Part 3 (1/2)

Lacy flapped his hand in limp rea.s.surance and after a pause shouted, ”Sorry, man!” in a hoa.r.s.e, broken voice. Then he put his head down against the steering wheel. I heard a m.u.f.fled giggle, and what appeared to be shudders of hysteric relief coursed through his shoulders. Finally without another word he sat erect and started the car, and we proceeded again through the dawn, moving at a dignified old lady's pace.

After several miles I managed to find words to speak, something ba.n.a.l and hollow like the ugly little episode itself. I cast a sidelong glance at Lacy, who for a long while had said nothing. The sensitively drawn, almost pretty face in profile had suddenly taken on a pinched and bitter cast: through the unblemished tan the boyish features were not really boyish but haggard, aging. When at last he spoke it was in a grave tone edged with anguish, and it was filled with marked, unsettling intensity, as if our dangerous escape had unloosened in him some fear long held in precarious restraint.

”I saw that motherf.u.c.king dog again,” he said.

”What dog?” I said. ”Again?” For an instant I thought he might have been made temporarily addled. ”Where?”

He drove on for a while without speaking. Then he said, ”See that?” and held up his right hand. There small s.h.i.+ny mounds of scar tissue, perhaps five or six of them, traversed the palm in a ragged crescent. I had seen these marks before. a.s.suming they were scars from a combat wound, obviously not now incapacitating, I had never bothered to ask him how they had come about, nor had Lacy ever volunteered an explanation-until now.

”It was toward the end of the fighting on Okinawa in '45,” he said. ”I had a rifle platoon in the Sixth Marines. It was in June, I remember, around noon on a June day and hotter-as an old gunny friend used to say-than the downtown part of h.e.l.l. Our battalion had been on the a.s.sault for two days, trying to wipe out a d.i.n.ky little town where the j.a.ps had set up an especially strong position. They had artillery in there, a lot of heavy stuff, lot of mortars, and we'd been taking a terrible pounding. But we managed to break them down pretty well with our own big guns and several air strikes, and my company moved up, as I say, around noon, to mop up along a couple of the streets of the town.”

He paused and I saw him reflectively rub his scarred palm along the edge of his cheekbone. ”Well, just as we moved out of the fields toward the edge of the village we began to get clobbered from a j.a.p mortar position which had somehow missed getting finished off by our guns. They were suicidal little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, you know-this was also along about the time of the kamikaze attacks-and they were determined to take us with them; that's why it was such miserable fighting. Anyway, we hit the deck at the edge of the road, I slid into a shallow little ditch full of muck, and that mortar began to pound the s.h.i.+t out of us. It was as dirty a barrage as I'll ever want to go through. They were zeroed in on us, firing for effect, and why or how I didn't get hit I'll never know. It must have gone on for a full five minutes or more when suddenly I looked up from where I was lying and saw, on the other side of the road, directly opposite and no more than four or five yards away, a big black skinny dog, standing there with his four legs sort of akimbo, simply out of his mind with fear at this bombardment going on around him.

”I must have made some sort of motion with my body then, raising up slightly. Although of course I fire from my right shoulder, I'm left-handed and was holding my carbine in my left hand, trying to keep it out of the muck. As I raised up then, the dog just flew at me from the road, and before I knew it he had his jaws clamped down and completely through the palm of my free hand. It was utterly insane, a nightmare, you see-this mortar barrage, with guys getting chopped up all around me, and here this wild terrified dog had sunk his fangs into my hand, so tight that I could not make him let go, as much as I struggled and yanked and pulled. The dog didn't make any noise, didn't growl, didn't snarl, simply glared at me with these mad wet eyes and chomped away at my hand. The pain was-well, beyond description; I don't recall whether I screamed or not. My platoon sergeant was not far away but even if he had seen all this he couldn't have done anything, pinned down like all the rest. Ah Jesus, every time I think of it my hand begins to ache all over again.”

”What in G.o.d's name did you do finally?” I asked.

”I knew I had to shoot the dog, but it's d.a.m.ned hard to fire a carbine, you know, or at least aim it well with one hand, and besides for some dumb reason I had the weapon on safety. Yet I knew I had to shoot him. And G.o.d knows I was trying to. And I kept looking at that G.o.ddam dog, kept looking into those crazy eyes. There was something-something, well, retributive, demonic about those eyes. How can I say it? It was as if for a moment I felt I was getting in a curious way my just deserts-that this dog represented all those innocent victims who are crazed and mutilated by war and finally have to lash out at their tormentors, seizing upon the first poor uniformed slob that comes to hand. A fantasy, of course-the poor beast was simply berserk with terror-but that's what did flash through my mind.”

”And of course you finally got him?” I said.

”Yeah,” he went on, ”I finally got that carbine around, and somehow worked it off safety, and shot him through the head. It was sickening, ghastly. And after the j.a.p mortars slackened off and the company could move ahead it took the corpsman at least five minutes to pry that dog's fangs out of my hand. And that was the end of the war for me, because that same afternoon I was evacuated to the rear and sent out to a hospital s.h.i.+p for precautionary anti-rabies treatment. It was while I was getting this long course of shots-a b.l.o.o.d.y painful business, I might add-that the campaign ended on Okinawa.”

He fell silent for a moment. We were not far now from the camp, and the early-morning traffic had begun to fill the roads-farmers in pickup trucks, tourists with Florida license plates heading north for the summer, marines commuting to work at the base. Lacy drove very slowly, and with extreme care.

”Ah G.o.d,” he said at last, in a somber, grieving tone. ”We'll never make it through this war.”

MY FATHER'S

HOUSE.

ONE MORNING IN THE YEAR AFTER the end of the war (the Good War, that is, the second War to End All Wars) when I had returned to my father's house in Virginia, and had slept long merciful hours, I woke up after completing a weird megalomaniacal dream. Not that I was unaccustomed to dreams touched with megalomania. A few years before, for example, when I was a writing student at college, I had a dream about James Joyce. In this particular reverie I was sitting at a cafe table somewhere in Europe, probably Paris, having a cup of coffee with the Master. There was no hesitancy in the way he turned his purblind gaze upon me, no embarra.s.sment in the sudden light touch of his hand on the back of my own, nor was there anything but nearly mawkish admiration in his Hibernian brogue as he uttered these words: ”Paul Whitehurst, your writing has been such an inspiration to me! Without your work I could not have finished Dubliners!”

I never thought I'd recapture the mad glee that seized me upon waking from such a c.o.c.keyed fantasy. And during the war I had no similar visitations. But the end of that exhausting conflict brought me such relief that I suppose it was inevitable that another such dream should return, rescuing my near-drowned ego. In this sequence I was seated next to Harry Truman as we cruised in a limousine down Pennsylvania Avenue. ”Paul Whitehurst”-once again the full name, precisely enunciated-”the best advice you ever gave me was to drop the atom bomb.” Amid pennants snapping in the wind and the blare of military music, I nodded left and right to the adoring throng. ”Thank you, Mr. President,” I replied. ”I gave it much thought.”

And waking, I lay there for a while, helplessly disgorging cackles of laughter. At last the dream faded away, as dreams do. Then I made my mind a blank. Finally, the sound of breakfast being made was borne upstairs and I inhaled the good smell and prepared for the new day.

Except for a central drawback, which I'll soon deal with, I was fairly contented in my father's house. The house itself inspired a kind of contentment. My father had never been a rich man, but the war with its naval contracts had brought prosperity to the sprawling s.h.i.+pyard where he toiled nearly all of his life; his share in the prosperity had allowed him to move from the cramped little bungalow of my childhood to an unpretentious, comfortable, locust-shaded house whose screened porch and generous bay windows faced out on a grand harbor panorama. The enormous waterway, several miles across, was always afloat with an armada of naval s.h.i.+ps or seabound tankers and freighters-all distant enough to be dramatic-looking rather than unsightly-and the harbor was forever being touted by the local boosters as the rival or the superior of San Francisco or Rio or Hong Kong, though to my mind they were exaggerating badly since the panorama was really too monotonous, too horizontal, to be ”breathtakingly scenic,” as was claimed.

Nonetheless, it was impressive in its way. Certainly I would concede that my father had bought himself a million-dollar view-he called it that at nearly every opportunity-and so I considered the fine expanse of water, sparkling in the sun or swept by rude squalls or echoing at night with mournful horns, to be one of the more amiable bonuses of my homecoming from the war. Tidewater summers were fiercely hot and dank but the harbor often bestowed on the house an early cooling breeze-”a million-dollar breeze,” my father would say on the more h.e.l.lish days. I'd awake beneath the sheet and stretch while the odor of coffee and pancakes filled my nose, and then I'd smile. What I mean is that I was conscious of making a genuine, broad, cheek-dimpling smile while I marveled over and over at my healthy living state, in which the primitive ability to smell warm pancakes and coffee was like a surprising gift. There is no mystery why these first waking moments were so luxuriously free of anxiety, why a s.h.i.+ver of pleasure-no, real bliss-ran through me when I blinked awake on the sun-splashed bed, listening to the mockingbird in the locust outside my window or, farther off, the gulls and sh.o.r.ebirds piping over the water, a Negro flower peddler, a horse cart creaking (there were still a few horses and carts in those days, though fast vanis.h.i.+ng), clip-clopping hooves, the cry of ”Flowers, flowers!” skewering my heart as it had done when I was a child. My happiness, my bliss, was quite simple in origin: I was alive. I was alive and home in bed instead of being a moving target on the Kyushu plain, or in the rubble of an Osaka suburb, praying for one more day of life in the cauldron of a war without ending-what a miracle, what a gift! So many times, only months before, death had seemed such a certainty that my very aliveness became a recurrent marvel.

It was hard, however, to avoid a s.h.i.+ver of guilt when I reflected on my luck. Over three years before, when I was seventeen, bravado mingled with what must have been a death wish made me enlist in the officer training program of the Marine Corps. Since those in my age group were considerably too callow to lead troops into battle, it was decided at the Navy Department that we be sent to college, where as book-toting privates we would gain a little learning and seasoning, also a year or two of physical and mental growth, before our fateful collision with the j.a.ps. My cla.s.smates and I, being the youngest of the young, remained uniformed college students for the longest period, while those who were only a year or so older went off for the officer training and preceded us into those terrifying island battles that marked the last stages of the Pacific war. No group among all the services had so high a casualty rate as we Marine Corps second lieutenants. This is firmly on the record. A harrowing book by an enlisted combat veteran, E. B. Sledge, called With the Old Breed, described the situation concisely: ”During the course of the long fighting on Okinawa ... we got numerous replacement lieutenants. They were wounded or killed with such regularity that we rarely knew anything about them ... and saw them on their feet only once or twice. ... Our officers got hit so soon and so often that it seemed to me the position of second lieutenant in a rifle company had been made obsolete by modern warfare.”

Thus had I been older only by a year or so I would have been immersed in Iwo Jima's bloodbath; a mere six months and I would have been one of Sledge's Okinawa martyrs, obliterated in what turned out to be the deadliest land engagement of the Pacific war, and among the worst in history. I actually escaped this horror by a hair, coming to roost not so many miles away on the island of Saipan, where I began to prepare for the invasion of j.a.pan and where I had ample time to reflect on both what I'd barely missed on Okinawa and Iwo Jima and what I was likely to encounter when I helped storm the fortress beaches of the mainland. The killing grounds of the recent past were for me merely a foretaste of things to come, and the sorry fate of all those scared but uncomplaining guys we'd said good-bye to seemed to foreshadow my own.

At any rate, there in bed I'd begin to grope and caress myself, getting a huge load of tactile satisfaction from the mere act of a.s.sessing my body's well-being. This was not the idle feeling up of one's self that preoccupies people alone in bed; it was a deliberate, meditative inventory of my precious parts. Consider hands and fingers alone, for example, and place them in the context of the Iwo Jima I so narrowly escaped. Everyone had heard about the landing beach at Iwo: bodies cut in half in the volcanic dust, legs and arms from a single corpse separated by forty feet, a puree of brains splattered among the mess kits and knapsacks. Nearly every marine who survived the war had fixed in his mind the number of Iwo Jima casualties-twenty-six thousand (of which nearly six thousand were deaths)-the entire population of many an American large town or small city, a chilling total of which thousands of components had to be hands and fingers, given the tendency of the hand, with its constant diligence and exposure, to be so vulnerable. Pondering the tally of fingers lost or mutilated on that infernal ash heap, I'd concentrate on one of my own, extend it, wiggle it, stroke it with my thumb, suck it, rub its tip gently against the skin encasing my rib cage, all the while reflecting on what pleasure it was to be able to perform any one of these small, innocuous, monkey-like operations.

Another matter was the loss of limbs. Leg loss and arm loss had been epidemic in the Pacific. What a delight it was, then, to be able to palpate the supple b.u.t.tery flesh of the biceps, pressing in so deeply with the thumb that I could feel the st.u.r.dy arterial flow of healthy blood as it coursed down the arm, or to vigorously pat the muscles of the thigh-the joy momentarily fading, replaced by a stab of guilt as I wondered what it must be like, at that very instant, to be lying without a thigh in some naval hospital, racked by the phantom pain of the amputee.

You could lose incredible parts of yourself, and be hideously mutilated, yet still live. In college I had known this guy named Wade Hoopes, from a small town in Tennessee, who was also a platoon leader at the time of his calamity. He and his little group had been reconnoitering the outskirts of a sh.e.l.l-shattered village on Okinawa when he stepped on a b.o.o.by-trapped grenade and instantaneously lost a leg. Only the miraculous ministrations of a medical corpsman saved him from bleeding to death. He had wanted to get a law degree when the war ended and make it big in Tennessee politics like his daddy, a onetime lieutenant governor. Wade was generous and sweet-natured, with an incipient politician's chatty bonhomie; I don't think he was brilliant, but that too fitted the political mold. One thing I recall achingly about Wade Hoopes was the idiot crush he had on June Allyson, and the alb.u.m of publicity photographs of her that he carried around everywhere-probably even to Okinawa-of June in swimsuits and bobby sox and dirndls, smiling her enchantingly bucktoothed, germ-free smile. It was amazing to think of him whacking off day in and day out over this squeaky-clean sweetheart. A blade of shrapnel from the same b.o.o.by trap that removed his leg had neatly destroyed his brain's speech center and he would never utter a word again-not a word, not a sound, not a peep. Literally struck dumb. When news came back to our training base on Saipan about Wade Hoopes we were shocked, and our speculation was that when the war was over an amputee might easily make it as a candidate-the sympathy vote. But a politician without a voice? It was like a beauty queen without t.i.ts. Otherwise his vital signs were excellent, which may or may not have been a blessing. But we all thought: At least he made it.

I listened to my stepmother, Isabel, clattering and banging away down below in the kitchen while my father, in the nearby bathroom, performed his operatic ablutions. He had a creditable tenor voice, a little reedy but resolute, and as he went about his bathroom business he warbled s.n.a.t.c.hes of Verdi and Puccini and Mozart operas that he'd picked up from old Caruso recordings and the Sat.u.r.day afternoon Metropolitan broadcasts on the radio. These he tried to duplicate in wildly misp.r.o.nounced phonetic Italian. The language is not meant to be sung by Anglo-Saxons. It took me a long time to realize that the words I heard above the flus.h.i.+ng toilet or blurted halfway through a gargle were Dalla sua pace and Il mio tesoro. More often what I heard was invented Italian, fruity vocables such as lalalala-Dio! or lalalala-amore! I regularly had breakfast with my father before we went our separate ways, I to school and he to the s.h.i.+pyard in an automobile full of his white-collar brethren, known as cost estimators, who were members of a car pool. All this was long before the death of my mother and before he met Isabel, a lady who had become a small but piercing nail thrust into my psyche. I listened to her kitchen commotion. Isabel was a good cook and her talents extended well beyond putting together an appetizing breakfast-there was no way I could begrudge her that. It was one of her contradictions, really, since it was hard for me to accept the idea that this straitlaced, pleasure-shunning person, a professional nurse with a palate anesthetized by hospital food and the chicken croquettes served at the Bide-A-Wee Tearoom, where she and her fellow spinster nurses dined in the years before she snagged my father, could prepare not merely an edible but a, by G.o.d, truly flavorsome meal. I suspect it was due to my father's influence. While scarcely a gourmet he had been reared on traditional southern cooking, which at its best is delectable; despite the fact that she had him pretty well under her thumb he had made it clear, I think, that he expected her to set a good table and she had risen to the challenge. So I had to chalk one up for Isabel. Her labors downstairs at breakfast-at least considered from my vantage point in bed, before we came face to face-always left me better disposed toward her than at any other time of the day. Even though she made a lot of noise. She was an ungainly woman, angular and raw-boned, and she tramped about the kitchen with a kind of hulking agitation; I wondered how she had succeeded at her nursing ch.o.r.es, which I conceived as requiring a low-keyed gentleness, an adagio grace beyond this woman's capacity.

Lying there, I occasionally reflected with a chill upon what might have happened to me had my father married her, say, five years earlier than he did, when I was a child of ten or so; she would have gobbled me up. As it was, I was fifteen when they tied the knot, and so I was able to avoid any real damage she might have inflicted, chiefly because school and college claimed me, and then the marines. So I wasn't at home all that often. I racked my head in an attempt to figure out the cause of our mutual hostility, but came up with nothing. From the beginning I was not so naive as to be unaware of the wicked stepmother myth. A stepmother was supposed to be a termagant, a ball-breaker. Lucky was the boy or girl (especially an only child like me) who drew a sweet and loving stepmother; they were supposed to be ungenerous, jealous, spiteful, suspicious, uncompromising, judgmental, and so forth. Still, I thought I might escape, and the problem for me was that Isabel, with certain modifications, was all of these, a living, breathing validation of the archetype. What prevented me from truly hating her-what caused me, rather, to squelch the upwelling of extreme dislike that her charmless character traits called forth-was my devotion to my father, whom I loved despite the baffling absence of taste that caused him to choose this homely middle-aged dominatrix for a wife. His love for me was obvious, transparent, and it would have been a body blow to him had I given her the snarling comeuppance I thought she deserved and slammed out of the house for good.

So Isabel and I maintained a frosty politeness and I tried hard to repress my rage at what I conceived to be her irrational antagonism. Likewise, I'm sure she put a stopper on the resentment she felt whenever she regarded her stepson: the ungenerous, self-indulgent, supercilious, arrogant, potentially alcoholic, masturbating, parasitical, egomaniacal young lout who lolled around the house with his b.a.l.l.s hanging out of his green marine skivvy drawers. G.o.d knows-especially given the emotional upheaval I was going through at the time, my unheroic though spellbinding escape from death, my survivor's guilt, my s.e.xual insecurity-I was no prize myself. Anyway, only a few months after the end of one war I was in another one-a cold war, to be sure, like the one that had begun to engulf the world (just recently annunciated by Winston Churchill at some Missouri cow college) but no less ominous and nasty.

Supine, gazing gravely across my midriff, I blessed the tent-post rigidity that made a modest canopy of the sheet that covered me, and I worked at pus.h.i.+ng back the urge to dally a bit. I did, however, give the upright a token stroke, more like a benediction, and saved for the last the luxury of a.s.sessing that part of me that took priority over hands, fingers, legs, arms, even eyes-even brains. Especially brains! Who needed brains? Marines had shed seas of sweat before a Pacific landing, tormented with fear over the safety of their adored apparatus. Nature had positioned the whole works in a relatively sheltered place; wounds there were relatively infrequent, yet young men in battle had sometimes been converted into instant eunuchs. It was another piece of myself whose survival was something to praise.

Well, just one more squeeze, I thought-a thought that coincided with a flash of flesh (what part of her I could not tell, though she was clearly unclothed); the translucent gauze of her curtained window prevented anything but a rouged phantom that as always nearly stopped my heart. Mamie Eubanks, right on time to the dot, toweling off after her morning shower. The Eubanks house, next door, was disturbingly near, Mamie's bathroom at such close remove from my bedroom window that, were it not for the intervening curtain and its frustrating semi-opacity my marine sharpshooter's eyes would have been able to discern each pore on her beautifully proportioned twenty-year-old bottom. As it was, the voyeur's antic.i.p.ation in me, whetted by the sound of splas.h.i.+ng water and Mamie's larky voice, usually warbling a hymn, was always ruined by the drapery beyond which she would float, revealing a distant rosiness or an instant's smudge I a.s.sumed was pubic hair, and that was all. Most of this to such inspiring tunes as ”Blessed a.s.surance, Jesus Is Mine” or ”Shall We Gather at the River.”

It was a routine that had gone on for several weeks. My father had moved into a neighborhood which, despite the elegance of the view, would have to be described as ”mixed income.” He was not rich but richer than his neighbors. The Eubanks family were hardworking and respectable people from some remote rural area across the James River, uneducated, decent folk with whom my father got along amiably, especially since his own origins were humble enough. But as there was nothing much in common between the Eubankses and my father and Isabel, the house next door remained largely an undefined presence and nothing more, though its proximity caused certain vague irritations. Mrs. Eubanks cooked constantly for a tribe of poorer relatives spread across the town, and the smell of her heavy country cuisine-ham, gravy, snap beans, black-eyed peas-often invaded our rooms. We inhaled a perpetual atmosphere of warm collard greens. Mr. Eubanks, a sometime preacher and part-time undertaker, had a deviated septum; his snores on still summer nights, when the windows were wide open, were often vibrant and alarming. On those nights my father, sleepless, would moan and call Mr. Eubanks ”King Kong.” Mamie Eu-banks had become my own personal thorn. When, some years before, I had gone off to boarding school, she had been an awkward and nondescript tyke with an unattractive pink frosting of acne.

Now I could scarcely believe the transformation. In those days the phrase that defined a young woman who had achieved an obvious s.e.xual potential was ”sweater girl,” and this Mamie was beyond question. Her complexion had the sheen of a gardenia, and beneath the cashmere she was all delicious bounce when she skipped up the walkway next door and sent me an inviting ”Hi!” This had been several weeks before, just after she had returned from summer session at some Bible college in North Carolina, and from the instant of our reacquaintance I harbored an ineluctable craving to do with her what I had been deprived of doing for so many months in the Pacific. I was surprised that I'd held off so long. I didn't know whether she was a virgin or not-as a Southern Baptist, member in good standing of the Baptist Young People's Union, she was most likely utterly unsullied-but it excited me to think that discovering whether she really was or wasn't could be part of an imminent erotic adventure. Lying there, I resolved to give her a phone call, as soon as my tumescence subsided, and arrange for a date, if possible that evening. She was of course so close I could just as easily knock on her door and ask her in person, but I was still a bit shy, and the telephone might provide the right margin of distance.

I glanced at the alb.u.ms which I'd been leafing through the night before, and had left on the bed beside me just before nodding off to sleep. One of my recent delights had been that of encountering anew some of my boyhood mementos and treasures, items that had been stored in closets ever since I'd gone off into the marines. I'd remembered a number of these possessions at odd moments while on Saipan or on some troops.h.i.+p or other, but I'd never thought I would see them again; to look at them now, to touch them and ponder them, connecting them to mementos of bygone experience, gave me a rich feeling of privilege, as if I'd come back from the dead (which I had) to reclaim objects made immeasurably more precious because they once seemed forever lost. There was my Remington .22 rifle, still rust-free and smelling of oil, which I'd shot squirrels with in the woods near the C&O tracks. There was a set of bound mimeographed editions of the Seahorse, the literary magazine I'd edited at boarding school. A silver cup I had won racing my Hampton One-Design, the little wooden-hulled sloop I'd helped build with my cousin. The twelve volumes of The Book of Knowledge, published in England circa 1910, which I'd read tirelessly between the ages of eleven and thirteen, brooding over its photographs of children my age on the beaches at Blackpool and Brighton, and playing cricket, and eating things like bubble and squeak and scones and other confections that American boys had never heard of. There were my Charles Atlas lessons, mailed to me weekly during the summer of my fifteenth year, when I was anxious about my attenuated physique and had ordered (for the then-prodigious sum of twenty-five dollars) these dozen booklets, sent at two-week intervals, instructing me in ”dynamic tension,” a weight-free technique whereby the ninety-eight-pound weakling would grow biceps the size of melons if he opposed his own muscles against each other long enough and hard enough; I had abandoned the regime after the second week, worn out from standing, jockstrap clad, in front of a mirror, futilely pulling and stretching my skinny limbs.

Then there was my alb.u.m of photographs. On Saipan, during the days and nights when I was most certain that my death was foreordained, I longed for this alb.u.m with a sorrowful sense of loss I'd never thought possible. The alb.u.m was the collective memory of my early youth, containing the images of those who had been dear to me, family and friends locked away in a closet ten thousand miles from the island where I was stranded in a near paralysis of fear. And so, having been persuaded that I would never see these likenesses again, much less their flesh-and-blood avatars, I pounced on this tacky leatherette volume with greedy pleasure. Looking at these dozens of snapshots was like re-entry into a boyhood where all my friends and companions had been brought back to life even as I had been granted a commutation from a sentence of death. But because that morning I would not, try as I might, rid myself of a nagging prurient fever, I returned once more not to my boarding school pals or buddies from grammar school days but to my cousin Mary Jane. There she was, four and a half feet tall, too cute for words, mugging shamelessly as she always did whenever I hauled out my Kodak during that summer before the war, in the aftermath of my mother's death, when I was sent to estivate with my nice aunt and her nice state cop husband in a tiny Carolina town just over the border. My stay there, asphyxiatingly lonely, produced one ineffaceable memory: the onset of my hormone supply, like the Johnstown Flood.

I had just turned fourteen. I'd half-forgotten the worst of that interminable summer-the loafing around in the airless bungalow, the radio's hillbilly strumming, the afternoon sacrament of ice cream, the forlorn moviegoing-but I couldn't possibly forget my l.u.s.t, a brand-new sensation (late bloomer that I was, I'd not begun to practice the Secret Vice) and oddly scary, inasmuch as I found it focused on the loudmouthed moppet of the house, Mary Jane. How could I have such feelings about a relative? And one so young? Consanguinity, I thought, and fear of incest were supposed to prevent the desires that were overwhelming me for my maddening kinswoman, age eleven, with the Juicy Fruit breath and the precocious b.o.o.bs who would plop herself, giggling, into my pajama-clad lap and howl, Momma, Paw-ul's teasin' me! Little did she know who was teasing whom, nor the effect she had one morning when, prying herself out of my now eager clutches, she innocently grasped my engorged rod and demanded, ”What's that?” Hysterically I replied, ”I don't know!” and bolted to the bathroom for the sweet cataclysm of my first o.r.g.a.s.m. Lucky for us both, no doubt, my sojourn ended soon afterward. But that noisy little hoyden would remain my Circe forever, and Ahoskie, N.C. (pop. 4,810), my unforgotten Babylon.

I heard my father clomp down the stairs on the way to breakfast, and I was about to jump out of bed, as I usually did, throw on my bathrobe, and join him at the table. But at that instant my eye was caught by the copy of the New Yorker I'd bought at a downtown newsstand the night before. I had gone to sleep while just beginning to browse through the cartoons and now, plucking the magazine from the pillow next to me, I perceived something I hadn't noticed before, something utterly remarkable. The text of the issue was unbroken from beginning to end, column after column of print weaving through the advertis.e.m.e.nts, the entire story or narrative or whatever it was marching on inexorably without interruption until it terminated on the final page just above the byline: John Hersey. It was amazing-a whole issue devoted to a single article. I turned back to the beginning and the t.i.tle ”Hiros.h.i.+ma” and began to read: A NOISELESS FLASH.

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, j.a.panese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiros.h.i.+ma, Miss Tos.h.i.+ko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.