Sons (21 page)

I wish you’d stop making puns, I said.

And now we’ve got the
second
one, my father said, and after we win it — oh yes, I’m fairly certain we’ll win it, we’re a strong and determined nation — after we win it, I’m not too sure we won’t make the same errors all over again, the errors we made last time, the ones that led inevitably to what we’ve got now. The sad part, Will, is that we’ve never really been permitted to grow out of our adolescence. You could write the history of our country through the eyes of a teen-ager because that’s exactly what America’s been for as long as I can remember — an impulsive, emotional, inexperienced adolescent, who, I’m beginning to suspect more and more, enjoys action, enjoys violence, enjoys, yes, murder. It’s murder, son, don’t look so outraged. I don’t care if you’ve got a Nazi boy pulling that trigger, or a Jap, or a sweet apple-cheeked lad from New Hampshire, it’s murder, it’s killing another human being without anger and in cold blood, it’s the worst
kind
of murder.

My face, wet and raw from the rain and the wind, was burning now with anger besides. If he was trying to prove to me that the adolescent was a murderous animal, he had certainly succeeded because I was ready to strangle him now, father or no. I mean, what the hell,
I
was working my ass off training to be a pilot so that I could go over there to help
end
this damn thing, and
he
was telling me, in effect, that I was being trained to commit murder. That was a good way to build somebody’s morale, all right, especially your own son’s, especially when he was in Basic and was hoping to get his wings come next May and be in Europe or the Pacific by July. That was a nice way to send your son off, by telling him he was a murderer for wanting to kill the people who were trying to enslave the goddamn world. Look, I said, nobody
wants
to fight a goddamn war, but sometimes you have to defend yourself, can’t you understand that?

Yes, he said, I can understand that. We all had to defend ourselves last time, too. France had to defend herself because she’d lost Alsace-Lorraine when the Germans beat Napoleon III. England had to defend herself because Germany was becoming a very big maritime power, and was grabbing off too much of the world’s commerce. Germany had to defend herself because tariff barriers were going up against her everywhere she turned. Russia had to defend herself because getting the Balkans would have satisfied her historic itch for an outlet on the Mediterranean. Even America, an ocean’s width away, had to defend herself because of her own expanding importance; if we had let the most powerful nation in Europe win the war, we’d have lost too much of the world’s trade, and our prestige as a rising power would have plummeted. We all had a lot to defend, Will. It just wasn’t what they
told
us we were defending, that’s all. And now we’re justifying yet another war — the Japanese attacked us, so of course we have to defend ourselves — striking our familiar adolescent pose and pretending we’re motivated only by high ideals and lofty principles.

He looked me straight in the eye then and said, Go fly your airplane, Will, and convince yourself it isn’t all bullshit. I’m afraid I can’t do that any more.

I was genuinely shocked because my father rarely swore, even in anger, and he did not seem to be angry now, he seemed only to be overwhelmed by an intolerable grief. I wanted to reach out suddenly to touch him. I wanted to say It’s okay, Pop, I’ll take care of you, please, Pop, it’s okay.

We forget, my father said. In July of 1918, I killed a man for the first time in my life, Will, I shot him in the face because we were defending an important hill overlooking a strategic plain.

I can’t remember the number of that hill now.

I can’t for the life of me remember it.

Eau Fraiche hadn’t changed much.

My division had moved into Germany shortly after the Armistice, and I’d stayed with them as far as Simmern, where the Army doctors decided they couldn’t get my feet to stop itching and recommended me for discharge. That was all right with me.

I arrived in New York on January 10, 1919, almost two weeks after my nineteenth birthday, and then went by train to Milwaukee. Everybody there was talking about Victor Berger, who was of course a Socialist and one of our state’s congressmen, and who had been convicted of conspiracy in December (while my division was proceeding into Germany via Luxemburg, to Saarburg, to Morbach, and then to Simmern where the doctors gave up on my feet). The conspiracy trial had taken place in Chicago under the Sedition Act, which meant that Berger had either said or written or done something tending to upset the authority of the government; when arrested, he was charged with obstructing the draft. He had been sentenced to twenty years in prison, and Milwaukee was still all abuzz with the verdict. I guess most civilians at the time were feeling fiercely protective of our freedom, and weren’t about to let the Bolsheviks take over America the way they’d done Russia in 1917. To me, it looked like a lot of fuss over nothing; all I knew was that the Great War had given me itchy feet.

But the issue was very real to the people in Milwaukee, and also to those in Eau Fraiche when I finally got there. Berger had been released on bail, naturally, and everybody was wondering whether Congress would deny him the seat to which he’d been re-elected just this past November, and also whether the verdict would be reversed once the case came up for appeal. Even Nancy, who hardly ever troubled herself over politics, kept talking about the Victor Berger case, the Victor Berger case, and I got the feeling that almost everyone in town had seized upon it as a topic of interest only because the war was over now and they didn’t have death and dying to worry about any more.

Nancy seemed changed.

I don’t mean physically, except for the way she tilted her head now, favoring the ear that hadn’t been damaged in her battle with the flu. She was developing a vocal tic as well, an automatic and irritating “Pardon?” whenever she didn’t quite catch a word. “Pardon?” she would ask, and tilt her head to one side, and raise her brows ever so slightly over eyes that seemed a deeper green than I remembered them, “Pardon?” Until finally one day after I’d been home about a week, I guess it was, I said, “Nancy, with all these pardons you’re throwing around, they should make you warden of Waupun State Prison,” and she burst into tears.

“I
knew
you’d hate my infirmity,” she said.

“It isn’t your infirmity I hate. It’s that damn
pardon
all the time.”

“Well, what shall I say?” she asked, sobbing. “‘I can’t
hear
you sir, I’m a little
deef?’”

“That might be better,” I said.

“Pardon?” she asked, not having heard me, the word escaping her lips before she could catch it. A look of startled dismay crossed her face, and then she burst into fresh tears. She was still not eighteen. I held her in my arms as she sobbed against my chest, and I felt too old. That was how Nancy had changed. She was so very young.

Not too much had happened to the town, though, it looked almost the same as it had when I’d left it a year before. Oh yes, they had changed Buffalo Street to Pershing Street, and had begun breaking ground for the new mall and administration building, and there were two new automobile agencies on Beaufleuve, and a new movie house on Seventh, but for the most part, there were very few differences. I walked the town alone the first night I got back. I had taken Nancy home at about eleven, and then had sat around the kitchen talking to my family, though I couldn’t think of much to tell them — should I have said I once stepped into a German’s guts? Along about midnight, I borrowed my father’s flivver again, and drove into town and parked it outside the courthouse, and then just began walking along Chenemeke Avenue. I finally turned left on Mechanic, and went on down behind the rubber plant. Nothing had changed much. I could hear a locomotive chugging along the siding on the plant’s west end. I was home. Nothing had changed.

The town was silent and deserted.

I walked up to Chenemeke again, and stopped in the center of the avenue. For only an instant, I thought I could hear the sound of muted artillery fire across some distant river. In my mind’s eye, but only for an instant, the reality of that cobblestoned street in Eau Fraiche, Wisconsin, merged with memory to become a narrower street in some unremembered town where a horse reared back in fright as a shell exploded, and the white wall of a house suddenly collapsed.

Only for an instant.

I started walking back toward the courthouse.

Karl Moenke’s dry-goods store was on the corner of Third and Chenemeke, same as always. Alongside it was the Coin de Lorraine, a sign in the window announcing that it was Under New Management. The marquee of The Wisconsin was dark, but you could still make out the names of the acts playing there that week, all of them familiar, business as usual. I suddenly wondered whether there had ever truly been a horse bleeding from the mouth in a French town, the name of which I’d already forgotten, ever truly been a young girl shrieking in the upstairs bedroom of a gutted house, ever truly been someone named Timothy Dear who had worn a shell fragment in his helmet like a Saint Davy’s Day leek.

I started the car and drove home.

We went down-peninsula on the last Sunday in January, Nancy and I.

It was a bitter cold day and Lake Juneau was frozen shore to shore. Nancy was wearing a dark brown motoring turban and a grayish-brown cape with a little fur collar, moleskin I think she said it was. She kept her hands inside her muff. There was a strong wind, and she leaned close to me so that she could hear everything I said. We were on a rock overlooking the icebound lake, surrounded by enormous pines. The picnic tables were below us in the distance, but no one was on the grounds, and the entire place had a forlorn look to it. I didn’t know why I’d taken her there.

I had been back for almost two weeks.

I thought at first I wanted to tell her how I’d felt on my first night home when I’d walked the deserted town and listened to the chugging of the railroad train behind the plant and later imagined gunfire, but I realized there was nothing to say about it, or at least nothing she would understand.

I wanted to tell her I didn’t love her any more, I guess.

She sat with her hands inside her muff, the mull resting on her lap, her eyes wide on my face, listening as I told her what it had been like on the troopship back to New York, where I’d been berthed with a lot of strangers because I’d been separated from my own company, of course, and how I had lost seventy-four dollars playing poker with some fellows from San Francisco, and how my feet still itched, I would have to go to see Dr. Henning, I told her, though I doubted he could do anything for me, not if the Army medics couldn’t. She listened with her eyes wide and expectant, straining to catch every word I uttered, while all the time she knew I was leading up to saying I didn’t love her any more.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her.

The wind came roaring in over the lake, blowing snow devils across the ice, and Nancy shuddered deeper into her cape, the fabric hanging in loose folds around her so that she blended with the rock, her green eyes never wandering from my face, her feet together, her muffed hands resting in her lap.

At last she said, “Bert, we hardly seem to know each other.”

I did not answer her.

“Bert,” she said, “were there other girls? French girls?”

I shook my head.

“Is it that you don’t love me any more?” She turned away suddenly and looked out over the lake. “If it’s that, you can tell me.”

“I don’t know what it is,” I said.

“Pardon?” she said, and turned swiftly toward me, her eyes brimming, and said, “I’m sorry, Bert, I didn’t mean to say that, I know you don’t like me to say that. But I... I didn’t hear you, Bert.”

“I said I don’t know what it is.”

“When I saw you at the station,” she said, “I didn’t know who you were.”

“I recognized you right away.”

“I’ve lost so much weight. I lost twelve pounds when I had the flu.”

“You look fine,” I said.

“I’m too skinny. I never
did
have a bosom, but now...” She shook her head. “I didn’t know who you were, and I thought to myself That isn’t Bert, that isn’t who I love. But then you kissed me and I looked up at you, and I thought, Well of
course
it’s him, you can cover the sky with clouds, yet still there’ll be the stars and the moon above. But now I think maybe it’s
me
who’s changed, maybe I’m not what you thought I was or how you imagined me to be when you were over there.”

“You’re how I imagined you to be, Nancy.”

She was about to cry. I wished she would not cry. I put my gloved hand on her shoulder and tried to tell her with a slight pressure that Please, I did not want her to cry, I was not worth crying over.

“What... what do you suppose it is, Bert?” she asked.

“Nancy,” I said, “it’s just that I don’t know where I belong any more.”

“Maybe you belong with me.”

“Nancy...”

“Because I love you.”

“Nancy, I wake up in the middle of the night, and I don’t know who I am.”

“You’re Bertram Tyler.”

“Or where I am.”

“You’re home.”

“That’s just it. I don’t
feel
as if I’m home.” I took a deep breath. “Nancy,” I said, “I think I want to leave Eau Fraiche.”

“All right,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, and nodded.

“But why?”

“I don’t know why.”

“Where would you go?”

“Milwaukee,” I said. “Or Paris.”

“Paris?” Nancy said, as surprised as I myself was, and then suddenly she burst out laughing. “What in the world would you do in Paris?”

“Well,” I said, “I guess I’d sit and drink wine or something,” and then I grinned, and then I began laughing, too.