Before Their Time: A Memoir (10 page)

After another moment or two of silence, Barney turned his back and resumed his walk. We were once again merely two guards, on nighttime duty in a Normandy
orchard, who were not supposed to talk to each other. The hours passed. The bright constellations seemed to move with the moon, and our shift soon ended.

I don’t think Barney Barnato gave me a thought after that. I wasn’t interesting enough for him. I lacked intellectual clout; I didn’t care sufficiently about his mysteries. Later, I learned that there were others in the third platoon who had suffered the same attention—and in embarrassed silence, too. It seemed that none of us considered it an honor.

AFTER weeks of inactivity, Paul Willis began to steal again. As old victims, Bern and I laughed about it sardonically, even though we weren’t quite sure where the joke was. Willis had again become the old opaque Willis we had known in Tennessee and South Carolina, unreadable and ungiving, feckless and weird. Gone were his adult concerns about the squad’s future, about Fedderman’s place in it, and our urgent need for harmony and mutual support, as he had expressed it aboard the SS
Argentina
and later acted on. What Bern and I felt, instead, was a sudden shakiness that we soon began to share, an insecurity that undermined the active surface of our lives—beneath the forced marches and the bayonet drills and all the other exhausting routines—and the beginnings of a familiar, wormy fear about what lay ahead.

Nobody wanted to talk about being scared. Our pride and self-esteem were involved, indeed threatened, and, beyond that, we had no useful vocabulary to describe such a state. How do you talk about fear when fear is fast becoming the chief currency of life? Willis’s behavior, as
strange to us as ever, became our barometer of possible disaster, and we began to read him daily for sinister omens.

Soon after that, Rocky disappeared one night, slipping out casually after dark through a hedgerow and staying away for forty-eight hours. While he was gone, we handled everything ourselves, much like a commune, with Barney, as the oldest among us, taking over as acting squad leader and Arch sticking his nose in every now and then to check things out and bolster our morale. We did all right.

When Rocky came back, he was clean-shaven, his hair freshly cut, eyes clear. Nothing was ever asked of him about his adventure (to my knowledge), and nothing was ever explained. He just picked up where he had left us. It was a typical Rocky performance, done with a deft and smooth touch, but like Willis’s thefts, it too somehow seemed to carry a warning. A kind of social deviance was suddenly in the air.

Bern caught me alone one day after the midday meal. “I think I’ll go to Mass on Sunday,” he said, as though I had asked him. The Catholics in C Company held weekly Mass out in the open, in an adjoining orchard, using an improvised altar. It was always well attended. But Bern and I rarely talked about religion. It was a minefield.

“I haven’t been to Mass since we landed in Cherbourg,” he went on, with a defensive growl.

“Well, sir, if that’s what you want.” I was eyeing him skeptically, but I didn’t mean to sound sarcastic. I knew better than that, in the face of religious convictions. But what had happened to his doubts, which he had expressed to me just once in a muted conversation that was over almost before it had begun?

“That’s what I want,” he said.

“Good.”

Arch blew a whistle to get us back into the field. “So you’ve returned to God,” I said.

“If I ever left.” Defiant Bern.

“Right.”

I guess there was nothing else to say. It was Bern’s conversation, still muted. He had launched it like a shell from a strange artillery piece, and it had landed right on target, but why, I asked myself, were we suddenly having this exchange, at that particular moment?

RUMORS of the day, wildly flapping across the Normandy landscape like broken-winged ravens:

 … the Germans had asked for a cease-fire, unconditionally.

 … fifteen hundred American POWs had been massacred in a German POW camp east of Munich—in another version, outside Nuremberg.

 … the Russians had surrendered. Stalin was dead, by his own hand.

 … the YD has been chosen as the American division to share in the administration of Paris with the French and British, post-liberation.

 … two hundred Japanese suicide bombers had flattened Seattle by sneaking in over the North Pole and dropping themselves and their explosives on the city.

 … we would get our typhus booster shots within three days.

 … Marlene Dietrich was coming our way with the USO, accompanied by her pal, Papa Hemingway.

 … Eisenhower and Montgomery had engaged in an open fistfight in front of Allied troops over the disastrous airborne landings in Holland.

 … ditto Michael Antonovich and Francis J. Gallagher, over other matters.

WE KNEW how the last rumor got started. For the first time, Antonovich and Gallagher had disagreed in public. It was over the use of the word “relevant,” or seemed to be, and it took place in front of the whole company right after reveille one morning.

“It’s just not revelant!” Antonovich shouted at Gallagher as we were breaking ranks. That stopped some of us in our tracks. Our captain and lieutenant never shouted at each other in front of the troops. We waited to see what would happen. In a moment, Gallagher bent down, pretended to pick up a cigarette butt, pretended to strip it, then straightened up. All very slowly. Still, we hung around. Something compelled us. Gallagher waited a few more seconds before answering, as though he was considering several alternatives.

“The word is ‘relevant,’ ” he finally said, very cool and loud.

“That’s what I said,” Antonovich snapped.

“No, it wasn’t,” Gallagher answered, beginning to walk away. “But the hell with it.”

Antonovich reached out as though to stop Gallagher from heading off, but seemed to think better of it. “What are you two staring at?” he yelled at Bern and Fedderman, who were still standing there gaping. “Move your butts.”

And what was that all about, we asked each other later, officers behaving so pettily in front of their men. I never learned, although I suspected, unhappily, that it had come from deep out of the shared past. All I knew was that the exchange—minimal as it was, bare-boned as well as sharp—unsettled the company. Nobody was happy to have witnessed it. There was an unspoken feeling among us that if it had happened that morning out in the open, without camouflage, then it had happened before in private and would happen again.

And it didn’t help much to believe that my man had won. Or to suspect that he probably always did.

AT THE end of the week, we got our typhus boosters, painful ones, too, and a day later they—somebody—ordered short-arm inspection for the entire division. This meant fourteen thousand Yankee penises—give or take—on limp display, not all at one time, of course. We hadn’t had a short-arm since we left the States. There was no need for one. No one had even spoken to a French woman, much less touched one. Unless Rocky Hubbell had during his forty-eight-hour caper, which seemed likely. But the rest of us were locked inside our hedgerows, strictly monitored, and, in any case, every brothel in Normandy was off-limits.

Everybody hated short-arm. It was insidious, a brilliant technique for invading our tentative sense of self and privacy. Penis, anus, testicles; cocks, assholes, balls. Nothing was sacred. When the order went out for short-arm, a mortified groan went up from the YD. And you couldn’t get out
of it by volunteering for KP or latrine duty. Everyone was subject.

Our time came. We lined up. Behind the first squad stood the second squad, joyous as always at the idea of watching us being humiliated. They jeered under their breath, talked dirty, laughed at us, as though they weren’t going to have to go through the same process themselves as soon as we were finished. Behind the second squad was the third, just as scabrous, hating the second squad perhaps more than the second squad hated us. While this was going on, two doctors, whom we had never seen before, wearing the caduceus on their jacket lapels, gave us the eye as they chatted briefly with Arch and Antonovich and Gallagher, doing the amenities before going to work.

In another moment, we dropped our pants and under-shorts at a command from Gallagher. (Actually, Willis dropped Bern’s undershorts, which he happened to be wearing at the moment.)

We stood there exposed as the doctors proceeded along the line from man to man, delicately using their middle fingers to feel behind each scrotum at the point where it joined the pelvis.

“Cough.” Rocky coughed, blushing furiously, I saw.

“Look to the right.” Johnson did as he was told.

“Cough.” Brewster managed a dry hack.

“Pull back the foreskin, please.” Willis responded eagerly.

“Do you wash there regularly?”

Willis nodded.

“It’s especially important to wash there, son. You know about smegma, don’t you?” A faint distaste suddenly became evident, as the doctor asked his question.

“Now cough.” Willis coughed.

“Again.”

And so on, down the line of the first squad, through Natale, Keaton, me, and on to Fedderman, who, as in most things, was last again.

“Cough.” Fedderman had trouble producing a fake cough for the doctors. He had to try twice.

The doctors took a moment then to consult together. I could hear their soft, professional voices whispering away. What had they seen? What had they felt as they fingered our testicles? More whispering. A clearing of throats. Then, apparently satisfied, they turned to walk behind us, in front of the second squad, which was still enjoying itself for the moment, jeering under its breath, still talking dirty. “Oh,
là,”
someone said, trying to sound lascivious. What a bunch.

“Quiet, back there,” Gallagher ordered.

Then we heard the command we’d been waiting for. “Bend over,” one of the docs said. And the second order: “Spread your cheeks and make it snappy, fellows.” Somehow, Army doctors never managed to sound like real officers.

They passed down the line behind us, looking up Johnson’s spread cheeks, up Rocky Hubbell’s dusty Texas gully, up Paul Willis’s, Brewster’s, Natale’s, up mine, then up Bern Keaton’s verdant Irish dale, and finally … what was this? What did we hear? Ira Fedderman was refusing to reveal himself, refusing to bend over and spread his buttocks for the benefit of two strangers. Could it be true? My God! Somebody hooted in the second squad at this protest. There was nervous laughter all around us. The doctors repeated the order, then Gallagher rushed over
and thrust his forefinger into Fedderman’s pigeon chest and shouted something. The two doctors looked bemused. Fedderman stood very still, chin up, at attention.

“Do what you’re told, for Chrissake!” Rocky yelled from down the line, his fatigue pants saucered around his ankles. It was getting chilly, standing out in the morning air like this. What was going to happen?

Fedderman held firm. I could almost feel his sphincter tighten. (God bless him.) I think we all felt it. Antonovich was now into the act, looking walleyed. Always subject to extremes, he threatened a court-martial. At the threat, Gallagher looked disgusted. A house divided. Gallagher shrugged apologetically at the doctors. One of them smiled back. He was amused. Genuinely so. Had he ever seen this kind of resistance before?

Fedderman still stood at attention, his shirttails barely covering his powerful behind. His fat thighs were pressed tightly together, his swampy genitals open to the entire Norman countryside. This went on for another few minutes, until the doctors decided to move on to the second squad. They were finally embarrassed, along with almost everyone else; they couldn’t wait to get away from us. Antonovich and Gallagher, assisted by Rocky and Arch, who had just arrived on the scene, hauled Fedderman off, marching him between them, like a convict, to company headquarters. First they let him pull up his pants. We watched them go, admiring Ira Fedderman, who was thin-lipped and scared-looking. In that moment, I almost loved him. At one corner of his mouth, as he marched away, hung a saliva bubble of anxiety, ready to burst.

They barely had a chance to get Fedderman’s wind up. It was over almost as soon as it began. The fact was that
our orders had arrived at last. The ones we had been waiting for for weeks. But they weren’t for General Simpson’s Ninth Army. They were for the Third Army, Patton’s Army, which was a world away in Alsace-Lorraine. (It was goodbye to “Roses of Picardy.”) At the news, which was spread by Antonovich in a voice pinched by excitement, I could begin to smell the fear (my own first) as we began to feverishly pack for the trip across France to Alsace. “Al-sotz,” Antonovich called it while Gallagher made a condescending face behind him. We were on our way by truck within hours, whipped along by Arch’s noisy fervor. What a racket again, what a roar, worse than Cherbourg. Fedderman’s overworked sphincter—everybody’s sphincter, for that matter—was probably tighter than ever as we left our apple orchard. I knew mine was, and it was destined to stay tight for a long time to come.

BY LATE afternoon, we were approaching Paris. That was the good word, passed along during breaks from one truck to another via our drivers, who were becoming the bearers of all rumors. At the news, my absurd hopes rose. Maybe we would have a day or two in the city. Maybe I would get to see Paris at last, however briefly. Maybe … But I knew better. Certain kinds of rumors could never be believed, mainly those that promised pleasure. And Paris had not figured in Captain Antonovich’s hastily compressed review of our future, which he delivered to us breathlessly just before we left Normandy. Lunéville was where we were headed. Pronounced “Looney-ville” by Antonovich, again with Gallagher frowning condescendingly behind him. There had not been a word about Paris.

Antonovich had told us that Lunéville was in “Al-sotz,” somewhere in the mysterious east. There we would relieve the Fourth Armored Division. The division, spearhead of Patton’s Third Army, was anchored just beyond the city of
Nancy, in the slow-rising hills that eventually ran up to the Vosges Mountains near the German border. The men of the Fourth Armored were heroes to half the world. They had led the race across France after the Normandy breakout and would have crossed into Germany itself if they had not run out of fuel and ammunition. The mere sound of their name intimidated me and everyone else. While we replaced the Fourth on what had become a static front, the division would pull out for rest and reconditioning in the area behind the Third Army lines. It was simple enough. And Paris was nowhere in the calculation.