Outward bound off the coast of Naples, Italy. June 6, 1944
THE CHINESE, who have increasingly more to tell us about many things, believe there are three ways to achieve immortality. One way, one is to have a child, another is to plant a tree, and a third is to write a book. In a kind of way they’re all very similar though aren’t they, all about leaving something to succeeding generations, to whatever social collective helped produce you, and to which you owe far more than any of us ever seem able to admit? All three sound relatively straightforward too, except right now there isn’t any prospective father on the horizon, so for the child’s sake at least better any one of mine is left to wait a while. And as I’m presently pacing about the rather beaten-up cabin of a hospital ship in the middle of the Mediterranean while the most destructive war in human history continues on all around us, tree-planting doesn’t seem quite on the cards either. So for want of any other option I’m going to try and achieve immortality the last Chinese way and write a book, this book. Well I’m not literally going to write it, not with pen and ink and my own hand anyway. No, I’m going to dictate it, and my big sister Margaret is going to handle the typing, because like quite a few other things in this world, I’ve recently come to appreciate that she’s a lot better than me at that too.
I suppose you could say my book is about growing up, about a poor little rich girl growing up. Okay, maybe the spoon in this particular little girl’s mouth the day she was born wasn’t quite silver, but it sure was made of some precious metal. And okay, maybe the little girl wasn’t quite as spoiled as that dreadful horror Violet Elizabeth Bott, the lisping daughter of the local nouveau riche millionaire in the Just William books I used to love reading. “I’ll th’cream and th’cream ‘till I’m th’ick,” she used to whine whenever she wanted her own way. No, the little brat I’m talking about didn’t lisp, and her means of getting her way were more subtle, most of the time anyway. And for the record her daddy’s money was old, which is still considered more respectable than nouveau, at least by people whose money is old anyway. And in Washington it’s still those people who get to decide what’s respectable. No, for the most part this poor little rich girl was more like Scarlett O’Hara than Violet Elizabeth, though nowhere near as pretty. Do you know that over thirty girls were considered for her role, but they still chose Vivien Leigh, even if she wasn’t American, far less a Southern belle? But wherever she came from, she was born in India I read somewhere, her Scarlett sure could plot and connive to get her own way too.
Like I said though, thankfully my story is about how this spoiled brat grew up, in some ways at least anyway, though I’m the first to admit I’m still a work in progress. I’m not talking about growing up physically though, after all other than my hair being shorter, a lot shorter actually, and I’ll tell you later how that happened, I still look pretty much the same as I did when I left Washington those few months ago. Though it seems like a life time now. Okay, I’ll admit I’ve put on a few pounds since then, but let’s face it PBS cooking isn’t designed to keep you slim, and when it started to become available again, Southern Italian food certainly wasn’t. Oh that’s right I suppose I should tell you that ‘PBS’ stands for Peninsular Base Section. Along with the administration of liberated Italy, ‘liberated’ is a word we liked to use a lot about Italy, it supplied the American Fifth Army with everything it required to do the actual fighting, though much to the fighting men’s disgust, never stooped to doing any of it themselves. No, other than that it’s still the same-looking Patricia as it always was, and nobody who knew me before I left will have all that much trouble recognizing me now… not physically anyway.
And before you get the wrong idea, dreadfully sorry, but I’m afraid this story’s not about me growing up sexually either. Maybe I’d have been smarter to keep that a secret, then you’d have continued flipping these pages indefinitely in the presumption you’d eventually come across your just reward. And we both know what your just reward would be, don’t we? I mean one of those torrid epiphanies when a chaste young American girl, who’s led the kind of cosseted crinoline life that befits all our spoiled brats, flits off to Europe, and promptly graduates from virginity to womanhood under the sweaty paws of some duplicitous world-wise lothario. A French or Italian one are invariably the favorite choices aren’t they, perhaps because they can be relied on to memorialize the epiphany in a suitably exotic language? And let’s be honest if you’ve just been deflowered you’d much rather have your chosen beau say ‘C’était incroyable, ma chérie’ or ‘Che era incredibile, il mio Tesoro’ or even ‘Eso fue increíble, mi amor,’ which Norman of the unspeakable surname, and you’ll meet him later, told me is the Spanish equivalent. Now aren’t they all much better than settling for ‘wow, that was fab, honey’ as our more homespun American deflowerers are apt to say?
And lots of real writers do so love that kind of hot material, don’t they? But if I’m going to start out being honest, I should admit that my chance of surviving a job interview for a virgin handmaiden had gone up in smoke well before I ever arrived out here. Truth to tell, and I may as well start out trying to tell the truth, I ate from that forbidden fruit as far back as Sarah Lawrence. And I suppose I should also tell you that Sarah Lawrence is a private girls’ college in Yonkers, New York and probably the most expensive in the whole U.S. of A. But I won’t tell you his name, that boy’s I mean who played Adam to my Eve, because we sure as hell weren’t meant to have boys like him around. In fact we weren’t meant to have any kind of boys around. Not to mention the fact I’m Catholic, and by even doing that sort of thing I risked gaining immortality by the first Chinese way a lot sooner than I’d have fancied.
But for the record he was not some Mediterranean rué at all, my beau, but from Darien, Connecticut I remember. Anyway, when I upped from Sarah Lawrence, ‘Shady-L’ my class called it, and headed for Rome with mom and dad, and not to become a handmaiden either, to go to university there, he accepted reality and pretty quickly married a really nice classmate of mine. Exactly why he did marry her I’m not sure to this day, as I didn’t ever tell him I was planning on not coming back, which rankled a bit for quite a while. Still, I wouldn’t have wanted to spoil things for either of them even then, even if he did marry her awfully quickly. In fact he went out and married her so quickly it was as if as if she’d been kept warm in his back closet as a marital understudy the whole time. That fact rankled quite a bit then too.
But to be really honest, my first epiphany wasn’t very memorable for either of us, taking place as it did in the village cemetery as we walked back from the movies. Of course that is supposing it was his first epiphany too. Let’s face it, he may even have epiphanized her before me, that other girl in the closet, I mean – God, maybe even in the same cemetery. He said it was his first epiphany as well of course, and assured me the very vaults of heaven shuddered for him too during it. But so what if he was just trying to be gentlemanly about the whole thing? After all he was a Yale boy, and that’s probably what they’re taught to say by daddy after they’ve deflowered young females from the girls’ college down the road, especially if they’re deflowering two young females from that same girls’ college simultaneously. I can’t believe he was actually two-timing me quite that brazenly though, and possibly even beside the very same headstone?
Me, I wasn’t taught anything by daddy about what to say in those circumstances, circumstances epiphanal I mean, for truth is if daddy had got a hint that it even happened I’d have been disinherited on the spot and shipped out to the nearest nunnery faster than you can recite Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, beatae Mariae semper Virgini, beato Michaeli Archangelo, beato Joanni Baptistae, sanctis Apostolis Petro et Paulo, omnibus Sanctis, et tibi etc. etc…….
And judging from the look on Margaret’s face right now as she types this, she for one wouldn’t have lifted a finger to stop him. Mom might have though, and have whistled up some lads from the Washington lodge of the Camorra, and have them drive up for a come to Jesus meeting with the boy in question instead. After all, isn’t it the boy who’s traditionally to blame when such dreadfully shameful events occur? But then I suppose you might not know what the Camorra is either. Well it’s a Mafia-style secret society that originated in Naples Italy near where mom was born, set up offices in the U.S., and specialized in… well… if you want to know the truth it was drive-by-shootings.
But for the record I had a very reasonable excuse for permitting myself an inaugural epiphany that particular night under the headstone as he and I, his name was Sanford by the way, no harm in telling you that, I suppose – the boy, I mean, not the headstone, well we had just both been to see Greta Garbo in Queen Christina. And let’s face it what young girl wouldn’t have succumbed to the romance of a dark, tree-lined New York cemetery on a warm summer night, and the entreaties of a well-perfumed Ivy Leaguer, after seeing Greta standing silently at the prow of her ship, the wind blowing in her hair, as she leaves for exile alone and miserable. But then I read somewhere too that the great Garbo was at her happiest being alone and miserable.
Nor for that matter is my story about me subsequently getting married then abandoning the bliss of matrimonial monogamy for the evils of adultery either. I’ve never been married, nor ever felt close enough to anyone that I particularly wanted to be, and if I’m being honest that includes to poor David as well. Even so, part of me still wishes he’d done the manly thing and proposed and let me turn him down, instead of being quite as duplicitous as it’s looking more and more like he was. But anyway if you ask me, as a plot-line for any book adultery isn’t worth that much anyway. Well I know Flaubert, Tolstoy and Nathaniel Hawthorne would all disagree. But then they could afford to, couldn’t they, as they were all far better writers than I can ever hope to be. Doubtless you’re already learning just how much better. And for the record as a subject for that kind of bodice-ripping epic I’m afraid I’m nowhere near as alluring as Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina or even poor Hester what’s her name, as you’ll doubtless learn too. Prynne, that was her surname, I remember it now.
Of course I know fine well there were a lot of married civilian women correspondents who came over here to cover the War, and in between doing it had flings with all sorts of people, and I don’t just mean each other, which by all accounts some did too. I mean even with some pretty senior Allied officers according to them. PBS types mostly, as they had more time to devote to that sort of thing than the fighting soldiers did, and a lot more inclination for it too from what I saw. And they also had a lot better opportunity for showering beforehand… and hopefully afterhand too. They could also take their chosen to far more romantic spots, as by far the nicest ‘rest’ establishments in and around Naples were reserved for PBS and Allied Military Government types only, and usually just their officers as well. Bill told me all about that, you’ll meet him too, and even took me out and showed me when I didn’t believe him. He said they never allowed fighting men in them as they, well, brought down the tone of the place. Not surprisingly the Isle of Capri was a favorite spot for taking any date, and they certainly didn’t allow the infantry there either. You know the isle of Capri, don’t you? It’s at the south end of Naples Bay and was where the Roman Emperor Tiberius had a palace named Villa Jovis. He actually ran the Roman Empire from Capri for years, as he felt far safer from the risk of assassination there than he did in Rome. That’s what he said anyway, but a lot of folk thought it was just a more secluded spot where he could practice his favorite form of debauchery, which I can’t explain to you in detail as it involved young boys, lots of them at once by some accounts.
Anyway, once and for all I didn’t do that kind of thing have, affairs with PBS or AMG officers on Capri I mean, even though Freddie once asked me if I was the general’s… what’s the expression the Brits use? “Bit on the side, it was, Margaret’s just looked up from the typewriter and informed me. Well I wasn’t anyone’s ‘bit on any side.’ So if it’s that kind of vulgarity you’re on the look-out for, you should wander off somewhere else in life’s book shelves, Fanny Hill under ‘C’ for John Cleland would be a good start. That’s where my class at Shady L usually went when we slipped over the wall and raided the village library, even though the well-thumbed edition they had of it was highly sanitized. Alternatively, if you really are hell-bent for that sort of exposé, I could give you some of their names, those women correspondents I told you about, who liked to go to Capri. Because maybe they’ll pen their own memoirs one day and tell you all about the kinds of thing they got up to themselves. And judging by what some of them told me after they’d come back and had one cocktail too many, it was my impression that their epiphanies were considerably more worthy of reading about than mine.
And finally, I’m not talking about me growing up emotionally either. As far as I can tell, I’m as prone to getting carried away with my own ideas as I ever was, like I’m carried away with writing this, and when I go to the movies I still get sad when I see sad things happen and angry when upsetting ones do, and I still laugh at funny things and get scared about frightening ones. The point is though, that maybe it’s the things I think are sad and upsetting and funny and frightening that have all changed, and that’s where maybe I did grow up.
I’ve been thinking for a few days now about writing this, since they told me I was to be packed off home. I wasn’t sure at first it was the right thing to do, because I know it’s an act of disloyalty, if not outright indiscipline. It’s also not very smart as Margaret has told me a dozen times at least. But if there were any doubts in my mind, they all vanished when I saw the ambulances pull up at the quayside and unload all the poor stretchered soldiers who’d given parts of their body and mind to help ‘liberate’ Italy. They’re from all over the world you see, not just American and British, but from France, North Africa, Poland, New Zealand, India, Nepal, Canada, Australia, damn near everywhere. Never mind any other consideration of right or wrong, they alone deserve that someone tell the truth about why they had to sacrifice so much for so little.
Please understand though, this isn’t a question of me wanting revenge, maybe for them, but not for me. Okay, I’ll admit at first I felt mad about what they did to me, and had to get even. But that feeling wore off pretty quickly because wanting an eye for an eye is just not the kind of person I hope I am. And if I ever was, something I saw by Salerno Beach when I arrived here put that kind of self-centered emotion into better context for good. I hope it did anyway. But then maybe that’s what everyone seeking vengeance says, that that’s not the kind of person they are either.
All of sudden though, the whole idea seems far more complicated than I first thought, and maybe it was a stupid notion that I could just start dictating and it would all come out so neatly that anyone reading it would understand what I was trying to say. Problem is though, I’ve never composed much of anything since I left University in Rome, and what I wrote there few folk in their right mind would want to read. That is unless they were a classical historian with a particular interest in Roman architecture. That’s what I studied before the War you see, Roman history, and I even had a book published about the antiquities of Rome. Odd subject for a girl to specialize in I suppose, but then in my own way I guess I was kind of odd. Maybe for that matter I still am. Anyway let’s face it, how many of you out there are interested in that, and even if you are, I’d rather forget about that book completely, as in a circuitous kind of way it helped cause some of the awful things I saw happen out here, maybe even some of the things that happened to these poor wounded soldiers.
Well truth to tell I did write the odd few blurbs that found their way into Stars and Stripes while I was in Italy. But no-one got to read what I really wrote. Same as they never got to read what Marie wrote, or Karl, or Freddie or any of the other correspondents, male or female. Landers’ faceless editor types in Fifth Army Command who were so fast to tell me how good those blurbs were, still changed them beyond even my recognition as soon as my back was turned. Except I didn’t find out they had till after they’d published them. But then they weren’t really editors were they, certainly not in the sense of just being there to make sure my copy was a little shorter or a bit more to the point. No, in their own way they were threshold guardians too, just like Grey Wolves and Butcher Birds. I suppose you don’t know what those are either, do you? They were keepers of the gates of a special world too, except the special world whose gates they were keeping were designed to stop people getting in. But instead those faceless editors who censored most everything we wrote were there to stop something getting out, and that something was the truth, the truth about why so many of our side’s soldiers suffered in Italy, and why so many Italian civilians suffered needlessly with them.
So in a nutshell that’s what my story is meant to be all about, about things I saw happen out here that America isn’t ever to get to know about. Because if they did it might irreparably dent our great myth that even in the most dreadful circumstances our side’s soldiers always play by the rules. But don’t worry America, I’m not just talking about our boys, because nobody’s army out here was perfect, not ours, not the British, not the French – no-one’s. So dear God let’s hope those same faceless editors don’t somehow get their hands on this manuscript and cut it up the same way. Margaret says for sure they’ll try to, but when they do I’m just to dig my heels in and keep on trying to find someone, somewhere who’ll help publish it the way I wrote it. That may take a while, years even, but one day it will happen. And even Margaret says I’m good at digging my heels in, maybe too good in fact. But spoiled brats are invariably good at that, aren’t we? What is it we say? Give me my own way or “I’ll th’cream and th’cream ‘till I’m th’ick.”
You could also call my story a life-voyage if you like, a sort of spiritual journey, from naiveté to something better, well a bit better anyway. Of course you may find this kind of talk metaphysical gobbledygook, the kind of priggish, pseudo-intellectual nonsense that spills easily from the mouth of rich folk who’ve never worked a day in their life. Frankly I can’t really blame you if you do. But at Sarah Lawrence there was a young professor who first made us all think of our lives as a voyage, one where we’re each given the opportunity to steer a course towards some sort of self-perfection, and by perfecting ourselves, help make the world a better place for everyone. Sounds a little obscure, doesn’t it, and to be honest we all thought so too at first. Of course this professor hadn’t arrived by the time Margaret left there. That’s why she’s scratching her head right now wondering where I’m going with this. But he was there when I walked through the gates of Shady L a few years later, and he wasted no time in telling our whole class that all our technology was worthless in keeping us from a morose future, and nor would our supposed powers of reasoning get the job done either. The only thing that could make us really happy he said, was if we could each manage to overcome our darkest passions. How was it he put it? “The seeds of the kingdom of heaven lie un-watered within each of us. But fail to nurture them and the devil’s kingdom will flourish in their place.” But to nurture the kingdom of heaven he said, we each had to control the evil lurking deep within every human being, the evil that could take over each of our souls if we were not on constant guard against it. The voyage that was our life was our individual attempt to suppress that evil. That’s what he proposed anyway, but it’s difficult to get a class of privileged eighteen-year-old girls to believe they were potentially evil, even if most of us did have a crush on him and were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on most things. But it didn’t help his cause that some of his theories were as yet a so shall we say undeveloped, he couldn’t always explain them very well anyway.
But then there were quite a few other things about him he never could explain either. For some reason he’d taught himself to speak all sorts of languages I remember, obscure ones like old French, Provençal and Sanskrit. But that got him crosswise with the greybeards of Columbia where he was doing his doctorate. Old French fine they’d said, and Provençal no problem, but no way they felt Sanskrit was quite the proper thing for a doctoral student of theirs to be learning. So he quit in disgust and spent the next few years trying to work out what he really wanted to do with his life, discovering his ‘bliss’ he kept on calling it. He read all sorts of things he told us while he was trying to work this ‘bliss’ out, works by Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and James Joyce. Carl Jung fine I say, Sigmund Freud no problem, but James Joyce? Anyone who can find bliss in Finnegan’s Wake, well… all I can say is they’re a lot smarter than I am. Which I have to admit he probably was, because shortly after arriving at Sarah Lawrence he did find it, his ‘bliss’ I mean. Her name was Jean, and she was one of his students, and we were all very jealous of her. She was a year or so ahead of us, and a wonderful dancer who came from Honolulu. I remember she once taught our whole class the hula, which did not go down very well with our greybeards either.
He was also obsessed by myths our young professor was, not myths as in mistaken beliefs, but myths as in metaphors for the metaphysical truths that underlie our physical world. They were like footprints these myths were, so he said anyway, the footprints heroes from different cultures who had gone before us had left in the sands of time, footsteps every human could forever after follow. And we should follow them, part of the way at least, as they represented the same search every one of those heroes had been on since the first of them appeared in literature, looked up into the dark night sky, and wondered what if anything his life meant, and if the answer was ‘absolutely nothing’ how he could go about changing that.
But most of us don’t seem to want to follow in any hero’s footsteps our professor said, regardless of where that path might lead. Sure we may sometimes look up into that same night sky and wonder what if any purpose we were put on this earth to fulfill, but then usually we looked back down, shook our heads and wandered off back home. And hadn’t that been exactly the point Shakespeare was making when he wrote:
‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
Out, out brief candle! Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’
We didn’t believe him of course, not then anyway. After all you could no more convince a class of well-to-do young girls that their lives were pointless than you could that they were evil. Still, we did have that crush on him, more so now that crush was unrequited, so we still took down our lecture notes faithfully, and only rolled our eyes at each other when his back was turned.
Maybe you won’t find any of this very useful, this talk of footsteps in the sands of time, and like I said, I’m not sure I did at first either. But something must have changed in me since then, because I’ve got his lecture notes open in front of me right now, and all of a sudden I think I can see what he was trying to tell us. So hopefully I can help you to see as well, especially if you’re already involved in your own spiritual voyage. And I hope you are involved in it, because you’re meant to be, and I hope it’s a voyage towards something worth having, not just you having, but the whole world having.
Margaret is checking her watch and rolling her eyes now too, and she’s not waiting till my back is turned. I think she’s beginning to wonder whether I’m just dragging this silly preamble out because I’m not sure where to begin. Truthfully I didn’t know at first, but now I do. I’m going to begin at the Abbey that day in early summer 1940. I know Karl and Freddie weren’t there, or Marie, Wojtek, or Sapsovitch, but everyone else was – Margaret, Jack, Uncle Mark, the Abbot, Carlotta and Brother Frido. The Abbey was there too in all its beauty, as its travertine walls shone pink in the morning sun. It was a haven of goodness, simplicity and learning then, the way I always want so badly to remember it; a man-made peak that reached up to the heavens themselves, and encapsulated the desperate hope of every Christian that someone powerful really was up there in the stars looking after us, helping each of us to somehow make our life better than pointless.
So here we go on my voyage. I hope it makes sense to you, and helps show you where those footprints in the eternal sands are. Most of all I hope it somehow helps you to reach your potential destiny more easily. Maybe it won’t though, because understand this, my particular voyage is also a story of disappointment, disappointment in myself, and most of all disappointment for getting my heroic footsteps all mixed up in the middle of it. So instead of becoming the hero in my own life’s voyage, in a way I almost became its villain. I don’t want you making that mistake too, but hopefully you won’t if you understand better why I almost did.