by Tobias Wolff
“Definitely. That’s a promise.”
“They all come back for Doctor Wolff’s famous rest cure.”
“I was thinking maybe next summer. As soon as I get myself really going on something.”
“Of course,” he said. “Filial duty. Have to look in on your old pop, make sure he’s keeping his nose clean.” He tried to smile but couldn’t, his very flesh failed him, and that was the closest I came to changing my mind. I meant it when I said I’d be back but it sounded like a bald-faced lie, as if the truth was already known to both of us that I would not be back and that he would live alone and die alone, as he did, two years later, and that this was what was meant by my leaving. Still, after the first doubt I felt no doubt at all. Even that brief hesitation began to seem like mawkish shamming.
He was staring at my wrist. “Let’s have a look at that watch.”
I handed it over, a twenty-dollar Seiko that ran well and looked like it cost every penny. My father took off his Heuer chronograph and pushed it across the table. It was a thing of beauty. I didn’t hold back for a second. I picked it up, hefted it, and strapped it on.
“Made for you,” he said. “Now let’s get these g-goddamned ties off.”
Geoffrey noticed the chronograph a few nights after I got home. We were on his living room floor, drinking and playing cards. He admired the watch and asked how much it set me back. If I’d had my wits about me I would have lied to him, but I didn’t. I said the old man had given it to me. “The old man gave it to you?” His face clouded over and I thought, Ah, nuts. I didn’t know for sure what Geoffrey was thinking, but I was thinking about all those checks he’d sent out to Manhattan Beach. “I doubt if he paid for it,” I said. Geoffrey didn’t answer for a while. Then he said, “Probably not,” and picked up his cards.
VERA’S FAMILY OWNED a big spread in Maryland. After a round of homecoming visits, I left Washington and moved down there with her to help with the haying and see if we couldn’t compose ourselves and find a way to live together. We did not. In the past she’d counted on me to control my moods so that she could give free rein to her own and still have a ticket back. Now I was as touchy and ungoverned as Vera, and often worse. She began to let her bassett hound eat at the table with her, in a chair, at his own place setting, because, she said, she had to have some decent company.
We were such bad medicine together that her mother, the most forbearing of souls, went back to Washington to get away from us. That left us alone in the house, an old plantation manor. Vera’s family didn’t have the money to keep it up, and the air of the place was moldy and regretful, redolent of better days. Portraits of Vera’s planter ancestors hung from every wall. I had the feeling they were watching me with detestation and scorn, as if I were a usurping cad, a dancing master with oily hair and scented fingers.
While the sun was high we worked outside. In the afternoons I went upstairs to the servants’ wing, now empty, where I’d set up an office. I had begun another novel. I knew it wasn’t very good, but I also knew that it was the best I could do just then and that I had to keep doing it if I ever wanted to get any better. These words would never be read by anyone, I understood, but even in sinking out of sight they made the ground more solid under my hope to write well.
Not that I didn’t like what I was writing as I filled up the pages. Only at the end of the day, reading over what I’d done, working through it with a green pencil, did I see how far I was from where I wanted to be. In the very act of writing I felt pleased with what I did. There was the pleasure of having words come to me, and the pleasure of ordering them, re-ordering them, weighing one against another. Pleasure also in the imagination of the story, the feeling that it could mean something. Mostly I was glad to find out that I could write at all. In writing you work toward a result you won’t see for years, and can’t be sure you’ll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and clears your head. I could feel it happening. I was saving my life with every word I wrote, and I knew it.
In the servants’ quarters I was a man of reason. In the rest of the house, something else. For two months Vera and I tied knots in each other’s nerves, trying to make love happen again, knowing it wouldn’t. The sadness of what we were doing finally became intolerable, and I left for Washington. When I called to say my last good-bye she asked me to wait, then picked up the phone again and told me she had a pistol in her hand and would shoot herself if I didn’t promise to come back that same night.
“Vera, really, you already pulled this.”
“When?”
“Before we got engaged.”
“That was you? I thought it was Leland.” She started to laugh. Then she stopped. “That doesn’t mean I won’t do it. Toby? I’m serious.”
“Bang,” I said, and hung up.
A WEEK LATER I traveled to England with friends. When they returned home I stayed on, first in London, then in Oxford, reading, hitting the pubs, walking the countryside. It was restful: the greenness, the fetishized civility, the quaint, exquisite class consciousness I could observe without despair because as a Yank I had no place in it. My money stretched double and nobody talked about Vietnam. Every afternoon I went back to my room and wrote. I saw little to complain of in this life except that it couldn’t go on. I knew I had to make a move, somehow buy into the world outside my window.
Some people I’d met encouraged me to take the Oxford entrance exams in early December. That left four and a half months to prepare myself in Latin, French, English history and literature. I knew I couldn’t do it alone, so I hired university tutors in each of the test areas. After they’d made it clear how irregular this project was, how unlikely, they warmed to it. They took it on in the spirit of a great game, strategizing like underdog coaches, devising shortcuts, second-guessing the examiners, working me into the ground. After the first few weeks my Latin tutor, Miss Knight, demanded that I take a room in her house so she could crack the whip even harder. Miss Knight wore men’s clothing and ran an animal hospital out of her kitchen. When she worked in the garden birds flew down and perched on her shoulder. She very much preferred Greek to English, and Latin to Greek, and said things like, “I can’t wait to set you loose on Virgil!” She cooked my meals so I wouldn’t lose time and drilled me on vocabulary and grammar as I ate. She kept in touch with my other tutors and proofread my essays for them, scratching furiously at the pompous locutions with which I tried to conceal my ignorance and uncertainty. All those months she fed her life straight into mine, and because of her I passed the examination and was matriculated into the university to read for an honors degree in English Language and Literature.
Oxford: for four years it was my school and my home. I made lifelong friends there, traveled, fell in love, did well in my studies. Yet I seldom speak of it, because to say “When I was at Oxford …” sounds suspect even to me, like the opening of one of my father’s bullshit stories. Even at the time I was never quite convinced of the reality of my presence there. Day after day, walking those narrow lanes and lush courtyards, looking up to see a slip of cloud drifting behind a spire, I had to stop in disbelief. I couldn’t get used to it, but that was all right. After every catch of irreality I felt an acute consciousness of good luck; it forced me to recognize where I was, and give thanks. This practice had a calming effect that served me well. I’d carried a little bit of Vietnam home with me in the form of something like malaria that wasn’t malaria, ulcers, colitis, insomnia, and persistent terrors when I did sleep. Coming up shaky after a bad night, I could do wonders for myself simply by looking out the window.
It was the best the world had to give, and yet the very richness of the offering made me restless in the end. Comfort turned against itself. More and more I had the sense of avoiding some necessary difficulty, of growing in cleverness and facility without growing otherwise. Of being once again adrift.
; I was in the Bodleian Library one night, doing a translation from the West Saxon Gospels for my Old English class. The assigned passage was from the Sermon on the Mount. It came hard, every line sending me back to the grammar or the glossary, until the last six verses, which gave themselves up all at once, blooming in my head in the same words I’d heard as a boy, shouted from evangelical pulpits and the stages of revival meetings. They told the story of the wise man who built his house upon a rock and the foolish man who built his house upon the sand. “And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell; and great was the fall of it.”
I’d forgotten I’d ever known these words. When they spoke themselves to me that night I was surprised, and overcome by a feeling of strangeness to myself and everything around me. I looked up from the table. From where I sat I could see the lights of my college, Hertford, where Jonathan Swift and Evelyn Waugh had once been students. I was in a country far from my own, and even farther from the kind of life I’d once seemed destined for. If you’d asked me how I got here I couldn’t have told you. The winds that had blown me here could have blown me anywhere, even from the face of the earth. It was unaccountable. But I was here, in this moment, which all the other moments of my life had conspired to bring me to. And with this moment came these words, served on me like a writ. I copied out my translation in plain English, and thought that, yes, I would do well to build my house upon a rock, whatever that meant.
Last Shot
GEORGE ORWELL WROTE an essay called “How the Poor Die” about his experience in the public ward of a Paris hospital during his lean years. I happened to read it not long ago because one of my sons was writing a paper on Orwell, and I wanted to be able to talk with him about it. The essay was new to me. I liked it for its gallows humor and cool watchfulness. Orwell had me in the palm of his hand until I came to this line: “It is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots.”
It stopped me cold. Figure of speech or not, he meant it, and anyway the words could not be separated from their martial beat and the rhetoric that promotes dying young as some kind of good deal. They affected me like an insult. I was so angry I had to get up and walk it off. Later I looked up the date of the essay and found that Orwell had written it before Spain and World War II, before he’d had the chance to see what dying in your boots actually means. (The truth is, many of those who “die in their boots” are literally blown right out of them.)
Several men I knew were killed in Vietnam. Most of them I didn’t know well, and haven’t thought much about since. But my friend Hugh Pierce was a different case. We were very close, and would have gone on being close, as I am with my other good friends from those years. He would have been one of them, another godfather for my children, another bighearted man for them to admire and stay up late listening to. An old friend, someone I couldn’t fool, who would hold me to the best dreams of my youth as I would hold him to his.
Instead of remembering Hugh as I knew him, I too often think of him in terms of what he never had a chance to be. The things the rest of us know, he will not know. He will not know what it is to make a life with someone else. To have a child slip in beside him as he lies reading on a Sunday morning. To work at, and then look back on, a labor of years. Watch the decline of his parents, and attend their dissolution. Lose faith. Pray anyway. Persist. We are made to persist, to complete the whole tour. That’s how we find out who we are.
I know it’s wrong to think of Hugh as an absence, a thwarted shadow. It’s my awareness of his absence that I’m describing, and maybe something else, some embarrassment, kept hidden even from myself, that I went on without him. To think of Hugh like this is to make selfish use of him. So, of course, is making him a character in a book. Let me at least remember him as he was.
He loved to jump. He was the one who started the “My Girl” business, singing and doing the Stroll to the door of the plane. I always take the position behind him, hand on his back, according to the drill we’ve been taught. I do not love to jump, to tell the truth, but I feel better about it when I’m connected to Hugh. Men are disappearing out the door ahead of us, the sound of the engine is getting louder. Hugh is singing in falsetto, doing a goofy routine with his hands. Just before he reaches the door he looks back and says something to me. I can’t hear him for the wind. What? I say. He yells, Are we having fun? He laughs at the look on my face, then turns and takes his place in the door, and jumps, and is gone.
TOBIAS WOLFF
Tobias Wolff lives in Northern California and teaches at Stanford University. He has received the Rea Award for excellence in the short story, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Books by Tobias Wolff
Our Story Begins
Old School
The Night in Question
In Pharaoh’s Army
This Boy’s Life
Back in the World
The Barracks Thief
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs
BOOKS BY TOBIAS WOLFF
BACK IN THE WORLD
Here are ten pungent and wonderfully skewed stories of exhilarating grace and lucidity. A gentle, ineffectual priest finds himself stranded in a Vegas hotel room with a hysterical, sunburned stranger. A show-biz hopeful undergoes a dubious audition in a hearse speeding across the California desert. As Tobias Wolff moves among these unfortunates, he observes with a compassionate eye the disparity between their realities and their dreams.
Fiction/Short Stories/978-0-679-76796-1
IN PHARAOH’S ARMY
In In Pharaoh’s Army Tobias Wolff gives us a precisely and sometimes pitilessly remembered account of his young manhood—a young manhood that became entangled in the tragic adventure that was Vietnam. Traversing an arc that leads from paratroopers’ jump school to the carnage of the Tet offensive, Wolff re-creates a war where survival depends less on skill than it does on blind luck and the ability to look inoffensive. The Americans are pitiable in their innocence and terrifying in their capacity for uncomprehending destruction. The allies are malicious practical jokers. And a successful mission is one that nets Wolff a stolen color television set—the better to watch Bonanza on Thanksgiving Day.
Memoir/978-0-679-76023-8
THE NIGHT IN QUESTION
A young reporter writes an obituary only to be fired when its subject walks into his office, very much alive. A soldier in Vietnam goads his lieutenant into sending him on increasingly dangerous missions. An impecunious mother and son go window-shopping for a domesticity that is forever beyond their grasp. Seamless, ironic, dizzying in their emotional aptness, these fifteen stories deliver small, exquisite shocks that leave us feeling invigorated and intensely alive.
Fiction/Short Stories/978-0-679-78155-4
OLD SCHOOL
The protagonist of Tobias Wolff’s shrewdly—and at times devastatingly—observed first novel is a boy at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his more privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants more than anything on earth to become a writer. But to do that he must first learn to tell the truth about himself. The climax of his quest becomes intimately entangled with the school literary contest, whose winner will be awarded an audience with the most legendary writer of his time. As the fever of the competition infects the boy and his classmates, fraying alliances, exposing weaknesses, Old School explores the ensuing deceptions and betrayals with an unblinking eye and a bottomless store of empathy. The result is further evidence that Wolff is an authentic American master.
Fiction/978-0-375-70149-8
OUR STORY BEGINS
New and Selected Stories
This collection of stories—twenty-one classics followed by ten potent new stories—displays Tobias Wolff’s exquisite gifts over a quarter century.
Fiction/Short Stories/978-1-4000-9597-1
ALSO AVAILABLE
The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, Edited by Tobias Wolff, 978-0-679-74513-6
VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 1995
Copyright © 1994 by Tobias Wolff
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1994.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Happiness Music Corporation: Excerpt from “My Happiness” by Betty Peterson and Borney Bergantine, copyright © 1948 by Happiness Music Corporation. Used by permission.
MCA Music Publishing: Excerpt from “I’m Sorry” words and music by Ronnie Self and Dub Allbritten, copyright © 1960 by Champion Music Corporation. Champion Music Corporation is an MCA company. All rights reserved. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. Used by permission.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Wolff, Tobias, [date]
In Pharaoh’s army: memories of the lost war/Tobias Wolff,
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76375-4
1. Wolff, Tobias, [date] 2. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975—Personal narratives, American. 3. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.
DS559.5.W64 1994
959704’38—dc20 94-11574
9B
Some of the names in this narrative have been changed.