“What’s this guy’s name?” I said.
“I don’t see what difference that makes,” she said.
“I like to know who we’re talking about, that’s all,” I said.
“His name is Max Eckstein,” she said.
“He sounds like a Max Eckstein,” I said.
“The way I sounded like a Radcliffe girl, right?” she said.
“All right, go on, go on,” I said.
... his father had chosen to continue living in Germany, Dana told me, rather than emigrating to Israel or America because he felt that Hitler had almost succeeded in destroying the entire German Jewish community, and if there were to be any Jews at all in Germany, some survivors had to elect to stay and raise their families there. But whereas he had been slow to recognize what was happening in Germany in ’38 and ’39, he immediately realized in 1949 that the Communists were constructing in Berlin a state not too dissimilar from Hitler’s. He had packed up his wife Dora, his seven-year-old daughter Anna, and his five-year-old son Max, and together they had fled to America. Anna had since married a football player for...
“A what?” I said.
“A football player. For the New York Giants,” Dana said.
“How’d a German refugee get to meet a...?”
“She’s quite American,” Dana said. “She was only seven when she came here, you know.”
“Yes, and little Maxie was five.”
“Little Maxie is now twenty,” Dana said. “And not so little.”
Her relationship with Max, she went on to say, was amazingly close, considering the fact she’d known him such a short time, actually only a month and a half, she’d met him in the middle of October on a...
“Yes,” I said, “a rainy Saturday, I know.”
“He’s a very nice person. You’d like him.”
“I hate him,” I said.
“Why?”
“Just how close is this relationship?” I asked.
“Close,” Dana said.
“Are you engaged or something?”
“No, but...”
“Going steady?”
“Well, we don’t have that kind of an agreement. I mean, I can see anybody I want to, this isn’t the Middle Ages, you know. I just haven’t wanted to go out with anyone else.”
“Well, suppose I asked you out?” I said.
“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know what you have in mind.”
“You mean you want to know where I’d take you?”
“No, no. I mean the relationship between Max and me is very close, and I haven’t really any need for what you might have in mind, if it’s what you have in mind. That’s what I mean.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I mean Max and I are very, well, close,” she said, and shrugged. “Do you see?”
“No.”
“Well, I really don’t think I need to spell it out,” she said.
“Oh,” I said.
“So if you want to just go to a movie or something, or maybe take a walk if you’re in the city one weekend...”
“Gee, thanks a whole heap,” I said.
“Well, there’s no sense being dishonest.”
“You’re sure Maxie won’t disapprove? I certainly wouldn’t want to get him upset.”
“His name is Max, " Dana said.
“Say, maybe the three of us could go to a movie together,” I said. “You think Max might be able to come down one weekend?”
“He’s carrying a very heavy program,” Dana said.
“Then I guess we’ll just have to go alone,” I said. “How about Thursday?”
“Thursday’s Thanksgiving.”
“Friday then.”
“All right. So long as you understand.”
“I understand only one thing.”
“Which is what?”
“Which is that I’m going to marry you.”
December
My instructor at Gunter Field in Montgomery, Alabama, was a man named Ralph Di Angelo, who had been a civilian pilot before the war, and who — because of the extreme need for trained pilots — had been taken into the Army with a first lieutenant’s commission and immediately assigned to Gunter, where he taught what the Air Force called Basic Flying. Di Angelo was a Service Pilot, and because there was a tiny letter S on his wings, we all called them Shit Wings.
I had gone from Preflight School at Maxwell Field to Primary Flying School in Orangeburg, South Carolina, and from there had reported directly and without furlough to Gunter Field. There were six flying squadrons on the field, each with about a hundred cadets in them. I was in the 379th School Squadron, Class 44J, the 44 designating the year I was expected to be awarded my silver pilot’s wings, the J designating the month and date this event would take place, the first half of May, hopefully.
This was my third day at Gunter, and nobody including myself was feeling too terribly happy just then because we had not been given any leave after Primary and we’d already been told there’d be no Christmas furloughs, either. My father had made plans to come down to Montgomery to visit with me on Christmas Day, but Montgomery was a far cry from Chicago, and besides, I was getting very very tired. At Orangeburg, I had flown the PT-17, which was possibly the most rugged plane ever built, strong enough for aerobatics like snap rolls and Immelmanns, with a fixed-pitch prop and a 225-horsepower Lycoming engine, blue with yellow wings — my instructor called his plane “Yellowjacket,” the name stenciled onto the fuselage just back of the cowling, with a sting-tailed bee, blue with black stripes, yellow-winged like the plane itself, hovering over the black lettering.
I’d had a total of seventy hours in that plane, my instructor being a man who had once run a small airport in Iowa and who was now doing his bit for the Army by making life miserable for aviation cadets. His name was Captain Felix Burmann, and he was a son of a bitch down to his boots. It was rumored that the obstacle course at Maxwell Field (where he had also taught) was named “The Burma Road” in his honor, it being a tortuous winding exhausting piece of real estate that snaked its way around the officers’ golf course, and then down by the river as cadets jogged their little hearts out around it. Son of a bitch or no, he had taught me to fly, and I was feeling like a pretty hot pilot by the time I got to Gunter and was introduced to the biggest damn airplane I had ever seen up close in my life, the BT-13, which was fondly, ha, called the Vultee Vibrator, or so Lieutenant Di Angelo told us the first day we marched out behind him to the flight line.
The lieutenant was olive-complected, with curly black hair, dark brown eyes, and a black mustache. Short and somewhat chunky, he kept a dead cigar stub clamped between his teeth at all times, reminding me of Mr. Fornaseri who ran the candy store on Division and Dearborn back in Chicago and who would not be caught dead without his guinea stinker in his mouth. Mr. Fornaseri was from Palermo, and it was reasonable to believe that Lieutenant Di Angelo could have easily blended with the population there — though how he would have fared in Milan was another matter. He came, he told us, from Elmira, New York, and had quickly added, “Not the prison there,” a quip we were all too frightened to laugh at. He had then gone on to say that we five cadets would be taught personally by him during our stay at Gunter Field, and that we would be doing all our flying in the BT-13, “this airplane here, which is fondly called the Vultee Vibrator, as you will soon find out.”