I was just outside the Arctic Circle the first time I saw the northern lights. I went to Umnak, which is in the Yukon, where they were setting up a new message center. I was to go and help the boys who’d just come from the Pauling Institute to set up. One night, I went out of this place where I lived just under the Arctic Circle, and there was this silence that was so heavy, you could hear it. I can’t explain it. It was like a repeated vibration that had no sound. Total silence. If you’ve never heard total silence, you can’t imagine it. So heavy a silence, it actually hummed. White velvet snow and a black velvet sky. There was no sound at all. Just the music of the spheres. Vibration. And I was sitting there thinking, Gosh, wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could see the northern lights? And honey, it was as though God said, “Well, there’s that awful brat again.” And they lit up. I mean: boom. Suddenly the whole sky lit up with a crazy display in rose, pale green, and gold, splinters of dancing light. I almost peed in my pants.
It was pinky green, pale pink, pale green, and pale yellow. There would be these beams that would just come up and would fade slowly away. And here come some more. That side of it would fade out and this side would go strong, and it would go up and go down. I’m going to tell you, I almost died. I almost died. And my dog, Ragzina, was sitting next to me, and she was listening to the silence, too. And when those lights started, she looked at me like, Daddy, Daddy, what are they doing? I thought, If she could sing, she’d sing “Scotland’s Burning.”
*
It was in the Aleutian Islands that I first began to cook. It was self-salvation that got me going, because I couldn’t take some of the mess of the mess hall food. It was things that were brought up there frozen, chickens that were two years old. When we had anything fresh, it was always cabbages. I didn’t eat cabbages for about three or four years after the war. Well, we all had some kind of little stove in that dugout to heat up the place and have water boiling so the humidity didn’t go down. But I quickly got a little two-burner alcohol stove going and learned how to steal from the mess hall. Sometimes I would say to the guys in my dugout, “Don’t eat that steak. Bring it back.” They were just hunks of plain steak. I would get garlic and the pepper mill and cook up a stew, and everybody loved it. Sometimes I would put a little oil and butter in this pan I had, put in little slices of that big soggy mess hall bread with some paprika and some pepper, and just turn it until it was crisp. We would sit around and drink beer and eat that. Then I used to go digging clams in the black sands of the Bering Sea. Beautiful clams. Huge, tender clams. So I’d dig these clams and I’d make creole sauce out of whatever I could make it out of and have dinner parties. I was always going into the kitchen in the mess hall and stealing onions. I made a candelabra, classical goddesses out of papier-mâché, and I went to the navy and stole target cloth. Dyed it bright yellow. And that was my tablecloth. Seated on the floor Chinese style around this table with candles as the williwaw went woooooo, we sat there in a room stinking gloriously of clams creole.
*
In our time off, we used to climb up to this plateau where there was a hot spring. So that the whole year you could see the tundra grass. It wasn’t green because it was arctic weather, but you could see the tundra grass. And of course, since spring is only two weeks, summer is two weeks, and autumn is two weeks, the tundra grass never completely decays. So it’s like two thousand years of mattress stuffing on top of the rocks. And I invented this game called suicide. We all had these fur parkas, and we’d go to this plateau and say, “Farewell, cruel world!” and just jump over the edge. You bounce on that tundra grass right to the bottom. So we used to go up there and have suicide every day when we got finished with our work.
One day we were on this place that was lower down near this hot spring, and here were these two newborn baby caribou. I knew enough never to touch anything wild, because if the mother smells anything foreign, she will just ditch it. But I saw that it had been a difficult birth because caribou never have twins. It is extremely rare. And it must have been very difficult; there was a lot of blood. I saw one was dead and one was alive, and I heard her making little sounds. I thought, The mother has probably gone off to wash or something, she’ll be back. And I went on climbing around on the tundra, and when I was starting back about an hour later, I went to see and the mother had not come back. So I took off my wool scarf. I just wrapped up that baby caribou and took it back and washed her with some warm water and took a clean undershirt and made a little teat and heated some Carnation milk. I’m afraid that I already had the reputation of being different, so they just thought it was another of my moments. I never dreamed she would survive, but she did. Hedy Lamarr. She had these black eyes just like Hedy Lamarr in the film
Algiers,
where Hedy just looks at the camera, you know, and the whole audience goes wild.
But I had these three dogs. One of Ragzina’s daughters belonged to someone who lived in the same underground dugout where I did. And then there was another dog. I would go strolling up and down the Bering seashore with these three dogs and this caribou. And I always took apples. They all loved apples, and the dogs would do this little dance. I’d make them stand on their hind legs and turn around. The caribou stood on her hind legs and turned around to get the piece of apple. Then she was growing and growing, and one day—I’ll never forget this—the dogs wouldn’t dance. They just looked at this caribou who’d gotten a little bit bigger, and they said, “That is not a dog. What is it?” All three of them. They wanted the apple, but they said, “What’s that?”
Then when her horns came out, they were covered with velvet. As the horns grow, the velvet itches them in some way. They just want to go and rub their horns and get rid of that velvet. So I would scratch her horns, and those dogs would sit in a row in the underground and they would just watch me as I scratched her horns.
She stayed, I think, eighteen months. I found her in early spring. The next spring the caribou herd came down from the mountains to eat some of the fern tops that grew along the low part. They loved those fern tops. She looked out of the little door that I had opened in this dugout and said, “Oh, my God, Daddy, what are those awful things coming down the mountain?” And I said, “It’s all right, they’re okay, they’re okay. Those are car-re-bous, car-re-bous. You’ll like them.” And she said, “Oh, I’m afraid. I’m scared.” And I said, “Well, come on back in.” Then she came back in and had her Fig Newtons.
She stayed on milk for a long time. But after she started to need something solid, I had to go and dig under the snow to get fern tops to feed her. I tried bread dipped in milk, and she would spit. Then I started digging in the snow for the little sprouting fern tops in the tundra. And then one day I was sitting eating a bowl of Fig Newtons in a very bored fashion. The PX only had Kleenex, aspirin, shelf upon shelf of quart containers of black pepper, and three million cases of Fig Newtons. So I was sitting rather bored with a Fig Newton and she came up and said, “What’s that? Oh, my God, it smells good.” And I said, “Do you want to try it?” And she would go through a case in like a day. Saved from snow digging. I thought: Nabisco forever.
But when the caribou herd came down the next time, in the fall, she said, “Daddy, who are those gorgeous things going past?” And she ran off with them. Then a strange and wonderful thing happened. The night before I was going to leave, I heard this bang, bang, and this voice: she had come to say good-bye. She came down alone. She knew I was going. How can you explain it?
*
When I was coming back, the big thing was smuggling my precious dog into the United States. The day after that first atom bomb, I knew that things were going to change. So I started training Ragzina to sit on my shoulders perfectly still as a fur piece. I also trained her to stay in a barracks bag with just her nose in an airhole. So when we left up there, I had ripped the fur collar off my parka and I wore this gray-and-white curly fur onto the ship. We were two hours loading, and that girl didn’t move. She was with me. I was with her. She knew how to stay right by me. Then we got in, I put her down, gave her a towel to piss on, and fed her. And I would walk her on the deck at night. Keep her in my stateroom in the day. Then I had this empty barracks bag with an empty cardboard box in it and these airholes. And I’d open the bag up for two hours unloading at Seattle. I got her right to that army camp. The next day I had a pass into Seattle. Got her straight to a vet and I said, “I want you to build her a little wooden cage. Ship her to Mobile, Alabama.” I hated the idea of shipping her, but I’d worn this long woolen undershirt all those seven days coming back so that her cage would stink of me. Aimee King met her at the train station. And I was reunited some two months later. Boy, did that dog wiggle.
I left her with this childless English couple because I couldn’t take her to New York. They were friends of the de Celles, and this woman said, “I never saw anything so adorable in my entire life.” And Ragzina took to them right away. I said, “Don’t tell me anything about her. I don’t want to hear anything about her. I want her to be happy, and I want you all to be happy.” So I never heard anymore about her. But, oh, God, for a year I missed that beast.
*
I was a week in Seattle being debriefed. And I had been in hospital at the very end with a wool rash. I had been wearing thick woolen drawers next to my skin for three years, and having never had wool next to my skin, I finally just had this pink rash all over. So I was in this mud pack in a hospital for a week to get rid of that. Then I was sent to San Diego to be released from the forces. You have to fill out three million forms to get out. The minute I got out, I took that khaki uniform down to the Pacific Ocean and threw it in. Got into seersuckers and fled to Los Angeles. Well, I got off the train and looked around at Los Angeles and an hour later jumped back on the train for San Francisco. Got off the train in San Francisco and thought, Wow, I’m home. I could smell something French and something Spanish, just like Mobile and New Orleans. I was at home. There were vibrations. I went to the opera, and Ruth St. Denis, an old dancer, was then seventysomething and still dancing. Couldn’t bend her ankles at all, so she did everything with her hands and floating scarves. She was sensational. And I would just lie in bed. That’s when I was adjusting to civilian life.
I already had a job in New York because I had ordered books before the war from the Chaucer Head Book Shop, which was owned by an Englishman and was in the East Fifties. When Mr. Gayfer was my guardian, he had given me so much that I could spend, and I had an account with E. Heffer & Company in Cambridge, England, and an account at Chaucer Head in New York. It was like $5 a month or so at each place. And I would save up until I could get a $15 book. That was extravagant in those days. Chaucer Head was old and rare books, a few new books. And I corresponded with this guy. Then I didn’t correspond during the war, but I think toward the last year of the war I was ordering books and corresponding. I had this nice letter from a secretary there saying, “Well, what are your plans for after the War? We have all your letters and see how you love books and what you have to say about them. And we are going to need a couple of new clerks, we’ve moved to Fifth Avenue. Would you like to come to work here after the War?” I wrote back and said, “Yeah, I’m going to be in New York, I guess.” I had no plans. I had no plans at all. I was just thinking, Well, I do want to go to Bayou La Batre and have fried oysters. So I stayed a couple of months in Mobile, saw everybody and had some good parties, and then left for New York.
Part Three
New York
The Break-Your-Balls-and-All-for-the-Dollar World
When I first moved to New York, I took only the bare essentials: my Remington typewriter, my stuffed monkey in a bell jar, and a box of gold paper stars to sprinkle on the stairways of my apartment building. The place was gray walls with that sense of grime. I couldn’t stand it. After I got there I found some place downtown where you could buy stuff for window displays, so I just bought bales of gold stars. Every two or three days I’d freshen them.
As for this monkey in a jar, I’ve had it in my life since before I was born. It was a christening gift that came two weeks before me, sent by my grandmother’s family, the Luenbergs, in Switzerland. A monkey in a little red uniform. I thought it was a bellhop costume, but I was told later it was a hussar outfit. His name is Coco. A lot of monkeys are named Coco. It’s a term of endearment, like cutie or dearie. Coco. It’s what the French call their children.
He was my Sunday toy. I played with him only on Sunday. In the South, everybody has a Sunday toy. And, of course, a Saturday night toy, too. His dueling scars are from my very first tooth. I bit him. He has no ears because I ate them. I loved him very much.
He went with me through the war; he was in my barracks bag. I thought, If he goes with me, nothing’s going to happen. And bless his heart, he is my oracle. He answers anything that can be answered with a yes or a no. If it requires gradations or definitions, he just looks into space. Whenever I have serious things to ask myself—should I or shouldn’t I?—I always ask him for a yes or no. Like should I really clean this house out? You know. And if you have a monkey, it attracts other monkeys. Just as if you have a cat, it attracts cats.
Later, when I was going to go to Paris, Aimee King of the Children’s Theater, who also dressed queens and kings for the Carnival and did the greatest of the masquerade costumes, said, “You can’t take that monkey to Europe in that shabby costume with his ears gone.” She said, “I’ll dress him.”