They were whistling their way northeastward, far out to sea, beneath which lay a nether world of silent stillness. And yet if such things could be recorded, somewhere deep below there might have been heard a sound of soft crying.
He tried to stop the tears—tried quite hard, in fact—but they flooded upward from a tightly gripped heart. In the dark, Kahn sobbed quietly and alone, and though it was partly from relief and partly from sorrow, it was partly from shame too. Because he was ashamed—of what he hadn’t done; and embarrassed too, because he smelled so bad.
36
Billy Kahn picked up the phone and dialed the Holdens’ number. From his hotel window he could see the open fields of Central Park, little patches of snow dotting the ground beneath barren trees. But the day looked fresh and crisp, and there were people in the park, walking dogs or hurrying to work.
“Holden residence,” someone answered.
“Is Mr. Holden in?”
“Who’s calling, please?” the voice asked.
“My name is Kahn. I was . . . in the same company with Frank Holden. I’m in New York City.”
“Just a moment, please,” the answerer said.
It had taken him a week to get out of the Army, since Patch’s pull apparently did not extend much beyond the flight line at Long Binh. It had been a week of interminable form-filling, physical examinations and orientations—in between which he lived in one of the BOQs at Fort Dix, New Jersey.
For the first day or so he had spent his spare time hanging around the officers’ club, where he could buy a meal and a drink. Even though he was a stranger, people frequently engaged him in conversation about the war as soon as they noticed the division insigne he was wearing, and that it was on his right shoulder, indicating he had served in a combat zone. He quickly discovered, however, that the questions were often tedious and sometimes painful and that, in fact, he did not want to talk about it, and so he started staying around his BOQ.
In the mornings he would walk to the commissary and buy sandwich fixings, which he prepared himself in his room, and he also purchased a couple of bottles of whiskey. Darkness came early in the month of February over the flat New Jersey plains, and after he had made himself a sandwich he would go and sit in a chair by the window and have a drink and look out over the empty parade ground. When the whiskey began to make him feel good, he would have another drink, and when he felt good enough he would begin to think about it . . . but only then . . .
Once, the day before he received his discharge, he had walked through the lobby of the BOQ past a television set showing the news. The story was of a big antiwar demonstration in Washington, and he stopped to watch it. The other officers, mostly second lieutenants, jeered and swore—but he did not. When the commentator switched to some real war footage, he went back up to his room and poured himself a larger-than-usual drink of whiskey.
“Hello,” a woman said. “Mr. Holden is unable to come to the phone right now. May I help you? This is Mrs. Holden.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Kahn said, faltering a little. “I . . . ah . . . knew your son, Frank. I was the . . . the Company Commander just before he took over.”
There was a pause at the other end.
“Are you in New York?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am—I’m in a hotel near Central Park.”
“Would you hold on a moment, please?”
The previous afternoon he had taken the train out of Fort Dix, sitting next to a haggard-looking woman in a blond wig who said she was a dancer and invited him to the club where she worked. Paying off the court-martial fine had left him with savings of eight hundred dollars, more or less, with which to begin the rest of his life, and the first thing he realized was that he needed some clothes. He had bought some slacks and a windbreaker at the post PX, but today he planned to go down to one of the shops along the street and buy himself a suit or sports coat.
“Hello,” a man’s voice said. “This is Francis Holden. I understand you knew our son.”
“Yessir,” Kahn said. “We were friends. He was my Executive Officer.”
“Where are you staying?”
“I’m in the Filmore Hotel . . . on Seventy-second Street—West, I think. It’s near the park.”
“If you didn’t know it, the funeral is today—at two,” Mr. Holden said. “But won’t you come over here a little before? We’re having some people in.”
He sounded slightly stiff, but very polite, Kahn thought, and thoroughly in control. Not at all like Mrs. Crump, whom he had phoned earlier down in Mississippi. But these were a different kind of people from the Crumps . . . and from himself, too.
“Please, Mr. Kahn,” Mrs. Holden said from another phone. “We aren’t too far away . . . You knew Frank. We’d like to see you very much—won’t you come over?”
“Yes, ma’am, I’d like to very much.”
“We’re on East Sixty-second Street,” the elder Holden said. “You can catch the crosstown bus or take a cab . . .”
After he hung up, Kahn went to the window and looked down at the busy sidewalks. The racket of automobile horns and other city noises drifted ten stories up to meet him, and he wondered if they knew, any of them down there. If they had any idea at all . . .
A few minutes later the phone rang. It was the long-distance operator. “I have your party now,” she said.
“Hello, is this Mrs. Dunn?”
The voice at the other end sounded pleasant and young, with a trace of an accent.
“My name’s Kahn, ma’am. You don’t know me, but I was a friend of your husband’s . . .
“Yes, we met on the ship going over. Oh, he wrote you? I didn’t know that . . .
“. . . Well, I was wondering when . . . the funeral was going to be. I’m in New York City now, but I’d like to try to come down for it . . .
“. . . It has . . . already? . . . Oh, at Arlington Cemetery . . .
“. . . With full military honors . . . I see . . . It must have been very nice. Yes . . . of course—I just didn’t think he . . .
“. . . Oh, of course . . . I had just been wondering if there was anything I could do, to be of help. It must be very hard . . .”
“. . . Well, if you think of anything, please don’t worry about calling. I’m at the Filmore Hotel in New York City, at least for another day or so . . .
“. . . No bother at all, ma’am. I, ah, I want to tell you something, though. Your . . . husband, Major Dunn . . . was a fine man. Very fine . . .
“. . . No, ma’am, I’m out of the Army now. My time was up . . .”
He put on the windbreaker and went to the elevator. It was nearly 11 A.M., and if he wanted to get over to the Holdens’ house he was going to have to hurry up and buy that sports coat and put it on.
The church was a gray Gothic spire situated at the confluence of the great and powerful avenues of Wall Street and Broadway. Former First Lieutenant Billy Kahn arrived jammed in a limousine with an aunt, an uncle and two cousins of the Holden family. They went straight inside, but he stood on the sidewalk for a while, watching other limos, taxicabs and private automobiles disgorging serious-faced, proper-looking people in front of the church. He thought he recognized some of the faces, but wasn’t sure. In any case, he thought, the Holden family were certainly well connected.
An icy gust deviled down the canyon of skyscrapers and needled his eyes, and he clutched the front of his new tweed jacket together against the cold—and also to make it fit better, since when he bought it he had simply asked for his old size, forgetting that he had lost weight. He hadn’t noticed how loosely it hung until he stopped in front of a plate-glass window on his way to the Holdens’, and by then it was too late to do anything about it.
They had ushered him warmly into the Holden household, offering food and drink, and taken him into the big living room where everyone was gathered and introduced him around. All eyes were on him, and the room fell silent when the Holdens began asking questions about their son. He had answered de
licately but truthfully, and given as close an account as he could of the final battle—leaving out, however, any mention of Patch’s refusal to relocate the company. During this time, most—except for the Holdens themselves—looked down at the floor, and a few had shaken their heads sorrowfully from time to time. In the end, though, all seemed relieved to have been carried back through the last moments by someone who had been especially close to it.
When he had finished, only Holden’s sister, Cory, was moved to tears, and as she sobbed quietly in a chair, Holden’s father said to him, “Billy, do you believe Frank had any idea what he died for?” Kahn thought about it briefly, then said, “Mr. Holden, he had a whole company to look after, and from everything I heard, he did the best he could. That’s the only answer I can give you.”
The honor guard arrived in their dress blue uniforms and formed up alongside the church. They received mostly passing, awkward glances from those filing in—with the exception of a tall, pretty girl standing on the steps, and she stared at them with such a narrowed fierceness in her bright green eyes that Kahn had a sudden inkling he knew who she was. He walked over and said, “Excuse me—is your name Becky?”
She continued to stare at the honor guard—six lieutenants and a captain, who were talking together quietly. “Yes,” she said.
“I guess I thought so. Frank told me about you.”
She looked at him. Her eyes were slightly red as though from crying, but not for a while.
“I’m Bill . . . Billy Kahn. Frank and I were in the same outfit.”
“Oh,” she said flatly, then added, “Why are you here?”
He stumbled for words for an instant. “I am . . . well, because . . . he was my friend . . .”
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean that,” she said, softening. “I meant, how did you get here . . . if you were just over there with him?”
He was about to answer when a tall, slightly graying man joined them. He was craggy and handsome and almost fatherly-looking, but he took Becky’s hand.
“Sorry I’m a little late—something came up,” he said. She leaned over and kissed him lightly on the cheek.
“Richard,” she said, “this is . . . Billy. He knew Frank . . . over there.”
The man extended his hand. “Hi, I’m Dick Widenfield,” he said. They shook hands, and Kahn fished around for a cigarette. In his pocket was Holden’s unsent letter; he had read it again this morning, and yet had no more idea what to do with it now than he had had the day he got it.
“You’re in the Army, then?” Widenfield asked.
“Until two days ago.”
“Oh, so you just came—”
“Oh God! It’s so stupid!” Becky suddenly blurted out. “Why did he have to die? For what?”
It was the second time that day someone had asked that question. He knew that the answer he had given before wouldn’t do this time . . . different people, different answer. Maybe there wasn’t a single answer. Maybe there wasn’t an answer at all . . . so he stood there dumbly and said nothing.
“Do you know our group?” Widenfield interceded. “We’re trying to stop this thing before it goes any further. There are some veterans organizing too—you could be of . . . you could help us, if you want to . . .”
Becky was watching him curiously, and he suddenly felt awkward and uncomfortable in the ill-fitting tweed jacket and his short, Army-cut hair.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do right now,” he said. “I haven’t been here very long.”
“Of course,” Widenfield said, “but look, why don’t you take this card? Give a call sometime—even if you just want to talk. Tell whoever answers I said to put you ‘straight through.’ ”
Kahn took the card and put it into his pocket along with Holden’s letter and Congressman Miter’s address. There were only a few people trickling into the church now, and the honor guard had formed up at the curb.
“I guess we should go in,” Widenfield said.
As they walked into the church, Becky dropped back beside Kahn.
“Did he say anything about me . . . before, I mean?”
“I wasn’t there; I didn’t see him for about a week or so before.”
“I hope he knew,” she said, “that I loved him,” and in a lower voice she added, “I was going to marry him . . .” Then she stepped quickly up beside Widenfield and took his arm to walk down the aisle.
Kahn took a seat alone in one of the hard, wooden pews in the back of the church beneath the high beams and buttresses. The organist had been playing low, funereal music, but as he sat the tempo built into a powerful, uplifting throb. It must be, he thought, the hymn they were discussing in the car, the family had requested the old Episcopal prayer of thanksgiving because it was “hopeful.” The sweet melodic strains swept high into the rafters of the church, until after a while they seemed to become a part of the old building itself—as did he, and the others—caught up, all of them, in the spirit of hope and thankfulness . . .
There came to him now something he had not understood before: that there was in fact a strength in the dead; it was their legacy to the living. Somewhere, he realized, in other churches in towns and cities all over the country where the war dead were being buried, this sad, bittersweet legacy was being passed along . . . to those like himself who had come through it and would go on to become bankers, or salesmen, or service-station attendants, or farmers, or forklift operators or geologists—and husbands and fathers—and spend their Friday nights swapping the truths and lies down at a VFW hall or in a bar until in time it wouldn’t matter which; the important thing would be to have a place to go and be with people like themselves, since anyone who hadn’t been there probably wouldn’t know what in hell you were talking about.
At the altar a young priest sat meditating, his head slightly bowed. He, Kahn had also learned from the conversation in the car, was chaplain of Holden’s old prep school, summoned down to New York by the family to deliver the final, parting words.
The organist continued to ring out the powerful joyous message of the hymn . . . A Prayer of Thanksgiving, he thought. It was very beautiful. How odd . . .
. . . Even the others, the ones with missing arms and legs and perforated intestines and steel plates and rearranged faces, he marveled—all of them, including the ones who would lie for years in hospital beds hoping to get well enough someday to walk outside and sit in the garden—they at least were still capable of pondering why it had happened to them; and for this they too could be thankful to the legacy of the dead.
The organist had gone through the hymn once and changed into a higher, more forceful key. From a balcony above, a lone voice rang out the hopeful words of the song:
We gath-er to-geth-er
To ask . . . the Lord’s bless-ing;
And pray that thou still
Our de-fend-er wilt be . . .
. . . and what a strong, wonderful voice! Clear and sweet—belonging, Kahn knew, to a member of the Metropolitan Opera Company: another touch added by the family.
When the singer finished, the organist returned to a deep prelude, building more power this time, preparing for a huge radiant burst which came as the great doors of the church opened and the captain of the honor guard stepped in. Behind him, the six lieutenants stood on either side of the casket, and as the organist plunged into the final stanza they stepped in perfect cadence as the people rose to their feet.
Kahn felt a swelling in his chest. He soared with the music. As the honor guard passed by, a single tear came, and rolled down his face and quickly dried on his cheek, but he made no move to brush it away. It made no difference. He knew that he could go home now to the life that lay in front of him—even though the biggest thing that probably would ever happen was already behind.
He had only one stop along the way, and that would be in Washington, to look up Spudhead’s father and tell him his son was doing fine—and also discuss with him the matter of a certain brigade commander and the deaths of fifty me
n.
Soon afterward, although he could not possibly know it now, the debt bird would fly away forever, leaving in its place a shadowy, begging void of doubts and questions. Why? What on earth was it had dragged him through the knothole onto the playing fields of hell, then brought him back again and left him here? He had seen many terrible things; yet now they seemed far away and growing dimmer. All he knew for certain was that somehow, he was close to the end of it.
The music exploded into a great ringing crescendo as the organist pulled out the stops; bells and cymbals trembled in the rafters and floors of this venerable house of God.
The little procession was far down the aisle, and the young priest behind the altar looked reverent and grave. Everyone watched the honor guard as it drew to a halt precisely at the close of the hymn, so none of them saw the former commander of Bravo Company raise his right hand to his forehead, bring it down again quickly and then slip out quietly into the cold February sun.
WINSTON GROOM is the author of seven books, including the phenomenally successful Forrest Gump and the prize-winning As Summers Die. He is coauthor of Conversations with the Enemy, which was nominated for the 1984 Pulitzer Prize. Before becoming a writer, he served in Vietnam, mostly with the Fourth Infantry Division from 1966 to 1967. His latest book, Shrouds of Glory, a history of the last great campaign of the Civil War will be published soon. Mr. Groom lives in Point Clear, Alabama.
Table of Contents
Back Cover
Preview
Titlepage
Copyright
Author’s Note
Dedication
Organization and Roster
Quote
Part One: THE VOYAGE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Better Times Than These Page 46