The Gallery

by John Horne Burns

  —They’re ZI-ing me. It’s one way to get out of all this crap.

  He told me about the new truth drug they gave him, and he wondered what he’d talked about under its influence.

  —Just like you do when you get crocked, I said reassuringly.

  —Well, anyway, I’m getting out of all this crap, he said over and over.

  After a while the MP told me I must go. The MP’s at the Parker House were a strange gang, gentle and gangling and tender. They used to kid the nuts, and they told me on my way out that many people outside in the army were crazier than some locked up in here.

  I remember that outside on the streets of Casa I wondered which of us would go next to the Parker House. I got lower and lower because I knew Perkins wasn’t just pretending. So finally I went into the Select Bar and started throwing them down. I got bluer and bluer in spite of the phonograph playing “L’ombre s’enfuit” and the luscious Casablancaise hanging over her cash register and the pigs sitting buxomly on the green leather chairs and waiting till I’d buy them a drink. It was a new sort of drunkenness I hit that evening. I seemed to be a ghost in a roomful of yelling people, all aliver than I.

  When they threw me out of the Select at closing time, I lurched through the streets of Casa and got lost. I’d go a few blocks, lean against a doorway, black out, come to, and then blunder on again. It was the only time I’d ever wanted to meet an MP. Once I came to and looked up to see the stars of Casa flickering. I was lying on my back in the rue, and an Ayrab was bending over me. He was removing my cigarettes and franc notes from my pockets. I began to laugh in my stupor as I thought of the GI legend that the Ayrabs will cut off your balls and sew them in your mouth. I laughed although the cognac had paralyzed me. The Ayrab stopped his frisking and kissed me on the forehead:

  —Je cherche ce soir un copain du genre féminin.

  And knowing I was about to black out again, I gathered up all my forces and yelled. The Ayrab fled laughing into the blue shadows. I remember being trussed into the MP wagon. And I remember waking in an immaculate bed at the Sixth General.

  —I want Lieutenant Duffy to give me a pink pill.

  —Oh hush your mouth, the nurse said, reversing my ice pack. You’re still as drunk as a skunk.

  I remember when it came our turn to go in the forty-by-eights. We sat by the long stubby train in the freight yards of Casa, swatting flies. The officer in charge of the movement bustled about counting noses. We lay on our barracks bags swigging from our canteens.

  —This is it. We’re going to Italy to fight.

  —Ah, blow it. . . . I figure we’re going to Oran or Algiers for more of this base section life.

  I remember that our officers had two cars of their own up front. We were put with all our equipment into the open latticed horse-cars. Guard details were posted in each car. Through the slats the Ayrabs could stick their fingers and remove anything, for we heard that the train went through Morocco at a speed less than a man could run. We made our beds on the floor, where there were still leavings of hay.

  I remember how strange and autonomous it was to scud slowly through Morocco in a boxcar. At one end we had a pile of C-rations and a gasoline can of water. On the floor were our packs and blankets. We slept like a litter of kittens. The brown cleft hills swam slowly past; I sat on a ledge with my legs swinging. The crap games started up. The train would stop in the middle of desert spaces where there was nothing to halt for. And Ayrab kids would come out of the nowhere as though they’d inched up from the sand. With them, since we’d been red-lined for months, we did a thriving trade in mattress covers, shirts, and trousers. They brought us vin rouge in leather bottles. At night, lying on the floor, it was hard to sleep. In the moonlight the sandy hummocks drifted past as though I watched them from a magic carpet. Or sometimes I remember that the duty officer would come to our car when the train was taking on water. He wore fatigues and carried his carbine slung on his shoulder. After six months in Casa he figured that these were genuine combat conditions. Who knew but what the Ayrabs would ambush us all by the full of the moon when we were stalled out in the middle of nowhere?

  —Remember it’s a court-martial offense to sell anything to the Ayrabs, men.

  —Yessir, we said in chorus.

  In his barracks bag the mess sergeant had beaucoup vin that he’d laid in before we left Casa. He had also a small spirit lamp, a present from his last shackjob. He was a Polack hunky and knew all the angles. He knew how to lick around officers with a bold obsequiousness that made them think he was treating them as a rough and ready equal. With us he was like an SS man in the movies. When drunk, which was always, he’d knock our heads together and let loose on us a stream of obscenities. He said that these phrases excited a shackjob more than loving words. Then when we were black and blue, he’d fall into a sort of motherliness toward us and make coffee. He was in his element in that forty-by-eight. Made us bring him his breakfast box of K-ration as he lay yawning in his sack. His buddy the second cook Jacobowski was growing a mustache on the trip.

  I remember the sorrows of our officers in their two wagons-lit up front. The French locomotive sooted all over the cars so that they had to sit all day with their windows closed while they read their cases or did crossword puzzles. Our officers fell into types. The Sporting Set had their musette bags full of rum and didn’t come out of their haze till we hit Algiers. The Girls had pneumatic mattresses which they inflated every evening at sundown. On the second day out of Casa the officers ordered the French engineer to put their cars at the end of the train. Said they were tired of looking like niggers. But French engineers take orders from no one but Maréchal Pétain.

  Outside of Oran at Mostaganem I remember we stopped on a siding near Prisoner of War Enclosure 131. Shipping to Algiers were all Italian officer P/W who’d decided that they were no longer fascist but wanted to collaborate with us Allies. We got out of our forty-by-eights and stretched our legs. We were warned by the duty officer that we mustn’t fraternize with the P/W.

  —Fraternize, my arse, the mess sergeant said after the officer had gone. Who wants to fraternize with an Eyetie? They fired on our boys in Africa, didn’t they? And they’re doin it now in Italy.

  —They did it because they were told to, the pfc said.

  He was a liberal and wore horn-rimmed spectacles.

  —I say, put the bastards against a wall, the mess sergeant said.

  He always shouted his opinions.

  —You forget the Geneva Convention, the pfc said gently.

  —Sure, we treat em white! the mess sergeant said, looking at his buddy Jacobowski. So in twenty years they can declare war on us again. What have they got to lose? They’ll live better’n they did in the Eyetalian Army. . . . Friggin wops . . . Dagos. . . .

  —Polack, the pfc said, almost inaudibly.

  I remember how the Italian officers approached their cars with the MP guards. I thought of the Guineas of Brooklyn and Joisey City with their pimpled faces and their oiled hair and the aggressive spite that made them boxers and corner toughs. For I’d never seen anything of the Italian Army except the explosive tiny Sicilians from Camp 101 who used to wait in the officers’ messes of Casa.

  —Christ! screamed the mess sergeant, waving his lumpy fists. They’re gettin parlor cars!

  —The Geneva Convention, the pfc prompted under his breath.

  —Those Ginso bastards are gettin parlor cars while we sleep like pigs in a forty-by-eight! Will someone please tell me what this goddam war is about?

  We walked a little closer to have a look at the Italian officers, waiting to mount the train with their gear.

  —Gosh, they are good-looking men, the company clerk said.

  He read the poems in Stars and Stripes.

  I remember that the Italians struck me with marveling. They looked neither like movie gangsters nor like the sad barbers of Brooklyn. These carried themselves with a certain soft proudness, though I remember arrogant ones among them. A few
were blond. But nearly all wore a delicacy of feature and a dignity I’d never seen before. Their noses and their mouths had a different look than Americans’. The Bersaglieri officers had sugarloaf caps with feathers in them. The Alpini officers wore shorts that showed their fine long legs, like the limbs on wrestlers in old statues. And all had sewed, below the left shoulder, a metal boot.

  —Well, Musso did all right in his men, the company clerk said.

  —Wait till we see the wimmin, the mess sergeant promised. I’m keepin my C-ration till we get to Italy. Those Ginso signorinas will do anything for food.

  —Damn good-looking guys, a corporal said. But I s’pose they’d put a knife in your back as quick as they’d look at you.

  I remember that one of our officers talked Italian. His old man had left Naples and had made a mint in the meat-packing business in Chicago. This was the moment Lieutenant Figarotta’d been sweating out for years, a chance to crap all over the folks from the old country. He stepped forward and offered a cigarette to an officer of the Alpini. When the officer reached out with a smile and a bow, Lieutenant Figarotta tittered and twitched the cigarette out of reach. The Italian officer flushed and stood at rigid attention. This scene angered some of us.

  —If you ask me, the pfc with glasses said, they make some of our officers look sick.

  But no one had asked him.

  —Pretty boys, ain’t they? the mess sergeant ranted to his following, but not too loudly. How’d ya like to have ya sisters goin out on dates with them? Because that’s exactly what them P/W are doin back in the States. And our wimmin are fassenated with that Dago stuff.

  And I remember that, as he was getting into his car, a captain of the Bersaglieri dropped his portfolio at my feet. I hesitated an instant, then I bent and picked it up and handed it to him.

  —Grazie infinite, he said.

  There was something old and warm in his voice such as I’d never heard before. I felt that beyond all pretense he liked me, that he was lonely and lost. On his lips was a neat mustache. He had clear gray eyes behind lashes longer than any I’d ever seen, except those that girls buy in the five and ten. His breath was sweet. He wavered an instant before me then vaulted into his car.

  The Italian officers hung out of the windows of their cars, talking excitedly to one another like vacationists on an excursion train. Most had blue-gray caps like Mussolini’s, with the earflaps tied up over their heads. Some waved cordially to the MP’s.

  —Addio al reticolato, a quel benedetto recinto! one called.

  The mess sergeant was beside himself with fury. He raved at all the cars of Italian officers:

  —If ya hadn’t declared war on us, I wouldn’t be here lookin at ya goddam sissy faces.

  —They had no more to do with the war than you did, the pfc confided to his spectacles.

  I remember that as I lay down again in my sack in the forty-by-eight, I mused on the faces of those Italians. They had fewer lines, fewer splotches than the young men of America. I wasn’t quite convinced that their sorrow came because they were defeated. It must be some agony that we as yet knew nothing of. . . . But then they’d declared war on us. They were our enemies. Yet in those young men of Italy I’d seen something centuries old. An American is only as old as his years. A long line of something was hidden behind the bright eyes of those Italians. And then and there I decided to learn something of the modern world. There was something abroad which we Americans couldn’t or wouldn’t understand. But unless we made some attempt to realize that everyone in the world isn’t American, and that not everything American is good, we’d all perish together, and in this twentieth century. . . . My mind kept reverting to the captain of the Bersaglieri. And under different circumstances he’d have ordered me to my death. . . . Something stirred in me that touched me more profoundly than ever before, even in love. And I fell asleep. . . .

  FOURTH PORTRAIT

  Father Donovan and Chaplain Bascom

  IN AUGUST, 1944, THE GALLERIA UMBERTO ECHOED LIKE A BOWLING alley to the noise of the truck convoys going north to the front. Father Donovan and Chaplain Bascom used to stroll afternoons through the din and the heat. Sometimes while window-shopping they’d take off their khaki caps and mop their brows. Chaplain Bascom wore a gold oak leaf, but Father Donovan was still that same first lieutenant who’d left a South Philadelphia parish with the blessing of his bishop and the Military Ordinariate.

  Chaplain Bascom was commenting on the heat. He was a stout man, used to the sun over his turnip patch in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

  —Hope we never git closer to hell than this, padre.

  —Beware of sins against the Holy Ghost, chaplain, said Father Donovan.

  For two years now he’d been indoctrinating his friend with Catholicism. He did it gently, for he was a mild sort of priest who replied you’re welcome when a telephone operator thanked him for his number.

  The two chaplains often walked arm in arm. They were the only officers in the 34th Division who did so, sober. They were reasonably fond of each other. And their friendship was high propaganda for the chief of chaplains, showing how all faiths worked together in the army.

  Chaplain Bascom withdrew his arm to light a briar pipe, his only vice.

  —These Neapolitans, he boomed jovially, could do with a shoutin baptism by immersion.

  —But they’ve already been baptized once, said Father Donovan. Though not in the Baptist Church, chaplain.

  —Well, I’ve written to Charleston, Chaplain Bascom went on doggedly. I told them that Naples is an unplowed field for Baptist missionaries with a will to work. . . . Bibles instead of cameos on Via Roma. Prohibition to cut out all this devil’s drink of vino. And good friendly Barathea Clubs on Wednesday evenings to keep these signorinas off the streets.

  This was the focus of their differences. The division chaplain had introduced them in the staging area, and they’d been friends ever since. To Missus Bascom and Lavinia, Chaplain Bascom reiterated by V-mail that Padre Donovan was almost a white man. And Father Donovan had offered up many a Mass and rosary for the conversion of Chaplain Bascom and his South Carolina flock. Both were popular chaplains in the 34th. Men who had knocked up a signorina came to Father Donovan for confession. Those desiring advice on their life insurance came to Chaplain Bascom. They complemented one another. Chaplain Bascom at the end of a meetin yelled for every man to get away from the sides of the tent and come up and be saved. Father Donovan was still as shy and efficient and button-eyed as when he played quarterback at the seminary.

  Father Donovan looked up at the glassless dome of the Galleria, at the lordly angels sounding their trumpets from the cornices.

  —Spacious as the Vatican, he mused. I’ll get you to an audience with the Holy Father next time we’re in Rome.

  —H’m’m, padre. A body has to draw the line at some things.

  Chaplain Bascom stumped along, huffing on his briar pipe. He’d underestimated the papist till the division went on the line. Then he’d seen why even Protestant colonels of regiments tried to requisition Romish chaplains. For along with his combat boots and neckerchief, Father Donovan wore a Purple Heart. He might have looked like a mouse, but the Italian-born mice at Cassino hadn’t been so much in evidence as Father Donovan ministering to the dying under a helmet that made him look like a child playing soldier.

  And Father Donovan also whisked along thinking his own thoughts. Often he looked slyly at Chaplain Bascom. How much he thought on Chaplain Bascom while reading his breviary! What a find this man would be for Holy Mother Church! That swollen voice, how eloquent it could be pouring out in praise of Mary, instead of inveighing against dancing and cardplaying and likker! Father Donovan would have given his Purple Heart for the conversion of Chaplain Bascom. For this grace he importuned every saint in heaven, including his dead mother, who’d scrubbed floors all her life.

  Father Donovan bent down and fastened a buckle on his combat boot. He paused to mop his thin pale face. He spied some
GI’s sitting at tables on the terrace of an outside bar.

  —In the mood for a cool drink, chaplain?

  —None of this vino for me, padre. You should take the pledge yourself.

  —And what would I do at morning Mass? Father Donovan laughed plaintively.

  They sat at one of the wicker tables under the dome of the Galleria Umberto. All about him Father Donovan spotted GI’s of the 34th who waved to him and went back to their sprawling. He ordered a glass of vermouth for himself and a tumbler of flavored gaseous water for Chaplain Bascom.

  —Our boys mustn’t think I’m guzzling, Chaplain Bascom said, holding up his orangeade to show everyone in the Galleria that he was taking the Neapolitan equivalent of an ice-cream soda.

  —It would only increase their esteem for you, Father Donovan said primly.

  Now Father Donovan didn’t smoke. He always said that the fumes of Chaplain Bascom’s pipe were enough for two. In spite of his wispy body he was in fine condition, and combat had made him like a grasshopper. Chaplain Bascom’s steaky belly had gone down during these two years of Africa and Sicily and Italy when he wasn’t getting Missus Bascom’s corn bread for supper. Father Donovan used to spend Sunday afternoons in South Philadelphia playing touch football with the kids of his choir—after he’d peeled off his Roman collar and rolled up his cassock till it was a black towel around his waist. Father Donovan loved baseball, candy, and the movies—after he’d assured himself that they’d been certified by the Legion of Decency.