Theophilus North (18 page)

Rip

Late in June I was surprised to discover that someone I had known fairly well at college was living in Newport's Sixth City. One late afternoon I was wheeling homewards along the Avenue when I was startled to hear a voice from a passing car calling “Theophilus! Theophilus! What the hell are you doing here?” I drew up beside the curb. The car which had passed me did so also. A man alighted and walked toward me laughing. Still laughing he slapped me on the back, punched me in the thorax, seized my shoulder, and shook me like a rat. It took me some minutes to recognize Nicholas Vanwinkle. All his life—through school, college, and military service—he had naturally been called “Rip.” There was a legend in his family that Washington Irving had known his grandfather well and had written him one day asking permission to use the name Vanwinkle, applying it to a likeable old character in a story he was writing about the Dutchmen living in the Catskills. He was given cordial permission and the result became known around the world.

And once again the name “Rip Van Winkle” attained a wide celebrity, for the man who was handling me roughly on Bellevue Avenue was the great ace in the War, one of the four most decorated veterans on “our side” and The Terror (and tacitly acknowledged admiration) of the Germans. He had been a member of the class of 1916, but the men who received their degrees in 1920 included many who had left school long before to take part in the War—some enlisting in Canada before our country was involved; some like my brother and Bob Hutchins joining ambulance units in France and the Balkans, then later transferring to our services. Many among the survivors of these dispersed students returned to Yale to complete their undergraduate education in 1919 and 1920. I had not known Rip well; he had moved in far more brilliant circles; he was the very flower of the
jeunesse dorée
and an international celebrity in addition; but I had conversed with him many times in the Elizabethan Club, where he could very well represent for us the figure of Sir Philip Sidney, the perfection of knighthood. Tall, handsome, wealthy, preeminent in all the sports he engaged in (though he did not play football or baseball), and endowed with a simplicity of manner far removed from the stiffness and condescension prevalent in his own
coterie
, sons of the great steel and investment banking houses.

By chance I ran into him in Paris one noon on the Avenue de l'Opéra in the late spring of 1921, soon after I had finished my year's study in Rome. We crossed near the entrance to the Café de Paris and he promptly asked me to lunch there. His simple spontaneity was unaltered. He was returning to America the next day, he said, to marry “the finest girl in the world.” It was a delightful hour. Little could I perceive that the price of our meal was from the bottom of his pocket. I had not seen him nor heard anything about his private life in the intervening five years. Five years is a long time in one's late youth. He was now thirty-five, but looked well over forty. The buoyancy of his greeting soon gave way to an ill-concealed dejection or fatigue.

“What are you doing, Theo? Tell me about yourself. I've got to go out to dinner, but I have a whole hour before I have to dress. Can we sit down and have a drink somewhere?”

“I'm free, Rip.”

“Come on—the Muenchinger-King! Put your bike in the back seat. Gee, I'm glad to see you. You've been teaching somewhere—is that right?”

I told him what I had been doing and what I was doing. I pulled out of my purse a clipping of the advertisement I had placed in the Newport paper. There was something refreshing and moving about the selflessness of his attention, but I was soon aware that it was precisely the relief of not talking or thinking about himself that he was enjoying. Finally I fell silent. His eyes kept returning to the clipping.

“You know all these languages?”

“Hit or miss and a bit of bluff, Rip.”

“Have you a good number of students or listeners, or whatever you call them?”

“Just about as many as I can handle.”

“You know German, too?”

“I went to German schools in China when I was a boy and have kept up my interest in it ever since.”

“Theo?—”

“Call me Ted, will you, Rip? ‘Theophilus' is unmanageable and ‘Theo' is awkward. Everybody calls me Ted or Teddie, now.”

“All right . . . listen, I have an idea. Next spring, in Berlin, there's going to be a banquet and two-day reunion for the men on both sides who fought in the air. Bury the hatchet, see what I mean? Hands across the sea. Gallant enemies. Toasts to the dead and all that. I want to go. I've got to go. And I want to get a little practice in the German language first. I had two years of German in prep school and I had a German grandmother. Now at that meeting I'd like to be able to show that I can at least stumble around in German. . . . Ted, could you find two two-hour lessons a week for me?”

“Yes. Early morning all right for you? Eight o'clock? I'm giving up some of those tennis coaching hours now that the pro's come back.”

“Fine.”

He looked down at the table a moment. “It won't go down well with my wife; but this is a thing I
want
to do, and, by Jesus,
I'll do it
.”

“Your wife doesn't like anything that has to do with Germany?”

“Oh, it isn't that! She has a hundred reasons against my going. Leaving her alone with the children in New York. She thinks that any recall of the War makes me nervous and high-strung. God damn it, this trip would make all that easier for me. And there's the
expense
, Ted—the useless
expense!
Mind you, I love my wife; she's a wonderful woman, but she hates useless expense. We have the New York house and we have this cottage. She thinks that's all she can manage. But, Ted, I've got to go. I've got to shake their hands. Bury the hatchet, see what I mean? They tell me I'm as well known over there as Richthofen is over here. Can you understand how I feel about it?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Gee, it's great seeing you again. It gives me the strength I need to put this thing through. Don't you think I owe them the courtesy of making an attempt to speak German? You can start me picking it up again this summer; and I'll work like a fool on it for the rest of the year. God knows, I have nothing else to do.”

“What do you mean by that, Rip?”

“I have an office. . . . The idea was that I was to manage my wife's property. But the money kept getting bigger and the advisers at the bank kept getting more and more important—so that there was less and less for me to do.”

I got the idea and answered quickly, “What would you like to do?”

He rose and said, “Do? Do? Suggest something. I'd like to be a streetcar conductor. I'd like to be a telephone repairman!” He brushed his hand across his forehead and looked about him almost feverishly; then concluded with forced joviality, “I'd like to break my engagement tonight and go out to dinner with you,
but I can't,”
and he sat down again.

“Well,” I said in German, “I'm not leaving town. We can have dinner some other night.”

He pushed his glass backward and forward broodingly, as though that possibility was doubtful. “Ted, do you remember how Gulliver in the land of the little people—”

“In Lilliput—”

“In Lilliput was tied to the ground by thousands of small silk threads? That's me.”

I rose and looked him straight in the eye: “You're going to that banquet in Germany.”

He returned my seriousness, lowering his voice. “I don't see how. I don't see where I'll get the money.”

“I always thought you came of a very well-to-do family.”

“Didn't you know?” He named his birthplace. “In 1921, in my city three large companies and five prominent families went bankrupt.”

“Did you have any inkling of that when I saw you in Paris?”

He pointed to his head. “Oh, more than an inkling. But fortunately I was engaged to a girl with considerable means. I told her that I had nothing but my severance pay. She laughed and said, ‘Darling, of course, you have money. You're engaged to look after my property and you'll be very well paid for that.' . . . I spent my last hundred dollars getting to the church.”

In 1919 and 1920 and in the years immediately following I came to know a large number of combat veterans—to say nothing, for the present, of those whom it was my duty to interrogate in a later war. (My part in “Rip's war,” as has been said, had been safely passed among the defenders of Narragansett Bay.) As could be expected the marks left by that experience on the veteran varied from man to man; but in one group the aftereffects were particularly striking—the airmen. The fighting men on land and sea in early youth experienced what journalists called their “glorious hour”—the sense of weighty responsibility bound up with belonging to a “unit,” exposure to extreme fatigue, to danger, and to death; many carried the inner burden of having killed human beings. But the “hour” of the first generation of combat aviators comprised all this and something in addition. Air combat was new; its rules and practice were improvised daily. The acquisition of technical accomplishment
above the earth
filled them with a particular kind of pride and elation. There were no gray-haired officers above them. They were pioneers and frontiersmen. Their relations with their fellow-fliers and even with their enemies partook of a high camaraderie. Unrebuked, they invented a code of chivalry with the German airmen. None would have stooped to attack a disabled enemy plane trying to return to its home base. Both sides recognized enemies with whom they had had encounters earlier, signaled to them in laughing challenge.

They lived “Homerically”; that was what the
Iliad
was largely about—young, brilliant, threatened lives. (Goethe said, “The
Iliad
teaches us that it is our task here on earth to enact hell daily.”) Many survivors were broken by it and their later lives were a misery to themselves and to others. (“We didn't have the good fortune to die,” as one of them said to me.) Others continued to live long and stoic lives. In some cases, if one looked closely, it was evident that a “spring had broken down” in them, a source of courage and gaiety had been depleted, had been spent. Such was Rip.

There was some discussion as to where Rip and I could meet for an eight o'clock class. “I'd like you to come over to my place, but the children would be having their breakfast and my wife would be running in and out to remind me of things I should do.”

“I think Bill Wentworth would let us use one of those social rooms behind the gallery at the Casino. We might have to move from room to room while they're cleaning up. I've never seen you in the Casino, but I assume Your Honor is a member there.”

He grinned and held his hand beside his mouth as though it were an unholy secret. “I'm a life-member. They don't let me pay any dues,” and he poked me as though he'd stolen the cookie jar.

So the lessons began: an hour of vocabulary and grammar followed by an hour of conversation, in which I played the role of a German officer. Rip owned a collection of books in both languages describing those great days. No session passed without his being called to the telephone from which he returned with an enlarged list of the day's agenda, but he had a notable gift for immediately resuming his concentration. There was no doubt that he derived great enjoyment from the work; it touched some deep layer of self-recovery within him. He studied intensively between sessions; and so did I. (“Did his homework,” as he called it.) My daily program permitted little time for desultory conversation at the close of the lesson, nor did his. When he rose he consulted the list of errands he must do: register certain letters at the Post Office; take the dog to the vet's; call for Miss So-and-so, his wife's part-time secretary; take Eileen to Mrs. Brandon's dancing class at eleven and call for her at twelve. . . . Apparently Mrs. Vanwinkle needed her car and chauffeur the greater part of the day. His appearance began to improve; he laughed more frequently, with some of the buoyancy of our first meeting on Bellevue Avenue. But there was no word that he had received permission to go to Germany.

One evening I paid my respects at Mrs. Cranston's.

“Good evening, Mr. North,” Mrs. Cranston said graciously, eyeing a straw box I was carrying. It was lined with moss and contained some jack-in-the-pulpits, trilliums, and other flowers whose names I did not know. “Wild flowers! Oh, Mr. North, how could you know that I value wild flowers above all others!”

“I believe, ma'am, that it's against the law to dig some of these up, but at least I rode outside the city limits to gather them. I've also borrowed a trowel and a flashlight and am ready to replant them around your house at any point you indicate to me.”

Henry Simmons happened at that moment to enter from the street.

“Henry, look at what Mr. North has brought me. Henry, help him replant them under Edweena's window where she will find them when she returns. A gift like that is a gift to us all and I thank you heartily for my share in it.” She tapped her table bell. “Jerry will bring you a pitcher of water. That will make the flowers feel at home at once.”

Neither Henry nor I was an experienced horticulturist, but we did our best. Then we washed our hands and returned to the parlor where some illicit refreshment was waiting for us.

“We have missed you lately,” said Mrs. Cranston.

“We thought you had shifted your affections to Narragansett Pier, Teddie, I swear we did.”

“And I missed you, ma'am, and you, Henry. I have some late-evening students now; and on some days my schedule is so crowded that I fall into bed at ten o'clock.”

“Now you're not going to overwork and make a dull dog of yourself, are you, cully?”

“Money! Money!” I sighed. “I'm still hunting for that little apartment. I've looked at a dozen, but the rent is more than I'm ready to pay. A number of my older students have offered to make me a present of a very acceptable apartment in their former stable or an empty gardener's house, but I have learned the rule that the relations between landlord and tenant should be as impersonal as possible.”