Some Faces in the Crowd (17 page)

When we went downstairs, we found almost as many presents as on other Christmas mornings. There was a nice fire engine from Uncle Norman, a cowboy suit from Aunt Ruth, a Meccano set from Uncle Adolph, something, in fact, from every one of Santa Claus’s helpers. No, it wasn’t the presents that made this Christmas seem so different, it was how quiet everything was. Pierce-Arrows and Packards and Cadillacs didn’t keep stopping by all day long with new presents for us. And none of the people like Norman and Ruth and Uncle Edgar, the famous director, and Aunt Betty, the rising ingénue, and Uncle Dick, the young star, and the scenario writer, Uncle Bill, none of them dropped in at all. James the butler was gone, too. For the first Christmas since I could remember, we had Father all to ourselves. Even the phone was quiet for a change. Except for a couple of real relatives, the only one who showed up at all was Clara. She came in around supper time with an old man whose hair was yellow at the temples and gray on top. Her face was very red and when she picked me up to kiss me, her breath reminded me of the Christmas before, only stronger. My father poured her and her friend the foamy yellow drink I wasn’t allowed to have.

She held up her drink and said, “Merry Christmas, Sol. And may next Christmas be even merrier.”

My father’s voice sounded kind of funny, not laughing as he usually did. “Thanks, Clara,” he said. “You’re a pal.”

“Nerts,” Clara said. “Just because I don’t wanna be a fair-weather friend like some of these other Hollywood bas—”

“Shhh, the children,” my mother reminded her.

“Oh hell, I’m sorry,” Clara said. “But anyway, you know what I mean.”

My mother looked from us to Clara and back to us again. “Chris, Sandra,” she said. “Why don’t you take your toys up to your own room and play? We’ll be up later.”

In three trips I carried up to my room all the important presents. I also took up a box full of cards that had been attached to the presents. As a bit of holiday homework, our penmanship teacher Miss Whitehead had suggested that we separate all Christmas-card signatures into those of Spencerian grace and those of cramp-fingered illegibility. I played with my Meccano set for a while, I practiced twirling my lasso and I made believe Sandra was an Indian, captured her and tied her to the bedstead as my hero Art Acord did in the movies. I captured Sandra three or four times and then I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I spread all the Christmas cards out on the floor and began sorting them just as Miss Whitehead had asked.

I sorted half a dozen, all quite definitely non-Spencerian, but it wasn’t until I had sorted ten or twelve that I began to notice something funny. It was all the same handwriting. Then I came to a card of my father’s. I was just beginning to learn how to read handwriting, and I wasn’t very good at it yet, but I could recognize the three little bunched-together letters that spelled
Dad.
I held my father’s card close to my eyes and compared it with the one from Uncle Norman. It was the same handwriting. Then I compared them with the one from Uncle Adolph. All the same handwriting. Then I picked up one of Sandra’s cards, from Aunt Ruth, and held that one up against my father’s. I couldn’t understand it. My father seemed to have written them all.

I didn’t say anything to Sandra about this, or to the nurse when she gave us our supper and put us to bed. But when my mother came in to kiss me good night I asked her why my father’s handwriting was on all the cards. My mother turned on the light and sat on the edge of the bed.

“You don’t really believe in Santa Claus any more, do you?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Fred and Clyde told me all about it at school.”

“Then I don’t think it will hurt you to know the rest,” my mother said. “Sooner or later you will have to know these things.”

Then she told me what had happened. Between last Christmas and this one, my father had lost his job. He was trying to start his own company now. Lots of stars and directors had promised to go with him. But when the time had come to make good on their promises, they had backed out. Though I didn’t fully understand it at the time, even in the simplified way my mother tried to explain it, I would say now that for most of those people the security of a major-company payroll had outweighed an adventure on Poverty Row—the name for the group of little studios where the independent producers struggled to survive.

So this had been a lean year for my father. We had sold one of the cars, let the butler go, and lived on a budget. As Christmas approached, Mother had cut our presents to a minimum.

“Anyway, the children will be taken care of,” my father said. “The old gang will see to that.” The afternoon of Christmas Eve my father had had a business appointment, to see a banker about more financing for his program of pictures. When he came home, Sandra and I had just gone to bed, and Mother was arranging the presents around the tree. There weren’t many presents to arrange, just the few they themselves had bought. There were no presents at all from my so-called aunts and uncles.

“My pals,” Father said. “My admirers. My loyal employees.”

Even though he had the intelligence to understand why these people had always sent us those expensive presents, his vanity, or perhaps I can call it his good nature, had led him to believe they did it because they liked him and because they genuinely were fond of Sandra and me.

“I’m afraid the kids will wonder what happened to all those Santa Claus’s helpers,” my mother said.

“Wait a minute,” my father said. “I’ve got an idea. Those bastards are going to be Santa Claus’s helpers whether they know it or not.”

Then he had rushed out to a toy store on Hollywood Boulevard and bought a gift for every one of the aunts and uncles who were so conspicuously absent.

I remember, when my mother finished explaining, how I bawled. I don’t know whether it was out of belated gratitude to my old man or whether I was feeling sorry for myself because all those famous people didn’t like me as much as I thought they did. Maybe I was only crying because that first, wonderful and ridiculous part of childhood was over. From now on I would have to face a world in which there was not only no Santa Claus, but very, very few on-the-level Santa Claus’s helpers.

T
HOSE FIRST DAYS OF
naval training, no one, to use a landlubber phrase, could see the trees for the forest. The only impression any of us had was of a new, overwhelming environment. I don’t think any of us would have even remembered each other’s faces if we had left there after forty-eight hours. It was something like being run down by an eight-wheel truck. You may get a quick look at the front end of the truck, but you’re darned if you could ever recognize the face of the driver.

Except for a few Chiefs temporarily elevated to the level of Navy privilege and responsibility (as our new commission status was described to us), we were all erstwhile civilians who did not know enough to differentiate between “parade rest” and “at ease,” or to translate three bells into our old Eastern Standard Time, or to explain the different functions of a stream anchor and a boat anchor. For nearly all of us those first hours were like the moment after the plunge from the high board into the pool when the diver is still going down, before he can begin to open his eyes and orient himself toward the surface. Unfamiliar subjects and unfamiliar systems of behavior were being thrown at us so fast that we had no chance to bring our surroundings into focus. We were still going down, but somehow, even in that dark confusion, we managed to respond to bells, bugles, commands and orders (we had just been told the distinction), for man, like his brother, the white rat, is highly susceptible to habit-suggestion.

Among us were men who turned out to be clever, men who proved slow, men who were quick to laugh, men who were sullen, men who had been college professors in sheltered academic communities and were shy among worldly men, and men who had been whiskey salesmen and knew how to make a Pullman washroom roar with laughter. But in the haze of strangeness that enveloped us those first days, we were all indistinguishable parts of one great beast that hit the deck at reveille, performed its calisthenics, went to chow, answered muster, attended class, formed for drill, marched, studied, fed, grew weary, shed its uniform, polished its shoes, doused its face and fell into its sack at taps.

It was procedure at the school, however, for our company to be commanded by a student officer from our own ranks. As Lieutenant Murdock, the young staff officer in charge of our metamorphosis informed us of this, there was a not quite imperceptible flinching back, the faceless mass not yet ready to assume responsibility, leadership, or even individual personalities. After all, we were not men. We were zombies in khaki. It seemed an affront to our conglomerate anonymity to attempt to single one of us out.

“We’ll alternate the job of Company Commander so that as many men as possible will have an opportunity to gain the experience,” the staff officer said. “All right, now, who wants to lead off? Anybody here with previous military experience?”

There was another uneasy silence, and although all of us were staring straight ahead, we gave the impression of dropping our eyes and lowering our heads to avoid being seen.

The young staff officer gave a small smile of superiority that was meant to be sympathetic. “Come on now, don’t be shy. You’ll probably all have to do it sooner or later.”

But we were not to be coaxed out from the protective herd.

“No previous military experience at all?”

Then, in the silence, a voice from somewhere in the rear spoke up. “I’ve had previous military experience, sir.”

Irresistibly, all our heads turned. Every one of us had to mark for himself this first one to disassociate himself from the group.

“All right, eyes front,” the staff officer snapped. “You men are still at attention.” Then he turned to the man who had answered his question, and told him to come front and center.

Even in our stiffened attitudes of attention, I could feel all of us in the ranks leaning slightly forward in our eagerness to see the volunteer. A short, wiry fellow, with a face his mother must call alert but which impressed us as cocky, he stepped out smartly, executed his flank turn with clean movements and, when he had come within proper distance of the staff officer, threw him a salute with plenty of snap (we were supersensitive to things like this because we were just then learning how much more difficult proper saluting was than it looked at first glance). While he held his salute nicely until the staff officer returned it, I recognized this eager beaver as the little fellow who had the upper bunk right next to mine in the barracks.

“Your name, sir?”

“Wessel, sir.”

“How much military training have you had, Wessel?”

“Naval ROTC in high school, sir.”

Someone down the line snorted. The staff officer addressed us soberly. “I am going to appoint Mr. Wessel your first Student Commander. He will be in exactly the same authority here that I have been since you reported. You understand, men, the fact that he is a Student Officer like yourself in no way limits his authority for the period of his command. Any act of disrespect or disobedience toward him will be considered an act of insubordination under the Articles of War.” He turned to Wessel and said officially, “Mr. Wessel, assume command.”

Wessel saluted again, very salty, and faced us solemnly. I don’t know if all of us did, but I think most of us could sense what was coming. By some law of compensation, men who are deprived of the natural means of self-expression and exchange of opinion can become so sensitized to each other that one can feel little silent waves of approval or apprehension or resentment running through an entire company. What we felt now had no approval in it. Something in the way Wessel looked, in the way he
changed
when he stepped forward to assume command, gave us a hint of what we were in for.

The bark of Wessel’s commands was keyed to a self-conscious stridency as he dressed us off, brought us back to attention and then put us “at ease.” Then he stepped forward and addressed us with exactly that tone of condescension that often passes for a confidential man-to-man talk from a ranking military leader to his men.

“Men,” he began, “I couldn’t help noticing a few moments ago that when I told Lieutenant Murdock I had had naval ROTC training, one of you laughed.” He paused, for emphasis, and though I think every one of us in the ranks wanted to laugh again, we all waited dumbly with poker faces. “Maybe none of you realize that if you had all been in the naval ROTC, if our country had been more fully prepared, Pearl Harbor would never have happened. So when you laugh at naval ROTC you’re casting aspersions on the Navy itself, and our flag.”

If it had been a movie, a great Old Glory in technicolor would have unfurled majestically behind Wessel at this moment. Or perhaps phantom images of Roosevelt, Marshall and King would have grouped around him. But this was just Wessel all alone, a small figure against the high walls and towers of the fort. Lieutenant Murdock was looking on, but there was no way of telling from his young, carefully indoctrinated face which side he was on. In the silence, if there is any such thing as a hate-detector, our rising resentment would have sent it on past the danger point. But Wessel was too insulated by sudden power to feel the hate waves that rose from us and curled around him.

“Now I would like to ask that man who laughed to please step forward,” he persisted.

No one moved. We all just stood there hating Wessel.

“Mr. Wessel,” Lieutenant Murdock said, “if you wish to call a man out from the ranks officially, I suggest you bring your company to attention and give him the command, one step forward, march.”

Now we knew where Lieutenant Murdock stood, and we regarded him as a human being for the first time since we had come to the fort. “Thank you, sir,” Wessel said, and saluted. He was a little flustered. He gave the command, “Attention” and about half the company snapped to attention, but those of us who remembered what we had been taught the day before, that you don’t have to respond to a command unless it is given properly, remained smugly ‘at ease.’
“Company,
attention,” Wessel quickly corrected himself, and he glared at us for capitalizing on his mistake. He had not been out there in front of us more than two minutes, but that had been time enough for a declaration of war on both sides. We had sighted each other and were moving forward to engage each other, as we were learning to say.