Tears in the Darkness (63 page)

“Marry me?” it said.

“Yes,” she answered.

Back at the convalescent center in Spokane, his doctors told him he wasn't ready for marriage. He wasn't “normal” yet. “Take it easy,” they said. “Get back on your feet first. Don't fall in love with the first girl that comes along.” His family was against it, too. “She isn't a Catholic,” his mother said.

In Spokane he bought Bobbie a wedding dress. A few weeks later, on February 16, 1946, at the Little Flower Catholic Church in Billings, they were married. She was in white, he was in uniform. Bobbie and Bud.

They honeymooned in Miami at the Embassy Hotel, a fancy art deco hostelry on the beach that served as an army rest and recuperation center for former prisoners of war. Then during the spring and summer they lived in a bungalow on the grounds of Fort George Wright in Spokane while he finished his treatment. On December 12, 1946, Bobbie gave birth to a daughter, Rosemarie.

They returned to Montana and set up housekeeping in a bedroom in his in-laws' house east of town near Shepherd, not far from the old Clark ranch. He was home, married to a Montana girl, living on the land he knew. He sketched, saw friends, thought about his future. In the fall he planned a trip to New London, Ohio, to spend time with an old comrade, Father John E. Duffy.

 

THE PRIEST
had come west to see him that summer. He'd driven out from New London in his brand-new Pontiac, met the folks at the ranch the Old Man was managing in Broadview, said hello to Bobbie and the baby.

They traded war stories for a while, then Duffy asked about his plans, and when the priest discovered that Ben Steele was at loose ends—thinking about this, thinking about that—he suggested he come to Ohio. They could work together on a book. He'd been thinking about a book since Bilibid Prison, a book that would include the kind of sketches that went down on the
Oryoku Maru
. Duffy would write the text, he said, and Ben would create the drawings.

Bobbie did not want him to go. Neither did his parents. Something about that priest, they said, the way he kept complaining about how Montana's gravel roads were ruining the tires on his new car. Besides, Duffy hadn't written anything yet. He'd been thinking about it, he said, working on the book in his head. Would Ben like to hear the title? ‘We Met Them at the Beaches.”

That spring, to spur him along, the priest sent him carfare, and Ben Steele sat down to sort things out. He wanted to draw, of that he was sure, and here was a man who supported his work, a man with a little influence. He knew that in Cleveland, just sixty miles from New London, there was an excellent institute of art. He might matriculate, if they'd have him.

 

AT FIRST
he got along well with the priest. He liked New London, a town that looked like a village—sleepy squares and greenswards, maples, oaks, and buckeyes. Duffy's old stone church, Our Lady of Lourdes, was on Park Street, across from some schools and a block from the town center. There in a room in the rectory, Ben Steele sat down to draw.

He drew from memory, drew all day every day and into the night. In the evening, when Duffy's clerical duties were done, the priest would return to the rectory to inspect the work of his protégé. He liked what he saw, he said, but he had a few suggestions. They should do a scene about this, they should do a scene about that, battle scenes mostly, keeping up the good fight.

Ben Steele had something else in mind, the other side of war, tableaux from the death march, O'Donnell, Tayabas Road. After several weeks of this back-and-forth, he began to wonder about the book and asked the priest to see some pages.

“Oh, there's lots of time,” Duffy said. “Time isn't an element here.”

“It is for me,” Ben Steele said.

 

IN AUGUST
that year, 1947, he bought a small place in New London with his back pay from the army, took a part-time job as a housepainter, and brought Bobbie and the baby out to live with him.

She was lonely right from the start. Her husband was always working, and she was pregnant again. She liked New London well enough, a picture-book place with small-town manners and ways, but she had never really lived outside Montana, and she missed the West, missed her friends and family. The locals tried to welcome her, invited her to garden parties and the like, but with a baby on her hip and another on the way, she had little time for soirees. And she found no society in the church, either. She'd converted to Catholicism to marry Bud, but she never took to her new religion, and now Duffy was nagging her about skipping confession and missing Mass.

Early that fall, at the urging of an alumnus who'd seen his work, Ben Steele applied to the Cleveland Institute of Art, a well-regarded four-year studio program. The freshman class was full, the registrar said, but he was welcome to come by with his portfolio and a professor would take a look and tell him if he had any talent.

He gathered up his drawings and charcoals, got in his 1939 black Ford
Victoria, and headed east along Lake Shore Drive into downtown Cleveland. Carl Gaertner, a well-known painter, happened to be at school that day. Ben Steele opened his portfolio. There was the water line at O'Donnell, the bars of Bilibid, a guard bayoneting a marcher on the Old National Road. A few hours later, he was admitted to the freshman class.

More than a third of the class that year were veterans, but, as far as he could tell, he was the only prisoner of war. In the company of other vets, he kept silent about his service. If someone sought his particulars, he'd say something like, “I just was ground crew in the Air Corps,” or change the subject, rush off to class.

“What's this I hear about you?” his design teacher said one day.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“I'm talking about being a POW and all that.”

“I don't know,” Ben Steele said. “I just was.”

He didn't want to talk about it. Those other guys on campus, they'd won the war, but he'd surrendered, and the stain of that sometimes left him uncertain, shamefaced.

 

HE LIKED HIS CLASSES A LOT
. One semester the great German caricaturist George Grosz held a workshop at the school. Ben Steele was dazzled by his war work, especially the artist's haunting pen-and-ink
Survivor
. His favorite class was with John Teyral, a master draftsman who could suggest a world with just a few well-placed lines. As artists say, he knew how to get the thing right, something his new student, Ben Steele, had been struggling with.

He was up every day at 6:00 a.m. Made himself a brown-bag lunch, filled a thermos with coffee, and left immediately for school, often arriving at the old redbrick building on Juniper Road before eight, ahead of everyone else. He spent all day in class, often staying late for extra instruction. Back in New London, he'd grab a bit of dinner and sit at a drawing board half the night.

Bobbie was miserable. Bud always seemed someplace else, and the loneliness was consuming her. He knew there was trouble and ignored it. Art was his religion now, and school was his sanctuary. The way he saw it, he'd been a long time getting here. All the way from Bilibid Prison, those first charcoal scratches on the concrete floor. How could Bobbie understand that? How could he explain it to her?

In November they had another baby, Julie Margaret. He was a sophomore now, busier than ever. Through the winter and into the early spring, Bobbie, brooding, started to lose weight and write home about her troubles. In the fall of 1948, her parents drove east for a visit, took one look at her—she'd lost twenty-five pounds—and told her to pack. “I thought maybe we had a future together,” she told them.

He was determined to finish school and didn't try to stop her. He thought, she'll be back. She just needs time home. He'd stay in school, make bus trips back to Billings, rebuild the marriage.

He sold their house to save money and sent her the furniture. A few months later, he received an envelope from a law firm in Billings. “Mental cruelty,” the divorce papers said.

He phoned her that night. Why was she doing this?

“That's what I want,” she said.

He didn't believe it. He was going to come west during break week, he said. They could talk, sort the mess out. She said nothing.

After that, the letters started to arrive, letters from his friends and family in Billings. They had seen Bobbie around town, they said, seen her with other men.

His work and grades started to slip. He suffered from dyspepsia, woke up from pillow-tearing war dreams. In the late spring of 1949, he got on a bus for the long ride home.

He went to her folks' house in Shepherd to talk to her and see the girls. She hardly looked at him. A few days later he asked her to lunch.

Bobbie was back working as a bookkeeper in Billings, her folks helping to raise the girls. He met her at a restaurant downtown. She seemed in a hurry, ate quickly. She had to get back to work, she said, then left.

He finished his lunch and wandered out into the sunlight, and as he looked back toward her office, he spotted her crossing the street and entering another restaurant.

The cuckold in him couldn't resist. When he came through the door he saw her at a table, cooing with a local celebrity, a singing cowboy. The man spotted him before she did and almost knocked her over running out the back door.

“Oh,” she said, “I just—”

“Goddamn you!” he said. “That's just about your speed, by God.”

________

 

THE NEXT DAY
he got on a bus back to Ohio. Past prairie, past farmland, one tiny town after another. An endless ride, alone.

He thought about the war, about coming home, about the beautiful girl he'd married. He remembered telling himself back then, “I've already been through hell, so everything's going to be easy from now on.”

He'd made a mess of it, he could see that now. And then he realized, “I still love her. I don't know why, but I still do.”

He loved his girls too and never imagined he would miss them so much, ache for them. His eyes started to water.

“Goddamn it,” he thought. “Goddamn it.”

Then, for the first time in his life, he started to feel sorry for himself. He'd never been so low. Imagine, after everything, this.

“I should end it all,” he told himself. “Get a gun. Blow my brains out.”

 

IN THE SPRING
of 1950 he got ready to receive his diploma. His mother alone came out to cheer for him.

“I never thought I'd see you graduate from college,” Bess Steele said, a big smile on her face.

He enrolled right away at Kent State University to earn education credits and by the fall of 1951 was certified to teach art. He was living in a rooming house in New London now, dating a bit, teaching art at the junior high and high school, drawing and painting on the side.

That November he attended the high school's annual Thanksgiving alumni dance, a big event in New London. He was wandering around the gym, drinking punch, when he spotted a woman he'd met in passing several times in town, Shirley Anne Emerson.

He knew a bit about her from her aunt Nonie, his landlady. She had graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University, a journalism major and art minor. She had worked as a buyer in a department store in Mansfield for a while, then had moved home to help her ailing grandfather. She was in the accounting department at a local factory now and was writing freelance articles for the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
. All in all an interesting gal, twenty-six years old, easy to look at.

She was sitting with friends, talking, when he wandered over.

“Would you like to dance?” he said.

She looked up, recognized him.

They danced a lot that night. He was like no one she'd ever known, this cowboy turned artist, this former prisoner of war.

They started to have dinner regularly, sometimes at Aunt Nonie's, sometimes at her mother's. When the town of Wakeman invited him to show some of his war art and give a talk about his experience, she went with him and was impressed.

Truth was, she'd liked him from the first, and it wasn't long before she was telling herself, “This is the one,” this nice-looking man with a wonderful laugh and dark piercing eyes. She wondered how such a man could suffer so much and still have such “boyish appeal.”

In May he said to her, “We better talk about getting married.” She didn't know the difference between a steer and a cow, but he didn't care.

“Yes,” she said, “we should.”

She told him she might not be able to bear children, a consequence of an old operation.

“Well, that's all right,” he said. “We have two girls.”

 

AFTER THE WEDDING
they went to Denver, where he got his master's degree, then he took a job with the Department of the Army setting up craft shops on army bases and posts in Kansas, Washington, D.C., Georgia. Finally, in 1959, he told Shirley he wanted to move back home to Montana, and he applied for a job as an assistant professor of art at Eastern Montana College in Billings. The next year they built a trim little split-level about a mile and a half down the road from the college. The house sat in an enclave of small streets tucked up against the long wall of rimrocks that frames the city's north side and separates it from the vast prairie beyond.

He was a natural teacher, popular with the students. Then on the first day of his second semester, he walked into his classroom and saw a ghost, a Japanese.

The student's name was Harry Koyama, the son of beet farmers from out Hardin way, the first Japanese that Ben Steele had encountered since the war. He looked at those dark, almond-shaped eyes, and his heart hardened and filled with hate. And when he found out that the boy's family had been locked up in an internment camp during the war, he assumed the boy hated him as well.