The Patriot

by Evan S. Connell

  He very soon discovered that he preferred the company of other veterans, whom he could identify, as they could identify him, by their clothing, which almost invariably consisted of brogans, khaki shirt or trousers, and a Navy peacoat or a leather jacket with some insignia, a row of bombs and an eagle, perhaps, painted on the back.

  One of these veterans was also studying art, and within a few days after the commencement of classes Melvin learned that his name was Kip Silver, that he belonged to a Greek letter fraternity, and that he had been a bombardier on a Flying Fortress. He had taken part in raids against many of the German industrial centers—Emden, Münster, Cologne, Frankfurt—and had a number of medals and citations. He was a sturdy little man in his middle twenties, sway-backed, with sloping shoulders and a rump like a Hottentot’s. His face was underslung, the jaws resembling a muzzle, an impression accentuated by a silky cocoa-colored mustache which flowed with sinister implications around the corners of his protruding, purplish lips and descended into a neat goatee. He looked, to Melvin, not like a man quite so much as an orangutan which found nothing exceptional in masquerading as a man, particularly on cold days when he would put on a black-brown leather helmet and buckle it tightly under his chin. On sunny days he wore a large French beret.

  They had been acquainted only a few weeks when Melvin received in the mail a card inviting him to dinner at the fraternity house. He accepted, but with surprise, for he had supposed Kip Silver spoke to him on the campus or when they passed on the street only because they happened to attend classes together. He was still more surprised to receive a second invitation, which he also accepted, and then, that same evening, to be asked if he would like to pledge. This would mean living in the fraternity house, eating at the community table, attending parties, and in general living a sociable sort of life. When they asked him he did not know what to say, because he had never thought about joining a fraternity, but they were waiting, and being afraid that they might think he was discourteous he thanked them and said he would feel honored to be a pledge. He meant that he was grateful and that he would think it over, but they misunderstood: one of them seized him by the hand while all the others crowded about offering congratulations and patting him on the back. He realized that they were making a mistake, but it seemed to him that it was his own fault and he therefore felt obliged to go along with the idea.

  A few minutes later he was in an upstairs room, seated beside a table on which there was a candle and an opened book—his right hand lying on the book; Kip Silver, the sponsor, stood behind him with fingertips resting on his shoulders. He listened without comprehension to one of the members, who had donned a billowing livid purple gown with a mask and a peaked hood, define the nine articles of faith and fourteen perpetual obligations which he, Melvin Isaacs, now assumed.

  The next day, wondering if it would be all right to ask if he might listen to those obligations once more and possibly get a copy of them, he moved into the fraternity house, assisted by Kip Silver and several other members. He had been living in a drafty boarding house that smelled of gas and cabbage, so it seemed like a wise move. He did not have many belongings: books, clothes, some phonograph records, a sea shell he had picked up on the beach at Pensacola, a potted cactus, a box of raisins and one of shredded wheat, for he customarily got hungry at night, a jar of powdered coffee which tasted watery no matter how it was brewed, a bullfighting poster, and a bottle of sour-mash whisky his father had given him. There were a few other items, but he was packed in about fifteen minutes, the whisky rolled in a sweater at the bottom of his duffel bag because he had a feeling that if it were seen he would be expected to share it with everybody in the fraternity house.

  He was assigned an exceedingly small room at the end of the third-floor corridor. This arrangement suited him; he felt fortunate that he had no roommate, except that a telephone was fastened to the wall beside his door and rang every little while. He hung a blanket on the wall to see if this might muffle the bell and the objectionable voices; it seemed to, slightly, but he was apt to swivel around from his desk and shoot paper clips at the blanket while someone just outside was talking—usually to a sorority girl, to judge from the inanity of the conversation.

  And it was on account of this telephone, in conjunction with a few other aspects of fraternity life which were galling to him, that he began going to a doughnut shop around the corner. Here he would slump in a booth for hours at a time, sipping coffee and muddling his appetite with various little pastries while he turned through the newspaper or some magazine and brooded over what he was going to do when he graduated and the government stopped paying his expenses. He would have a degree, a Bachelor of Arts degree, which meant that he had been to college for approximately four years and had an elementary knowledge of perhaps half a dozen subjects, with the certain implication that he did not know much about any of them. How many Bachelor of Arts degrees were awarded each year in the United States he had no idea, but there were, no doubt, many thousands, and the more he thought of this the more depressing it became. He considered returning to the Navy, and began to wish he had never requested his release. He had not been doing anything there, and the Navy offered no future; on the other hand, that was the peculiar charm of the Navy. As a seaman he had been under no obligation to bestir himself either physically or mentally, except to meet the minimum requirements of his job.

  These hours in the doughnut shop, however agreeable as a respite from the telephone and the harassment he suffered as a pledge, struck him as otherwise unprofitable, so much so that he periodically exhorted himself to do something, but could not then think of much to do. Weeks went by.

  One afternoon when he returned to the fraternity house his father was in the lounge.

  “I’ve been waiting two hours!” Jake Isaacs exclaimed. “Where can we talk? You aren’t eating enough—you look like a ghost. Come, we’ll sit on the front steps of the house, I always wanted to do that. Being in a fraternity, I envy you, such a life.” He was already at the door and was beckoning. “I have some news. You must get to know Louis Kahn, who is out of the Army and is in Kansas City intending to marry your sister. None of us could believe it, but it’s true!”

  Melvin followed him out of the house and obediently sat down on the steps, interested to hear more of Louis Kahn, but at the same time vaguely irritated that his father had appeared, because he had been planning to take a shower and relax in the doughnut shop until supper. There was no way of predicting how long his father would stay; he enjoyed driving to the university, he arrived without warning and might stay no more than fifteen minutes, after which he would go speeding back to the city, or he might remain until it became obvious that he was hoping for an invitation to eat in the fraternity dining hall.

  “How soon will you be coming home for a visit?” he insisted, and plucked at Melvin’s sleeve. “You must get to know Louis. You can take a bus, it isn’t far, I drive here in no time. If you don’t like to ride on the bus, don’t hesitate to say so. We will drive up to get you. Louis has received a sports car from Italy. Nobody knows how he can afford it. He’s a magnificent driver. He’ll be happy to come and get you if I am busy.”

  “I don’t understand,” Melvin said. “It was just a little while ago that you were threatening to have him arrested the minute he showed up. Now you sound as though you like him.”

  “Yes, that’s true. I was wrong. There’s less difference in their ages than I thought. Louis is not even thirty.”

  Melvin looked at him in astonishment. “Do you mean you’re actually going to let him marry Leah?”

  “Yes. We are all very happy. He will be good for her. She obeys him, for one thing, I don’t know why. She has never paid the least attention to anything I said.”

  “How can you feel so strongly about a thing and change your mind so quickly?”

  “Why not? It’s a matter of being informed of certain facts. What’s the matter? You don’t approve?”

  “Well,” said Melvin
after a while, “if she wants to marry him, and I guess she does, it’s a good thing you don’t object.”

  “This Friday we are going to the wrestling matches in the municipal auditorium. Louis was a champion wrestler in the Army. He’s enormous. He looks like an oak tree. Next week I am introducing him to my Legion post. We are all extremely anxious to see you. You haven’t been home since Christmas. Louis brought presents for all of us from Italy, and has a wrist watch for you. Since Christmas you haven’t been home. It isn’t far; merely buy a ticket. Here, I’m giving you the money,” and he slipped some bills into Melvin’s breast pocket.

  Melvin got up and walked around uneasily; he did not like the idea of being obliged to accept a wrist watch from someone he had never seen, and whenever his father neatly slipped a little money into his pocket, as frequently happened, he became uncomfortable.

  “What’s the matter? Are you offended?”

  “No, I’m not offended. It’s just that I’ve got a lot of things to do, I mean, studying and so forth.”

  “Study? You’re painting pictures, what is there to study? I have always wished I had talent.”

  “You don’t understand. I don’t paint all day, just part of the day, and I’ve got a course in art history, and the theory of composition and a lot of others, and then there’s these non-elective courses like plain English I’ve got to take to qualify.”

  “To qualify for what?”

  “Well, to get the GI Bill they have these regulations, see, and stipulations.”

  “You should spend more time studying. Your grades, unfortunately, have never been remarkable.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “After graduation when you apply for a position the employer will request a transcript of your record at the university, you will be obliged to produce it. Grades are important. Nobody will hire you. You should take advantage of your fraternity friendships. I’m going. I would like to remain for supper, but I have business in the city. I will tell your mother you are looking fine, in excellent health, which is not strictly true. You are growing thin, you should eat more. Get a haircut. Good-by. I will tell Louis you are looking forward to meeting him.”

  As his father drove away, waving and nodding, Melvin slumped on the steps and put his head in his hands.

  A few weeks later, considering that already he was twenty-two years old, he took a pencil and paper and spent a while attempting to account for this fact. Spring had come again; from his window he could see through the boughs of a massive, mottled sycamore for a distance of fifteen or twenty miles across the Kaw River valley. The sun was bright and warm, there were no clouds in the sky, and while he sat behind the desk there was a faint, sliding rumble overhead and one last avalanche of snow darkened the window as it cascaded from the eaves and splashed to the ground far below, while the upper limbs of the sycamore swayed from the shock. Then, as if it were truly spring, and they had that instant been released from a cage, two swallows veered by, tilting in noiseless, vertical perfection on some invisible current; he opened the window and leaned out, looking all around, at the wooded hills, the long, winding river, and the great valley, and closed his eyes to gather the full warmth of the sunshine on his face.

  Almost a year had passed since the capitulation of the Germans, and it seemed to him quite odd that there had actually been a war, and that he had spent more than three years of his life in military service. Those years had been as real and palpable as his life had ever been, yet now they were gone, and each experience he had known so intimately was gone. He had flown above the Gulf, and, glancing over his shoulder, observed Sam Horne watching him attentively—but now this did not exist. Where, in fact, was Horne? Was he alive? There had been no word from him, not since that postcard in New Orleans, and that was October of last year, no, the year before last. Horne was getting married, was that what he had written? No, he was already married and his wife was pregnant. Yes, and the child was due to be born around Lincoln’s birthday, which would mean it would be on its feet by now and speaking a few words, or whatever children did when they were thirteen months old, and yet it seemed like only last year, or the previous year, that they had begun cadet training, running the obstacle course and learning elementary navigation.

  Melvin drew his head in the window and looked at a Corsair made of balsa wood and painted Navy blue which hung by a thread from a thumbtack in the ceiling. The Corsair was slowly turning in the breeze. Against the pale green ceiling all perspective was lost and the model became real, turning in the sky; and it seemed to him that he might be somewhere watching Sam Horne return. In a little while the plane would come howling overhead, the flaps descending, the wheels unfolding.

  Melvin reached up and with his finger lightly touched the balsa plane, which spun around, rocking back and forth. He wondered again what had become of Horne. Perhaps he had been killed because he had miscalculated a trifle, for just an instant, and the Corsair crashed. Or had he died in the Pacific—shot down, destroyed by a Japanese pilot he never saw? At Saufley Field they talked about this. “All right,” Horne said, and Melvin clearly heard him, “you don’t know any Japs. Neither do I.”

  Could such reasoning be justified? At the time it seemed a little strange, but Horne had been so sure, so positive. Now take the dead at Hiroshima—how could the holocaust be justified? On that August morning, he had read, the sky over Hiroshima was perforated by a flash of light that traveled from east to west, from the city toward the hills. A fisherman in a sampan twenty miles out to sea heard the explosion, but there was no noise in the city. There was darkness beneath the cloud, and the people, silent and dazed, with blood pouring from their mouths and nostrils. A hospital collapsed and fell into the river, and there was a man squeezed between two long timbers like a morsel between two chopsticks. Huge drops of water, as large as marbles, fell from the cloud on the burning houses. The animals, too, were burned; the horses, dogs, and cats hung their heads, vomited, and died. There was a woman whose skin slipped from her body in huge, glovelike pieces. A group of children stood in a circle holding hands; their eyes were melted and the fluid ran down their cheeks. In the middle of the city, beneath the center of the explosion, the silhouette of a man was cast on the ground. Later in the day another American airplane flew over Hiroshima, to reconnoiter or gather data on the weather.

  The chimes were announcing supper. Melvin washed his hands and went downstairs, still thinking, and his manner attracted the attention of one of the fraternity brothers. Melvin did not hear the brother ask if he was ill, and was annoyed to find someone had caught him by the arm and was ordering him to sing a song. Melvin refused. He was ordered to eat his supper standing up, but this did not suit him either.

  The following afternoon he was summoned to the chapter room. There he listened phlegmatically while the vice president, dressed in the mask and billowing gown with the sequin-encrusted crest on the peaked hood, sonorously reread the nine articles of faith and the fourteen perpetual obligations.

  Being asked, at the conclusion of this reading, to reaffirm his oath of fraternal loyalty, Melvin balked; then, feeling guilty at this display of ingratitude, for it did seem to him that the members must have privately agreed to lower their standards in order to pledge him in the first place, he slapped one hand down on the waiting book, and raced through the sacred oath. This was not well received; a tense silence ensued, during which he considered whether or not to hear what else they might wish to say, or whether to get up and walk out. He realized that he did not care in the least what they said or did.

  Fraternity life, so far as he had learned, engendered song and ceremony, numberless protestations of friendship, promises of a rich future life, and frequent taxes which were known as assessments and which never failed to enrage him. Nor did he know quite why, but the fact that at meals everyone seated themselves in unison at a cryptic signal from the president’s table also enraged him. No one outside the fraternity knew about this signal. Being a pledge, he was exclude
d from knowledge of sanctums Delta, Gamma, and Beta, but the signal to sit down at the table had been revealed to him on the night he made his pledge, for it belonged to Alpha, the lowest order of mystic communication. He understood that when, that is to say, if, he was initiated—and as matters were going it had begun to seem doubtful—if he was initiated he would be admitted to sanctum Beta, wherein he would be taught the handshake. This had seemed worth waiting for, but now he was not so sure.

  However, there were the parties, which he enjoyed and at which he drank a good deal; and the intramural athletic contests, which he enjoyed even more; and on the assumption that perhaps he had been expecting too much and had given very little in return, he decided he might try out for a place on the fraternity track squad. In high school he had been a not incompetent hurdler, for his legs were long, and in mid-air sailing over the barriers he displayed a kind of energetic enthusiasm reminiscent of a wallaby, but because the fraternity boasted two excellent hurdlers he concluded he should become a broad-jumper.

  So it was that one fine day in April he got dressed in his old cadet athletic gear which he, together with Sam Horne and a good many other members of the battalion, had wanted to keep and so had reported lost: khaki shorts, white wool socks, black gym shoes, and a reversible T-shirt orange-yellow on one side and Navy blue on the other. In addition, he borrowed a wool sweatshirt from another pledge, and thus outfitted, with a large towel wrapped professionally about his neck, he went jogging stiffly but cheerfully around the cinder track hoping to be mistaken for a member of the Kansas varsity, or perhaps a visiting Navy athlete. However, nobody else on the track paid much attention and he found himself scrutinizing them as they raced by, wondering which of them were just out for exercise and which were members of the university team. He recognized one—a hawk-faced long-distance runner whose picture was often in the sports section of the newspaper—and jogged after him for a few hundred yards but soon gave up. He lay down on the grass of the football field to rest for a while, fell asleep in the sunshine, did some calisthenics after waking up, and then trotted over to begin broad-jumping; but here he was discouraged by the effort it took to reach the pit, and so, after two or three jumps, feeling slothful and rather embarrassed, he slunk off the field, took a hot shower and got dressed, and spent the remainder of the day in the doughnut shop.