“Will, please”
“I’m sorry.”
“You make me feel very cheap sometimes.”
“I said I’m sorry.”
“You’re... you’re the first person I’ve ever done this with, you know, I’m not some... some damn old prostitute you picked up on Eighth Avenue.”
“I know you’re not.”
“I’m only seventeen.”
“I know.”
“You might try remembering that.”
“I will.”
“The same age as Juliet.”
“Juliet Schwartz?”
“Sure, Juliet Schwartz.”
“Now what are you going to do? Start crying?”
“Over you? Fat chance,” she said, and burst into tears.
“Juliet was only fourteen,” I said, and handed her a corner of the sheet. “Here. And besides, you’ll be eighteen next month.”
“That makes me some kind of hag, I guess.”
“No, it makes you a beautiful young lady.”
“Yeah, crap,” she said, and wiped her eyes on the sheet, and then reached for my khaki handkerchief on the night table, and noisily blew her nose. “I’m not a fool, you know,” she said. “My father’s a lawyer, you know.”
“I know he is.”
“I can get very mean if I want to.”
“Dolores, I can’t imagine a mean bone in your...”
“I hate that name.”
“But I love it.”
“But you don’t love me!”
“Do you want me to say I do?”
“Yes.”
“I love you,” I said.
“What?”
“I love you.”
“No, you don’t,” she said. “You’re only telling me that now because you’re afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Of what I said. About statutory rape.”
“When did you say that?”
“I didn’t, but I had it all ready. I was going to say, ‘There’re only two things I have to say to you, Lieutenant Tyler,’ and then you’d say, ‘Yes, and what are those two things?’ and I’d say, ‘Statutory rape.’ But it didn’t come out that way because you got me so angry. Do you really love me, Will?”
“I adore you.”
“Yes, I adore you, too. Can you get a pass this weekend?”
“I doubt it.”
“Can you get tickets for The Class Menagerie?”
“Why? What’s...”
“For Friday night?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“Daddy left for Los Angeles yesterday to negotiate another one of his panty deals, and Mother’s leaving for Easthampton Thursday. I thought we could spend the whole weekend together...”
“Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”
“Because if you wouldn’t admit you loved me, I was going to jump in the river.”
“I’ll get the pass, and I’ll get the tickets.”
It was easier to get off the base for the weekend than it was to get tickets to the play. But I managed both, and arranged with Dolores to meet her at the apartment at seven o’clock that Friday night. The bell rang at six-thirty. When I opened the door, I was surprised to find her standing there wearing a plaid skirt, loafers, and a white blouse, hardly appropriate attire for dinner and the theater afterward. She came into the apartment trembling and apologetic, telling me we couldn’t possibly go out, explaining that she would have called me if the apartment’s telephone hadn’t been disconnected for the summer, but she knew I was waiting for her, and so she’d caught a taxi, and it was still downstairs, and she’d run out of the house without her bag, could we please go back to Sutton Place at once?
In the taxicab, she explained that she had heard sounds coming from her brother’s room the night before, and had thought at first he was up late recording. But when she’d gone in to him, she’d found him sitting in the center of the bed staring at the opposite wall, mumbling what had sounded like gibberish at first, Tupelo Lass, Thundermug, Utah Man, Hell’s Wench, not understanding until her brother said the words King’s Ransom, which she recognized as the name of his airplane, and realizing all at once that he was reciting a partial roll call of the B-24s that had flown low over the Ploesti oil fields on the day he’d lost his eye. When he saw her in the room, he told her that his eye socket was bleeding and begged her to get him something to stop the blood, and she had sat on the edge of his bed, and taken his hand, and convinced him that he was home and safe, talking gently and quietly to him until he drifted off to sleep again. Today, he had seemed completely calm, had in fact gone for a walk in the park this afternoon, leaving his important project for the first time in months. But he had returned just as she was getting ready to dress, and when she greeted him at the door, he said to her, “Shave your head,” and went directly to his room where he turned on the radio full blast, in time for the six o’clock news. She was terribly worried now, feeling certain she should not have left him alone.
The apartment was still when we got there.
Dolores turned on the hall light. “Douglas?” she called.
There was no answer.
“Douglas?” she called again.
He was sitting in the living room near the piano, a blurred huddled shape in the velvet-covered easy chair, the carpet at his feet strewn with newspapers and magazines, the recorder resting on the piano top beside him. “Is that you?” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said. “Listen to this,” he said, and suddenly snapped on the recorder, and turned to us with his unwavering Cyclops gaze as the spool began to unwind.
Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea, the recorded voice said, the WPB has estimated today that the war cost us only $7,400,000,000 a month in the year nineteen hundred and forty-four, but the question we now ask and will continue to ask is what does that have to do with the price of fish, when glass eyes are going for a dollar a dozen? Perhaps you’d like to answer that one for us, Mr. Truman, while raising the American flag in Berlin, the same flag that was flying over Washington when we declared war, and telling everybody there that if we can put this tremendous machine of ours, which has made victory possible, to work for peace, we can look forward to the greatest age in the history of mankind, in which case why have they stolen my eye and refuse to return it though I’ve mailed countless petitions, give me back my eye you sons of bitches, they’re buying soap in panic all over America, do they hope to wash away our sins, do they hope to wash away the blood, they’ve been warned there’s no shortage, is it true that the Nazis made Jews out of soap, why are we hoarding, do you know that General Minami says, and I quote in Japanese, I always quote, I have the facts right here at my fingertips, don’t try to con me, pal, I know you’re putting it to my sister, Japan, I quote, Japan will be ready to talk peace only when the whole of East Asia is freed from Anglo-American colonial exploitation and when Japan and other nations in the world are assured of a peaceful life based on justice and equality, so where’s my just and equal eye, did you look under the sofa, Lolly, do you remember once when I touched you in the tub and you began to cry, does he touch you, that prick, the Japanese have refused our ultimatum, I told you they would, listen to this, So far as the Imperial Government of Japan is concerned it will take no notice, of what I ask Premier Suziuki, no notice of what, of yellow men being bombed, of eyeless bombardiers sighting, dropping sticks and stones will break my bones and Lolly has no tits, who’s this William Z. Foster who was named chairman of the national board and Party, if there’s going to be one, why weren’t we invited, I’ll bring my cup and pencils, you can shove dimes up my ass and watch me dance the polka, the FBI has tracked down half a million draft dodgers, who would have dreamt, love, that so many Americans had no heart for this beautiful war, did you know that Henry Ford said today just before his eighty-second birthday that the nation and the world, I quote, are on the eve of a prosperity and standard of living that was never before considered possible, but ask old Hank what he was doing back in the summer of 1920 in Dearborn, Michigan, ask him how come, love, ask him should Jews buy his automobiles today, love, why not if they’ll soon be buying the ones the Nazis make, I’m so damn tired, folks, we’re running a little late, folks, the Japanese’ll never surrender, they know I haven’t got a chance with just one eye, oh Jesus Lolly my eye is bleeding again, oh Jesus Lolly save me, love, help me, love, save me (and then suddenly his real voice erupted over the litany coming from the recorder, his real voice burst into the room high and strident, Help, he screamed), Lolly save me help me save me (Help, oh Jesus, help!), and I remembered what Michael Mallory had confided to me so earnestly outside this building on the bank of the river, that he’d kept waiting for the war to catch up to him, kept waiting for the world’s idiocy to overtake him at last (Help, Douglas Prine kept screaming over the sound of the recorder).