Lies My Mother Never Told Me (6 page)

We knew the story of the Bronze Star—not from him but from our mother. A soldier from his company had taken machine gun bullets to the stomach. He lay in plain view of the Japanese pillboxes, screaming, trying to hold in his intestines with his hands.
Two medics who'd tried to assist him had already been killed. My father, furious, ran from his position of safety, zigzagging like crazy until he reached the poor soldier and shot him up with the medics' morphine. For this, he'd been awarded the Bronze Star.

I found the scene in
The Thin Red Line
. It is not a private but Sergeant Welsh, our old pal Warden from
Eternity
in his new, crazier, meaner, drunker incarnation, who runs down to the screaming soldier. When Captain Stein tells Welsh he's going to recommend him for the Silver Star—a higher medal than the Bronze Star—Welsh replies, “If you say one word to thank me, I will punch you square in the nose. Right now, right here.”

Neither of the two biographies of my father that came out in the early eighties mention this Bronze Star—nor do any of his papers—though the medal rests in its original box in the James Jones archives at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin. My father wrote a sentence or two about it in
WWII
, saying it had been given to him randomly and arbitrarily. But when it had been offered, he'd taken it, not like his character Sergeant Welsh, who says Fuck You to the entire world.

 

When he was on Guadalcanal, my father killed a man in hand-to-hand combat. This scene is also in
The Thin Red Line
. In the novel, the calamity happens to the skinny, terrified Private Beade. It is the only documentation of the event in existence, as far as I know.

By the time my father's division, the Twenty-fifth Infantry, showed up on Guadalcanal, the U.S. Marines had already beaten the Japanese back and broken their supply lines. They were starving to death and dying of malaria by the thousands. But they still held on, hiding in bunkers and in the jungle, fighting on, unwilling to retreat, refusing to surrender. The starving Japanese soldier crept out of the jungle in his filthy fatigues and attacked my father while he was squatting to relieve himself. My
father was forced to kill the soldier by wrenching his bayoneted rifle from his hands and bashing him in the head and chest with the butt. They were both afraid to shoot the gun, which might draw more soldiers—Jap or Yank—lurking in the dense, almost impenetrable jungle.

My father found the soldier's wallet in his pocket, a small, slim, red false-leather wallet with a thin black-and-white photograph of a young Japanese woman holding a baby in her arms. I had seen the wallet once, perhaps ten years earlier in Paris, when in a mournful and fragile moment, he'd taken it out of its hiding place and sat at the dining room table, looking at it.

For the rest of my father's life, he was haunted by the killing of this Japanese soldier. After he was sent back to the States for surgery on some torn ligaments in his ankle, he told his superior officers he would not fight anymore. They threw him in the stockade. They thought he'd lost his mind.

So what happens to these soldiers, if they survive, when they go home? That is the subject of
Whistle
, the last book of James Jones's trilogy, which I did not read in its entirety until it was published, much later in the fall of my freshman year of college. That book is about the return to the States of his four main characters, wounded during the fighting in the New Georgia campaign.

While they all recover from their physical wounds, none of them is able to survive his experience of war, and his reentry into society.

 

I went off to Wesleyan on Labor Day weekend and realized, after talking to other students, that I knew very little about anything. I believed I'd gotten into Wesleyan because of who my father was, not because I deserved it. My dad had even written my college application essay. I'd sat next to his big leather office chair, engulfed in the smoke from his fat Cuban cigar, watching him type it out on his IBM Selectric II. He used the word
avocation
when describ
ing my interest in stage acting. “Do you know what that means?” No, I didn't know what that word meant. “Well you should. It means an interest outside of your main line of work. Like acting, for you.”

I timidly asked if it was okay for him to be doing this.

“Those goddamn New York millionaires probably hire people to do this shit for their kids. Why shouldn't I help you?”

But now he was gone. During my first few months of college, I felt like a person wandering around in the dark, fumbling for a light switch. I got plastered every night, but was up at eight in the morning to make my Russian language class at nine. Some weird fuel made up of rage and fear kept me going, and constantly on my guard.

As the orphaned child of a renowned doctor might search for answers in the pursuit of medicine, I was naturally drawn to literature and immediately registered for a course in twentieth-century literature. On the first day, a gentleman with a graying goatee and little glasses got up before the class of a hundred students and recited a poem:

By the fourth line, the professor's voice cracked. By the last line, a tear trickled down his face. “Yeats,” he managed to say. Wow, I thought. How many years had this man been teaching kids who couldn't care less? Teaching the same poems over and over again. And yet, they still brought tears to his eyes. I knew he was the teacher for me. The next day I went to visit him during
his office hours—Professor George Creeger, on the top floor of one of the old houses that made up the English Department.

I didn't see any reason to hold back, so I told him everything. I told him who my father was, and how I'd decided to stay home with him and go to public school in East Hampton rather than go away to prep school, because he was sick and I wanted to be near him. I explained that my first written language was French, that I'd gotten into Wesleyan because of my acting background but that I no longer had it in me to act, and that I didn't know how to write a literature paper, but if he'd show me, I'd do my best. He spent several hours with me, explaining the structure of a three-page paper. My first effort was on Hemingway's “Big Two-Hearted River.” He gave me a B+. On my next one, I got an A.

I found several such brilliant, kindhearted guides that year, and under their mentorship, I began to read in earnest. For an entire semester my sophomore year, I studied Tolstoy with my Russian language professor, Duffy White.

One evening in the library, lying in a big, square fauteuil with my feet up, I was reading the scene in
War and Peace
when Prince Andrej dies, and it was as if Tolstoy had reached out to me personally, across a continent, an ocean, and more than a century, and touched me on the shoulder. It was another light twinkling through the darkness.

During the 1812 battle of Borodino, Prince Andrej is wounded in the thigh, and an infection develops. He is taken in by the Ros-tovs and spends his last days surrounded by his beloved Natasha Rostova, her parents, his own sister Princess Marya, and his little son from his first marriage. Feverish and weak, Prince Andrej slowly begins to slip away from them.

He dreams he is lying in the room he is lying in, when the heavy double doors begin to open. Prince Andrej knows it is death trying to get in, and in the dream, in abject terror, he gets up and with all his will and might, attempts to push the doors
closed. He is unable to lock them, and after a last valiant effort, “It entered, and it was
death
, and Prince Andrew died.

“But at the instant he died, Prince Andrew remembered that he was asleep, and at the very instant he died, having made an effort, he awoke.”

But he awakens liberated from his body and his bodily concerns, and while he attempts to show interest in his family, he is simply going through the rituals required of him before his heart stops beating forever. He is released from his earthly cares, and feels only lightness, and an overwhelming love for all of humanity. He becomes a part of the greater firmament, and no longer feels anguish, fear, or pain.

I read the passage again, and remembered what my father had told us as he lay in his hospital bed after that terrible night, two days before he died. After I'd read the scene for a third time, and stopped the crying that had overwhelmed me, my first lucid thought was, How did Tolstoy do this? This Russian count who had about as much in common with me as an airplane had with a fly, had obviously lost someone and knew what it was to grieve; he had thought long and hard about it, and sometime between 1863 and 1866, he had written it down.

And I understood why my father had been so distant and vague his last few days. He had finally been at peace, and it was not that he didn't care or love us, but that he was letting go. I felt an enormous sense of relief as I realized—it is those who are left behind who suffer, not the person who dies.

I could feel the hairs on my arms standing on end, as if I'd been plugged into a wall socket. It was a feeling I continue to have to this day when I stumble upon a great truth, revealed on the page by a great mind.

Now I had a direction. I would follow the writers who had come before my father, and the ones who would come after. They
would have to take his place as my guides. I began to feel a tenuous sense of hope.

I called my mother the next day and asked what my father had thought of
War and Peace
. She said he'd read it several times and had studied the battle scenes in careful detail while he was writing
The Thin Red Line
.

 

My senior year, I applied for a coveted spot in a literature seminar called War as Told, taught by the renowned scholar Khachig Tololyan.
The Thin Red Line
was on the reading list, at the time the only course at Wesleyan that included any of my father's works.

On the first day of class, when Dr. Tololyan handed out the syllabus, I saw he'd changed the reading list. Now, instead of
The Thin Red Line
, we would be reading Norman Mailer's
The Naked and the Dead
.

Obviously, Dr. Tololyan had been forewarned.

On the very last day, we had a party. After several glasses of wine, I started to feel brave and righteous. I went up to Dr. Tololyan and asked, “Did you change the reading list on my account, sir?”

He responded that he'd thought it would be too difficult for me if people didn't like the book. That it might get too personal. He opted against provoking any possible friction or emotional scenes in his class.

“I think it's a better novel than
The Naked and the Dead
,” I said.

“Do you, now?” he said with a slight smile.

“I do. And I could have told you things about the book and what he was thinking when he wrote it that might have interested you.”

He did not look pleased, but it was the last day of class, and I
didn't really care if I got an A or an A- (he gave me an A-). So I smiled and turned away, in search of another glass of wine.

 

Several years later, I met Herbert Mitgang at the poet William Jay Smith's apartment on East End Avenue in New York. I was holding a vodka on the rocks, and the impulse to throw the drink in Mr. Mitgang's face was so strong my hand started to tremble. He looked questioningly into my eyes as he shook my other hand, and I stared back at him with all the pent-up rage I'd bottled up over the years.

I didn't do it. I didn't do it because I didn't want to embarrass my kind host, nor his son Greg, who was a good friend of mine.

I got blind drunk that night and then went home and cried, because I hadn't had the courage to defend my father.

Here is the only humorous anecdote surrounding my father's death my mother ever told.

 

My mother adored Lauren Bacall, known as Betty to her close friends, and they had been good friends for many years. Gloria thought Betty Bacall was the most beautiful woman she'd ever met, and she admired Betty because Betty was completely down-to-earth and suffered no flattery from sycophants.

For several days after my father died, my mother, lying with a bottle of scotch on the couch in the living room, refused to budge. Someone called Betty Bacall, who arrived like the cavalry. Taking the situation in hand, she said to Gloria, “All right, Moss. You don't have to get up now, but you will soon. I went through it with Bogie and I know exactly how you feel. Here's what you do: nothing. No impulsive decisions, no rash moves. Don't start giving stuff away that you'll regret later. Don't sell the house. Don't do anything stupid and for God's sake, don't fuck Frank Sinatra.”

Betty was of course referring to her own disastrous rebound relationship with Sinatra in the wake of Humphrey Bogart's death. Gloria started to laugh. She laughed so hard she had to sit up to avoid choking, and from there, she finally got up and had something to eat.

Two days later the phone rang. Gloria picked up.

“Hi, Moss, it's Frank.”

“Frank who?” she said.

“Frank who the hell do you think? Sinatra.” They had been friends for many years, but it seemed absurd to her that he'd automatically assume there were no other Franks of importance in her life.

After a pause, he said, “I called to say I'm so sorry about Jim. Do you need me to come out there?”

“Uh…”

To his great astonishment, she started to giggle, and couldn't stop.