The appointment carried Dad for almost a year. Once he had some money, he went back to Germany. It was 1931, and as a Commander of the Order of the White Elephant and a friend of the prince, Dad had entrée in Berlin to the Siamese legation. He attended all-night parties at the embassy, breakfasted with the prince on whiskey, wafers, and cigars exotically rolled in lotus leaves, and admired (from a distance) the fragile beauty of Siamese women while flirting with German women of more robust beauty.
But this was the 1930s, and Germany was suffering hyperinflation while toying, in truculent vengefulness, with the fascism of this new man, Hitler. Dad was never politically astute (Mom was the political one in our house), but as some artists are, he was prescient and sensed an underlying menace.
So the poet who was to be presented at 117 Lakeview Avenue, Cambridge, and whom Heb feared was some effete bohemian, was not unaccomplished, nor did he lack prescience. Three weeks before Charlie’s birthday party, Hitler invaded Poland, launching World War II.
Suddenly, Blitzkrieg was a new word on the American tongue. Before the invasion, Dad had joined a paramilitary unit out of Fort Devens, Massachusetts, which had been formed to prepare young professionals for military service if needed, and Dad spent a lot of time drilling and shooting.
Beyond that, Dad was succeeding as a poet. He had published poems in a number of leading magazines, particularly, in America, in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry. In Britain, his was prominently the single American voice in the 1932 New Signatures.
New Signatures was an anthology, as it was presented as a sort of anti-Eliot publication—T. S. Eliot being the leader of the esoteric school of, as Dad used to disdain it to me, effete intellectual thinking. Dad was a feeler first, and while he liked Tom Eliot personally and was flattered by Eliot’s interest in him, Dad thought that the man was literarily a cold fish. Here’s how he summed up Eliot’s work: “If you are writing only for those who may catch every recondite allusion in your footnotes—footnotes to a poem, forsooth!—then your audience is mandarin indeed.”
The poets of New Signatures were introduced as passionate seekers for new ways to feel at a time when the coolness of technology was triumphant. W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis—and Dad. Though Dad never considered them a “school,” and though he never concerned himself very closely with the international social events that so deeply concerned the others—the Spanish Civil War, for example, or the triumph of Bolshevism and then Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe—for years afterward, Dad’s name was bandied about with theirs as though they were a school.
Dad was on a roll—his poems appeared regularly in the establishment literary press. He had brought two volumes of his own poetry into being, A Bravery of Earth (1930) and Reading the Spirit (1936), and he had circled the globe. He had hobnobbed with writers, some of whom would later be giants, both in Europe and in America. And yet through all his travels, as he reported to me, my father had never seen a woman descend the staircase in her house to meet a visitor with the energy and with the vibrancy of Heb.
When Heb descended the stairs to meet this pal of her brother’s, the bohemian poet, their eyes met, and he nodded. But he turned aside then and disappeared back into the library. Heb stepped into the library in time to see the man draw up a cane from an umbrella stand and, continuing an interrupted conversation, lunge at her mother—a confirmed pacifist—as with a bayonet.
“Thus!”
“Yes, yes, Mr. Eberhart. But we’ll never defeat Hitler that way.”
“It’s the only way.”
Tableau.
The frisson passed—thank goodness—and soon after that Grandmother rang the bell and dinner was served. Later they all went to the theater to see Life with Father.
Heb wasn’t beautiful, as Dad later confided to his brother in a letter; she was good looking, but it was the life in her that drew one.
For her part, my mother told me, she had always wanted a man with a soul. She had known many a world-beater in business as potential beaux—these were the fellows she weeded out at the factory—but she was drawn to a sensitive man. Trouble was, she was also a healthy young woman who disdained a wimp.
Her ideal, she reported to me, would be someone like her pal the painter Rockwell Kent, with whom she went to dances. He flattered her youthful infatuation, but he was clearly unsuitable by reason of both his age, which was advanced, and his radicalism, which was pronounced.
More suitable in terms of age was another of her dance favorites, Bradford Washburn, the mountaineer and later founder of Boston’s Museum of Science, but that afternoon of Charlie’s birthday, what Heb saw while she distracted the militarist poet from his attempted coup upon her mother was something that pleased her very much, right from the start.
Perhaps he did have a sensitive soul. But he also had the physique of a football player. He offered the straightforward, high-cheekboned, square-jawed visage of the American heartland. And soon she learned he was charm itself. “Not bad,” she recalled to me years later. Even before dinner was served that evening, she had this idea—Not bad at all.
Of course, Heb’s parents saw her attraction. Consequently, after she and my father had been for several long afternoon walks, her parents warned her that poets generally make very little money. At that time my father was waiting for pages of his newest book to be shipped from England for binding and publishing in the United States.
German U-boats were sinking a great many ships then, and Dad expressed his worry over the safety of his “sheets.” Heb, who still did not know my father very well, was pleased to be able to relieve her parents’ minds. Mr. Eberhart may have an avocation of poetry, she reported, but her parents would be pleased to learn that he had business sense as well—he was an importer of fine linens.
By the time that notion was dispelled, it was obviously too late to save Heb from her fate. She was in love and mightily so. Reciprocating the feeling, my father decided it was time to give Heb an important gift. At an auction, he bought her what he was told was a string of cultured pearls. Touched by the gift, Heb sent the pearls to a jeweler to be cleaned and restrung. When they were returned to her, they were accompanied by an appraisal identifying them as a perfect string of natural pearls.
Now, here’s why my mother was, from the very first, a perfect mate for my father. Mom told me she never checked up on this discrepancy. It was more fun, she felt, not to know.
Were her pearls cultured, as Dad had paid for? Or had her string been switched by mistake at the jewelers with a much more valuable natural string? Or maybe the two appraisals had been switched by mistake? After all, pearls look pretty much the same, one from another, unless you’re an oyster. Maybe now Mom really did have a valuable necklace of natural pearls, and someone else had her cultured ones—and neither of them would ever know! What fun!
But Dad was ever a diffident lover. He was good with a bayonet, with a pearl necklace, and with a poem, but he was hesitant—as it is said nowadays—about commitment. All through 1940 and halfway through 1941, Heb and Dick were inseparable. Frequently they discussed marriage. However, my father worried deeply that marriage might “kill off the poetry,” as later he expressed it to me.
In July 1940, Dad took Heb to Chicago to visit his brother, Dryden, and Dryden’s new wife, Dudie. During that visit, Uncle Dry took Dad aside and told him firmly that he must either marry the woman or set her free to pursue other marital opportunities, and that he, Dryden, would prefer the former. Meanwhile, Heb had begun to wonder whether her continued forbearance might imperil her dignity.
One afternoon, the two of them stopped their car beside Lake Michigan and had a very long talk that escalated into a furious row. At a certain point, Heb leaped from the car and disappeared into the shrubbery. My father sat in the car for a while, fuming, expecting her at any moment to return. When she did not return, he became worried, and he got out of the car and called for her and tried to find her among the shrubs. She was nowhere to be found. Incr
easingly frantic, Dad became convinced that, in her despair, she had thrown herself into the lake and had drowned.
That’s the climax of the story as Dad always told it.
Now here’s Mom’s next chapter.
In fact, what had happened was that she had stomped along the shore until she found a bench in a park, and she had sat down there to cool off. When, to Dad’s immense relief, he finally discovered her and explained to her how sure he had been that she was dead, she became so angry once more at his insufferable self-regard that she stated she was ending this cat-and-mouse game immediately and returning to Cambridge forthwith.
When Mom described this scene to me years later, it was not with the joking tolerance she generally used. Dad’s unawareness of the simple play of human emotions and the actions they precipitated was then—and it remained—clouded by his poetical lens and by his conceit. And years later, even the memory of his blindness at so important a moment for my mother still hurt her.
Everyone was ganging up on poor Dad, and he had to do something.
So the next day, he invited Heb to attend a planetarium show before she departed. He had thought hard about this, and he had a poetical scene all planned. Under the skies of Mars and Venus, he intended to ask her his Big Question.
However, when they arrived at the Adler Planetarium, the place was closed. Dad was distraught. What was he to do? He couldn’t just ask her his question as they sat in the car. Nor was a park bench the proper venue. As they strolled along the shore of the lake, his mind was casting frantically this way and that, while at the same time he was trying to give no clue of the turmoil inside. Soon they chanced upon a spot where one might take a speedboat ride onto the lake. Should she like to take such a ride? Well, yes. He paid, they clambered aboard along with a jolly crowd of other partygoers, the engines turned over, and the ride began. Then, at the moment when the boat reached its apogee into the lake, without a word—because he was too shy to have uttered one—he reached for her finger and slid onto it his mother’s pearl ring set with diamonds.
Uncertain, hopeful, bruised, all Heb could say was, “But Richie, what does this mean?”
He was unable to do more than to nod.
However, the rest of the passengers got the point, and they began to cheer and clap.
It was good that they did, because at the moment, Dad, the passionate lyricist, could not voice anything at all. Later, when Dad would tell me this story and would arrive at this point, he would laugh. “I was speechless,” he would say. “Isn’t that amazing?”
CHAPTER SIX
Four months after my parents’ marriage, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Dad wasn’t certain what he must do. He had a responsibility to teach through that academic year at a high school in Cambridge, which he did. But what to do next?
It was late spring 1942, and the war was not going well. There were reversals on every front. With the exception of Jimmy Doolittle’s symbolically satisfying but strategically insignificant bombing raid on Tokyo, the Japanese were implacable in the Pacific. Singapore fell. Rommel was rampant in North Africa. Tobruk fell. MacArthur’s vow to return to the Philippines was moving, yet it seemed the merest braggadocio. Hitler’s June invasion of Russia had stunned Stalin. The Wehrmacht was making mincemeat of the Soviets. The Allies appeared to be fumbling. They seemed to have no plan.
Dad’s mind was frequently on the islands of the southwest Pacific, among which he had sailed with deep pleasure only fifteen years before, and he later told me it was easy to envision the horror there as the enemy overran the archipelagos. The Bataan Death March literally made Dad sick.
My father need not have enlisted. He was thirty-seven: too old. Indeed, most of his literary friends strongly discouraged him. The navy? That was no place for a poet. It would kill the muse. Had Dad no better idea what to do with his spirit than to fight a war? War was not for artists. War was for dumbbells. War was for those who had no subtlety, for those who could not see gray. Let others fight the war, stupid and blunt as it was.
In addition, Dad was confronted by the pacifism of his mother-in-law and by the conscientious objection of his brother-in-law. But Mom supported whatever Dad felt he must do, so when the spring semester was done, Dad applied for a commission in the navy as a deck officer. However, it turned out that he had red-green color blindness, a defect that excluded him from deck-officer training. In any event, he was a little too long in the tooth, so the navy routed him to the reserves, where his experience as a teacher and his skill with guns could be put to good use.
So while the battles raged abroad, he and my mother remained stateside—first in New Jersey, then Florida, and later California, until the war’s end. Dad’s duty was instructing in aerial free gunnery—teaching young men to shoot double-barreled machine guns from navy bombers. He was promoted several times and ended the war at Alameda Naval Air Station on San Francisco Bay.
As an aside, wherever he was stationed, Dad wrote. So much for killing the muse. It was the same with the business world: when Dad became a floor-wax salesman after the war, that, too, was supposed to be the death knell of his verse. But not so. Much of what I believe is Dad’s best verse comes from the times when he thrashed for hours each day in the raw stew of life—and wrote at night, to restore his connection to God, or to joy, or at least to equilibrium.
Beyond Dad’s writing, he had another asset wherever he was stationed. He had Mom. Often she would tell me that she and Dad had the best of it during the war. Most couples were separated, sometimes for months on end. My parents weren’t. Dad was always pleased to have my mother along at officers’ club parties so he could share a bit of her history. The talk might turn, let’s say, to Hitler and to how that tyrant would respond to the anticipated cross-Channel invasion of Fortress Europe. That is, to D-day.
“Let’s ask Betty,” my father would say. “She knows Hitler.”
Mom would respond with varying amounts of humor depending on the circumstance, “Oh, Richie, I don’t know him. I met him.”
And that was true. In 1936, when my mother had just graduated from Smith, her parents sent her, along with two classmates, on a trek to Europe, especially Denmark and Germany, to see cousins from my grandmother’s side and, of course, castles and cathedrals.
Just then, some of Mom’s German cousins were emigrating to America. For example, there was cousin Fritz Gynrod, the opera singer. Cousin Fritz would subject Mom to delicious embarrassment whenever she visited him in New York. He would stop her in the middle of a crowded sidewalk and burst into song, just to show her how he did that aria as compared with some other, competing singer. On the other hand, others among the Doerings and the Gynrods were staying in Germany. To Mom’s disquiet, when she visited them, she found that some of them had even voted for Hitler. The man was, after all, keeping the Communists at bay.
(Later, after the war, it turned out that none of Mom’s German cousins had voted for Hitler. In fact, it turned out that nobody had ever voted for Hitler, ever. Still, Mom used to chide them: “The man told you what he was going to do. All you had to do was read his book. He told you in advance.”
“But we were frightened, Betty. Of the Communists we were afraid.”
“You should have been afraid of yourselves!” Mom snapped.)
But in 1936, the girls had a splendid time touring Germany. Among other destinations, they went one time to Berchtesgaden. It was rumored that Hitler was there and was making himself available to the public. So they climbed up a long slope of alpine fields, lovely in the sunshine, in a slow-moving procession of the curious or the admiring. As they approached a flat near the summit, they descried a group of men in front of which the crowd was passing. The man in the middle, of average height and build, wearing a long overcoat, they determined must be Adolf Hitler. People would stop and speak with him, perhaps shake his hand, and then pass by.
As Mom approached Hitler, she struggled with what to say when she met the man. She disliked what little she knew of
him, but her relatives thought he was doing well by them, and she hated to be impolite. Finally, she settled on “Greetings from America,” in German. So when my mother met Hitler, she made a curtsy, straightened, and said her little speech. Hitler caught her eye, smiled slightly, nodded, and murmured thanks. Then my mother passed on.
Her two lasting impressions of her meeting with evil were that the famous mustache fit his face much more naturally than it appeared to do in lampoons afterward, and that the men surrounding Hitler were so burdened with exotic armaments as to seem ludicrous.
Interesting stuff at the officers’ club.
A thing that surprised me at first about Dad’s reflections on the war was that the war had another side too. Everyone who has been in combat knows that war is hell. Even a noncombatant like my father knew this, he who at least had imagination.
But there is the love of war too, which is a puzzle for a poet. And war has its funny side. Dad saw the humor in it. One of the funny moments, he always said, occurred when the men didn’t know whom to salute. You spend your entire professional life saluting everyone or being saluted by everyone else; it becomes an instinct. But what do you do when you can’t tell whom to salute? For example, Dad used to laugh, whom do you salute in a communal shower? There may have been an admiral in there, and probably some captains, but who could tell? One tired body grabbing hot water and soap is much like another. And in any event, status in a shower among men is on a basis more ancient than gold braid.
Less frequently reported of war is the sorrow at war’s end—that it is over. Many remember that photograph of the ticker tape and of that sailor kissing the girl in Times Square. But behind that happy picture is another truth: the war had given everyone something to do. Many people, especially young people, don’t quite know what to do with their lives. They shamble; they lurch. War was good for some of them. Of course, war can be horrid, but for five whole years the war solved the problem for many young men and women who didn’t know what to do. It had the ability to take them out of themselves—we were attacked; how can I help?
The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told Page 4