August 13, 1946
NOTHING SET HIM APART from the crowd, except the fact that he did not want to stand out. But you could not tell that by looking at him. All you saw was a rawboned young man with wolfish eyes, not unlike the mob of young men shouldering one another in the aftermath of the war and the huckster glare of neon signs and come-hither marquees. You could tell he was an out-of-towner from the way he was staring up at the rings of smoke rising from the Camel sign above his head, but that did not make him special. On a clement summer night, Times Square was full of tourists.
It had taken him a year to get here. That was how long it was, almost to the week, since he had seen that dog-eared copy of Life magazine with the photo of an American boy in a sailor suit, drunk on President Truman’s announcement that the Japanese had surrendered, bending a white-uniformed nurse over backward in an orgasmic kiss of peace. As soon as he saw it, he knew where he was headed. Here was a country where uniforms were innocent as children’s clothing. Here was a city where people could shout their joy to the rooftops. Here was a place where love would bend over backward to meet him.
The immaculate halos of American ingenuity continued to rise from the perfect O of the smoker’s mouth. He knew how they worked, because he had struck up a friendship with a fellow on the ship’s crew, whom he had pestered with questions all the way over. The rings were ten feet in diameter and not smoke but steam, collected from the building’s heating system and stored in a reservoir behind the sign. Every four seconds, a piston-driven diaphragm forced the steam through the hole. What a country, what a people, to put their genius to such ends!
And now he was one of them. He had come down the gangplank onto the pier that morning an immigrant, a greenhorn, a displaced person. He had emerged from the customs shed an hour later, a one-hundred-percent American. And he had not even had to lie. All he had had to do was keep quiet. He had spent almost twenty-five months, seven hundred and fifty-three days to be exact, keeping quiet.
Shh. Don’t talk. Don’t move. Someone will hear.