William F. Buckley Jr. (7 page)

Henry led him to the kitchen and opened a drawer. Danny took the opener and walked out to his car. He was about to press the starter button, but then stopped, took out a can of beer from the box in the backseat, opened it, perched it on the floor of the car and, descending from the car, reached again into the backseat. Under one arm he carried the carton from the liquor store,
in his right index finger he dangled one of the gallon jugs of cider. He went back into the house and returned to the car with empty hands. The policeman was still at the driveway entrance. Danny asked him where to go to buy some food.

At ten that night, Caroline was asleep in her room. Danny got up from the chair in the living room and told Henry it would make sense to go for a swim, “especially since we’re both loaded.” Henry said the water would be pretty cold by now, but sure. He ducked into his bedroom and came back with two towels. He turned the lights in the house out, and passed through the door into the moonlight.

The two undergraduates, trim veterans of a bloody military campaign in Italy, walked the twenty steps to the lakefront, dropped their clothes, and plunged into the cold, pure water.
Everything about this place is perfect
, Danny thought, except that Mrs. Chafee—
Prudence Chafee! What a name she was saddled with
—got sick and popped off! Shit. Life is pretty sticky. Some people’s lives. His life was pretty good, thanks; no complaints. He swam on his back looking up at the sky. Then he bit his lip. Was all this booze-thought? Was he on a sentimental high? Four beers and a bottle of wine were threatening to make a philosopher out of him. Oh well, so why not? He smiled back at the moon.

But the water did feel fine, and he thought he caught a little regenerative smile on Henry’s face. Can’t hide from a full moon, no sir, shouldn’t even try.

C
OMPLETING his junior year, Henry Chafee was busy. Like other students he was taking five courses, and like many of his classmates he was doing a divisional major—in his case, history, economics and political science. And then Henry was active in extracurricular activities. He spent one afternoon every week as duty editor at the
Yale Daily News
, where he was now a senior editor. Three afternoons every week in the spring he spent at the gymnasium, boxing. As when playing football or hockey, his fall and winter sports, Henry had a reputation among his teammates for exposing himself mercilessly to punishment. He would block and tackle with a zest almost singular, and on the ice was all but ferocious in going after the puck. When boxing, his aggressiveness was as marked as his defense was nonchalant. Earlier in the
month he had been knocked out—“I’m not sure I was actually unconscious,” he said to the coach apologetically, lifting himself off the mat.

“You deserve to have been unconscious,” the coach snarled at him. “I don’t get it, your right glove was halfway down to your gut and—here, wipe the blood off your lip.”

At hockey he was skilled, in football he was fast but weighed only 155 pounds. As a boxer his progress was considerable, and late in junior year he qualified for the varsity team in the middleweight division. Early on a Saturday morning in mid-May he was on the old, rattly chartered bus, headed for the match at West Point. They were approaching Poughkeepsie when team captain Dizzy Koch, a formidable twenty-year-old 200-pounder from Minneapolis, asked the coach, Harry Gulph, if there was a magic way to get tickets for the Joe Louis fight at Madison Square Garden that night. The coach didn’t look up from his crossword puzzle but muttered, sure, all you had to do was pay thirty bucks to a scalper.

“If you want to call it ‘magic,’ ” the coach concluded, “say Hesto Presto when you hand over the money.”

Thirty dollars was a pretty magical sum of money, Captain Dizzy acknowledged; that would buy you three hundred hamburgers. And then, as if blinded by a revelation, he stood in the swaying bus, hanging on to the baggage rack, prepared to address the team.

Dizzy was an enthusiast, and now he blared out his suggestion, his scheme. Each team member would deposit three dollars into a pool, there would be a drawing. And? And the winner to take the boodle and attend the fight! There was general enthusiasm for the idea, except for Harry Albright, who said he didn’t have three dollars, and if he did, he wouldn’t risk it on so dumb a game. There were groans all around. The coach was caught up by the idea and confessed that he had twelve dollars left over from expense money, and that he would use that as “scholarship” contributions to the pool, available only for students on scholarship—“Raise your hands, everyone on scholarship.” Three, including Henry, raised their right hands. There was animated
discussion on whether Harry Albright should be subsidized, it went to a vote of the whole team, and he won narrowly. Everyone was now a participant.

Harry Gulph collected the bills and the boxers wrote out their names on a pad passed around. Dizzy used the scissors on his Swiss Army knife, and the slips of paper were put into the coach’s fedora. Coach Harry was by now wholly caught up in the drama and with exaggerated gestures he first blinked his eyes, then raised his left hand to cover them, and then, absolutely to insure that he was not cheating, looked up at the roof of the bus while with his right hand he twiddled the slips of paper, finally drawing one out. Without looking at it, he ceremoniously handed it over to Dizzy.

“Here you are, Captain. You read out the winner’s name.”

Henry the Winner acknowledged first the congratulatory cheers, then the groans of frustrated disappointment; and later, just before noon, he knocked out his opponent, drawing cheers from ten travelers from New Haven and boos from several hundred cadets.

Henry found the experience exhilarating. At the post-tournament lunch he apologized to his victim, who remarked that he too had been surprised. “Damnedest thing, been boxing three years; never happened before.” He felt better when Henry said that he had himself been knocked out only a week or two earlier. The cadet seated on his right asked Henry if he had served in the Army before going to Yale, and Henry said yes, he had been in Italy. This was the formulation he used—he would not say, as most veterans did routinely, that he had “fought” in Italy.

With whom?

He identified the unit. Henry hoped the interrogation would end there, but it didn’t.

Had he been in action?

Yes, Henry said, and now he took over the helm, carefully navigating the course of the conversation. To have swerved over to an entirely different course would have struck his lunch mate as rude, or defensive; when intending to divert an inquiry into what kind of a life you had had in the military you don’t return
suddenly to the subject of boxing. Something nearer at hand …

“My roommate was in the Navy in the Italian theater and was in on the landing at Nettuno. But it was successful, initially at any rate; surprise landing—you probably read about it. It was the Navy that delivered an Army corps in what was really total secrecy. It wasn’t the Navy’s fault that the ground commanders were too timid to exploit the opportunity before them. Kesselring had nothing in the area, largely due to the fact that the Navy conducted a highly successful diversionary landing at Civitavecchia, sixty miles to the north. Here at West Point do you get any training in naval warfare, or does that come only after you get to be a colonel or something?”

The maneuver worked. It helped that the cadet, it transpired, was the son of a naval captain. For the rest of the lunch they fought happily the naval war, 1944–45, and Henry minded not at all when the action moved to the Pacific.

The Yale bus drove to the Greyhound station and when it stopped there to let Henry out, his teammates cheered him. He grinned broadly and, putting his gym kit down on the ground, gave his teammates the boxer’s triumphal hands-clenched-over-head salute, and went then to the ticket window to buy a ticket to New York.

The old gray bus was on time, and he worked his way to the rear. It was not crowded, but he did not want to risk sitting down within earshot of the gray-haired scrawny driver who listened to the baseball game on his portable radio as he punched the tickets. Henry was not in a mood for offhand conversation with the driver, or indeed with any one of the dozen riders sitting about the bus, men and women of all ages bound for New York for whatever reason. As the bus moved along on the western shore of the Hudson River, Henry observed offhandedly the light water traffic on the river. But there were a few sailboats, happily confirming the arrival of spring.

It was a good thing that he was unaccompanied, he reflected, since he had no intention of going to the prizefight. He was
working in his own way, systematically, to overcome his fear of physical violence and he was making progress in his own deliberate, deliberated way. It is one thing, he told himself, to hit another student with a well-padded glove in a college gymnasium, something else to do the kind of thing that would be done at Madison Square Garden in pursuit of a half-million-dollar purse. He had seen enough newsreels of the great fights in which Joe Louis had been boxing’s king almost as long as Henry could remember. Louis was a good clean fighter and often he knocked out his opponent, but almost always there was blood and pain and flesh mutilation. When this happened on the screen Henry would close his eyes, and no one would notice. He would hardly go to see the real thing and run the risk of closing his eyes.

What he would do was listen carefully to the fight over the radio and read accounts of the fight by the sportswriters and—he thought this would be an amusing exercise—perhaps go on and write a column for the
Yale Daily News
on what it had been like, live on Saturday at Madison Square Garden. He smiled confidently. His piece would be full of local color. “At the opening of the third round the fat lady in the front row stood up on her seat and screamed, ‘Kill him, Joe! Kill him!’ She ran a far greater risk of getting killed than Joe Walcott.” That kind of thing. Who would contradict him? He could pick up some of what he needed in the way of atmosphere by listening intently to the radio.

He walked with some excitement across town from the bus station outside the Dixie Hotel and soaked in the excitement of what surely was the most vibrant city on earth. Everyone seemed to strain to welcome the summer. He walked on Forty-second Street and headed west. The streets were being cleaned and a spray truck passed by, dampening the afternoon dust. On Broadway the whole world lit up in front of him, and he remembered his very first sight of it as a little boy, and his settled conviction that he was in Oz, because he had just read a book about the magic kingdom, and surely it was about Times Square?

He walked about, looking for a restaurant that would tune in on the big fight. Perhaps they all would. But he spotted the likeliest of them all on the corner of Broadway near Fiftieth Street.
Where better than the restaurant founded by and, he once read, still presided over by the great king of the sport, Jack Dempsey? He remembered the picture in
Life
magazine when he was a freshman, Gene Tunney dining with Jack Dempsey at Dempsey’s bar.

He got the last free table, in the corner of the room. Most of Dempsey’s patrons were standing along the bar, their ties loose, half of them wearing seersucker jackets, some of them white jackets and khaki pants left over from army days. They consumed a lot of beer and soon were concentrating intensely on what was being said on the radio by Don Dunphy. Henry ordered the deluxe steak dinner at $3.25. The man at the bar nearest him, wearing a Dodgers baseball cap and a loose-fitting blue jacket, complained that the radio wasn’t on loud enough, though Henry had no problem in hearing what the excited commentator was saying as it became clearer and clearer, after the second-round knockdown, what would soon now happen. The kibitzers were demonstrative, and when the champ knocked out the challenger, in the fourth round, the old, imperious lady in dressy satin at the corner gave the signal to the bartender, who acknowledged it by announcing that there would be a beer on the house. Could that be Mrs. Jack Dempsey? The detail would be good in the story he would write, so he motioned to the waiter and asked, and the answer was no, that was Jenny, and “What Jenny says around here goes.” Henry drank happily with the crowd, then picked up his little overnight bag and walked out into the sultry heat of Broadway, headed for the Yale Club five blocks east.

“Where you going with that bag, handsome?”

She was slim; her hair covered one of her eyes in the style of Veronica Lake. She swung about her glittery handbag as she approached him, her hips swaying. “How about a little drink before you go to bed? Before we go to bed?”

Henry could not quite believe what he heard himself saying: “Where?” The heat in his loins had been instantaneous, as though his single word were a switch lighting up a huge dynamo.

“I know a place just a couple of blocks away, nice private place.
We can have anything handsome wants—beer, wine, Scotch, gin, sixty-nine.” She smiled broadly, her eyes large, brown, alert.

Henry walked with her, nervous but resolute. She had her arm around his. He was surprised that, with his left arm, he was lightly rocking the overnight bag. Like Gene Kelly getting ready to tap-dance. Night-out-on-the-town stuff! He cleared his throat. “Okay, you guide me. What’s your name?”

“Lena. What’s yours, handsome?”

“I’m Henry.”

“I like that. Do they call you Hank?”

“No, just Henry.” They came by an old man stirring chestnuts over coals. He had attached a piece of cardboard to a leg of his roasting oven. It said all that needed to be said: “10¢.”

“Buy me some,” Lena said.

Henry handed the old man fifty cents and opened his hand, displaying two fingers. Under the street light Henry looked down at Lena. She was young—about his own age, Henry guessed—dark, her breasts tumescent. She did not need that much makeup, he surmised. He handed her one bag of hot chestnuts, stuffing the second one in his pocket. She took one, pulled off the shell, tugged Henry to get moving and began daintily to nibble.