by James Salter
But what had happened to him, at the end?
There was a pause. “I wish I knew,” she said. They had some imbalance in the family, they were very sensitive to medication, she explained. It had taken him a long time to get over the medication they treated him with in Italy when he got wounded. Just years. Perhaps he was on some medication again. She only knew that he got ready to go to work one morning and just went into the bathroom and shot himself. He was buried in Spur, she said, in the family plot.
Afterwards I sat thinking about him. I hadn’t seen him for half a lifetime and yet I remembered him clearly. His letters always began in a touching way, My dear Jim. He’d been a sergeant in a reconnaissance platoon and had heard the colonel remark, unaware he was nearby, that if a single man was commissioned in the field, he wanted it to be Morgan. He was twenty-one at the time but true manliness arrives early. In one of his letters to me he had written, I have come a long way since I left you, and I regret every step …
THE CAPTAIN’S WIFE
IN THE LATE SUMMER OF 1945, a second lieutenant wearing wings, I walked into the officers’ club at Enid, Oklahoma, with Horner. We had driven half the continent with gas coupons begged from truck drivers, occasionally shooting holes in rural road signs with our new pistols. In the club the jukebox was going. They were playing poker. We were part of the Air Force. It was our turn now. It was to be our story, our broad wake, the immense battering noise of the engines just outside the cockpit window of the B-25s we would soon be flying, roaring past the grain elevators that were close to the field. We were a form of gentleman, the sort that strolls along the beach in summer clothes after the shipwreck, making jokes about capsized lifeboats. Our interest was in the prodigious—riotous nights mainly and the emptiness of mornings when we lounged in wrinkled uniforms, recalling late hours and all we had seen and done.
Horner, who had a face that looked as if he might be reformed, given the time, and that was capable of an expression very close to earnestness, I see with a sheet pulled around him, hair awry, and the furious arm of some girl as she awkwardly throws a bottle at him, damn you! It is in the Gayoso or the Carlton, Memphis or perhaps Dallas. Four A.M. and a knock on the door—the bellboy arriving with the unobtainable fifth under his jacket. Whoever it was who said she didn’t do things like this is caught standing in bra and panties. “Why, hello, Miss Cole,” the boy says politely.
The scene shifts readily, the artistes walk on and off, some making a single appearance, others demanding more, banging on the door in the early hours with their high heels.
Withal there were moments of something else, decency, perhaps, pure amid the disorder—the two WAVES, and the one I was with, though I never saw her again, who came from a world that coolly rebuked ours. Clean-limbed in blue and white, she seemed prepared to like someone I was not ready to be, and I remembered her long after and her town, Green River, Wisconsin. I didn’t mention it to Horner, who would have used one of his familiar words: “heartrending.” In these matters, as in others, he was dauntless.
——
The end of the war, though not unexpected, came quickly. We were in Austin at the time and aware that something had happened—people were hurrying down the street and crowding in front of a doorway nearby. It was the doorway of a liquor store, and they were preparing for the greatest celebration of their lives, one which, although joining in, we observed with halfhearted enthusiasm. In one bold stroke we were devalued, like currency, and for nearly six months were transferred from field to field, to bases ever more bleak and—the aircraft mechanics having been demobilized—silent.
Horner and I had been separated. He was stationed in Florida, where, in a sudden conversion, like Pascal’s, he got married. I was to have been his best man but couldn’t get to the wedding. I knew the bride’s name, that was all.
We left for overseas that winter, destined for places with storied names that had now become backwaters—defeated nations, abandoned staging points. We sailed from San Francisco in early 1946, beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, from which hung a huge sign we were unable to read. When our troopship had passed it we went to the rear deck, thrilled by the glory of mission at last though gloomy at the timing, and looked back. Facing the Pacific it read: WELCOME HOME, HEROES. It was the era of flight but not jet flight. The Pacific was endless—it took almost forty hours to fly to Japan and fifteen days to sail to Manila. Horner was in a group sent to Europe.
I had achieved, with assistance, a state of emotional nihilism, or had tried to achieve it. It seemed proper. We were going off for three years to the other side of the world with no real idea of what it would be like other than its great distance from home. This spoke for lack of attachment, even fatalism. At the same time, however, like a man with an unwholesome secret, I was in love.
During the final spring, at one of the last hops at West Point—gold buttons, gray trousers with black stripes, young faces, couples possessing the dream—there had been a moment when the crowd of dancers parted to reveal a girl in a black dress with many small slits, like the eyes in a silhouette, and a flesh-colored slip beneath, a girl with beautiful hair and a brilliant smile. She was leaning back from her partner and talking. It was an illumination. It overwhelmed me. They turned and she was visible on the opposite side of him. From the shadow of the balcony which was the running track, wait, that was not it, from the arched doorway that led to the stairs where the stags lingered on the landing, I stepped forward. I walked onto the floor without hesitation, as if I had received a signal, as if on cue. A hundred couples were dancing on the wide wooden floor. Not knowing her, barely knowing her partner, I said, “May I cut in?”
Fortunately I do not remember what else I said, only the confidence with which I took her in my arms and danced. Everything I was and that I was sure she was seemed clear. This close she was even more stunning, magnificent dark brows, fine arms, a touch of coolness in her level gaze. I was elated—she was so clearly the ideal.
I discovered she was a student at Pratt and came from West Newton, a town near Boston. She was not like the brittle New York girls. Deft with my questions, she was more grave, assessing. Physically she was breathtaking, flawlessly made—you can say all you like about soul—and capable of arousing the greatest desire. Poised and somewhat teasing, she was maddeningly discreet about who had invited her up for the weekend and whom she knew. But I had her name and address and in the rush of those final weeks I wrote to her.
After graduation I was able to come to New York more than once to see her. We went to nightclubs, a football game. That I was still in uniform and would stay in uniform was distracting to her. Her own ambitions lay in art. In a year or two she would be working as assistant to a prominent fashion illustrator, wearing the models’ clothes and sunbathing on the terrace when he was out. I said those things to her that come from enthusiasm and complete belief. I was in her thrall. I had hardly done more than kiss her, but that winter, as we prepared to board the troopship, it was she I called from California to say goodbye.
There were three other men sailing who were involved with her. I was aware of only one. I had learned his name, and several days out, having waited for an opportunity, I approached him as uneasily as if I were going to ask for a loan. He was at the railing by himself, a lean, romantic type with a rather elegant surname which I will approximate as Demont—I suspected that he knew her better than I did and perhaps in ways I did not. We looked at the sea for a while. As casually as I could, I mentioned her name.
He nodded his head, showing no sign of surprise. As, with an occasional glance at me, he began to talk, I realized I did not figure in his story, either among memories or rivals. I felt like a spy, one who with the greatest luck finds secret papers lying openly on a desk. He had met Toni when she was fifteen, he told me. She had been visiting a cousin in Charleston, West Virginia, where he was from. As he spoke he seemed like a young man from a good family who had fallen in love with an unknown girl who had been sailing by. “
She’s always had men running after her in droves,” he said matter-of-factly.
“What is she like?” I asked. I had a very good idea of what she was like. I had kissed her. I had felt her against me, touched her neck and waist. Peripheral as these things were, I was certain what lay at the core.
She was ambitious, beautiful, heartless, he told me. A good drinker. One night when he was at Napier Field he had called her long distance and proposed for thirty minutes and then gone on leave to New York and stayed there for ten days, begging. He had managed to read some pages in her diary. He saw that there were others, someone named Beezy. I love him so! she had written. There was a telegram from him saying he was flying in from Oklahoma (Love you like mad) to see her. I can hardly wait! she wrote.
All this had crushed Demont. He had given up. She belonged to Neal now, he said—he’d had her up for June Week. Neal was on the ship, but instinct told me not to talk to him, too. In any case, I had decided: I was going to win her.
It took two years. Her love was slowly given and deeply held. One way or another I was able to come back to New York several times. The surprise of having me call. In a low voice she confessed, “I feel all heavy inside.” Down Park Avenue we fled in a kind of delirium, on our way to the theater, in a separate cab from my parents’, kissing passionately. I would wait outside the fashion illustrator’s apartment house and she would come down after work, young and smiling. Everywhere the city welcomed us. We were its renewal, its lyric. Along cool parkways drenched in green I drove to see her in the country, where she had borrowed for a weekend the house of some friends. It was early summer, the road filled with homeward-bound cars. Chappaqua, Campfire Road. The narrow signs are flashing by, the hour of shadow and the last, stunning light. She is waiting on shaded porches, alone in the house. I am flying along the side road, filled with life. Of course, it did not turn out as I foresaw. This was still in the beginning. Bare-shouldered and seemingly interested in other things—the dinner, how to open the wine—she shied away from me all evening. I did not know enough to take her ear in my teeth, so to speak, to hold tightly and force her to be still.
I sent close friends, when they were home from the Pacific, to see her, Crawford, who was gentle and sincere, Rafalko, the great end of the 1943 and 1944 teams. I did not want her to forget me, and there was also the power of all the letters, of being apart, the denied love that reality cannot equal.
I cannot think of it without sadness. I think of the day-long, intimate hours in her apartment with the same record playing over and over, phrases from it like some sort of oath I will know till the day I die. The intensity, the closeness.
For once only are we perfectly equipped for loving. That was the time; she, perhaps, was not the right person or I was not. It is heartbreaking to remember her pleas and her simple words: I am waiting.
There is the fever and afterwards the long white mornings, the blankness of recovery. I was in Washington by then, still on the road that led away from her, and among rivals she did not know. She had stopped begging me to let my true desires and real self live. She had written them off, although when love has been etched so fiercely, the scar remains always.
A few years later she married someone. He was away somewhere when I came to see her, one of the last times. My first book had been published; there was money from the sale of it to the movies and we were going to dinner at the Brazilian restaurant next door to her old apartment, where Greta Garbo, she once told me, liked to go.
She was wearing a blue silk dress. The same dark hair, birch-white skin, full mouth, bright teeth. The same goddess’s body. We drank, we talked as we used to, but it was not the same, it had been used up. We spent the night in harmony, like two veteran dancers, reunited but no longer lustrous.
She was married to still another man when she died at forty, beautiful and inachieved until the end. She had never had children or fame. Men had always desired her, some I never knew about. As if obedient to her wishes, I had finally turned to the life she always envisioned for me, but too late for the two of us. The years when we might have joined together had passed.
It is in the blizzards of New England that I see her, the snow, the old houses hidden in it, warm window lights. I drive through her town in winter, oak woods, pale sky, a stone boathouse, memories. I think of her mother, her mother’s life, when she brought her children east to live, or was it that her mother stayed in California and sent them to an uncle and aunt in West Newton? No matter, there is the pond, gray and ice-coated, and the railroad bridge that she passed on walks, in her girlhood, in her youth and perfection long ago.
——
In the Pacific the war had ended but its vast, shabby landscape remained. In Manila Bay the water was the color of rust from sunken ships. Unidentified masts and funnels were sticking above the surface. Manila was half destroyed; the tops were blown off the palm trees, the roads were ruined, the air filled with dust. There were still rotting helmets and field equipment to be found on Bataan. The licit had disappeared. Theft was an industry, deserters coming into barracks before dawn to steal what they could. There were incomplete rosters, slack discipline. Men were threatening to shoot officers who were too conscientious. On Okinawa a corporal was driving a nurse around to the black units in an unmarked ambulance. She lay on a bed in back, naked from the waist down. She charged twenty dollars.
I saw MacArthur in the Manila Hotel on Philippine Independence Day. He was thicker around the middle than I had pictured him and shorter, with hair slicked across a balding head. MacArthur was then still a disputed figure, slandered by many who had been under his command and of less interest to me than the fighter pilots met in the latrines of bars and nightclubs who, weaving on their feet, claimed to have been Richard Bong’s wingman or possibly McGuire’s. Of less interest also than one of my hutmates at Nielsen Field who every night showered, put on fresh khaki, and went off to an enormous dance hall in a once fashionable district, Santa Anna, returning the next morning soiled, unshaven, missing insignia, and smelling faintly of ammonia, which was the approximate odor of Filipino women. I went with him finally. It was a place as big as a field house, seething and crowded, with a full band on a stage at each end and a thousand sergeants, petty officers, and girls sitting at tables.
We were at last sent to squadrons where a few languid old-timers reigned, secure figures who were on intimate terms with the supply sergeant and knew how everything was done. The fighter pilots went to remote fields in Korea, Japan, and Okinawa. With fifteen or twenty others I was sent to transports and stayed on for a while in Manila, living in corrugated-iron huts that the last of the wartime flyers had abandoned, leaving behind among other things amateur photos of nude Australian girls and addresses scribbled in pencil on the back of instrument cards.
It was not long before, like the onset of a disease, the winnowing began. Word of mouth brought the news—someone had seen someone, someone had heard … Men began to disappear. One by one there came the names.
Did you hear about McGranery? they said. Spun in on Palawan in a P-51. Gassman was killed there, too. Jack Ray, always smiling, was killed on Okinawa. Woods crashed in a coral pit on takeoff there and died. The planes had to be flown correctly or they were treacherous; they would stall, one wing dropping abruptly, like a horse stumbling. At low speed, on a go-around, suddenly opening the throttle could make them roll onto their back, the controls unable to prevent it.
Schrader was dead, we heard. MacDonald. Like drops of pelting rain they were exploding in the dust. Averill got killed in Korea, going around in a P-38. Domey was killed; Joe Macur. Cherry got killed; Jim Smart, the streamers curling from his wingtips as he went into the sea.
The accidents. They were the stark trees in the forest that stood alone, at the foot of which nothing thereafter grew. The wreckage of the cities would be cleared away but never the oil slick on the sea that was all they found of Smart. For me, however, it was a siren song—the fierce metal planes with their weathered
insignia, the great noise as they launched, the distant runways at Negros, Yontan, Cebu. The danger of it was a distinction which nothing else could afford. It would not happen to you, of course, it would never happen to you, and also, as has been pointed out, you could discover death as quickly by fleeing from it, be stung the soonest.
Mahl, with whom I had flown in primary, was dead in Europe, his funeral was in Paris; Joe Martin, split-“S”ing from fifteen hundred feet in a P-47; Dabney, a unique figure, killed in a crash in Italy, the local people cut the finger from his corpse to get his ring.
Who had been killed—it was that for years. I flew in many funeral formations, timed to pass over the chapel as the officers and wives, the widow among them, emerged, two flights of four, tight as nails, roaring past with one ship conspicuously missing. In the evening the piano is playing at the club. They are rolling dice at the bar. You are surviving, more than surviving: their days have been inscribed on yours.
——
In July 1946, five of us, Farris and I among them, went on to Hawaii. For more than a year I remained, flying transports.
Honolulu in those days was not much changed from the town James Jones described in From Here to Eternity. The war had filled it with money and strangers but the social structure and pace were those of a colonial domain, untroubled, remote. Visitors came by sea, on the Matson Line, and usually stayed for a couple of weeks at one of the two big hotels that were on the beach at Waikiki, the Moana or the famous Royal Hawaiian, which during the war had virtually belonged to naval officers on leave. There was a fountain in the lobby that gave forth pineapple juice and musicians strolled beneath the windows in the fragrant darkness. Close by was the private Outrigger Club, a few restaurants and shops, and beyond that the low, sunstruck façades of the tropics.
Hawaii was in many ways a distant province of California and its reputation so romantic that they said, as they did of Tahiti, you left it either crying or drunk. Movie stars were part of its lore. I had a navigator, part Hawaiian, whose beautiful sister had run off to the other side of Oahu with one, hoping to get into the movies in the time-honored way, and their mother had made him follow and humiliatingly retrieve her. He had been a beachboy, this navigator, at the Outrigger, an envied position something above a caddy and beneath a tennis pro. He told me that before the war when the old Matsonia sailed they would go from stateroom to stateroom, drinking and saying goodbye, and when the gangplank was raised they would still be aboard. As the ship passed the breakwater they would dive, fully clothed, heaped with leis, from the stern, aloha.