Prudence (7 page)

“I’m so sorry. I can’t believe it. I’m so sorry,” he mumbled.

Felix looked at the girl and at Frankie and Billy in turn but said nothing. And then he turned and disappeared back into the woods to fetch the body.

It wasn’t until they had the girl cleaned and washed and, thanks to an injection Jonathan had given her, asleep in the maid’s bedroom downstairs off the kitchen, that Felix and Billy returned with the other girl. Frankie waited around outside the door, pacing to the kitchen and back. He knocked but Emma wouldn’t let him in as she tended to the first girl.

No one got to see the other girl when Felix carried her back because Felix had taken off his long-sleeved shirt and wrapped it around her head, either to keep the world from looking at her or the dead girl from looking at them. He carried her directly to the icehouse, where he covered her in a sheet, and there she lay until the sheriff had time to come out and look at her. By then they had found the German and that discovery eclipsed everything else. He questioned them and then left. An accident. Afterward Felix had buried her behind the
Pines.

THE WAR
1943–
1945

SAN ANGELO, TEXAS—APRIL 1943

F
rankie and another cadet were crammed into the seats behind the bomb bay of a Beechcraft AT-11 Kansan. A third student, the one honing his skills as a bombardier, was stuffed up in the nose of the Beechcraft under the feet of the pilot and the instructor. Frankie was in charge of the camera: he was to record their hits on the pyramidal shacks scattered over the flat, featureless Chihuahuan desert. It was April 1943 and bombs, real bombs, were falling all over the world—Tunisia, Sicily, the Ruhr. The USAAF had stepped up its campaign in Tunisia and Sicily. The RAF had developed a new bomb the papers were calling a “blockbuster,” but the RAF and the USAAF referred to as a “cookie.” A 4,000-pound bomb capable of leveling a whole city block.

Frankie longed to be in North Africa. He had been in the USAAF for seven months but he was still a cadet. He and his fellow cadets were halfway through their twelve-week bombardier program, though that could change at any moment, as had everything else in the Air Force. The joke was that the Air Force wasn’t as good at getting planes in the air as it was at changing course, heading, altitude, and target. Instead of dropping real bombs, they dropped casings full of sand and black powder, never more than 500-pounders, to simulate bomb strikes. What would it feel like to drop a 4,000-pound bomb? What would it be like to feel the plane lift after the payload
left the bomb bay and some seconds later the explosion reached you, two miles up in the sky? That would be real, while this—all this—was just training, just another bit of routine pasted over the raw wood of experience, like a yearly coat of enamel on an already overpainted door.

All the same, Frankie was enjoying himself. As he looked down over the desert, he felt he was looking with eyes very different from the ones that wouldn’t look Billy, Felix, or Jonathan in the eye when he left the Pines in August of ’42. Today they had live bombs on board for a change. The advantage of training with live bombs was that they weighed almost the same as the bombs they would use in combat. Not that they had so much as seen a B-24 or a B-17 or any heavy aircraft they would use in the war. Instead, they flew the Texan for gunnery practice and the Beechcraft for bombing practice. Still, it was good to be in the sky.

The camera was pointed out of a five-inch hole cut in the fuselage of the Beechcraft. They had to record their hits if they were to pass. Frankie would rather be in the nose, accessed by a hatch a single step down from the cockpit, and so narrow that the pilot had to close the hatch after the bombardier crawled in and stamp on it a few times to get it to latch. Most of the other cadets hated getting in the nose, but Frankie had discovered that he liked being a bombardier. He liked the tight space up in the nose, the cluster of instruments and the mysteries of the Norden bombsight itself, clamped to the floor. He liked watching the asphalt runway speed under the wheels of the plane and the moment when the wheels left the ground, the soft cushion of air on which the plane rode up, up, up until the harsh geometry of the desert filled his view. There was the sight and there was the target and all the calculations he had to go through to make sure his load dropped where it belonged. He had to know his instruments and how they worked, and he had to remember his physics and
math (angle, altitude, airspeed, ground speed, wind speed, and direction, the weight of the aircraft and the weight of the payload). When they commenced the bombing run, and control transferred from the pilot to the bombardier, he was blissfully, fully, completely in charge. His heart lifted. Everything that bothered him—everything that had happened before—fell away below him.

On the next run it would be his turn to remove the cotter pins from the bombs and make sure they were racked properly and pull the lever at the bombardier’s command. After that he would be back in the nose. And someday, who knew when (this was the Air Force, after all), he would be matched to a crew. He bent over the camera and waited patiently for the bombing run to begin.

Like the others, he’d imagined being a pilot, not a bombardier. He had finished cadet training at Princeton and qualified as a pilot. But on his second day at Maxwell, his cohort was marshaled on the parade ground and told they were going to be bombardiers and that theirs was a special job not many men could perform. Releasing bombs didn’t seem special to Frankie then. It felt, rather, like a consolation. The job of a mechanic. That evening during mess, he approached his instructor, a lieutenant with a luxurious mustache, and told him that he had taken flying lessons and would be best used as a pilot. The lieutenant listened to Frankie carefully, stroking his mustache.

“I see,” he said. “So you’ve taken flying lessons.”

“Yes, sir,” said Frankie.

“This was in New Jersey. While you were in college?”

“Yes, sir. That’s correct, sir,” said Frankie stiffly.

“And I am to understand that you were certified as a pilot?”

“Yes, sir,” said Frankie. He tried his best not to smile.

“Hmmm,” said his instructor. “So there’s been a mistake somewhere. Right?”

“I think so, sir.”

“Well, there must be. You’re in the Air Force, and the Air Force is in the business of putting planes in the air. And here we have a qualified pilot.”

“Single- and double-engine, sir.”

“Oh? That changes everything. Or it should, correct? You are a pilot certified to fly single- or double-engine planes.”

“Yes, sir.”

The other cadets had gathered around.

“Except, Lieutenant Washburn, the Air Force doesn’t make mistakes.”

“It might have.”

“So, you’re saying the Air Force, commanded by Commander in Chief Franklin Delano Roosevelt, doesn’t know what it’s doing? You’re saying the president of the United States has got it all wrong?”

“No, sir—”

“Maybe you should replace him.”

“Excuse me, sir?” Frankie’s palms were beginning to sweat and his collar rubbed against his neck as he swallowed.

“It seems that the president made a mistake when he put you in bombardier training. Not that you’re a bombardier yet. No, you are a cadet. Cadets don’t fly planes. Cadets don’t navigate planes. Cadets don’t drop bombs. Cadets don’t shoot down enemy fighters. They don’t do any of this. Do they?”

“I don’t know, sir. I don’t think so, sir.”

“Maybe you could tell me what they do, son.”

“What who do, sir?”

“Cadets. What’s the job of a cadet?” The officer turned in a circle. “Everyone, listen up! Everyone, listen! Cadet Washburn is going to tell us all what the job of an aviation cadet is.”

“I don’t know if I can do it, sir. I don’t know if I can say, sir.”

“You can fly a plane. You should fly a plane. The president of the
United States evidently wants you to fly a plane. But you can’t answer a simple question of mine? You want to fly planes over enemy territory and bring death to the enemy but you can’t answer a question, man to man?”

Frankie knew he was being humiliated. He knew he was being maneuvered by the officer into a situation in which there was no good answer, in which there wasn’t an answer at all. And he knew that the point wasn’t to obtain one but rather to secure his public humiliation. Not that the humiliation served any purpose. It was humiliation for the sake of humiliation, for the pleasure of it. For the pleasure the officer found in it. Frankie knew this. It made the humiliation even worse. When Frankie didn’t answer, the officer turned to the rest of the dining hall and spoke loudly over the din.

“You all are here to learn to be bombardiers. Why? Because the Air Force needs bombardiers. Why does the Air Force need bombardiers? Because getting our bombs on target, bringing death to the enemy, is our most important job. It is our sacred duty to kill the enemy with bombs. And it is one of our most dangerous jobs. Bombardiers die. You are here because too many bombardiers have died fighting the enemy, and we need more of you to do the same. There have been no mistakes. There are no other reasons. You are here because we need you here. And a cadet’s job is to do whatever we ask you to do and to do it to the best of your ability. With any luck you won’t wash out. You’ll become bombardiers, and you will have a chance to drop our bombs on the enemy. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir!” said the cadets, Frankie’s voice among theirs.

The officer was the first in a series of professional psychopaths who made up the officer corps at Maxwell. There seemed to be some kind of secret brotherhood of jerks among the instructors and the upperclassmen, who in their own way fed the machine of stupidity. The upperclassmen took turns grinding them down. Frankie and the other cadets slept six to a room, with one desk and one chair. When
an upperclassman entered the room the cadets had to jump to their feet and scream, “Attention!” Some of the upperclassmen liked to enter the room, leave, come back on the pretense of having forgotten something, leave again, come back for another item, until the freshman cadets were exhausted and hoarse from jumping to their feet and shouting. At the mess hall the cadets sat six to a table with an upperclassman seated at the head to make sure they ate correctly, which meant sitting up straight on the leading third of the chair seat, taking a forkful of food, and bringing it straight up before altering its course ninety degrees and parallel to the ground to meet their mouths. There were all sorts of petty disciplines. But Frankie quickly learned he didn’t mind. He didn’t mind the routine. Or the humiliation. He didn’t mind the inanity of it all. The other cadets grumbled to themselves when they were sure they weren’t being overheard—when the six of them were crammed into the shower room (six men, one shower, five minutes) or before inspection or when they fell out after marching practice. How the Air Force was in love with parades! It was all inane, stupid, and empty, and the cadets knew that they were being kept busy marching and parading and cleaning and rushing from one activity to the next because the Air Force had no idea what to do with them and was trying to stay one step ahead, training them on the fly, as it were. Much to Frankie’s surprise, the mindlessness was fine with him.

There had been just as much inanity at Princeton, if not more. Though while the stupidity of the Air Force didn’t bother him, the stupidity of the Ivy League had settled into a dull ache just behind his eyes shortly after his arrival at Princeton. It settled down and stayed there for four long years until he graduated. Oh, God, how he had hated Princeton. How glad he was to be free of it. Free of the senselessness of the place; free of the forced hilarity, bordering on hysteria, of the eating clubs. He had been encouraged to bicker Ivy (Jonathan had been in Ivy) and he had gone along with it so as not to
disappoint Jonathan. There hadn’t been any interviews needed to join the USAAF. But to join Ivy? He had ten rounds of interviews, formal interviews around the large dining room table, followed by two all-night sessions of deliberations and three weeks of mandatory parties. He did it all. He smiled through it all. He drank when they told him to drink and he answered their questions (What does your father do? How do you spend your summers? What do you think you can contribute to Ivy?). And every night he was reminded of Fitzgerald’s assessment of Ivy as “detached and breathlessly aristocratic.” He wasn’t so sure about that. “Distressed and breathlessly autochthonic” was more like it: Ivy was most profoundly concerned with being of its place. He got in, nonetheless.

When Emma pressured him to try out for the Triangle Club, he had done that, too. If being a “gentleman” was Jonathan’s wish for him then being “theatrical” was Emma’s, and nothing would do but the oldest musical comedy group at Princeton. He auditioned by accompanying himself on the piano on an up-tempo version of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Moonburn.” It did the trick. Emma was “over the moon” but Frankie’s soul sank a little. Ivy for Jonathan. Triangle for Emma. And what for him? He tried out for and made the Nassoons. Participating in all of these groups had been a source of constant distress. The energy with which his “pals” in Ivy faked a lack of interest—in their studies and in each other—was rivaled only by the degree to which they affected to be “jolly” and “good sports.” The same was true of Triangle, which demanded a steady output of zaniness of a certain pedigreed sort, ending in the drag revue every spring. Even while simply eating at Ivy, Triangle members were expected to burst into song with spontaneity—a spontaneity that had been rehearsed late into the evening the night before. Heaven forbid if you were in a serious mood, or simply too tired to muster the requisite amount of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm—this went for all of Princeton—was an affect that one practiced, or needed to practice,
in front of the mirror every day. Frankie understood himself as a blandly middle-course kind of guy, but Princeton didn’t admit to that kind of thing.

During his sophomore year, a fellow Triangle member had pulled Frankie aside after practice and invited him along on a trip to New York with “some of the boys.” A few of them took the Dinky to Princeton Junction and from there, the metro line to Penn Station, then the subway up to Ninety-Sixth Street and Central Park West. As they approached the city, his companions had become more and more exuberant, more excited, more
dramatic
. When the door to the apartment opened, they exploded into frivolity and made a great show of kissing their host—an old Princeton alum—on both cheeks and clapping their hands together. For his part, Frankie didn’t know how to act. It was loud. There were no women, not one. He looked around the room and saw men kissing one another over drinks, dancing outrageously (funny how his mother’s language came to mind to describe something his mother would never have been able to imagine). He tried to fake having a good time but was unable to do it. One of his classmates found him sipping grapefruit juice in the corner of the living room.

“Having fun?”

Frankie shrugged.

“Aren’t you one of us? You are, aren’t you?”

He supposed he was. But he didn’t want to kiss anyone there—that would be merely an act in a series of acts that was Princeton rather than something real. Sitting there all alone, he thought of Billy. He wanted to kiss Billy, because, well . . . because he did. Because of how he felt about Billy. Because of who Billy was, not because of what kissing him meant, to him or to anyone else. When he was next to Billy it was so thrilling, so unbelievable, so gratifying. More than anything else. Ever. He wanted to spend time with Billy precisely because he didn’t have to act—act happy, act sad, act
shocked. He didn’t have to act at all. The lack of pretense was part of the attraction. The opposite of this. The feeling of freedom attached to Billy extended beyond him to include Felix and all of the Pines—the days structured by real weather rather than social or parental weather. The woods themselves, unfolding behind the Pines, carried only possibility.