Closing Time (42 page)

Yossarian was touched by her candor. The photograph was of a kind taken routinely by the squadron public relations officer, showing members of a crew waiting at a plane before takeoff. In this one he saw himself standing off in the background between the figures in focus and the B-25 bomber. In the foreground were the three enlisted men for that day, seated without evidence of concern on unfused thousand-pound bombs on the ground as they waited to board and start up. And Yossarian, looking as slender and boyish as the others, in parachute harness and his billed, rakish officer's cap, had merely turned to look on. The chaplain had lettered the names of each man there. The name Yossarian was largest. Here again were Samuel Singer, William Knight, and Howard Snowden, all sergeants.

"One of these young men was killed later on," said Mrs. Tappman. "I believe it was this one. Samuel Singer."

"No, Mrs. Tappman. It was Howard Snowden."

"Are you sure?"

"I was with him again on that one too."

"You all look so young. I thought you might still look the same when I was waiting for you at the airport."

"We were young, Mrs. Tappman."

"Too young to be killed."

"I thought so too."

"Albert spoke at his funeral."

"I was there."

"It was very hard for him, he said. He didn't know why. And he almost ran out of words. Do you think they will set him free soon and let him come back home?" Karen Tappman watched Yossarian shrug. "He hasn't done anything wrong. It must be hard for him now. For me too. The woman across the street is a widow and we play bridge together evenings. I suppose I might have to learn to live like a widow sooner or later. But I don't see why I should have to do it now."

"There really is some concern for his health."

"Mr. Yossarian," she answered disapprovingly, in an abrupt change of mood. "My husband is now past seventy. If he's going to be ill, can't he be ill here?"

"I have to agree."

"But I suppose they know what they're doing."

"I never, never could agree with that one. But they're also afraid he might explode."

She missed the point. "Albert doesn't have a temper. He never did."

Neither could think of any new effort to make, what with a local police force recording him as a missing person, a department of the federal government that professed no knowledge of him, another department that brought cash and regards every fifteen days, and a third department that insisted he had been called back into the army reserves.

"They're all rather fishy, aren't they?" he observed.

"Why is that?" she asked.

The newspapers, two senators, a congressman, and the White House were all not impressed. In the latest version of the chaplain's Freedom of Information file, Yossarian had witnessed changes: everything on him now had been blacked out but the words
a, an
, and
the
. There was no Social Security number and there remained in the file only a copy of a scrawled personal letter from a serviceman dating back to August 1944, in which all but the salutation "Dear Mary" had been blacked out and, at the bottom, the message from the censor, who'd been Chaplain Tappman: "I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army." Yossarian thought the handwriting was his own, but could not remember having written it. He said nothing to Karen Tappman, for he did not want to risk upsetting her about a woman in the chaplain's past with the name Mary.

In the psychological profile constructed by the FBI, the chaplain lit the model of that kind of preacher who runs off with another woman, and the empirical evidence was preponderant that the woman he had run off with was the organist in his church.

Mrs. Tappman was not convinced, for there had been no church organist and her husband had been without church or congregation since his retirement.

Yossarian waited almost until they had finished eating before he gave her the new piece of information he had gained from Gaffney in a telephone call from the plane over Lake Michigan. They dined early at her request and were able to save three dollars on the early bird specials. This was new to Yossarian. They enjoyed an additional discount as senior citizens and did not have to show ID cards. This was new too. He ordered dessert only because she did first.

"I don't want to alarm you, Mrs. Tappman," he said, when they were finishing, "but they are also speculating it might be"- the word did not come easily to him-"a miracle."

"A miracle? Why should it alarm me?"

"It would alarm some people."

"Then maybe it should. Who will decide?"

"We will never know."

"But they must know what they're doing."

"I would not go that far."

"They have a right to keep him, don't they?"

"No, they don't have the right."

"Then why can't we do anything?"

"We don't have the right."

"I don't understand."

"Mrs. Tappman, people with force have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing. That's the catch Albert and I found out about in the army. It's what's happening now."

"Then there's not much hope, is there?"

"We can hope for the miracle that they do decide it's a miracle. Then they might have to let him go. There's also the chance they might call it"-he was hesitant again-"a natural evolutionary mutation."

"For making heavy water? My Albert?"

"The problem with the miracle theory is another psychological profile. It's almost always a woman now, in a warm climate. A woman, if you'll pardon me, with full breasts. Your husband just doesn't fit the mold."

"Is that so?" The words were a blunt retort delivered with cold dignity. "Mr. Yossarian," she continued, with a look of belligerent assurance on her sharp face, "I am now going to tell you something we have never disclosed to anybody, not even our children. My husband has already been witness to a miracle. A vision. Yes. It came to him in the army, this vision, to restore his faith at the very moment when he was about to declare as a public confession that: he had given it up, that he no longer could believe. So there."

After a moment during which he feared he had angered her, Yossarian took heart from this show of fighting spirit. "Why would he not want to tell anybody?"

"It was given just to him, and not for notoriety."

"May I pass that information on?"

"It was at that funeral in Pianosa," she related, "at the burial of that young Samuel Singer we spoke of before."

"It was not Singer, Mrs. Tappman. It was Snowden."

"I'm sure he said Singer."

"It makes no difference, but I gave him first aid. Please go on."

"Yes, he was conducting this Singer's funeral service and felt himself running out of words. That's just how he describes it. And then he looked up toward the heavens to confess and resign his office, to renounce right there any belief in God, or religion, or justice, or morality, or mercy, and then, as he was about to do it, with those other officers and enlisted men looking on, he was granted his sign. It was a vision, the image of a man. And he was sitting in a tree. Just outside the cemetery, with a grieving face, watching the funeral with very sad eyes, and he had those eyes fixed on my husband."

"Mrs. Tappman," said Yossarian, with a long sigh, and his heart was heavy, "That was me."

"In the tree?" She arched her brows in ridicule. He had seen such looks before on true believers, true believers in anything, but never a self-assurance more rooted. "It could not be," she informed him, with a certitude almost brutal. "Mr. Yossarian, the figure was unclothed."

With delicacy, he asked, "Your husband never told you how that might have come about?"

"How else could it come about, Mr. Yossarian? It was obviously an angel."

"With wings?"

"You're being sacrilegious now. He did not need wings, for a miracle. Why should an angel ever need wings? Mr. Yossarian, I want my husband back. I don't care about anyone else." She was beginning to cry.

"Mrs. Tappman, you have opened my eyes," said Yossarian, with pity and renewed fervor. He had learned from a lifetime of skepticism that a conviction, even a naive conviction, was in the last analysis more nourishing than the wasteland of none. "I will try my best. In Washington I have a last resort, a man at the White House who owes me some favors."

"Please ask him. I want to know you're still trying."

"I will beg him, implore him. At least one time a day he has access to the President."

"To the little prick?"

It was still early when she dropped him at his motel.

Coming back from the bar after three double Scotches, he saw a red Toyota from New York in the lot, and a woman inside eating, and when he stopped to stare, she turned on the headlights and sped away, and he knew with a half-inebriated sniffle of laughter that he had to have been imagining the Toyota and her.

Lying in bed ingesting candy bars and peanuts and a canned Coca-Cola from the vending machine outside, he felt too wakeful for sleep and too sluggish for the meaningful work of fiction he had carried with him hopefully still one more time. The book was a paperback titled
Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories
and was by Thomas Mann. Lighter fiction was even heavier for him these days. Even his revered
New Yorker
seldom had power to rivet his attention. Celebrity gossip now was largely about people who were strangers, the Academy Awards were likely to go to films he did not know and to performers he had not seen or even heard of.

He missed Melissa but was glad he was there alone; or, as he tickled himself in elusive modification, he was glad he was alone, although he missed Melissa. He found a classical music station and was horrified to hear a German Bach choir begin the score from the American musical comedy
Carousel
. He jammed his middle finger hurling himself at the tuning dial. With the second station he was luckier: he came into a medley that brought him the children's chorus from
La Boheme
and next the children's chorus from
Carmen
. And after that, to the accompaniment of rising static from distant sheet lightning, there came the chorus of anvils he recognized from the German
Das Rheingold
, attending the descent of the gods into the bowels of the earth to steal gold from the dwarfs to pay to the giants who had built their glorious new home, Valhalla, under a contract from whose original terms they were already backing away. The giants had been promised the goddess conferring eternal youth; they had to settle for money. In doing business with the gods, Yossarian judged again, with eyes growing heavier, it was always smarter to collect up front.

As that chorus of anvils diminished into static, he heard faintly in the static an illogical musical pandemonium of primitive wild laughter ascend through the scales in tune and in key and then, nebulously, beneath a hissing layer of electrical interference, a very different, lonely, lovely, angelic wail of a children's chorus in striking polyphonic lament he believed he recognized and could not place. He remembered the novel by Thomas Mann about which he had once thought of writing and wondered in his fuzziness if he was losing his bearings and dreaming he was listening to the Leverkühn
Apocalypse
of which he had read. And in several more seconds that failing broadcast signal faded out too until there survived only in a primeval void of human silence the insistent sibilance of that simmering and irrepressible electrical interference.

He did dream that night in disjointed sleep that he was back in his high-rise apartment in New York and that the familiar red Toyota with the woman inside eating sugar buns was pulling back into the same spot in the parking area outside his motel room in Kenosha, on whose far border a paunchy, stocky, bearded middle-aged Jew who was a G-man trudged back and forth with moving lips and his head bowed. A lanky, conspicuous, orange-haired man in a seersucker suit looked on inoffensively from a corner, with twinkling flames in his eyes, holding an orange drink with a straw in a large plastic cup, while a darker man with a peculiarly Oriental cast to his features was observing all of them cannily, dressed fastidiously in a blue shirt, rust-colored tie, and a single-breasted fawn-colored herringbone jacket with a thin purple cross-pattern. Hiding slyly in the shadows was a shady man wearing a dark beret who smoked a cigarette without using his hands, which were deep in the pockets of a soiled raincoat that was unbuttoned and ready to be flashed open instantly for the man inside it to expose his hairy self in a lewd invitation to stare at the repellent sight of his underwear and his groin. Yossarian at the end of his dream had satisfying sex briefly with his second wife. Or was it his first? Or both? He came awake thinking of Melissa guiltily.

When he stepped outside for breakfast, the red Toyota with the New York license plates and the woman inside chewing food was parked there again. It pulled away when he stopped to stare, and he knew he had to be fantasizing. She could not be there.

24

Apocalypse

"And why not?" asked Jerry Gaffney, in the airport in Chicago. "With Milo's bomber and the chaplain's heavy water, and your two divorces, and Nurse Melissa MacIntosh and that Belgian patient, and that fling with that woman with a husband, you must know you're of interest to other people."

"From New York to Kenosha for just one day? She couldn't drive that fast, could she?"

"Sometimes we work in mysterious ways, John."

"She was in my dream, Jerry. And so were you."

"You can't blame us for that. Your dreams are still your own. Are you sure you were not imagining that?"

"My dream?"

"Yes."

"It's how I was able to recognize you, Gaffney. I knew I'd seen you before."

"I keep telling you that."

"When I was in the hospital last year. You were one of the guys looking in on me too, weren't you?"

"Not you, John. I was checking on employees who phoned in sick. One had a staphylococcus infection and the other salmonella food poisoning picked up-"