To the airmen, when she worked at the airfield in St. Louis and then in Forestville, Nonie was of value. I saw her hardly at all once she was in Carolina; so I know what I know of that part of her life long-distance or from imagination. In those days, not many women, not many men, could be around men troops who were going into combat. Some people choked on the nearness of death, on the brooding fact of wartime loss, the loss of one’s right to live; but Nonie could brushingly make her way past that; unsquinting, she could endure the systematized brutality and stupidity, the government of pride, the adroit killers, the second-raters. She was quite a strong-willed citizen.
Nonie’s moral taste—I don’t mean of a goody-goody sort—her open-eyelidded thing toward violence and will, she came to hate what was not like that—I’m not a naïve girl. She had always hated in herself any sense of having been fooled. Or wrong. But the destruction wrought by certain s.o.b. ’s, inept fatality so readily available, the revelation reflected unsteadily from the deaths of others, and grief that stupid accidents were unbounded, unpenned, loose in the world—it was like when she was thirteen . . . It was Nonie in the storm . . . She was somewhat like that in disposition. She was quite expert on armament and manufacturing and on the cheating manufacturers did in their manufacturing procedures and that of some unions, the cheating, the laziness, the stupidity. The possibility of death because of the actions of dishonest souls being petty (her word) affected her day by day. It’s all wrong but what can you do about it. She said, “I feel whupped . . .” Momma said Nonie was burnt out. Momma said Nonie refused to give in. Momma said, Nonie keeps on going. Death in combat might be death by accident. Or by semi-assassination by your own side. I know enough to know what’s going on—that meant she knew of death arriving because of an airman’s failure of nerve. She knew about death following on the apparently shallow blunders of bad leadership. The reality of uninspired, self-loving officers and the gutting of good units out of malice and the inspiriting of certain other units, the realities of officers and pilots and of maintenance men and of the metal of pieces of equipment: this sort of weight, she wanted to know what this meant.
Or she wanted to ignore it, toss it off she wants to say it doesn’t matter; she has a job to do; everyone has a job to do—well, let’s do it.
Men she knew, collapsing, cracking up or being promoted and cracking or being demoted, flunked out, sometimes viciously, the difference in fates and in personal strength, she could not maintain her sense of reason . . . She said in a stiff voice, “I am having my ups and downs . . .”
Then, every few months, she went violently crazy but only for two or three days. She got mean and careless, moistly loony. She would fight with anyone. The entwining of her sense of things, her perceptions, her systems (her pride), the inside of her flesh, with the outer project of the war and the ways she was instructed in how things happened in the conduct of the war and caused the outcomes of battles and of aerial combats more and more upset her with her own current sense of truth . . . I mean her concern for certain of her own principles of triumph became knotted in a bad way in her. She couldn’t separate herself from her moods—she couldn’t get the knots undone. In her were reactions and knowledge about the how-it-works . . . the works, the kit and caboodle. Those terms, how-it-works . . . the works, the kit and caboodle, refer to what-is-involved in real-world stuff over periods of time. They have to do with meaning when time is taken into account.
I don’t know how Casey helped in those periods or not—I wasn’t there—and I don’t know how they taught each other lessons and so on.
The authoritarian and lawless, the extravagantly third-rate and vicious began, briefly, to get her down. It’s burnout, I guess, she said, finally adopting that term for herself.
It is possible to use that term, but in real moments runaway souls—lying and crying and trying to get away to truth and less pain, mercifully or mercilessly—become different from before—one’s troubled minutes are like that; she had entered a different world of resolve—of clarity, but of damaged momentum and perhaps of opacity, after all . . . Lila said, Nonie made an investment. Nonie speculated on her youth . . . The speculation tormented her, a certain suspense in it.
Boys: she rarely, never really, let them influence what she thought—so far as I know. And she managed her independence toward women. She was somewhat brilliant about those things. Her systems impressed me. Her style: she had a kind of plunging style in sync with certain currents of feeling and thought that placed her in American daily politics as semi-extraordinary in a normal way—within a certain social range—a woman, a nice girl.
Warlike, competent, competently flexible in the situation of the war and also in the local situations arising from the circumstances of the war, adaptable, successful on the home front at preparing others for fatal combat in war, she came into a certain self-conscious attention of mind. People saw her value. Outsiders admired her. Her more or less self-centered silence and her kind of pain, even her pain about the world, these were centered on what was in her own mind, were fixed on her own observations, came from her own life and from her own dreams . . . her new misery.
Not from Casey. Nonie admired Casey and the possibilities in life for a woman that Casey saw and the extremity of self-will, the marvelous drama of that; I think these things are so; and let us say Casey was a rival to existence and to my ways of thinking and behaving, but as Nonie grew into someone influenced by Casey, the magnetic orbits changed; and I became a rival of Casey’s, although we did not know each other. I mean I am part of what Nonie knew. And used to fight off Casey’s influence. Nonie used bits and versions of my ways of reasoning and my sorts of perceiving in order to live.
“I’m a good general—I’m not a saint,” Nonie said to me . . . We don’t have many American saints . . .
She was still Nonie, but she would call long-distance, and in the house of the sick people, I would answer the phone.
“Are you still a sucker for stories?” she might begin.
“Sure,” I would say, if I was eleven years old or twelve.
Or about her love life—she called it that—or some guy’s attempted suicide—or a real suicide, a divorce: information about the world.
She would say, “Tell me what you think a real bastard is, first.”
Or: “Do you think life is sad? Do the books you read say a lot about sadness?”
It was funny: I could hear her jealousy-in-abeyance—it was in her breath, that it was in abeyance, like the sound of nervous running around in the switching tail of a horse, in the dark, a whispery thing.
I would answer her by rote, cautiously, in some politic fashion. And I ran away from her often, even face-to-face, but especially at a distance, in spirit and on the phone, I mean. And I never wrote to her about these things.
“It depends,” I said. “It’s usually not too smart to have a closed mind on matters like this.”
“Is that so? Why is that?”
“A closed mind doesn’t win a war.”
“Oh? But why? Tell me why.”
“Nonie, I can’t . . . I think that when you close a subject, it’s bad . . . Or it turns bad—or conclusions get to be untrue very fast . . . But you don’t always get a choice . . . You have to shut down. And go on . . . That’s a lot of the time, I mean.”
“I’d like to be a nice person,” she said vaguely.
In an odd, broken, adolescent voice I said, “You are a nice person . . .”
“No. I’m not. I’m all right, though. Keep your nose clean, Little Brother.”
It’s in-the-air, it’s the zeitgeist—wartime fashion.
“Understanding these things is one of the things we’re poor in,” I would half shout, a fatuous kid over the phone to her.
None of her wartime friendships lasted. The romances with guys didn’t last more than a few years. Casey lasted two and a half years.
Nonie is cracking under the weight of what she now knew . . .
No one she
knew from the jobs she had in the earlier parts of the war looked anybody up a year later—she said—after transfers and breakdowns and burnout . . . Everyone is too ashamed, she said. Then: “It’s all so petty I could spit,” she said.
She and I are part of a far harder mathematics than the multiplications and divisions of family emotion are.
Her sadness now means her vocabulary is different: events in life (and this includes love) have a peculiar nature, the number of lives down the drain . . . cannon fodder . . . the hierarchy of merit—and of survival—and the hierarchies marking one’s being of greater or of less use to the world—and the hierarchies of will, of successful vanity and wickedness . . .
What Casey had seen in Nonie early on, Casey’s excitement at seeing a young woman in a state of silence at the beginning of her flowering, was no longer visible.
Nonie said, “We get older, Wiley . . . Not too many people get smarter, I’ll tell you . . .”
She has various kinds of absolutism of focus, of narrowness, various disciplines, but now each is expanding in a clouded, perhaps harmed and harmful way, into an extended and personal sensibility about the world . . . not more intelligent, but experienced and sad. Nonie was never tactful, you know. We were all surprised by what she became—it was a surprise party for all of us . . . “Love” as a surprise party? How educational . . . How trying . . . A lot of the education you get in this world is what you don’t want to know, but you learn to know it anyway. The SOUL, which is the sum total of what you are, up to this moment, what has been done to you, what you have done in return, that weight in the breast, fogs up the chambers of attention. You have an emergency—of the soul. Her condition of attention and of being able to focus, her degree of concentration has become strange. When shutting out becomes the topic, she opens in an oddly oblique way instead. Shutting out is a common wartime thing, shutting out and then opening out into a situation with concentration is what is meant when you say someone is good-at-something. It is what concentration is. And being a nut. She is a nut for working hard, she loves her work . . . It is called love-for-one’s-work until one is burned out.
Nonie told me that no one can tell being burned out from malingering . . . from having had enough . . . from mere restlessness . . .
The now-unrecognized moments in a mythical and maybe immortal way—I mean as in a parable—show me Nonie moving as if by remote control at some sort of distance from herself among the deaths, the emotions, the stupidities that controlled things in such a way that things become uncontrolled . . .
Nonie said, “The people who do the best are serious but not too serious . . .” She wants to find a formula.
She is like a china doll, Momma said. People expected too much of her . . . You have to be nice at a party, but you have to learn to say no, too . . . And: “She’s a little cracked, my daughter . . . Well, I’m ill: I hope Casey can take care of her . . . Everything is a battle and a half when you’re ill,” Momma said and sighed.
No one I knew made it through the war without cracking up—at least, they cracked up for a while . . . Some got over it—some got over it a little. Some didn’t get over it; not ever.
You have to be as tough as you have to be . . . If people are rough, you have to learn to play rough . . . Everybody and his brother has a hand in what you have to be . . .
It was like one’s dreams. In the skull of the dreamer, in these stilted representations of the real, the motions of breath nearby are a stilted attempt to recognize the plausibility that in the Messerschmitt is Monsieur Smith with a knife rat-a-tat-tat, the vehicle of every man and of every man’s murder—and are not real motions.
“Who am I?” Nonie asked. “I wish someone would tell me . . .”
Some of the early deaths had been unnecessary even as sacrifices. Training became more sophisticated, realer, more concerned with actualities of enmity and topography and weaponry. Ignorance and exhaustion are great forces that shape our lives and determine battles. Everyone she had known had lied to her.
Nonie worked hard—she worked herself into the ground—she helped establish the Air Force and Air Force training methods; she helped impart procedures of combat to human minds . . . The airmen gave her a joke medal. She fought hard, and she looked so young. They named twelve planes after her, and streets in two separate camps. In the streets of tents you would come on signs with her name on them: Nonie Street. N. S. Silenowicz Street . . . She was as good as any colonel . . . She’s my daughter and she does important work . . . She has done very important things . . . It was important work that meant SOMETHING—life and death for many, many people . . .
Perhaps more important than anything I do or can do or will ever do.
Nonie’s nerves: two years at that time was a wartime generation. She said her work was two steps from combat.
Willful and a troublemaker, a woman of guile and will—and very good-looking—she accomplished a good deal on a very specific level of accomplishment. The millions and millions of kids who turned eighteen at every instant of that year and then the harvesting of their youth in the shadow realm of minds and then, in reality, and the destruction of the animal world, well, how do you live with that? Perhaps war is the triumph of the exalted ordinary. I really do not know. In the war she eased the way for many and helped preserve the minds of many. Eased the way to murder? The ways one moment props or crowds the next and elusively becomes it, but not clearly, makes it hard to judge these matters. Most outcries of moral insult are incompetent in relation to reality. Surely, we were about to be murdered by enemies.
“Who are you to judge? I don’t know why anyone asks you anything,” Nonie said to me.
I said, “But YOU asked me.”
Who am I to judge? I don’t know. Nonie’s was an old role, one that women have filled for millennia—a priestess thing of preparing virgins for the sacrifice. She was a true heroine of an old-fashioned kind—expensive for the world.
Also, a lifesaver . . .
She said, “I’m a lot nicer than you are, Wiley, and I count for more in the world, you know . . .”
She faded into illness of soul. Immolation and repentance came when the momentum had turned—and was in our favor. And a different spirit had set in: and even more complicated office procedures and training procedures had to be followed. The tide of victory was a phrase back then.
It seemed to me that in war relativism ruled almost everywhere; it was the key to what went on—who is stronger now and where, and to what extent. Everything was comparison. The mind swam in one dangerous comparison after another . . . Death is an absolute of sorts in comparison to life. “It is my personal absolute,” a boy said to me once. The mathematics by which a large number of deaths add up to a national fate is part of that flexibility of real-time logic in which relativism becomes wartime merit. One sees, in wartime, that the victors are odd-eyed relativists who measure and weigh real moments and who feel and know and who study the reality of time, its realities; but Nonie could not endure an exile from her sense of having access to the only meaning there was.
Her self as having access to the central truth, her soul’s real nature was that of A Single Daydream labelled perhaps THE LAST LAUGH for-which-millions-have-to-die. Her hallucination was of a stonily eternal foliage somehow tissue-y but set outside of time in an unchangeably motionless rightness. A bow to her was made by the universe, the world, made to her as a daughter, a citizen. This is the weighty and a shatterable thing of herself as a speculation that did then in wartime shatter . . .
She says, “I don’t cry . . . I never cry . . .” She tosses her head. The female will in a girlishly muscular body, really a beauty, a more and more agonized example of a cheerful coed who knows too much, someone who had the nerve to go out and get her own way and pay the price—and not in her daydreams, either . . .
These were years in which Nonie felt no envy toward men and only a little toward women . . .
Perhaps she glimpsed, then, barely, how absolute co
nvictions isolate someone, island you . . . the continent of yourself surviving in an ocean of shifting makeshifts . . . it is like the breakdown some people have in college . . .
She wasn’t the right type anymore . . . I shouldn’t talk like this to you but what the hell . . . the hell with it . . . Everyone had become a patriot by then and she couldn’t hold her own with so much competition . . . And, to be honest, she wasn’t so young: that goes fast, you know. She needed a rest. She wanted a different kind of life with no news in it . . . You understand that in people, Wiley?
The sadness of a person, not of the highest sort, the person, but a person on our side? Having been chosen by God for this suffering and for all her luck, good and bad, and for the events of her life, Nonie, with a suddenly half-dismissed ego and a profound experience of the deaths and humiliations of numberless others, Nonie was humble and punished. Nonie, bruised and shaken, honestly educated in a severe fashion by then . . . her idea(s) of herself, which had been one of the loonier forms of the conviction of absolute grace, fled from her—leaving her heartbroken, bereft, and mad.
The expression of her eyes—I saw her twice in this period—the expression in her eyes, in those aquariums of somewhat lurid light—her persistent physical health—my sister’s purposes—well, Mom said, Make no mistake, Nonie found herself—too bad it didn’t last . . .
I.e., the moments hadn’t stopped . . . They never do . . .
“I get mixed up . . . I have a headache . . .” Nonie said. And: “You do things for a moment and you haven’t any time to think but the results last . . . do you know what I mean? Well, if you know, tell me what that means . . . What do philosophers say about that . . .”
I said, “I want the world to go on . . . I don’t want an apocalypse . . . And everything to be over . . .”
“Well, you’re young,” Nonie said. She said it almost absently . . .
The Runaway Soul Page 53