Rumors of Peace (34 page)

I
LIKED ART CLASS
because there were dumbbells mixed in with the Towks. And I liked the art teacher, Mrs. Pinelli. We used to have a clean, simpering teacher who was more interested in having you weave baskets and make pretty bookmarks than in drawing and painting, and I hated her. But Mrs. Pinelli's hands were dirty with charcoal and paint. She didn't frown and pinch her lips when you sketched Hitler being riddled by bullets against the Chancellery wall. Mrs. Pinelli said, “Make his torso shorter if he's falling forward.” Mrs. Pinelli didn't say, “Good heavens, what is that?” when I began a big watercolor illustration of the great poem I was going to write. The picture was mixed up because everything had to be there together, but Mrs. Pinelli said, “Interesting composition! Good tension!”

I wasn't sure how I would go about showing Egon and me. Our twined arms and pressing lips were too private for the eyes of Mrs. Pinelli and fourteen classmates, yet that was the most important part of the picture. I finally decided to place the sun right in front of us, so all you saw was a blaze of light. I had done that, very cleverly, and now I was reworking the emerald hills, slapping and splashing down new layers of brightest green, while Don, across the room, was reverting to his short, goofy self by screeching a Conté crayon across the tabletop, until now at last someone threw an eraser at his head.

It was just at this moment that a girl from the office came in with a note, and with a face so profoundly serious, so sorrowful and bowed and filled with hushed importance that the voices and bustle of the class abruptly died away. Mrs. Pinelli, standing by one of the tables, glanced at the girl's face and took the note. When she had read it, her hand dropped down at her side; she looked as if she were going to cry. We were all very still, looking at her. Green paint dripped from my brush. Don was holding the eraser that had bounced from his head. But Mrs. Pinelli didn't speak. She walked slowly back to her desk. There, after a long moment, she said, “Class, I've just received word from the office . . . the president is dead.”

It was not possible. There had never been another president. He was eternal, like God, but God as He should be—great, yet ordinary, too, caring about coal miners and sharecroppers, our FDR with his flashing smile and jaunty cigarette holder, and the way he said, like someone you knew, “My friends,” yet so great that you didn't count him among the bigwigs, he was so far above them, so grand in his black cape, so serious, and he had worked so hard for the United Nations, and now he wouldn't see the flags flying and hear the cheering crowds, he would be in the darkness of his grave like Aunt Dorothy and Mario. . . .

These thoughts seemed eternal, too, as if they had been going around in my head for centuries, yet the sad important girl was just stepping back out the door, and Mrs. Pinelli was just pulling out her chair and sitting down at her desk, where she took up a drawing someone had turned in, but you could tell she wasn't looking at it. I laid down my paint brush. The room was still quiet. Then, though we had not been given permission, we began putting our things away. Mrs. Pinelli said yes, we could leave.

In the hall we saw that the whole school was leaving. There wasn't the usual shouting and laughing, except for some seventh graders. I saw Peggy walking along with some of her Towk girlfriends, and I wondered if she was pleased with the news. Roosevelt cut no ice with her, she was a Republican; maybe she was even rejoicing. I went over to her, to become angry, to relieve the soreness in my chest. But Peggy looked as cast-down as everyone else. I walked along with her and her friends. I had never walked with a bunch of Towks before, but today
was different; it seemed to join everyone together. Even the teachers seemed joined to us, standing at their doors as always, but not eagle-eyed for misbehavior; it was as if a barrier between us had been removed, and we looked at them openly with the great strangeness of what had happened, and they looked back the same way, even hard Mr. Lewis, and especially Mrs. Lewis, who stood with her lace hankie in her hand.

At my locker I nodded good-bye to the Towks, and they nodded back. Everything was formal; everything was strange. Don was formal, too, waiting silently for me at the door. Silently we walked out into the spring afternoon.

Then he spoke majestically, almost like Roosevelt himself. “Today is the end of an era.”

I gave a sad nod.

“He was a great man. We'll never see another like him.”

“I know.”

“This is a date the world will remember.”

“April twelfth.”

When we walked by the garrison, we stopped and looked through the storm fence. The busy atmosphere was gone; everything was quiet, as if a string had snapped. Soldiers stood by the open door of a barracks building, listening to a radio news broadcast.

“Do you realize,” Don said as we leaned against the fence, “that he was voted in thirteen years ago? That's one hell of a long time.”

“I know.”

“It's a crime he couldn't have made it to the end of the war.”

“That's what I wish too.”

“It's the irony of life,” said Don, and we walked on.

A woman walking along the street had apparently not heard the news yet, for she was walking briskly, with a cheerful face. Don felt she should be told. He went up to her.

“Pardon me, lady. Did you know President Roosevelt died?”

She gave him an angry look. “If you're making some kind of joke, you should be ashamed.”

“It's no joke. You can just look around.”

She did look. She looked at a group of students walking along without the usual loud banter. She looked through the storm fence at the silent
soldiers. Faintly, from the open door of the barracks building, you could hear the sound of the radio broadcast.

“My God,” she whispered, “it can't be true.” And there before us, clapping her hand to her face, she broke into tears.

“It was hard to do,” said Don as we walked on, “but I felt I had to do it.”

We passed the park.

“Do you think they know?” asked Don, indicating the old men on the benches. It was hard to tell. They were quiet, but they were always quiet. Still, they didn't look stunned and grief-stricken. Don crossed the lawn and spoke to one.

“They knew,” he said, coming back.

Maybe when you got that old, nothing stunned you. Maybe you used up all your grief on the way.

“Well,” sighed Don as we approached my house, “I guess we'll have to get used to what's-his-name now.”

“Who?”

“What's-his-name, the VP.”

“I don't care about him.”

“Truman.” He tasted the name on his tongue. “President Truman. It doesn't sound right.”

“It sounds awful.”

At my front steps we parted soberly.

Mama's eyes were red when she opened the door, and as I stepped inside, I saw them fill and overflow. It loosened the soreness in my chest, and my own eyes wetted. She had been sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, and we went back there and sat down, and we had a cry together.

It was odd how the kitchen table was always there in the things you remembered after. Mama sitting there the day the Germans invaded Denmark. The night we came up from the cellar alive and had hot Ovaltine. The last breakfast we had together with Peter. And now again the same faded green oilcloth, the same salt and pepper shakers, the same old metal toaster, and the big round clock on the wall, ticking.

We listened to the radio the rest of the afternoon and ate alone together. When Dad came home, at about eight o'clock, he put his
lunch pail on the kitchen table, and his and Mama's eyes met in a long look, as if someone in the family had died, and then he shook his head with a sigh, and Mama bent down and took his dinner from the oven where she kept it warm. I didn't say anything either. It seemed that there was nothing at all to say.

We listened to the radio again afterward, late into the night.

“. . . I walked across town, toward Broadway, and exchanged glances with hundreds of people who looked stonily back. . . . A group of businessmen halted by the foot of an elevator shaft. They had exchanged jokes for years about little boys who thought there had never been another president and never would be, who thought that Roosevelt was immortal. In a way, the businessmen had thought so themselves. Now, they knew he was. . . .”

What did he mean? The whole terrible point was that Roosevelt was not immortal; he had died.

Some of the voices were from churchmen. I didn't like churchmen, but I liked them tonight, they said truthful things. “. . . Thou hast taken from us Thy servant, who has led us faithfully and truly through twelve fateful years, and we are stricken and bereft. . . .”

Some of the voices were full of purpose and spirit. “. . . I can't help but believe that the force of his personality will continue . . . I can see that wonderful face saying to every one of us, ‘Go ahead, keep going!'”

One of the speeches was very long, by a war correspondent. “For myself, who spent most of the war years abroad, when Mr. Roosevelt was in the White House, I would like to say this: When President Roosevelt died today, the Fascist dictators lost their greatest enemy. . . . And just as the Nazis feared him, the people, whom the Nazis conquered and enslaved, loved and revered him above all foreign statesmen. . . . In France and in Belgium, when they were liberated last summer, the people there felt somehow grateful to the President personally, but that was not all. Somehow, too, he represented to them the great hope of achieving lasting peace on this sorry planet. . . .”

Very late at night, there was a hymn sung, “Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh. . . .” Then there was a moment of silence.

“April 12, 1945, has closed.”

A
PRIL
17:

Nuremberg Falls!

Luftwaffe Shattered!

1,345 Planes in 2 days!

A
PRIL
18:

Yanks Smash into Leipzig!

Russ. Gain on Berlin!

Open Up All-Out Assault!

A
PRIL
20:

316,940 Nazis

Taken in Ruhr!

U.S. Troops Break

Okinawa Stalemate!

A
PRIL
21:

Red Army 7 Miles From Berlin!

Moscow Announces Final

Drive Across Oder!

Fierce Fighting on Okinawa!

Y
OU NO LONGER SAW
one headline or two across the page; there were always three or four, sometimes more. So much was going on that you could hardly keep up. Berlin almost reached. Prison camps revealed, full of emaciated slave laborers. Hitler rumored to have fled south, the coward. Montgomery's troops pushing north to Denmark. Pétain facing trial in France. Okinawa falling fast. Baguio taken, the last Philippine holdout.

A
PRIL
22:

Russ. Reach Berlin!

16 Armies Drive

Into Burning City!

Reich Ripped to Shreds!

                   
The emerald hills loom high in the sky,

                   
as the last day of war grows near,

                   
and soon the swans so white on the sea

                   
will cross its blue without fear.

A
PRIL
23:

Welcome United Nations!

Russ. Smash Deep

Into Heart of Berlin!

                   
The United Nations will meet on high

                   
to make our vict'ry eternal,

                   
so that we will not have to die

                   
in smoke and flames infernal.

A
PRIL
24:

Red Armies Linked Inside

Berlin! Great Tank Battle On!

Molotov, Stettinius, Soong Here

                   
The sun will shine in the creek like gold,

                   
our two hearts will beat together,

                   
while world peace comes like glory untold,

                   
a moment to last forever!

I couldn't stop writing. I wrote a long letter to Peter, whose ankle had healed and who was tramping across the rubble of Germany, heading east toward the Russian advance. I sent him my poem, leaving out the last stanza. I wrote Karla, too, and sent her the poem. And I wrote Helen Maria, but I didn't send her the poem because I feared her literary opinion. I thanked her for her letter and said I hoped I could come down and see her soon. . . .

                
I am really happy to know you will get to Oxford at last, it is a wonderful reward that you have awaited many long years. And now that the Russians have smashed into Berlin, the end of the war can't be far off. I am sorry President Roosevelt could not be alive to see it. I realize now that he was in failing health, but at the time I thought it was political propaganda, and also, I did
think that it was
impossible
that he could die, that is an honest statement.

                
He would be happy to know that the United Nations is opening tomorrow, as he had planned. Will you be going? I will be going on the 26th, I'm going with the school. Which brings me to Peggy. I will give you a report on her progress, I mean her lack of it. You're right, she's too far gone. Concerning the United Nations, I told her she should sign up to go, and the other day she told me she had; but she's still not sure she will go because school excursions bore her. I will tell you about the long talks we had in her room. She always seemed to be wavering on the edge of giving up her stupid life and getting free, but she would get mad at the last minute, as if you were trying to take something away from her, as if she were frightened, too, like someone being pushed into deep water. So I have stopped harping.

                
You may think I'm being melodramatic, but I have a strange feeling about Peggy these days, that she is choosing her life's direction for good and will not change later on. It's a feeling in my bones. This is why she must come to the United Nations; to me it is a crucial decision on her part. If she will attend this historic event which she has heretofore called dull and uninteresting, it means she has seen the light. But I can't tell what is going on underneath and if she has seen the light. We will just have to wait till the 26th to see if she will make the correct crucial decision. . . .

I wrote a lot more, and when I was finished, I was still in a writing mood, but there was no one left to correspond with. The one person I wished most to write and send my poem to I could not. Egon had never answered my last letter, and it was five weeks now. I was often struck with a shuddering certainty of having offended him and ended everything. Yet I did not really believe that he could feel that way; I felt sure there must be another reason for his silence. More and more is seemed he must be away on vacation, someplace where there was the snow that he longed for, up at Tahoe, where it still lay thick on the mountains; and I could see him skiing down the slopes in the keen
mountain wind, crouching as he soared high in the air, his blue eyes narrowed.

A
PRIL
25:

Berlin Overrun!

S.F. Welcomes

World Leaders!

I looked at the photographs of crowds massed around limousines from which famous figures stepped out, and then I matched up the figures with the names below. There was Governor Warren and tall, snowyhaired Secretary of State Stettinius. There were the Russians—Commissar Molotov, short and gray-haired, and a handsome aide called Gromyko. There were Anthony Eden and Clement Attlee and Lord Halifax, all very English-looking—I hoped Helen Maria would be there. And there was Trygve Lie from Norway, and Field Marshal Smuts from South Africa, with his pointed white beard like Professor Ford's, and slender Soong from China, and Arabs in dark robes and flowing white headdresses, and Carlos Romulo from the battling Philippines, and Masaryk, the Czech foreign minister, and there were Negroes, too, Endekatau from Ethiopia and Clarence Simpson from Liberia. Every nationality was represented—eighty percent of the world's population, the article said. Eighty percent in agreement, the other twenty being the crushed Nazis and Japs, who would have no say-so. How could we go wrong?