Burning the Days (7 page)

And so I grew, born to the city and thus free not to love it. I knew the streets, the subways, the steam issuing from the lower parts of buildings, the stores with their proprietors, the movie houses, all the sounds. I felt deadened by the intimacy. I was unaware as yet of the invisible city—the sexual one, its geography forever fixed in memory by acts of love, Greenwich Avenue, Third, Eleventh Street, the Chelsea, the Beaux-Arts—and I was drawn away to what I imagined lay in the world beyond.

In 1948, in the Marianas as a member of an aircrew, I cut my leg on a coral reef and the wound refused to heal. Blood poisoning—septicemia—gradually set in. We had flown on to China and
Peking. My upper leg was covered with sores, my khaki pants stuck to it in half a dozen places. A European doctor, an Italian, in Peking offered to treat me for fifty dollars gold, by which was meant U.S. dollars. There was roaring inflation in China at the time. Huge bundles of bills, tied with string, were only enough for a meal.

I didn’t have the fifty dollars. We flew back to Shanghai. By then I was feverish, and heading homewards in the slow droning plane hung far above the sea, I listened to the unearthly music of delirium.

In Hawaii, in the hospital, in the sunlight and silence, I sometimes fell asleep with a book forgotten in my lap. The book was dense and overwritten, though perhaps I did not see it as such; the pages were like slabs and the dialogue often artificial, but the closing lines, when I finally reached them, made the blood come to my face. It was
You Can’t Go Home Again,
the last of a series of thick novels in which the barely disguised author, Thomas Wolfe, talented and misunderstood, stormed through life in search of glory, love, and fame.

It was in New York, the seething city, that the unconquerable writer, his brilliant editor, and rich, married mistress carried on their lives in hypnotically repeated sentences. I lost myself in the book and the possibilities it described. I let its size and force sweep over me. That it was essentially banal and too earnest did not affect me. It was like spending three nights on a train with a disheveled stranger—Wolfe was in fact a gigantic man, a kind of Southern Pantagruel who wrote while standing up, on top of the refrigerator, it was said, with pages falling in disorder to the floor—who never stops talking and is able to make all you had formerly known dissolve. Foxhall Edwards was the name of the fabulous editor whose character was based on that of Wolfe’s actual editor, Maxwell Perkins, and a woman named Aline Bernstein was known to be the model for the book’s Esther Jack.

It had been more than five years since I had been, except for brief visits, home, to Manhattan, and now, brazen and overdrawn, it was before me again, the skyline not of the city of my boyhood but of one that might be. I did not feel the urge to return to it but rather recognized that it was authentic, that having been a boy there was an advantage, one that I might even make use of. Wolfe wrote with the envy and excitement of an outsider. I was, though exiled, a native.

——

Now it is snowing, one of the terrific storms that first mute and then obliterate the sky. The snow sweeps down, making the buildings seem like liners at sea, muffling everything with silence. The streets become white, all the ledges and trees, the sleeves of overcoats, the marquees. Soon snow has blanketed the earth and hour after hour still down it comes. The cars with their headlights are drifting through the whiteness, the buses and bundled figures struggling home. All night it snows. The city has never been more intimate, more prodigious.

In the morning the snow goes on. The avenues have disappeared, the traffic lights on long unblocked vistas shift without meaning from red to green and back again. There is a sole, breathtaking architecture: white lines.

This is essentially the city, less certain towers, my father and grandfather knew. I know many things about my father’s life—not the house he lived in as a boy or the school he went to—but almost nothing of my grandfather’s. He had a sister who had married well, and he was part owner of a hotel near Saratoga, my mother says, a wooden hotel in the Greek Revival style—it being her father-in-law’s, she is vague concerning the details. I spent the summer there as a child. I can dimly see the broad veranda—perhaps the memories are not genuine—wicker chairs, the glass in the doors, brass spittoons, and stuffy, unwholesome smell.

It was the summer of 1928. In the distance, though no one heard, was the faint sound of a great watershed, the mist rising from it. Events—the Crash—seem to have wrenched the hotel from my grandfather’s hands. Why hadn’t he sat me down, even at five or six, and, re-creating the place with his hands, told the epic story? I don’t know. In truth I don’t remember the hotel, I barely remember the grandfather. Whatever he knew, whatever any of them knew, is lost. A few shreds of what their lives meant may have come down to me but the real things, spirit and character, ambitions, marital relations, difficulties, the fate of friends—of all that I have nothing.

We know at first hand, as witnesses, perhaps five generations, most brilliantly of course our own; in one direction those of our parents and grandparents, in the other, children and grandchildren. In my own case much was lopped off. The past is haphazard. I think of the remark of the English cabinet member who was retiring to the seventeenth-century Cornwall farmhouse that had always been in his family. It is the men without roots, he said, who are the real poor of this century.

At the same time there is the exultation of knowing that history begins with one’s childhood, that everything around you, the buildings, park, mansions, museums, are all a kind of decor, the background for something far more important: one’s own existence. This existence, this starring role, is what the city in fact is made of—it is the true city, the city of memory and triumph, enduring, indifferent to tears. The derelict hotel on the hillside, abandoned long ago or torn down, the weedy tennis courts, the fallen fences, all this has no significance. It foretold nothing and bent not a single strand of one’s fate.

YOU MUST

M
Y FATHER,
hair parted in the middle, confident and proud, had been first in his class. A brilliant unknown with a talent for mathematics and a prodigious memory, he graduated just ahead of a rival whose own father had been first in 1886.

The school was West Point, and he had also been first captain, though that was harder for me to imagine. In any case, the glory had slipped away by the time I was a boy. He had resigned his commission after a few years and not much evidence had remained. There was a pair of riding boots, some yearbooks, and in a scabbard in the closet an officer’s saber with his name and rank engraved on the blade.

Once a year on the dresser in the morning there was a beautiful medal on a ribbon of black, gray, and gold. It was a name tag from the alumni dinner at the Waldorf the night before. He liked going to them; they were held towards the end of the winter and he was a persona there, more or less admired.
George Horowitz, ’19,
the white card encased at the top of the ribbon read. His first name, Louis, he disliked.

When I was older he took me to football games, which we left during the fourth quarter. Army was a weak but gritty team that came to Yankee Stadium to play Notre Dame. Behind us, the
stands were a mass of gray, hoarse from cheering, and a roar went up as a third-string halfback, thin-legged and quick, somehow got through the line and ran an incredible slanting eighty yards or so until he was at last pulled down. If he had scored, Army would have won.

In the end I went to the same school my father did. I had never intended to. He had arranged a second alternate’s appointment and asked me as a favor to study for the entrance exam—it was the spring of 1942. I had been accepted at Stanford and was working for the summer on a farm in Connecticut, sleeping on a bare mattress in the stifling attic, dreaming of life on the Coast, when suddenly a telegram came. Improbably, both the principal and first alternate had failed, one the physical and the other the written, and I was notified that I had been admitted. I knew what my father, more than anything else, wanted me to do. Seventeen, vain, and spoiled by poems, I prepared to enter a remote West Point. I would succeed there, it was hoped, as he had.

——

In mid-July up the steep road from the station we walked as a group. I knew no one. Like the others I carried a small suitcase in which would be put the clothes I would not see again for years. We passed large, silent buildings and crossed a road beneath some trees. A few minutes later, having signed a consent paper, we stood in the hall in a harried line trying to memorize a sentence to be used in reporting to the cadet first sergeant. It had to be spoken loudly and exactly. Failure meant going out and getting back in line to do it again. There was constant shouting and beyond the door of the barracks an ominous noise, alive, that flared when the door was opened like the roar of a furnace. It was the din of the Area, upperclassmen, some bellowing, some whispering, some hissing like snakes. They were giving the same commands over and over as they stalked the nervous ranks that stood stiffly at attention,
still in civilian clothes, already forbidden to look anywhere but straight ahead. The air was rabid. The heat poured down.

I had come to a place like Joyce’s Clongowes Wood College, which had caused such a long shiver of fear to flow over him. There were the same dark entrances, the Gothic façades, the rounded bastion corners with crenellated tops, the prisonlike windows. In front was a great expanse which was the parade ground, the Plain.

It was the hard school, the forge. To enter you passed, that first day, into an inferno. Demands, many of them incomprehensible, rained down. Always at rigid attention, hair freshly cropped, chin withdrawn and trembling, barked at by unseen voices, we stood or ran like insects from one place to another, two or three times to the Cadet Store, returning with piles of clothing and equipment. Some had the courage to quit immediately, others slowly failed. Someone’s roommate, on the third trip to the store, hadn’t come back but had simply gone on and out the gate a mile away. That afternoon we were formed up in new uniforms and marched to Trophy Point to be sworn in.

It is the sounds I remember, the iron orchestra, the feet on the stairways, the clanging bells, the shouting, cries of
Yes, No, I do not know, sir!,
the clatter of sixty or seventy rifle butts as they came down on the pavement at nearly the same time. Life was anxious minutes, running everywhere, scrambling to formations. Among the things I knew nothing of were drill and the manual of arms. Many of the other new cadets, from tin schools, as they called them, or the National Guard, knew all that and even the doggerel that had to be memorized, answers to trivial questions, dictums dating back to the Mexican War. How many gallons of water were in the reservoir, how many names on Battle Monument, what had Schofield said, what was the definition of leather? These had to be rattled off word for word.

All was tradition, the language, the gray woolen cloth, the high black collars of the dress coats, the starched white pants that you got into standing on a chair. Always in summer the Corps had lived in tents out on the Plain, under canvas, with duckboard streets—Summer Camp with its fraternal snapshots and first classmen lounging against tent poles; this was among the few things that had disappeared. There was the honor system, about which we heard from the very beginning, which belonged to the cadets rather than to the authorities and had as its most severe punishment “silencing.” Someone who was guilty of a violation and refused to resign could be silenced, never spoken to by his classmates except officially for the rest of his life. He was made to room by himself, and one of the few acknowledgments of his existence was at a dance—if he appeared everyone walked from the floor, leaving him, the girl, and the orchestra all alone. Even his pleasures were quarantined.

West Point was a keep of tradition and its name was a hallmark. It drew honest, Protestant, often rural, and largely uncomplicated men—although there were figures like Poe, Whistler, and even Robert E. Lee, who later said that getting a military education had been the greatest mistake of his life.

I remember the sweating, the heat and thirst, the banned bliss of long gulping from the spigot. At parades, three or four a week, above the drone of hazing floated the music of the band. It seemed part of another, far-off world. There was the feeling of being on a hopeless journey, an exile that would last for years. In the distance, women in light frocks strolled with officers, and the fine house of the Superintendent gleamed toylike and white. In the terrific sun someone in the next rank or beside you begins to sway, take an involuntary step, and like a beaten fighter fall forward. Rifles litter the ground. Afterwards a tactical officer walks among them as among bodies on a battlefield, noting down the serial numbers.

Bang! the door flies open. We leap to our feet. Haughty, sway-backed, wearing white gloves, a cadet sergeant named Melton saunters into the room. He glances at us. “Who are you misters? Sound off!” he commands. He turns to the wall lockers on which we have worked for hours preparing for inspection. Everything has its shelf and place, the folds are clean and sharp, the undershirts like pads of paper, the neat linen cuffs, the black socks.

“Whose locker is this?” he asks with disdain. Not waiting for an answer, he sweeps the contents of a shelf to the floor. “It’s a mess. Are these supposed to be folded? Do it over again.” Shelf after shelf, one locker after another, everything is tumbled out. “Do it right this time, understand?”

Implacable hatred floods upwards. “Yes, sir!”

——

One of my first roommates was the son of a congressman. He was twenty. In Chicago, he revealed, he’d been living in an apartment with two prostitutes. As a sort of proof he smoked, walked around in his underwear, and marveled at nothing. We were, for the most part, fingerlings, boys in our teens, and his swagger seemed the mark of an enviable thing with which he was already familiar: dissipation. We ran up and down the stairs together but in formation stood far apart. There I was next to a tall, skinny boy who had a cackling laugh and astonishing irreverence. He was a colonel’s son and had come from Hawaii, crossing the continent in a Pullman and spending the night with a woman in a lower berth as she moaned over and over, “My son, my son.” His name was Horner; in time he introduced me to rum, cards, and as a last flourish, poison ivy.