The Gallery

by John Horne Burns

  I remember that at Casablanca it dawned on me that maybe I’d come overseas to die. Thus I was put for the first time in my life against a wall which I couldn’t explain away by the logic of Main Street or the Weltanschauung of Samuel Goldwyn. I’d read of the sickness of Europe and shrugged my shoulders—Oh those furreners. It didn’t occur to me that they were members of the human race. Only Americans were.

  And I remember finding myself potentially expendable according to the Rules of Land Warfare, trapped in a war which (I said) was none of my making. So I began to think of my Life with the tenderness of a great artist. I clasped myself fondly to myself. I retreated into my own private world with the scream of a spinster when she sees a mouse. And I remember that I saw the preciousness of the gift of my Life, a crystal of green lymph, fragile and ephemeral. That’s all I am, but how no-accounting everything else is, in juxtaposition to the idea of Me! What does anything else matter? The world ceases to exist when I go out of it, and I have no one’s assurance but my own for the reality of anything. Those who were machine-gunned in 1918—it’s the same as though they had never been.

  I remember that I began to think these things in Casablanca, though I didn’t utter them. Therefore in a sense I went mad. Those who brood on death in wartime find that every pattern of life shrivels up. Decency becomes simply a window-shade game to fool the neighbors, honor a tremolo stop on a Hammond organ, and courage simply your last hypocrisy with yourself—a keeping up with the Joneses, even in a foxhole.

  Oh my sweet Life, my lovely Life, my youth—all destined for a bullet. . . . Perhaps it were better if my mother hadn’t borne me. I wondered whether my father really wanted children, or was feeling sorry for himself after a rough day at the office.

  I remember in Casa going to the Gare on MP duty from the repple-depple to see that some of our joes got loaded on the forty-by-eights—forty hommes and eight chevaux. They were going to Oran, then to Algiers, then to Italy. We’d heard that General Patton had GI’s walking about in the Algiers summer in OD’s and neckties. Even the French could tell what was cooking.

  —Forty American men in a boxcar, like cattle. Wish I had my camera. The American people ought to know about this. Wish I could write my congressman.

  —They look like the French Foreign Legion.

  —Are your canteens full, men?

  —The Ayrabs sell vin rouge all along the route.

  —And buy the shirt offn your back.

  —This is an outrage to American manhood.

  —Americans are dying in Italy right now. The American people know that, don’t they?

  —Yes, but do they care as long as we preserve their standard of living for a few more years? D’ya think they give one healthy you-know-what when they get up in the morning?

  —See the chaplain. . . .

  O my Life, my green ignorant dreaming Life! I said so long to them as the forty-by-eights left the Gare at Casa.

  And when I remembered that soon it would be my turn to go to Oran, I didn’t go back to the repple-depple, even though my pass said I should. We kept on our MP brassards, and bigtimed it through Casablanca in our leggins. The bars didn’t open till 1700 hours. So we went to the Vox Theater, which the Red Cross was operating, and saw a movie in technicolor. It was all about the glory of the Army Air Forces, those same ones who at the repple-depple bitched about the calisthenics and the sleeping on chicken wire.

  I remember waiting for it to get dark in Casa because as an American I’d all sorts of ideas about the Romance of Evening. I wanted a girl, but it was the American code to pick them up in twos, with your buddy. From high school on I’d doubledated. Going steady and gettin a little lovin weren’t private affairs, because they were done in parked cars. I couldn’t understand how a French sailor, and cold sober too, could walk up to a girl by herself, talk to her, and take her arm. No sense of shame at all. French love and all that. I thought that love, till you got married, was a business of foursomes. Otherwise it seemed something rather sneaky. You were expected to kid back and forth at some bathing beach or roller-drome. Eventually you reached over somewhat sheepishly and the foursome broke up into two twosomes.

  —Nossir, nothin in the world like American wimmin. Maybe a little independent, but then ya can’t spend all ya time in bed.

  —I never did understand those Lysol ads and all that talk about keepin yaself dainty.

  —I knew a Polish beast once. She loved it.

  —French girls do things that no decent American woman would.

  —A chaplain once explained to me the difference between love and lust. But I can’t remember exactly what he told me.

  —All I know is, boy, when you’re in love, everything you do together seems beautiful. . . .

  Those Casablancaises—it wasn’t hard to get myself invited to their homes if I came armed with half my PX rations. Maman always claimed she wasn’t born in North Africa, but of course France after June, 1940, wasn’t fit to live in. Her girls went to the cinéma and to bicycle club and to dancing school. They loved to be taught American songs by rote. That was one way to kill an afternoon. They liked to be called Jackie.

  But I remember that the surer bets were in the bars. There the widows of French officers sipped crème de menthe. Not a one that didn’t claim mon mari had been killed in Tunisie; not a one whose rank had ever been lower than commandant.

  —Je suis seule ce soir avec mes rêves. . . .

  I remember how the fetid fragrance of Casablanca let up in the evenings. The oleanders came out with the bats. There was a hum and clatter from the New and Old Medinas. Little Ayrabs ceased their operating and promoting. The sound of donkeys wheezing and snorting and stalling died with their clopclopping in the streets. Then I knew that I was far, far from the States, and that nothing I had brought with me of my own personal universe would make Casa anything other than Casablanca, a hinterland of secrecy, where German submarine captains came ashore in civvies and drank by my elbow in bars.

  I remember that I first knew loneliness in Casablanca, the loneliness that engenders quietism. I was stripped of distractions and competitions since I no longer was a citizen of my own hermetical country, with ideas on progress, better homes, and sanitation. These thoughts often assailed me on the benches in the Parc Lyautey after sunset. My loneliness was that of a drunken old man sitting in a grotto and looking out on an icy sea at world’s end. Then, sinking away under a weight of time, I’d be constrained to draw down the head of her on the bench beside me. I’d kiss her in an attempt to focus all my longing and my uneasiness.

  —Demain sans doute il fera beau, et après-demain, et la semaine prochaine.

  —L’ombre s’enfuit. . . .

  Through her hair I counted the spines of barbed wire in the enclosure of the tank park. There the French kept old tanks lined up for a surprise review by General de Gaulle.

  Along with the barren names of Cazes and Mogador and Mazagan I remember birdlike ones, Henriette and Marie and Suzanne and a chorus of others who rode their bicycles by me on Saturday afternoons and made me teach them to jitterbug. They were almost like pretty boys, those Casablancaises. They had the pinched brilliance of old paupers’ garments, lovingly mended and darned.

  —Darling, they said, il faut gémir quand nous faisons l’amour. Et la prochaine fois je te prie de m’apporter un peu de chewing gum.

  I remember Casa. . . .

  SECOND PORTRAIT

  Louella

  HER PERMANENT WAS ALWAYS A WRECK IN NAPLES. IT WAS HARD to retain either her dignity or her crispness in the simple act of walking along Via Roma.

  She’d arise every morning with just a soupçon of hangover and lower herself tenderly into the fat green fascist bathtub in her apartment. There she’d float among the perfumed suds till her head cleared and she could think lovely thoughts of all the good she was going to do that day. (First she’d put on her blue uniform of sveltest cut, stroking the Red Cross patch on her left shoulder. The other girls allowed the
mselves to get wilted during the day, to wear junky jewelry and divisional patches on their lapels. But not Louella. She was proud of her volunteer status, and she always tried to conduct herself the way an American officer should.)

  Louella lay in her bathtub. A line of Emily Dickinson’s sang through her head: Success is counted sweetest by those who least succeed. . . . Actually it hadn’t much to do with the sultriness of a Neapolitan morning, but it gave her a lift. In her work, keeping up the morale of American GI’s and officers, she had to be vital. Some of the other girls weren’t. They’d done too much settlement work in Hartford slums; they’d come overseas with too starry eyes; and they’d collapse into Vassar cynicism when some lonely lieutenant colonel tried to make them in a jeep. Louella maintained that her sort were like the pioneer women in covered wagons who followed their men into the West. Names like Nancy Hanks, Ann Rutledge, and Jane Addams came to her mind. Thus at thirty-nine she’d learned a secret most American women were in danger of forgetting: war strips everyone down to their (his or her) essentials. Louella was fighting her own private war in Naples—just being a woman. Perhaps she’d never be a great one because she had too much heart and let people walk all over her. But Naples was her battlefield, and her American Red Cross uniform made her a modern Jeanne d’Arc with a smile and a coo for all comers.

  Louella’s apartment had belonged to a Fascist lawyer before AMG stuck him in the internee camp at Padula. He must have been very vain, like all Italian men, because he’d fastened a mirror over the bathtub. Louella looked up from her ablutions and smiled at herself. She’d been told she looked like Billie Burke in 1900. It was true. The dark gold hair she spent so much time keeping crisp, the too generous mouth, the slightly querulous chin. The circles under her pale blue eyes were deeper this morning. Louella wanted so much to go on the wagon, but then that would diminish her effectiveness as a morale factor. After all, when some poor flier came up from Foggia to see her, she couldn’t very well ask him to see the town on lemonade. And she knew perfectly well that those little half-moons under her eyes were because she couldn’t sleep, worrying about the state of the world.

  She’d made airplane drivers her especial province. They were so pitifully young and lost, lemon-haired kids of twenty-four. And they seemed to be grateful for the stabilizing influence of a maturer woman. Younger girls would have abandoned themselves to mad fun on equal terms with fliers, but Louella instead played the part of one of those eighteenth-century women (just past the first flush) who held brilliant salons and had a profoundly moral influence on the young men who sat at their feet. She knew, with pardonable pride, that she was fulfilling a function unique in the Red Cross. An American woman is a symbol in the mind of any American soldier in Italy, but an American woman divorced of all selfish aims was unique in Naples of August, 1944.

  When she first came to Naples, she’d tried to interest herself in the GI’s because she felt it was her duty to do so. She’d read that they were the underprivileged, the proletariat of a democratic army. But somehow she couldn’t quite get to the GI’s. All they wanted was to hold hands and talk about nothing. So gradually a conviction was born in Louella (which she never whispered to her dearest friends) that, though they were good kids and all that, the GI’s were just a little . . . vulgar. Perhaps God had intended her for something, well, on a little higher level. And then the officers were much lonelier because their commissions had put them into unnaturally exalted positions. Wasn’t she perhaps helping those who were the worst off? GI’s have buddies and signorinas all over the place, but most American officers are isolated and sensitive. Which reminded her of that ineffable line: If I can stop one heart from breaking. . . .

  The war had been the consummation of Louella’s life. Like most people who are a teensy bit out of the ordinary, she’d waited thirty-nine years for something into which she could throw herself wholly. She liked to compare her life up to now to a high-powered engine wasted in lifting matches. And now (changing the metaphor) she was living in the most sorrowful time the world had ever seen, a time to sink her teeth into. She’d started her Public Ministry by having officers to her lovely home in Cambridge, giving them those little snacks they couldn’t get at Fort Devens. The way they’d smiled at her during her candlelight suppers had given her a priestesslike ecstasy of sacrifice and service. She was forgetting herself in the sorrows of others, than which there is no more cathartic annihilation of self.

  But gradually the type of officer who came to her Sunday Evenings at Home began to give her qualms. She’d always been a woman of unusual sensibilities, and she smelled something phony. Instead of the gallant second lieutenants who used to come around for her lobster salad, who had high ideas and talked vital things till electric currents chased up and down her spine, she’d observed that she was now entertaining rather smug older officers with big rear ends. They were forever talking about how they’d give their eyeteeth to get overseas, but they never seemed to go. They cursed the Pentagon, which (they said) had emasculated old warhorses like themselves into the chairborne infantry. Now Louella, whatever her faults (and she was by no means perfect), wasn’t exactly slow. She decided that these officers were cowards who were making a good thing out of the war. They had all the protected prestige of the uniform and none of its trials. In fact, they were having the time of their lives in the foxholes of the 1st Service Command, drawing per diem, eating C-rations at the Copley Plaza. And all the while they cursed draft dodgers and strikers and criticized the slow conduct of the war in North Africa. She got so that she couldn’t look at them without that nausea that visits women of scruple. They were nothing but thugs got up like an Arrow collar ad. She’d close her eyes at the head of her buffet, clutch her napkin, and think that the boys she could serve weren’t in the United States any more. They were dying in Africa and looking at the dirty Arab women and wondering if everybody had forgotten them. Louella felt faint with pity.

  So she’d joined the Red Cross as a volunteer, with the stipulation that they send her overseas immediately.

  Louella got out of her tub, dried herself, and stepped into her immaculate uniform. Dry cleaning in Naples was unpredictable, but they loved her so at the QM laundry that she got priorities on all her garments. She’d pointed out to the officer in charge that, whereas a Negro truck driver didn’t have to bother about his appearance, it was her stock in trade. He’d agreed with her feelingly because he came from Alabama.

  She decided to look in on her roommate Ginny, a pitiful little thing from Detroit. It was Ginny’s job in the Red Cross to serve coffee and doughnuts to all airplanes landing wounded at Capodichino.

  The shutters weren’t down in Ginny’s room. The implacable light of Naples streamed in. Sandflies made a dancing nimbus before the open window. Louella guessed that Ginny had probably got drunk when she’d come off duty at the airport, had poured herself into bed, and was now in the troubled sleep of a hangover. Ginny lay under her mosquito netting, her hair over her face. Tears lay in the pools under her eyes. That was just like Ginny, to go out and get tight, give herself to some GI she felt sorry for, then come home and cry her silly little eyes out. For a long time Louella had wanted to have a good taking down of hair with her roommate, but Ginny’d always shied away from woman-to-woman confidences. Perhaps she’d been scared by a big nigger while doing settlement work.

  Louella stood at the head of Ginny’s bed, aware of how trim and spruce she herself looked, while that dizzy little thing lay there with her tears leaving gashes in what rouge she hadn’t washed off.

  —Morning, stinky, Ginny said, reaching for the handkerchief beside her cigarettes on the night table.

  —Hullo, darling. Did you pour coffee for your basket cases at the airport last night? Then did you meet some strapping staff sergeant and go off and get tight with him?

  —I wasn’t drunk, Ginny said.

  She lit a cigarette and offered Louella one, which was gracefully declined. Louella never wanted her roommate to fe
el she had to be nice to her. After all, she’d made the first overtures, which Ginny had repulsed in the most peasant manner. But Ginny began to cry in earnest now, puffing on her cigarette and sobbing in a manner that reminded Louella of Italian opera.

  —I’m about due for a section eight, Ginny said. If I can get one from the Red Cross. Stinky, I can’t stand it much longer. . . . Those poor little bastards. Flown in from the evac hospitals. . . . They’ve got legs off . . . arms off . . . wounds all over them. . . . And they just lie there on the stretchers and grin at you. . . . I’ve never seen such eyes. . . . I try to pour the coffee, but my hands get shaky, like I had d.t.’s . . . and I haven’t. I don’t drink as much as you do, stinky.

  —Some girls can hold it better than others, Louella said softly.

  She was of the opinion that a reproof can be delivered in the mildest tone. That was part of the tradition of a great lady. But then anything subtle would be wasted on Ginny.

  —God, I’m not soft, Ginny said, her sobs strangling off. But it just knocks hell out of me, stinky, what I see on those hospital planes. I’d settle for an assignment in Rome, giving instructions on shopping tours from behind a counter. . . . This is something I just don’t understand. They’re so good, those kids. What harm did they ever do? And they lie there, terribly, terribly hurt. And if they’re able to talk, all they want is to discuss upstate New York and the crops and their mothers and their girls. Such sweet faces . . . not at all bitter . . . American men are so good-looking.

  —American men, Louella said, have understood very little about the world in which they live. They’re new to anguish. Europeans have already lived with it. Europeans are concerned simply with existing. Americans have always had enough and to spare. . . . Naturally Americans are baffled by combat. It doesn’t have much to do with the stock market ticker and that dash for the eight-ten after kissing your wife. . . . But they’ll get over it after a time. There have been wars before, and men have recovered from them.