“She nearly killed herself that night,” I said.
He burst into tears again. “Oh,” he said. “She loves her kids. Leaving them alone don’t mean nothing. She loves them all. And she ain’t ever going to forgive herself, that’s what I’m afraid of. That woman is going to drink herself to death, she’s going down, man. I don’t know what to do for her.”
There was nothing I could say to this. In the back of my head I was thinking, a day’s work wasted, I’d never even get to go over my notes. But I offered him something to eat. He finished up his whiskey and rose to go. Again that look of shame and humiliation in his face as he thanked me and my wife once again for what we had done for his daughter. And then he left.
When Vallie came home with the kids that night, I told her what had happened, and she went into the bedroom and wept while I made supper for the kids. And I thought of how I had condemned the man before I ever met him or knew anything about him. How I had just put him in a slot whittled out by the books I had read, the drunks and dopers who had come to live in the project with us. I thought of him fleeing from his own people into another world not so poor and black, escaping the doomed circle he had been born in. And left his daughter to die by fire. He would never forgive himself, his judgment far harsher than that I in my ignorance had condemned him with.
– -
Then a week later a lovey-dovey couple across the mall got into a fight and he cut her throat. They were white. She had a lover on the side who refused to stay on the side. But it wasn’t fatal, and the errant wife looked dramatically romantic in her huge white neck bandages when she took her little kids to the school bus.
I knew we were getting out at the right time.
Chapter 16
At the Army Reserve office in the armory the bribe business was booming. And for the first time in my Civil Service career I received an “Excellent” rating. Because of my bribe rackets, I had studied all the complicated new regulations, and was finally an efficient clerk, the top expert in the field.
Because of this special knowledge, I had devised a shuttle system for my clients. When they finished their six months’ active duty and came back to my Reserve unit for meetings and two weeks summer camp, I vanished them. I devised a perfectly legal system for them to beat it. In effect I could offer them a deal where after they did their six months’ active duty, they became names on the Army Reserve inactive rosters to be called up only in case of war. No more weekly meetings, no more yearly summer camps. My price went up. Another plus: When I got rid of them, it opened up a valuable slot.
One morning I opened the Daily News, and there on the front page was a big photograph of three young men. Two of them were guys I had just enlisted the day before. Two hundred bucks each. My heart gave a big jump and I felt a little sick. What could it be but an expose of the whole racket? The caper had blown up. I made myself read the caption. The guy in the middle was the son of the biggest politician in the state of New York. And the caption applauded the patriotic enlistment of the politician’s son in the Army Reserve. That was all.
Still, that newspaper photo frightened me. I had visions of going to jail and Vallie and the kids being left alone. Of course, I knew her father and mother would take care of them, but I wouldn’t be there. I’d lose my family. But then, when I got to the office and told Frank, he laughed and thought it was great. Two of my paying customers on page one of the Daily News. Just great. He cut out the photograph and put it on the bulletin board of his Army Reserve unit. It was a great inside joke for us. The major thought it was up on the board to boost unit morale.
That phony scare threw me off guard in a way. Like Frank, I started to believe that the racket could go on forever. And it might have, except for the Berlin crisis, which made President Kennedy decide to call up hundreds of thousands of Reserve troops. Which proved to be very unlucky.
The armory became a madhouse when the news came out that our Reserve units were being called into the Army for a year’s active duty. The draft dodgers who had connived and paid to get into the six months’ program went crazy. They were enraged. What hurt the worst was that here they were, the shrewdest young men in the country, budding lawyers, successful Wall Street operators, advertising geniuses, and they had been outwitted by that dumbest of all creatures, the United States Army. They had been bamboozled with the six months’ program, tricked, conned, sold, never paying attention to the one little catch. That they could be called up to active duty and be back in the Army again. City slickers being taken by the hicks. I wasn’t too pleased by it either, though I congratulated myself for never having become a member of the Reserves for the easy money. Still, my racket was shot to hell. No more tax-free income of a thousand dollars a month. And I was to move into my new house on Long Island very soon. But still, I never realized that this would bring on the catastrophe I had long foreseen. I was too busy processing the enormous paperwork involved to get my units officially on active duty.
There were supplies and uniforms to be requisitioned, all kinds of training orders to be issued. And then there was the wild stampede to get out of the one-year recall. Everybody knew the Army had regulations for hardship cases. Those that had been in the Reserve program for the last three or four years and had nearly finished their enlistment were especially stunned. During those years their careers had prospered, they had gotten married, they made kids. They had the military lords of America beat. And then it all became an illusion.
But remember, these were the sharpest kids in America, the future business giants, judges, show business whizbangs. They didn’t take it lying down. One young guy, a partner in his father’s seat on the Wall Street Exchange, had his wife committed to a psychiatric clinic, then put in papers for a hardship discharge on the grounds that his wife had had a nervous breakdown. I forwarded the documents complete with official letters from doctors and the hospital. It didn’t work. Washington had received thousands of cases and taken a stand that nobody would get out on hardship. A letter came back saying the poor husband would be recalled to active duty and then the Red Cross would investigate his hardship claim. The Red Cross must have done a good job because a month afterward, when the guy’s unit was shipped to Fort Lee, Virginia, the wife with the nervous breakdown came into my office to apply for necessary papers to join him down at camp. She was cheerful and obviously in good health. In such good health that she hadn’t been able to go along with the charade and stay in the hospital. Or maybe the doctors wouldn’t go that far out on a limb to keep the deception going.
Mr. Hiller called me up about his son, Jeremy. I told him there was nothing I could do. He pressed me and pressed me, and I said jokingly that if his son was a homosexual, he might be discharged from the Army Reserve and not called to active duty. There was a long pause at the other end of the phone, and then he thanked me and hung up. Sure enough, two days later Jeremy Hiller came and filed the necessary papers to get out of the Army on grounds he was a homosexual. I told him that it would always be on his record. That sometime later in life he might regret having such an official record. I could see that he was reluctant, and then he finally said, “My father says it’s better than being killed in a war.”
I sent the papers through. They were returned from Governors Island, First Army HQ. After Pfc. Hiller was recalled, his case would be evaluated by a Regular Army board. Another strikeout.
I was surprised that Eli Hemsi had not given me a call. The clothing manufacturer’s son, Paul, had not even shown his face at the armory since the recall to active duty notices had been sent out. But that mystery was solved when I received papers through the mail from a doctor famous for his book publications on psychiatry. These documents certified that Paul Hemsi had received electric shock treatments for a nervous condition over the past three months and could not be recalled to active duty, it would be disastrous to his health. I looked up the pertinent Army regulation. Sure enough, Mr. Hemsi had found a way out of the Army. He must have been getting advice from people higher up than me. I forwarded the papers on to Governors Island. Sure enough, they finally came back. And with them special orders discharging Paul Hemsi from the United States Army Reserve. I wondered what that deal had cost Mr. Hemsi.