We were pretty well practiced in burying our memories of the dead.
On my freshman hall there had been twenty-four boys. In September 1946, eight of us were back at school. Numbers don’t mean much, that’s always the trouble with body counts. The empathetic drive does not engage with a number. Stories are the antidote. Everyone must have his story told.
I wrote letters to my mother for an hour every morning. There was a little oak-paneled common room, and in the winter, the caretaker, an old man named Pharaoh, lit the fire at five, so I’d be in there in my robe and slippers at six, scribbling away in a mohair club chair at the hearth. Supposedly I’d muscled all my problems into a cage while I was locked up at Casa Del Rey. But those letters. Mother kept them. You can see them if you’d like. You’d have thought I was at sleepaway camp. I’d write things like, I didn’t go out Saturday night because there were reports that the James Gang was going to hold up the Dinky! Jokey foolishness. I told her I avoided public places because the Junior Birdmen had warned against enemy activity. I thought that if I pretended to be a child I could shield her from what I’d become. I was really only deceiving myself, of course, believing that there could be anything childlike left in me. A new letter every day. I was a murderer in a clown suit.
So she sent Ben to check up on me. Of course, who was checking on Ben? He was only a few months out of the Navy himself and had his own terrors to contend with. Those poor boys on their floating bull’s-eyes. At sea, everything signifies death—you’re surrounded by it, the gray, depthless water that’s ready to swallow you up, and the monotony is a form of death, too, weeks of routine as you steam across oceans, weeks of flat horizon, and then the enemy appears and it’s as though the fabric of the world is ripped open right before your eyes. It must be almost impossible to believe. You must think at first that the enemy is an apparition. And the battles, like two prizefighters squared off toe to toe and slugging away until one goes down in a cloud of blood. My god, the fires, all the munitions aboard erupting like volcanoes. I’ve heard stories, though never from Ben. Never one word. He was at Midway, so he saw plenty, but he never said a thing about it. My own sea travels, thank god, were considerably less dramatic. A week to Liverpool, a week back.
Never uttered a word about what he’d seen. Of course, neither did I. He’d wait all day for me to get out of class, and we’d go directly to a bar and drink ourselves blind, stagger back to the dorm, and in the morning I’d get up and go to class. I suppose he slept most of the day or wandered around campus. No idea what we talked about. The first round of Nuremberg verdicts had come down, and we must have talked about that, about those numbers, which no one had believed during the war, even though Rabbi Wise and the Jewish press had been putting them out since ’42 or ’43. We must have talked about that. But I can’t remember.
What I can remember is Ben’s face at nineteen or twenty, clear as day—an odd thing. Marvelous black hair that he swept back like a singer, and no matter who was talking, his eyebrow was always cocked. A skeptic from the day he was born. Do you remember him? You were so little when he died. But of course you’ve seen pictures. Women loved him. Even when we were kids it was obvious that girls wanted to be around him. Right from the beginning, he had a natural ease, something that drew people in. Just the opposite of me. I do remember his face so well. I was in a fog for years after I got back but his face was always clear. I never would have said it, but I loved him. We were thick as thieves but it never crossed our minds to say that we loved each other. You understand how it was? You loved your mother or your girl.
And then Ben went back home. I believe he worked at a warehouse until he started school himself. We wrote sporadically. Once we’d left home we never lived in the same city again, you know. We visited at first, but in retrospect it’s clear I made decisions that kept us apart. At the time—for decades, in fact—I blamed the demands of work and I blamed geography and I blamed timing. It’s rarely the case that anything stands between you and family but that you choose it. When I finally admitted this to myself, I could have made an effort, but even then I thought, The ruts in the road have frozen hard, there’s no changing now. God, the stories I told myself. The very mechanism which makes us unique as a species is the very thing that makes us impenetrable to ourselves. The ability to weave a story from only a few threads of detail, to make those connections, to invent actions that have not yet occurred—it can be a great hindrance to discovering truth, can’t it?
I could only imagine painful outcomes were I to broach the subject with Ben—his eyebrow cocked, mocking. So many times I imagined the futile arguments about my good intentions, his dismissive responses, my
