by Ward Just
I said, Where are they going?
A recital. Someone hired a soprano and a pianist for the evening. Supper after the recital but they won’t stay. They’ll go someplace else for dinner alone. Probably the Pump Room, where they can sit in the darkness and hold hands, eat steak flambé, and not have to talk to anyone.
I said, Where does she live?
Aurora looked closely at me and gave a long exasperated sigh, rolling her eyes. She lives here, dummy.
I could feel my cheeks redden and there seemed no suitable reply, so I smoked and sipped my drink and inspected Aurora’s room, schoolbooks stacked in the corner next to a tennis racket and a field-hockey stick, a Princeton pennant on the wall between a Viva Zapata! poster and an African mask, photographs in frames on her dresser and desk, and a Toulouse-Lautrec drawing of a dancer in full fling. A bulletin board held ticket stubs, matchbooks, and a drying corsage. The room was heavy with her scent, even with the window thrown open to the air. I had never been in a girl’s bedroom and did not know what to expect. But I was surprised to see a studio photograph of MarIon Brando with an inscription I could not read, his bold signature beneath.
Another friend of my father’s, Aurora said, following my eyes.
What’s he like?
Very nice, she said. Sexy. Very amusing, wonderful storyteller. Beautiful manners, beautiful eyes. He grew up around here, you know.
I didn’t know that.
Yes, she said. But he doesn’t live here anymore.
We listened to the night sounds of Chicago for a while and then she turned off the light. More animals tumbled from the bed and suddenly we were kissing in a tangle of sheets. The sheets smelled of her and of stuffed animals. Her bedroom door was open and soft light filtered in from the corridor, more shadow than light. We were hurried, as if breath were rationed and if we didn’t rush we’d run out, and then unhurried, as if we had been making love for centuries, our own discovery along with Peyton Loftis and the characters in all the books on her shelves, even Marlon Brando. At that moment I felt like someone else’s creation, guided by some imagination more powerful than my own. Aurora was whispering something in my ear but I could not hear owing to the rushing in my head. She was saying Wils, Wils, and I was nodding as if I understood but what I saw and felt overcame what I heard. She was telling me to take off my shirt and whatever else was between us, so I impatiently rid myself of the shirt and all else, one by one until I was stripped. In the half-light from the corridor I saw her smile, an inward smile for herself and for me, too. She was very strong. She arched her back and gave a cry that seemed to come from the center of her heart. Her eyes popped open and closed again at once but I did not follow because I did not want darkness, the darkness of aloneness. I was so close to her I could count her eyelashes. I unbuttoned her blouse, button by button, and when I was done I thought I had never seen anything in the world as lovely as her skin. She had a shiny black barrette in her hair and I removed that, and a wristwatch and bracelet and I removed those also, looking at her closed eyes and inward smile that now seemed unruly, fierce in its desire. We paused then, hesitating; and from somewhere in the street we heard swing, Benny Goodman I was certain. The horns went on and on behind Goodman’s soaring clarinet but when I whispered his name she shook her head so vigorously her hair flew on the sheets. But it was Goodman all right, and the world was suddenly with us again. The music became part of the room’s darkness and then it faded and the car drove away into Lincoln Park. We heard a siren but that faded, too, perhaps actually, perhaps because we weren’t paying attention. We were only with each other. The world went away, leaving only the rustle of bedclothes and her sounds and mine as we continued until we could continue no longer. The animals fell from the bed, one animal after another, and the apartment’s stunned silence closed around us, the seconds advancing, drawing us into our no longer mysterious future. The roaring was still inside my head. I was not thinking clearly except I knew, and I knew she knew, that this night was a great discovery, as momentous as any we would experience together, a dividing line. Precisely what it divided did not call for explanation, except I never wanted to be on the other side again. That was settled. I thought it was hard in this world to know what it was you didn’t know, and now there was one less unknown unknown. I was in a state of restless contentment, overloaded, not trusting myself to speak. I stretched out on the bed, holding her as we rocked slowly from side to side. She was humming the Goodman melody we had heard from the car in the street. While she hummed, she beat a soft tattoo on my chest. She was smiling, her fierceness disappeared; or perhaps it was only in hiding. We were surrounded by her scent and mine, so dense you could not separate them. She looked at me and back at herself, murmuring something about negative space, things that were inside and things that were outside. Then she began to laugh. Now I watched her draw a cigarette from the pack, light it, and blow a smoke ring in the darkness, watching the ring slowly dissolve and collapse, her inward smile intact and her eyes glittering.
When I moved to disentangle myself, she laid her hand flat on my chest.
No. Don’t.
Be still, she said.
So we remained together in her bed, smoking and interviewing each other. Not all the questions had answers and some of the questions were make-believe. After a while she excused herself and disappeared into her bathroom. I heard nothing, then her humming something jazzy, bah-da-dada da. I lay on my stomach and looked down at the books stacked on the floor. The one on top was leatherbound, ARCHIVES printed on the spine. I opened it at random, the page filled with a minute script, difficult to read but certainly Aurora’s handwriting, long paragraphs prefaced by a date. I closed the book at once and replaced it, realizing I had stumbled on a diary, passages of description and dialogue. I knew that Henry Laschbrook was there somewhere and Charlie Smithers and, I hoped, me.
In a moment she was back, leaning against the doorjamb, finishing the cigarette. I did not move, watching her in the half-light of the corridor. But when I opened my arms wide she did a little shimmy and launched herself as if from a diving board, landing across my body, giggling wildly. She had an idea we could pretend we were at summer camp, so we had a pillow fight and following the pillow fight whispered confidences, inventions of one sort or another.
Later we decided to prowl the apartment, the bedroom that Aurora’s father shared with Con-su-e-laaaa, the anonymous guest room, and the doctor’s consulting room with its private entrance. The consulting room was austere, a chaise with a small table to one side, a box of tissues on the table. No ashtray, I noticed, but there was a shallow bowl with sticks of Wrigley’s gum. The doctor’s ladder-back chair was back of the chaise, out of the patient’s line of sight. There was a formal Sheraton desk bare of paper and a glassed-in bookcase filled with medical reference books and journals. The atmosphere of the room was dour, discouraged and somehow lifeless. I could not imagine how Jack Brule sat in his chair for an hour at a time; and I imagined his disembodied voice behind the patient when the hour was up, So long, see you next week. The voice of God or of Oz. The walls were bare except for two framed certificates, the doctor’s medical diploma and a license from the state of Illinois. The carpet on the floor was a faded green with an indeterminate pattern. Heavy curtains covered the windows. The chaise had a Turkish bolster at one end, the bolster with a head-sized indentation. We stood in the doorway in our bare feet and suddenly Aurora nudged me, beginning to chuckle. She explained that inside the glassed-in bookcase, pushed back on the rear shelf where you couldn’t see it, was a human skull. Supposedly taken from an Indian mound out near Galena. Her father’s joke, but the point of the joke was unknown. Her father wouldn’t say.
An honest-to-God skull? I asked.
With teeth, she said.
Does he have a name for it?
Not that I recall, Aurora said.
We stepped down the corridor to his study. I looked carefully at the photographs, a wedding picture with a smiling woman
who did not fit Consuela’s description of Cow, pictures of Dr. Brule and Aurora, and watercolors of empty rooms—a bedroom, a foyer, a dining room with a long table and a single chair, modest rooms that looked as if they belonged in seaside cottages in Ireland or in Spain. The pictures were delicately done and water was visible from the windows, the water a flat washed-out turquoise. There was a photograph of the doctor reading a newspaper in a Paris cafe, and one of Consuela on horseback, a Stetson on her head and a polo mallet in her hand. I looked back at the photographs of Aurora and saw for the first time how much she resembled her father, the set of her shoulders and her way of standing and her look, filled with curiosity, eyes wide open, always maintaining a certain distance in public. Their features were similarly compact, especially the smile that curled up at the edges, the one the doctor used so sparingly. Her mother had an outdoor look, a guileless athletic expression somehow at odds with the wedding dress, low cut, yards and yards of tulle, the train gathered at her feet. Her expression said, All in all, I think I prefer the golf course. Aurora and her mother were identically built, and that gave me something to think about; her mother looked to be a few years older than Aurora was now.
Dr. Brule’s discharge paper was framed in plain wood painted black, the sort of frame you bought at the dime store. It was hung behind the desk. Next to it were photographs of three young soldiers, unshaven and in filthy uniforms, pistols hanging from web belts next to field canteens. The men looked exhausted and I saw that the one in the middle was Dr. Brule, taller than his comrades, his face drawn, his eyes hidden in shadows. The men were loose, slouched as if they had completed an arduous day; and there was still a way to go. There were palm trees in the background and a battered army jeep partly concealed in the trees. The shadows were sharp from a merciless sun. I looked closely and saw that all three men had the caduceus insignia on their shirt collars, along with the bronze leaf that signified the rank of major. But the sad-faced men, in their weariness and boredom, did not look like doctors. They looked like ordinary foot soldiers; and then I noticed the cigarette in Dr. Brule’s fingers, as much a part of him as his wedding band and web belt and unsoldierly slouch. There were four photographs of the doctors. All of them appeared to have been taken on the same miserable summer’s day.
Aurora had put on my shirt and given me one of her father’s robes. When she moved to peer closely at the photographs, I slipped my arm around her waist, feeling the material of my own shirt and the warmth of her body beneath it. We continued to stare at the photographs of exhausted men in filthy fatigues, the grainy texture reminding me of Mathew Brady’s compositions of the Union infantry. Aurora said she had no idea where they were taken or the year or the circumstances. She did not know the names of the other doctors. Her father would not identify or explain, saying only that he would tell her about them someday but that day had not arrived. When she complained that he was secretive, that she deserved to know what he was doing all those years he was away, he replied sharply that he was under no obligation to confess the facts of his own life. The war was on a strictly need-to-know basis, that was how things were set up. That was the agreement. So, still wondering who or what was involved in the “agreement,” she stopped asking and filed the question under Unmentionable in her archives. There were Unmentionables in all families, she said, probably even yours, events and situations that were forbidden. I smiled at that.
Secrets, I said.
Secrets, she agreed.
The definition of personality, I went on, reminding her that Odysseus wept when he heard the poet sing of his great deeds abroad because, once sung, they were no longer his alone. They belonged to anyone who heard the song.
I suppose, she said doubtfully.
Probably your father did something great in the war, I said. Some act of bravery or sacrifice—
She made a dismissive gesture. You should have seen him when he came back. He was a mess.
There’s a cost, I insisted, remembering what he had said to me earlier about hatred and observing the enemy up close. “In your passion you become like them.” It’s a private experience, I said, and he doesn’t want to share it and shouldn’t have to. I was surprised at my own vehemence and knew that I had intruded. I said to her, Sorry. I really don’t know anything about it.
Aurora did not reply. We stood silently, looking at the photographs, making of them what we could, I felt a subtle change in her and in me, too, standing half stripped in her father’s private study, wondering when he and Consuela would return from dinner. Of course I liked it where I was, with Aurora in the bright light of the desk lamp, my arm around her waist and her head on my shoulder, a delicious immodesty. It seemed to me that anything was possible now that we were on the right side of the divide. I remembered reading somewhere of one of the Italian hill communities, inhabitants of a region overrun again and again by alien peoples, Austrians, Hungarians, Serbs, Turks, Germans. The true test of character in that region was the ability to step outside one’s own identity, go beyond one’s roots to another realm altogether, a kind of transcendence. Such an ability required the severest sort of self-knowledge coupled with the will to survive. Your soul would be multilingual, not to mention your conscience. I felt one identity slip away and another take its place, and I was certain that Aurora felt it also, and with the same excitement. I knew we would make our own way in this fabulous undiscovered country, fortified by these new identities as yet undefined. We discarded the robe and the shirt. I kissed her, all the time wondering if her father had heard the poet and was afraid or was afraid of hearing the poet.
She bumped me with her hip while she thought things over. She said, It’s your first time, isn’t it?
Oh, no, I said. Not at all. I stand around naked all the time with beautiful girls in their fathers’ private studies, looking at war photographs. It’s the normal thing in Quarterday. We’ve been doing it for years and years. When she smiled wickedly and raised her eyebrows I knew at once that I had misunderstood the question, not for the first time that evening.
What if it is, I said.
Nothing, she said.
What about you?
What if it isn’t? she said.
With my newfound identity, my multilingual transcendence-into-another-world-altogether, I summoned what I hoped and believed was a manly smile, the prelude to a most intimate exchange—and then I knew I did not want to hear this poet’s song, not then, not ever. Somewhere behind me I heard the tick of a clock. I was aware of the heavy silence between us, Aurora turning slowly away from me, waiting for the answer to her question; I could not see her face, but I knew she was grinning. The men in the photographs stared out in vacant indifference. I pulled Aurora close and bent toward the photographs, believing that if I looked hard enough I would find—I suppose the word was inspiration. But nothing came and after an interval I said, It’s the Pacific theater.
Yes, she said quickly. That’s where he was. I know that much.
I was looking closely at the second photograph, the doctors standing in front of a military building, a flag hanging limply in the heat.
I said, That’s the Philippine flag.
Aurora said, He’s never mentioned the Philippines.
The last of the photographs did not include the doctors. It was taken by a professional, a posed picture of an American general and his aides. The general seemed to be composed of skin and bones but he stood alone and unsupported, a little apart from the others with his ghostly dignity, his eyes averted from the camera. His posture, his great height, and the boniness of his skull reminded me of Aurora’s father as he was now. The general’s face was familiar. And then I knew for a certainty where Dr. Brule had been and what he had endured.
I said, Your father called it “the Hike.”
That’s what he calls it, Aurora said. Another joke.
I took a step forward to look at the photographs more critically. The war was close in time, but it seemed part of another era. Today’s war was Korea.
Books came one after another and there were articles every day in the newspapers, an anniversary of a battle or the death of one of the great commanders or a fresh analysis of this tactic or that, the Ardennes or Guadalcanal. The agreed-upon silence not to contradict the Hollywood version of events was giving way at last, yet even the firsthand accounts were written with circumspection and most veterans declined to speak at all of their wartime life, the experience too personal, too frightful even now to relate for the education of civilians, spectators really, bystanders who listened out of a sense of duty or simple curiosity or pity. What self-respecting veteran could look into those faces, so filled with sympathy and noncomprehension, and tell the exact truth? The exact truth was profoundly private, as closely held as the most shameful secret; and to speak of it would be to lose it, a truth so hard won. The hard facts of the matter were etched on their faces. I looked at those long-ago photographs in their dime-store frames and knew that “the Hike” was the Bataan Death March and that Jack Brule was one of the survivors and that his stoic silence was the means of that survival.
I said, Did he ever mention Bataan?
No, Aurora said. What’s Bataan?
I volunteered nothing further, preferring instead to join the conspiracy of silence. There were so many conspirators, would one more make a difference? Somehow Jack Brule’s secret had become my secret, and if he did not care to share it with his daughter, neither would I.
What’s Bataan? she said again.
A battle early in the war, I said. The Philippines.
Was my father in it?
I don’t know, I said. Might have been.
The name’s familiar—
Let’s go back to your room, I said. They’ll be here soon, your father and Consuela. We can go around the corner, have a bite to eat.
Will you tell me about Bataan at dinner?
I don’t know much about it, I said, and turned from the photographs. How I enjoyed telling stories about municipal corruption and the Chicago Mob, describing the way of the world to North Shore debutantes. But this was different. This was serious, a war in which many thousands died and Jack Brule was one of the walking wounded. I had an idea that it was some form of patriotism that caused him to withhold the facts of his own life; and it was not my business to interfere, though as I thought about it I knew I had made a choice. The choice was between Jack Brule and Aurora, and I had chosen him over her, preserving his privacy and her—I suppose the word was innocence.