Goodbye, Darkness (5 page)

The Ruskins and the Macaulays were the cream of an odd crop. I also devoured Wyss's
Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, The Little Colonel, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
, Swift on Gulliver, Lamb on roast pig,
Tom, the Water Baby
, a translation of Malory's
Morte d' Arthur
, and, on a descending scale, William Ernest Henley, Sir Henry Newbolt, G. A. Henty, Franklin W. Dixon, Burt L. Standish, Edward Stratemeyer, and Horatio Alger, Jr. My appetite for juvenile junk was enormous. One summer on Cape Cod I read twenty Frank and Dick Merriwells in less than a week. But a pattern was forming; I was being drawn to Victorian authors and those who followed the Victorian mode. (I was a throwback in other ways; I scorned saddle shoes and reversible raincoats and loathed Swing.) This slanting toward the last century was most striking, and most significant, in books about war. Here I passed Scott Fitzgerald's test. My vision of martial splendor, both ours and that of our allies, could withstand all threats of disillusionment; I was transported by dreams of leathernecks sweeping all before them, and the glint of moonlight on the sabers of French cavalry, and British squares standing firm with the Gatling jammed and the colonel dead. It wasn't difficult. Millions had done it before me. Their equivocal view of battle can be summed up in a single word. At Waterloo Pierre Cambronne commanded Napoleon's Imperial Guard. When all was lost, a British officer asked him to lay down his arms. Generations of schoolboys have been taught that he replied: “The Guard dies, but never surrenders.” Actually he said:
“Merde!”
(“Shit!”) The French know this; a euphemism for
merde
is called “the word of Cambronne.” Yet children are still told that he said what they know he did not say. So it was with me. I read Kipling, not Hemingway; Rupert Brooke, not Wilfred Owen;
Gone with the Wind
, not Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane.

The pacifism of the 1930s maddened me. I yearned for valor; I wanted the likes of Lee and the Little Colonel to be proud of me. To show my contempt for the Yankees, I fashioned a homemade Stars and Bars from a sheet and watercolors, and sneeringly flaunted it at school recess. My classmates were confused; they didn't know what it was. Once my mother had screwed up her courage and told her father-in-law that she supposed his father had fought her grandfathers. Grandpa sat in confused silence for a while; when drunk, he always looked extremely puzzled. Then he realized that he had been insulted. He raised his chin and gave her a stare of hauteur. “
Manchesters
,” he said, “sent
substitutes
.” My mother didn't know what he was talking about. Luckily for my hide, I was experiencing a similar failure of communications. It was ludicrous. Here was a ninety-eight-pound weakling, an unsuccessful Charles Atlas client whom even Betty Zimmerman could beat the shit out of, dreaming of glory under banners furled long ago in dusty attics. Most of the rest of my generation believed in appeasement, at least when it came to war, but I was an out-and-out warmonger, a chauvinist dying for the chance to die. As it happened, my daydreams were translated into reality by the emergence of a wicked genius bearing a black Swastika, a Teutonic monster unmatched in all the books I read, who could be destroyed only on the battlefield. Long afterward I flattered myself that I had been prescient, that like Churchill I had seen the gathering storm. It is true that I wept over Nanking and Munich, and that, once I had learned a little German, I rose early to rage at Hitler's wild speeches. But the fact is that I was really an eager Saint George looking for a dragon. I'm not sure that, or something like that, wasn't true of Churchill, too.

Henry V was naturally my idol, and here we skirt one of the central events of my life: my discovery of Shakespeare. I was now fifteen. For years I had been plagued by a vocabulary of words I could understand but not pronounce because I had never heard them spoken. “Anchor” had come out “an-chore,” “colonel” as “ko-low-nall,” and I had put the accent on the third syllable of “diáspora.” But I could no longer ignore diacritical marks in dictionaries; Shakespeare cried to be read aloud. And as I did so I was stunned by his absolute mastery. In Johnson's secondhand bookstore in Springfield I found a forty-volume set of his works, with only
Macbeth
missing, for four dollars. I knew where I could get a
Macbeth
for a dime, so I paid a dollar to hold the set, and returned with the rest two months later. I have it yet, tattered and yellowing. It was the best bargain of my life.

I memorized the role of Hamlet, then Marc Anthony in
Julius Caesar
, and then long soliloquies from
Macbeth, Lear, Othello
, and
Romeo and Juliet
. In high school I produced, directed, and starred in
Hamlet
and, looking like a minstrel-show end man, in
Othello
. My stage career ended in 1938, when the Smith Club of Springfield brought Orson Welles to the Municipal Auditorium. This was a few weeks after his Martian broadcast. The place was jammed. But after sneaking into countless concerts, I knew every room in the building, including the one where Welles would rest during the intermission between his lecture and his readings. I appeared on the threshold, immaculate in my double-breasted blue-serge suit. “Mr. Welles,” I said in my reedy adolescent voice. He looked up from his text. I piped, “I am the president of the Springfield Classical High School Dramatic Club.” His eyes bulged. His jaw sagged. In a hollow voice he gasped:
“No!”

My father had taken a lively interest in my stage career, though he had vetoed my plan to enter the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. “Actors are bums,” he said, and that was the end of that. He was determined to save me from debauchery. To New Englanders of his stock, the worst blow that could fall on a youth was acquiring “a Record,” that is, a police record; it was as great a stigma as Jean Valjean's yellow passport. (I took a different view. Later, in college, when I was arrested for being drunk and disorderly on the Amherst green and fined ten dollars, I passed the hat at my fraternity and never gave the matter another thought.) One day when I was about fifteen I was one of several boys lolling on a lawn like Restoration rakes with two girls who were notorious for going, as we put it, all the way. We were playing “under the sheet,” adding that phrase to song titles and thus giving them giggly double entendres. A nosey Parker looked out her window, saw our orgy, and called my father, who fetched me home and clouted me. Shortly afterward I heard about masturbation and asked him for the real lowdown on it. He gave me the old malarkey about brain damage and how he had never done it, hadn't even heard about it until a sex hygiene lecture in the Marine Corps. Then he gave me the keeping-yourself-pure spiel and explained the facts of life. I bought it all; I tried hard (and unsuccessfully) to follow his advice and think pure thoughts. He had assumed that I would. Somehow he kept his faith in me, affectionately calling me “Bozo” and always looking for sources of pride there, just as I was trying to please him. His favorite song was “I'm Always Chasing Rainbows.” He was of that generation that believed in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow — my generation knows that if it's there, it belongs to the government — and he believed that if I shaped up I could lick the world.

Yet I was a discouraging son. He didn't really expect much of me: just that I be a normal American boy, fleet of foot, handy with a mitt and a bat, a tinkerer who could fix things like warped storm doors, defective lawn mowers, light switches, and running toilets. I could do none of these. On one memorable July 4 I dropped a whole bag of “torpedoes,” fireworks which exploded upon impact, on my feet, and had to be rushed to the hospital. The following year I picked up a live sparkler from the wrong end. Given my love of prose, I should have at least been a good student. I wasn't; lessons bored me. I preferred books which teachers didn't assign or, in most cases, hadn't even read. Once I brought home a report card with three D's. Seeing my father's disappointment and then feeling it — he believed in corporal punishment for that, too — I finished the next marking period with straight A's, which, as he rightly pointed out, proved that I could do it. Then I failed shop, which was considered impossible. We were all building little short-legged, hinged tables for people who breakfasted in bed. The instructor turned the legs for me on a lathe. All I had to do was drive the nails straight. I couldn't do it, not once. My father took one look at my efforts and groaned, like the Giant Despair in
Pilgrim's Progress
.

My one success in his eyes, and I did it for him, was in Scouting. I became a junior assistant scoutmaster and an eagle scout. In a formal ceremony I pinned a little silver eagle on my mother's dress and my father pinned my badge on me with his one hand. Our picture was in the papers. I have it still, and looking at it I can see only that hand. He could do almost anything with it, even build a cold room and a fruit cellar, and I, with my two hands, could do so little.

At the dinner table my mother always cut his meat into small pieces. It was his only concession to his handicap. He gardened, painted, and defeated me with effortless ease in Ping-Pong and horseshoe pitching. No one could beat him at anything. He was direct, forceful, incapable of compromise. Once a landlord flirted with my mother and sent her flowers. My father came home, took the flowers back to the landlord, and crammed them down his throat. Later, thanks to a small inheritance from one of his Manchester aunts, he made a down payment on a suburban home. The local Communist party decided to picket it. They wanted to see the public welfare rolls, a likely source of future party members. My father had decided that those unfortunate enough to be on relief should not be embarrassed and exploited; their names would be kept in confidence. Compared with what was to come thirty years later, the Communist demonstration was almost charming. (One placard read: “Mr. Manchester, servant of the people, does not serve the people.”) But on the first — and last — evening, they boasted to reporters and neighbors that we were cowering in our darkened house. As they were about to break up, our Chevy turned in to the driveway. My father had taken us to Sam's Diner and then to a Jeanette MacDonald–Nelson Eddy double feature.

He was such a beautiful man, with such a beautiful rainbow of a laugh. Later as a newspaperman I came to know many world figures, from Churchill and Eisenhower to Stevenson and the Kennedys. I never met a man with more charisma than my father. He ruled us like a pasha. Yet in retrospect I wish he had been a shade less competent. He was the only member of the family who knew how to drive a car, or write a check, or negotiate a loan. Inexplicably he had permitted half of his national serviceman's insurance to lapse; only five thousand dollars of it, and the shrinking equity in our home, seemed to stand between us and eligibility for those same relief rolls should he die. And he was dying. He suffered from migraines, ulcers, hypertension, and most of all from the wounds of 1918, which had never really healed. One frightening evening he was carried, bleeding internally, out of the house, to an ambulance, and thereafter he was in and out of Springfield Hospital and veterans' hospitals.

The end approached as World War II approached, but I knew far more about what the Germans were doing than what was happening to the man who supported my mother, my four-year-old brother, and me. I stood by his bed for the last time on Sunday, January 19, 1941. He knew he had only a few days to live, but the possibility that he might cease to exist never entered my mind. Mute and uncomprehending, I kissed him upon the lips, held his good hand while he said that I was a genius (that being a common excuse for daffiness then) and reminded me once more that I was a Manchester (with all that that entailed). But his strongest message was unspoken. His eyes said:
Avenge me!

I was eighteen by the calendar, fourteen or less in knowledge of the world. He hadn't even permitted me to apply for part-time employment, because he said I would be taking jobs from the poor. Somehow I had reached the extraordinary conclusion that we were rich. Actually I knew nothing about money; I had heard, in the course of one conversation between my parents, that our house was worth either eighty-five thousand dollars or eighty-five hundred, I didn't know which; to me the second figure, which was correct, was essentially no different from the other. So, in the autumn of 1940, I had left for Massachusetts State College in Amherst, cocky in my newfound masculinity and increasingly sure of my flair for the language. During the Christmas vacation I had rattled away on my typewriter, aware that my father lay ill in the hospital but kept in ignorance of what the doctors had told my mother: that it was a matter of time, and of very little time, before he left us. I returned to Amherst for the end of my first semester. In the middle of final exams the call came from an uncle: “Your dad has passed away.” He was forty-four years old.

I remember the funeral. It was savagely cold, an iron cold; the ground had to be jackhammered open to receive the coffin. A little sapling stood at the foot of it. Today it is a beautiful tree, and he lies in its lovely shade, but then it offered pitifully small protection from the weather. We were all shivering, then shaking. The others were weeping, but I just stared down at the grave. I wondered:
Where has he gone?
Then a curtain falls over my memory. It is all a dark place in my mind. I recall nothing that happened in the next four months. It was my first experience of traumatic amnesia, or fugue. I was in deep shock. My mother later told me how helpful I was in selling the car and house, in moving us to a tenement and taking in a roomer. None of it has ever come back to me. Apparently I returned to college and completed the year. The dean's office has a record of my grades. I have looked at the textbooks I studied that semester. It is as though I were seeing them for the first time.

When I returned to conscious life I was working as a grease monkey in a machine shop at thirty-five cents an hour, eighty-four hours a week. If I made five hundred dollars between that job and another job in the college store — thirty cents an hour there — I could, with a scholarship, stay in school. My mother told me that whatever happened, I must not think of dropping out. I was dumbfounded. Such a thought had never crossed my mind. Like Chekhov's perennial student, I could imagine no life away from classes and books.