Wat darling, let me go pack the rest of my junk or we’ll never get out of here. I’m so afraid the new apartment will vanish into thin air before we move into it. I love you, love you, love you. Write soon.
P. S. Something just occurred to me. I mean, it really occurred to me when I made my silly joke about people getting intimate with a handshake, or whatever it was I said. You’ve never asked, Wat, and I never thought it necessary to say so. But I think you should know that I stopped taking the pill the day you left for the Army. I love you. Be careful or I’ll die.
July
I suppose I felt that Dolores should have had at least some sort of patriotic understanding for the sacrifices made and still to be made, considering the fact that her brother had lost his eye flying a low-level bombing mission over Ploesti. But she surprised me by saying it would certainly be worth a few thousand dollars to get myself out of the Army, and if I knew how to arrange it, I should make the proper inquiries at once.
I knew how to arrange it and also where to arrange it. The word had been passing around Mitchel Field for months now, the hangar talk being that you could get a medical discharge, a safe assignment, a furlough extension, or a transfer merely by contacting the right people and crossing their palms with silver. I knew the talk was true, and I personally resented its authenticity. Mind you, I held no brief with the Army’s recently disclosed points system for discharge. It seemed to me that the scheme was heavily weighted in favor of two types of soldiers, those who were married and had children, and/or those who had received certain combat awards or decorations. Someone like myself, who had flown fifty combat missions over enemy territory with his hands and feet freezing and his head pounding, could muster only thirty-six points against the eighty-five required for discharge — a point for each month I’d been in the service, and another for each month I’d served overseas. The system was unfair, and it placed me in imminent danger besides of being reassigned to the Pacific to fight against the Japanese while some Army instructor stationed in Iowa got his discharge because he’d happened to sire three kids. But that didn’t mean I was ready to buy myself out of the Air Force.
My father had written in his most recent letter to me that the United States Government might be a little slow in redressing grievances, but that it always made good sooner or later, as witness the bill President Truman had just signed, whereby we would pay the Sioux Indians for ponies the Army had taken from them after the massacre at Little Big Horn in 1876. With a stroke of not unexpected sarcasm, my father had written, “I’m sure your Uncle Oscar, though he is but a mere Apache, will be terribly pleased.” Well, it was easy to become cynical about anything that had to do with the Army, but I sure as hell hoped it wouldn’t take them another seventy years to revise the points system. Anyway, the day after I received my father’s letter, I was glad I hadn’t been lured into buying a fake discharge. The way the Army had finally caught up with its pony thieves, the Air Force finally caught up with the two commissioned officers and six enlisted men who were involved in what was described as a “nefarious and scandalous racket.” The ring was arrested on July 6 at Mitchel Field; when I told Dolores that night about the furor on the base, she only shrugged and said, “You waited too long, love.”
The “love” was an affectation acquired from her brother, who had of course been stationed with the Eighth Air Force in England. The cynicism was her own, somewhat unsettling to discover in a girl who would not be eighteen until next month, especially when her opening line had been “Hay is for horses.” I suspected, though, that I was leaning a bit too heavily on that first impression, trying to create for myself the image of a beautiful dope. Because aside from humping her, which was delicious, I wanted no real involvement with Dolores Prine, and the easiest way to avoid any meaningful relationship was to convince myself she was incapable of tying her own shoelaces, which simply was not true.
Her older brother, Douglas, had graduated from Science (which Dolores assured me was the best high school in New York City) at the age of sixteen, and was in his second scholarship year at Columbia when the Army drafted him. Wearing his black patch with all the flair of a latter-day pirate, curly hair darker than his sister’s tumbling onto his forehead, he would fix me with his one good piercing eye blazing out of his head like fire from The Green Lantern’s ring, and engage me in polemic — political, religious, financial, artistic, it didn’t matter. He loved to argue, and more often than not he would draw Dolores into our heated debates as well, and together sometimes they would strike sparks long into the night while I secretly yearned to touch her, and she knew I did, and glanced shyly at me, slyly, as if to say, But you see, love, I can think as well. The arrest of the Mitchel Field ring sent Douglas off into a lecture on the moral dissolution of America, his thesis gaining vigor the following day when it was revealed in Chicago that the use of counterfeit red ration coupons had reached a new high, some 8,000,000 points having passed over the nation’s meat counters in June alone. Two days later, when federal agents in New York arrested twenty-four people on charges of selling or possessing narcotics, Douglas showed me the Daily News headline like a poker player exposing a royal flush, shouting at me as though I represented the system — “This is what I lost my eye for!” he screamed, and his mother came in from the kitchen and advised him please to calm down as his father was still asleep.
Mrs. Prine seemed more concerned with her son’s infrequent outbursts than with her daughter’s daily wanderings. School for Dolores had ended on June 15, but before then I had made arrangements with a corporal out at Mitchel to use his parents’ apartment on West End Avenue as soon as they left for Nantucket on the Fourth of July. I had been promoted to first lieutenant after the Fiume raid, which meant that I was now earning about two hundred dollars a month, when I added in my longevity pay and my subsistence allowance. I couldn’t very well pay the corporal an exorbitant amount for the use of the apartment, but he was willing to settle for ten dollars a week, plus whatever small favors I could extra-legally confer as an officer — passes, use of Army vehicles off the base, bar duty at the Club, where he hoped to meet higher-type broads. (This was all before the scandal broke; afterward, I was pretty damn careful about anything I signed for him.) In any event, Dolores and I spent a lot of time at the apartment, and her mother’s indifference to her whereabouts puzzled me. I asked Michael what he thought about it one day — this was before the Air Force transferred him out to Luke Field, where he was to begin training fledgling pilots — and he told me with a great deal of scholarly nodding of head and adjustment of imaginary spectacles that sexual mores were changing in America, harrumph, but that parents were still unable to visualize their children in situations any more compromising than those they themselves had experienced at the same age. Add to this the fact that Mrs. Prine was a phenomenally ugly woman who had probably never had a pass made at her in her life, and you could understand why she could not for a moment imagine, harrrrumph, what her nubile daughter was doing every day of the week, harrrrumph. I thanked Michael for his shrewd observation.