CHAPTER 17
CHER AMI
I remember in the Pocket hearing one soldier ask, “Hey, buddy, what time is it?” and another soldier answer, “What the fuck do you care? You’re not going anywhere.”
Both that desire to know and the dismissal of that desire are relatable now. I won’t be going anywhere for a long, long while.
After I woke up in my glass display, I struggled to understand my condition—the weird circumscribed immortality I’d accidentally been granted—but also, and relatedly, I tried to understand where I was: what a museum was and what my function was inside one.
Apart from the few joyous days I spent with Baby Mine, my existence has been and continues to be defined by the uses to which humans have put me. This seems unjust, and perhaps it is, but I console myself by considering that the existence of nearly every creature is defined by what other creatures make of it.
For just as humans use us animals as companions, servants, laborers, factories, and food, so, too—as my brother Thomas Hardy once observed, on the train to London—do they use us in order to know what to make of themselves, by way of comparison and contrast. This practice has a long intellectual history that I now have the time and the ability to explore. Aristotle, I have learned, described animals as illustrative of certain human traits, particularly irrational impulses. Descartes, extrapolating from Aquinas, regarded us as mere machines, since we supposedly lack immortal souls. Darwin studied pigeons closely and inclined to agree with Aristotle.
Humans seem to have a pronounced tendency, even a need, to draw distinctions between opposites and to zealously maintain them, even when evidence suggests that those boundaries are quite blurry indeed: man and animal, life and death, moral choice and innate instinct.
What I missed most, at least at first, was the sense that every day might turn out to be momentous, that for good or ill my life might be abruptly transformed. I soon understood that barring the occasional change in the museum’s hours or the periodic cleaning or rearrangement of my case, things are going to remain pretty much the same.
As compensation I have my expanded capacity for seeing and knowing. In the early days of my after-death life, I chose to look in on some of the men whom I had encountered during my time in France and see how they were faring. I figured that keeping an eye on those men might provide me with clues regarding what that war had meant to them and therefore what I had come to mean.
My observations were interesting, if not quite enlightening. Some of the men came through their wartime experiences in fine spirits, grateful to have survived and eager to resume the lives they had lived.
George McMurtry was one of the lucky ones, as he’d be the first to insist. He resumed his prewar career as an attorney, then went on to earn a fortune in the stock market, maintaining homes on Park Avenue and in Bar Harbor, as well as memberships in all the best clubs.
Those who’d known McMurtry before the Great War were surprised to detect upon his return to civilian life a new gentleness in his manner, one that became more pronounced with the passage of years, along with an occasional hint of wistful melancholy. When asked on such occasions if he was feeling all right, he would always say that he was remembering a friend.
After his conviction and bad-conduct discharge were reversed, Maurice Revnes returned to the States, got married, and had a moderately successful career as a producer of films and plays. His wife was afraid to sleep in the same bed with him, for he’d wake in the night thrashing and sometimes screaming about his missing leg—upsetting in itself and somehow all the more so given that he had kept his leg and lost only the majority of his left foot. Revnes died in Florida at the age of ninety-five; newspaper obituaries identified him as a World War I veteran but included no mention of the Lost Battalion.
Many of the men—particularly, for whatever reason, the westerners—never married, unwilling or unable to burden a woman with their broken bodies and erratic minds. Many spent their remaining years in tumbledown shacks outside dead-end towns on the desolate prairies from which they’d come, guarding their solitude, keeping clear of the currents of history. One or two of these men lived long enough to be awakened by a flash of light, a fireball rising over the distant desert, and a sudden rush of wind declaring that history had found them anyway.
Of all the men I’d known, the one I found myself following with the greatest interest was Charles Whittlesey.
I watched him on the streets of New York City as he walked to work and hoped not to be recognized. Even as he avoided people, he seemed drawn to the city’s feral pigeons, feeding them on his noon break from his law office, naming those who congregated on the ledge outside his rooming house. They seemed to make his existence bearable when the days were sloppy and the clouds were gray and he hated the meat loaf he’d had for lunch and felt that no more happiness would be forthcoming.
I watched him take longer and longer nighttime walks, and I understood that he was cruising—or rather, that he was passing his former cruising spots without ever picking or being picked up, without even any intent. When he encountered and identified men he once would have approached, he riveted his eyes to the pavement, walked on. Whit in stasis.
This went on for a while. He seemed to be deliberately trying to lead the same sort of ghostly death-in-life that circumstances had forced upon me.
And then it was the fall of 1921 and Whit was on a train, heading my way. To my disappointment he was bound not for the Smithsonian but for Arlington National Cemetery, where he had still more war-hero obligations to meet.
He had come to serve as a pallbearer for a soldier who’d been killed during the war in France and whose remains could not be identified.
It was a crystal-blue day better suited to a picnic than a somber service. The event reunited Whit with George McMurtry and Nelson Holderman, between whom he sat joylessly while President Warren G. Harding led the ceremony. General Pershing and Marshal Foch were there, too, both spewing grandiloquence, decorating their speeches with platitudes—in honored glory, et cetera—evidently untroubled by asserting the authority to speak in the presence of men who had fought in the trenches.
But Whittlesey, like McMurtry and Holderman, wasn’t listening to the oratory. Whit and I were both thinking of one soldier in particular, one who most probably lay in the Meuse-Argonne under a cross inscribed HERE RESTS IN HONORED GLORY AN AMERICAN SOLDIER KNOWN BUT TO GOD. Yet there remained—and Whit chose to dwell in—the sliver of possibility that the soldier whom he and his fellow pallbearers carried to his grave that November day had once been Bill Cavanaugh.
“I should not have come,” I heard Whit murmur to McMurtry. “It has been too unnerving.”
McMurtry smiled and reached over, playful and reassuring, to jostle Whit’s knee. This he regretted immediately: it felt like a scarecrow’s limb or the frame of a barn overdue for collapse.
President Harding pinned a medal on the flag-covered coffin, and they laid whoever the Unknown Soldier was to rest.
As he walked away from the tomb, Whit was thinking of how fine it would be to be unknown.
I watched him on the train ride back north, seated next to McMurtry, saying, “They’re always after me about the war. I used to think I was a lawyer. Now I don’t know what I am.”
I watched him visit his family in Pittsfield the following weekend, speaking nothing of the burial—as if an event with the Great War’s victorious commanders and the president of the United States merited no remark—until after dinner, when his impatient father asked him about the ceremonies. “They made a deep impression,” Whit said, and fell silent again.
I watched him attend a Red Cross fund-raiser, where he was praised for his efforts—relentless, compulsive—to assist with the enrollment of a half a million members between Armistice Day and Thanksgiving. At the dinner he turned abruptly to the major seated next to him—another combat veteran—and asked, “How do you get through the day? Raking over the ashes like this revives all the horrible memories. I can’t remember when I’ve had a good night’s sleep.”
The next day I watched him attend a fancy reception at the New York Hippodrome for Supreme Allied Commander Marshal Ferdinand Foch, where he shared the stage with armless and legless veterans, paying tribute to one of the war’s chief architects with the mute testimony of its costs. Whit wondered, not for the first time, whether all the work he’d done since the war had mostly served to reinforce the notion that it had been just and good and therefore had made the next war easier, inevitable.
I watched him return home alone that night to the usual racking cough that woke the other residents of his rooming house, all of whom cursed him under their breaths but none of whom broached the issue with him or with the landlady, in deference to his heroism.
As always, Whit knew that he was waking them.
Yet something had changed.
When he finished his nightly liquor and turned out the light, I saw that his face had relaxed, untroubled to an extent I’d never seen before.
I watched him return to work at White & Case, laughing genuinely at his colleagues’ jokes, not worrying about his cough, which, ironically, caused him to cough much less often.
I watched him stay late that afternoon to bring all twelve of the cases he’d been working on up to date. He left notes, not in plain sight but easy to find: “Look in upper-left-hand drawer of my desk for memoranda of law matters I have been attending to.”
I watched him visit the Pruyns the following afternoon, Thanksgiving Thursday, appearing, as they would later say, in unusually cheerful spirits. It was also the one-year birthday of Patricia, the Pruyns’ daughter, Whittlesey’s godchild. Whit’s dearest friend, Marguerite, was present, and she, too, would later report that Charlie had been in a very high mood. He’d brought baby pins for the little one, had laughed and played peekaboo.
I watched him start his last full day in New York City by using the office telephone to contact an army press officer who owed him a favor in order to find out how to contact the German lieutenant who’d sent the surrender request via Hollingshead while they were in the Pocket.
Whit being a famous war hero, they tracked the man down. His name was Heinrich Prinz, and he had gone to work for the American occupation after the Armistice. They arranged for Whit to speak to him by telephone. Prinz had lived briefly in Seattle, of all places, and his English was superb.
They forgave each other everything.
I watched Whit type up letters. He was a skilled and meticulous typist, even in an office well outfitted with secretaries.
Later, in response to frenzied queries from every reporter in Manhattan, the recipients of these notes would remain united in their commitment to keeping the contents confidential, issuing a joint statement to The New York Times: “The letters contain only personal farewells and in no instance attempt to explain the reason for his departure.”
I watched him tell his colleagues of plans to visit his parents in Pittsfield again, because both his father and his brother Elisha were ailing. Later that evening he’d tell Marguerite the same thing.
After he was gone, Marguerite would remark, “I think that was about the only lie Charlie ever told in his whole life.”
They’d been particularly eager to interview Marguerite, because she was widely assumed to be Whit’s fiancée—and because a story of despair caused by thwarted love is easy to write and readily intelligible to their readership—but she would assure them that that absolutely had not been the case. The reporters would observe to one another, but would not write, that Marguerite seemed oddly wonderstruck, and even slightly amused, as if appreciating what Whittlesey had done as a clever magic trick and an elaborate practical joke.
Given my current state, I was able to see all this for myself, but as it happened, that final item also came to me: an elderly curator arrived early, pulled up a chair beside my case, and read me the article in its entirety.
“I thought you should know,” he said. I learned later that one of his sons had been killed in France.
I am a stuffed pigeon, so despite my intimate association with Charles Whittlesey in life, in death, and in history, no reporters ever asked me for comment—not that they would have been able to understand me anyway. Still, it would have been nice.
I’m not sure what I would have said then, and I’m not sure now. During their time together at Camp Upton and in the early days of the war, Whittlesey and McMurtry would chide each other good-naturedly on the subject of religion, McMurtry being a relaxed and tolerant Presbyterian and Whittlesey being a relaxed and tolerant atheist. During their few idle moments in the Pocket, they renewed these discussions with greater urgency. “What do you say over the dead?” McMurtry asked. “Since you have no faith of your own, I mean? Our chaplain can’t keep up with this killing, so I step in when I can, but without the churching I’ve got, Whit, I think I’d be lost at sea. What do you do?”
Whittlesey seemed perplexed by the question. “I say whatever they would have me say,” he replied.
“That’s all well and good for the fellow who’s dead, I suppose,” McMurtry said, “but what about you? Let’s be honest: we say these things to hold ourselves together as much as to safeguard anybody’s immortal soul. What do you say to yourself?”
Now Whit understood, and he nodded and blushed a bit. “It’s not something I’d expect everyone to adopt,” he said, “but I sometimes think of a line from Catullus, the Roman poet. ‘Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.’ That’s ‘So forever, brother, hail and farewell,’ more or less. It’s held up for two thousand years, so I suppose it’ll carry me through this.”
I’ve returned to it often. It doesn’t promise the comfort of heaven, and it doesn’t evoke the glory of war. It doesn’t assert that the death was necessary, or valuable, or just. It just declares admiration for the dead and grief at the loss.
Best of all, it addresses the dead as “brother,” thus erasing nearly all the distinctions that might have separated Whit from the fallen in life: rank, class, background. Even species, I like to imagine.
I don’t know where Whit went—where he is now, if he can be said to be anywhere. I stretch myself out into the cold darkness toward him, but I get no reply.
While I’m hesitant to apply my own experience to Whit’s, I draw on my memories of homing: of the intense, convulsive need to return to my loft and the translation of every sensible thing into routes and impediments. Once I was launched into the air, the world in all its plenitude seemed no more than a thing to be traversed and endured on my way home.
I think that may be how Whit felt about the world before he found his route out. Bill Cavanaugh, whom we both loved, used to say, Pigeons fly faster to a happy home. Wherever Whit is now, I hope he’s happy.
Hail and farewell, brother. I salute you, and good-bye.