photograph, a twenty-year-old wife, the story of how it happened. What more is there to wish than to be remembered? To go on living in the narrative of others? More than anything I felt the desire to be rid of the undistinguished past, to belong to nothing and to no one beyond the war. At the same time I longed for the opposite, country, family, God, perhaps not in that order. In death I would have them or be done with the need; I would be at last the other I yearned to be.
That person in the army, that wasn’t me, Cheever wrote after the war. In my case, it was. I did not know the army meant bad teeth, drab quarters, men with small minds, and colonels wearing sunglasses. Anyone from the life below can be a soldier. I imaginedcampaigns like Caesar’s, the sun going down in wooded country, encampments on hilltops, cool dawns. The army was that; it was like a beautifully dressed woman; I saw her smile at me and stood erect.
The army. They are playing the last songs at the hop, the sentimental favorites. I am dancing with a girl named Pat Potter, blonde and elegant, whom I somehow knew. There are moments when one is part of the real beauty, the pageant. They are playing “Army Blue,” the matrimonial and farewell song. A hundred, two hundred, couples are on the floor. The army. Familiar faces. This immense brotherhood in which they bend you slowly to their ways. This great family in which one is always advancing, even while asleep.
The stern commandments had become my commandments, the harder thing than triumph, in the poet’s words. Long afterwards, in Georgia, as a captain, I was getting off an airplane behind a lame man. We paused at the bottom of the steps. “Remember me?” he asked. It was then I saw who he was, the son of a friend of my father’s, whom I had recognized as an underclassman. “What happened to you?” I said. “You’re not still in the army?”
He’d been retired, he said, but it was strange, he often thought about me.
“What do you mean?”
I began to recall it as he told me. He had played football as a plebe although he was small. He was a quarterback. The following fall he had come to me for advice: Should he continue to try and make the team—there was only the slightest chance—or drop it and go out for manager? There was an assistant’s opening; he was from Atlanta, and the manager of “A” Squad was traditionally a Georgian. It was a wonderful spot and he would be in line to inherit it.
The manager was someone to be envied, I agreed, but not admired. Even if he was only a third-string quarterback, he would beon the team, and his moment might come in the twilight of some epic game. Unsoiled and slender, he might come off the bench to lead them to victory.
It sounded like advice of mine. He had taken it, and the week afterwards his leg was broken in practice, he said. He was in the hospital for more than a month and fell so far behind in his studies that he never caught up, graduating much farther down in his class than he would have, so though he had wanted the Engineers, he got the Infantry instead. In Korea he was hit by a mortar shell that shattered his legs and was given a medical discharge. His career had ended.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I told him.
“I owe it all to you,” he said.
——
The truest man I knew was dark, with skin almost sallow, a high forehead, and Asia-black hair, Kelton Farris—Nig, as they called him, or Bud. He was from a town called Conway, not far from Little Rock, and all plebes from Arkansas were expected to know an apocryphal speech made in the legislature when it had been proposed to change the name of the state, or at least its unique pronunciation. “Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Goddamnit,” it began—I forget its many outrages though I knew them then. “When I was a boy at the age of fourteen, I had a prick the size of a roasting ear and could piss halfway across the Ouachita River. ‘Out of order, out of order!’ You’re
That person in the army, that wasn’t me, Cheever wrote after the war. In my case, it was. I did not know the army meant bad teeth, drab quarters, men with small minds, and colonels wearing sunglasses. Anyone from the life below can be a soldier. I imaginedcampaigns like Caesar’s, the sun going down in wooded country, encampments on hilltops, cool dawns. The army was that; it was like a beautifully dressed woman; I saw her smile at me and stood erect.
The army. They are playing the last songs at the hop, the sentimental favorites. I am dancing with a girl named Pat Potter, blonde and elegant, whom I somehow knew. There are moments when one is part of the real beauty, the pageant. They are playing “Army Blue,” the matrimonial and farewell song. A hundred, two hundred, couples are on the floor. The army. Familiar faces. This immense brotherhood in which they bend you slowly to their ways. This great family in which one is always advancing, even while asleep.
The stern commandments had become my commandments, the harder thing than triumph, in the poet’s words. Long afterwards, in Georgia, as a captain, I was getting off an airplane behind a lame man. We paused at the bottom of the steps. “Remember me?” he asked. It was then I saw who he was, the son of a friend of my father’s, whom I had recognized as an underclassman. “What happened to you?” I said. “You’re not still in the army?”
He’d been retired, he said, but it was strange, he often thought about me.
“What do you mean?”
I began to recall it as he told me. He had played football as a plebe although he was small. He was a quarterback. The following fall he had come to me for advice: Should he continue to try and make the team—there was only the slightest chance—or drop it and go out for manager? There was an assistant’s opening; he was from Atlanta, and the manager of “A” Squad was traditionally a Georgian. It was a wonderful spot and he would be in line to inherit it.
The manager was someone to be envied, I agreed, but not admired. Even if he was only a third-string quarterback, he would beon the team, and his moment might come in the twilight of some epic game. Unsoiled and slender, he might come off the bench to lead them to victory.
It sounded like advice of mine. He had taken it, and the week afterwards his leg was broken in practice, he said. He was in the hospital for more than a month and fell so far behind in his studies that he never caught up, graduating much farther down in his class than he would have, so though he had wanted the Engineers, he got the Infantry instead. In Korea he was hit by a mortar shell that shattered his legs and was given a medical discharge. His career had ended.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I told him.
“I owe it all to you,” he said.
——
The truest man I knew was dark, with skin almost sallow, a high forehead, and Asia-black hair, Kelton Farris—Nig, as they called him, or Bud. He was from a town called Conway, not far from Little Rock, and all plebes from Arkansas were expected to know an apocryphal speech made in the legislature when it had been proposed to change the name of the state, or at least its unique pronunciation. “Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Goddamnit,” it began—I forget its many outrages though I knew them then. “When I was a boy at the age of fourteen, I had a prick the size of a roasting ear and could piss halfway across the Ouachita River. ‘Out of order, out of order!’ You’re
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