Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey Read online

Everyone feels old when they’re sad, even children. Even pigeons. During my stay in the dovecote, I’d felt young and happy much of the time, but I never felt that I belonged there, and I’d always felt the pull of an unidentified desire just beyond my reach. I came closest to catching whatever it was when I was in the sky. Looking down at the towns and the land, I had a yearning to be a part of something larger and the sense that I could be. But back at the farm, that feeling of oldness would creep in again, and I couldn’t say why. Maybe in France that would change.

  Miss America whispered, “I’m glad it’s not me.” Lady Jane told her to hush.

  Big Tom reminded me always to listen to the voice. “Don’t take any risks over there,” he said. “Do your best, do your duty, and we’ll see you when it’s over.”

  I kissed them all, a quick beak-to-cheek, and John reached in, speaking low as ever. “You’re a fine, odd creature, Cher Ami,” he said. “That’s why I’ve always loved you.”

  He brought me close to his mouth, and his soft, soothing voice dropped to a whisper, as if to confide something he didn’t want even the other birds to hear. “Save my son,” he said.

  My heart beat hard against his clasping hand. I’d be a liar if I said that I wasn’t excited. I wanted to fly with the best homers in Britain. I wanted to save John’s son, and others. I felt sure that I was approaching the brink of my destiny.

  I wasn’t mistaken.

  How was I to know that I’d never see John—or Big Tom, or Lady Jane, or Miss America, or any of the rest—ever again?

  CHAPTER 4

  CHARLES WHITTLESEY

  The desire to be something other than what one is is a cruel affliction, and I am finally cured.

  The Toloa sailed without fanfare this morning, without anyone knowing that Charles “Go to Hell” Whittlesey is among her passengers. Last week I bought my ticket under the name C. W. Whittlesey—no first name, no “Lieutenant Colonel.”

  I’ve stowed myself in a cabin on the starboard side, one I chose from the chart at the American Express office based on its proximity to the upper promenade deck. To get there I need only pass through two doors and ascend two sets of stairs—or “ladders,” as sailors are wont to call them—and I’m confident that the engines’ drone will cover any openings and closings and footfalls I generate in my egress.

  Here on the open sea, my plan finally under way, the finely wrought nerves I’ve fought to keep in control feel so at ease that I don’t blanch when the bellhop recognizes me. I let him alert his commander that he has a celebrity aboard, and I accept an invitation to dine at the captain’s table this evening. Why not? Soon I’ll be free of all obligations; one more won’t hurt.

  I was the last man on earth whom one would expect to become a war hero. Soon I won’t have to live up to anyone’s expectations.

  I set about unpacking. I’ve already arranged for the disposition of most of my significant possessions, which would be of no use to me where I’m going, and the stack of letters I’ve brought will take care of the rest. The one addressed to George McMurtry—my second-in-command in the Pocket—encloses the original copy of the German surrender request, the one to which I am alleged, falsely, to have replied, “Go to hell.” My Congressional Medal of Honor I’ve left to my mother, along with all my other property. That assemblage of ribbon and bronze-coated copper rests in a safe-deposit box with my will at the Mercantile Trust Company back in Manhattan. I never wanted it. All it did was remind me of those doomed men, steadfast in their refusal to complain or give in.

  But it will be a comfort to Mother. She’ll put it over the mantel in the drawing room, where its star and eagle will be on display but out of the sun so the blue ribbon won’t fade. I’m sad I’ll never go back to visit anymore but glad I won’t have to see it—showy, embarrassing.

  Gallantry, the quality ascribed to me in the newspaper stories about my citation, is in fact not in my nature. My nature is to feel, still, every bit of the horror that we encountered in the Pocket. I can’t blame Mother, though, for wanting to be proud. Her life has not been easy, and she has always thought me her oddest child.

  “You stand out because of your suppressed nervous temperament,” my mother told me one day when I came home complaining about school. The teacher always called on me because I always knew the answers, and I didn’t want the other pupils to despise me as a know-it-all. I understood even then that when my parents described me to their friends as “sensitive” and “bookish,” those were not meant strictly as compliments.

  I was born January 20, 1884, and raised for my first ten years in Wisconsin, the second-oldest of six boys. I had a brother Frank, named after my father, who died at his first birthday, so I was for all intents the eldest. I loved my brothers, but Annie Elizabeth, my only sister, was my dearest friend. Two years younger than I, she was sweet and kind and equipped with a poetic sense of humor. Nobody got her jokes the way I did.

  “What do you call a sheep with no legs?” she asked one afternoon as we walked home from the one-room schoolhouse beneath a cotton-balled blue sky.

  There was no way to predict her punch lines that refused to behave like punch lines.

  “A cloud!” she said. As cryptic as it was, we fell to the ground laughing and had to pick leaves from each other’s hair when we stood up again.

  My family moved back east the year of Annie’s death. Just shy of her eighth birthday, she was cut down by the black diphtheria epidemic then scything the North Woods. We moved not to get away from bad memories, though that was a benefit, but because my father had taken a job as a General Electric purchasing agent. From Connecticut, he missed New England.

  Ours was a well-heeled family, and we fit comfortably into the western Massachusetts ethos, with its belief in hard work, and duty, and hell and damnation for those who sinned—though this last was mildly expressed in our Unitarian household.

  My father is silver-haired now but still straight of spine. My mother’s eyes are blue as steel. Growing up, I never asked them for permission to shoot birds, as all my brothers did. “Remember, son, that this is not a toy,” my father would say each time he held out the muzzle-up family rifle to their eager hands.

  I have learned few enduring truths in my too-short, too-long life, and here is one: if something must be stated repeatedly, ritualistically, then it is almost certainly not true. The gun is a toy, as much for grown men as for foolish boys.

  My father goaded me over my disinterest, not quite calling me a coward yet wondering, “What are you afraid of, son?” He didn’t expect me to be a hunter but wanted me to hold a weapon in my hands without flinching.

  Silent of mouth, I would reply in my mind, This device is made to kill at worst, to maim at best. But I made myself say, “Nothing, Father. I’m not afraid.”

  So I learned to shoot.

  Quieter after Annie’s death than before, I inclined toward literature and poetry. I felt more at ease with girls than I did with boys, the latter discomfiting me with their crudeness and violence. For a while this preference was indulged by my parents and teachers, first with knowing sighs as natural melancholy at the loss of Annie and then laughed off. I must be, they joked, a pint-size Romeo pining for my crushes. But when at last I imagined myself as a Romeo, it was Mercutios, not Juliets, for whom I was yearning.

  More than anything I was alone. I took long solitary walks through the Berkshires, examining plants and watching birds. Among many other things, my time in the Argonne Forest spoiled woods for me.

  Everyone feels old when they’re sad, even children. Roaming the hills of western Massachusetts, I felt old much of the time. Aware in a vague way of my fundamental difference from other boys, I thought a lot about how, if not to be more like them, then to be the sort of person whom they’d like. When I matriculated at Pittsfield High, I deliberately set out to become more popular, with a grim understanding that this would amount to con
cealing, not expressing, my inner life. I succeeded, at first through sheer effort and then with increasing ease as I came to enjoy my new niche as a storyteller with a sense of humor more accessible, I suppose, than Annie’s had been. “Laconic” and “sarcastic,” as the men in my regiment would later invariably describe me. Classic New England.

  At Williams College—twenty miles from Pittsfield, a different academic world but an overlapping social scene—I grew to my full height of six feet two inches, towering over my classmates. But my eyesight was poor: I wore spectacles then as I do to this day, and I was never seen with a ball in my hands. I compensated for my athletic deficiency with an upright bearing and an impeccable style of dress that earned me the nickname “the Count”—one bestowed with affection, as I was good-humored about my own foibles. In spite of my determination to be a gentleman, I allowed myself to become known as a “regular guy,” then the highest compliment that a man could give another man. “Chick,” they said—another of my innumerable nicknames—“is always up for a beer and a late-night bull session.”

  This was all true. But even as I maintained my respectable standing within the comfortable cloche of Williams, I’d begun to take an interest in the vaunted postcollegiate world that we were about to enter, to be reflective and serious about how I’d contribute. To say that I was an idealist in my youth understates the case. I flirted with socialism. I composed verse as a member of St. Anthony Hall. I wrote in my yearbook that the purpose of a college education is “learning to judge correctly, to think clearly, to see and to know the truth, and to attain the faculty of pure delight in the beautiful.” All achievements that proved conspicuously useless a few years later when I was watching my men get shot and gassed and blown to pieces.

  After I took my law degree from Harvard, my parents hoped I’d remain in Cambridge—to be closer to them and to marry some fine Boston girl named after a virtue: Faith or Patience—but I moved to Manhattan. I said it was to embark on a Wall Street career, and that wasn’t a lie, as I soon found a position at Murray, Prentice & Howland, which is in fact on Wall Street. But so, too, was my move prompted by the liberty that the city would afford me to live as I chose.

  Those years between the Panic of 1907 and the establishment of the Federal Reserve were, believe it or not, a fascinating time to practice law. The intricacies of contracts and the evolving stringency of the rules governing banks absorbed and grounded me, even as my entanglements with men—queer men, as Felix taught me to say—gave my body and heart the occasional flight. No one suspected, with the possible exception of Bayard—J. Bayard Pruyn, that is, my Williams classmate and closest male friend, through whom I’d soon meet Marguerite—and Bayard would never mention it, or even let on that he knew. Intensely loyal, cheerfully tolerant to an almost irritating degree, Bayard could forgive or brush off any lapse by his confederates, always secure in his conviction that they were pure at heart. If they reneged on deals, or seduced typists, or had trysts in public parks with other men . . . well, it was all more or less the same to Bayard: disappointing, but even the best of us makes mistakes, so what’s to be gained by shaming anyone?

  After three years with our respective firms, Bayard and I had learned enough and built professional reputations strong enough to go into business for ourselves. We formed a partnership and founded a firm of our own. It was a struggle at first to make a go of it, but our list of clients grew, and we settled into a comfortable routine. Even my discreet meetings with men, once a source of such anxiety, had come to seem manageable, unremarkable, just another part of my life in the city.

  Then, in May of 1915, the Germans sank the Lusitania, killing twelve hundred passengers and crew, including 128 Americans.

  I’d been following the war since it began in August, but my residual socialism had left me with deep—and, as it turns out, valid—concerns about exactly which citizens of the belligerent nations would shoulder the burden of combat and therefore inclined me to be a pacifist. Not so my brother Elisha. He had moved to the city, too, and was living at the same boardinghouse as I. Always a patriot, an adventurer, and frankly a hothead, he took the U-boat’s act of aggression as his cue to join the fight. America hadn’t entered the war yet, but by that fall he’d figured out how to become an ambulance driver in France.

  * * *

  • • •

  We sent each other letters. With every missive he invoked the glory he felt in emulating our ancestors who fought in both the Revolutionary and Civil wars. “Our nation is shamefully unprepared,” he wrote. “Our men must be made ready.”

  I was not ready, and it had never occurred to me that there was anything I ought to feel ready for. The only drafting in my world was that of drafting a contract and handing it off to a typist. Since we were boys, I had kept a careful distance from Elisha’s masculine world because I looked down on it as cheap bravado. But Elisha’s service showed me that there could be nobility in such brotherhood. I confess that I ceased to find the prospect of becoming a manful-man repugnant. When manifested in football and fraternity pranks, this roughhousing seemed stupid and shallow, but now that it was for ideals that I could admire, I saw the appeal. I felt challenged by Elisha’s example and, embarrassingly, by the fact that our parents were far prouder of him as a son than they’d ever been of me.

  Plenty of powerful Americans agreed with Elisha, including Lindley Garrison, the secretary of war. Garrison overran President Wilson in his support for the Preparedness Movement, which organized volunteer camps that provided professional men the chance to play citizen-soldier, attaching them to regular army units for a month or so in the summer with no requirement to enlist. In the papers I read over the breakfasts Mrs. Sullivan prepared, I often saw the one in upstate Plattsburgh referred to as “Business Men’s Camp”: the hundreds of men there were mostly older, in their thirties and forties. Educated. A lot of attorneys. Even Quentin Roosevelt, Theodore’s youngest son, attended. He’d later die in the war at the age of twenty.

  And so in the summer of 1916, convinced that Europe would bleed itself white if we didn’t eventually put an end to it, I went, too, up to Plattsburgh. Bayard was surprised, as I was hardly the soldier type, but said he could keep up the practice in my absence, no trouble. Summer was generally an idle time, made even more so by many of our peers’ sudden interest in putting aside their briefs and covenants to try marching in formation.

  Marguerite, predictably, was both amused and horrified. I told her that I was doing it for Elisha, that I was doing it for democracy. These were both true. But if I am honest, so, too, did I do it out of romantic yearning for a purely masculine environment, a desire to unite with other men in common purpose. At Williams and Harvard, I had felt inklings of what such an environment might be like, but there our ostensible seriousness was constantly being adulterated by social obligations, fatuous demands that we demonstrate our good breeding. At camp, I imagined, we’d have no time for such frivolity; the business of living moment to moment would eclipse any jockeying for status or making of future plans.

  By “romantic,” I should clarify, I do not mean “erotic.” While I had no doubt that I’d encounter other queer men in the camp—with greater frequency, maybe, than I did in the city—we’d be there to serve our country, not to pursue our own liaisons.

  Training at Plattsburgh did not disappoint. Far upstate on Lake Champlain, two dozen miles from the Canadian border, the camp did have the atmosphere of the old college spirit. By day we went on drills and hikes and sat in classes on history and tactics. Evenings we gathered around actual campfires to roast Frankfurter sausages—or “hot dogs,” in keeping with prevailing sentiments toward the Germans—and to hear various eminent speakers, such as Elihu Root and Major General Leonard Wood.

  Although that first summer I was technically a private—Company L, Seventh Training Regiment—I and my fellow volunteers weren’t treated as such: the assumption was that if we formally enlisted, we’d
serve as commissioned officers. We learned about “kitchen police” detail—i.e., KP, i.e., Cinderella Duty—a task that we’d be able to assign as punishment to men who might one day be under our command and require discipline by way of coal-shoveling, potato-peeling, dishwashing, ashcan-cleaning, and floor- and bench- and table-scrubbing, all tasks regarded as particularly loathsome and humiliating, since they were the work of women. But though we learned the language and structure of the army’s hierarchy, only the top of the pyramid was present: we had no one to command.

  Though many a fellow went off to Plattsburgh equipped with a firm undergraduate grasp of the classics and imagining himself as an epic hero in the offing, the poetic genre best matched to that July was the pastoral idyll. We walked out each morning into the muzzy yellow light filtered by the clouds over the lake and did our drills amid the torpid bobbing of dragonflies. Days off, we walked the woods and swam the cold waters, and I liked how I looked when I removed my clothes to do so: my former paleness tanned lightly by the sun, my thinness less spindle, more sinew.

  As predicted, I met the occasional man like me, queer but manly, and when I returned to the city that August, a couple of them did look me up at my invitation. Usually we dined at the Williams Club, which I had helped to found. The building, donated by the wife of a famous graduate, was conveniently close to the Midtown neighborhoods where I and many other young men, single and working in offices, resided. We’d eat and retire to my fellow Plattsburgher’s place, always the perfect picture of discretion.

  I was at the Williams Club, in fact, on April 2, 1917, when I read President Wilson’s declaration of war. I’d intended to order dinner and read the later editions, as I did most evenings, but the announcement left me agitated, without appetite. It is a fearful thing, the president said, to lead this great peaceful people into war. But we would fight, he pledged, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free people as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.