The Tight White Collar (6 page)

Lisa and Chris had an apartment in the back of the building so that they had a view of the river, and sometimes Lisa sat in front of her kitchen window and pretended that she was in a palace and that the river was the Rhine and that Chris was not going to come home from the job he'd taken at the factories after his folks put him out, but that he would be returning from an afternoon of hunting on his own private game preserve.

When it was time for the baby to be born they had to put the new crib against a wall in the kitchen and then there didn't seem to be room to turn around anywhere, but Lisa and Chris didn't mind. Living together, being married, was just like playing house except that the game never ended and neither one of them ever had to leave to go somewhere else. Jess Cameron delivered the baby, a girl, three days after Thanksgiving 1941, and Chris took Lisa home from the hospital on the same Sunday morning that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

“I'll have to go,” he told Lisa. “I guess everybody will before it's over.”

“Yes,” said Lisa, not caring, really, about anything that was happening some place as far off as Hawaii. “But not today, darling, not today.”

“But soon,” replied Chris, unsmiling, “very soon.”

“For heaven's sake, Chris,” said Lisa, “can't you think of anything besides a silly old war some place? We've got a brand-new baby to think about. You don't plan to rush off to Pearl Harbor this minute, do you?”

Chris looked down at the little face inside the pink bunting.

“No,” he said at last. “Not this very minute.”

Years later at the state university, a professor in the education department had asked Chris why he wanted to be a schoolteacher at all.

“There has to be a reason, Chris,” the professor had said. “All of us have to have a reason and a good one, too. One that will stand up when the going gets rough as it always does sooner or later. No one goes into this racket because of the money because there's no money here. And that crap about doing one's bit for mankind is also pretty lame. If a man has a big yen for that sort of thing he could join the Salvation Army and have a much easier time of it. Tell me, Chris. What reason are you going to give yourself?”

“It was the war,” said Chris. “I decided during the war.”

“Yes, but I didn't ask you
when
you decided. I asked you
why
.”

But Chris could not tell him. At first he hadn't been able to tell Lisa, either. When he had decided that he wanted to become a teacher he had simply written her a V-Mail and told her of his plans. Her answer had come back that she thought it was wonderful and that with the GI Bill there wouldn't be any problem at all and wasn't it terrific that at last they'd be able to get out of Cooper's Mills.

“I'm so proud of you, darling,” Lisa had written. “You'll go to college and become a teacher and everything is going to be wonderful.”

But it wasn't the threat of Cooper's Mills and the factories that had influenced Chris. It was something else, something that had taken a long time to happen and end and crystallize into decision, and Chris couldn't tell anyone because he couldn't remember exactly when or how it had come about.

The town, he remembered, could have once looked like a great many of the towns in northern New England except that there wasn't much of anything left of this particular town that looked like anything at all. It had been late afternoon and they had been trudging through the countryside since before dawn. They were lost. The lieutenant knew it, Sgt. Christopher Pappas knew it, the whole goddamned platoon knew it. There wasn't a sign of regiment, battalion or company anywhere. The road curved on, uneven with frozen ruts. The men had ceased to be tough infantrymen, eager for another crack at the Germans. They were ugly and tired and beginning to turn on each other.

“Listen, Lieutenant,” said Chris, “you can see they're fagged. It might be a good idea to stop for chow.”

“After we get around the next curve,” replied the lieutenant.

So they marched on over the broken road. Chris listened to the scrape of combat boots against the rough ground and he heard the mutterings of the men behind him.

Suddenly the road straightened and sloped downward and there was a little town in front of them. Or what was left of a town. Every building that had not been destroyed altogether had some part of it smashed; roof or window or wall.

“For it's Hi-Hi-Hee for the Field Artilleree—” sang the lieutenant under his breath as he looked around.

They all gathered at the foot of what had once been the main street.

“Let's eat,” called the lieutenant and the men headed for what was left of the town church. There were only three walls standing but these offered some protection from the cold wind.

“Gonna snow again,” said one of the men.

“So what're ya bitchin'? We'll all go skiing.” He pronounced it “sheeing” and laughed at his own joke. “Get it?” he asked when no one else laughed. “She. You know. She. Dame. Female. Broad.”

No one even smiled.

“Why don't you shut up, O'Brien?” asked one of the men.

O'Brien shrugged and sat down on the hard ground.

They opened K-rations and ate. They smoked. And during the half hour that they sat there no one had anything to say. Chris looked at the broken walls of the church and wondered if once the spire had risen straight and white and plain or if it had been topped with a gilded cross.

Lutherans, aren't they? he asked himself. Aren't most Germans Lutherans? Anyway, it doesn't feel as if anyone had ever burned incense or genuflected here.

“Off your butts,” called the lieutenant.

The men stood up and fell into a semblance of a rank and started to walk.

Chris heard the artillery ahead of them now, very faintly, from miles ahead, but he knew it was there.

When the next curve in the road straightened, they saw a small settlement of six or eight houses spread out before them.

Peaceful, thought Chris, as if the war had never passed this way at all.

Smoke came from the chimneys of the houses and somewhere a dog barked.

“Jesus!” muttered the lieutenant. “Just like Currier and Ives.”

“Like Vermont, right around Thanksgivin',” said someone else.

“I can't help thinkin' that my old woman would say that it's a hell of a ways to the nearest store,” said another.

“You, Kenyon,” the lieutenant signaled a man. “Come over here.”

Kenyon was a corporal and, according to the lieutenant, the best goddamned scout in the United States Army.

“Go take a walk around and see what you can see,” said the lieutenant.

Kenyon made his way carefully toward the first of the little white houses while the men who stayed behind waited tensely, hands suddenly pliant and ready for action on their rifles. When Kenyon returned he did so quickly, walking upright, not bothering to tread carefully or to take cover.

“Nobody there but farmers,” he reported, “cookin' supper. And let me add that what they're cookin' smells a helluva lot better and more appetizin' than what we just ate.”

The lieutenant was chewing his thumbnail. His eyes darted from one farmhouse to the next and Chris Pappas felt a sudden hatred, tinged with pity, rise within him.

The lieutenant is going bugs, thought Chris. He's at the point now where he sees a fugitive German soldier in every farmhouse and he lives in a world where every
hausfrau
is a traitor. Poor bastard. He can't even look at a scene full of peace without thinking of the war.

“Too goddamn good to be true,” muttered the lieutenant.

“I'm tellin' you, Lieutenant,” said Kenyon, hurt.

“I know, I know,” said the lieutenant. “I'm not doubting you, Kenyon, it's just this goddamned feeling I've got.”

“The artillery passed this way,” said Kenyon, “and even they left this place alone.”

“I know,” repeated the lieutenant and turned to Chris. “Come with me,” he said. “The rest of you wait here.”

Kenyon was deeply and gravely offended and it showed on his face.

“To hell with him,” he said to the man next to him. “If he can't depend on me any more to hell with him.”

They moved slowly and as Chris followed the lieutenant he smiled inwardly at the sight of the big, brave American officer advancing on a peaceful farmhouse with his rifle clutched in both hands and a tight look around his mouth.

How many years of civilization went before us, thought Chris. How many years of teaching and preaching have come to nothing now that we walk over each other's countries with the sole idea of killing one another. We're supposed to be men. Hundreds of thousands of years went into making us into men and now look at us. Waste. Thousands of years—millions and millions of brains. For
this
.

The lieutenant paused before he kicked at the door of the first farmhouse to motion to Chris. Stay back and to one side, his hand said. Cover me.

Chris crouched under a window and hated the lieutenant in earnest now. The officer had infected him with fear and suspicion. He had smashed the shell of civilization from around him and had made him into an animal whose only thought now was to preserve himself.

An old woman came to the door. She wore a dress of flowered, lavender material and a black knitted shawl was wrapped around her shoulders.

The lieutenant addressed her in excellent German which Chris did his best to follow with what he remembered from high school and what he had picked up overseas.

“I am an officer in the American army,” said the lieutenant. “Who besides yourself is in this house?”

Chris peered cautiously through the window over his head. There was no place for anyone to hide in that room except behind a curtained space which might have concealed a closet or another small room. Chris almost giggled. Even if there was no one in this house there might be someone in one of the others. He wondered if the lieutenant was going to go through this performance at every one of the other farmhouses.

“No one,” said the old woman in a voice as cold as the look she gave the lieutenant. “My only son was killed in France. I am alone.”

The curtained space in the room was very still. Too still? Again, Chris damned the lieutenant. The virus of fear was running through every vein in his body, poisoning him.

Chris never knew what it was that made the lieutenant so sure that the old woman was lying, nor what extra perception told her that the American officer knew. In the next second she had thrown the door wide and hurled herself toward the lieutenant. He threw her to the floor in one vicious motion and his aim never wavered as he fired twice into the curtained space. Two German officers fell forward as Chris watched and the flowered curtains billowed gracefully around them. The old woman lunged for the lieutenant's gun and the lieutenant took deliberate, careful aim and shot her.

Later, Chris had a girlfriend in Germany. Her name was Margretha and her husband had been killed by the Russians. Chris brought her cigarettes and sugar and chocolate for her little girl. In return for these gifts, Margretha slept with him, cooked whatever food he brought and tried to create a small island of comfort and peace for him in her house. The child's name was Christine and Margretha often laughed with Chris about this.

“There you see?” she told him. “Christopher and Christine. They go together like the American ham and eggs.”

Often, during the weeks that Chris lived with Margretha, he took the snapshot which Lisa had sent of his own daughter out of his billfold and studied it carefully.

“I'll get mixed up,” he had laughed with Lisa before leaving for overseas. “Whatever shall I do with two Lisas to think about?”

“You're not to call her Lisa,” Lisa had said. “We'll call her Midget because she's so little and cute.”

Chris looked at Christine in Germany and at the snapshot of Midget and saw that between the two children there was actually very little difference. They were of an age, the offspring of young parents and both had been born under the shadow of war. Christine was blonde, blue eyed and pure Aryan, her mother said, and Midget was dark haired and had brown eyes exactly like her father's.

The children! It came to Chris after a long, long time of thinking.

It's the children who are not different!

Adults, nations, languages, customs and habits were all opposite one from the other. But not the children. He had seen them in England, Holland, Belgium, France and Germany and children were children. Small, untaught, unformed, born in hope and often destroyed by grownups who could think no more clearly than those whom they attempted to mold. Untaught. The word clung to Chris's mind as a spider web would have clung to his hand. Untaught. Children were born gentle. It was the people who taught them who pointed out the ways of greed, destruction and decivilization.

Now if it were up to me, thought Chris, if I were a teacher . . .

It was not until after he got home that Chris told Lisa the story about the war and about the old woman in Germany and about how he had come to realize that the problems of the world could be solved if one taught the children early, often and thoroughly.

“Well, for heaven's sake,” Lisa had said, horrified. “He didn't have to shoot that poor old woman, did he?”

After that, Chris never told the story to anyone. It all sounded much too melodramatic and Chris never wanted people to think that he dramatized anything. But most of all he did not tell because he wasn't sure himself if he taught because he really believed the things he had told himself or because of the feeling that came over him sometimes in a classroom. A feeling that he could not bring himself to admit he felt.

Power.

I'm doing this all by myself. I'm molding their minds. Shaping their thinking. Forming the children in my image.

Sometimes, in the years that followed, Lisa Pappas was occasionally reminded of the years she and Chris had spent at the university. Then she would shudder and think, That hellhole, and push remembrance determinedly from her mind.

The town of Denton, where the university was located, was in the central part of the state and was a pretty town by the standards of northern New England with its old-fashioned lampposts, ivy-covered brick buildings, small paned windows in old houses and its general aura of age and stability. But the end of the Second World War and the advent of the GI Bill of Rights caught Denton flat-footed and unprepared for the influx of student veterans. Almost overnight the town and the university found themselves in the position of having to make provisions not only for hordes of new students, but for students who would arrive with wives and children and furniture. Hastily, they cleared a vast tract of land a quarter of a mile out of town and there they erected row upon row of old army barracks and converted them into four-room apartments, and they called this place College Road Housing for Student Veterans. There had been neither the time nor the inclination to paint the buildings, so they stood now, the same olive-drab color as they had been on army posts throughout the country, and the walls that had been slapped together to divide the apartments were made of the thinnest plywood. It soon became a standing joke on College Road for families already situated to warn newcomers about the walls in the College Road Apartments.

“Don't put your bed against the wall of the apartment next door,” they said and laughed.