Sons (39 page)

There was, I had not expected, it appeared so suddenly, gray, shark-gray, shark-nosed, turbojets streaking fire from beneath swept-back wings, I was not sure, I thought at first, “Nine o’clock high!” I shouted to Ace on my left wing, but it was gone. I snapped my head around. “Did you see it?”

It came again. I could not believe there’d been enough time to execute a turn, but it, there, Colombo flying wing to the element leader shouted, “Jet above you, Ace!” and in that frozen moment
Aces High
burst into flame. The jet was gone. Streaking high over the formation, it swept up and out of sight, and I heard Ace yell, “I’m hit!” and Colombo shouted, “Where the fuck’d it go?” and I found myself unable to speak, unable to utter the commands a flight leader should have known to, Get out, I thought, “Ace!” I shouted, “What was that?” a pilot in one of the other planes asked.

We were fifty P-38s on a mission over Fiume, forty-eight actually because we had lost two to flak as we swarmed over the refinery, Ace in flames now, Get out, I thought again. He was on my left wing, slightly below me, and I could see the three big holes the shells had left at his wing joint, between the gondola and the engine nacelle, flames lashing up out of the shattered wing tanks, and Ace’s voice erupting into my headphones, “I’m on fire!” and I thought, Yes, I can see, and he screamed, “Selector valve! Fire in the cockpit!” and I thought Get out, Ace, ditch her, get out, get out, “Get out!” I yelled, “Fast!” I yelled, and saw him reaching forward and up for the emergency hatch release control and then suddenly pulling his hand back to slap at his flight suit, “I’m on fire!” he screamed, and I saw flames enveloping the cockpit as he rose from the armor-plated seat, still struggling with the release handle, desperately trying to get it open, “Hatch is stuck, Will,” he said very quietly, eyes wide above the oxygen mask, hands fluttering wildly, and in that instant the tanks blew. My own airplane rocked with the blast, I pulled my head to the right in reflex, left shoulder coming up protectively, and then immediately looked down to see that the right wing and nacelle of
Aces High
had sheared off in the explosion and was dangling helplessly from the boom, suspended for only a moment before it broke away completely and began falling toward the ground. The gondola was gone, there was only a jagged open hole where it once had been, blackened twisted metal like a gaping rotten mouth.

The demolished hulk of the airplane started a plunging deadfall.

There was another explosion when it hit the ground.

I woke up trembling.

In the dream, my brother-in-law Oscar had come to me in full tribal regalia, headdress bristling with feathers, strings of beads and bones dangling from his neck and spread across his chest, lifting his hand, extending one long brown linger, and solemnly intoning, “Why did you steal our lands from us?” I backed away from him, close to the open mouth of the drum barker, and shouted over its tumbling roar, “Why did you steal my sister?” but he kept moving closer to me, closer and closer until I thought I would fall into the drum and have my clothes torn from me, thought I would be tumbled and tossed until I came out at the opposite end stripped to my skin, naked and white. I sat up. I was wearing a flannel nightshirt, and the bed was cozy with the warmth of Nancy’s body, but I could not stop shaking. The image of Oscar lingered, and then faded slowly. I blinked my eyes against the approaching dawn. It was almost time to get up. It was almost time to get dressed for work.

I did not know what was happening to me. I guess maybe I had hoped to set Chicago on its car, become a paper tycoon within a week, branch out into New York and London, Paris and the world. I guess I’d nurtured, while listening to the pounding of the drum barker, wild dreams of owning countless mills, monopolies,
cartels,
the bark dropping down through the open still ribs and being whisked away together with remnants of the forest, twisted leaves and clinging dirt, my dreams soaring upward — Bertram A. Tyler, Chairman of the Board, I would smoke big cigars and hold meetings and they would whisper my name in the same awed breath as J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie. But I had been with Ramsey-Warner for almost ten months now, and whereas I was now earning twenty-seven dollars a week, I was still rolling logs over to the woodpecker, still caught between the pounding and the drilling and the grinding, a long long way from becoming the powerful magnate I imagined in my fantasies. In fact, I considered myself just a step outside the poorhouse door, what with eggs costing eighty-three cents a dozen, and bacon selling for fifty cents a pound, and butter priced at seventy-four cents a pound, and shoes (which you could get before the war for three or four dollars a pair) now selling for upwards of ten dollars. And even though prices were government-fixed for coal, milk, and bread, twenty-seven dollars a week didn’t go very far when there were two mouths to feed and two people to keep clothed against the bitter Chicago winter. (February so far had been a prize month, with temperatures recorded at six below zero, and the wind — as Nancy put it — “whistling to blow the marrow from your bones.”)

I got out of bed.

The floor was cold. I pulled on a pair of pants over my nightshirt, and then put on my slippers and went into the kitchen and banked the fire in the stove and shoveled in some coal from the scuttle, and then put up a pot of water to boil. The toilet was in the hallway outside, shared by us and the Grzymek family downstairs. Mr. Grzymek was a Pole who worked for the McCormick Reaper Works, across the railroad tracks and within walking distance of where we lived.

The seat was cold.

Everything in the building was cold at this hour of the morning. I squatted there with my nightshirt pulled up and my trousers hanging down over my knees, and I thought Bertram A. Tyler, Chairman of the Board, living in a two-unit structure (small, but terribly comfortable) with a toilet in the hallway (modern plumbing, though, all very nice), overlooking the Sanitary and Ship Canal on the edge of the city’s colored section, and boasting of a view that featured the House of Correction, the International Harvester Company plant, the railroad tracks of the P.P.C. & St. Louis, and Mr. Grzymek’s reaper works. Bertram A. Tyler wiped himself, pulled the flush chain, and went back into the apartment to wash and shave.

I longed for a luxury home on the lake, longed for membership in the Union League Club where, standing outside on the sidewalk, I had seen women in furs and men in tuxedos floating out like visions in the make-believe world I’d created beside the drum barker — what worries did
they
have about the price of food or clothing? I had tried to explain all this to Nancy, I had tried to tell her that the world was moving very quickly and we were standing still in it, and she had said, (this was before we’d gone to see a doctor) Do you think there’s something wrong with us, Bert, that we can’t have a baby?

Nancy, I had said, don’t you sometimes get the feeling it’s all rushing right by us? They’re putting a dial on the telephone, Nance, you won’t have to jiggle the hook any more and ask for an operator, you’ll get your number just by twisting a dial set right there in the base — Nancy, do you see what I mean? I went down to pick up my Victory medal at the armory last week, and I held it in my hand and looked at it, and it made me feel like a dinosaur. It’s as if the war happened a hundred years ago, Nance, it’s as if everything has already moved way out and
beyond
the war, we’re already living in a new era, only we haven’t yet caught up with it. Am I making any sense to you, Nance?

Well, she said.

Look, I said, it’s that everything seems to make me dizzy nowadays, I don’t mean physically dizzy. I mean not knowing which way to turn because as soon as I decide I’m in favor of something or against something else, it all changes in the next minute, and I’m not sure any more.

Bert, she said, you
did
get a raise, they at least know you’re on the payroll, they
must
have their eye on you.

Nancy, I’m not making myself clear to you, I said. I’m trying to tell you I don’t understand what’s happening in this country, and unless I can draw a sure bead on it, I’ll be standing alongside that damn drum barker, excuse me, for the rest of my damn life, excuse me. Do
you
know what’s going on? Does
anyone?
I get the feeling sometimes that everybody’s rushing someplace, only they don’t know where. And the worst part is that
I’m
standing still,
we’re
standing still. I used to think I’d own that mill inside of a year. Now I think I’ll be lucky if I get to operate a chipper inside of five years.

Well, Bert, she said, you’ve got to be patient.

I carried the kettle of hot water to the sink, turned on the light bulb over the mirror hanging there, and poured some water into the basin. Then I set the kettle down on the drainboard of the washtub, and stropped my razor, and worked up a lather in my shaving cup, all the while wondering how Oscar had got in my dream, I’d never stolen a piece of property from him in my life. The kitchen was beginning to warm up. There were only three rooms in the flat, the kitchen, the parlor, and the bedroom. The kitchen was in the center of the house, and the big black coal stove threw off a lot of heat, but rarely enough to warm up the bedroom which was on the northeast corner of the building and got some really terrific winds. Nancy had wanted me to buy a kerosene heater for the bedroom, but I’d heard of too many fires starting in those things, and I’d refused to do it. What annoyed me most, though, was that I couldn’t afford to get her one of the new electric heaters.

Well, I thought, at least we don’t have a baby to worry about too, and suddenly opened a big gash on my cheek. I looked up at God (hovering somewhere around the ceiling) and silently assured him I was only joking. I had never been a particularly religious person, but I was beginning to think more and more lately that I was being repaid by a vengeful deity for the sinful ways of my youth. Nor had I really believed what Dr. Brunner had told us; wasn’t it possible that I’d inhaled some of that rotten stale mustard gas lying in holes all over France, stinking of death, and that it had somehow messed up my insides?

Frantically, I wiped at my cheek with one of the good towels Nancy’s mother had given us when we got married. I’ll silently bleed to death here, I thought. When Nancy wakes up she’ll come into the kitchen and look down at me and say, Oh, Bert, you
shouldn’t
have! Nothing can be
that
terrible! I smiled at my own slashed face in the mirror. I was mortally wounded, getting blood all over my nightshirt and Nancy’s expensive towel, a near-pauper in a dead-end job in a city I despised, and all I could do was grin idiotically at myself, though I could not for the life of me see anything funny in our situation.

We had gone to visit Dr. Brunner one night at the beginning of January, Nancy clinging to my arm, her head ducked against the fierce wind as I led her up Twenty-sixth Street. He was a tidy little man wearing a long white coat, a stethoscope hanging from his neck, an air of sympathetic efficiency about him. But in spite of the fact that people were mentioning sex much more freely wherever you went these days, thanks to Dr. Freud, whose ideas about sublimation had quickly traveled from Vienna to New York to Chicago, I still found it extremely embarrassing to reveal to Dr. Brunner the things Nancy and I could not even comfortably discuss alone together. I kept turning the brim of my hat over and over in my hands, without looking at either him or Nancy, fumbling for words, certain that Nancy was blushing, and beginning to think we’d made a terrible mistake by coming here, we’d only been married nine months, why hadn’t we given it a little more time before running to a doctor? Dr. Brunner kept nodding all the while I talked, and once he said, “I know this is difficult for you,” and I said, “Yes,” and went right on talking, afraid that if I once lost steam I’d quit altogether. When I finished, the doctor said, “Good, I understand. Let me assure you immediately that there are many healthy young couples who find themselves in your identical situation. We may have nothing to worry about here. But let’s examine you both first, and make whatever tests are necessary, and then we’ll be able to tell better, eh?”

The examinations were a nightmare, I’d never been so embarrassed in my life. Dr. Brunner matter-of-factly told us afterward that he had found nothing wrong with my testicular size, and that his routine (!) internal examination of Nancy had revealed no pelvic defect, but of course he would be able to tell us more after he had taken an ejaculated specimen (which he wanted before I left the office) and also a post-coital specimen (Nancy would have to conic back the day after tomorrow) and had studied my sperm count and Nancy’s ovulatory temperatures (I could not believe I was hearing these things spoken by a man, doctor or not, in the presence of a lady! By turns, I wanted to melt into the carpet, cover Nancy’s good car, or strangle Dr. Brunner). Nancy and I were both silent in the trolley car on the way home. Her face was still flushed, she kept her muffed hands in her lap, she did not even glance at me. I was certain I had exposed her to the most humiliating experience of her life, and I silently vowed never to take her to Dr. Brunner’s office again. We went to bed without discussing any part of the horrifying incident, nor did we mention it at breakfast the next day, or at supper when I got home from work that night.

In bed, in the arctic zone of our northeast comer room, Nancy turned her head toward me and unexpectedly whispered something in my car.

“What?” I said, “I didn’t hear you, Nance.”

“I’m
the one supposed to be deaf,” she whispered.

“I’m sorry, I just...”

“Bert,” she whispered, “we have to make love tonight.”

“What?”

“I’m going to see Dr. Brunner tomorrow morning,” she whispered.

“Oh,” I said. We lay stiffly beside each other in the darkness. I could hear her expectant breathing, the sound of the water tap dripping in the kitchen, a train chugging along the tracks a mile away to the south. “Nancy,” I said, “are you sure you want to go back to him? Maybe we ought to...”