Troops of the Third Army were thirteen miles from the Czech border on the north and on the west, the Seventh Army pushed to within fifteen miles of Nuremburg, the Canadians advanced toward the Zuider Zee, the United States First swept northward through the Ruhr pocket and engaged in bloody street-to-street combat in Halle, the French took Kenl on the Rhine, and in a hamburger joint on Sixth Avenue, when I asked Dolores if she minded my eating onions, she answered, “Yes, I mind terribly,” and suddenly kissed me for the first time. The French marched to within ten miles of the Swiss border, the United States Seventh crossed the Fils River and took Weilhelm, we were ten miles from Bremen, we had occupied Bologna after a nineteen-month campaign, the Soviet High Command announced that Russian troops “had marched a thousand miles from the gates of Moscow” to capture Erkner at the eastern limits of Berlin, and in a taxicab heading for Sutton Place, I put my hand under Dolores Prine’s skirt, and she tightened her thighs on it at first, catching it and stopping my advance, and then opened slowly to my pressure, my fingers touching the mound bulging crisply beneath her cotton panties, “Will,” she said, “please,” but I did not remove my hand, the American armies were standing on the banks of the Mulde River, and the Russians were only forty-eight miles away.
Who was this girl?
I hardly knew.
Beautiful, yes, I thought she was perhaps the most beautiful girl I’d ever met, but I had thought that from the very start, when she’d walked into the apartment on the arm of her Lebanese rug salesman, and that had never changed. There was too, I suppose, the promise of passion in her hazel eyes, daring me, mocking me, a passion only partially unleashed — her twistings beneath me on the grass in Central Park, dusk falling, “We’ll get mugged if we don’t watch out, Will,” and a schoolgirl giggle — it was only a matter of time, she knew it, I knew it, and I dreamt each night at Mitchel Field of entering her and hearing her shriek aloud in ecstasy. That was there, then, the promised passion of Dolores my flamenco dancer, that and a suspected capacity for pain, too, which seemed equally Spanish in origin, though her father was Irish (“With a fifth of scotch thrown in,” he told me) and her mother was Dutch. But beyond the wild expectation of taking her to bed — she seemed to me the materialization of every pin-up picture I had hung on barracks walls from Mississippi to Italy and back again — was there really a beginning here, a gentle flute song floating on the wind of a dying April, was there really anything to love about this lovely girl? (She was, it occurred to me once, when I was feeling unusually Freudian, the total opposite of Francesca, the beauty of Foggia, and perhaps to me the symbol of everything clean, innocent, and alive, as opposed to everything soiled, corrupt, and dead — well, not the total opposite, I suppose, since the old man Gino had a cataracted eye and Dolores’ brother wore a patch over an empty socket. I didn’t too often think psychoanalytically, however, and I was probably dead wrong.)
She wrote poetry. She showed me one of her efforts several days before I finally took her naked on her quilted bed in the back bedroom of the Sutton Place apartment while her one-eyed brother was out dancing and her parents were visiting friends in Connecticut for the weekend and two Russian armies were pushing the Germans further back into Berlin. The poetry was terrible.
I told her what I thought of it — we were in a Chinese restaurant on the fringes of Harlem, she did know the city well, I had to give her that. She looked at me solemnly for a moment, and then asked, “What do you know about poetry?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Then how do you know it’s terrible?”
“It doesn’t move me.”
“It moves me,” she said.
“You wrote it,” I said. “Listen, you asked for my opinion, and I gave it to you.”
“I asked for your praise,” she said.
“I thought you wanted my opinion.”
“I don’t need opinions,” she said. “Every cheap critic in the world has an opinion, but only poets have ideas.”
“Excuse me, I didn’t know you were a poet,” I said.
“I’m not "
“Then what are we arguing about?”
“If you love someone, you’re supposed to say her poem is good.”
“Your poem is terrible.”
“Then you don’t love me.”
“Did I say that?”
“Do you love me?” she asked.
The first real contact was made on April 25, when a four-man patrol of the United States 273rd Regiment came upon a Russian outpost at Torgen on the Elbe, two miles west of the advancing American forces.
The bedspread had been quilted by Dolores’ mother. “We shouldn’t be here alone,” she told me, “maybe we’d better go out to a movie or something.”
“We’ve seen everything around,” I said. “We’ve been to twelve movies in the past week, if I never see another movie as long as I live...”
“Then let’s go for a walk.”
“It’s raining,” I said.
“Will...”
“Yes?”
“Don’t do this to me. Please.”
“Do what?” I said.
“If you don’t love me, then please don’t.”
“I never said I didn’t love you.”
“You never said you did, either.”
“Come here.”
“No. Please.”
“Come here, Dolores.”
“Don’t call me that. Please.”
“Lolly? Dec?”
“Please she said. “Please.”
“Come here, Dolores. I won’t touch you. I promise.”
“You will,” she said, and came to the bed.
On April 28, Benito Mussolini was shot to death by partisans in the village of Dongo on Lake Como, together with his mistress Clara Petacci and sixteen Fascist leaders. On the last day of April’s dyings, large and small, Il Duce’s body and that of Signorina Petacci were hung upside down from a steel girder in what had once been a gasoline station. Signs were placed above their bound feet, black-lettered onto white, proclaiming their names to the assembled populace. They were cut down later and taken to the morgue, but only after Mussolini’s head had been kicked to a bloody pulp by a crowd that once had cheered him in life. On that same day, in a bunker below the Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun committed suicide. The announcement from Berlin read, “At the head of the brave defenders of the Reich capital, the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, has fallen. Inspired by a determination to save his people and Europe from destruction by Bolshevism, he has sacrificed his life.”
By that time, I was humping Dolores Prine day and night.
May
It was shortly after the end of my lunch hour at the mill when a runny-nosed kid came over from Building 17 to tell me that Mr. Moreland in Personnel would like to see me at two o’clock. I told him I’d be there, and then asked if he knew what it was about, but he just shrugged his shoulders and wandered off across the yard with his hands in his pockets. Since it was then a quarter of two, and since the walk to 17 could conceivably take fifteen minutes (if a person had a cork leg) I advised Allen Garrett that I was going up to the executive building, and then put down my picaroon and left the conveyer belt.