It had been more than five years since I had been, except for brief visits, home, to Manhattan, and now, brazen and overdrawn, it was before me again, the skyline not of the city of my boyhood but of one that might be. I did not feel the urge to return to it but rather recognized that it was authentic, that having been a boy there was an advantage, one that I might even make use of. Wolfe wrote with the envy and excitement of an outsider. I was, though exiled, a native.
—
Now it is snowing, one of the terrific storms that first mute and then obliterate the sky. The snow sweeps down, making the buildings seem like liners at sea, muffling everything with silence. The streets become white, all the ledges and trees, the sleeves of overcoats, the marquees. Soon snow has blanketed the earth and hour after hour still down it comes. The cars with their headlights are drifting through the whiteness, the buses and bundled figures struggling home. All night it snows. The city has never been more intimate, more prodigious.
In the morning the snow goes on. The avenues have disappeared, the traffic lights on long unblocked vistas shift without meaning from red to green and back again. There is a sole, breathtaking architecture: white lines.
This is essentially the city, less certain towers, my father and grandfather knew. I know many things about my father’s life — not the house he lived in as a boy or the school he went to — but almost nothing of my grandfather’s. He had a sister who had married well, and he was part owner of a hotel near Saratoga, my mother says, a wooden hotel in the Greek Revival style — it being her father-in-law’s, she is vague concerning the details. I spent the summer there as a child. I can dimly see the broad veranda — perhaps the memories are not genuine — wicker chairs, the glass in the doors, brass spittoons, and stuffy, unwholesome smell.
It was the summer of 1928. In the distance, though no one heard, was the faint sound of a great watershed, the mist rising from it. Events — the Crash — seem to have wrenched the hotel from my grandfather’s hands. Why hadn’t he sat me down, even at five or six, and, re-creating the place with his hands, told the epic story? I don’t know. In truth I don’t remember the hotel, I barely remember the grandfather. Whatever he knew, whatever any of them knew, is lost. A few shreds of what their lives meant may have come down to me but the real things, spirit and character, ambitions, marital relations, difficulties, the fate of friends — of all that I have nothing.
We know at first hand, as witnesses, perhaps five generations, most brilliantly of course our own; in one direction those of our parents and grandparents, in the other, children and grandchildren. In my own case much was lopped off. The past is haphazard. I think of the remark of the English cabinet member who was retiring to the seventeenth-century Cornwall farmhouse that had always been in his family. It is the men without roots, he said, who are the real poor of this century.
At the same time there is the exultation of knowing that history begins with one’s childhood, that everything around you, the buildings, park, mansions, museums, are all a kind of decor, the background for something far more important: one’s own existence. This existence, this starring role, is what the city in fact is made of — it is the true city, the city of memory and triumph, enduring, indifferent to tears. The derelict hotel on the hillside, abandoned long ago or torn down, the weedy tennis courts, the fallen fences, all this has no significance. It foretold nothing and bent not a single strand of one’s fate.
YOU MUST
MY FATHER, hair parted in the middle, confident and proud, had been first in his class. A brilliant unknown with a talent for mathematics and a prodigious memory, he graduated just ahead of a rival whose own father had been first in 1886.
The school was West Point, and he had also been first captain, though that was harder for me to imagine. In any case, the glory had slipped away by the time I was a boy. He had resigned his commission after a few years and not much evidence had remained. There was a pair of riding boots, some yearbooks, and in a scabbard in the closet an officer’s saber with his name and rank engraved on the blade.
Once a year on the dresser in the morning there was a beautiful medal on a ribbon of black, gray, and gold. It was a name tag from the alumni dinner at the Waldorf the night before. He liked going to them; they were held towards the end of the winter and he was a persona there, more or less admired. George Horowitz, ’19, the white card encased at the top of the ribbon read. His first name, Louis, he disliked.
When I was older he took me to football games, which we left during the fourth quarter. Army was a weak but gritty team that came to Yankee Stadium to play Notre Dame. Behind us, the stands were a mass of gray, hoarse from cheering, and a roar went up as a third-string halfback, thin-legged and quick, somehow got through the line and ran an incredible slanting eighty yards or so until he was at last pulled down. If he had scored, Army would have won.
In the end I went to the same school my father did. I had never intended to. He had arranged a second alternate’s appointment and asked me as a favor to study for the entrance exam — it was the spring of 1942. I had been accepted at Stanford and was working for the summer on a farm in Connecticut, sleeping on a bare mattress in the stifling attic, dreaming of life on the Coast, when suddenly a telegram came. Improbably, both the principal and first alternate had failed, one the physical and the other the written, and I was notified that I had been admitted. I knew what my father, more than anything else, wanted me to do. Seventeen, vain, and spoiled by poems, I prepared to enter a remote West Point. I would succeed there, it was hoped, as he had.
—
In mid-July up the steep road from the station we walked as a group. I knew no one. Like the others I carried a small suitcase in which would be put the clothes I would not see again for years. We passed large, silent buildings and crossed a road beneath some trees. A few minutes later, having signed a consent paper, we stood in the hall in a harried line trying to memorize a sentence to be used in reporting to the cadet first sergeant. It had to be spoken loudly and exactly. Failure meant going out and getting back in line to do it again. There was constant shouting and beyond the door of the barracks an ominous noise, alive, that flared when the door was opened like the roar of a furnace. It was the din of the Area, upperclassmen, some bellowing, some whispering, some hissing like snakes. They were giving the same commands over and over as they stalked the nervous ranks that stood stiffly at attention, still in civilian clothes, already forbidden to look anywhere but straight ahead. The air was rabid. The heat poured down.
I had come to a place like Joyce’s Clongowes Wood College, which had caused such a long shiver of fear to flow over him. There were the same dark entrances, the Gothic façades, the rounded bastion corners with crenellated tops, the prisonlike windows. In front was a great expanse which was the parade ground, the Plain.
It was the hard school, the forge. To enter you passed, that first day, into an inferno. Demands, many of them incomprehensible, rained down. Always at rigid attention, hair freshly cropped, chin withdrawn and trembling, barked at by unseen voices, we stood or ran like insects from one place to another, two or three times to the Cadet Store, returning with piles of clothing and equipment. Some had the courage to quit immediately, others slowly failed. Someone’s roommate, on the third trip to the store, hadn’t come back but had simply gone on and out the gate a mile away. That afternoon we were formed up in new uniforms and marched to Trophy Point to be sworn in.