Part 7 (1/2)

I say ”we,” but in fact I did not know anyone else who read these things. Perhaps my parents did, for they brought the books home. What were my friends reading? We did not then talk about books; our reading was private, and constant, like the interior life itself. Still, I say, there must have been millions of us. The theaters of war-the lands, the multiple seas, the very corridors of air-and the death camps in Europe, with their lines of starved bald people...these, combined, were the settings in which our imaginations were first deeply stirred.

Earlier generations of children, European children, I inferred, had had on their minds heraldry and costumed adventure. They read The Count of Monte Cristo The Count of Monte Cristo and and The Three Musketeers The Three Musketeers. They read about King Arthur and Lancelot and Galahad; they read about Robin Hood. I had read some of these things and considered them behind me. It would have been pleasant, I suppose, to close your eyes and imagine yourself in a suit of armor, astride an armored horse, fighting a battle for honor with broadswords on a pennanted plain, or in a copse of trees.

But of what value was honor when, in book after book, the highest prize was a piece of bread? Of what use was a broadsword, or even a longbow, against Hitler's armies which occupied Europe, against Hitler's Luftwaffe, Hitler's Panzers, Hitler's U-boats, or against Hitler's S.S., who banged on the door and led Anne Frank and her family away? We closed our eyes and imagined how we would survive the death camps-maybe with honor and maybe not. We imagined how we would escape the death camps, imagined how we would liberate the death camps. How? We fancied and schemed, but we had read too much, and knew there was no possible way. This was a novel concept: Can't do. We were in for the duration. We closed our eyes and waited for the Allies, but the Allies were detained.

Now and over the next few years, the books appeared and we read them. We read The Bridge Over the River Kwai, The Young Lions The Bridge Over the River Kwai, The Young Lions. In the background sang a chorus of smarmy librarians: The world of books is a child'sLand of enchantment.When you open a book and start readingYou enter another world-the worldOf make-believe-where anything can happen.

We read Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, and To h.e.l.l and Back To h.e.l.l and Back. We read The Naked and the Dead, Run Silent, Run Deep The Naked and the Dead, Run Silent, Run Deep, and Tales of the South Pacific Tales of the South Pacific, in which American sailors saw native victims of elephantiasis pus.h.i.+ng their own enlarged t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es before them in wheelbarrows. We read The Caine Mutiny, Some Came Running The Caine Mutiny, Some Came Running.

I was a skilled bombardier. I could run a submarine with one hand, and evade torpedoes, depth charges, and mines. I could disembowel a soldier with a bayonet, survive under a tarp in a lifeboat, and parachute behind enemy lines. I could contact the Resistance with my high-school French and eavesdrop on the Germans with my high-school German: ”Du! Kleines Madchen! Bist du franzosisches Madchen oder bist du Amerikanischer spy?”

”Je suis une jeune fille de la belle France, Herr S.S. Officer.”

”Prove it!”

”Je suis, tu es, il est, nous sommes, vous etes, ils sont.”

”Very gut. Run along and play.”

What were librarians reading these days? One librarian pressed on me a copy of Look Homeward, Angel Look Homeward, Angel. ”How I envy you,” she said, ”having a chance to read this for the very first time.” But it was too late, several years too late.

At last Hitler fell, and scientists working during the war came up with the atomic bomb. We read On the Beach, A Canticle for Leibowitz On the Beach, A Canticle for Leibowitz; we read Hiros.h.i.+ma Hiros.h.i.+ma. Reading about the bomb was a part of reading about the war: these were actual things and events, large in their effects on millions of people, vivid in their nearness to each man's or woman's death. It was a relief to turn from life to something important.

At school we had air-raid drills. We took the drills seriously; surely Pittsburgh, which had the nation's steel, c.o.ke, and aluminum, would be the enemy's first target.

I knew that during the war, our father, who was 4-F because of a collapsing lung, had ”watched the skies.” We all knew that people still watched the skies. But when the keen-eyed watcher spotted the enemy bomber over Pittsburgh, what, precisely, would be his moves? Surely he could only calculate, just as we in school did, what good it would do him to get under something.

When the air-raid siren sounded, our teachers stopped talking and led us to the school bas.e.m.e.nt. There the gym teachers lined us up against the cement walls and steel lockers, and showed us how to lean in and fold our arms over our heads. Our small school ran from kindergarten through twelfth grade. We had air-raid drills in small batches, four or five grades together, because there was no room for us all against the walls. The teachers had to stand in the middle of the bas.e.m.e.nt rooms: those bright Pittsburgh women who taught Latin, science, and art, and those educated, beautifully mannered European women who taught French, history, and German, who had landed in Pittsburgh at the end of their respective flights from Hitler, and who had baffled us by their common insistence on tidiness, above all, in our written work.

The teachers stood in the middle of the room, not talking to each other. We tucked against the walls and lockers: dozens of clean girls wearing green jumpers, green knee socks, and pink-soled white bucks. We folded our skinny arms over our heads, and raised to the enemy a clatter of gold scarab bracelets and gold bangle bracelets.

If the bomb actually came, should we not let the little kids-the kindergartners like Molly, and the first and second graders-go against the wall? We older ones would stand in the middle with the teachers. The European teachers were almost used to this sort of thing. We would help them keep spirits up; we would sing ”Frere Jacques,” or play Buzz.

Our house was stone. In the bas.e.m.e.nt was a room furnished with a long wooden bar, tables and chairs, a leather couch, a refrigerator, a sink, an ice maker, a fireplace, a piano, a record player, and a set of drums. After the bomb, we would live, in the manner of Anne Frank and her family, in this bas.e.m.e.nt. It had also a larger set of underground rooms, which held a washer and a dryer, a workbench, and, especially, food: shelves of canned fruits and vegetables, and a chest freezer. Our family could live in the bas.e.m.e.nt for many years, until the radiation outside blew away. Amy and Molly would grow up there. I would teach them all I knew, and entertain them on the piano. Father would build a radiation barrier for the bas.e.m.e.nt's sunken windows. He would teach me to play the drums. Mother would feed us and tend to us. We would grow close.

I had spent the equivalent of years of my life, I thought, in concentration camps, in ghettoes, in prison camps, and in lifeboats. I knew how to ration food and water. We would each have four ounces of food a day and eight ounces of water, or maybe only four ounces of water. I knew how to stretch my rations by h.o.a.rding food in my s.h.i.+rt, by chewing slowly, by slos.h.i.+ng water around in my mouth and wetting my tongue well before I swallowed. If the water gave out in the taps, we could drink club soda or tonic. We could live on the juice in canned food. I figured the five of us could live many years on the food in the bas.e.m.e.nt-but I was not sure.

One day I asked Mother: How long could we last on the food in the bas.e.m.e.nt? She did not know what I had been reading. How could she have known?

”The food in the bas.e.m.e.nt? In the freezer and on the shelves? Oh, about a week and a half. Two weeks.”

She knew, as I knew, that there were legs of lamb in the freezer, turkeys, chickens, pork roasts, shrimp, and steaks. There were pounds of frozen vegetables, quarts of ice cream, dozens of Popsicles. By her reckoning, that wasn't many family dinners: a leg of lamb one night, rice, and vegetables; steak the next night, potatoes, and vegetables.

”Two weeks! We could live much longer than two weeks!”

”There's really not very much food down there. About two weeks' worth.”

I let it go. What did I know about feeding a family? On the other hand, I considered that if it came down to it, I would have to take charge.

It was clear that adults, including our parents, approved of children who read books, but it was not at all clear why this was so. Our reading was subversive, and we knew it. Did they think we read to improve our vocabularies? Did they want us to read and not pay the least bit of heed to what we read, as they wanted us to go to Sunday school and ignore what we heard?

I was now believing books more than I believed what I saw and heard. I was reading books about the actual, historical, moral world-in which somehow I felt I was not living.

The French and Indian War had been, for me, a purely literary event. Skilled men in books could survive it. Those who died, an arrow through the heart, thrilled me by their last words. This recent war's survivors, some still shaking, some still in mourning, taught in our cla.s.srooms. ”Wir waren ausgebommt,” one dear old white-haired Polish lady related in German cla.s.s, her family was ”bombed out,” and we laughed, we smart girls, because this was our slang for ”drunk.” Those who died in this war's books died whether they were skilled or not. Bombs fell on their cities or s.h.i.+ps, or they starved in the camps or were ga.s.sed or shot, or they stepped on land mines and died surprised, trying to push their intestines back in their abdomens with their fingers and thumbs.

What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. I wanted strength, not tea parties. What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live.

Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circ.u.mstances where courage is still prized. This life could be found and joined, like the Resistance. I kept this exhilarating faith alive in myself, concealed under my uniform s.h.i.+rt like an oblate's ribbon; I would not be parted from it.

We who had grown up in the Warsaw ghetto, who had seen all our families ga.s.sed in the death chambers, who had s.h.i.+pped before the mast, and hunted sperm whale in Antarctic seas; we who had marched from Moscow to Poland and lost our legs to the cold; we who knew by heart every snag and sandbar on the Mississippi River south of Cairo, and knew by heart Morse code, forty parables and psalms, and lots of Shakespeare; we who had battled Hitler and Hirohito in the North Atlantic, in North Africa, in New Guinea and Burma and Guam, in the air over London, in the Greek and Italian hills; we who had learned to man minesweepers before we learned to walk in high heels-were we going to marry Holden Caulfield's roommate, and buy a house in Point Breeze, and send our children to dancing school?

THE BOYS WERE CHANGING. Those froggy little beasts had elongated and transformed into princes and G.o.ds. When it happened, I must have been out of the room. Suddenly here they all were, Richie and Rickie and Dan and all, diverse in their varied splendors, each powerful and mysterious, immense, and possessed of an inexplicable knowledge of arcana.

The boys wandered the neighborhoods now, and showed up at girls' houses, as if by accident. They would let us listen to them talk, and we heard them mention the state legislature, say, or some opinion of Cicero's, or the Battle of the Marne-and those things abruptly became possible topics in society because those magnificent boys had p.r.o.nounced their names.

Where had they learned all this, or, more pertinently, why had they remembered it? We girls knew precisely the limits of the possible and the thinkable, we thought, and were permanently astonished to learn that we were wrong. Whose idea of sophistication was it, after all, to pay attention in Latin cla.s.s? It was the boys' idea. Everything was. Everything they thought of was bold and original like that. While we were worried about sending valentines, they were worried about sending troops.

Plus their feet were so big. You could look at the boys' sheer physical volume with uncomprehending astonishment forever. Had the braces on their teeth been restraining their very bones? For look at them. You would never tire of running your wondering eyes over the mystery of their construction, so plain, and the mystery of their bulk, and the mystery of their skin, and even their strange boxy clothes. The boys.

We ran, we fancied, to sweetness, we girls. The boys, as we got to know them, were cynical. They addressed each other out of the corners of their mouths in cryptic staccato phrases, all clever references to that larger world wherein they dwelt and where we longed to go ourselves. If you got to know them, apparently, they would tell you about their teachers at Shady Side Academy-teachers my own father had studied under, but about whom, alas, he could come up with precious little.

We girls chafed, whined, and complained under our parents' strictures. The boys waged open war on their parents. They cursed their fathers, and disobeyed them outright. (”What can they do? Throw me out?”) Was this not breathtakingly bold? The boys' pitched battles with their parents were legendary; the punishments they endured melted our hearts.

Each year as we rose through the grades, dancing school met an hour later, until one year it vanished into the darkness, and was replaced by, or transmogrified into, another inst.i.tution altogether, that of country-club subscription dances.

The engraved invitation came in the mail: The Sewickley Country Club was hosting a subscription dinner dance several weeks thence. Each of several appropriate country clubs, it turned out, gave precisely one such dance a year, at a time that coincided with boarding-school vacations. I knew Sewickley children, having opposed on playing fields their school's ferocious field hockey team. The old village of Sewickley had come to prominence late in the nineteenth century when some families quit their grandparents' mansions on Fifth Avenue and moved in a body to that green and pleasant land. They zoned it to a fare-thee-well and furnished it with a country club, a Presbyterian church, and a little expensive school. Now they were asking us to a dinner dance.

We showed up at our own country club in pale spaghetti-strap dresses and silk shoes, to board a yellow bus in the snow. There we all were: the same boys, the same girls. How did they know? I wondered which of those remote country-club powers, those white-haired sincere men, those golden-haired, long-toothed, ironic women, had met on what firm cloud over western Pennsylvania to apportion and schedule these events among the scattered country clubs, and had pored over what unthinkable list of schoolchildren to discuss which schoolchildren should be asked to these dances they held for what reason. If you were part Jewish, would they find you out, like Hitler? How small a part could they detect? What was at the end of all this novitiate-solemn vows?

We dined that night in faraway Sewickley, at long linen-covered tables marked by place cards. Our shrimp c.o.c.ktails were already at our places. We were like Beauty in the castle of the Beast: that is, I, at least, never laid eyes on the unknown adult or adults who had presumably invited us, designed and ordered the invitations, secured a room and a band, and devised the menu. There were some adults against the walls, all dressed up, who ignored us and whom we ignored.

My dinner partner was a fragile redhead from Sewickley, a Paulie-from St. Paul's School-whose hulking twin sisters had several times mown me down on the hockey field. From him I learned that some girls my age voluntarily played golf. Like many of the boys, he was good-natured, polite, somewhat cowed, and delicately handsome. One was not, however, thank G.o.d, required to fall in love at a subscription dance, although it had been known to happen.

We ate chicken breast in velvet sauce on ham. We ate wild rice, tomato aspic, and, as a concession to our being in fact children, hot fudge sundaes or green peppermint parfaits.

During dessert the band straggled in and set up by the freezing French doors to the terrace. The band was an unmatched set of bored men in dark suits and red carnations. The only bands that counted in our book were Lester Lanin's and Eddy Duchin's. These men, as at all subscription dances, were merely locals: a drum, a ba.s.s, a piano, a clarinet. Their boredom, and the possible death of their musical ambitions, and the probable complete disregard of everyone with whom they had dealt over this engagement, unless they had had the good fortune to run into my mother, had drained all the expression from their faces. Sometimes, though, on a jitterbug or a Charleston, you could pry a wink out of the drummer.

The band struck up, not surprisingly, ”Mountain Greenery.” This frenzied sequence of notes had been our cue conditioned since we were ten. We danced.

There were boys here from far away-not only from familiar Fox Chapel and expected Sewickley, but also from Ligonier, that pretty village in the distant mountains where the Mellons lived. There were older boys here, who had already been to deb parties. And there were some very tall boys-some of ours and some of theirs-whose shoulders rose above our heads like those few lone trees which burst through the canopy in a rain forest. Although these big boys' status was as great as their stature, they rarely smiled or relaxed, but instead looked worriedly around over our head-tops, frowning, earnest, always at the edge of a wince.

”Isn't he cute?”

In the densely carpeted ladies' rooms we all hurried. We didn't meet each other's eyes in the long mirrors.

”Which?”

”Which what?”

”Which is cute?”