“I guess, then, I must learn not to think like a civilian,” Chip said with a sigh. “Particularly as I shall so soon be finding myself one again.”
“I’ll send you a card every Christmas, saying, ‘Who’s the enemy now? Think!’ ”
Chip knew better than to ask Gerry about geisha girls; there were regular officers who had been to Japan before the war who were far better equipped to inform him, and in two days’ time he managed to have, all to himself in a rented villa, one of the loveliest and most expensive girls in Sasebo. Her charm, her tact, her beautiful manners and quiet, muscular competence made her a new and enchanting experience. And her demonstrative pleasure at a bauble was the same that she showed if he gave her a diamond; he knew, for he did both. She carried artificiality to an art so high that it seemed even morally superior to naturalness.
Gerry had more to say to him about the nature of their conquered foe on a train journey they took to inspect the ruins of Nagasaki. Chip had tried to organize cultural expeditions in Sasebo for the men of their division—there were some beautiful shrines, a monastery and a palace—but he had had few takers. What the crew wanted to view was Nagasaki, an hour’s trip away, which required a pass.
“What does it tell you about our countrymen,” he asked Gerry, “that the only thing they want to see is something that has been totally destroyed?”
“A gaping hole instead of a lovely shrine? What do you expect? Isn’t there something quintessentially negative in a culture based on the sale of antidotes to bad breath and body odor?”
“With an occasional breakfast food thrown in,” Chip retorted. “No doubt it’s the civilian in us.”
He organized a party of some forty men, obtained the passes and took them to the train. Gerry and he, boarding only a minute before departure, mistook the last car for the more luxurious one reserved for American officers. When the conductor pointed this out, they assured him they were happy where they were and wouldn’t bother to move. But the man shook his head emphatically and barked his answer like a drill sergeant.
“No, no! This not officers’ car! You go officers’ car!”
And he insisted on holding the train until they had taken their seats where they belonged.
“Why does he care so about our being comfortable?” Chip asked.
“He doesn’t give a damn about our comfort. He wants to see that we go where we are told to go. Orders are orders—for us as well as him. That’s why the Japs are going to win this occupation. They accept the fact that they have to obey MacArthur. But what they also see—and what preserves their national dignity—is that we have to obey MacArthur, too. So instead of being drowned in self-pity, like the occupied French, they stick their chests out. Americans and Japs are equally subject to the new Mikado, who just happens to be an American general.”
“You really admire them, don’t you? These men who, a month ago, you referred to as little yellow brothers?”
“Ah, but they were enemy then.”
Nagasaki, ell-shaped, had lost the whole of one ell. Because most of the houses had been of wood, the destruction by fire was almost total, and as the rubbish had been assiduously cleaned away, Chip and Gerry drove their jeep almost unimpeded over the vast red-brown wasteland, punctuated here and there by the twisted steel structures of burned factories looking like the skeletons of fallen dirigibles. Stopping before one of these to take photographs, they saw a group of boys staring at them. For the first time in Japan Chip recognized hate in native eyes.
“Could anything justify it?” he asked as they drove on.
“The bomb? How about saving a million American lives?”
Chip felt too bleak to want more of his friend’s remorseless realism. He had been about to ask whether the bomb could not have been demonstrated on some less populated area, but then the whole stark horror of it silenced him. They completed their tour almost in silence and then returned to the station.
“I think I know something that I mind more even than the loss of life,” Chip said, ten minutes after the train back had started.
“The life lost wasn’t so much more than what was caused by our incendiary bombs,” Gerry muttered. “And nobody gripes about them.”
Chip ignored this. “It’s the loss of valor. Valor won’t count for anything now. If your enemy can annihilate you, you have to give in to him. Churchill could have talked all day about fighting in the streets and in the fields, but if Hitler had had the bomb, ‘We will never surrender’ would have been an idle threat.”
“Well, we’d better make damn sure no one else gets that bomb” was Gerry’s only comment.
But Chip, as he pondered his new deduction for the rest of the ride, began to wonder whether there might not be an actual relief in the very core of this new horror. If men could exterminate each other, was it not possible—or at least conceivable—that they would not resort to war? And if they could no longer resort to war against an oppressor, they would have to come to terms with that oppressor. And presumably, in such a case, they would cease to dub him an oppressor. For what would such a dubbing be, after all, but simple bad manners? And without the nomenclature, perhaps some of the quality so denominated would disappear. If right could no longer beat down wrong, might right and wrong, having to live together, fusing perhaps, not become the same thing?
Chip could even speculate that a lifelong burden might be about to fall from his back, like Christian’s in Bunyan’s tale. It had always been his religion—or his obsession—or his superstition—that the world was made of evil, which had to be endlessly destroyed. Now perhaps it had become true that the process of destruction was futile. If so, was there anything to do but get on with one’s life? Surely it was just as well that he would soon be going home.
14. ALIDA
ONE’S LIFE seems to divide itself into chapters of much varying length. In the beginning we need a new one for each school that we attend, sometimes each vacation, certainly each love affair. But then there come periods when whole years, maybe even decades, can be lumped into a single division, when our existence resembles nothing so much as a long western train trip over prairies that stretch uniformly to a constantly receding horizon. Such periods, however, need not be unhappy or even boring. Indeed, they can be the best of one’s lifetime.
Such a period for me was the one that began with Chip’s return from the war, early in 1946, and ended fifteen years later with our departure from Benedict to New York. During much of this time I experienced a happiness and peace of mind that I had not believed obtainable by a person of my nervous temperament.
Chip, released from the navy, practiced law briefly in New York in the Wall Street firm that represented the Benedict Company. He and Lars Alversen were soon put in charge of the not inconsiderable section of that firm that took care of the company’s law business. Chip was afterwards moved to Benedict, where he became his father’s principal assistant. In due course Elihu’s master plan was implemented, under which Chip became the managing chairman of the company while retaining a more or less nominal partnership in the law firm, and Lars, remaining in New York, was placed in full charge of the company’s legal affairs. Chip’s father’s lifetime ambition was thus achieved; he was able to look forward to a benign old age in which his brilliant son would take over all of his business and civic responsibilities. As evidence of our commitment, Chip and I built a wonderful modern house, all craggy gray brick where it was not all gleaming, view-filled glass, on the level of the residential hill immediately below his parents’.
But the great thing was what happened to Chip’s personality. He had returned from the war with what I can only describe as a bursting appetite for peace. Never shall I forget his flushed countenance on the first night he arrived back from the Pacific and took me out to a night club. Never before had he spoken so openly of himself. And, to be truthful, almost never since.
“It’s hard to describe what I’m feeling,” he kept telling me, making it less difficult, however, by con
stant replenishments of whiskey. His drinking that night seemed almost medicinal. He must have wanted to tell me something that would have seemed incredible in sobriety. “It’s hard to describe an internal state that doesn’t make any sense. And in which I don’t intellectually even believe! But all my life I’ve been dogged with a sense that I was…wicked.”
“But we were taught that in Sunday school. Isn’t it original sin?”
“Yes, but mine was somehow worse. Perhaps because I had such a swelled head. I had to be more damned. I couldn’t be just like the others. I was Charles Benedict of Benedict! And then, in college, it seemed as if the whole world had suddenly blown apart in a veritable orgy of sin. The Japs started slaughtering everyone in China and Manchuria and down the coast, and the Germans tried to exterminate the Jews. In Russia, Stalin killed peasants by the million, and in Spain … well, why go on with it? Mankind was damned, and this time there would be no ark. But then, Alida … well, laugh at me if you want….”
“I’m not laughing at you, dearest. I’m not laughing at all.”
“No, you’re not, it’s true. You’re a good girl. You’re putting up with me.” He took another drink. “Well, anyway, it seemed to me that there might, after all, be some kind of redemption. I remembered what my grandfather had said about God loving the Germans but still wanting the Allies to win. I guess it was something like that I felt when Gerry Hastings and I lowered that dud shell from the bow of the LST. As if we were dumping with that grim black object the core of all the wickedness in the world. Or perhaps not really dumping it but planting it where it would take a long time to grow. And in that time was a chance for … well, why not for redemption?”
“You believe in God, then?” I asked hesitantly. “It’s funny, but I’ve never asked you.”
“I know. In our world that’s considered bad form. Mr. B—my grandfather, I mean—belonged to a simpler time. But no, I don’t think I believe in a personal god. And I’m not at all sure about divine mercy or even an afterlife. But I don’t care about those things. What I’ve always been sure of is evil—evil in me and in other men. I’ve always believed that man was basically rotten, putrid, mean, that the universe was made out of bad things. But now it seems to me that wickedness is somehow temporarily in abeyance. Oh, very temporarily! But we have a period, a few years maybe—I don’t know—in which we can do things! Live! I think now I can be a good husband and a good father and a good son.”
Well, the astonishing thing about all this was that it turned out so. Chip did become all of those things. He did not again discuss himself with me so personally, but he lived up to his three resolutions. Perhaps he was best in his third. Neither of his parents had aught but praise for him from then on.
As a father Chip left more to be desired, although I believe he did his best according to his own lights. Eleanor never quite recovered from the four years of having no father, and as she grew up her increasingly critical and sometimes surly disposition spurred her on to the political left, where she took stands inimical to all that the Benedicts regarded as gospel. Yet even when she was at her worst, Chip tried to be patient with her, and I used to tire of their endless arguments, in which he tried, with exasperating equanimity, to win her back to a more capitalist way of thinking. With Dana he was more successful, because his son admired him intensely and dreaded disappointing him. It was touching to see the boy walking behind his father on a fishing expedition, carrying his rod and cocking his hat exactly as Chip did. But it was obviously unhealthful that he was so afraid of Chip, and I knew that one day we should have trouble. But why should I have borrowed it?
I cannot say that my understanding of my husband was much more profound than it had been in New Haven and Charlottesville, but I decided—I think on the whole wisely—that a profound understanding between spouses was not essential to a happy marriage. What at least then seemed much more important to me was that I was now an integral part of his active life. I had had little to do with his law career, and nothing with his naval, but the position of the wife of the chairman of the board in a company town is not unlike that of an ambassadress. I was a true partner in my husband’s work.
There were not only the many office parties that had to be given and the visiting businessmen who had to be entertained; there were the board meetings of the hospital, the settlement house, the library, even the country club, that had to be attended. If Chip was expected to take over his father’s responsibilities, I was no less expected to take over, or at least to share, his mother’s. Mrs. Benedict showed no jealousy at my forced inclusion; she seemed ignorant of the very knowledge that most women in her position would have clung to their prerogatives. Her remarkable aptitude and the fact that I welcomed her assistance at all times no doubt eased the situation. I had no ambition to be queen of Benedict; I was sincerely contented to be one of the court.
So much is written about people who can realize their full personalities only by breaking out of an oppressive family or social hierarchy that one is not always aware of how many there are who can accomplish the same thing only by breaking in. The joys of eschewing multiplicity for unity, the thrills of belonging as opposed to escaping, are less celebrated, yet I believe that a sense of being an outsider is at the core of most people’s misery. Sometimes their exclusion is obvious, as that of Jews by anti-Semites, or blacks by rednecks, or the untutored and unwashed by the perfumed and cultivated. But actually the sense of not being a true part of a dominant group is almost universal, because it is a state of mind not necessarily reflected in the external facts. A superficial observer, for example, might have thought that Alida Struthers in 1937 was not justified in her acute sense of social inferiority. Had she not been of old Knickerbocker stock, a graduate of Miss Herron’s Classes, a nationally known debutante? Perhaps—but what did those things mean to her? To me the important facts were that my father couldn’t pay his bills, that my mother was dowdy and pretentious and that both were sneered at by the people who really knew what was what. I could read gossip columns about “lovely blue-blooded Alida Struthers” till the cows came home without altering this.
Now the delightful thing about my social position in Benedict was that it was assured against even the murkiest doubts of my id. There was no questioning the fact that Alida Benedict was looked up to by all. Oh, of course I assumed they made all kinds of cracks behind my back about “gold-digging tramps from the big city,” but neither my origins nor my small deserts could dim my present glory in their envious eyes. Everyone was charming to me—that was the real point—and if Macbeth had been brought up as I had been, he would never have disdained “mouth honor, breath.” But I shouldn’t be too cynical. Some of my new friends were no doubt sincere. Everything at the top of the heap isn’t necessarily hypocrisy. To tell the truth, there’s probably no more of it there than at the bottom.
The happiest thing about my occupations in town and company was that they took some of the heat off my earlier compulsion to know what my husband was doing and thinking. We were embarked on the same journey with presumably the same goals, and I found myself increasingly inclined to accept the evaluation of Chip by his associates as it was continually expressed to me. “What a wonderful man your husband is” was the kind of laudation to which I became pleasantly accustomed. And it was true. He was a wonderful man—to live with, anyway—considerate, neat, punctual, efficient, shrewd and surprisingly patient. I say “surprisingly,” because one was always aware of how much better he would have done the thing, the mishandling of which had given cause for his patience. And if our parties, our summers, our very home life, were all part of the Benedict operation, that did not mean that we had no fun. We had plenty of fun.
And love? Oh, there I go again. Do women who aren’t passionately loved ever deserve to be? Chip would probably not have chosen me for his wife had he had it to do over, but how many husbands would? He was as affectionate, as interested, as most spouses. Half the wives in Benedict would have swapped their husbands
for him, and not just because he was chairman of the board, either. Even if I was only an appendage to Chip Benedict, wasn’t it something to be an appendage? I discovered that there could be an actual satisfaction in putting a collar around my ego, a pretty collar, to be sure, and allow it, like a sleek and manicured poodle, to trot docilely down the avenue after the stately Doberman of Chip’s personality. Perhaps I went a bit far in mentally condoning the infidelities that, I suspected, occurred on his business trips. Had I reached the point of abjection where such conduct in my lord and master made him seem even more my lord and master?
I have said that Chip was widely admired in Benedict. He was not universally so. Many of the old-timers felt that he had cheapened the quality of the glass, particularly in tableware, and many deplored his extension of the business into such affiliated lines as porcelain and kitchen products as a debasement of the founder’s more concentrated ideal. Some of these also deplored his pro-union policies, suggesting that he was more interested in a political future in Connecticut than in the true welfare of the business. But Chip, at small gatherings of officers and directors where such objections could be discreetly voiced, always denied that there was any basic difference between his policy and that of his late paternal grandfather.
“In the old days it paid to fight the unions,” he would point out. “It no longer does. Labor strife is too expensive, and half the time you lose. The public wants its unions; let it support them. Pay what you have to pay your workers, and add it to the price of your product. If you can—and Benedict still can.”
“You may find a limit to what you can charge for cheap glass,” someone responded.
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