by Jack Livings
I can only assume that William Push spent his last years, his decade of sequestration, sitting at the controls there, pulling levers, monitoring the gauges, sorting through his neighbors’ pneumatic notes, playing the valves with the virtuosity of Rachmaninoff, teasing music from the building’s residents, plucking each one like a guitar string, sounding discord on the ninth floor, generating joy on the third. He must have come to believe he was the composer of their desires, that their every feeling was an expression of his grand structure, his direction giving form to the unspoken, the unfelt, the unimaginable. Without him at the helm, the building’s fragile organic systems would rot. Thus the trouble with endless observation—we come to mistake interpretation for creation. Even our own behaviors, so quaintly called choices, are nothing more than observation and reaction followed at light speed by a transformative brain trick that bends temporal perception: voilà, free will.
* * *
Old men are strange creatures. My father is ninety-three years old. When I begin to question him about his past, he answers readily, without suspicion. It is a little shocking how willingly he offers up his most heavily guarded secret, the locus of his shame, after a lifetime of keeping it locked away so deeply within himself. Perhaps, as a person ages, he cares less and less what others think of him. Only monsters are predisposed with their legacies, anyway. He never even asks why I want to know.
All the same, it doesn’t arrive on a silver platter. He has to tunnel his way to the story at his core when I ask, with no preamble, whether he ever made his confession to Albert Caldwell, as part of their pact. In the book, I say, you just leave it hanging. You never say.
Oh, I couldn’t have told him about Poland even if I’d wanted to, he said, much less write about it. In those days, it was all still classified. Make no mistake, I was far from ready to tell anyone—I didn’t need any motivation to keep it to myself.
What about now? I say.
Oh, all activities have been declassified. I suppose I could tell anyone I wanted.
Have you ever?
No, he says. After a moment he says, Ah, I see.
He waves the remote at the TV until it mutes, and he tips his head back and breathes at the ceiling for a while. He is moving into a dream state; when we’re talking, it’s not unusual for him to sit there for minutes on end, examining the beams above his head, massaging the arm of his chair. We’ll sit with the house creaking around us until he finds his way. And so I wait.
Finally he begins. After the war, he says, I went back to Princeton. This was the fall of ’46. The dorm at night was like an asylum. Boys weeping in the showers, screaming in their sleep. Christopher Stanwyck stabbed his roommate with a fountain pen in the middle of the night, raving about the Japs. None of us were in our right minds that first year back, but we adjusted. Most of us did. The astonishing power of focus and intellectual engagement. And the elastic nature of youth. We’d argue about Sartre and Popper in the eating clubs with real vehemence—there’d be fistfights! Brawling over philosophy, can you imagine? But you have to understand, arguing about No Exit with boys who’d been POWs, boys who’d seen firsthand the worst impulses of humanity become manifest—they understood that these works were necessary to the survival of the species.
You didn’t bring your own experiences into the discussion, that was poor form. But what happened was always there behind the curtain, whispering at us. Maybe it was a form of therapy, all the not talking about what we’d seen. And then there were those who hadn’t come back, of course. Conspicuously absent at the beginning of the semester. You’d ask after someone’s old roommate and he’d tell you. Okay, sorry to hear that. What branch, what theater? What a shame.
We were pretty well practiced in burying our memories of the dead.
On my freshman hall there had been twenty-four boys. In September 1946, eight of us were back at school. Numbers don’t mean much, that’s always the trouble with body counts. The empathetic drive does not engage with a number. Stories are the antidote. Everyone must have his story told.
I wrote letters to my mother for an hour every morning. There was a little oak-paneled common room, and in the winter, the caretaker, an old man named Pharaoh, lit the fire at five, so I’d be in there in my robe and slippers at six, scribbling away in a mohair club chair at the hearth. Supposedly I’d muscled all my problems into a cage while I was locked up at Casa Del Rey. But those letters. Mother kept them. You can see them if you’d like. You’d have thought I was at sleepaway camp. I’d write things like, I didn’t go out Saturday night because there were reports that the James Gang was going to hold up the Dinky! Jokey foolishness. I told her I avoided public places because the Junior Birdmen had warned against enemy activity. I thought that if I pretended to be a child I could shield her from what I’d become. I was really only deceiving myself, of course, believing that there could be anything childlike left in me. A new letter every day. I was a murderer in a clown suit.
So she sent Ben to check up on me. Of course, who was checking on Ben? He was only a few months out of the Navy himself and had his own terrors to contend with. Those poor boys on their floating bull’s-eyes. At sea, everything signifies death—you’re surrounded by it, the gray, depthless water that’s ready to swallow you up, and the monotony is a form of death, too, weeks of routine as you steam across oceans, weeks of flat horizon, and then the enemy appears and it’s as though the fabric of the world is ripped open right before your eyes. It must be almost impossible to believe. You must think at first that the enemy is an apparition. And the battles, like two prizefighters squared off toe to toe and slugging away until one goes down in a cloud of blood. My god, the fires, all the munitions aboard erupting like volcanoes. I’ve heard stories, though never from Ben. Never one word. He was at Midway, so he saw plenty, but he never said a thing about it. My own sea travels, thank god, were considerably less dramatic. A week to Liverpool, a week back.
Never uttered a word about what he’d seen. Of course, neither did I. He’d wait all day for me to get out of class, and we’d go directly to a bar and drink ourselves blind, stagger back to the dorm, and in the morning I’d get up and go to class. I suppose he slept most of the day or wandered around campus. No idea what we talked about. The first round of Nuremberg verdicts had come down, and we must have talked about that, about those numbers, which no one had believed during the war, even though Rabbi Wise and the Jewish press had been putting them out since ’42 or ’43. We must have talked about that. But I can’t remember.
What I can remember is Ben’s face at nineteen or twenty, clear as day—an odd thing. Marvelous black hair that he swept back like a singer, and no matter who was talking, his eyebrow was always cocked. A skeptic from the day he was born. Do you remember him? You were so little when he died. But of course you’ve seen pictures. Women loved him. Even when we were kids it was obvious that girls wanted to be around him. Right from the beginning, he had a natural ease, something that drew people in. Just the opposite of me. I do remember his face so well. I was in a fog for years after I got back but his face was always clear. I never would have said it, but I loved him. We were thick as thieves but it never crossed our minds to say that we loved each other. You understand how it was? You loved your mother or your girl.
And then Ben went back home. I believe he worked at a warehouse until he started school himself. We wrote sporadically. Once we’d left home we never lived in the same city again, you know. We visited at first, but in retrospect it’s clear I made decisions that kept us apart. At the time—for decades, in fact—I blamed the demands of work and I blamed geography and I blamed timing. It’s rarely the case that anything stands between you and family but that you choose it. When I finally admitted this to myself, I could have made an effort, but even then I thought, The ruts in the road have frozen hard, there’s no changing now. God, the stories I told myself. The very mechanism which makes us unique as a species is the very thing that makes us impenetrable to ourselves. The
ability to weave a story from only a few threads of detail, to make those connections, to invent actions that have not yet occurred—it can be a great hindrance to discovering truth, can’t it?
I could only imagine painful outcomes were I to broach the subject with Ben—his eyebrow cocked, mocking. So many times I imagined the futile arguments about my good intentions, his dismissive responses, my own anger swelling, and it was as though I had lived it. What was I angry about? He’d done nothing to me. He’d said nothing. But I was angry that he’d not been a better inquisitor. I’d needed to tell him I was falling apart but I couldn’t muster the strength to do it on my own, so I blamed him for being the gentle, unassuming fellow that he was. And I imagined giving him hell for it. Imagine an argument a thousand times and it rivals reality. Write it down and it becomes reality.
This is how we gained dominion over the animals, you know. Our ability to predict future behaviors based on our experience of the past. Our ability to make up fictions. We do live in the past and future simultaneously, don’t we?
What am I talking about? Good grief, how do you put up with me? I’m sorry. But the context is essential. It is essential that you understand.
I agree, I say.
You’re my child but you were never a child. I’m sorry for that. I’m beyond believing anything I could say would help you. That ship sailed a long time ago. But I’ll tell you what you want to know.
I needed to unburden myself, my father says, but I couldn’t tell Ben because I couldn’t live with the shame of it, and something told me he’d suffered far worse than I had. What did I have to complain about? I had my life! I had my arms and legs! I didn’t want to sound like some sort of coward. I certainly couldn’t tell my mother or father. Never. But if we’d stayed close, Ben and I, I would have had to tell him. You see how these decisions are made? These deep, unspoken fears that govern our lives? Of course I’d have told him if I’d been near him, so in order to make that impossible, I engineered a life far from him.
And let me tell you something. To hell with prison. To hell with classified activities. That wasn’t what stopped me from telling him. It was shame that stopped me.
What is it you would have told him, Dad?
Yes, yes. Even now I’m avoiding the subject, is that it? Fine, then. Fine.
My father looked again to the ceiling and said, You know that in ’42 Donovan recruited me out of school because I spoke good Polish and had been to the country a few times when I was a boy—a professor in the Department of Slavic Studies put him on to me. He took four of us. Mazur, Wojcik, Bissel, and me, because we spoke the language and knew the country. I believe Wojcik had only been in the U.S. for a couple of years. Family had fled Poland for political reasons. So, it was because of your grandmother’s bloodline that I was scooped up by OSS.
I was twenty years old. Certainly twenty was a different proposition at that time. But at twenty, regardless, experience plays no role in your decisions. If you were someone like me, what you called experience was Hardy, Yeats, Graves, Edward Thomas. Hemingway, of course. But you didn’t understand what they were trying to tell you. You’re excited by the idea of dying on the field, dying for a cause. I believed their experience to be mine. So it wasn’t my uniform I wore, but theirs.
I was based in Washington for a year, assigned to a branch that worked closely with British intelligence. Highly decentralized command structure. I don’t think I saluted more than a handful of times. It was a real circus, that place. Donovan was a ball of charisma, and whenever he met a new man he became instantly smitten with the possibilities—this man would be the one to win the war. Then you left the room and he forgot all about you. Within reason, an intelligent person could do what he wanted at OSS. Do you know what I worked on?
You helped write manuals.
That’s right. I was recruited for my Polish, but once I got there I sought out the writers, and they needed someone with a pulse to type up the Morale Operations manual, so I got myself taken off radio intercept work and put into the typing brigade.
After the Morale Ops manual was finished, they put the squad to work adapting a British field manual. This was the fall of ’43. The British manuals were field-tested. They were clear, devoid of the usual military mumbo-jumbo, and they followed a distinct, very English line of reasoning. The language and structure of the manual itself taught you to think in the particular logical fashion they intended to teach you. Quite something.
Do you know what simple sabotage is? my father says.
No.
We had a two-pronged approach to sabotage, he says. Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls blowing up the bridge is sabotage work, full stop. You parachute into France, connect with the Maquis, spend a few weeks plotting in a hayloft, and then on the new moon you infiltrate a power plant, lay charges, cut the fuses, blow the turbines, and escape back to the safe house. Extraordinarily dangerous work.
The second type, simple sabotage, was a practical philosophy that was to be laid out in field manual number three, the one we were working on that fall. The goal was to turn average citizens into saboteurs without putting them at risk. The idea was that if properly motivated, anyone could do it. Factory workers, file clerks, plumbers. Anyone could fight the German war machine. And if everyone in the country is fighting the Germans, well.
My father tips his chin back and speaks again into the space above his head: His arsenal is the kitchen shelf, the trash pile, his own usual kit of tools and supplies.
That’s ours, he says. We used it as a little code around the office, a little joke in the mess as we were filling our coffee cups. His arsenal is the kitchen shelf. It’s more than sufficient, isn’t it? Very catchy. Nice rhythm, wouldn’t you say?
He is smiling crookedly at me, eyebrows arched, a look I know well. Professorial, my paternal interlocutor. I am supposed to puzzle out the line.
Ah? he says and dips his chin so that those misty blue eyes peer over the tops of his black frames.
His arsenal is the kitchen shelf, I say.
He whispers it back to me slowly, his hand pressing the rhythm into the skin of my forearm. His ARE senal IS the KIT chen SHELF.
Iambs, I say.
Good, he says, squeezing. The meter?
I repeat it in my head. Tetrameter.
Now, isn’t that nice? he says. And the alliteration—do you hear the snake and the silence? S, s, tch, sh. Subversive, dangerous silence. You understand the attention lavished on every letter? All this care for a manual, a tool for outlining principles and objectives, a military booklet. Then “the trash pile.” Bacchius, a trisyllable. Drops like a brick through the skylight. The trash pile, rank and smelly. Not “refuse heap.” Too soft. Hard t. Hard p. It’s jammed in there like a wrong note. And then back to iambs at the end. Great thought went into every line. I spent the better part of six months watching them work, and they worked urgently, these men and women. Before the war they’d been screenwriters, poets, journalists—published writers. They’d argue over a paragraph break for half a day, resolve the issue, then pick it up again the next morning because one of them was foolish enough to say, “Confirming the break in section B of paragraph two, page fifteen.” Back at each other’s throats. We worked until midnight and they went home to their screenplays and their stalled novels. They drank so much they had gills. By the winter of ’44 you couldn’t find whiskey anywhere, so they were on terrible stuff, bathtub hooch. Mornings were unpleasant. Those who drank at night were hungover, and those who drank in the daylight hadn’t gotten warmed up yet. The couriers knew better than to knock before lunch.
I suppose I contributed in small ways. My job was to take notes, mark changes on the working document, and at night to type up fresh pages for the morning. I followed every peregrination, every line change, every rearrangement of the steps a field agent was to take in disseminating the sabotage message. It became a part of my existence—it’s not unusual for the apprentice to know the form of the work better than the ma
ster, who has to create the form and is therefore occupied with all sorts of thorny questions of philosophy and craft. He’s in argument with the medium most of the time. But I was free to absorb the manual’s deeper questions and internalize its precepts.
A state of mind should be encouraged that anything can be sabotaged. That’s from the introduction, and I took it to heart. It was an ideology and I was an idealist.
When it was finished, they ran a thousand copies and off it went to the field agents … the field agents—we tended to go a little slack-jawed when the field agents came through. They were mysterious, sublimely aloof creatures. The administrative officers were always at their wits’ ends over the agents’ behavior. They’d go tearing off through the French countryside, drop out of communication for weeks, sometimes months, with no regard for their orders, and back in D.C., command would be irate—smashing furniture, threatening to shut down entire operations—until lo and behold one day in waltzes the field man for debriefing and here’s the admin officer, the CEO of Ohio Steel out in the real world, suddenly quiet as a mouse, fetching coffee for this twenty-year-old in full beard who hadn’t even bothered to salute. We’d hear reports from China or Afghanistan about field officers marrying multiple women or running liquor, spending money like water, but did anyone raise a finger? Necessary evils of deep cover. An unholy mess, the whole thing. Donovan kept it all together by the force of his personality. He was very close to Roosevelt.
OSS did have a reputation—one we cultivated, I suppose—of being a New Haven social club where waiters in bow ties and waistcoats served sidecars on silver platters. But our agents’ survival odds were abysmal. And if they did survive a mission, they were redeployed quickly, usually into a more dangerous scenario than the last. It was almost as if command was simply trying to see what it would take to kill you. So it took the edge off to pretend that we were a poetry discussion group, I suppose. A number of the field officers were foreign-born—liberated prisoners of Gestapo prisons, Spanish Republicans who’d landed in French refugee camps, what have you. The recruiting pitch was, We’ll get you out of this dungeon, but you have to go back in for us, deal? Those boys and girls, let me tell you. They’d kill you as soon as look at you. They’d been to the white-hot center of hell and escaped Satan himself.