“Agreed.”
And the result was that Prentice had spent hours over each of his letters to Burlingame, first in the Air Force and then at Camp Pickett, copying and recopying his manuscript, going to the post library to check his literary references, making sure that each paragraph made its own trenchant point and that the finished product could be read without apology as part of a continuing intellectual dialogue. It was hard work.
Burlingame was now in the Navy, or rather in something called the V-12 Program, which allowed bright students to attend civilian universities in naval uniform, and he seemed to have plenty of time for prose composition:
… You speak of your Army comrades as “brutally stupid.” I too am surrounded by the type, and can find little compassion for them. Have you read Farrell’s
Studs Lonigan?
Do so, and you will find the majority of my classmates in its pages. They are without minds; they are without purpose. They think it “Hot shit” to roll in the bed of some downtrodden whore and to talk of it lasciviously afterwards. I am not shocked by their antics – they amuse me – but I find it depressing to realize that these are specimens of the finest America has to offer in her young manhood. And if this is what one encounters in the V-12,
I can imagine that the caliber is still lower in a unit such as yours, which must include the very dregs of society. Well,
C’est la guerre
.
With regard to religion, I suppose this will startle you (remembering our talks at school about Schopenhauer, etc.) but I am no longer an atheist. In the past several months I have taken honest stock of my philosophical attitudes, and have found to my surprise that Christianity is no longer the anathema I once thought it to be. I can understand now why the greatest thinkers, the most enlightened minds in all of our Western culture have propounded the Christian ideal and the Christian ethic in one form or another …
It went on for several more pages, but Prentice felt he had read enough. He carefully wiped his fountain pen and went back to work on his partially finished reply. “As for Christianity,” he wrote, “I continue to distrust it, as I distrust all dogma and all moral and/or spiritual certainties.” That sounded right – it had the right tone – but he would have to compose three or four more sentences in the same vein before he earned the right to copy out his final paragraph, which he had already scribbled in a burst of inspiration: “I don’t imagine you’ll be hearing from me for a while because I’m in the process of being shipped to Europe, where I expect we’ll all be rather busy for some time – the dregs of society, Studs Lonigan, and me.”
He was still working over the intermediate sentences when Quint and Sam Rand came clumping up to the bunk, smelling of beer. “Prentice, old buddy,” Quint said, “if you ever got out of that sack and looked at the bulletin board, you’d have found out we’ve got eight-hour passes tonight. We’re going to Baltimore. How about getting off your ass?”
And Hugh Burlingame was instantly forgotten. It was the first
time Prentice could remember Quint’s calling him “old buddy,” even in sarcasm, and it was pleasing to know that he and Rand had come back to the barracks to get him before taking off. As they started down the snow-blown company street, turning up their overcoat collars against the wind, he felt uncommonly jaunty. His new uniform seemed to fit much better than his old one, and he was delighted with the new-style “combat boots” they had been issued at Meade: he had already learned how to darken their tawny color by singeing them with a flame and then applying many coats of polish. They made his legs less spindly and put a new, manly authority into his walk. Neither Quint nor Sam Rand had bothered to darken their boots and they walked as if their feet hurt; for that reason, as the three of them set off for what promised to be a rollicking night on the town, Prentice felt he looked much the most trim and soldierly of the group. And he allowed his rising sense of camaraderie to embrace Sam Rand as well as Quint, for he could see now that Rand posed no serious threat: there was reassurance in the very fact that Rand was so simple and unschooled, so “colorful,” like a character actor in the movies. He could serve both Prentice and Quint as a kind of homely, comic relief from the more serious aspects of their friendship, and in that way could safely be welcomed. In combat, when Sam Rand lay wounded, Prentice might run out under heavy fire to bring him back and carry him all the way to the aid station, as Lew Ayres had done with the other man in
All Quiet on the Western Front
, not realizing he was already dead. And Quint, unashamed of the tears in his eyes, would say, “You did all you could for him, Prentice” (or better still, “Bob”). But in the meantime he had to ask them both to stop and wait for him at the PX near the bus station while he called his mother; and when he was folded into the phone booth, dialing for long distance, he didn’t feel soldierly at all.
“Oh,
dear,
” she said when he had explained that the pass woudn’t give him time to get to New York and back. “Well, but do you think they’ll give you any leave from the other place? The one near here?” She meant Camp Shanks, New York, which was the port of embarkation and was said to be shrouded in secrecy.
“No,” he said. “They don’t even let you make phone calls from there. But anyway, I’ll write. And listen, promise not to worry, okay? I’ll be fine.” The receiver was slippery with sweat in his hand.
“All right, dear. But you
will
be careful, won’t you? I know that sounds silly, but I just—”
“Sure I will. I’ll be fine. You just take care of yourself and –
you
know – promise not to worry. Okay?”
When he’d hung up he had to sit quiet in the steaming booth for a few seconds, wondering why he had called her at all. And when he came out, stamping to arrange his pants over the boot tops, he found Quint waiting alone.
“Where’s Sam?”
“He took off. Ran into some friends of his who had a taxi, and he went along with them. Said he’d try to meet us later in town. You all set?”
In the bewildering civilian disorder of Baltimore they found the hotel bar where Sam had said he’d try to meet them; but Sam wasn’t there, and their predicament was compounded when the bartender refused to sell Prentice a drink.
“Oh, what the hell,” Quint said. “He’s in the
Army
, for Christ’s sake. He’s going
overseas
. What kind of bullshit is this?”
“Watch your language, soldier. The law says twenty-one, and swearing don’t change it none. I serve him, I lose my job.”
“Hell, go ahead, Quint; you have one anyway.”
“No. The hell with it.” And they stood aimlessly near the bar
for a while, gazing at tables full of civilians or of officers and girls, or of enlisted men and girls, until Quint said, “Let’s get out of here.”
“To tell the truth,” he said when they were out on the street again, starting to walk without any idea of where they were going, “to tell the truth I didn’t really expect Sam to show up. I don’t think old Sam wants anything to interfere with the serious business of getting himself laid tonight.”
And Prentice chuckled, but it disturbed him a little. He hadn’t fully dared to expect that they’d go to a whorehouse tonight, or pick up girls in a bar or whatever it was you did, but what else was worth the effort of doing on your last night of freedom in the States? Did Quint believe that only simple, “colorful” soldiers did things like that? Was it possible that Quint, for all his twenty-four years, was as shy of girls as he himself?
Now they were in what seemed to be the garish, Times-Square part of the city; they were standing under the marquee of a burlesque theater, and Quint, with a frown and a shrug, said they might as well go inside. It was better than going to a movie, anyway; but the show was a disappointment. Most of the women didn’t look really desirable, and their stripping was a meticulous concession to police restrictions. The comedians weren’t funny, and the whole performance kept coming to a stop so that vendors could patrol the aisles with boxes of candy in which, according to the master of ceremonies, were secreted many valuable prizes including silver cigarette lighters and genuine leather wallets.
“Well,” Quint said, when the tedious show was over and they were out on the freezing sidewalk again. “Hell, let’s get a drink somewhere. Maybe we can at least get a drink in this cruddy part of town.” And the first bar they tried served them bottled beer without a question. It was narrow and bleak, with green walls
and a smell of disinfectant, and they settled themselves into a booth just as the jukebox rumbled into the opening strains of “I’ll Walk Alone.” Most of the other customers were old men lined up at the bar, several of them hawking and spitting on the floor, but there were other servicemen too, and in one of the booths two sailors sat with their arms around two very young-looking girls, the only girls in the place. The beer was stronger than the stuff Prentice was used to in the PX, and by the third bottle he was feeling pleasurably vague: he was ready to decide that this might, after all, be as good and memorable a way as any to spend his last pass, sitting in this strange, squalid bar while John Quint held forth on the larger social and historical aspects of the war. For Quint had broken his moody, pipe-smoking silence and begun to talk – more out of boredom, it seemed, than any real conversational impulse – about economics and politics and world affairs; he was becoming almost as eloquent as on the day of the I. and E. lecture back at Pickett, and the happy difference was that this time he was talking to Prentice alone and allowing Prentice to reply. It was like the old talks with Hugh Burlingame, at school.
“Well, but look at it this way, Quint,” Prentice heard himself saying, impressed with the timbre of his own voice. “Look at it this way …”
“… right. You’re absolutely right, Prentice.” And although Prentice could never afterwards remember what it was he had said, he knew he wouldn’t forget the solemn, nodding approbation in Quint’s face. “You’re absolutely right about that.”
“ ’Scuse me for buttin’ in, fellas,” said a stranger’s voice through the veils of smoke, and they looked up to find a young, drunken sailor hanging unsteadily over their booth. “Here’s the thing. Me’n my buddy got these two li’l gals all loved up, only
we gotta be back at the base in twenty minutes. Okay if we turn ’em over to you? I mean I figured you fellas looked kinda lonesome here.”
Prentice looked at Quint for guidance, but Quint was intently picking the wet paper label off his beer bottle.
“Tell you what,” the sailor said. “Just tell me your first names, so I can introduce you. I mean shit, whaddya got to lose?”
Quint looked up at him with what struck Prentice as an odd mixture of contempt and bashfulness. “John,” he said.
“Bob,” said Prentice.
And in less than a minute, during which Prentice and Quint didn’t quite meet each other’s eyes, the sailor was back. This time he brought his buddy, a huge red-haired boy who seemed to be asleep on his feet, and the two girls. “Hey there, John,” he said heartily. “How’s it going? Hey there, Bob. Fellas, I’d like you to meet a couple friends. This here’s Nancy, and this here’s Arlene. Okay if we join you fellas a minute?”
The next thing Prentice knew both sailors had gone and left them with the girls. The one called Nancy, plump and talkative with tightly curled black hair, sat chattering cozily beside Quint, and the one called Arlene was pressed into the tremulous circle of his own arm. She was very thin and dead silent, and she was heavily perfumed.
“… no, but tell me one thing, John,” Nancy was saying. “One thing I still don’t understand. How come you’re friends with Gene and Frank when they’re in the Navy and you’re in the Army?” And Quint made some polite, inaudible reply. He had removed his glasses and was wiping them with Kleenex, blinking at Nancy with his small eyes.
Then suddenly Arlene became talkative too. “You got a nickel, Bob?” she said. “I want to play that song again, ‘I’ll Walk Alone.’ I love that song.”
He rose to do her bidding, stamping the pants around his combat boots, and he hoped she was watching as he made his way to the jukebox in his new walk. When he came back she sang the lyrics for him along with the record, sitting erect with her hands in her lap and staring straight ahead to let him admire her profile, which had an oddly sloping forehead and contained several powdered-over pimples.
“They’ll ask me why,” she sang, “and I’ll tell them – I’d rather. There are dreams I must gather, dreams we fashioned the night – you held me tight …”
While she sang he had time for some rapid, baffled speculations about these girls. Were they whores? Could it be that the sailors had already had them and taken off without paying the bill? No, no; the girls would never have let them get away. How old were they? Seventeen? But what kind of girls that age would be in a place like this, allowing themselves to be passed around like merchandise?
“… I’ll always be near you, wherever you are; each night, in every prayer. If you call I’ll hear you, no matter how far – just close your eyes, and I’ll be there …”
And where had the sailors found them? Probably they were what the newspapers called “V-girls”; and here he was briefly troubled: would they be carriers of venereal disease?
“… Please walk alone; and with your love and your kiss-es to guide me—” Arlene closed her eyes and allowed a little tremor of sentimentality to wrinkle her forehead at the climax of the song – “till you’re walk-ing beside me – I’ll walk alone.” Then she opened her eyes and took a dainty but deep drink of beer, leaving lipstick on the glass and foam on her lips. “God, I love that song,” she said. “Where you from, Bob?”
“New York.”
“You have any brothers and sisters?” This seemed wholly out
of character for her: it was a standard conversation opener for the kind of girls who came to prep-school dances. He tried to put things on a more worldly plane by telling her that he and Quint were at Meade and due to go overseas any day, but that didn’t seem to impress her: she had evidently met a good many boys from Meade. Soon the conversation threatened to dry up altogether, and he looked across the table for help, but Quint was red-faced and cramped with laughter at something Nancy had said, and Nancy, laughing too, was wearing Quint’s overseas cap. Then suddenly Arlene squirmed closer and dropped her hand on Prentice’s thigh, massaging it in a light, rhythmic way that sent delightful waves of warmth from his knees to his throat. It was a very small, childish hand with bitten-down nails, and it wore a high-school ring.