The Truth of the Matter (26 page)

At first he had been overwhelmed with empathetic horror as a plane skewed out of formation: my God my God my God they’re all going to die! But soon, even on that first run, he shut down his imagination. By the time he flew his third mission, he had fallen into a calm detachment and even a sort of fascination as one after another of those B-17s went down. He looked on as an observer of an ill-thought-out game; he couldn’t have withstood it if he had looked on from the point of view of a participant. And he shut away his certainty that there wasn’t enough luck in the world to allow him to survive. Those Flying Fortresses flew at such high altitude most of the time that, even when he was firing at enemy planes, he remained curiously indifferent. Throughout the war he never saw a person killed; he only saw planes go down.

In the end, he only remembered all the details of his first mission of the required thirty-two; the others ran together if he made any effort to distinguish one from another. Only that first flight and, naturally, his last flight. Every man in the Corps remembered his last flight, certain that having gotten that far, he wouldn’t survive it. But by the time of Sam’s final flight, the Luftwaffe had pretty well been destroyed and their oil supplies wiped out. Sam’s last flight—his thirty-second and final flight—was a mission to drop supplies to the French Resistance fighters in Savoie, near Switzerland. The weather was perfect; the air had such clarity that it seemed to Sam to have substance and depth, appearing to thicken in the distance to a pure, gelid, translucent blue. And the sunlight was all-encompassing and apparently without a source, as though it would not come and go with the hours; it illuminated every object, every vista, equally.

The chutes that were dropped from the squadron of B-17s were color-coded: red, for instance, for medical supplies, yellow for food, green for ammunition, and other colors for other things. There was something playful about the blossoming parachutes floating to earth, their cargo swinging gently from side to side, with the Alps in the background and cloudless skies above Lake Geneva. It was as though they had happened upon a new and perfect amusement park ride. A wondrous thing, a diversion that would more than meet the expectations of any eager child, unlike the disappointing tedium of a pretty carousel or the terrifying sway of the flag-flying Ferris wheel. And, although the plane itself vibrated with the noise of its engines, the aspect of the big gray airplanes casting shadows over the valley and the hundreds of parachutes drifting through the air was one of silence. They were flying at relatively low altitude, unhampered by oxygen masks and untethered to a power source, and below them the Resistance fighters waved their arms in acknowledgment, signaling V for victory.

Sam looked out at the panorama as it unfolded and was unable to keep his guard up against the seduction of relief. He had been puzzled, had put his hand to his face and discovered a wash of tears, although he hadn’t been aware he was crying. In fact, he wasn’t crying in any sense of the idea he had ever had; it was more as if he were simply overwhelmed at having to accommodate once again the idea of after. After the war. He had driven it from his mind, and suddenly there it was again, the prospect of his life going forward.

At that moment Sam was conscious—for the first time in his life—of what it was like to be happy. Of course, he often had been happy, but he had been literally careless and had taken it for granted in the same way that, before the depression, he had discarded pennies, leaving them in a dish on his bureau, because they were inconvenient to carry. Years later he realized that the only thing of value he had come away with from the war—other than his life—was the occasional ability to be guiltlessly and unapologetically glad. It wasn’t a complicated sentiment; it was merely an exuberant acknowledgment of being responsible only for life as he was living it in the moment. Every now and then he was able to recognize that there was nothing he could do about the miseries of the world; and in that instant of liberation, his self-ness was triumphant and overwhelming.

And even though gladness—joy, perhaps—wasn’t a complicated emotion, it was rare. When he boarded the bus from Columbus, Ohio, to Washburn, in June of 1947 and gazed out the window at the rolling hills planted with corn, which he recognized, and other sweeping, cultivated fields of crops he couldn’t identify, he began to feel the tension of pleasurable anticipation, though he couldn’t think why. Sam had taken advantage of seeing the countryside wherever he happened to find himself when he was in the Army Air Corps. For four days in Tehran and several more in Cairo, for instance, he had been interested in everything and gone out to see whatever he had time to investigate, whereas his crewmates remained uninterested and stayed behind, playing endless card games and keeping out of the sun.

He had gone to some trouble to see the pyramids and had attempted to summon a sense of awe, although it wasn’t until after he had survived his tour that he was able to think back on them with wonder. He had surely tramped over half of Ireland and much of Scotland, as well. And he’d spent lots of time in London. Certainly he hadn’t expected to be affected one way or another by the countryside of the state of Ohio.

But when the bus pulled into the little station in Washburn, across from the square, which was shady and dark green on a very hot, bright day, Sam was unexpectedly overtaken by a welling up of euphoria, very nearly exactly the feeling he had experienced on that final mission looking out at the bright parachutes floating to earth on a beautiful day. Although he had jotted down Dwight’s address and had been told how to get there, he headed off in another direction for a brief stroll along the limestone sidewalks and across the old brick streets. He passed nicely groomed houses and two churches that stood in handsome opposition to each other, catty-cornered across an intersection that was also deeply shaded by fine old trees that appeared to have stood forever on each of the four corners where High Street and Vine intersected.

He had expected to walk off his unreasonable joy, to stretch his legs and tamp down this odd fervor, but, in fact, his sense of well-being only intensified. The town of Washburn affected Sam with the same surge of lightheartedness he had experienced on that final run. Here was everything, Sam thought, but all of it in moderation. The countryside was rolling, though not mountainous, and there were fine old houses, though not particularly grand ones, and small bungalows, but no signs of real poverty. It seemed to Sam a place in which one’s life could be ordered to the shape of his true nature, as opposed to living in an extreme atmosphere, like New Orleans, or New York, or San Francisco, or even Natchez, Mississippi, where it was too easy to surrender one’s character to the prevailing climate of the place. When, eventually, he returned to the bus station to retrieve his duffel, Dwight and his wife, Trudy, were waiting for him, and the three of them walked together across the square to Scofields.

Although Sam had officially been hired only as the program director of WBRN, he worked at the radio station in nearly every capacity. He did a show at five in the afternoon in which he summarized the local news from the townships in Marshal County, and eventually news from other counties, as well. He gave a brief account of the national news that came in on the wire, read the weather predictions, and announced upcoming events. He had a knack for divulging information in a kind of lazy chatter that made even the worst news sound manageable and the least interesting information seem worth knowing. He was good at stimulating local interest in an upcoming play or a concert. He talked about the program or the plot a little bit, seeming to have a surprised but simultaneously low-key interest in the occasion. And he did gain listeners, although the network programs were the station’s bread and butter.

The salary he made at the station he put away in the bank each week, because his main employment was as a sales representative for Lustron Homes, whose headquarters were in Columbus. The Lustron Corporation mass-produced porcelain-coated stainless-steel homes that could be assembled with a wrench in less than two weeks by a modestly accomplished homeowner. The idea had seemed brilliant to Sam in the abstract.

In the spring of 1948, the day Sam’s own house was delivered on two huge Lustron trucks, he had already explained enough about it on the radio that a sizable crowd gathered in front of and in the yards next to the small lot Sam had bought on Birch Street. By the time his house was fully assembled, he had sold three other models. He wrote to Carl Strandlund that the houses sold themselves.

The fact was, though, that Sam didn’t like living in his efficient, pale yellow porcelain-enameled house with the turquoise-blue shutters, the whole of which only needed hosing down once a year or so, never requiring repainting. But whenever a driving rain hit that steel exterior, he felt as though he inhabited a tin can at which someone was shooting a BB gun. The house was quirky but not charming, with odd shelves and cabinets built into the design, ample storage everywhere in efficient but peculiar places, and clean-lined, lean furnishings provided by Lustron at Sam’s request and at a discount. It was remarkably neat and well organized, but, to Sam’s way of thinking, it was not especially appealing.

“You know what, Sam,” Betts said to him one evening, looking around the living room from her seat on the built-in couch beneath the big front window, “this is a house that you can’t imagine getting old in. It’s like a place you go to wait for something else. Like a train station or the bus station. Do you know what I mean? This is a house you only stay in until you leave.”

Sam stayed on there, though, and oversaw the construction of the other Lustron houses he had sold in Washburn, but within less than a year, he resigned from the company, which was running into all sorts of unexpected problems with production in any case. He concentrated on his job at WBRN, which was steadily adding advertisers. Sam had come up with an idea for a weekly on-air talent competition with a live audience, and it had become surprisingly popular, although some of the various acts didn’t translate very well over the radio and required Sam to think fast in order to describe what was going on to the listeners at home.

Will Dameron was intrigued by those Lustron homes. He didn’t like them, but he liked the idea of them. Eventually Will traded a hilly, forty-seven-acre tract of land adjacent to the Green Lake Golf Course for a partnership with Sam; the two of them were convinced that prefabricated homes had a promising future if they were carefully planned. Sam had found a company outside Boston, in Framingham, that thought along the same lines, and he persuaded Cardinal Homes to put up a few houses on spec, entirely under his supervision. The Cardinal Corporation would retain all but ten percent of any profit in exchange for their initial investment. If the speculation was successful, Sam and Will would have sole rights to operate the franchise in the twelve counties surrounding Washburn, as well as in the city of Columbus.

“For a while I thought about staying with Lustron, since the buyer can get government subsidies,” Sam explained to Will. “But, I don’t know. I don’t really like living in one. Those houses . . . There’s no way you can ever feel moved in. You can just wipe off or wash away any sign you’ve ever been in the place. Inside and out. I thought I’d like that. The easy upkeep, I mean. But, I don’t know. . . . Carl Strandlund’s saying they’ll be able to produce four hundred houses a day. But I was thinking what it would be like. Lustron’s thinking they’ll be able to sell them for somewhere around nine thousand dollars. But I think it’ll have to be more if they’re going to make any profit. You see, what happens,” Sam said, “is that they crate the entire house right at the plant. Load it on flatbeds in reverse order of assembly. That part’s fine. The idea’s good. But the cost . . . each house weighs close to twenty tons. Now, Cardinal ships on flatbeds, too, but the product isn’t so heavy. The strength comes from traditional framing at the site. And they’re bigger. Can be about as big as you want. A lot more variety.”

Sam spent all his spare time poring over the various possible floor plans. “The thing is,” he told Will, “not to have every house look like the one next to it. Different layouts, different uses of materials. It’s awful to see what they’re doing out on Long Island. And they’re building on slab to save costs, but I don’t want to do that. Cardinal includes the cost of a cellar, since their houses are designed with cold weather in mind. In the Northeast. But we get plenty of cold weather in Ohio. I’ve always thought there’s a way to do this right. People want to own their own houses. But why would they want a house that looked like every other house on the block?”

The two men had agreed, though, that before any construction began, it only made sense to get the utilities in place, the water, gas, and electric services set up in one fell swoop, because they were planning for growth. Here was the real risk they were taking, and both of them knew it. The time-consuming chore and expense of obtaining permits and variances, of installing the gas, water, sewer, power, and phone lines, was unsatisfying and frustrating and done at their expense. There were endless problems, just as Sam and Will had known there would be, and they often reminded themselves or each other that this was the part of their investment that allowed them to foresee long-term benefits.

As the big yellow shovels and earthmoving equipment began crawling over the acreage—turning the soil and throwing up high walls of dirt on either side of the furrows they dug—both Sam and Will were discouraged at the sight. This part of the project wasn’t a bit exhilarating. The tidy streets they envisioned looked like trammeled cattle runs. The foundations were dug, but the forms hadn’t been set in place yet to pour cement, and the basements and winding channels filled with rain and then became muddy trenches, as though an army had just departed. Will and Sam were glad, though, that the water drained away so quickly; they had done perc tests, but, said Will, “the proof of the pudding is in the pie.”