let’s go find some pussy,” Michael said.

“Shhh,” Ronny said. “There’re ladies present.”

“Where?” I said.

“Out there on the water plucking their guitars.”

“Let’s find some pretty pussy to pluck,” Michael said, and laughed and threw his arms around me. “You know what I’m going to do, Will?” he asked.

“What’re you going to do?”

“Pee in the water,” Michael said.

“Men,” Ronny said, “we are getting drunk.”

Michael had, with considerable difficulty, already unzipped his fly, but he judiciously allowed me to lead him away from the water’s edge and into one of the underpasses where he urinated against a wall that had been chalked with the legend slap the jap!

“Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat,” Michael said, drilling the wall with a steady stream of urine. “Rat-tat-tat-tat.”

“Behold the yellow menace,” I said.

“The yellow peril,” Michael corrected. “I am going to tell you something about this war,” he said, slopping onto his trouser leg as he tried to maneuver himself back into his pants, “Will Tyler, here’s the thing about this war.” He put a scholarly finger alongside his nose, tilted his head to one side, blond wood shavings spilling around his ears, grinned cherubically, and said, “This war will soon be over because two brave and stalwarts are going over there to zap them!” and triumphantly zipped up his fly.

“Men,” Ronny said, and slid down the sloping concrete wall and passed out. chin on his chest.

“Men,” I said, “Ronny Booth is unconscious.”

“Fuck him,” Michael said. He threw his arm around my shoulder, and we crossed under the Drive at Division Street, and began walking downtown, away from Ronny and the lake, singing “Jingle Bells” because it was clever in June, and “Over There” because it was corny at any time, and “Mairzy Doats” because it was crazy like us, and then trying to hum “Holiday for Strings” because it was difficult especially when intoxicated. The Loop had never been too terribly exciting on a Sunday night, but ever since the war began and the lights were dimmed, it had become positively ghostly, with servicemen milling around the streets as if searching for a party that had somehow been canceled. In defense against the gloom, Michael and I began singing the Army Air Force song, mindful of the unamused glares of the servicemen all around us, but marching bravely along anyway, arm in arm, as we belted out the lyrics.

Douglas was four and a half miles from downtown Chicago, and nobody in his right mind would have chosen it as a nighttime destination. We were not precisely in our right minds that Sunday, though, nor were we consciously heading for Douglas. We were, instead, heading into the skies above where brave fighter pilots plunged their war machines into fat billowing clouds, Or, to be more precise, we were heading for Wentworth Avenue, which was the main street of Chinatown, where we hoped to get some egg rolls and chow mein. Carried along by the spirit of our rousing song, off we go, we marched past Marshall Field, into the wild blue yonder, grabbing a subway train at State and Randolph, climbing high, all the way to Cermak Road where we disembarked and staggered into the Sun Shu Chinese Restaurant, in which establishment we consumed four egg rolls apiece and two orders of chow mein, not to mention huge quantities of Chinese tea, none of which made us any soberer than we’d been at the start of our journey. Mistily shrouded by the warm Chicago night and the alcohol fumes that blurred our vision, we lurched out of the restaurant and instead of turning back toward Cermak and the subway station, turned in the opposite direction instead and, singing, misgaited, giggling, and bellowing, made our way into the colored section of Douglas.

As we came into Douglas, we felt at once, Michael and I, and communicated it without speaking to each other, that we had been shot down by Messerschmitts or worse and must now through courage and guile, through wile, women, and song somehow find our way back to our own friendly lines, which were either the Douglas or the Jackson Park lines of the Rapid Transit.

“Shhh,” I said.

“Shhh,” Michael said.

There was in this contorted drunken landscape a conglomerate architecture sprung from poverty, rooted in need, that had transformed a once-affluent residential area into a congested slum within the space of forty years. Tarpaper shacks squatted check by jowl with barracks-like structures, spindly wooden staircases rising to rickety second- and third-story porches. Rusted parts of washing machines, sewing machines, bedsprings, tricycles, bicycles, abandoned automobiles sprouted everywhere, a jagged, disintegrating crop. Monumental heaps of moldering garbage rose like undisputed bunkers against soot-streaked crumbling brick buildings — Fuck You painted on a wall in shrieking white, sheets and bloomers and blouses and skirts flapping on clotheslines, trying to escape the backyards below, a dog squatting and shitting outside the entrance doorway to a shack, a little girl idly dragging her doll through the mud. We had come down Wentworth, I guess it was, and then State, and then turned east on Thirty-first, and now we threaded our way with fallen-pilot care through a populace sullen in blackface, men in undershirts and trousers throwing sidelong slitted glances as we passed, women in flowered housedresses, hair up in pieces of rag, remnants of the Old South only four and a half miles from downtown Chicago, only a hundred years away on the underground railway. A group of men sat playing dominoes outside a ramshackle tottering structure, one of them wearing only patterned Bermuda shorts, another drinking beer from a pitcher, Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room, you could hear that towering Illinois voice reverberating through this crouching slum as the breeze from the lake ahead, blowing fresh and clean onto the Drive five miles north, here brought in a stench as strong as that of Michael’s piss in the underpass.

I was suddenly filled with rage.

My anger had nothing to do with sympathy for an oppressed minority or any of that crap. I didn’t feel any democratic principle was being violated here, it wasn’t anything like that. There was too much real democracy at stake everywhere else in the world; I wasn’t about to start crying over a bunch of poor bastards living in the asshole of Chicago. Actually, I didn’t know what caused my anger. But I suddenly did something very strange and dangerous.

I picked up a brick and threw it.

I happened, in fact, to throw it at a first-floor window which smashed with amazing alacrity, not for nothing had I been a star third baseman with the Grace School Blues. A fat Negro man sitting on an upturned garbage can and fanning himself with a folded copy of the Tribune didn’t quite appreciate either my anger or my throwing arm. “You sumbitch white bastard!” he shouted, and jumped off the garbage can and came racing after Michael and me, brandishing the folded newspaper like a hatchet. Michael, who was not as sober as I yet, even though he’d reacted to my window-smashing in absolute astonishment, stumbled and fell, and I ran back to help him, and then looked up to discover that seven thousand men and boys of varying sizes, shapes, and shades were coming down the street after us, led by the Tribune-swinging fat man.

I was terrified.

I thought how ignominious it would be for a future fighter pilot to be squashed into the pavement by a rioting band of black men who had surely misunderstood why I’d thrown a brick through one of their windows, even though I myself didn’t yet understand why I’d done it. Michael, the idiot, was laughing! I thought. Oh my God, please don’t let these boogies, niggers, Negroes, NEGROES hear this madman laughing! Clutching Michael’s hand in my own, running like the track star I once had been, though burdened by Michael, who giggled and lurched and stumbled and cursed, I heard the sudden sweet sound of the subway rumbling along the tracks on Michigan Avenue and miraculously found the platform at Thirty-first, it must have been, or Twenty-ninth, or Twenty-sixth, God knew where, while Michael laughed insanely, and behind us the Negroes shouted bloody murder just because I’d hurled one lousy little goddamn brick. The train rolled in to a screeching stop.

I never thought we’d get out of there alive.

July

There was, I had not expected, there was, the German guns had started shortly after midnight, star shells erupting in the moonlit sky over the Marne, the river itself a curve of molten silver winding through poppy-dotted wheatfields, I had not expected. The shells came screaming at us from twenty miles away, Holy Mother, Mary of God, and we crouched trembling in trenches we had deepened the day before when the papers on a captured German major revealed Von Boehn’s plan of attack to us. The trenches faced Varennes and Courtemont, which the French were defending and which we expected to be overrun, our own plan being to wait until the German bombardment had abated, at which time we would scramble out of these deeper trenches and move forward into the echeloned slit trenches that would form our line of defense against a flanking attack.

I was Private Bertram Tyler in Captain Reid’s F Company of the 38th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Division, with our backs to Hill 231, wooded, higher than the plain, our bayoneted rifles pointed toward the curving right flank of the Marne horseshoe, the toe caulk of which was Jaulgonne to the north, the two heel caulks being Mézy to the west and Sauvigny to the cast. The Paris-Nancy (Nancy!) railroad tracks paralleled the river, passing through H and E Companies massed on the bank, skirting behind the 28th’s L Company facing Jaulgonne, and then disappearing out of sight to the east.

I was Private Bertram Tyler, and I had never been in battle before. As we waited now for them to come across the river in pontoon boats, as I lay with my face pressed to the dirt wall of the trench, there was insinuated into all the smells around me — the smell of men vomiting, the smell of phosphorus, the smell of earth suddenly exploding, richly, darkly turning loamy interior to the midnight air, the oppressive biting stink of cordite, the rancid aroma of sweat produced by fear, the smell of the waist-high wheat gold and silver in the moonlight, splashed with blood-red gilded poppies — into all these contradictory smells came the stench of human flesh burning and entrails exposed, the horrible sickly scent of death.

I tried to move away from Timothy, I did not want him to know how terrified I was. I was weeping into the earthen wall of the trench, ashamed of myself, frightened beyond sanity, the Germans would be coming soon, they would cross the river and storm our position.

“Easy, Bert,” Timothy said beside me.

“I’m scared,” I said. “Oh God, I’m so seared.”

“I am, too.”

Trembling, crouching, weeping, I flattened myself against the side of the trench as another shell exploded. I had not expected, there was nothing to prepare, I did not imagine, could not have, the noise. I wanted to cover my ears, but I was afraid to let go of my rifle. There was no small arms fire as yet, only the heavy steady pounding of our own guns firing northward across the river, unrelenting, and the muted faraway counterpoint of the big German guns, a steady rumble on the horizon. The sky flickered with light, erratic and unsettling, as though the eyes were out of focus. Shells exploded in the distance, adding to the muted enemy percussion, and the air shivered with the high whining whistle of incoming artillery fire, the deafening explosions everywhere around us, the shrapnel adding its own deadly high whistle to the air, clods of earth growing wheat and poppies landing with lifeless thuds, soil sifting in a whisper into the trenches, the sound constant, until at last the barrage stopped and we knew they were coming across the river because we heard the clacking of the machine guns and the popping of the rifles and the irregular louder explosions of grenades along the bank. Someone was shouting, the shout streaked the comparative silence like a smear of blood, a whistle shrilled into the midnight expectancy, a doughboy whispered “Jesus save us,” sibilant and scared, and we came out of the trenches and ran in waist-deep wheat like children in a dream summer on a star-drenched night — It’s really only another July, I told myself, and firecrackers are popping for independence by the river.

There was, you could not, all order was gone, the troops retreating on our front were French, their uniforms, you could, the Bois de Condé was where they would hold, the reserves of the 28th were waiting there, French at first, you could see their uniforms. And then the color changed, the landscape changed, the army coming over the railroad tracks and into the fill was German, fierce against the summer sky, bayonets glinting in moonlit pinpricks, machine-gun carts hauled by barking dogs, horse-drawn batteries rumbling into place. They wished to go to Paris, and we were there to stop them, but Paris was not the prize to defend, Paris was the immediate goal. The prize was Hill 231, where a strategically placed machine gun could control the entire plain, a knoll worthless for anything but artillery now, perhaps a good site for a small French château in another time and in another place, but not here and not now. Here, with the German batteries in place and beginning to pound shells into the slit trenches, now with the machine guns adding their staccato ululation to the din, we understood very little, and cared less, about over-all strategy or logistics. We did not know where the 4th or the 7th were, did not even fully comprehend whether Château-Thierry was to the east or the west across the Marne. We knew only Hill 231. This was our reason for being here, Hill 231, this was why we crouched and waited to kill, crouched and saw Fritz come over the horizon with identical intent, to kill for that elevation of ground behind us, from which our own guns were now firing over our heads.

I knew I would remember Hill 231 forever.

The rest was chaos.

Fear, excitement, and incredibility waged a war within me as fierce as the one that lurched across that disputed plain.

I had never known such terror. It came in successive waves of shock, the same tingling crack of surprise accompanying it each time, a sharp spasm jerking the neck and causing the eyes to pop wide open, a hot rush of blood to the head, a loosening of the bowels, a weak drained feeling in the crotch, but no time, no time to think or feel because new white tremors erupted almost at once, like unexpected slaps to the face in a pitch-black room.

The excitement rode over each exploding peak of horror, a curious wild and heady sense of adventure, a feeling of absolute maleness contradicting the terror, the rifle in my hands as enormous as a penis on the edge of ejaculation. Dodging, running, crawling, I fell like a soldier, and I regretted that no one was there to see me behave so courageously (even as fear rocketed into my skull again), no one but other men exactly like myself experiencing the same crude mixture of emotions, no one there to take my picture and shout exultant praise.

I could not believe what was happening. In my terror and excitement, a logical tiny section of my mind kept asking what I was doing here, was I insane running a zigzag course through exploding grenades, were my eyes actually witnessing a man’s body being cut in half by a shell, his head and torso flying off in one direction, his legs standing lifelessly erect for an instant before they toppled over like twin sandstone columns, was I dreaming? A grenade exploded some ten feet ahead of me and a German fell back into the wheat with a gushing hole in his abdomen. A machine gun instantly opened fire, and I leaped sharply to the left, eyes straining, the terror was back, the fear had a stench of urine I could smell in the crevices of my brain, I threw myself headlong through the rustling wheat, and watched the slender golden stalks dancing fitfully as the bullets whined through, and began to weep in fear and ecstasy and open incredulity.

I did not kill a man until four o’clock that morning, I think it was four o’clock, they told me later that was when Captain Reid made me a corporal in the field, but I have no recollection of being promoted, I can only remember the first time I killed a human being.

He was, I could not, I was exhausted, we had been fighting since midnight, there had been no letup. Endless corridors of wheat, running, why was I running? Explosions everywhere, the feeling that I alone was the quarry, a desperate skittering figure in a moonwashed landscape, some unseen force trying to obliterate me, hurling salvo after salvo of lethal steel wherever I turned, however I maneuvered. I was tired enough to fall flat to the earth and hug the trampled stalks to my mud-stained tunic, but too frightened to rest because machine guns relentlessly chewed the night and new bomb craters opened everywhere, spewing fresh legs and arms, sodden mannequin limbs dripping human blood, a severed helmeted head rolling, rolling, rolling, and coming to a stop at last, black with powder, red with blood, startling white where bone fragments had come through the cheek.

He appeared, he suddenly, I had expected someone like myself, young and frightened, the German equivalent of an Eau Fraiche lumberjack, with a girl back home in Dusseldorf, a fräulein writing the equivalent of Nancy’s letters, someone who perhaps had listened to our own barrage this past midnight and trembled as I had, someone who had never slain and who now, because of a numbered hill behind us, was ready to kill for the first time. But he, the wheat shifted in a sudden wind fresh off the river, I raised my head and jerked my eyes to the right and then rapidly to the left, every sound was terrifying, every movement cause for fresh panic, and he, he rose, he suddenly stood before me in the undulating wheat. For a moment brief and static, for a frozen moment brittle enough to shatter with a heartbeat, we looked at each other, our eyes met and we stood on the edge of homicide in a foreign wheatfield while machine guns clacked like distant farmyard fowl.

He was very big, I thought Why, he’s a man, they’re asking me to fight a man. Not a boy, not someone like myself, but a grown man who looked at me in shocked surprise from beneath a helmet certainly more formidable than my own, new leather boots and belt, gas mask slung and hanging from a strap on his massive chest, rifle clutched in both hands, his finger inside the trigger guard. I looked at him, this all took place in a tick of time, there was a sudden hush as the machine guns stopped for only an instant, and we looked at each other, and I thought Say something to him and I thought What are we doing here? and I wanted to giggle, I was possessed of an uncontrollable urge to giggle, I could feel my face cracking with an overriding need for laughter. And then the machine guns near the railroad fill began again, and I knew that one of us must kill. I knew, he knew, we faced each other in that foolish instant of non-recognition, and were both murderers in our hearts long before one of us became a murderer in fact.

As my finger groped for the trigger of the rifle, the notion that this stranger would want to kill me seemed idiotic, we did not know each other. And yet my finger moved of its own volition, it seemed, found the trigger with practiced ease, those weeks and weeks of pulling off shots at lifeless targets paid off now in a moonwashed field south of the river Marne, and I raised my rifle even as my finger tightened and the gun recoiled sharply, the butt hitting me in the ribs, so that I was aware only of my own sharp pain at first and did not see the German’s face burst open. I winced, I must have cursed, he was falling away from me, falling back straight and stiff, already dead, the force of the bullet knocking him back some three feet. I watched as he fell, fascinated by his face spurting blood, and wondered if he, like me, had wanted to giggle at our unexpected confrontation.

And then I turned away.

Feeling nothing.

Only later that day, when Captain Reid told us we’d broken the back of the German attack and with it their hopes of taking the Surmelin Valley and the Rocq Plateau, only then did I say to Timothy Bear, “I killed a man, Tim.”

And he said, “Yes, Bert.”

“I didn’t feel anything,” I said.

We looked at each other. We were eating horsemeat goulash in a trench stinking of pulp and gristle; overhead, four Spads were engaged with a flight of red-nosed Fokkers. We looked at each other and were silent. I studied Timothy Bear, his face, his eyes, and knew I would never again see the Indiana farmboy who had cajoled us through sixteen weeks of training at Camp Greene. In his place, there was someone as alien to me as my German victim had been, and I realized as he stared back at me, that he too was seeing someone other than the Bertram Tyler he once had known.

Friendly strangers, we sat and chewed on horsemeat and watched the aerial acrobatics overhead, and in a little while we were telling stories about what had happened to us separately that night, and a short time later we were laughing together.

August

We had come all the way from the campus of the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, following the same route the three slain civil rights workers had taken at the end of June, stopping in Meridian, Mississippi, and then going on to visit the charred ruins of the Mount Zion Methodist Church in Longdale, the heat a sentient adversary, dust add mimosa mingled, the taste of death and the scent of fuzzy pink, the insects rattling in the scrub pine, the scorched iron bell lying mute in unforgiving ashes. We had then gone through Philadelphia, namesake of another town in another place where another bell had once sounded for liberty, and driven twelve miles northeast on State Highway 21 to the Bogue Chitto Swamp where the charred remains of the Ford station wagon had been found, three of its hubcaps already stolen by Choctaw Indians from the reservation, a final piece of irony. And then we had traveled in shimmering Mississippi heat, our pilgrimage taking us in the opposite direction to the Old Jolly Farm where the three men had been found six weeks after they’d disappeared, buried twenty feet deep in red clay, each of them shot to death. Chaney, the Negro, had first been viciously beaten. The New York pathologist who examined his body said later, “I have never witnessed bones so severely shattered.”

Now we rode westward toward the Louisiana border and a town called Clayton, where we hoped to continue our voter registration work. The man driving the car was a twenty-three-year-old named

Luke (no relation to the saint, but a divinity student nonetheless) Foulds from Brewster, New York, who had been one of the eight hundred students indoctrinated at Oxford during the week Chancy, Schwerner, and Goodman were there. He wore rimless eyeglasses, and he had a pale pinched face, a rather sharp nose, thin unsmiling lips. A humorless man by nature, he had become positively dour after learning that the three workers — he had known Schwerner casually — had indeed been killed. A rumor had circulated in the beginning, you sec, that the disappearance of the trio was a hoax, a stunt concocted by CORE to call attention to the voter registration drive. I knew right away they were dead, however, and I told my father that their murders only strengthened my resolve to go south with Larry Peters.

I was sitting alongside Luke on the front seat of his old Chevy, and Larry was in back with a girl named Jennifer Stott, who was a sophomore at Vassar, and who never let anyone forget it. Blond hair cut close to her head, busty in a white peasant blouse, thick-hipped in a pale denim skirt, meaty thighs flashing whenever she crossed her legs, she sat barefoot beside Larry and tried to convince him she had not been frightened when a gang of kids in Philadelphia had yelled “Nigger lover!” at the car. I knew she was lying because I myself had been scared half out of my wits. The only one of us, in fact, who had maintained his cool against the approach of what looked like impending disaster was old dour Luke. Which was perhaps proper and fitting, since Luke was our mentor and our boss, and the three of us were here only to serve as his assistants, having symbolically joined him on the Fourteenth of July, Bastille Day.

It had been some July.

I was willing to bet there had never been a July like it in the history of the United States.

“This July started in June,” my mother had said, and I think she was right, but I also think she was referring only to the temperature, which was the highest ever recorded in Talmadge for that month. Lake Abundance (ha!) fell a good four feet (which wasn’t very comical to the people who owned summer homes around it) and there were more brush fires in town than ever before, the siren on the firehouse roof erupting some two or three times a clay, volunteers popping into their cars and rushing all over the countryside, invariably arriving too late to save anything but the plumbing. Elsewhere, though, July had also started in June with the resignation of Ambassador Lodge in Saigon, and the disappearance of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner in Mississippi. Of the two events, the one unquestionably most important was the disappearance of the rights workers. Immediately following the passing of a massive civil rights bill by the Senate, the scent of violence rising from that snake-infested southern swamp caused most thinking citizens to wonder what would happen when the bill passed the House and became the law of the land. The war, or whatever the hell it was, in Vietnam had been meandering along through four administrations now, and there seemed little danger of it changing its course for the worse, even with the appointment of an Army general as the new ambassador. In fact, President Johnson had told the press that Taylor’s appointment in no way indicated a change of policy in Vietnam. “The United States intends no rashness,” he said, “and seeks no wider war,” and there was every reason to believe him. We had our hands full right here at home without worrying about a limited commitment eleven thousand miles away. In fact, by the time the civil rights bill became law in July, we had lost only a hundred and forty-nine American advisers in Vietnam, which was not a bad average considering the fact that we’d been actively involved there since December 1961, when our first helicopter company went over to assist the Vietnamese army.

In Mississippi — where for the first time in history Negroes were protected by law when entering such heretofore exclusive places as polling booths, classrooms (though I had thought they’d settled that one back in 1954), factories, hotels, restaurants, movie theaters and even barber shops — they were dragging the Pearl River and trying to find the body of a Negro named James Chancy, who together with the two white men Schwerner and Goodman (“Are they Jewish?” my father asked) had disappeared on June 21. It made for confusion.

It even made for confusion in a place like Talmadge, which in all modesty had more than its proportionate share of intellectuals and influentials: professors, writers, editors, art directors, critics, performers, publishers, all of them eager and willing to tell the rest of the nation what to read, cat, wear, watch, enjoy, drink, feel, and think. Even the Talmadge brain trust, as exemplified by such sterling exhibits as Professor Robert Fitzhugh who taught film and film techniques at the university and who only the week before had reviewed Harlow for The New York Times Book Review, and who had written oh just countless critiques of other books for The New York Review of Books and anonymously for Time; or Leon Coopersmith, he of battle-of-bands fame, not to mention fortune in radio broadcasting earned through the popularity of his most ambitious show, a gem titled Hello, Mrs. America, which was beamed daily from a restaurant somewhere in downtown Pasadena, nor even the television producer David Regan, who had created a half-hour teen-age comedy show entitled Wing It! doubtless inspired by his beauteous wife Katherine Bridges Regan, acquired not four years ago, he being almost forty at the time, and she having practically gone through elementary school with me (I had, in fact, once had a terrifying crush on her); even those towering intellectuals — but no, seriously, even the really intelligent and creative people in Talmadge didn’t know quite what to make of that July.

Goldwater did nothing to help the confusion. Talmadge was a Republican town but essentially sensible, anyway, except for the Lake Abundance crowd and the four faggots on Javelin Road and the wife-swappers who had lived in brief discreet bliss on Caramoor Way. So now the Party in conclave high and solemn had nominated for its presidential candidate a man who had: 1- Voted against the civil rights bill (there were only three Negro families in all Talmadge and perhaps a bushelful of Jews, but everyone in town nonetheless liked to think of himself as highly democratic, small d), and 2- Advocated the defoliation of Vietnam (the people in Talmadge, tree-worshipers all, visualized a vast unsightly parking lot in Southeast Asia, probably in a two-acre residential zone) and 3- Promised to give his commanders in the field all the support they needed, even if it meant the tactical use of nuclear weapons (that giant mushroom specter rose over the twin steeples of the First Congregational Church — wherein David Regan had taken for his bride the young and doubtless giggling Katherine Bridges — and scared the population witless).

The British publisher who was bringing out my father’s De Gaulle book in London, visiting our house at the end of June, solemnly asked, “You people aren’t serious about this Goldwater person, are you?” and my father had pooh-poohed the Arizonan’s chances, figuring even then that Scranton would surely get the nomination, especially now that Lodge was coming home to help him campaign. But in July, there was Goldwater, boasting — as the current joke had it — that come November he would ride triumphantly into Washington in his coach and four. And nobody in Talmadge knew what the fuck to think.

My mother’s daily letters to me in Mississippi were a form of cursive whistling in the dark. She had told my father that he owed it to me to grant me my manhood, but now that I was actually in the South and violence was breaking out everywhere around me, her courage was beginning to falter and she filled page after page with Talmadge’s reactions to the nomination, gossipy, endearing, her tiny precise handwriting only inadvertently betraying the fears she later confided to me. The situation was not helped when she received a letter from the very organization I was serving, warning of the dangers I might encounter, and announcing that because of the “tense situation,” they were not accepting any further volunteers for their program. Then, to put the maraschino cherry on it, a New York detective shot and killed a fifteen-year-old Negro boy, and a cry of police brutality roared all the way from Yorkville into black Harlem where full-scale rioting erupted on the loneliest night of the week, which also happened to be hot and sticky like most July nights in New York, there has to be a connection between heat and violence.

In July, Talmadge pondered the Republican platform promising “full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” while brick-throwing, looting, burning Negroes in Harlem were passing out leaflets that proclaimed: “We don’t have to go to Mississippi because Mississippi is here in New York.”

And in August, I was in Mississippi in a moving car on a deserted highway as dusk deepened the sky and birds chattered wildly in the treetops.

(Wat Tyler, nattily dressed for travel in southern climes, rests his weary head against the back of the seat. In black and white, the sun glancing through the trees casts a leafy filigree upon the windshield.)

The automobile was parked at the side of the road ahead, the headlights on even though it was not yet dark. A man stood casually leaning against the side of the car as we approached. Seeing us, he stepped into the middle of the road and held up his hand. He was wearing gray trousers and a white shirt open at the throat. A gun was slung in a holster on his hip, and there was a deputy sheriff’s star pinned to his shirt pocket. Luke stopped the car. The man walked over. His hair and mustache were the color of his dusty boots. His eyes were a bright blue.

“Evening,” he said.

“Good evening,” Luke said.

“Mind if I have a look at your license and registration?”

“Is something wrong?” Luke asked.

“Nothing at all,” the deputy answered, and glanced into the back seat. “You coming from Philadelphia?” he asked.

“That’s right,” Luke said.

The deputy accepted Luke’s license and registration. In the beam of his own headlights, he studied both and then walked back to our car. “This’s a New York driver’s license,” he said.

“That’s right,” Luke said again.

“You from New York?”

“Brewster,” Luke said.

“That in New York?”

“Upstate New York.”

“Guess that’s how come you ain’t familiar with the law here in Miss’ippi.”

“What law is that?” Luke said.

“Lights on at dusk,” the deputy said.

Immediately, Luke readied for the dashboard switch and turned on the headlights.

“Well, it’s a little late now,” the deputy said. He glanced at his watch. “Close to seven o’clock,” he said, “that’s a long way past dusk.”

(Wat Tyler, sitting beside Luke on the front seat of the silent automobile, feels a sudden lurch of fear. He wets his lips. The deputy stands motionless outside the car. In the woods lining the road, an owl hoots and falls silent.)

“Want to come along with us?” the deputy asked.

“What for?”

“I jus’ tole you. Lights on at dusk.” The deputy smiled pleasantly. “Yours were off.”

“Well, they’re on now,” Luke said.

“But too late.”

“Look, officer...”

“I jus’ think y’all better come along with us, huh?” the deputy said, still smiling. “For your own p’tection, huh?”

“We’re supposed to be in Clayton by...”

“Oh, were you heading for Clayton?”

Luke was silent for a moment. Then he merely nodded.

“Huh?” the deputy asked.

“Yes,” Luke said.

“What you going to Clayton for?” the deputy asked.

“We’re going there on business,” Luke said.

“What kind of business?”

“Personal business.”

“Nigger business?” the deputy asked. Glancing at Larry in the back seat, he grinned and said, “Oh, ’scuse me, boy. Didn’t see you sitting there in the dark and all.” Turning his attention back to Luke, he said, “Been a lot of agitation down this way, maybe you heard about it. I think y’all be safer with us tonight, ’stead of cruising the roads.”

“We’re not cruising the roads,” Luke said. “We’re driving directly to Clayton.”

“No,” the deputy said, and shook his head. “Maybe you was driving to Clayton, but you ain’t driving to Clayton no more. What you’re doing is you’re letting my partner there take the wheel, and you’re coming along with us. Now that’s what you’re doing, you see?” The deputy smiled again. “I think you sec,” he said.

Casually, he sauntered over to the other car and whispered a few words to his partner behind the wheel. The front door opened. His partner, wearing identical gray trousers and white shirt open at the throat, came out of the car and tugged at his undershorts. He was almost entirely bald, a fringe of reddish hair circling his tanned pate. A dead cigar stub was clamped between his teeth. He ambled over to our car, smiled at Luke, and said, “Evening. My partner says I’m to drive you into town.”

“I guess so,” Luke said, and sighed.

“It’s for your own p’tection,” the second deputy said, almost apologetically, and then looked into the back seat. “Nigger,” he said, “you mind getting out?”

“What for?” Luke asked.

“I don’t like riding with niggers. He’ll have to walk.”

The first deputy, who had come back to the car and was standing casually and angularly near the fender, the heel of his right hand resting lazily on the butt of his revolver, said, “Come on now, Fred, be democratic.”

“Oh, I am, Curly,” Fred said, “I am that. It’s just I can’t stand the stink of niggers, that’s all. You mind getting out, boy?”

“You stay where you are,” Luke said, without glancing into the back seat.

“Now that’s not wise,” Fred said, chewing on his cigar. “Not wise at all. You don’t want to be adding a more serious charge to a tiny little traffic violation, now do you?”

“What’s the more serious charge?” Luke asked.

“Resisting an officer.”

“No one’s resisting an officer.”

“Well now, I just heard you advise that black nigger back there to stay where he is, whereas I asked him to get out of the car.” Fred leaned into the open window and said, directly to Larry, “Nigger, didn’t I ask you polite and nice to get out of that friggin’ heap? ’Scuse me, miss,” he added, and touched his index finger to his eyebrow, as if in salute.

“Well, what do you say, fellas?” Curly asked.

“If he gets out, we all get out,” Luke said.

“It’s a long walk to town,” Fred said.

“Close to four miles,” Curly said.

“Past dam sites and everything,” Fred said.

(Another jagged lance of fear. Wat Tyler remembers the farm where the bodies of the three workers were discovered, bitterweed and scrub pine, the hole left by the dragline in the earthen dam, the men buried in shallow graves while the dam was still in construction, and week after week the unsuspecting builder had covered them with yards of red Mississippi clay.)

“He’s not getting out of this car alone,” Luke said.

“Suit yourself,” Curly said. “You want to all get out? Please?”

We got out of the car. We all stayed close to Luke. The one called Curly (though his hair was as straight as my own) seemed the least menacing of the two deputies, and our eyes kept wandering to his face for reassurance. Jennifer was petrified. The stench of fear rose from her body as though emanating from her crotch, strong and female and feral. She was not a pretty girl, but there was a look of ready availability about her, combining now with the fear on her face and in her eyes, to create an impression of extreme vulnerability, the willing rape victim. I sensed it was a dangerous look to be wearing on this deserted highway, and I felt my own fear rising again as Fred’s eyes traveled over the outline of her full white brassiere beneath her white cotton blouse. Jennifer turned slightly sideways, into my shoulder, to avoid his gaze.

“You ain’t afraid, are you, miss?” Fred asked.

“What’s there to be afraid of?” she asked, intending the words to come out boldly and with just the proper touch of Vassar hauteur, surprising even herself when she heard the tremulous sound that issued from her mouth.

“Nothing.” Fred said. “Any white girl who ain’t afraid of riding with a nigger sure ain’t got nothing else to be afraid of, has she, Curly?”

“Nothing at all,” Curly answered.

“You just trot your sweet little ass up ahead of the car there,” Fred said, and grinned around his cigar. “We’ll drive nice and slow all the way to town.”

(In Wat Tyler’s camera eye, the eye of a generation, he sees himself in a filthy jailhouse, winos and bums holding kangaroo court over his sodomized form inert on an insect-ridden, excrement-befouled floor. Courageously he bears the weight of a bearded redneck who calls him nigger lover and screaming faggot pansy while outside a deputy holds a water hose at the ready and the black-and-white film cuts fitfully in orgasm not his own.)

The holding cell I occupied with Larry and Luke was perhaps eight feet long by five feet wide, a washbasin in one corner, an exposed toilet bowl in the other. The cell, the corridor outside were scrupulously clean, smelling of disinfectant; even the water in the toilet bowl was tinted green and smelled of pine. A deputy sat at the far end of the long corridor, reading a magazine under a caged light bulb. An air conditioner hummed somewhere serenely.

(An old Negro condemned to death for raping a white girl strums on his guitar while next door Jennifer sobs out her fears to the two Negro girls from Howard who share the cell with her. She is afraid that the deputies will force her to strip and stick their fingers into all her apertures. On black-and-white film, Wat Tyler sticks his lingers into at least one of her apertures. Her milky white breasts, nipple-tipped, fill the screen, and Larry Peters’ black face is superimposed on them while the offscreen Negro strums his guitar and mournfully laments the fact that he was caught in flagrante delicto.)

A television set was going at the far end of the corridor, the turnkey alternately dozing and glancing up at the movie which had come on at eleven-thirty. Luke was asleep in one of the hanging berths against the right-hand wall of the cell. I was sitting on the lower berth, and Larry was on a straight-backed chair opposite me. I had had to move my bowels from the moment the deputy stopped us on the highway, but now I was embarrassed to do so on a toilet bowl that could be seen from the corridor outside the cell. They had officially charged us with the motor vehicle violation, as well as with resisting a public officer in the discharge of his duty (the judge had said something about willfully delaying and obstructing) both of which heinous crimes were admittedly only misdemeanors but apparently serious enough to warrant the setting of bail for each of us at a hundred dollars.

“The idea is to keep us here long enough to miss the Clayton meeting tomorrow night,” Larry said. “Everybody’ll arrive at eight o’clock, waiting for the fearless rights workers from the North, but the fearless workers won’t show. So they’ll all drag their asses back to their shanties, and shake their heads, and mutter in their pone about how there isn’t any hope for the Negro in this country, they jes’ ain’ no hope for us pore ole niggers, Amos,” he mimicked in a thick watermelon dialect, and then scowled in despair.

He was very black, no, that’s not true, he was very brown, a good chocolate fudge brown color, with thick lips showing pink inside, and wide nostrils, and a huge brow, and hair cropped very close to his skull. You could not mistake him for anything but a Negro. I mean, there was not the slightest possibility that he would have been cast as Santa Claus in a high school play. Considering his somewhat obvious coloration (he was one of two Negroes at Talmadge High, the other being a sort of mocha color, like the drapes in my father’s office), I should have noticed him sooner. The fact is, however, that I was busy with my own friends and my own pursuits and didn’t become aware of him until he made the approach.

He introduced himself on the steps outside Main one day, and told me he was a piano player and was interested in getting himself an organ, did I think he could come over to the house to try mine out before he bought one? I said sure he could, and he came over one spring day after school, we were both juniors then, the forsythias lining the drive were in full flower, I remember how rich his skin looked against the riotous yellow as we went into the house.

I took him up to my room and he fooled around with the Farfisa a little, and then hesitantly asked me how much it had cost. When I told him, he nodded solemnly and then said maybe he ought to take a few lessons before he spent that kind of money. Then, unexpectedly, he asked if I would like to give him lessons, and offered to pay me for them. I told him I’d be happy to teach him what I know (I wasn’t happy at all) and that he certainly didn’t have to pay me, which pleased him enormously and which doubtless qualified me for membership in the NAACP. Anyway, I gave him three lessons and discovered he was absolutely without talent. He didn’t even have a sense of rhythm, which sounds like a sick joke, but which happened to be absolutely true. After the fourth lesson, I told him he was a hopeless case, and he got mad as hell and didn’t speak to me for a month afterward. Then, I forget what happened, I think we were working together on the junior variety show, that’s right, Dawn Patrol was playing and Larry was running the switchboard, and we got to talking again, and he admitted he couldn’t even hum in tune in the shower, and that was how we got to be friends.

Well, I say friends, but we weren’t really friends, not then.

I don’t think I was using Larry as my Show Nigger, but I do think he became my Guinea Pig Nigger, and I’m sure now that my curiosity was a bit overbearing at times, yes, I’m positive. There were too many things I wanted to know about Negroes, and Larry was the only Negro I knew, so I pursued him relentlessly, asking him whatever came to mind, even if I felt or knew the question would embarrass him. That sounds terrible now, I’m really quite ashamed of it, like superior white massa asking bare-ass pickaninny do he stand when he pee like de white man do. But I had the idea then (or at least this is what I told myself in defense of my own position) that the only way Larry and I could explore our samenesses was to understand our differences. We had to do this, I told him, because the Negro as we had invented him in America simply was not the equal of the white man.

The first time I told Larry he was not my equal, he punched me in the mouth. That was when we were still getting to be friends. The second time I told him was when we were both seniors and feeling like big shots with our orange-and-black senior beanies, the big T for Talmadge on the front superimposed with the hopeful date of our graduation, ’64. We were coming past the playing field where the soccer team was practicing head shots, Coach Lambert throwing the ball repeatedly at the skulls of his players, and they dizzily batting it back to him. It was a bright fall Connecticut day, clear and sharp and invigorating. Larry was wearing his team sweater (he was on the swimming team and had earned his varsity letter as a freshman) over a white turtleneck — brown skin, black sweater, orange arm stripes and letter T, orange-and-black beanie, and behind him the riotous plumage of autumn, red, orange, gold, tan — color was everywhere around us, and very much on my mind.

I opened the subject cautiously this time; he had a devastating right jab, and I was very fond of my teeth. I also opened it guiltily, wondering whether all my talk about equality or the lack of it wasn’t merely a coverup for what was actually prejudice. Was I, in effect, simply taking an unpopular position (You are not my equal, Larry, and I will explain why) to screen an even less popular position? (I do not like the color of your skin, Larry, nor the way you talk, or walk, or smell. In short, I envy the size of your cock.) I had, for example, never been able to stand the complexion of Indians (not American Indians; I had never seen one — but Indian Indians) who always seemed to me to be the color of dried anemic dog shit.

Well, I said, and Larry listened, ready to take offense, what I meant when we talked about this in June, you see, is that the white man has forced this goddam peculiar situation...

Oh, peculiar, Larry said. Is that what it is? Peculiar?

Yes, because it’s unnatural. Well, you know what I mean, Larry, all the business, for example, of not allowing slaves to marry. How can we expect the Negro male today to accept responsibility if his ancestors...

He’s lazy and shiftless, right? Larry said.

Look, I said, I’m trying to be serious here. I’m talking about not allowing the Negro to get a good education or a meaningful job. I’m talking about all the crap the white man’s forced upon the Negro in order to create an inferior human being.

Here we go again, Larry said.

Larry, I’m trying to say that the white man’s task in the next generation...

The white man’s burden, you mean.

I mean our task, all right, yours and mine, not only the white man’s, ours, okay? Our task in this next generation’ll be to cut through all that crap and create a new American Negro who...

By selective breeding, right? Like livestock, right?

Fuck you, I said.

Fuck you, Larry said. You’re a bigot like all the rest. You’re just a smarter bigot, is all.

Okay, I said.

You don’t want me to be your equal, Larry said.

I want you to be my fuckin’ equal, I said.

Then get me a date with a white girl, he said.

Get yourself a date with a white girl, I answered.

He didn’t tell me until much later, when we trusted each other enough to talk openly about girls (and I honestly believed that was the last barricade) that he had taken my advice and got himself a date with a white girl named Patricia Converse from Stamford, who was no prize, but who had sucked him out of his mind. I felt an initial flaring of anger, don’t tell me prejudice doesn’t die hard. Don’t tell me my aversion to the color of Indian Indians (not American Indians, mind you) had nothing to do with Negroes. I visualized Patricia Converse as a very fair blonde with blue eyes, I saw Larry’s ugly black cock in her mouth, and I felt violently protective of all my women, big white massa standin in de doorway guardin Missy Annabelle home fum Atlanta, don’t tell me, man. Don’t tell me I didn’t have to step on something inside me and crush it that day, smashing what I thought was the final barricade, and seeing a small flash of triumph in Larry’s eyes, knowing he savored the image of White Womanhood Defiled that flitted through my mind, and wanting this time to punch him in the mouth because he was my equal now or at least I thought he was. What I didn’t understand was that I was not yet his equal.

To become his equal (and I didn’t learn this until we arrived in Mississippi), I would have to stand with him on a red clay dam, and be shot to death by white men to whom my color meant nothing, shadowed as it was by my Negro friend beside me.

I was not willing to die for Larry Peters.

I sat opposite him in a very clean cell in a very clean jail, both of us tired and depressed, neither of us speaking. From the far end of the corridor, we recognized Lyndon Johnson’s voice coming from the television set, and Larry said, “What’s that?” and I said, “Shhh.”

“My fellow Americans,” Johnson said, “as President and Commander-in-Chief, it is my duty to report that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply...”

“What does he mean?” I asked Larry.

“Those PT-boats a few days ago,” Larry said. “The ones that attacked our destroyer.”

“That reply,” Johnson said, “is being given as I speak to you tonight. Air action is now in execution against gunboats and certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam which have been used in these hostile operations.”

“There it is,” Larry said. “The son of a bitch is declaring war!”

“How can he do that without an act of Congress?” I asked.

“He’s doing it, isn’t he?” Larry answered.

“Our response for the present,” Johnson said, “will be limited and fitting. We Americans know, although others appear to forget, the risks of spreading conflict. We still seek no wider war.”

The turnkey, apparently bored by these events in Southeast Asia, clicked the set to another channel. Robert Mitchum’s unmistakable voice superseded Johnson’s in the jailhouse corridor as he urged his men into combat against the Japanese.

“Maybe they’re just testing us,” I said.

“Maybe,” Larry said.

“Like...”

“Like what?”

“Like... I don’t know... when they put those missiles in Cuba.”

“Testing our resolve, huh?”

“Yeah, our resolve.”

“Yeah,” Larry said. He sighed deeply. “You think we’ll ever get out of this joint?”

“Sure,” I said. “My father should have got the telegram by now, don’t you think?”

“Oh sure,” Larry said. A troubled look crossed his face. He hesitated a moment, as though not certain he wished to reveal what he was thinking. Even when he started to speak, he said only, “Jesus, I hope...” and then shook his head.

“What?” I said.

“I don’t want to go to war, do you?” he said.

“No,” I said.

It was not my father who came down to bail us out.

The man who stepped through the doorway at the far end of the corridor the next morning, ducking his head under the lintel, rising to his full height again as he followed the turnkey to my cell, tall and powerful-looking for all his sixty-four years, was my grandfather.

“Hello, Walter,” he said.

“Hello, Grandpa,” I said, and smiled.

“Have they been treating you well?” he asked.

“I guess so,” I said. “Grandpa, these are my friends, Luke Foulds and Larry Peters.”

“How do you do, boys?” my grandfather said.

“And there’re some more in the next cell,” I said.

“How many all together?” my grandfather asked.

“Well, the three girls and us,” I said.

“I’ll make out a check for six hundred dollars,” my grandfather said to the turnkey.

“I got nothing to do with money,” the turnkey said. “You see them upstairs about that.”

“I will,” my grandfather said.

“Sir,” Luke said, “this is very kind of you, but I’ve sent home for money and...”

“My grandson’s wire indicated you were all in a hurry to get somewhere.”

“Yes, sir, we are. But...”

“Well, you can reimburse me later,” my grandfather said. “Meanwhile, let me get you out of this place.”

“Grandpa?” I said.

“Yes, Walter?”

“Couldn’t my father come?”

My grandfather looked at me for what seemed like a very long time. At last, he said, “No, Wat, I’m sorry, he couldn’t.” He hesitated only an instant. “He has an important business meeting in New York tomorrow morning.” And then, before I could read the truth in his eyes and be hurt by it, he turned swiftly and walked down the corridor.

September

My mother died on the second Sunday in September, four days after Italy surrendered to the Allies. The Air Force gave me an emergency furlough and a lift on a C-47 to the Orchard Place Airport in Park Ridge. From there, I took a train and arrived in Chicago shortly after dusk. I did not want to go home. I was certain there would be a black wreath on the door, and I did not want to see it.

The chaplain had called me into his office at ten o’clock that morning and said, “Cadet Tyler, I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you. We got a call from Chicago just a few minutes ago. Your mother had a heart attack and passed away last night.”

I looked at him and hated him instantly, the gold-rimmed eyeglasses and the echoing gold cross on his collar, the harsh grating sound of his Bronx speech as he told me my mother was dead — no, “passed away,” he had said, “passed away last night,” the euphemism somehow making the fact more intolerable. I nodded and fastened my eyes on a bayonet letter opener on his desk, refusing to look into his face, afraid that I would begin crying here in the presence of this goddamned pious fool from Baychester Avenue.

“I’m sorry, Cadet Tyler,” he said.

“Thank you, sir.”

“I’ve already spoken to the C.O. about leave.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“He’d like a few words with you when we’re through here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“My own mother died in childbirth,” he said, as if somehow that exonerated him.

The barracks was empty as I packed my duffle and tried to sort out in my mind what I would need for my four-day furlough to Chicago. They would be burying her on Wednesday, and this was Sunday — no, that was only three days, I was due back by formation Thursday morning. The C.O. had told me he’d have to put me back a class unless I returned in time. As it was, I would have to make up two hours of code, two hours of sea-air recognition, and an hour each of math and physics, the C.O. telling me all this as though the possibility of washing out was the foremost thing in my mind on that Sunday my mother died. I told him I would be sure to be back by formation Thursday, sir, and he said I had better, because whereas it was permissible for me to miss three days of my intensive and arduous ten-week training program (though I would have to make up those lost hours, I understood that, didn’t I? Yes, sir, I said, I understand that), it was inconceivable that I could miss anything more than that without getting chased into the class behind mine. It’s for your own good, Tyler, he told me, we can’t put a man in the air without the training he needs to survive, all of this while the knowledge of my mother’s death sat behind my eyes and I wanted to cry but could not.

I could not cry on the transport, either, because there were twenty-five other guys in the plane, all headed for the Chicago Army Air Base. The train into the city was packed with civilians and soldiers, and I sat stiffly erect by the window and listened to the wheels and thought of movies I had seen where a guy is sitting by a train window and the wheels are clacking and the sound triggers a flashback, but there seemed to be nothing I could remember. I could not remember what my mother looked like, I could not remember a single one of her homespun sayings. And, of course, I could not cry because a member of the United States Army Air Force does not cry on a public conveyance, not when he is wearing on his garrison cap that winged propeller, no.

I could not cry in the taxicab, either. The driver, watching me in the rear view mirror as we worked our way east down Washington Street from the station, said, “Well, it looks like the Cards and the Yankees again, huh?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Same as last year.”

“Yes.”

“Probably be a lousy series.”

“Mmm.”

“Well, how can you have a good series when half the guys are already in the service? You know where Di Maggio is? In Santa Ana. Where’s that, that Santa Ana?”

“California.”

“Yeah, California. Remember the pitching Johnny Beasley done for the Cards in last year’s series? You know where he is this year? In the Air Force, that’s where he is. It’s gonna be lousy, how can it be good? You think it’ll be good?”

“I don’t know.”

“Naw, it can’t be good,” the driver said, and fell silent until we pulled up in front of the old house I loved on East Scott Street. Then all he said was, “That’s seventy cents, soldier.” I paid him and tipped him and got out of the cab and hesitated on the sidewalk because I suddenly felt like a stranger here. I had left Chicago on June 27, and had spent five weeks in basic military training in Nashville, Tennessee, proceeding at the end of July, directly and without furlough, to Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Alabama, for pre-flight schooling — a stranger here now, and more a stranger because my mother was dead.

There was no wreath on the door.

I thought at first that someone had made a mistake, perhaps that cockeyed preacher from the Bronx had given me a message intended for a Cadet Taylor or Wylie or some other unlucky bastard, but not for me, Will Tyler, whose mother could surely not be dead, she was only forty-two years old. The brass doorknobs were polished, the twin spruces climbed into the blue stained-glass sky, everything seemed the way it always had. And then the door opened, and I looked at my sister Linda’s face, and knew there had been no mistake. My mother was dead.

They had placed the coffin in the living room, and I thought at once they had put it in the wrong room. It should have been in the kitchen, with the radio going, and with “Just Plain Bill” filling my mother’s calm universe with fictitious turmoil. There were wooden folding chairs arranged in rows before the coffin, and my father sat on one of them beside my Aunt Kate and her Apache husband, Oscar, who looked more and more like an Indian the older he got. There were banks of flowers heaped beside the open coffin; I suddenly wondered if I should have sent some. My father’s eyes were red-rimmed.

I had not yet looked at my mother.

I went to my father, and he embraced me and kissed me on the cheek, and said only, “Will,” and my Aunt Kate turned to Oscar and said, “Oscar, it’s Will,” and Oscar nodded, his seamed and wrinkled face impassive. There were other relatives in the room, they came slowly into focus, my father’s younger brother John, who now lived in Milwaukee, and my mother’s two sisters, who still lived in Freshwater, and cousins I had never seen, hordes of relatives, how had they managed to assemble so quickly? I had the strangest feeling they were all waiting for me to go to the coffin, that this was the part in the movie where someone would turn to someone else and say, “It’s her son,” the way Aunt Kate had said, “Oscar, it’s Will,” and then their eyes would follow me, and they would carefully gauge my reactions when I saw my mother dead, calculating my grief, sympathizing with my loss, and yet somehow detached, as though denying the presence of death by forcing only the immediate family to become its reluctant hosts. Perversely, I would not go to the coffin, not while their eyes were upon me. I saw the question on my father’s face, Aren’t you going to pay your respects, Will? and I ignored it and chatted with my Aunt Clara, who was my mother’s oldest sister, and whose son was with the Marines somewhere in the Pacific. Do you think you’ll be heading out that way, Will? she asked, and I said I didn’t know, I still had almost seven months of training ahead of me, and my aunt said, Maybe it’ll be over before you get there, and I said I certainly hope so, Aunt Clara, not meaning it.

I did not go to the coffin until I was alone in the room.

My sister had made sandwiches and coffee, and everyone had gone into the kitchen, Oscar asking my father if there was anything to drink in the house, the old Injun seeking the white man’s firewater, and my father took him into the dining room where the locked liquor cabinet stood against one wood-paneled wall. I listened to the voices floating through the corridors of the house that could never seem home to me again, drifting toward the kitchen (the image of my mother, head tilted to one side, favoring her good ear as she listened to the radio, peas as green as her eyes tumbling into the sink colander), and I was alone with her, and she was dead.

I knelt by the coffin, and I looked into her face.

And her eyes closed gently by some undertaker’s thumbs were sightless, and I noticed white strands in her golden hair, and I remembered in a painful rush that brought fresh tears to my eyes this gentle woman I had loved so dearly, this humorless country girl who could explode into sudden laughter, this comforting, guiding, devoted woman who had been my mother. I reached out to touch her cold and lifeless hand folded across her bosom, and sobbed my grief against the padded altar railing before the coffin and could think of no prayer to send her out of my heart and out of my mind.

I felt my father’s hand on my shoulder.

He said something to me, and I nodded and turned to him, and held him close as though fearful I would lose him too in the very next moment, held him fiercely and tightly while the voices whispered in the other rooms.

We buried her on Wednesday morning.

I went directly from the cemetery to the Northwestern station on Canal and Madison, and from there by train to the Orchard Place Airport where I hitched a ride on a C-54 going to Montgomery. We developed engine trouble on the way down, and landed for repairs at a small airport someplace in Tennessee. The pilot told us we would not be ready to take off again until eleven that night, and were free to leave the airport if we wanted to. I checked my duffle bag and took a bus into the nearest town.

There was a sense of anonymity in those wartime streets. The sidewalks were sticky with a gelatinous khaki-colored mass that seeped in and out of bars and shops, arcades and luncheonettes, an eyeless seeking protoplasmic ooze that sucked from every Army town in the country whatever juices it possessed. Souvenir shops and shooting galleries, hot-dog stands and honky-tonks, movie theaters and greasy spoons boomed with the coming of the GI dollar, fifty dollars a day once a month for the lowliest buck private, ten million men in khaki searching for pleasure on their hours away from camp. I was grateful for the loss of identity, and resentful when two farmer-type MPs singled me out to ask for my furlough papers. There was nothing in them to indicate that my mother had died. The MPs studied them leisurely, noting when I had left Montgomery and when I was due back, and then the tallest of the pair said, “Okay, soldier,” and I put the folded papers back into the pocket of my blouse, and continued walking up the street.

There were the sounds of approaching night, a tenor saxophone and trumpet in B-flat harmony, a woman’s laughter, wire brushes on a snare drum’s head, a soldier swearing, a bass fiddle pulsing like an exposed heart in a laboratory jar, a piano tinkling with a whorehouse beat, New Orleans twice removed, automobile horns and the clatter of high-heeled pumps ankle-strapped, the shuffle of GI boots along streets already cooling, the amplified blare from a record shop, “It seems to me I’ve heard that song before, It’s from an old, familiar score,” and across the way a sidewalk hawker shouting out the starting time for Stage Door Canteen, which was supposed to be a good movie and which I had not seen. I walked past him resplendent in his blue uniform and gold braid (wondering why he wasn’t in a real uniform) and studied the glossy black-and-white stills in the display cases, and then stood decisionless near the box office, and finally moved on again, merging with the sidewalk soldiers.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do.

Whiskey was scarce as hell, but by asking around, I managed to get onto a GI who had brought a case back with him from a weekend home, and who was selling the stuff at premium prices. I tucked the bottle into the waistband of my trousers, under my blouse, and walked into a little park on the edge of town where a Civil War general spread his quivering buttocks astride a rearing stallion, his sword pointed toward Washington, D.C., no doubt. I found a bench far from the sidewalk noises, uncorked the bottle, and began to drink. I drank steadily and deliberately. In a little while, I began crying.

The girl came lurching out of the darkness, as drunk as I was, as black as the darkness, black skin and black eyes, black chiffon dress tight across small high breasts, stumbled clickingly out of the darkness on high-heeled patent leather pumps, black, as sudden and as shocking as death itself, and stopped before me and put her hands on her hips and squinted me into focus and whispered, “What’s the matter, so’jer?”

“Nothing,” I said.

She stood above me with the professional tilt of a sidewalk whore, pelvis angled toward me, black dress clinging to a certain nakedness beneath, the promise of a tangle of black pubic hair, a pink nigger twat as ripe as the thick lips smiling at me now in open invitation. There was a small knife scar on her right temple. She smelled of perfume and perspiration.

“Why you cryin’ then?” she asked.

“My mother’s dead,” I answered.

“Tha’s too bad,” she said, and sat beside me with some difficulty, and put one plump widespread hand on my thigh. “Give me a drink, so’jer,” she said.

“Sure,” I said, and handed her the bottle.

She wiped the lip of the bottle before drinking from it, and then tilted it to her mouth and took a long burning swallow, and gagged, and wiped the lip again and handed the bottle back to me.

“Where you get that stuff?” she asked. “Taste jus’ like piss.”

“Bought it,” I said.

“Taste jus’ like piss,” she said again. “Give me some more of that stuff,” she said, and reached for the bottle. She drank

again, said, “Whoo, man, that’s jus’ awful,” and then said, “What’s yo’ name?”

“Will.”

“I’m Daisy. How’s that?”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“No, it ain’t, it’s dumb. Dumb ole nigger name.”

“No, it’s fine,” I said.

“Listen, I’m sorry ’bout your mother,” she said.

“That’s okay.”

“I got two li’l kids my own,” she said, “I know wha’s like to be a mother. I’m real sorry, man.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“Sorry,” she said, and shook her head. “Listen, Bill,” she said, “there one thing...”

“Will,” I said.

“Will,” she said, “one thing Daisy know how to do, it’s take the miseries out a man, you hear?”

“I hear,” I said.

“You want me to?”

“Got no money. Spent it all on this piss here.”

“I know you got money, Bill.”

“No, cross my heart.”

“How you ’spect to get a fancy lady ’thout money, Bill?”

“Got none though.”

“Show you a real fine time, Bill.”

“Got no money though.”

“Listen, Bill, tell me the truth.”

“That’s the truth.”

“You got money, Bill?”

“No money.”

“Pore Bill,” she said. “Mammy gone, money gone, whiskey ’most all gone. Give me some of that whiskey there, Bill.” She took the bottle again and, without wiping the lip this time, tilted it to her mouth and drank. “Oh, man,” she said, “like to burn a hole clear thu me.”

She handed the bottle back to me. We sat silently on the bench.

“Well, Bill,” she said at last, “what we goan do ’bout you?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“You wanna go back there in the bushes?”

“Got no money,” I said.

She rose unsteadily and stood swaying before the bench, her head tilted, her eyes squinted, a single gold earring dangling from her left ear, the other doubtless lost in some GIs undershorts. She held out her hand to me then, the white-pink palm suddenly revealed, and said, “Come on, Bill, we goan to church.”

She led me stumbling drunkenly off the path to the spreading cover of an oleander, and then she guided me gently to the ground and pulled the black dress up over her long brown legs and put my hand between them. “You got a rubber, man?” she asked, and I said, “Mmm, yes,” and she said, “Doan you come inside me ’thout one,” and I thought, Minister’s daughter or whore, all anybody thinks about these days is getting pregnant. What would be so wrong about getting pregnant, Daisy-girl, what would be so wrong about shooting some hot white seed into you? You want to be a whore with a twat of gold? Okay, make a baby for me, Daisy, make a baby girl with long blond hair and honey molasses skin to take the place of the one we laid deep in the ground today. “You goan be able to get this up, Bill?” she asked, and I said, “Take it in your mouth, honey,” and she said, “How I know where you had it last?” but she put her head into my lap and her lips gently parted over me, soft and wet and thick, and she sucked deep dizzying draughts and then abruptly moved her head away and whispered soberly, “Where’s the rubber, man?” I rolled onto my side, her hand dropping to cover me and coax me while I fumbled with my wallet and extracted from it the Trojan the United States Army Air Force had so thoughtfully provided. She smoothed it onto me with professional agility, and said, “You goan put that thing real deep inside me, Bill, you goan fuck this mother clear out of your head,” and I thought she had somehow got the sentence wrong, and then she was on her back again, her legs bent and spread, holding me in both deft guiding hands as she pulled me into her. “Now give it to me, Bill,” she said, and I thought, Honey, it’s Will, can’t you get that straight, and she said, “Tha’s right, baby, give it to me, fuck me out of my head, baby, give it to me, Bill, give it to me,” repeating a litany she had probably learned in the cradle, changing nothing but the name, and even that was wrong. All of it’s wrong, I thought, I’m choosing the wrong memory, this is what I’ll remember for September 15, 1943, and not an open grave receiving my mother’s body! I tried desperately to recall what my father had said to me as I knelt beside the coffin because it seemed to me all at once that my mother was in danger of being instantly forgotten, of disappearing forever into an urgent brown void beneath a spreading oleander in a Tennessee park. I could remember my father’s presence suddenly behind me, could remember the weight of his hand on my shoulder, and then, at last, his words came back to me, and I repeated them in my head as Daisy wrapped her legs tight around me and pulled my orgasm into her slippery vault, not knowing what all the words meant, but taking solace from them anyway.

“I almost lost her years ago,” he said. “We were lucky,” he said. “I loved her, Will. I won’t know how to live without her.”

October

October 3, 1918

October 4, 1918

October 6, 1918

Tuesday, October 8

October 9, 1918

Friday, October 11

Sunday, October 13

October 14, 1918

Tuesday, October 15

I received all three of Clara’s letters on the same day, October 21. It was the day after Timothy Bear got killed in the Clairs-Chênes woods. He had been lying not three feet away from me when the German shell exploded. We had both thrown ourselves headlong into the dirt seconds before it hit. Timothy did not get up after the explosion. He lay silent and motionless with one hand still clasped over the base of his skull, just below the protective line of his helmet. There was no blood on him, no scorched and smoking fabric to indicate he’d been hit. I thought at first he was merely taking a longer time than usual to get to his feet again. I crawled over to him, and I said, “Timothy? Are you okay?” and he did not answer. And then I saw the steel sliver that had pierced the top of his helmet, sticking out of the metal and the skull beneath it like a rusty railroad spike. “Timothy?” I said again, but I knew that he was dead.

The next day, the 33rd Division on our right was relieved by the French 15th Colonial, who brought in mail for us, and with it Clara’s three letters. I had not cried when Timothy Bear was killed. There is something in war, you do not cry, it is almost as if the person never existed. But now, reading Clara’s letters, I began to weep because I was certain I would lose Nancy, too, and then nothing in the world would matter. They thought I was shell-shocked at first. I cried all during the attacks on La Mi-Noel and the Bois de Forêt and the small woods southwest of Clery-le-Grand, cried throughout the mopping-up operations on October 24. I did not stop crying until we were relieved by the 5th Division on October 27, and sent back to Montfaucon, leaving our artillery behind in support.

A letter from Eau Fraiche was waiting for me upon my arrival there.

Sunday, October 20

November

The train had come down from Boston, and it was jam-packed when it stopped at New Haven. She had her crap spread out all over the seat, two valises, a guitar, and a duffle bag, as if she were going on a grand tour of the Bahamas instead of probably just home for the Thanksgiving weekend. I had conic through three cars looking for a seat, and when I spotted her living in the luxury of this little nest she’d built, I stopped and said, “Excuse me, is this taken?”

She had dark brown eyes and long black hair parted in the middle of her head, falling away straight on both sides of her face, framing an oval that gave a first impression of being too intensely white, lips without lipstick, checks high and a bit too Vogue-ish, a finely sculpted nose and a firm chin with a barely perceptible cleft. The look she gave me was one of extreme patience directed at a moron, her glance clearly saying Can’t you see it’s taken?

“Well, is it?” I asked.

“I’ve got my stuff on it,” she answered. Her voice sounded New Canaan or mid-Eighties Park Avenue. It rankled immediately.

“I see that,” I said, “but is anyone sitting here?”

“I’m sitting here.”

“Besides you.”

“No.”

“Then would you mind putting your stuff up on the rack?”

Her look of patience turned instantly to one of annoyance. I was forcing her to move her furniture out of the apartment just after she’d painted and settled in. She turned the look off, got up without so much as glancing at me again, lifted the guitar onto the rack and then reached for the heavy duffle.

“I’ll get it,” I said.

“Don’t bother,” she said.

She was wearing sandals and tight chinos, and I discovered her backside as she lifted the duffle up onto the rack with a great show of delicate college girl maidenhood being strained to its physical limits. The gray sweatshirt she had on over the chinos rode up as she lifted one of the valises, revealing a well-defined spine, the halves of her back curving into it like a pale ripe apple into its stem. She turned to pick up the other valise, and I saw MIT’s seal on the front of the sweatshirt, flanked by a rounded pair of breasts too freely moving to have been confined by a bra. She saw my goofy leer, made a face, hoisted the valise up onto the rack, slid back into the seat, cupped her chin in her hand, and stared through the window.

“Thank you,” I said.

She did not answer.

“Look,” I said, “your bags didn’t pay for a seat, you know.”

“I moved them, didn’t I?” she said, without turning from the window.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, but she still did not turn from the window.

“You coming down from Radcliffe?” I said.

“What gives you that impression?” she said, and turned from the window at last, and assumed again that patient expression of someone talking to a cretin.

“You sound like a Radcliffe girl.”

“And just how do Radcliffe girls sound?” she asked, so annoyed by my presence on her turf, and so confident of her own allure in sweatshirt and chinos, brown eyes burning with a low, angry, smoky intensity, white face pale against the cascading black hair, completely stepping down several levels in the social strata by deigning to utter in her New Canaan nasal twang anything at all to someone like me, who should have been up a tree someplace eating unpeeled bananas instead of trying to start a conversation with the WASP princess of the western world. I was already half in love with her.

“Radcliffe girls sound rude and surly and sarcastic,” I said. “So do Yalies,” she said.

"Are you from Radcliffe?”

“No, I’m from B. U.”

“Is that a school?”

“Ha-ha,” she said. “You’re from Yale, all right.”

“How can you tell?”

“I can tell,” she said in dismissal, and turned to look through the window again, pulling her long legs up under her.

“Must be fascinating, watching all those telephone poles go by,” I said.

“Yes, it is.”

“My name’s Wat Tyler,” I said.

She turned to me with a reproachful look. Certain she had tipped to a put-on, she said, “Mine’s Anne of Bohemia.”

“Hey, how’d you know that?” I said, surprised.

“How’d I know what?”

“About Wat Tyler. Not many people do.”

“Luck,” she said.

“Come on, how’d you know?”

“I had to do a paper on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

“What’s that got to do with Wat Tyler?”

“Nothing. But that’s how I got to him.”

“How?”

“Well... can you name the Four Horsemen?”

“Sure. Plague, Pestilence...”

“Wrong.”

“You’re not talking about the Notre Dame foot...”

“No, the Bible.”

“Plague...”

“Wrong.”

“I give up.”

“I’ll give you a clue.”

“Give me a clue.”

“They’re on different colored horses — white, red, black, and pale.”

“Pale what?”

“Just pale.”

“I still give up.”

“Death’s on the pale horse,” she said. “War’s on...”

“... the black one.”

“Wrong, the red one. Famine’s on the black one.”

“Then Plague’s on the white one.”

“There isn’t any Plague.”

“Has to be a Plague.”

“That’s what I thought, too. But there isn’t.”

“Then who’s on the white horse?”

“Christ. At least, a lot of people suppose it was Christ. Nobody really knows for sure who John the Divine meant.”

“But you thought it was Plague.”

“Yes. That’s why I went to the library to see what they had.”

“What’d they have?”

“Plagues, epidemics, blights, everything. But there was a very popular plague back in 1348...”

“Popular?”

“In that it was widespread. The Black Death, you know?”

“From the Tony Curtis movie of the same name,” I said.

“It was bubonic.”

“It certainly was.”

“Killed a third of England’s population.”

“Sound of Music was even worse.”

“Anyway,” she said, and raised her eyebrows and quirked her mouth as though in exasperation, but it was clear she was enjoying herself now, feeling comfortable enough with me to be able to make a fleeting facial comment on my corny humor, and then move right on unperturbed to the very serious business at hand, which was how she happened to know anything at all about Wat Tyler who had been killed by the mayor of London in 1381, lo, those many years ago, when both of us were still only little kids. “Anyway,” she said again, and turned her brown eyes full onto my face, demanding my complete attention, as though knowing intuitively it was wandering to other less important topics, never once suspecting, heh-heh, that I was lost in thought of her alone, of how absolutely adorable she looked when she struck her professorial pose, relating talcs of poxes and such, and stared back into her lady-hypnotist eyes and wanted to bark like a dog or flap like a chicken, “Anyway, when I was looking up all this crap, I learned that a couple of the labor statutes put into effect around the time of the plague were thought to have caused the great peasant rebellion of 1381, do you see?” she said.

“You have a tiny little beauty spot right at the corner of your mouth,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Listen, are you sure you know who Wat Tyler was?”

“Oh sure,” I said. “He led the great peasant rebellion of 1381. Against Richard II.”

“So what did I just say?”

“I don’t know, what did you just say?”

“I said that certain labor statutes...”

“That’s right...”

“... caused the rebellion of 1381.”

“So?”

“So Richard II was married to Anne of Bohemia.”

“I know.”

“So that’s why when you said you were Wat Tyler, I said I was Anne of Bohemia. Because when I was looking up plagues in the library... the hell with it,” she said. “What’s your real name?”

“That’s my real name.”

“Wat Tyler, huh?”

“Walter Tyler. Everybody calls me Wat, though. Except my grandfather sometimes. What’s yours?”

“Dana. Don’t laugh.”

“Dana what?”

“Castelli. Guess who I’m named after?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“You can imagine.”

“Oh no! Really?”

“Really. I was born in 1946, right after my mother saw him in The Best Years of Our Lives.”

“When in 1946?”

“Was I born, or did she see the picture?”

“Born.”

“December. Two days before Christmas.”

“So what did you find out about him?”

“Dana Andrews?”

“No, Plague. On the white horse.”

“I told you, there was no Plague. Only War, Famine, Death, and Jesus.”

“Then all your research was for nothing.”

“I didn’t mind. I like libraries.” She smiled again. “Besides, it gives me something to talk about on trains.”

“Listen,” I said, “I’m really sorry I asked you to move your bags.”

“Don’t be silly. I was being a hog.”

“Would you like a beer or something?”

“I don’t think there’s a bar car.”

“Has to be a bar car.”

“Had to be a Plague, too, but there wasn’t.”

“You watch the seats,” I said. “I’ll check it out.”

In the next to the last car on the train, I ran into Scott Dundee who was now a freshman at Tufts and who was sitting with a girl he introduced as “Gail Rogers, Simmons ’67,” the same asshole he’d always been. He asked if he could give me a lift home from Stamford, but I lied and said I was being picked up, preferring a taxi to his Great Swordsman company, and then hurrying into the last car, knowing by then of course that Dana Castelli had been right, there was no bar car. I lurched and staggered my way forward again, the New Haven Railroad performing in its usual glassy-smooth style, and when I got back to where she was sitting I nearly dropped dead on the spot. The guitar, the duffle bag, and both suitcases were piled onto the seat again, and Dana was turned away from the aisle, legs up under her, one elbow on the window sill, staring out at the goddamn telephone poles. I felt, I don’t know what, anger, rejection, embarrassment, stupidity, clumsiness, everything. And then, suddenly, she turned from the window, whipping her head around so quickly that her black hair spun out and away from her face like a Revlon television commercial, and her grin cracked sharp and clean and wide, confirming her joke, and we both burst out laughing.

That was the real beginning.

We talked all the way to Stamford.

She told me her father was Italian and her mother Jewish, this WASP princess of the western world. They had met while he was still a budding psychoanalyst in medical school, an ambition that cut no ice at all with her mother’s father, who objected to the marriage and who threatened to have this “Sicilian gangster” castrated or worse by some gangster friends of his own, he being the owner of a kosher restaurant on Fordham Road in the Bronx and therefore familiar with all kinds of Mafia types who rented him linens and collected his garbage. Joyce Gelb, for such was her mother’s maiden name, was then a student at Hunter College and running with a crowd the likes of which had only recently signed petitions for the release of the Scottsboro Boys. She wasn’t about to take criticism of her Sicilian gangster, who in reality was descended from a mixture of Milanese on his mother’s side and Veronese on his father’s and who anyway had blue eyes which she adored. Joyce told her father he was a bigot and a hypocrite besides, since he hadn’t set foot inside a synagogue since her mother’s death eight years ago, when he had said the Kaddish and promptly begun playing house with his cashier, a busty blond specimen of twenty-four. The couple, Joyce Gelb and Frank Castelli, eloped in the summer of 1941, fleeing to Maryland, where they were married by a justice of the peace in Elkton, Frank constantly glancing over his shoulder for signs of pursuing mohelim. In 1942, the Castellis bought a small house in Hicksville, Long Island. Secure from the draft (he had been classified 4-F because of his asthma) he began analyzing the neurotics in Hempstead and environs.

“Do you know the kind of town Hicksville was?” Dana said. “When I was still a kid, the suggestion came up that they should change the name of the town to something better, you know? Like there are some towns on Long Island with really beautiful Indian names — Massapequa, Ronkonkoma, Syosset — and even some very nice, well, suburban-sounding names like Bethpage and Lynbrook and, well you know. So guess what? The town fathers objected! They actually preferred Hicksville, can you imagine that? Which is just what it is, of course — Hicksville, U.S.A., I lived there until I was thirteen years old; the most thrilling thing that happened was the erection of a shopping center, you should pardon the expression.”

At the age of thirteen, as she was entering puberty (“and beginning to blossom,” Dana said, and winked and gave me a burlesque comic’s elbow), Dr. Castelli moved his practice and his family to Park Avenue...

“In the mid-Eighties, right?” I said.

“Seventy-ninth,” Dana said.

“Close,” I said.

“No cigar,” she said.

... and Dana began attending the Dalton School, no mean feat for a kid whose Italian grandfather still ran a latticeria on First Avenue, and whose Jewish grandfather made a good living keeping the fleishedig plates from the milchedig. She was now, she told me, an English major at Boston University, and she hoped one day to write jokes for television comedians, which I might think a strange and curious ambition for a girl, but after all some of the funniest people in America were women, witness Lady Bird Johnson, she said, without cracking a smile.

We began talking about Kennedy then, both of us realizing with a sudden shock that he had been killed just a year ago, and then doing what people inevitably did when talking about that day in November remembering with almost total recall exactly where they were and what they were doing when the news broke (“I could hear them saying, ‘The head, the head,’ and i listened in bewilderment and fear because I was sure now that something terrible had happened to me, that they were all talking about my head, that maybe my neck was twisted at a funny angle, maybe there was a line of blood trickling from under my white helmet.”). Dana had been in her father’s office, necking on his couch with a boy from CCNY, Friday being Dr. Castelli’s day at Manhattan General, where he worked with addicts on the Narcotics Service. The radio had been tuned to WABC, Bob Dayton spewing machine-gun chatter and canned goodies from The Beatles, when the announcer broke in to say that Kennedy’s motorcade had been fired upon, the news causing Dana to leap up from the couch not a moment too soon, being as she was in a somewhat vulnerable position just then.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“You know,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, and felt violently protective all at once, ready to strangle the snot-nosed, pimply-faced City College rapist who had dared put his hand under her skirt or whatever it was he’d been doing.

“Well, you know,” Dana said.

“Sure,” I said.

Which led us into talking about the MIT sweatshirt she was wearing, and how she had come into possession of it so early in her college career, the fall term at B.U. having started only in September.

She told me that she had met this dreamy boy at the Fogg Museum one rainy Saturday (Oh, please, I said, where are the violins?) and he’d turned out to be a very sensitive young man who had managed to get out of East Berlin immediately after the Russians lifted their blockade in 1949. (A German, I said, that’s real groovy. What was his father during the war? A baker?) His father, Dana promptly informed me, was Jewish and in fact a survivor of Auschwitz, which, I might remember, was a German concentration camp, in fact the camp where four million Jews were annihilated, in fact. His father had chosen to continue living in Germany...

“What’s this guy’s name?” I said.

“I don’t see what difference that makes,” she said.

“I like to know who we’re talking about, that’s all,” I said.

“His name is Max Eckstein,” she said.

“He sounds like a Max Eckstein,” I said.

“The way I sounded like a Radcliffe girl, right?” she said.

“All right, go on, go on,” I said.

... his father had chosen to continue living in Germany, Dana told me, rather than emigrating to Israel or America because he felt that Hitler had almost succeeded in destroying the entire German Jewish community, and if there were to be any Jews at all in Germany, some survivors had to elect to stay and raise their families there. But whereas he had been slow to recognize what was happening in Germany in ’38 and ’39, he immediately realized in 1949 that the Communists were constructing in Berlin a state not too dissimilar from Hitler’s. He had packed up his wife Dora, his seven-year-old daughter Anna, and his five-year-old son Max, and together they had fled to America. Anna had since married a football player for...

“A what?” I said.

“A football player. For the New York Giants,” Dana said.

“How’d a German refugee get to meet a...?”

“She’s quite American,” Dana said. “She was only seven when she came here, you know.”

“Yes, and little Maxie was five.”

“Little Maxie is now twenty,” Dana said. “And not so little.”

Her relationship with Max, she went on to say, was amazingly close, considering the fact she’d known him such a short time, actually only a month and a half, she’d met him in the middle of October on a...

“Yes,” I said, “a rainy Saturday, I know.”

“He’s a very nice person. You’d like him.”

“I hate him,” I said.

“Why?”

“Just how close is this relationship?” I asked.

“Close,” Dana said.

“Are you engaged or something?”

“No, but...”

“Going steady?”

“Well, we don’t have that kind of an agreement. I mean, I can see anybody I want to, this isn’t the Middle Ages, you know. I just haven’t wanted to go out with anyone else.”

“Well, suppose I asked you out?” I said.

“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know what you have in mind.”

“You mean you want to know where I’d take you?”

“No, no. I mean the relationship between Max and me is very close, and I haven’t really any need for what you might have in mind, if it’s what you have in mind. That’s what I mean.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I mean Max and I are very, well, close,” she said, and shrugged. “Do you see?”

“No.”

“Well, I really don’t think I need to spell it out,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“So if you want to just go to a movie or something, or maybe take a walk if you’re in the city one weekend...”

“Gee, thanks a whole heap,” I said.

“Well, there’s no sense being dishonest.”

“You’re sure Maxie won’t disapprove? I certainly wouldn’t want to get him upset.”

“His name is Max, " Dana said.

“Say, maybe the three of us could go to a movie together,” I said. “You think Max might be able to come down one weekend?”

“He’s carrying a very heavy program,” Dana said.

“Then I guess we’ll just have to go alone,” I said. “How about Thursday?”

“Thursday’s Thanksgiving.”

“Friday then.”

“All right. So long as you understand.”

“I understand only one thing.”

“Which is what?”

“Which is that I’m going to marry you.”

December

My instructor at Gunter Field in Montgomery, Alabama, was a man named Ralph Di Angelo, who had been a civilian pilot before the war, and who — because of the extreme need for trained pilots — had been taken into the Army with a first lieutenant’s commission and immediately assigned to Gunter, where he taught what the Air Force called Basic Flying. Di Angelo was a Service Pilot, and because there was a tiny letter S on his wings, we all called them Shit Wings.

I had gone from Preflight School at Maxwell Field to Primary Flying School in Orangeburg, South Carolina, and from there had reported directly and without furlough to Gunter Field. There were six flying squadrons on the field, each with about a hundred cadets in them. I was in the 379th School Squadron, Class 44J, the 44 designating the year I was expected to be awarded my silver pilot’s wings, the J designating the month and date this event would take place, the first half of May, hopefully.

This was my third day at Gunter, and nobody including myself was feeling too terribly happy just then because we had not been given any leave after Primary and we’d already been told there’d be no Christmas furloughs, either. My father had made plans to come down to Montgomery to visit with me on Christmas Day, but Montgomery was a far cry from Chicago, and besides, I was getting very very tired. At Orangeburg, I had flown the PT-17, which was possibly the most rugged plane ever built, strong enough for aerobatics like snap rolls and Immelmanns, with a fixed-pitch prop and a 225-horsepower Lycoming engine, blue with yellow wings — my instructor called his plane “Yellowjacket,” the name stenciled onto the fuselage just back of the cowling, with a sting-tailed bee, blue with black stripes, yellow-winged like the plane itself, hovering over the black lettering.

I’d had a total of seventy hours in that plane, my instructor being a man who had once run a small airport in Iowa and who was now doing his bit for the Army by making life miserable for aviation cadets. His name was Captain Felix Burmann, and he was a son of a bitch down to his boots. It was rumored that the obstacle course at Maxwell Field (where he had also taught) was named “The Burma Road” in his honor, it being a tortuous winding exhausting piece of real estate that snaked its way around the officers’ golf course, and then down by the river as cadets jogged their little hearts out around it. Son of a bitch or no, he had taught me to fly, and I was feeling like a pretty hot pilot by the time I got to Gunter and was introduced to the biggest damn airplane I had ever seen up close in my life, the BT-13, which was fondly, ha, called the Vultee Vibrator, or so Lieutenant Di Angelo told us the first day we marched out behind him to the flight line.

The lieutenant was olive-complected, with curly black hair, dark brown eyes, and a black mustache. Short and somewhat chunky, he kept a dead cigar stub clamped between his teeth at all times, reminding me of Mr. Fornaseri who ran the candy store on Division and Dearborn back in Chicago and who would not be caught dead without his guinea stinker in his mouth. Mr. Fornaseri was from Palermo, and it was reasonable to believe that Lieutenant Di Angelo could have easily blended with the population there — though how he would have fared in Milan was another matter. He came, he told us, from Elmira, New York, and had quickly added, “Not the prison there,” a quip we were all too frightened to laugh at. He had then gone on to say that we five cadets would be taught personally by him during our stay at Gunter Field, and that we would be doing all our flying in the BT-13, “this airplane here, which is fondly called the Vultee Vibrator, as you will soon find out.”

“It’s got an unpleasant reputation,” he had said, “but you’ll learn to develop a great deal of respect for it. I know it looks enormous to you, but that’s only because it is; the engine under that housing’s got four hundred and fifty horses in it. I realize you’re all aces already, but you’ve never flown anything with a controllable pitch propeller, or mixture controls, and this is also going to be the first time you’re flying without a helmet and goggles because there’s a canopy to close over your head, as you may have noticed. You’ll be wearing earphones instead because you’ll be in constant radio contact with the tower — that’s another first, you’ve never flown a plane with a radio in it before.

“Now you all heard what the squadron commander told you a little while ago, and I’m going to repeat it now because he was absolutely right, and you might as well understand it. Nobody’s going to coddle you here at Gunter. Both me and this airplane are going to be a lot less forgiving of your mistakes. In Primary, you learned how to take an airplane up and how to bring it down, but here in Basic we’re going to teach you to use it as a tactical weapon, and I can tell you the pressure’s going to be a lot tougher than it was in Primary, no matter where you went to Primary — we get them here from all over, believe me, and even the best of them have been known to bawl in their second week. The C.O. asked you to look at the man on your left and then at the one on your right because one of you was sure to wash out of here and end up in navigator or bombardier school. Okay. I’m telling you now that out of you five cadets, there’s a strong possibility only three of you will make it through Basic, and out of those three, only one of you might get through Advanced. So you’d better listen hard and keep your heads moving at all limes because you’re here to learn to fly and not to fool around. You’ll notice that there’s a little picture of a burning pitchfork painted behind the cowling of my plane there, and that the name of the plane is The Eighth Circle,’ and whereas I don’t want to frighten any of you aces, I also want it clear that I’m going to make life hell for you if you don’t learn to fly the way I want you to fly.

“Now I want one of you to get into that front cockpit and the rest of you on the wings there, and I’ll try to familiarize you with the instruments and controls, after which you can feel free to climb into any plane on the field and learn that cockpit inside out and backwards because you’ll be taking a blindfold test on it day after tomorrow. You, what’s your name, you get in the cockpit. It’s going to feel a little strange at first, but don’t let that bother you.”

That was our first-day introduction to Lieutenant Ralph Di Angelo, who seemed about as pleasant as Captain Burmann, the terror of Orangeburg. (I wondered, in fact, which obstacle course had been named after him.) Yesterday, my second day at Gunter, I had gone up for my orientation flight, and today Lieutenant Di Angelo gathered the five of us around him at one of the long tables in the squadron building and chewed on his cigar and said, “Cooper, you want to pay some attention here, or do you want to wash out on your third day?” to which Cooper replied, “No, sir, I’m listening, sir,” and Di Angelo said, “Yes, then keep your head moving,” and cleared his throat, and in his lovable gravelly Elmira, New York, voice said, “Today we’re going to have a demonstration of take-off with the stabilizer back. You’ll remember that yesterday I showed you how to fly with the power off, and the stabilizer trimmed for a glide, and you’ll remember how hard it was to hold your nose down in flying position when we turned the power on again and rolled the trim-tabs back. As a final check before we fly over to Taylor Field today, we’re going to deliberately take off with the stabilizer rolled back about three-quarters, that’s approximately the position for landing. I want you to remember that this is what might happen if you forget your cockpit procedure before take-off or are shooting follow-through landings and aren’t quick enough to neutralize your trim-tabs.

“Remember that you’ve got to keep the attitude of the airplane constant when you’re climbing out of the field, never mind the position of your stick, you’re going to have to fight that stick in order to keep your nose down. Until I decide to zero the trim-tabs and trim up the ship, you’ll be working your right rudder to correct the torque, and you’ll be keeping that heavy forward pressure on the stick to compensate for the stabilizer being in the wrong position. Any questions?”

“Yes, sir,” Cadet Bollinger, a fuzzy-cheeked boy from Pennsylvania said in his high, almost girlish voice, blue eyes opened wide as if in expectation of a religious miracle. “What happens if we let go of the stick, sir?”

“Bollinger,” Lieutenant Di Angelo said, “if you’re by yourself, you’re dead. I’ll be back there today, so presumably nothing will happen. Seriously,” he went on, though I hadn’t honestly caught any joke, “the nose’ll rise, you’ll do a snap roll at fifty feet, and you’ll end up in the ground. Any other questions?”

Nobody had any other questions.

“Okay,” Di Angelo said, “after we’ve each had a chance at trying to kill ourselves, we’re going over to Taylor and shoot some more landings. Murphy, I want them at the ground today, and not three feet in the air. Jacobs, I want your head moving all the time. There are a couple of hundred airplanes in the air around here, and I want you to keep track of all of them whenever you’re up there. Okay, Tyler, let’s go.”

It was a bleak, gray day, penetratingly cold and damp. I was wearing a zippered jump suit over my underwear, fleece-lined leather flying pants and jacket, fleece-lined gloves and boots, but I was still chilly. My parachute tucked up into the small of my back so it wouldn’t bang against my ass with each step I took, I followed Di Angelo out to his plane, silvery against the gray day, the blue cowling indicating our squadron, the ramp crowded with planes from all the other squadrons as well, yellow cowlings, red ones, white ones. The Eighth Circle, very funny, I thought, and Di Angelo said, “’Morning, Harris,” to the T-3 who was his crew chief, and who was standing near the propeller. “All right, Tyler,” he said to me, “get the log book, and check the red-line entry,” the red line being a diagonal mark across a small box, to the right of which were listed all the Army tech orders not yet complied with. If a red cross was marked in the box instead of that diagonal red line, it meant the airplane was unsafe to fly and was not to be taken up under any circumstances.

Sitting on my parachute in the front cockpit, with Di Angelo behind me, I fastened my seat belt, and then took off the control lock and verified the freedom of the stick and rudder. I turned on the master electrical switch then, put on my earphones, and tuned in the tower. The radio-interphone switch was on radio. I kept watching it from the corner of my eye because I knew that whenever Di Angelo snapped it to inter from his controls in the rear cockpit, I’d be getting an interphone bleat about something or other I was doing wrong. Nor was a cadet supposed to say anything to his instructor from the moment they got into the airplane to the moment they got out; all the radio squawks would be one-way, from the rear cockpit to the front. I verified that my propeller control was in full-low pitch, set my mixture control full-rich, cracked the throttle, and then hit the primer three or four times.

The switch clicked over to inter.

“Let’s go, Tyler, we haven’t got all day here, there’s a war waiting.”

I pulled the stick back against my belly, and then put my toes on the brakes to make sure they were locked. With my right hand on the magneto switch and my left on the throttle, I stuck my head out of the cockpit and yelled, “Clear?” to Harris.

“Clear!” Harris shouted back.

I moved the magneto switch through 1 and 2, click, click, and heard the third click as I moved it to BOTH, and hit the starter. The propeller spun and caught. I yanked the stick against my belly again, added throttle, and then pulled back to idle. Picking up the mike in my left hand, I said, “Gunter Tower, this is 0934, over.”

“0934, this is your instructor in the rear cockpit,” Di Angelo said. “How about switching back to radio before trying to contact the tower?”

I immediately turned the switch to radio, and said again, “Gunter Tower, this is 0934, over.”

“0934, this is Gunter Tower, go ahead.”

“0934 on the line, ready to taxi.”

“Roger, 0934. You’re clear to taxi to runway 27.”

“0934, Roger and out.”

I signaled to Harris to pull the chocks, my toes on the brakes, the engine ticking over. He yanked them and gave me the thumbs-up signal. I began adding throttle, and the stick suddenly came banging back hard into my belly, jerked by Di Angelo in the back seat, who immediately cut the throttle and snapped the switch to INTER and shouted, “You forgot to keep your stick back, Tyler! You were adding too much throttle! Keep that damn stick back!”

Rattled, I released the brakes and managed to roll the plane out correctly, turning left past the parked planes on the ramp, and moving straight out onto the taxi strip. Di Angelo’s voice erupted into my earphones again.

“Zigzag her down the line, Tyler, how else can you see anything over that big humping engine? Do you want to get us killed before we’re off the ground? Keep your head moving!”

Trembling now, hating that goddamn RADIO-INTER switch and wishing it would break off in his left hand, I waited for the other planes to clear, zigzagging down the line past the maintenance hangars and the squadron building, and finally moving into the number-two position for take-off, parked at a ninety-degree angle to the runway.

“All right, Tyler, I’ve rolled the stabilizer control three-quarters of the way back,” Di Angelo said, “and it’s going to stay there until I roll it to Neutral when we get up in the air.”

I nodded and wet my lips.

“You’re about ready for take-off, aren’t you?” he said, and I looked ahead to see that the number-one plane had already left. “Is your head up and locked?” he shouted. “Let’s keep it moving at all times, Tyler, on the ground as well as in the air, let’s see what the hell’s happening around us, shall we?”

I checked the two mags, my eyes on the tachometer, and moved the prop control all the way to the rear, the engine straining, the sound changing as the prop blades cut the air at a greater angle, and then I put it back into low pitch and returned the throttle to idle. I switched to radio, picked up the microphone in my left hand and said, “0934, ready to take off.”

“Roger, 0934,” the tower said, “clear to take off.”

I could not get used to the feel of the stick. I was adding throttle, and the plane was roaring down the runway, but I couldn’t get the tail off the ground, and the pressure on the stick was completely strange to me. The huge engine pounded and pulled, the whole plane seemed to be vibrating with the need to break free of gravity, but the tail would not rise, I could not get her to lift. I remembered what Di Angelo had said about the attitude of the plane, concentrate on the altitude and never mind what the controls are telling you, so I pushed harder on the stick and felt the tail come up only slightly, still refusing to rise completely off the runway, pushed even harder, my arm trembling, the muscles straining, my hand wrapped tight around the resisting shaft of metal that controlled the elevator, pushing, pushing, What happens if you let go, sir? The tail was beginning to rise slowly, I could feel her coming up, I kept both feet working the rudders to keep the plane straight, “You’re doing well, Tyler,” Di Angelo said, “keep the pressure on that stick, keep your nose down, you’re getting her off the ground now, there you go, hold her hard, Tyler, don’t let go of that stick, keep the pressure on it!” We were making eighty or ninety miles an hour now, the plane was leaving the runway, rising steadily, fifty feet, climbing smoothly into the air, a hundred feet, still climbing, we had not done a snap roll, we had not flipped over and hit the ground. From the tail of my eye, I saw the trim-tab control move forward as Di Angelo shoved it into the Neutral position.

“All right,” he said, “climb out of this traffic and level off at 1500 feet, we’ll be flying southeast to Taylor Field. You’re still not looking around enough, Tyler. Close your goddamn canopy. And stop feeling so fucking proud of yourself,” he added, even though he could not see my grin from the rear cockpit.

We walked around the field on Christmas Day, my father and I.

We did not talk much at first. A noisy wet wind was blowing in fiercely off the highway, discouraging conversation. We walked briskly, our strides almost identical, somewhat duckfooted, frankly unattractive. I was an inch shorter than my father, with the same angular build, the same blue eyes and high cheekbones, the same nose my mother used to call “the beak of Caesar, the Roman greaser,” the same thin-lipped mouth. To the single hardy cadet who approached us from the north, we must have looked like differently dressed twins skirting the edge of the parade grounds there, my father with one gloved hand clutching his Homburg to his head, the other in the pocket of his black coat; I with my garrison cap tilted jauntily, the collar of my short overcoat pulled up high around my ears like a raunchy ace.

When my father began talking, his first words were carried away by the wind. I turned toward him and squinted into his face, straining to hear him, because I thought at first he might be saying something important. But he only wanted to know how my training was going, whether or not they were really teaching me to fly because what would matter most when I got over there was how well I knew my job. I told him that my instructor in Primary had taught me all sorts of combat tricks, and then I explained how much I was enjoying Basic, where I was flying the 450-horsepower trainer, and how I was looking forward to Advanced, where I hoped to start flying two-engine planes in preparation for the P-38, assuming of course that the Army didn’t have other plans for me — like perhaps training me for a single-engine fighter plane or, fate worse than death, one of the big four-engine bombers. Ferrying a bomber over Germany, I told my father, wasn’t exactly my idea of fun.

My father said that none of it was fun, and the sooner I learned that, the better off I’d be. Oh yes, he said, he knew how anxious I was to get over there, a young man likes to be where the action is, likes to feel he’s helping to make history. He could understand my frame of mind, he said, because he’d felt exactly the same way back in 1918 when he’d hurried off to join the Army and do his share in winning the Great War. Of course, he said, we don’t call it that any more, do we, Will, the Great War? Which may indicate some measure of maturity on the part of the American people since there’s no such thing as a great war, is there?

I didn’t enjoy the fact that he’d stooped to punning to make his point, which I found dubious to begin with. I was also beginning to feel very cold and wet, the Alabama rain coming in hard against my face, driven by a fierce northwest wind. Nor was I looking forward to one of the little lectures my father had been fond of delivering before I’d enlisted in the Air Force. I really though we’d settled that question once and for all on the day he said he’d sign. So I figured I’d put an end to any further discussion right then and there by simply stating that the Nazis were bad and that fighting them was therefore good, period.

Yes, my father said, but only three months ago the Italians were bad, and fighting them was good. It now appears they were only poor misguided victims of Mussolini, who couldn’t wait to get rid of him, ignoring for the time being a heritage of fascism that went all the way back to the Roman Empire. But then, Will, this is all about fascism, dictatorship, totalitarianism, and enslavement versus liberty, justice, freedom, and Abraham Lincoln’s mother’s dog, isn’t it?

I was about to tell him I didn’t particularly appreciate the note of sarcasm in his voice because I happened to believe that’s exactly what this war was about, and I was willing to defend with my life if necessary the very principles he seemed to be mocking. But he wasn’t expecting an answer, and he wasn’t waiting for one. He brought his hand up sharply to clamp the Homburg tighter onto his head as a fresh gust of wind threatened to send it skimming across the railroad tracks to where the Negro troops were billeted. We’re saving the world for democracy all over again, he said, speaking louder than the wind and with the same angry sarcasm, his head turned toward mine, his face wet, his blue eyes demanding attention. We’re assuming, of course, that what the world wants or even needs is democracy, he said, and we’re assuming that our great American experiment — which is now only in its hundred and sixty-eighth year — will succeed one day, will come to full maturity one day. I wonder just when that’s going to be, though, don’t you? We came through our puberty when we fought the Civil War, Will, and we might have made it safely into manhood if only the world hadn’t involved us in another war so soon afterward. But the very young are always expected to solve the problems of the world, and God knows we were the youngest nation around just then. Europe had thrown some sixty-five million men into the meat grinder and solved nothing at all, so I guess it seemed only proper for us to throw in another four million and set everything right. Well, who knows? Maybe Europe’s getting too old and too wise to ever fight another war after this one. Then again, I thought she was too old even after the last one — which didn’t turn out to he the last one at all, did it, but merely the first one.

I wish you’d stop making puns, I said.

And now we’ve got the second one, my father said, and after we win it — oh yes, I’m fairly certain we’ll win it, we’re a strong and determined nation — after we win it, I’m not too sure we won’t make the same errors all over again, the errors we made last time, the ones that led inevitably to what we’ve got now. The sad part, Will, is that we’ve never really been permitted to grow out of our adolescence. You could write the history of our country through the eyes of a teen-ager because that’s exactly what America’s been for as long as I can remember — an impulsive, emotional, inexperienced adolescent, who, I’m beginning to suspect more and more, enjoys action, enjoys violence, enjoys, yes, murder. It’s murder, son, don’t look so outraged. I don’t care if you’ve got a Nazi boy pulling that trigger, or a Jap, or a sweet apple-cheeked lad from New Hampshire, it’s murder, it’s killing another human being without anger and in cold blood, it’s the worst kind of murder.

My face, wet and raw from the rain and the wind, was burning now with anger besides. If he was trying to prove to me that the adolescent was a murderous animal, he had certainly succeeded because I was ready to strangle him now, father or no. I mean, what the hell, I was working my ass off training to be a pilot so that I could go over there to help end this damn thing, and he was telling me, in effect, that I was being trained to commit murder. That was a good way to build somebody’s morale, all right, especially your own son’s, especially when he was in Basic and was hoping to get his wings come next May and be in Europe or the Pacific by July. That was a nice way to send your son off, by telling him he was a murderer for wanting to kill the people who were trying to enslave the goddamn world. Look, I said, nobody wants to fight a goddamn war, but sometimes you have to defend yourself, can’t you understand that?

Yes, he said, I can understand that. We all had to defend ourselves last time, too. France had to defend herself because she’d lost Alsace-Lorraine when the Germans beat Napoleon III. England had to defend herself because Germany was becoming a very big maritime power, and was grabbing off too much of the world’s commerce. Germany had to defend herself because tariff barriers were going up against her everywhere she turned. Russia had to defend herself because getting the Balkans would have satisfied her historic itch for an outlet on the Mediterranean. Even America, an ocean’s width away, had to defend herself because of her own expanding importance; if we had let the most powerful nation in Europe win the war, we’d have lost too much of the world’s trade, and our prestige as a rising power would have plummeted. We all had a lot to defend, Will. It just wasn’t what they told us we were defending, that’s all. And now we’re justifying yet another war — the Japanese attacked us, so of course we have to defend ourselves — striking our familiar adolescent pose and pretending we’re motivated only by high ideals and lofty principles.

He looked me straight in the eye then and said, Go fly your airplane, Will, and convince yourself it isn’t all bullshit. I’m afraid I can’t do that any more.

I was genuinely shocked because my father rarely swore, even in anger, and he did not seem to be angry now, he seemed only to be overwhelmed by an intolerable grief. I wanted to reach out suddenly to touch him. I wanted to say It’s okay, Pop, I’ll take care of you, please, Pop, it’s okay.

We forget, my father said. In July of 1918, I killed a man for the first time in my life, Will, I shot him in the face because we were defending an important hill overlooking a strategic plain.

I can’t remember the number of that hill now.

I can’t for the life of me remember it.