Let Me Finish (18 page)

 

A day or two later, dropped off at our own destination during the night, we alighted from our abandoned lone Pullman car in the early morning sun and found ourselves on a straggly patch of prairie with a rim of tall mountains to the west. No one had a clue about where we were—"I think it's Oregon," somebody said—or what anyone had in mind for us. Birds twittered. Then a stubby locomotive slid into view from around the bend, hooked on, and pulled us into the future. We were armorers, it turned out, or about to be, and this was Lowry Field, outside Denver, where we would suck up thirteen weeks of intensive courses in small arms, electrical controls, chemical warfare, explosives and ammunition, bombs and bomb racks, and the like, and a main course in the Browning .30- and .50-caliber machine guns. As such matters were measured in 1942, the change in us from whatever we'd been before—students, for the most part—to tough, coveralled ground-crew maintenance noncoms ready for attachment to some imminently departing Pacific-bound P-47 fighter outfit or B-24 bombardment squadron in line to join the massively growing Eighth Air Force in England, was trifling. Direct combat would not be our lot, and though we knew enough to count ourselves lucky, we had no clear sense of the dimensions of what we'd missed: how our soldier's chance of experiencing everyday fear, with the risk of death or maiming ever at hand, had gone whispering by. And Denver, we'd already heard, was a country club: one of the few cities where the best bars and
restaurants had been set aside for enlisted men, not the brass, and where overnight passes grew like clover. I had it made, it seemed. At the same time, the alteration of life and fortune that I and most of my American generation endured over these few months is not something that young men or women today—or so they keep telling me—can quite take in.

Back among my fellow seniors on Commencement Day in Harvard Yard, with the tides of war almost visibly lapping at our toes, I'd run into a favorite professor of mine, Kenneth J. Conant, as he hurried past in full plumage, and took the chance to shake his hand. Three or four vivid courses with him in contemporary and medieval architecture had almost lured me away from my major in English, and when I'd seen him in May, while delivering a late paper to his office in the Fogg Museum, he'd taken a key and a flashlight out of his desk and invited me down to a large room in the basement, where we spent half an hour circling a great table model of the classic dig he'd been engaged upon at the twelfth century Burgundian Abbey Church at Cluny—a work now suspended because the site was in the hands of the enemy. My last Harvard lecture, it turned out, was a private one, and when it was over, Conant, his eyes alight, said, "One of these days. Soon." He'd go back, he meant, and so he did. There's a Rue Conant in Cluny still, celebrating his grand feat of scholarship.

I forgot about this moment in the shocking, boring surge of events after graduation, but one day in March of 1943, a bare nine months later, I thought of Professor Conant again, and wondered what he'd make of my new line
of work. Since I'd seen him, I'd finished tech school, got married, become an instructor in machine guns and power turrets, picked up a couple of stripes, and had made Permanent Party at Lowry. Permanent Party! Connoting riotousness, it meant the opposite. I'd be in place, for a change, no longer subject to sudden orders or departures, a noncom citizen of Lowry at least for now, and allowed to take up a residence off the post. In G.I.-ese, I'd found a home.

What I wanted Conant to come look at with me was the Browning Caliber .50 Machine Gun, M2—a lean, sixty-four-pound, five-foot-eight-inch automatic dispenser of destruction, with an interestingly perforated barrel jacket within which the barrel and complicated inner parts banged back and forth at blurry speed and with terrifying noise and smell. I didn't get to fire this weapon often—mostly in the malfunction sheds, where the guns, from fixed downward-tilting positions, fired (or failed to fire) their bursts into underground trenches, while groups of students, by threes or fours, observed and tried to figure out what was wrong with each cunningly botched gun, and how it could be fixed. Learning the Browning, I'd fallen in love with its dozens of slots and grooves and cams, its springs (some coiled within each other) and switches, its ejectors and extractors. In supporting roles were the accelerator, a beckoning forefinger at the front of the oil buffer body, which quickened the recoil; the breech lock, which froze things at firing, and its partnered, instantly-arriving breech-unlocking pin; and, as main player, the slim, pale steel bolt, which, nipping backward with a fresh round in its teeth, simultaneously knocked free the spent casing of
the old round and, reversing, rammed the new projectile snug into the same chamber, ready for fire. All this was accomplished with such dispatch and precise, minute tolerances that it was not, as one supposed, the explosion of gunpowder but the heat of friction during extraction that rendered the ejected, clattering cartridge case piping hot to the touch. Professor Conant relished the inventive new as much as the medieval—he'd introduced me to the Mies van der Rohe–designed Tugendhat House, in Czechoslovakia; Frank Lloyd Wright's Johnson's Wax factory in Racine, Wisconsin; and more—and had we been standing together in this cluttered Lowry hangar, with the weapon before us on a tall table, he'd have run his fingertips across its silky metal surfaces and asked questions. "This?" he'd say, pointing inside the lifted cover. "Oh that's the belt feed lever," I'd say in return. "And see how this knob on the front end runs inside that hollowed-out angle, that path along the top of the bolt, and with recoil becomes a cam to pull over the next round. If you lift out this little round piece in the middle and then drop it back down facing the other way, the belt will feed from the opposite side. And this gizmo on the slide is the belt feed pawl, which sort of snaps over the top of each new round and grabs hold."

"'The Belt Feed Pawl,'" Conant would repeat happily, making it sound like a name in Dickens.

These imagined scenes helped pass the wearying and boring hours of repeated instruction, during which we had to present the exact same material each week to another incoming fresh class of students, but our central preoccupation, the Browning .50-caliber aircraft machine gun, still
holds up in history. Amassed forward-facing in the wings and body of the new P-47 and P-51 fighter planes, and heavily distributed about each B-17 or B-24 heavy bomber—ten guns, working in pairs fore and aft and in turrets above and below, and singly on either side of the waist—it was the weapon, it could be claimed, that in cumulative numbers and after long bloody trial destroyed the German Luftwaffe and won that part of our war. Modern automatic guns are quicker and deadlier, but the Browning, which employed no electronics or gas-assisted movements, was a little apex of the late American industrial era: a whole New England factory of usefully moving and reciprocating parts slimmed into a narrow box and delivering its product eight hundred and fifty times per minute, at an effective distance of two miles.

This fresh expertise helped stay any guilt over my favored status just then, away from the dirty and distant events of the war, but did not dispel doubts I felt about my value as a teacher. I'd had a .22 rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun as a boy back home, and knew how to use them, but any affinity in me for this sort of work came as a surprise when it surfaced in a mechanical aptitude test I took in my first week in the service. If the Air Force had shoved me into the right place somehow, it showed genius in keeping me on as an instructor, instead of sending me along to employ this stuff on the line, where I would have been instantly lost. Many of the Idaho high school kids and Arkansas rice farmers and Louisville cab drivers and Brockton plumbers who filled up the stuffy, newly thrown-up classrooms at Lowry seemed to take in the workings of the Browning after a couple of peering glances inside the lifted cover or with one finger running down beside the exquisitely rendered drawings in the manual. They knew how Dodge truck engines and Motorola radios and John Deere reapers and family Electroluxes actually worked and where they could go wrong. I knew how to listen to a complicated lecture and effectively throw back the same stuff in an exam. Listening to me gabbing away in front of a blackboard or pointing up inside a Martin 250 CE electrical turret on a platform, they maintained a lidded ennui, a dislike that matched their sour feelings for everything they'd encountered in the service so far. I was chickenshit, but given a chance they'd probably win this goddam war, if they had to.

It was a near thing at that. When I entered the armament school, about half our section had gone to college, with a couple of grad students thrown in; everyone else had finished high school. By the time I began teaching, six months later, there were no college guys in the incoming groups, and over the next eight months—before the Army mysteriously converted me, overnight, into a historian—the class I.Q. plunged downhill. When fewer and fewer of the students seemed able to pass the weekly tests, tests were abandoned. When it was noticed that half the students were falling asleep in their chairs, the chairs were removed, and we lectured on, six hours at a stretch, to G.I.'s sitting cross-legged on the floor or out on their feet, with elbows propped in a window frame. Some of them didn't know the difference between the numbers ten and zero. We instructors, smoking together during the ten-minute break at the end of each hour, talked about this in low tones and
wondered whether the service rosters were going to be good enough to carry us to the end. We'd seen the bottom of the barrel.

 

Evelyn Baker and I got married at ten-thirty on a Saturday night in October, an hour or so after my last Lowry class let out. Eleanor Emery, a Bryn Mawr classmate of my mother's who lived in a square, porched house on Washington Street, filled in—along with her jovial husband and mostly grown children and neighbors—as family. There was candlelight and cake and champagne, and a new service friend of mine, Dan Rapalje, from New Jersey, stood up for me as best man. Rearrangements of this sort were the common thing in these makeshift times, and were appreciated. My mother was there, having made the two-day trip out on the crowded wartime trains, as did Evelyn's father, Roland (Tweaker) Baker, a Republican cotton broker from Boston. This side of the war, an extemporary and exuberant making do, is largely overlooked in the annals. I missed all the arrangements, being on duty, but a half hour or so before the ceremony Mr. Baker took me aside to say that my wife to be had just hit him up for some money. He'd braced himself while Evelyn consulted a little list she'd made up. "How about five dollars?" she said.

She and I had been together for four years, starting just before my arrival at college. Her parents were freshly divorced, and she and her mother and three younger sisters were staying on in their suburban house in Weston, an easy forty-minute bus trip away from Harvard Yard. Her mother,
Mary, vague and charmingly prone to malapropism, ran things with a frazzled good will, and the three lively and variously gifted girls turned to Evelyn—and then to Evelyn and me—for direction and entertainment. Here, at home inside a Jane Austen novel, I passed my college weekends, carving Sunday roasts and getting the station wagon serviced, explaining the double finesse in bridge, lacing up ice skates, sharing by radio the fall of Paris and the night bombings of London, giving the horselaugh to Wendell Willkie, teaching the racy lyrics from "Pal Joey," and picking up the dogs at the vet after their shots, having fallen not just in love but into a family.

Evelyn, thin and brown-haired, with a strong chin, was tougher than anyone I'd met before. A full-scale diabetic since the age of six, she ran her case without fuss or complaint, shooting each day's doses of insulin into her thigh, and backing away from nothing in life. Once in a while she'd unbalance and begin to slide into the daze of an insulin shock, and her mother or I would have to grab her waving hands and make her take some orange juice or bites of a Hershey bar in response. The early diagnosis of her disease had come only a few months after the discovery of insulin, and her first specialist, the godlike Dr. Eliot Joslin, of Deaconess Hospital, took her as a young child into a ward of recent amputees and said, "Take a look—this will happen to you if you don't take your shots." Enraged more than cowed, she became a model case, cited in the journals, who lived to eighty without losing her limbs or her eyesight. Her father, another bully, saw an absent son in her.
One Saturday in our first autumn together she stationed me next to a high stone wall at the foot of a hill in Framingham, and told me she'd come by here shortly on her horse. Tweaker was a fox hunter, and though the local hunt had run out of foxes they made do with drag races instead, with decoy sacks of meat towed around the woodland course in advance, to lure the hounds. On this day, all played out as advertised—the baying hounds, the tootling horn, the scattered, rushing riders in pink or black habits, the thick sounds of hoofs on green turf. There was Tweaker, on his white hunter Feathers. And here suddenly came Evelyn, yards above me in the air on her enormous, gasping animal, her face white and excited as she cleared death by an inch or two and flew away up the hill. She scorned and hated this, I knew, and soon afterward told her father the hell with it, he'd have to break his neck on his own.

Tweaker, a ferocious Tory, saw no reason that his girls should go to college, and Evelyn, forever ashamed at her lack of a degree, paid him back as a serious and insatiable lifelong reader and full-bore liberal Democrat. In this, she resembled her grandmother Baker, who'd been thrown in jail for picketing the State House during the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. Tweaker was a throwback. Later in the war, when I'd gone off to the Pacific, he began providing a small monthly stipend to Evelyn and her nearest sister, Tudie, whose husband Neil MacKenna, was an infantryman in Europe. But he and Evelyn fell into a dispute about race one day, when she held that it was a disgrace that our armed forces were still segregated during a war that was supposed to be about
democracy and equality, and the next month the checks stopped coming.