Chapter 05

HAL SAID, FASTENING THE GOLD BAR TO THE COLLAR OF HIS SHIRT: —Nothing can hurt you now, dear . . .

He looked at his face in the mirror of the latrine. It was that same latrine in which he’d scrubbed toilet seats with Bon Ami for Saturday morning inspections. Last night he’d clipped the officer candidate badge from the pocket of his blouse. Now he was a second lieutenant in the Army of the United States. Perhaps this was the moment in which he was to come into his kingdom.

Hal thought that something had been omitted from his nature —some gland, some gonad, some force possessed by all the other men and women in the world. He knew it when his Viennese mother used to look at him by candlelight as she played Der Rosenkavalier waltzes on her piano in Greenwich Village. He knew it in his first scrap at Public School 13. He knew it in the Bayonne office of the Standard Oil Company.

Hal’s secret was a great emptiness within himself. He believed in nothing, often doubting his own existence and that of the material world about him. Some evenings when he was drunk in Greenwich Village, he’d stretch out his hands and say:

Everybody was his friend. He was six two and had such magic of face and body that people looked at him when he came into rooms. He was held to be a wit because the vacuum inside him made him envelop like a bell jar every personality he met. Everyone said he was a genius, but Hal thought himself a zombi, one of the undead. Consequently everything in life was quite clear to him, as it is to one who lives for ninety years and then allows himself to be buried alive because he can’t put up with human beings any longer.

His commission had put him into the first stable spot of his life. It was the first time that he knew exactly where he stood. His pinning the gold bar to his collar had the same effect as if the president of the United States had chopped off his head, pickled it, and set it for display inside a gilt frame, as whiskys are advertised in The New Yorker magazine. For Hal it was a relief to have the horizons of his mind planed down, with certain conventional fences erected in their stead. He would be saluted by all enlisted men, and henceforth his mind must move along neat little tracks, greased by order of the secretary of war. It was the first breather Hal had ever had from coping with things.

—And you’ll be overseas soon, dear, he said to himself, turning away from the mirror. Perhaps you never belonged in America at all.

He walked out of the latrine and into the squad room. They were busy putting straight their bars, because after the general had handed you your commission at graduation, you put on your insignia any old way and rushed out to give one dollar to the first officer candidate who saluted you.

Hal had been popular at OCS. He’d agreed with everyone and understood them all. For one week he’d been acting company commander. On week ends, like the rest of them, he’d tear into Washington, take a room at the Statler, and get drunk with all the cliques. There was the Brilliant Crowd, the Swishy Crowd, the Empire Builders, and the Drugstore Cowboys. Hal knew them all, even those fringers who didn’t belong to cliques.

And now he was leaving them with the same smiling casualness as he’d come into the company twelve weeks ago. He’d always had this sense of isolation: he loved his Viennese mother when he was with her in the Bayonne apartment; he loved people when he was drinking with them. But when he was alone, it was as though all his life with others had never been. They were all shadows thrown on the wall of his brain. Hal was just a raw piece of sensitized paper. And no one would ever develop the pictures he’d taken. . . .

—Hal, said a new second lieutenant, grabbing his hand. Look me up in New York. And stay out of the Astor Bar, hear?

—They’re making Hal security officer at Fort Hamilton, another said. Then the Germans will never know what is sailing out of the harbor. . . .

They all milled around from their packing and looked at him with sentimental old-school eyes. Their new bars glistened like jewels on paupers. Hal knew that it would be months, if ever, before their uniforms, for which the people of the United States had given them each two hundred and fifty dollars, would look natural. At heart they were all still corporals or sergeants.

Hal towered over them all as he shook hands. He’d been close to every one of them. Each had expressed his personality in Hal’s company with the license of a spinster before a mirror. But not one had ever made to him the gesture of surrender. They were simply happy that he’d understood them and accepted them. They had loved him for the reflection he gave them back of themselves, for he knew how to make people shine in their own eyes.

He went out of the barracks and took the bus for Washington. The undergraduates were getting out of their classes, and his arm got stiff from the unaccustomed saluting he had to return rather than initiate. And the undergraduates saluted him in tribute to the commission that they themselves were still sweating out. They’d be gigged if they didn’t salute. The Adjutant General’s School was almost like the movies in its conception of the Army of the United States. Its new second lieutenants were the cream of something or other. Hal smiled to himself as he thought that he was the most pasteurized of them all.

He got on the long bus, pulling in his legs, which never fitted anywhere. He leaned back in a dreamy way, deceptive of relaxation. Two WAC’s across the aisle nudged one another. Hal knew. They were telling each other he looked like Gary Cooper. The bus began to groan off, and he slitted his eyes, feigning sleep.

It was a little officer candidate behind him, from class twenty-one. All the way into Washington he talked Hal’s ear off, of how in another month he too would be a second lieutenant. At the Adjutant General’s School there was a relation between students and already commissioned officers that tickled Hal. The barrier between them wasn’t quite that of officers and enlisted men, but the incestuous byplay between the upper and lower forms of a large private school. The officers called the enlisted men gentlemen with the sniggering deference of a dowager toward a pantrymaid who is about to come into a fortune. But Hal said nothing of this. He wished the little man well and got out of the bus.

It was the Washington of June, 1943. There was a hysteria here that ran underground from the Pentagon to the Statler, Mayflower, and Willard hotels. The sun was as tyrannical as it can be only in Washington, but everything was air-conditioned. Everybody drank a good deal and everybody talked about bureaucracy and the windup of the Tunisian campaign. Brigadier generals flounced along the street like democratic abbesses. All the enlisted men who weren’t sweating out a commission at Fort Belvoir or Fort Washington wore the shoulder patch of the Washington monument. Near the navy buildings soft-cheeked Waves strolled in an innocent pride. WAC’s tore efficiently through the streets. Thousands of sailors and marines were on the loose with cameras strapped to their shoulders. Civilians groaned about the housing problem, but everybody beamed at everybody else, particularly on Pennsylvania Avenue after dark. To Hal it seemed as though America had grown sharp and young again after the years 1929–1939. They all thought of themselves as part of an adventure, so for the first time in a decade they were united, proud, and rather gay. Washington was a garden party listening to communiqués from Europe. Then the shining frocks and the seersucker suits would have another drink, and the talk would bubble up again. There was plenty of shrimp at O’Donnell’s Sea Grill. The only people who looked at all uneasy were a few British and French officers who’d come over for infantry training at Fort Benning. For this was Washington of June, 1943.

Walking through Washington steeped Hal in a Schwärmerei he’d inherited from his Viennese mother, who’d wept all through his childhood in Greenwich Village. Last week they’d had words, so she hadn’t come to his graduation from OCS. Hal thought himself wiser than she. Every time she tried to put the silver cord around him, he’d cut it with a tender rueful smile. Their relation hurt them both. But Hal had read too much at CCNY and had had one bout too many with smawt young psychiatrists. Their fingers were all over his soul, the way the flesh of a salmon is maculate from the angler’s fingers. So in Schwärmerei Hal floated through the world as today he walked through the streets of Washington. He smiled and was oh so gentle with all. And he read and reread the New Testament and Harry Emerson Fosdick and Monsignor Sheen and Rabindranath Tagore and Omar Khayyam and Elsie Robinson and Clare Boothe Luce. And this was why Hal said, as people hung over him at midnight:

—You must understand yourself, kid. Then you’ll get to a point where you’re as solid and limpid as good hot jazz in a dive at four o’clock in the morning.

—But you help us understand ourselves, they said, putting a careless arm round Hal’s shoulders. We talk to you, and everything seems clearer. Then we go away, and everything is as snafu as it ever was. Tell us your secret.

Confronted with the peripheries of his own personality, he became frightened. It was like walking down a long corridor, every door of which bore his name. Yet he was an alien in all those rooms. He could open door after door, but in each he was as ill at ease as he’d been in the last. Thus he often wondered what it was he had, that everyone came and talked to him and assured him of a wisdom that he never sensed. To himself he was a magnificent and brilliant zero. Yet he’d have had everything if God had given him a single creative impulse. Instead he’d been put on earth simply as five hair-trigger senses in a gorgeous shell of flesh. He was incapable of taking anything and molding something out of it. . . .

Hal entered the lobby of the Hotel Statler. It was twenty degrees cooler than the streets outside. A rush of sweat came under his gabardine shirt stretched taut over his wide tanned back. He grabbed off his cap, feeling faint and giddy in the icy damp air. He tucked his cap under his belt; the gold bar on it swung like a neon firefly from the lope of his long legs and his tight neat hips. As usual people lounging in chairs gave him the lookover and looked once again. A naval flier winked at him. And a wilted mother swooning in the midst of two quarrelsome little girls fanned herself harder as Hal passed. He went into the men’s bar and drank three rum cokes with the quick precision that had made him famous in the bars of the Village.

It wasn’t possible for Hal to be five minutes in a bar without being invited to join someone. He saw the usual overtures beginning from a table across the room, where sat a catlike man in an open shirt, looking like a State Department secretary on his afternoon off. So Hal settled for his drinks and went out into the elevator. He’d been one of the great drinkers of the Village, even when he was at CCNY. Alcohol made him colder and more compassionate and more penetrating than ever. When he arrived at the state which in others would be drunkenness, the last veil of illusion was torn from him. At such moments he saw nothing to life but a grisly round of eating and sleeping and talking to others until your heart stopped beating. His huge physical charm heightened under alcohol. He’d hold himself up like a locket before the dazzled eyes of whomever he was with. And then he’d excuse himself and go away to sleep. He never had hangovers because the alcohol never gave him any plus for which to exact a corresponding minus.

In the elevator Hal lit a cigarette and looked at the operator, waiting for him to speak first. The boy’s head rose out of the high collar of his Statler livery.

—Today you’re a new lootenant, ain’t ya? the boy said with 4-F wistfulness.

The boy laughed and slid open the door. Hal walked along the corridor. He passed himself in mirrors. He knocked at the door of 2023 and leaned his head against the jamb. The door opened.

—Ho-ney! she said. Take off your rubbers and come into this house. . . . He’s in the shower . . .

Hal took her by the elbows and tried to hold her off from him and look into her face. Instead she edged across the barrier and kissed him, her breath sweet with rum. Her lips skidded across his mouth. Sometimes she even kissed him in the presence of her husband. It made Hal sick and sad because he knew she loved him and had flaunted the mistake of her marriage from the first night that Lyle had introduced them. She used to come down from New York every week end that Lyle was free from OCS. Then she would experiment in getting Hal drunk till she found that his essential chill became ice by midnight.

—First of all, she said after the kiss, you’re going to share our New York apartment. Lyle won’t hear of anything else.

He released himself softly and walked to the window. She poured him a drink and sat on the bed to watch him. From the shower came the hiss of the spray.

—Because if I did, I’d go around in Indian costume and sing songs by Charles Wakefield Cadman.

Helen was crisp by Nature and Helena Rubenstein. She worked at a large department store, drawing hard stylized mannequins for ads. She claimed to no illusions, but Hal believed that she was fuller of them than most New Yorkers. Actually she had a nature simple and passionate, secretly dreaming in terms of the Idylls of the King.

—Why do you pretend to be a saint? she said, kicking off a shoe. You’re a bitch on wheels.

—Let’s get away from personalities, he said. I’m sick of them. . . . Everybody’s playing on me like a harp. And you’re not happy till you’ve pulled off all my strings.

—All jazzed up, aren’t you? You’ve enough energy to put the lights on again all over the world.

A screaming sort of singing came from the bathroom, and they both knew that Lyle was toweling himself. Presently he came out in his shorts. He was a little fat, and hairless as an Eskimo. He talked constantly about the theater in a high strident voice and was miserable outside New York.

—He’s here he’s here he’s here he’s here, Lyle shrieked and swung Hal three times by the hips. Stand by the mirror, child. . . . Helen, I just see it, I visualize it. . . . Better than Danny Kaye. Put him on the stage in gold foil, and have Gertie Lawrence singing to him in a violet light.

—You’ve both been stabbed to death by New York, Hal said, walking again to the window.

—Listen to the likes of that! Lyle shrieked. He covers the water front and he’s eating in chophouses and he’s doing Pennsylvania Station at five in the morning and he’s biting the hand that feeds him. He has pernicious anemia every time he gets out of New York.

The old song and dance, Hal thought. They were all three like hamburg chopped fine from New York. They all professed to love her, yet New York had pressed them down with her rhinestone steam roller . . . too much speed, too much automat, too close proximity, too many manufactured values, and no humanity in the anthill. Every New Yorker a doll with flashing eyes and expensive gestures. They all drank too much and smoked too much, and no one really enjoyed himself in anything he did. They read the New Yorker and went to all the first nights. They had high blood pressure of the soul and petrification of the heart. Machines for sex and money and furs. That was all. Hal sat down on the chaise longue and put his hand to his head. The other, holding his glass, went slack.

—Oh that body, Helen said to her husband. The kind you cherish in settlement house boys.

She worked on the theory that to oxidize her desire for Hal at all times when they were together was the surest method not to give offense to her husband. Thus (she figured) no dam of Victorian inhibition would build up inside her and break, to everybody’s embarrassment.

—That body, Lyle said, should be up against a ballet bar every morning at ten o’clock.

—To hell with the New York stage, Hal said. I look enough like a chorus boy as it is. I don’t dare go to the beach at Fire Island.

At moments Hal found a desert of horror in Lyle, shrieking for irrigation from the heavens. No rain ever fell on that parched face. Lyle’s eyes protruded when he talked. Nearly everything he yelled forth in his monologues had a quality of dry pumice in it —shrouds like the linen on night club tables, smiles like Italian waiters on roof terraces above Central Park. There was a thirst in Lyle madder than a morning after. The whore and the mystic were at odds in Lyle’s heart, and writing copy for perfumes hadn’t helped him any. Yet he came close to believing in anything that was smawt. Though sometimes, when the dawn came up over the subways, Lyle would be visited with an epileptic ague, and he’d babble about a little farm in Vermont.

—Hal, said Helen after a pause, is in the position of Jesus Christ attending Radio City Music Hall.

—The most tragic remark of the year, Hal said, and poured himself another drink.

They drank all afternoon and evening in that air-conditioned hotel room. Helen switched on the Philharmonic concert and lay back on the bed with her shoes off, one arm under her head, a glass in her hand, and stared at the ceiling. She said that the designs in Mozart’s music brought her back to sanity, yet there was a fever in her eyes as she pretended to listen to the Jupiter. Lyle talked over and through all music, shouting like the mistress of a ballet troupe counting out the time. He talked of the advertising business after the war, of how—now that he was commissioned— he was going to talk his way into army PRO and sit out the war in the Pentagon. The music made Hal as nervous too. He sat on the floor and wondered if the room would close in on him. When the sun set outside over Washington, they rang for lobster salad and sandwiches and melons. Then they continued to drink till midnight. Lyle passed out reminiscing of Maria Ouspenskaya and was laid on his bed. His face was as pasty and wrinkled as an old squaw’s.

Hal turned to go to his own room. By the door Helen caught him and reached up to his shoulders.

Her body shook, for Lyle had never given her anything profound or warm. The veneer cracked on her mouth. He saw that she was as lonely and outlandish and simple as a cactus. Her kisses, to which he couldn’t respond, searched all over his face.

—But you need a woman, Hal, she said. You need love because you’re afraid of life. . . . You think you’re subscribing to ideals of nobility and selfishness. They don’t exist any more . . . if they ever did. People have become petty and horrid . . . if they ever were anything else. . . . This is the age of toothbrushes and war bonds and depilatories. Shakespeare and Dostoievsky are dead . . . spirituality was something to console people when they couldn’t buy medicine and life insurance. . . . If you don’t stop chasing shadows, you’ll go nuts. You’re far enough out of this world as it is. Very few can still get to you. I can . . . imagine that I love you.

—All right then, I do, she said. Do you think of yourself as some redeemer? If one were to show up in this day and age, he’d be crucified by more horrible methods than Pontius Pilate ever dreamed of. . . . Let go of yourself, for God’s sake. . . . You’re in a bad way.

He pulled himself from Helen’s arms and shut the door in her face. In his own room he looked again at himself in the mirror— the bright bar, the striped shield on his left collar. All he needed was an eagle to perch on his head. He took off his clothes slowly and lay down naked on his bed. His body stretched along under the sheets like a lank and flexible flagpole.

Then there came upon him the old vertigo of his childhood. Noises sounded ominous in his ears. The very air became a maelstrom of fear to suck him down. Even the whispering of his hair on the pillow promised a menace and a shudder too dark to contemplate. The final stage in the attack was that the darkened room shot backwards in his vision to one-quarter its size, as though he were looking through reversed binoculars. The chair by his bed was a piece of furniture for a doll’s house. Hal lay and trembled and tried to pray in the soft dialect of his mother.

While waiting for orders to sail from the New York port of embarkation, he worked at Brooklyn Army Base. But the eight hours of toil inside the area guarded by glistening MP’s was only a hiatus to his nights. He simply did what he had been taught to do at OCS and waited till 1630 hours, when he would slip by the white-leggined sentinels and take the subway from Brooklyn to Times Square.

Sundown was for him a time of passionate questing. After dark New York opened up like a sticky lily. He courted every stamen and pistil of this flower; he knew it with the loving horror of a naturalist who has succeeded in evolving a frightful fern which he keeps and fondles by moonlight. So after dark Hal could be seen slipping through avenues and squares of New York City from Central Park to Greenwich Village.

He was seeking something missing in himself, something like his own double, which would confront him with the image of something positive. He was always alone. He would listen to people at the Astor, at One Fifth Avenue, at little beer joints off the Bowery. They all had much to say, as most people have, and Hal would bend over them listening and smiling his shy brilliant smile and encouraging them to pour out everything that was in them. He’d drink two to their every one. Then he’d slide away from them and go out into the summer night. For it was the old story of his life: everyone discovered that Hal understood him and was elated, the way a man is when he buys a perfect mirror at an auction.

Hal usually wound up drinking beer and sucking pickled eggs in flyblown bars of the Village. Then he’d walk about from four o’clock in the morning until it was time to return to Brooklyn Army Base. Just before dawn in Brooklyn the air was sweetish with baker’s buns and the sweet brown smell of roasting coffee.

One day in July, 1943, Hal received ten mimeographed copies of a movement order by which he was assigned to permanent overseas station By Order of the Secretary of War. He looked at the purple dittoes of the adjutant general’s seal and signature, and something cool slithered in his spinal column. So he made his will on the quiet blank form, increased his insurance, and decided to make up his differences with his mother. It was a month now, this their latest spell of ignoring each other. She would have spent that month in her flat at Bayonne, sending out her mind in panic over the universe, and having it return to her lap like a whimpering pigeon. Two months earlier she’d been toying with the Catholic Church. This month she’d be convinced that Basic English was the solution to the world’s problems—and hers.

He left Pennsylvania Station for Bayonne. At first he thought he might go carrying his new carbine so that his mother could see the facts for herself when she opened her door. But then, she had a Viennese instinct for disaster, by her unaided imagination. He knew his father would still be at the office. So he went directly to the apartment, having armed himself with a bunch of jonquils and sweet peas at a corner florist’s. He rang the bell, let out a sigh, and drew himself up to his six feet two.

His mother was wearing her housecoat as she answered the door. She’d always wanted him to call her Eugenie, but her name somehow never reached his lips—only her function. She’d once been beautiful but the weight of his father’s body and of his father’s personality gave her the appearance now of a lily snapped in a press. Eugenie was so tiny that Hal wondered how anyone as big as himself could have come out of her. He kissed her cheek and then her hands, which she most often wore folded on her breast. This gave her an attitude of a piety counterfeiting her inner resignation, because no other pose availed her anything. He knew she hadn’t nursed a hope since he’d left her breast.

—Mother, Hal said, I’m going overseas. You know we aren’t allowed to tell exactly when.

—And I had a feeling you would come today, she said. Traces of her Viennese dialect still remained.

She relieved him shyly of his flowers and led him into the parlor. She had a Jacobean piano covered with shawls, and pictures of himself at all ages on the shawls. She never opened the piano when she played Grieg songs and Strauss waltzes, so her music whimpered like her voice. By the tea caddy he observed a pot and two cups.

Her eyes floated before him like flowers in oriental rice paintings. She tucked up her little feet under her housecoat and pulled on the cigarette he offered her. The loose bracelets by her wrists tinkled to her elbow.

—I’d like a shot with my tea, Hal said turning to his father’s cupboard. How’s Dad?

—It’s his ulcers again. And he has eight new deals . . . is that the word? . . . and talks with his mouth full at table.

Hal stirred whisky into his tea. There was a secret odor of his father’s tobacco through the flat. He remembered that same whiff when he used to reach up to his father’s knees and cry; that same bittersweet pungency that seeped under the door of his parents’ room when they lay awake after midnight and shouted at one another about the rent and the difficulties of the English language. Hal’s father’s tobacco was Hal’s father, gross and mordant. Even now he saw the saliva bubbling about his father’s mouth as he smoked his after-dinner cigar. He saw the jut of his father’s stomach under those rich pencil-striped vests; he heard that grating voice scolding in his ears:

—He talks much about you lately, Eugenie was saying, stirring her tea with a waferlike spoon. Oh how proud he was of your commission! The other night he had some people in to supper. . . . He said that the reason why his son was not here was because you couldn’t leave Fort Hamilton.

—He never thought he’d have a second lieutenant in the family. He thinks this is his reward for making me play basketball at the Y. He’s made an American man of me finally . . . one that a stockbroker needn’t be ashamed of.

—If you could leave a picture of yourself in your uniform . . . with your visored cap and green blouse . . . I think it would please him.

The whisky gave him an almost instantaneous lift. He got up and walked to the bookcases. Eugenie belonged to all the monthly book clubs and got limp boxed Shakespeare and classics with ornate covers and illustrations. His father read only the papers. His mother had even taken a subscription to the Sunday afternoon concerts at Carnegie Hall. She’d been seen entering the auditorium fearfully in her pince-nez and studying her program notes in the intermission. She was always alone. He’d heard too that she used to jump out of her seat at the Beethoven sforzandi. And Hal remembered her too when they still lived in the Village, sliding through the streets with her shopping reticule, out of reach of the gangs playing baseball up the alleys. In those days she still spoke German, and she seemed to hold for support to the tenement walls as she walked along. Sometimes she would take aside a crying Italian child and slip it a piece of candy. . . .

After Hal had walked around the room once, it seemed to him that his father was following him, telling him not to break anything because it cost dear. His father’s conversations had always been inventories of prices, admonitions of what boys not to speak to at school, and lectures about young men who’d Got Ahead in America. They’d never once talked to one another.

Hal sat down beside his mother on the couch and reached for her hand. A smile came to her lips as though there were some stricture in her left breast that made her catch her breath. And he remembered that when his father had first started to make money, she’d taken himself for little treats to the movies—uptown. And coming home in a wild enthusiasm she’d sometimes suggested that they splurge and take a taxi. Settling back in the seat with her eyes closed, she’d nearly always reached over for his hand. She used to run her fingers along the hair on his wrists. So this was the first time Hal had ever actively caressed his mother, other than in greeting or in parting. . . .

—I have a feeling, he said smiling and forcing a bubble into his voice, that I’ll see Vienna before the war is over. . . . What would you like from there, Mother?

—You must just write and tell me how the city is . . . a long long letter on how the people are dressed. You can write such good letters.

If he felt an agony of emptiness when he walked about the outside world, looking handsome and omniscient, Hal knew only a flatulence in his own home. He’d rarely come there since he’d left CCNY and had gone to work for Standard Oil in Bayonne. And every time he entered this apartment, he seemed to run square into the big stomach of his father. His father’s hats always bulked on the rack. And once having fought through his father’s abdomen, he’d meet another image bumbling around the walls by that candle-light that Eugenie always preferred to electricity. It was a moth with a woman’s face. It flew around his head in tenderness and terror, beating its own antennae with its wings. Often it would swoop at him and he would recoil in childish horror, to discover then that the moth was at the other side of the room, thrashing against the wallpaper. . . .

His mother held tightly to his hand. Her fingers went tentatively a little way up his wrist.

—I have never seen you look so hübsch, she said. There’s something in your face that’s improved by the severity of the uniform.

He felt sorry he’d said it and took away his hand as softly as he knew how and went and poured himself some more of his father’s whisky.

—You’ll stay to dinner? she asked. When something told me you were coming, I went wild with all my red points. Mr. Liedermann is very good to me at the market.

—I shouldn’t even have left Fort Hamilton, he said, to come here. We’re what they call alerted. . . . I can’t stay, Mother.

The cruelty that was forever rising between them strangled him. They were constantly groping toward one another. But everything they could say had a smothered overtone of: Oh, what’s the use? We were together for nine months, and we never can be that close again. . . .

Hal watched her from the doorway. It was the last musical comedy she’d seen before leaving Vienna. Eugenie’s back was toward him. And remembering that her eyes were shut while she played, Hal decided that he’d go now. He knew that was the way she expected it to be.

Leaving New York harbor and easing out to sea in blackout to join the convoy, Hal had a sense of something being lifted from him, as though his umbilical cord were cut anew. He seemed at last a free agent, responsible to no one. He put out his cigarette and went up on deck. The East River had a slow humming in it. He could smell the oil on the water and hear the fumbling of the tugs. He looked up at the stars and leaned his head against a davit. The ship trembled under him, but he couldn’t see the water that buoyed her up. Atavistically he felt that he must have experienced this same security and warmth when he lay on his mother’s lap, when thinking was only a registering on his brain of the first impressions of his five senses. Now this concept of ocean made his mind go faint and blank in annihilation, the concept of the mother.

He felt his long thick thighs against the railing of the ship, twined about the metal in loving support. And he thought about the current of his life, which had not yet been quickened thirty years earlier. He thought, This world and this sea aren’t so very much bigger than I. They’re all inside this head of mine. They didn’t exist thirty years ago when I was not. And some time in the future they’ll all go out again for me, like a moving picture when the arc lamp fails. . . . I can have a profounder influence on my world than I have hitherto had. Since the whole thing is nothing but a shadow in my brain, there must be some secret how I can make the reflections dance the way I want them to. . . . I should like to meet the Man with the flashlight. . . .

He spent the endless days in the convoy reading and taking sun-baths on the officers’ deck. His body got to be the smoky hue of coffee except for the small white circles around his eyes where he wore his sunglasses. Hourly changing the position of his body as he sprawled on his GI blanket stenciled with his name and serial number, Hal read and read the New Testament, especially the Gospel of Saint John. From this evangelist he got the taste of a bright sweet fruit such as he’d never experienced from allowing anybody to make love to him. And at nights he began to dream of a love not to be found in the bodies of men or women, but a love going forth from his own mind to all the human beings in the world, since actually they existed only in himself. For him to refuse to love them would be as cruel as if God were to shut off the sun and sit back to watch the results. To Hal in his sleep there came often a line that would cause him to start up from the bed in his stateroom, tingling with sweat as when he was fourteen:

One Sunday in the middle of the Atlantic the transport chaplain took to his bunk with a bout of seasickness. The merchant marine master of the ship canvassed all the officers aboard for a volunteer to conduct church service. Hal heard his own voice lifted. So on a foredeck while the gun crew looked down from their nest Hal addressed several hundred GI’s and officers who had nothing else to do but come to church. They sat around him on the tarpaulins in a big half-circle with their hands clasping their ankles.

He was nervous and exalted as he talked. He put his hands behind his back and paced about in a tiny ring. Often he had to lift his voice because a starboard wind kept blowing his words out into the Atlantic. Everyone was keyed up because the convoy had been tacking all night long. The escort destroyers had been zigzagging, and the depth charges had been thudding below them. They hadn’t slept without their life preservers. Hal spoke to them of the power of prayer and of the mind of God, in which everything is beautifully ordered (even if it wasn’t to them), and the delicate discriminations God made between a sparrow’s falling in the air and an airplane’s diving to the ground. He told them that each had a little of God in them, and how some, by using that inkling of something beyond them as a firefly to guide them, got closer to God than others did. Finally he spoke of the mystery of death, of how we were all afraid of it instead of being resigned to it.

—Imagine, Hal said, and he found that his voice was choked, that you’re all just drops of rain. I know you all think you’re pretty wonderful. But a drop of water isn’t much, is it? But maybe a drop of water has its thoughts too. The important thing (and he waved his hand toward the plunging bow of the ship) is the sea itself. It’s just as easy to die as to be born. . . .

After his sermon he left them quickly, for he’d moved himself farther than he’d intended. He couldn’t bear to face anyone. He walked swiftly to the open space below the bridge and watched the water swell and scud under the bow. Presently someone came and stood beside him.

—Thank you, suh, for that sweet message from the Spirit. Just as movin as any ah ever got at revival meetins in Shelby, South Calina.

It was a small freckled pfc, wearing his helmet liner against the sun. He kept peering at Hal and running his tongue over his goat-teeth, a rich mocha from chewing tobacco.

—Well now, that’s sin, the boy said winking and seeming to be fighting a temptation to nudge an officer. You git you there some of that mountain dew and then you git you a nigger gal, and fore you know it, you have to confess Jesus Christ as your savior. . . . When ah’m thirty ah too am gonna git saved by confessin Jesus Christ as mah savior. Jest now ah figure ah’m a lost sinner. But ah read a piece in mah Bahble every night.

The boy snapped out of his dream of equality between their ranks and saluted him. Something told Hal that he should have stayed with this boy. Just a little longer.

After noon chow he found the bulkhead to the engine room open and went down the flights of stairs cutting through the runways on the sides of the amphitheater compartment in the center of the ship. When he reached the Diesel engines, he leaned on the railing to watch the walking beams pump and the pistons slash through the air with their slow murderous fists. They were oiled and burnished. The heat of the engine room was fierce. Hal wondered if great American industrialists went to a hell like this. Through the tube under his feet passed the thick axle that turned the ship’s screw in the water outside. He felt faint from the temperature and began to wonder if the engines that man had made caused God any jealousy.

A finger made a hole in his back, so he turned to face the engineer officer wearing oil-spotted blue dungarees. He was young and affected a certain brusqueness, perhaps to offset the lush nude tattooed on his chest.

—What a character to be talking about God, the engineer said. You make me laugh. If I looked like you, my Polish pig at Newport News wouldn’t be ditching me every time she gets drunk. I buy her furs and I buy her flowers. I buy sateen-covered chairs for her dive. And what for? So she can hold open house while I’m at sea and give away for nothing what I’m paying for. . . . Perhaps you can tell me what I ought to do, Mr. Anthony.

This engineer had cold Swedish eyes that pierced nonsense. He played the game his own way. He showed Hal the engines and the salt water purifiers and the boilers, touching each fondly with his red arms. And Hal thought that the sea gave men a certain immediacy to reality and an insight. This was the reason for the wisdom all sailors had. They were more and less than other human beings. They could laugh at the woman in whose arms they were lying, and they laughed at all earth-rooted men secretly, but with great good humor, pitying them a little, the way one pities those who’ve never been able to learn to walk.

—Engines, Hal said, wondering if it would get a laugh, give me more of a feeling of power than I get from the men who made them.

—You talk like I do when I get rummed up. . . . You’re slightly off the beam, but I like you. And I can size up my man, don’t think I can’t. . . . Say, why don’t you come up and live with me for the trip? I got an empty bunk. And you know goddam well that the merchant marine lives better than you poor doughfeet below deck. You wouldn’t have to eat Spam three times a day. And I got beaucoup rye. . . . Whaddya say?

—I’ve never learned to live with anyone, Hal said. I’d be a disappointment to you. I have my moods. I get ornery.

—Well, so do I, the engineer said, taking hold of Hal’s arm. There was a kindness and a disinterestedness in his squeeze. When we get ornery, we could bat the hell outa one another. Do us both good. . . . Whaddya say?

—Maybe it would be better if we met on deck at night and talked once in a while. You see, I keep telling myself I need one close friend. But I know I never can have one.

One midnight he stood on the officers’ boat deck and watched small lightnings play on the horizon. Every fifteen minutes he’d duck inside the blackout curtain and have a cigarette. The thunder had a dull unsatisfied rumble. And certain things had come clear in his mind after thinking all afternoon. He had a tempo different from anyone else’s in this world—whether faster or slower he didn’t know. And all his current was imprisoned in himself in insulation of his own making. He’d never be able to make contact with people on their own grounds because he couldn’t accept those conventions of timing and pacing that made conversations possible. Only in moments did his spirit reach out to others’ like a flash of lightning. For the rest he was destined to be alone, like a twin whose double has died at birth. . . .

The antiaircraft guns on the turrets opened up with a spit of tracers, sending ribbons out into the sky. A rain began to fall. Lightnings soft and cozy began to play about the ship’s funnels. It occurred to him that maybe no one else on earth heard this thunderstorm except himself. In the flashes between the tracer anti-aircraft and the streaks of summer lightning he could see the other ships in the convoy rolling over the horizon. Nevertheless they seemed sure of their own reeling fates, like drunken people on a nerry-go-round. And then Hal had an intuition that in these muddy heavens a bolt was being prepared especially for him. He dropped to his knees by the railing, frightened and alone.

In the gummy city of Oran he was visited with something that in the old days at CCNY would have sent him to a smawt psychology student. It began as a malaise, a feeling that his heart had been broken crossing the Atlantic. He’d thought to carry his soul intact out of the States, but he seemed to have dropped a piece somewhere, possibly in the ocean. He would wake in the mornings with a feeling of the most intense displacement. He didn’t know where he was or why he was here. Something in him seemed to be chasing another part. Often this hunt between sections of himself became so vicious that he had to put his head between his hands, as a man with a hangover expects his heart to stop in the very next moment, and prays for even the distraction of a bowel movement.

Or at the beach of Ain El Turk, lying in the sun on his days off, drinking Grand Marc, Hal would look anxiously at the sky with the presentiment that some vulture was up there wheeling over him. These anxieties he sought to escape by being with his men as much as possible and seeking to trace his own uneasiness in his GI’s. But they only laughed among themselves and got drunk and went AWOL and picked up diseases from the women of Oran.

One day in an attempt to uncoil himself from his paralysis, Hal asked to be made officer of the day. There was to be a formal guard mount in the Place. It was the first time in the history of the American Army that a second lieutenant had requested a detail as officer of the day. A French band played two national anthems. Hal, standing in the Oran sunset by the flagpole, wondered if his leggins were tight, whether the bar of paper from an Old Gold package he’d pasted on his helmet liner had slipped off. He did a smart about-face and walked to the opened ranks to inspect their pieces. He had a pressing feeling in his head and his heart beat so that he thought he was going to fall on his face in the loose sand of the parade ground. The guard for the evening was composed of Oran MP’s, tough and cynical, because they’d been wounded in Tunisia. But instead of being sent home they found themselves patrolling the streets of Oran and arresting GI’s with loose buttons. In between these functions the MP’s operated and promoted with the bars and the ladies of the evening, arresting them or possessing them as the mood struck them. This was Hal’s guard. Yet in formation they were magnificent, nazi-looking. Their eyes glittered snake-like under their varnished liners. Their brass and weapons and cartridge belts were impeccable.

Hal stepped up to the flawless files, knowing that though they kept their eyes front they were appraising him and sniggering to themselves. He hadn’t been in Tunisia or in the landing on Gela. He was just a base section chickenshit second looie. He heard the breathing of each man as he inspected him up and down, cracking the rifle as he snatched it from each. By the second file he all but slipped in the sand as he did his right face. But he got through the whole guard without a hitch. As he was grabbing for the rifle of the last sentinel, he dropped it. He had to stoop over and pick it up. He tilted it and peeped down the bore.

—Wasn’t before you dropped it, sir, the man answered, never flicking his eyes from attention.

Somehow Hal got through with the guard mount, the closing of the ranks, the lowering of the flag. While the bugler blew retreat and Hal stood at parade rest, he felt their eyes and the setting Oran sun gouging at his back. He posted his first relief and reported to the adjutant, asking to be relieved as OD because he wasn’t well. He was shaking so that he had to wedge his knees together as he stood at attention before the adjutant.

—Lieutenant, said the adjutant, it isn’t good policy to drink in hot weather, especially just before you have a guard mount.

—Then use your mosquito netting and take your atabrine, hear? . . . You’re relieved as officer of the day.

Hal saluted and did an about-face. His heart was going like his knees. The adjutant must have heard it. He didn’t bother with chow. But when he’d removed his side arms and leggins and had put on fresh suntans because the leggins had creased the others, he went at once to the officers’ club, stood at the end of the bar, and ordered one brandy and soda after another. Already in the lounge were majors with nurses or with French WAC’s of the Corps Féminin Auxiliaire de l’Air.

For some time now Hal had been noting in himself symptoms unknown to himself in the bars of New York, where he used to stand for hours alone, listening and appraising and throwing down the drinks. It had always been the same with him in bars: the joe next to him struck up a conversation. But in the bars of Oran some gap had arisen between him and all other human beings. It seemed to him that anything anybody else had to say was too prosaic, too factual, or too obvious to the situation. Like a bad exposition at the beginning of a play. It amazed and horrified him how people could talk for ten minutes on such subjects as how they couldn’t get the cigarette brand they wanted at the PX; what they said to their first sergeant; or the Oranaise who wouldn’t. Hal’s mind had become like an idling motor; he could foretell what they’d say ten minutes before they said it. In everything they wished to communicate there was something like a stale joke. And Hal found it difficult, after a few drinks, to look them straight in the eye. There was some vast and deadly scheme in which they were all working; only they didn’t know it.

Hal himself had an inkling of what was upsetting him. Casting about for a rational explanation of why he felt so odd in Oran, he decided it was because the war was beginning to seep into his bones. This war was the fault of everybody, himself included. Therefore he couldn’t bear to hear them jabbering at him, opaque to another reality more bitter than their own. They were enmeshed in their own tyranny of fact, insensitive to the dreadfulness of their own natures and to the position in which they happened to be—squirrels of fate in a slimy North African town, having the time of their lives. And Hal wondered if all the Americans rolling in the materialism of the base sections were living like bloodsuckers off the deaths of those at the front, which were their only excuse for being here at all. And gradually, pondering on his new inability to come to grips with people in their domain of PX rations, office hours, and no mail from home, Hal found himself swimming in a wild and lonesome lake of semantic irrelevance. Nothing made any more sense to him. There was nothing anybody could say to him to lift the weight of unreality that was crushing him. He felt like a sleepwalker among all these grimacing marionettes. He wondered if overseas in wartime there might be some dark vortex of death that sucked back from Salerno even to the city of Oran. His desire was to tear himself away from all who tried to monopolize his ear. Something in him kept saying, Come away, dear. Your place isn’t here. . . . But where?

By evening, with no dinner in his stomach, Hal was still at the end of the bar. He was slightly stupefied. The brandy of North Africa didn’t give him the compassionate calm that he got from the rye of the States. It was only a poison that anesthetized whatever censor was in his mind. In the mist of the fumes of Grand Marc things crawled up through a trap door in his brain. They were nameless little incubi with no bodies or faces, but they scuttled around inside his head squeaking in furry voices of doubt and doom. They played with one another like a litter of kittens, but it was the calculated play of children putting on a show for their parents. Hal knew that actually they were playing with him—that each of these vague animals was himself in pieces.

The bar filled up with officers and nurses and Red Cross girls. They wedged themselves into their niches and attempted to impinge their private worlds on one another. By now Hal knew also all the solitary drinkers of Oran. But if they looked his way or motioned to him to join them (he’d been father confessor to them all), he’d study his glass or look at the wall. Others would immerse themselves sufficiently to float what they imagined were their troubles, then they’d forage about the club for someone to talk to, carrying their individual obsessions in their arms like abortions being hustled to a sewer. Only Hal had no particular release. Alcohol simply shut tighter the gates of his prison, spraying the air of his jail with something deathly sweet. He saw himself beating about in the fumes and fanning, trying to create air where none was.

A figure slipped into the empty place at the bar on his left. He didn’t look, as he used once to turn welcomingly to newcomers in New York, as though they were keeping an appointment with him. He merely ordered another drink. But straightway he was aware of a seepage between himself and whoever stood next to him. It was as though they’d already entered into conversation. The elbow touching his own on the bar was eloquent though motionless. At last Hal couldn’t stand the atmosphere any longer. He narrowed his eyes and slowly turned his head to look out over the club terrace.

At his left was a parachute captain who seemed to be looking through him. Apparently he too had been waiting till the psychic charges he’d been hurling at Hal would energize him into turning, as the sun eggs on a sunflower. The captain was shorter than Hal and slighter. He had a tension as exquisite as the fake repose of Greek athletes in marble. His jet hair was so tightly curled that it had an energy all its own. He was dressed in combat fashion. His sleeves were halfway up his elbows. He wore no tie. The hair grew up his throat and on his neat tight arms. His eyes were set at a slant, and his teeth were white and daggerlike. He seemed a monarch of some race of cats.

—Look at them, will you? he said to Hal, as though they were resuming a conversation.

The parachute captain put one of his boots on the brass rail and kicked it. Then with a lazy tension he made a gesture including all the other people leaning on the bar:

—This race of straphangers and human adding machines. . . . Look at the faces of those nurses. Sleek inanity sleepwalking in a beauty parlor. Look at the paunches on those majors. . . .

His vituperation came out slowly, with the detailed passion of an expert at murder.

—You don’t like Americans? Hal said. He was fascinated by the green eyes and by the parachute insignia, wings suspended like a bat’s at dusk.

—Who does, except themselves? Automatons from the world’s greatest factory. . . . They have no souls, you see . . . only the ability to add up to one million. Did you ever hear them try to carry on a sensible conversation? . . . Oh, they’ve got quite an ingenious system of government, I grant you. But none of them gives a damn about it except when it gets them into a war. . . . They’ve got less maturity or individuality than any other people in the world. Poetry and music to them—why they’re deaf to anything that isn’t sold by an advertising agency. . . . They don’t know how to treat other human beings. With all their screaming about democracy, none of them has the remotest conception of human dignity. . . . Listen to the sounds that Negro band is making. That’s their American music. Sexual moans and thumps. . . . They don’t know how to make love to a woman, and all their hatreds are between football teams or states of the same Union or for people they don’t understand. Victims of the mob spirit and regimentation. . . . They’ve never really suffered. But when they get the first twinge of toothache of the soul, they start feeling sorry for themselves instead of learning any wisdom from pain.

—Truth is always treasonous, the captain said, clicking his glass with a soft ferocity on the bar. And now these poor dears are involved in a war. This war is simply the largest mass murder in history. Theirs is the only country that has enough food and gasoline and raw materials. So they’re expending these like mad to wipe out the others in the world who’d like a cut of their riches. In order to preserve their standard of living for a few more years, they’ve dreamed up ideologies. Or their big business has. So they’re at war with nearly everybody else in the world. The rest of the world hates Americans because they’re so crude and stupid and unimaginative. . . . They will win this war. They’ll reduce Europe to a state of fifteen hundred years ago. Then their businessmen and their alphabetical bureaucracies will go into the shambles of Milan, Berlin, and Tokyo and open up new plants. . . . International carpetbaggers. . . . Millions of human beings will be dead, and most of the human feelings will be dead forever. . . . Hurray for our side. . . . We’re destroying all the new ideas and all the little men of the world to make way for our mass production and our mass thinking and our mass entertainment. Then we can go back to our United States, that green little island in the midst of a smoking world. Then we can kill all the Negroes and the Jews. Then we’ll start on Russia.

—Me? the captain said. I’m the most optimistic man in the world. I see what is happening to the human race. It gets worse all the time. . . . What an obscene comedy.

The parachute captain had an almost effete way of speaking, like poets in the Village. This contrasted with his agile body and the violence of his passion.

—I am buried near Taormina on the island of Sicily. I wish I had a few flowers on my grave. . . . When I was alive, I loved flowers.

Afterwards Hal often thought of the parachute captain. His life in Oran became a round in which he did his work, enclosed in himself. He made no further attempt to enter into the lives of others. Nor did he visit any army psychiatrists. He knew he’d arrived already at a point where no one schooled in Freud or Jung could help him, any more than a bespectacled young psychiatrist from CCNY could have helped Jesus Christ in the Garden by psychoanalyzing the bloody sweat.

Nevertheless Hal went at the problem with a simplicity finer than any with which he’d ever attacked the enigma of his life heretofore. He went on the wagon from January to July of 1944. Stopping his drinking had no particular effect on him for better or for worse. He smoked a little less, and the evenings dragged more That heightened awareness of his was still with him. After a deep night’s sleep, sweltering under his mosquito netting, he could never be sure whether he’d really slept at all. He seemed merely to blank out for eight hours. Awaking, he was neither better rested nor less fatigued than when he went to bed.

He knew no French, for some block arose in his mind whenever he tried to learn a Romance language. Yet he made the acquaintance of an Oranaise who worked in the officers’ PX. This girl never forced an issue. She was as cool as a mannequin. From some secret source of supply she had a jeep—she’d been loved by a brigadier general in the ATC, by an American ensign, and by a French colonel from Sidi-Bel-Abbes. When Hal’s work was finished, she’d meet him with her jeep and relinquish the wheel to him. On these outings she wore polaroid glasses, wedgies, and a blue silk bandanna about her hair. Unlike most French girls she seldom spoke; and when she used her French on him, she pantomimed everything without a trace of nervousness. Evenings, he’d stay at her apartment and sit drinking fruit juice while she played “Tristesse” on her piano.

He often slept on the couch in her apartment. Sometimes at sunrise she’d come to his side in her blue kimono. She’d sit on his couch and watch while he passed without a jar from the depths of his sleep into full wakefulness. Then she’d take his hand. Sometimes she kissed his wrists or the lobes of his ears.

In a sense he was happier with Jeanne than he’d ever been. She had all his sensibilities plus a fortitude he didn’t own. She was the first with whom he had the certainty that anything he needed would be found in her, and with an abundance that would stop flowing only with her death. Jeanne was like a tube reaching into eternity that sucked up a grace of oxygen to one asphyxiating. She never seemed much moved by anything except when he took her hand or when she read aloud to him from the Jour de Colère of Pierre Emanuel. Hal caught very little of this poem. But often he thought that his only salvation would be to marry Jeanne. For she had that awareness and resignation of spirit that has sipped everything lovely in life, letting such values be her guide through some mortal experience that has purged her. The focus of her compassion was in her breasts, geometric as cones. Her nipples seemed to see.

In June, 1944, when Jeanne had brought him to a tranquillity like a magnetic field pointing all one way, she left him to visit her mother in Casablanca for a month. When he drove her to the station in Oran, he knew and she knew that they’d never see each other again. It was terminating in the silvery casualness with which it had begun. As she mounted the battered wagon-lit, she turned back and kissed him on the forehead, saying:

—Et je dis, en quittant tes charmes,

Sans larmes:

Adieu! . . .

The cadence of her voice told him what they were both thinking, for three days her spirit remained with him intact. He continued to sleep at her empty apartment, to which she’d left him the key. But on the fourth day his old sickness seized him with redoubled violence, as though Jeanne’s nursing had only caused its virus to become dormant. Hal now couldn’t bear the company of other Americans at all, particularly of his brother officers. It was difficult for him to sit still in one place without chain-smoking to distract himself from a compulsion to keep in constant motion. He couldn’t look anybody in the face. While giving orders to his GI’s, he’d walk up and down his office wringing his hands and feigning to concentrate. Sometimes it took every gram of control to keep from telling his first sergeant to please go away and let him alone. And he decided he’d have to fall off the wagon because at least having a glass of something numbing in his hand gave him an excuse for remaining stationary in one spot. When these fits were at their height, Hal had a feeling as though he’d like to dash the whole twenty-five thousand miles encircling the world. Then he’d come back to his point of departure and find himself standing there leering and saying, Welcome home, old goon. . . .

He meditated putting in for a transfer to Casablanca to be near Jeanne. But he knew and she knew that she’d done everything in her power for him, that her therapy was only a breathing spell in the denouement. Even now at the Hôtel Anfa or at Villa Moss she’d be allowing someone else to possess her cool body, the while she covered her eyes and thought of Hal and shook her head sadly. There’d been nothing cloying in her pity for him. But what Jeanne had given him was a sip of life, for which he had no thirst. He’d read enough romances to know that he’d already entered, through no fault or desire of his own, into league with those who are on the other side of the looking glass.

He got a five days’ leave forced on him, for his CO had noticed his removed emotional state and had chalked it up to overseas blues. He booked passage on a plane to Cairo and stopped off in Algiers, both to see the city and to renew the acquaintance of some of his friends from OCS. He left the plane at Maison Blanche and hitchhiked into Algiers. It lay before him in the July afternoon, sprawled on its hillside like the segment of an amphitheater. Dozens of barrage balloons floated above the harbor like silver sausages on a blue plate.

In the offices of AFHQ Hal sat on his friends’ desks and cocked a critical eye to see whether possibly some new insight or mercy had been born in them as a result of being overseas and brooding on the war. They cursed the Ayrabs and said that the French were playing us for all they could get. All their meannesses, latent in the States, had only been crystallized by a year in Africa.

So Hal declined their offers to dinner at a dozen sumptuous messes and went out to walk along the Rue d’Isly. There were more British than Americans in evidence, clumping along in their boots and gaiters and shorts. And at 1800 these British all left the streets for a few minutes to put on their long trousers.

On a ramp near the Hôtel Aletti Hal found a transient officers’ mess. The meal was good. Discovering that he could buy a bottle of wine, he fell off the wagon. Along with the brown pork chops and the greenery on his plate the strong white wine began to work upon him. He knew what was coming—the old desolating anxiety and heartache stirred in his bowels. He knew he oughtn’t to finish the whole bottle, but he did and lit a cigarette.

The P/W lieutenant in charge of the mess had been leaning against a column and looking at Hal with a luminous interest. This Italian resembled a little the parachute captain, but there was also in his brown triangular face a print of the wildness of Reggio Calabria. He treated his waiters with a gentleness, unlike the domineering of the Italian officers over their soldati in the P/W enclosures around Oran. This Italian lieutenant knew some secret of relaxation, for he nestled his thick hair indolently against the column and crossed his bare legs. He was wearing his old Italian khaki shorts, but his shirt was American suntan P/W issue, with stars attached to the tabs of his open collar.

Finally Hal lit another cigarette and held one out to the P/W lieutenant. The Italian bounded toward him as though he’d been preparing this movement for the past five minutes. The flare from Hal’s cigarette lighter threw into relief the brown eyes and the sleek head. The Italian took a puff and came to attention.

—Grazie tanto. . . . Lei mi sembra così gentile. . . . Se tutti fossero come Lei.

The Italian kept at rigid attention by Hal’s table. Now it was hard enough for Hal to keep up any intercourse with people whose language he could understand. Therefore a huge tension reared inside him when he knew he couldn’t get a word across to the P/W lieutenant. Hal wasn’t one of those extroverts who could shout in English at someone ignorant of the language, and use violent gestures, hoping thereby to force some semantic rapport. Nevertheless he motioned the Italian to sit down opposite him. The lieutenant in his turn motioned one of the waiters to bring another dish of ice cream. Hal had to eat it. The ice cream didn’t belong to the Italian, but there was a miraculous graciousness in his bounty as he smiled his melting smile and talked a soft stream of compliments of which Hal didn’t understand a word. Yet it wasn’t so difficult as he’d feared. He didn’t have to cope with the Italian. When an American started to talk, Hal always felt like asking him to please shut up. But there was nothing offensive about this elegant little man. Perhaps he was lonely after thirteen months of imprisonment. Perhaps Italians, being gregarious and rhetorical, became even more melancholy than British and Americans.

—Mi permetta, signor tenente. Mi chiamo Scipione. E Lei non può immaginare quanto mi piacerebbe avere un amico sincero. Beh . . .

—If I were going to be in Algiers long, Hal said, I could distract myself by teaching you English. I’d like to do something for someone.

—Quindi, the P/W lieutenant said. He spread his hands in a deprecating shrug as though to say that their friendship was already a sealed testament. Ho una bellissima stanza qui in un albergo d’Algeri. . . . Sono tanto, tanto bravi con me gli americani.

—Sono quattordici mesi che non tocco una donna, Scipione said. Ho quasi perso il ricordo. Ma . . . cosa vuole? È il nostro destino.

Hal was aware of the official stand on fraternization with prisoners of war. But he waved for another bottle of wine.

—Caro tenente, mi dispiace. Ma la lunga prigionia mi ha rovinato lo stomaco. Il vino non lo posso più bere.

—In short, Hal said, you won’t drink with me. Lucky people. No rough edges in your relations with others to be lubricated with the grape. I envy you.

Rising abruptly from the table, he shook hands with the gleaming little officer. A look of sodden dismay and regret flooded the brown graceful face.

Though something told him not to act this way, he turned away with a surgical smile and went out into the city of Algiers. It was beginning to grow dark. He went and drank at the Center District Club, where Italian P/W dispensed a potent rum. At midnight he went walking along the Mediterranean and picked up a girl. But he discovered that the rum or his own mind had finally made him impotent. He lay beside her weeping and thinking through the old tale of Narcissus.

On July 26, 1944, Hal left Africa. He carried with him its silt, since no one can be on that continent long without forever being marked with something shadowy, brooding, and evanescent as the Ayrabs. He sailed on a British steamer onto which had been sardined the last remnants of Allied Force Headquarters. Everyone said that as soon as the ship sailed the French would clip the hair of all Algerian grisettes and machine-gun the Ayrabs to boost their own sagging prestige. They sailed on an old cruise steamer converted into a troopship. There were sumptuous meals, and the British were most obsequious, as though from some policy of gratitude for lend-lease. The passengers were a garish lot. They’d been swept out by the last broom to clean AFHQ: French captains involved in some misty liaison, American signal corps officers still carrying telephone wire and switchboards, and unidentified Desert Rats who’d been waiting transportation to the Italian front since the fall of Tunisia. Every night the ship blacked out, for who knew but what Jerry might fly down from southern France and bomb the daylights out of them? Reconnaissance planes had been over Algiers every night in July, 1944. If he bombed this troopship, some of the stoutest old lumber of the Allied armies would go to the bottom.

After Hal had swung his bedding roll into the hold, where he bunked in the five-high arrangement, he stood on deck and watched the lights of Algiers shimmer away from him. The barrage balloons still swung aloft in the moonlight. He was leaving Africa forever. There he’d spent almost a year of his life. Some of the aridity of the desert had been blown into him. There his personality had learned of limitless horizons and the sickening mirage of eternity. There he’d been sliced by the French perfection of detail, but soundlessly, as glass under water can be sheared by a scissors.

He tried to sleep a lot on the trip to Italy, but the hold was an inferno in the daytime. And at night the ventilators sounded as though his head were being held under water. So he spent the hours of light hiding under funnels on the deck. To read there were only improving books put in the ship’s library by British pietistic societies seeking to turn the traveler’s mind to his salvation. Most often Hal read the Gospel of Saint John.

He knew he was going to Italy, though security forbade his knowing where. The dopesters were all certain they’d land in Naples. And Hal, just after a rich English breakfast, when with coffee and a cigarette his spirits would rise to what would be normal in most men—numbness and resignation—used to wonder what he’d find in Italy. Perhaps his African sojourn had been a time of testing, a dark night of the soul. Perhaps in Italy he’d finally blossom out. But in his midnights he knew that Italy would be just one more new place to adjust himself to. And his powers of elasticity were now about as good as a rubber band’s that has lain in a sunny attic.

In those midnights when he couldn’t smoke on deck because of the blackout, Hal used to lean over the rail and glare at the phosphorescence of the Mediterranean. He’d seen it from Oran and Algiers. Now he was on it. The Romans rode on it, Shelley was drowned in it, Mussolini thought it was his sea. By sunlight it was an aching blue. At midnight it was just another body of water on which a ship could float. Sometimes, in the dark, anonymous figures in shorts came and stood beside him and shared his glances over the black water glowing in the wake of the ship. But even though they stood at his elbow, Hal made no attempt to enter their worlds, as he might once have tried to. Once, accosted by a word of greeting, he left the rail and descended swiftly into the sweltering hold. Anything was better than to be talked to. It was his achievement that in crossing the Mediterranean he never said a word to anyone except the gentle Cockney table waiters.

He saw the Cape of Bizerte shrouded in its ghostly triangle of sunset. He saw the island of Sicily jutting like a palace. Over those escarpments the spirit of the parachute captain flew. Perhaps at night his spry hairy figure sucked the blood of Sicilian children abroad late in the streets of Palermo.

With the dawn of the third morning he arose heavy and sweaty to find birds flapping alongside the ship and a hammerlike mass of ocher rock lifting out of the sea. He saw the eyeless sockets of caves in its sides and many pretty villas perched over crevasses.

—That’s Capri, someone said to someone else, accenting the last syllable. We’ll go and see the grottoes. The airplane drivers do a lot of their shacking there.

—That’s Naples, said the voice that accompanies all travelers. I’d know it from the postcards and the pitchers in the barbershops. Look, that’s Vesuvius. . . . Yessir, the old anthill’s smokin. Ain’t got over the shock of Anzio yet. . . . And see that big thing that looks like a country club at the top of the city? That’s Castel Sant’Elmo. . . . I been readin my guidebooks.

Hal thought, See Naples and die, wondering if he really might. It had the same open-fan formation, spread on the hills and sliding into the harbor, as Algiers. But it was vaster, Naples. Hal thought of the million lives squirming in that crowded dihedral; of the spray of dialect, of the typhus and DDT, of the flash of colors in the streets where boys slept on their bellies. An odor such as he’d never whiffed before was in the air, a stink and a perfume of dead flowers and human matter and the voice of Saint Thomas Aquinas at the University of Naples and Enrico Caruso dying at Somma Vesuviana and all the spaghetti in the universe. Already the tugs were slithering them into their berth like patient worried little daughters leading a blind old mother. And tiny fishing skiffs water-bugged it over the bay and careened alongside the British troopship. The fishermen showed their teeth and called out in an indescribable dialect.

Nearly all the berths in Naples harbor were twisted like the machinery in a petroleum yard after an explosion. Blasted and bombed cranes clawed wildly at the sky. A few ships still lay on their rusty sides. They looked like fat women who’d committed suicide in water too shallow to drown them. The acres of devastation along the water front were something Hal had never imagined, except in the rubbled castles of his own brain. For a mile along the port area the houses lay in their gray dust. Here and there a room stuck out of a second story where a bomb had split a house in half. Some were like dollhouses, in which a side can be hinged away for a cross section of all the rooms. Here was half a staircase leading nowhere, a flapping shred of blue wallpaper. In one blasted room the pictures still hung askew on the wall, waiting for some housewife to come and straighten them. The dock area and beyond it were mostly blocks of rubble and segments of balcony and girders thrusting out in pointless punctuation marks. In these ex-houses people had been born and loved and begotten and died. Eggs dropped from the sky had blown them apart.

Hal leaned his head against the railing. Now he understood the difference between being and not-being, there in the silence and the heat and the mess of Naples at high noon. The lovely, the cruel, and the opportunist were all entombed here in this shambles around the Bay of Naples. Himself, trembling and weary and reduced to a zero before the horror of it, saw the aftermath. He saw clearly what he’d been feeling dimly for twenty-nine years— that to human life and striving there’s no point whatever. That we are all of us bugs writhing under the eye of God, begging to be squashed. That as evidence of our mortality all we leave behind us is the green whey of a fly that is swatted to death.

There was a dispute over the order of debarkation. Finally the British infantry were marched off first. They were going straight to the front, so there was no need of their idling on deck. They clunked down the gangplank with their rifles.

Some of the Americans got bored watching the stream of Limeys debarking, so without authority they scaled the rope ladders, grabbing their barracks bags and bedding rolls and tearing across the hinged bridge to land. They pre-empted little Neapolitans to tote their luggage. These were dirtier and more vociferous than anything Hal had seen in Africa. He’d expected a Neapolitan would look like a chef in a Second Avenue restaurant, standing on the pier in an apron and mixing a dish of spaghetti and garlic.

—Eyeties, said the voice of the Eternal Tourist. Ginsoes. There they are. The Ayrabs of Europe.

The barracks bags and the bedding rolls were put into piles with armed guards. Nobody trusted the little Neapolitans. Hal heard explanations that one would be three miles away by the time he’d hoisted your baggage to his shoulder. He heard that if a jeep were left unattended in the streets of Naples, the Neapolitans would pick it clean to the chassis.

He obeyed all the landing instructions and found himself in a two-and-a-half-ton truck with all his baggage inviolate. The small Neapolitans swarmed all over the truck, not at all fazed by having empty or loaded carbines pointed at their heads. Over all the confusion at the port their dialect twittered and buzzed like a hive of hornets. Hal sensed that for all their dirt and thievery they also stole a zest and a passion for life.

He was driven through the port area, past tetrahedron air-raid shelters, past files of crumbled buildings, to his billet on Via Diaz. He lumped all his junk in the center of the floor and went out to see Naples. It was 1600 hours; the sun was like a white-hot thumb pressing on Castel Sant’Elmo.

In the first words he’d spoken in four days he inquired the way to the main drag. On Via Roma he found moving in both directions on both sidewalks of the narrow street a crowd thicker than anything in Times Square. The Allied soldiery all had a sour look. The Italians were selling cameos. They catered also to every bodily need in shrill idiomatic English. Pimping was the province of very tiny boys. Hal walked for five minutes and came at last to a spacious arcade opening off Via Roma. The crowd just pushed him there. It was like walking into a city within a city. There was no glass in the domed skylight. He asked an idling GI for information.

—This is the Galleria Umberto, lootenant, sir. Everybody in Naples comes here.

Hal looked around the Galleria as he walked through it. It was like all outdoors going on inside. He liked the feeling of being roofed over without any coffin sensation of claustrophobia. The Galleria was jammed with Allied soldiers and sailors, women sweeping, bars, art shops, small booths selling jewelry, columns, tattered flags and standards, lights suspended from the vaulted roof as though this were some vast basketball court.

—These people, he said to himself, are all in search of love. The love of God, of death, or of another human being. They’re all lost. That’s why they walk so aimlessly. They all feel here that the world isn’t big enough to hold them. And look at the design of this place. Like a huge cross laid on the ground, after the corpus is taken off the nails.

Hal walked around the Galleria. He stuck his hands into his pockets, swaggered a little, and tried to smile at everyone. Often his smiles were returned. But he didn’t follow them up. His was the disinterested smile of God the Father surveying the world after the sixth day. And Hal had never seen so many soldiers whose free time hung like a weight on their backs, as their packs had hung in combat. They sat at the outside tables of the bars and drank vermouth. They wore shoulder patches of three divisions. Their faces were seamy or gentle or questioning or settled or blank. No other people in the Galleria Umberto had so many nuances on their lips as the Americans Hal saw there.

After looking in all the shop windows and all the posters and traversing both sides of the X-shaped pavement that bisected the Galleria, Hal sat down at one of the tables. He knew that he was in the tiniest yet the greatest city of the world. But it hadn’t the fixed pattern of a small town. It was a commune of August, 1944, and its population changed every day. These people who came to the Galleria to stand and drink and shop and look and question were set apart from the rest of the modern world. They were outside the formula of mothers and wives and creeds. The Galleria Umberto was like that city in the middle of the sea that rises every hundred years to dry itself in the sun.

An old Neapolitan in a greasy apron was standing beside his table. Hal ordered a drink, giving the old man two cigarettes and the fee for a double vermouth, which tasted like fruity alum. And then, looking again through the Galleria, which had enraptured him as a circus does a child, Hal saw a figure bearing down on him. And he knew that he had been waiting, had been summoned to the Galleria for this. The figure came through the mob with the surety of a small boat picking its way through shoals.

The parachute captain took one of the wicker chairs and sat down beside him without saying a word. Hal felt the bright bitter eyes going over his face. The Neapolitan brought another vermouth. Then Hal spoke with the studied casualness of one who seeks to show that his thoughts are elsewhere:

—Blow all that, the parachute captain said. You’ve always stalled with me. That’s caused your ruin. You’re a dishonest man, chum. You think of yourself as the center of the universe. . . . And anything that doesn’t fit into your scheme of things gets rationalized away like a piece of rock found on the wrong geologic stratum.

That vague sword was already beginning to pierce Hal’s heart, but he paid no attention and said:

—The same? The captain threw back his head and laughed. Your pity goes too far, boy. Or not far enough. You’ve never learned the difference between seeing humanity and getting smothered by it. The more you feel you must love humanity, the more you indicate a certain deficiency in yourself. . . . Jesus Christ must have been a misanthrope deep down inside, who tried to offset his truer characteristics. Love is the most natural thing in this world, you see. A lover never feels he must love, because he does. Only the half-arsed poets invented love as a force that has nothing to do with anything, because they had to cook up something to write about, as propagandists cook up causes to die for. . . . I’m talking of the sorrow of those who think, rather than those who do. . . . In wartime the greatest heroes are the sensitive and shy and gentle. They’re great because they have to live in a world which is dedicated in wartime to an annihilation of everything they stand for. They’re the unsung. No one will ever sing to them. Except us, the dead. Their theme’s too secret, like masturbation. . . . If a man all his life has oxidized his every mood the moment it entered his glands, if he insulted and slugged his way along, it’s not a much greater effort for him to go into battle. The gentle die in battle. Your crude extrovert comes out of his ordeal more brutal and crass and cocky than when he went in. That’s the way civilizations die, gradually. A premium is put on physical courage in wartime which kills off the gentle, because they’re too noble to admit of cowardice. So they die. . . . Death to them is terrible. And it’s just another of those things to people who aren’t aware of life, except as a current of vitality that carries them along.

—And yet, Hal said, leaning forward and hearing the thumping of his own heart, you fought and died in Sicily a few months ago. What are you so bitter about? Your ghost should mount a soapbox in Union Square. Perhaps you could finally teach the world something.

The elegant and mocking figure looked at him and laid its shining high boots across an adjoining chair. This parachute captain had the scorn of a demon, who knows that he can very well afford to thumb his nose at God because he will burn through all eternity no matter what he does.

—My death in Sicily, the captain said, sending a graceful hairy claw through the air, was merely a compensation for my life. My life was a mess. I was a Broadway chorus boy. Do you think I liked swishing my way through the American theater? Do you think I enjoyed the fascism of great stars and booking agents and elegants who thought they were writers? Jesus, no! But in my jump training I was able to exorcise all this nonsense. In the crazy camaraderie of silk and geronimo I achieved reality to my life. . . . Oh, there was nothing solemn or dignified in the way I took my exit. It was a bullet in my face, just after I’d landed, and was looking around for my men, to urge them on in the way that cameramen like. My death was the expiation of that ridiculous society for which I danced, painted and epicene behind a proscenium arch. I was a very jerky marionette on the stage and a very still one as a corpse. . . . But let me tell you one thing, Joe: the ecstasy of death is a greater one than I found in love or the dance with a capital D. . . . I pity you for all your struggling and whining to yourself. For I’m free, free! . . . Out forever from under all this pitiful shit of human life!

—Your imaginary troubles, the captain said, crooking a finger and smiling almost tenderly, are far more serious than mine ever were. At least I was able to lump all mine in one ball.

Hal looked away into the sunny Galleria. The captain’s words clattered in on him. And there was that old sinking sensation of having a world on his shoulders without asking for it.

—The wisdom of death, he said, trying to strike a tone of banter. But his teeth showed like a skull’s.

—The French, the captain said, striking a tone of preciosity, speak of the expérience mortelle. We’ve both had it . . . but it seems to have paralyzed you, boy. You must either live or die. You’re trying to do both. . . . I died. . . . But my spirit is congealed into one knot of fury. I left this life angry, but not hurt; whole, even though mangled. . . . I see through you. You’re trying to conceal that your soul is a perfumed jellyfish. You’ve tried to wrestle with the larger issues when you’re not sure whether you can read and write. . . . Wise up to yourself, buddy. It’s not too late.

—I don’t care to drink with you any more. And please, please don’t visit me again. Let me alone. You’re the essence of all that’s evil in the world. You’re the evilest person I’ve ever known. There’s something about your mouth, the way it works, as though this world were just your orange, to be sucked dry. . . .

—Ah, mysticism and metaphor, the captain said softly, also rising. There’s no place for that crap any more, chuck. It’s outworn, like the Middle Ages trying to smoke out syphilis with incense. Certainly there are faith and spirituality, but this time there’s no applying the old creeds and schemes. You have no right to seek God directly. You must do it through other people. They’re all small pieces of Him. If you know and love all the people of your time, you know God.

—Let’s go down on our knees together, Hal said—and pray because we’re both so proud and cold and heartless.

—Less proud and cold and heartless than most. . . . I prayed as I was dying. And I died at twenty-two. . . . But my death was part of the scheme and the deception, that’s all. . . . You don’t want to learn anything, do you kid?

For the next five days he lay in his billet and looked at the ceiling. For five nights he couldn’t close his eyes. In his head he heard a continual crashing, as of buildings falling down irreparably. Often it seemed to him that he was capable of everything, but especially of the great and the good things of life. It seemed he had only to stretch out his hand and the sorrowing world would be remade and every tear dried in every eye. He wanted so to help, to help, to help. . . .

Then they took him in an ambulance to the Forty-fifth General Hospital, where he was given a knockout drug for paranoia and delusions of persecution. A nurse there was a first lieutenant, a Russian Jewess named Luba. She said to the psychiatrist, a major:

—Gee, sir, nuts are all so individual. They’re not ordinary people. . . . Now you take that tall good-looking one who thinks he’s Jesus Christ. . . . Why, damn it, if he grew a beard, I’d believe he was. . . .

THIRD PORTRAIT