The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (19 page)

When the resources of the air base ran thin, I borrowed a jeep and went to visit Foggia, Cerignola, or Barletta. There wasn't much in Foggia, because it had been bombed flat. There wasn't a lot in Cerignola, either, because there never had been; sleepy farm town with a huge new cathedral that smelled like a latrine, it was the kind of community that the Italians used to say Christ never bothered to visit. But Barletta lay on the lovely, limpid Adriatic, not yet a septic tank, and you could swim and lie on the beach and gaze speculatively at the beautiful fifteen-year-old Whore of Barletta, rejecting commercial offers in the afternoon for the sake of improving her suntan, and even meet civilians of a different kind. One was a former Italian Army artillery captain named Ugo Vittorini, whose brother, Elio, was one of Italy's finest novelists. Ugo had served in Yugoslavia. A fierce anti-Fascist, he had managed to persuade his entire battery to desert to the partisans there, while his wife, Maria, was operating a "safe house" for
partigiani
between the lines in northern Italy. Now they were a quiet professorial couple with children and a pleasant apartment on a courtyard, and they impressed me very much.

Twenty-two years after the war my wife, Carol, and I attended the Science Fiction Film Festival in Trieste and arranged to meet our two older daughters (then at school in England) in Naples as soon as their term ended. We had a week to spare, and we spent it driving a rented Fiat through my war. I don't know what it did for Carol, except a little heat prostration here and there, but I found it fascinating. Foggia! In 1944 there had been almost nothing standing except the beat-up tower of the church; in 1967 it was all pastel stucco high-rises, and I couldn't even find the church in the towers around it. Barletta, too, was all high-rise pink and blue apartment buildings and a whole new battery of hotels and restaurants. But in Cerignola time had stopped. Not a building had been added, none taken away, and the church still smelled like a latrine, while all the rest of the area had risen from the grave and turned into Miami Beach.

Around the same time I found the solution to a minor mystery that dated back to Stornara. A bomb wing was made up of four groups, but our wing had only three: the 455th, 456th, and 458th. I always wondered where that last group had got to, and then in a casual conversation with Hal Clement, he supplied the answer. The 457th had been detached to fill a hole in the AAF in England, and he had been in it. Pity it worked out like that. I would have been thrilled to meet Hal Clement in Italy.

An observed fact of my life is that I have almost always gotten everything I wanted, sooner or later. Another observed fact is that sometimes by the time I get it I don't want it any more. For Christmas the Army gave me that thing I had been scheming and contriving for, for a year and a half, a chance to transfer to the Infantry, go to OCS, and become an expendable second lieutenant with the Fifth Army as it crawled up the mountains toward the Po.

Catch-22 was that in order to take advantage of this boon, one had to re-up for two more years, and it was clear to everyone who looked at a map that the war wouldn't stretch that long. It was annoying that the Germans didn't seem to perceive this fact. Indeed, they had just launched the Ardennes attack, perplexingly as if they thought they were still a viable military force. But the Russians were grinding bloodily west, and the Fifth Army was creeping north up the Apennines; even the Japanese were being pushed off one island after another, and there was no doubt in my mind that the European part of the war would run out in a few months and the rest of it not long after.

But still—

A third of a century later, with Vietnam so huge in the recent past, it is hard for me to remember how righteously most of us viewed our cause. But we did. The Nazis had done terrible things. How terrible we were being reminded every day, as the Americans and British liberated one concentration camp after another. It was a moral obligation to stop them, even at risk—maybe especially if at risk, to prove, well,
something
to, well, somebody.

So I stewed over this problem for a while, doing arithmetic in my head. Allow a month for the papers to be processed; that brings us into January. Add ten weeks for the OCS course, and say another two to hang around a replacement depot waiting for an assignment. That brought us to early April at best before I would be handed my platoon to lead into combat, and where would the combat be? Surely not in Europe any more. And the war against Japan seemed mostly a matter of Air Force and Navy, even if it managed to stay in business long enough to get me there.

As it turned out, my arithmetic was a little wrong. The Germans managed to hold out until May, plenty of time for me to get my head blown off if I had really wanted it. But in the event it was taken out of my hands, anyway. Someone in AAF/MTO headquarters in Caserta had his eye on me. They had discovered that I had been a writer and an editor as a civilian, and decided I would be more use with words than with weapons or weather instruments. So in January, 1945, I packed up and headed west across the peninsula.

U.S. Army Air Forces/Mediterranean Theater of Operations was headquartered in the King's Palace in the town of Caserta, a few miles inland from Naples: immense rectangular tenement of a building that reminded me a lot of Knickerbocker Village. It wasn't just Air Force, or even just Americans. The whole allied Mediterranean war effort was directed from there. People like Eisenhower and Churchill passed through from time to time, causing much pain to the headquarters troops who were required to shine themselves up for ceremonial parades. (We Weather Squadron people were never involved in that sort of thing, fortunately for the good name of the service.) The place was full of foreigners. There was a big RAF unit, and I became friendly with some of them on a bridge-playing and beer-drinking basis. There were French troops, including black colonials; co-belligerent Italians; and quite a few former members of the Wehrmacht, now working in the mess halls as KPs to feed us conquerors. There I met my longtime friend Eddie Cope, the sage of Houston, Texas, who passed on to me all he had learned at the University of Texas's drama department. ("There are only three reasons for any line: to show character, advance the action, or get a laugh," "If you show a gun on the stage, you have to fire it." Etc. They are all good rules, tolerant about being broken when necessary.)

What I was supposed to be doing was public relations and editing the squadron newspaper. Public relations wasn't hard. I prepared a standard form, and was given a clerk-typist to pound them out and mail them off to local newspapers whenever any of our number did anything interesting, like getting promoted from Pfc to Corporal, Editing the newspaper was a little less straightforward, since I didn't know anything about newspapers. I solved it by converting it to a magazine, borrowed a mimeograph, found a civilian printer to do the covers, and put out one of the nicest fanzines you ever saw.

It was an undemanding way to spend time in Italy, but in the familiar environment of typewriters and layouts ordinality was seeping back. I didn't seem to be
doing
much, and I began to hear the step of the Fool-Killer catching up behind me.

I was also in love. Dorothy LesTina and I had been heating up the Army Postal Service with an awful lot of correspondence. Now she was in Germany, a first lieutenant, whose principal job was to stand up on a platform in front of ten thousand troops while some GI crooner sang "Darling, je vous aime beaucoup" to her. (Of many odd individual contributions is a war effort made.) Germany was on the same side of the Atlantic as I was, which was tantalizing, and it was my deep belief that if any GI was going to sing love songs to my girl, it should be me. I could not see any way to arrange that, and frankly, the war was beginning to seem a bore. The Germans had been pushed back out of the Bulge, and it was all just mopping up. And not very interesting.

What I didn't know about the Bulge was that two of my best friends were receiving their death sentences there. Neither of them was wounded. But Dirk Wylie hurt his back jumping out of an Army truck; it got worse, turned into tuberculosis of the spine, and he died of it in 1948. While Cyril Kornbluth strained his heart lugging a .50-caliber machine gun around the Ardennes Forest, and died of essential hypertension a few years later.

What I did know was that the Bulge was the last real effort the Germans could possibly make, and the war was winding down. So I cast about for some more interesting way to spend the time until I would get back to civilian reality, and found it on Mount Vesuvius.

The 12th Weather Squadron had requisitioned a former Cook's Tours hotel there. It was called the Eremo, which means "hermit," and it was isolated enough for the name to fit.

As a headquarters flunky, I had the use of it any time I could borrow a jeep to get there, which was often. The Eremo made it quite a comfortable war. We had kept on the civilian staff—not all of them, and without spit and polish; but they cooked much more interesting meals than I had had anywhere else in Italy at that time, trading Army Spam for civilian fresh vegetables, and they were perfectly willing to make our beds and shine our shoes and bring us drinks on the terrace. It was a quiet place to write, I perceived at once. There was also a writing job which needed to be done—preparing the Squadron History—and I began to scheme to transfer myself to the Hill. About the time the war in Europe ground to an end, I got my druthers.

Living on the side of a volcano is not like being in your average Mamaroneck split-level. This was the same mountain that had creamed Pompeii in a.d. 79. It hadn't done anything quite that spectacular since. But you never knew. It had voided some pretty substantial lava flows a year or so before I arrived, while the Eremo was the pleasant fringe benefit of some Luftwaffe unit. You could still feel the warmth of the rock, just inches below the surface, and now and then there would be a little shudder.

What mashed Pompeii, of course, was not lava but airborne ash. When time permitted, I drove to the excavations and poked around in the interrupted life of the Roman city, and it was quite a contrast to look up from the yards-high ash-fall to the peaceful top of the mountain, gently steaming a couple of miles away, and realize that
that
came from
that
. But in the hotel we were safe enough. Ash would be windblown away.

Lava would come down the side of the mountain, in unpredictable directions and possibly very fast, but the Eremo was on a little bulge, with the Italian government volcanological observatory just above it. One felt a certain reassurance from that. Any likely lava flow would probably divide around the bulge, and anyway, the volcanologists would know what was happening. Until they started running, there was no need to worry.

The most adventurous thing about the Eremo was the drive up the narrow, winding mountain road that led to it. I learned to drive a truck on that road, the night of V-E Day. We had to get back to Caserta. We were all drunk, but I was less so than the others, so I drove the six-by-six down those hairpin, guardrail-less curves, over the shifting pumice roadway, and somehow survived. But that was a small price to pay for living on the Hill, among the beautiful slopes where Spartacus held off all the Roman legions, looking out over Capri. Living on the Hill entitled one to a few little extras, such as Red Cross girls. Normally they were officers' issue and knew it, but a private hotel halfway up a volcano was a powerful inducement to some.

Most of all, the Eremo was a peaceful place for writing—not necessarily on the history of the 12th Weather Squadron. I did do a little of that, from time to time. But I also wrote the first draft of "Donovan Had a Dream"
*
there, still one of my favorite early action-adventure stories. I also wrote a large number of perfectly lousy
New Yorker
ish stories about Army life, some of which still survive in my sin file and none of which have ever been published. I was beginning to feel like a writer again.

Altogether, I was in Italy less than two years. It does not now seem very far away—it is a trip I've made over a long weekend since—but it seemed like voyaging to intergalactic space then. It stays in my mind as an unending flicker of kaleidoscopic impressions. Playing ping-pong among Roman ruins, strolling in the Borghese Gardens. Italian music, the
canzone
they sang in the streets. The opera. An afternoon in Milan, just after the war was over. La Scala had been bombed out and the opera was being performed in a movie theater a few blocks away, and there I saw the most tenderly comic performance of
La Bohème
I had ever seen or ever hope to see; the mind-blowing Mimi turned out to be Renata Tebaldi, dewily fresh at the beginning of her astonishing career. And at the other end of a career, a few weeks later in Naples, Toti del Monte singing the same role, the voice still beautiful but the weight of ages in the way she moved and looked.

Hitchhiking in a British truck in Barletta, and finding myself surrounded by soldiers in a uniform I had never seen, speaking a language I could not recognize; they were Yugoslav partisans, wounded out of the gorges, recuperating in an Italian hospital before being smuggled back to fight again. Giving a lift to a Rothschild baron, from Naples to Rome; he was of the Parisian branch of the family, sent to ride out the war in the lesser holocaust of Italy. Racing a Mercedes in my jeep all the way up the Apennines. Standing in the ruins of Catullus's summer home, at the tip of the Sirmione peninsula in Lake Garda, with defeated Germans blowing up their ammunition dumps and preparing to surrender all around the shores of the lake. Drinking cherry liqueur
con selz
in Naples's
galleria
(and, years later, finding John Home Burns's magnificent, tortured novel about that wartime Stew). The stench of Neapolitan alleys. The warm salt idleness of Adriatic beaches. The rotting hemp all along the road to Caserta.
Lacrimae Cristi
and raw wartime
grappa
with, it was said, one hundred-octane gasoline added to give it authority. The streams of tracers over the Bay of Naples as a Luftwaffe photo-reccy pilot tried to steal a shot of the harbor. The curate who led me through the Roman catacombs with a skinny taper timed to burn out just before the end of the tour, so that we walked the last ten yards among the walls of bones in darkness. American jeeps and German
feldwagens
waiting in the same mile-long line for their turn at the one surviving brewery in the foothills of the Alps. RAF sergeants, their eyes streaming with tears, on the day that FDR died. In memory it is all one bright flash after another.