To the End of the War (12 page)

Fanny leaned over the boxes sitting in the center of the floor and inspected book titles without much interest.

“Oh, that’s all right, Sandy,” she answered in her rough friendly Southerner’s voice. Fanny had seen Sandy’s books before; the whole house was filled with them as this room. Sandy’s mania for books was a frequent topic whenever her name came up at a party. It was always mentioned that Sandy probably had as many books as the Endymion Carnegie Library. Fanny could never get over her amazement at the thought of so many books. It wasn’t natural to spend so much money for books.

“Do you want a drink?” Sandy asked them. “I’ve been trying to keep George off the liquor. He’s been hitting the bottle too much, but I don’t guess one more will hurt him.” Sandy winked at George and laughed.

“Yes, by God!” said George with a surly grin. “I’ve been trying to get a drink all day. If you people hadn’t come down here, I probably never would’ve got one.” George’s voice was heavy with jocularity, as if he were making an effort that didn’t quite take. His grin, too, was heavy and seemed about to fall apart from its own weight. There was a false belligerence in his manner.

George was long-boned and big. His head was long and meaty and thin-lipped. His hands were large and heavy. He seemed to radiate physical strength, but there were circles under his eyes and he moved the stump of his leg, amputated just below the knee, gingerly, as if it hurt him and he was still feeling around, trying to get used to its being gone. He was a fine specimen of the American athlete, and so made a rather sad sight, like a pianist minus his hands.

Johnny assented, and Wilson also, to Johnny’s surprise, accepted a drink. Sandy rose and went into the kitchen to mix them. Johnny, knowing how disgusted and embarrassed he felt when some fool tried to be sympathetic about his own limp, tuned to George and began to talk, trying hard to ignore George’s missing leg. He and George felt a sense of intimacy from which the others were excluded, and they talked about combat using terms and phrases that the others, even Wilson, did not understand.

Abstractedly, Johnny was surprised by Sandy Marion. He had expected some heavily literary female with gray or even white hair and horse-like hips, a woman frustrated by her own life who had turned to being a littérateur. Sandy was nothing like these. She looked startlingly young, and her long loose hair was black as coal with only a single gray hair here and there. Her body was that of a young woman of twenty-five. But even more startling, there was some youthfulness of spirit about her that made her seem to be enjoying with relish all the world of experience that a young person suddenly discovers is at his command. She seemed to be more contemporary of the two young men than of Fanny and George.

She came back with four drinks, handed them around without taking one herself, and sat down on the end of the large couch-like bed beside Fanny.

“Did George tell you about his leg?” she asked quietly. “Kirby’s going to do a story on it for him. Do you remember Kirby Atkinson?” She looked at Johnny and Will with a quick smile. Johnny remembered Kirby vaguely as a tall, gangling boy several years older than himself who never talked much; he nodded to her question, wondering if she had called attention to George’s leg on purpose. The remark should have been out of place, but oddly enough, when she said it, everything became less strained; the tension of trying to ignore George’s missing leg relaxed.

“He’s a fine musician.” Wilson said in his rich pleasing voice. “I didn’t know he was writing.”

“Is Kirby Atkinson a writer?” Fanny asked with surprise.

Sandy smiled. “Well, he’s struggling at it. If he isn’t, he’s having a lot of fun.”

“Why don’t you show Sandy your poem?” Fanny asked Johnny. “Johnny’s a writer, too,” she told Sandy.

“I’m not a writer,” Johnny said quickly. Fanny sounded like a kid who had the biggest agate on the block.

“I’d like to see it,” Sandy said. “If you want to show it.” She looked at Johnny’s perpetually dour face. No one would have taken him for another would-be writer. It was an amazing thing how so many of these boys in the war turned to something like that for expression. Sandy had seen it a number of times. When a man was bound up externally so that he had no release for his individuality, he would always turn to some form of art for release. She remembered a remark Maugham had made in one of his recent anthologies, about the great amount of poetry that had come out of the last war as a result of the moral shock of the war. She was more inclined to think it because the men who wrote it were unhappy and had no other way of getting rid of it.

“I liked it,” Will said, “when I read it. Why don’t you show it to them? It’s on the war, too.”

“Sure,” said George roughly. “Let’s see it.” George acquired a quick interest upon finding the poem was on the war.

Feeling foolish and inwardly cursing Fanny, Johnny pulled the poem out of his pocket and began to read it, wasting no time on preliminaries.

“
The White and The Black.

See this picture:

A hotel room

In a Southern city,

And in the room a soldier sits.

He sits relaxed—and happy—

In a saddened fashion.

His shirt is off;

The blond hairs upon his chest

Glisten

With a salty dew of Southern heat.

His shoes are off;

His stockinged feet are cocked

Upon the window sill.

The fan drones with the weariness

Of never-ending energy,

A sound unheard through repetition.

A scotch and soda sits,

Smoking with coldness,

Upon the ashstand at his elbow.

A cigaret smoulders away its life

Waiting on his pleasure.

The upholstered rocking chair

Rolls gently with contentment.

The soldier is at peace—

A saddened peace—

But still a peace.

He has much money in his pocket,

And a three-day pass lies on the dresser.

The soldier sits

And rocks

And thinks

And stares out of his hotel room window

High above the tiny Lilliputians

Who rush about their daily business

With a zest that is amusing

To the soldier.

For the soldier

(Though he is but twenty-one)

Is old and tired.

He’s fresh from overseas,

And the ribbons on his shirt

That is hanging neatly in the closet

Speak of battles, wounds, and fighting.

And as he stares out across the city

To the greenness of the farms beyond,

He sees America—

That abstraction he’s been fighting for—

Spread out before him.

And perhaps it is the scotch

That flows pleasantly through his muscles,

But every sound and smell and sight

Is pregnant . . .

With America.

And the soldier sits

And rocks

And thinks

And, in thinking, wonders

And, in wondering,

Feels happy—

Yet unhappy,

Feels proud—

Yet feels ashamed.

The scotch has freed his brain,

And the thoughts he thinks are never thoughts

But misty moods,

Impressions.

Have you seen the picture?

Then feel the thoughts

That are not thoughts:

This is America,

This is the life I’ve lived.

It is inconceivable

To me

That this life might someday be gone;

That trains,

That buses,

That this hotel,

Will someday not exist,

And being non-existent

Also unremembered;

That I,

My friends,

The life I know,

Might someday

Be the reason for the speculation

Of historians,

For the vast energetic diggings

Of bearded and be-spectacled professors.

But Rome fell—

And, in falling, believed

Beyond any doubt whatever

That it would never fall.

This city is America,

And in being America,

And part and parcel of America,

Is foolish, asinine, and wrong—

And yet is wise, magnificent, and right.

And while these people read

The newspapers and magazines

That tell how many thousand men have died

Today

And tell stories of the mighty heroes

Of freedom

And of Democracy,

My gang, my friends, my fellow drunks and cocksmen

Are cursing them, Democracy, and freedom—

And are dying for them

And the things they curse.

While my friends are dying cursing God,

These people go to movies of

Nurses in Bataan—

And cry.

I saw that movie,

And I laughed—

I could not help myself—

And these people of America

Who were sitting near enough to hear,

Stared at me with hurt looks

In their eyes

And made me laugh the more.

These people of America

Knit sweaters

And ‘Do Their Bit’

By going to the USO.

They volunteer for Red Cross work,

And all the time my friends

Are dying

With curses in their mouths.

They live in the white;

We live in the black.

I; I am a mutation,

A lucky one.

I am back inside the white,

But my soul’s still in the black.

I am both

But neither.

And still the buses run—

The USO—

The ARC—

I am of the black

And anxious mothers say:

‘Keep our sons clean.

They should not drink

Or be allowed to patronize the whores.’ ”

After he finished reading, Johnny sat for a moment staring at the papers in his hand. He ran his tongue over his teeth pensively, then with an abrupt movement refolded the papers and jammed them back into his hip pocket.

“That’s good, now isn’t it,” Fanny said to nobody in particular.

Johnny took another drink from his glass and stared at Fanny over the rim of it without expression. George stirred his body and shifted the stump of his leg reflectively. His eyes were moist and he stared at Johnny with a crooked grin.

“That fits me, too,” he said in his rough voice. “That fits me, too. People don’t understand that part of it. It’s like a different life.”

Sandy felt she must say something, although Johnny did not appear to care whether she commented on the poem or not. Nevertheless, she felt he was watching her to see what she would say. The emotional effect the poem had had on both Johnny and George was obvious; it had nothing to do with good or bad poetry. It was a part of their lives that they had seen and understood in the poem.

“I liked it,” she said sincerely. “You gave me an insight into soldiers that I’d never had before. And more important, I got an emotion out of it. That’s the main purpose of poetry. Of course, I know you and George, but if I was touched emotionally without knowing either of you fellows—and without having shared your experience—then your poem has been effective. It’s good, because it’s effective—and that’s the only purpose of poetry, at least to me.”

Johnny took his eyes away from Fanny and looked at Sandy. He grinned suddenly with embarrassment. Sandy smiled kindly. “It seems to me too much emphasis has been placed on tradition and the subtle perfection of craft, without giving due credit to poetry’s real purpose: the creation of emotion in a reader and the giving of an insight into an experience of life that he has never had before. You don’t have to worry about meter or imagery, if your poetry is true to your experience and strikes some responsive chord of emotion in the reader. I think the poetic days of rose gardens and big full moons are about gone.”

Johnny shook his head. “I just fool around with it,” he said.

“Don’t let people tell you it must rhyme or have meter—or else sound like Whitman. If it’s something you feel inside, that’s what’s important.

“If you’d let me, I’d like to make a copy of it to send to Kirby. I think he’d like to read it.”

Johnny shrugged. “Okay,” he said. “Sure.” He got the poem out of his pocket and handed it to her. She laid it on a small table beside the bed.

“How would you all like another drink?” she asked. Her answer was three nods. Everybody seemed to have settled into a semi-introspective relaxation.

“Sandy,” Fanny asked, “are you and Eddie going to the Thanksgiving Dance Wednesday?”

Sandy gave her a quick warning frown, but Fanny either did not see it or did not get it.

Fanny looked at Sandy.

“Yes, we’re going,” Sandy said, unable to avoid the question. “We’ve already reserved a table. My sister, Riley, is coming down from Chicago. She and George are going with us.”

“Wow, goddam it, Sandy,” George burst out. “I’m not going to any goddam dance. We’ve argued the whole thing out before.” He raised the stump of his leg gingerly and shifted his buttocks irritably in the chair. “I don’t give a goddam whether Riley comes down here from Chicago or not. I’m not going to any goddamned dance.” George’s big husky frame bristled stolidly with his angry determination. He laughed harshly. “I’d be a hell of a lot of use at a dance, wouldn’t I? The one-armed paperhanger.”

Fanny suddenly realized what Sandy meant by the warning frown. There had been talk of trouble between George and Riley since George had come home minus a leg. Fanny blushed quietly and wondered when she’d learn to keep her big mouth shut.

“All right, George,” said Sandy soothingly. “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to. Nobody’s going to force you.” In spite of the soothing tone of her voice, there was as much evidence of strong will about Sandy as there was about George. “I don’t care what you do. But you’re only putting it off. Eventually, you’re going to have to start going out in public. The longer you wait to do it, the harder it’s going to be. You can’t spend your whole life hiding in a house without ever going out.”

George raised his stump and shifted again, angrily. “I’m not going,” he bellowed clumsily. “I’ll be goddamned if I’ll go to a goddamned dance with a leg off and on crutches.” Wilson looked at him and softly stroked the knee of his trousers with his long fingers. How would you do that? What minors and crescendos would one use to portray this? Moke Jones would know. What mathematical strings of notes could you use to show a man who shifted and squirmed and twisted, trying to feel a leg that was no longer there? The concerto of the man with one leg. There were songs that needed to be sung, songs the world needed to hear. Moke Jones who was a Negro would understand how to compose a song of a man without his leg to stand on.