Burning the Days (18 page)

The joy of meeting him, of seeing him walk unconcerned down the path—he was like the owner of a racing stable, in precarious shape, as it turned out, who had come up from nothing, and for a time I more or less wore his silks. Not officially, of course—I had a future. I was a lieutenant and he a major but my rank had weight. I was a regular. I had become a general’s aide. Through me he touched inner circles and legitimacy. He liked to hear stories about West Point, the visit of the president of Brazil, the saber accidentally left stuck in the ground after the parade had passed.

When not with him I would hurry to the quarters where Leland and Paula lived. Off we would go to the Hale Kalani, the Ala Wai Club, Gibson’s, or Elmer Lee’s. Leland knew Elmer Lee from before the war, he used to surf with him. Elmer Lee would come to the table.

“How’s your
umalima,
Elmer?” Leland asked.

“What’s that?”

“You know.” Leland put his elbow on the table and pretended to arm-wrestle.

“Oh, no. I got to learn the language all over. I thought it was something else.”

The nightclubs and restaurants, The Willows, and La Hula Rumba. Chun Hoon’s. More than once Leland was passed out in the car.

The current was pulling faster and faster. Nothing is as intense as unconsummated love. She was married to the wrong man. He was decent, loyal, understanding, though he would never really understand her. He was also finally jealous. When he returned quivering like a bull, she supposed, from one particular trip, she would have to calm him by being “very wifely and submissive.” The words made me tremble.

She had been so young when she married. It had been a kind of accident. She was then and would become an independent woman who drank, liked people with money, was scornful, and could charm anyone she chose to. You are the one, she said, why hadn’t she met me? Why hadn’t I met her?
It would have been so easy,
I wrote,

Could have been,
For every place you were
He came to later,
You could trace his footsteps
To the same
Hop, hotel, or football game …

“Read it again,” she said to me.

When we didn’t see each other we spoke for hours over the phone. Across the hall in the rickety bachelors’ quarters a friend of mine had a phone I could use. It would have been impossible to use the common one downstairs and carry on the low-voiced, endless conversations.

I flew my first fighter, a P-47—big engine throbbing slowly as I taxied, hard tires jolting on the concrete—out over the base soft-ball
game and all of Honolulu, and when I landed, proud of myself and my sweat-darkened flying suit, went right to their house. “My God,” Paula said, “I’ve never seen you look so pale.”

I would die in a crash, I knew, without ever having made love to her. There is that certainty of a woman who was made for you just as Eve was for Adam. On my dresser was a photograph taken at their engagement party, laughing, joyous, filled with life, the best one of her I had ever seen. She had made Leland bring it over to me one day. She was ready to give anything, do anything, and we were held apart by all that was drawing us together: honor, conscience, ideals. There was no way out.

We used to take our planes, the four-engine transports, back to the States for major inspections and modifications. On one of the trips I went to Los Angeles for the first time and in the late afternoon, driving along Sunset Boulevard, was passed by a convertible with the top down. There were three or four people in it and one of them—she turned and I saw her clearly—was a girl I had been infatuated with in high school. I was in uniform and called out and waved. I saw her wave back but then whoever was driving the car sped up and cut through the traffic. I couldn’t catch them. I watched her disappear down the silky road and vanish around a curve, it was near Bel Air. The world of schooldays and youthful dreams from which I had never really separated myself had suddenly passed me by and gone. I was in a new world, a more serious world, in which love was even stronger and more consuming.

II

It didn’t end as I expected. The fever never broke as Leland had hoped, but Paula, sensing something perhaps, the impossibility of our situation, the hopelessness of pretending, put her mark on me in another way, a very feminine way, I came to see later, subtle, lasting, sure. She chose for me the girl I ought to marry, whom I
had met one afternoon in the courtyard of the Moana, Ann Altemus, good-looking, unspoiled, very much of her class, which was minor society, she was from the horse country in Virginia. Her father owned a big farm near Warrenton. She was perfect for me, Paula said, exactly the kind of girl I needed. I believed her. Who else loved me as much or knew me as well? What she did not say was that she saw someone she knew she could be friendly with and who would not be a threat to her.

We were all stationed in Washington together for a year and a half, and not long afterwards I stood at the altar in the chapel at Fort Meyer with my wife-to-be. We had more or less strolled into marriage. Our parents—her father and my mother—disapproved. They did not understand that the rest of the world was pleased with the idea. We, too. I knew, as one does, that she saw life as I did but felt misgivings at the solemnity of the vows. To myself I said, “Five years.” Paula and Leland were there—he was my best man. The reception was in their little house in Georgetown. Paula held her new baby in her arms, a little girl, and my wife and I drove off in a dashing yellow MG, stopping for the first, uneasy night in some nameless motel on the road to Florida.

——

After I left Honolulu I saw O’Mara only once. It was in Valdosta, Georgia. He was driving through and came to dinner. We were stationed there, living in an apartment above the two spinsters who were our landladies and watched all comings and goings from the parlor below. I had been promoted but I could see I had fallen in O’Mara’s estimation, settled into predictable life with a woman who obviously did not take to him and was not stimulated by the things we were remembering. It was not that I had lost promise but rather, he must have felt, that I had been bridled. It was a friendly evening, but uninspired.

Later I heard he had gotten into trouble. Through cards he had
lost his car and the beautiful golf clubs. He’d been at Kelly Field in an administrative job, feared and disliked, a martinet and, what seemed to say everything, an inconstant one, polished and immaculate one day, unshaven and inexplicably rumpled the next. So he passed from sight.

——

When our first child came she was named for Leland and he was her godfather. As couples we were living far apart by then. Leland was an attaché in South Africa. It was a great bore, Paula thought, but they traveled and had a certain status.
We adored Rome. After a brief tour I am feeling extremely cultured and so annoyed with Nero.

I was assigned to a headquarters in Germany. Paula’s letters had beautiful stamps with animals on them.
Everybody is a lieutenant colonel,
she wrote,
I love you.
We saw them once or twice in Europe—once they drove up from Paris to visit. He was the same, cordial, more moody perhaps, the lines deeper in his face, a glass more often in his hand. They were giving each other false little smiles. They had come to a rocky part of marriage, but we knew they would continue together. They were bound by children, friends, career—everything that had once stood between Paula and me. It was the long journey that held them together. It was good sense, plus all they had lived through.

——

They were divorced in 1959, two years after our second child was born. It was Paula who insisted on the divorce—she must have been young and happy once but she couldn’t remember, she said. Leland was shattered by it. He married again soon after. She did not, and we once more drew close. By then I was out of the Air Force. She came up from Washington frequently and we went there.
A sudden burst of missing you unbearably,
she wrote. There
were three of us again, and it was still she and I who were intimates, excluding the other. When she was visiting I would come back in the evening and find two women, both amiable, smiling, sitting on cushions on the floor and waiting for me. We would drink and have dinner at a low table in front of the fire. She would tell stories of dates with other men, or the lack of them, just as I had once done with her. Someone had a man they wanted her to meet. Unrewarding adventure—he brought his sister along, they were obviously in love with each other, and it looked like a long affair, she added. She worked for a while on Capitol Hill, then for a foundation, then a boutique, and wrote for
The Washington Star.
For years she had an off-and-on relationship with the alcoholic son of an old family she and Leland had been fond of, but she was too intelligent to marry him. Finally she met the man she was looking for, a journalist, divorced, urbane. He and I seemed to have limited interest in one another, or perhaps he felt her interest should end. In any event, the curtain descended.

I saw Leland once more. It was in 1961 during the Berlin crisis. As a reserve, I’d been sent to France. Leland was stationed at Fontainebleau and one weekend I drove up there. He, his wife, and I had dinner. It was as always—at the last minute there wasn’t enough food in the house and he and I went out in the evening dark for some hasty shopping, a bottle of wine, meat, some cheese. He was in fine spirits and on good terms with the shopkeepers. I was impressed that he knew the French word for “wedge,” as in “wedge of Camembert.” He spoke good French. He called his wife darling. Somehow I didn’t believe it.

He retired as a colonel and they went to live in the south of Spain. I had news of him only rarely. I imagined him as he had always been: a perfect companion on the links, drinker in the bar afterwards, the heels on his loafers a bit worn down. Like an unimaginative British officer in some remote town, but knowing exactly who was who and what their business was.

Then I heard he was dead. It was completely unexpected. He hadn’t been ill. The night before they had gone out to dinner and played bridge with friends. In the morning he couldn’t be wakened.

I called Paula. I hadn’t spoken to her for a long time—she was living near Palm Beach. Yes, it was true, she said. She seemed undisturbed by it. There was some Spanish law that a body had to be buried within twenty-four hours, and because arrangements to fly him home couldn’t be made in time, he was buried there, in Spain. A memorial service was being held in Washington but she wasn’t going up for it; she would not look back.

A SINGLE DARING ACT

L
ATE IN THE SUMMER OF
1951 I entered at last the realm long sought and was sent to Presque Isle, Maine, to the 75th Fighter Squadron.

The operations officer, distinguished by having had his photograph, while fighting in Korea, on the cover of
Life,
had been killed in an accident a few days before I arrived. What the history of the squadron was I did not know and was not told. Its tradition was embodied for me by the new operations officer, a plump Southerner, lying on the floor of a bar in town, too drunk to stand but still animatedly talking to and later borne from the place by his admiring pilots. It was he who gave me my first jet rides. His equipment always looked as if it had been borrowed—helmet oddly perched on his head, flying suit too small and deeply pinched by parachute harness—but he was an experienced pilot, the stick held daintily in his stubby hand. It was September. The heat had never died. Flies were trying to come indoors for the winter and a pennant race that turned out to be the most famous ever was going on. In a car parked out near the runway my wife waved congratulations as I taxied in alone in the trainer for the first time.

I felt I was born for it. One of the initial things I did when I went up without a chase plane in an F-86 was climb to altitude and shut
the engine off. The sky was suddenly flooded with silence, the metal deadweight. Calmly, though my fingers were tingling, I went through the steps to restart it, air start, it was called. Afterwards I did it again. I wanted to be confident of the procedure in case of a flame-out, and following that I never thought of them with dread.

The true hierarchy was based on who was the best pilot and who flew the most. There might be an obvious leader or two or three near equals. One quickly sensed who they were. In addition there were those who had flown in combat. Their stories were listened to more attentively. There was a big, overconfident pilot in another squadron who starred in one of the first I heard. He had flown F-80s, the earliest jet, in Korea. He was coming back from a mission one day, leading his flight home, at thirty thousand feet on top of an overcast. He called radar for a vector, “Milkman, this is Maple Lead.” Milkman answered, identified the flight on the radar screen, and gave them heading and distance to their field, which was K-2: One hundred and seventy degrees and a hundred and twenty miles.

The flight was low on fuel and the weather deteriorating. They would have to make an instrument approach, the leader knew. He called his element leader for a fuel check, “What state, Three?”

The fuel gauge on the F-80 had a small window where the pilot set in the number of gallons he had at takeoff, and thereafter, like an odometer in reverse, they clicked off during the flight. “Sixty gallons, Lead,” the element leader replied.

“No sweat.”

The clouds were solid. They could see nothing. After a while the radar station gave them another steer, still one hundred and seventy degrees, ninety-five miles.

“How are you doing, Three?”

“Forty-two gallons.”

“Roger.”

The ships, not far apart, could do nothing to affect one another
though they shared a common fate. There was no need to speak. Silent minutes passed. The gallons fell away.

“Milkman, Maple Lead. Where do you have us now?”

“Stand by one, Maple Lead. We have you … steer one eight zero to home plate, sixty-six nautical miles.”