The Hunt

“Poor old Bert,” Jenny said as they got in the car. “We must find him a woman so he can share our happiness.”

“Old Bert’ll do all right. His mistress is his job. If he gets too lonely, he’ll go get his trenchcoat and he’ll have to beat them off with a bat.”

“Stop that. You give him such trouble.”

“I’m showing my affection. It’s the only way men can show affection for each other without getting arrested.”

She tossed back her head and laughed. “Sometimes you make me laugh and I am not even sure wily.” She snuggled against him. “I am so happy, Kee.” For a month now they had been living in a dream world. The subject of Hitler and politics was rarely mentioned.

“Someday we’ll look back on these days and realize how special they are,” Keegan said tenderly.

“Promise?”

“Absolutely. Falling in love is a magic time.”

“Are we falling in love, Francis?”

“A fait accompli for me, my love,” Keegan said softly. “I fell in love with you that night at Conrad’s, the first time I laid eyes on you.”

“What a lovely thought.”

“You are a lovely thought,” he said.

“Oh Francis, it has been so wonderful it makes me nervous. I am so happy.”

He laughed. “That may be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Nicer than ‘I love you’?” she said, taking his arm in hers and squeezing against him.

He looked down at her with surprise. “You’ve never said ‘I love you,’” he said. “Not to me.”

“I just did.”

“Very obliquely.”

“Then I will say it directly,” she said looking up at him with tears in her eyes. “I love you. Je t ‘aime. Ich liebe dich. “ She reached up and barely touched his lips with her fingertips. “I do love you so, Francis. When we are together, my chest hurts but it is a good hurt. When we are apart, it is painful.”

She cupped his face between her hands and barely touched his lips with hers. They brushed their lips together, their tongues flirting with each other, as the chauffeur drove them away to a park he had selected near the Seine on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, where the track was located.

They spread a blanket and he wound up the Victrola and put on “Any Old Time” by Lady Day and she leaned back and sang along softly.

“I learned that song listening to Billie Holiday on the radio,” she said. “Have you ever seen her?”

“Once. A friend of mine, John Hammond, insisted I go up to Monroe’s, that’s a Harlem nightclub, to hear this new singer who turned out to be Lady Day. She was—I don’t know how to describe her—heartbreaking and heavenly at the same time. I remember we stayed there until dawn. She could smile and tear your heart out. You’ve got the same quality, Jen.”

He sat up suddenly. “Jesus, what’s the matter with me!” he said. “John Hammond is a good friend of mine.”

“Who is John Hammond?”

“He’s a top producer for Columbia Records, one of the biggest. He’s put some of the jazz greats on the map. Listen, I’m sure he would flip out if he heard you sing. We’ll call him from the hotel tonight. You can audition for him over the phone.”

“You are crazy . .

“Crazy serious. I promise you, one song and he’ll offer you a contract.”

“No, no. I couldn’t. . - not over the phone. Long-distance like that.”

“Jenny, stranger things have happened. America’s a funny place.”

“Do you miss it?” she asked.

“I don’t know, I guess I do,” he said. “ I think maybe I’ll have to go home for a while. I’ve been gone a very long time.” Then a moment later: “You’ll love New York.”

She sat up suddenly. “What?”

“I said you’ll love New York. We’ll go there on our honeymoon.”

“Honeymoon?”

“Marry me, Jen. I adore you. I will devote my life to making you safe and happy.”

She seemed troubled and did not respond immediately. “I want to marry you, Kee. And I thank you for asking me. I don’t know...”

“Jenny, in one night you’ll hear every great jazz artist alive. We’ll do the Apollo and the 1-larlem Opera House, the Savoy, Cotton Club

“I don’t think I’m ready to give up on Germany.”

Keegan barely missed a beat. “Okay, we’ll stay over here. You’ll be my wife, that makes you an American citizen. They can’t touch you.”

“Oh Kee, for such a worldly man you are so naïve. Don’t you see, they can and will do anything they want to. Would you give up your citizenship and become a German? Stay here not knowing whether you can ever go home? Would you do that, Francis?”

He didn’t answer.

“The difference between us is that you know you can go home anytime you want to. If I went to America I could never come back. Kee, my father fought for this country just as you fought for yours. He died in 1916 fighting for the Kaiser. I cannot walk away from Germany thinking I did nothing to try to make it better. Did you give up on America because things went badly? Did you do that? Is that why you live in Germany now?”

“No,” Keegan answered. “That’s not why I left.”

“Tell me, I want to know all about you,” she said softly. “Maybe it will help me.”

For all his adult life, Keegan had prided himself on never looking back. The past was the past, too late to change, so forget it. But in the last few months he had been forced into introspection, by Vanessa, by Vierhaus and now by Jenny. It all seemed far too complex to explain and even Keegan did not fully understand why he had left America to become a nomad in Europe. He had never discussed his past with anyone before, not even Bert. He didn’t answer her immediately and when he finally started talking it came out like a flood is he tried to put it all in context. His mind drifted back to the terrible summer of 1932, to Washington, and a night that had changed his life forever.

“I was in Washington,” he began. “I don’t even remember why. A hot summer night. I ran into n acquaintance of mine named Brattle from Boston and he invited me to dinner on his yacht. It was moored in the Potomac River, at the edge of the city.”

The night began with shock, shock at the sight of Bonus City, which they passed on the way to the dock. For three months, army veterans and their families, calling themselves the Bonus Army, had been camped in Washington, demanding a five- hundred-dollar bonus that had been voted them in 1924. Although it wasn’t due until 1945, they desperately needed it now.

Keegan was unprepared for the awesome spectacle of twenty thousand ex-soldiers and their families living in squalor around the Capitol and White House. For while this was the year of the Washington Bonus March, it was also the year the twenty- month-old son of America’s greatest living hero, Charles Lindbergh, had been kidnapped and murdered. A shy and reclusive man, the “Lone Eagle,” as he was known by everyone in America, had conquered the Atlantic Ocean alone in his single-engine plane. Lindbergh, his wife Anne and their new baby were as close to royalty as one could get in America and so the tragedy dominated the news from the night the child was stolen from his New Jersey home until his body was discovered seventy-two days later and then onward as the murder investigation intensified and became a national obsession.

Other news had also overshadowed the march. In France, President Charles Doumer was assassinated in a Paris bookstore. The relatively unknown governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was challenging Herbert Hoover for the presidency. Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weismuller had become an instant movie star grunting “Me Tarzan, you Jane” and five other lines of dialogue in Tarzan the Ape Man. A machinist named George Blaisdell invented a cigarette lighter which he called a Zippo.

Author Erskine Caldwell had shocked the country with Tobacco Road, his novel about life among sharecroppers in the Deep South and there had been threats of book banning in Boston and in the South. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World stunned everyone with its dismal science fiction view of life in the future while, on the radio, Buck Rogers was introduced, presenting a completely different vision of the future.

In Oklahoma, where years of poor farming practice had depleted the land a devastating drought finished the process, adding hundreds of thousands of farmers to the country’s 13 million unemployed. There were two thousand hunger marchers in London; New York’s Mayor Jimmy Walker resigned from office in the midst of a juicy scandal; young John Wayne was fighting for his life every Saturday afternoon in a matinee serial called The Hurricane Express; Herbert Hoover announced Prohibition a failure and encouraged state liquor laws; and Flo Ziegfeld, who had redefined the meaning of the term showgirl when he created “The Ziegfeld Girl,” died in Hollywood with his wife Billie Burke at his side. Walter Winchell, radio’s dark prince of gossip, commented in the Stork Club one night, “This. is one helluva year,” and there was no arguing the point.

Little wonder these stories and others had crowded the veterans’ march off the front page and finally out of the newspapers and off the radio altogether. Washington had become an enormous “Hooverville,” a name synonymous with the temporary, ragtag villages all over the country that housed the millions of nomadic, dispossessed, jobless people wandering the land in search of lost dreams. As the weeks dragged into months, the plight of the veterans became just another footnote in this, the worst year of the Depression so far.

The Bonus Camps were a ragtag collection of lean-tos, tents, cardboard shacks and crates, sweltering in one of the hottest summers in Washington history. Here and there, makeshift gardens struggled in the heat to produce stunted tomatoes and hard-eared corn. Women bathed their children in tubs with water from the Potomac and Anacostia rivers. The crowd was neither unruly nor threatening.

As they drove past the miserable campsites, Keegan realized how easily he might have been one of them. Jocko Nayles, who had driven him down to Washington in the Pierce Arrow, had commented, “Jesus, Frankie, these are our guys. We fought with them. Things bad as they are, why don’t they pay ‘em?”

“Haven’t you heard?” Keegan had replied. “Hoover says the Depression’s over. He wants them to go home and starve to death so he doesn’t have to look at them.”

The trouble was, most of them had no homes or jobs to go to. In this, the most dreadful summer in the nation’s history, there were thirteen million people unemployed. The suicide rate was three times normal. And the President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, continued to preach what was by then a warped and illogical litany, that the economic recovery of America was in full swing, that the greatest danger was from “Prohibition gangsters who’ve turned our streets into battlegrounds” and that the family would be the resurrection of America. Hoover, of course, wasn’t talking about the families who had lost their jobs, their homes, and their dignity in a desperate and failed economy wrought by arrogant millionaires. He was talking about the “decent families” who still had jobs, who earned a living wage, sat by their Atwater Kent radios at night listening to Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy and Li’l Orphan Annie, and who drove to church each Sunday in their Fords and Chevrolets.

Decency in the minds of Hoover and his ilk was directly related to those who worked, paid their taxes and made monthly mortgage payments, it did not relate to those forgotten men who had lost everything because of an orgy of indulgence promoted by the nation’s captains of industry and championed by Hoover’s predecessor, Calvin Coolidge, who had preached that “prosperity is permanent.” It was a lie, of course, and Coolidge, foreseeing the coming calamity, had chosen not to seek a second term in 1928, leaving Hoover to become the fall guy for the worst depression in written history. Eight months after Coolidge left office, the house of cards had collapsed.

“The country’s in a helluva mess, Jocko,” Keegan had said. “Count your blessings.”

Keegan had squirmed through dinner, listening to Brattle rave about the “Commies camped on the White House lawn” and spouting phrases like, “Why don’t they get jobs like decent people,” although he had inherited his money and had never worked more than half a day in his entire life. He had blathered on about conditions in the country in an arrogant sermon typical of the attitude of those who had actually benefited from the Depression.

“And these goddamn Bonus Marchers, they ought to get the hell out of here,” Brattle said, “go home and get a damn job. Contribute something.”

“Come on, Charlie,” Keegan said, “These aren’t malingerers. They can’t find jobs, for Christ sake. You’ve got to have a college degree to get a job as an elevator man in Macy’s. Since the first of the year, a quarter of a million people have lost their homes.”

“And five thousand banks have gone iI1to the hole because of it,” Brattle snapped back. “People don’t meet their responsibilities. Jesus, there’s eleven million farmers out there holding off the banks and insurance companies with goddamn shotguns, refusing to pay their mortgages.”

“Yeah, and they’re burning corn because it’s cheaper than coal and killing their livestock because they can’t afford to feed them,” Keegan said. “You can’t relate to any of this, you’ve never been broke. It’ll hit you one of these mornings when you wake up and wonder why you don’t have steak with your eggs.”

“Whose side are you on, anyway?” Brattle asked edgily.

“I didn’t know there were sides.”

“Hoover’s got it under control,” said one of the guests, a youngish man wearing a striped jacket and a straw boater. “Did you see the Tribune this morning? Gross National Product’s up, economy’s looking brighter .

“That’s bullshit and you know it.”

Brattle’s wife gasped.

“Sorry,” Keegan said, “I forgot where I was for a minute.”

“Well, I should hope so,” Brattle growled.

Keegan leaned back in his chair and picked up a copy of the afternoon Star from a chair. He held it up for everyone at the table to see.

“Here’s our great president in his celluloid collar and button-up shoes telling a troop of Girl Scouts bow great things are. ‘Nobody has ever died of starvation in this country,’ he says. Then we turn to this little three-paragraph yarn on page twenty- six.” Keegan read it slowly: “‘The New York City Welfare Department said today twenty-nine people died of starvation in June in the city and 194 others, mostly children, died of malnutrition.’” He paused for a moment. “Which page of the paper do you read?”

There was a momentary pall over the conversation, then Evelyn Brattle said cryptically, “Well, that’s New York City for you.”

A young woman shook her shoulders. “It’s the stock market,” she peeped. “Too many people were playing the stock market who didn’t know what they were doing.”

“That’s right, darlin’,” Brattle said smugly. “Listen, investors lost seventy-four billion dollars in the stock market, Francis, that’s three times what the war cost, and most of them were upper middle-class jerks who shouldn’t have been in it in the first place.”

“But they pumped it up for people like us, right, Charlie?”

“You’re beginning to sound like a goddamn Bolshevist.”

Keegan had laughed. “Same old story,” he countered, “if you don’t think like I do, you’re a Red.”

“Well, hell, it’s a natural process,” Brattle said, brushing off the comment. “The world goes through this kind of thing every thirty, forty, fifty years. Leans out the population. Gets rid of the runts.”

Never mind that many of those destroyed were bankers, brokers, their own peers, a fact that was obvious from the number of homburgs and chesterfield coats in the soup kitchen lineups. Brattle’s attitude was typical; the rich “leaning out” the runts of the litter. So Keegan suppressed his disdain. There was no discussing it further with the people at Brattle’s table. Theirs was the hardened attitude of the fats against the leans.

About nine o’clock, Keegan heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire. A few minutes later the sweet, stinging odor of tear gas drifted out across the river.

Then came the other sounds: the faraway screams, the neighing of horses and the bizarre creaking of tank treads on cobblestones. And suddenly the night seemed lit by dozens of fires.

“By God, it’s started!” Brattle cried out. “Hoover’s finally moving on the bastards.”

The dinner party pressed against the railing of the yacht, searching the night for a view of the battle. Then another yacht cruised past and someone yelled, “Hey Charlie, they’re crossing the Eleventh Street Bridge!”

Brattle had immediately ordered his captain to move the yacht out into the river and down to the bridge, there to join other yachts and pleasure boats crowded near the shore to watch the tawdry spectacle. They moved in closer for a better look, lying close to the bridge, where a major named Eisenhower had set up machine guns to prevent the ex-soldiers from moving back into the city. They watched as a chunky major on horseback, wearing pearl-handled revolvers, ordered his men to douse the ragged main village on the edge of the Anacostia River with gasoline and burn it. The scene became nightmarish. Flames broiled into the black sky and horses and men with brandished sabers galloped to and fro in front of the crackling inferno. Tear gas bombs were lobbed through the night and burst on the sidewalks as women and children ran screaming before the onslaught.

Keegan suddenly felt a desperate need to know what was happening. He stood on the deck of the yacht horrified by what the army was doing to its own ex-comrades in arms, recalling a time fourteen years before when he had been a small part of the catastrophe that had started all this.

At that moment, standing on the deck of Brattle’s yacht, Keegan felt a desperate need for a Bert Rudman to describe the full sweep of what was happening around him. Could this incredible attack on the veterans be happening all over the city, or was this an isolated incident of violence? He had to know.

“By God, they’re cleaning that bunch of Commies out,” Brattle proudly proclaimed, slapping his leg.

“They’re not Commies, for God’s sake, they’re army veterans,” Keegan cried out angrily, and whirling on his heels, ordered the yacht’s long boat to take him back to the pier.

On the way to the hotel, Jocko had skirted what had been the major thrust of the army’s attack on the Bonus villages, the streets littered with used tear gas canisters and remnants of canvas and cardboard houses. As they passed an abandoned park, Keegan told Jocko to stop.

Keegan got out of the car, threw off his jacket and tie and walked down a knoll, out into the remains of one of the tent villages, now a scene of devastation. Nothing was left standing.

A man in a tattered shirt, its right sleeve folded up over the stub of his missing arm and pinned at the shoulder, wandered numbly toward him, stumbling through the remnants of the camp, silhouetted by the fires of the main camp several blocks away. He stopped for a moment and stared at a ragged sign, “God bless our home,” fluttering feebly from a shattered tent pole.

Tear gas tears had made scant streaks in the dirt on the man’s cheeks. On his shirt were pinned a Purple Heart and a Silver Star. He moved on, stumbling in shock through the wreckage of the Bonus village, staring bleakly at the ruined tents, the burned lean-tos, the shattered remains of chicken coop houses and cardboard shacks, and the trampled gardens and broken suitcases and ragged remains of clothing. He looked under pieces of cardboard and canvas.

“Tommy!” he yelled. “Tommy-boy, it’s yer dad.”

He almost bumped into Keegan, so intent was he on examining the wreckage scattered around him. He looked Keegan up and down, studying his freshly laundered shirt and Palm Beach pants.

“What the hell’re you doin here?” he demanded with hatred in every syllable.

“Looks like the Argonne the day after,” Keegan said softly.

“You was there, at the Argonne?”

Keegan nodded.

“No worse than this,” the man croaked bitterly.

He started to babble, his sentences running together almost incoherently. “We fit with honor there, this is our shame, they’s dishonored the flag and the army, that fat pig in the White House and his pimp, MacArthur. It’s a parade! m’boy Tommy says this afternoon and we all goes up there to Pennsylvania Avenue and we’re standin’ there watchin’ the army paradin’ down the street, some of us even cheerin them. . . then. . . then they come down on us, they come down on us, cavalry, a whole battalion of machine gunners. I seen the standard of the 34th Infantry, too, my very outfit and them with their bayonets pulled, oh goddamn, can you believe it, we all thought it was some kind of parade, the army was comin’ out to support us, some of us cheerin’ like that. Jesus, man, we don’t have guns, we don’t have bayonets or horses, for God’s sake they had tanks. Tanks come at us! Suddenly that bastard suddenly up and orders a charge. Oh, that miserable polo-playin’ sonofabitch dandy, Patton, with his fancy goddamn ivory-handled goddamn guns ordering those soldiers, soldiers! Our own goddamn comrades, cutting us down with their sabers like we was wheat in a field at harvest, runnin’ us down like we was pigs in a sty, oh, I seen ‘em spear two young lads no older than my Tommy and they trampled half a dozen women under their horses, women and children has died here today. . . a baby lies back there dead in his maw’s arms of tear gas, goddamn, of god, god, damn! Got to find m’wife and boy, be’s only seven, got away from me when they come down on us with them fuckin’ horses. Chasm’ after his dog and my Emma went after him and I lost ‘em both in the smoke and the dark and the gas. Oh goddamn, goddamn those miserable bastards. They’s dishonored the flag, every man who ever raised a gun to defend it, every man who ever fit for his country and wore his uniform proudly. Well, I spit on the flag and never again will I be able to salute it without my heart tearing apart inside me. The shame, the shame

He wandered off through the haze, still babbling, breaking the monotone of his outraged dialogue occasionally to call after his wife and child.

The blue haze of tear gas now stung Keegan’s eyes and the skin on his arms. Framed against the sky’s orange glow, he saw Patton, a block away, astride his white horse, leading it through the destruction, stopping occasionally to praise his marauders with a “Well done” or “Good show.” Keegan stumbled back through the battlefield to the car where Jocko Nayles was leaning against the front fender, tears gushing from his good eye.

“I don’t believe this,” he said. “We fought side by side with some of these boys, Frank.”

“I know, I know,” Keegan had answered, trying to regain some semblance of composure. “Let’s get out of here, Jocko.”

They had gone back to the hotel, slept fitfully and left before dawn for the two-day drive back to Boston. By the first light of dawn, the main highway leading from Washington had looked like the aftermath of Gettysburg or Atlanta. Women, children, tattered men, confused and lost, straggling like robots along the two-lane blacktop highway, a vagabond population with no place to live, nothing to eat and no hope in their tortured eyes on an aimless pilgrimage to nowhere, for they had no homes to return to. Under every bridge and beside every railroad crossing were ragged Hoovervilles, tent cities filled with decent men who rode the rails from one desperate camp to the next in search of hope; men who had lost faith in their institutions, the banks, the manufacturers, the insurance companies, their leaders.

They stopped for gas and Keegan had bought a morning paper, hoping to get the same sense of the tragic sweep of the night’s events that once he had gotten from Bert Rudman’s story of Belleau Wood, yearning to know what misguided insanity had sent an army against these men who had once faced death for their flag. But the stories were fragmented, inconclusive, inaccurate. On the front page, Hoover praised MacArthur for “delivering us from the siege of Washington” and later in the story:

“Beware the crowd—it destroys, it consumes, it hates—but it never builds.”

Keegan crushed the paper and threw it on the floor.

“When we got to New York we drove up to Roosevelt’s campaign headquarters and I wrote him a check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It wasn’t just that, it was a lot of things, that just brought it all to a head. Anyway, a week later I left and I’ve been here ever since.” He- stopped for a moment, watching a group of swans paddling down the estuary toward them.

“And now you miss it and you want to go home,” she said. “You have not given up on America. Some of us have not given up on Germany either.”

He nodded slowly. “You made your point,” he said. “But Jen, you have to go on living. People still fall in love and get married, have kids. Hitler can’t stop that. Politics and love don’t have anything to do with each other. That’s oil and water. Sure, things are bad, that’s even more reason to get out. Marry me, darling. Come to America. Give it a chance. When things settle down here, we’ll come back.”

“I love you desperately,” she stammered, “but I. . . I..

She stopped, trying to sort out all the threads of the dilemma, and sensing her dismay he reached up and laid his hand on her cheek.

“Hey,” he said tenderly, “forget it for now. Look at the swans.”

The swans moved slowly past, drifting aimlessly with the current.

“Did you know the only time swans titter a sound is when they’re making love and when they die?”

“Oh, you made that up,” she said.

“Absolutely true,” he said, placing his hand over his heart. “That’s why they call a dying man’s last words his swan song.”

She laid her hand on his chest and fear flickered momentarily across her face. He leaned over and kissed her. Her lips, soft and full, parted slowly and her tongue caressed his lower lip.

“Never fear,” he whispered. “There’ll be no swan songs for us.