With your hair cut just as short as mine
LENINE REPORTED ALIVE
AUDIENCE AT HIPPODROME TESTIMONIALS MOVED TO
CHEERS AND TEARS
several different stories have come to me well authenticated concerning the depth of Hindenburg’s brutality; the details are too horrible for print. They relate to outraged womanhood and girlhood, suicide and blood of the innocent that wet the feet of Hindenburg
WAR DECREASES MARRIAGES AND BIRTHS
Oh ashes to ashes
And dust to dust
If the shrapnel dont get you
Then the eightyeights must
The Camera Eye (29)
the raindrops fall one by one out of the horsechestnut tree over the arbor onto the table in the abandoned beergarden and the puddly gravel and my clipped skull where my fingers move gently forward and back over the fuzzy knobs and hollows
spring and we’ve just been swimming in the Marne way off somewhere beyond the fat clouds on the horizon they are hammering on a tin roof in the rain in the spring after a swim in the Marne with that hammering to the north pounding the thought of death into our ears
the winey thought of death stings in the spring blood that throbs in the sunburned neck up and down the belly under the tight belt hurries like cognac into the tips of my toes and the lobes of my ears and my fingers stroking the fuzzy closecropped skull
shyly tingling fingers feel out the limits of the hard immortal skull under the flesh a deathshead and skeleton sits wearing glasses in the arbor under the lucid occasional raindrops inside the new khaki uniform inside my twentyoneyearold body that’s been swimming in the Marne in red and whitestriped trunks in Chalons in the spring
Richard Ellsworth Savage
The years Dick was little he never heard anything about his Dad, but when he was doing his homework evenings up in his little room in the attic he’d start thinking about him sometimes; he’d throw himself on the bed and lie on his back trying to remember what he had been like and Oak Park and everything before Mother had been so unhappy and they had had to come east to live with Aunt Beatrice. There was the smell of bay rum and cigarsmoke and he was sitting on the back of an upholstered sofa beside a big man in a panama hat who shook the sofa when he laughed; he held on to Dad’s back and punched his arm and the muscle was hard like a chair or a table and when Dad laughed he could feel it rumble in his back, “Dicky, keep your dirty feet off my palm beach suit,” and he was on his hands and knees in the sunlight that poured through the lace curtains of the window trying to pick the big purple roses off the carpet; they were all standing in front of a red automobile and Dad’s face was red and he smelt of armpits and white steam was coming out around, and people were saying Safetyvalve. Downstairs Dad and Mummy were at dinner and there was company and wine and a new butler and it must be awful funny because they laughed so much and the knives and forks went click click all the time; Dad found him in his nightgown peeking through the portières and came out awful funny and excited smelling like wine and whaled him and mother came out and said, “Henry, don’t strike the child,” and they stood hissing at one another in low voices behind the portières on account of company and Mummy had picked Dick up and carried him upstairs crying in her evening dress all lacy and frizzly and with big puffy silk sleeves; touching silk put his teeth on edge, made him shudder all down his spine. He and Henry had had tan overcoats with pockets in them like grownup overcoats and tan caps and he’d lost the button off the top of his. Way back there it was sunny and windy; Dick got tired and sickyfeeling when he tried to remember back like that and it got him so he couldn’t keep his mind on tomorrow’s lessons and would pull out “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” that he had under the mattress because Mother took books away when they weren’t just about the lessons and would read just a little and then he’d forget everything reading and wouldn’t know his lessons the next day.
All the same he got along very well at school and the teachers liked him, particularly Miss Teazle, the English teacher, because he had nice manners and said little things that weren’t fresh but that made them laugh. Miss Teazle said he showed real feeling for English composition. One Christmas he sent her a little rhyme he made up about the Christ Child and the Three Kings and she declared he had a gift.
The better he liked it in school the worse it was at home. Aunt Beatrice was always nag nag nag from morning till night. As if he didn’t know that he and mother were eating her bread and sleeping under her roof; they paid board, didn’t they? even if they didn’t pay as much as Major and Mrs. Glen or Dr. Kern did, and they certainly did enough work to pay for their keep anyway. He’d heard Mrs. Glen saying when Dr. Atwood was calling and Aunt Beatrice was out of the room how it was a shame that poor Mrs. Savage, such a sweet woman, and a good churchwoman too, and the daughter of a general in the army, had to work her fingers to the bone for her sister who was only a fussy old maid and overcharged so, though of course she did keep a very charming house and set an excellent table, not like a boarding house at all, more like a lovely refined private home, such a relief to find in Trenton, that was such a commercial city so full of working people and foreigners; too bad that the daughters of General Ellsworth should be reduced to taking paying guests. Dick felt Mrs. Glen might have said something about his carrying out the ashes and shovelling snow and all that. Anyway he didn’t think a highschool student ought to have to take time from his studies to do the chores.
Dr. Atwood was the rector of the St. Gabriel’s Episcopal Church where Dick had to sing in the choir every Sunday at two services while mother and his brother Henry S., who was three years older than he was and worked in a drafting office in Philadelphia and only came home weekends, sat comfortably in a pew. Mother loved St. Gabriel’s because it was so highchurch and they had processions and even incense. Dick hated it on account of choirpractice and having to keep his surplice clean and because he never had any pocketmoney to shoot craps with behind the bench in the vestry and he was always the one who had to stand at the door and whisper, “Cheeze it,” if anybody was coming.
One Sunday, right after his thirteenth birthday, he’d walked home from church with his mother and Henry feeling hungry and wondering all the way if they were going to have fried chicken for dinner. They were all three stepping up onto the stoop, Mother leaning a little on Dick’s arm and the purple and green poppies on her wide hat jiggling in the October sunlight, when he saw Aunt Beatrice’s thin face looking worriedly out through the glass panel of the front door. “Leona,” she said in an excited reproachful voice, “he’s here.” “Who, Beatrice dear?” “You know well enough… I don’t know what to do… he says he wants to see you. I made him wait in the lower hall on account of… er… our friends.”
“Oh, God, Beatrice, haven’t I borne enough from that man?”
Mother let herself drop onto the bench under the stagshorn coatrack in the hall. Dick and Henry stared at the white faces of the two women. Aunt Beatrice pursed up her lips and said in a spiteful tone, “You boys had better go out and walk round the block. I can’t have two big hulks like you loafing round the house. You be back for Sunday dinner at one thirty sharp… run along now.”
“Why, what’s the matter with Aunt Beatrice?” asked Dick as they walked off down the street. “Got the pip I guess… she gives me a pain in the neck,” Henry said in a superior tone.