Sons (48 page)

I suppose I felt that Dolores should have had at least
some
sort of patriotic understanding for the sacrifices made and still to be made, considering the fact that her brother had lost his eye flying a low-level bombing mission over Ploesti. But she surprised me by saying it would certainly be worth a few thousand dollars to get myself out of the Army, and if I knew how to arrange it, I should make the proper inquiries at once.

I knew how to arrange it and also where to arrange it. The word had been passing around Mitchel Field for months now, the hangar talk being that you could get a medical discharge, a safe assignment, a furlough extension, or a transfer merely by contacting the right people and crossing their palms with silver. I knew the talk was true, and I personally resented its authenticity. Mind you, I held no brief with the Army’s recently disclosed points system for discharge. It seemed to me that the scheme was heavily weighted in favor of two types of soldiers, those who were married and had children, and/or those who had received certain combat awards or decorations. Someone like myself, who had flown fifty combat missions over enemy territory with his hands and feet freezing and his head pounding, could muster only thirty-six points against the eighty-five required for discharge — a point for each month I’d been in the service, and another for each month I’d served overseas. The system was unfair, and it placed me in imminent danger besides of being reassigned to the Pacific to fight against the Japanese while some Army instructor stationed in Iowa got his discharge because he’d happened to sire three kids. But that didn’t mean I was ready to buy myself out of the Air Force.

My father had written in his most recent letter to me that the United States Government might be a little slow in redressing grievances, but that it always made good sooner or later, as witness the bill President Truman had just signed, whereby we would pay the Sioux Indians for ponies the Army had taken from them after the massacre at Little Big Horn in 1876. With a stroke of not unexpected sarcasm, my father had written, “I’m sure your Uncle Oscar, though he is but a mere Apache, will be terribly pleased.” Well, it was easy to become cynical about anything that had to do with the Army, but I sure as hell hoped it wouldn’t take them another seventy years to revise the points system. Anyway, the day after I received my father’s letter, I was glad I
hadn’t
been lured into buying a fake discharge. The way the Army had finally caught up with its pony thieves, the Air Force finally caught up with the two commissioned officers and six enlisted men who were involved in what was described as a “nefarious and scandalous racket.” The ring was arrested on July 6 at Mitchel Field; when I told Dolores that night about the furor on the base, she only shrugged and said, “You waited too long, love.”

The “love” was an affectation acquired from her brother, who had of course been stationed with the Eighth Air Force in England. The cynicism was her own, somewhat unsettling to discover in a girl who would not be eighteen until next month, especially when her opening line had been “Hay is for horses.” I suspected, though, that I was leaning a bit too heavily on that first impression, trying to create for myself the image of a beautiful dope. Because aside from humping her, which was delicious, I wanted no real involvement with Dolores Prine, and the easiest way to avoid any meaningful relationship was to convince myself she was incapable of tying her own shoelaces, which simply was not true.

Her older brother, Douglas, had graduated from Science (which Dolores assured me was the best high school in New York City) at the age of sixteen, and was in his second scholarship year at Columbia when the Army drafted him. Wearing his black patch with all the flair of a latter-day pirate, curly hair darker than his sister’s tumbling onto his forehead, he would fix me with his one good piercing eye blazing out of his head like fire from The Green Lantern’s ring, and engage me in polemic — political, religious, financial, artistic, it didn’t matter. He loved to argue, and more often than not he would draw Dolores into our heated debates as well, and together sometimes they would strike sparks long into the night while I secretly yearned to touch her, and she knew I did, and glanced shyly at me, slyly, as if to say, But you see, love, I can
think
as well. The arrest of the Mitchel Field ring sent Douglas off into a lecture on the moral dissolution of America, his thesis gaining vigor the following day when it was revealed in Chicago that the use of counterfeit red ration coupons had reached a new high, some 8,000,000 points having passed over the nation’s meat counters in June alone. Two days later, when federal agents in New York arrested twenty-four people on charges of selling or possessing narcotics, Douglas showed me the
Daily News
headline like a poker player exposing a royal flush, shouting at me as though
I
represented the system — “This is what I lost my eye for!” he screamed, and his mother came in from the kitchen and advised him please to calm down as his father was still asleep.

Mrs. Prine seemed more concerned with her son’s infrequent outbursts than with her daughter’s daily wanderings. School for Dolores had ended on June 15, but before then I had made arrangements with a corporal out at Mitchel to use his parents’ apartment on West End Avenue as soon as they left for Nantucket on the Fourth of July. I had been promoted to first lieutenant after the Fiume raid, which meant that I was now earning about two hundred dollars a month, when I added in my longevity pay and my subsistence allowance. I couldn’t very well pay the corporal an exorbitant amount for the use of the apartment, but he was willing to settle for ten dollars a week, plus whatever small favors I could extra-legally confer as an officer — passes, use of Army vehicles off the base, bar duty at the Club, where he hoped to meet higher-type broads. (This was all before the scandal broke; afterward, I was pretty damn careful about anything I signed for him.) In any event, Dolores and I spent a lot of time at the apartment, and her mother’s indifference to her whereabouts puzzled me. I asked Michael what
he
thought about it one day — this was before the Air Force transferred him out to Luke Field, where he was to begin training fledgling pilots — and he told me with a great deal of scholarly nodding of head and adjustment of imaginary spectacles that sexual mores were changing in America, harrumph, but that parents were still unable to visualize their children in situations any more compromising than those they themselves had experienced at the same age. Add to this the fact that Mrs. Prine was a phenomenally ugly woman who had probably never had a pass made at her in her life, and you could understand why she could not for a moment imagine, harrrrumph, what her nubile daughter was doing every day of the week, harrrrumph. I thanked Michael for his shrewd observation.

Mrs. Prine, now that I thought of it,
was
a singularly unattractive woman. Small-bosomed, narrow-hipped, near-sighted but too vain to wear eyeglasses, she squinted and flapped around the big Sutton Place apartment dictating letters to a temporary secretary who came in once a week, directing club activities and charities, arranging balls and parties, scattering papers like fallen leaves behind her, and constantly glancing back over her shoulder as though expecting something she had overlooked to grab her by the nape of the neck. It was reasonable to believe that the farthest thing from her mind was her daughter’s sexual initiation, and I was grateful for her indifference, but at the same time felt oddly guilty each time she squinted her greetings to me at the front door.

On his days off, Mr. Prine followed his wife around the apartment like the executive offices on a battleship, wiping a white gloved hand into the angled joining of bulkhead and deck, fluttering helplessly in her boiling wake, bald pate glistening, eyebrows raised in anticipation of the calamities she constantly predicted. Douglas towered over his father by a full foot and a half, and it was somewhat comical to see Mr. Prine coming sleepy-eyed out of the bedroom at two in the morning to ask his huge, one-eyed son, calmly and patiently, to please lower his voice. Mr. Prine was chief counsel for a firm that manufactured ladies’ girdles, corsets, and the like (“He’s very big in ladies’ underwear,” Dolores said to me one day in our West End Avenue bed, and then wiggled her eyebrows as I burst out laughing at the old old gag), and he was constantly being sent to negotiate contracts in Minnesota or Maine, coming home a week or ten days later to hear his wife forecasting some new impending disaster. He was invariably too busy to concern himself with what was happening to either of his children, a failing that pounded itself home with frightening suddenness at the end of the month, when the vague calamity his wife had been expecting descended with fury upon his household.

I should have suspected that something was wrong with Douglas from the start, but I assumed only that he was too bright for me, that he was aware of meanings too subtle for me to grasp. He had purchased a wire recorder shortly after his discharge, and was now engaged in filling spool after spool with recorded notes for a documentary radio program he hoped to submit one day to the major networks. Whenever I went to see Dolores, I would find her brother closeted in his room, surrounded by open newspapers and magazines, the radio blaring the news as he selected and snipped the articles or items he needed for his project. There was no mistaking the seriousness with which he approached his task, nor his conviction that he was embarked on something that would prove enormously valuable to the world in its post-war reconstruction. Sometimes, as he played back his assorted gleanings, his voice took on the mannered cadences of a Walter Winchell or a Gabriel Heatter, but he always seemed to realize when he was hamming it up, and excused himself by saying he had not yet overcome the theatrical lure of the microphone. For the most part, he read his items into the machine in his normal speaking voice, dispassionately, and I was honestly impressed by the logical order in which he had arranged his news fragments, and forced to respect the purposeful clarity of even those parts of his indictment with which I disagreed. An indictment it was, no question about that. Only occasionally did he veer from his thesis, as though he had absent-mindedly strolled off a path that wound through a formal garden to find himself entangled in a patch of weeds. But he always found his way back again, always managed to extricate himself, the flat recorded voice returning to recite the facts he was laboriously compiling.

That was in the very beginning.

He became convinced early in June that the Japanese would never surrender and that he would be called back into the service to do more bombing. He did not know how they expected him to look through a bomb sight again, he had only one eye, didn’t they realize that? Were they now redrafting blind men and cripples to light their war? The Japanese would never surrender, despite the pounding we were daily administering in the Pacific, and even if they
did
surrender, it was all for nothing.

“Look at this,” he would say,
“look
at this world we’re attempting to save, what’s the point?” He would pick up a clipping from his desk then and begin reading it in the portentous voice of a
March of Time
announcer, “July 8, 1945 — an American guard at the POW camp in Salina, Utah, today machine-gunned the tents of sleeping German prisoners, killing eight and wounding twenty, how are we any better than they? Look at this one, July 13, 1945” (the
March of Time
voice again) “the House Un-American Activities Committee today assigned an agent to investigate Representative Rankin’s claim that Hollywood is the greatest hotbed of subversive activities in the United States, and that big names are involved in one of the most dangerous plots ever instigated for the overthrow of this government. It’s the goddamn Palmer Raids all over again, have you ever heard of A. Mitchell Palmer?” (What newspaper is that from? I asked.)
“Look
at this stuff, Will, this is all fact, look at it. July 14, 1945 — Genera! Eisenhower announced today in Frankfort-on-the-Main that United States troops may now converse on streets and in public places with adult Germans, do you get the significance of that, Will? They were only allowed to talk to
kids
before this, but Eisenhower says the new move is a result of rapid progress in de-Nazification. I say if we’re talking to the Germans today, we’ll be sleeping with them tomorrow, the same way you’re sleeping with my sister. Oh, don’t look so surprised, I’m not blind, I’ve still got
one
good eye, buddy. Anyway, who cares? What you’re doing is only an infinitesimal part of the whole molecular structure.”

In bed one afternoon toward the end of July, Dolores said, “Now there’re these two buttons, okay? And if you push the one on the right a hundred million Chinese peasants will die immediately. You can save them all, though, by pushing the one on the left, but then
I’ll
die. Have you got it?”

“I’ve got it,” I said.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Which one would you push?”

“This one,” I said, and gently touched the nipple on her right breast.

Dolores looked down at herself and grinned. “You mean you’d sacrifice a hundred million Chinese just for me?”

“Two
hundred million.”

“Yes, but only peasants.”

“Landlords, too.”

“Mandarins?”

“Even emperors!”

“You must really love me then.”

“Who said so?”

“I said so. What would you do if I told you I never wanted to see you again?”