They all sit, Michael thought, like people with dependants or deferable physical ailments. And their women, the wives and mothers, glared accusingly at all the other men, as though they were on the verge of saying, "I can see through you. You're in perfect health and you have plenty of money hidden away in the vault, and you want my son or my husband to go instead of you. Well, you're not going to get away with it."
There was a buzz from the machine on the desk of one of the secretaries. She stood up and looked bleakly out across the room.
"Michael Whitacre," she called. Her voice was rasping and bored. She was an ugly girl with a large nose and a great deal of lipstick. Michael noticed, as he stood up, that her legs were bowed and her stockings were crooked and wrinkled.
"Whitacre," she called again, her voice bristling and impatient. He waved to her and smiled. "Control yourself, darling," he said. "I'm on my way."
She stared at him with cold superiority. Michael couldn't blame her. Added to the automatic insolence of a government employee was the heady sense of power that she was sending men out to die for her, who obviously had never had a man look kindly at her in her life. Each oppressed minority, Negroes, Mormons, Nudists, loveless women, Michael thought as he approached the door, to its own peculiar compensations. It would take a saint to behave well on a draft board.
As he opened the door, Michael noticed with surprise that he was trembling a little. Ridiculous, he thought, annoyed with himself, as he faced the seven men sitting at the long table. They swung round and looked at him. Their faces were the other side of the draftee's coin. To match the fear and resentment and argument waiting in the outside room, here were unrelenting suspicion, shrewd, constantly reinforced hardness. There isn't one of them, Michael thought, staring unsmilingly at their unwelcoming faces, that I would ever talk to under any other circumstances. My neighbours. Who picked them? Where did they come from? What made them so eager to send their fellow-citizens off to war?
"Sit down, please, Mr Whitacre," said the chairman. He motioned glumly to the vacant chair at the head of the table. He was an old man, fat, with a face that had heavy, cold dewlaps, and angry, peering eyes. Even when he said "Please", there was a peremptory challenge in his voice. What war, Michael thought, as he walked to his chair, did you fight in?
The other faces swung round at him, like the guns of a cruiser preparing for a bombardment. Amazing, Michael thought, as he sat down, I've lived in this neighbourhood for ten years and I've never seen a single one of these faces before. They must have been lying in wait, lurking secretly in the cellars, for this moment.
There was an American flag on the long wall behind the board, real cloth this time, a garish spot of colour in the drab room, behind the grey and blue business suits of the board and their yellow complexions. Michael had a sudden vision of thousands of such rooms all over the country, thousands of such greying, cold-faced, suspicious men with the flag behind their balding heads, facing thousands of resentful, captured boys. It was probably the key scene of the moment, 1942's most common symbol, the lines of terror and violence and guile brought to this single point, shabby, loveless, with only the promise of wounds and death to add any stature or nobility to the proceedings.
"Now, Mr Whitacre," the chairman said, fumbling nearsightedly with a dossier, "you claim a 3 A exemption here because of dependency." He peered at Michael angrily, as though he had just said, "Where is the gun with which you shot the deceased?"
"Yes," Michael said.
"We have found out," the chairman said loudly, "that you are not living with your wife." He looked triumphantly around him, and several of the other members of the board nodded eagerly.
"We are divorced," Michael said.
"Divorced!" the chairman said. "Why did you hide that fact?"
"Look," Michael said, "I'm going to save you a lot of time. I'm going to enlist."
"When?"
"As soon as the play I'm working on is put on."
"When will that be?" a little fat man at the other end of the table asked in a sour voice.
"Two months," said Michael. "I don't know what you have down on that paper, but I have to provide for my mother and father, and I have to pay alimony…"
"Your wife," the chairman said bitterly, looking down at the papers before him, "makes five hundred and fifty dollars a week…"
"When she works," Michael said.
"She worked thirty weeks last year," the chairman said.
"That's right," Michael said wearily. "And not a week this year."
"Well," said the chairman, with a wave, "we have to consider the probable earnings. She's worked for the last five years and there's no reason to suppose she won't continue. Also," he glared down once more at the papers in front of him, "you claim your mother and father as dependants."
"Yes," said Michael, sighing.
"Your father, we have discovered, has a pension of sixty-eight dollars a month."
"That's right," said Michael. "Have you ever tried to support two people on sixty-eight dollars a month?"
"Everybody," said the chairman with dignity, "has to expect to make some sacrifices at a time like this."
"I'm not going to argue with you," said Michael. "I told you I'm going to enlist in two months."
"Why?" said a man down at the other end. He peered glitteringly through pince-nez glasses at Michael, as though ready to ferret out this last subterfuge.
Michael looked around him at the seven glowering faces. He grinned. "I don't know why," he said. "Do you?"
"That will be all, Mr Whitacre," the chairman said.
Michael got up and walked out of the room. He felt the eyes of all seven men on him, angry, resentful. They feel cheated, he realized suddenly, they would have much preferred to trap me into it. They were all prepared.
The people waiting in the outside room looked up at him, surprised, because he had come out so quickly. He grinned at them. He wanted to make a joke, but it would be too cruel to the taut, harried boys waiting so painfully.
"Good night, darling," he said to the ugly girl behind the desk. He couldn't resist that. She looked at him with the unbreakable superiority of the person who will not be called upon to die over the man who may.
Michael was still smiling as he started down the steps, but he felt depressed. The first day, he thought, I should have gone in the first day. I shouldn't've exposed myself to a scene like that. He felt soiled and suspect as he walked slowly through the mild late-winter night, among the strolling couples oblivious to the tattered, shabby war being fought between one soul and another, in their name, in the dirty loft over the Greek restaurant half a block away.
Two mornings later, when he went down for his mail, there was a card from his draft board. "As per your request," it read, "you will be reclassified as 1A on May 15." He laughed as he read it. They have salvaged victory out of the ruins of their campaign, he thought. But he felt relieved as he went upstairs again in the lift. There were no more decisions to be made.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
NOAH opened his eyes in the soft dawn light and looked at his wife. She sleeps, he thought, as though she were keeping a secret. Hope, he thought, Hope, Hope. She must have been one of those grave little girls, walking through that white clapboard town, always looking as though she was hurrying to some private destination. She probably had little caches of things stuffed away in the odd corners of her room, too. Feathers, dried flowers, old fashion-plates from Harper's Bazaar, drawings of women with bustles, that sort of thing. You didn't know anything about little girls. Would be different if you had sisters. Your wife came to you out of a locked vault of experience. Might just as well have come from the mountains of Tibet or a French nunnery. While he was smoking cigarettes under the roof at Colonel Druids Military Academy for Boys, We Take the Boy and Return the Man, what was she doing, walking gravely past the churchyard with all the Plowmans tucked in under the old turf? If there was a plan in anything, she was preparing for him then, preparing for this moment of sleeping beside him in the dawn light. And he had been preparing for her. If there was a plan. Impossible to believe. If Roger hadn't somehow met her (how did he meet her?). If Roger hadn't half-ironically decided to have a party to find him a girl. If Roger had brought one of the dozen other girls he knew, they wouldn't be lying here together this morning. Accident, the only law of life. Roger. "You make time and you make love dandy, You make swell molasses candy, But, honey, are you makin' any money? That's all I want to know." Caught in the Philippines, Bataan, if he had lived that long. And here they were in Roger's room, in Roger's bed, because it was more comfortable. Noah's old bed slanted to the right. It all started when he reached up for the copy of Yeats's The Heme's Egg and Other Plays on the Public Library shelf. If he had reached for another book, he wouldn't've bumped into Roger and he wouldn't have lived here and he wouldn't've met Hope and she probably would be lying in another bed now, with another man watching her, thinking, I love her, I love her. If you thought about it you stared into the pit of madness. No plan to anything. No plan to loving or dying or fighting or anything. The equation: Man plus his intentions equals Accident. Impossible to believe. The plan must be there, but cleverly camouflaged, the way a good playwright disguises his plot. At the moment you die perhaps everything is clear to you, you say, oh, now I see, that's why that character was introduced in the first act.