We Are Still Married (32 page)

Sunday morning I borrowed a bicycle and rode around the battlefield, a pleasant ten-mile circuit along shady roads. Hot dry weather, as it was in July 1863, and along the Emmitsburg Pike south of town, fields of wheat and oats stood in the mile-wide valley between the long low ridges where the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia faced each other on the third day of the battle, July 3. The first day's fighting was wild and sudden and scattered west and north of Gettysburg; the second was intense and murderous and located at the Union flanks on Culp's Hill and around Little Round Top, The Wheatfield, The Peach Orchard, and Devil's Den, where men in close quarters battered each other to death by the thousands; but it is the third day, when the lines had been drawn, that is clearest in the imagination. At three o'clock that afternoon, about thirteen thousand Southern men came out of the trees on Seminary Ridge and marched through the fields straight into a Northern artillery barrage and up the slope against Northerners drawn up in a superb defensive position along Cemetery Ridge. The slaughter lasted a half-hour, and two-thirds of the men who left Seminary Ridge did not return.

This half-hour is so vivid to anyone who has read accounts of it that, as you bike up through the red brick Lutheran campus and along Seminary Ridge, cruising in low gear through McMillan Woods, where Pettigrew's Brigade of North Carolinians waited, you can hear them rustle in the weeds in the ditch where they lie listening. Of the brigade, some two thousand arrived on July 1 and about six hundred marched away in the middle of the night, July 4, their cause lost. “To the eternal glory of the North Carolina soldiers who on this battlefield displayed heroism unsurpassed, sacrificing all in support of their cause. Their valorous deeds will be enshrined in the hearts of men long after these transient memorials have crumbled into dust,” reads the inscription on a nearby monument. In a tree overhead, a mockingbird went through its entire routine of six or seven songs. I rode on, to the figure of Robert E. Lee on his horse looking east watching his men die in the sun. The sculpture has been given a protective coating against acid rain that makes it look like dark-brown plastic, the color of a toy man on a horse. I dismounted and walked the bike out beyond the tree line and up to the first stand of wheat.

It seems dumb to be so caught up in a battle that ended more than a century ago and that you don't even begin to understand. You hear them whisper as they edge forward, gray-butternut figures crouching in the woods, and hear skittish horses nicker and whinny at the whump of distant cannon, but it's dumb if you can't imagine why they would fight this battle, which I can't. The wheatfield was fresh and untrampled. The silence was like the terrible stillness that, according to most accounts, fell over the field just before Pickett's Charge began—a wall of silence like a dam about to burst open, then the flood of Confederates marching double-time across the mile and up toward the stone wall in the distance, cheering, yelling, the flags, and then the storm of fire. Now it is so quiet on the losers' side of the battlefield that you can't imagine what made them mad. The phrase “states' rights” means no more to me than the phrase “warm boot. ”

I walked the bike up the road toward Little Round Top, the crucial hill where a brigade of Maine men held off Longstreet's South Carolinians and Georgians and saved the Union flank. It was a formidable position to attack, impossible even, and as I walked up, the boulders looming above, I could barely imagine the sort of rage that might impel a man to lead such a charge. I tried to imagine. I made a speech to myself, “You SOBs, hide in the rocks, we're coming to haul you out. Bastards. Shoot you, stab you, cut your throat, pound your head open with a rock, or whatever it takes. This was a good country until you decided you could do what you damn please, when you please, and to whom, chop off people's rights and go to make every poor sinner be exactly like you—you do that, you kill what's beautiful in this country. A century from now, if you win, which you likely will, nobody in this country will feel like they are part of anything. Thanks to you, asshole. Everybody'll be loose as gravel and nobody'll be free. Nobody'll even care which state they're from and it won't matter, everywhere will be one paved paradise. Well, I don't care to live in your country and I don't want you to either. Let's die.” I swore a little more for flavor as I reached the top of the rise, the woods and sunny meadow where thousands perished in an afternoon, and climbed on the bike and rode north, toward the crowds and the monuments.

A
POSTCARD TAKES ABOUT FIFTY WORDS gracefully, which is how to write one. A few sweet strokes in a flowing hand—pink roses, black-face sheep in a wet meadow, the sea, the Swedish coast—your friend in Washington gets the idea. She doesn't need your itinerary to know that you remember her.

 

Fifty words is a strict form but if you write tiny and sneak over into the address side to squeeze in a hundred, the grace is gone and the result is not a poem but notes for a letter you don't have time to write, which will make her feel cheated.

 

So many persons traveling to a strange land are inclined to see its life so clearly, its essential national character, they could write a book about it as other foreign correspondents have done (“highly humorous ... definitely a must”), but fifty words is a better length for what you really know.

 

Fifty words and a picture. Say you are in Scotland, the picture is of your hotel, a stone pile looking across the woods of Druimindarroch to Loch Nan Uamh near the village of Arisaig. You've never seen this country. For the past year you've worked like a prisoner in the mines. Write.

 

Scotland is the most beautiful country in the world and I am drinking coffee in the library of what once was the manor of people who inherited everything and eventually lost it. Thus it became a hotel. I'm with English people whose correctness is overpowering. What wild good luck to be here. And to be an American! I'm so happy, bubba.

 

In the Highlands, many one-lane roads which widen at curves and hills—a driving thrill, especially when following a native who drives like hell—you stick close to him, like the second car of the roller-coaster, but lose your nerve. Sixty mph down a one-lane winding road. I prefer a career.

 

The arrogance of Americans who, without so much as a “mi scusi” or
“bitte”
or “
s'il vous plait,”
words that a child could learn easily, walk up to a stranger and say, “Say, where's the museum?” as if English and rudeness rule the world, never ceases to amaze. You hear the accent and sink under the table.

 

Woke up at six, dark. Switzerland. Alps. Raining. Lights of villages high in the sky. Too dark to see much so snoozed awhile. Woke up in sunny Italy. Field after field of corn, like Iowa in August. Mamas, papas, grammas, grampas, little babies. Skinny trees above the whitewashed houses.

 

Arrived in Venice. A pipe had burst at the hotel and we were sent to another not as good. Should you spend time arguing for a refund? Went to San Marco, on which the doges overspent. A cash register in the sanctuary: five hundred lire to see the gold altar. Now we understand the Reformation.

 

On the train to Vienna, she, having composed the sentences carefully from old memory of intermediate German, asked the old couple if the train went to Vienna.
“Ja, ja!”
Did we need to change trains?
“Nein.”
Later she successfully ordered dinner and registered at the hotel.
Mein wunder-companion.

 

People take me for an American tourist and stare at me, maybe because I walk slow and stare at them, so today I walked like a bat out of hell along the Ringstrasse, past the Hofburg Palace to Stephans Platz and back, and if anyone stared, I didn't notice. Didn't see much of Vienna but felt much better.

 

One week in a steady drizzle of German and now I am starting to lose my grip on English, I think. Don't know what to write. How are you? Are the Twins going to be in the World Series?

 

You get to Mozart's apartment through the back door of a restaurant. Kitchen smells, yelling, like at Burger King. The room where he wrote Figaro is bare, as if he moved out this morning. It's a nice apartment. His grave at the cemetery is not marked, its whereabouts being unknown. Mozart our brother.

 

Copenhagen is raining and all the Danes seem unperturbed. A calm humorous people. Kids are the same as anywhere, wild, and nobody hits them. Men wear pastels, especially turquoise. Narrow streets, no cars, little shops, and in the old square a fruit stand and an old woman with flowers yelling, “WŌSA FOR TEW-VA!”

 

Sunbathing yesterday. A fine woman took off her shirt, jeans, pants, nearby, and lay on her belly, then turned over. Often she sat up to apply oil. Today my back is burned bright red (as St. Paul warns) from my lying and looking at her so long but who could ignore such beauty and
so generous.

I
T OCCURRED TO ME the other day that I could use a better typewriter, one with some memory capacity but not too much, so I walked down to 40th Street to an office-machine shop, and found a typewriter with memory and with a sheet of white paper in it on which a person or persons had typed: “fadksjdfjkdsjfkjkfjdkjfkjskdjfkaj-kdfklsjdk catcatacatcatdogdogsdogdogdogdoguiuwthethethethethethetheth the birdsthe cats the birds and cats and dogs and flowers sall day long we played int he field and had fun in the sun with our friends and relatives. WE went to the beach and the park and played ball and swam. IWe ate hot dogs and hambarugers aldjksjfjsadhfjsdjfkjsdkfwewewewewewewewe quququququququququququququ-ququmamamamamamamamamamamamamamama ususususususus 34343434343434343434”

The line about “fun in the sun with our friends and relatives” struck me as exactly the experience I missed out on this summer. I didn't play in the field or go to the beach, didn't play ball or swim, didn't eat many hot dogs or hambarugers either. For the most part I sat here in my office at The Fadksjdfjkdsjfkjkfjd and went ququ, and then I traveled for a couple weeks in Denmark and went a little ququ there, too. I don't eat hambarugers in foreign countries, because I'm proud to be an unugly American who eats what the natives do, fried eel or calves' brains, lambs' eyeballs with rancid yak butter, whatever's on the menu, and say thank you. I am a good citizen, just as my mamamamamamamamamama taught me to be. I speak softly and know how to apologize and express gratitude in many languages, especially Danish.
Undskyld
is to say “I'm sorry,” which Danes hardly ever say, but they say thank you incessantly, in a dozen variations, including:
tak, mange tak, tusind tak, tak fordi du vil se os, tak for sidst, tak for mad, and tak for aften,
which mean, respectively, “thanks,” “many thanks,” “a thousand thanks,” “thanks for seeing us,” “thanks for the last time,” “thanks for the meal,” and “thanks for the evening.” I use them often. I try to be a model American. I walk politely around Skagen, around Svendborg and Roskilde and through Copenhagen, dressed in muted colors, carrying no camera, wearing no Mets cap, admiring cathedrals and palaces, public gardens, ordinary Danish streets, Danish buses, billboards, plumbing, everything Danish, and when people walk up to me and say,
“Aldjksjfjsadhfjsdjfkjsdkfwewewewewe,”
I answer (in Danish), “I am sorry. I am an American. I do not understand you.” This becomes tiring after a while. After three weeks of good international citizenship as a bird in a world of cats and dogs, weakly chirping
thethethethethethetheth,
I am exhausted, done in, tuckered out, fed up, run down, and I long for that summer paradise described on the typewriter with memory. I'd like nothing better than to plop down on American sand with friends and relatives under the American sun that rhymes with “fun,” pop a cold one, play ball, get in the swim, and chow down on a big hambaruger with raw onion, bright-yellow American mustard, in a soft white bun, and holler, “How about those Mets?” to someone who'd answer, “Hey!” Time to come home.

My first hot dogs of the summer, in fact, were two I ate with my son on Saturday afternoon of Labor Day weekend, in Flushing Meadows Park at the U.S. Open tennis tournament, across the IRT tracks from Shea Stadium, where the Mets were entertaining the Dodgers. Big-league tennis is dominated these days by Czechs, Swedes, and Germans (in two of whose languages I can say “Thank you” and “Excuse me”), and we sat in the sun, in the cheap seats at the top of the stadium, and watched Steffi Graf, the nineteen-year-old West German phenom, dispose of a Frenchwoman in two fast sets, 6-0, 6-1. My son is nineteen, too, an aspiring rock-'n-roll guitarist. He writes songs and records them and mixes them and intends to become a fine artist. When I was nineteen or so, I used to put on a Buddy Holly record and pick up a tennis racket and pretend it was a guitar and I was him.

Graf was so much fun to watch, later we waited in line at Court 16 and crammed into the tiny grandstand there and sat through two men's matches so we could watch her doubles match (with partner Gabriela Sabatini of Argentina) and, when a tall horse-faced man announced that it had been switched to the stadium (and a thousand of us Grafites groaned), we raced over there and snuck down past an usher into a box seat for a close look. Graf is a big broad-shouldered long-legged girl with a long blond ponytail who had won the Australian and French Opens and Wimbledon earlier that year and, a few days later, would win the Open to complete a Grand Slam, a feat accomplished only four times before, but you didn't need to know that to see what a happy, ferocious athlete she is. She and her ponytail bounce around the baseline, then she hops a little three-step as she receives service and takes an open stance and whacks the ball so hard that her follow-through takes her right off her feet. She leaves the ground when she serves and on most of her forehand shots and her overhead smashes. When she cocked her arm for a smash, the look on her face was homicidal, and she went a foot in the air as she put the ball away.