Lillian and Dash (31 page)
“The men like to think they can laugh at their officers, sir. It’s really a form of equality that denotes respect, sir.”
“Bullshit, Hammett. If it doesn’t stop immediately, I’ll ship your sorry old ass the hell out of here.”
“Understood, sir. Anything else, sir?”
“Otherwise, good paper. Dismissed.”
Older man and younger man exchanged salutes.
L
ILLIAN AT
H
ARDSCRABBLE
was healthy and strong, very strong.
For her the last moments of wakefulness in her large bed at night were the sweetest of her long day; she was conscious
of how vital she was, intellectually and physically. Farmwork pleased her enormously. She loved feeling the tautness of her stomach muscles, the strength in her thighs, the muscularity of her arms and back. She wrote Hammett, “My ass muscles would make Rodin drool.”
Lillian thought of Hammett in a somewhat new fashion. Her attraction had always, from the very beginning, been based on admiration. They always differed over how deserved it was. Now, really for the first time, envy was present. Even when they had been separated in the past, she knew part of him belonged to her. She no longer felt that way. The world of men he inhabited now gave her the sense that Hammett no longer needed her. His letters were mostly about that masculine world, and, yes, they did evoke her jealousy.
James Roosevelt’s office called again from Washington with a request that she heard as an opportunity. No, not another propaganda film. This time something much more active, participatory, perhaps even somewhat dangerous. The tide of the war on the Russian front had turned dramatically after Stalingrad and the Red Army was now sweeping westward through Poland and toward Germany. Did Lillian wish to accompany that army and write about its advance? The Russians had actually requested her presence and participation.
Lillian wanted very much to see the war. At least that envy of Hammett would be dealt with. And she wanted to see the war won. Wasn’t this, after all, the reversal of the
misfortunes she had witnessed in Spain years before, the just conclusion she had hoped for then?
The trip to Moscow tested her physically and emotionally. Thirty-six hours in a variety of transport planes with stops in Anchorage—Hammett could not have been too far away—and Irkutsk, Ulan-Ude, Novgorod—she’d heard of that city, at least—and stopovers in places that had no names.
After three days in Moscow being wined and dined and fussed over, and after seeing a lifeless performance of
The Little Foxes
that offered more Chekhovian ennui than Hellman rage, and another good evening talking about film with Sergei Eisenstein, Lillian was more anxious than ever to see the war. And especially to see it being won.
A small military transport finally took her and a young captain who spoke passable English to Warsaw and then on a second hop to within a hundred miles of Prague, from where Lillian and her interpreter joined a truck supply route to the Second Armored Division, which had fought at Stalingrad and was now pushing inexorably toward Germany itself. She was perhaps a day or two from the siege of Prague. She wrote in her notebook:
Fighting and war are two very different matters. I have seen war, and war is destruction, destruction of lives, of what has been carefully built, of plans, of the very spirit that underlies all these things, the
spark that allows what is human in us to ignite in the first place. War is the snuffing of that flame. War is civilization’s funeral. War is the face of a very beautiful dead woman in Madrid.
Fighting is a different creature entirely. It is energy and force of will. It is vengeance and sinew brought to fever pitch. It thrives and flames in its own time, self-contained, unmindful, and, of course, unaware of what future fighting it will bring. It feeds on itself. And while it lives it is more alive than anything else men do. More alive than laughter, more alive, if you can believe it, than the exhilaration and expectation of sex.
Kurin not only kills von Harden … a part of him enjoys doing it. To my shame, I anticipate sharing his enjoyment.
Lillian joined the Second Armored Division on the eastern shore of the Vltava as it bombarded the Germans and Czech fascists who defended the city with heavy cannon fire and multiple rocket launchers continually. Lillian wadded cotton in her ears and pulled her beret down over them. Russian planes bombed and strafed the city during daylight hours.
German artillery returned fire from the heights across the river. Their firepower remained substantial no matter how much damage the Russians believed they had caused. Much
of the old city would have to be destroyed before any attempt could be made to cross the river. It puzzled Lillian: The situation was hopeless. Why won’t the bastards surrender?
She wrote:
The Russians have set up headquarters in an old Customs House on the eastern quay of the Vltava. From here I see the great Gothic city above us to the west on the other side of the rushing river, almost invulnerable to direct attack since none of her many bridges remained intact. There is no telling how long the bombardment from artillery and air attack must continue. Pieces of Prague crumble daily before my very eyes.
Our command post has been hit repeatedly by German artillery. Still, we are safe in its basement. Most days I watch the effect of the artillery assault on the old city. I had been in Prague briefly years ago during my honeymoon and remember standing on the rampart of Praha Castle at night and looking down over the glittering town, the black Vltava reflecting the stars. Now I look through field glasses and see those same ramparts, still intact because it, the great cathedral, and the monastery beyond have been spared until this point. I spend hours scanning the city; it is impossible for me to turn away from any civilian activity—the attempt to clear debris, a
delivery of food, a family moving to a safer place—all that I can see through my glasses.
Here is what I saw not more than one hour ago. From just below the piling of the Charles Bridge my eye caught a fleck of white and then another. Slowly, from behind the stone wall of the boathouse three figures emerged, a woman, a man, a child. The child, a girl, was waving a white scarf. The woman waved a white hat. The man, short and wide, carried what appeared to be a wooden platform. When he placed it at water’s edge, it was clear he had been carrying a small raft.
This was most likely a family, and they were trying to escape the bombardment by crossing the river and joining the Russians. The three lay flat on the raft, parents atop the child; they drifted out into the river. The father had a short paddle. The mother never stopped waving her daughter’s white scarf.
The raft was about a quarter of the way across the Vltava when shots at them from the other side of the river began to pelt the waters around them. When the father was hit, his knees came up suddenly and then he slipped into the river, his wife and daughter held him briefly before he tumbled off the raft. The raft tipped over, plunging the woman and child into the water. The mother clung to the raft while the current started to pull the girl away. She reached for her child
too late and after a terrible moment began swimming after her daughter.
She and then the daughter were overwhelmed by the current at midriver. I saw the white hat and the white scarf touch, entangle, and get carried downstream.
Shock, Aftershock
Z
ENIA HEARD FIRST
and simply went to pieces. When I got to the kitchen, she was on her knees sobbing, “No, oh no, oh no.” Her son was standing soldier-straight against the wall. He looked frightened. Zenia said, “He’s dead. The president. He’s dead.” I went to my knees and we held each other, sobbing, both sobbing.
She had heard the news on the radio. Now we sat with coffee and listened while more complete information came. It was late afternoon, a Thursday. Cerebral hemorrhage. He complained of a terrible headache, terrible, slumped over unconscious. It all happened so fast.
The sun was low.
I noticed that Gilbert did not understand our extreme grief, so I explained to him that his mother and I loved President Roosevelt very much and that we were taken by surprise that he had died. Gilbert wanted to know how old he was. “Sixty-four, sixty-five,” I thought.
“Ain’t that plenty old enough to die, Mama?”
Zenia looked at me to respond. “You miss someone however old he is, Gilbert. And the president is a very important someone to us. The war, we need him to win the war.”
“Are we going to lose the war now?”
“No, Gilbert, we’re going to win the war, but he won’t be there to see it, and that’s really sad.”
Max didn’t allow me to cry as a child. I learned to cry after I met Hammett, but I pretty much got over that. The war, its destruction, its victims, rarely brought me to tears. But I was weeping now. The cello voice I loved silenced. I don’t know why, but I asked Zenia if I could hold Gilbert. He looked over at her to see if he ought to step into my arms. Zenia said, “Go on.”
The boy’s hair roughed my cheek. My tears flowed onto him. His strong body was wire-stiff. He smelled like a newborn. I said, “You always have to remember this day, Gilbert. Always. It is the day a very great man died.” It was a speech out of a scene I’d never write.
When the phone rang I didn’t answer. It couldn’t have been Hammett. Seven time zones away, he may not even have gotten the news. Goddamned war.
We listened to the radio in the kitchen all evening. We cooked a little. Ate some egg sandwiches. Excerpts from many of his recent speeches filled the kitchen. How clear they were. How strong. How smart. How comforting. Even now. It was exactly the voice I heard when he telephoned
me about the
North Star
project. That voice was presidential but sweeter, more charming. He wanted something from me that day.
The radio told of preliminary plans being made for the funeral. FDR’s casket would be transported slowly northward by train along the eastern shore. Mourners could pay respects as the funeral train made its way toward Washington. It would slow for the mourners. After resting in state at the capitol, the president would be carried home to Hyde Park, New York, which is only about half an hour away from here. I’ll drive over in a month or so.
It bothered me again that Hammett wouldn’t allow himself to see his greatness. Our fight, the worst we’d ever had, wasn’t about drinking or lying or fucking around, it was about FDR, about what he meant. It was hard to trust Hammett’s judgment about anything political after that.
After Zenia saw Gilbert to sleep, we sat and listened to the radio. Zenia, who didn’t drink, had a glass of sherry with me. When she started to cry, I started to cry again. She said she was crying because
her people lost a friend
. Then she said she was crying for Mrs. Roosevelt.
That’s when I thought of James and wondered how I would get in touch to offer my condolences.
The radio voice told us in glowing terms about the new president. Praise was heaped upon this little-known and little-accomplished man. The radio text dutifully reminded us how remarkable our democracy was, since a new president
had already replaced the old and this process had taken place swiftly and peacefully. “We can thank our lucky stars—or rather our wise and benevolent Founding Fathers—that we are the world’s leading constitutional democracy, a nation of laws and not of men, whereas in many other parts of the world …”
Why do they have to spoil things with crap like that?
I
KNEW SOMETHING WAS
up when Colonel Avery made
The Adakian
a biweekly and put us all on an active training schedule. Full-time training
and
the paper made our once sweet lives a hell on Kiska. That was about three months ago.
If that didn’t make it abundantly clear that an attack on the Jap mainland was imminent, the nature of our new training assured it. Have you ever scrambled over the side of a troop ship at three in the morning, climbed down a rope ladder that tore your hands apart, crammed yourself into an LST in open sea with a hundred other guys? And doing it all under full field pack? Twice a day? Every day? Toughest thing I ever did. Even when I was young. Still, I managed to keep up. ’Nuff said.
