The Story of a Marriage (17 page)

“What I told you was the truth, Pearlie,” he said at last. “Let’s leave it at that. I was sent to a camp. It was a long time ago.”

But I would not let it be: “You got out somehow. You came out here.”

“I already told you what that hospital was.”

“You’re saying you weren’t faking it.”

He turned to me. “That I was crazy?”

“Yes.”

Buzz stood with his hands on his hips, letting the wind blow his shirttails around his body. “In India I visited a temple where the monks lived on nothing but sunlight. I think they had broth once a day, but they said it was air and light. It brought them visions, they said. Took them away from the illusions of the world,” he said. He was not making any sense. “Have you ever gone to the edge of your senses? Have you ever starved?”

I bristled. “My parents did their best. It was a hard time.”

“I want you to know I went to that edge,” he said. “I wasn’t faking it. What happened in the war, what happened to all of us, that’s what I’m trying to prevent. The kind of thing that sent me to that hospital, the loneliness of that. I don’t know how else to explain it. I was starting to feel it again in that bachelor apartment, the one you made fun of, the one with just one burner and no way out. I thought I’d gotten over Holland, and years went by. And then I felt it again. I wouldn’t do all of this, put you through everything, if I knew some other way.”

“The camp made you …” I couldn’t quite bring myself to say it made him mad.

“Not the camp,” he said. “I found a way out of the camp.”

Two visiting doctors helped him escape. Like medicine men arriving at a Western town, one tall with a thin beard, the other short and smiling. One was from Spain. They came at the end of a workday, with the sky spread out above them like a great skeletal bird, pinked by a dropped sun, and the weary Quaker official announced they were looking for healthy volunteers for a medical study. This happened now and then; some men volunteered to wear lice-infested underwear to test insecticides; some ate feces to study hepatitis; some lived for a month at zero degrees; all of this was just to do something, be worth something in a world at war. These particular doctors simply handed out a pamphlet that read: Will You Starve That They Be Better Fed?

“Do you have the weak mind?” the Spanish one asked Buzz in a cold metal room, and he shook his head. “Do you have the tired heart?” and he shook his head. It seemed impossible that these could be the requirements for the study, and Buzz understood only later that it was the doctor’s poor English.

Buzz left the camp, he told me, and traveled to Minnesota on a train ride that baffled him: coeds barging through the dining car in sweater sets, screaming with laughter, and after them plunged college boys in dinkies; and stranger sights, such as the man sitting next to an enormous cello, and a man standing in between the cars, rolling his cigarettes in a little plastic machine, who smiled and offered one for free—a world of plenty, a city, in other words, though in every station they passed, a reminder was plastered for passengers to read:
IS THIS TRIP NECESSARY? SAVE FUEL FOR OUR BOYS; COMBINE TRIPS OR DO WITHOUT.
But no one in Minneapolis seemed to be doing without, not compared to where he’d come from.

The hygiene laboratory offices were at a university, in little green fluorescent rooms, and it was there he met the other men in the experiment. Immediately he began to judge the others on how well he thought they would adjust. Later they all learned that none of the first impressions meant anything, not a strong handshake, or a confident grin, or a healthy appetite, or even appearing to have suffered from hunger and poverty; no one could possibly have predicted who would snap under the strain.

They lived in something like a dormitory, the walls painted the same lichen green as the laboratories, with a lounge where they smoked and read magazines, or studied for classes—for they were allowed to attend classes—and there were no locks on the doors, no guards. That part of CO life was over. It was November in Minnesota, but Buzz and the other men felt their freedom as the first sign of spring.

Not that they had much time; language classes took up twenty-five hours a week, with an idea they might later go overseas and aid in refugee camps. They were given all kinds of menial tasks—laundry and cutting potatoes, nothing as degrading as the camps—and Buzz took a course in business and another in literature. He had never seen the inside of a college classroom before. Worrying that he didn’t belong there, he sat on the aisle in the back, so that if asked to do so he could leave quickly and without embarrassment. “It was strange,” he said, “in the classrooms, to see young men so relaxed and free.” They seemed to follow the war closely, and some dropped out to join the fight, but only a few seemed awkward about being alive and reading Chaucer while the world was burning. Buzz felt very apart from them.

As for the experiment, at first it was no effort at all. They had to walk twenty-two miles a week, two miles to the dining hall for meals, some treadmill just for testing, in addition to sports or ice-skating or other activities they were free to enjoy. And for a long time, they ate as much as any man would. Better food than at the camps, or least more varied food than Spam and apples every night. It was about three months before the doctors told them the control period was over and they would begin a new regimen. Buzz looked forward to that. Unable to kill a man, unable to survive the camps. Here he was at last able to do his part.

He had never known what hunger was; how could he? How could any of us, who claim to be “starving” an hour or two after breakfast? During the Depression and war rationing, we thought we knew hunger. But we didn’t. For the boys in Minnesota, meals went down to eight and five o’clock, portioned meagerly from cabbage and potatoes to less than half what they were used to eating. This went on for one month, two months, six months. Each man’s body devoured a quarter of itself.

There is a face all starving people share: the dull apathetic stare you might recognize from footage of Africa, or from people on the street, and after only two months Buzz had that stare. It is called “the mask of famine.” It comes from facial muscles that have withered away. Some parts of the body tighten with thinness, like the arms and legs, and some sag, like the knees. The lungs begin to fail; the heart loses its voltage; the pulse begins to slow, although the blood itself thins out with the water the body hoards, who knows why? Getting dressed becomes difficult; opening a bottle of longed-for milk seems ironically impossible; even a book cannot be held open long enough to read it. He learned the difference, he told me, between the longing ache of hunger and the swift, sharp jab. Sometimes hunger goes on so long, invades the body so deeply for its hidden stores that it gives a prophecy of old age; the spine collapses, the posture topples. A starving man of twenty might experience a sensation that he will not regain for sixty years: the feeling of having grown old. I wondered if Buzz would feel it again when real age came upon him, if one morning at eighty he would step out of bed and recall, with surprise, this same bone-creaking, shivering feeling—the body in old age—that he had felt before when he was young.

They stopped going to classes; they stopped ice-skating and exercises; they stopped everything but they couldn’t stop dreaming of food, stealing menus from restaurants and going over each item like thieves planning a heist. Buzz’s eyes became waxy and luminous, his spine as segmented as a larva, and his brain shifted in colored waves, an aurora borealis; he could no longer bear the treadmill, even for a few minutes, and not because he was too tired or lacked the will; he simply had no muscles left to move. He said he felt like a creature from a children’s book, something unnatural:

a kitchen broom brought to life. They told him his heart had shrunk to twenty percent of its normal size. It was the result of starvation, of course, but to his addled mind it made sense. “It came as a relief,” he told me, for now how could anyone love him? And who could he ever love?

“Everything all right here folks?”

A policeman leaned out of his patrol car, the window glass creasing his arm’s under-fat. I suppose he was not used to seeing a white man, a colored boy and woman wandering the hills. He was talking to Buzz.

“Everything’s fine, officer,” the young man said very gently.

“This is private property, you know. You can’t be trespassing here.”

“I know the owner. We’re potential buyers.”

The policeman let that idea roll around in his skull like a gum-ball until at last, with a clank, it landed. He looked me over from top to bottom. “There’s much nicer land elsewhere, for you folks,” he said meaningfully, then advised us to move along. His exit conjured a genie cloud of dust.

I did not say a word. Rings of fear and rage were passing through me. Memories of Kentucky.

“It’s late,” Buzz said, hoisting his jacket onto his shoulder and approaching Sonny, who stirred one last time before letting his eyes flutter open. Buzz went over and picked the boy up in his arms, and my son feigned sleep as he always had with his father. The scenes of starvation hung around us in the air. Let him have it, I thought. What he wants is easy to give, and what I want I do not even know, though this will do. Five hundred acres with a fence all around. Let it end. The man carried the boy across the heaving, golden fur of the field and said, as he passed me, “We’ll take your son back home.” Let everyone have his wish.

I had managed to save five thousand dollars from the allowances Buzz doled out, and without touching that nest egg I still had plenty to spend on Sonny. Buzz went on an extended trip—selling his factory, telling me to “sit tight and wait.” I was glad to think about something other than the news of war and draftees. I bought Sonny new leg braces (the leather had worn out of the old ones), more doctor’s visits, and, as a treat, secretly sponsored Hank, a neighborhood boy, in the Soap Box Derby with the agreement that Sonny could watch and help paint. The boy solemnly swore a complex Cub Scout oath, and we went together, the three of us, to a Chevrolet dealer on Van Ness to get the regulation racing wheels and parts for the car. For a week Sonny sat on a little stool and watched redheaded Hank nailing his car together, my son perfectly silent and still except the few times he asked a question (“Howzit steer?”) and Hank raised his head with a long-suffering look and slowly explained.

I couldn’t ever buy him Hank’s kind of childhood, but I could make two dreams come true. One was to attend the races, where hay bales separated the onlookers from the racers themselves, some in helmets, most in baseball caps, floating down the hill in pinewood boxes painted in angry imitation of street-thug cars—flames, devils, snakes, thorns—though steered by angelic drivers. Hank came in near the back of the pack, but his loss allowed the second dream: folding up my son’s weak legs into the car, teaching him to grip the wheel securely, and getting four reluctant boys to push him two blocks down a safe stretch of road. “Look at me!” he kept shouting. “Look at me!”

He told me, after it was over, that he’d won the race.