Some Faces in the Crowd (24 page)

Late that Sunday afternoon Winnie’s mother and father had come to visit. He was a large man with a muscular paunch, reddish, gray-streaked hair and a mottled, orange-freckled face. She was shorter than Winnie and a little dumpy, but the color of her skin was almost exactly the same as Winnie’s, only maybe just a shade darker, as when you’re making chocolate milk and you put in a few extra drops to make it just a bit more chocolaty. They seemed to be polite, dignified people, and everything was perfectly peaceful and friendly until Winnie put Tommy to bed. Tommy had half-forgotten about George and he had run his legs off all day and he went off to sleep without even thinking of the second glass of water. But in the middle of the night a terrible grown-up shout from downstairs shook him out of his sleep and made him feel all trembly and scared inside.

“You’re a
nigger!
Never forget you’re a
nigger!”

The strange, ugly word shook the house. Tommy sat up in bed, and though he had never heard the word before he knew in some instinctively wise way that it had something to do with his daddy’s saying, “Never,
never
mention her color again.” Tommy did not understand, but he knew there was some problem of one person being white and another person being coffee color that made grown-ups terribly nervous and angry and confused and violent.

Tommy crept halfway down the stairs and peered through the slats of the banister. He could see Winnie’s father, but he could not see Winnie. Winnie’s father was angrier than he had ever seen anybody in his life. He had seen Mama and Daddy arguing, but he had never seen one grown-up bawling out another one the way this big man with the freckled pumpkin-color face was bawling out poor Winnie the Pooh. “You’re a nigger,” he was shouting, and the word cut through the house like an angry whip. “Maybe you’re ninety-nine and ninety-nine one-hundredths per cent white, but you’re still a nigger. And niggers don’t marry white men. Maybe in the last world and maybe in the next but not in this one, God damn it. What if your baby is white? He’ll grow up to hate you! And what if he’s black or high yeller like you? Your husband’ll hate him. And what if you don’t have any, like Cloretta? You’ll end up hating each other. God damn it, I tell you, Winifred, we won’t allow it. We don’t want to see no more trouble in this miserable world than there’s in it already. Look at me, a high-school education, but a redcap all my life because I got a drop or two of the wrong kind of blood in me. Somewhere back there in your great-granddaddy’s time some white man started this thing and now we got a family that ain’t black and ain’t white, just a bunch o’ poor miserable nigger in-betweeners. So I say, no, we won’t let you. It’s bad enough with Cloretta who we always feel funny about visiting because she’s living white. But you’ve got color in your skin and you can’t rub it off by marrying white.”

Tommy didn’t hear anything from Winnie. He heard Winnie’s mother say in a honey-soft voice, “Baby, Papa’s not mad at you. He’s just mad at the way things happen sometimes. But he loves you like I do and he’s trying to help you from getting into something that’ll hurt you later on.”

It wasn’t her father’s angry voice, but her mother’s soft and loving one, that made her cry. She got crying the way Tommy did sometimes when he started choking on his sobs. It wasn’t the soft, wet kind of crying, but the dry, hard kind that gets tighter and tighter in your throat. It sounded awful. It sounded as if she was dying. And when she ran out of the room and up the stairs she had her hands over her face and couldn’t even see Tommy. She ran into her room and slammed the door and threw herself on the bed and cried that hard, dry cry for a long time into her pillow. It was awful hearing her cry like that. Tommy wanted to go in and see her, but he was afraid to. His daddy had been right to warn him. There was something powerful and evil about the color of a person. There was something about the color of a person’s skin that was never,
never
to be mentioned in public.

Tommy crawled back into bed and thought about that. He thought about that harder than he had ever thought about anything in his whole life. Then he turned on his light to go to the bathroom and Winnie heard him and came in. She wasn’t crying any more. There was a kind of set look to her face that made her look very serious. “Tommy, you don’t have to worry,” she said. “I’m not going away. I’m not going to get married. I’m going to stay here with you as long as you need me.”

Boy, was Tommy happy! He jumped up and down on his bed and sang, “Winnie isn’t leaving, Winnie isn’t leaving, goodie, goodie, goo—ooodie, Winnie isn’t leaving.” Then he hugged her and bounced on her lap and chanted his kindergarten sing-song again and nuzzled into her neck. She nibbled on his ears and tried not to cry. He was so happy, so happy that it would take him many years to forget this moment of triumph. “Oh, goodie, oh, goodie, I knew you wouldn’t leave me, I knew it, I knew it, I knew you wouldn’t leave me,” he sang. Winnie’s eyes were wet with a strange, bitter kind of relief and she said, “Yes, I suppose I did too.” Then she gave him a fond pat on the back flap of his Dr. Dentons. “Now scoot into bed. You should have been in bed hours ago. And I’m a little tired, too.”

Tommy settled back in bed with the lights out, smiling into the darkness and chanting, “I’ve got Winnie back, I’ve got Winnie back, I’ve got Winnie back …”

Tommy kept waiting for the night when George would come and Winnie would tell him. It would serve him right for all the things he had done to Tommy. He had made Tommy realize for the first time what it might feel like to lose somebody you loved very, very much. It served him right. It served him right.

But George never came to the house again. Whether Winnie phoned him or wrote him or just how she did it Tommy never knew. The little snapshot of George stayed on her dresser, but that was all. It stayed there for years. But later on Tommy would be able only vaguely to associate it with any actual person, much less an actual threat.

When Mama and Daddy came home from California they were pleased to find everything in order. Tommy was in good health and fine spirits and the house was spotless. “Well, I’m glad to find everything so peaceful,” Mama said. “Did anything happen?” “No ma’am,” Winnie said. “Oh, yes, one night when it rained we had a leak in the upstairs hallway. But except for that, you’ll find everything just about the same.”

Winnie stayed with Tommy’s people for about nine more years, until Tommy was almost fourteen. When he was six they had had to scold Winnie for babying Tommy. She still tried to dress him when she should have known he was old enough to dress himself. Winnie couldn’t seem to learn not to fuss around Tommy. She worried more than his mother about such things as his being out on drizzly days without his cap and rubbers.

When he was fourteen, Tommy said, “Mom, Winnie’s driving me nuts. She’s always picking at me to wear this or do that. I wish she’d mind her own beeswax and leave me alone.”

Tommy’s parents talked it over and decided, difficult as it was to face, that Winnie had outlived her usefulness. She could not stop doing for him all those little things that no self-respecting teen-age boy can stand. “I dread having to tell her,” Tommy’s mother said. “She’ll go off into one of those old-maid hysterics and I won’t be able to stand it.” So they gave Winnie a six-weeks’ summer vacation and near the end of it they wrote her a letter explaining the situation, giving her a liberal severance pay and promising to keep their eyes open for another position for her.

Early one fall when Tommy was getting ready to leave for college, Winnie came to call on them. She couldn’t have picked a more inconvenient time, but she had meant something to them once and they didn’t know how to turn her away without hurting her feelings. She said she hadn’t seen Tommy since he was grown up and she hoped they wouldn’t mind if she dropped in for just a few minutes, as she had loved him so much as a little boy that she just couldn’t resist stopping in to see how he had turned out. Tommy was embarrassed at all this mushy stuff, but he remembered a few things about this old nurse of his, and as long as she didn’t take too long he didn’t really mind seeing her again. He couldn’t remember too much about her, although now that he looked at her it began to come back to him about her high-yellow coloring. In the tinted picture in the family album she was quite handsome with her honey complexion and her dark, wavy hair dropping nicely to her shoulders. Her hair was streaky gray now and she wore it up in a rather severe, old-fashioned bun. Dad had said she had been “a knockout—a regular sun-tanned Loretta Young,” but she looked faded and bony now, although she did have nice eyes.

“So you’re Tommy,” she said. “To think you’re my own little Tommy boy.”

Tommy squirmed. He wondered how long this was going to take. He tried to think of something to say. “Well, how are you these days, Winnie?”

She tried to make a joke of it. “Oh, all right, I guess. Still pretty spry for an old maid.”

The words were like stones in the wall that stood between the eighteen-year-old Tom and the Tommy boy of his childhood. Loosening the stones that stood in the way of his remembering, he was thinking of his old Winnie, his Winnie Pooh, and once more he was stepping through into that dim yet feverish past when he had loved this coffee-colored stranger with all the narrow intensity that charges and confines a child’s world.

I
THOUGHT I HAD
run the gamut of command posts, from half-destroyed farmhouses to elegant castles on the Rhine—but this one was the pay-off: an ancient little convent on a hillside overlooking a gingerbread Alsatian village and the German lines beyond. A special recon outfit with the 7th Army lining up for the jump across the Rhine had moved in, but the sisters had not moved out, and so the two organizations were living side by side under the same roof, the French nuns industriously devoted to peace, the recon group industriously devoted to war. It was hard work, dangerous work, infiltrating enemy lines at night to determine troop movements and gun emplacements, but at evening mess most of the conversation was joke and banter, punctuated by the regular Jerry artillery fire that sounded as if it were passing directly overhead. “Alsace Alice,” the youthful CO said. “She’s been trying to find us for a week. She isn’t even close tonight.”

The nun who served us conscientiously, silently, and without ever changing expression, as if she had lived all her life among American officers who sat down to dinner without taking off their .45’s, refilled our empty coffee cups. The coffee was so good that nobody wanted to finish it, so we lingered over our cups, drawing slowly on the cigarettes or pipes we lit from the flickering candles that threw a soft yellow glow over the table. Everybody felt well fed and relaxed, the war, for the moment, wasn’t breathing down our necks, and it was too early to crawl into our bed rolls. A good time for talking. At first we talked about the things that everybody in the ETO wanted to talk about that winter. How long the war would last, how long our guys would have to stay on after the supermen folded up, and what we’d do when we finally got back to the States again. I talked and the young CO talked and a lieutenant from Brooklyn, he talked plenty, and a former cavalry officer from Texas told us how he was going to open a riding academy in New York City.

But the captain didn’t say a word. He had a grave, weather-beaten face, and a slow, deliberate way of eating, of moving and of listening to what was being said. All I knew about him was what the CO had told me, that he was a professional, a company commander with the 1st Division. What he was doing down here in Alsace I wasn’t told. Conversation was beginning to run down when I happened to mention Aachen. I forgot just what I said, something about the unbelievable destruction that was still new to me, something about the unexpected docility of the people there.

Then, to draw him into the group, I asked the captain casually, “Let’s see, the 1st Division was up around Aachen, wasn’t it?”

The captain drew his cigarette from his mouth. “Yes, we were at Aachen,” he said.

“Rough, rough, hey, Captain?” said the lieutenant from Brooklyn. The captain waited so long that I thought that was the end of it. Finally he said, “My outfit was held up for sixty-four days outside of Aachen.”

“Heavy losses?” the CO asked.

The captain drew another cigarette from his pack and offered the rest around. “By the time we got through, our battalion wasn’t even a good-sized company. We finally got through it all right. But it was close, very close.”

He inhaled slowly, took the cigarette out of his mouth with that poised deliberateness of his and again I thought this might be all there was to it. But all of a sudden he was into his story. He told it with such an economy of words and emotions that it wasn’t until he had finished that I realized what kind of story he had told. There wasn’t much more to say after the captain got through. The CO blew out the stubby melted candles. I went upstairs into one of the cold, narrow bedrooms that the nuns had evacuated for us, stripped down to my long-johns and wriggled into my bed roll. I closed my eyes, but I was still thinking about the captain and his story. After a few minutes I reached out for my flashlight, a pencil and pad, and, at the risk of burning out my battery—which at night in a theater of war is like losing the sight of both eyes—I tried to put the story down as the captain had told it. Not word for word, for I do not have that kind of memory, but next morning, as soon as it was light enough, I read it over and I felt satisfied that it was as close as I would ever get it to the way the captain told it. So here it is, a little better spelled, a little more legible, better punctuated here and there, but otherwise exactly as I had scribbled it down that night in the convent with the Führer’s artillery lobbing them systematically but futilely over our heads:

I don’t remember exactly when I first noticed Shapiro. (That’s not his name, but if you don’t mind, that’s what I’ll call him, because in view of what finally happened I think it would be better just to call him Shapiro and let it go at that.) I think the first time he came to my attention was on the transport going up from Africa. I was a company commander at the time. Ordinarily the only men I would have come in contact with were the lieutenants who lead my platoons and the sergeants who lead the squads. But the first day out, this lad Shapiro, a new replacement, was brought to my attention. Yes, that’s right, now that I think of it I remember it very well. Sergeant McCardle reported him. He caught Shapiro lighting a cigarette on deck after dark. The first time he warned him, just warned him, that’s all. But the next night he caught him again. Those were the days when the Heinie U-boats were raising hell with our convoys, so this was no joke. The second time McCardle reported him to me. “Sir, if you want to know what I think, he’s a smart-aleck Jew-boy from Brooklyn,” said McCardle. “If he’s a soldier, I’m a rabbi.”