Sons

January

Eau Fraiche hadn’t changed much.

My division had moved into Germany shortly after the Armistice, and I’d stayed with them as far as Simmern, where the Army doctors decided they couldn’t get my feet to stop itching and recommended me for discharge. That was all right with me.

I arrived in New York on January 10, 1919, almost two weeks after my nineteenth birthday, and then went by train to Milwaukee. Everybody there was talking about Victor Berger, who was of course a Socialist and one of our state’s congressmen, and who had been convicted of conspiracy in December (while my division was proceeding into Germany via Luxemburg, to Saarburg, to Morbach, and then to Simmern where the doctors gave up on my feet). The conspiracy trial had taken place in Chicago under the Sedition Act, which meant that Berger had either said or written or done something tending to upset the authority of the government; when arrested, he was charged with obstructing the draft. He had been sentenced to twenty years in prison, and Milwaukee was still all abuzz with the verdict. I guess most civilians at the time were feeling fiercely protective of our freedom, and weren’t about to let the Bolsheviks take over America the way they’d done Russia in 1917. To me, it looked like a lot of fuss over nothing; all I knew was that the Great War had given me itchy feet.

But the issue was very real to the people in Milwaukee, and also to those in Eau Fraiche when I finally got there. Berger had been released on bail, naturally, and everybody was wondering whether Congress would deny him the seat to which he’d been re-elected just this past November, and also whether the verdict would be reversed once the case came up for appeal. Even Nancy, who hardly ever troubled herself over politics, kept talking about the Victor Berger case, the Victor Berger case, and I got the feeling that almost everyone in town had seized upon it as a topic of interest only because the war was over now and they didn’t have death and dying to worry about any more.

Nancy seemed changed.

I don’t mean physically, except for the way she tilted her head now, favoring the ear that hadn’t been damaged in her battle with the flu. She was developing a vocal tic as well, an automatic and irritating “Pardon?” whenever she didn’t quite catch a word. “Pardon?” she would ask, and tilt her head to one side, and raise her brows ever so slightly over eyes that seemed a deeper green than I remembered them, “Pardon?” Until finally one day after I’d been home about a week, I guess it was, I said, “Nancy, with all these pardons you’re throwing around, they should make you warden of Waupun State Prison,” and she burst into tears.

“I knew you’d hate my infirmity,” she said.

“It isn’t your infirmity I hate. It’s that damn pardon all the time.”

“Well, what shall I say?” she asked, sobbing. “‘I can’t hear you sir, I’m a little deef?’”

“That might be better,” I said.

“Pardon?” she asked, not having heard me, the word escaping her lips before she could catch it. A look of startled dismay crossed her face, and then she burst into fresh tears. She was still not eighteen. I held her in my arms as she sobbed against my chest, and I felt too old. That was how Nancy had changed. She was so very young.

Not too much had happened to the town, though, it looked almost the same as it had when I’d left it a year before. Oh yes, they had changed Buffalo Street to Pershing Street, and had begun breaking ground for the new mall and administration building, and there were two new automobile agencies on Beaufleuve, and a new movie house on Seventh, but for the most part, there were very few differences. I walked the town alone the first night I got back. I had taken Nancy home at about eleven, and then had sat around the kitchen talking to my family, though I couldn’t think of much to tell them — should I have said I once stepped into a German’s guts? Along about midnight, I borrowed my father’s flivver again, and drove into town and parked it outside the courthouse, and then just began walking along Chenemeke Avenue. I finally turned left on Mechanic, and went on down behind the rubber plant. Nothing had changed much. I could hear a locomotive chugging along the siding on the plant’s west end. I was home. Nothing had changed.

The town was silent and deserted.

I walked up to Chenemeke again, and stopped in the center of the avenue. For only an instant, I thought I could hear the sound of muted artillery fire across some distant river. In my mind’s eye, but only for an instant, the reality of that cobblestoned street in Eau Fraiche, Wisconsin, merged with memory to become a narrower street in some unremembered town where a horse reared back in fright as a shell exploded, and the white wall of a house suddenly collapsed.

Only for an instant.

I started walking back toward the courthouse.

Karl Moenke’s dry-goods store was on the corner of Third and Chenemeke, same as always. Alongside it was the Coin de Lorraine, a sign in the window announcing that it was Under New Management. The marquee of The Wisconsin was dark, but you could still make out the names of the acts playing there that week, all of them familiar, business as usual. I suddenly wondered whether there had ever truly been a horse bleeding from the mouth in a French town, the name of which I’d already forgotten, ever truly been a young girl shrieking in the upstairs bedroom of a gutted house, ever truly been someone named Timothy Dear who had worn a shell fragment in his helmet like a Saint Davy’s Day leek.

I started the car and drove home.

We went down-peninsula on the last Sunday in January, Nancy and I.

It was a bitter cold day and Lake Juneau was frozen shore to shore. Nancy was wearing a dark brown motoring turban and a grayish-brown cape with a little fur collar, moleskin I think she said it was. She kept her hands inside her muff. There was a strong wind, and she leaned close to me so that she could hear everything I said. We were on a rock overlooking the icebound lake, surrounded by enormous pines. The picnic tables were below us in the distance, but no one was on the grounds, and the entire place had a forlorn look to it. I didn’t know why I’d taken her there.

I had been back for almost two weeks.

I thought at first I wanted to tell her how I’d felt on my first night home when I’d walked the deserted town and listened to the chugging of the railroad train behind the plant and later imagined gunfire, but I realized there was nothing to say about it, or at least nothing she would understand.

I wanted to tell her I didn’t love her any more, I guess.

She sat with her hands inside her muff, the mull resting on her lap, her eyes wide on my face, listening as I told her what it had been like on the troopship back to New York, where I’d been berthed with a lot of strangers because I’d been separated from my own company, of course, and how I had lost seventy-four dollars playing poker with some fellows from San Francisco, and how my feet still itched, I would have to go to see Dr. Henning, I told her, though I doubted he could do anything for me, not if the Army medics couldn’t. She listened with her eyes wide and expectant, straining to catch every word I uttered, while all the time she knew I was leading up to saying I didn’t love her any more.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her.

The wind came roaring in over the lake, blowing snow devils across the ice, and Nancy shuddered deeper into her cape, the fabric hanging in loose folds around her so that she blended with the rock, her green eyes never wandering from my face, her feet together, her muffed hands resting in her lap.

At last she said, “Bert, we hardly seem to know each other.”

I did not answer her.

“Bert,” she said, “were there other girls? French girls?”

I shook my head.

“Is it that you don’t love me any more?” She turned away suddenly and looked out over the lake. “If it’s that, you can tell me.”

“I don’t know what it is,” I said.

“Pardon?” she said, and turned swiftly toward me, her eyes brimming, and said, “I’m sorry, Bert, I didn’t mean to say that, I know you don’t like me to say that. But I... I didn’t hear you, Bert.”

“I said I don’t know what it is.”

“When I saw you at the station,” she said, “I didn’t know who you were.”

“I recognized you right away.”

“I’ve lost so much weight. I lost twelve pounds when I had the flu.”

“You look fine,” I said.

“I’m too skinny. I never did have a bosom, but now...” She shook her head. “I didn’t know who you were, and I thought to myself That isn’t Bert, that isn’t who I love. But then you kissed me and I looked up at you, and I thought, Well of course it’s him, you can cover the sky with clouds, yet still there’ll be the stars and the moon above. But now I think maybe it’s me who’s changed, maybe I’m not what you thought I was or how you imagined me to be when you were over there.”

“You’re how I imagined you to be, Nancy.”

She was about to cry. I wished she would not cry. I put my gloved hand on her shoulder and tried to tell her with a slight pressure that Please, I did not want her to cry, I was not worth crying over.

“What... what do you suppose it is, Bert?” she asked.

“Nancy,” I said, “it’s just that I don’t know where I belong any more.”

“Maybe you belong with me.”

“Nancy...”

“Because I love you.”

“Nancy, I wake up in the middle of the night, and I don’t know who I am.”

“You’re Bertram Tyler.”

“Or where I am.”

“You’re home.”

“That’s just it. I don’t feel as if I’m home.” I took a deep breath. “Nancy,” I said, “I think I want to leave Eau Fraiche.”

“All right,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, and nodded.

“But why?”

“I don’t know why.”

“Where would you go?”

“Milwaukee,” I said. “Or Paris.”

“Paris?” Nancy said, as surprised as I myself was, and then suddenly she burst out laughing. “What in the world would you do in Paris?”

“Well,” I said, “I guess I’d sit and drink wine or something,” and then I grinned, and then I began laughing, too.

“Paris,” she said, “well, well.”

Her laughter trailed. She took one hand from her muff, wiped at the corners of her eyes, and then quickly tucked it away again. We sat silently on the huge rock overlooking the frozen lake.

“Bert,” she said, “if it’s because you don’t love me, please don’t feel... please don’t go away because of that.”

“No, it isn’t that.”

“Bert,” she said, “please don’t go to Paris.”

“I wouldn’t go to Paris.”

“Please don’t go anywhere.”

“Well...”

“Without me,” she said. “I’m so embarrassed,” she said. “I thought...” She shook her head. “Here I am being so forward and you’ve... made all sorts of plans that don’t include me.” She readied up suddenly with one clenched hand and pressed it to her cheek. “Forgive me,” she said.

“Nancy,” I said, “I killed seven men.”

“Pardon?”

“I killed...” She lifted her face to mine, her eyes immediately seeking my lips. I took her naked hand in both my own, and very softly said, “I killed seven men.”

“Yes, Bert,” she said.

“I shot one of them in the back.”

“Yes, Bert.”

“I stole from dead soldiers. A ring from one German and a pair of boots from another. I threw away the ring.”

“Yes.”

“In a town one day, I can’t remember the name of it, we... Nancy, there were five of us on patrol, and there was this dead horse in the courtyard and a French girl standing in the doorway, and we... we took her upstairs to where one wall of the house had been blown away, and they, on a straw pallet up there, they did it to her, Nancy. J’ai treize ans! she screamed. Une vierge! But they forced her, Nance, and... I... I didn’t try to stop them, I didn’t do anything to stop them. And then we left her there and walked down the wooden steps and out into the courtyard again where the horse lay dead in bright sunshine with flies buzzing around his bleeding mouth, and a soldier named Kerry showed us a silver pendant necklace he had taken from the second bedroom upstairs where the girl’s mother was dead on the floor from the shell that had hit the house, and which he said would bring him luck, I didn’t try to stop them, I didn’t even try.”

I was out of breath. I bent and put my forehead down on Nancy’s hand. She sat unmoving.

Then she said only, “Yes, Bert.”

“Did you hear me?” I said.

“Yes, Bert,” she said. “I heard you.”

February

On the weekends I had to play, I would die from wanting Dana.

I had got together with three other freshmen guys at Yale, one of whom was in pre-med and who had suggested the name for the group, a great name, The Rhinoplasticians, a rhinoplastician being a doctor who docs nose bobs. We didn’t sound as great together yet as the old Dawn Patrol had, but we were getting there, and also we were beginning to play a lot of local jobs, especially at preppie parties in the vicinity, where college MEN made a big hit with all the little girls from Miss Porter’s. We usually pulled down about twenty-five bucks a man whenever we played, and we played approximately once every other weekend, which meant that I was earning between fifty and seventy-five dollars a month, more than enough to pay for the apartment in Providence. I was living on a tight allowance from my father, and I didn’t think it was fair to ask him for additional money to pay for the apartment, so the new group was a godsend. But at the same time, whenever I played to earn money to pay for the apartment, I couldn’t get up to Providence to use the apartment; it was something of a dilemma, not to mention painful besides.

The apartment belonged to a guy named Lenny Samalson, who was studying graphic design at Risdee. Lenny had a girlfriend in New York, and her name was Roxanne, and she went to Sarah Lawrence but her parents were very strict, making it necessary for Lenny to go down to the city each weekend if he wanted to see her. Roxanne lived in the same building as Dana, on Seventy-ninth and Park, and when Dana casually mentioned, you know, that it would be convenient if she and I had, you know, a place where we could be alone together on weekends, Roxanne said, Well, how about Lenny’s place in Providence? and we grabbed it. Lenny was delighted to let us have it because I paid him thirty dollars a month for using it only on weekends, and not every weekend, at that. On the other hand, we were delighted to get it because it was only two hours from New Haven and an hour from Boston, which meant that Dana and I could both leave for Providence after our respective Friday afternoon classes, and get there for dinner, by which time Lenny was already on his way to New York and the carefully guarded Roxanne, who, Dana said, had lost her virginity at the age of fourteen on the roof with the boy from 12C.

I had very little difficulty getting away from Yale for weekends, but our trysts involved a certain amount of subterfuge on Dana’s part. Dana was but a mere female freshman living in Shelton Hall and blanket permission (pun unintended by the administration of B.U., I’m sure) for overnights had to be in writing from her parents. With permission, she was entitled to unlimited weekends, provided she signed out before the two a. m. curfew, and left a telephone number where she could be reached. Dana had little difficulty convincing Dr. Castelli that blanket permission would be far simpler than having to call home each time she was invited to spend a weekend with a girlfriend. And the telephone number she left at Shelton each Friday afternoon before putting her check in the overnight column was of course the one at Lenny’s apartment.

Providence was a singularly grubby town, but Lenny’s apartment was really quite nice. I had always thought artists were sloppy people who left twisted paint tubes and dirty rags all over the place, but Lenny was very tidy. In fact, since he was in Graphic Design rather than Fine Arts, he hardly ever worked in oils, and the place was miraculously free of the aroma of paint or turpentine, which could have been disastrous in a one-room apartment with a screen separating the kitchen from the bedroom-living room. Lenny had hand-decorated the screen himself, using the Nuclear Disarmament symbol in various sizes as an over-all black-and-white pattern. The symbol, Dana informed me, was a composite of the semaphore signals for the letters N and D, this information having incidentally been garnered by her in library research for a paper she was doing on William Shakespeare, figure it out. The screen stood at the foot of the bed, and tacked to it was a very decorative poster Lenny had painted in blues and reds, advising everyone to MAKE love, not war, though actually we didn’t need any reminders.

I loved Dana very much.

Before Dana, I had only had a relationship with one other girl in my life, and that had been Cass Hagstrom. The time with Cass had been very exciting for me because she was the first girl who had let me do anything substantial to her and I was overwhelmed and grateful. That was also when everything else was really going great for me — Dawn Patrol was playing almost every Friday and Saturday night, I was the football team’s captain and quarterback, and I was maintaining a ninety average at Talmadge High. I was as much in love with life, I guess, as I was with Cass.

But even the most exciting times with Cass, and there were some, did not compare with what I experienced with Dana. I loved everything about Dana, and this wasn’t a matter of a first sex experience, nor were things going so great at Yale, either, because they weren’t. In fact, to be perfectly truthful, I was having a very difficult time adjusting to college life, being burdened with two creepy roommates, and carrying a full program of English, French, History, Economics, and Physics. Moreover, I was confused about a lot of things.

I had dutifully registered for the draft in October 1964, within five days after my eighteenth birthday, aware that I owed the Army two years of compulsory service, and ready though reluctant to pay my debt to the country. Well, that’s corny, banners waving and bugles blowing and all that crap. But I believed in freedom, you see, I believed in the concept of self-government, and I recognized that a great nation did have responsibilities to the rest of the world, and I was committed to sharing those responsibilities. I knew my Army duty would be postponed so long as I kept up my grades at Yale and continued to be classified a student, but I knew that eventually I would have to serve, and whereas the idea was a pain in the ass, patriotism aside, I was nonetheless ready to do what had to be done.

In February 1965, I began to get confused.

I don’t think Dana had anything to do with my confusion, though perhaps she may have. She was a very opinionated beautiful young lady, and her contempt for President Johnson was something monumental. Like a lot of girls, she had accepted Kennedy as a sort of father-image with whom incest was not only thinkable but perfectly acceptable. And then, cut of all cuts, this positively groovy guy had been replaced by a real father-type who had a stern demeanor and a disapproving down-turned mouth, who wore eyeglasses when he read his speeches, who whooped it up with all the ladies at the inaugural ball, and who spoke in a lazy Texas way designed to alienate every kid on the eastern seaboard, if not the entire world. Dana’s favorite nickname for him was “Ole Flannel Mouth,” though she also began calling him “Loony Bins Johnson” shortly after the inauguration. In Lenny’s apartment one night, she performed for me a ten-minute argument between LBJ and his daughter, which ended with him shouting, “Well, I reckon Ah’m the Pres’dent, and y’all kin not have the automobile tonight!” When I told her that he was a good administrator who could goose Congress into giving us some much-needed legislation, Dana said, “Oh, crap, Wat,” and tacked another anti-Johnson Pfeiffer cartoon to Lenny’s Ban-the-Bomb screen, and then did a devastating take-off of Johnson collaring unsuspecting senators in the cloakroom and twisting their arms to vote for legislation on new bird sanctuaries, her imitation developing to the point where I’m positive it was slanderous (though I have to admit it was funny as hell, too.)

February got confusing.

I’m not trying to say that everything wasn’t pretty confusing to begin with. I had two roommates in Edwin McClellan Hall. One was named Alec Kupferman, and he was a spooky kid with a beard who hardly ever said a word to anyone, wandering around the campus and the room immersed in whatever private thoughts consumed him day and night. I don’t think he attended classes. He would appear like a sudden hallucination in the doorframe, and merely nod, and go to his bed, and put his hands behind his head and stare up at the ceiling. I felt very uneasy whenever he was around, which thank God was not too often. My other roommate was a winner, too. He was a kid named Abner Nurse from Salem, Massachusetts, who claimed that he was a direct descendant of Rebecca Nurse who had been tried and hanged for a witch in 1692. I believed it. If ever there was a warlock in the world, it was Abner Nurse. He had red eyes. I swear to God, they were red. Not fire-engine red, of course, but a brown that was so close to orange it was red, especially when he sat at his desk late at night with the single lamp burning, probably reading up on evil potions and deadly brews from a witch book hidden behind his copy of Playboy. He had black hair that stuck up on his head in two spots, exactly like horns. I had never seen him naked, because he was very shy about taking showers when anybody else was around, but I think that’s because he had a long tail he kept tucked up inside his underwear. He changed his underwear every day. He always left his Jockey shorts in a corner of the room, like a neat little burial mound, until there was a week’s supply piled up there, and then he would pick them up and carry them down the hall to the john where he would hand-launder them as though they were dainty delicate unmentionables. I once heard him talking in his sleep, and what he said was “Hanna-Kribna” over and over again in rising cadence, which I’m sure was authentic Salem witch talk. When I caught him reading a rather personal letter from Dana to me, I told him I would bust him in the mouth if he ever did it again, and he rooted me to the spot with his red-eyed satanic gaze and shouted, “Descend in flames, turd!” and then laughed maniacally and stalked out of the room. I didn’t hit him because he was somewhat larger than I, measuring six feet four inches from the top of his head to the tips of his cloven hoofs, and weighing two hundred and twenty pounds in his Jockey shorts.

So the room situation at old Eli was somewhat confusing, as was the situation with The Rhinoplasticians (Jesus, I really dug that name!) because we were trying to develop a unique and original sound that was far-out and divorced from hard rock, but at the same time we knew we couldn’t get too experimental or we’d never get any jobs, and I needed the job-money to keep up the Providence apartment, but I couldn’t get to use the apartment if we played too many jobs, which we wouldn’t play if our sound got too shrill or unintelligible.

“Now this is what I call providence,” Dana said the first time we used the apartment, and then sat shyly on the edge of the bed, her hands folded in her lap, as demurely and expectantly as a bride. And though we had made love before, several times in the back of the station wagon and once in her bedroom on Park Avenue while Dr. Castelli and his wife were at the opening of I Had a Ball, this was in a sense the first time for us.

She studied me with a solemn brown-eyed look, as though aware that something memorable was about to happen, that we were really about to commit to each other here in Lenny Samalson’s apartment on Lenny Samalson’s bed, about to share an intimacy that would be infinitely more binding than our previous hurried and awkward couplings had been. She stared at me for several moments, as though trying to read on my face the knowledge that I, too, knew this was extremely important. And then she rose silently and fluidly from the bed and walked toward the john at the other end of the apartment, near the kitchen, and came back to me naked not five minutes later.

Her body was a contradiction, I observed it at first with all the professional aloofness of a gynecologist. She had large breasts with pink-tipped nipples. I had touched her often, I knew the feel of her by memory, but this was the first time I’d seen her naked, and now she seemed too abundant somehow, as though her mother-earth ripeness, her bursting fullness had been designed for another girl and not her. The triangle of her pubic hair was thick and black. An equilateral tangle of Neapolitan density, it sprang from the whiteness of her belly and thighs like some unexplored jungle, promising fecundity, combining with the lush womanliness of her breasts to deny the girlishness of her narrow hips and long legs. She did a self-conscious model’s turn for me, and her backside came as another surprise, hinted at before in skin-tight jeans, but nonetheless startling now in its swelling nakedness, an unsubtle echo of her breasts. Her body advertised its erogenous zones in billboard blatancy, refusing secrecy to her sexuality, brazenly inviting what her downcast nun’s eyes sought to conceal.

She had learned some things from Max that I had never learned from Cass, but she taught them to me only subversively in the weeks that followed, never once indicating they were skills acquired in another man’s bed, pretending we were learning everything together for the first time ever on earth. There was a gleeful exuberance to the way she made love. Cass Hagstrom had approached sex with all the joy of a mortician, her brow covered with a cold sweat, a tight grim look on her face, her eyes widening in frightened orgasm as though she were looking into her own open coffin. But Dana entered our Providence bed with nothing less than total abandon, an attitude I naturally and mistakenly attributed to my own great prowess until I learned she took the pill religiously each and every morning and, thus liberated, could fearlessly express and expose herself. When we began making love each time, a small pleased smile would light her face and her eyes, lingering as we crossed those separate male-female boundaries to that suspended genderless territory where we each became the other. It was then that something else moved onto Dana’s face to replace the smile, drifting into her eyes and swiftly, smokily stretching them out of focus. Reason, intelligence, conscious will drained from her features as an utterly wanton look took complete possession, flushing onto her face, rising there directly from the hungrily demanding slit between her legs. In those few mindless moments before she came, she was totally and recklessly female, completely trusting my maleness, paradoxically fortifying our oneness, our commingled identity, receiving and demanding and responding and succumbing until everything surrounding me and containing me was Dana, this cloud, my love, this sweet sweet Dana. In January, we found each other, and in the discovery found ourselves as well.

But in February, the confusion began.

In February, the way Dana and I later reconstructed it, everybody in Vietnam decided it was time for a little truce, little wine-rice break in the heat of battle, get these troops out of the hot sun, Captain, don’t you know it’s time for the Year of the Dragon to become the Year of the Snake? Let’s get some of these lads back to Saigon for some fun there, hey Captain? Charlie wants a seven-day cease-fire, why, fine, we’ll give him a seven-day cease-fire.

Dana: Oh, Colonel, it was nasty! Those wily Orientals, they was all the while hiding ammunition and putting up they mortars, sir, while we was guzzling beer in Saigon bars with Hello, Joe, you likee fig-fig girls, oh, sir, I can tell you it was terrible. Where they was heading for, sir, was Pleiku, down around Ouinhon, Phumy, Kontum and Hanna-Kribna, I swear that boy is a witch, sir! And what they done, they pound the hell out of us, sir.

Me: Well, sir, the cease-fire ended at midnight, and we was sitting around having a last smoke ’fore we hit the sack when all of a sudden Charlie come running out of the high grass either side of the air strip, musta cut a sizable hunk thu the barbed wire to get thu that way with them satchel charges, sir, and he begin blowing up everything he could lay his hands on, he hits the choppers, he hits the recon planes, he just determined, sir, to blow Camp Holloway clear off the map.

Me again, different voice: They opened up with the 81s along about the same time, they musta been hiding oh six or seven hundred yards from the compound, and them mortars come banging in, man, they musta fired fifty, sixty rounds of them. Knocked down a quarter of the goddamn billets, killed seven of our guys, and wounded about a hundred.

Dana, doing her now world-famous President Johnson imitation: The worst thing we could possibly do would be to let this go by. It would be a big mistake. It would open the door to a major misunderstanding. I want three things: I want a joint attack. I want it to be prompt. I want it to be appropriate.

She got what she wanted.

Or rather, he did.

The United States aircraft carriers Ranger, Hancock, and Coral Sea, cruising in the South China Sea launched forty-nine Skyhawks and Crusaders twelve hours after the Vietcong attack on Pleiku. The planes roared over Donghoi, a hundred and sixty miles above the seventeenth parallel, and bombed and strafed the staging area there. The next day, Vietnamese Skyraiders joined United States jets from the Danang base and flew north to bomb Vinhlinh, a Red guerrilla communications center.

Dana: He come striding across the field, you dig, man, and he ain’t bad-looking for a gook, he got this real pretty girl gook with him, she look like the Dragon Lady. He got this black mustache and these six-guns slung on his hips, man, he look like a real marshal, ’stead of a gook marshal. His name Nguyen Cao Ky (man, I’m positive now that boy a witch!) and he wearing this all-black fly suit and a white crash helmet, man, he going to shoot every motherless Cong clear off the face of the earth.

Me, assuming the role of the President’s Press Secretary: Today’s joint response was carefully limited to military areas which are supplying men and arms for attacks in South Vietnam. As in the case of the North Vietnamese attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin last August, the response is appropriate and fitting.

I honestly did not know how appropriate or fitting it was because I honestly did not know just what was going on over there. Nor did anyone seem anxious to tell me. There were rumors that Maxwell Taylor, our ambassador to South Vietnam would soon be recalled because of differences with General Nguyen Khanh, the current head of the Saigon government, not to be confused with Nguyen Cao Ky, the Vice Air Marshal, he of the black jump suit and white crash helmet, Nguyen apparently being a Vietnamese name as common as Tom. I had no idea what Khanh looked like because the South Vietnamese seemed to change their leaders as often as Roger Nurse changed his underwear, very often leaving them in little piles in the corner, too. Our new man who’d been sent to Saigon to investigate the developing situation was called McGeorge Bundy. (I didn’t believe his name, either.) He was the President’s top White House foreign relations adviser. To show how important he was, it was shortly after he arrived in Saigon that the Vietcong decided to kick hell out of us. General Westmoreland, who I guessed was running the whole shooting match for us over there, was shocked by Charlie’s audacity. “This is bad,” he said, “very bad.”

I, too, was beginning to think maybe it wasn’t so good.

On the other hand, President Johnson assured the nation that there had been no change in the position of the country in regard to our desire or our determination to help the people of Vietnam preserve their freedom. “Our basic commitment to Vietnam,” he said, “was made in a statement ten years ago by our President Dwight Eisenhower, to the general effect that we would help the people of Vietnam help themselves.” Dana’s respect for Eisenhower was exceeded only by her respect for Johnson, but she doubted that our policy of containing Communism had originated with dear old Ike, preferring to believe instead that we’d been chasing Reds at home and abroad for such a long time now that anyone becoming President was duty-bound to continue the pursuit, the present echoing the past, the course already charted, the future preordained, and all that jazz. Ten years ago, when Eisenhower made the statement to which Johnson now alluded, I was only eight years old and thought the President was that nice bald man who sounded a lot like Sally Lawrence’s grandfather. I had no idea what he was saying about the country or what he was doing for it. (“Nothing,” Dana insisted.) What I did remember about ten years ago was being led into the basement of the Talmadge Elementary School, which had been stocked with food and water and blankets and battery-powered radios, and being told by Mrs. Weinger that this was a practice air raid and that we would remain in the basement until we heard the all-clear sounding from the firehouse roof. She then went on to tell us a little about radiation, all of us sitting wide-eyed and fearful, and I could remember wondering aloud what would happen if my father was caught in New York when the bomb fell (Shhh! Mrs. Weinger warned me) and my mother was at our house on Ritter Avenue, and I was here at school — would we ever get to see each other again? I was terrified.

Now, everyone seemed to have forgotten all about shhhh the bomb, everyone seemed to have passed it off as just another nasty little weapon no one in his right mind would use, the way no one in his right mind would have used gas in World War I, the way no one in his right mind would even think of waging war in this day and age, because war was hell (we had been taught to believe), war was foolish, and war was suicidal. Yet we were waging war in Vietnam. Or so it seemed.

Something was happening, and I didn’t know what. But whereas I was confused, I did not begin to get frightened until Sunday, February twenty-first.

Dana had an old beat-up straw hat she used to wear whenever she was studying for an exam. She had bought it six years ago when she’d gone to Nassau with her parents, and it was just about falling apart now, its red ribbon faded and torn, its edges jagged, its crown full of open holes. But it was her “study hat,” and she compulsively pulled it down over her ears before cracking a book, as though isolating herself from the outside world within its tattered straw confines. She was wearing the hat and nothing else that Sunday, sitting cross-legged and naked in the center of Lenny Samalson’s bed, surrounded by open French textbooks. She was in the midst of intoning some Baudelaire out loud, Ma jeunesse ne fut qu’un ténébreux orage, when the news announcement interrupted the music, this must have been, oh, a little past three in the afternoon, Traversé ça et la par de brillants soleils, and the music stopped, and the announcer said that Malcolm X had been shot to death by a man with a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun at the Audubon Ballroom on upper Broadway in Manhattan. The announcer went on to say that Malcolm’s murderer had been a Negro like himself (small consolation to the dead man) and that he had been immediately apprehended by the police and charged with homicide.

I don’t think either Dana or I experienced any great sense of loss. But sitting in the center of Lenny’s bed, wearing only her study hat, she began to weep softly, and I went to her and took her in my arms, and we huddled together, suddenly chilled, as the radio resumed its program of recorded music.

March

Columbus, Mississippi, in 1944 was hardly a serviceman’s paradise, so I guess we were all moderately grateful that a dance was being held on the post that Friday night. Besides, the propwash around the field had insisted that girls from places as exotic and as distant as Memphis, Tennessee, were being brought in by the bus-load as Colonel Chickenshit’s big St. Patrick’s Day gift to the cadets. (It was later rumored that the colonel had initially decided to limit the festivities only to those men who, like himself, were of Irish descent. But it had been pointed out to him by a tactful Chair Corps officer that Purim had come and gone only eight days before with scarcely a nod of recognition to the Jewish cadets, so maybe it would be a better idea to give all the men a well-earned and much-needed opportunity to dance till dawn with southern belles from far and wide, eh, Colonel? The colonel had reluctantly agreed.)

I had been sent to Columbus Army Air Field on February 27, to begin flying twin-engine AT-9s in preparation for the P-38. Michael Mallory, who was in Advanced Flying School at Luke Field in Arizona, had postulated the theory in one of his letters to me that both the quality and quantity of nookie in any given American community diminished in direct ratio to the quantity of servicemen there. His observation certainly applied to Columbus. I went to the dance that night only in desperation, hardly believing that Old Chickenshit was really bringing in girls from all over Dixie. As it turned out, I was absolutely right.

The mess hall had been decorated with green crepe-paper streamers, green cardboard cutouts of leprechaun hats and shamrocks, white cutouts of clay pipes. A makeshift bar had been set up on sawhorses in front of the steam tables, and bottles of 3.2 beer were being handed over it as I came into the building. A seven-piece Air Force orchestra was playing at the far end of the hall near the doors leading into the kitchen, with an inept lead trumpet player struggling vainly to imitate Ziggy Elman in “Opus Number One.” There were perhaps two dozen couples dancing. Some thirty girls lined the walls, sitting in ante-bellum splendor, easily recognized from previous sorties into town as nothing but local talent. Fifty hungry aviation cadets ogled these beauties, entertaining lewd thoughts of getting them out behind the PX, fat chance. Fifty more crowded the bar (similarly decorated with pipes, shamrocks, and hats) laughing a lot and telling stories in loud voices of their aerial exploits that day. “Opus Number One,” clumsily modulated into “Tuxedo Junction.” A cadet, already drunk on the mildly alcoholic beer and in imminent danger of washout, kept striking his hand on the scarred piano top in time to the music, throwing the trumpet player off beat, as if that poor soul needed an additional handicap. The band droned on interminably against a counterpoint of girlish southern voices clacking away in augmented fifths, mingled and mixed, bouncing off the high-ceilinged room, echoing, streaked with the sharp aroma of tomorrow’s chow being stewed in tonight’s kitchen. The whole scene looked dismal and sounded bleak, an entirely unsatisfactory substitute for a weekend pass, which privilege was undoubtedly forbidden by some secret Air Force regulation to the effect that no aviation cadet be permitted to have any fun whatsoever during his training period, lest this somehow diminish his effectiveness as a fighting unit of the United States Army. I decided to have a beer before leaving, and then I decided the hell with the beer, I’d just leave. I was turning to go when I heard someone just behind my shoulders say, “Beautiful, absolutely gorgeous” with such dripping sarcasm that I imagined for a moment I’d spoken my own thoughts aloud. I turned to find myself looking directly into the amused eyes of a cadet I recognized as Ace Gibson, reputed to be the hottest student pilot at Columbus. He was shorter than I, about five foot eight, and he looked like one of Walt Disney’s little forest animals, with wide wet brown eyes, a pug nose, and slightly bucked teeth. I would have disliked him immediately even if I had not been jealous of his reputation or prejudiced by his nickname.

“Nothing in town,” he said to me, “and nothing here, either. What’s a man supposed to do?”

“I’m going to sleep,” I said, and started to take a step around him. “No, hold it,” he said, and gestured with a slight jerk of his head to where a girl sat alone on the side of the room. “The chaperone,” Ace said. “A sweet young mother. Come on.”

She was sitting some thirty-five feet from where we stood near the entrance doors, a blond girl wearing a white pique dress and brown-and-white spectator pumps. Her long legs were tanned, and she kept them primly crossed, but one foot was jiggling in time to the music. She looked to be about seventeen or so, and I could not understand how Ace had figured her to be a mother, young or otherwise. Besides, a revised quick count of the available nookie had downgraded my original estimate to perhaps forty girls in all (including the blond in the white dress) meaning that the odds tonight were approximately three to one, more than I felt like coping with after a hard day’s flying. But Ace Gibson clapped me on the shoulder, which I didn’t like, and burst into a chittering sort of expectant laughter, which I also didn’t like, and then hooked his arm through mine and led me over to where the girl was sitting.

“Good evening, ma’am,” he said to her, “my name is Ace Gibson. This is my buddy...” and paused.

“Will Tyler,” I said.

“How do you do?” she said. “Ah’m Hattie Rolfe.”

“Hello, Hattie,” Ace said, “would you mind if we joined you?”

“Ah’m not permitted to dance, you know,” she said. “Ah’m one of the chaperones.”

“Well then,” Ace said, as I stared at him in amazement, “we’ll just sit and chat, if that’s all right with you, ma’am.”

“Thet’d suit me jes’ fine,” she said, and smiled.

Up close, I was beginning to notice a few things about her that Ace must have spotted immediately from the doorway. She was definitely not seventeen, though how he had been able to tell that from a distance of thirty-five feet was beyond my understanding. Could he have seen the crow’s feet around her eyes, could he have possibly noticed the wedding band and small diamond ring on her left hand, could he have detected from such a distance that the knitting in her lap was a partially completed khaki-colored sleeveless pullover. (Was there a soldier husband overseas someplace, Rooms for Rent, the possibility of a permanent-party arrangement with an experienced woman of at least twenty-seven or — eight years old?) How could he have surmised all this from thirty-five feet away? I looked at him appreciatively. He was now telling the girl that he had spent some time in Mississippi before coming here to Columbus, having taken his Basic Training in Biloxi, and suddenly he asked me where I’d gone through Basic, and almost before I could say, “Nashville,” he turned again to Hattie and said, “Not much of a crowd here tonight, is there?”

“Well, it ain’t much to holler about,” Hattie said. “I’ll allow that.”

“Will and I were hoping for something a bit more gaysome,” he said, which I assumed was a southern expression because Hattie reacted just as though he’d served her a heaping full platter of chit’lins and pone, laughing helplessly, and all but slapping him on the knee. They were certainly off to a fine roaring start. So promising, in fact, that I decided to go back to the barracks, and was waiting to make my break, when Ace brought me into the conversation again. I realized all at once that the inclusion was deliberate. He truly wanted me to stay. He was not using me as a straight man, the way some guys did while they worked their points with a chick. I felt suddenly and oddly touched.

“Will and I both like Columbus a lot,” he said, “but it’s really difficult, you know, to get to understand a place, isn’t that right, Will?”

“Oh yeah,” I said, “it’s really difficult.”

“Especially when we get into town so infrequently, huh, Will?”

“We don’t get in too often,” I said to Hattie, and grinned stupidly, entirely mindful of how little I was contributing to the discussion, and grateful for Ace’s efforts, and hopeful that he would not think I was a moron.

“Though Sundays are usually free,” he said.

“Unless there’s a cross-country scheduled,” I said.

“Yes, they conic up every now and then,” Ace said.

“Yes,” I said.

“What do you do on Sundays?” Ace asked Hattie, and nodded almost imperceptibly to me, signaling that this was where we were supposed to lead the conversation, get it, Will? Around to where we could find out what this delicious piece of pecan pie did with her Sundays, get it?

“Oh,” I said, and Ace smiled and raised his eyebrows approvingly at the coming of the dawn.

“I work on Sundays,” Hattie said.

“What kind of work do you do?” I asked.

“She must be a movie star,” Ace said.

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah.”

“No, I’m not,” Hattie said seriously.

“Of course not,” Ace said. “She’s a fashion model.”

“Not that either,” she said.

“A designer?” I said, and looked at Ace.

“Of what?” Ace asked.

“Dresses?” I said.

“Ladies’ dresses?” Ace said.

“Third floor,” I said, and he burst out laughing.

“No, no,” Hattie said, shaking her head.

“Well, I give up,” Ace said.

“So do I,” I said.

“I’m a waitress,” Hattie said, and shrugged.

“Days or nights?” Ace asked immediately.

“Days. I go on at eight in the morning, and I’m off at four.”

“Look at this little girl,” Ace said. “Slaves all week long in a restaurant...”

“A diner,” Hattie said.

“... a diner, and then comes here on her own free time...”

“I’m off Mondays,” Hattie said.

“... to do her part for the war effort by providing a little bit of cheer for servicemen far from their homes and their loved ones.”

“I’m only here by accident,” Hattie said. “We had to have six chaperones for the girls, and they called me yesterday because one of the women supposed to come got taken to the hospital.”

“Oh, the poor woman,” Ace said.

“What was wrong with her?” I said.

“Nothing,” Hattie said. “She was pregnant, and it got to be her time.”

“Do you know what we’re going to do this Sunday when Hattie leaves the diner?” Ace asked.

“Yes,” I said. “We’re going over to the hospital to visit that poor little old woman who was supposed to chaperone tonight.”

“Wrong,” Ace said. “We’re going to wait on Hattie.”

“You’re going to what?” Hattie said.

“Wait on you.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re going to buy a big steak, and then me and my buddy here...”

“Will Tyler,” I said.

“... are going to bring that steak over to your place, Hattie — you do live in Columbus, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, “but...”

“... where we’ll cook it and serve it and clean up the kitchen and do the dishes afterwards, without your having to lift a finger all night long. How does that sound to you, Hattie?”

“Okay, I guess, but...”

“No buts, Hattie,” Ace said.

“Well, I guess he wouldn’t mind too much.”

“Who?”

“My husband.”

“I’m sure he’d be pleased to know you’re being so well taken care of,” I said.

“Oh yeah, it isn’t that,” Hattie said.

“Then it’s settled,” Ace said.

“It’s just that he’s usually so tired,” Hattie said.

“Tired? Who?”

“My husband.”

“Tired?” I said.

“When he gets home at night.”

“Home?”

“My husband.”

“Home?” Ace said. “Home from where?”

“He’s a sergeant in the Medical Corps. He’s stationed at Northington General in Tuscaloosa. He gets home every night about six o’clock. Unless there’s an epidemic or something.”

“I take it there is no epidemic right now,” Ace said.

“No,” Hattie said.

“Nor one expected for Sunday.”

“No. I really don’t think he’d mind, though, if you fellows came over. He likes steak.”

“Might be difficult to find an open butcher on Sunday,” I said.

“Mmm, yes, hadn’t thought of that,” Ace said. “And what about ration coupons?”

“What about that Lycoming radial?” I said.

“What about it?” Ace said.

“That faulty horse. Supposed to be two ninety-five,” I said.

“He’s talking about the Curtiss AT-9,” Ace explained to Hattie. “Oh,” Hattie said.

“We’re supposed to check the red-line entry,” I said.

“There’re these two Lycoming radial engines, each two hundred and ninety-five horses.”

“Oh,” Hattie said.

“One of them’s missing,” Ace said.

“One of the horses,” I said.

“Dangerous to fly her that way.”

“Have to tend to the horses.”

“Supposed to do it before tomorrow morning.”

“Almost tomorrow morning now,” I said.

“Better be going,” Ace said, and rose. He executed a courtly bow, lifted Hattie’s left hand with the wedding band and small gleaming diamond to his lips, brushed a gentle kiss against it, and said, “Until next time, Hattie.”

“Goodnight, Hattie,” I said.

“Charmed,” Hattie said.

Outside the mess hall, Ace took off his hat, wiped the sweat band, and replaced it on his head at a precariously jaunty angle, but not before I’d noticed that his thatch of brown hair was already beginning to thin at the crown. On the way over to the EM’s Club, he told me he would be nineteen years old in a few months, and that his real name was Avery Gibson. The nickname, he explained, had nothing whatever to do with his flying prowess. It was instead the result of an inventive WASP father who, in fine Saturday Evening Post tradition, had bestowed “Ace” on Avery at the age of three, and “Skipper” on his older brother Sanford. The older brother was now in the Pacific with a PT-boat squadron, his rate being Gunner’s Mate/Third, his nickname apparently causing no end of conflict with the lieutenant (j.g.) who commanded the boat. Ace said he hated his own nickname because it gave him all the renown of a Western gunslick; everyone was waiting to shoot him down long before they met him. But I noticed that he walked with a cocky rolling gait, as though he were carrying an invisible swagger stick in one clenched fist, and he wore his uniform with all the authority of an already commissioned officer.

In the club, we sat drinking beer and talking.

Ace was from Reading, Pennsylvania, where his father, Stuart Gibson, was a stockbroker. His mother, Miriam, whom everyone called “Mims,” kept horses. Six horses. Ace hated horses, an aversion directly attributable to the fact that he had been thrown from the saddle at the tender age of ten and then dragged, foot caught in the stirrup, for some twenty feet before Mom-Mims caught the horses bridle and brought the beast to a stop. His father kept a forty-four-foot ketch on the Schuylkill, and he could be found out on the sailboat most good weekends, though it was Ace’s estimate that he was lucky if he got to use it twenty days all summer. It was apparent from what Ace said that he had as little love for boats as he had for horses.

Surprisingly, I said out loud, “Don’t you like your parents?”

“Do you like yours?” he asked.

“My mother’s dead,” I said.

“I’m sorry.”

“She died last year. I liked her, though. I think I liked her.”

“What about your father?”

“He’s okay,” I said, and shrugged. “He sure gave me a lot of static about joining up.”

“Mine was eager to get me out of the house,” Ace said, and smiled.

“It’s just he’s so dumb about some things,” I said. I guess I felt a little guilty saying it; he was, after all, my father. So I quickly told Ace how much I respected a man who had started as a lumberjack in Wisconsin and had gone on to become a very important man in the paper industry. I sketched in his early days as a trainee at Ramsey-Warner, relating the story the way I’d heard my father tell it so many times at the dinner table, and then explained how he had taken a job as salesman for the Circle Mill after he’d lost his first job, and how after fifteen years of tough in-fighting he had become Executive Vice President, from which position he was finally able to challenge the company’s president, an older party who was slowly becoming incapable of making tough business decisions. The challenge had involved two vital points, and perhaps my father would have lost the battle if he hadn’t convinced the board that he was right about both. One was a takeover offer from Ramsey-Wamer, the company he’d once worked for, and the other had something to do with wallpaper, either with severely cutting production of it, or increasing production, I’d forgotten which. But the board sided with him. and almost eighteen years to the day he’d started at Circle, my father became president of the company, which was certainly something to admire. Ace admitted that it was certainly something to admire and then, probably shamed by his own earlier references to old Stu, told me how his father, too, had been an uneducated man who took it upon himself to learn the workings of the market and then had amassed a fair fortune playing with stocks, which was certainly nothing to sneeze at. It certainly wasn’t anything to sneeze at, I agreed. Thus having coped with our separate heresies, we went on to discussing more pleasant matters, namely Ace’s brother Skipper, of whom he seemed genuinely fond, and whom he described as “a really handsome guy, Will, the original golden boy.” I told him a little about Linda then, and what a great crazy kid she was.

We finished our beers and walked over to the flight line, where the planes sat in a moonlit row, ready for the morning (light. Ace told me he couldn’t wait to begin flying that old P-38, which was only the best damn fighter plane ever built. I told him that the way the war was going, we might not get over there in time to fly one, and he said, “Don’t you worry, Will. This war ain’t going to end till I get there to end it,” and then laughed his cluttering little laugh, which I still found annoying.

There were several other annoying things about him.

I discovered, for example, that he had a remarkable sense of humor and a truly enormous stockpile of jokes for every occasion. (That wasn’t the annoying thing.) The annoying thing was that whenever he saw or heard something that nudged his joke file, he would automatically recall the punch line out loud, “Yeah, but lost time we were taking movies,” and then would say, “Do you know that joke, Will?” and whether you knew it or not, “Yes, I know it, Ace,” he would go right on to tell the entire joke, anyway. So if you’d heard it, you would have to sit through it again in Technicolor with Ace relishing each hilarious syllable. And if you hadn’t heard it, you had in effect heard it because he’d already given the punch line before telling the joke. The result was mind-numbing. Then, in a luncheonette later that night, after we’d taken a jitney into Columbus, and after Ace had told seven jokes, three of which I’d already heard, the punch lines to the other four already delivered, I discovered another of his little faults, and this one really bothered me.

When the waiter, a tired old man dragging ass after probably twelve hours of labor, shuffled over to the booth and gave us our menus, Ace said, “Bacon and eggs, please,” and then politely inquired, “Is the bacon nice and soft?”

The waiter said, “Oh yes, sir, the bacon is nice and soft, very tender bacon, sir.”

Ace instantly said, “Then I don’t want it. I like my bacon crisp.”

The waiter looked puzzled for an instant, and then said, “Well, we can make it crisp for you, sir, if that’s the way you like it.”

Ace considered this, and then asked, “You won’t burn it, will you?”

“Oh no, sir, of course we won’t burn it.”

“I like it burnt,” Ace said.

“Well, if you like it burnt...”

“Never mind, I’ll have ham instead.”

“Ham and eggs, yes, sir.”

“No, ham on rye with a slice of pickle. Are the pickles very sour?”

The waiter, wary now, asked, “How do you like your pickles, sir?”

“How have you got them?”

“However you like them.”

“I don’t like them.”

I should not have been surprised by his waiter-baiting. Ace had removed the wire grommet from his hat the moment we left the field, giving it a raunchy fifty-mission crush, and on the darkened streets of the town he’d been thrown at least six highballs from soldiers mistaking him for brass. He had returned each salute unblinkingly, as if they were only properly his due; there had been no mistaking his cruel enjoyment of the ruse. But I guess I was dazzled by his flow of confidences that night, and overwhelmed by his enormous ego, even though I was not completely taken in by his fancy patter and sleight-of-hand. I knew, for instance, that whereas he claimed to hate the name “Ace,” he nonetheless enjoyed his reputation as a hot pilot and felt the name, however acquired, was entirely appropriate. I suspected, too, that his boasting desire to get overseas and “shoot down a thousand Germans” may have been masking a fear of actual combat with real enemy airplanes. And yet, I felt pleased and flattered to be in his presence.

A friendship was beginning that night in Mississippi, and I think we both recognized how slowly and carefully it needed to be explored, both respected how easily it could have been destroyed before it even truly started. I was willing at once to forget whichever of his small inadequacies rankled, and ready to trust that he would forgive my own annoying defects in return.

It was a good beginning.

April

We had come from the vestry into the chancel, where we stood now and waited for the wedding to begin, though I suppose it had properly begun the moment I made my entrance with the minister and my best man. It had been raining all day Saturday, and the ground outside West Presbyterian was soggy and riven, mud running off the sloping lawn down to Indian Street. I stood before the red-carpeted steps to the left of Danny Talbot, who was my best man, and watched the slow Sunday drizzle that pressed the high arched windows of the church. I did not want to look at the open wooden doors through which Nancy Ellen Clark would come on her father’s arm within the next few moments. I did not want to get married. Rosalie Hollis in the organ loft was playing “Claire de Lune,” and I could see from the tail end of my eye, as I steadfastly watched the oppressive drizzle, my family sitting in the first three pews on the right side of the church, Nancy’s family on the left, all of them there to witness a wedding that should not be taking place, I did not love her.

Yes, I loved her.

No, I did not love her. I was nineteen years old, there was too much yet to do, too much yet to see, to experience, to feel. I did not want to marry Nancy Ellen Clark and take her to the apartment we had rented in Eau Fraiche on Mechanic Street, the apartment I had painted last week in colors Nancy chose from Mr. Eckert’s sample book, our furniture arriving on Wednesday from Talbot’s, an unreal shelter that apartment, unlived in, unused, waiting empty for the bride and groom to return from their two-week honeymoon in Chicago, where we would be staying at the Blackstone Hotel, I did not want to go.

I wanted to go. I wanted to make love to her, I wanted to take off her dress and her petticoat, hold her naked in my arms, tell her secrets about myself, whisper them in her good ear, hold her close and confide everything because I loved her so much I could die.

They sat in anticipation, the wedding march was beginning, my mother and father in resplendent Sunday-wedding best, and beside them my sister Kate with her half-breed stud, no feathered headdress on his proud Apache skull, but wearing instead a white man’s dark suit probably bought second-hand in an Arizona beer hall, arms folded across his massive chest. And on his right, my sisters Harriet and Fanny in georgette chiffon, and my brother John, all of eight now, probably longing to pick his nose, but worrying the flap of it instead with his forefinger as Rosalie Hollis pounded the keys and Lohengrin reverberated in the wooden church and the gloomy drizzle pressed against the windows.

Too much to see and do, I wanted to devour worlds, every universe there was, the ushers starting down the aisle, two by two in black, why did men dress alike for weddings and for funerals? the ground upon which Timothy Bear had lain exposed in death, his mouth open, his eyes open, his skull open to the shell fragment that had drained his maleness and left him there for friend and enemy alike to sec, a limp geometric tangle of lifeless limbs, my best man dead while flashy Danny Talbot stood next to me by default and the four ushers joined us, sealing off escape, I could not run, I wanted to bolt.

And in Paris, what would I do? In Paris, I would learn to say "Je vous en prie,” and I would roam Montmartre in search of fancy ladies, gartered and laced, perfumed and rouged, who would lift their skirts and French me, would Nancy Ellen Clark do that, would I dare to ask her in the secret dark of our bedroom on Mechanic Street to do things she had never once conjured in her wildest fantasies? I would become the Paris correspondent for the New York Tribune, I would send daily dispatches on the progress of Mr. Wilson’s efforts to quell the land-hungry appetites of the British, the French, and the Italians, my byline would read Bertram A. Tyler, the A for Alfred, though Nancy perhaps herself did not know this, another secret to tell in our midnight cloister, my middle name is Alfred, is that not amusing, mon gamin, let me take off your garter and press it to my lips. Or I would become a translator once I became fluent in the language, I had learned to say Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir, mademoiselle with considerable ease in far too many French towns, what a laugh when Timothy Bear tried to cope with the language, what a laugh that boy was. And once fluent with the tongue (I beg you, mademoiselle, be more careful with your tongue, eh?) once fluent with the language, I would translate novels, perhaps pornography, I would walk along the Champs Êlysées wearing a black derby and a long black coat with a black velvet collar, carrying a walking slick, and they would whisper about me in every sidewalk café, not knowing who I was, but surmising I was terribly important, fluent as I was in four languages, and able to translate Marcel Proust’s most complicated writings, I, Bertram A. Tyler, the amazing nineteen-year-old American who had set the continent abuzz, tall and handsome and oo-Ia-la quel homme!

The bridesmaids were coming down the aisle singly now, somewhat drizzle-dampened in peach-colored gowns, each carrying small bouquets of tea roses and baby’s breath, Nancy’s younger sister Meg first, a silly bewildered grin on her face, followed by Adelaide Moore, who had been voted Dairy Queen of the state three years back, before we’d entered the war, but who still hadn’t caught herself a husband. Behind her, in the identical peach gown was Brigitte Rabillon, who was keeping steady company with Danny Talbot, it was said they would be married in June as soon as he became executive sales manager of his father’s furniture company. He had already asked me if I would do him the extreme honor of being his best man, but by June I would be in the Loire Valley, one of France’s most discriminating wine tasters, but he is an American, they would say! Ah oui, monsieur, but he knows wine like no other man on earth, it is said he can tell a good vineyard from the road as he approaches in his automobile, ah oui, monsieur, he drives one of those Stutz Bearcats, he is trés formidable, vraiment. Then came Felice Clark (no relation to my intended bride), who, it was rumored, had had numerous exciting things done to her dawn-peninsula during our great American adventure, while all the town bloods were away in Europe, the party having been thrown by several forty-year-old members of the Republican Club, who decided in private smoke-filled conclave that this might be a good time to explore the virtues of some of the younger ladies around, they being deprived of company of their own age and all, hence the sad story of Felice Clark, who had lost it repeatedly down-peninsula one starless night last October on the back seat of a flivver, and who now marched down the aisle looking hardly sullied or blemished, had Nancy ever done anything with anybody anywhere anytime? Suppose, no, the thought was unthinkable, not here with Reverend Boland at my side, but suppose, ah suppose, well, are we any of us perfect? but suppose in that Chicago hotel room tonight (will we be there tonight, did I check the train schedule?) suppose there is no blood? the blood on the straw pallet under the thirteen-year-old girl in that French farmhouse and the blood of her mother on the floor of the second bedroom and the blood of the horse in the courtyard outside, the flies eating blood, suppose there is no blood from my Nancy, will it matter? I do not love her, how can it matter?

Clara, Nancy’s older sister and her maid-of-honor, came through the doors radiantly happy in a pale blue gown, yellow roses crushed in a bouquet against her bosom, dear Clara who had written to me of her sister’s illness during those dread weeks so many centuries ago, I must have loved Nancy very much then, I cried for days when I thought I might lose her.

Oh Jesus God, I love her now, too, with all my being! I love her desperately, I would kill any man who touched her, who even dreamt of touching her. I pledge to you, Nancy, my life, my troth, my undying devotion, I love you, Nancy, I will never stop loving you!

Or perhaps an automobile agency on the Avenue Neuilly, strictly American cars, bring the old Ford over there, put the nation on wheels. Ah, oui, madame, you may well ask who that strikingly

handsome American is! He is Bertram A. Tyler, he is the man who brought the Ford automobile to France, ah, oui, and put the nation on wheels. (Has someone already brought the Ford automobile over there and put the nation on wheels?) I’ll drive him out of business, I’ll fluently make speeches in the Bois de Bologne, I will stand on the equivalent of a French soapbox, make speeches the way the Bolsheviks are doing here in America, only I will extol the merits of buying a Ford automobile from the Bertram A. Tyler Agency on the Avenue Neuilly, where the owner himself, the proprietor, the boss, mesdames et messieurs, speaks fluent French, why even colloquial French, and where you will get the squarest little deal on the continent, bar none, buy your car from me, my friends, make me rich, I want to be a rich American bum, I want to gamble the night away at Monte Carlo, and dance the waltz in the grand ballroom of the Alhambra in Cimiez, and take my yacht to Cannes, I want to be Bertram A. Tyler, the notorious American bachelor tycoon, bachelor, do you hear? I don’t want to get married, not today, not any day, not ever, ever, ever!

She came through the doors on her father’s arm.

My heart stopped.

Her hand rested ever so delicately on the sleeve of his black coat, her eyes behind the veil were downcast as though she were carefully watching the toes of her white slippers, the white lace gown seeming to float of its own slow volition down the church aisle, suspended around her tiny figure as she came closer to me and the organ notes floated from the loft in fat and mellow accompaniment, my Nancy’s triumphal music. She was beside me now, standing on my left, the minister before us, her father having stepped back and away, symbolically mine already though her father had not yet given her in marriage, not really mine as yet because the words had not been spoken. “Dearly beloved,” Reverend Boland said, “we are gathered together here in the sight of God,” perhaps not even mine after the words were spoken, perhaps not to be mine for a long long time to come, “to join this man and this woman in holy matrimony, which is an honorable estate.” We were both so very young, I felt our exposed youth glaringly out of place in this old people’s church, they who knew so very much, but who watched this ancient ritual in silence now, saying nothing, eyes wet, watching, “not to be entered into unadvisedly, but reverently, discreetly, and in the fear of God. Into this holy estate these two persons come now to be joined,” Nancy’s eyes still downcast behind the veil, I wanted to see her eyes, I wanted to read what was in her eyes, did she want this marriage any more than I did?

I thought of a forest at dusk and the lone barking of a dog against the approaching night, the laughter of a lumberjack booming from the bunkhouse, “or if there be any present who can show just cause why these parties should not be legally joined together, let him now speak or forever hold his peace.”

I wanted to say Yes, I can show very just and reasonable cause why we should not be joined. I hardly know this girl. I’ve known her forever, but I don’t know her at all, why are you all rushing us into this? Why are you insisting that I become a man when I’m still not done being a boy, a father when I want to remain a son? Stop them, somebody, I thought, stop them! Papa, tell them I’m still your son, tell them there are still a boy’s worlds to conquer, there are still hoptoads to catch.

“Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?” Reverend Boland asked, and Nancy’s father said, “I do,” gruflly, his two seconds on stage after eighteen years and one month of caring for his Nancy, feeding her, clothing her, loving her, all finished in the two words, “I do,” I give her to be married to this man, I do, his chance to stop it gone, wasn’t anyone going to stop it? Reverend Boland put Nancy’s right hand into my own right hand, and suddenly looked very solemn and frightening.

“Bertram Alfred Tyler...”

(My secret gone, he had given away my secret, he had given me one less thing to confide to Nancy, to bind her to me in the night.)

“Wilt thou have this woman to be thy wedded wife, to live together in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all other keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?”

“I will,” I said.

“Nancy Ellen Clark, wilt thou have this man to be thy wedded husband, to live together in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love him, honor and obey him, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all other keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?”

“I will,” Nancy said.

“The ring,” Reverend Boland whispered.

The ring was in my hand, Danny Talbot immediately pressed the ring into my hand. Reverend Boland again said, “The ring,” and gently pried the golden circle loose from my fingers, and said, “The wedding ring is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual bond which unites two loyal hearts in endless love,” and then gave me the ring again. I took Nancy’s left hand in my own, and repeated what I had learned at yesterday’s rehearsal, “In token of the pledge of the vow made between us, with this ring I thee wed,” and quickly slipped the ring onto her finger.

Reverend Boland stood still and tall and majestic for a moment, a pleased awed smile on his face, as though he had been privileged to witness a miracle. Then, as I stood before him with Nancy’s trembling hand in my own, he intoned in a rich and solemn and echoing voice the words we were in this church to hear, the words that had taken less than ten minutes (I had met her in the summer of 1915!) to reach, “Forasmuch as Bertram Alfred Tyler and Nancy Ellen Clark (it was still not too late, I could bolt for the doors at the rear of the church, run west for California and the Pacific Ocean) have consented together in holy wedlock, and have witnessed the same before God and this company (get a boat to Hong Kong, become a rich silk merchant there, wear a little black hat on my head) and have declared the same by joining hands (and have a dozen concubines, Lotus Blossom, Peach Tree Honey) and by giving and receiving a ring (it’s not too late, I thought, run, I thought, run!) I pronounce that they are husband and wife together, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Reverend Boland paused and raised his face heavenward. “Those whom God hath joined together,” he said, “let not man put asunder.” He paused again. He looked at us both. “Amen,” he said.

Nancy lifted her head and her eyes and her veil, and I brushed my lips against hers, embarrassed to be kissing her here in public, even though she was my wife now, my wife! And I said, not knowing if I meant it, “I love you, Nancy,” and she tilted her head to one side and, eyes glistening, said, “Pardon?” and I knew that I had meant it.

May

There was pot in the apartment, of course, provided by Lenny as matter of factly as he provided the silverware and the sheets, nothing to write the Federal Bureau of Narcotics about, just enough for a little smoke every now and again. Actually, it would have been just as simple for Dana and me to have bought our nickel bags in Cambridge or New Haven, but it was more convenient to have the stuff waiting there for us in Providence each weekend (not to mention a good deal safer besides, what with all those state lines being crossed). Lenny would leave it in a little plastic bag in the refrigerator (“Oregano, in case anyone asks; livens up the cuisine”) and we would pay him for it on a consumer basis, using an honor system Dana and I scrupulously respected. Neither of us were potheads. We’d bust a joint on Friday night when we got to the apartment, and maybe have oh at the most two or three more over the weekend, something like that. It was good.

Everything was good that spring.

Dana said that nobody in Hollywood would have been interested in Our Love Story because it was so plebeian; we had not met cute, and we didn’t do any kookie offbeat things like buying red onions on Olvera Street, the commute being a long one from Providence. I informed her, however, that she possessed a couple of natural attributes long considered viable commodities on the Hollywood mart, and that perhaps we could approach a movie sale under the table, so to speak, Our Romance being weak on plot, true enough, but at least one of the characters being well-developed, if she took my meaning. (“Oh yes, sir,” she trilled, “I take your meaning, and I do so want to be a star!”) But I suppose our relationship was singularly lacking in spectator interest. We did not, for example, walk barefoot in the rain even once that spring. We walked — yes, sometimes when the sky over that old city was an unblemished blue, and the spring air came in off the Atlantic with a tangy whiff of salt and a promise of summer suddenly so strong it brought with it the tumbled rush of every summer past, the lingering images of crowded vacation highways and white sand beaches, fireworks and beer, hot dogs, lobster rolls, children shrieking, weathered oceanfront hotels, last summer crowding next summer in that Providence spring — we walked hand in hand and told lovers’ secrets no more important than that I had cheated to win a prize in the third grade (and had not been found out) or that Dana had lettered in eyebrow pencil when she was twelve years old, on her respective budding breasts, “Orangeade” and “Lemonade.”

But we had no favorite restaurant, we did not discover a great Italian joint with red-checked tablecloths and candles sticking in empty Chianti bottles dripping wax, where Luigi whom we knew by name rushed to greet us at the door (“Mama mia, you no binna here long time!”) and led us to a table near a cheerful fire that dispelled whatever winter’s bite still hovered, though spring was surely upon us and we were in love. We had no such rendezvous where jealous patrons watched as Luigi fussed over our glowing romance and waited while we tasted the rubious wine, and kissed his fingers and nodded and went out to the kitchen to tell his wife that the young lovers loved the wine, our personal Henry Armetta, while we ourselves grandstanded to the crowded cozy restaurant, I staring deep into Dana’s eyes, she touching my hand on the checked tablecloth with one slender carmine-tipped forefinger, we had no such place.

We had instead a hundred places, all of them lousy. We ate whenever we were hungry, and we were hungry often. Like frenzied teeny-boppers, we became instantly ravenous, demanding food at once lest heads roll, and then were instantly gratified by whatever swill the nearest diner offered — until hunger struck again and we became wild Armenians striding the streets in search of blood. Dana was at her barbaric worst immediately after making love. She would leap out of bed naked and stalk through the apartment, a saber-toothed tigress on a hunt, heading directly for the refrigerator where she would fling out food like the dismembered parts of victims, making horrible sounds of engorgement all the while, and then coming back to me to say, “Shall I make us something to eat?” She was an excellent cook, though a reluctant one, and she sometimes whipped up ginzo delights learned from her father’s mother, and unlike anything even dreamt of by my mother, Dolores Prine Tyler, with her Ann Page pasta.

The games we played were personal and therefore exclusive, lacking in universality and therefore essentially dull to anyone but ourselves. The Tyler-Castelli Television Commercial Award was invented one Saturday night while we were watching a message-ridden late movie on Lenny’s old set, wheeled to the foot of the bed. The judges for the TCTC Award (Dana and I) gave undisputed first prize to the Wrigley Spearmint Chewing Gum commercial as the best example of freedom from complexity, pretentiousness, or ornamentation; the coveted runner-up prize went to the Gallo Wine Company, whose handsome baritone actor-vineyard owner on horseback was forced to sing “wine country” as “wine cun-tree” for the sake of the jingle’s scan. In similar fashion, there was the Tyler-Castelli Award for Literary Criticism (first prize went to Martin Levin of the New York Times for having reviewed ten thousand books in five months, somehow skipping only the novels of Styron, Salinger, Bellow, Roth, Malamud, and Updike); the Tyler-Castelli Award for Athletic Achievement (first prize went to Sonny Liston for his recent one-minute performance in Lewiston, Maine); and the Tyler-Castelli Award for Quick Thinking (which went to Lyndon Baines Johnson for his speedy dispatch of the United States Marines to Santo Domingo, his second such award in three months).

There was (I knew, Dana knew) nothing very special about our love, except that it was ours and it was good. We floated, we drifted toward a limbo of not-quite irresponsibility, lulled by each other’s presence and the soporific vapors of spring. I was protected from the draft by my student status at Yale, and I was smart enough (Wat Tyler on black-and-white film asserts to his own high intelligence while assorted professors and scientists applaud his modesty) to be able to grapple with whatever old Eli threw at me in the semester to come, confident in short that I could preserve my deferment. Dana was a bright girl and an honor student, and if we slouched through most of our courses, it didn’t show in our grades. We bathed regularly. We wrote or called home even when we didn’t need money. We were a pair of passionate isolationists who sought neither followers nor converts, involved in a love we knew was genuine and true. And since it was ours alone, and since it was so good, we naturally felt free to abuse it.

(This is Wat Tyler’s first screen appearance in color, idol of millions, and he is disturbed by his red-faced image, did he look that way in the rushes? Apart, he wonders how Dana can have caused such rage in him. The flickering frames of film reveal the camera coming in for a tight close shot of his fists clenching and unclenching. The audience Wat Tyler watches the star Wat Tyler as the sound track shrieks under the tense, homicidal hands, “I can’t get no satisfaction.”)

Dana was sitting in the center of Lenny’s bed, eyes averted the way they’d been that first night here in January, partially turned away from me, hands in her lap. She was wearing faded blue jeans and a green sweater. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. There was no lipstick on her mouth. It was ten o’clock on a Friday night. She usually caught the five o’clock train from Boston and was at the apartment by six-thirty.

“Why are you so late?” I asked her.

“I ran into someone.”

“Who?”

“An old friend.”

“Where?”

“In Boston, where do you think? My God, Wat, it’s only...”

“Why didn’t you call?”

“I wasn’t anywhere near a phone.”

“Well, where, what do you mean, there’re phones all over Boston, how could you possibly not be anywhere near a phone? Didn’t you know I’d be worrying?”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“Well, I was.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Where were you?”

“By the river.”

“What river?”

“There’s only one undergraduate river in Boston, which river do you think?”

“I’m not that goddamn familiar with Boston.”

“The Charles,” Dana said softly.

“With who, whom?”

“With Max.”

(The close shot of Wat Tyler’s eyes reveals jealousy, fury, fear, unreasoning black rage, all represented by a superimposed fireworks display erupting in each pupil. The soundtrack features his harsh breathing. The Stones’s “Satisfaction” has segued into The Yardbirds’ “I’m a Man.” It is wintertime in the film, the window behind Wat Tyler is rimed with frost, there is the distant jingle of Dr. Zhivago sleigh bells on the icebound street outside. In the room it is May and Lenny Samalson has put flowered Bonwit Teller sheets on the bed in celebration of spring, but it is a dank winter in Wat Tyler’s mind; her body will hardly have deteriorated at all when they find it naked in the snow a week from now.)

“Max,” I repeated.

“Yes. Max.”

“You ran into him.”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“I didn’t exactly run into him. He called.”

“When?”

“This afternoon. I went back to the dorm to pick up my bag, and Max called.”

“To say what?”

“To say how was I, and it had been a long time, and all that.”

“So how’d you end up by the river?”

“He said he had a few minutes and would I like to go for a walk or something? So I said I was on my way to catch the train to Providence, and he said Oh, in that case. So I felt sorry for him and I said Okay I’ll take a walk with you, Max.”

“So you went by the river for a few minutes, and now it’s ten o’clock at night when you should have been here by six-thirty.”

“We didn’t stay by the river.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Wat, I’m very tired. I really would like to put on my nightgown and go to bed. Can’t this wait until morning? Nothing so terrible happened, believe me.”

“What did happen?”

“We went up to Max’s room, and we had a drink.”

“And then what?”

“And then we had another drink.”

“Did he try to lay you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you let him?”

“No.”

“Why’d you go up there, Dana? Didn’t you know he’d try?”

“No, I didn’t know he’d try. I wanted to see if he’d try.”

“You were sleeping with the guy for a month before we met, did you expect him to get you up in his room and discuss the weather?”

“I didn’t know what to expect. I hadn’t seen him since December, when we ended it, and I was surprised when he called and... I was curious, all right? I wanted to see.”

“See what?”

“I wanted to see if... there was anything there any more.”

“What did you expect to be there?”

“Damn you, Wat, I loved him once!”

“The way you love me.”

“Yes. No. Right now, I hate you.”

“Why? Because I don’t like you kissing around with your discarded boyfriends?”

“We didn’t... oh, all right, yes, he kissed me, all right? He kissed me several times, all right?”

“Good old trustworthy Max.”

“You’re a riot, do you know that? You even expect Max to be faithful to you!”

“I expect Max to get run over by a bus!”

“Go make a little doll, why don’t you?”

“I’ll make two while I’m at it.”

(The image on the screen, the Victorian strait-laced stuffy impossible image of Walter Tyler, Esquire, is amusing even to himself. He cannot believe the soundtrack, he cannot believe that these words are issuing from his mouth, and yet the camera never lies, and he can see his lips moving, he can hear the words tumbling sternly from his prudishly puckered mouth, what docs he expect from her?)

“I expected more from you.”

“More? Than what?”

“Than... whatever you want to call it. An adventure in some guy’s room. Kissing you and... getting you drunk...”

“Oh, crap. Wat, I’m not drunk. Do I look drunk?”

“You look like a cheap cunt.”

“Thank you,” she said, and rose suddenly and swiftly from the bed, and walked immediately to the lone dresser in the room where she began pulling out slips and bras and nightgowns and stockings, flapping each garment angrily into the air like a battle Hag.

“Where do you think you’re going?” I said.

(The words are familiar and clichéd, they suddenly reduce this love affair to the absurd, taking from it even its dullness, its lack of uniqueness. His face in closeup is clichéd, too, it expresses the emotional range of a stock company James Garner. He looks by turn indignant, terrified, self-righteous, and a trifle ill.)

“I’m going back to Boston,” Dana said.

“You just got here,” I said.

“Yes, and I’ll get back, too.”

“I thought you loved me.”

“You don’t own me,” Dana said.

“I don’t own you. but I thought you loved me.”

“I do love you, but you don’t own me.”

“Well, stop flapping your goddamn clothes around like that.”

“They’re my clothes, I’ll flap them however the hell I want to flap them, you silly bastard,” she said, and burst out laughing.

In bed there was no quarrel, there was never any quarrel.

(There is no film, either. There is no second Wat Tyler when he is in bed with her, no alter ego, no schizophrenic super-image hovering somewhere in the air-conditioned spectator darkness.)

The long limp line of her lying still and spent against the rumpled sheet.

I came out of the bathroom and was surprised anew by her, each fresh glimpse a discovery. One arm raised above her head, elbow bent, hand dangling, she lay on her side with eyes closed and lips slightly parted, distant, oh so distant from me and the apartment and Providence and the world, cloistered in whatever sun-dappled female glade we had led her to together. I stood with the bathroom door ajar behind me, one hand still on the knob, and watched her quietly, and knew something of her selfsame mood, felt it touch me from across the room to include me in a sweet and silent private peace.

The first time she blew me, I yelled when I came and the guy next door banged on the wall.

“Who taught you that?” I whispered later. “Max?”

“Oh no, sir,” she said. “That was my very first time.”

“Sure,” I said and smiled. Max could not have mattered less. We were still discovering each other, Dana and I. We were falling in love over and over and over again.

June

6/12/44

I can’t wait for you two guys to get together. My brother’s about as big as you are, Will, maybe an inch or so taller, with blond hair and brown eyes and my dumb buck teeth, only on him they look good. Are you an athlete? He was an athlete back home, a four-letter man, his sports were baseball, basketball, soccer, and track. Baseball was really his game, though; he pitched a no-hitter in the Little League when he was only ten years old, I’ll never forget that day as long as I live.

My mother came over to the field in the seventh inning, wearing jodhpurs and flicking her riding crop against her boot. I told her Skipper had a no-hitter going, and she said, Really, what’s a no-hitter? She was there to pick us up after the game, and she was pissed oft because it wasn’t over yet. She kept telling me about a dumb mare named Peony who’d developed a capped hock. I wanted to say Listen, go to hell, you and Peony both, my big brother’s got a no-hitter going, can’t you understand that? They carried him on their shoulders after the game, he was all covered with sweat, his face all flushed, and he looked around — he was on his back, you know, legs up in the air, arms waving for balance — he twisted his neck and spotted me in the crowd and yelled Hey there, Ace, we did it, huh? We did it.

He was in college when this thing started, you know, he could have gone in as an officer, but he didn’t want to. I told him he was crazy. Look, I said, get the most out of it, Skip, get the good chow and the broads and the easy times, why knock yourself out? No, he couldn’t see it my way. He enlisted in the Navy, so now he’s a big deal Gunner’s Mate/Third, what’s that the equivalent of, Will? A buck sergeant? He’s wasting himself, he really is. And with that Navy officer’s uniform, he could be getting more tail than he’d know what to do with, not that he’s making out too badly as it is. He’s got himself a little nurse off the hospital ship out there, she’s risking decapitation for fraternizing with an enlisted man, but she just can’t keep her hands off him. She goes around in a fog all day long, just waiting to get ashore to be with him, No, no, Miss Abernathy, I told you to prick his boil, do you know that one? You do? There’s this new nurse at a hospital, you see, and on her first day the intern tells her...

June 14, 1944

I’ve always had a thing about names, Will. When I was twelve or thirteen, I used to dream of dating girls with names like Connie or Grace or Wendy or Gail, they were all lovely blond dolls with long hair blowing. I guess I must have fallen in love with a dozen Connies later on, but only because I was already in love with the name. Even now, if someone says, Listen there’s this great girl you have to meet, her name is Gladys or Adelaide or Hannah, it’s simply not the same as April or Deborah or Diane. Okay, it’s a quirk. But you try living with Avery for a while. All I’m trying to say is that the name got me even before I saw the actual airplane. Even the number got me. What are you laughing at? You think P-38 is the same as P-40 or P-47? Well, it isn’t. There’s something sexy about P-38, stop laughing, will you? P-38, listen to it! It rolls off the tongue, P-38, it’s got a nice easy flow to it — you jackass, I’m trying to tell you something about this airplane we’re flying!

You know what the Germans call her? Der gabelschwanz teufel, I think that’s how it’s pronounced. It means fork-tailed devil. Now, Will, that’s a pretty fair reputation to have up there with you, the fork-tailed devil, the Lockheed Lightning. You can’t tell me that Curtiss Warhawk or Republic Thunderbolt sound anywhere near as exciting as Lockheed Lightning, that’s like saying Minnie is as exciting as Fran. I’m not even talking about looks now, I’m talking about the name of this bitch, the P-38 Lightning, it makes you want to hop into her and ride her up against whatever they’ve got!

The first time I glimpsed her, Will (I know you felt exactly the same way because I saw you when you landed, I saw that look on your face) the first time I glimpsed her sitting out there on the field in a long line of silver beauties in the sun, I thought You can’t ask me to fly that sweet precious thing, you can’t ask me to risk taking her off the ground where she might get hurt, you’ve got to build a big plexiglas bubble all around her and just let people come to gape at her the way I’m gaping now. I could have written a poem about that piece, well, what the hell’s so comical, would you please tell me? I happen to be serious here.

No, the hell with it. Never mind. No, never mind. Just forget it. If you want to go through life an ignorant, insensitive clod, that’s your business. Why don’t you go over there and sit with old Hotshot Horace, let him spit on you when he talks, maybe you like guys who use their hands when they tell how they dove at the screen, rat-tat-tat-tat-tat, pwwwwwwwssssssshhhhhhhh, all over your blouse, go ahead, Will, never mind the people in this world who’ve got a little feeling for things.

I know that airplane has the same effect on you, I know she has.

Will, did you ever see anything so gorgeous in your life? I could’ve kissed that whole long shining silver line of her, right from that sweet thrusting nacelle, cannon and all, machine guns, every tooled part of that beautiful machine, kissed both those booms and traveled down her belly under those majestic wings — did you ever imagine such a wingspread? I thought, God, she’s the biggest fighting airplane I’ve ever seen, she’s going to swallow me, this bitch, and make me a part of her. When I climbed inside her, Will...

Saturday

June 17, 1944

6/25/44

We had driven down to Los Angeles from Santa Maria, and were sitting with a sodden captain from the Van Nuys Army Air Base in a bar called The Eucalyptus on Wilshire Boulevard. The captain’s name was Smythe, and he had received a Dear John letter from his wife the day before. He was telling us that all women were tramps and that you could not trust them as far as you could throw them.

“To coin a phrase,” Ace said.

“Absolutely,” Smythe said, “to coin a phrase.”

He had a red mustache, and he stroked it now and lifted his empty shot glass, tried to drain it all over again, realized there was no whiskey in it, and said, “Bartender, let me have another drink here, willya? My glass is empty here.”

The jukebox was bubbling with red and blue and yellow lights and oozing “Harlem Nocturne” into the scented dimness of the bar. From the leatherette booths came the muted hovering whisper of men engaged in earnest negotiation with all the town whores, the clink of melting ice in whiskey-sodas gone two a. m. flat, the lamentable sound of someone puking in the men’s room behind the hanging flowered curtain.

Smythe sipped at his fresh drink with remarkable restraint, and then began to describe his wife’s lover in far too meticulous detail, it seemed to me, almost with reluctant admiration, almost as if he longed to poke us with an elbow every now and then, and grin fraternally, and say, “How do you like that son of a bitch?” The son of a bitch was a real estate agent in Smythe’s home town somewhere in Massachusetts. Naturally, he was 4-F, but apparently not too physically handicapped to have escaped Mrs. Smythe’s attention. “Knew the fellow all my life,” Smythe said. “Went to school with him. To school. With him. Her, too. Went to school with both of them.”

“He could have had the decency to stop while you were talking,” Ace said, and laughed, and said to me, “Do you know that one, Will?”

“Yes. I do,” I said.

“You know him?” Smythe asked. “You know the man who womanized my wife?”

“Never heard of him,” Ace said.

“Went to school with him,” Smythe said.

“What school was that?”

“Saint Thomas Aquinas.”

“Are you a Catholic?” I asked.

“No,” Smythe said. “Saint Thomas Aquinas was a Catholic, but I am not a Catholic, no. My wife is a Catholic. Was a Catholic. The man who womanized her is a Catholic. I should never have gone to Saint Thomas Aquinas. That was my first mistake.”

“That was your second mistake,” I said.

“What was my first mistake?”

“What was his first mistake, Ace?”

“Getting,” Ace said.

“Getting what?” Smythe asked.

“Born, married, drafted, screwed.”

“Yes, sir,” Smythe said, “that was my first mistake, all right.”

“This is the best pilot who ever lived,” Ace said.

“Thank you,” Smythe said, “but I am not a pilot. I am in Supply.”

“I was referring to my friend here, Will Tyler.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Will Tyler owes the squadron thirty-seven dollars.”

“Which I’ll pay.”

“Which he will of course pay because he’s a trustworthy and decent human being.”

“Not like that son of a bitch Andy, how do you like that son of a bitch?” Smythe said at last, and grinned and actually gave Ace an elbow.

“I take it that Andy is the guy who put the horns on you,” Ace said.

“That’s who he is, all right. Biggest mistake I ever made in my life,” Smythe said.

“Would you like to know why Will Tyler owes the squadron thirty-seven dollars?”

“No, why?” Smythe said.

“Because he put thirty-seven bullets into the screen, and all thirty-seven of them made holes longer than the legally prescribed length of two inches. That’s why.”

“Thirty-seven holes, my, my,” Smythe said.

“Thirty-seven holes at one dollar a hole equals thirty-seven dollars, if my addition is correct,” Ace said.

“Your addition is flawless,” I said.

“Are you boys fliers?” Smythe asked.

“We are very hot pilots,” I said.

“Are you familiar with air gunnery, sir?” Ace asked.

“Oh no,” Smythe said.

“There’s a B-26 that tows a screen for us to shoot at,” Ace said. “We use a B-26 because it’s the only one of the bombers that can simulate the speed of an enemy fighter. The screen is made of woven wire...”

“Oh, I see,” Smythe said.

“... wrapped in thread, and we fire live bullets at the screen. Fifty-caliber machine-gun bullets.”

“Oh yes.”

“Each pilot has different colored bullets. So at the end of the day we can see how many hits he’s made. Will’s bullets today were red.”

“Old Red Bullets Tyler,” I said.

“Now there’s an angle beyond which we are not supposed to attack because shooting down the bomber is not the objective, sir, definitely not the objective.”

“No, no.”

What he was trying to explain to Captain Smythe whose wife had run off with Andy the real estate man was that you came up on the screen (you usually rose to meet enemy lighters because they tried to attack an escorted bomber formation from above, a position that gave them the advantage in speed and maneuverability) you came up on the screen in a flight of four airplanes, your bullets painted in one of the primary colors, red, blue or yellow, with green thrown in for good measure. Because the screen was constructed of tightly woven wire mesh, the bullets left a streak of paint behind them whenever you scored a hit. Now when you attacked the screen in a perpendicular pass, it was difficult to hit because you were traveling in different directions and had to lead it the way you would a flying duck. But if you fell behind the screen it became easier to hit because you were then traveling in the same direction at almost identical speeds and it was somewhat like firing at a stationary target instead of a moving one. At the same time, though, you were endangering the bomber because it was now ahead of you, say at one or two o’clock level, and there was the possibility of ripping its tail assembly to shreds with your enthusiastic slugs. The further you fell behind the screen in your pass, the more oblique was the firing angle, with the result that the slashes you put into the target got longer and longer. That was what Ace was trying to explain to the drunken captain from Massachusetts.

“... costing the United States Government a considerable amount of money should a bomber get shot down by accident.”

“Naturally.”

“There is a fine of one dollar per bullet for each bullet that has left a telltale hole larger than two inches.”

“Oh yes.”

“Today, Fearless Will Tyler put thirty-seven such holes in the screen, thereby causing the pilot of the B-26 to have a screaming shit fit. I tell you, sir, Will Tyler is already a flier of renown, even though he has not yet shot down a single enemy plane. He almost got one of ours today, but that doesn’t count. I ask you, Will, I ask you now in the presence of this grieving officer and gentleman...”

“That’s me,” Smythe said.

“I ask you why the hell you did such a dumb fool thing?”

“Because it was fun,” I answered.

June 27, 1944

June 29, 1944

July

The temperature in Chicago on that Sunday, July 27, had readied ninety-five degrees by four o’clock that afternoon, and there was scant relief from the oppressive mugginess, even on the beach. In Eau Fraiche, on a day like this, we would have packed a picnic lunch and gone down-peninsula where the breeze blowing in off Lake Juneau would smell of pine and the water would be as clear and as icy cold as a cut diamond. Here in Chicago (which Mr. Sandburg three years ago had called “half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher,” and I didn’t know how right he was till now) we sat on a lakeside beach and wondered if we wouldn’t anyway be basted in our own fat.

On days like today, when Chicago seemed out to destroy us personally, when her buildings crowded in too tight, and her people jostled and pushed and talked too loud, the thought would again cross my mind that maybe I’d been shell-shocked over there, otherwise why would I have done a crazy thing like sacrificing the eight-dollar deposit on the Mechanic Street apartment and paying all those freight charges to have our new furniture moved here? Nancy crying and saying she did not wish to go to Chicago, and my telling her there was opportunity for me there, what opportunity? A madman’s dream I had caught in a butterfly net on our honeymoon?

The advertisement had appeared in the Tribune, asking for a man with some knowledge of the paper industry to start as a traineee at Ramsey-Warner Papers, which was opening a new mill on the waterfront at Kedzie and Thirty-first. The waterfront had turned out to be the West Fork of the South Branch of the Chicago River, and the new mill would not be completed until June 1921, but in the meantime they were willing to retrain experienced people in their own production methods, and were willing to pay twenty-two dollars a week besides, which was not exactly alfalfa where I came from. So I had gone to see a Mr. Moreland out at the Joliet mill, and I had told him that whereas I did not have any experience in the paper industry, I did know a considerable lot about timber, having worked in a logging camp from the time I was fifteen until the time I enlisted in the Army—

“Oh, are you a veteran?” Mr. Moreland asked.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“See any combat?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I was with the Third Division at the Marne and later fought in the Meuse-Argonne offensive.”

“We were hoping for somebody with at least some experience, though,” Mr. Moreland said.

“Well, I haven’t any experience, sir,” I said, “but I’m a hard worker. I’ve got a wife to support, you see, and...”

“Oh, are you married, Taylor?”

“Tyler. Yes, sir, I was married just last Sunday. I’m here in Chicago on my honeymoon.”

“You’re applying for a job while you’re on your honeymoon?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, well,” Mr. Moreland said.

“Sir,” I said, “I can’t see any future for me in timber.”

“Can you see one in paper?”

“Yes, sir, I can,” I said.

“When’s your honeymoon over, Taylor?”

“Tyler. On the twenty-first of April.”

“Can you start on May first?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I guess you’re hired.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, and that was that.

I was always having to break things to Nancy after I’d already gone and done them, it seemed. I told her that night about my taking the job, and she said she thought I was crazy, so I reminded her that not so long ago she had said she’d come with me even to Paris if that’s where I wanted to go, and she said, Pardon? which she said a lot lately when she heard things she didn’t want to hear.

The apartment on Springfield and Twenty-eighth was nice, even Nancy had to admit that, a far sight nicer than the one we’d agreed to rent in Eau Fraiche. But Chicago was overwhelming, and I thought I would never get used to it. In our first several weeks there, I imagined I would choke each time I walked out into the street, the soot and grime were so terrible. Smoke poured from a thousand chimneys, prairie dust billowed up from the sidewalks, filth seemed everywhere in evidence, despite the big iron litter bins on the curbs, two and a half feet long and eighteen inches high, but so positioned that you had to step into the gutter to lift the lid and drop anything into them.

The buildings were another thing, not as big as some I’d seen in New York but enough to make me dizzy anyway whenever I looked up at one of them. In Eau Fraiche, the tallest building had been the Wisconsin Trust over on Carter Street, six stories high and considered huge. Here in Chicago, the City Hall and County Building covered the entire square between La Salle, Randolph, Washington and Clark Streets. Even the post office filled a whole city block, a big slate-gray building with a huge dome in the center and openwork stone balustrades over the pillared wings on each of its four sides. Of all the architecture in Chicago, I think I felt most comfortable with the two lions outside the Art Institute, themselves enormous, but affectionately called “prairie dogs” by the people of the city. I was not yet a Chicagoan. I could not get used to the grime or the size, I could not get used to the lack of open space, and most of all, I could not get used to the noise.

Trolley cars rattled and clanked over countless switch intersections, iron wheels raising a din so loud you could hardly hear yourself speak, whether you were riding in one or walking alongside it on the sidewalk. There were more automobiles in two Chicago city blocks than there were in all of Eau Fraiche (well, maybe I’m exaggerating) and they made more noise with their honking horns and squeaking brakes and squealing tires and broken wheel chains than I had ever heard anywhere else except on the battlefield in France. There were still a lot of horses in Chicago, too, clomping along, pulling coal wagons that tumbled their clattering loads onto chutes into open basement windows, hauling wagons carrying jangling scrap iron and junk, drivers screaming at their teams, policemen blowing whistles, and over it all the elevated trains pounding in from north, south, and west, to add to the resounding cacophony that was the parallelogram of the Loop. I could not stand anything about Chicago.

Moreover, I was beginning to think in those first few months that the paper industry wasn’t exactly for me. My job was to stand between the barker and the woodpecker, which did not mean that I was positioned between a dog and a bird, though the foreman did have a dog, a Welsh terrier who nipped at my heels and who went frantic each time the cranes piled up a new shipment of eight-foot-long logs. It seemed to me that a dog who went crazy at the sight of wood shouldn’t have been hanging around a paper mill. I’d never liked dogs, anyway. (That’s not true. I started disliking dogs when the Germans were using them in the war.) This particular little dog was called Offisa Pupp after the cartoon character, and he started hating me the day I reported to work. My partner on the job was a fellow named Allen Garrett, a strapping six-footer from Chicago’s South Side, who, like me, was seeking to make a “future” in the paper industry. Allen worked with me at the far end of the barking drum where the peeled logs came out. We both held spiked picaroons in our hands, and we — well, I think I’d better explain what I was beginning to learn about making paper from wood.

Back in Eau Fraiche, we always cut a felled tree into eight-foot lengths, but the drum barker wasn’t designed to take such big chunks of wood and also you couldn’t make paper out of wood that still had the bark on it. So the first thing that happened was all the logs were piled up in these towering pyramids and then dumped into what was called the hot pond, which was a big concrete basin through which hot waste water from other parts of the plant flowed. This was done to soften the bark and get rid of leaves and ice and clinging forest dirt. Then they were carried up a jack-ladder conveyer to the circular saw where they were cut into four-foot lengths so they could be taken to the drum barker. I came in after the drum barker, some exciting job, I was not exactly an executive.

The drum barker, or the barking drum as we also called it, was a cylindrical steel tube open at both ends, close to fifteen feet in diameter and some forty-five feet long. Supported by rollers and enormous steel tires, power-driven by chain belts slung from overhead and spaced along its entire length, the drum received a tangle of logs on a conveyer belt from the hot pond and the cut-off saw, tumbled, tossed, and sprayed them for maybe fifteen minutes, and then plunked them stripped and white onto a conveyer belt at the other end. The drum made a lot of noise, as what wouldn’t with thousands of logs banging into each other and shedding their skins, the loosened bark dropping through the open-rib construction onto another conveyer belt, to be whisked away as fuel for the steam plant. At the far end of the drum, Allen Garrett and I studied each of the logs as they went by on the conveyer belt. If we saw one with a section of bark still clinging to it, or a furrow filled with pitch, or a knot, we hooked it with our picaroons and rolled it over to the woodpecker, where the operator there would either drill out the knot or grind off the bark, after which we rolled the log back onto the conveyer belt. I knew nothing at all about what happened to the wood once it moved deeper into the mill. I was new in this business, and it was a bore.

I worked fifty-four hours a week, from eight o’clock in the morning to six o’clock at night. It took me almost an hour and a half to get to the mill in Joliet, which meant that I had to get up at six in the morning, wash and dress, go into the kitchen for breakfast with Nancy, and then run down to catch the #88 streetcar to Archer Avenue, where I transferred to the #74 to Cicero Avenue, and then caught a train. The train was run by the Chicago and Joliet Electric Railway, and the trip was thirty-one miles each way, morning and night. I would not get back to the apartment until close to eight o’clock. It was a long, grueling noisy day, broken only by the pleasant lunch-hour conversations I had with Allen Garrett. I naturally looked forward to my Sundays with Nancy.

It was therefore disheartening to wake up to a ninety-one degree heat that Sunday, and the promise of another suffocating Chicago day. We packed a picnic lunch, much as we might have done back in Eau Fraiche, took two streetcars to Twenty-ninth Street, walked the three blocks to the beach, and tried to enjoy ourselves despite the rising temperature and the throngs of people.

I was exhausted when the trouble started.

Nancy was lying beside me on the blanket, her blond hair curled into a bun at the back of her head, her black bathing costume striped horizontally at the skirt-hem and on the mid-thigh pants showing below, wearing black stockings that must have been unbearable in this heat, a fine sheen of sweat on her face and on her naked arms. A ukulele started someplace, and a man with a high whiny voice began singing all the old war songs, “Good Morning, Mr. Zip-Zip-Zip!” and “I’d Like to See the Kaiser with a Lily in His Hand,” and finally got around to some of the newer stuff to which he didn’t know the words, “Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home,” and “Let the Rest of the World Go By,” Nancy trying to hum along with him, but the heat defeating everything, a stultifying crushing heat that made movement and even conversation too fatiguing to contemplate.

With considerable effort, I had raised myself up on one elbow in an attempt to locate the ukulele player with the nasal voice, scanning the beach and only chancing to look out over the water where I saw first a small raft, and then noticed that the person on the raft, paddling it toward the beach, was colored. New to Chicago, I did not know at the time that the Twenty-ninth Street Beach was considered “white” territory, an improvised adjunct to the Twenty-fifth Street Beach which bordered the black belt, the section of Chicago known as Douglas. I only learned that later. What I realized now, signaled by the sudden cessation of the ukulele and a hush so tangible it sent an almost welcome shiver up my back, was that something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong. A man was running down toward the lakefront. Another man was shouting, “What’s that nigger doing here?”

“Get back where you belong!” someone yelled.

“Get him out of here!” a woman screamed.

I rose to my feet and with my back to the sun (this was close to five o’clock, I suppose, but the sun was still strong behind me), I looked out over the lake and saw that the intruder was just a boy, fourteen? fifteen? it was difficult to tell from this distance, but a boy certainly enough, judging from the slenderness of his body and the quick eager way he lifted his head and broke into a grin that flashed white across his black face. Perhaps he had not understood the consternation he was causing here on this white beach, perhaps he had assumed the men and women running down toward the shore were there to greet him after his exceptional and extraordinary navigational feat, the brave sailor who had come halfway around the world, or at least the several hundred yards separating the white beach from the black beach beside it, he had surely misunderstood because he was still grinning when the first stone struck him.

“Get the little bastard!” someone yelled (they knew he was little then, they knew he was only a boy) and another stone struck the raft, and the grin vanished from the boy’s face, he knew now that the people on this discovered shore were unfriendly, were perhaps even hostile, a volley of rocks and stones falling upon the raft and upon his shoulders now as he frantically paddled in an effort to get out of range, “What is it, Bert?” Nancy said, and I moved off the blanket and began running toward the shore as a rock struck the boy full in the face and he fell into the water.

And now, now a hush fell over the beach again, deeper than that initial shocked silence that had marked the boy’s approach, expectant now with an almost theatrical suspense. Would the boy surface, had the rock stunned him, would his grinning black face pop suddenly out of the water to the cheers of the onlookers and the applause of a crowd mollified by his moxie, would he climb once more onto his flimsy raft and paddle his way back to those African shores from whence he had come? The question hung suspended in stifling heat and tempers stilled but only for a moment. There were colored men on the beach now, “Let us through,” they were saying, three or four brave scouts probing this humid white no man’s land, “let us through, goddamn it! The boy’s drowning!” and I thought, Let us through! but we were not being let through, the boy had not yet surfaced, the raft rotated in aimless circles on the lake as still as death. A policeman appeared, I heard a Negro say, “Officer Logan, there’s the man there who threw the rock,” and a white man whispered, “Logan, the Cottage Grove Station,” and I thought, The boy is drowning, let’s get to him.

But the motion of history moves away from minor events toward those of succeeding importance, the minor event here being an adolescent Negro who had paddled in too close, who had invaded too deeply, drowning now perhaps as some other Negroes still tried to get past the barricade of white men who prevented them from entering the water, while behind them and slightly removed, the voices continued in rising argument, the colored men insisting that Officer Logan of the Cottage Grove Avenue Station arrest the man who had thrown the rock which had knocked the boy from the raft into the water where he was now perhaps drowning as the voices continued their tedious assault, Arrest him, arrest him, and the white men complained that the boy had merely slipped off the raft, and the debate went on, it being the major issue now, and the boy did not surface, and Officer Logan did not take action. The white man who had thrown the possibly fatal rock stood apart from the angry bubble of dissent, wearing upon his face the proud look of an acknowledged marksman, knowing he was the center of a debate of magnitude, the eye of the storm, basking in his newly earned celebrity until suddenly the colored men whirled upon him in fury (He’s drowning out there, I thought, O lord Jesus, he is drowned) and began to hit him.

If one can say when any war begins, it was then that this war began, this was the firing of the first shot, so to speak. Forget the ancient festering ills, discount them as a possible cause — the 50,000 Negroes who had been coming from the South over the past two years, moving into previously white neighborhoods, crowding into already crowded sections of the city where the rents were lowest and the anti-black feelings were highest, taking jobs that white men felt were rightfully their own, often working for lower wages, many of them bringing back from the war a new sense of maleness — had they not slept with the same French girls, had they not drunk the same French wines, had they not faced the same German bullets? — forget all this, discount whatever real reasons existed for this war, discount even the minor incident of a stray rock causing a boy to drown out there on the lake, and mark the true starting time of this war as seven minutes past five o’clock on the afternoon of July 27, 1919, when a crowd of angry indignant Negroes attacked a white man.

There were slats on the beach, pieces of weathered wood, rocks, empty bottles, all sorts of weapons for a ragtag army suddenly called into front-line action, whites and Negroes, all of them sweltering in the same Chicago blast furnace. Reinforcements were coming now from the Twenty-fifth Street Beach, black men running over the blistering sand to join the fray, driving the white men into the water where the drowned boy was all but forgotten now and the raft still drifted in idle circles, and then turning on Officer Logan himself to chase him off the beach and onto Twenty-ninth Street.

I tried to break away, to get back to Nancy. I saw a knife suddenly appear in a Negro’s hand, I felt the same sense of futile confrontation I had felt in that Marne wheatfield so long ago, was I now to face another stranger, was I now to kill for another meaningless piece of real estate? The shouting, the noise, the insane chatter of sweaty combat filled the gravid air, a wooden club came down upon the man’s brown forearm, a gash of bright red blood ran from his elbow to his wrist, there were other men upon him now, and more running from every corner of the beach, a white man’s face pressed into the sand, a Negro stepped upon, a kick, more blows, cursing, I thought only Nancy, I must get to Nancy. I shoved my way through. She was on her feet when I readied her, I had never before seen a look of such utter disbelief on her face as I seized her hand and yanked her to me and, leaving our blanket and our picnic basket behind, rushed her away from this frightening mass of struggling humans.

“Meanwhile, the fighting continued along the lake,” I read to Allen Garrett from the Chicago Tribune on our lunch hour the next day. “Miss Helen Mehan and her sister, Marie, had been bathing with a friend, Lieutenant Banks, a convalescing soldier. A colored woman walked up to the trio and made insulting remarks, it is said. Banks attempted to interfere, but the colored woman voiced a series of oaths and promptly struck the soldier in the face. Negroes in the vicinity hurled stones and rocks at the women and both were slightly injured. In less than a half hour after the beach outbreak, Cottage Grove Avenue and State Street from 29th South to 35th were bubbling cauldrons of action.”

That cauldron was still bubbling and would continue to bubble until the end of the week, when 6000 troops of the state militia and 350 °Chicago policemen managed to restore order. By that time, 23 Negroes and 15 whites had been killed, 537 people had been injured, and 1000 more had been left homeless.

The militia was withdrawn on August 8.

August

When Dana and I got off the ferry at Fire Island Pines, my mother was waiting on the dock with a little red wagon upon which was painted the name of the people from whom we had rented for nine summers, ROSEN, the lettering expertly rendered, not for nothing was Sid Rosen an art director at Doyle Dane Bernbach.

My mother looked terrific.

She would be thirty-eight years old on the tenth of the month, Tuesday in fact, but summer did something for her each year, and from a distance I could visualize her as she must have looked as a young girl. She was wearing faded dungaree shorts and a blue tee shirt, her grin white against a deep tan, her brown hair windblown and curling somewhat from the salt air, legs and breasts still good (those never change, King Oedipus, sir, Your Majesty), moving swiftly toward the gangway with a nervous quick energy that made every step she took seem impulsive, almost impetuous. Summer robbed her of ten years each year; rob her of another ten gratuitously, and you had the eighteen-year-old girl Will Tyler, the returning lighter pilot ace, met in New York City in the spring of 1945. Not quite eighteen actually. I looked out over the dock. Will Tyler, ex-Air Force Wunderkind and current somewhat aging enfant terrible of the publishing world was nowhere in evidence. Home sulking, I thought, ruminating in his martini about the tastelessness of only sons who bring home girls with whom they are undoubtedly sleeping, for shame.

My mother embraced us both, lifting her cheek for Dana’s kiss.

“You brought the sun with you,” she said. “We’ve had nothing but rain for the past five days. Dana, you look lovely.”

“Thank you,” Dana said. She always seemed a bit shy in my mother’s presence. I suspected she didn’t like my father at all, but I knew she was genuinely fond of my mother, and I could never understand her reserve. We were coming away from the slip now, walking past the plumbing supply store, threading our way through the swarms of bicycles, wagons piled with luggage and groceries, summer people in shorts and swimming suits, all scattering off the dock and onto the narrow wooden walks. The Pines, when we had first begun coming to it in 1956 had been a quiet family community with one or two fags living in blissful silence far from the gay hectic life at Cherry Grove. It was now, I would guess, fifty per cent queer and fifty per cent straight, which was at least giving everybody a fair shot at equal housing opportunities. I still felt a little strange, though, whenever I was candidly appraised, as now, by a mincing boardwalk stroller (“Never take candy from strange men,” my grandmother had told me in the fastnesses of her Tudor City apartment, she being my only living grandmother, a spry old dame of sixty-six, with the same quick energy as her daughter Dolores Prine Tyler), but the discomfort wasn’t anything like what I had felt the first time my father took us to visit Cherry Grove. My embarrassment then, of course, had been caused only by deep insecurities about my own manhood, I being all of ten at the time. But I had not dug the scene, and I had never gone back.

My mother seemed excited to see us. She immediately told us all about the cocktail parties we’d been invited to during the next week (“Everyone’s dying to see you, Wat, and of course to meet Dana”) and the surprise birthday party being given for her on Tuesday night, and the possibility that we might be able to borrow a boat for a sail on Wednesday, but then assured us we could be by ourselves whenever we wanted (I thought at first she meant something other than she did) and that we were under no obligation to trail along with her and Dad.

“Where is Dad?” I asked.

“Back at the house,” she said. “He’s looking forward to seeing you both.”

I wondered, in that case, why he had not been at the dock, hmmm? It was my guess that he was still wrestling with the problem of who would sleep where and do what to whom, a surmise that was immediately confirmed when he grabbed our suitcases at the door of the house. “Wat!” he said. “Dana! Hey, it’s great to see you! How was the traffic coming out?”

“Oh, not bad,” I said, and found Dana and myself being drawn in his wake to the bedroom at the rear of the house, where he quickly deposited Dana’s bag, “This is your room, Dana,” and then turned to take my elbow in a firm, fatherly, guiding grip, wheeling me around the bend in the hallway and leading me to the bedroom near the kitchen (where I knew the damn screen needed repairing) and saying, “This is yours, Wat, do you both want to freshen up, or would you like a drink first?” He was being very tolerant in his attitude, including us in his adult world where you offered grown-ups drinks if they didn’t want to freshen up first after those tedious Long Island parkways, but he was also making it clear he didn’t expect any adult hanky-panky under his roof for the several weeks Dana and I would be there, preferring us to fornicate on the open beach instead, I guessed.

I looked at the single bed against the torn screen, and then I looked at my father, and his eyes met mine and clearly stated, That’s the way it is, son.

And my eyes dearly signaled back, Aren’t we being a little foolish?

And his said, If you want my approval, you’re not getting it, son.

And mine said, Okay, you prick.

Out loud, I said, “I see the screen’s still torn.”

Out loud, my father said, “I’ll get John to fix it in the morning,” John being the Pines idiot who went around fixing torn screens and putting bedboards under sagging beach mattresses.

I went back to Dana. She was still standing in the corridor around the bend, her hands on her hips. She looked totally forlorn. I took her in my arms.

“Drink, Dana?” my father called from out of sight somewhere, the liberal Spanish dueña sans mantilla or black lace fan.

“Yes, thank you, Mr. Tyler,” Dana piped, and then whispered, “Listen, are we supposed to...”

“What are you having?” my father called.

“Whatever you’ve got!”

“We’ve got everything!”

“Just some scotch, please,” Dana said. “With a little water. Wat, are we supposed to even know each other?” she whispered.

“I’ll climb the trellis each night,” I said.

“There is no trellis,” Dana said. “Besides, what’s that big bedroom right next door? That’s the master bedroom, isn’t it?”

“I think so.”

“Wat...”

“In fact, I know so.”

“Wat, do you want a drink?” my father called.

“Yes!” I shouted. “I think I need one.”

“What?”

“Yes, a little scotch on the rocks, please.”

“Coming up,” my father said.

“Did you get the kids settled?” my mother asked from the kitchen.

“Yes, Dolores, the kids are settled,” my father said, not without a trace of smug satisfaction in his voice.

“I’ll wither and die,” Dana whispered. “Oh, Wat, it’ll be just awful.”

The first week was, in fact, absolute hell because it was the week my father was taking away from his office (ten days, actually — he had come out on Friday the sixth). The way he wanted to spend his vacation, it seemed, was by wandering around that old gray clapboard house like one of the queen’s own guard, Dana being Her Majesty, and I being a surly peasant trying to break into her bedchamber. He scarcely ever left us alone during the day, and his snores from the master bedroom each night were an un-subtle reminder that the old family retainer was sleeping right there, man, ready to spring into action at the first hint of a footfall in the corridor outside. We finally did make love on the beach one night, but Dana was ashamed to take a shower after we tiptoed back into the house, because she said everyone (meaning Old Hawkeye) would know she’d got “sand all up her.”

I couldn’t understand my father at all. He was charming and pleasant to Dana, telling her really entertaining stories about the publishing field, spicing them with gossip about this or that literary celebrity, “Did you know that Jimmy Baldwin?” or “Were you aware that Bill Styron?” pretending to a vast inside knowledge that he honestly was not privy to; my father’s list consisted largely of books of photographs. (It was as if, in allowing the Tyler evolution to follow its natural growth pattern, he had brought it from lumber-jacking, through papermaking, into book publishing, and then had sophisticated it a step further by publishing books that were non-books; even as America itself had evolved from a nation where men first labored with their hands into a nation where machines did the work for men — and often did work that was utterly without meaning.) But despite what seemed to be his total acceptance of the girl I had chosen, he adamantly refused to let me possess her. I had the feeling more than once that he was actually coming on with her himself, that he looked too longingly at her breasts, leaped too hastily to light her cigarette, tried too hard for a cheap laugh to an old joke. I didn’t want a goddamn sparring match with my own father; I wasn’t attempting to turn the old bull out to pasture, but neither did I want him gamboling around with the young heifers. It was all very unsettling. I was having my own doubts about where I lit into the scheme of things just then (if my father’s publishing of picture books was a logical development in the growth of the Tyler family, what came next? Where did I take it from there? Was I the comparatively stunted tree in the foreground of the colophon, or the giant spruce towering against a limitless sky?), and I did not need added aggravation from dear old Dad.

My mother’s tactful intervention helped the situation somewhat. She was very careful to let me know whenever she and my father planned on being out of the house for more than a few hours, and on one occasion she managed to cajole him into taking her into the city for dinner. I even overheard her discussing the entire spectrum of morality with him one night, and whereas her admonitions did nothing to lessen his surveillance of the sanctum sanctorum, he at least quit hanging around Dana and me during the daytime, when all we wanted to do was lie on the beach together and talk quietly about my developing plans.

I found out about my father during our last week at the beach, so I guess you can say he had a lot to do with the decision I finally reached. But if there are endings, there are likewise beginnings, and my grandfather Bertram Tyler — the beginning — also had something to do with shaping my molten thought.

Grandpa, en route from Chicago to London where he was negotiating a contract for the export of clay-coated boxboard, came out to the beach unexpectedly, a few days after my father had gone back to work, amen. He had met Dana briefly at Christmastime, and was delighted to see her again now. But he looked tired, his blue eyes paler than I remembered them, his face somewhat drawn. As it turned out, I was unduly worried about him; he had had a truly harrowing trip from Chicago, with his plane circling Kennedy in the fog for an hour and a half before finally being turned away to Philadelphia International. He had taken a train to Pennsylvania Station (which was in the throes of a massive overhaul) and then another train out to Sayville, and then the ferry to the Pines, and was now near total collapse. Dana mixed him a martini that would have curled the toes of an Arabian used to drinking camel piss. My grandfather said, “Dana, this is just what I used to drink in Chicago in 1920,” and then called to my mother in the kitchen to come join us. “In a second, Pop,” she yelled back, “I’m getting some snacks,” and my grandfather put his feet up on the wicker ottoman and sighed and said, “It’s good to be home.”

We had our talk two days later.

The weather, heralded by the fog that had marked his arrival, had turned surly and gray again; a lire was needed each morning to take the chill out of the old house. We had used up the small supply of shingles in the living room scuttle, and my grandfather and I volunteered to replenish it. It was a pleasure to watch him work with an ax. I always felt that unless I was careful I’d chop off a couple of my own fingers, but he used the ax without even looking at it, almost as if it were an extension of his right hand, talking all the while he worked, the way some men can play piano and smoke and drink beer all at the same time without once missing a beat. He would hold the shingle upright in his left hand, the ax clutched close to the head in his right hand, and whick, a single sharp stroke and the shingle was split, another shingle appeared in his left hand, another whick, “How are you doing at school, Wat?” he asked.

“Oh, great,” I said. “Everything’s great.”

“Getting good marks?”

“Oh, sure.”

“I like your Dana.”

“I like her, too.”

“When do you go back?”

I didn’t answer him. He was looking directly at me, his left hand reached out automatically for another shingle, he felt sightlessly along its top for the true center, jabbed it with the ax once, sharply, raised his eyebrows and said, “Walter?”

“I’m not sure, Grandpa.”

“Not sure when you’re due back?”

“Not sure if I’m going back.”

“Oh?”

We didn’t say anything for several moments. My grandfather busied himself with splitting the shakes, and I busied myself with stacking them up against the chimney. The air was penetratingly bitter, tendrils of fog sliding in off the beach, a needle-fine drizzle cutting to the bone. I was wearing blue jeans and my Yale sweatshirt, but I was cold. My grandfather had not brought any beach clothes with him; he worked in pin-striped trousers and an open-throated white shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his gold cuff links, studiously bent over each shingle now, even though he could have done the job blindfolded. At last, he said only, “How come, Walter?”

“I’m just not sure, Grandpa.”

“Don’t you like school?”

“I like it.”

“Having trouble with somebody there? One of the teachers?”

“No.”

“Is it Dana?”

“No.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I guess not,” I said.

“All right,” my grandfather said, and smiled, and looked down at the shingles and said, “Think we’ve got enough to get us through the winter?” and smiled again, and put the ax back in the shed and then rolled down his cuffs, and I started piling the rest of the split wood in orderly rows against the chimney. I wanted to tell my grandfather what I was thinking of doing, wanted to get an opinion other than Dana’s, but I was afraid he’d think I was a coward. So I worked silently, with my brow wrinkled, longing to communicate with him and knowing I could not. And finally, when I’d stacked all the wood, I said, again, “I’m just not sure, Grandpa,” and he said, “Well, why don’t we take a little walk?” and I looked at him curiously for just a moment because the last time I’d taken a walk with him was when I was six years old and we had gone up the hill behind the house on Ritter Avenue and looked out on a bright October day to where Long Island Sound stretched clear to the end of the world.

I had told him that day that there was a girl in the sixth grade whose name was Katherine Bridges, and I loved her, and she was the most beautiful girl in all Talmadge, even though she wasn’t born there but was adopted and had come from Minnesota. But I did not want to tell him now that Dana Castelli was the most beautiful girl in the world; I wanted only to tell him of what I’d been slowly but certainly deciding to do come fall, and I didn’t want to tell him that, either, because this was a man who had faced German bayonets in the trenches at Château-Thierry. Nor was it a particularly inviting day for a walk, the drizzle having grown heavier, not quite yet a true rain, but forbidding nonetheless.

We walked down to the ferry slip and watched the boat coming in through the fog, her horn bleating, and watched the passengers unloading. My grandfather suddenly said, Isn’t that Will?” and I looked to where he was pointing and saw a tall man wearing a Burberry trenchcoat coming down the gangway and striding onto the dock in a duck-footed walk that could have belonged to no one but a Tyler.

(In Wat Tyler’s camera eye, the man he sees striding toward him and his grandfather is simultaneously the villain who is keeping him from Dana and a rather impressively handsome gentleman with an expansive smile on his face. The images, double-exposed, are confusing. He wants to hate this man for his offhanded treatment of the Love Affair of the Century, and yet he cannot help but respect and admire him. For the first time in his life, or at least for the first time that he can remember, he wants to say, “Pop, I love you.” The screen images dissolve.)

My father saw us immediately and came to us, embracing first my grandfather, kissing him on the cheek, and then going through the same family ritual with me.

“I didn’t expect anyone to meet me,” he said. “I caught an earlier boat.”

“Actually, we were just going for a little walk, Will,” my grandfather said.

“Well, good,” my father said, and threw his arms around our shoulders, comrades three, and said, “I’ll join you,” which did not overly thrill me, because frankly I did not want him to know about the plan I’d been considering, and I was afraid my grandfather might mention the doubts I’d voiced about going back to Yale.

But we took off our shoes, all of us, and went onto the beach where the mist enveloped us, and walked close to the water’s edge, the ocean seeming warmer than the air, and we talked. We talked about the weather first, it being omnipresent, I explaining to my grandfather that the summer people were divided into two factions, those who believed the best weather came in July, and those who favored August. And from there, as a natural extension of talking about the weather, we began to discuss the riots that had taken place in Watts the week before, Watts being a Los Angeles community I’d never heard of before it made racial headlines, and I said something about heat probably being a contributing factor, and my grandfather expressed the opinion that heat had very little to do with emotions that had been contained for more than a century.

“I can remember once...” my father started, and then shook his head and fell silent.

“Yes, Will?” my grandfather said.

“No, nothing,” he answered, and shook his head again. He was walking between me and my grandfather, his shoes in his hands, his socks stuffed into the pockets of his trenchcoat, his trousers rolled up onto his shins. Together, the three of us skirted the sea’s edge, silent now.

(The screen is suddenly filled with the image of three spruces against a sky certainly much bluer than the real sky over Fire Island. The trees are swaying slightly, there is the whisper of wind on the sound track. The film must be a foreign import, the first such in Wat Tyler’s memory. There are English subtitles traveling along the bottom of the screen, as though blown there by the same wind rustling in the treetops. The titles are abominable. The first title reads HERITAGE, and the next reads GENERATIONS. Wat Tyler wishes to leave the theater of his mind, perhaps to buy some popcorn in the lobby.)

My grandfather began speaking again. He was a wise old bird, my grandfather, I don’t think I realized just how wise until that day on the beach when the mist insulated the three of us from the world. He must have understood, long before I did, that my father was truly in the center of our solitary march along the beach, geographically and genealogically, the only one of our company who could lay claim to being a father to one of us and a son to the other. Because of this, because my grandfather must have sensed the strain of this double role being exerted on his son and my farther, he led us gently into conversation, talking across my father to me, talking across me to my father, transforming our three-way discussion into something remarkably crazy.

(On the screen, the three spruces, one slightly taller than the next, have dissolved into the three Tyler men walking in the mist. But the men refuse to maintain fixed camera positions. One becomes interchangeable with another and yet another, so that it seems sometimes that Wat is talking directly to his father when he is really in conversation with his grandfather, seems at other times that Will is talking to Bertram when he is actually looking at Wat. The whole thing is very avant-garde. Wat is sure it will cop the Golden Lion Award at Venice.)

“You can’t expect violence to be self-restrictive,” my grandfather said.

“What do you mean?” my father said.

“The riots. Surely they’re linked to what’s happening in Vietnam.”

“I don’t see any connection.”

“He’s talking about our way of life,” I said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Our way of life,” I repeated, knowing I still had not made myself clear, and looking to my grandfather for help. But his attention seemed momentarily captured by a boat barely visible through the fog on the water, and as we walked on the edge of ocean merged with shore, equally lost in obliterating fog, he remarked how crazy it was for a boat to be out in this kind of weather and then abruptly mentioned that he had read about the forty-one-year-old singer Frank Sinatra coming off his yacht, Southern Breeze, in the company of the nineteen-year-old actress Mia Farrow and two somewhat older actresses, for a Hyannis Port visit with the father of one assassinated President and two current United States senators.

“I grew up listening to that man,” my father said.

“You don’t have to tell me,” my grandfather agreed, smiling. “You had that Victrola going day and night.”

His archaic language suddenly rankled. I wanted to get the conversation back to Vietnam, back to the truly modern idea he had offered but only tentatively explored, the idea that this pointless war of ours was beginning to seep into every phase of our national life, the idea that violence as a solution for problems abroad was most certainly being emulated as a solution for problems here at home. I resented the digression. Without so much as a preamble, I said, “First they take the air war north of the Hanoi line, and bomb only eighty miles from the Chinese border, and then...”

“But of course, there’s a great deal of violence everywhere you turn,” my grandfather said, interrupting me, and causing me to frown momentarily. “Not only in Vietnam.” There seemed to be a note of warning in his voice, as though he were anachronistically saying, Cool it, baby. You want to rap about this Yale thing, then let your wise omniscient venerable old guru lead us into it gentle-like, dig? I blinked my eyes.

(The screen conversation is taking a ridiculous turn. The film is becoming even a bit far-out for the likes of Cahiers. Someone asks if anyone has read Up the Down Staircase, someone else — it sounds like Wat but it could just as easily be Foxy Grandpa — says that laughter is cleansing, it is good for America to enjoy a healthy laugh, not to mention a sob or two, over the problems of a teacher in a slum school, the same way it is good for America to enjoy the James Bond cinema spoofs.)

“They’re not spoofs,” I said. I was certain now that both of them, father and grandfather, had veered off on a tangent because they refused to discuss something that was terribly important to me. Together, father and son, they had decided in secret conspiracy to prevent an airing of my thoughts, thereby scuttling my plans even before they were fully formed. So I very loftily said something about the “spoof” label being a very handy way of alleviating our Puritan guilt over enjoying a sado-masochistic reaction to Bond’s screen exploits, the same way we had felt it necessary to call Candy a spoof as well, so that it would then become acceptable reading for all the ladies of Garden City.

“Did you read Candy?” my father asked, surprised.

“Yes, didn’t you?”

“Well, yes, but...”

“But it was a spoof, right?”

“No, it was pornography,” my grandfather said.

“So what’s wrong with pornography?” I said.

“Nothing,” my grandfather said.

“I just didn’t think you were reading pornography,” my father said.

“What’d you think I was reading? Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle?”

“No, but not pornography.”

“I’ve also read the Marquis de Sade,” I said.

“Where’d you get hold of that?”

“From the top shelf of books in your bedroom,” I said.

“Got to be more careful with your dirty books, Will,” my grandfather said, and smiled.

“I guess so,” my father answered, and returned the smile, and again I had the feeling they were excluding me, that their bond with each other was closer than mine with either of them. So I forced the conversation back to Vietnam again, because Vietnam was what was on my mind, and I wanted them to know this, while simultaneously wanting to keep my formative plans from them, telling them that first Ambassador Maxwell Taylor had informed the nation that the aggression was from the north, while 8000 of our Marines landed at Danang, bringing our total number of men in arms to 75,000 with experts predicting 150,000 American troops in Vietnam before the end of 1965. Then President Johnson had said, “What we want to do is achieve the maximum deterrence with the minimum danger and cost in human lives,” and announced that 50,000 more men would be sent there right away, bringing our total to 125,000 with the estimate for year’s end now being 200,000 and the draft quota more than doubled from 17,000 to 35,000 a month.

“Well, you don’t have to worry about the draft,” my father said.

“Pop,” I said, “maybe we all...”

“He’s a student,” my father explained.

“I know,” my grandfather said.

“Suppose I wasn’t?”

“Weren’t.”

“Weren’t. What then?”

“But you are.”

“But a lot of kids aren’t. And when the bomb falls, it’s not going to ask who’s a student and who isn’t.”

“There’s not much danger of that,” my father said. “Not with a hotline between Washington and Moscow.”

“Assuming somebody has a dime to make a call.”

“It’s not a pay telephone,” my father said, exhibiting monumental humorlessness.

“I once got a call in Chicago,” my grandfather said, “from a man who told me, ‘Mr. Tyler, this is your exterminator.’ Seared me out of my wits.”

"You?” my father said. “Scared you?”

“Sure,” my grandfather said. “Turned out he really was the exterminator. Your mother had called about ants in the kitchen.”

“We’re all scared of the exterminator,” I said. “We’re like a gambler down to his last chip, down to his underwear in fact, with nothing more to lose. We’re saying, ‘The hell with everything, I’ll take my chances,’ and we’re putting shorts and all on the next roll, figuring we’ll either walk out naked or fly home in a private jet.”

“Survival’s always been a gamble,” my father said. “Do you think you’re saying something new?”

“Yes!”

“Well, you’re not. The first time a caveman picked up a club...”

(The screen is filled with the impressive image of William Francis Tyler, publisher and lecturer as he expounds his theories on The Ultimate Weapon, relating to a dozing audience the alarm felt in the civilian population each time a new weapon is developed, going on to explain while the camera zooms in on a busty blond co-ed picking her nose that mankind has always had the good sense, the camera is back on his face now, in close-up, to place restrictions on its own capacity to destroy itself, his voice droning on as the camera suddenly cuts away to a shot of the grandfather, Bertram Tyler, staring moodily out to sea, and then intercuts close shots of Will Tyler’s face with those of Wat Tyler’s, to emphasize the point that this is strictly between father and son now, the provocateur oddly removed. Nobody understands the film any more. The theater is half empty.)

“Yes, thank you very much, Pop,” I said, “but that kind of thinking no longer applies. This Vietnam thing is new. It’s new because a lot of kids aren’t willing to gamble any more, don’t you see? Why should we? So a hotshot Vietcong-killer like Ky can go on running his cruddy little country? Who the hell cares?”

“South Vietnam is important to our security,” my father said.

“Whose security?”

“Ours. Yours, mine.”

“How about the security of the five hundred Americans who’ve already wasted their lives there?”

“Some people would not consider that a...”

“... or the God knows how many more we seem ready to waste?”

“Do you want all Asia to go Communist?”

“I don’t give a damn what it goes, Pop.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I mean it.”

“You don’t.”

“It’s a bad war, and...”

“There are no good wars,” my grandfather said suddenly.

“... and the only way to make it any better is to end it.”

“How?” my father asked.

“By refusing to fight the goddamn thing,” I said.

I was very close now. I was very close to telling him. We stopped walking for an instant, the three of us. I was trembling. My grandfather was suddenly standing between us, one hand on my shoulder, one hand on my father’s. I was not aware that he had moved, but he was between us.

“These are different times, Will,” he said gently.

“I fought my war,” my father said.

“So did I.”

“Then why...”

“And we also made our peace.”

A strange thing happened then. We both turned to our fathers at the same moment, we were both sons at the same moment. Simultaneously, my father and I both said, “Pop...” and then fell abruptly silent. I no longer knew what I wanted to say, or even if I wanted to say it. My father shook his head. We began walking up the beach again. The air seemed suddenly dense, the fog suffocating. It was my grandfather who broke the silence again.

“Have either of you seen The Sandpiper?” he said.

Quickly, with a glance at my father, I said, “We gave Burton and Taylor the award for August.”

“Award?” my father said. There was a dazed expression on his face, as though he had wandered into an alien world from a familiar and much-loved landscape. He had tucked his shoes under his arms, and he walked with his hands in the pockets of his trenchcoat, looking first to me, and then to my grandfather, as though he did not recognize either of us.

“The Tyler-Castelli Award,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, and nodded, though I was sure he did not yet understand.

“For the Most Convincing Performances in a Religious Film,” I said.

“Supposed to be packing them in all over the country,” my grandfather said.

“That’s because truck drivers enjoy watching a man kiss his own wife,” I said.

“In Metrocolor,” my grandfather said.

“And Panavision,” I said.

“It isn’t always possible,” my father said abruptly.

“What isn’t?”

“Peace.”

“I’m sure Hanoi wants peace every bit as much as we do,” I said. “If we could just...”

“Do you mean Vietnam?” my grandfather said, and suddenly looked his son full in the face.

“Yes,” my father said too quickly, and I suddenly realized he had not been talking about Vietnam at all, and was immediately ashamed of my own driving need to make clear my position on the war. I wanted to shout, No, please, Pop, say what you were about to say, tell us what you really meant, but I knew the moment was gone. I thought Oh, Jesus, if only I hadn’t been here, he’d have told my grandfather, they’d have talked, they’d have talked together. And then I recognized that I was really thinking about myself and my father, and felt suddenly desolated, the way I’d felt that day waiting for the elevator, when he’d sent Mrs. Green to find out what I wanted for my graduation.

We walked the rest of the way up the beach in silence, my grandfather, my father, and I.

The bedroom Dana occupied was adjacent to the master bedroom and opposite the john. In the off-season, it belonged to the Rosens’ little girl who, judging from the evidence arrayed around the perimeter of the room, was a child with a scientific bent. On bookshelf and dresser top, end table and vanity was a formidable collection of spiders in jars. The spiders were all currently dead, but this was no indication that they had not been alive and hale when little Dwight (for such was the darling’s name — Dwight Rosen) had incarcerated them and fed them their wingless, legless flies, the withered carcasses of which now littered the bottom of each jar. As a homey touch (or perhaps as further nourishment — who knew the mysterious workings of the scientific mind?) Dwight had further provided a carpet of lettuce for each of her jarred prisoners, which leaves were now wilted, brown, and mildewed. Altogether, her collection was a little unappetizing.

Her room was an airless chamber, a single screened window facing the door, an opposition adequate perhaps for cross ventilation if the door were left ajar, but since Dana and I were naked on little Dwight’s bed, I had not deemed it appropriate to leave the door ajar, or even unlocked. Yes, the pink door was locked, and the flowered window shade was drawn over the screened window, so that the groping and the writhing on the bed was contained within those four walls even as the spiders were contained in their jars, unseen by any eyes save those of the Walt Disney characters who cavorted on the wallpaper, they being only dumb forest animals who could register neither complaint nor surprise.

My mother, while not wishing to aggravate our tenuously resolved Oedipal situation by letting on that she knew Dana and I were, uh, ah, enjoying an, uh, ahem, sexual relationship, had nonetheless collared me in the kitchen on the Friday after my grandfather left for London and informed me that she had been invited to a party down the beach at the Stenquists’ (Erik Stenquist being a closet queen with a wife who was apparently deaf, dumb, and blind) starting at live p. m. and that she’d be there until eight o’clock, at which time she planned to meet my father’s ferry, it being his habit (now that his vacation had ended) to take the six-thirty p. m. boat from Sayville every Friday night, and the eight-ten a. m. back each Monday morning.

“So I’ll be gone from five o’clock to a little after eight o’clock,” my mother said.

I said, “Oh, okay, Mom.”

She looked at me steadily, hazel eyes unwavering, and said, “I’ll be leaving at about ten to five, and your father and I won’t be back until a little after eight.”

“Fine,” I said.

“We’ll have dinner then,” my mother said. “Just some cold cuts, will that be all right?”

“Great,” I said.

“At eight o’clock or a little after,” my mother said. “When your father and I return.”

“Right,” I said, “you’ll be gone from five to eight.”

“Yes, from five o’clock to eight o’clock,” my mother said.

“Okay,” I said.

We nodded at each other like teacher and pupil who had just come through a particularly difficult educational experiment and were now anxious to march off to our just and separate rewards, hers being a few martinis at the Stenquists’, mine being Dana.

It was about seven o’clock, I suppose (I don’t really know because I had taken off my watch and put it on Dwight’s vanity alongside a jar containing a very large black and, I was sure, poisonous and thankfully dead spider) but it was probably around seven or thereabouts because we had come into the bedroom at five-thirty, giving Mom a half-hour’s grace period, and had made fast and furious love, and were now beginning to explore each other again, not truly explore because you cannot explore territories already claimed, but beginning to walk around our acquisitions like proud landholders with pleased smiles and small nods, appreciatively and gratefully, and beginning also to get a little excited in the bargain, all metaphors aside. It was about seven o’clock, then, when I heard footsteps in the hallway outside, and sat straight up in bed, and heard the bathroom door closing across the hall, and heard someone urinating. Dana had clutched the sheet to her naked breasts (it’s true that girls do that, I had never believed it when I saw it on the screen) and had turned to me with her brown eyes wide, neither of us speaking, both of us listening to the interminable stream across the hall behind the closed bathroom door, and then the door opened again, and there were more footsteps, retreating, the floorboards creaking in the old seaside house, and I heard my father’s voice call from the living room, “Dolores?” and hesitate and then call again, “Anybody home?”

I was, by this time, already out of bed and pulling on my blue jeans while Dana fumbled with bra and panties, neither of us speaking, listening for those footsteps that would bring Old Sherlock directly to the spider lab of Dwight Rosen, but hopefully not before we were both properly dressed and admiring all those lovely dead arachnids in their jars. The footsteps instead stopped outside the master bedroom next door. My father hesitated in the corridor again, called “Dolores!” again, and then went into the bedroom. I heard the door whisper shut behind him. I heard the slip bolt being thrown. I looked at Dana. She was dressed now and frantically combing her hair. I heard the telephone being dialed in the bedroom next door, a toll call, judging from the number of times the dial was twirled, and I thought several things in tumbling succession. I thought first what a good thing it was that my father hadn’t allowed Dana and me to share this bedroom next to the master bedroom because the walls were obviously paper-thin and he would have been able to hear every rattle and creak of every spring on Dwight’s narrow bed, and I thought it odd that Dana hadn’t mentioned hearing any of my parents’ own nocturnal action, and suddenly wondered if they still engaged in such action (Oedipal wish), and thought also that my father was probably calling his office with some last-minute instructions, having undoubtedly left some time after lunch to catch an earlier boat than usual, forgetting for the moment that it was now seven o’clock or thereabouts and the office would be closed, forgetting all of these things in the next few moments because that was when my father’s voice cut through the cardboard walls with their Disney characters cavorting, cut through my thoughts, cut through my life and made it abundantly clear that this my America was a phony bitch of a land where anything of worth or value was becoming buried under an overwhelming heap of garbage. All of this my father accomplished in less than twenty sentences.

“Hello,” he said. “Everything all right?”

“I just got here,” he said. “It’s okay, she’s out somewhere.”

“I ache all over,” he said.

“Oh, really,” he said, and chuckled. “That’s very interesting.”

“Stop it,” he said, “you’re giving me a hard-on.”

“Listen,” he said, “I’d better go now.”

“Will I see you Monday?” he said.

“I love you,” he said.

“Goodbye,” he said.

That was how my father honed the steel blade my grandfather had helped to pour and hammer. That was how my father — in a voice strangely unlike his own, coy, flirtatious, arch — convinced me that I would not go back to Yale in the fall, I would no longer use my student deferment as an excuse to avoid confronting the draft, I would instead drop out of school and do whatever I could in protest against this war that seemed to me representative of everything rotten in America, including my father.

I could not look at Dana.

We left little Dwight’s bedroom and walked noisily out of the house, the fucking hypocrite.

September

I was Lieutenant William Francis Tyler of the 94th Fighter Squadron of the 1st Fighter Group of the 306th Fighter Wing of the Fifteenth Air Force based in Foggia, Italy. I had got to bed at two A. M. the night before after having drunk myself into a stupor at the Allied Officers Club in town. It was now six-thirty a. m. and the sergeant who shook me awake kept saying over and over again, “Let’s go, lieutenant, let’s go,” and I mumbled in my sleep, “You’re kidding,” even though I had seen my name chalked onto the blackboard at Group Headquarters yesterday afternoon, and knew that I would be Hying this morning. “You’re on, lieutenant,” he said, “let’s go.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You up?”

“I’m up.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure, goddamnit.”

“Okay, lieutenant.”

It was cold in the tent. I unzipped my sleeping bag and heard the sergeant moving over to Ace’s cot to shake him awake, and then going down the line past Tommy Rodwin and over to where Archie Colombo was snoring. There were only four of us in the tent. For the past month, we had been paying an Italian mason to build us a permanent shelter out of tufa block and corrugated steel, but he was working slowly and the house was not yet finished. I sat on the edge of my cot, shivering on my air mattress even though I was wearing long johns.

“What the fuck time is it?” Ace asked.

“Six-thirty,” I said.

“Never let a fuckin’ man sleep around here,” he said, and swung his legs over the side of the cot and stood up and began waving his arms in big circles while running in place.

“Hey, Colombo, you up?” I shouted.

“I’m up,” Colombo answered.

“We’ll all be up, you don’t keep quiet,” Rodwin mumbled from his cot, the only one of us who was not flying that day.

I pulled on a pair of coveralls, picked up my toilet kit, and stumbled out into the dawn, glancing automatically at the sky above, clear and blue, which was no indication it would be the same over the target, wherever that might be today. The autumn countryside was yellow and soft in the early morning light, a faint mist still clinging to the ground where the sun had not yet touched the shadowed hollows.

I had shaved the night before, so I just washed my face now, and brushed my teeth, and looked at my watch and tried to tell myself I did not have a hangover. The officers’ area was adjacent to the flight line, and the P-38s were lined up with their noses facing the runway, catching glints of sunlight, crew chiefs and mechanics moving up and down the line as they coughed the airplanes into life, warming them up in case we would be flying today. I dropped off my gear at the tent and then walked diagonally out of the area into the officers’ mess hall where I ate my usual breakfast of canned orange juice, oatmeal with powdered milk, powdered scrambled eggs, Spam, and coffee. If we flew, I would not be eating again until late this afternoon.

The Briefing Room was in an old church taken over by the Fifteenth as its headquarters. I took a chair alongside Ace, who had not shaved and who would probably eat after the briefing, as was his superstitious custom. Our Operations Officer, Major Dimple, who was second in command to Colonel Spiller, was standing behind a table at the front of the church, where the altar once must have been. An Air Force map of southern Europe, covered with a sheet of plexiglas, hung on the wall behind him. A crayoned red circle on the plexi located today’s target, some place in Yugoslavia. Crayoned blue lines to the target area indicated our headings from Foggia. Crayoned red dots along our flight route indicated expected flak points. Major Dimple consulted the clipboard in his hand, cleared his throat, and said, “Good morning, gentlemen,” and no one answered. It was still dim inside the church; the huge map was illuminated by a long fluorescent tube; the half-light of dawn pressed against the arched stone windows like faded silk. “Mission and target,” the major said. “Rendezvous with B-24s over Kraljevo, Yugoslavia, provide penetration, target, and withdrawal cover.” This was hardly a surprise, since those crayoned blue lines led straight to Yugoslavia, but an audible sigh of relief went up nonetheless from the assembled pilots. It would be a short run. Our last raid had been deep into Germany, and we had lost eight B-17s over the target, a heavily defended synthetic petroleum plant, five of them to flak and three to mid-air crash. It was an incredible feeling to be sitting a thousand feet above the heavies as they flew into the box barrage put up by the Germans, knowing there was nothing you could do but wait until they had dropped their load and come of the target, at which time you would try to protect them from any fighters the Luftwaffe still had. You saw those poor bastards sailing directly into the black puffs of flak, each evil-looking blossom indicating the explosion of a shell, and even though you could not hear anything over the roar of your own engines, you knew that each of those unfolding black flowers was malign but oddly impersonal. The barrage the Germans laid up into the sky was in the shape of a box through which they knew with certainty the bombers had to fly if they expected to reach the target. It was as simple as that, no question of marksmanship, no question of ground battery crews zeroing in. The flak exploded and the bombers flew through it, and each black puff was only objectively deadly. It was different when, flying unarmed through soup on a weather reconnaissance mission deep behind enemy lines, you saw nothing, no explosive puffs, but suddenly felt the airplane rock from a percussive blast behind you, and knew the ground radar was closing in on your tail, and suddenly swerved to the right in panic, and dropped two thousand feet and dodged to the left, knowing you could in your stripped-down state outrun any fighter they put into the air against you, but terrified of those invisible bursts tracking you in the eyeless night. Over the target on a bombing mission, you were safe if you flew a fighter plane because you veered up and away to wait while the B-17s or B-24s dropped their loads, unable to assist them in any way (the Luftwaffe would not send its own fighters into the teeth of a ground barrage) until the ordeal was over, and they broke from the target and headed home. And oh the goddamn pitiable sight of those poor bastards coming off the target, broken, smoking, losing altitude, limping away after they had arrived in such bold formation and suicidally rushed that wall of exploding flak. If you ever talked to a bomber pilot, you wondered how he managed to keep his sanity, and you felt oddly embarrassed when he told you the prettiest sight in the world was a P-38 coming down to cover him as he broke off target.

“Take-off time is 0845,” the major said. “Your route is as follows: base to forty-four ten north, twenty twenty cast to Kragujevac to Paracin to forty-three fifty-two north, twenty-one twenty-four cast to last landfall at Albanian-Yugoslav coastal border to base. ETA at rendezvous is 1000 hours, altitude 21,500 to 22,000 feet. Radio silence, of course, until you’re over the target,” he said, which was the cue, as it was at every briefing, for the group’s meteorologist to step up with the day’s weather report. Captain Rutherford was a moon-faced little man with a pencil-line mustache and a high reedy voice. He invariably read the weather report like a radio announcer doing a thirty-second spot following the news, as if totally unaware that one or another of us had earlier flown a recon mission over the target to gather the information, the enemy being extremely chary about letting us know when it was okay to bomb. If the skies were dear, Rutherford sounded as though he were reporting the good news to thousands of housewives anxious to go out shopping, rather than to a collection of sleepy-eyed pilots who were dragging ass and hoping for fog over the target. When he said, as he did now, “Stratus at 2000 feet over Dubrovnik and the offshore islands,” we ladies of Lake Shore Drive knew he really meant it was raining lightly there, “clearing rapidly inland approximately midway to target, cirro-cumulus at 24,000 to 26,000 over the Kragujevac-Paracin-Kraljevo area, ceiling and visibility unlimited.” He smiled, pleased with his delivery; in a mimeographed Intops Summary, the weather would probably be reported later as simply CAVU. Rutherford nodded in dismissal, took a seat behind the table, and did not look up when Captain Schulz (who we all insisted was a Nazi spy, even though he was our own Intelligence Officer) came forward to give us our flak and enemy aircraft information. This was the part we always listened to very closely. With the back of his hand, Schulz brushed a hank of straight blond hair off his forehead, blinked at the assembled pilots, consulted a scrap of brown paper so tiny that we were certain he would swallow it as soon as he had read us the information on it, and then matter-of-fact said, “Flak reported on mission route week of September 10 as follows: Stolak and Bileca, light to medium; Pljevlja, heavy; Priboj, intermittent light; extremely heavy over target area and in Kragujevac-Paracin-Kraljevo triangle. Suggest alternate headings to avoid Pljevlja batteries. Very little E/A activity this past week, though eight Me 109s were sighted ten miles southeast of Sarajevo, at five thousand feet, no markings. Eighth Air Force has reported sighting jets again, but the possibility of any in Yugoslavia is extremely slight; whatever comes at you from Belgrade/Zemun or possibly Novi Sad will be conventional aircraft. You’ll probably have a lot of stragglers coming off the target, plenty to keep you busy on the way home. If you’re shot down...” (We all stopped listening here, because this was the part we heard at each and every briefing, reiterated for all of us idiot pilots who were only flying an airplane that cost a quarter of a million dollars and who had been trained at an expense of another couple of hundred thousand dollars, but who were too dumb to know what we were supposed to do if we got shot down, unless it was repeated seven days a week) “... properly and with respect if you’re picked up by the Luftwaffe, hostilely if the ground forces get you, and extremely badly if the Gestapo does. Check your sidearm before take-off, make sure you’ve got your packet of money, your first-aid kit” (ho-hum) “your emergency rations, and your knife. If you’re forced down, you’re under orders to destroy the airplane. If you bail out, get rid of your parachute.” Schulz looked at his little brown piece of paper again, and then sat down. Major Dimple came forward.

“All right,” he said, “here are your plane assignments,” and began reading off the names of the pilots and the numbers of the planes they would be flying into Yugoslavia. Our group was always briefed together, which meant that there were forty-eight pilots assembled in the church that morning. The 94th Squadron had twenty-five pilots in it, but no more than sixteen of us went up on any mission, four flights — White, Red, Blue, and Yellow — with four P-38s in each flight. Today, only fourteen of us were going, in flights of four, four, three, and three. Not every pilot had the same plane assigned to him for every strike, but Ace and I were lucky in that respect, flying the identical plane each time, a privilege usually reserved only for senior pilots. (We naturally considered those airplanes our own, and were terribly annoyed when they were assigned to other pilots for a mission we were not flying.) On both nacelles of Ace’s airplane, he had painted four spread playing cards, all aces, and the name Aces High stenciled in a semicircle above them. My plane was called Tyler’s Luck, a bastardization of the comic strip Tim Tylers Luck, and the design on my engines featured blond Tim and black-haired Spud, both grinning. Anyway, since Ace and I knew which planes we’d be flying, we stopped listening again, until the major said, “Check your timepieces,” and then hesitated, watching the sweep-hand, and then said, “It’s oh-eight-seventeen, good luck, gentlemen,” which we never felt he really meant.

Captain Kepler, who had been assigned squadron leader for this mission, gave us a brief talk outside the church, telling us what altitude he wanted to fly at to rendezvous, and setting our courses and speeds. He told us again that he didn’t want any noise until we were over the target, and then he looked at his watch, said, “Okay, guys,” and walked off to get a second cup of coffee in the mess hall. Ace and I went to the latrine because this would be our last opportunity to do so (we rarely used the pilot’s relief tube) until sometime this afternoon. Then he went for his good luck cup of coffee, and I went back to the tent to dress.

The weather was still mild on the ground, but it would be something like eighty degrees below zero outside the airplane at 30,000 feet, and even though the P-38 was equipped with a heating tube, the temperature in the cockpit rarely rose to above fifty-five degrees. The Air Force also had a heated flying suit complete with an electric plug that fit into a cockpit jack, but the suit shrank when you washed it, and as a result only the smallest guys in the squadron flew in anything like heated comfort. So I always wore long johns, over which I pulled on a pair of khaki pants and shirt, and then coveralls, and then my leather fleece-lined jacket. I never wore the leather helmet because it got too uncomfortable on a long flight, preferring the poplin instead. I took very good care of my hands and my feet because those were the parts of the body that really began to ache after a while (those and the coccyx; you were sitting on the valve of a Mae West throughout the entire mission). I had bought a pair of fleece-lined boots from a British officer for twenty bucks, and those were what I wore on each raid, together with a pair of woolen, flannel-lined, sweater-cuffed GI gloves. Still, my hands and feet were always cold.

Sergeant Balson was standing alongside the plane when I came up to the flight line at about eight-thirty. He had already started her, and he stood listening to the engines now, bald head cocked to one side, the way my mother used to listen, though the crew chief was not the slightest bit deaf. Hands on hips, wearing coveralls and a wool cap, he kept listening to the engines as I approached, and then, without a word of greeting, said, “She seems to be warming up slowly, sir, missing a few times, but she’s sound, don’t worry. The left engine throttle lever is loose. And the trim-tab on the right is pulling a little hard.”

“Anything else, Ballsy?”

“That’s it, sir, have a good flight.”

“Thank you. See you later.”

“Right, sir.”

I went up the ladder onto the wing. The P-38 was not a small airplane. It weighed 17,500 pounds combat-loaded and 14, 100 pounds when the cannon and machine guns were taken out of the nose for an unarmed weather recon flight. Either way, it was a huge hunk of machinery for one man to take into the air, and I always climbed into that cockpit with a sense of apprehension, knowing that my full concentration would be demanded for the next several hours, and knowing that I would come back to the field with a pounding headache. The P-38 cruised at close to 270 miles an hour, as fast as the Mustang or the Thunderbolt, except at high altitudes, and even though I rarely experienced a sense of speed in the air (all of us were weaving over the bombers at the same speed, throttles set), I nonetheless recognized that I was hurtling through the sky at very high velocity, especially when we passed a stationary cloud mass and the point was suddenly and forcefully driven home, and I knew that the only things keeping me aloft were those twin 1600 horsepower Allisons and my own intelligence. So I constantly listened to every sound, reacted to every vibration, every alien ping, knowing instantly if an engine was missing or an instrument was off, preparing to deal with any malfunction that threatened to drop me to the ground — and that alone could give a man a goddamn headache, even if he didn’t have the Luftwaffe and the flak to worry about.

On the ground, though, the airplane was nothing less than beautiful. Looking at her head-on, you saw three huge, thrusting silver bullets, the forwardmost one being the canopied cockpit with its lethal nose, on either side of which were the engine nacelles with their three-bladed airscrews. From wing tip to wing tip, the ship measured fifty-two feet, which meant that once inside the cockpit, you were looking out past the flanking engines onto twenty-six feet of metal on either side of you. It was nice to have two engines in case one decided to quit or was helped to quit by the GAF; it was also nice to have that 23-mm Madsen cannon in the nose surrounded by four 50-caliber machine guns, which was, to be modest, exceptionally heavy armament. The engine booms tapered like torpedos back to the twin fin-and-rudder tail assembly, with the main undercarriage wheels jutting from the twin booms, just back of the wings. Those wings were six feet off the ground when the plane was sitting on the flight line. The over-all impression was one of enormous size and power. Tyler’s Luck, the legend read — Amen.

If there was anything that characterized the flight-line wait before take-off, it was our absolute silence. There was no radio chatter between the pilots, no need even for the formality of tower clearance. At precisely 0845, the leader of White Flight thundered down the runway and took off, followed by his wingman seconds later, and then by the element leader and his wingman. I was the element leader of Red Flight. With Ace Gibson on my wing, I taxied onto the wire mesh landing mat, following the two planes ahead, and did a final run-up check, propeller switches in AUTOMATIC, governors in full-forward take-off position, magnetos at 2300 rpm, toes holding hard on the hydraulic brakes. I pulled the left governor back until I got a reduction of 200 rpm, and then returned it to the full-forward take-off position, making sure I got 2300 rpm again. Then I checked out the electrical system — voltmeter approximately twenty-eight volts, ammeter charging below fifty amps. I was ready. As White Flight circled the field overhead, waiting to be joined by the rest of the squadron, I thought This is number nineteen, thirty-one missions to go, and then Archie Colombo, leading Red Flight, poured on the juice.

At 0848, I was airborne.

The people of Foggia did not like P-38 pilots. This made it difficult to form any alliances with girls, and so we were extremely lucky to get Francesca. The reason they did not like P-38 pilots was that the Air Force had repeatedly bombed the railway marshaling yards when the town was still held by the enemy, and the villagers had repeatedly repaired the damage done in the raids until finally the Air Force dropped leaflets telling them to stop fixing the yards or the town itself would be bombed. The Italians went right ahead with their reconstruction work after the next raid, so the Air Force naturally sent in its P-38s to bomb and strafe Foggia. Whereas we were in no way connected with those long-ago pilots who had done the dirty deed, the moment a girl from Foggia found out you flew a P-38, you were dead. It didn’t pay to lie, either, because they knew more about the Air Force than the Air Force did itself, and they could tell (by which field you were stationed at in the Foggia complex) whether you flew a bomber or a fighter. Moreover, the 94th Fighter Squadron was one of the few Air Force units permitted to wear an additional piece of jewelry above the silver pilot’s wings: our identifying squadron insignia, a top hat in a ring. Fifty-cent pieces were very difficult to come by on the base, because enterprising machinists were turning them into this insignia jewelry, which was then traded to pilots for anything from two or three fresh eggs to a half-dozen cigars. But if you wore the insignia over your wings, it immediately identified you as one of those hated P-38 pilots who had shot up the town, and instantly brought pride in one’s squadron into direct conflict with one’s natural desire to get laid.

Francesca either hadn’t heard about those fearsome P-38 pilots of yore or simply did not give a damn. We had met her on the road one day while we were trying to hitch a ride into town, all the jeeps having disappeared by the time Ace and I got out of debriefing. Our flight leader and his wingman had been shot down in a raid over Odertal, and Ace and I, presumably having witnessed every enemy pass, had been detained to answer Major Dimple’s interminable questions, Were they in flames, Did they hit the deck, Did you see silk? and so on. Francesca was not exactly what one would have called a beauty, but she was a girl, and she was there. She came down the road on a bicycle, rare for these parts, since the Germans had taken with them almost anything that had wheels, wearing open sandals, one of those flowered housedresses with buttons down the front, and a threadbare black cardigan sweater fastened only at the throat and flapping loose around her shoulders like a short cape. She was a chunky girl with curly black hair and brown eyes, a lot of hair under the armpits, some on the legs, but then again, even the higher-type broads in Rome hadn’t learned to shave like American women. Ace hailed her and asked her in English if she would give us a ride to town, and she smiled in a shy, frightened manner and shook her head and shrugged her shoulders, indicating she did not speak English, which we later learned was an absolute falsehood. She spoke English as well as any other Italian in Foggia, in fact better; she had been shacking up for some three months with a bomber pilot who caught very heavy shit over Budapest and had never been heard from since. She also told us later that she was afraid of us that first day on the road because she thought we might rape her, and had pretended not to speak English so that she could listen to and understand everything we were saying and therefore be forewarned if we decided to jump her. If we had any designs at the moment, however, they were on her bicycle and not her hot little body. We kept waving our hands around and trying to explain to her that we wanted a ride into town, and finally Ace demonstrated a method whereby the three of us could share the bike, he sitting on the seat and pedaling, she sitting sidesaddle on the crossbar, and me straddling the rack over the rear wheel, legs sticking out almost parallel to the ground, a system that worked for a distance of perhaps six feet before we all fell into the ditch at the side of the road, Francesca displaying a great deal of inviting white thigh as her dress went up over her tumbling legs. I think it was then that we decided she might not be so bad to fuck.

She lived, as it turned out, in a stone farmhouse about seven kilometers from the field, which made it all very convenient. Her mother was dead, and her father was a smelly old wop who had a cataract over one eye, and who would have sold his only pair of pants for a good meal and a steady supply of vino. There were only two rooms in the house, a bedroom and a sort of combined kitchen-living-dining room. But there was also a barn and the arrangement we later worked out was that Gino, the old man, would sleep in the barn whenever Ace and I came over to see his daughter.

On the night of the Kraljevo raid, Ace and I stopped to lift a few at the Officers Club, and ran into the pilot who had flown the lead bomber. He told us that everytime he went onto Automatic, turning the plane over to his bombardier to fly through the bomb-sight, he experienced all the qualms of a man running through a thunderstorm without an umbrella, certain he would be struck by lightning at any moment. It was always with an enormous sense of relief that he took back the controls after the bombs were away, as if returning his fate into his own hands once again. It turned out that his airplane was the one Ace and I had picked up off the target and escorted home, or at least close enough to home for him to contact Big Fence for a vector without getting jumped by bandits. In gratitude, he kept buying us drink after drink, and we didn’t get to leave the club until ten o’clock that night. By the time we got over to the farmhouse, Gino was already asleep in the big lumpy double bed in the bedroom at the rear of the house. We had thoughtfully brought over two packs of cigarettes, and therefore felt no qualms about shaking him out of the sack and sending him off to the barn. The obsequious old bastard gratefully slipped out of bed in his underwear and thanked us for the pleasure of being banished from the house, while tucking one package of Camels (the other we gave to Francesca) into the waistband of his droopy long johns and praising the United States Army Air Force for its noble and courageous pilots, grazie, grazie, mille grazie for bomba the town, for fucka the daughter, but especially for bringa the cigarettes.

Only stupid women ask questions, only beautiful women ask favors. Francesca was neither. She knew why we were there, and she knew what she could expect in payment for her small sacrifices. We were reasonably decent fellows, though involved in the occupation of escorting bombers, and we never beat her or abused her, even when we were drunk. We were drunk whenever we went to her after a mission (which was sometimes five days a week and sometimes twice a week, and sometimes not at all for a week or ten days or two weeks or however long it took for the weather to break), and we always brought additional whiskey to the farmhouse because we wanted Francesca to have a drink with us before we went into the bedroom. I don’t think Francesca enjoyed whiskey, but she always had at least one with us before we went to bed.

There was no electricity in the old farmhouse; if there ever had been any, the repeated bombing raids had effectively knocked it out, and nobody involved in the war was worrying about repairing electrical lines to Gino’s cruddy little spread. Ace and I undressed in the light of the single kerosene lamp burning on the round table in the center of the large room, then went into the bedroom wearing only our khaki undershorts and climbed into bed to wait for her. In the beginning, when we had first started with Francesca, one of us would go into the bedroom with her while the other waited outside. But a fireplace provided the only heat in the farmhouse, and wood for fuel was going at premium prices, and it got pretty damn cold even on a summer’s night, sitting in that big empty stone room without a fire. So one night Ace came into the bedroom, shivering, and said, “I hate to disturb you,” and I said, “Then please don’t,” and he said, “Move over, Francesca,” and climbed into bed on the other side of her, and it had been that way ever since.

She blew out the kerosene lamp on the round table now, and came padding across the stone floor of the house and into the bedroom. The door on the wooden guardaroba creaked open. In the darkness, she put on a cotton nightgown, and felt her way across the room to the bed, and crawled in between Ace and me.

She let us do whatever we wanted to do.

I don’t know whether she enjoyed it or not.

She never said a word in bed, not a single word.

In the morning, we went back to the field at seven a. m., in time for briefing, knowing that if the weather was good we would fly to Hungary or Yugoslavia or Germany or Poland or Austria to bomb.

My hands and feet were always cold in the airplane, and I always came back with a headache.

October

That Sunday afternoon, Allen Garrett called me a Bolshevik.

Nancy was in the kitchen doing the dishes with Allen’s wife. He and I were in the parlor, drinking and talking and smoking cigars, a habit I had picked up from him out at the mill. He got up out of his chair suddenly and stretched himself to his full six feet two and a half inches, raised his arm and pointed his forefinger at me, his eyes blazing, and shouted, “Bert, you’re a goddamn Red!” Even though everyone was calling everyone else a Red or a Bolshevik along about then, I was surprised anyway by Allen’s accusation. And hurt. And angry.

The hysteria had started back in April, I guess, when Mayor Ole Hanson of Seattle (who had previously been making trips all over the country to alert it to the menace of a world proletarian revolution as openly promised by the Russians themselves at the formation of their Comintern) found a bomb in his mail. On the very next day, in Atlanta, Georgia, a colored girl had her hands blown off. She happened to be working for Senator Thomas R. Hardwick, who was chairman of the Immigration Committee, and who was strongly advocating stricter immigration quotas in order to keep the Bolsheviks out of America. It had been her misfortune to open a package addressed to her boss, presumably with his permission, the servant situation in Georgia being what it was. And on the last day of April, sixteen bombs bearing the same false Gimbel Brothers return address were discovered on a shelf in a New York City post office. It was not considered coincidental that they were addressed to such capitalists as J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, or to such high government officials as Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

The situation only got worse in the weeks and months that followed. We were a people who had mobilized more than four million men to make the world safe for democracy, and suffered close to 365,000 casualties in history’s bloodiest war. We were not ready to have our sacrifices rendered meaningless, we were not ready to lose our country to wild-eyed anarchists and dedicated revolutionaries. We knew how to deal with imminent danger, and we dealt with it effectively and mercilessly, the way we had dealt with Kaiser Bill’s misguided troops on the battlefield. On May Day in New York City, the offices of a Socialist newspaper named the New York Call were ransacked and seven members of the staff were beaten up so badly they had to be sent to the hospital. A parade of Socialists in Cleveland was stopped by a mob of soldiers who insisted they get rid of the red flag they were carrying, leading to the throwing of a punch, and then a fistfight, and then open combat, and finally riots all over the city in which one man was killed and dozens more injured.

It was my opinion that people were getting a little crazy only because the country was about to go completely dry. I was not a hard-drinking man, but I had learned a little bit about alcohol on my recent trip abroad (Nancy always giggled when I referred to my war experience that way), and I knew that there was nothing wrong with a nip or two, especially when the weather was as miserable as it was this October. The Wartime Prohibition Law had gone into effect on the first of July, just in time for Independence Day, and the Volstead Act had been passed by Congress this month, putting teeth into the already ratified Eighteenth Amendment by making it a crime to distill, brew, or sell any beverage containing more than one-half of one per cent alcohol by volume. In the meantime, Allen and I were still drinking Bronxes in the parlor of my own home that afternoon, while waiting for the Eighteenth Amendment to go into effect in January. But it was not surprising to me that a nation deprived of its right to consume alcohol, however moderately, was a nation that would go looking under its bed for bearded bomb-throwers.

It seemed to me, I had been saying, that we could not blame everything that was happening in this country on the Communists. The Boston police had had every right to strike last month, they were only earning eleven hundred dollars a year...

“That’s more than what you and I make, isn’t it?” Allen said.

“We’re new on the job,” I said, “and we don’t have to buy our own uniforms and guns. There’s nothing wrong with a man striking for a decent living wage.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a strike that isn’t instigated by the Bolsheviks,” Allen said.

“Are you telling me the Boston cops are Bolsheviks?”

“I’m telling you there’s no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime! That’s what the governor of Massachusetts said, and that’s what I’m saying.”

“Then how about the steel workers? Do they have a right to strike?”

“Bert, don’t you know that whole crowd there is infested with Reds? Who’s the man who did the most to organize the steel workers, can you tell me that? Well, I’ll tell you, Bert. It was William Z. Foster, a left-wing syndicalist. The whole damn strike there is a conspiracy. If I owned a steel mill, I’d do just what they’re doing over in Gary, I’d bring in strikebreakers by the thousands and protect them with the National Guard, that’s what I’d do. You wait and see how quick this strike’ll be settled now that they’re wise to those Reds.”

“Well,” I said, “you can’t bring in strikebreakers every time there’s a strike. John L. Lewis has called one for November first, now are you going to...?”

“The UMW voted for public control of the mining industry,” Allen said. “What’s public control if not Communism?”

“They want more money,” I said. “How would you like to work underground twelve, fourteen hours a day, breathing all that stuff into your lungs?”

“The hell with them,” Allen said. “Palmer’s got the right idea. He told them if they go ahead with this strike, they’re violating the Lever Act. Do you know what the Lever Act is?”

“What’s the Lever Act got to do...”

“It gives the President the power...”

“... with here and now?”

“... to step in whenever anything inter—”

“It was a wartime measure!”

“... feres with the production of...”

“The war’s over, Allen!”

“Coal is fuel!” Allen said. “And the President can tell those Red bastards to cut the crap and start producing it! That’s the power the Lever Act gives him!”

“Gives the Attorney General, you mean. Wilson’s a sick old man, he doesn’t know what’s going on in this country any more. If you want my opinion, I think Palmer’s a lot more dangerous than either the Boston police or the steel workers or...”

That was when Allen jumped out of his chair and said, “Bert, you’re a goddamn Red!”

“No, Allen, I’m not,” I answered, surprised, and hurt, and angry.

“What’s going on out there?” Allen’s wife called from the kitchen.

“Its nothing,” Allen said.

“It sure sounds like something,” she answered.

“It is something,” I whispered to Allen. “It’s very definitely something when a friend of mine can call me a Bolshevik simply because...”

“I didn’t say a Bolshevik!”

“You said a Red!”

“I said you sounded like a Red.”

“No, you said I way a Red.”

“Is that you, Bert?” Nancy called from the kitchen.

“The girls are getting upset,” Allen said.

“No more upset than I am,” I said.

“I see you’ve managed to smell up the entire parlor,” Nancy said, coming into the room. Rosie Garrett followed immediately behind her, a tall slender girl with long black hair and dark eyes, wearing lip rouge (“The devil’s own paint,” Nancy called it, though she herself had begun putting powder on her face) and a tan suit, skirt tight above the ankles, tan spats to protect her from Chicago’s winds. Congress had passed the Nineteenth Amendment in June, making it illegal to deny the right to vote on account of sex, and the thought of Rosie Garrett casting a ballot next year, when the law would go into effect, was somewhat frightening. Both she and Allen were older than either of us, each in their early twenties and terribly sophisticated. (They had spent Allen’s week-long vacation in New York City this past summer, and had seen Up in Mabel’s Room, which Rosie claimed had not shocked her the slightest tiny bit.) Rosie smoked cigarettes. Together, she and Allen made a very striking couple, and I was always conscious of my own, well, not exactly handsome looks when I was with them; my nose especially, though Nancy insisted it was a quite regal nose. Nancy, of course, looked fresh and lovely anywhere, in anybody’s company. She had put on a little weight since we got married, but those few extra pounds only brought her up to where she’d been before her illness. Slightly flushed as she came into the parlor, she flapped her hands at the cloud of cigar smoke. Behind her, slender dark Rosie put a cigarette between her rouged lips and struck a match.

“What was all the shouting about?” she asked.

“Allen thinks I’m a Red,” I answered.

“Allen thinks Douglas Fairbanks is a Red,” Rosie said, and Nancy burst into laughter. Rosie blew out a puff of smoke and then went to sit on the arm of her husband’s chair, putting her hand on his shoulder. He was still frowning, though God knew why. He was the one who’d called me a Red.

“A goddamn Red, in fact,” I said.

“Please, there are ladies present,” Rosie said in mock affront, and wiggled her black eyebrows at Nancy, who again laughed.

“We were talking about the strike,” Allen said.

“Grrrrrrr,” Rosie said. “He reminds me of a grizzly when he’s this way. Look at him. Grrrrrrrr,” she said again, and tousled his short blond hair, and said, “Doesn’t he look just like a bear, Bert?”

(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.)

“Bert?”

(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.)

“Bert’s out gathering wood violets,” Nancy said.

“No, Bert is sulking,” Rosie said.

I did not answer. I was wondering all at once about having made the world safe for democracy. As Allen sat opposite me and glowered in suspicion, I found myself thinking something seditious, thinking something traitorous, thinking (God forgive me) that perhaps Timothy Bear had been duped into giving his life for a slogan that was meaningless, that maybe there was no such thing as freedom, not in America, not anywhere in the world, that perhaps the boundaries of freedom would always be as rigidly defined as the boundaries of the Twenty-ninth Street Beach had been this past July, where trespassing had led to stoning and to death. I found myself overwhelmed by a wave of patriotic feeling such as I had never experienced before (not even when the German guns were sounding all around me), and I suddenly realized that America was only now, only right this minute beginning to test the strength of a political idea that was more revolutionary than anything that had ever come out of Russia, testing it in a hundred subtle and unsubtle ways, not the least of which was the unexpected appearance of a lone Negro on a forbidden beach. And I wondered, exultantly, hopefully, fearfully, what would happen when America decided to find out exactly what freedom meant, exactly to what limits freedom extended.

“All right, I know you’re not a goddamn Red,” Allen mumbled at last.

“Grrrrrrrr,” Rosie said.

November

It was two days after Thanksgiving, two years and a bit more after President Kennedy had been shot and killed. We stood in an early morning drizzle along the stone wall that was the eastern boundary of Bryant Park in this city where I’d been born. There were fifty of us, more or less, waiting for the bus that would take us to the nation’s capital, where we could make our protest known against the war in Vietnam.

Similar groups were waiting at thirty other pickup points throughout the city, and two special trains hopefully packed with demonstrators were scheduled to leave from Pennsylvania Station later that morning. The march on Washington had been conceived and co-ordinated by the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, and the group’s expectation was that a crowd in excess of 50,000 concerned Americans from all over the country would surround the White House demanding peace in Southeast Asia. Sixty-five hundred demonstrators were supposed to be leaving from New York City, and SANE had calculated that 141 buses would be needed to take them south. By Friday evening, they had received definite commitments for 84 buses, and were hoping to charter an additional 31 coaches from Greyhound, and another 50 from a Connecticut company, more than enough to carry even a larger crowd than anticipated. But now, on Saturday morning, as a gray and sunless dawn broke over the New York Public Library, there was trouble already and we were being told by the marshal of the Bryant Park contingent that a rally had been scheduled for nine that morning for those of us who might never make it to Washington.

The problem, it seemed, had originated with the bus drivers’ unions. Jackie Gleason had elevated the bus driver to the plane of a national folk hero with his weekly portrayal of the boisterous Ralph Kramden, and thus intellectually inspired, thus cognizant of their role in history and eager to protect and preserve the republic against subversives, anarchists, beatniks, and the like, the bus drivers of America had refused to man the buses chartered for the trip, and only forty-eight of the committed vehicles had arrived at the scheduled pickup points. It appeared to the SANE officials that this was surely an illegal restraint of interstate travel, but in the meantime we demonstrators stood chilled and despondent in a city silenced by the long weekend holiday, the leafless trees around us sodden and stark against a monochromatic sky.

Dana had once written a skit about some North American Indians called the Ute, their unique characteristic being that everyone in the tribe was under the age of twenty-live. (Ute, don’t you get it? she said, Ute! and I advised her that her sense of humor was far too excellent to be wasted on a cheap pun. Later that same day, when I told her we needed a new light bulb for the fixture over the sink, she convulsed me by replying, “Sure. What watt, Wat?”) Anyway, it dismayed me to discover that not too many Utes were now in evidence in Bryant Park. The drizzle may have had something to do with that, or perhaps the fact that so many of the sponsoring organizations had such long names; the Ute of America, Dana had pointed out in her witless skit, preferred ideas to be short and to the point, preferably capable of being expressed in a single word, or better yet, a symbol. It was now close to seven a. m., I guessed, and the crowd had grown to perhaps sixty or seventy people, but I saw only a dozen kids our age, half of whom were obvious beatniks with long hair, dungaree jackets, and boots. The absence of more Utes in the assemblage may have accounted for our very orderly controlled manner; we looked less like demonstrators than we did a queue of polite Englishmen waiting outside a chemist's shop. The steady drizzle did nothing to elevate our spirits, nor did the nagging knowledge that perhaps our early morning appearance here was all in vain, there would be no goddamn transportation to Washington. Even the arrival of a bright red Transit Charter Service bus elicited nothing more than a faint sigh of relief from the crowd. Had there been more Utes present, the sigh might have become a cheer. In this crowd of octogenarians, however, it sounded more like a groan from a terminal cancer patient. Well, octogenarians wasn’t quite fair. There was, to be truthful, only a sprinkling of very old people moving quietly toward the waiting bus. The remainder belonged to that other great Indian tribe (also made famous in Dana’s skit) the Cholesterol, easily recognized by balding pates and spreading seats, strings of wampum about their necks, golden tongues (never forked) spouting pledges, promises, admonitions, and advice to their less fortunate brothers, the Ute. Maybe that wasn’t fair, either. What the hell, we were all standing there in a penetrating November drizzle, all with our separate doubts, all hearing the marshal advising us that we would load from the front of the line (a senseless piece of information since I had never waited on any line that loaded from the rear) and then asking, “Where are those two girls?” to which a long-haired beatnik replied, “Boy, if you please!” and the marshal said, “You can’t prove it by me. Am I that square?” and a member of the mighty Cholesterol shouted, “No, you’re not!” a good homogeneous mixture of marchers we were taking to Washington that day.

There was not enough room on the single bus for all the people moving in an orderly line toward the Sixth Avenue curb. But a row of private cars with vacant seats in them was pulling in behind the bus now, and people began dropping out of the line in twos and threes, always in order, to enter the cars and be driven off into the gray wet dawn. Dana and I waited our turn. By seven-thirty we were aboard the bus, and in another ten minutes the doors closed and we pulled away from the curb and headed for the Lincoln Tunnel.

I felt apprehensive, but I could not explain why.

It had rained in Washington, too, and the streets were still wet when we assembled outside the White House at eleven o’clock that morning. The sun was beginning to break through. Looking across the Ellipse, I could see the obelisk of the Washington Monument wreathed in clouds that began tearing away in patches to reveal a fresh blue sky beyond. It was going to be a beautiful day after all, clear and sunny, the temperature already beginning to rise, and with it the spirits of the protesters. The organizers of the march were passing out signs on long wooden sticks, each bearing a carefully selected slogan. My sign read, vertically:

Dana carried a sign in the shape of an American flag, the field of stars in the left-hand corner replaced by a slogan, the bottom three white stripes lettered with a second slogan, so that the message read:

There were additional slogans as well, all of them muted in tone as befitted the dignified approach of the sponsoring groups, all of them professionally printed by the hundreds, except for the dozen or so hand-lettered posters carried by some of the more militant forces who seemed to be shaping up into cadres of their own, signs that blared in blood-dripping red U.S. IS THE AGGRESSOR or AMERICA, GET OUT NOW! I noticed, too, as I lifted my sign and rested the wooden handle on my shoulder, that some of the hard-core cadres were carrying furled Vietcong flags, and my sense of apprehension grew, though I could not imagine trouble in this orderly crowd, the soft-spoken monitors explaining what we would do, the clouds above all but gone now, a robin’s egg blue sky spreading benignly over the glistening wet white clean buildings of the capital.

The appearance of the first swastika was shocking.

We were marching along three sides of the White House, STEPS TO PEACE, STOP THE BOMBINGS, flanked by the wrought iron fence surrounding the lawn and the wooden police barricades set up to bisect the wide sidewalk, RESPECT 1954 GENEVA ACCORDS, the police watching with a faint air of familiar boredom, apparently without any sense of impending trouble, “NO MORE WAR, WAR NEVER AGAIN” — POPE PAUL, no one chanting or singing, even the militants looking oddly suppressed save for the anticipatory fire in their eyes and the color of the now unfurled Vietcong flags, when suddenly the storm troopers appeared in Army fatigues and combat boots, swastika armbands on their shirtsleeves, George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi elite, one of whom held in his right hand a fire-engine red can with the label GAS on it, and in his left hand a sign reading FREE GASOLINE AND MATCHES FOR PEACE CREEPS.

The reference, of course, was to the two immolations within as many weeks this November, the first having taken place outside the river entrance to the Pentagon, not three miles from where we now marched, when a thirty-one-year-old Quaker named Norman Morrison drenched his clothes with gasoline and, holding his eighteen-month-old daughter in his arms, set fire to himself in protest against the Vietnam War. An Army major managed to grab the child away from him in time, but Morrison could not be saved, and he was declared dead on arrival at the Fort Meyer Army Dispensary. A week later, a twenty-two-year-old Roman Catholic named Roger LaPorte set himself ablaze outside the United Nations building in New York City, and died some thirty-three hours later, still in coma. The immensity of those gestures, ill-advised or otherwise, coupled with the memory of Jews being incinerated by Nazis in the all-too-recent past (Judgment at Nuremburg had taken two Academy Awards not five years ago!) transformed this American Nazi’s at best insensitive offer into an act at once barbaric and intolerable. It was no surprise that someone rushed him, yanked the armband from his shirtsleeve, and began tearing his poster to shreds. (The surprise came later; his attacker turned out to be an ex-Marine who, like the Nazi, was opposed to the march.)

I expected trouble to erupt full-blown then and there.

I saw another Nazi rushing forward with a poster that read IN WAR, THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY, wielding the sign like a baseball bat, Vietcong flags on poles being lowered like spears now, a minor war paradoxically about to begin on the fringes of a protest against war. There was a lunatic aspect to the scene, the row of orderly marchers with their beautifully rendered posters, a middle-aged phalanx that circled the White House in the company of a sparse number of Utes, while Vietcong flags confronted Nazi swastikas, schizophrenia in the sunshine, the Washington police seemingly as dazed as the photographers, but only for a moment. Swiftly, efficiently, they moved in to break up the scuffle. Flash bulbs popped too late. My head was turned away, there was no danger that a recognizable photograph of me would appear on the front page of the New York Times. (Was this in my mind even then, the persistent rumor that draft boards were deliberately calling up peace demonstrators in reprisal, was this what caused my apprehension?)

We marched across the Mall later to the Washington Monument and listened to speeches gently urging peace. Looking north across Constitution Avenue, we could see the White House, and to the southwest across the Tidal Basin, the glittering white temple of the Jefferson Memorial. I did not know what to think. President Johnson had only yesterday affirmed through his Press Secretary Bill D. Moyers that the anti-war demonstrations were “a part of the freedom guaranteed all Americans.” But Moyers had gone on to say that the President was “obviously impressed also by the other kind of demonstrations taking place in South Vietnam where tens of thousands of Americans were serving their country and offering themselves in support of freedom.” Johnson seemed certain that the great majority of Americans were in favor of his Vietnam policy (but not the many thousands who were gathered here at the monument) and he had delivered through Moyers what sounded ominously like a warning to those of us who were opposed to the policy there, asking us again to “weigh the consequences” of our actions. I did not feel we were accomplishing too terribly much as we listened to the speeches. I felt a sense of helplessness, a certain knowledge that however many of us rose in protest against what Norman Thomas later called “this monstrously stupid chess game in which the pawns bleed,” no matter how many of us made our views known and our voices heard, the course had already been charted; there were empires at stake of which we had no inkling.

All the way back to Talmadge, I could not shake my gloomy despair nor my edgy apprehension.

The Talmadge Advertiser-Dispatch published only two editions a week, one on Monday and the other on Thursday. Since the march had taken place on a Saturday, the earliest mention of it could only have appeared on the following Monday.

It was my father who brought the item to my attention. He had told my mother that he wanted to speak to me, and when I went into the living room, he was sitting in one of the Hogarth chairs flanking the fireplace. I took the chair opposite him. A pitcher of martinis was on the end table near his right elbow. It was nearly empty, and he was holding an almost-drained glass in his hand. I hoped he was not drunk.

“How come we never have heart-to-heart talks?” he asked.

“I don’t know. How come?” I answered.

“When I was a kid,” he said, “I used to go see all the Andy Hardy movies — you ever hear of Andy Hardy?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Old Judge Hardy would take Andy into the library for these heart-to-heart talks, and they would get things all squared away. I used to wish my father would take me into the library and have one of those talks with me, but he never did. We used to have a library upstairs in the house on East Scott, well, you’ve never seen that house, you wouldn’t know. It was a nice room. I’m sorry we never used it. I mean, to talk.”

I didn’t say anything.

“This is a nice room, too,” my father said, “though of course not a library. Your mother’s got good taste. This is a nice room, don’t you think?”

“Yes, it’s a very nice room,” I said. “I’ve always liked it.”

“Shall we have a heart-to-heart talk?”

“About what?”

“I try to be a good father,” he said suddenly.

Again, I said nothing.

“Did you see this?” he asked and handed me a copy of the Advertiser-Dispatch folded open to page four. I was surprised to see my high school graduation picture there, with a caption over it that read:

The single paragraph under the picture merely stated that I was one of an estimated thirty-five thousand protesters who had gone to Washington the week before.

“Is this today’s?” I said. Idiotically, all I could think was TALMADGE UTE MARCHES.

“You didn’t tell me you were going to Washington.”

“You didn’t ask me.”

“Do I have to ask?”

“I guess if you’re interested, you have to ask.”

“No, I don’t have to ask. A father doesn’t have to ask his own son what he’s up to. You’re supposed to come to me and tell me. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

“Pop,” I said, “maybe we ought to talk some other time.”

“No, let’s talk now.”

“Dinner’s almost ready...”

“Dinner can wait!”

“How many of those have you had?”

“I can drink you under the table anytime you’d like to try it, Wat, so don’t give me any of that!”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” he answered.

We sat opposite each other silently. I put the newspaper down on the oriental rug. My father poured what was left of the martinis into his glass.

“What’s your plan?” he asked.

“My plan for what?”

“You drop out of school, you go on a goddamn march, you get your picture in the paper for everybody to see...”

“I’m not ashamed of what I did.”

“No, I’m the one who’s ashamed.”

“Then I’m sorry. I guess we all have different things to be ashamed of. If I embarrassed you, I’m sorry.”

“You may be sorrier when your draft board sees that newspaper. You think they’re kidding up there? You think this war is a joke?”

“No, I most certainly don’t think it’s a joke.”

“You’ve been 1-A ever since you dropped out of Yale,” he said. “What’ll you do when they draft you? Refuse to go? Let them send you to prison?”

“No, I haven’t got the guts for that.”

“Then what? Run for Canada?”

“I don’t think I could leave America.”

“You love it so much you can’t leave it, huh? But you can go on a march...”

“Pop,” I said, “if you love something enough, you should be able to say it’s wrong.” I paused. Still without looking at him, I said, “The way I think you’re wrong, Pop.”

“About what?”

“About... a lot of things. About this. Your ideas about this.”

“And what else?” he said sharply.

“Nothing. Nothing else.”

“Join the Navy,” he said. “Nobody wants to get killed, that’s understandable. I joined the Air Force because I didn’t want to end up in the Infantry. The Vietcong have no fleet and no air power, you’d be safe in the Navy. Give them your two years or whatever you owe them, and then come home and live your life.”

“No,” I said. “It may be too late, but I’ve already decided to appeal my classification.”

“What do you mean, too late?”

“I’ve been lucky so far. They’re drafting guys left and right.”

“What kind of an appeal?”

“I want it changed to 1-A-O.”

“What’s that?”

“Noncombatant.”

“That’s very smart,” my father said, “you’ve got a lot of smart ideas. You’ll put yourself on a battlefield without a gun, very smart.”

“It’s a matter of principle,” I said.

“It’s a matter of bullshit, ” he said. “You anxious to get killed?”

“No, but...”

“The idea is to stay alive, Wat.”

“That’s only part of the idea.”

“Stay alive,” he repeated. “However you can. Do whatever you have to do to stay alive.” Our eyes met. “Do you understand me?” I shook my head. “What don’t you understand?”

“I don’t understand staying alive by hurting someone else. If... if that’s what you have to do to stay alive, Pop, then you go ahead and do it. But don’t ask me to... to hurt anyone. I can’t do that.”

“What are we talking about?” he asked, suddenly frowning.

“Pop...” I started, and then only shook my head.

“Say what you have to say, Wat.”

“No, I don’t have anything to say.”

My father drew a heavy breath. “If anything happened to you...” he said, and hesitated. “Do you want to kill your mother?”

“Do you?” I said.

That was the closest we came to bringing it out into the open. That was the closest I came to saying, You son of a bitch, who are you fooling around with, some cheap cunt from the office, some college girl you picked up on your lunch hour, some Park Avenue whore, how (dare you tell me how to live my life when you haven’t yet learned to live your own? That was as close as we came.

My father turned away from me. Looking into his glass, he said, “Son, I...” and shook his head. I had the sudden feeling that he was going to cry. Without looking up at me, he quickly said, “I don’t want you to get hurt.” His lip was trembling. He kept staring into his glass. “Wat, I only...”

It occurred to me that I could help him. It occurred to me that he was trying to say he loved me. But I watched him from across the room, watched him struggling with whatever it was inside that made it impossible for him to say the words to his own son, and when at last he began sobbing, I swiftly left the room.

I did not stop hating myself for a long time afterward.

December

She came limping away with her number four engine gone, Ace and I hovering above her, the pilot already feathering her number two; we were going to have a straggler not a minute and a half off target. Major Kander, our flight leader, said, “Springcap Seven-Nine, cover her,” and I pressed the transmitter button in the center of the control wheel, and said into the oxygen mask microphone strapped over my chin and mouth, “Springcap Seven-Nine, Wilco,” and peeled off with Ace on my wing not four feet to the right.

There was a big hole in the bomber’s belly, and I saw now as we dropped down over her that the rear turret was gone as well, how the hell were we going to get her back to Foggia? The heavies were supposed to cruise at one-sixty after target, but if she was doing a hundred and thirty, she was lucky, already beginning to lose altitude and dropping more speed as the blades on her number two feathered and the propeller stopped. She had made a sharp right turn away from the bombing line and was now flying on a southerly course to the rally point, but there was no question of her keeping up with the other B-17s, we would have her on our hands all the way back to Italy. In the far distance, I saw some of the bombers already forming up, and suddenly Ace’s voice shouted, “Break left!” and without stopping to think or to question, I immediately turned the wheel to the left, put in the left rudder, went into a roll, sucked back on the stick, goosed the airplane into a screaming climb with Ace clinging to my wing, and only then looked down to see what he’d been yelling about — four FW-l90s dropping out of the clouds for a pass at the bomber’s right side, apparently unaware as yet that Tail-End Charlie was gone and that the bomber had a blind spot. They came in on her in trail, all their firepower — four 20-mm cannons and two 13-mm machine guns for each plane — spraying the bomber in sequence from her nose to her tail as they made their first pass. It was too late to break up their formation, they came screaming up level on the poor stuttering bastard, approaching her over half the clock, twelve to six, staggered four abreast and filling the sky with thunder, black-spinnered each and every one of them, big black white-trimmed crosses on their gray flanks, smaller black swastikas on their tails, cannons blasting from the wing roots and the wings themselves, machine guns spitting from the cowlings of each plane as they came in level, one after the other, and then swung low under her for a try at the ball turret in the belly.

We were waiting above them as they broke clear of the bomber on her left-hand side and began to climb. The ball turret had swung around, and the gunner was following them as they rose, joined in firepower now by the gunner in the upper turret, and the waistgunner on the left, all of them shooting steadily as the enemy planes screeched for the cover of the cirrus clouds above, through which Ace and I dropped down on them, hoping the B-17’s gunners would let up when we joined the fray and not get two of their own little friends. We did not surprise the Germans; they had known we were there when they began their attack. But their own surprise was complete; as we dropped down on them, a second pack of FW-190s appeared on the bomber’s tail and a third formation dove in on the right again, all of them apparently having hidden in the cloud cover until the first pass was completed. Their timing was absolutely perfect. The attackers aft came in one behind the other in a single line, their flight leader learning immediately that the tail position had been knocked out by flak over the target, and safely diving and firing and ripping the tail assembly to tatters and then swooping under the belly as the three other planes in the flight followed close astern. I knew the bomber was done for. As the tail attackers dropped out of sight to reform for another pass, the third pack came in, using the same tactics the lead flight had employed, four planes attacking in trail at two, three, four, and five o’clock, perpendicular to the bomber’s long right flank, in slightly escalated altitudes from the tail to the nose. They raked the big ship and then pulled up over her this time, and I saw the upper turret explode with what must have been a direct cannon hit, and Ace shouted, “Three o’clock high!” and it was then that I thought we’d all had it, the bomber, Ace, me, every fucking United States Army Air Force plane in the sky over Poland that day because just then a pack of six Messerschmitts dropped out of the clouds on my right wing.

The bomber was losing altitude fast. Smoke was pouring from the waistgunner’s position aft of the radio compartment. The first flight of FW-190s had reformed and were diving on her nose now in an attempt to deliver the knockout blow, coming in one after the other in a straight single line, shooting at the cockpit and then peeling off just out of range of the nose guns. Ace was swearing into his radio. We had not seen the Luftwaffe on our last six missions, their habit being to hoard ships and gasoline for strikes they could be certain were coming, and now the sky was swarming with them. They were not concerned with us, we were only incidental. They were after the B-17. To each of those German pilots, the big brown bomber must have seemed the symbol of everything that was destroying the German dream, relentlessly pounding oil refinery and synthetic plant, aircraft factory and railway line. We had lost three B-17s to flak over the target, and now the German Air Force wanted to make it four, and they furiously attacked that poor descending bastard in successive determined waves as Ace and I tried desperately to break up their formations, buzzing in and out and around their superior force, going for the lead ship each time, diving in at the nose, pressing the machine-gun button on the rear of the wheel the instant an enemy spinner appeared in the illuminated ring sight, trying to rake the cowling and the cockpit, and then pulling back on the stick and climbing for another dive as another flight zoomed in on the bomber.

It was hopeless.

My hands and feet were freezing, I found it difficult to breathe. My eyes, my head kept jerking around to every minute of the sky-clock (“Keep your head moving!” Lieutenant Di Angelo had shouted in Basic Flying at Gunter Field) and the headache was upon me full-blown, beating in my temples and at the base of my skull. Together, Ace and I managed to knock down two Focke-Wulfs, but the bomber was losing altitude steadily, dropping closer and closer to the ground, and there was almost nothing we could do to save her. The German fighters followed her down as we kept trying to drive them off, persistently closing in on her, and finally scoring direct hits on the navigator’s compartment and the cockpit. The big lumbering crippled airplane went into a slow flaming spin toward the ground, and the German pilots broke off contact at last, streaking for home, one of them having the audacity to waggle his wings at us when he left. We got out fast before the flak started again, and picked up the rest of the flight some fifty miles beyond the rally point. We did not see any other enemy fighters on the way home, but we ran into heavy flak over Hungary, losing two more bombers to a rocket battery, and picking up another straggler with her number one engine gone. At Trieste, which we could see clearly below us from 20,000 feet, I dropped down on her left wing and lifted my hand in the three-ring sign, letting the pilot know I was leaving him there, and he threw the sign back, and I veered away with Ace on my left, and called into my microphone, “Big Fence, this is Springcap Seven-Nine. Request a fix, over.”

“Big Fence reading Springcap Seven-Nine. Give me a long count, over.”

“Springcap calling Big Fence. Commencing long count. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Over.”

“Springcap Seven-Nine, your position forty-five thirty-nine north, fourteen four east, approximately five miles cast of Trieste. Take heading one-six-six, you are approximately two hundred and sixty miles from base.”

We made it home in fifty minutes. As soon as I landed, I slid off the wing, opened my pants, and fired seven hours’ worth of piss at the runway while Sergeant Balson looked the other way and tried to pretend I wasn’t sending up a steaming stinking cloud to envelop his precious airplane.

We could not stop thinking about the bomber we had lost.

The pilot had been a guy named George Heffernan, a soft-spoken law student from Minnesota. We had often ribbed him about his gentle manner, telling him he would never win a court battle because he was not an aggressive type, this in spite of the fact that he had flown the lead bomber in a massive flight of five hundred bombers against the crude oil refinery at Floridsdorf on the fifth of November, and again on the eighteenth. Now, in December, a week before Christmas, flying for the first time after a long spell of bad weather, he had been shot down over Poland, and we had watched the spinning flaming airplane he and his crew had named Mother’s Milk explode on contact with the ground while the Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs hovered.

We had also been informed by Archie Colombo in our tent (we still referred to it as a tent, even though the mason had finally finished our tufa-block house and we were living in unprecedented luxury that included a tank and heater built for us by one of the T-3s and fueled with 100-octane aviation gasoline) that a recent strike against Odertal had brought up two ME-262s, the dreaded twin-engine German jet. It was his opinion, an opinion shared by many of us in the Air Force, that if the Germans could produce enough of those airplanes, we would lose our air superiority and stand a good chance of losing the war as well. I had never seen the jet, but other pilots had related tales of it rising suddenly and frighteningly to attack at speeds better than five hundred miles an hour. Firing four cannons from its fuselage nose, the ME-262 could outclimb, outmaneuver, and outshoot any piston-driven airplane we possessed. Ace and I were not happy about Archie’s wide-eyed report, and we were even less happy about having seen Georgie Heffernan go down in flames over Poland. And since we were miserable, and tired, and perhaps a little scared, we drank a lot that night.

There was no shortage of scotch just then because the squadron had learned of a cache of Haig & Haig in Cairo, and had chinned in a small fortune to buy a full case in anticipation of our Christmas celebration. Tommy Rod win had been elected to fly the secret mission. In Cairo, they had tried to tuck the contraband into the gondola around him, but the cramped cockpit would not accommodate all twelve bottles. So Tommy had been forced to cache three of them in the left engine nacelle, and they got so damn hot on the return flight that they shattered. He had landed in Foggia in a heavy fog, the nacelle stinking of booze, and had almost been lynched by the rest of us because of the breakage. But there was still plenty of scotch around, and Ace tucked a full fifth into the waistband of his trousers before we grabbed a jeep and headed for Francesca’s place.

I don’t know how we got there alive; I don’t even remember who was doing the driving. It must have been a little past midnight when we drove into the courtyard and almost knocked over the fence penning in Gino’s single pig — a relative, we suspected. We reeled over to the darkened farmhouse and Ace threw open the door and yelled, “Frankie, where the fuck are you?” and then said, “Will, you see anybody?” and I said, “No, it’s dark in here,” and he said, “Of course, it’s dark in here, there’s no light in here,” and I yelled, “Frankie!” and Francesca came out of the bedroom pulling a woolen robe around her.

“It’s late,” she said.

“It’s fucking early,” Ace said.

“You flew,” Francesca said. It was not a question.

“Yes, we fucking flew,” Ace answered. We were still standing in the dark, the door closed behind us, the only illumination coming from the moon that glanced through the window at the far end of the room. “Put on some lights,” he said. “Isn’t there any electricity in this dump?”

“You know there is no electricity,” Francesca replied.

“I don’t know anything,” Ace answered. The kerosene lamp on the table sputtered and then flared. Yellow light spilled onto the stone floor in a wide flickering circle. “What’s that?” Ace asked. He was pointing to a flimsy structure at the far end of the room, shaped somewhat like a skeletal isosceles pyramid with four shelves. It was difficult to see anything too clearly in that dim corner, but the bottom shelf seemed to contain tiny figures representing the Holy Family, and the Three Kings, and a few shepherds and sheep and angels and what appeared to be a lopsided camel, all of them standing on a pile of straw Francesca had doubtlessly brought over from the barn. The other three shelves, spaced at intervals inside the open pyramid, each smaller than the next in ascending order toward the apex, were empty.

“Il presepio,” she explained.

“Tell her to talk English,” Ace said. “Talk English!” he shouted at her, before I could say a word.

“It is a custom,” she said, and shrugged. “For Christmas.”

“What’re the empty shelves for?”

“Gifts.”

“Don’t expect any from us,” Ace said.

“I was not expecting any from you.”

“Damn straight,” Ace said. “Where’s the glasses? I thought you were bringing glasses.”

“Coming,” Francesca said, and went barefoot to the wooden cabinet near the stove. “Was it bad?” she asked.

“It was marvelous,” Ace said. “Fucking marvelous.”

“We lost Georgie Heffernan,” I said.

“We lost some others, too.”

“Yes, but we personally lost poor Georgie.”

“So what? She doesn’t even know who poor Georgie is.”

“Was,” I said.

“Was. So what? Fuck him. Come on, Frankie, bring those glasses over here.”

“He’s upset,” she said to me.

“Who’s upset?” Ace said. “Here I am in lovely Italy a week before Christmas about to fuck a pig I wouldn’t look at back home, why should I be upset?”

“He didn’t mean that,” I said. “Come on, Ace, come on.”

“I meant it,” Ace said.

“He meant it,” Francesca said softly, and put three glasses on the table.

“Give her a drink,” Ace said.

“I don’t want anything,” she said. “I was sleeping when you came.”

“Give her a drink, Will. We sent a man all the way to Cairo for this scotch, you damn well better drink it. You better drink a whole lot of it, Frankie dear.”

“Have a drink, Frankie,” I said.

“All right, but just a little.”

“A lot” Ace said. Pouring, he mumbled, “Bet old Skipper ain’t fucking a pig like you, you can bet on that.”

“Tell him to stop,” Francesca said. “He doesn’t have to come here if he doesn’t want to. No one forces him to come here.”

“Oh, shut up,” I said. “Drink your fuckin’ whiskey, and shut up.”

“You too,” Francesca said, and angrily lifted her glass and threw off the three fingers of booze without stopping to take a breath. “More,” she said, and held the glass out.

“Thinks it grows on trees,” Ace said, but he poured the water tumbler half full again, and again Francesca drained it without batting an eyelash.

“Where’s the governor?” Ace asked. “Out with his prize pig?”

“Asleep,” Francesca said.

“He falls asleep quicker than most of us, you know,” Ace said.

“How come?” I asked.

“Only got one eye to close.”

“Ask me, he’s only got one ball, " I said.

“Just between you and me. Mac, you better have three of them,” Ace said, and burst out laughing, and then said, “You know that one, Will?”

“Yeah, I know that one.”

“This guy walks into a bar, and he says...”

“He knows the story,” Francesca said.

“So what?” I said. “If Ace feels like telling a little story, what’s wrong with him telling his little story? Did you fly to Poland today?”

“No,” Francesca said.

“So shut the fuck up, and let him tell his story. Go on, Ace, tell your story.”

“I forget the story.”

“It was about Georgie Heffernan,” I said.

“No, Georgie’s dead, the dumb bastard. Have another drink, Francesca.”

“I hate you both,” Francesca said, but she held out her glass.

“So hate us, who cares?” Ace said. “I’m going to bed.”

“So am I,” I said.

“Buona notte,” Francesca said, making it sound like a curse, and not moving from the table.

Ace and I went into the bedroom. Gino was snoring away in his underwear. Ace pulled back the blankets and said, "Out, shit-head!” and the old man sat up and stared into the darkness with his one good eye, and then realized it was us, the liberating Americans, and immediately got out of bed, and shuffled and scraped his way out of the room. He said something briefly to Francesca outside, and then we heard the front door open and close, and we knew he was on his way to the barn. As we undressed, I could hear Francesca muttering to herself in Italian, the repeated click of the bottle’s lip against the rim of her glass, the sound of the whiskey being poured. Ace and I climbed into bed.

“Come on, pig!” he roared, but Francesca did not reply.

In a little while, we were both sound asleep.

Perhaps it happened because we were both so drunk. It happened many times afterward, however, when neither of us was drunk, so I can’t use that as an excuse. Perhaps it happened because we had seen Georgie Heffernan go down in flames. But we had seen bombers knocked down before, and our reactions were always the same, and they had never precipitated anything like this. Perhaps it happened because of Archie Colombo’s story about the jet, and the possibility that we might meet one on the raids to come and be defenseless against it.

Or maybe, I don’t know, maybe it had something to do with the fact that we had already flown thirty-two missions, with rest leaves to Rome after the twelfth, Capri after the twenty-fifth, and eighteen missions to go before we would be sent back home. Maybe after thirty-two missions with your hands and your feet freezing cold and your head pounding, you got too tired or too scared and just didn’t give a damn any more. Maybe you could only pretend for so long that everything was quite normal, thank you, and that escorting bombers over enemy targets was exactly what you’d be doing if asked to decide on any given day (“You anxious to get killed?” my father had said at the dinner table in our East Scott Street house on a day in March of 1943, when my mother was still alive and I was in a hurry to fly airplanes).

I heard someone weeping, and at first I thought Francesca had crawled into bed and was crying because of the way we’d talked to her earlier. I guess that was why I readied out, I’m sure that was the reason, thinking that Francesca was the person crying, and putting my arm over her shoulder next to mine, and then hearing Ace say, “Skipper, I’m afraid,” and knowing all at once it was not Francesca, knowing that Francesca was not lying between us, she had not come to bed. “I’m afraid,” Ace said, “I’m afraid, I’m afraid,” and I kept my arm over his trembling shoulder, and he moved his face in against my chest, his tears falling on my skin, and said, “I’m afraid, oh Jesus I’m afraid, Skipper,” and I said, “Come on, Ace, it’s okay, come on now.” He must have recognized then that I was not his older brother but only a friend named William Francis Tyler who had flown a harrowing mission with him that morning and afternoon, he must have realized then that we were not brothers. But he did not move away from me, he seemed to come closer instead, and I suddenly found both my arms around him, cradling him as though he were a baby, while he wept against my chest.

I’m certain it was Ace who started what happened next, but it doesn’t matter. It may very well have been me. I’m certain, though that his hand as he lay cradled in my arms accidentally brushed against me, and I’m equally certain that I was unaware of it at first. And then it happened again, and this time I felt the whisper of his fingers and this time I knew he had touched me, and I felt myself lengthening in response, felt quick creeping tendrils of excitement in my groin and along my cock, and was suddenly embarrassed. I think I wanted to move away from him, I think I wanted to call for Francesca, wanted her to bear the onslaught of whatever was beginning there in that pitch black room, but I could not turn away from Ace — he was my friend, he was crying bitterly, he was terrified. His hand tightened around my cock, he clung to my cock as if it were his own, as if by clutching the stiffening member between my legs he was reclaiming whatever maleness had been robbed from him in the sky over Poland that day. I moved my hand onto his groin. I reached in the darkness for him. To my surprise, I discovered that he was already hard, and I began crying too, inexplicably, uncontrollably. Sobbing together, we fitfully jerked each other into oblivious orgasm, and the next morning accompanied a thousand Fortresses and Liberators against transportation chokepoints in Hungary.