Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

by Kathleen Rooney

  Even that morning, when greeted by Major General Alexander, I had found no reserves of disgust for him, only pity. That spring morning, as the distant willows on the Harlem Meer swayed in the breeze, I could no longer summon enmity toward any individual man. The war itself had been the real antagonist.

  Anyway, in that instant I was studying Stephen House.

  Recognizing men who are attracted to other men bears a certain resemblance to reading poetry. It rewards an attentiveness to multiple layers of meaning—the confidence to discern what is being communicated and to react accordingly. Corporal House was undeniably poetic: athletic, masculine, but with a mild and bright sensitivity. My type, I guess. I discovered myself to be not only lonely but full to my edges with lust, unexpressed.

  “Pleased to meet you, Corporal House,” I said.

  Several incompatible shades of discomfiture, I noticed, had hit him at once. He’d been ambushed by my celebrity, unsettled by the uncommon experience of standing beside someone taller than himself, alarmed by my open look that suggested I’d figured him as queer, and even more alarmed by the inkling that I might be, too.

  And of course an ugly intruding subject twisted between us like a loop of barbed wire.

  “Colonel, I’d just like to say—” he started. “I’m not sure you know this, but—”

  I didn’t particularly want to discuss the subject he was trying to raise. “You have nothing to apologize to me for,” I said, rather more abrupt than reassuring.

  He looked as if I’d dropped a key through the bars of his cell. “Sir?” he said.

  “Really, House, let’s get that straight right off the bat. Neither you nor any other member of the 305th has anything to apologize for or to feel guilty about.”

  House was dumbstruck. “Thank you, sir,” he managed. “It’s really been eating me. I can’t begin to tell you how many nights I’ve lain awake—”

  He kept his voice steady and his head high, which I appreciated, but his eyes had begun to fill, and I leaned in to put a hand on his shoulder—to buck him up and because I wanted to touch him. “You did your best with the orders you were given,” I said. “We all did. We did things that caused harm that we didn’t intend or we failed to do things that might have helped. It doesn’t matter. It was war. You’re forgiven. Put it out of your mind.”

  “I can’t thank you enough, Colonel. I—”

  “Whittlesey,” I said. “Or call me Charles. I’ve had my fill of being called Colonel. I’m not in the army anymore. You’re walking south, I assume?”

  I gestured, he nodded, and we fell in step. “They gave me my discharge last month,” he said, his sloe-eyed glance meeting mine. “So apart from ceremonial engagements like this one, the army’s leaving me alone. I can finally go back to work. Luckily, my firm held my job.”

  “That is lucky,” I said. “What kind of work do you do?”

  “I’m an engineer. Bridges, tunnels.”

  “Should be quite a demand for that, the way the city’s growing.”

  “That’s the hope. Pretty mundane stuff by your standards, probably. You’re a Harvard man, I hear?”

  “Harvard for law, Williams for my bachelor’s,” I said. “That’s not as impressive as it sounds either. I don’t make impassioned speeches to rapt juries. I just try to keep bankers out of trouble.” I took a deep breath. “Listen, I’ll be dining at the Williams Club this evening. Would you care to join me?”

  “Absolutely, yes,” he said, looking at me directly. “It’d be an honor. What time?”

  “Seven,” I said. “It’s at 291 Madison Avenue. I have duties to attend to now, but I look forward to seeing you then.”

  Damp under my arms, heart beating fast, I watched him walk off. His ready acceptance had assured me that my hunch was correct.

  * * *

  • • •

  Stephen House showed up in civilian clothes punctually at the heavy oak doors of the Williams Club, as did I. Freshly shaven and easy of manner, he seemed to be one of those constitutionally happy people.

  We were shown to my usual table in a dark, cherrywood corner. Meeting publicly in one of my regular haunts might seem bold, but I counted on plain sight being the best place to hide.

  The staff knew me to bring guests, and unlike in other restaurants—where it was commonplace for strangers to clap me on the back and shake my hand and thank me for my hallowed stand in the name of America, thereby obliging me to neglect both my companions and my food—the waiters and my fellow clubmen treated my presence as routine.

  Stephen House lived up to his surname. Speaking with him engendered a homey feeling, a casual rapport that I could move into comfortably. Over steak and potatoes and English peas, he and I talked about harmless things: my work in contract law, his in engineering, the warming spring weather, our fondness for the city.

  I was too nervous to eat much but had an extra brandy. I hadn’t been with anyone for more than sixteen months, since my leave from Camp Upton that New Year’s Eve.

  Stephen asked me back to his place.

  * * *

  • • •

  His chambers were cozy, with a private bathroom but without a private kitchen; there was a restaurant on the ground floor. Convenient—for him to live in and for me to get to and get away from. It reminded me of Marguerite’s and wasn’t far from her place, actually.

  As we settled into his sitting room, he poured me a scotch, and the weight of the cut-glass tumbler anchored me. Stephen House seemed a steady and discreet type of man; he’d hew to the code of honor to never reveal another man’s secret life. As a civil engineer, he, too, had a career and a reputation to protect.

  “It’s a treasure to have found the company of a fellow veteran,” he said, sipping his drink. “I was at a wedding last week, and I tried to explain to one the guests that all the stories he’d read about us doughboys had been crammed full of bunk. I hadn’t exactly expected gratitude, but he clearly resented having the stuffing knocked out of his favorite myths.”

  “Before we shipped for Europe,” I said, “my parents threw me a farewell dinner and presented me with a canteen made of silver. A silver canteen! Can you imagine how that would have gone over with the rank and file? Now that I’m back, they don’t want to hear a word about how unrefined it all was.”

  Stephen laughed at that, with the appropriate measure of bitterness. “I’ve tried to be honest with myself about it,” he said. “It’s no fun to think you might have been played for a sucker. But the more I learn, the clearer it seems that the war was motivated less by any desire to safeguard democracy than by plain greed. While Wilson was supposedly keeping us out of the war, the banks were loaning billions to England and France. They sent us over there to secure those loans. But you work on Wall Street. I’m sure you know more about this than I.”

  “You’re not wrong about greed,” I said, the scotch warming my throat. “But I led my men there anyway, as ordered. Beyond creating a lot of widows and orphans and invalids, it made no difference. That’s why you never stop hearing about the Lost Battalion, you know. Why we lead parades. Not because we helped changed the course of the war but because we didn’t, and the army knows it needs to justify the waste.”

  “I’m not sure that’s exactly true,” said Stephen. “You underestimate the symbolic value of what you did. You and your men inspired the rest of us.”

  “Inspired the hawks. The politicians. Inspired other men to think that it’s noble to die abjectly. Respectfully, Stephen, you may think that just because you’re meant to think it.” My anger welled aimlessly. “None of this matters now,” I said, finishing my scotch in a gulp. “I want to forget the war.” I leaned forward to set my tumbler aside, involuntarily rising.

  “Don’t leave,” Stephen said, next to me in an instant, taking the empty glass, placing his warm hand on the back of my neck. “I didn’t br
ing you here to talk about the war.”

  He smelled green, like vetiver, and a bit sweaty. It was heady. We stumbled toward the bedroom, two tall drunk men, tugging off clothes.

  We fucked on his iron-frame bed, squeaking but sturdy against my thrusts, and by the time I pulled out to come on the small of his muscular back, I’d managed to forget everything for a fleet few seconds. It was excellent.

  When I returned to myself, twisted against him atop his sheets, Stephen lit a cigarette and looked at me expectantly.

  “So,” I said, rusty at pillow talk but sensing it was called for, “you don’t sound like you’re from New York. Where’s home for you originally?”

  “Detroit,” he said, exhaling away from me, as fetching in profile as straight on. “That’s where I went to college, too. Wayne State. I grew up near the Detroit River, which is the only thing about the city that I miss. I couldn’t wait to move here and start my real life.”

  “What’s your favorite memory of Detroit?” I was genuinely curious.

  “The Belle Isle Bridge,” he said without hesitation, brown eyes on the middle distance, as if he could see it. “I once watched a man—a rich entrepreneur, one of the heirs to the Scripps publishing empire—fly an airplane under it as a stunt. It was a Curtiss Model F, a kind of flying boat. Quite something to see.”

  I smiled, but I could already feel the past reaching for me: buzzing overhead, and Larney saying, We’re in for it. My last swallow of scotch had caught up with me and wasn’t helping.

  “That sounds like a fine memory,” I said. “I can’t think of airplanes without thinking of the war.” I couldn’t stop myself. “For a moment today, I felt certain that the being who understands me most in this world is a pigeon.”

  “Cher Ami?” Stephen said. “He’s a military aviator of sorts himself, isn’t he?”

  “She,” I said. “I think about Cher Ami. I think about all of them.”

  “Charlie,” he said, freighting the two syllables of my name with such compassion that I felt crushed. “I understand why you’d feel that way. But you’re not being fair to yourself. You weren’t responsible for the deaths of any of your men. Blame the Germans. Blame the army. You saved half your command.”

  I’d said far too much. I’d taken him for a young and erudite bon vivant, but now I saw a serious urgency underpinning his fun.

  “I could have refused the order,” I said. “I know the law. I could have gone to the stockade and taken my dishonorable discharge. Today I might be representing hoodlums and swindlers instead of bankers, but that would be okay. No one would know who I am.”

  “And somebody else would have led your men into the Pocket,” Stephen said. “And instead of blaming yourself for what happened while you were in charge, you’d be blaming yourself for not being there to help.”

  He wasn’t wrong, but that didn’t make me feel any better. I looked away, shifted in the bed so we were no longer touching.

  We fell silent for a while. I could hear raindrops against the window, and I wondered when the weather had blown in; the day had been so clear.

  I pulled away gently, swung my legs to the floor, reaching for a sock.

  He sat up against his pillow to watch me dress.

  “When we were in France,” I said, “we heard that church bells from all over Austria had been collected and taken to the Vienna arsenal to be melted down and converted into munitions.”

  “I think we all heard that story.”

  “But what happened to the bells after the war?” I said, buttoning my shirt. “I cannot imagine that the Austrians have restored them to the peaceful forms they had before. The churches will get new bells. Or they won’t. And the old bells will remain tools, or shells, or cannons. Irrevocably altered from their original shapes. I am a repurposed church bell.”

  “The papers may be full of lies,” he said, “but you’re just as good a man as they say you are. And I’d like very much to see you again.”

  I permitted myself a few seconds to look at him. He really was quite handsome. And kind. Exactly the sort of man whom in my youth I might have idly imagined myself meeting. But I had not met Stephen House in my youth.

  “You haven’t any idea what kind of man I really am. I shouldn’t have come here. It’s too risky. And it’s not fair to you. I’m a hero. Everyone is always watching.”

  “I would never say a thing. If that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “You seem like a good man, Stephen,” I said, pulling my jacket from the back of a chair. “I thank you for a very lovely evening and for your continued discretion. But please don’t come to the Williams Club again, and don’t try to see me anywhere else. I wish you much continued happiness. Good night.”

  Naked still, he couldn’t very well follow me out into the misty street. The rain had moved on.

  Walking past the golden warmth of cafés and bars, I imagined myself among those inside, laughing without a trace of bitterness. Instead I went back to another solitary night, coughing in my drab room. I drank another whiskey. Undressing, I noticed I’d buttoned my shirt incorrectly in my hurry to leave.

  * * *

  • • •

  On those summer mornings, sunshine poured into my chamber like lemonade into a glass. The beginning of every day was the best, before it all came back.

  To bathe and shampoo, to shave and dress for another day seemed a bit too much at first. But I did it. Weekend or weekday, I accomplished whatever was expected of me and then some.

  Autumn came. On the anniversary of the Armistice, I agreed to issue a statement: When an individual shows courage under stress, we feel a thrill at his achievement, but when a group of men flash out in the splendor of manliness we feel a lasting glow that is both pride and renewed faith in our fellow man.

  I strove to be chaste, failing only rarely, and succeeded overall in giving the impression of being vaguely prudish. Two or three times a week, I attended funerals of men who had finally died of their wounds. And month after month I was showered with honors. That metaphor—“showered”—as if I were expected to receive that rain like a parched desert, when in fact it burned like acid. I turned down requests for appearances that numbered in the thousands. Politely, but never without regret.

  I tried to practice enough law to earn a living.

  In August of 1920, John J. Munson stumbled into my law office on Rector Street. In itself this was hardly unusual. I was visited weekly by veterans from every division of the American Expeditionary Forces, not just the 77th.

  As he pushed past the secretary, demanding that I see him without an appointment, I hardly recognized him. During the war he’d been blandly attractive, with abundant dark hair whose maintenance seemed one of his fondest hobbies; though mustard gas had left terrible scars on his arms and back, it had spared his face. The man whom I ushered into my private office was thin and sinewy; when I took his hat, his scalp showed beneath greasy strands. His shirt gave off a ripe unwashed smell, and when he spoke, his once-mellifluous voice quaked like an old man’s.

  “I need your help, Colonel,” he said. “I need you to pull some strings.”

  “Whit,” I said. “Please, call me Whit. How can I help?”

  “I’m still not over it,” he said. “Let a door slam, and me, I jump like I’m stung.”

  Munson looked every inch like the drunk that he’d become.

  “Did I ever tell you about the shell?” he said. “A shell hit right beside me, right in my funkhole. French 75, high-explosive, sticking out of the ground, closer than I am to you right now. I sat there and waited for it to explode. Trying to be ready. How do you get ready for something like that? It was a dud. But now it’s like I’m still waiting, listening. Waiting for the explosion.”

  “Well . . .” I said, but it didn’t seem to matter whether I was there or not.

  “I jump at so
unds, normal city sounds. The rumble of the elevated. Train whistles. The pneumatic drills putting up skyscrapers and fixing the sidewalks. A pneumatic drill sounds like a machine gun.”

  I could smell gin on his breath. Prohibition had to be hard on him. Like many respectable citizens, I had a prescription at my pharmacist’s for as much whiskey as I required for medicinal purposes, but poor Munson was no longer in any way respectable, and a mere prescription wouldn’t be enough for him even if he were.

  “The first thing I’d recommend,” I said, trying again, “is getting yourself a shave and a new suit.” I opened my bureau drawer to access the petty-cash box; I’d reimburse the firm later, after I got Munson on his way. “Here,” I said. “We can call this a loan. Pay me back when you’re on your feet again.” I knew it would almost certainly be spent on more liquor, but figured I owed him a chance to turn himself around.

  “No, no, no,” he said, waving the bills away. “I just need someone to listen to me while I figure it out. I’ve tried to push it from my brain. But it comes crashing back, like a cupboard full of tin pots clattering to the floor. Wherever I am. They’ve still got us surrounded. We’re still lost. That shell—the fuse—it’s a long fuse. It’s still burning.”

  He lurched from his chair.

  “Remember how we came up on that hill? We thought we were dead men. Remember? You kept us up, but we knew. That was supposed to be the toughest defense on the German line, and the krauts had cut and run! It was all ours, not a shot fired! Do you remember that feeling? All I wanted in the war was to stand on top of a hill—stretched tall, fearless—but now look at me.”

  Despite all my training in argument and rhetoric, I was flummoxed; it was pointless to persuade a shell-shocked man.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, running a hand over his sweating forehead. “God-awful sorry you’re seeing me like this. My life is all apologies and disappointments now. I can’t get it to make sense anymore, civilian life. Remember when we didn’t call it that? We just called it life? I don’t know how to talk to people anymore, but I talk to my dead friends all the time. I think about the things they loved and will never have again. Freddie hated the food at training, but he loved the shredded wheat with raspberries and cream on sale at the canteen.”