Let Me Finish

by Roger Angell

  Tweaker, a ferocious Tory, saw no reason that his girls should go to college, and Evelyn, forever ashamed at her lack of a degree, paid him back as a serious and insatiable lifelong reader and full-bore liberal Democrat. In this, she resembled her grandmother Baker, who'd been thrown in jail for picketing the State House during the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. Tweaker was a throwback. Later in the war, when I'd gone off to the Pacific, he began providing a small monthly stipend to Evelyn and her nearest sister, Tudie, whose husband Neil MacKenna, was an infantryman in Europe. But he and Evelyn fell into a dispute about race one day, when she held that it was a disgrace that our armed forces were still segregated during a war that was supposed to be about democracy and equality, and the next month the checks stopped coming.

  In Denver that winter, Ev and I—I never called her Evvie, as others did—put up in a couple of hotels or back at the Emerys' house, and then in a modest white-brick apartment house on Sherman Street called the Bahamas. I was still in school but got off on Saturday nights and Sundays, and also, weirdly, twice a week after taking a midnight bedcheck in my barracks. This was legal but exhausting—I had to be back on duty by seven in the morning—and in November I got sick and was toted back to Lowry in an ambulance. Once there, I was told I had the flu—there was a semi-secret epidemic in progress on the post—and that every infirmary bed was taken. I was ordered to go to bed in my barracks and have my buddies bring me food from the mess hall and soft drinks and apples from the PX. Each morning, though, I'd have to get up and get dressed and go on sick call again, so they could check on my case. I protested that I had a wife and a little apartment back in town, where I'd be warmer and better looked after. Couldn't I call a cab each morning and come out for sick call from there? "Oh, no, that would never do," said the medic captain, smiling. "People might say we're not looking after you."

  I got better, resumed my classes in time and graduated—and shortly thereafter became aware that the Army Air Force had lost me. I'd fallen back by a week while ill, and when my original group finished up they'd been shipped out to a factory school in Detroit for a last three weeks of training—every man of them and my service record, too. Slowly, over a few days, I realized that I'd become invisible. I appeared on no duty roster; and when I turned up for morning roll call nobody said my name. It was too good to be true. Warily at first and then with the louche air of an outcast dog, I hung around the Rec Room playing pool and then slid into line early for my undeserved chow. I had plenty of passes tucked away, some of them still legal, and spent happy hours in town with my new wife. Sometimes we walked the neighborhood, arm in arm under the trees, or took in an early double feature at the movies before dinner. Reluctantly I'd grab a late cab back to the post, in case someone missed me. Nobody did. It was the other way around, in fact, because soon I noticed that I had company in my loony exile. Before long there were twenty or thirty of us: a league of derelicts. The great rushing apparatus of the war—millions of men going somewhere else in a hurry, with fresh-cut orders in hand—had sprung a leak and cast us loose. Our pool and Ping-Pong and sack-time skills shot upward. Now and then a sergeant or the Officer of the Day would stick his head in the door and look us over, but Lowry had three full shifts of students in place by now, which meant that there were always extra G.I.s idling about at odd hours. Couldn't this sweet deal last for the duration? Surely none of us would be dumb enough to give in to conscience and spill out a confession. The empty paydays were a problem, but perhaps there were civilian jobs to be picked up on the side. Was there anything doing in the private armament sector? Evelyn, meantime, had found a job as an assistant secretary in a private school, and I began to notice a certain impatience in her when she'd come home and discover me still there, or there again, finishing the Denver Post crossword at the end of the day. "Is this my fault?" I'd cry, spreading my arms. "Jeez."

  This Peace of God lasted almost three weeks, as I recall, until one of our number sailed off on an unauthorized furlough to visit a girlfriend in Milwaukee and got nailed on the way back. The response was swift. Teams of officers and noncoms went through every squadron at Lowry One and Lowry Two, sweeping us up like suspects in a bank heist—a good fifty of us by now—and threw us into a special barracks while they cast about for our lost papers. Every fatigue duty from around the sprawling base now fell to us—KP and latrine clearing, painting and maintenance, weeding and hangar sweeping, day after day, all administered with an irritable or vengeful zeal. I remember four successive sub-zero February nights when I was in charge of six furnaces and three insatiable coal stoves, the sweat freezing on my wrists and eyebrows as I trudged from barracks to barracks. It was uncalled for—we had violated no rules or orders—and when we rebelled, melting away in hilarious numbers while marching to the next vile job, our C.O., a major, went bonkers and dispatched M.P.s to escort us to work. We were prisoners, or just about, and when this came out—in the time it took for our indignant letters to get home and take effect—the major was fired and disgraced. I'd already got free, having wangled myself a day job in Personnel, in the ancient red-roofed Headquarters Building, and before long word came down that they'd found my service record at last—sorry about that—and that I'd go to instructors' school for a week, and then take up my first class that following Monday.

  In a snapshot of me taken in early spring of 1943, I am wearing minuscule wire-rim eyeglasses—the compulsory back-up pair I'd been required to keep on hand to slip on during gas mask drills; I had fallen back on these when two prior pairs of horn-rims snapped within days of each other that winter when I stepped outdoors into the four-thirty a.m. sub-zero cold, on the way to the dawn shift at Lowry. A reticence of memory surrounds these times, because of their blandness, but perhaps also from the way everyday contentment slips through our grasp. We'd found ourselves a one-story brick house on Garfield Street—an almost new cottage in a modest, treeless development not far from the field. Two flights of narrow concrete steps led up the lawn to the front, where a stepped-forward, Tudorish sector of the little living room made room for a side-entering front door. Inside, there was comfortable furniture, a bedroom and adjoining tiny guest room, a dining nook and kitchen, and, out in back, a garage and a bit of yard with, yes, white picket fencing. The rent, I think, was eighty-two dollars a month, payable to owners now also off at the war somewhere. This overhead closely matched my entire take-home pay as a new corporal, but with Evelyn's small salary and a hundred or so each month in checks from home tacked on we stayed afloat. Though carless, I was invited into an instructors' car pool; one of our older sergeants—Albert, from Little Rock—had money and drove an ornate black LaSalle, with white-wall tires. He had high blood pressure, he kept telling us, and would never live to forty. At home, Ev and I drank Old-Fashioneds before dinner—at whatever odd time it occurred—and listened to my Ellington and Coleman Hawkins and Muggsy Spanier records, played on our portable. Friends and family came out to visit: Evelyn's mother and her sister Tudie; my new stepmother Betty, livelier and funnier here while away from her kids; and a college classmate of mine, Larry Brown, who unexpectedly presented us with an Old English Sheepdog puppy we named Mandy. Larry, an ensign, was taking a crash course in Japanese at the Navy Intelligence School in Boulder, and bowed and sucked in his breath whenever he spoke. Evelyn and I were at home in Denver, knowing the names of the nearer mountains, making free with our no-fare privilege the bus and trolley routes, and exclaiming over the exuberant weather, which dropped deep billows of dry snow overnight and then sucked them away in the high-altitude sunshine by noontime the next day. We saved up for the movies every week— Casablanca and Shadow of a Doubt and Eric Von Stroheim as General Rommel in Five Graves to Cairo turned up, among others. Once, we caught the slick Phillips 66ers basketball team, and another night some great rodeo at the Denver Stock Show. That summer, we grabbed tickets for the Jack Teagarden All Stars' date at Elitch Gardens, and when we swung close to the bandstand, dancing, saw the mournful maestro taking his temperatu
re behind a held-up sheet of music. We had a cat, Henry, to keep Mandy company, and Evelyn acquired her first printed stationery, with "535 Garfield Street" at the top, and perhaps wrote home even more often than before. In another photograph, I am sitting on our tiny Victorian sofa on a Sunday in clean, freshly pressed suntans, with my legs crossed, smoking a pipe.

  We ate up domesticity—Ev, I think, because of her scary father, and I, after all this time, still in reaction to my childhood's departed mother. My father, after a decade on the beach as a bitter divorced man, was happy in his new marriage, and had cleared out my bedroom and my sister Nancy's bedroom to make room for Betty's two young sons. Nancy was in Boise, Idaho, with her professor husband, Louis Stableford, now an Air Corps lieutenant, and their young daughter. A bit later they were transferred to Topeka, Kansas, and produced another baby, a boy. Countless young Americans in service were flourishing in this extempore style, with nothing in their lives within their control but—if they were anything like us—finding freedom in each day's release from the grownup business of war. We were also lonely: that was the surprise. What I missed most were the new friends we'd made as a couple together, back home: the beginnings of what we were going to be.

  Evelyn and I had gone to a lot of jazz joints in Boston and New York during the years we'd been keeping company, and this part of our lives took a nice upward jag or jump in my senior year when we became friends with George Frazier, an older man who was writing a lively twice-a-week jazz column, "Sweet and Lowdown," for the Boston Herald. I'd written him a letter adding something to an item in one of his columns, or perhaps even correcting something, and he wrote back in friendly fashion and asked me to give him a call, and soon I was invited up for drinks at his place, in an apartment house next door to the Harvard Crimson on Quincy Street.

  George was tall and lean, with expensive clothes, gray crinkly hair, a perpetual Chesterfield in his hand, and a slight limp: a case of polio in childhood had left him with a turned-in right foot and, in time, a nice exemption from the draft. He'd been at Harvard about ten years earlier, and at graduation had won the Boylston Prize for Rhetoric, the hallowed award given to the writer of the best senior class essay. One of the runners-up in George's year was Harry Levin, the eminent future Joyce scholar and the Harvard English Department's most relentlessly intellectual professor.

  "How did that Boylston thing happen?" I asked George once.

  "Pah," he said, with a dismissive gesture. "Levin froze at the plate."

  George's wife, Mimsi, was pale and great-looking, with a wide swatch of crimson lipstick, like Billie Holiday's. She was the first woman I ever heard say "fuck." Together, George and Mimsi and Evelyn and I stayed late at the better jazz places in Boston, and we were excited about the trumpet player at the Savoy Café on Massachusetts Avenue: Frankie Newton, who recorded for Blue Note and had a great touch with the mute. He was said to be able to hold converse with Professor Levin about Joyce, though I never heard them talk (or play) together. Sometimes Evelyn and I went back to the Fraziers' apartment after one of these outings to listen to more records. One June night, we four stayed up all night there, drinking Tom Collinses and laughing.

  When Evelyn came out to Denver for our wedding she gave away her big, staid Old English Sheepdog Topper to the Fraziers. George had just gotten a new job in New York as entertainment editor of Life magazine, with an unlimited after-hours expense account, and when we heard from him next he told us that whenever he or Mimsi called up Nick's or Café Society Downtown or the Ruban Bleu for a reservation, they asked for a table for three. Topper got the extra slot.

  Looking for music in Denver, Evelyn and I began to hang about a Denver nightspot called the Embassy, and picked up a friendship with the band leader, Clyde Hunt, a slight, cheerful Negro (as we all said then) vibraphone artist in rimless glasses. A couple of times Clyde and his wife and a player from his quartet—the piano player Fletcher or the guitarist Ben Sohier—came by for Sunday lunch, and the Hunts would produce snapshots of their young kids, back home in Chicago.

  Moments like this have come flickering back as I've been writing this chapter, and the emotion they carry comes as a surprise. I've kept quiet about my trifling Army career all these years, because I was ashamed of my safe, lowly status. I had volunteered for the Navy and then the Marines shortly after Pearl Harbor, but was told that no service would take me because I was so nearsighted. Still, I knew that some college friends of mine had already grown into command positions here and there, while I was playing house, and others had begun to die in faraway places. A returning, persistent memory of Denver in 1943 is of me and Evelyn downtown at night, where we encounter two or three lieutenants coming along Market Street in our direction: young newly made officers, with no overseas or combat ribbons. Evelyn is wearing a flowered cotton summer dress, with a skirt that just comes to her knees, an open cardigan sweater, and low pumps. Her hair is waved, in the fashion of that time, and she has fresh lipstick. As the little group approaches, she takes her hand away from my right arm, and I shoot them one of my flyboy highballs—back straight, head and shoulders slightly turned in their direction, elbow firmly crooked, and the short salute snapped off and done with in an instant—and what I get back is something embarrassed and half-hearted. Their gaze takes us in, and the yearning there, just for that second, breaks your heart.

  This state of things could not last, nor did we entirely want it to. When we got home on furlough, in June and again in January, sitting up the first night on the highspeed, streamlined Burlington Zephyr, the war had come closer. We always kept up—the attention everyone gave to the news in that time is astounding—reading two Denver newspapers every day, and regularly getting packages from home containing the Times and torn-out sections or columns from the Herald Tribune and PM. We saw The Nation and The New Republic, and read Janet Flanner and Molly Panter-Downs and Richard Rovere and the wideranging Reporter at Large war stuff in The New Yorker each week. At night, of course, we tuned in to Sevareid and Murrow and Bob Trout and William Shirer, from London and North Africa. After the fall of Stalingrad, the map of Russia appeared so often on the front page that it came to resemble a classroom chart, with thick arrows pointing to places like Orel, Kursk, Vitebsk, Pinsk, and Smolensk, where men were dying in enormous numbers as the tide of war rolled westward. In my furlough stopovers in New York, some of the service men and women you saw on the street wore the uniforms of other countries, and officers going by or climbing into staff cars included majors and commanders and colonels. Dinner guests at my father's were just back from Washington or had fresh news from Moscow; things were looking up for our troops in Sicily, they said, and we might even be wrapping up in New Guinea in another few weeks. They asked me for the "G.I. viewpoint," but I demurred. Back in Denver, before my transfer from the Machine Guns and Power Turrets shift into a nine-to-five historian, a tech sergeant on leave from the Eighth Air Force turned up one day before class, in his wings and ribbons. He was a brother or cousin of one of our fellow instructors, out on a pass from the local military hospital, where he was recovering from wounds. His B-17 had been to places like Hanover and Wilhelmshaven, but he did not elaborate. "Don't fly in the low echelon," he told us.

  Before this, I'd been accepted for armament officer training school and also for the administrative O.C.S. school in Miami, but was told there were lengthy back-ups in the quotas. Unexpectedly, in February 1944, something better came along—a chance to join a group of Public Relations noncoms headed for the Central Pacific to staff a Seventh Air Force G.I. magazine. (I'd just had a story published in The New Yorker, which might have helped my chances.) Within days, it seemed, we'd closed up our life in Denver and gone home on a final furlough; Evelyn took up chores at the Whites' farm in Maine, and, away from her now, I became the managing editor of Brief, a fifteen-cent, slickpaper weekly, published in Hawaii but covering a westward beat of four million square miles. For a time our stories centered on skimpy B-25 raids to distant small islands in the
Gilberts and Marshalls, but after the bloodlettings at Tarawa and Kwajalein, the invasion and capture of the Marianas brought full-scale, hardened runways and a shot at Japan itself. One afternoon at Hickam Field, in Honolulu, an Intelligence major we Brief guys knew ran off a private screening of some still-classified film footage of the Eighth Air Force's disastrous B-17 raid on the German ballbearing works at Schweinfurt, back in the previous August—part of a massive double raid that also included the Messerschmitt works at Regensberg. Bad weather had separated the main groups, and once the escorting P-47 fighters had to turn for home at the end of their fuel limits, the waiting Focke-Wulf 190 and Messerschmitt 92 fighter groups launched attacks over a distance of almost two hundred miles, in relentless waves. When they exhausted their ammunition, other groups appeared, and when they, too, at last departed the flak attacks began. Some of this grainy or sun-flared black-and-white footage still sticks in mind—a progressive, jolting panorama of explosions and flames, with the bombers, under ferocious attack, losing their formation and drifting out of their places in the sky. One of the great dark B-17s is on its back and spewing debris, while another, trailing a thin plume of vapor, pursues a tilted, stately path off and down to the left, with a jammed rudder or dead pilot. In among the chunks of falling, failing planes you can spot the hunched little forms of bailed-out American crewmen from a stricken plane overhead, with their arms clasped around their waists or knees as they rip past in free-fall, waiting for a safer level before they open their chutes. There are plenty of Browning .50s to watch in action, with the masked and muffled waist gunners at their stations dodging and flinching as they swing the pivoted guns back and forth and fire, the thick belts of ammunition feeding snakelike from over their shoulders. They gesture and try to yell whenever another FW flickers into view, spewing gunsmoke, and is instantly past, over their heads. This was not quite the stuff we were teaching at Lowry—nor would the decision have been quckly made to show this film there, I think, if the chance had come. Two hundred and thirty B-17s attacked Schweinfurt that day, while another hundred and forty-six went off to Regensberg (these planes labored on from their targets all the way to bases in North Africa), and sixty of the total, with six hundred crewmen, went down. The attack was called a success, but on October 14, the Eighth's B-17s had to go back to Schweinfurt again, two hundred and ninety strong this time, and again lost sixty planes and crews, with another twenty or thirty planes crashing on landing or being written off from battle damage. Five dead airmen and forty-three wounded were taken off the planes that got home. After this, the Eighth Air Force called off daylight raids over Europe until the arrival of the long-range P-51 fighters, in the spring.