Catch-22 (25 page)

   The visitors entered uncertainly as though they felt they
were intruding, tiptoeing in with stares of meek apology, first the grieving
mother and father, then the brother, a glowering heavy-set sailor with a deep
chest. The man and woman stepped into the room stify side by side as though
right out of a familiar, though esoteric, anniversary daguerreotype on a wall.
They were both short, sere and proud. They seemed made of iron and old, dark
clothing. The woman had a long, brooding oval face of burnt umber, with coarse
graying black hair parted severely in the middle and combed back austerely
behind her neck without curl, wave or ornamentation. Her mouth was sullen and
sad, her lined lips compressed. The father stood very rigid and quaint in a
double-breasted suit with padded shoulders that were much too tight for him. He
was broad and muscular on a small scale and had a magnificently curled silver
mustache on his crinkled face. His eyes were creased and rheumy, and he
appeared tragically ill at ease as he stood awkwardly with the brim of his
black felt fedora held in his two brawny laborer’s hands out in front of his
wide lapels. Poverty and hard work had inflicted iniquitous damage on both. The
brother was looking for a fight. His round white cap was cocked at an insolent
tilt, his hands were clenched, and he glared at everything in the room with a
scowl of injured truculence.

   The three creaked forward timidly, holding themselves close
to each other in a stealthy, funereal group and inching forward almost in step,
until they arrived at the side of the bed and stood staring down at Yossarian.
There was a gruesome and excruciating silence that threatened to endure
forever. Finally Yossarian was unable to bear it any longer and cleared his
throat. The old man spoke at last.

   ‘He looks terrible,’ he said.

   ‘He’s sick, Pa.’

   ‘Giuseppe,’ said the mother, who had seated herself in a
chair with her veinous fingers clasped in her lap.

   ‘My name is Yossarian,’ Yossarian said.

   ‘His name is Yossarian, Ma. Yossarian, don’t you recognize
me? I’m your brother John. Don’t you know who I am?’

   ‘Sure I do. You’re my brother John.’

   ‘He does recognize me! Pa, he knows who I am. Yossarian,
here’s Papa. Say hello to Papa.’

   ‘Hello, Papa,’ said Yossarian.

   ‘Hello, Giuseppe.’

   ‘His name is Yossarian, Pa.’

   ‘I can’t get over how terrible he looks,’ the father said.

   ‘He’s very sick, Pa. The doctor says he’s going to die.’

   ‘I didn’t know whether to believe the doctor or not,’ the
father said. ‘You know how crooked those guys are.’

   ‘Giuseppe,’ the mother said again, in a soft, broken chord of
muted anguish.

   ‘His name is Yossarian, Ma. She don’t remember things too
good any more. How’re they treating you in here, kid? They treating you pretty
good?’

   ‘Pretty good,’ Yossarian told him.

   ‘That’s good. Just don’t let anybody in here push you around.
You’re just as good as anybody else in here even though you are Italian. You’ve
got rights, too.’ Yossarian winced and closed his eyes so that he would not
have to look at his brother John. He began to feel sick.

   ‘Now see how terrible he looks,’ the father observed.

   ‘Giuseppe,’ the mother said.

   ‘Ma, his name is Yossarian,’ the brother interrupted her
impatiently. ‘Can’t you remember?’

   ‘It’s all right,’ Yossarian interrupted him. ‘She can call me
Giuseppe if she wants to.’

   ‘Giuseppe,’ she said to him.

   ‘Don’t worry, Yossarian,’ the brother said. ‘Everything is
going to be all right.’

   ‘Don’t worry, Ma,’ Yossarian said. ‘Everything is going to be
all right.’

   ‘Did you have a priest?’ the brother wanted to know.

   ‘Yes,’ Yossarian lied, wincing again.

   ‘That’s good,’ the brother decided. ‘Just as long as you’re
getting everything you’ve got coming to you. We came all the way from New York.
We were afraid we wouldn’t get here in time.’

   ‘In time for what?’

   ‘In time to see you before you died.’

   ‘What difference would it make?’

   ‘We didn’t want you to die by yourself.’

   ‘What difference would it make?’

   ‘He must be getting delirious,’ the brother said. ‘He keeps
saying the same thing over and over again.’

   ‘That’s really very funny,’ the old man replied. ‘All the
time I thought his name was Giuseppe, and now I find out his name is Yossarian.
That’s really very funny.’

   ‘Ma, make him feel good,’ the brother urged. ‘Say something
to cheer him up.’

   ‘Giuseppe.’

   ‘It’s not Giuseppe, Ma. It’s Yossarian.’

   ‘What difference does it make?’ the mother answered in the
same mourning tone, without looking up. ‘He’s dying.’ Her tumid eyes filled
with tears and she began to cry, rocking back and forth slowly in her chair
with her hands lying in her lap like fallen moths. Yossarian was afraid she
would start wailing. The father and brother began crying also. Yossarian
remembered suddenly why they were all crying, and he began crying too. A doctor
Yossarian had never seen before stepped inside the room and told the visitors
courteously that they had to go. The father drew himself up formally to say
goodbye.

   ‘Giuseppe,’ he began.

   ‘Yossarian,’ corrected the son.

   ‘Yossarian,’ said the father.

   ‘Giuseppe,’ corrected Yossarian.

   ‘Soon you’re going to die.’ Yossarian began to cry again. The
doctor threw him a dirty look from the rear of the room, and Yossarian made
himself stop.

   The father continued solemnly with his head lowered. ‘When
you talk to the man upstairs,’ he said, ‘I want you to tell Him something for
me. Tell Him it ain’t right for people to die when they’re young. I mean it.
Tell Him if they got to die at all, they got to die when they’re old. I want
you to tell Him that. I don’t think He knows it ain’t right, because He’s
supposed to be good and it’s been going on for a long, long time. Okay?’

   ‘And don’t let anybody up there push you around,’ the brother
advised. ‘You’ll be just as good as anybody else in heaven, even though you are
Italian.’

   ‘Dress warm,’ said the mother, who seemed to know.

   Colonel Cathcart was a slick, successful,
slipshod, unhappy man of thirty-six who lumbered when he walked and wanted to
be a general. He was dashing and dejected, poised and chagrined. He was
complacent and insecure, daring in the administrative stratagems he employed to
bring himself to the attention of his superiors and craven in his concern that
his schemes might all backfire. He was handsome and unattractive, a
swashbuckling, beefy, conceited man who was putting on fat and was tormented
chronically by prolonged seizures of apprehension. Colonel Cathcart was
conceited because he was a full colonel with a combat command at the age of
only thirty-six; and Colonel Cathcart was dejected because although he was
already thirty-six he was still only a full colonel.

   Colonel Cathcart was impervious to absolutes. He could
measure his own progress only in relationship to others, and his idea of
excellence was to do something at least as well as all the men his own age who
were doing the same thing even better. The fact that there were thousands of
men his own age and older who had not even attained the rank of major enlivened
him with foppish delight in his own remarkable worth; on the other hand, the
fact that there were men of his own age and younger who were already generals
contaminated him with an agonizing sense of failure and made him gnaw at his
fingernails with an unappeasable anxiety that was even more intense than Hungry
Joe’s.

   Colonel Cathcart was a very large, pouting, broadshouldered
man with close-cropped curly dark hair that was graying at the tips and an
ornate cigarette holder that he purchased the day before he arrived in Pianosa
to take command of his group. He displayed the cigarette holder grandly on
every occasion and had learned to manipulate it adroitly. Unwittingly, he had
discovered deep within himself a fertile aptitude for smoking with a cigarette
holder. As far as he could tell, his was the only cigarette holder in the whole
Mediterranean theater of operations, and the thought was both flattering and
disquieting. He had no doubts at all that someone as debonair and intellectual
as General Peckem approved of his smoking with a cigarette holder, even though
the two were in each other’s presence rather seldom, which in a way was very lucky,
Colonel Cathcart recognized with relief, since General Peckem might not have
approved of his cigarette holder at all. When such misgivings assailed Colonel
Cathcart, he choked back a sob and wanted to throw the damned thing away, but
he was restrained by his unswerving conviction that the cigarette holder never
failed to embellish his masculine, martial physique with a high gloss of
sophisticated heroism that illuminated him to dazzling advantage among all the
other full colonels in the American Army with whom he was in competition.
Although how could he be sure?

   Colonel Cathcart was indefatigable that way, an industrious,
intense, dedicated military tactician who calculated day and night in the
service of himself. He was his own sarcophagus, a bold and infallible diplomat
who was always berating himself disgustedly for all the chances he had missed
and kicking himself regretfully for all the errors he had made. He was tense,
irritable, bitter and smug. He was a valorous opportunist who pounced hoggishly
upon every opportunity Colonel Korn discovered for him and trembled in damp
despair immediately afterward at the possible consequences he might suffer. He
collected rumors greedily and treasured gossip. He believed all the news he
heard and had faith in none. He was on the alert constantly for every signal,
shrewdly sensitive to relationships and situations that did not exist. He was
someone in the know who was always striving pathetically to find out what was
going on. He was a blustering, intrepid bully who brooded inconsolably over the
terrible ineradicable impressions he knew he kept making on people of
prominence who were scarcely aware that he was even alive.

   Everybody was persecuting him. Colonel Cathcart lived by his
wits in an unstable, arithmetical world of black eyes and feathers in his cap,
of overwhelming imaginary triumphs and catastrophic imaginary defeats. He
oscillated hourly between anguish and exhilaration, multiplying fantastically
the grandeur of his victories and exaggerating tragically the seriousness of
his defeats. Nobody ever caught him napping. If word reached him that General
Dreedle or General Peckem had been seen smiling, frowning, or doing neither, he
could not make himself rest until he had found an acceptable interpretation and
grumbled mulishly until Colonel Korn persuaded him to relax and take things
easy.

   Lieutenant Colonel Korn was a loyal, indispensable ally who
got on Colonel Cathcart’s nerves. Colonel Cathcart pledged eternal gratitude to
Colonel Korn for the ingenious moves he devised and was furious with him
afterward when he realized they might not work. Colonel Cathcart was greatly
indebted to Colonel Korn and did not like him at all. The two were very close.
Colonel Cathcart was jealous of Colonel Korn’s intelligence and had to remind
himself often that Colonel Korn was still only a lieutenant colonel, even
though he was almost ten years older than Colonel Cathcart, and that Colonel
Korn had obtained his education at a state university. Colonel Cathcart bewailed
the miserable fate that had given him for an invaluable assistant someone as
common as Colonel Korn. It was degrading to have to depend so thoroughly on a
person who had been educated at a state university. If someone did have to
become indispensable to him, Colonel Cathcart lamented, it could just as easily
have been someone wealthy and well groomed, someone from a better family who
was more mature than Colonel Korn and who did not treat Colonel Cathcart’s
desire to become a general as frivolously as Colonel Cathcart secretly
suspected Colonel Korn secretly did.

   Colonel Cathcart wanted to be a general so desperately he was
willing to try anything, even religion, and he summoned the chaplain to his
office late one morning the week after he had raised the number of missions to
sixty and pointed abruptly down toward his desk to his copy of The Saturday
Evening Post. The colonel wore his khaki shirt collar wide open, exposing a
shadow of tough black bristles of beard on his egg-white neck, and had a spongy
hanging underlip. He was a person who never tanned, and he kept out of the sun
as much as possible to avoid burning. The colonel was more than a head taller
than the chaplain and over twice as broad, and his swollen, overbearing
authority made the chaplain feel frail and sickly by contrast.

   ‘Take a look, Chaplain,’ Colonel Cathcart directed, screwing
a cigarette into his holder and seating himself affluently in the swivel chair
behind his desk. ‘Let me know what you think.’ The chaplain looked down at the
open magazine compliantly and saw an editorial spread dealing with an American
bomber group in England whose chaplain said prayers in the briefing room before
each mission. The chaplain almost wept with happiness when he realized the
colonel was not going to holler at him. The two had hardly spoken since the
tumultuous evening Colonel Cathcart had thrown him out of the officers’ club at
General Dreedle’s bidding after Chief White Halfoat had punched Colonel Moodus
in the nose. The chaplain’s initial fear had been that the colonel intended
reprimanding him for having gone back into the officers’ club without
permission the evening before. He had gone there with Yossarian and Dunbar
after the two had come unexpectedly to his tent in the clearing in the woods to
ask him to join them. Intimidated as he was by Colonel Cathcart, he
nevertheless found it easier to brave his displeasure than to decline the
thoughtful invitation of his two new friends, whom he had met on one of his
hospital visits just a few weeks before and who had worked so effectively to
insulate him against the myriad social vicissitudes involved in his official
duty to live on closest terms of familiarity with more than nine hundred
unfamiliar officers and enlisted men who thought him an odd duck.

   The chaplain glued his eyes to the pages of the magazine. He
studied each photograph twice and read the captions intently as he organized
his response to the colonel’s question into a grammatically complete sentence
that he rehearsed and reorganized in his mind a considerable number of times
before he was able finally to muster the courage to reply.

   ‘I think that saying prayers before each mission is a very
moral and highly laudatory procedure, sir,’ he offered timidly, and waited.

   ‘Yeah,’ said the colonel. ‘But I want to know if you think
they’ll work here.’

   ‘Yes, sir,’ answered the chaplain after a few moments. ‘I
should think they would.’

   ‘Then I’d like to give it a try.’ The colonel’s ponderous,
farinaceous cheeks were tinted suddenly with glowing patches of enthusiasm. He
rose to his feet and began walking around excitedly. ‘Look how much good
they’ve done for these people in England. Here’s a picture of a colonel in The
Saturday Evening Post whose chaplain conducts prayers before each mission. If
the prayers work for him, they should work for us. Maybe if we say prayers,
they’ll put my picture in The Saturday Evening Post.’ The colonel sat down
again and smiled distantly in lavish contemplation. The chaplain had no hint of
what he was expected to say next. With a pensive expression on his oblong,
rather pale face, he allowed his gaze to settle on several of the high bushels
filled with red plum tomatoes that stood in rows against each of the walls. He
pretended to concentrate on a reply. After a while he realized that he was
staring at rows and rows of bushels of red plum tomatoes and grew so intrigued
by the question of what bushels brimming with red plum tomatoes were doing in a
group commander’s office that he forgot completely about the discussion of
prayer meetings until Colonel Cathcart, in a genial digression, inquired:
‘Would you like to buy some, Chaplain? They come right off the farm Colonel
Korn and I have up in the hills. I can let you have a bushel wholesale.’

   ‘Oh, no, sir. I don’t think so.’

   ‘That’s quite all right,’ the colonel assured him liberally.
‘You don’t have to. Milo is glad to snap up all we can produce. These were
picked only yesterday. Notice how firm and ripe they are, like a young girl’s
breasts.’ The chaplain blushed, and the colonel understood at once that he had
made a mistake. He lowered his head in shame, his cumbersome face burning. His
fingers felt gross and unwieldy. He hated the chaplain venomously for being a
chaplain and making a coarse blunder out of an observation that in any other
circumstances, he knew, would have been considered witty and urbane. He tried
miserably to recall some means of extricating them both from their devastating
embarrassment. He recalled instead that the chaplain was only a captain, and he
straightened at once with a shocked and outraged gasp. His cheeks grew tight
with fury at the thought that he had just been duped into humiliation by a man
who was almost the same age as he was and still only a captain, and he swung upon
the chaplain avengingly with a look of such murderous antagonism that the
chaplain began to tremble. The colonel punished him sadistically with a long,
glowering, malignant, hateful, silent stare.

   ‘We were speaking about something else,’ he reminded the
chaplain cuttingly at last. ‘We were not speaking about the firm, ripe breasts
of beautiful young girls but about something else entirely. We were speaking
about conducting religious services in the briefing room before each mission.
Is there any reason why we can’t?’

   ‘No, sir,’ the chaplain mumbled.

   ‘Then we’ll begin with this afternoon’s mission.’ The
colonel’s hostility softened gradually as he applied himself to details. ‘Now,
I want you to give a lot of thought to the kind of prayers we’re going to say.
I don’t want anything heavy or sad. I’d like you to keep it light and snappy,
something that will send the boys out feeling pretty good. Do you know what I
mean? I don’t want any of this Kingdom of God or Valley of Death stuff. That’s
all too negative. What are you making such a sour face for?’

   ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the chaplain stammered. ‘I happened to be
thinking of the Twenty-third Psalm just as you said that.’

   ‘How does that one go?’

   ‘That’s the one you were just referring to, sir. “The
Lord is my shepherd; I —” ‘

   ‘That’s the one I was just referring to. It’s out. What else
have you got?’

   ‘ “Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto
&mash;” ‘

   ‘No waters,’ the colonel decided, blowing ruggedly into his
cigarette holder after flipping the butt down into his combed-brass ash tray.
‘Why don’t we try something musical? How about the harps on the willows?’

   ‘That has the rivers of Babylon in it, sir,’ the chaplain
replied. ‘ “…there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered
Zion.” ‘

   ‘ Zion? Let’s forget about that one right now. I’d like to
know how that one even got in there. Haven’t you got anything humorous that
stays away from waters and valleys and God? I’d like to keep away from the
subject of religion altogether if we can.’ The chaplain was apologetic. ‘I’m
sorry, sir, but just about all the prayers I know are rather somber in tone and
make at least some passing reference to God.’

   ‘Then let’s get some new ones. The men are already doing
enough bitching about the missions I send them on without our rubbing it in
with any sermons about God or death or Paradise. Why can’t we take a more
positive approach? Why can’t we all pray for something good, like a tighter
bomb pattern, for example? Couldn’t we pray for a tighter bomb pattern?’

   ‘Well, yes, sir, I suppose so,’ the chaplain answered
hesitantly. ‘You wouldn’t even need me if that’s all you wanted to do. You
could do that yourself.’