It was funny the way words meaningless to me then, despite my father’s eagerness to explain (my mother listening so attentively, as though he were telling her something private, not to be heard by the children, a glance exchanged at the table, their eyes meeting, had he said something to her that I did not understand, why had he been so insistent on defining the way of life a man chose, the way of life to which he irrevocably committed himself — well, never mind.) The words had meaning for me now because, home and safe, surrounded by all the things I had known through eighteen years of boyhood, I suddenly felt a lack of direction or will, and wondered whether it wasn’t time to engage in some of that critical revision my father had tried to promote those many years ago.
I told myself that what I missed most was flying. I had not been inside an airplane since I left Foggia early in April, and I wished now that I could climb the access ladder onto the wing of a Lightning again, open the top hatch and settle into the pilot’s scat, lock my safety belt and run through all the familiar pre-flight checks, battery switch on, cross-feed switch off, tank selector valves to outer wing on, half a hundred more burned into my memory through repetition. I longed to taxi out to the end of a runway, and then hold hard on the brakes and open the throttles, manifold pressure and rpm mounting, the airplane trembling around me, and suddenly let her go, release the brakes and allow her to roll away, speed building, fifty miles an hour, eighty, airborne at a hundred, memory taking over completely as I thought again about flying. I wanted to be in the sky again. I missed flying terribly, I told myself, and had no right to deny myself its pleasure any longer. So I went out to the Elmhurst Airport one day, and rented a twin-engine Beech for fifteen dollars an hour, and took her up and put her through some simple maneuvers, and then landed her, and went back home to the house on East Scott, still filled with an odd sense of deprivation.
I took out Charlotte Wagner that Friday night, and discovered that she wanted to talk exclusively about the old days at Grace School, recalling incidents I had either forgotten or never been a part of, remembering classroom jokes and school outings, student and teacher characters, all the games she had cheered, and even the cheers themselves, turning to me in the parked automobile, eyes glowing, to chant, “With a G! and an R! and an A! and a C! and an E! With a Grrrrace School...” and then pulling away when I tried to kiss her, and telling me I had never answered the postcards she’d sent me from Cape Cod in the goddamn summer of 1944! I called Sarah Cody the next day, and went to pick her up in high expectation because she had always been a fun-loving kid with a fine Irish sense of humor and adventure, and a smile that broke like a sunrise, with a good figure besides and a reputation for being pretty easy, or so Michael Mallory had reported. She was even prettier than I remembered, sleek black hair and a pert fresh mouth and sparkling blue eyes, the conjured image of every Irish lass who’d ever been kissed in a haystack, but she told me almost immediately that she had been scheduled to go out with a senior from Northwestern who had come down with a bad cold, and so I was extremely lucky that she was free, it being a Saturday night and all, and then expressed keen disappointment when I told her that what I had in mind was a movie when her original plans had been for dancing at The Empire Room. Sarah Cody, it seemed, was being dated almost every night of the week by university boys who found her ravishing, witty, sexy, responsive, inventive, brilliant, and nothing if not perfect. The movie was lousy. I did not try to kiss her goodnight because I didn’t wish to mar the flawless line of her lipstick. In desperation, I called Margaret Penner that Wednesday and said, “Hello there, Margie, this is Will Tyler, I don’t know if you...” and she hung up, small surprise. In an agitated state of extreme critical revision, I decided that perhaps I missed Dolores Prine, I guessed.
We had said goodbye one October night, huddled together in a hotel bed, Dolores warm and trusting and weeping in my arms as I let lies fall like autumn rain around us, gently pattering on the sodden leaves of what she thought was an undying love. Dolores, I said to her, I’ve never met anyone like you in my life, I hate to leave you now, but I’ve got to go back to Chicago, I’ve got to go home to find my roots again, can you understand that (and she said, Yes, love, weeping) and I said, I’ve been through a war, Dolores, and there are a lot of things I don’t yet know about myself or about what’s waiting for me in civilian life, and so I’ve got to go back, and I can’t take you with me, not yet, can you understand that (and she said, Yes, love, weeping) and I said, Maybe after I’ve been there a while, maybe after I’ve had a chance to find this person who is Will Tyler, to look at myself in the mirror (Yes, love) and come to terms with myself, know what it is I really want, why then maybe, Dolores, I can send for you and we can be together again, but not now, Dolores, can you understand that, not now (Yes, love, weeping) and made love to her again before dawn because if I was going to be a rat, if I was going to lie to this eighteen-year-old kid (Yes, love, yes) and cause her to believe that I would one day send for her, cause her to believe that this was not truly the end, not truly goodbye, then I might as well go whole hog, might as well be the consummate bastard, take all I could get from her before I left her flat, yes love yes love yes, and we said goodbye.
She had written eight letters to me, none of which I’d answered. I went upstairs to my room now, and read them over again. In the last letter, she had enclosed the snapshots we’d taken the day before I left New York. Clipped to the twelve prints was a slip of white paper with the single word “Remember?” scrawled onto it. I looked at the black-and-white photographs now, trying to reconstruct in my mind the exact moment when the camera’s shutter had clicked to freeze Dolores into one or another characteristic pose, realizing all at once that the girl whose pictures lay spread out beside me on the bed was not just one girl, not only Dolores Prine, but really a rather extraordinary and startling collection of girls: Dolores munching on a jellied apple, her hazel eyes opened wide in surprise as the camera clicked on a ravenous bite; Dolores striking a mock sexy pose against a lamppost on Lexington Avenue, coat open, one hand on her hip, the very image of a Parisian streetwalker, eyes slitted, mouth curled in sensuous invitation; Dolores gazing down at the river outside her building, sunlight caught in the shimmering web of her hair, her eyes all but closed, her face in silhouette as clear as alabaster, as soft as snow; Dolores leap-frogging a fire hydrant, legs akimbo, hair floating, eyes and mouth wide open, shrieking in girlish delight as the shutter clicked; Dolores angry and frowning because I had been saying, “No, your head a bit more to the right, that’s it, no, a little more, yes, perfect, no,” until she shouted, “Go to hell, Will!” just as I snapped the picture. I studied this crowd that was Dolores, trebled it, multiplied it by a thousand, converted it into a mob of Doloreses, and then reversed the procedure, condensing, solidifying this universe of girls into one alone, Dolores Prine, who seemed to me now the most marvelous girl I had ever known. In those frozen snapshots on the bed, I detected a pulsating life, and I wanted to hold it close and fierce, and never let it go again. I went into my father’s library, missing her desperately, telling myself that what I wanted to do was go down to New York for a few days, maybe a week, spend some time with her, nothing was happening in Chicago anyway. Dear Dolores, I wrote, and crossed it out, Dolores darling, I wrote, and crossed it out, and wrote Dear Dolores again, and then wrote, I’ve been here in Chicago for several weeks now, doing all the thinking I told you I’d have to do before corning to any knowledge of myself and, oh, shit, I thought, and crumpled the letter and threw it into my father’s wastebasket. I got up from the desk and began pacing the room, walking past the floor-to-ceiling bookcases, my eye traveling over books that must have been bestsellers when my father was about my age, stuff like Miss Lulu Belt by Zona Gale and The Valley of Silent Men by James Oliver Curwood, and Mooncalf by Floyd Dell and a very hot little number called Jurgen by James Branch Cabell, which I took from the shelf and thumbed through, finding a long underlined passage in it. I became curious about some of the other books then, and began leafing through them at random to see if my father had marked any more pages. Most of them looked unread. There was, however, a corner niche of World War I books which were dog-eared and heavily annotated. I carried some of those over to the desk and scanned the notes he had boldly scribbled into the margins, indignant outbursts like Nonsense! or This did not happen! sympathetic praise like Yes, God, yes! or I remember the stink, too! Intrigued, I found myself reading a paragraph in the middle of one book, and then turned back to the first chapter, and then moved from my father’s desk to the big leather chair near the Franklin stove, and suddenly lost all interest in writing my letters. That afternoon, I discovered that I did not miss Dolores and I did not miss flying.