Her smiling “hello” had propelled us into conversation. Although it turned out she was two years younger than I, we discovered that, having attended the same high school, we had a number of acquaintances in common. Also we’d had many of the same teachers. As we’d evaluated them, we discovered we pretty much agreed on their competences and qualities.
Before excusing myself from the table, I revealed that I’d asked our neighbor whether she’d care to see a film showing in a cinema a few miles away, “The Big Sleep,” with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, it happened to be.
This announcement produced a profound silence, during which I caught sight of my mother fixing a Medusa stare on my father. Blinking as he cleared his throat, my father smiled at me. “It is Christmas night,” he said gently, “ your first home from the war and… ”
“We’re planning to sing carols around the piano,” my mother broke in, “and then I’ll make hot chocolate to sip while we listen to our favorite excerpts from Handel’s ‘Messiah’ on the phonograph. As we’ve always done. Your father and I carried on the tradition while you were gone, of course.”
“Oh…afraid I hadn’t….” ‘Remembered’ was on the tip of my tongue, but, hearing the cruelty of pronouncing that word at this moment, I was able to suck it back in. “… hadn’t been thinking,” I managed to get out. Then realizing that explanation was scarcely a softener, I felt a surge of pity come rifling up my throat, shot from my metaphorical heart, pity not only for my father, whose skin was thin as a butterfly’s wing, but even for my armadillo mother. My head went down, as if I were praying, yet wretched as I felt over the hurt I was causing, I had no intention of capitulating to the urge to redress it. I had to get out. Now.
More silence, a really fearsome weapon of my mother’s. I ended it with what I intended to be a sincere apology, lie though it was, while still making clear that I was resolving the conflict on my terms. “Oh, I’m really sorry I asked her, but now it’s done, I’m afraid.”
A third still longer, and therefore more threatening silence. My mother’s pale lips were pinched so tightly together that the Inquisition couldn’t have forced out a syllable.
“John….” She finally broke the silence by pronouncing my name, then pausing as she was poised to strike. “Before you go any further in encouraging this young woman, who for all I know might be perfectly respectable otherwise, I think there’s something you ought to be aware of.” She made a strategic pause, to which I declined to respond to with an inquiry.
“The family of that person, and, mind you, I have nothing else against her…,” another measurable pause, “well, they’re Catholics.”
Calling up strength generated by my recent, perhaps imagined, almost romance with Deirdre, soon to be Sister Lucia, I blurted out in an unquavering voice, “Maybe I’ll be able to persuade her not to enter St. Margaret’s Convent, you know, on the other side of the post office. So she’ll avoid Hell by finding her way onto the straight and narrow Methodist road to Heaven.” How cruelly flip I was after my liberation!
Hearing my mother gasp, I saw my father jump up from the table and rush to the opposite end, near to the kitchen. He threw his arm across his wife’s heaving shoulders as she sobbed, “I don’t know what’s got into that boy. He doesn’t seem to be our son any longer.”
I had to bite my tongue to keep from shouting, ‘the war, it’s the war! And a beautiful little novice in St. Margaret’s Convent.’ In order not to cause any additional splintering of the trinity of our family on this Christmas night, I began carrying dessert plates and flatware into the kitchen. Soon my father joined me. After we’d cleared the table and headed back toward the dining room, he slipped the key to our Studebaker into my pocket. There was no need to be stealthy. My mother, remaining at her place at the table, chin on her breast as though in prayer, dabbed her eyes with her lace handkerchief. No sound was coming from her, but her shoulders were bobbing like a motor whaleboat in a rough sea.
The date wasn’t worth the price. In fact, it was a debit. The doll-like prettiness of the girl of the neighborhood, Mary Jo, who with her fur coat off was more plump than I’d judged her to be, paled beside the dark beauty of Deirdre. And some acne was all too obviously covered with pancake makeup. No sooner had she settled in the Studebaker, her right shoulder close to the door on her side, leaving a space on the seat between us that suggested I was infected with a contagious disease, than she informed me she was waiting for the return of a marine. A running back on the football team, he’d left high school at the end of his junior year, just as the war was ending.
The night before he’d embarked on a tour of duty in the occupation of Japan, which I’d helped bring about by my participation in taking lives and shedding blood, he and Mary Joe had pledged to be faithful to each other. As she solemnly announced the inaccessibility their commitment to be chaste had imposed on her, I, with considerable experience in the mores of the military, had to choke back a laugh of scorn. “Though we aren’t exactly engaged, we’re as good as,” she explained. Which pronouncement brought a derisive but undelivered ‘congratulations!’ to the tip of my tongue.
On she chattered about the prowess of her beloved on the gridiron, his patriotism in leaving school to enlist, all the manly virtues that complemented his handsomeness. How could I possibly measure up to, let alone supplant, such a paragon? In the cinema we both took care to keep our elbows off the armrest between our seats. The instant the lights dimmed, despite the blare of music and flashing of the Pathé news on the screen, in my mind I relived to the point of feeling tactilely the tips of a beauty’s slender fingers on the side of my hand.
Additionally I was put off by noticing that during the feature film Mary Jo fished a stick of chewing gum out of the handbag she held in her lap as if it were a fumbled football she’d recovered. It occurred to me she might consider the bag a crucial component of a chastity belt. When she said goodnight, as she emerged from the car, whose door I was holding open in front of her house, she was still working away on the gum. Had the conventional thanks for the date been offered, a chaste touching of lips, or only her lips on my cheek, somehow I would have declined it.
Consoling myself for spending an ungratifying, to say the least, evening as I drove home, I realized I’d kept my mind, my inner eye and ear, and, as well, my desire fixed so intently on Deirdre, the novice, soon to be Sister Lucia, that I had only the haziest idea of what was happening on the screen, except that the plot seemed hopelessly tangled to an inattentive mind. Later I somewhere read, or was told, that the film was based on a novel by Raymond Chandler and that William Faulkner had come up with the screenplay, both of whom it seemed likely had been soused while they were writing.
In early January off to college I went, with hundreds of thousands of other veterans, to secure an education, which before the war had been reserved for the privileged few. It would enable us to become professionals, earning unheard of salaries, as well as turn us into enlightened citizens who would commit ourselves to a morality that within our country would eliminate prejudice and poverty and, spreading to the nations of the world, would serve their peoples as models. And above all it would lead to the abolition of war. If reading this manifesto six decades later, you detect a heavily ironic undertone, you can trust your ear.
The identity of the college I attended has no bearing on this narrative. I was not, I confess, a dedicated student. Yet it went well enough for me to feel I’d been released from the self-imprisonment I’d imposed on myself, after having had to submit to those years of discipline, often pointless, sometimes sadistic, that had provided the man-and-woman-power to engage in the slaughter of war.
How frequently during those college days I saw the beautiful Deirdre, still a novice, in my inner eye, lived again those preciously few minutes we’d been enclosed together in the vestibule-shrine of St. Margaret’s, heard in my inner ear her sing her little John the postman ditty, felt
again the touch of her fingers on the side of my bare hand, and puzzled over what her impulse and intention had been! Such a gratifying yet problematic inner life did not motivate me as a student or prompt me to socialize to any significant extent with my fellow students, even with, or perhaps I should say, especially with the vets, athletes, or cheer-leader types among them. I did though meet and court my first wife.
Home for the spring break of my freshman year, while sauntering one morning along my mail delivery route of a few months before, under a Pacific-blue sky in March sunshine, with its promise of warmth and resurrection, I found myself approaching St. Margaret’s, just to see the door to the hallowed place and pass by. Although I could feel the hard leather button of the doorbell in the tip of my forefinger, I didn’t dare to mount the brownstone steps. Just having finished descending them was a familiar figure, his leather bag slung over his left shoulder, plodding along the sidewalk. Back in December unknowingly he had begun my liberation from myself.
“Mitch!” I shouted. Glancing back but not stopping, he turned around. Then I went racing toward him, intending to embrace him. “How’s it going, Mitch?”
The blank look my presence and greeting drew as he stared at at me face to face, warned me not to follow my impulse.
“Okay, how ‘bout you?” He sang out in his deep raspy voice, then trailed off into that hearty laugh I remembered so well. For a couple of seconds I stared into the eyes behind the thick lenses of of his glasses, muddy stones in oval-shaped scoops of cloudy water.
“Don’t remember me, do you, Mitch?” I responded, trying to make my interrogative sound matter-of-fact, not reproachful. As I listened to my words reverberate in a moment of silence along the street, I heard the quivering resonance of a plea. I had to forbid my voice to identify myself as ‘your helper during the Christmas rush.’ There was a considerable pause as Mitch narrowed his eyes, then broke into a broad smile. I’d never noticed how yellow his teeth were. “Wull, I seen yuh ‘round.” Again that gush of good-will laughter as he winked.
A question that I’d sorely, jealously wanted to put to Mitch while I’d been doing part of his route but never had had the courage to, came leaping into my head. In the months between then and now the possibility had haunted me. As I held back the words, ‘has one of the novices ever sung a little song to you when you deliver the mail to St. Margaret’s?’ I almost choked on them. Emitting a sound that must have been inexplicable to Mitch, I could do nothing but turn it to bitter laughter, which, joined with Mitch’s hearty guffaw formed a dissonant duet Bartók might have written for a violin and bass viol.
“Well, take it easy, kid,” Mitch called over his shoulder as he veered onto the walk leading to the steps of the house next to the convent. “‘N keep yur pecker up.” Although no doubt he meant it as a conventional good-bye, I took it as bitterly ironic advice.
“So long, Mitch,” was all that I could get out in response. And that was that.
#
Reader I advise you to stop reading here. Sorry that I’ve had to go on.
A Meditation on My Own Story
As I write this narrative, not because I want to but because I must, I’m in the ninth decade of my life—in my eighties, that is, of course. It’s more of a grope and suppose than a confession, a grope in the darkness of my past to grab hold of something that happened to me sixty-some years ago, something that, while seemingly insignificant, has stayed with me and has played a part in determining who I am and why I am what I am. I’m not deluding myself into believing that getting it out, into words on paper, will bring justification or acceptance or purgation, a term that merges the religious and the psychological. Certainly it won’t bring consolation or peace of mind or conscience. It demands to be done not for what it will produce or lead to, but for its own sake. If a few incidental sparks of light should be struck, certainly not the blinding flash that, it’s recorded, converted Paul of Tarsus into St. Paul, transforming his being and his life—a negatively pertinent allusion—those glimmers will be a bonus, a gratuitous reward.
Some spare but relevant details of my life between then and now. If I haven’t fallen back into the depths of the bottomless pit you found me in at the beginning of this narrative, neither have I managed to lift myself all the way out of it, never near enough to the top of the abyss to live with joy in the sunlit world. Rather, from time to time I’ve just been able to get myself, by scrambling, to a level where briefly in the flesh, and from time to time in glows of memory, I have been able to see and find joy in the beauty that harks back to Deirdre the novice.
Three times I’ve tried marriage. Three times I’ve failed. And there have been, I must confess—perhaps acknowledge would serve while being a less damaging word—a number of other relationships, each of which ended either badly or sadly. That bare bones summary should make clear who is the cause of those failures.
I do consider it fortunate for myself, and for all my partners, let’s call them, and certainly for those potential human beings who have never come into being, that I’ve not imposed this world on a single child. Or, to turn it around, the world hasn’t been burdened with any offspring of mine. Just consider the blood with which we fuel and lubricate the death-dealing machines that run what we call civilization. Consider the massive abattoirs we construct in which to carve up flesh to satisfy our nation’s appetite. Consider the deep valleys we dig in, in order to bury the scorched and fleshless bones, skeletons of what once were women, men and children. The collaborative intelligence of the brightest and best of those we educate should relieve us of pain, give us health and longevity, generate enlightenment, cultivate sensitivity, make us hunger for and be satisfied by beauty, tenderly care for our earthly home, produce equality, nurture goodness, and foster love of all living creatures. Just think of the horrors it has given birth to. Father a child to fuel and feed, to be shaped and destroyed by such monstrosities? That lets me out.
End of jeremiad. Which might strike you as a brief and outrageously presumptuous attempt to emulate the last forty or so pages of War and Peace. Not so. This narrative is not a lesson that elucidates a theory of history. Nor is it a homily or cautionary tale. As you should and I do know, stories neither have nor need morals, usable or useless. They are just what they are.
Well, I’m an old man, now facing what’s left and then what isn’t, alone. My salt and pepper hair is thinning, my face is a dried prune, I’m a bit stoop-shouldered and slightly bowlegged, not from lugging an overloaded mailbag, I can assure you. Yet my heart and lungs are sound enough for someone my age. As for my brain, having read this narrative you be the judge. My second wife did have a daughter and a son by a former husband. When she and I married, they were grown and had families of their own. Although there were no conflicts, even hard feelings over their mother’s divorce from their father, her marriage to me, then our divorce, her children and I never became close. The last time I saw and spoke to either of them— it was the daughter— was at her mother’s funeral, some twenty years ago. I know nothing of her or her brother’s whereabouts, even whether either of the two is still breathing. I have no known relatives on either my mother’s or father’s side. I do, however, have reason to believe that my mother’s only sister, my aunt, of course, who died when I was in my teens, was read out of the family for producing an illegitimate child. He or she was not embraced by our family. Nor ever mentioned. What may have happened to her or him I haven’t the least idea of or interest in.
Never have I regained a mustard seed of any faith. Nor have I managed to escape from the pit of guilt that was dug by a never-sleeping conscience, a conscience that, without knowing how to do penance or how to petition for forgiveness, gropes and grieves over the collective part I played in the gratuitious mass killing of innocents at the end of the war against already vanquished Japan. I’m afraid the candle Deirdre the novice lighted for me that long ago Christmas Ev
e has failed to illuminate the darkness in which I’ve lived.
I’d be overstating to no purpose were I to assert that Deirdre has constantly been living in my consciousness, determining my every choice, decision and action. On the other side, I’d be pointlessly denying were I to contend that, buried alive in my mind, she never resurrects herself. Or do I summon her back? I’m not being in the least sentimental, only stating a cold fact, of which the narrative I’ve just written is, I hope, sufficient corroboration. Isn’t life defeat, loss and bitterness, with rare small triumphs, bits of sweetness, glimmers of light?
What I do find strange, unaccountable, is that so far as I’ve ever been able to recall, Deirdre has never appeared, as have and still do the blood-chilling horrors of war, in a dream. Might it be that she’s all dream, that she never happened as I imagine, that it’s mostly, if not completely, invention? That I’ve embellished a triviality into a private myth? I must concede that from time to time I do have doubts about how much I’ve made of those few minutes I spent alone in the vestibule of St. Margaret’s Convent with a novice named Deirdre. The wondering, though, is real.
Had I in particular, a young man, little more than a boy, even though an initiated veteran, actually aroused in a beautiful novice the womanhood she was denying for a life of chastity? Had I caused her deep pain? Or is it possible that what I’d sensed emanating from her, an urge deep in the flesh, might have been brought to the surface, if not by Mitch, her jolly middle-aged mail carrier, then by any other passably congenial, eligible, and, yes, sexual young man?