Mrs. Prine, now that I thought of it, was a singularly unattractive woman. Small-bosomed, narrow-hipped, near-sighted but too vain to wear eyeglasses, she squinted and flapped around the big Sutton Place apartment dictating letters to a temporary secretary who came in once a week, directing club activities and charities, arranging balls and parties, scattering papers like fallen leaves behind her, and constantly glancing back over her shoulder as though expecting something she had overlooked to grab her by the nape of the neck. It was reasonable to believe that the farthest thing from her mind was her daughter’s sexual initiation, and I was grateful for her indifference, but at the same time felt oddly guilty each time she squinted her greetings to me at the front door.
On his days off, Mr. Prine followed his wife around the apartment like the executive offices on a battleship, wiping a white gloved hand into the angled joining of bulkhead and deck, fluttering helplessly in her boiling wake, bald pate glistening, eyebrows raised in anticipation of the calamities she constantly predicted. Douglas towered over his father by a full foot and a half, and it was somewhat comical to see Mr. Prine coming sleepy-eyed out of the bedroom at two in the morning to ask his huge, one-eyed son, calmly and patiently, to please lower his voice. Mr. Prine was chief counsel for a firm that manufactured ladies’ girdles, corsets, and the like (“He’s very big in ladies’ underwear,” Dolores said to me one day in our West End Avenue bed, and then wiggled her eyebrows as I burst out laughing at the old old gag), and he was constantly being sent to negotiate contracts in Minnesota or Maine, coming home a week or ten days later to hear his wife forecasting some new impending disaster. He was invariably too busy to concern himself with what was happening to either of his children, a failing that pounded itself home with frightening suddenness at the end of the month, when the vague calamity his wife had been expecting descended with fury upon his household.
I should have suspected that something was wrong with Douglas from the start, but I assumed only that he was too bright for me, that he was aware of meanings too subtle for me to grasp. He had purchased a wire recorder shortly after his discharge, and was now engaged in filling spool after spool with recorded notes for a documentary radio program he hoped to submit one day to the major networks. Whenever I went to see Dolores, I would find her brother closeted in his room, surrounded by open newspapers and magazines, the radio blaring the news as he selected and snipped the articles or items he needed for his project. There was no mistaking the seriousness with which he approached his task, nor his conviction that he was embarked on something that would prove enormously valuable to the world in its post-war reconstruction. Sometimes, as he played back his assorted gleanings, his voice took on the mannered cadences of a Walter Winchell or a Gabriel Heatter, but he always seemed to realize when he was hamming it up, and excused himself by saying he had not yet overcome the theatrical lure of the microphone. For the most part, he read his items into the machine in his normal speaking voice, dispassionately, and I was honestly impressed by the logical order in which he had arranged his news fragments, and forced to respect the purposeful clarity of even those parts of his indictment with which I disagreed. An indictment it was, no question about that. Only occasionally did he veer from his thesis, as though he had absent-mindedly strolled off a path that wound through a formal garden to find himself entangled in a patch of weeds. But he always found his way back again, always managed to extricate himself, the flat recorded voice returning to recite the facts he was laboriously compiling.
That was in the very beginning.
He became convinced early in June that the Japanese would never surrender and that he would be called back into the service to do more bombing. He did not know how they expected him to look through a bomb sight again, he had only one eye, didn’t they realize that? Were they now redrafting blind men and cripples to light their war? The Japanese would never surrender, despite the pounding we were daily administering in the Pacific, and even if they did surrender, it was all for nothing.
“Look at this,” he would say, “look at this world we’re attempting to save, what’s the point?” He would pick up a clipping from his desk then and begin reading it in the portentous voice of a March of Time announcer, “July 8, 1945 — an American guard at the POW camp in Salina, Utah, today machine-gunned the tents of sleeping German prisoners, killing eight and wounding twenty, how are we any better than they? Look at this one, July 13, 1945” (the March of Time voice again) “the House Un-American Activities Committee today assigned an agent to investigate Representative Rankin’s claim that Hollywood is the greatest hotbed of subversive activities in the United States, and that big names are involved in one of the most dangerous plots ever instigated for the overthrow of this government. It’s the goddamn Palmer Raids all over again, have you ever heard of A. Mitchell Palmer?” (What newspaper is that from? I asked.) “Look at this stuff, Will, this is all fact, look at it. July 14, 1945 — Genera! Eisenhower announced today in Frankfort-on-the-Main that United States troops may now converse on streets and in public places with adult Germans, do you get the significance of that, Will? They were only allowed to talk to kids before this, but Eisenhower says the new move is a result of rapid progress in de-Nazification. I say if we’re talking to the Germans today, we’ll be sleeping with them tomorrow, the same way you’re sleeping with my sister. Oh, don’t look so surprised, I’m not blind, I’ve still got one good eye, buddy. Anyway, who cares? What you’re doing is only an infinitesimal part of the whole molecular structure.”
In bed one afternoon toward the end of July, Dolores said, “Now there’re these two buttons, okay? And if you push the one on the right a hundred million Chinese peasants will die immediately. You can save them all, though, by pushing the one on the left, but then I’ll die. Have you got it?”
“I’ve got it,” I said.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Which one would you push?”
“This one,” I said, and gently touched the nipple on her right breast.
Dolores looked down at herself and grinned. “You mean you’d sacrifice a hundred million Chinese just for me?”
“Two hundred million.”
“Yes, but only peasants.”
“Landlords, too.”
“Mandarins?”
“Even emperors!”
“You must really love me then.”
“Who said so?”
“I said so. What would you do if I told you I never wanted to see you again?”
“I’d come to your house and break down the door.”
“But I wouldn’t let you in.”
“If I’d already broken down the door...”
“Yes, but I’d call the police.”
“And get me sent to jail?”
“Why should I care? If you don’t love me...”
“I love to touch you,” I said. “Mmmm, where are those sweet buttons?”