The Pledge (10 page)

“You've seen something I never saw,” Dr. Bacon said. “You'd have to make judgments very different from mine.”

“Trouble is, I can't make judgments. My thinking is too screwed up. I don't know up from down or right from wrong. A few of us from the paper got together the other night — all of them correspondents who'd been in Africa or the Pacific or in Europe, and we had dinner and talked about things and got a little drunk, and none of them gave a good goddamn whether anything was right or wrong, and then the question of Dresden came up, and you remember when you and Mom took me to Europe — I was only thirteen — and we stayed overnight in Dresden, it was like a fairyland city, and then the next time I went through Dresden it was with the army and the city was gone, nothing but rubble and ruins. We had wiped it out of existence, perhaps not as totally as we wiped Hiroshima and Nagasaki out of existence, but for all practical purposes the same, and thousands and thousands of people died there in a fire bombing that made the attacks on London seem like child's play, and this argument came up with the men I was eating and drinking with, and their attitude was: So what? The bastards deserved it. They'll think twice before they start another war with the United States. But who deserved it? The children who died in Dresden? The children who died in the concentration camps? The Indians I told you about? Who deserved to die? I remember one night when you came home from the hospital, and you were white as a ghost and shaking and told us that you had spent nine hours in the operating room trying to put together a kid who had been run over by a truck, and you couldn't keep back the tears when you told Mom about it and how it didn't work and he died anyway, a little Negro kid who nobody gave a damn about, and you had your team of four doctors working with you and the two best scrub nurses in the hospital. It was the only time I ever saw you cry. And then nobody claimed the body, just a homeless runaway kid. And we do that. We try to work miracles to save one life, and then without blinking an eyelash, we put millions to death.”

His father drew on the cigar and watched the smoke. Then he rose, went to his medicine cabinet, and found two brandy glasses and a bottle of cognac. “Helps the throat,” he told Bruce. “Maybe it helps the soul a little, too.” He studied his son thoughtfully. “That's the way it is,” he said. “You can go round in circles and hammer your head against the wall, but that's the way it is. At least we tried to save the kid, and if there's a heaven or a god or anything of that sort, well, perhaps it counts for something.”

When they had stepped into his father's study, Bruce intended to tell his father about the visit from Jorgenson, just as an interesting and curious incident; but then he realized that if he spoke about Jorgenson, he would also have to go into his acquaintance with Legerman and his peremptory flight from India and his time spent with Majumdar and Chatterjee, all of which he had erased from his account to his father of the time spent in India — an account sketchy at best. Later, he asked himself whether there was a measure of guilt involved — or was it something almost ominous in the air of this postwar America? Did he really know whether or not Legerman was a communist, even though Legerman had admitted it? And exactly what was a communist? He could not recall ever having met someone who said, “Bruce, I'm a card-carrying communist.” Or were there cards? He tried to remember what Legerman had said to him on the subject, but his memory was fuzzy in that area. He knew that both Chatterjee and Majumdar were Communist Party members, but a Communist Party in another country, especially a country so distant and so poverty-stricken as India, seemed to have little if any relationship to the newspaper stories denouncing the Communist Party and accusing them of everything from the rash of strikes that were flaring up all over the country to the conveyance of the secrets of the atom bomb to the Soviet Union. He finally admitted to himself that he did not speak of Legerman for the same reason that he did not try to find Legerman and tell him that an FBI agent was asking about him, and he softened his self-critical sense with the excuse that he had no notion where Legerman might be. And where was his luggage and his typewriter and his notes that Legerman had promised so faithfully to send to him?

Exactly eleven months after Bruce had left India, his luggage arrived, care of the newspaper where he had worked.

NEW YORK CITY
Downtown

   

T
HE MONTHS PASSED
, and Bruce realized that whatever the writing of a book was to others, to him it was_imprisonment combined with not a little torture. Other books appeared, were reviewed and read by whatever number of people purchased them, and then disappeared to somber graves in libraries. He wrote over a hundred pages on England before the Normandy invasion, and then destroyed what he had written. The least difficult was the intensity of the battle on the European mainland, but even there his memory of battle was not what he sought, but an inner truth that might describe the unwritten horror that used war as its camouflage. He remembered Tolstoy's dictum only too well, that every story of war and battle was a lie; but when he went to
War and Peace
, seeking Tolstoy's own circumvention of that trap, he could not find it. But
War and Peace
was fiction, and he, Bruce Bacon, was seeking the truth — or was fiction the only place that truth could be found? He would watch his typewriter turning into the enemy, and then recall sitting at the bottom of a shellhole, in slime and mud and dirty water, taking down the names of the four soldiers there in the mud with him, that he might credit them for the stories they were telling him, and writing their names and his notes with a stub of a pencil in a damp little notebook, and then finding that he had managed one or two fine, strong phrases; and remembering this now, he would take a pencil and a legal pad and go into Central Park, and sit there on a bench, scribbling away.

But this was a small and rather worthless remedy; all it created that was positive was a sojourn of a few hours in the fresh air and the sunshine. On the other hand, he had spent endless hours in the New York Public Library, going through the back issues of the wartime years to see how the other correspondents on the
Times
and the
Daily News
had handled their dispatches. But that was a mine that yielded no metal of any use to him; he would have to find his own way or give it up entirely.

His romance with Sally Pringle, if one could call it that, appeared to disintegrate as the intensity of his absorption with his book increased. One day she called him with a pair of tickets for a Broadway opening, and he pleaded that he had to work that evening.

“Bruce, what on earth do you mean, you have to work?”

“I'm trying to work out a problem.”

“Which you give yourself. It's your own project.”

She slammed down the telephone in disgust, but a week later, when he made his apologies and his pleas, she consented to see him again. But romance was corroding. An editor of a leading fashion magazine, a competitor
of Harper's Bazaar
, told her that he had offered Bruce an in-house job for twenty thousand a year, a princely sum at the time, and Bruce had turned it down out of hand. Bruce was tall, good-looking, and much admired in circles that Sally enjoyed; but to her he appeared to be going nowhere, bound to a book which she felt would never be finished.

Also, their dates were becoming argumentative. She could not comprehend his horror at the bombing of Hiroshima. When he recalled what he had seen in the concentration camps, she said, “No. No, I will not believe that the Germans put six million Jews to death. I know Germans. Mother and I were in Germany twice before that awful war.” In bed, she was delicious, wildly emotional and enthusiastic. Bruce realized how well they were in tune with each other's sexual drives and needs. But they were not in love, either of them, and both of them realized that.

The months went by, and he wrote and rewrote, and tore up much of what he wrote, and at long last he had something over a hundred pages of manuscript that he was satisfied with. At least it was a beginning and proof that eventually he would do what he had set out to do. If not in celebration, at least in relief, Bruce went outside and began to walk. It was mid-November in 1946, a cool, windy day, the best kind of a day in New York City. He felt more relaxed and alive than he had felt in weeks. He wore an old sport jacket of Harris tweed over a sleeveless sweater, and old gray flannels and comfortable shoes. He walked south down Lexington Avenue, easily and swiftly. At Forty-second Street, he responded to thirst and hunger and took himself into an Automat, where he put coffee, fried eggs, and bacon on a tray and found a table for himself.

A few moments later, a voice said, “If you're not waiting for someone, I'll join you.”

Bruce glanced up to see the broad, smiling, toadlike face of Milton Greenberg. It took a moment to make the connection with the press club in Calcutta, and then he rose and shook hands eagerly.

“I must jay you look happier than the last time I saw you in Calcutta.”

“I feel happier. Sit down.”

Greenberg had a cup of coffee in his hand.

“Getting something to eat?”

“I've eaten,” Greenberg said. “What are you doing on my turf?”

“Still with the
Daily News?”

“I been there twenty years.” He set the coffee on the table. “I hear they threw you out of the CBI?”

“Sort of.”

“Boychik, it's a distinction to be thrown out of a whole damn theater. It means you're on to something nobody else is.”

“Only the famine. You saw it.”

“I did. I certainly did. I also hear that you put the
Trib
on hold to write a book.”

“You're going to tell me everyone else is writing a book. Anyway, how do you know?”

“Word gets around. And don't feed me that crap about everyone else writing a book. Lousy books. There hasn't been a good book out of this war yet.”

“Mine can make the same garbage heap. You know, Greenberg, it's good to see you. You're something real. I came back by Air Transport, booked right through. It was like closing my eyes in Calcutta and waking up here. At the airport, customs cleared me without waiting, and there was one of those big green Checkers waiting, and an hour later I was in my apartment. Women on the streets walking their babies, clean, neat, beautiful. Summer dresses. High, beautiful tits. Clean streets. No mud, no blood, no guts …” His voice died away.

“I know what you mean,” Greenberg said.

“You're real. You bear witness. That's what I'm trying to do with this book of mine.”

“You got any of it finished?”

“About a hundred pages that I can read without feeling sick.”

“Have you shown it to anyone?”

“No,” Bruce said quickly. “I can't. I got this girl I hang out with, and she begs me to let her see it. I can't.”

“Don't. Don't show it to anyone except your publisher. People don't know a damn thing about writing, and they'll just give you shit and louse you up. You got a publisher?”

“I thought I might look for an agent — a literary agent.”

“You could, but I might save you that step and the piece they grab. I know the editor-in-chief at Scandia Press. His name is Mel Bronson, and Scandia is a rich and very respected house, and if you show him a hundred pages and he likes it and he feels you're on the track, he'll come across with a very nice advance.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe twenty, thirty thousand.”

“I could use that very nicely,” Bruce said. “Would it be asking too much if — well, say you called him?”

“Sure. But Bruce, nobody has to open doors for you. With your track record during the war, any editor in town will be delighted to talk to you. I just think Bronson is a bright guy and Scandia is maybe a shade better than most houses.”

The following day, when Bruce decided to call Bronson and give him what he had written, he reflected that it was decent of Greenberg to set it up. After all, he hardly knew Greenberg, aside from sharing quarters with him in Calcutta and passing the time of day, and as good as his word, he had spoken to Bronson.

“By all means,” Bronson agreed, after Bruce had reached him by telephone. “Suppose we say three o'clock today. I followed your stuff during the war, and it was damn good and damn enlightening, and I'm just pleased as punch to look at your manuscript. First look, you said?”

Scandia's offices were on Fourth Avenue, between Twenty-ninth and Thirtieth Streets, and Bronson himself was a large, white-haired man of about sixty, pink-skinned and hearty in his manner and his welcome. He accepted Bruce's manuscript as if it were eggshell precious. “I shall read it with great expectations,” he said. “You say it's different? Bless you. What the world needs is a book about this war that is different. I'll read this over the weekend and call you next week.” He took the manuscript out of its brown envelope and laid it reverently on his desk. “You don't have an agent, do you?”