Now, sitting beside me in the darkness, he understood my gloom, and reached into the pocket of his tunic for a folded sheet of paper which he handed to me. Shielding a flashlight with his cupped palm, he threw a beam of light onto the paper and said, “Have you seen this yet, Bert? A clerk from B Company ran some off on the ship’s mimeo. It’s from the Dodger.”
“The what?” I said.
“You know, the Camp Dodge newspaper.”
In the light of Timothy’s shielded flash, I unfolded and read the mimeographed sheet:
If the war doesn’t end next month, of two things one is certain: Either you’ll he sent across the great pond or you’ll stay on this side. If you slay home, there’s no need to worry. If you go across, of two things one is certain: Either you’ll he put on the firing line or kept behind the lines.
If you’re behind the lines, there’s no need to worry. If you’re at the front, of two things one is certain: Either you’re resting in a safe place or you’re exposed to danger.
If you’re resting in a safe place, there’s no need to worry. If you’re exposed to danger, of two things one is certain: Either you’re wounded or you’re not wounded.
If you’re not wounded, there’s no need to worry. If you are wounded, of two things one is certain: Either you’re wounded seriously or you’re wounded slightly.
If you’re wounded slightly, there’s no need to worry. If you’re wounded seriously, of two things one is certain: Either you recover or you don’t.
If you recover, there’s no need to worry.
If you don’t recover, you can’t worry.
When I readied the bottom of the page, Timothy, who had been reading silently over my shoulder, began chuckling. I laughed with him. In the hold of a foreign ship waiting to sail across thousands of miles of ocean to a foreign battlefront, we laughed softly in the darkness, and I wondered if we’d ever in our lives see New York City again.
May
I loved that city.
It took an hour and a half to get there from Talmadge, but ever since we’d organized Dawn Patrol, one or another of us guys would go in almost every Saturday to shop Forty-eighth Street or to catch whichever of the groups were downtown in the Village. My mother said I was a native New Yorker, which wasn’t quite true in spite of the fact that I was horn in New York; at Lenox Hill Hospital, in fact, on Seventy-seventh and Park. At the time, my father was attending NYU on the GI Bill of Rights, and living with my mother in a run-down apartment in what was then considered a terrible slum but was now euphemistically called the East Village. With a little help from my grandfather (or perhaps from both my grandfathers, since Grandpa Prine was still alive at the time) my father started his own business in November 1946, at first publishing stuff like street maps and industrial pamphlets, and then bringing out a series of one-shot, newsstand exploitation magazines, and then finally moving into hardbound books. We moved to Talmadge just before Christmas that year, two months after I was born, to the same house we still lived in on Ritter Avenue. So I hardly felt honest calling myself a native New Yorker, although it was technically true. Nonetheless, whenever I went into that city, I felt as if I were going home.
I didn’t feel quite that way today.
I had come in to see my father because there was something important I wanted to discuss, and I had learned over the years that the best place to talk business with him was in his place of business. This was Wednesday, and Talmadge High was having teachers’ conferences, so I’d caught the 9: 34 out of Stamford, and was in the city by 10:19. I’d spent a half-hour in Manny’s on Forty-eighth, looking over some of the new Japanese amplifiers, and then I’d called my father to ask him if I could come up. He sounded surprised but pleased, which was at least one point for our side. Still, I was scared.
I walked over to Forty-second and spent an hour or so in Bryant Park, where a fag tried to pick me up. I never knew what to say when a fag approached me. This one looked especially sad and uncertain, as if it were the first time he’d ever done anything like this, though that was probably his style. Anyway, I just said “Sorry,” and got off the bench and walked away. I was unhappy about leaving the park because it had been a good place to think; I still hadn’t come up with an approach to my father. I stopped for a hot dog and a Coke in a place on Forty-fourth and Sixth, and then ambled down to Fifth Avenue as if I didn’t have a care in the world. It was a great day for walking.
We’d once had a man from California visiting us, a publisher my father was anxious to do business with, and he’d said the only time he really enjoyed New York City was “when they started taking their coats off.” This was that kind of a day, with a blue sky stretched tight between the buildings, and bright sunshine spanking the sidewalks, and people walking along with their coats off, grinning. By the time I reached the Doubleday’s on Fifty-seventh, I’d worked out a plan, so I immediately headed back for my father’s office on Forty-eighth and Madison.
All the way up in the elevator, I rehearsed my scheme.
He’s too smart to con, I told myself, though why I should even have to think of conning him is certainly a matter for speculation, considering the fact that I’ll be eighteen in October — well, suppose he says no? Well, he can’t say no if I get him to agree with me in principle first. Because if he concedes in principle, he can’t refuse permission on any valid moral ground, that’d be hypocritical, he certainly isn’t a hypocrite, whatever else he is. Anyway, I’ve never won a frontal assault against him in my life, why try now? Logic, that’s the thing. Get him to yield intellectually, and then zing in the fast ball. It should work.
I hope.
The elevator doors opened. I took a deep breath.
Tyler Press occupied the entire sixth floor of the building, and so the company colophon and the company receptionist were the first things anyone saw when stepping out of the elevator. Of the two, I infinitely preferred the colophon, my father’s taste in receptionists running rather toward the motherly type. This particular mother, one of a long line who had sat behind this selfsame desk since the company’s formation in 1946, was in her fifties, a gray-haired dignified lady with pleasant blue eyes and a warm, helpful smile, ample mother breasts in a white blouse, gold chain hanging, semiprecious purple stone cradled, “Hello, Wat,” she said, “how nice!”
“Hello, Mrs. Green,” I answered. “Is my father in?”
“Let me check,” she said, and smiled again, and lifted the telephone.
The company colophon was on the wall behind Mrs. Green’s desk, a circular blue disc upon which were three spruce trees of varying heights, their towering tops protruding from the upper rim of the circle. There was a strong sense of growth and tradition inherent in the colophon, and I felt oddly moved each time I looked at it. Whatever the Tylers were, we had all most certainly descended from my grandfather Bertram Tyler, the lumberjack, and this heritage was clearly the intent of the colophon. Studying it now, though, I wondered for the first time which of those three spruces represented me — the shortest one in the foreground, or the tallest one reaching for the sky.