Burning the Days (27 page)

We went back to Langley. A strange, bottomless reaction had set in. With Paula and Leland, in whose house we were staying, I could hardly talk and found it impossible to laugh. Paula said she admired my courage, though what I’d had felt gone. We spent that evening talking about God. They were firm believers. It all seemed unimportant and beside the point.

——

Dreams remained. For years afterwards in nightmares stark as archive footage, I was what I had been. We were in Asia somewhere. Disaster was in the air. We were surrendering and there had been a warning from the enemy, a written warning, that because
of the many atrocities we had committed there could be no guarantee of safety. I was standing in a hospital near three or four pilots, one of whom I knew. They were going to try to cross to where their planes were parked, take off, and continue fighting. They started for the field. There was firing, heavy and relentless. Someone came to ask if I would take the fourth plane. An F-100. I hadn’t been in one for years …

I did fly, however. On weekends I flew with the National Guard and went with them to summer camp in Cape Cod or Virginia. In the fall of 1961 we were placed on active duty—it was the so-called Berlin crisis—and went to France for nearly a year, to Chaumont, where DeShazer had crashed and where my agent, Kenneth Littauer, had flown during the First World War. They had lit bonfires at the corners of the field, he said, to guide planes home after dark.

It was September. We landed in a light rain, the first ones, having flown the planes across the Atlantic, stopping in the Azores and Seville. I asked the crew chief who met me what the town was like. He answered without hesitation, “Looks all right.”

That year, I understood quite well, was the close of things. We were reserves—I had looked down upon such as we were now. I wore the uniform still, the colored ribbons, but the genuineness was gone, even when Norstad, the glamorous theater commander, came on a visit and lay sideways in an easy chair in his flying suit, chatting about the outbreak of war and what it would bring as he saw it, or even the brusque appearance of LeMay himself, with a retinue that filled an entire plane. We were able to conduct ourselves well enough if called upon and convincingly say “Sir,” but it was only for a time.

This transparency set me free. All that before had been insignificant, unmartial, caught my eye, buildings, countryside, towns, hotels. As a lieutenant colonel I had a room of my own at the head of
the stairs. There, late at night, back from a restaurant, back from the bar, I sat writing. I had three lives, one during the day, one at night, and the last in a drawer in my room in a small book of notes.

There were wonderful things in that book, things that I am unable to write or even imagine again. That they were wonderful was not my doing—I merely took the trouble to put them down. They were like the secret notebook of the
chasseur
at Maxim’s, without ego or discretion, and the novel woven around them (A
Sport and a Pastime
) owed them everything. The leather-seated car I drove is gone; the house of Lazan and his wife, where we went for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner, I know is off towards Langres somewhere but I doubt I would be able to find it again; the elegant couple in Paris have divorced; the young girl, the essential element—of course, she cannot change; that is the whole point—went to America and became what you might expect. Ironically, the portrait I made of her she never read.

Much has faded but not the incomparable taste of France, given then so I would always remember it. I know that taste, the yellow headlights flowing along the road at night, the towns by a river, the misty mornings, the thoughts of everything that happened there, the notes that confirmed it and made it imperishable.

——

In the blue twilight, lightning descends to the dim Texas plains. I can hear it crackling on the radio. The sky is filled with storms, a huge line of them. I am barely on top at forty-two thousand feet; they boil beneath me, shot with lightning like a kind of X ray, heaving the airplane around. Down there is Frederick, Oklahoma, where we were stationed for a while just after the war. There were shining new planes in rows but no one to maintain them. The bare wooden barracks in which we sat idle grew cold as autumn advanced.

By now it is dark. The radio compass is erratic. I believe I have
Tyler but can’t be sure. A bit later I try Baton Rouge—nothing. The fuel is just at fifteen hundred pounds. I call for New Orleans destination weather: scattered and ten miles’ visibility, they reply, but beneath me it is overcast despite the report. Then, not more than five minutes out, the clouds begin to break, there are lights.

Years when I crossed the country alone, like some replica Philip Nolan, in thousand-mile legs. Taking off from Wright-Patterson in a tremendous rainstorm, unable to even see the end of the runway or the trees. Taking off from McGuire in another downpour—Ritchings with an umbrella walking me out to the ship—taking off at Mobile, taking off at March and Forbes. Taking off at Tyndall, the earth like dust on a mirror, a long, unmoving line of smoke—from the paper mill, was it?—running south as far as eye could see. Going out early in the morning, hands still numb, the magical silence of the runways, the whole pale scene. Heading for the Gulf under its blue haze, counties and parishes intent and unaware though I know their lives in vast detail, Brookley shining like a coin in the light off Mobile Bay.

Sometimes, because of the light, in the visor there is the moist dark of one’s own eye, bigger than a movie poster. Sometimes there is the sun directly ahead making it impossible to read the instruments. The earth below is shadowed. There are mythic serpents of water, lakes, rivers smooth as marble. Empty sky, the rumbling aircraft, the radio overflowing with voices and sounds. Above the yellow horizon, near the vanishing sun, suddenly, a dot. Behind it a faint line, a contrail. By some forgotten reflex I am stunned awake, as in days past when we watched intently, when the body filled with excitement to see it: the enemy!

There were airfields everywhere, left over from the war, relic fields the names of which I knew from stories, Wendover, Pocatello. Leaving them and climbing out, over the alkali, the thin trace of roads, railroad tracks, dust. Not a city, not even a house.

Snow on the distant hills, which are slowly sinking as I rise, all else brown. The West. From here it is endless, land that goes on forever. Down there it is the sky that has no end.

One night as I was calling for a letdown near St. Louis, the city jewel-like and clear, a voice in the darkness asked, “Flatfoot Red, is that you?” Flatfoot, our call sign from Bitburg, and Red, the color of the lead flight.

“Yes,” I said. “Who’s that?”

En route you seldom saw other fighters and almost never recognized a voice.

“Ed White.”

The pleasure, the thrill, in fact, the sort that comes from a lingering glance across a room, a knowing nod, or a pair of fingers touched briefly to the brow. We were able to exchange only a few words—How are you? Where are you headed? I looked for him in the blackness, the moving star that would be his plane, but the heavens were littered with stars, the earth strewn with lights. He was on his way to somewhere, the heights, I was sure. I was going in to land.

“See you,” he said.

Who could know it would be otherwise and he was one whom I would never see again? We had flown on the acrobatic team together, he the right wing, Whitlow the left, Tracy in the slot.

After his death his widow remarried. Not many years later, she herself died, apparently a suicide. The waters had closed over them both.

I often thought of White and that hail across the darkness I took as a last meeting. I thought of him as I watched a parade in the city one day. It was November, Armistice Day, but there was the heat and fullness of late summer. The dirt was blowing in the streets. I was part of New York myself by then, returned to it. They came along Fifth Avenue, the ranks of the American Legion, the
police and high-school bands, teenage girls dressed in blazers, ten-year-old colonels wearing sunglasses, fat men, limpers. The drums went by. The sidewalks were crowded with people. Rows of silver trumpets passed. Then the flags. The crowd watched. Not a hat was lifted, not a hand stirred.

——

Once at a dinner party I was asked by a woman what on earth I had ever seen in military life. I couldn’t answer her, of course. I couldn’t summon it all, the distant places, the comradeship, the idealism, the youth. I couldn’t tell about flying over the islands long ago, seeing them rise in the blue distance wreathed in legend, the ring of white surf around them. Or the cities, Shanghai and Tokyo, Amsterdam and Venice, gunnery camps in North Africa and forgotten colonies of Rome along the shore.

I couldn’t describe that, or what it was like waiting to take off on missions in Korea, armed, nervous, singing songs to yourself, or the electric jolt that went through you when the MIGs came up. I couldn’t tell about Mahurin being shot down and not a soul seeing him go, or George Davis, or deArmont, who used to jump up on a table in the club and recite “Gunga Din”—the drunken pilots thought he was making it up.

I couldn’t tell her about brilliant group commanders or flying with men who later became famous, the days and days of boredom and moments of pure ecstasy, of walking out to the parked planes in the early morning or coming in at dusk when the wind had died to make the last landing of the day and the mobile control officer giving two quick clicks of the mike to confirm: grease job. To fly with the thirty-year-old veterans and finally earn the right to lead yourself, flights, squadrons, a few times the entire group. The great days of youth when you are mispronouncing foreign words and trading dreams.

We came in from the flight line at Giebelstadt or Cazaux, weary, faces marked, unknown, and went into town to drink. Money meant nothing and in a way neither did fame. I couldn’t tell any of that or of the roads along the sea in Honolulu, the dances, the last drinks at the bar, or who Harry Thyng was, or Kasler, or the captain’s wife.

II

FORGOTTEN KINGS

I
N MY HAND
is a blue square of paper, the blue of Gauloises, and slowly I unfold it once more. I feel the excitement still. The creases have acquired a memory, opening, they reveal the invitation:

Can you meet me for a drink Relais
Hotel Plaza Athénée Saturday
evening seven P.M.?

It is signed simply,
Shaw.

November, the darkness coming on early, or perhaps December, late in the fall and the year, 1961. The city, as I thought of it, was like a splendid photograph, every wide avenue, every street. I had never met a writer of distinction. My agent, who was Irwin Shaw’s agent also, had given him my name, and I was driving to Paris to meet him, coming in from the chill provinces by way of the thrilling diagonal that ran on the map from Chaumont, up through Troyes, to the very heart.

I had a large, elegant secondhand car, blue also, the shade of uniforms of the fleet, steering wheel on the wrong side, four speeds forward and four in reverse as well, small ignition key like
those to a safe-deposit box or clock. The engine purred, the boulevards blazed with light. I drank the very air, I was entering Paris.

Crossing a vast intersection crowded with traffic I suddenly jammed on the brakes and managed to stop in the act of barely kissing—there was no sensation attached—the gleaming rear fender of the car ahead, a brand-new, as it happened, Citroën. The owner kept on shouting in a French more rapid than any I had ever heard, cars were blowing their horns and inching around us, we were trying to find an invisible dent in the shining black finish. At length police arrived and finally dismissed the case. Half an hour had passed. I arrived at the Plaza Athénée sick with despair. It was nearer to 8 than 7. I had missed the appointment. The doorman—the car was frequently saluted by them in those days—allowed me to park in front, and empty-hearted I went into the Relais. The first thing I saw was a solidly built man standing at the bar in an open trench coat, a copy of
Le Monde
stuffed in one pocket. I recognized him instantly. “That’s all right,” he said as I stumbled through an apology, “what are you drinking?” It was quintessentially him.

Time with its broad thumb has blurred nothing. He was forty-eight that year and already late for a dinner he was going to on Avenue Foch. He gave me the address—come afterwards for coffee, he said. A few minutes later, paying the bill, he left. Thus I discovered that Paris. There were worlds above, I learned, but there are also worlds below. I found Avenue Foch—the name itself has only a faint resonance now, the century is ending and into its crypt all such things will vanish, marshals of France as well as unknown
poilus
—and I also found the île St.-Louis, rue de Grenelle, Place St.-Sulpice, and apartments and restaurants as well as other towns and regions, not always in France, because of him. He was my unknowing Virgil, brief in his descriptions, irrefutable, fond of drink. Years later I heard him give some advice: never be in awe of anyone. He was not in awe of Europe. He tossed his coat on her couch.

That first night was for me like the ball that Emma Bovary never forgot. There were fourteen in the dinner party including a young Peruvian actress in a black silk dress cut astonishingly low. An older man took her aside to say, “I don’t know who you came with but you’re not going home with him. That’s definite.” They were telling stories of theater, films, the maharajah of producers who refused to allow the woman he was escorting to use the ladies’ room in a fashionable hotel. He rented a suite instead. She went in, came out, and he paid the bill, fifty pounds.

“The new Trubetskoy,” someone observed.

We drove down the Champs. The air was filled with the bite of autumn, it was tingling. The sea, endless and black, was falling against the coasts. I had met screenwriters, owners of restaurants,
joueurs.