Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  On the other hand, Secretary of War Stimson introduced the point system on May 12. Many confusions and exceptions—inadvertent and otherwise—attended its implementation. The rules governing officers were enforced less strictly than those for enlisted men. Sixty missions was a lot.

  “[One] weekend … an order arrived [at Goodfellow] to discharge a certain number of officers,” Heller wrote in Now and Then. “I had lost most of my pocket money in a dice game or card game … and just happened to be on hand”; if so, his escape was simply fortuitous. His individual flight record confirms that on May 14, he was reassigned to a “separation center.” His Certificate of Service confirmed that his “service was terminated” by “Honorable Relief from Active Duty,” on June 14, 1945.

  He packed up his Lucky Little Bell and returned to New York. He and Shirley—probably, more accurately, Dottie—made plans for an autumn wedding in the synagogue Shirley’s family attended, Congregation B’nai Jeshurun. It was located on Manhattan’s West Eighty-eighth Street, between Broadway and West End Avenue. With Shirley’s blessing, Heller applied to the University of Southern California, under the G.I. Bill (California had seemed golden to him during his military training there, despite wartime fears of a coastline invasion).

  One day, during “a spell of beautiful weather,” he spent a day strolling around Coney Island, “with little idea of what to do with myself,” he said. The old social clubs had “passed away of attrition.” The rides looked smaller than he remembered. Wasn’t liberation supposed to feel more liberating than this? On Surf Avenue, he spied an old school chum, Davey Goldsmith, home on furlough. They traded tales of old friends—Abie Ehrenreich, about whom there was still no word; George Mandel, who seemed to be recovering, though he now had a metal plate in his head (the sniper’s bullet had penetrated his helmet but only went so far into the brain). Many of their mates had dropped out of school and gone to work at lousy jobs.

  Heller treated Goldsmith to a Nathan’s dog and french fries, and for a moment they felt like kids once more. “When we went on the Parachute Jump, I was tense again for just the few seconds of suspense that preceded the unexceptional drop along protective guide wires,” he recalled in his memoir. “But coasting down, I had to wonder why anyone would want to ride it a second time.” To himself, he admitted, “After sixty missions overseas, I was now selective in my adventures.” The Coney Island part of his life was over. He was no longer his mother’s little Joey. Nor was he “Heller this, Heller that,” with a military bureaucracy to make up his mind for him. He was Joe Heller, about to be married. Relief flooded him—and apprehension. As he gazed at the ocean one last time and looked across the old neighborhoods, he “felt with sadness that something dear was behind me forever.”

  * * *

  MORE THAN THE WAR, the acceptance letter from Story magazine that arrived at his mother’s apartment one afternoon in midsummer, forwarded from Texas, made him feel like a hero. Only his old pal Danny the Count had heard of Story, but the news that “our Joe” was about to become a published author impressed everyone, including his fiancée’s social enclave on Riverside Drive. “Overnight, I was, or felt myself [to be], a local celebrity,” he wrote. “I became talked about.” He liked the adulation.

  The summer brought more good news (maybe the Lucky Little Bell was working its charms): an acceptance letter from the University of Southern California; and then, on August 6, word of Hiroshima.

  “I cannot recall a single expression of outrage in this country against Harry Truman for dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. Or Nagasaki,” Paul Fussell insisted in 1995. “The criticisms … came … later.” Infantrymen like William Styron, still on the ground at the time, felt the bomb had saved their lives. “I really honestly believe [I] would not be here [otherwise,]” he said. As for Joe Heller: “I was a very happy civilian … when the atom bomb went off,” he said. With the defeat of Japan, with no danger now—under any circumstances—of returning to combat, he could almost relive his missions with fondness. Dreamily, he recalled, “[O]nce we were in formation [on the way to a target], I’d put on the radio, and I’d listen to music, and I’d hear songs—Carousel, Louisiana Hayride, the music of Oklahoma—and you’d get these bouncy tunes on there.” In more somber moments now, he’d realize that, despite all he’d lived through, he “knew nothing about war … very little about [his] own combat experience.” What he knew—all he knew for sure—was that the war was over and Joe Heller was the author of “I Don’t Love You Any More.”

  * * *

  IF SHIRLEY HAD READ “I Don’t Love You Any More” as disguised truth, she would have run screaming from her handsome young intended. The story’s view of marriage is pitiless: Cohabitation is an unnatural arrangement that corners men and women into grating and dehumanizing routines. Couples remain committed to one another for reasons unknown. Whether the fundamental flaw rests in individuals or in middle-class morality remains unexplored.

  During the course of the story, a war veteran who has just come home discovers he no longer loves his wife. He is “purposely” cruel to her, “not really wanting to be, but nevertheless deriving some perverse pleasure in seeing her unhappy.” Her habit of being “considerate” toward him somehow “mak[es] him bitter.” He argues with her in repeated banalities, refuses to get dressed to greet another couple who’ll arrive any minute, and keeps demanding a pitcher of beer. The wife leaves (for good, the husband fears), the visiting couple arrives, expresses concern for their friends, and then the wife returns with the beer. The husband grins at her “like an erring schoolboy” and the wife smiles “sheepishly.”

  The piece is dialogue-heavy, choppy. It moves like an awkwardly staged one-act play. There is little evidence of an authorial eye: The wife is described as “well rounded so that she possessed a strong physical attraction.”

  Shirley was not a naïve reader. Joe appreciated this. She understood what he said of the story years later: “[I]t [was] based on things I knew nothing about except for my sifting around in the works of other writers”: Shaw, Saroyan, Hemingway, O’Hara. The story was “malign and histrionic” because these writers were malign and histrionic. The couple’s unhappiness meant nothing; it was a “convention” of the kind of short fiction he had been reading.

  Shirley admired the young author’s attempt at a metaphor: Throughout the piece, the husband plays with a Chinese puzzle, two metal rings he can’t prize apart despite his most brutal efforts.

  “I Don’t Love You Any More” appeared in the September-October issue of Story, just as Joe and Shirley were finalizing wedding arrangements. In the contributor’s note, Joe said he had been “comfortably rehabilitating” himself since his discharge “under the point system,” and that at present he was “busy trying to get a play produced.” He had not penned any plays, other than a few stabs in high school at crafting something along the lines of the radio dramas he used to listen to at night, or a comedy in the vein of Moss Hart or George S. Kaufmann.

  “I Don’t Love You Any More” earned him twenty-five dollars. He was now a professional writer, like his poor, broken friend George Mandel.

  * * *

  AT GROSSINGER’S, and during the brief leave from Texas, when he convinced Shirley to stay with him, he barely had time to pause and contemplate the girl who was going to change his life. From the beginning, Shirley was Joe’s “most appreciative audience (and sometimes his crooked straight man),” according to Barbara Gelb. She was fiercely loyal to him (championing his short story to everyone they met), but not without irony, sometimes at his expense. She could “laugh and cry at the same time, and [was], therefore, the perfect Heller heroine,” Gelb said: a mixture of “gaiety and rue.” Shirley joked with friends that she shared with Joe an admiration for Joe Heller.

  Dolores Karl, who would soon become one of Shirley’s closest friends, described Shirley as “very elegant, though understated. She knew how to dress on a budget. She knew how to put it all together.”

  At
Grossinger’s, Joe had thought her “privileged,” though her parents had struggled up from poverty. She carried herself with dignity, confidence, and pride, a manner learned from her mother. “Dottie and Barney were an interesting couple. There was no question she was the boss and everyone knew it,” says Jerome Taub, Shirley’s cousin. “Dottie made all the important decisions and Barney just went along with everything.” His main sportswear factory was in Philadelphia, but he had to commute because Dottie insisted on living on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive. She knew the power of appearances.

  Together, Dottie and Shirley educated Joe in social taste and etiquette. For example, he was astonished at how well (and deeply) they “knew the difference between sirloin steak and top sirloin, prime rib and top round.” He learned from them that “only first-cut brisket was suitable for a good pot roast.”

  These sorts of distinctions, and belief in their importance, enveloped him during preparations for the wedding. The arrangements had to be perfect. Like Dottie and Shirley, B’nai Jeshurun was modestly sized but graceful. The street, one block west of Broadway, was quiet. The bright orange and rusty-tan of the synagogue’s facade nicely complemented the large brown door, appearing to darken the tone of the wood. The door opened wide beneath an elaborately carved stone arch topped by a Star of David. The building had been dedicated in the fall of 1917, in what was then a rapidly growing upper-middle-class Jewish neighborhood. For over twenty-five years, Rabbi Israel Goldstein had served as B’nai Jeshurun’s spiritual leader. A well-known Zionist, he traveled frequently to promote his cause; he would also be instrumental in founding Brandeis University.

  “There was at all times a degree of competition between the congregational responsibilities of my rabbinate and the broader claims of my public career,” he admitted in his memoir. “Nevertheless, to the best of my ability, I [balanced] my duties wholeheartedly.” On October 2, 1945, these duties included marrying Joseph Heller and Shirley Held.

  It was a busy month for the rabbi. On the day he led the wedding ceremony, he helped draft a telegram to President Truman on behalf of the Interim Committee of the American Jewish Conference. The telegram said that Great Britain should facilitate the immediate entry of 100,000 Jews into Palestine and that this should be seen as an “initial step toward the definitive solution of establishing a Jewish national homeland [there].” It was his firm belief that “sufferance ha[d] been the badge” of the Jewish people, but it was not written that “sufferance [was their] destiny.” He said, “Our destiny is to be a people among peoples, standing on our feet upon the hallowed soil of our fathers.”

  He did not pronounce such sentiments at the wedding, but the gravity of the rabbi’s beliefs colored the ceremony. On the marriage certificate, beneath dark blocks of Hebrew, Joe and Shirley signed their names. The signatures were careful: no joyous rush or heedless impatience to get things done; rather, a solemnity and an apparent recognition of the occasion’s seriousness.

  Later that day, at a reception at Dottie and Barney’s apartment, there “was a lot of drinking, especially by Joe’s family and friends,” says Jerome Taub. His part of the family was in the liquor business, and “the family motto was, ‘Liquor is made to be sold, not to be drunk.’ So there was no excessive drinking on our side.” He didn’t know Joe, but his immediate impression was that he lived “in his head.” Maybe he was a little shy, perhaps intimidated by the Held and Taub families, who were well off compared to Joe’s mother, brother, and sister.

  After the reception, Joe and Shirley tossed their bags in Taub’s car. He drove them to the train station. Along the way, “one of Joe’s relatives”—his brother Lee, Taub thinks—“got very sick” from all the booze he’d consumed “and threw up out the car window.”

  At the station, Joe and Shirley boarded a Pullman train for Los Angeles and waved good-bye to their families—Sylvia crying; Lee silent; Lena, with her cane, struggling to distinguish Shirley’s name from the name of Lee’s wife (Shirl/Perle turned out to be a tongue-twister for her).

  “The motives for my decision to go to the University of Southern California remain opaque, but they doubtless included the indispensable one that I was accepted there,” Joe recalled years later. “I don’t doubt that they were also evasive in purpose, intended to delay, to buy time. I didn’t want … to have to decide right away what I was going to do for the rest of my life.… I felt myself much too young.… Going to college was easier and more appealing than going to work and certainly … more respected.”

  With a Pullman berth for a honeymoon bed, and his name in print in the magazine sticking out of his coat pocket, he snuggled with his wife. Together, they dreamed aloud about the far West’s lovely hills.

  PART TWO Happy Valley

  6. Words in a Box

  IT WAS A BLUSTERY New York early-autumn day. Joe walked crisply across Washington Square Park. Rumor had it that Robert Moses, the parks commissioner, planned to remove the park’s fountain and construct a turnout in the middle of the block that could accommodate eight to ten buses at a time. He’d been aiming to route traffic through Washington Square since before the war, despite the Villagers’ protests. The man was like a desk general: no idea, and no interest in, conditions on the ground. NYU wasn’t much better. Over the shouts and picket signs of the neighborhood’s Save Washington Square Committee, the school was apparently going to raze the old bohemian row houses and tenements along the park’s edges for a big new law school. It was easy to laugh—as many students did, shuffling by the picketers on their way to classes—at the neighbors’ futile demonstrations. Still, the people’s presence in the streets, yelling slogans, made for plenty of excitement.

  Joe headed for the Education Block building, just east of the park. The latest figures he’d heard claimed NYU enrolled more veterans than any other university in the nation—over twelve thousand—and you could spot every last one of them: rumpled, prim—no longer at attention as they used to be in the army, but with tattered vestiges of the old discipline. Sleepless and serious. Above all, serious. They took too many classes. They wanted to learn.

  On the corner of West Fourth and Washington Square East, Joe pulled from his coat pocket a letter in a familiar cream-colored envelope, which he’d received earlier that day. Again he read the note, dated September 8, 1947: “We feel compelled to say no to it … Somehow—and perhaps we’re wrong—we find it hard to believe that a gang of boys would smoke marihuana [sic] right out in the open, especially in their home neighborhood.”

  Was this guy kidding? Had he been to Coney Island? Did he ever leave his office?

  Joe read further: “One little suggestion, though: are you writing out of your own experience? If you’re not, I think it might be interesting for you to try—for a while, at least—to concentrate on people you know and emotions you share.” The letter was signed by Donald Berwick, for The New Yorker. The joke was that this latest short story, “Murdock, His Son, and a Man Named Flute,” was closer to Joe’s experience than anything he’d tried up until now. It was straight out of Sammy the Pig’s pool hall and Mermaid Avenue. He was proud of the story’s symmetry: the way the father, a two-bit bookie, defends his racket by telling his wife if he didn’t run the numbers, someone else would, and then hears a similar excuse from the man who sells dope to his son; the way Murdock beats on his boy and then gets manhandled by the doper. Well, maybe The New Yorker didn’t like Runyonesque characters, though Joe had tried the magazine with everything he had, humor as well as grit. It seemed that every week, the cream-colored envelopes showered down on him. Berwick couldn’t have taken the time to read these things, could he?

  A gust of wind blew leaves along the curb. Joe pulled his coat collar up. On afternoons like this, he almost wished he’d stayed in California.

  “Murdock, His Son, and A Man Named Flute”: A blocky title. Maybe it was a blocky story, step by telegraphed step. Was it too obvious, lacking evocative power? Still, the practical thing to do was to stick the story in
another envelope, send it somewhere else. Don’t even think about it. Keep the pages flying.

  Early that evening, after classes, he caught the subway to West Seventy-sixth Street, heading to the apartment he shared with Shirley just off Central Park West, near the New York Historical Society and the American Museum of Natural History. Shirley’s parents had helped them land this place after they’d returned from Los Angeles. A friend of Dottie and Barney’s owned the building, a slim five-story brownstone with a nice new elevator. In their first year back, Joe and Shirley had occupied a small apartment here with a roll-out sofa; then a bigger space opened up, one floor above, with a full kitchen and bedroom. Dottie and Shirley decorated it immaculately, and Dottie often went over to cook for the couple: prime rib, pot roast. Barney helped with the rent, and with extra school expenses. Sometimes, Joe augmented his monthly income by working part-time, after class, in the circulation department of a magazine called American Home.

  Now, at the kitchen table, Joe spread the pages of his latest rough draft, a piece based on the tale he’d heard years ago, as a Western Union messenger, about the fellow delivering telegrams who meets a couple who wants him to make love to the woman while the man watches. He had in mind a story of lost innocence, the education of an adolescent, along the lines of Sherwood Anderson’s “I Want to Know Why,” which he’d just read. But he couldn’t find the right tone. He’d never been that naïve. And what was the point? The rich can be as morose as the poor? Everyone knew that, didn’t they?

  He wrote, “He had been kept close to home while his father was alive, and it was only recently that he had been allowed the freedom of observation. The world about him was beginning to unfold slowly in a vast and puzzling panorama, delighting him with each new revelation.”

  He set the pages aside. He asked Shirley if she wanted to invite guests for dinner that weekend. She liked to entertain. What about asking his writing teacher, Buck Baudin? Buck was just six years older than Joe; he was starting to earn good money, selling stories to magazines. He’d had a couple of pieces in Esquire. Good Housekeeping paid him fifteen hundred dollars for a story.