Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey Page 3

  The producer didn’t ask much of me: put on fatigues and a trench helmet, pose with my former subordinates, pretend to consult a map. Since my scenes were shot in a Westchester County meadow, not in the Charlevaux Ravine, I didn’t even have to spend a night away from home. They assured me that my performance, such as it was, would be blended so seamlessly with actual battle footage from the Argonne Forest that the audience would be convinced I was there.

  I was there, of course. The experience seems far stranger in retrospect than it did at the time: a day spent playacting the most horrible events of my life in order to help someone produce a largely false depiction of it that will almost certainly supplant the real thing in popular consciousness. Marguerite couldn’t believe that I would consider it, tried to reassure me that I was within my rights to refuse. Why on earth would you want to relive that? she asked. I replied with a muddled paraphrase of Alexander’s appeal to my sense of duty.

  The truth was that I was reliving it every day anyway.

  I, unlike Valentino, am by no means handsome enough to spark collective sexual fantasies among the moviegoing public. When I saw myself in The Lost Battalion at its New York premiere, I squirmed in my seat at how awkward my performance seemed: stiffer than the manufactured sets wherein actors playing brave enlistees bade farewell to actors playing proud parents. I realize now that my and my fellow veterans’ filmed behavior was quite natural, or nearly so, given the odd circumstances. It was the context—cast onto the silver screen—that made us appear cringing and gauche, out of place, simply because we weren’t rolling our eyes and thrashing about like Valentino and Ayres. I and my men were in the film to grant it authenticity, yet somehow we were the least convincing thing in it. The whole experience was a pungent reminder—a reminder I didn’t need—that in a contest against passion, truth always makes a poor showing.

  In any event the reviewers thought my stoic taciturnity apt. “American deadpan,” said one of the notices. “A man of infinite class and a true gentleman,” said another.

  I wished they would all shut up.

  The film flopped in New York City, but they still trot it out as a reliable fund-raiser at American Legion halls all over the country. All right with me—the wounded and their families need the money—so long as I never have to see it again. I fled celebrity after The Lost Battalion’s retreat from theaters, but celebrity follows. Even here on Broadway, I look over my shoulder, half expecting to find it behind me.

  In another sense—a sense that Valentino might or might not understand—I am quite the performer. Canyons of incomprehension yawn between me and most other human beings, and I keep acting as if it’s possible for me to reach across and join them on their side, to span the gap between who they believe me to be and who I really am. Theater of war, theater of life. I’ll always have to be an actor if I stay.

  Rounding Columbus Circle, I look up at the statue of the man who discovered America, this America that bore me toward enlistment aboard ideals that still bind me: Honor and Duty. Not merely words to be carved in the marble of tombstones. Like the angel holding the globe on the statue’s pedestal, we infantry tried to hand the world back to itself intact, though we who fought have been blown apart. Whether the world will hold together remains to be seen.

  On the October day when we reached and were trapped in the Pocket, we learned that for an infantryman a successful attack can be worse than a defeat. I will dream forever of men with blown-off legs attempting to run. Of skin shreds and scraps of American uniforms. Of the whistle of a shell and the pulverized chunk of flesh that’s left of the man who’d just been next to you. Corpses annihilated, no hope of a marked grave. War as magician. War as vanishing act.

  Immediately after we were rescued, ordinary activities, like brushing my teeth—mechanical before—felt stunningly enjoyable. Now almost nothing does. To go from living like a soldier, thinking only from minute to minute, to having once again to think far into the fields of the future is more than many minds can muster.

  My hand shakes as I light another cigarette, but I smile anyway, because happiness has crept back to me now that it’s almost time to execute my escape. A woman on the corner startles at my face, illuminated by my match, grinning like a jack-o’-lantern. I want to reassure her—Believe me, lady, you have nothing to fear from me—but she hurries to the next block.

  Passing Seventy-ninth Street, I recall my brother Melzar’s wedding a little over a year ago—September 27, 1920—at All Souls Unitarian Church on the Upper East Side, straight across Central Park from where I’m walking now. Though the ceremony was tiny, I had Marguerite there with me, just as we’d stood up together in her sister’s wedding. Melzar and his bride, Addie, live today not three blocks from the church, and Melzar, a pillar of respectability, works for the Phelps Dodge Corporation. His life runs in a comfortable furrow from their home to his offices on John Street, and I am glad that there’s no chance of bumping into him here.

  Though I’ve been walking for almost an hour, I don’t feel tired as I reach Riverside. Amid the misty rain and the fog of the Hudson, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument rises before me like a decrepit ghost.

  A compact approximation of a Corinthian temple, the design was called “The Temple of Fame.” From the looks of it, the columns and eagles began to decay instantly upon its dedication in 1902, which certainly reflects my experience of fame. But the marble blocks, dissolving and sugary, don’t depress me as they might have in the years between the standoff in the Pocket and my new resolve. I laugh out loud at my own bathos, which likely makes me look crazy, but that’s all right; I don’t want to be approached.

  The usual wooden benches line the chalky promenade, just as they did when I first came to the city with little experience but great desire. Banking and contractual law filled my days, and I soon sought ways to fill my nights.

  I was expected to have a strong handshake and broad shoulders, to be a man’s man as well as a woman’s man and a Christian, and not to be weak-kneed, thin-skinned, effeminate, sissified. I kept my hair up, as Felix would later teach me to say.

  At Williams, and then at Harvard, all the surfaces had had a haughty, hygienic varnish, and I’d affected just such a varnish myself. In truth I preferred the smut and dirt of the city. The oily filth of the leather straps on the subway. The hints on the street of things done in darkness, away from the lamps and their nimbuses of gnats. Yet this dirtiness held a kind of purity, a virgin allure.

  When I came back after the war, I could no longer access this.

  At Williams I’d gained the reputation of someone who worked too hard to spare time for the ladies. At Harvard the same. In the city, too, I maintained a decorous fiction about who I was and for whom I spared time. When renting my lodgings, I asked my landlady if I could have women in my rooms. “Why, certainly,” she replied. “This is your home.” I have always appreciated the polite ways by which New Yorkers in close quarters remain aloof, granting one another privacy. But I never hosted even one woman in my rooms.

  I discovered quickly that for someone with my proclivities, one of the most private places is actually the street. The term I now know to use is “cruising”: I went cruising. One of the many bits of slang that Felix—whom I first met right here, at the monument—taught me. I wore out my shoes that first summer, drifting after dinner and before bed. What led me to the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, which Felix told me was a well-established pickup spot, I’ll never know. Some kind of instinct, I suppose.

  That August night in 1908, strolling in the cool breeze off the Hudson, I simply felt an impulse to look up. Felix sat on a bench at the base of the one-hundred-foot-tall cylindrical rotunda, a structure whose phallic suggestiveness was not lost on me.

  I sit now where he and I first sat, and I light another cigarette. He was smoking then, too. Calmly intelligent and dressed with a trim elegance, he looked nothing like the swishes and obv
ious types—which is not to say I resented them, as some men did. They didn’t bother me then and don’t bother me now; I’ve just never been interested. I like masculine men. Felix was masculine, middle-aged but unlined, and youthful, his skin tallowy somehow, his jaw strong, his hair blond.

  “Need a light?” he asked. Exciting me, for I knew that that was not all he was offering.

  I sat beside him, apprehensive yet finding something safe about him, too, discreet and distant, like a mathematical theorem.

  We went to bed together only once, that night, at his place, the Dakota, quite nearby, very big, very private. And it was fine: less sweaty and furtive, more practiced and unhurried than any of my student tumbles. Yet not something to repeat—not because I felt guilty but because we simply enjoyed each other more as friends. Professorial in manner, Felix took an interest in mentoring me. He taught me where else I might go in the city to find what I sought—what restaurants and bars I could try if I tired of the streets.

  Soon enough I had my round of places to meet men—men like me: respectable and professional and bourgeois in their normal lives. Men bound by an unspoken code to never betray our shared secret. But I still visited the monument on occasion for nostalgia’s sake.

  Now that I, too, am a war veteran like those it commemorates, the monument is doubly significant to me. Perhaps triply: just like the structure, I am falling apart. Fame has all but foreclosed my previous life. I am so much more identifiable now, potentially subject to blackmail. I have permitted myself only a couple of assignations since my return.

  If I sit here too long tonight, someone will read me as seeking a tryst. I don’t want to speak to anyone, so I stand and walk past the monument toward the Hudson.

  A seagull sits on a post near the shoreline, huddled up but not asleep, its beady eye shining in the light reflected off the water. I wish I had some bread to feed it. The river stinks, but I’ve smelled worse.

  “You can never know,” I tell the seagull. “And I can never show you.”

  The bird’s neck telescopes slightly upward; its sharp teardrop head ticks toward me.

  Because there’s some purchase to be gained through acting a little cracked, I continue. “The war. The trenches and the funkholes, all festering cesspools breathing forth the toxic reek of guts and shit. American. German. French. Horse. Atrocious, barbarous—it stank. Words falter. Fetid and stygian, a river in Hades. I missed flush toilets. Those long days in the Pocket, I had many wishes, but selfishly, among them—among those blood-filled holes and dying men—frankly one was to no longer have to touch and dwell in my own excrement. Like animals do. But not wild animals, or mostly wild ones like you. Like animals in confinement. Forced to find a home in horror. Forced by men like me.”

  The seagull makes that cruel face that all seagulls make and turns away. I do the same. Wishing again that pigeons were here at night—much kinder birds—but such is not their way. They are all home, as I should be.

  Rain falls as I walk back south. I should return by the path I came, take the most direct route to where I live. Bachelors’ quarters, as they say.

  Instead I turn on Amsterdam. Straight through Hell’s Kitchen, where Bill Cavanaugh used to live. I do not know his old address, though I could probably find it through the army. His mother’s still there, with his little sister, Annie. He described the place when we were in France. I’ve never visited.

  Geographically speaking, Hell’s Kitchen is not far from my place in Midtown. In every other sense, it’s a world away. A block into the neighborhood, the atmosphere changes, I hear voices dropping and feel eyes tracking me, and the full dimensions of the foolhardiness of my detour begin to become clear. These streets are more orderly now than when Bill was growing up here, but that order, I recall, is imposed by gangs, not by the police department, which evidently will patrol it only in sizable packs. Thanks to Prohibition, the commercial prospects of the old tanners’ warehouses along the river have been reinvigorated by rumrunners; the previously senseless violence of the local hooligans has found fresh purpose.

  A slender, tidy fellow in spectacles and a dinner jacket must make for quite a sight among the tenements. While most of the inhabitants no doubt bear me no ill will, one or two are enough to make trouble, and it’s not hard to imagine some toughs accosting me out of simple curiosity, much as John James Audubon might have hastened to shoot an unfamiliar bird. My pulse quickens, as does my step, and I laugh at myself. What, at this point, have I to fear?

  As luck would have it—both the gangsters’ luck and mine, for I can hardly imagine what disastrous effect the casual murder of a national hero might have on their criminal enterprise—I arrive unmolested at Tenth and Fiftieth, the heart of Hell’s Kitchen. I allow myself a moment’s pause, imagining I’ll find some sign that will show me where Bill hailed from, but there’s nothing, or almost nothing. The streets smell wet, and gently of horses, and I can see the outlines of pigeon coops atop some of the roofs. Bill always smelled like tobacco and hay.

  At the doorway of the building on the corner, some resident has planted a statue of St. Francis of Assisi. The Cavanaughs can’t possibly live there—what odds would those be?—but Bill was our regiment’s best pigeon handler, and that’s how I picture him: St. Francis standing with an armful of birds.

  Saints fast and give their worldly possessions away until there’s nothing left to give. I have done something similar, though I am no saint.

  Sentimental narratives are ever popular, but especially in times of decline. I cut left on Fiftieth and strive to be unsentimental—about Bill or about his treasured Cher Ami, whose very name bespeaks sentimentality: Dear Friend. Oh, dear.

  For years I’ve felt like a rotten egg trying to hide beneath a fresh white shell.

  The Neo-Gothic spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral tower in the night. Even to an unbeliever, the church’s beauty refuses to be denied. Bill was Irish Catholic, and faithful. The taste of him, I imagine, like sweet and healthy candy. How I wish I could have loved him without fear. His charisma without guile. World without end, Amen. The church’s roseate stained-glass window regards me like a judgmental eye.

  Forgive me, I think as I skirt Grand Central, where Marguerite thinks I’ll go tomorrow to take the train to Pittsfield. I put my younger brother Elisha on that train last week. He’d been living by me—his own room in the same spartan building—but I sent him home to be with our parents. He was an ambulance driver in France before I went over, he got gassed as well, and his resulting TB was a horror, truly. The whole quarters could hear him coughing through the walls at night, louder than me. Now that I am leaving, I don’t want him to be here on his own.

  And here indeed I am again: 136 East Forty-fourth, my home for one more night. I let myself in and head to my room.

  For years, whenever I’ve come home, I’ve felt like a suitcase dumped out at a hotel: secret disarray behind a closed door. But this past week I have packed myself tightly, everything in its right place, and I am happy to be taking myself away. The doctor to whom Bayard sent me gave me some pills to help my cough and to help me sleep. “We can mask the symptoms at least,” he said. For weeks I took them, not with water but with whiskey. His pharmacist dispensed it to me, as so many pharmacists have been doing lately, in keeping with the requirements of Prohibition.

  The bottle helps me endure what I can’t when sober. It doesn’t make me forget. Nothing makes me forget. It merely lets me be in proximity to the memories without being sliced by them. My memories of the Argonne do not merely get on my nerves; they scrape across my mind like a cheese grater. But not tonight. I take no whiskey, no pills, having thrown them all away, not wanting anyone to find them.

  And for once I feel as though I don’t need them. The clothes I’ll wear tomorrow are already laid out on the chair, my army-issue pistol in the pocket of my coat, loaded, even though I don’t plan to need it. On my trip I’ll take n
o baggage aside from one change of clothes, and my dress uniform, and the eight letters I’ve typed up this past week, stacked neatly beneath the lamp on my desk, addressed to the people I am most sorry to be leaving. Mother and Father and Marguerite, Melzar and Elisha, Bayard and McMurtry, et cetera, et cetera. My ticket for the Toloa is on top of the heap. I undress. Touch the ticket once before I flip out the light.

  I fall asleep in peace for the first time in years, the city noise soothing me, the sounds of tires outside hissing over dim, wet streets.

  * * *

  • • •

  I wake to a gray morning and the clinks downstairs of Mrs. Sullivan cooking breakfast. I requested that she have mine at eight. When she knocks to bring the tray, I am dressed and ready.

  “You’re looking cheery today, Mr. Whittlesey,” she says as she brings the meal in, enlivening the small space with the roasted scent of coffee.

  “Am I?” I smile, smelling the food: heat and grease. A man hit by a shell disintegrates into bits, like an overcrisped slice of bacon when bitten.

  “I hope you have a fine time with the family,” she says, black skirts rustling, her widow’s weeds. “Please tell Elisha that I’ve been praying for his recovery.”

  “I will,” I say, though I won’t, and anyway no amount of praying will heal his lungs. “Mrs. Sullivan, here’s my check for next month’s rent. If you could do me the courtesy, would you cash it right away?”

  “Of course, Mr. Whittlesey, of course,” she says, her eyes puzzled beneath her steel-gray eyebrows.

  But I know that she’ll do it, as she’s a woman of her word. Given the unorthodox nature of my plans, I want to spare her any financial inconvenience.