12
WHEN I REACHED THE RECEPTION AT THE headmaster’s house, the place was teeming with alumni and trustees—many familiar from newspapers and television—forming a scrum around the beaming face of the president’s adviser. He was being showered with congratulations. People were basking in the reflected glory of one of their own kind. Suzanne had parked Bobby by a bay window, where he could overlook the playing fields while she helped the headmaster’s wife pour tea and coffee for this gathering of the great and good. Although neglected by everyone, Bobby seemed quietly content to stare out at the stately elms that shadowed the night sky. For a moment, I almost felt sorry for him, remembering Doc Steele’s story about how my father liked to discreetly listen to him play, as I often sought out Max, now a rare occurrence indeed. The thought caused me to turn to Suzanne, and as I did, she glanced up from the tea service at her elbow and her intent expression dissolved into one of lost wonder. She smiled, her glittering blue eyes touched with sliver shards, projecting a warmth that was actually inviting. What had happened to “on the warpath”? What names hovered on her supple lips?
Before I could think twice, Byron Folley’s wife, following Suzanne’s stare, caught sight of me, too, and, hurrying over, quickly ushered me past the two Secret Service officers by the reception area and into the headmaster’s study, telling me with the Gentile aplomb of a southern belle out of Macon, Georgia, to sit tight while she got the “man of the hour.” She had clearly been given her instructions. I didn’t have more than a minute to inspect the bookshelves and the religious knickknacks scattered about the headmaster’s study before the president’s national security adviser entered with quick, purposeful strides and closed the door behind him. He moved toward me as if he would send his splendid forehead crashing into my chest. He then took my hand and, in the same gesture, motioned to a pair of chairs emblazoned with the school crest.
I was petrified to be sitting across from this brilliant man. He was only inches away and he leaned far forward for intimacy. This was the compact face and tight working jaw I’d glimpsed on the front pages of The New York Times and on the cover of Time magazine, no less, whispering in the ear of two presidents. Just that morning, he’d chaired a meeting of the Joint Chiefs, with the fate of thousands of young men’s lives hanging in the balance.
He smiled while his reddened eyes swept my face like sonar.
“I just wanted to thank you. I wanted to thank you for being a friend to my son. I know how Jack thinks the world of you.”
“Oh, Jocko—Jack’s such a great receiver,” I gushed. “The way he manages to get himself open makes it a cinch for me.”
He bent closer over the intervening space, a new eagerness flickering in his nut brown eyes.
“He’s that good, is he?”
My effusive lies were effortless. “And hands . . . he makes my worst passes look like I parked it on a dime.”
“I gather he had a tough fall season.”
“It was tough for all of us; the competition in the league was pretty intense.”
“I feel terrible. What with things as they are in Washington, I wasn’t able to get to a game last fall.”
“My mother hasn’t been to a game in three years.”
I thought it was a helpful remark, but I wasn’t sure how it went over, since he didn’t smile or nod.
“How is your mother? I don’t think I’ve seen her since . . . well, it’s been a long time.”
“She’s fine.” I knew he meant the memorial service.
“I don’t know how Jack ended up such a fine athlete.” He pulled at his jaw. His fingers were perfectly manicured. “I dreamed of doing what he does, at his age, at your age. I had poor eyesight. I failed all my eye exams for the army in 1941. I tried to memorize the chart, but they still caught me out. I’m okay for tennis if I don’t have to play net.”
I thought of Elliot Goddard’s dismissive anecdote about the man sitting across from me: peering through binoculars three miles off Omaha Beach. Or was it three hundred yards off the beach in an LCD? This little story and its permutations seemed to take on a life of its own within certain circles.
He put his palms together before him and intertwined his fingers. “I know Jack had problems in the fall; I know he was ill. And I wanted to thank you for your discretion . . . and for being a friend.”
It was Jerry Gadsden who had told me. It was Jerry who had found him overdosed on heroin in the toilets. He’d probably saved his life, because Jerry knew just what a heroin OD looked like. He had dragged Jocko to the infirmary and put him in the ambulance for the hospital. It was Jerry he should be thanking, not me.
“I know what you did and I appreciate your friendship for my son. You understand, if his name ever got in the papers . . . what it would mean.”
I nodded, wondering if it was a mistake or if somebody had told him it was me on purpose. What’s in a name . . . .
“Tell me, is he so unhappy? I can barely get a word out of him. His mother is beside herself.”
That stumped me. Suddenly, I saw in front of me a man with a sick child. And desperate for him to be well again. Jerry had told me about the terrible state in which he’d found his son. And that spring, back from rehab, Jocko had been furtive and glassy-eyed, barely speaking. Jocko had been the golden boy of our class. And Jocko wasn’t the only one. There were days when it seemed as if some infectious agent had gotten past our walls and was picking guys off one by one.
But I didn’t tell him that.
“I think it’s got to be hard . . . with so many protesting the war.”
He nodded, his lips pressing tight, as if he were gripped by sudden pain. I could see nothing of the handsome son in the father.
“It’s been rough on the family. But I thought Jack understood, what was at stake, what had to be done.”
“It’s hard,” I offered again, realizing that I was being provocative for my own sake. “When the world”—and I made a feeble gesture toward the four walls and the Circle beyond—“thinks it might be a mistake.”
“Does he think it’s a mistake?”
“I think it would be hard for any of us, with a dad so much in the public eye—and all the controversy. He’s got to be feeling the pressure. And, of course, with his loyalty to you . . .”
“Loyalty?” His brow flexed as if his superior brain had stripped gears, or I’d inadvertently tossed in a monkey wrench. “I’d never presume on his loyalties to make up his own mind. In the end, we’re all called on to come to terms in our own way, in our own time.” A spark of anger flared in his eyes. “Your father certainly had his own take on affairs of state.” At this, I felt a surge of hidden pleasure, as if I’d been looking for the right button and by instinct had actually pushed it. I longed to toss out a name or two.
“I thought your speech was terrific.”
He flashed a dismissive frown, his gaze settling fully on my face once more.
“Forgive me for saying it, but you remind me of your father at the same age. I can’t tell you how just the sound of your voice brings back a dozen schoolboy conversations. It’s one of the great disappointments in my life that he’s no longer here to offer me counsel.”
I was floored: offer me counsel. As if he were reading my mind thought for thought, he continued.
“Not that we always agreed. But his instincts were sound, his judgments well constructed. I respected him enormously.” He leaned closer again. “In our senior year, in 1932, he opened my eyes to the pitiless evil we faced. To this day, his prescience in these matters amazes me. His read on events in the early thirties affected me deeply, and time has only vindicated his terrible vision.”
He was reeling me in hook, line, and sinker. Was it my father’s morbid fascination with the Greek Dark Ages and the collapse of Mycenaean civilization or Virgil’s reports from his brother in the FBI?
“A terrible vision?”
“Stalin, the destruction of the Kulaks, the great famine in the Ukraine, the work camps—I heard it first from him. And then later, the monstrous appetites of Hitler. He’d traveled in Germany over summers while we were still at Winsted . . . he was friends with some famous German archaeologist; the details escape me, but his insights were electrifying. He’d smelled the smoldering sulfur fumes.”
Virgil, I thought, as a vision swam up before me, not a vision of hell, exactly, but of a man walking in air: slowly strangling. I must have seemed slightly catatonic at that point as my imagination rushed to encompass the new data.
“And John was a real scholar, so unlike most of our classmates, who were headed into law and banking. I appreciated that in him; I was a history and politics man at Harvard. I appreciated his clarity of thought—unlike the lucubrations of so many woolly-headed academics. He appreciated how the light of the past might illuminate the present, even in the darkest days of the Depression, when the country had lost its way.” He reached out to my arm. “I never leave here without visiting the portrait of your grandfather in the library.”
“Great-grandfather . . . thank you, sir.”
“We need to remember where we come from.”
He slackened his grip, his head nodding. “You would be just the person to explain it to Jack—I know how much he respects you—if you feel up to it. Explain the spot we’re in: If the extreme Right has its way, we’ll blow one another to smithereens; if the far Left has its way, they’ll let us be steamrolled by the Communists, making excuses at every bad turning, justifying capitulation or putting off hard decisions by resorting to morally ambiguous arguments. We’re caught in the middle—you see”—he made a motion with his hands, a little circle between us, including me, and his son . . . our people—“holding the line, balancing the dangers and costs of defending the free world. Perhaps time is on our side, perhaps not, but a collapse in Southeast Asia could be catastrophic. Making Stalin’s bloody depredations, even Mao’s, look like child’s play down the road. If we show weakness, they’ll eat us alive.”
He stared at me glassy-eyed, like a cornered animal. I was in such a panic of sensory overload, I couldn’t get a thing out.
He must have sensed my discomfort, for he stood suddenly. He waved a hand, as if disgusted with himself for letting his exasperation get the better of him in front of the likes of me. Then he smiled stoically and made a cursory survey of the headmaster’s study, noting with a scowl the religious trinkets, the plaster-cast statue of Saint John the Baptist by the fireplace, which contained the microphone for Max’s secret taping system. (This was the source for the corrupted version of my conversation with the president’s adviser that appeared in Like a Forgotten Angel. The source, too, of Max’s portrayal of my father as a neofascist schoolboy in the early thirties.)
He reached to shake my hand, and with a motion of his head to include the place where we were standing and all that it represented, he said, “Nobody ever said it was going to be a picnic.”
I was tempted to ask him about Kim Philby but figured I’d had my shot.
“I thought you were great tonight, sir,” I finally managed to say.
He kept the handshake tight. “Would you keep an eye on him? Do keep an eye on Jack for me. Explain it to him, what’s at stake. He won’t speak to me anymore.”
I am still moved by the memory of a man pleading for help for his son. . . a man who had been instrumental in sending tens of thousands of young sons to their deaths in the jungles of Vietnam. Such a burden should be borne by no man. On the other hand, his three sons never served, nor are their names numbered among the glorious dead.
The next morning, the Reverend Springfield was soused. He walked pretty steadily up the aisle considering his normal limp and his shattered right leg—still containing fragments from an 88 shell in an action that had cut in half two of his best friends. But I could see the booze in his eyes—Jerry had taught me that, my mother, too—those soft gray eyes that shone with a dull anger, as if he’d had four or five stiff ones instead of his usual two or three. The others in the chapel procession were looking funny, too, like they knew something was amiss but were trying to pretend that it would be okay.
Byron Folley pulled at his clerical collar as he walked up the aisle and there was sweat on his face and he wasn’t even pretending to be singing the hymn. The Reverend Paul Oakes was there, too, dragging himself along, looking pale and withered, and carefully glancing over at Charlie Springfield every now and then as if afraid the younger man might drop in his tracks. Years before, Charlie Springfield had been his protégé; they went back a long way together: the kind of friendship between an older man and a younger with little in common but a rock-bottom faith.
Everything went just fine until the sermon came along, and then things stopped going fine. Everybody knew it the instant the last verse of the sermon hymn was being sung and the Reverend Springfield pulled himself up from his seat in the choir stalls and staggered up the steps of the pulpit. The youngest boys knew because they were in the front and they could see his angry, vacant eyes, which searched the high spaces of the chapel for inspiration. The faculty and trustees and the president’s adviser and the CIA boys sitting farther back realized it because they knew from long experience how a man looks and behaves when he has had a few too many.
The Reverend Springfield had the look of a prophet about him and he let ’em have it right between the eyes. As the hymn ground to a halt, he gripped the sides of the pulpit, where two carved pelicans waited in silent vigil, gripped so hard that his knuckles rose like white knobs; then, as if he might be having second thoughts, he began to sway back and forth. His large livid face bunched tightly around the eyes, which glared, yellow-gray and slightly bloodshot, at the congregation, like the eyes of the world-weary hunter who’s been on the trail of his quarry for years and, at the very moment the prey’s in the crosshairs, realizes the meaning was all in the chase and not the kill.
“Good mornin’ . . .” he bellowed in his best Carolina drawl, which he knew immediately put all the Yankee establishment on edge. He pointed his finger at us as he fumbled with the slips of paper in his copy of Essays and Prayers, where he had scribbled a few notes. He roared mightily: “My subject is pride, pride and doubt. I speak of lifedestroying pride, death-defying pride, spirit-devouring pride that with ambitious aim sets itself against the love of God.”
Then he really let us have it, using the poet Milton as his main text, warning the powerful and influential gathered before him how those who make them idols are like unto them, and so is everyone that trusteth in them. He tore into the presumptions of U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam. Then he began speaking of the rebel angels, measuring our pride against theirs. Who the hell did we think we were, for even the goddamn angels, he shouted, the rebel angels, were kicked out of heaven because of excess pride, yes, even the angels. . . .
I couldn’t resist a glance at the Williams Memorial, in front of which Bobby and Suzanne sat and beamed with seraphic smiles.
Charlie turned to the pages of Essays and Prayers, letting us know he was dipping into the dark waters of the Winsted pedigree.
“‘What is this path of darkness we are treading with such a fixed and obdurate countenance, looking neither forward nor back to ask why, why the path of darkness? For the path, like the river of life, is long; like the river of Time, it floweth we know not where, but on its waters we are bound for eternity . . . black and white, North and South, in destiny shared.’”
His voice echoed down the nave, where the president’s adviser and the trustees and the faculty must have been twisting a little in their seats. I noticed Elliot Goddard, too, with a rancid smile on his face.
“Don’t you see?” he howled, eyeing no one but eyeing all. The youngest boys right below him looked up with wonder because they’d never heard a grown man go on like this. “Don’t you see our presumption in claiming this jus divinum for ourselves, our nation: to reach out our hand and force our will where we have no right to be? Beware the temptation of God-like reason that seeks to expose what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death, and danger dare, even for an eggshell. . . yes, gentlemen, even for an eggshell. We forget who we are. We hear only the song of fools; we overstep our bounds and trample indiscriminately in places we are not wanted.”
Byron Folley sat rigidly in his seat, not moving a muscle, as if he were facing a firing squad. Mr. Oakes sat hunched over, his face obscured by his large hand, which pawed steadily at his ravished brow. While Virgil Dabney, seated in the shadows at the side of the nave, glowered with a sardonic scowl.
“Listen to the sage advice of Seneca, who wrote”—and he fumbled for a slip of paper, this for Virgil’s crew—“on the importance of simplicity, modesty, and restraint in public affairs; frugality and thrift— mercy that is as sparing with another’s blood as though it were its own, knowing that it is not for man to make wasteful use of man. One must learn the pleasure, wrote Seneca . . . the small satisfaction of knowing that we know nothing. Yes, gentlemen, my fine esteemed friends, we must learn our limits, for we have fallen on evil days. ‘For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.’”
Max shoved his elbow into my side as he caught his mentor’s eye. “De Vere,” he said, and sighed, his eyes brimming with tears.
The Reverend Springfield pulled himself up as high as he could in the carved pulpit, where the two stoic pelicans seemed to buoy him on sturdy wings. Then he spread his arms in Miltonic rage.
“‘O shame to men!’” He bellowed. “‘Devil with devil damned firm concord holds, men only disagree of creatures rational, though under hope of heavenly grace: and God proclaiming peace, yet live in hatred, enmity, and strife among themselves, and levy cruel wars, wasting the earth, each other to destroy.’”
He paused for effect, panting and passionate.
“These, too, are the toils of sin and pride and arrogance.”
Byron Folley remained pale and motionless. Mr. Oakes was still bent over, his face hidden from view. Max, beside me, had tears streaming down his cheeks. I could not resist a look over my shoulder to where the president’s adviser sat listening intently, and right behind, with their elegant wives, the CIA men faced stoically forward. Elliot sat there beaming—relishing the weave of art and politics— with his stunning wife and his eldest daughter, who had flown up from Washington that morning. Two of his compatriots were in the row behind, two grandsons of a former president: One had orchestrated a coup d’état against Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953; the other had once headed the CIA technical division that developed biological poisons for use against Castro and enemies in the Congo. Behind them, another classmate of my father’s and close colleague of Elliot’s; his hobby as a boy had been making train schedules, and he had gone on to develop the North Atlantic convoy system, then the Marshall Plan and the U-2 spy plane, topping his career with the master plan for the Bay of Pigs. He took the fall for that failed operation, or failed execution; he was given the congressional Medal of Honor and dismissed from the CIA. The night before, I had seen him prowling his old haunts in the library, where as a young boy he had composed those railroad timetables to amuse himself. These men knew when their heritage and pedigree were being invoked in a critique of itself. Nor were they immune to self-scrutiny, these honorable men; they had made their moral calculation: for the greater good.
“‘What if earth . . .’” boomed Charlie Springfield, tears welling in his unhappy eyes, “‘what if earth be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein, each to other like, more than on earth is thought?’ And what if we, the outcast of the world, the tired and hungry and persecuted who arrived on these distant shores in search of a new kingdom, a new paradise on earth . . . what if we shall become like those rebel angels, thinking ourselves like them—self-begot, self-raised, and sui generis.” He pointed an admonishing finger to dissuade us from such ideas of American exceptionalism. “Our puissance is our own?”
He nodded at us sagely as a longing smile eased across his fleshy face.
“Is that what it has come down to for us? Is that why we have made this long long journey on the river of Time—come all this far to this new land, in search of some prelapsarian innocence, where we might begin again, make a new start? Lost . . . Oh lost.”
He bowed his head for a moment.
“Or will we learn like Job, at least to question—even stand up to our God and say, And where is the place of understanding? Man knoweth not the price thereof.” He paused and his eyes gravitated downward and he slowly fingered one of the carved pelicans at his side, the way one would the head of a beloved child.
“Will we learn to accept God’s great gift to us . . . the gift of doubt? For that is the price of understanding. For God did not deny Adam and Eve knowledge in the Garden, for the knowledge of good and evil exists for all eternity and is for man to know; but only that man should see that it is not gained by deceit, or quickly, or easily—not as a facile thing to be gained by selfish shortcuts, but a truth enshrouded in doubt, enfolded with love, and finally given as grace is given, freely . . . existing always within you.”
He raised his eyes heavenward and smiled as if he would laugh down the moon and stars.
“For, my friends, wisdom and truth begin at home: ‘by small accomplishing great things, by things deemed weak subverting worldly strong, and worldly wise by simply meek.’”
He lowered his gaze slightly as though suddenly concerned for the younger boys, who were grouped nearest to him below the pulpit. He looked into their small faces and uncertain eyes and gave them a friendly smile, touching his white vestments where his heart would be, and whispered as if to impart a secret only to them.
“It is inside men”—and he winked at the boys below him—“for there is the garden of your heart’s desire, which must be carefully tended; that is where true paradise is found.”
A strange, tremulous look came into his eyes, as if some invisible hand had suddenly snatched from him the power of speech. And just like that, he shrugged and retreated to the choir stalls. It was the last sermon he ever gave.
I couldn’t help turning again to the stoic face of the president’s adviser and wondering what was going through his mind: bobbing in high waves, his poor eyes trained through binoculars on a long line of gray beach, rising and falling in the nauseating swells of that overcast June morning. And there, stretched before him an entire continent all the way to Siberia, there on its very edge defended by concrete bunkers and steel obstacles and barbed wire . . . where tiny figures ran and fell and huddled under a hail of machine-gun fire and mortars, the surf running red with their blood and guts.
At the end of the service, as before, I strategically stationed myself in the ambulatory, helping to tidy up and collect chapel programs. I was able to keep an eye on the departing alumni as they passed my father’s memorial. I noted how Elliot Goddard and at least four of his colleagues paused before the inscription, two or three reaching to the carved letters as if to impress an invisible fingerprint in tribute or sorrow.
A patriot . . . a traitor? Or just another name, another lost boy on the river of Time?
Most of the Sunday papers carried a front-page article on the president’s adviser’s speech. The headlines told of a hardening of U.S. policy toward the North.
The following day, we began marching practice for the Memorial Day parade in the town of Winsted. Charlie Springfield was senior drillmaster. It was an old school custom to participate in the town’s Memorial Day parade, which concluded at the town cemetery, where the Civil War dead had been laid to rest. The tradition had been instituted by General Alden, who had led a company of men from the town—though almost two decades before he built his school nearby, most of these had died at Antietam. The marching was judged good for community relations and a worthy experience for the boys to join in the honoring of those men who had died for their country, now including men from the town of Winsted who had died in both the world wars and in Korea. Recently, two twin brothers, drafted together, had been killed in the same unit on the same day in Vietnam. The blue-collar citizens of Winsted were fiercely protective of their memory. Over the last few years, the school’s lackadaisical marching had met with little enthusiasm, and in the current rebellious antiwar atmosphere . . . well, the older boys and younger faculty wanted no part of it.
The sixth-form prefects had always been responsible for drilling the younger boys and overseeing the practices, but not this year; they resisted nearly to a man. So Charlie Springfield stepped in and personally took over the drilling. We were in for a shock. If he was anything, Charlie Springfield was a mass of contradictions. After all, he was a decorated soldier who had served his country honorably and knew all about the nature of sacrifice. As he had told me, many of his comrades lay under white crosses in the American cemetery on the bluff overlooking Omaha Beach.
So on those luminous and warm sunset evenings after dinner, the newly mown grass fragrant with dew, Charlie Springfield would come limping down to the practice fields, slightly tipsy, laughing and making quips to the boys about their long hair and disheveled looks. Then suddenly it was all business, and he’d be shouting out commands like a master sergeant, his voice echoing across the green playing fields as he strode up and down the platoons, giving corrections and calling out the cadences until the boys got it right. It was a strange metamorphosis that seemed to come over him, as if the military lingo of drill practice caused something to snap in his brain, as if he were transported back to a different place and time—two worlds struggling inside him.
Often, he would turn just plain ornery and tear into boys on the slightest provocation. That shocked the hell out of me. Maybe it was his drinking; maybe it was the humid heat of those late-spring evenings when the sappy cut grass coated our shoes as we marched. It was a disconcerting thing to see the brooding, dark anger begin to well up inside Charlie Springfield as he drilled us, as he began cursing and shouting at us, lecturing us about our slovenly behavior and unpatriotic attitudes. It was as if we were guilty of some obscure sin for which our only expiation was a perfect drill formation. The boys became scared and dumbfounded by his behavior. They grew quiet as the onslaught mounted evening after evening, as though one of their own kind had inexplicably turned on them.
He would run up to a boy in the ranks and yell in his ear. “You slovenly unkempt son of a bitch, you think you can act like this all your damn life—time you grew up; now get the cadence right—right, left, right, left, right, left . . . column to the left . . . march. You scoundrels, you scum, so you think that being Americans means you can sit back on your tender lily white butts all your life and smoke dope ’til the second coming? Think you can just waltz through life without paying your dues? Sometimes a man has gotta learn to fight for the country he loves, for the land his fathers sweated to build and died to defend.” And then inexplicably, Charlie Springfield began turning on Max, yelling and cursing at him, singling him out for special abuse when he was no worse than any of the others. It was bizarre the way he worked Max over, because we knew that he loved Max (he’d already submitted two of Max’s short stories to The Atlantic). And I saw it get to the point where Max had tears in his eyes, and I swear Charlie Springfield did, too—tears of anger or frustration. It didn’t make sense. And poor Max, who could take anything, was shaken up for first time I could remember.
But we got it right. By God, we got it right.
Memorial Day turned out to be brilliantly sunny, with barely a whisper of a breeze as we lined up under the great spreading elms by the schoolhouse to begin our march into town. We were all dressed in white ducks and white shirts, dark blazers, and overseas caps that could not hide the long hair of the older boys, which dangled down to their shoulders, not to mention the peace buttons and flowers prominently displayed on their lapels. Charlie Springfield, sporting his campaign ribbons and a Silver and Bronze Star, inspected the ranks, sending many away to polish up their shoes or change a shirt.
On the stroke of eleven from the schoolhouse bell, we set off toward the town of Winsted, a little more than two miles away. Relations between the school and the locals had been rapidly deteriorating over the past year. To the townies, mostly blue-collar workers from the nearby textile mills and paper factories, Winsted was a school for spoiled rich boys, the sons of the owners of the factories where they and their fathers and grandfathers had spent their lives toiling. And what with the slow, ineluctable demise of the textile factories and the increasing reports of drugs and antiwar agitation on campus, the townspeople were definitely not enthusiastic about our participation in their Memorial Day celebrations. Memories of those twins killed in Vietnam were still raw. We, in turn, had been explicitly warned to avoid any kind of confrontation.
The minute we arrived in the town, the catcalls and snickering began, making it hard to keep calm. Charlie Springfield walked up and down the platoons, his medals gleaming on his lapel, trying to keep our guys in line. He seemed like his regular old self, trying to make jokes, as if we’d done our thing, made a decent show, and didn’t really have to take it all that seriously anymore. But then I could see him begin to stiffen and get angry as the abuse from the crowd grew in intensity. It seemed to trigger something in him. He told to us quietly, tensely, that we were to keep looking straight ahead and pretend we hadn’t heard a thing.
The main street of the town by the drugstore and firehouse was lined five or six-deep along the sidewalk. People were waving American flags and pulling apart six-packs of Budweiser. It was twelve o’clock and we were marching right down the center of the street, where there was no shade from the lofty oaks that picketed the parade route. Our shoes pulled on the tarry road surface. The worst of it was that we could move only at a snail’s pace. There were Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops in front of us and then veterans from the local VFW post, none of them moving very fast. It soon turned into a humiliating experience as we were forced to march in place in the blazing heat, forced to put up with the snickering comments from the crowds on the sidewalk. “Richboy snobs,” “Faggot hippie Commies,” “Rich boys never gonna be in the army—daddy will see to that,” “Get haircuts, you rich boy creeps,” “Gawd sakes alive, they’re like a bunch of women; fighting would be too good for them.”
Charlie Springfield was getting more and more flushed, and he finally turned to the crowds and shouted for them to shut up. He tried to increase the pace of the march, but there was no speeding up those Scout troops or the veterans from the VFW post. Behind us was a color guard from the army base at Fort Devens and then a band from the local high school. We were right in the middle, cut off, with no retreat possible. Sunlight glinted menacingly off the instruments of the marching band to our rear; splinters of eye-searing chrome sparked on the parked fire engines. It seemed like every can of beer in the crowd reflected back shards of jagged silver. We were told to halt, to keep marching in place. My face was a blur of sweat and heat. Then the abusive language got heaped in bucketfuls. Some began spitting at us.
Charlie Springfield, red-faced, went up to one of the town cops along the parade route and asked him to do something about the abusive behavior of the crowd. The cop smiled at him icily from behind his dark glasses and shrugged, obviously enjoying the spectacle and the irritation in Charlie’s face. The thickest part of the crowd was centered down a bit farther, by the firehouse, where a lot of teenagers and younger children had gathered to sit on the town’s spanking new fire engine to watch the parade. The sixth form was becalmed right in front of them. A frenzy of jeering began. I could see that Charlie was fuming as he yelled for the crowd to be quiet; then he turned on the sixth formers and demanded they hold their tongues. But some of the sixth formers couldn’t take it any longer and began eyeing the crowd maliciously, responding first under their breath and then louder, until their cries were as loud as their tormentors’—“Fuck you, buddy; fuck you, asshole”—cries that were like sporadic gasps for air after we’d been drowning under the hail of epithets for a good half hour.
And then the parade slowed down even more, grinding to a halt right in front of that damned fire engine, which seemed perversely to take the glare of that swollen sun and stick it smack in our faces. Charlie hobbled as best he could among the sixth formers and pleaded with them to be quiet, but it did no good. The ranks had broken. We stood defiant. Through the glare I could make out the grinning faces of teenagers and some of the old veterans who were enjoying the three-ring circus. And there was a fat policeman who stood by the fire engine with his hands on his black-belted hips. The bastard was sneering with pleasure.
An ice-cream cone was thrown. It smashed against the white ducks of one of the guys in front of me, a chocolate smear down his leg. Then as if a signal had been given, other bits of food were thrown at us. The ranks became scrambled as we tried to duck the missiles. Charlie Springfield yelled at the fat policeman.
“For Christ’s sake, do something, will you!”
The policeman only grunted with amusement and tipped his hat. A beer bottle careened into the rank in front of me, striking someone on the back and shattering on the street. Then a can hit somebody in the head. A boy was down.
Then it happened: Something burst inside Charlie. I saw his jacket open and realized there was a drab olive holster on his hip. He reached under his jacket and pulled out his old service .45 semiautomatic and stood there in front of the crowd and began firing it wildly into the air. Those in the crowd, like a huge multi-celled organism, shrieked and fell to the ground or began dashing in all directions. We stood frozen in place—catatonic at the impossible sight, blinking at the quick explosive bursts from the pistol, which shattered the air and seemed to put the whole world into centrifugal motion, except for those of us who remained rooted. Charlie got off seven shots, when the noise of his gun was suddenly joined by the noise of another gun, maybe two or three shots that came from the fat policeman by the fire engine, who must have been a great shot, since two of his bullets hit Charlie Springfield right in the chest and the third seemed to take off his right ear. Charlie just stood there, barely moved by the impact, as if surprised by all the commotion, his eyes suddenly very peaceful. He lowered his arm and looked queerly at the pistol in his hand, as if he didn’t quite know why it was there, and kept looking as he slumped to the pavement. For a moment, he knelt on the tarmac as if in prayer and then pitched forward onto his face. I think he must have been dead by the time he was down; that policeman had known where to place his shots. Max was the first one to him. He grabbed Charlie up as one would a lover, both arms around him to support his body, as if lifting him from the earth would save him, but he was gone.
The death of Charlie Springfield—Christian Foster in Max’s novel— forms the central climax of his narrative. The protagonist’s shocking loss of his only friend and mentor on the faculty precipitates his slide into depression, from which he escapes only with the publication of his first short stories. But Max adjusted the facts in a way that proved not only unfair to Charlie but harmful to his family: the cause of the lawsuit a decade later by Charlie’s son, Josh, who for years had shared his Twinkies with Max when he baby-sat for the Springfields. In the novel, Max described how Charlie fired two shots in the air and, seemingly stunned and then despairing at the chaos of screaming spectators, turned the gun on himself, firing a single shot to the head. A suicide. Max’s lawyer claimed artistic license. Max said, to use a more recent term, that Charlie’s action constituted a suicide by cop: Charlie would have known the likely outcome of pulling a gun in a crowd and beginning to shoot with police present. I was there; I saw the look of surprise and bafflement on Charlie’s face; something had snapped in his mind and, for a terrible moment, he lost touch with reality. I suspect he may not even have remembered that his gun was loaded, and he abhorred violence. Utter incomprehension filled his eyes as he slumped to the street, and an unwillingness to leave us or his family. At the inquest, an investigator testified that the ammunition had been purchased over ten years before; his wife said the .45 had been kept at the back of a top shelf with all his old army gear and that she’d never known him to take it down except on Memorial Day.
Max and I and others testified at the inquest on the shooting, but it didn’t change anything. The cop said that there had been children about and that a man who was blasting away into the air could just as easily have lowered his aim. And I suppose he was right, although I made the point that I thought Charlie had gotten off seven shots, which meant the .45 was empty, unless there had been a round in the chamber. The forensic expert agreed the gun was empty, but the cop only shrugged. “Who’s counting?” he said. When the investigating panel was presented with an affidavit from a psychiatrist in Boston who described treatment for manic depression and a family history of schizophrenia, the case was open and shut. I have a distinct aural memory of those shots. I often hear them in my sleep—seven distinct shots, even after all the other shooting I’ve heard. It was as if the world I had once known, which had been crumbling through my fingertips, was obliterated in a matter of seconds, scattered like that crowd was scattered.
We never reached the cemetery that Memorial Day, the place where the town assembles once a year to pay their respects to the war dead, going back to three minutemen, one who died in skirmishes as the British retreated to Boston in 1775, and two others at Bunker Hill. My great-grandfather is buried there. He could have been buried in Brookline, near the family homestead, where his ancestors are buried, or at Elysium, where he was happiest. But he chose this mill town cemetery, and, as with the location for the school he founded, he chose wisely. Here were buried more soldiers from his regiment, who had died at Antietam, than anywhere else; mill workers and sons of mill workers, they had all enlisted on the same day in June 1861. That was why he chose to become one of them. In the end, he wanted to be near the men he had led into battle. That responsibility never ceased to weigh on him. When I return to school for reunions, I leave time to walk the winding road into town and down Main Street and past the firehouse, where I halt a moment to remember, and up into the low hills above the Naushon River to visit that lovely cemetery with its crowning red oaks and scattershot of white azaleas, where I pay my respects at my great-grandfather’s grave, which sits among those of men who died for their country. The stone is a simple granite marker and contains only his name and dates and an inscription: He ably led his men in the cause of abolition. Let the bell of freedom ring.
Since my school days, since the loss of those twin brothers, there have been a few added graves of soldiers who died in Vietnam, along with a few more of recent vintage. I visit their graves, too. I never knew them . . . and yet I do.