—by which gauge, Lawrence’s post-war life with Pamela had been a disaster. His was the ancient story (in these recent times all too often updated) of the decorated warrior who returns from combat to a wife not the one dreamt of in battle. About Pamela, he had lately told Morgan: “I thought I knew her.” He meant—at the time of their marriage, in 1943, smack in the middle of the war. After all, as the “in” children of New York parents of a certain economic and social rank, he and Pamela had been cast together since early childhood, firstly on the kazoo-blowing, paper-hat birthday circuit; secondly, tongue-tied and stiff-kneed, in the de Corcy dancing classes (held November through March on alternate Friday afternoons in the Colony Club ballroom); thirdly, throughout adolescence, at carefully structured parties temporally related to their being home on holiday breaks from their respective boarding-schools; fourthly—fully fledged—when he was at Yale (obsessively dating a string of girls) and Pamela was at Vassar (being obsessively dated by a string of guys), they would bump into each other at football games in New Haven or once in a while at a New York nightclub (down in the Village or up in Harlem) and they would greet each other, casually: “Hello, Pamela.” “Hi, Larry.” (She was alone in calling him “Larry.”) After Yale, and throughout the three years he was at Columbia Law School, their paths did not cross: following her graduation from Vassar, Pamela went to Washington to work in the office of a three-initial government agency (exactly which one Morgan was never told). But with the onset of the war, for whatever reason, she returned to New York and in the autumn of 1942—by which time Lawrence had been in uniform for over a year—they met again. Fatefully. The circumstance: Lawrence, home on a week-end pass, invited to a dinner party given by friends of his parents, Pamela seated next to him at table; and, as he much later told Morgan: “I crashed.” Returned to his four-stacker destroyer, he courted Pamela by letter (more accurately, notes) written at off-duty moments on a continuum of hazardous convoy-escort voyages to England and back; to England again and back again; again to England and again, back. Which letters Pamela answered, not in like volume or intensity, but enough to encourage him. Enough—six months later (in February of 1943), when he was again in New York on a weekend pass, to ask her if they might become engaged. Incredibly, she said yes. And then, only three months later, in late May, just prior to his reporting to the Submarine Chaser Training Course in Miami (by dint of a “delayed-order leave”)—strangely and suddenly, like heat lightning, they married: vows exchanged at eleven on a Tuesday morning in the chapel of St. James Episcopal Church, their parents and two Vassar friends of Pamela’s in attendance. Followed by a champagne lunch. Followed by a two-night honeymoon. Lawrence’s—a bridegroom’s—euphoria projected to Morgan and Sidney on that evening in gloomy Miami when the three of then converged at the front door of the Columbus Hotel and took a first walk together and told each other, in a beginning way, their autobiographies.
Whenever Morgan thought about Pamela, it was in terms of the effect she had had on him the one time he met her…. The remembered photographs of her which Lawrence had shown to him and Sidney back in Miami had prepared him for the long-legged stunner she in fact was: but the photos had not warned of her in-the-flesh animality: that in a social jungle, she was like encountering a leopard, the way she came on, sleek and scented and darkly intelligent. No grasslands languor in her. Add to that lack of languor the stimulus of a conveyed indifference to consequence, and you end up with Morgan’s immediate sense of her: as dangerous. That once-ever meeting had taken place in February of 1946. Lawrence, returned from the war a mere four months, already showed signs of a man in emotional chaos. Sidney and Morgan, knowing him as they did, saw him so: nervous and slavishly attentive to Pamela, his humor in short supply.
Pamela spelled it out for him soon thereafter: marriage, she told him, wasn’t for her. It kept her from doing the things she wanted to do when she wanted to do them. It prevented her, she said, from being herself. Their marriage, she said, had been a war-time mistake…. She told him all this on a Saturday morning. That night, around ten o’clock, Lawrence turned up drunk at Sidney and Linda’s apartment. Linda went to bed, leaving Sidney alone with him: Lawrence wild, raving in a drunk’s uninhibited, repetitive, unpunctuated way about the wreck of his marriage, about himself, about Pamela: he loved her—she did not love him—men (he gestured) “men plural”—were what she loved, one at a time, to play the gender game with. He ranted on, fluctuating between a weeping, head-in-hands despair and sudden adrenal risings of anger that sent him lurching to his feet. Finally, worn out, with nothing left in him to vent, he sank back on the couch and let Sidney take off his tie and shoes and position him length-wise on the couch for sleep. He was out within seconds. Sidney spread a blanket on the floor and lay down on it, and that way, near him, kept vigil. Around dawn, Lawrence came to, massively disoriented and instantly sick. Sidney, prepared, had a roasting pan as receiver for the heaved-up bile. Then a trip to the bathroom, Sidney acting as a steady crutch, then back to the couch; back on the floor for Sidney. A bit before eight, Linda, fully dressed, emerged from the bedroom. It wouldn’t do (she whispered to Sidney) for Lawrence to wake up and to have to face her first thing, there in the small apartment. She’d slip out now and go to her sister’s house. She glanced at Lawrence’s prone figure: “Try to pin him down for dinner next Thursday night.” Sidney nodded and smiled: he loved her belief in the curative powers of food for all ailments, whether of body, soul, or heart…. At noon-time, Lawrence came fully around; fully in the grip of what Sidney later described to Morgan as—“an Homeric hangover.”
Throughout the afternoon, Sidney looked after him. Got him to quit apologizing; got him to take a shower and to shave. As the first shadows of the early March twilight crept into the room, Lawrence began soberly to talk. It seemed “fantastic” to him to think that at just this time twelve months ago the war was still on, Roosevelt still alive, the atom bomb an undreamt of, undropped thing—himself on a battleship in the Pacific, engaged in ferocious combat, yet: yet, in spite of all the horrors that were going on then, he had had about himself “a sense of worth,” (of) “wholeness,” (of) “hope” whereas, now, he felt “cut down; useless and defeated.” His body was slumped dead-weight in his chair, his hands limp in his lap. His eyes, though, were bright and desperate. “Tell me what you think I should do, Sidney.”
By dusk-time, Sidney had succeeded in exacting from him the promise that he would seek professional help. It hadn’t been easy, persuading him to take that path. Behind Lawrence’s repeated protestations that he—“ought”—to be able, on his own, to pull himself together, “ought,” on his own, to prevent himself “from giving up and caving in,” Sidney heard, like echoes, the tenets of courage as postulated in the chapel sermons of Lawrence’s school-days, wherein Life was analogized to Sport: that as a man, one is judged on the basis of the spirited way one “fights the good fight and gives his all to the playing of the game….”
“I ought to be able to—”
“Stop talking that Anglo-Saxon ‘ought’ stuff,” Sidney had finally exploded. “Spare yourself and me any more of it. It’s crap, Lawrence. It doesn’t apply to what you’re up against now. Look—: look at it this way: as trained lawyers, we know how to listen to a client’s stated legal problem and how to interpret it in terms of a judicious solution. The key word, Caesar, is trained. A psychiatrist is trained to interpret human problems; trained to understand, get it?”
“Maybe.”
“Try harder.”
“I’ll think about what you’ve said.”
“You’ve just flunked the course. Thinking about it will get you nowhere. If you want to pass the course, you’ve got to commit to getting the help you need. So will you? Will you put your clean right hand over your dirty left heart and tell me here and now that you will?”
Lawrence let out a sound, in part groan, in part sigh. “Okay, okay. I surrender.” Then, with a flash of energy that was fresh: “I give you my wo
rd I will.”
“Eureka! You’ve just graduated.”
On which commendatory note, Lawrence stood up, knotted his tie, put on his suit coat and his overcoat. Sidney walked with him to the elevator. In it, Lawrence kept its door from closing: “Morgan—” he said.
Sidney nodded: “I was just thinking about him.”
With a tact essential to the equilibrium of their tripod friendship, Lawrence volunteered: “I’ll telephone him later this evening; cue him in on what’s happened.” Then he released his hold on the elevator door and pushed the Down button. The door slid to. Clicked into place. The elevator descended.
Within six weeks, Pamela went to Reno. By early summer, the divorce was (in Lawrence’s words) “a done thing.”
…Shifts of the shoreline sands…
These days, fourteen months later, Lawrence seemed to be pretty well recovered. He was still seeing a psychiatrist. He had lost (probably forever) his old air of total ease. He had used to stride into rooms; now he tended to stand in a doorway and look around, peering in, before entering. He was much liked; socially much sought after. But by his own admission, social life, per se, didn’t attract him in the “blithe” way it once had. He enjoyed the company of women and had among that sex—“several good friends.” It wasn’t in the cards, he said, that he would ever marry again. On the other hand, anything was possible. So maybe, at some point, he would. Maybe. “Someday.”
The assailing rain—slowing him way down, lengthening the trip into the city, delaying arrival at his office.
After a week away from his desk, and with what would surely be a massive pile-up of work awaiting him, he should logically be regretting the delaying circumstance of the storm. Yet far from regretting it, he welcomed it for its being the prolonging agent of this, his first solitude since Mrs. Leigh’s death…. It was as if he had two heads, hence two minds, one employed at driving the car, the other (seemingly beyond his power to control it) using up the extended time of this first solitude by taking a kind of synoptic roll-call of the persons he most loved in this world.
Now, present before him: Geoffrey Barrows…After five and a half years of war’s separation, they had met again; the unforgettable date Friday, January 11, 1946 (at which time Morgan had been home from the war about two months, Geoff nearly six months). They had spoken frequently on the telephone: Hatherton—Philadelphia, Philadelphia—Hatherton: calls of the kind easy between vintage friends. But beyond glossary reassurances of their post-war states of health and mind, they had not attempted to talk about themselves in any way that resembled completeness: there was, they agreed, too much to say, too much that had to be told about the last five years’ experiences, too much to tell about what was happening to them now. For such communication as that, they must be together. Thus had come into being this planned, greatly anticipated meeting.
At Geoff’s request, they had settled on New York as the place for their reunion. Morgan opted to put up at the Plaza Hotel; Geoff said he would stay at a friend’s apartment. In the comfort of a Pullman bedroom, Morgan had made the overnight journey from Cleveland; by ten A.M. he was at the Plaza, settled in a large room windowed above Central Park. Geoff, coming by car from Philadelphia, had promised an “elevenish arrival.” At about 10:45, tapped out rhythmically on the room’s door, was the identifying knock that went back to their Harvard Law School days: Da dada da da—DA DA (“Shave and a haircut—six bits”).
“Come in!”
They had had just enough time to sound each other’s names before they collided in embrace, following which bodily impact, rocked back from it onto their heels, they looked at each other, laughing, completely amazed at being together again.
Near the room’s windows they sat down in the deep comfort of chairs positioned to give a view of the park. There were two pigeons taking temporary shelter on the sill, complaining in throaty tones about the day’s weather: typically January, cold and gray and windy. Remoter from the pigeons’ voices was the sound of moving traffic and the urgent trill, erratically let, of a doorman’s steel whistle blown to summon cabs, and farther away the held pitch of a car’s stuck horn, all of which outside auditory pother heightened appreciation of the room as a relatively peaceful, quiet haven.
“God, where to begin?”
Between them, ascendance had never played a role: it would not have occurred to either of them to suppose about his interim story that it was the greater one (though as Morgan would soon learn, Geoff’s was surely the more extraordinary).
“You start us off, Morgie,” Geoff said.
In the way Geoff said it, Morgan thought he detected an overtone of decided preference that he be the one to begin, which nuance prompted in him an immediate closer scrutiny of his best friend: a tall man of ordered appearance (polished, really) even when he was sitting down, loose and relaxed as he was now, with his long legs stretched out before him, crossed at the ankles; a handsome face; uncommonly blue, discerning eyes; dark, well-groomed hair, seen in this close inspection as beginning to gray, the graying barely noticeable (until noticed) and then not as the main indicator of such physical changes as are inevitably wrought by the passage of time, but rather as a complement to some other change, one by far more exceptional (now that Morgan was beginning really to see it) present in the whole expression of the whole face, of high well-being, the charged strike of which, as Morgan fully took it in, caused him to positively exclaim: “You’re on top of the world!”
“I am,” Geoff immediately said, and exuberantly repeated: “I am!” Then, though, with a sudden augmenting seriousness: “But it’s complicated, Morgie.”
Ah. Complicated: that potent adjective prized by the imagination as an opener to kingdoms of possibility. Right away—the very instant Geoff said the word—Morgan saw that he wished he could take it back. Why? For the reason Morgan quickly articulated: “You’ve just thrown away your chance of getting me to start us off.”
Geoff flashed a smile of the kind a girl named Margy Somethingorother had once described to Morgan as—“Geoffrey’s delectable under smile”—a half lift of the mouth’s corners, made from beneath eyelids lowered in a parody of self-disparagement. “I know,” Geoff acknowledged: “Loosen your corset strings, honey.” Morgan laughed. Geoff said: “That’s what a guy in our camp used to say. Ernest Gustavsen, called ‘Gus.’ A bomber navigator. He had a raft of fizzy sayings. He claimed he’d gotten them from his mother-in-law. He had one wallet-size snapshot of his wife, one of said mother-in-law, and one of his horse, an old nag named Bubbles.” Geoff smiled: “Of the three, Bubbles was the best looking…. I hope Gus is happy back home with his trio of femmes. He’s from some little town in northern Minnesota. I’ll probably never see or hear from him again. But that’s true of most everyone in our unit. When it came time for us to disperse—after all those endless months we’d been together—it was weird the way we all mulled around, holding on, handing out our addresses, slapping each other on the back, telling each other we’d for sure stay in touch—knowing as we said it that nine times out of ten, we wouldn’t. There was no lie though in our wish to…. You know what I’m talking about, Morgie.”
“Down to my toes,” Morgan answered. He had listened to Geoff, fascinated, attracted more and more to what, about him, seemed new: new in the sense that all his interesting qualities of mind and character, familiar from yore, seemed, now, larger in scale; more in the open; more—offered: all as evidenced in his greatened ease of self (in the past somewhat inhibited), and in the liberated way he gave utterance to his thoughts—which gains, as Morgan pondered them, he began to define in terms of facility. Ah. That was it! Geoff had become—enabled. And in the sudden way intuition works, he knew: “You’re in love,” he stated, abruptly, with a spontaneous effusion of pleasure.
Geoff didn’t move a muscle, only sat there low in his chair, eyes as calm as a calm sea, and as tranquilly deep, and his voice the same: “You’re wonderful,” he said. “You haven’t changed. I’ve been banki
ng on my belief that you wouldn’t have.”
And with a further advance of intuition, Morgan knew not to say another word; to only listen.
“Along with everything imaginable that a POW camp was, above and beyond all else, it was an obstacle to privacy.” (That was Geoff’s opening sentence)…Everything that took place, took place in the open. That old saying, ‘One for all and all for one,’ was the key to the sustaining of morale: all of them equal, equally enduring, equally surviving, equally together. One might prefer the company or conversation of X, but the preference was never exercised to a point that excluded Y or Z, adhesion of the group being the thing that most mattered, with private judgments and feelings about those who comprised it, privately held, rarely, rarely overtly shown. It was by means of what Geoff called—“our sanity-keeping activities”—that true individuality spontaneously surfaced: for instance, during the playing of team sports, and of course, most obviously, in the “lectures” delivered on subjects of the lecturer’s pre-war field of expertise. And not the least in the sanity-keeping department, the plays they had rehearsed and staged (“I wrote you about the first one we put on, The Man Who Came to Dinner, me smooching my way through the role of Maggie Cutler”).
So there they all were, Krigesgefangenen—POWs—held behind barbed wire, winters and summers, month in and month out.
There were two men in the group whom Geoff singled out and spoke of as “intellectually remarkable.” One was the botanist; the other a composer and teacher (“in real life”) of music theory—first name “Alan” (Geoff spelled it out), surname “Litt” (also spelled out)…Alan Litt…a fighter pilot (as Geoff had been). It was Alan Litt who had lectured about music in all its forms: sonatas and symphonies, operas and song-cycles; Alan Litt from whom Geoff had learned “about clefs and scales and key-signatures”—rudiments of an art foreign to him…. Geoff went on about Alan Litt: about how, as a POW, he had hoarded blank pieces of paper, and when he’d acquired a few pages, the way he had painstakingly ruled them into a series of music staves, as many as the paper could possibly contain, and how at the noisiest of times, he would sit, “amazingly concentrated,” separate from everyone else, doing what—when Geoff asked him—he described to Geoff as “sketching ideas for a string quartet” he had in mind to compose…. “There was only one other guy who could seal himself away from the group in something like a similar way—a devout Catholic who prayed on his knees beside his bunk, eyes closed, crucifix in hand, every morning and every night, in full sight of everyone. A ballsy act of humility.”
Matters of Chance Page 26