False Gods (23 page)

So long as I was too young to accompany my brothers on their expeditions, she did not have to fight to keep her "baby" at her side, and I suppose I must have imbibed by a kind of osmosis many of her fears. The two things of which I was most certain by the time I was eight years old were that the world was full of terrifying things and that terror must never be shown. Bees stung; spiders bit (or if not, their horrid crawling on your skin was just as bad); wolves and even raccoons (if rabid) could tear you to pieces; moose might smash your skull with their front hoofs; snapping turtles and who knew what else lurked beneath the deceptively still surface of ponds and lakes. Nor were inanimate things less baneful. Rocks could coalesce into fatal landslides; precipitous mountain slopes could coax you into a fall; and quicksand could swallow you up. Yet from the beginning I had the conviction that these fears were my own personal humiliation and doom. They certainly never visited my father and brothers, and Mother didn't count, being a woman and enviably immune to the jeers and scorn rightly meted out (I always thought it was rightly!) to that unforgivable creature, a coward. I was like a lost soul in a Calvinist world, damned before birth for no fault of my own, but nonetheless contemptible to the suspicious company of the elect.

But there was still a hope. There were early puritans who had clung to the desperate theory that if they could train themselves to
look
elected, they might fool even God into supposing they were. Like one of these, even before my twelfth year I was seeking out those occasions when I might appear brave, or at least normally undaunted, to the male members of my family. I insisted now on accompanying my brothers on their hikes and adventures, tearing myself away, with the brutality of desperation, from my pathetically protesting mother. At first they were reluctant to take me, saying that I would lag behind and be a nuisance, but Father, emerging for once from his personal reveries, told them brusquely that I was to be included, and after much grumbling, but seeing that I really tried to keep up with them, they became good-natured enough.

And I was successful. Or did I have the devil's own luck? When on a camping trip, sitting around the fire at night, I asked what the small illuminated discs in the woods around us were and was told they were wolves, I took for granted that my brothers, as they often did, were trying to frighten me and continued imperturbably to toast marshmallows. Actually they were wolves, whose not uncommon practice it was to wait until the campers retired and then sniff around the extinguished fire for any remnants of food. But I received the approval of my slyly watching companions, though had I known the truth I might have had a convulsion. And another time, when we were climbing a steep hill, the wind carried off the favorite cap of my oldest brother and it landed on a ledge below so narrow that only I was of a size to be able to clamber out to retrieve it. What the others could not see from their distance but was perfectly clear to me when I approached it was that the ledge was actually wide enough to be negotiated without risk. And I was the hero of the hour.

At Saint Ambrose's, the Episcopal Church boarding school near Boston to which all Dowses were sent, I found my form-mates, with one exception, even easier to take in than my brothers. I was a good-looking boy, if I say so myself, and I have often been told that I have a pleasant and amicable manner, so making friends was never a problem. But boys can be horribly mean, and they like to test one another, and when I found myself the target of a nasty little clique, and it was obviously necessary for me to challenge one of them to a fistfight in the accepted arena of the schoolhouse cellar, I picked one bigger than myself, but who, after careful observation, I had concluded was a bully and a coward. I had learned by then, you see, that I was not the only member of the unelected. In our combat I rushed at him with desperation and gave him so smart a blow on the nose that he bled alarmingly and quit the struggle. He was known for months thereafter as Attila, who, as no doubt you're aware, died of a nose bleed. This established my martial respectability, but I was always very careful to avoid any offense, or even the appearance of one, that might have led to another encounter.

For I never lost mind of the slender grounds on which my immunity rested. The school placed great emphasis on manliness, not only in sports but in all aspects of life, and it began to seem to me that even the least eventful career offered so many tests that I was bound to be found out in the end. Much was made of the sacrifice of the young graduates who had lost their lives in the First World War, and on Armistice Day we turned in chapel to face the great west window dedicated to their memory and sang heartily the school hymn, to which a special stanza reciting their heroism had been appended. My father had served in the trenches, but he had always refused to discuss his experiences, stating in his usual terse fashion that there was no need to put in our minds the terrible pictures of which he wished his own were free. That, of course, made it worse for me. I had nightmares about those slimy dugouts, with rats below and death above and the hideous possibility of becoming a living torso without limbs or being left with a face that was no face. War would be the ultimate test. There had been one for Father, and I had little doubt there would be one for me. How right I was!

I was never tempted to confide my anxieties to a friend. It never occurred to me that there could be anyone who would not have deemed them shameful. But there was one boy at school whom I suspected of suspecting me. It was Andy Ritter, the same who turned away from me at the bar before lunch. Andy was the predator for whom I was the natural prey. Like the lion who seems actually angry at the poor zebra he is mauling, he was always hostile, and my efforts to disarm him, of which I'm ashamed to admit there were several, only made him worse.

"I don't make friends with fairies," he once snarled at me.

Now why did he call me that? I had had no such relations with other boys at school, nor had I even wanted to. I could only assume that Andy was using the term simply in the sense of an effeminate man, and weren't such men notoriously supposed to be cowardly? So Andy
knew.
It justified my gloomy suspicion that I might be able to fool some of the people some of the time, but never "God," whoever or whatever He was, some bearded Jehovah perhaps. For had He not sent a militant angel in the form of Ritter to notify me that my game of
looking
like one of the elect had not taken
Him
in? No, not for an instant.

Andy's attitude, anyway, brings me to the subject of girls, in which I was always very much interested. I admired girls, as did most boys, and I was attracted to them, as were most, but, decidedly unlike the majority of my sex, I also envied them. Girls did not have to be brave. Indeed, the very opposite was true. If they screamed at the sight of a mouse, or recoiled in horror before a garter snake, it was considered actually appealing. I think in some perverted fashion I may have thought that the closer I got to a girl, even to the ultimate closeness, and the more I made her mine, or myself hers, the nearer I came to achieving her blessed immunity.

I tended at holiday dances to cut in on the less attractive girls. It might have been an inner obedience to the saying that only the brave deserve the fair. But I suspect it was more the fact that the males of most species prove their prowess by fighting over females. I remember a diorama at a natural history museum which showed two magnificent bull moose locked in a perhaps fatal combat while the desired cow stood indifferently by, chewing her cud. It was true that the cow was ugly, but male animals are indifferent to age or looks in the weaker sex. Not so man. What the bull seeks is a harem; what the man looks for is beauty. And as I avoided combat, I also avoided its occasions.

Of course, the animals are quite right. Beauty has nothing to do with sexiness in a woman. I met Amanda at a debutante party in the spring vacation of freshman year; we became secretly engaged the next year, and you will recall that we were married immediately after graduation. Amanda was a plain little Jenny Wren, but she was bright and animated, and she became actually pretty with the self-assurance that possession of a steady beau gave her. She had never expected to appeal to a man as attractive as me. Am I sounding vain? But you must admit I was kind of cute back then. You understand that I use the term
cute
to avoid the hubris of claiming I was a man, that is, a warrior. Oh, it's all too clear! But Amanda, God help her, loved me, and I reveled in her love. We were happy, and we might still have been, had we not taken that fatal cruise to celebrate our fifteenth wedding anniversary.

The war came right after the birth of our first daughter. Of course, I had always known it was coming. In the endless discussions with friends of which branch of which service one should apply for, to demonstrate one's proper patriotism or at least to escape the ignominy of the draft, I had considered army or navy intelligence, but had rejected the idea because, I think, I was more afraid of the stigma of noncombat duty than combat itself. Indeed, for the first time I began actually to ponder the possible truth of President Roosevelt's "nothing to fear but fear itself." Was it even conceivable that the war might offer me a deliverance from the apprehensions of a lifetime?

At last I applied for the commission of ensign (deck volunteer general) and became a "ninety-day wonder" after training for that period of time aboard the U.S.S.
Prairie State,
moored in the Hudson on the upper west bank of Manhattan.

And then my fate took a curious turn. Instead of being sent to sea, I was assigned to Vice Admiral Clarke's staff at 90 Church Street, where I found myself a kind of personal secretary to the old man, running errands, writing letters, accompanying him on social occasions and even handling some of the delicate problems of his rather difficult children. It was no fault of mine that he became so dependent on me that he opposed my transfer to more active duty, and Amanda, delighted to have me home, argued strongly that it was a quite sufficient contribution to the war effort to guard from distracting botherations the high officer who was responsible for the safety of our whole eastern sea frontier. But as I had always concentrated on looking the part of a man of courage, it now surely behooved me not to look the part of his opposite, and I suspected that few of my friends appreciated the stranglehold that my chief had on my naval career and deemed me the willing and complaisant captive of his personal needs. And so I found myself in the position of having actually to throw away the shield that a kind fate seemed to be interposing between me and my old nemesis!

The call for more officers on sea duty was now so urgent that Admiral Clarke was obliged to endorse my application for assignment to the amphibious fleet. I had decided that I might do better on a ship such as an LST, where one had only, so to speak, to follow the leader in a line of transports, than on an attacking destroyer, where any moment of panic might paralyze the brain and endanger the vessel. What I had not counted on was the favoritism of my admiral, who followed my career from his desk in Church Street (as a naval officer he could not really resent my desertion) and was instrumental in my being made captain of a landing ship tanks.

Well, it started off well enough. I had nine officers and a hundred men under me, and being reasonable in my expectations of them and polite and friendly in my dealings, I soon found myself popular. We crossed the Atlantic to take part in the invasion of Normandy and had the good luck to unload our troops on one of the less guarded sectors of the beaches. After returning to the Solent three days later and dropping the hook exactly in our assigned position, I wondered whether the murky god of my adolescence had not been appeased at last.

Alas, he was only waiting for a more opportune moment. Some weeks later, ordered to London to take on Canadian troops, we passed at night through the Straits of Dover within range for some hours of the German shore batteries. They opened up on the convoy, and despite the British jamming of their radar, they managed to hit the merchant vessel directly ahead of us.

Now I learned what hell is. My crew, of course, were at their battle stations, and I at mine on the bridge with the officer of the deck, the executive officer, the chief quartermaster and a signalman. The night was black but lit with the flare of gunfire and the blazing wreck of the merchant ship, which we now had to pass and leave astern. I was suddenly absolutely convinced that we were going to be struck. The shell would land directly on the bridge itself. There was no doubt in my mind; it was the simplest and grimmest of facts. I opened my mouth to suggest some kind of evasive maneuver to the exec, whose figure I could just make out in the darkness, but no sound emerged. And then I knew that the horror choking me was simply unbearable. Anything, even death was preferable.

Suddenly I was walking aft. I was leaving the bridge. Leaving my battle station without even transferring the "conn" to the exec! I think I meant to jump off the ship. At least I can recall leaning over the side on the stern, vaguely aware of the staring white faces of the gun crew of the three-inch fifty close beside me, and peering into the hissing foam of our wake. Did I hope to be picked up by a lifeboat of survivors from the wreck astern? Was I deterred by the apprehension of being sucked into our screws and cut to bits? I am not sure.

All I know is that I remained there, a miserable shivering wretch, until the firing ceased and I returned to the bridge. I mumbled something about an attack of the "trots." Nobody said anything.

So there it was. Nemesis. The final blow had fallen at last. Yet in the next days nothing happened. I was treated in the wardroom with the same good manners, and I began to wonder whether it was my imagination that these now veiled an unspoken scorn. I knew that the episode must have been discussed by every man on that vessel. But only in the eyes of the exec, a strange saturnine fellow in whom I fancied I could detect a resemblance to Andy Ritter, did I really believe I could make out a glimmer of contempt, and I suspected him of having felt that for me all along.