Prince of Peace (12 page)

The last thing I'd imagined for our reunion was that when Michael and I finally met again our old priest-nemesis would be standing between us, but that is what happened. Michael was crossing toward us. When our eyes locked together I raised my hand to wave at him, but it seemed a wholly stilted gesture. Monsignor Riordan's presence? No, something else.

Now that I was facing my friend at last a new question had popped open in my mind. How would he take it that I'd created a personality around an imitation of him? Michael had always served me as a kind of compass of perception. With him what-was-what had always been obvious, and the things and styles that seemed good to him had by virtue of that seemed wonderful to me. He had been, and I gathered from his talk still was, both funny and solemn. They had seemed the perfect modes to me and I'd consciously tried to duplicate them in my own responses. I did not succeed, of course, but I became what I remain, ironic and pessimistic, the Greenwich Village versions of Michael's attitudes.

The closer Michael came the taller he seemed. He wore his nervousness quite loosely, as a given of the moment, as if awkwardness between us was the most natural thing in the world. He was the first to speak. "Welcome home," he said when he grasped my hand.

I had to smile; the son of a bitch welcoming
me
home! "Thanks," I said feebly.

"It must have been rough," he said. I realized what he was doing, turning all the shit they'd just been giving him on its ear by giving it to me. He was dodging the embarrassment of our reunion by making a joke on the leering Monsignor Riordan. Michael was proposing an improvisation. I caught it instantly, as if I was his drummer, as if this was Birdland.

"It wasn't that bad," I said. "You do what you have to do."

"I guess so. But I doubt if I could have."

"You never know..." I matched his grieving tone exactly. We were picking up where we'd left off ... until you're in the situation how you'll react."

"Some men just have what it takes, I guess."

"Though really," I offered modestly, "I can't claim any credit."

"Well, you may not believe this, but..." Michael gave me his most meaningful look. "...I wish I'd been there with you."

"Where?" Monsignor Riordan asked, bewildered.

It was time to turn the scat around. I answered him, "Korea. I just wish I'd been with Michael, that's all. He has what it takes, Monsignor. Don't you think?"

The old coot blinked at me.

"I appreciate it, Frank," Michael said.

Monsignor Riordan eyed us both, then muttered, "I misunderstood ... He turned and took several steps, then stopped and said to Michael, as if he were a schoolboy after all, "Tell your mother I have some envelopes that need addressing."

"Yes, Monsignor."

We watched the priest leave the hall. He seemed stoopshouldered and weary, and I felt a twinge of guilt, as if we'd been tossing lit matches at a derelict.

The hall was nearly empty. The Holy Name Society volunteers were noisily clearing the tables. Michael and I stood in awkward silence until I realized that he was waiting for me to speak. It would have been wrong to be sarcastic, but the prank with Monsignor Riordan had been such a relief that I wanted to prolong it. "As I was about to say before I was so rudely interrupted by Kim II Sung..." I grinned cockily, proud to have remembered the North Korean's name. "...it's great to see you're back." I slapped his back to underscore the hackneyed pun.

"Did you miss me?" he asked somewhat mockingly, as if to deflect the banality of my welcome the way he had the others.

But I met him head on. "Hell yes, I missed you. What do you think?"

"I think you're a turd," he said.

"Who's a turd?" I punched his shoulder. It was rock hard, and he cocked his fist to punch me back.

He held the pose for a long minute, hooding his eyes like a boxer posing for a photo. Then he straightened up and laughed. "God, we were punks, weren't we?"

"Some of us still are, Mike."

"I thought when I saw you in church, That can't be Durkin! You moved. Even your folks moved. I couldn't believe it when I heard they moved."

"Yes, they live in Queens. I never get up here anymore. I came up today to see you."

"Oh yeah? Not for the plenary indulgence?"

"Well, that too, naturally."

He looked away, as if our needling had run its course and he wasn't sure where that left us. After a moment he said, "How are they?"

"Who?"

"Your mom and dad. Mo."

"They're great. They love it out there. A yard, grass, their own tree, the whole bit. They flipping love it. Mo's in a nice Catholic high school. She calls herself Maureen now. My mother can still walk to Mass every morning and my old man has a clunker of his own. Everything's a dream but me. Me, I've lost my soul." "Because you live in the Village?"

I shrugged. "'N.Y.Jew' my father calls it. Famous for its urban campus, its liberal curriculum, its heterogeneous student body, but also for its atheists, Commies, dope fiends and transvestites. Professors stand in line to take whacks at Irish kids, to prove that there is no God but Sartre and Simone is his
savant
."

Michael said nothing. I realized that my blase references would be lost on him, and I resolved not to show him up. The deprivation of his having not read a book in years only then struck me. The New Testament didn't count. "What about you?" I asked. "You get the GI Bill, right?"

"Rights."

Cracks, I thought. Everything is cracks. "I mean, are you going to use it, or what?"

"I don't know yet."

"When do you get out of the army?"

"I could be out now. My leave is up January first. I have to let them know by then."

"You wouldn't stay in?"

He looked at me sharply. "I wouldn't? Why not?"

I blushed. "Well, you know. Christ! It's the army!"

"And you civilians think the army is shit, right?"

His defensiveness stunned me. "I'm no civilian," I said inanely. I meant that the very notion requires a military point of reference.

"It's one of the things they say, you know. That civilians hate us. After the wars are over they just want soldiers to flush themselves down the toilet."

"You think the Holy Name Society hates you?"

He shrugged, pulled out a pack of Camels and lit one.

"If you did stay in, what would...?"

"I'd apply for OCS. I guess they'd take me."

"You guess? Jesus Christ, of course they'd take you, after what you did."

He flicked the match, as if we were outside, and he said fiercely, "Let's cover that right now, Durk. I didn't do shit! Get it? Not shit! I don't want that what-I-did crap from you!"

"What crap?" I asked helplessly.

Michael's face was inflamed and his mouth had tightened in the way it always had when he was angry. His chin had a way of turning white, even while the skin from his neck up burned. I had a fresh ear now on the pitch of his emotions. He was puffing at his cigarette compulsively and his hand trembled. He was more tightly wired than I'd realized. I chided myself. What did I expect? It wasn't the Adirondacks he'd returned from that fall.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I think I'm on edge. I mean I know I'm on edge. I don't know what I'm going to do."

He stared at me. I remember how starkly I perceived his despair then. It was the despair of youth, the absolute conviction to which only the young are capable of clinging that the pattern of a lifetime is already set, and that never would zest, affection or spontaneity form part of his experience again. "Downward to darkness," is the feeling, "on extended wings." I was as young as he was, of course, and did not recognize the illusion for what it was, having not learned yet that despair overpowers us not once but repeatedly through life. Only in looking back on them are we capable of seeing how little true damage those fits have done us. At that moment, though, I felt only a bleak sweet kinship with Michael; I was as convinced as he was that the joy that had made us friends was irretrievably lost. But no real matter. Our despair would make us friends again.

"Maybe I'll do some coaching," he said after a moment. "Monsignor said I could lend a hand with the CYO league." "Would they pay you?"

"I'm loaded. I've got two years' back pay piled up. Sergeant's pay."

"Wow. Well, maybe coaching's just the thing. You kept in shape, I guess, huh?"

"How many pushups do you want?"

"How high'd you get?"

"Five hundred."

"Jesus Christ, Mike! Every day?"

He smiled. "Morning, noon and night."

It was as if a bird had taken off from behind a bush by my feet, scaring me, but also giving me my first real inkling of what he'd been through. Fifteen hundred pushups a day? That was something I could understand. I'd never done fifty. All at once I realized that what seemed like strength to everyone else—the quality that pulled him through—was to Michael himself the most acute desperation. And I realized too that his ordeal had not ended. Now instead of Chicoms tormenting him he had us. We were punishing him with our distance from his experience, from the sickness of soul it left him with. The vicious routines required by mere survival had been suspended everywhere but inside him. A vacancy, willfully displayed, had come over him. A hero to the world, I saw at last, but a basket case to himself.

To my horror I found myself using the line he'd used on me in our shtick for the monsignor. "It must have been rough, Mike." "Where the fuck have you been, Durk? I've been home on leave for weeks."

I had to look away, I was so ashamed. I'd been afraid to face him for fear of what he'd think of me. Yet I hadn't thought of him. It had never occurred to me that Sergeant Michael Maguire, D.S.C., Silver Star, could stand in need of me. "Mike, I'm sorry." I found his eyes. "I should have come up sooner. I was afraid to. You're a fucking war hero, you know. I'm a chump, a saphead."

He laughed. "That's true." He lowered his eyes bashfully. He regretted his outburst.

"But I'm here now. I came all the way up for you, and I want the credit. I even went to fucking Mass."

"Hey, come on."

"Sorry. But I mean I did, you know."

"Aren't you a Catholic anymore, or what?"

"I guess I'm not."

"Jesus!" he exhaled dramatically, as if he'd never met one of us.

I nudged him. "No atheists in foxholes, eh?"

"Do you know who said that?"

"No idea. Robert Service?"

"A priest said it. A priest said it on Bataan, a chaplain name of Father Cummings. You might like to know that he was killed later when the Jap ship carrying him and hundreds of other prisoners from the Philippines to Japan was sunk by an American submarine."

"God."

"Yeah, God. We had our own version in Korea: 'No atheists in foxholes, only assholes. The atheists are in college.'"

"Oh, fuck, Mike. Come on."

"Nothing personal, Durk. Hey, nothing personal."

"You said we civilians hate you, but that isn't it, is it? You hate us."

"Wouldn't you?"

"What, hate the people I was supposed to be defending? I wouldn't think so, no."

"'A tidy foxhole,' we used to say..." He stared at his cigarette. "...'and a tight asshole.'" He looked up at me. "I knew guys who shit their pants." He waited for me to react. When I didn't he said, "Hey, Durk,
I
shit my pants."

"Because you were afraid?"

"No. It was in the camp. I had the runs the whole time. Sometimes it just flowed out of me without my even knowing it, like I was a retard or something. Of course, there's nothing to clean yourself off with and you can't wash your pants. You know what happens? Do you?"

"No, I don't."

"You get used to it. You get used to the smell and to the crud in your pants and to the rash on your butt. And you don't have to be embarrassed because everybody else has shit in his pants too. At first I would pray for a solid bowel movement. I mean, can you believe it? Praying for that, Durk? But then I stopped praying about it because it stopped being important." Michael looked back at the Holy Name members who were stacking dishes onto a stainless-steel cart. "What do you think my fans would say if they knew their hero went around with shit in his pants for two years and nine months?"

"Hey, Mike, everybody shits, you know? Even the pope." As I said this I knew how off the point it was. Michael's caustic reminiscence seemed to fill a profound inner need of his, a declaration of the real, a rejection of the Hollywood fantasy people had of what he'd been through. Shit is real, no doubt about it. No wonder he was troubled: why should an experience of such prolonged and utter degradation have resulted in his glorification?

We were both, I think, aware of the irony that Michael's bitter remarks implicitly invited me into a new intimacy with him. Would I be the person to whom he could confide his experience? His true experience? Already I had some sense of how heroically he was fending off the reduction of his identity
into
heroism, and I saw how a willing friend—one to whom he could be everything but a hero—could help him. But for the life of me I could not think of a way to express my sympathy. Why couldn't I have said, simply, "You can tell me what it was like"? Perhaps because one cannot presume that such secrets as he had could be shared. Did I in fact want to be entrusted with them? If, as I have said, there was an invitation to intimacy in his show of bitterness, it was not enough. We were not ready for each other yet, that's what I felt. Suddenly I wanted to get away from him. I imagined myself saying, "Well, it's been cool. See you around." But that was equally impossible. I was paralyzed, neither here nor there with him.

"Anyway," he said. He dropped his cigarette on the floor. As he ground it out I wondered if it would do damage, but the floor was terrazzo.

He made no move to leave.

Since clearly we'd have each welcomed a way to prolong if not our conversation our time together, neither of us moved to end it. So we stood there stupidly in the corner of the parish hall. A long few moments of awkwardness passed before it was apparent that no one was going to rescue us.