Recently — some thirty-five summers later — I returned to San Diego. Everyone had told me I wouldn't recognize it, but I did. The smog was new, and Linda Vista had vanished beneath weeds and new construction, but the part of the city I knew best was still familiar. The Grant Hotel, though seedy and dwarfed by the gleaming Little Americana Westgate Hotel across the street, looks as it did from the outside, which is mostly how I saw it then. The uniform store still stands on Broadway, four blocks from the waterfront, though it now provides uniforms for nurses, chauffeurs, doormen, orderlies, elevator operators, and policemen. Balboa Park is largely unchanged. A short walk from there takes you to the enormous Marine Corps parade ground, where with a little tug you watch field-hatted DIs chewing out trembling boots. Across the water an immense aircraft carrier looms grayly. The gaping docks at the foot of Broadway are unused, but if you close your eyes you can recall boarding an APA wearing a field marching pack, your seabag on your shoulder, saluting the ensign on the fantail even though you couldn't see him. And a brief stroll from the transport bays takes you to the railroad station, where I — or, more correctly, Barney — met my mother.
This was a terrible time for her. She had already lost her husband; my baby brother and I were all she had. To support herself, she had taken a secretarial job at the Federal Reserve Bank in Oklahoma City. We had both assumed I would have at least a few days' leave before sailing. As it turned out, the only way she could say goodbye to me was to come to Dago. That day, for unexplained reasons, all liberty was canceled, so I went over the hill, climbing a wire fence. Barney went with me. By now we were skilled in the arts of evasion; we could almost enter a phone booth and leave by a side door. And we were deft improvisers. We didn't know whether my mother would be arriving by train or by bus — actually she was aboard a train, standing up for most of the thirty-six-hour trip — so he covered one depot while I covered the other. We met every batch of arrivals for twelve hours. Then he found her, and I embraced her and took her to the Grant, where I had hired a room. The manager intercepted us outside the elevators. She has always looked much younger than she is. He misunderstood our relationship, and I was about to fly at him when he recoiled, hopping, and apologized.
We ate at a little red waterfront sandwich shop, strolled around the square outside the hotel, and returned to her room. For the first time since leaving for Parris Island I could take a real bath; like Blanche DuBois, in my youth I felt deprived without frequent soaks in a hot tub. And then the two of us talked hour after hour. The mother-child dyad is central to any man's development, and this was especially true of me, for I had always been more anima than animus, more “feminine” in the Jungian sense — sensitive, poetic, creative, warm — than “masculine”: direct, orderly, logical, assertive. I had begun to change since putting on a uniform, but my mother was still the sun around whom I orbited. We reminisced about my childhood, about nursery stories from those days, even sang some nursery songs. We didn't talk much about my father. That wound was too recent even to have begun healing. Later I remembered those hours of tender talk when I read why MacArthur, in writing postwar Japan's constitution, gave Nipponese women the vote. It was, he said, the most effective way of curbing samurai militarism. Men make war, he told his staff. Women hate it. Certainly my mother did, and no one had better reason. This frail, loving woman, incapable of hurting a soul, had been raised by the fierce Confederate Valkyries and shattered by the death of the war-crippled man she loved. Now she had to see her son off to even more terrible fighting.
She gave me a watch, which miraculously survived the war and still keeps good time. Then she rode down to the lobby with me and we embraced. Outside on Broadway I looked back through a window. She was still where I had left her, standing alone, crying. Our eyes locked. I turned away, my eyes also damp. In many ways I was still a boy.
But I wanted to be a man, and an essential step in the process —one my mother wouldn't have understood — was the forfeiture of my own virginity. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven; a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to kill, and a time to heal. There is also a time to get laid, and I was due. We weren't going to be stateside much longer — there was ominous activity around the APAs by the docks — but my prospects for strange purple sins were improving. I was surer of myself, readier to take charge; being a sergeant had done that for me, too. And I had a couple of good leads. The best one came from an unlikely source, a fellow sergeant named Bareass Miller. Even by Marine Corps standards, Miller was crude. If he felt horny and no relief was in sight, he said, he would “walk into a crowd of women, pull out my cock, and burst out crying.” That hadn't been necessary here, he said, because a girl named Taffy Meredith, from his Midwest hometown, was working for the government in a town south of Dago. She had lined up a bombshell for him. He had screwed Taffy herself before enlisting. “She puts out,” he said, “and she's classy.” Her father was a judge. She had been a coed at Michigan State; now she had a defense job. She thought it patriotic. Besides, all the boys had left the campus. Bareass had told her he'd try to find someone suitable for her here. “Lovely tail, more your type than mine,” he said. He'd phone her, tell her I was collegiate, and set up a tryst.
We met in the San Diego Zoo. The lioness was pissing at the time. There I was, as agreed, and just as I heard a feminine rustle approach, this coarse beast ejected a stream of urine like water from a garden hose. I stared at it, enthralled and blushing, wondering darkly whether Bareass could have arranged this — it would have been just like him. Then I heard the girl giggling. She touched my sleeve and said softly, “Slim?” The lioness finished and I turned, doffing my barracks cap and saying, “Taffy?” Neither of us spoke for a long moment. She was giving my fraternity ring a sidelong glance, and I was speechless. In a lifetime a man may encounter three or four young women with such extraordinary figures, and hers was my first. But there was more to her than that, an indefinable air of breeding. Bareass was right; Taffy had class. Her upper lip was long and aristocratic; her neck high; her smallest movements dainty; her spill of hair just the right shade of light auburn. Altogether she was beautiful in a hieratic, mystic way. Her dress was designed along classic Greek lines: white matte silk crossed cleverly at her throat and then fell away in liquid folds. Her arms were bare. Earrings were her only jewelry. On my initiative — I think it was mine; in our generation a girl like that always made you believe it was yours — we impulsively held both hands, face to face, and rocked back on our heels like a couple in a square dance, appraising each other in a growing silence. At that time less than I percent of the population had a college background — a tenth of today's. We paired off, speaking almost simultaneously: Michigan State and Massachusetts State, Chi Omega and Lambda Chi, varsity swimmer and cheerleader. Simultaneously we both burst into laughter, as though we had heard a marvelous intramural joke. In less than a minute we found that back east we had three mutual friends, and in another minute, still laughing but holding just one hand now, her right and my left, we were frolicking through Balboa Park naturally and easily and, we thought, as gracefully as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, pausing to sing the old songs, so recently heard on campuses across America but already dated:
We'll build a bungalow big enough for two,
Big enough for two my honey, big enough for two,
Tua-luma-lumma …
Please do to me what you did to Marie
Last Saturday night, Saturday night,
First you caressed her, then you undressed her …
And words which still haunt me, though my college students today tell me they are sexist:
A man without a woman is like a ship without a sail,
Is like a boat without a rudder, is like a kite without a tail …
On a park bench she raised her hands to her hair, and the movement did something for her. I asked her about her work, and we were howling before she could finish: “… in the data-analysis group of t
he aptitude-test subunit of the worker-analysis section of the division of occupational analysis and manning tables of the bureau of labor utilization of the War Manpower …” We dried our eyes after that one, and she said seriously that she had heard scuttlebutt about the Women Marines. She intended to join up. Later I heard more about these female leathernecks. The men in the Corps called them “BAMs,” for “broad-assed Marines,” and they called the men “HAMs,” for “hairy-assed Marines.” Men like Bareass enjoyed such exchanges, but whatever Taffy and I were, we weren't vulgar. I know what we thought we were. We thought we were in love. Already on the bench, once the giggling stopped, we were caressing each other, our bodies arching, yearning for each other. It seemed remarkable at the time, but of course it wasn't. In peacetime we wouldn't have reached this point until the eighth or ninth date, but the clock and the calendar were moving relentlessly, and it seemed a millennium since either of us had met someone from the same background.
In my next incarnation I may choose not to fall in love in wartime, not unless I am at least a major and can afford a room of my own. Taffy and I had literally nowhere to go. Already other couples were passing slowly, eyeing the bench. We parted then, but the next night I took her to a movie, Mrs. Miniver, during which I established that Taffy had an active tongue, wore Munsingwear, and responded to my restless foreplay with the normal prickling of erectile tissues, labial weights, and thickenings. As the last reel spun she explored me. I was fully tumescent. My fingers entered her — two of them, then three, then four. She whispered: “Girls are sort of elastic.”
All this was wrong, and I think it was jarring for both of us. Such a poem of a girl deserved to be wooed by candlelight, with gentle reassurances and Debussy in the background. At the very least I should have given her a whirlwind courtship, with gifts and flowers and, above all, a mattress. We were not this kind of people. But they were that kind of times. And I had to keep glancing furtively at my watch. I was due back at Linda Vista in a half hour. Payday was two days away, and I wanted to reach an understanding now. After the show, in a rundown diner which advertised “Scotch-type” whiskey and “hamburger-type” meat — one of those places with two price lists, servicemen paying more — I took my courage á deux mains and made a puerile remark, one I'd been rehearsing during the movie, about the taste of the original apple remaining in our mouths. Again she made it easy for me. She eyed me, then dropped her eyes, sighed, and said, “I guess I'm kind of roundheeled.” I looked blank. The expression was new to me. So she said, “You know — a pushover. Miller probably told you. I've been naughty, really bad, a couple of times. I was nervous about this blind date.” She took my hand and looked up again. “But now I'd like to be with you if you want.”
In those days hotel clerks gave couples a hard time if the woman wasn't wearing a wedding ring. She said she could borrow one. I stammered something about reserving a room at the Grant right now, and after a telephone call there, we were all set for Saturday night. There was a bad moment when I came out of the phone booth. She was nursing her elbows. She bowed her head and mumbled, “I feel dirty.” But when I kissed her she kissed back, hard. I was elated. I knew Powers would cover for me. We would have the whole night. As we parted her eyes widened, then looked heavy. Her mouth softened. Her lips silently said, “Slim.” She rose and left, her walk slow and swaying.
Back at the camp, in the NCO slopchute, Bareass leered and demanded, within hearing of a half-dozen other sergeants, a full report on my patrol. I was angry, which was unreasonable of me. He, after all, had made my assignation possible. And although I was trying to keep my romantic feelings on a lofty plane, on another level they were quite primitive, even exploitive. Part of me wanted to tumble the girl out of sheer lewdness and male vanity. I wanted to be in like Flynn. Try as I might to suppress it, a crude tabloid headline kept flashing across my mind: manchester gets ashes hauled / puts blocks to knockout coed. I wanted to take out bragging ads, rent billboards, buy air time to announce that I had hit the mother lode.
Nevertheless there was more to our relationship than that. I believed that I had adored her at first sight, that I wanted more than carnal knowledge of her. I felt sure that each of us could live joyously in the other. Subconsciously, I suppose, I wanted to leave my seed in her before sailing. Subconsciously, perhaps, she wanted to receive it. Our time together had been cruelly brief — though thousands of others had made wartime marriages after a few hours' acquaintance — but already I had an idealized image of her, and I believed that was true of her image of me, too. I had to be tender with her, and selfless. Coupling would mean more to her than it meant to, say, the lioness. I was right. To my everlasting sorrow, I was right.
Paydays were erratic in the Marine Corps, but liturgical. The paymaster sat behind a little desk in the company compound, and we formed a line in front of him. I thought he would never get to me. I was at the end of the line; I had been packing my gear. Taffy and I were to meet three hours later, outside the uniform shop, as soon as she could leave work and take the Ramona bus to Dago. Actually I had no idea how much dough I would get. My sergeant's pay was seventy-eight dollars a month, but because the paymaster's visits were irregular, and there were deductions for war bonds, I had never given cash much thought. I only knew that since my mother's visit I had been stone broke; I'd had to borrow to take Taffy to the pictures. Had I been better informed, I might have anticipated the monstrous injustice which was about to be visited upon me. It happened, from time to time, that the Marine Corps would discover that it had been systematically overpaying a man. In that event, the account would be squared on the next payday. The paymaster patiently explained this to me as I stood, baffled and then apprehensive, before him. At last I said, “How much do I get?” Wordlessly he slapped a quarter on the desk. “That's all?” I cried. He nodded. And I knew that there was no appealing a paymaster's decision.
Frantically I ran around the camp, trying to lay the sleeve on friends. All the Raggedy Ass Marines were gone. There was Bareass, but he and his girl had a date at the Grant, too. In his tactful way he suggested I take it up with the chaplain. So I was left with an erection and two bits. Twenty-five cents bought exactly three minutes of conversation between Linda Vista and Ramona. I called Taffy, but it was impossible to explain such a situation to a girl, any girl, in three minutes. She was at first startled, then subdued — her voice so low that I could hardly hear her. I promised to get the money together somehow. Would she meet me outside the uniform store next Saturday? She mumbled; I didn't understand her and said so, and she said in a slightly higher register, “No, Sunday. At the zoo, where we were.” I was about to tell her I would change the reservation at the Grant, but then my time was up. The line went dead.
During the next week I raised every nickel I could. I borrowed shamelessly from the Raggedy Asses when they returned from liberty that night. I would have robbed a bank if I had known where one was. Altogether I amassed over a hundred dollars, enough to rent the hotel's honeymoon suite. In the zoo I waited a long, long time. Darkness was coming down upon the park when she arrived in a dull frock, with a haggard, heartbreak look and eyes which avoided mine. She wore no ring. I studied the dress. “Did you molt?” I asked with hollow cheeriness. Then I tried to take her in my arms. She turned her cheek and let me peck it. She was standing stiffly, her elbows at her sides, clasping her purse as though she were afraid someone might snatch it. Someone did; I did. Again I tried to embrace her. She folded her arms high over her shoulders and pivoted away in that way girls did then when they were embarrassed, or caught off balance. “Let's sit on the bench,” she said. The weight of unshed tears hung in her voice. Feigning confidence, I told her I had made another reservation at the Grant and felt stunned when she shook her head decisively. We really didn't know each other, she said; we had been crazy to think of such a thing; she wasn't that kind of a girl; she didn't want her name to become a barracks joke. The words made no sense, but the bleak, funereal music was clear. Sh
e had been ready the other day, but she wasn't now. The wine had passed its point. She finally said that we mustn't see each other again.
Stricken, I just sat there, 140 pounds of bone, gristle, and dismay. I felt a gray, hopeless lassitude. Looking back across the years, I yearn to tell the Sergeant: Play for time, you jerk. Take her to another movie; get back on the campus track; let her laugh and warm up and then take her; she'll want you then. Instead I idiotically hummed a few bars of “Something to Remember You By,” the broadest possible hint at the memorable something I wanted from her. She retrieved her purse and took a tighter grip on it. Fighting the pain in my chest, I looked over her shoulder at the night sky. A roving moon sailed through a white corridor of cloud; then a wind vexed the sky and stars were visible through rags of clouds. Taffy fell silent. I glanced down. A moonbeam rested on a long diagonal across her face, from eyes to lips. She had nothing more to say; neither did I. We left the park holding hands once more, but now as children walk hand in hand from a playground that has been closed, this one, for us, having just been closed forever. At the time I invested the scene with the dimensions of tragedy, silver rain slanting on cruel lilacs. In fact it was a temporary disappointment, like having to give up a good book before reading the last chapter. It seems merely poignant now, regrettable but remote. I knew little about Taffy, and nothing about war. At that time I wasn't even aware of the naval hospital elsewhere in the park. Certainly I never dreamed that I would one day lie there, tormented by memories of horrors which, the day Taffy and I said goodbye, would have been incomprehensible to me.