This may be a far cry from Hitler's propaganda, but the person who told me this joke is a fine lawyer and a good Christian.
You'd better give some hard thought to the long pull that a marriage is. I know I'm jumping the gun, but now is the time to reflect, before you're too involved. Never, never forget one thing.
The girl you marry, and the woman you must make a life 'with, are two different pe,people.
Women have a way of living in the present. Before marriage she's out to win you. Afterward you're just one of the many factors in her life. In a way you're secondary, because she has you, whereas everything else is in flux-children, household, new clothes, social ties.
If these other factors are disagreeable to her, she will make you unhappy.
In a marriage with a girl like Natalie Jastrow, the other factors would all tend to bother her perpetually, from the mixed-breed children to the tiny social slights. Then might get to be like the Chinese water-drop torture. If so, you'd both gradually grow bitter and miserable, and by then you'd be tied together by children. This could end up as hell on earth.
Now I'm just telling you what I think. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, or stupid, and out of touch. It doesn't matter to me that this girl is Jewish, though there would be grave questions about the children's faith, since I feel you're a pretty good Christian, somewhat more so than Warren at the moment. I'm impressed by what you say about her brains, which her being the niece of Aaron Jastrow sure bears out. A Jew's Jesus is a remarkable work. If I thought she could make you happy and give you some direction in life I'd welcome her, and take pleasure in personally punching in the nose anybody who upset her. But I think might become a second career for me.
Now, I'm reconciled to letting you go your own way. You know that.
It's hard for me to write a letter like this. I feel like a fool, elaborating the obvious, expressing truths that I find distasteful, and above all intruding on your personal feelings. But that's okay. You sent us your letter. I take it to mean that you wanted an answer.
This is the best I can do, If you want to write me off as a bigot, that's all right with me.
I'll show this letter to your mother, who will no doubt disapprove of it, so I'll be forwarding it without her endorsement. Maybe she'll add something of her own.
Warren is home. He has put in for flight training and may get it.
Love, Dad Rhoda liked to sleep late, but her husband woke her the following morning at eight o'clock, handing her his letter to Byron and a cup of hot coffee. She sat up with grouchy abrupt gestures, read the letter through as she sipped, and passed it back to him without a word.
"Do you want to add anything?"
"No." Her face was set. She had worked her eyebrows a bit over Pug's passage on women and marriage.
"Don't you approve of it , "Letters like that don't ? change things," Rhoda said with deep su" female contempt.
"Shouldn't I seti it?"
"I don't care."
He put the envelo in h s hr Pe east pocket. "I see Admiral Preble at ten O'clock this morning. Have you had any second thoughts?"
"Pug, will You please do xactly as you choose?" Rhoda said, in a pained bored tone. She sank down into the bedclothes as he left.
The Chief of Naval Operations did not appear surprised when Pug said he would take the post. At dawn Henry had awakened with a, overmastering sense that he could not duck the assignment, and with this, he had stopped thinking about it. Preble told him to get ready in a hurry.
His orders to Berlin were already cut.
Byron Henry's encounter with Natalie Jastrow two months earlier Bhad been much in character. He had drifted into it.
Unlike his father, Byron had always been directionless. Growing up, he had dodged the Sea Scouts, Sevem Academy, and anything else pointing to a naval career. Yet he had no ideas for any other career.
His marks were usually poor, and he developed early a remarkable capacity for doing absolutely nothing. In fits of resolve he had shown himself able to win a few A's, or put together a radio set that worked, or rescue an old car from a junkyard and make it run, or repair a collapsed oil heater. In this knack for machinery he took after his father and grandfather. But he became bored with such tinkering. He did too poorly in mathematics to think of engineering.
He might have been an athlete. He was agile, and sturdier than he looked, but he disliked the regimens and teamwork of school athletics, and he loved cigarettes and beer, though the gallons of beer he drank did not add a millimeter to his waistline. At Columbia College (where he was admitted because he charmed an interviewer, scored well on the intelligence test, and wasn't a New Yorker) he barely avoided expulsion for bad grades. What he enjoyed was taking his ease at his fraternity house, or playing cards and pool, or reading old novels over and over, or talking about girls and fooling with them. He did find in fencing a sport suited to his independent temper and his wiry body. Had he trained more he might have been an intercollegiate finalist at the epec. But it was a bore to train, and it interfered with his idleness.
In his junior year he elected a course in fine arts, which athletes took because, so the report ran, nobody ever failed it.
However, at midsemester, Byron Henry managed to fail. He had done no work and cut half the classes. Still, the F startled him. He went to see the professor and told him so. The professor, a mild bald little lover of the Italian Renaissance, with green spectacles and hairy ears, took a liking to him. A couple of remarks Byron made on Leonardo and BotticeHi showed that, in the few sessions he had attended, he had learned something, unlike the rest of the hulking somnolent class.
They became friends. It was the first intellectual friendship in Byron Henry's life. He became an enthusiast for the Renaissance, slavishly echoing the professor's ideas, and he finished college in a blaze of B pluses, cured of beer guzzling and afire to teach fine arts.
One year of graduate work at the University of Florence for a Master of Arts degree; that had been the plan.
But a few months in Florence cooled Byron. One rainy November night, in his squalid rented room overlooking the muddy Amo, sick of the smells of garlic and bad plumbing, and of living alone among foreigners, he wrote his friend that Italian painting was garish, saccharine, and boring with its everlasting madonnas, babes, saints, halos, crucifixions, resurrections, green dead Saviors, flying beared jehovahs, and the rest; that he much preferred moderns like Mire and Klee; and that anyway, painting was just interior decoration, which didn't really interest him. He scrawled several pages in this cornered-rat vein, mailed them off, and then went vagabonding around Europe, forsaking his classes and his hope of a graduate degree.
When he got back to Florence, he unda cheering letter from the professor.
... I don't know what will become of you. Obviously art was a false lead. I think it did you good to get hot or, some subject. If you can only shake off your lethargy and find something that truly engages you, You may yet go far. I am an old traffic cop, and standing here on my corner I have seen many Chevrolets and Fords go by. It's not hard for me to recognize the occasional Cadillac. Only this one seems badly stalled.
I've written about you to Dr. Aaron Jastrow, who lives outside Siena, You know of him. He wrote A Jew's Jesusp made a pot of money, and got off the miserable academic treadmill. We used to be friends at Yale, and he was very good indeed at bringing out the best in young men. Go Ind talk to him, and give him my regards.
'That was how Byron happened to call on Dr. Jastrow. He took a bus to Siena, a three-hour run up a rutted scary mountain road. Tmice before he had vi ted the bizarre S' little town, all red towers and battlements and narrow crooked streets, set around a gaudy zebra-striped cathedral, ona hilltop amid rolling green and brown Tuscan vineyards. Its main claim to fame, aside from the quasi-Byzantine church art he had studied there, was a peculiar annual horse race called the Palio, which he had heard about but never seen.
At first glance, the girl at the wheel of the old blue conver
tible made no strong impression on him: an oval face, dark enough so that he first Italian, dark hair, enormous sunglasses, a pink sweater took her for an over an open white Shirt. Beside her sat a blond man covering a yawn with a long white hand.
"Hi! Byron Henry?"
"Yes."
"Hop in the back. I'm Natalie Jastrow. This is Les bassy in Paris, and He's visiting my uncle."
i works in our em girl either. X"at Natalie Jastrow saw I Byron did not much impress the American, through the dark glasses was a slender lounger, obviously with red glints in his heavy brovm hair; he was propped against the wall of the Hotel Continental in the sun, smoking a cigarette, his legs loosely crossed. The light gray jacket, dark slacks, and maroon tie were faintly dandyish. The forehead under the hair was de, the long slanting jaws narrow, the face pallid. He looked like what he was-a collegiate drone, a rather handsome one.
Natalie had brushed these off by the dozen in earlier years.
As they wound through narrow canyons of crooked ancient redbrown houses and drove out into the countryside, Byron idly asked Slote was s d about his embassy work. The Foreign Service man told him he pote a section and was studying Russian and Polish, hoping in the political sc w or Warsaw. Sitting in the car, Sic)te appeared for an assignment to Mo 0 very tall; later Byron saw that he himself was taller than Slote; the Foreign Service officer had a long trunk but medium-sized legs.
Slote's thick blond hair grew to a peak over a high forehead and narrow pinkish face; the light blue eyes behind rimless glasses were alert and penetrating, and his thin lips were compressed as though with habitual resolve. All the time they drove, he held a large black pipe in his hand or in his mouth, not smoking it. It occurred to Byron that the Foreign Service might be a pleasant career, offering travel, adventure?
and encounters with important people.
But when Slote mentioned that he was a Rhodes Scholar, Byron decided not to pursue the topic.
Jastrow lived in a yellow stucco villa on a steep hillside, with a tile roofs. It was a fine view of the cathedral and Siena's red towers and after the girl drive of about twenty minutes from town.
Byron hurried and Slote through a terraced flowering garden full of black-stained plaster statues.
"Well, there you are!" The voice was high, authoritative, and impatient, with a faint foreign note in the pronouncing of the r's.
Two sights struck Byron as they entered a long beamed living room.
a painting of a red-robed Saint Francis with arms outstretched, on a background of gold, taking up a good part of one wall, and far down the long sitting room on a red silk couch, a bearded little man in a light gray suit, who looked at his watch, stood, and came toward them coughing.
"This is Byron Henry, Aaron," the girl said.
Jastrow took Byron's hand in two dry little paws and peered up at him with prominent wavering eyes. jastrov/s head was large, his shoulders slight; he had aging freckled skin, light straight hair, and a heavy nose e beard was all gray. "Columbia 'reddened by a cold. The neatly trimm d 38, is it?"
"Yes, sir."
"Well, well, come along." He went off down the room,buttoning the flapping folds of his double-breasted suit. "Come here, Byron."
Plucking the stopper out of a heavy crystal decanter, he carefully poured amber wine into four glasses. "Come Leslie, Natalie. We don't take wine during the day, Byron, but this is an occasion." He held up his glass. "To Mr.
Byron Henry, eminent hater of the Italian Renaissance."
Byron laughed. "Is that what Dr. Milano wrote? I'll drink to that."
Jastrow t k one sip, Put d tossed off the sherry
like a shot of roo Own his glass, and ked at his w tch.
ye. Jastrow exclaimed with a delighted smile, "Ah! One, two, akeyryour glass to the table."
Seeing the Professor wanted to get at hilselsulinec,lit, Byron 100 a three. good lad. Come along, Natalie.
It was a spare lunch: nothing but vegetables with white rice, then cheese and fruit. The service was on fine old china, maroon and gold.
A small, gray-headed Italian woman passed the food. The tall dining room %endows stood open to the garden, the view of Siena, and a flood of pale sunshine. Gusts of cool air came in as they ate. When they first sat, the girl said, "What have you got against the Italian Renaissance, Byron?)f
that's a long story.))
"Tell us," said Jastrow in a classroom voice, laving a thumb across his smiling mouth.
Byron hesitated. Jastrow and the Rhodes Scholar made him uneasy.
The girl disconcerted him more."Removing her sunglasses, she had disvi closed big slanted dark eyes, gleaming with bold intelligence.
She had a Soft large mouth, painted a bit too orange, in a bony face.
Natalie was regarding him with a satiric look, as though she had already concluded that he , a fool; and Byron was not fool enough to miss that.
"Maybe I've had too much of it," he said. "I started out fascinated.
join ending up snowed under and bored. I realize much of the art is brilliant, but there's a lot Of overrated garbage amid the works of genius.
My main objection is that I can't take the mixture Of Paganism and Christianity. I don't believe David looked like Apo o or Mos ke Jupiter, ores ll Mary like every Renaissance artist's mistress with a borrowed baby on her lap. Maybe they couldn't help showing Bible Jews as local Italians or pseudo-Greeks, but-" Byron dried up for a moment, seeing his listeners' amused looks. "Look, I'm not saying any of this is important criticism. I guess it just shows I got into the wrong field.
But what has any of it to do with Christianity? That's what sticks in my craw. Supposing Christ came back to earth and visited the Uffizi, or Saint Peter's? The Christ of your book, Dr. Jastrow, the poor idealistic Jewish preacher from the back hills? that's the Lord I grew up with. My father's a religious man; we had to read a chapter of the Bible every morning at home. Why, Christ ings." Nata wouldn't even suspect the stuff related to himself and his teachings Jastrow was regarding him with an almost motherly smile. He said brusquely to her, "Okay. You asked me what I had against the Italian Renaissance. I've told you."
"Well, it's a point of view," she said.
Eyes twinkling behind his glasses, Slote lit his pipe, and said between puffs, "Don't fold up, Byron, there are others who have taken your polition. A good name for it is Protestantism." "Byron's main point is accurate." Dr. Jastrow sounded kindly, danctal oc rred when paganining his the fingers together. "The I ian Renaissance was a great blossoming,of art and ideas, Byron, that cu sin and the Hebrew spirit-in its Christian expression-briefly fertilized instead of fighting each other. It was a hybrid growth, true, but some hybrids are stronger than either parent, you know. Witness the mule."
"Yes, sir," said Byron, "and mules are sterile."
Amused surprise Hashed on Natalie Jastrow's face, and her enormous dark eyes flickered to Leslie Slote, and back to Byron"Well said. just so." Jastrow nodded in a pleased way. "The Renaissance indeed couldn't reproduce itself, and it died off, while the pagan and Hebrew spirits went their separate immortal ways. But that mules bones are now one of mankiners richest deposits of cultural achievement, Byron, whatever your momentary disgust from overexposure."
Byron shrugged. Leslie Slote said, "Is your father a clergyman?"
"His father's a naval officer," said Jastrow.
"Really? What branLh?"
Byron said, "Well, right now he's in War Plans."
"My goodness! War plans?" Dr. Jastrow pretended a comic flutter.
"I didn't know that. Is it as ominous as it sounds?"
"Sir, every country draws up theoretical war plans in peacetime."
fl your father think a war is imminent?"
"I got my last letter from him in November. He said nothing about a war. The other three exchanged odd glances. Slote said, "Would he, in casual correspondence?"
"He might have asked me to come home. He didn't."
"Interesting," said Dr. Ja
strow, with a little complacent grin at Slote, rubbing his tiny hands.
"As a matter of fact, I think there's going to be a war," Byron said.
This caused a silence of a second or two, and more glances.
Jastrow said, "Really? Why?" "Well, I just toured Germany.
You see nothing but uniforms, rades, drills, brass bands.
Anywhere you drive, you end up passing army trucks full of troops, and railroad cars loaded with artillery and tanks.
Trains sometimes a couple of miles long."
"But, Byron, it was with just such displays that Hitler won Austria and the Sudetenland," said Jastrow, "and he never fired a shot." Natalie said to Byron, 'Leslie thinks my uncle should go home.
Herman Wouk - The Winds Of War Page 3