William F. Buckley Jr. (2 page)

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four Mississippi. Five Mississippi.
He had counted out the five specified seconds, heard the blast of his grenade. He could now move in, prepared to encounter whatever creature survived the grenade. Cautiously he entered the bunker from the back, with his left hand beaming his flashlight splashily, up, down, right, left, his right on the rifle trigger. The two German soldiers were dead.

Danny paused. The floodlight was now out, the gunfire suddenly ended.

He dropped his rifle and ran the seventy, eighty yards back toward his foxhole. He jumped into it, grabbed Henry by the collar, shook him, and whispered roughly, “Come on! Quick!
Come with me!
” Henry climbed out of the foxhole and, Danny’s arm firmly on his sleeve, jogged alongside, back once again in the direction of their star. Danny’s star, Henry was thinking, not mine, as he wrested free from Danny’s grip, turned his rifle toward his stomach and pushed on the trigger.

D
ANNY O’HARA had been instructed by the senior at Yale who tapped him for Zeta Psi to wear informal clothes for the initiation rituals that evening. “You know, khaki pants, whatever. And coat and tie, of course.” Coat and tie wasn’t any longer quite “of course” at Yale. One master, freshly installed at Silliman College, had specified coats and ties to be worn at meals in his college dining room, and a mere three weeks later the freshly elected twenty-year-old president of the college’s student association called on the master to inform him that it was the consensus of the students that to insist on a coat and tie was intrusive and fascistic.

“
Fascistic?
” the master asked. He was a professor of philosophy and frequently took pride in slipping it into casual conversation
that he was probably the first academic in the country to start up a faculty chapter of Bundles for Britain. That was back in 1939! “I am about as much a fascist as John Stuart Mill,” he comforted himself.

Well. Student ignorance. There wasn’t anything—he knew—to be done about that. But he did have the authority to remove any scintilla of evidence that would induce, even if it did not justify, so ugly a label. Accordingly, he repealed his ruling. Undergraduates could henceforth dine at Silliman wearing anything they chose. One student, the next Halloween, took license to do just that, and arrived at the dining room wearing nothing at all.

But the fraternities held on to fascistic standards for a while longer, so that at 4:45 on the Tuesday, Daniel Tracey O’Hara fixed his tie while looking at the mirror above the sink. He was not so distracted by the social ritual that lay ahead of him as to fail to note that notwithstanding his beard, which tended to heaviness, he was incandescently young in appearance and good-looking, his hair light brown with here and there a curl, his eyes brown and penetrating, his lips fixed, it seemed, in a position at once quizzical and patronizing, his white teeth showing between lips that never seemed absolutely to close. He was lithe and strong and tall, and he winked at himself as he left the washroom to return to the student suite he shared with Henry Chafee.

Henry of course knew where Danny would be going. There was not the slightest resentment over his roommate’s preferential status. It was two months ago that Danny had asked Henry whether he would be joining a fraternity. He got back the answer—Henry wasn’t coy about it—that Henry couldn’t afford a fraternity. Danny was regretful about this but didn’t distract himself with egalitarian concerns. The administration at Yale forbade fraternity membership to more than 25 percent of the undergraduate body, so that a heavy majority were always on the principal, non-fraternity-belonging side of the tracks, and nobody seemed to have the time to stimulate social resentments. After two years together, Danny had come to terms with differences in economic resources. Danny’s mother lived in Palm Beach with Danny’s incumbent, affluent stepfather. Henry’s widowed mother lived in
Lakeville, Connecticut. Danny’s own father had died during freshman year.

“Died of what?” his date Martha had asked him, the night of the freshman prom.

“There is some question about that in our family,” Danny said gravely. “There is the school of thought that says Dad died from drinking too many dry martinis. There is the other school that holds that he died because one day he couldn’t
get
a dry martini.” He then grinned. An infectious grin, so Martha didn’t much mind it that Danny was speaking unkindly about his late father.

He would need extra money for fraternity dues. Danny was never absolutely sure who it was—his mother? his stepfather? his father’s trust?—that sent him the monthly checks. They came in from different sources, but they always came. When he had special needs (a car, a European vacation) he would write to his mother. She had instructed him, when he got back from the war, to do this. She would forward his request to whichever of his patrons was, in her judgment, either more affluent at the moment, or else more inclined to make comfortable the life of Daniel T. O’Hara; though he would learn, that summer in France, that his suppliers were not wholly elastic in keeping Danny solvent and happy. “I forget, Mother,” Danny once asked her after getting back from his vacation. “Did Grandfather die rich?”

“He had money”—his mother referred to her father, the late President—“but not a whole lot of it. Mother needs looking after. Whether there will be much left over after she goes, I’m not sure, and you certainly shouldn’t count on it.”

“Maybe she will leave me one of Grandfather’s postage stamps?” Danny smiled.

“You are a nasty, avaricious boy,” Rachel Roosevelt O’Hara Bennett smiled back at him, kissing him lightly on his nose.

Danny had been content to let the matter rest and reminded himself that since he was taking a major in American history at Yale he might at some point pause to examine what if anything the fawning historians had unearthed about the personal wealth
of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his grandfather, who had died when Danny was twenty.

Danny had visited him only once. This was at Hyde Park, the patriarchal estate on the Hudson River where the President spent weeks at a time during the summer. He had been too busy for a leisurely visit, what with the strains of a world war. But a presidential election was coming up, and family photographs were for that reason alone very much in order. The grandchildren were lunched at Hyde Park, were photographed (no interviews), but were not invited to spend the night. His mother had once complained, “Everybody thinks Hyde Park is as big as the Waldorf-Astoria. Actually, it is an
enormous
house, twelve bedrooms.” Driving home Danny had said, “Mother, isn’t Grandfather going to die soon? I mean, he looks like it, don’t you think?” His mother said not to talk that way, that there was a national election ahead. And anyway, presidents get the best doctors in the world.

So in that first summer of sophomore year, Danny had traveled to Europe. Henry stayed with his bursary job at the Yale Library, taking long weekends with his mother and younger sister at the family home in Lakeville. Henry’s mother had been widowed when her two children were ten and five. She raised them with eyes sharply focused on the need to economize. Mrs. Chafee worked in the library of Hotchkiss School and budgeted family life as though there were no income except for what her salary provided. Henry suspected his mother had a rainy-day fund hidden somewhere—naturally so, given that both the children had been sent off to boarding schools. This would not have been possible to manage, he explained to his less worldly sister, Caroline, without help from somewhere. But whatever her discreet resources, Mrs. Chafee, when she spoke about money, stressed only the drain of the family overhead, and turned away any question about the expense of boarding schools. When Danny suggested to Henry that he ask his mother for a loan so that he might travel to Europe, Henry was astonished at the mere thought of making such a request. “You don’t understand, Danny. You just don’t bring up things like that to Mother.”

So Danny traveled alone to Europe, and when he got back
from his ten-week trip, he showed 8mm movies, using a bedsheet Scotch-taped to the wall as a screen.

“Certain of the sights I took in,” Danny addressed his roommate and four other sophomores from across the hall, tilting his beer bottle up, “the camera simply refused to film. You understand, Josh? It’s what Professor Sewall calls ‘technological modesty.’ ” Josh grinned, priming his own bottle. “Can you buy that sort of stuff, I mean, the professional stuff, in Paris?” Danny shrugged his shoulders. “How would I know?” In such moments Danny’s patronizing smile was especially beguiling. If only they knew, he thought.

That was last month, before the fraternity elections. It was time now to go—he had been counseled on no account to appear late at the fraternity. But that, and the trip to Europe, and his 1947 Ford Sedan notwithstanding, when Danny opened the door to go to his induction into a fraternity, he sensed that a little curtain, however fine, had been drawn between him and Henry. The luxuries of vacation travel were one thing—Danny and his roommate were physically separated during the summer, so there could be no daily abrasions—it had been only at the moment of departure that the distinction was felt: one roommate whose vacation would be restricted to occasional weekends at home, seventy-five miles from New Haven; the second, off on a vacation that would take him to pleasure spots in Europe, lasting over the entire summer. But this would be different, a little bumpier. Danny’s fraternity was only five minutes’ walking distance away, and now Danny would be at liberty to go off for dinner or for relaxation other than to the college dining hall or the college’s facilities, and of course he would inevitably be making new friends. Invitations to nonmember fellow students were limited, in his fraternity’s bylaws, to two invitations per term to the same student.

So, Danny felt a twinge of something—he was not quite sure what it was. Sadness? Well, no, not really. Pride? That figured there, somewhere. Disdain for those who did not do quite so … well? Could not afford to be so free? It was all there, somewhere, in greater or lesser measure. Did he feel a whiff of self-isolation?
But he had consciously thought the matter out as he walked away from the army hospital in the Arno, after his first visit. What he had said to himself then was foresighted but simple: Either they would remain friends or they would not, but if they attempted to stay on as friends there would be no way to—vaporize?—an experience they had had in common. In fact, only they shared that experience. It was only Danny, and Henry, who knew about the Arno offensive and how Henry had first funked it, then tried to kill himself. If the memory of it was going to haunt them, then better not to see each other at all. But when after their discharge they resolved to apply to room together at college, it had to be on the understanding not that the Arno offensive would be forgotten but that it would be ignored. Either ignored, or maybe even sublimated. But that would be Henry’s responsibility. Danny would just never bring it up, not ever. This turned out to be easy. From the beginning, he had been comfortable with Henry, the least demanding of companions; not quite the sparkler, dear Henry, but he could laugh, indeed did so, and he was so very earnest, and so very much devoted to his family, to Caroline in particular.

He was walking confidently now up York Street toward Zeta Psi. He told himself yet again that obviously he could never forget the events of August 12 and the Arno offensive, but that was over three years ago, and they had spent much time together. Would Henry ever be truly independent of him? Danny wondered.

No. But this had nothing to do with the day-to-day pleasure he took in Henry’s company. Avery nice guy, easy to share quarters with, arousable for a serious conversation, if the urge to have one came up, which it seldom did with Danny.

No, he thought finally, as he approached the graystone exterior of the fraternity, things were fine just the way they were, and Henry was just fine. A real pity, to be sure, that he was a fucking coward. Danny smiled. He savored the formulation.

B
ACK THEN, in the field hospital, Private Henry Chafee had declined to speak to anybody. After three days of this, the doctor concluded that his muteness was a part of the trauma. On Day Five, the company clerk came around to record the exact circumstances of Henry’s battle wound. “I know you can’t talk,” the corporal said, his notepad in front of him, “so just nod your head yes or no, and if necessary you can write on this pad here, okay, buddy?”

Henry closed his eyes and turned his head away. Only the sound of the big fan was heard, blowing in hot air, it seemed. The clerk faltered; then, after a minute or two, he rose from his chair. “Okay, okay. So you don’t want any of this business. We can get the details from O’Hara. Get better.”

He walked out of the long, hot tent where the casualties were stretched out, twenty-four of them, on army cots. He wondered to himself whether that was the smell of blood pure and simple. Or was it a combination, blood and all the medications one takes when blood works its way out of where it is supposed to stay. Whatever, it was unpleasant. He resolved, mockingly, not to be wounded. The corporal was glad to breathe air less fetid, though in the hot sun of the Arno Valley it was hotter than in the tent with its two big fans.

Danny thought it prudent simply to leave Henry alone, at least for the first week. What he did was write him a letter, meticulously sealed, on the envelope of which he wrote,

To be opened and read only by Pvt. Henry Chafee.

What he wrote was that, although he, Danny, did not know the correct term for it, he had to assume there was one such word: the word that described the man suddenly frozen in battle, immobilized. “I know enough about people in general, and about you, to know that it isn’t a mark of—well, of an organic character defect. So let’s let that one lie. Now, what I did on Monday you are free to think of as specially fraternal, or any way you want to put it, but it seemed to me totally logical at the time, and I’m only sorry I wasn’t quick enough on the draw to get that fucking carbine away from you. Anyway, I’ll leave you alone a few days and then I’ll come around.”