5. “I Don’t Love You Any More”
“[T]HERE WERE[N’T] MANY young men who came out of World War II … who did not believe that the world had been saved for democracy and that there was this vast … sunny plain of peace that was going to last forever,” William Styron said.
Back in Coney Island, the sun wasn’t shining, and whatever satisfaction or confidence Heller may have felt aboard ship on his way home clouded over quickly. Aimless and depressed in the days before Lee suggested he go to Grossinger’s, he wandered past the ash heap that had once been Luna Park, as shaky on his feet as if he had been battered in a bumper-car frenzy. The Luna Park disaster had been a bonanza for his pal Lou Berkman, who was working now in his family’s junk business. Berkman and his father picked scaffolding, pipes, lumber, and asbestos out of the moldering debris and sold it all. The rest of Heller’s friends weren’t doing so well. Abie Ehrenreich was still missing overseas. And George Mandel, who had gone to Europe with the infantry, had been shot in the leg in Holland. While recuperating in a military hospital, he heard about the Battle of the Bulge, to which his unit had been ordered. He checked himself out, eager to rejoin his comrades. A sniper shot him in the head. He had survived—his condition uncertain.
* * *
HELLER STORED his Lucky Little Bell of San Michele on the scuffed wooden floor beneath his bed in the barracks at Goodfellow Field. He thought of it each time the West Texas wind carried the lowing of sheep across dry, brittle plains. The mail had brought him no word about his short story, and he hadn’t heard from Shirley.
From outside his window came a burst of unintelligible language. A group of Filipino officers had just arrived on the base for a taste of American flight training. They had not flown since the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor, and they were more than a little rusty. Heller felt glad he had nothing to do with training. (His flight record for March 1945, signed by Capt. Ernie E. Groce, confirmed that “No Flying Time [was] Accomplished at This Station.”)
Heller was one of a “great number” of combat returnees assigned to San Angelo in the spring of 1945, according to the History of the 2533rd AAF Base Unit (Pilot School, Prim-Basic) at Goodfellow Field. “Almost without exception, the … returnees … required more time to adapt … to flying [again], the cause … being that all had suffered combat fatigue … and apparently had not had sufficient time to recuperate from the rigors of combat flying.”
The account went on to say that now that the men had been reassigned, “it is impossible to state how these officers will work out.” Most of the men had “no administrative experience. They are in general pilots who flew their missions and returned.” The base commanders felt overwhelmed by the heavy “rotation policy” and “rapid turnover” of individuals, many of them traumatized by their time overseas. The returnees’ morale was low, “with separation from the service the ultimate goal of the majority of personnel.”
* * *
ANOTHER MAIL CALL. Another silence from Shirley. Heller lay on his bed with a copy of Flight Time, the base newspaper, studying its breakdown of the military’s impending point system. Men would be discharged according to points they’d accrued, the tally based on number of dependent children (twelve points each), length of military service and time of service overseas (one point each per month), and number of medals earned (five points a medal). The magic number was eighty-five.
Sixty missions. Surely that, by itself, was enough.
Stan Kenton’s Orchestra, featuring the singer Anita O’Day, was scheduled to play a Goodfellow concert—the first time a “name band” had performed on base, according to Flight Time. Heller would have rushed to see Duke Ellington, but Stan Kenton he wasn’t so thrilled about. Trips into town, these days, were less fun than they used to be because local businessmen had begun to complain about soldiers loitering rowdily in the streets. Colonel Gunn had established “courtesy patrols” in town—more MPs—to improve the “military discipline of personnel at this station.” The paper listed upcoming movies at the base theater: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Dillinger, featuring Edmund Lowe and Lawrence Tierney, and a frittery Tracy/Hepburn concoction, Without Love, also starring Lucille Ball. Apparently, a USO show was in the works. It would highlight Spanish dancers and a local magician. So much to look forward to.
There had been nineteen training accidents in the past four weeks. Communication problems with the newly arrived Filipino officers were not likely to improve that number.
Eighty-five points. He didn’t have enough. Did he?
Why hadn’t he heard from Shirley?
In his lassitude, in the heat and grit and boredom, it was easy to believe that Grossinger’s had been a dream, the redhead he had met just another glamour shot in the back pages of Flight Time. In the paper, pictures of beautiful women always appeared next to photos of infants labeled “Papa’s Pin-Ups.” (What was the message here? Unlimited sex and family sentiment? The good life—doubled—for which you boys have been fighting so bravely? You can have it all?) He had to concentrate to convince himself he really had met the girl in the far-off Jewish Alps, and to remind himself how the moment had occurred, so he could relive it until the memory was embedded in stone.
A dance contest. A bottle of champagne. A smiling young girl.
Now, at Goodfellow, as more days passed without encouragement from Shirley, Heller began to suspect something was wrong, and he phoned her. He was right. “My mother got cold feet,” Erica says. “My grandparents [were] convinced … she was making a mistake. They were his biggest fans.” She recalls, “There was a famous family story about him riding to New York on a milk train from Texas, to get her to change her mind.”
“Milk train” could have been a euphemism for any form of cheap travel, but given the time and place, the phrase probably should be taken literally. “Trains that made stops at most every small town and even a few of the larger farms were called ‘milk trains’ because one thing they did was to pick up the fresh milk,” explains David Wood of the Railway Museum of San Angelo. According to Wood, nine milk trains and seven “doddlebugs,” or self-contained motorized cars also carrying passengers, left San Angelo daily in 1945. The trains went to Fort Worth, Texas. From there, several routes were available to New York—most likely through Kansas City and Chicago.
Heller’s mission to retrieve his girl probably occurred in late April (we know, from some of his statements, that he was back at the base in early May). “Obviously, he was quite persuasive,” Erica says.
“It was Shirley’s mother who [really] took the initiative when I was alone with her one afternoon in her living room,” Heller recalled in his memoir. “‘Barney thinks,’ said Dottie, with the devious premeditation that was second nature to her and occasionally endearing—it was likely that Barney, the husband, had no inkling of what she was up to—‘that it’s because you don’t have the money that you don’t give her a ring.’”
“Give her a ring?” Heller blurted. “What for?”
“To get engaged to be married.”
Now, that’s persuasion. Dottie knew how to get things done—at Grossinger’s and now on the Upper West Side.
“I had money enough for the ring,” Heller wrote. “[Dottie] made the purchase and billed me just $500. [Immediately,] friends and families on both sides were delighted with the match. I was a young and unformed twenty-two and a half; the bride had just passed twenty-one. Almost every fellow I’d grown up with in Coney Island was getting married at about that time.”
Ring on finger, kisses offered, assurances made, he returned to Texas to finish serving his time.
* * *
“V-E DAY”—May 8, 1945—“was pretty banal for me,” Heller told a Newsday reporter. “I was … at [the] San Angelo Army Base in Texas. We knew V-E Day was coming, but didn’t know what day it was going to be. Finally, we heard the announcement over the radio. The day came and went. I don’t remember any great celebration.” The mess hall served a cake, but that was all. “[T]he men were mostly concerned about the point system.… Everybody was asking, ‘How many points do you have?’”
Combat returnees rejoiced that Hitler had apparently killed himself in a bunker somewhere at the end of April; they had known victory in Europe was imminent. On May 8, President Harry Truman celebrated his sixty-first birthday and dedicated the victory to the memory of Franklin Roosevelt, who had passed away on April 12. Nationwide, flags remained at half-mast. At Goodfellow, Flight Time made sure the returnees didn’t get too giddy. Right after V-E Day, rumors circulated on military bases that the VA had announced plans to release from active duty between 200,000 and 250,000 soldiers. Flight Time insisted this story was “without foundation,” and quoted Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson to the effect that soldiers would not be released “en masse.”
A few days later, the paper cautioned military personnel that “the war is about half over.” Flight Time ran a piece attributed to the “Camp Newspaper Service” that read, in full: “The State Department has made public evidence of German plans for continuing to fight for world domination even after total military defeat. The evidence was collected by various Allied Governments, and is based on reliable information, according to State Department officials.”
Meanwhile, Goodfellow’s new swimming pool was now ready for use, and all the men on the base were required to take a swimming test.
Dust storms showered the pool; some afternoons, the air turned so brown, the only things visible, more than a few feet away, were telephone poles staked here and there. Towels, clothing, beds, and food smelled of loam. Whenever someone smashed a Ping-Pong ball in the rec room, puffs of dust rose from the table.
Heller sat on his bed, counting and recounting his points.
Later, he claimed he left Texas in mid-May and was officially discharged at Fort Dix, in New Jersey, on June 10, 1945, one of the first men released under the new point system. Records obtained from the Military Personnel Records Facility of the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis do not say how many points he had. At rough glance, the total appears to fall short of the required minimum. Chad Dull, currently the base historian at Goodfellow Field, expressed surprise that Heller was released before the end of the hostilities with Japan. This odd timing, combined with the fact that Heller came home without flying his required seventy missions overseas, logging no flying time in Atlantic City or San Angelo, invites speculation that he received medical dispensation for an early release. He told a doctor in Atlantic City he couldn’t fly anymore; at San Angelo, he was clearly one of a number of men pegged as suffering from combat fatigue.
On the other hand, Secretary of War Stimson introduced the point system on May 12. Many confusions and exceptions—inadvertent and otherwise—attended its implementation. The rules governing officers were enforced less strictly than those for enlisted men. Sixty missions was a lot.
“[One] weekend … an order arrived [at Goodfellow] to discharge a certain number of officers,” Heller wrote in Now and Then. “I had lost most of my pocket money in a dice game or card game … and just happened to be on hand”; if so, his escape was simply fortuitous. His individual flight record confirms that on May 14, he was reassigned to a “separation center.” His Certificate of Service confirmed that his “service was terminated” by “Honorable Relief from Active Duty,” on June 14, 1945.
He packed up his Lucky Little Bell and returned to New York. He and Shirley—probably, more accurately, Dottie—made plans for an autumn wedding in the synagogue Shirley’s family attended, Congregation B’nai Jeshurun. It was located on Manhattan’s West Eighty-eighth Street, between Broadway and West End Avenue. With Shirley’s blessing, Heller applied to the University of Southern California, under the G.I. Bill (California had seemed golden to him during his military training there, despite wartime fears of a coastline invasion).
One day, during “a spell of beautiful weather,” he spent a day strolling around Coney Island, “with little idea of what to do with myself,” he said. The old social clubs had “passed away of attrition.” The rides looked smaller than he remembered. Wasn’t liberation supposed to feel more liberating than this? On Surf Avenue, he spied an old school chum, Davey Goldsmith, home on furlough. They traded tales of old friends—Abie Ehrenreich, about whom there was still no word; George Mandel, who seemed to be recovering, though he now had a metal plate in his head (the sniper’s bullet had penetrated his helmet but only went so far into the brain). Many of their mates had dropped out of school and gone to work at lousy jobs.
Heller treated Goldsmith to a Nathan’s dog and french fries, and for a moment they felt like kids once more. “When we went on the Parachute Jump, I was tense again for just the few seconds of suspense that preceded the unexceptional drop along protective guide wires,” he recalled in his memoir. “But coasting down, I had to wonder why anyone would want to ride it a second time.” To himself, he admitted, “After sixty missions overseas, I was now selective in my adventures.” The Coney Island part of his life was over. He was no longer his mother’s little Joey. Nor was he “Heller this, Heller that,” with a military bureaucracy to make up his mind for him. He was Joe Heller, about to be married. Relief flooded him—and apprehension. As he gazed at the ocean one last time and looked across the old neighborhoods, he “felt with sadness that something dear was behind me forever.”
* * *
MORE THAN THE WAR, the acceptance letter from Story magazine that arrived at his mother’s apartment one afternoon in midsummer, forwarded from Texas, made him feel like a hero. Only his old pal Danny the Count had heard of Story, but the news that “our Joe” was about to become a published author impressed everyone, including his fiancée’s social enclave on Riverside Drive. “Overnight, I was, or felt myself [to be], a local celebrity,” he wrote. “I became talked about.” He liked the adulation.
The summer brought more good news (maybe the Lucky Little Bell was working its charms): an acceptance letter from the University of Southern California; and then, on August 6, word of Hiroshima.
“I cannot recall a single expression of outrage in this country against Harry Truman for dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. Or Nagasaki,” Paul Fussell insisted in 1995. “The criticisms … came … later.” Infantrymen like William Styron, still on the ground at the time, felt the bomb had saved their lives. “I really honestly believe [I] would not be here [otherwise,]” he said. As for Joe Heller: “I was a very happy civilian … when the atom bomb went off,” he said. With the defeat of Japan, with no danger now—under any circumstances—of returning to combat, he could almost relive his missions with fondness. Dreamily, he recalled, “[O]nce we were in formation [on the way to a target], I’d put on the radio, and I’d listen to music, and I’d hear songs—Carousel, Louisiana Hayride, the music of Oklahoma—and you’d get these bouncy tunes on there.” In more somber moments now, he’d realize that, despite all he’d lived through, he “knew nothing about war … very little about [his] own combat experience.” What he knew—all he knew for sure—was that the war was over and Joe Heller was the author of “I Don’t Love You Any More.”
* * *
IF SHIRLEY HAD READ “I Don’t Love You Any More” as disguised truth, she would have run screaming from her handsome young intended. The story’s view of marriage is pitiless: Cohabitation is an unnatural arrangement that corners men and women into grating and dehumanizing routines. Couples remain committed to one another for reasons unknown. Whether the fundamental flaw rests in individuals or in middle-class morality remains unexplored.
During the course of the story, a war veteran who has just come home discovers he no longer loves his wife. He is “purposely” cruel to her, “not really wanting to be, but nevertheless deriving some perverse pleasure in seeing her unhappy.” Her habit of being “considerate” toward him somehow “mak[es] him bitter.” He argues with her in repeated banalities, refuses to get dressed to greet another couple who’ll arrive any minute, and keeps demanding a pitcher of beer. The wife leaves (for good, the husband fears), the visiting couple arrives, expresses concern for their friends, and then the wife returns with the beer. The husband grins at her “like an erring schoolboy” and the wife smiles “sheepishly.”
The piece is dialogue-heavy, choppy. It moves like an awkwardly staged one-act play. There is little evidence of an authorial eye: The wife is described as “well rounded so that she possessed a strong physical attraction.”
Shirley was not a naïve reader. Joe appreciated this. She understood what he said of the story years later: “[I]t [was] based on things I knew nothing about except for my sifting around in the works of other writers”: Shaw, Saroyan, Hemingway, O’Hara. The story was “malign and histrionic” because these writers were malign and histrionic. The couple’s unhappiness meant nothing; it was a “convention” of the kind of short fiction he had been reading.
Shirley admired the young author’s attempt at a metaphor: Throughout the piece, the husband plays with a Chinese puzzle, two metal rings he can’t prize apart despite his most brutal efforts.
“I Don’t Love You Any More” appeared in the September-October issue of Story, just as Joe and Shirley were finalizing wedding arrangements. In the contributor’s note, Joe said he had been “comfortably rehabilitating” himself since his discharge “under the point system,” and that at present he was “busy trying to get a play produced.” He had not penned any plays, other than a few stabs in high school at crafting something along the lines of the radio dramas he used to listen to at night, or a comedy in the vein of Moss Hart or George S. Kaufmann.
“I Don’t Love You Any More” earned him twenty-five dollars. He was now a professional writer, like his poor, broken friend George Mandel.
* * *
AT GROSSINGER’S, and during the brief leave from Texas, when he convinced Shirley to stay with him, he barely had time to pause and contemplate the girl who was going to change his life. From the beginning, Shirley was Joe’s “most appreciative audience (and sometimes his crooked straight man),” according to Barbara Gelb. She was fiercely loyal to him (championing his short story to everyone they met), but not without irony, sometimes at his expense. She could “laugh and cry at the same time, and [was], therefore, the perfect Heller heroine,” Gelb said: a mixture of “gaiety and rue.” Shirley joked with friends that she shared with Joe an admiration for Joe Heller.
Dolores Karl, who would soon become one of Shirley’s closest friends, described Shirley as “very elegant, though understated. She knew how to dress on a budget. She knew how to put it all together.”
At Grossinger’s, Joe had thought her “privileged,” though her parents had struggled up from poverty. She carried herself with dignity, confidence, and pride, a manner learned from her mother. “Dottie and Barney were an interesting couple. There was no question she was the boss and everyone knew it,” says Jerome Taub, Shirley’s cousin. “Dottie made all the important decisions and Barney just went along with everything.” His main sportswear factory was in Philadelphia, but he had to commute because Dottie insisted on living on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive. She knew the power of appearances.
Together, Dottie and Shirley educated Joe in social taste and etiquette. For example, he was astonished at how well (and deeply) they “knew the difference between sirloin steak and top sirloin, prime rib and top round.” He learned from them that “only first-cut brisket was suitable for a good pot roast.”
These sorts of distinctions, and belief in their importance, enveloped him during preparations for the wedding. The arrangements had to be perfect. Like Dottie and Shirley, B’nai Jeshurun was modestly sized but graceful. The street, one block west of Broadway, was quiet. The bright orange and rusty-tan of the synagogue’s facade nicely complemented the large brown door, appearing to darken the tone of the wood. The door opened wide beneath an elaborately carved stone arch topped by a Star of David. The building had been dedicated in the fall of 1917, in what was then a rapidly growing upper-middle-class Jewish neighborhood. For over twenty-five years, Rabbi Israel Goldstein had served as B’nai Jeshurun’s spiritual leader. A well-known Zionist, he traveled frequently to promote his cause; he would also be instrumental in founding Brandeis University.
“There was at all times a degree of competition between the congregational responsibilities of my rabbinate and the broader claims of my public career,” he admitted in his memoir. “Nevertheless, to the best of my ability, I [balanced] my duties wholeheartedly.” On October 2, 1945, these duties included marrying Joseph Heller and Shirley Held.
It was a busy month for the rabbi. On the day he led the wedding ceremony, he helped draft a telegram to President Truman on behalf of the Interim Committee of the American Jewish Conference. The telegram said that Great Britain should facilitate the immediate entry of 100,000 Jews into Palestine and that this should be seen as an “initial step toward the definitive solution of establishing a Jewish national homeland [there].” It was his firm belief that “sufferance ha[d] been the badge” of the Jewish people, but it was not written that “sufferance [was their] destiny.” He said, “Our destiny is to be a people among peoples, standing on our feet upon the hallowed soil of our fathers.”
He did not pronounce such sentiments at the wedding, but the gravity of the rabbi’s beliefs colored the ceremony. On the marriage certificate, beneath dark blocks of Hebrew, Joe and Shirley signed their names. The signatures were careful: no joyous rush or heedless impatience to get things done; rather, a solemnity and an apparent recognition of the occasion’s seriousness.
Later that day, at a reception at Dottie and Barney’s apartment, there “was a lot of drinking, especially by Joe’s family and friends,” says Jerome Taub. His part of the family was in the liquor business, and “the family motto was, ‘Liquor is made to be sold, not to be drunk.’ So there was no excessive drinking on our side.” He didn’t know Joe, but his immediate impression was that he lived “in his head.” Maybe he was a little shy, perhaps intimidated by the Held and Taub families, who were well off compared to Joe’s mother, brother, and sister.
After the reception, Joe and Shirley tossed their bags in Taub’s car. He drove them to the train station. Along the way, “one of Joe’s relatives”—his brother Lee, Taub thinks—“got very sick” from all the booze he’d consumed “and threw up out the car window.”
At the station, Joe and Shirley boarded a Pullman train for Los Angeles and waved good-bye to their families—Sylvia crying; Lee silent; Lena, with her cane, struggling to distinguish Shirley’s name from the name of Lee’s wife (Shirl/Perle turned out to be a tongue-twister for her).
“The motives for my decision to go to the University of Southern California remain opaque, but they doubtless included the indispensable one that I was accepted there,” Joe recalled years later. “I don’t doubt that they were also evasive in purpose, intended to delay, to buy time. I didn’t want … to have to decide right away what I was going to do for the rest of my life.… I felt myself much too young.… Going to college was easier and more appealing than going to work and certainly … more respected.”
With a Pullman berth for a honeymoon bed, and his name in print in the magazine sticking out of his coat pocket, he snuggled with his wife. Together, they dreamed aloud about the far West’s lovely hills.