The Gesture

parents

1

I once heard it said that in the United States the first generation has brains and the second money and the third a conscience. As a matter of fact, I think it was my uncle who said that. I do not think that he meant it as a compliment to capitalistic democracy. I suspect that he had me in mind. For I am third generation, rich, you see, with all that that implies, but through some innate perversity I have never quite been able to accept the world that was my birthright.

My family is not rich in the Hollywood sense of the word, certainly. But my father is a member of that last bulwark of Victorianism, the professional class, and he spent considerable money sending me to a private school and entering me, at least, in Yale University in 1939. After that I took over and began to exhibit the standard peculiarities of a prodigal son. I learned to drink, cashed my share of bad checks, quoted Karl Marx, did no noticeable amount of work, and, after two and a half years, to the surprise of nobody at all, flunked out. Actually, the authorities allowed me the last courtesy of a voluntary exit. This was inspired, I suppose, by the generally benevolent spirit of the times. I quit in December of 1941.

My subsequent career was not much different from that of any other young man who joined up too soon and regretted it. I spent four years in the Army Air Forces, glimpsed briefly five continents and two oceans, and finally was demobilized in late 1945 with considerable back flying pay in my pocket and a high opinion of my own importance. Since then I have been engaged in leading what I call an independent life. It consists of living in the city of New York, where I share a walk-up with an apprentice banker, and finishing my education at Columbia University on the G.I. Bill of Rights.

Columbia is not a pretty spot. However, I prefer it to Central Park, and during the hot evenings last summer I used to spend considerable time wandering around its environs. I had my favorite bench—not one of those that overlook Riverside Drive and the Hudson. I would sit myself down on Morningside Drive and there enjoy one of the last remaining natural views in the city of New York, the panorama of Harlem. From the Heights you can see clear to the East River. No skyscrapers interfere in that direction. In New York’s steel frontage it forms an indenture, a sort of architectural plateau. And as I would sit there I would think at times upon the strange way in which we Americans have implemented our no doubt profound democratic faith.

One evening, as I waited on my bench for a night class to begin, I heard footsteps behind me and then a familiar voice. Hello, Whip, it said. I turned and there was Willie.

Willie Turk is a big man. He was wearing glasses and that surprised me. He was dressed in a blue pin-stripe suit. It was neither conservative nor gaudy but could only be described as cheap, which was the one thing, no doubt, it was not. It was the sort of suit that was then available to the veteran. The last time I had seen Willie, he had been sporting the uniform of a U.S. Air Corps officer. This was a far cry. I regarded him with mixed feelings.

He sat down.

They told me I might find you here, he said.

What are you doing in town? I asked.

I came to talk to you, he said. I wanted to find out what you’re doing.

Well, I was working for an advertising agency, I said, Now I’m here.

What about your old man’s company?

I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.

Still stubborn, eh?

This G.I. Bill’s doing all right by me, I said, on the defensive.

In that case, he said, I guess there’s no use my seeing you. Frankly, I was looking for a job.

What are you doing now?

Drawing down my twenty bucks a week unemployment insurance.

What sort of a job would you like?

Just anything, he said wistfully. Anything that would give me a start. I thought I could make a deal with this electrical concern. It didn’t work out though. I was driving a cab for a while. But to hell with that. I want something with a future.

Of course I could have helped him. I could have gone around to certain men I despised and said to them, Here is a fellow who wants a job and deserves a job, and in their conciliatory fashion, they would have given him one for which he was not fitted, among men who did not speak his own language, but the thought of it at that moment was simply more than I could face, so I did what may have been a vile thing. I said, Frankly, I can’t help you.

As a matter of fact, he said, quite without resentment, I think I’ll go back in the Army.

Can you?

Well, I can enlist as a sergeant pilot, anyway.

That’s no life for you, I said.

No, but at least I’ll be flying.

Is it worth it?

I’ll take anything at this point, he said.

He sat there and stared out into the evening and I stared at him and somehow did not recognize him. How quickly a half-year can change a man when you yourself have changed. Willie had once been one of my closest and firmest friends, and the fact that I knew he was no longer left me with a sense of treachery to some faith I could not name, but which I was quite sure, somewhere within the last six months, I had abandoned. And I tried to reason with myself. I reviewed in my mind those painful days we had spent together to see if there was some extra dignity we had known then and I had now lost that might justify my present sense of shame. But I could find none. For war does not cleanse men. Those who are strong remain strong, and those who are weak merely show it more obviously, but nothing fundamental changes within us. No, as to that, I suppose it was mere sentiment I felt. Nothing is so poignant, after all, as harrowing times recollected on a full stomach. And as we sat there staring out into the new evening, speaking of past friends now dead or abandoned to the obscurity of their private lives, the whole story came back to me, and with it those memories I had tried so hard to suppress. And then it was that I began to suspect that my difficulty lay not in what I had abandoned, but in what I had never found.

2

One morning some four years ago I was sitting on my cot in an Army barracks at one of our largest, newest, and ugliest Western air bases, when a stranger approached me, extended his hand, and said Whipple?

Yes.

I’m Turk.

I had been prepared for this introduction by a notice on the bulletin board the day before which said that I as a bombardier was assigned to the crew of one Lieutenant Turk, a pilot. I had never seen him before, however, and looking him over now I felt much as a good Moslem must on meeting his designated bride. Actually though, I rather liked what I saw. He was over six feet tall, well built and, in a less energetic environment, I judged he might have topped two hundred pounds. He would have made a good tackle or left guard. I was quite confident he could fly a B-17. And that, I had learned, was all that you should ask of your pilot.

Indeed it was I rather than Willie who was on trial in this situation. As a bombardier, my guild status was distinctly inferior to his. Then there was another thing, too. I was never quite sure of my social position in the Army. I had discovered to my chagrin, you see, that even a renegade Yale man is a Yale man born and bred to the outsider. Rightly or wrongly, a stigma had attached itself to my past. In fact, I had learned to reply, when asked, that I had attended (mumble) school and (swallow hard) college and that my ambition in life was to be a happy fisherman and marry five rich wives. As long as Willie accepted me, therefore, I was hardly the one to question him. And he did accept me.

He proved to be a happy-go-lucky fellow who never inquired too deeply into either men or affairs, and we soon became fast friends. I suppose we never did have many so-called interests in common, but then American soldiers rarely go in for ideological discussions and that kind of thing, and we had a common affinity for hard liquor and easy women, and I can truthfully say that I spent many pleasant evenings in his company.

And then also, of course, we flew in combat together. There is a difference, after all, between knowing a man in the Army and knowing him in the war. I got to know Willie principally in the war. And that in turn brings up something which for me has always been a rather delicate point.

We were sent overseas with a complete group of B-17’s in the early part of 1943, and, after an adventurous, not to say riotous, trip, we joined the Eighth Air Force and set up shop in the middle of an obscure English village some fifty miles northeast of London. Our group displayed the usual incompetence of green units. We were lucky, I am told, that we only lost one-half of our crews in the first three months. I did not, however, appreciate the benevolent percentage at the time. Then one day I got hit myself.

Five miles up and ten miles outside Paris, one sunny morning, a twenty-millimeter shell, which dismembered my navigator, filled me with sufficient fragments not to kill me outright, but to render me incapable, for some time to come of further flight. As a matter of fact, my wounds were generally of what is called superficial character. My real wound was of a different sort. For what happened after that I have thought up various excuses over these past years. I have blamed it on my background or physiology or even a congenital tendency to hysteria evidenced by my grandmother who was a suffragette. Right now I find the best policy is to admit that it happened and let it go at that, though, of course, it is easier now.

The medics treated me well at the hospital. They sewed me up quite adequately and in due time sent me back to my group. There, there seemed to be some question concerning my status. I was to do ground work for a while pending a final medical report, though eventually, it was hoped, I would fly. They hoped so. I can’t say I ever did. No, I found that I did not want to fly at all. It was spring then. It was spring in England, and oh, if you have ever had spring fever and wished not to work, think how it is to have spring fever in a war. In June of 1940, so I have read, the sun shone all day long for the Stukas to strafe the roads of France and the tanks to roll over the newly dried earth, for weather is a weapon nowadays and there is no reason to grow overly sentimental concerning spring. And in late May of 1943, the skies grew clear and the daylight longer and the Eighth Air Force struck out with its first major offensive and I thanked God that I was not being butchered too. For in my new leisure, my mind was given time to digest certain facts that before it had been too tired to comprehend, and it was then that I realized the horror of the war. Spring itself was most painful. Take the birds. You will think me very silly, no doubt, if I tell you I have been scared by birds; but have you ever seen them, say, at fifteen yards as I have? Foot soldiers jump at loud noises, but we were trained visually, and sparrows that wheel against an open sky have silhouettes quite similar to fighter planes in an attack echelon. Or think of the bees or the flowers or young women in an open field or any of those phenomena which at that time of year raise man’s most vital hopes, and think of knowing these under prospect of imminent death. Oh God, if I must die let me die in December. Or at least let me do so more gratefully than we usually did.

In the evenings I would go into Norwich and there in one of the oldest and worst bombed towns in England I would immerse myself in a secondary life. It was queer. All my life I had wished to go to England. I had read about England and thought of England, and here now this was my England! I would pretend. I would say to myself I am a young scholar, I have come to this country to study at Oxford or Cambridge in pursuit of philosophic truth, or I am a tourist here, a favored gentleman, or a lonely traveler. I wished to be an interloper, to throw away my uniform, this brand I wore. One evening, I remember, I ate tea and sandwiches in the upstairs reaches of a small merchandise store and the place was quite empty and subdued and in one corner across from me a young cleric was talking to a woman, and to the drone of their voices I daydreamed and transported myself and I was part of this, an element in a mature world I had never known where men and women lived lives with consciences of their own and silent escapades more adventuresome than anything I in war could know; and then I stared up from my plate and I noticed they were looking at me and I was exposed, not one of them after all, but a thing grotesque. For always there was war. Always there was the group that I must come back to and always it was loathsome.

I lived at that time in a stone hut, permanent officers’ quarters, for they needed my former bed for the more transient type of personnel that made up the combat crews. I roomed there with the squadron flight surgeon, Captain Stephens, a tall man with great bones and the quiet indulgence of someone who has seen much tragedy about which he can do nothing. He was older than I and I never did learn anything about his former practice, though I know he had a wife in a sanitarium in California. Every evening at eight he would sit down on his bed and write her long letters with the aid of Webster’s dictionary and much visible rumination. Usually he was