Quartet for the End of Time (37 page)

Four times the ocean surged and plunged and crushed him beneath it, and four times he managed, somehow, to hold on. But it was not— he knew then, and always after—according to his own will he was sustained. It was according to some other force, hardly proper to him—the same, perhaps, that had threatened at one time to crush the bandit's throat—that he remained, clinging to the underside of a trestle bridge, fourteen feet in the air, as the waves beat against him, and huge ugly crabs fell with the weight of stones, and then continued their slow unthinking course over his body just as naturally as though he were not still suspended above it but lay already at the bottom of the sea. They crept in through the tears and folds of his clothes, locating whatever warmth existed, close to the skin. Later—no; he would be unable to account for it. How it was he'd managed to hold on all that time. Because, even years afterward, when he thought of it, he wished he could have drowned. That he could have had his flesh torn from his
face and fingers and been laid out to dry like the swollen bodies he found the next morning, splayed on the beach or suspended from trees. Their clothes torn from them, their skin blasted. That he would not have been among those few who remained. Roaming about, without speaking, looking among the ruins for other survivors—and not recognizing, equally, when he met them, the living and the dead.

VI.

Sutton

ON THE WARPATH. WASHINGTON, D.C., WINTER 1936
—
WITH A BRIEF DETOUR TO NEW YORK CITY, 1928
—
NEW YORK CITY, SUMMER 1936
—
VARIOUS LOCATIONS IN THE SOUTH, SOUTHWEST, AND MIDDLE WEST OF THE UNITED STATES, 1937
—
NEW YORK CITY, 1937
–
1941
—
LONDON, 1942
—
THE HAGUE, GUADALCANAL, GUAM, MAKIN ISLAND, 1943
—
NEW YORK CITY, CASSINO VALLEY, ROME, 1944
—
BERLIN, DACHAU, 1945.

I
n January 1936, when the Bonus Bill finally passed, Sutton had been working for just over three months at the
Washington Evening Star
. She put her name in for the story, even though she knew she didn't stand a chance of covering it. Jim Dalling, editor in chief, had already made that much clear: he was never going to send her, or any woman, for that matter, he said, to cover the news on the streets. The
Star
was not the
Los Angeles Examiner
, and had no need of the sort of journalism propagated by the likes of William Randolph Hearst, say, or any of his “sob sisters.”
Well, she was no “sob sister,” Sutton had told Dalling. He would find that out sooner or later if he was willing to give her a try. Dalling had just chuckled and shuffled the papers on his desk, marking the end of their interview.

I like that, he had told her. A woman with spirit; a woman with grit. Yes, I would not be surprised, he said, if you are invited to Mondays at the White House very soon.

Sutton was still working copy for the “women's pages” then, but if she was lucky, Dalling told her when she was hired, she stood a decent chance of becoming one of “Eleanor's girls”—allowed to attend the First Lady's weekly press conferences. Still, she put her name in for “street” jobs from time to time anyway—just to let Dalling know that he could always change his mind.

Even when, three days later, the President vetoed the bill, the verdict—which had easily passed through the Senate—was never in doubt. Roosevelt's veto was purely symbolic—intended only in order to save face after his having so staunchly opposed the motion for so long. He managed to look unwavering and resolute and, in the end, still got credit for passing the bill.

Within a week the bonus checks were being mailed out all over the country—the average payment somewhere in the vicinity of $550.

Once again, Sutton suggested a story. It would be from the “women's angle,” she said. What did it mean to the families who had waited so long to receive their check? To the women who had been left behind when their men marched off, first to France, and then to Washington, after the war? What did it feel like, after such a long wait, for the bonus to actually arrive? But by the time Dalling got around to seriously considering her proposal, even Sutton recognized it was too late—the whole thing more or less forgotten. What remained of it was only the taint on Hoover's career from the riot of '32, and the more recent scandal surrounding FDR's “rehabilitation” projects after, just that past September, hundreds of veterans had been drowned off the Florida Keys.

For six months there had been a call to investigate the disaster from
the VFW, the American Legion, and a spattering of citizen groups, but the Roosevelt administration held it off; the official stance was that the veterans' deaths had been an act of God.

“Everyone makes mistakes,” it was decided in a government meeting directly following the disaster. “But not everyone makes hurricanes. It may be ignorance and error in judgment on the part of the government but it is not a crime, and to measure the ignorance and the errors in judgment of the government or any one man against the ignorance and the errors of judgment of nature, is to measure a single grain of sand against the bed of an ocean.”

Still, the taint on Roosevelt's career did not go away overnight. He continued to be criticized for the “mistakes,” however relative in the cosmic scheme, his administration had made. Most notably, this criticism came from Massachusetts Representative Edith Nourse Rogers, who had been elected to her husband's seat in Congress in 1926 and had promptly become the self-appointed protector and champion of disabled veterans. She insisted loudly that the truth about the veterans killed in the Labor Day hurricane was being systematically withheld, and after being twice refused a direct audience with the President, she further complained that a “reign of terror” existed in Washington, and that ordinary employees of the government were afraid to “express themselves.”

Finally, in March, six months after the disaster, several hearings were called in order to address the issue of compensation. It was a whitewash—an undisguised attempt to “clean up” the mess that had, since the hurricane, refused to go away. Rogers was well aware of this, but could do nothing but hound witnesses and argue bitingly with the chairman of the investigation, John Elliott Rankin—and Wright Patman, also on the committee, who still maintained the “act of God” position. Patman called for a “point of order” whenever Rogers mentioned anything that deviated from the agreed-upon New Deal script.

Sutton put her name in to cover this story, too. This was certainly, she insisted in her note to Dalling, a “women's issue”—belonging next to the exposés on cosmetics companies and decorating tips. Again she was refused.

She went to the hearing anyway. There was, after all—she realized—nothing to stop her.

When Rogers asked Ivan R. Tannehil—the assistant chief of the Weather Bureau's forecasting service at the time of the hurricane—if, according to his professional knowledge and opinion, he would have chosen Islamorada as a place to send veterans for rehabilitation, Rankin almost leapt from his seat, invoked a point of order, and accused Rogers of “embarrassing the witness.” Sutton scribbled all this down and more, then went home and typed up a piece. She turned it in to Dalling early the next morning, but Dalling told her that the story had “already run.”

Not in the “women's pages,” she said.

This is not a woman's story, he said.

He did not find Sutton's “spirit” as amusing this time as he had before. Finally, though, to her surprise, her story did run—and not in the “women's pages,” either, but on page three of the national news. The delay had in fact proved opportune because on June 1, Rogers had come back with one last swing when the bill for relief of the hurricane veterans finally came to a vote. She accused Rankin of refusing to call key witnesses, and of withholding anything that suggested a contradiction to the preestablished “act of God” theory.

The government, and everyone seated here today, knows, she said, that though what occurred in Florida may well have been an act of God, the responsibility for those men's lives was
not
God's, but our own—all of us gathered here today. These responsibilities were not carried out.

The Relief Bill passed and even those who had championed the “act of God” position throughout the proceedings were glad that something had been done—enough at any rate to quiet Rogers.

I
T WASN
'
T UNTIL 1941
, five years later, that Sutton ran across any mention of the Bonus Army again. She was working “on the street” by then, for the
New York Herald Tribune
, when she caught wind of the story. Someone had come across what they claimed to be one of Eddie Gosnell's famous photographs of Hushka and Carlson—the two men killed in the July '32 riot—photographs that had later mysteriously disappeared.
Gosnell himself had been found dead in a rented room in an apparent suicide back in '33—an event that had at the time caused quite a stir, though very little of it got into the press. None of the veterans believed that Gosnell's death was a suicide. It was rumored, instead, that he had made some powerful enemies leading up to, and then directly following, the publication (some weeks after the riots) of the photographs he'd taken of the two dead men. Why—it was wondered aloud—had it taken so long for the photographs to appear? What had stopped Gosnell from printing them right away?

Whatever the pressure had been, it was later suspected to have ended Gosnell's life. After some disagreement and a consultation with two ex-wives, Gosnell (which was discovered not to be his real name) had been buried with full military honors in Arlington Cemetery under the name of Edward Steinkraus. An investigation into the affair had been led by the right-wing Khaki Shirts, but even the angriest veterans seemed resigned to the fact that it would come to nothing— and it did. Not only had the photographs disappeared, but all record of them had as well. The last known word on the subject was an exchange that took place between Gosnell and an unknown caller, shortly before Gosnell's death, in which he reportedly exclaimed, “Tell him I'll see him in hell!”

But now, suddenly, nearly nine years later, a disabled veteran from Ohio named Jim Bradley claimed to be in possession of one of the Gosnell photographs—not the ones that had originally been published, but one that, instead, had never made it to press. Sutton followed up on the story right away. She even traveled up to Boston to meet with Bradley— but no one but her seemed the slightest bit interested. It had already been five years since the Bonus Bill had passed, and now there was a new war on. Besides, as was pointed out to her several times, there was no proof that the photograph was actually Gosnell's—or even that the men in the photograph were Hushka and Carlson.

It was true that Jim Bradley's photograph had been so badly damaged it was difficult to clearly make out the faces of those it pictured—and indeed there were very few identifying features in the photograph at all
that designated it as having been taken at the conflict on the twenty-eighth of July, 1932, and not any other day. But since when, Sutton had asked, did one require proof to run a story in the paper? Here was a man claiming to be in possession of one of Eddie Gosnell's photographs.
There
was the story. In all likelihood, a man had died on account of that photograph!

Still—the story never ran.

I
T WAS ONLY NATURAL
for Sutton to feel that way then; she had “given up representation,” as almost everyone had “given up representation,” just before the war. It was as liberating to give it up, she found, as it had been to first discover it. To learn, as a child—through the simple technique of shading—to lift simple objects from the page. It was remarkable: the way that little empty square in the left-hand corner of each apple she drew into the margins of her school notebook (the one part of the drawing that she had not, and would not, touch) was what in the end rendered the image whole. She had felt, she remembered, an almost irrepressible joy as the apples had rained down on her page—each one marked by a simple caricature of light in its upper left-hand corner.

It was this same joy that she felt in the realization—so many years later, when she encountered the “painterly realisms” of Malevich; the glorious abstractions of the Delaunays, or Fernand Léger—that it was not the apple, but in fact, precisely, what the apple
was not
(what, that is, of the apple remained stubbornly beyond her power even to perceive, let alone re-create on the page) that allowed it to be reproduced as it was— or at least as it seemed. If it was, in this way, only through the acknowledgment (an actual
physical allowance
within the space of the represented object) of the limitations of the eye that an object might be brought suddenly—miraculously—to form, was it not probable that to realize anything in its truest sense, one was obliged not to reproduce what was at any time visible to the eye, but instead what escaped it entirely? Further: if “reality”—what appeared to the eye, and therefore to the mind—was based, in essence, on
what did not in fact exist at all
, how could it itself be based, in the end, on anything more than simple faith?

B
UT PERHAPS SHE HAD
discovered all of this much earlier, when she had stood in front of Pieter Brueghel the Elder's
Big Fish Eat Little Fish
on her first visit to the Metropolitan Museum, at the age of eight. It had been the first—and also the last—time she had been invited to accompany her mother on one of her “rests,” to visit her Aunt Sylvia in New York.

Aunt Sylvia was three years older than her mother, and had never married. She was what her mother described, with great respect, as a “real working artist.” An interior decorator, she had started her own business, which had even—though just barely—survived the crash of '29. Sutton would always remember it very vividly afterward, the way her mother and Sylvia had sat together, hip to hip, on Sylvia's chaise lounge, leaning into each other as they spoke—her mother's hand sometimes even pressed into the pocket Sylvia made of her own. She remembered her mother's expression as she spoke, in a whisper, so that though Sutton could observe them from a distance she could never hear what they said. It was a blank, beseeching look—as though the words she uttered, which seemed to stream from her all at once in a rush, were in fact one long extended question, to which there would, or could, be no reply. She recalled that if ever she approached, Sylvia would look up brightly, before folding Sutton, along with her mother, into a firm embrace. For a few moments, then, the three of them would be pressed together like that, and Sutton would feel almost perfectly happy—having found herself, in this way, in sudden proximity to the great mysteries that that intimacy, which more often excluded her, contained.