by Les Weil
He was a clever boy interested in the arts, who had studied Greek at the University of Illinois, and had the unpleasant luck to be an infantry soldier in Europe. He learned about combat, and would not fire his rifle at the enemy, though he had chances: this oddity became an important detail in his reputation, but it was no disgrace, for we accepted it as a gesture or disdain for the war. Jordan was gentle and brave; he endured what had to be endured, and so he was accepted, though he was the company homosexual.
He was happy with the role, I think, for like any serious lover he was used to humiliations in seeking love, and the company had opportunities for him. He smiled under the insults due his position, and at such moments he resembled a shy young teacher trying to control a difficult class without shouting. I recall Sergeant Matulich saying,
"Hey, Harvey; oh, Harvey" (it being the custom to call him by his first name, in mockery, and also out of a sense of his gentleness) ; "how about it tonight, Harvey? How's my chances?"
"Oh, I couldn't say," Jordan answered. "When can I expect to see you?"
"You know what I mean, Harvey!" Matulich roared. "Don't give me the run-around!"
That sort of thing was normal, and yet Jordan was no outcast. He was modest and discreet, and there were no complaints -nowadays, perhaps, as he approaches forty, with his hair greying, and his figure no longer slender, he may be having his troubles. He will be teaching at one of our smaller state universities, I suspect, and his apartment will have something genuine by one of the French Impressionists; there will be a Turkish carpet, bibelots, possibly a samovar.
He will be having his way with a handsome boy on occasion, but very likely he will also be having trouble with the police; for that is his fate, sooner or later. It would not surprise me if he has already been obliged to move once or twice from one little university to another, and he may be growing weary of that; but his lectures will remain interesting -he will always have a thing to say about the lovely peoples of Asia Minor.
During our war, of course (that ancient war), he was safe among soldiers. I heard rumors about his affairs, but he was never compromised, and the only real trouble he ever had came from a different source, and by accident.
He would not fire his rifle at a human target, and that got him into several kinds of trouble with Sergeant Matulich, who was our platoon guide; for Matulich despised such delicacy.
Matulich was a man of middle size, well put together and strong, with a large head roughly modeled, and a soft broad nose like a fighter's, and his large brown eyes could stare fiercely; but he was not up to his appearances. He was cautious; he had an excessive regard for himself; when we were attacking he was slow, and when we were on defense he was temporizing and fearful: he spoke contemptuously of recklessness. But he had authority, and he did not disgrace himself, so that he was free to persecute Jordan, as it pleased him.
"Hey, Harvey," he would say. "When are you going to take time off and use that rifle?"
Or, "Why not just try that rifle, Harvey. Ain't you got any free time, Harvey?"
Such assaults were a part of our lives, during the first three or four months of fighting, for Matulich had a position and power; and then one day Jordan's unwillingness to fire his rifle endangered another man, Matulich himself.
It happened on a shiny, cloudy day in southern Holland, during one of the rare German counter-attacks; poor devils, they came straggling out of a little pine forest at ten o'clock one morning, and marched at us, uncertainly. Some were firing machine pistols, but most were merely carrying rifles. They had been living in little caves they had dug, which later we examined; there were tin cups and plates, and bits of sausage and black bread, and a smell of stale, burrowing animals.
They were poor troops, but on this day four or five of them got quite close to our line, and caused some of the men in my platoon to run. Matulich was among them, and so it happened that he was shot at. Indeed, he must have heard the bullets whistling by, and thought his time had come -I heard him shout and moan as he ran crouching close to earth.
He had come close to Jordan's foxhole, with the German fire seeking him, and so he had shouted to Jordan, who was watching carefully, no doubt.
As Matulichh said later, "I could see him; sure I could! There he was, with his goddamned head sticking up out of that hole, grinning at me, and not doing anything to help me! Well, goddamn it!"
Something had to come of it; after the battle, Matulich made an accusation, with a direct hostility which I never again saw in him.
"You son of a bitch of a queer," he said, "you damn near got me killed! Didn't you? Just try to say you didn't!"
Jordan kept silence; he stood leaning on his rifle, with his teacher's air of unhappy indulgence.
"Well, what do you say?" shouted Matulich, drawing closer. "Well, you goddamned fairy bastard, what about it?"
And then he swung a punch with his right hand, and caught Jordan cleanly on the mouth, knocking him down and drawing blood from the bruised lips. Jordan remained sitting, without raising either hand to touch his face.
"I'm sorry," Jordan said. "I'm truly sorry; but I don't want to hurt anybody! I don't believe in hurting anybody. I'm sorry, Sergeant."
He would not yield, and so Matulich turned away, flustered, saying, "Don't ever do it again. Don't ever do it again, you hear?" The scene was over, and it was not long before we perceived that Matulich would no longer be able to carry on his old persecution.
Any such joke could only recall Matulich's frantic running, and so there were no jokes, and the war continued a little more cleanly for us without them. We went up to the Maas River, and then traveled eastward to the front in Germany. We fought from just east of Aachen to Cologne, and when that city fell, we moved south into the Remagen Bridgehead over the Rhine. There were heavy causalities all along, but neither Matulich nor Jordan was hit, and Jordan remained a humanitarian, capable of generalized love; one night in the gentle hills just east of the Rhine, I observed him in a classic action of his love.
That afternoon, we had killed three German infantrymen in a meadow (and they lay as they had fallen), and lost one of ours, for whom a blanket had been found. There came a moonlight clear enough to see by, and Jordan came to my foxhole, where I was standing a guard, and told me that he wished to compose the limbs of the dead; thereafter he was a narrow black figure, kneeling and moving. He was like the women who used to follow armies, in the days when war allowed such formal sentiment. I heard a sound of sobbing, of deep grief, and the next day I saw that the corpses had been taken care of ... legs parallel, arms rudely clasped over the chest, eyelids down--
Jordan kept to his path, silent and mild.
Matulich was not so fortunate. He knew how to look after himself, but he was soft. It happened that over a period of many months he began to show the effects of strain: at first, there was only an intensification of his love for deep cellars and holes in the ground. Once I saw him caress the stone wall of a cellar as if it had been loved flesh.
He took a habit of singing a melancholy piece called "You Only Hurt the One You Love." His face grew sad, and his harsh small tenor voice wavered sometimes in the middle of a phrase.
He developed odd cravings. For several weeks he traded all his rations for the canned pork and eggs to be found in one of the packaged field rations; after that, he grew enthusiastic about chocolate candy, and then at last he took up granulated sugar.
He talked too much about the dangers which were coming. He worried about the cities we might have to attack, and the rivers we would surely have to cross. While we were still in Thuringia, he was dreading the Elbe, far to the east ....
He became a problem to the rest of us at about the time we were passing the Harz Mountains. Several times he disappeared in the middle of a fight. Once in a little forest he was gone for almost two hours, and we gave him up for dead or captured; we searched for him, and even mourned him in a preliminary way, as a courtesy, until we found him leaning against a tree almost half a mile from the plac
e where the shooting had been.
He was smoking a cigarette and nervously smiling; he explained that he had been obliged to take prisoners to the rear.
There had been no prisoners, because the fight had been a trifling affair at long range, but we understood that he had a right to save appearances. In fact, we tolerated him, for the war was coming to an end, and we were preparing to be joyful; and, as his cowardice grew, he began to learn politeness.
His voice grew softer. He asked advice of privates whom he might have battered with his sergeant's scorn in other days, and he was always happy to share one of the marvelous holes he dug in the soft spring loam.
He even became friendly with Jordan. Several times I saw them in close conversation, and once, after our last really bitter fight, in a town of the Harz Mountains, I saw him take his white, drenched face to Jordan as to one who could give comfort, and then they talked together, over a bottle of Rhine wine, for almost three hours.
Six men had died that afternoon, and they were our last heavy losses; after them, we wandered intensely out into the Saxon plain, and it happened that Matulich began to put away his fears. He seemed to get a grip on himself; he became faintly sycophantic, and discreet, and his success in this came to resemble a reward for having stayed alive.
He found a place for himself once again, and was contented with it, no one challenging him or recalling embarrassments.
The war ended for us at a little river in Saxony called the Mulde, and we had our celebrations there, with Matulich's new composure already a mystery of the past. It was a mystery I did not investigate. Sometimes I wondered vaguely at it, and at last came upon an explanation of it by accident.
With the war's end, I took up a career of drinking. I made love to some of the tottering, desperate German girls living in our village, but for the most part I spent my free time with a bottle. It was a pleasure to me that the nights were warm. I used to wander, carrying wine . . .
One night, I stretched out on the bank of the Muld: in a tall grass whose blades were grainy on one side, and smooth as wax on the other. I slept, and did not wake until long after midnight according to the feel of the wind, and the faint, aqueous beginnings of dew. I became aware that something had wakened me, and so I looked around without moving my body. Across the river I could see lights from the Russian camp, and sense the quietness of those garish soldiers, who had come to meet us driving pigs and cattle, and leading chickens on leashes made of string. They were eastern men, those sturdy peasant lads, with the look of far countries where mares' milk is a delicacy.
Some twenty feet away was the figure of a man standing, and it was this which had wakened me. His back was toward me, and he was naked: his body was slender, and there was a starry sheen on his white skin.
In a moment the man knelt down into the black earth, and spoke, and I recognized Jordan's voice: "Oh, God," he said. "It's good to be alive!"
Another voice answered, Matulich's voice: "Well, you're all right, Harvey. I wonder what time it is?"
"Oh, it's late, Sergeant," Jordan answered. "I knew we wouldn't be enemies forever!"
His voice was mild, though there was in it a note of triumph .. Let us say that Jordan had achieved a triumph, -who even now may be dreaming of golden Circassian boys.
Young Love
Edward Loomis
I was examining a comic strip that some of my intellectual friends had recommended: it was said to be very literary, and pleasantly nostalgic; its title was Young Love (the characters were boys and girls of high school age), and the author's name was Rebecca Kent -I had taken in these details, when I noticed something familiar in the leafage of a tree that occupied the upper right-hand corner of the last panel. It was a little monogram, C : the style of the drawing then caught my eye, vaguely reminding me of something, and so I looked at the dialogue, hoping for a stimulus to memory, but I got no help there, for the dialogue sounded like the characters. Within the possibilities of the occasion, the author had found some interesting lines -I read, and was amused. The author was expert with erotic feeling.
During the rest of the week, I followed the strip, and found the monogram (usually in a cloud or tree) in each installment; and as I was reading, I made out the organizing convention of the strip, which was comedy: an occasional serious interlude seemed likely the characters would evidently be permitted to grow sad. I was impressed with the strip, for it was an exotic phenomenon, a diversion in an unlikely place, and one morning while I was going about my own work, I remembered the meaning of the monogram. It was indeed familiar: C -it was the mark of a high school friend, Peyton Carter, who had signed his paintings with it, and now I could see in the pictures of the strip a way with line and color that Peyton might have been able to arrive at.
Peyton -old friend! We had gone to the war together, from a little town near Akron, in 1943, and I had received several letters from him in the next year and a half; I answered these, and then, as time passed, I failed to notice that he had stopped writing, and when I returned home in 1945 I discovered that Peyton's family had moved away.
Intermittently during the years after the war, I wondered about him, and I missed him (as someone to think about in my world), for he had been a good friend -we used to say of him that he was the only boy in town who had no enemies.
I now considered the possibility that someone else might have happened upon Peyton's monogram, and that seemed unlikely: I concluded that Peyton was illustrating a strip that someone else was writing -probably not Rebecca Kent, for that seemed an unlikely name; and I was pleased. It seemed auspicious that a friend of mine should become a successful illustrator. I decided to find out if my pleasure was justified, and so I wrote a letter, to Peyton, addressed to my own newspaper (a California paper -I too have moved away from home) in care of the comic strip called "Young
Love." I asked if my letter had found its way to that Peyton Carter who had once lived in S-, Ohio, and I signed my name over my address.
Within a week I had a reply, a brief, pleasant letter: my guess had found the mark. Peyton had come to life again, and he was planning a trip "to the Coast" -he would see me soon, and in fact he telophoned me early in the afternoon four days later.
I asked him to visit me, and he appeared at three-thirty, in a taxicab: I went down the walk to greet this ghost from the past, and was pleased to find him, at an age near forty, only very moderately changed from the gentle boy he had been in high school. He had some grey hair, and looked prosperous. His face had the supple, almost feminine skin that I remembered, and the whites of his eyes were clear. He was a little heavier, perhaps, and nervous -that was inevitable.
We went inside, and I introduced Peyton to my wife and children: after a time, my wife took the children away, and Peyton and I went out to my study, a dark, pleasant room at the rear of the house. I was approving of Peyton (not as a friend-that was a thing of the past!) but as someone I might learn to know; I mentioned the strip, and Peyton was anxious to talk about it.
"I've found myself, I believe," be said. "You know I published three novels back in the 'forties, and they were awful failures. In my strip, though, I've gotten around to a way of thinking that's congenial to me. I feel at home with the subject, with the times -I've always been fascinated by the past, you know . . . I sit and dream about it, sometimes."
He continued talking about the strip as if it were entirely his own work, and this was not my understanding of the situation. I did not wish to sponsor a confusion, and so I said, "Do I understand that you're all alone in this enterprise?"
"Of course," he said.
"Then Rebecca Kent is your pseudonym. I'd wondered about that."
"No. It's my strip. I write it and I illustrate it. Sometimes I get a little help with the drawing for the Sunday pages; but I'm prolific. I turn out my share of work! They don't complain about me on that score, I assure you!"
I thought that perhaps Peyton had not heard me correctly, and so I said, "The strip is signed R
ebecca Kent--" And I held up the morning paper, folded in such a way as to expose the latest installment.
He looked at it, and he seemed embarrassed. "I do the whole damn thing," he said.
"Of course." I was uncomfortable, but also calm. I was on my home ground. My books were in place, and I understood most of them: my typewriter was old-fashioned. I smiled, and said, "It's an intelligent piece of work, certainly, Peyton. I was amused by last week's sequence --"
"Did you like it? They wanted me to change all that. I never go near the office, you know; I work at home; and they sent somebody out to see me -it's quite a little distance from New York. I wouldn't hear of any changes, and so the sequence went in just the way I wrote it, and I've had several compliments already-"
We were on safe ground; the visit continued pleasantly, and at the end of it Peyton invited me to lunch with him on the following day, at his hotel.
I was willing to accept; after Peyton left, I got my wife to make a statement about him, and she said, "He gives me the creeps. I think he dislikes me, and I certainly dislike him!"
That was something to think about; and I was in a cheerful mood at one o'clock the next day, when I got to the lobby of Peyton's hotel. It was an excellent hotel, perhaps the best in Southern California. The arrangements in the lobby encouraged me to believe that I was a trespasser. The air was quiet; there was a shy, lenitive hum from the air-conditioning equipment.
As I was thinking I ought to telephone Peyton's room, I observed that I had attracted the attention of a woman who was standing in front of the elevators -an elegant, thirtyish figure. She smiled at me, and I nodded; she started toward me, and for a moment I wondered if she were approaching someone standing behind me. Then I decided that she must be an acquaintance I had forgotten, or Peyton's wife (I did not know whether he had a wife), and so I prepared myself to greet her in a friendly way.
She came up to me and touched my sleeve. "You're so prompt," she said. "Why don't we go into the bar?"
"I beg your pardon," I said. "I'm to meet somebody here-"