William F. Buckley Jr. (3 page)

In fact, Danny mused, Henry’s suicide attempt wonderfully capped the subterfuge. The company records showed that Private H. Chafee had been stopped by an enemy bullet while charging forward in pursuit of duty, and was subsequently dragged forward and then carried by his fellow soldier to the medical center. It was too good.

Danny went in on Saturday. He asked the nurse at the desk whether Private Chafee would receive Pfc. O’Hara. “Just ask him. Don’t pressure him.” An answer came in over the primitive intercom: Pfc. O’Hara to proceed to Ward B.

Danny walked to the designated area and at the entrance to the ward asked an attendant which was the number for Henry Chafee. He would just as soon not need to stare at the faces of a
dozen or more mutilated men just to find Henry’s bed. But he had maneuvering to do even within the ward he was looking for. A doctor or nurse or aide here, with the need to step around them and the paraphernalia of a hospital, trays at various levels, bottles, tubes, all of them to be skirted.

At number 12A he saw him. Henry’s face was unshaven, a blond beard gestating; but his head was intact, the heavy bandages beginning only at chest level. His left arm was strapped to his side to accommodate the two needles, one giving him nourishment, the other blood plasma. Danny said nothing, but took Henry’s hand. Henry began to cry. Danny looked around protectively, but in the ambient misery, quiet tears were not noticed. Danny gave him time. Then he said gently, “You got my letter?”

Henry nodded.

“Well, I have a proposal. It is really quite simple. It is that we won’t ever discuss what happened at the Arno. And come to think of it, I’m not giving you much of a choice on the question, because that’s the way
I
want it, and,” Danny pointed to the stripe on his shirtsleeve, “I’m senior over you.” Danny had teased Henry when the order was issued at Camp Wheeler promoting the platoon. Three soldiers had inadvertently been left out of the roster. A correction came in a week later, but it left Danny senior in grade.

Henry spoke now. He did not attempt a smile. With his free hand he reached for a limp handkerchief. Danny looked away while Henry wiped his eyes. “Okay,” Henry said. “But you can understand I can’t take it out of my mind, and won’t. Not ever. I don’t know if I’m glad to be alive, but I guess I can say I’m glad you are my friend.”

The tears were once again visible. “Can you go now, Danny? Maybe come back tomorrow, or the next day? I have to sleep.”

He closed his eyes, and Danny got up.

He stared down at his companion-at-arms and felt a great rush of pity, though laced with contempt. He would not conceal the truth from himself, never mind what he had written in the letter. It was simply established that Henry’s character was flawed. Danny could never again feel for him quite what he once had.
When they met, soon after arriving at Camp Wheeler in Georgia to take infantry training, the base friendship was conventional: He was dealing with another soldier, on whom he could rely as a comrade in action. No more; Henry was different. But a nice guy, he would certainly not take that away from him.

By the time he reached the door, he had come up with the idea.

So now he went to the company clerk. He wanted to know, he told the sergeant, how to proceed with the matter at hand.

He got back from the sergeant a mimeographed form. He completed it and took it, as directed, to company headquarters, where he got the “Recommended for Citation” form. He relished the words as he inked them down on the form, sitting on a wooden stool in the cramped duty office. The sergeant on duty was preoccupied. He blew his cigar smoke into the air while scanning the freshly arrived directive having to do with a new variety of gonorrhea. He pinned it up on the wall, after spotting a space not already covered by other notices.

I was behind Private Chafee a few yards
, Danny wrote,
when the enemy fire struck him down. But before collapsing, he managed to fire several rounds into the bunker, and this made it possible for me to approach the enemy gunners and knock them out with the hand grenade.

Only Danny knew of the great, hilarious imposture over which he was presiding, and it amused him that its beneficiary, Henry, would be infuriated by it.

But what could Henry do, after all? Danny had taken in hand, at the height of a broad offensive military action, a fellow soldier who might otherwise have been court-martialed for cowardice—
cowardice in the face of the enemy
, as the war codes put it. Instead, a few weeks later, Private Henry Chafee would be discharged from the hospital and given a citation for gallantry in action plus a Purple Heart.

Henry would obviously have to play along. Either that or confess his cowardice—and maybe even get Danny court-martialed.

Henry’s mortification, as the colonel pinned the medal on him, was all-consuming—he had been taken completely by surprise, called out of the ranks that morning at reveille. After the
ceremony he had refused to speak to Danny. For several days he had needed to concentrate on Danny’s impulsive generosity the evening of the offensive before resuming the friendship, which had hardened during the closing, uneventful winter before their discharge, after which they headed for the same university and put in to room together.

T
HE IDEA was more popular with her children than with Rachel. She didn’t mind a sail around the harbor or even a day sail to Block Island, a matter of four or five hours. But once Clement had proposed the longer cruise, there was no reversing the landslide of enthusiasm he triggered. Clement had a way of announcing his celebratory ideas without first checking with her. Sometimes he had already hired the orchestra. This time he did the equivalent, getting the children all excited. Danny’s return from freshman year at boarding school was reason enough for maybe a little party for his friends; and yes, Lila had finished the fifth grade at her little school at Newport with the highest grades in the class.

All of this was good, but hardly grounds for major exertion.
When she was a girl, Rachel reflected, nobody made a fuss over what were considered workaday achievements. She remembered the summer in Campobello with her father, stricken by polio. Rachel had been awarded the Canadian equivalent of an Eagle Scout badge for girls. Her reward was a pat on the head from her father in his wheelchair and from her mother a smile, but not very different from the smile she got every day. Most days. On the other hand, true, it was hard to notice such things as children when one’s father was campaigning for Vice President, then serving as governor of New York, all of this preparatory to life in the White House. And then too, her brothers never thought to concelebrate their achievements with those of their younger sister. By contrast—Rachel was pleased by the growing intimacy between the boy and his younger sister—on the day Danny came back from his boarding school at Millbrook, Lila greeted her big brother elatedly at the door, presenting him with a beaded belt on which she had worked at odd moments ever since Easter. The border was red, the background yellow, the Indian symbols green, and his name appeared in tiny brown beads discernible a good ten feet away:

◊  ◊  ◊  DANIEL O’HARA  ◊  ◊  ◊

Lila was proud of her artifact and Danny was very pleased by it, and wore it at dinner, drawing Thelma’s attention to it when she came in from the kitchen with the soup. When Clement rapped his table knife on the wineglass, demanding silence around the table, the children knew that their father would come up with a celebration. Last year he had made it a visit to Playland at Rye, an amusement park more than three hours’ drive away, and three years earlier, just before Clement O’Hara had gone off to England as an official involved with the Lend-Lease program, there had been the trip to Niagara Falls.

“Silence, silence!” The chattering stopped. Mr. O’Hara told them he had accepted an invitation to watch fireworks on the Fourth of July at Nantucket with his old friends the Giffords. He paused.

Danny knew there was something else to come. Anybody can go to Nantucket, a matter of a couple of ferry rides.

“And I thought it would be fun to
sail
to Nantucket on
Listless
!”

The reaction was as Clement O’Hara had expected. That of the children, and that of their mother.

The O’Hara sloop was a quite ancient sailboat, 36 feet long, built during the twenties and neglected during the first years of the Depression. Danny was enchanted by it. The preceding summer, when the
Listless
was pulled out of storage, he had stood by the whole time the hull was recaulked and repainted. He engaged the sailmaker in inquisitive conversation when it was recanvassed, and attentively looked on when the engine was pulled out and overhauled. He signed up at the Ida Lewis Yacht Club for sailing lessons and was soon racing in a 24-foot Star.

He egged his father on every weekend to take
Listless
out. But Clement O’Hara’s enthusiasms were short-lived, and
Listless
was used for routine triangular outings in Narragansett Bay. The trip to Block Island was an exception, and it had not been comfortable, the wind coming in that August day as usual, hard and from the southwest. It hadn’t helped morale on
Listless
that his sister and mother both felt queasy. Arrived at Great Salt Pond, Rachel had cooked the steak, served supper to her family, then left on the evening ferry for Newport after tucking her children into bed at the motel. Now in prospect was a sail all the way to Nantucket—a forty-mile run, much of it over open water; battling currents pronounced and eccentric was not a venture Rachel looked forward to. Still, she had to admit that it was a novel, and in a way a glamorous outing. Of course, Danny and Lila responded to their father’s plan with noisy enthusiasm.

Rachel O’Hara contrived a smile, and rang for dessert.

In the fortnight before the trip, Danny devoted himself to every detail of
Listless
’s needs and appearance. He made innumerable checklists, and when he could corral the attention of his father, insisted he go over them. He told Lila to make up a list of everything that would be needed for the galley, and he, Danny, would go over the list and correct it, and then give it to their
mother. Were the necessary tools all there? Danny told his father, who was amused, that it was not safe to set out without a big wire cutter. The purchase was authorized. Danny checked the charts, the batteries, the radio direction finder, the radio; he gave the brightwork an additional coat of varnish and on the afternoon he thought of as devoted to the final details—they would set sail two days later—he stowed in his own locker his three or four most essential personal effects, including his flashlight, his Swiss Army knife, and his .22 Colt revolver.

The weekend before had given them the longest day in the year. Today the wind was sprightly during the afternoon, the sun steady and radiant. Clement left the house late an hour or two before dinner, setting out for one of his meetings in New London with his partners in the oil storage company. He would be spending the night at New London, returning in midmorning.

That night, Danny played cards with Lila and then read from his mother’s Agatha Christie collection, finally turning off the light in his bedroom.

But he didn’t sleep. He tried counting cricket chirps—he often tried that, during sleepless summers. He explained to Lila that by doing so, counting toward one thousand, you could never actually
get
to one thousand. Because always—“I mean
always
, Lila—you are asleep before you get there.”

By the time he got to four hundred, Danny couldn’t remember whether he had already done three hundred, or five hundred. He wasn’t concentrating on the numbers, or on anything in particular, but he was not dozing off. He was hatching a plan. Danny’s plans, beginning when he was a very little boy, had a way of materializing quite suddenly, quite fully.

He jolted up from his bed, flicked his bedside light back on, took off his pajamas, put on his briefs, the white tennis shorts lying on the armchair, and an Ida Lewis sports shirt from the drawer. He squeezed into his tennis shoes, lifted his flashlight from its hook in the closet, and walked silently downstairs to the kitchen. Flashing on his light, he opened the bin where Thelma kept the brown paper grocery bags. He withdrew one, then tiptoed
to the refrigerator for an orange and a banana, and to the pantry, where he pulled out a half-dozen graham crackers.

Fully provisioned, he trod quietly to the garage, put his paper bag into the wire container at the back of the bicycle and wheeled it gingerly toward the garage door. This was his only real problem, he figured—opening and closing the wide two-car door without making any noise. He put the bicycle up against the wall, shone his light on the door fastener, and gently but firmly pushed on it until the heavy weights on either side asserted their gravitational authority and the door began to slide open. Danny slowed the movement toward the end of the cycle, to avoid the click-shut sound that might flag the attention of his mother.

It was a difficult maneuver. With one hand he kept the garage door from closing, with the other dragged his bicycle into the open air. That done, he could reverse the door’s movements, easing it shut. It would not do for his mother to wake and find the garage door open. On the other hand, she would never notice the missing bicycle.

He thought to himself, pedaling down Alford Lane toward the little highway that would take him to the Bay: This was the greatest adventure he had ever undertaken. He was by himself, propelled by his own power, prepared for the first time in his life to spend the night entirely alone, entirely unsupervised. Where?

On
Listless
! He had never spent the night aboard the boat. Two days from now, his father had promised him, he and Lila could sleep on the boat, at anchor in Nantucket. The senior O’Haras would of course stay with the friends they were there to visit.

As the bicycle drew close to the marina, Danny had it all worked out in his mind. He would open the main hatch to the main cabin, focusing his flashlight on the combination lock. Then perhaps he would turn on the cabin light, pour himself a Coca-Cola from the icebox, maybe eat a graham cracker or two, thumb through a copy of
Yachting
magazine. Then when he felt
truly
sleepy, he’d go forward to the fo’c’sle, unfold a sleeping bag and stretch out.