Lovedeath Read online

  I mention this not to pretend some scholarly precision—my readings are too haphazard, my research twice removed, my methods less than stringent and more than suspect—but to share the complex game I played, which was, to the best of my ability, to get it right.

  This is not to say that I did get it right. (Sometimes I chose not to, as when I have mustard gas used experimentally some months before it actually appeared on the Western Front in the spring of 1917.) But I do believe that those who witnessed these events and wrote about them so eloquently, in prose and poetry, did seem to come closer to the terrible beauty and terror of combat than most of the war chroniclers since Homer. Knowing that memory is faulty at best, I still trusted the persistence of their memory.

  Strange things happened during this immersion period of research for “The Great Lover.” A casual mention by a 1916 line officer of a painting titled “The Happy Warrior” by the nineteenth-century artist George Frederick Watts sent me into the dusty stacks of the University of Colorado (at Boulder) library to find an example of the art that seemed to appeal to both the romantic and morose side of this officer. Going through books published in the 1880s and not checked out since 1947, I came across a photograph of Watts’s allegorical painting “Love and Death” and knew at once that it would become the central metaphor of my Somme tale. I went so far as to contact my agent and editor requesting that a print of this obscure painting be used as a frontispiece in the novella collection.

  Only later, when reading a previously ignored section of Siegfried Sassoon’s autobiographical novel trilogy, The Memoirs of George Sherston, did I come across this passage:

  I felt as if I had changed since the Easter holidays. The drawing-room door creaked as I went softly in and crept across the beeswaxed parquet floor. Last night’s half-consumed candles and the cat’s half-empty bowl of milk under the gate-legged table seemed to belong neither here nor there, and my own silent face looked queerly at me out of the mirror. And there was the familiar photograph of “Love and Death,” by Watts, with its secret meaning which I could never quite formulate in a thought, though it often touched me with a vague emotion of pathos.

  Finally, I have to say that my reading of these novelists and poets in 1969 and 1970 did more than simply confirm my antiwar feelings of the time. Seeing the impact of their verse and literature on the generation that came of age between the wars, observing how an Oxford class in the late 1930s could be so moved by the word-memories of the Great War that they could ignore Hitler’s rise and take a pledge that they would not fight for their country under any circumstance…all this added a disturbing and enlightening perspective to an already complex issue. Even with Vietnam festering and the antiwar intellectualism beckoning, I understood that perceiving the horrors of war was not enough…that there were things worse than warfare…death camps for one, the darkness of a Thousand Year Reich for another, trading a Vietnam for a nuclear exchange for a final thing…and that while nothing could excuse the stupidities that led to a Battle of the Somme, events could explain the honest need for the next generation to return to its own front. And the next generation. And the next.

  Does all this answer the question of why I chose to include actual poetry in “The Great Lover” and why I worry so much about the details? Probably not. But I appreciate your attention.

  Oddly enough, I did not consider using the single piece of post-Great War poetry that most moved me during those dear, dead, waiting-for-the-draft days of the late sixties. The poet was Ezra Pound, who—by great coincidence—had been fired some sixty years earlier, in 1908, from his post as instructor at the same Wabash College I was attending. Reputedly he had been harboring a chorus girl in his room. Like Mark Twain’s Sandwich Island cannibals who ate the missionary, Pound said that he was sorry. He said that it was an accident. He said that it would not happen again. The college fired him anyway. (Pound went on to better things, sailing to Italy to join his literary friends, exclaiming, as he stepped down the gang-plank, that he had been “saved from the Ninth Circle of Desolation!” which anyone who has attended my little college in Crawfordsville, Indiana, can understand.)

  The poem is “HUGH SELWYN MAUBERLY.” I thought twenty-two years ago that it was a good parable not only for the horror of the Great War, but for the tragedy of America’s experience in Vietnam. I still think that is true.

  IV

  These fought in any case,

  and some believing,

  pro domo, in any case…

  Some quick to arm,

  some for adventure,

  some from fear of weakness,

  some from fear of censure,

  some for love of slaughter, in imagination,

  learning later…

  some in fear, learning love of slaughter;

  Died some, pro patria

  non “dulce” non “et decor”…

  walked eye-deep in hell

  believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving,

  came home, home to a lie,

  home to many deceits,

  home to old lies and new infamy;

  usury age-old and age-thick

  and liars in public places.

  Daring as never before, wastage as never before.

  Young blood and high blood,

  fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

  fortitude as never before

  frankness as never before,

  disillusions as never told in the old days,

  hysterias, trench confessions,

  laughter out of dead bellies.

  V

  There died a myriad,

  And of the best, among them,

  For an old bitch gone in the teeth,

  For a botched civilization,

  Charm, smiling at the good mouth,

  Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

  For two gross of broken statues,

  For a few thousand battered books.

  And so we return to “Liebestod.” To love. And to death. And, I hope, to love again. And perhaps the final word should be borrowed from my fictional poet James Edwin Rooke, who may have heard Lieutenant Guy Chapman quote Andrew Marvell as the young lieutenant watched his comrades prepare to die at the Somme:

  My love is of a birth as rare

  As ’tis for object strange and high:

  It was begotten by Despair

  Upon impossibility.

  —Dan Simmons

  Colorado, January, 1993

  ENTROPY’S BED

  AT MIDNIGHT

  We’d just gotten out of Denver, headed west during Friday rush hour, up the first major hill and Caroline had asked what the runaway truck ramp was for, when I saw the semitrailer in trouble on the eastbound, downhill lanes. At the time I thought he merely was going too quickly for the four-mile, six-percent grade, but the next morning in Breckenridge I saw the photos of the wreckage on the front pages of both the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News; the truck driver had survived but three women had died in the Toyota Camry he’d smashed into and forced over the concrete restraining wall.

  At the time, I told Caroline what the runaway truck exits were for and we’d watched for other ramps during the hour drive to the little ski-resort town. “It looks scary,” she said, looking at one of the steep cul de sacs of deep gravel. “Do trucks run out of control very often?” Caroline had turned six just three months earlier, in May, but she was precocious both in her vocabulary and her anxiety about a world with too many sharp edges. If Kay and others were to be believed, I’d helped create that anxiety in her.

  “No.” I lied, “It’s very rare.”

  Breckenridge in August was not the most exciting place I could have taken my daughter after not seeing her for several months. The small ski town was more “real” than Vail or Aspen, but other than a few upscale shops and a single Wendy’s—disguised as an old Victorian home but still featuring a menu suitable for kids—there wasn’t a hell of a lot to do there in the summer. I’d planned on camping Fr
iday night, but after three months of dry heat in Colorado this weekend turned cold and blustery with heavy rains. I found us a small suite with a kitchenette at a lodge below the ski area and that evening we settled in to watch George Pal’s War of the Worlds on a tiny TV.

  Tucking Caroline in that night in the little daybed in the dining area, the rain running noisily from the gutters outside, I couldn’t help but notice how much she looked like Kay. In the five months since the two of them had moved back to Denver, Caroline had thinned out, her face was beginning to reflect Kay’s elegant bone structure as the baby fat receded, and her brown hair was shorter, not much longer than Kay’s when I met her that summer after I’d returned from Vietnam and hit the Pepsi truck. Caroline’s dark eyes showed the same vulnerable intelligence as Kay’s, and I noticed that she rested her cheek on her palm rather than the pillow, in the same way.

  The great tragedy of being separated from your children, even briefly, during the early years is that when you return they’re different people. Perhaps that’s always true, whatever age. I don’t know. “Daddy, can we go see the Alpine Slide in the morning?”

  “Sure, kiddo. If the weather improves.” I was sorry that I’d grabbed the brochures from the lobby. It would have been all right if Caroline hadn’t taught herself to read before she was five. As it was, she’d read aloud the glowing descriptions of the Alpine Slide from each of the five “What-to-Do-in-Breckenridge” brochures. To say that I was less than enthusiastic to have her slide down a mountainside would have been an understatement.

  “That movie about Martians was silly, wasn’t it, Daddy?”

  “It sure was.”

  “I mean, if they were smart enough to build spaceships, they’d be smart enough to know about germs, wouldn’t they?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. I’d never thought about it. War of the Worlds had been the first non-Disney movie I’d ever seen—I was five when it was released in 1953—and all the way back from the Rialto I’d clung to my older brother’s hand. “Didja see the wires holding up those stupid Martian machines?” Rick had asked, probably trying to allay my fears, but I had only blinked in the gray Chicago snowfall and held on more tightly to his mittened hand. I’d slept with a night-light for months after that and couldn’t look at the night sky from our third-floor landing without waiting for the meteor trails of the invading Martian cylinders. A year later, when we moved to a small town thirty miles from Peoria, I reassured myself that the Martians would attack the big cities first, leaving us rural folks enough time at least to commit suicide before their heat rays were turned on us. Later when my fears had turned from Martians to nuclear war, I used the same logic to find some peace of mind.

  “Good night, Daddy,” said Caroline, nestling her cheek on her palm.

  “Good night, sweetheart.” I went into the other room, slid the door half closed, and tried to read from Raymond Carver’s last collection of stories. After a while I gave it up and listened to the rain.

  I never liked Kay’s dad much—he’d been a civil engineer before he retired and still held a black-white view of every issue—but he’d surprised me by coming to visit me at the clinic where I was drying out and recovering from whatever kind of breakdown I’d had just after Kay and I were separated.

  “Kay tells me that you watched Caroline go to school every morning and were waiting for her when she came out,” said the old man. “Were you thinking about kidnapping her?”

  I smiled and shook my head. “You know better, Calvin. I was just making sure she was okay.”

  He nodded. “And you almost punched that lady who was baby-sitting Caroline while Kay worked.”

  I shrugged, wishing I was wearing something other than a bathrobe and pajamas. “She was driving Caroline and the other kids around in her van without having them wear seatbelts.”

  He looked at me. “What are you afraid of, Bobby?”

  “Entropy,” I said without taking time to think.

  Calvin frowned slightly, rubbing his cheeks. “It’s been a hell of a long time since my college physics,” he said, “but isn’t entropy just the energy you can’t get at to do work?”

  “Yes,” I said, amazed that I was talking about this to Kay’s father, “but it’s also a measure of randomness. And the certainty that everything which can get fucked up, will. It’s the operative force behind Murphy’s Law.”

  “The Brooklyn Bridge,” he said.

  “What?” I said.

  “If entropy scares you, Bobby, think about the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  I shook my head. It hurt. Being sober was not all it was cracked up to be.

  “John Roebling and his son designed that bridge to last,” said Calvin. “Built in the 1870s for a tenth its current traffic, finished years before the first car would cross it, but all stresses were figured, all tolerances multiplied by a factor of five or ten, and look at it today. They gave it a complete inspection a few years ago and decided all it needed was a new coat of paint.”

  “Great,” I’d said at the time. “If you’re a bridge.”

  But I went to New York after I was released from the clinic. My cover story was that I was going back to confer with Centurion, Prairie Midland’s parent company, about transferring back to the Denver area, but in reality I’d gone to stare at the bridge. I wondered if I’d been factoring tolerances for Caroline’s life by a margin of five, or ten, or more, and in so doing turning things which should have been growing in the sun into brick and iron.

  Stupid idea. There was a great bar right near the base of the bridge, but I only had a beer before going back to the hotel.

  The rain let up sometime after midnight but a strong wind still blew down from the mountains and I was grateful for the extra blankets on the shelf. Several times I went out to check on Caroline. She was fine, sprawled in one of the impossible contortions six-year-olds prefer for sleep, and I pulled the spread and blanket back over her and went back in to try to sleep.

  One of my favorite Orange File reports was the claim of Farmer McDonald and his son Clem. Those aren’t their real names, of course. I don’t know what I’ll do if I ever get around to collecting these in some sort of book or something. So often the claimants’ names are so perfect to their stories—like that lecherous dentist in Salem, Oregon, named Dr. Dick—that I can’t imagine changing them. Also, to enjoy the files the way I have all these years, you’d have to read them in the full insurancese, complete with police reports, field adjustors’ forms, accident diagrams, and the statements and depositions taken from the victims, claimants, primary participants, and witnesses.

  Every once in a while I get an echo of claims-file insurancese when they interview a deputy sheriff or state trooper or someone on TV after a shooting or somesuch. I used to prod Kay from her book and make her watch. “Uh…at approximately this point in time,” the fat deputy would be saying into the camera, “uh…the alleged suspect exited his ve-hicle and proceeded on foot…uh…at a high rate of speed until myself and Officer Fogerty intercepted and proceeded to restrain the suspect. At this time…uh…the suspect offered some physical resistance which, between Officer Fogerty and I, we successfully succeeded in overcoming.”

  I translated for Kay. “That means the crook got out of his car and ran like hell until those two knocked him down and stomped him.”

  Kay would smile dutifully. “Bobby,” she’d say, “every pseudo-profession and level of bureaucracy has its double-talk quotient.”

  “Like what?” I’d say. The only jobs I’d ever held were in the Army and insurance. They were about the same thing.

  “Take my field,” she’d say. “Education. What we lack in technical terms we make up for in useless jargon. A child can’t be retarded, he has to be labeled SLIC…a Significantly Learning-Impaired Child. We can’t hire a coordinator to take care of a growing drop-out problem…we advertise for a TOSA—Teacher On Special Assignment—for Discontinuers. Instead of tutoring a slow child, we design elaborate IEP’s—Independent Edu
cation Profiles for non-autonomous learners. Instead of high groups for fast learners, we have to fund TAG programs.”

  “Yeah,” I’d say, waving at the screen where our local, attractive, Eurasian-female anchorperson had taken the place of the fat deputy, “but cops talk so wonderfully stupid.”

  Anyway, Farmer McDonald had been reshingling his barn roof when the events of the aforementioned automobile insurance claim proceeded to occur.

  Wait a minute, you say. Automobile claim? While reshingling a barn? Wait. Listen.

  This was when I was working out of the Oregon office of Prairie Midland. Farmer McDonald owned a large place thirty miles southeast of Portland. I remember it was raining when I went out to take measurements and statements. It’s always raining in my memories of Oregon.

  So anyway, Mr. McDonald was about a third finished with the shingling job on the north side of the barn when he grew a bit nervous about the increasingly steep pitch of the roof. He went down, found a long bit of rope, went back up, tied one end securely around himself, and went higher to attach it to something solid. He decided that the cupola was too rotten and the lightning rods and weather vanes were too flimsy. That’s when he saw Clem, his grown son, in the yard near the house. McDonald tossed the rope over the roof ridge and down to him, ordered Clem to tie the line to something “real solid,” and then went back to the north roof to get on with his shingling.

  Clem weighed about 280 pounds when I interviewed him and he grinned a lot. I had no doubt that Kay would have staffed him as a SLIC student and given him the strongest IEP a non-autonomous learner could receive. Clem had been one of the Discontinuer TOSA’s failures. He also could have used a bath.