William F. Buckley Jr. Read online

  So in that first summer of sophomore year, Danny had traveled to Europe. Henry stayed with his bursary job at the Yale Library, taking long weekends with his mother and younger sister at the family home in Lakeville. Henry’s mother had been widowed when her two children were ten and five. She raised them with eyes sharply focused on the need to economize. Mrs. Chafee worked in the library of Hotchkiss School and budgeted family life as though there were no income except for what her salary provided. Henry suspected his mother had a rainy-day fund hidden somewhere—naturally so, given that both the children had been sent off to boarding schools. This would not have been possible to manage, he explained to his less worldly sister, Caroline, without help from somewhere. But whatever her discreet resources, Mrs. Chafee, when she spoke about money, stressed only the drain of the family overhead, and turned away any question about the expense of boarding schools. When Danny suggested to Henry that he ask his mother for a loan so that he might travel to Europe, Henry was astonished at the mere thought of making such a request. “You don’t understand, Danny. You just don’t bring up things like that to Mother.”

  So Danny traveled alone to Europe, and when he got back from his ten-week trip, he showed 8mm movies, using a bedsheet Scotch-taped to the wall as a screen.

  “Certain of the sights I took in,” Danny addressed his roommate and four other sophomores from across the hall, tilting his beer bottle up, “the camera simply refused to film. You understand, Josh? It’s what Professor Sewall calls ‘technological modesty.’ ” Josh grinned, priming his own bottle. “Can you buy that sort of stuff, I mean, the professional stuff, in Paris?” Danny shrugged his shoulders. “How would I know?” In such moments Danny’s patronizing smile was especially beguiling. If only they knew, he thought.

  That was last month, before the fraternity elections. It was time now to go—he had been counseled on no account to appear late at the fraternity. But that, and the trip to Europe, and his 1947 Ford Sedan notwithstanding, when Danny opened the door to go to his induction into a fraternity, he sensed that a little curtain, however fine, had been drawn between him and Henry. The luxuries of vacation travel were one thing—Danny and his roommate were physically separated during the summer, so there could be no daily abrasions—it had been only at the moment of departure that the distinction was felt: one roommate whose vacation would be restricted to occasional weekends at home, seventy-five miles from New Haven; the second, off on a vacation that would take him to pleasure spots in Europe, lasting over the entire summer. But this would be different, a little bumpier. Danny’s fraternity was only five minutes’ walking distance away, and now Danny would be at liberty to go off for dinner or for relaxation other than to the college dining hall or the college’s facilities, and of course he would inevitably be making new friends. Invitations to nonmember fellow students were limited, in his fraternity’s bylaws, to two invitations per term to the same student.

  So, Danny felt a twinge of something—he was not quite sure what it was. Sadness? Well, no, not really. Pride? That figured there, somewhere. Disdain for those who did not do quite so … well? Could not afford to be so free? It was all there, somewhere, in greater or lesser measure. Did he feel a whiff of self-isolation? But he had consciously thought the matter out as he walked away from the army hospital in the Arno, after his first visit. What he had said to himself then was foresighted but simple: Either they would remain friends or they would not, but if they attempted to stay on as friends there would be no way to—vaporize?—an experience they had had in common. In fact, only they shared that experience. It was only Danny, and Henry, who knew about the Arno offensive and how Henry had first funked it, then tried to kill himself. If the memory of it was going to haunt them, then better not to see each other at all. But when after their discharge they resolved to apply to room together at college, it had to be on the understanding not that the Arno offensive would be forgotten but that it would be ignored. Either ignored, or maybe even sublimated. But that would be Henry’s responsibility. Danny would just never bring it up, not ever. This turned out to be easy. From the beginning, he had been comfortable with Henry, the least demanding of companions; not quite the sparkler, dear Henry, but he could laugh, indeed did so, and he was so very earnest, and so very much devoted to his family, to Caroline in particular.

  He was walking confidently now up York Street toward Zeta Psi. He told himself yet again that obviously he could never forget the events of August 12 and the Arno offensive, but that was over three years ago, and they had spent much time together. Would Henry ever be truly independent of him? Danny wondered.

  No. But this had nothing to do with the day-to-day pleasure he took in Henry’s company. Avery nice guy, easy to share quarters with, arousable for a serious conversation, if the urge to have one came up, which it seldom did with Danny.

  No, he thought finally, as he approached the graystone exterior of the fraternity, things were fine just the way they were, and Henry was just fine. A real pity, to be sure, that he was a fucking coward. Danny smiled. He savored the formulation.

  Three

  BACK THEN, in the field hospital, Private Henry Chafee had declined to speak to anybody. After three days of this, the doctor concluded that his muteness was a part of the trauma. On Day Five, the company clerk came around to record the exact circumstances of Henry’s battle wound. “I know you can’t talk,” the corporal said, his notepad in front of him, “so just nod your head yes or no, and if necessary you can write on this pad here, okay, buddy?”

  Henry closed his eyes and turned his head away. Only the sound of the big fan was heard, blowing in hot air, it seemed. The clerk faltered; then, after a minute or two, he rose from his chair. “Okay, okay. So you don’t want any of this business. We can get the details from O’Hara. Get better.”

  He walked out of the long, hot tent where the casualties were stretched out, twenty-four of them, on army cots. He wondered to himself whether that was the smell of blood pure and simple. Or was it a combination, blood and all the medications one takes when blood works its way out of where it is supposed to stay. Whatever, it was unpleasant. He resolved, mockingly, not to be wounded. The corporal was glad to breathe air less fetid, though in the hot sun of the Arno Valley it was hotter than in the tent with its two big fans.

  Danny thought it prudent simply to leave Henry alone, at least for the first week. What he did was write him a letter, meticulously sealed, on the envelope of which he wrote,

  To be opened and read only by Pvt. Henry Chafee.

  What he wrote was that, although he, Danny, did not know the correct term for it, he had to assume there was one such word: the word that described the man suddenly frozen in battle, immobilized. “I know enough about people in general, and about you, to know that it isn’t a mark of—well, of an organic character defect. So let’s let that one lie. Now, what I did on Monday you are free to think of as specially fraternal, or any way you want to put it, but it seemed to me totally logical at the time, and I’m only sorry I wasn’t quick enough on the draw to get that fucking carbine away from you. Anyway, I’ll leave you alone a few days and then I’ll come around.”

  In fact, Danny mused, Henry’s suicide attempt wonderfully capped the subterfuge. The company records showed that Private H. Chafee had been stopped by an enemy bullet while charging forward in pursuit of duty, and was subsequently dragged forward and then carried by his fellow soldier to the medical center. It was too good.

  Danny went in on Saturday. He asked the nurse at the desk whether Private Chafee would receive Pfc. O’Hara. “Just ask him. Don’t pressure him.” An answer came in over the primitive intercom: Pfc. O’Hara to proceed to Ward B.

  Danny walked to the designated area and at the entrance to the ward asked an attendant which was the number for Henry Chafee. He would just as soon not need to stare at the faces of a dozen or more mutilated men just to find Henry’s bed. But he had maneuvering to do even within the ward he was looking for. A doctor o
r nurse or aide here, with the need to step around them and the paraphernalia of a hospital, trays at various levels, bottles, tubes, all of them to be skirted.

  At number 12A he saw him. Henry’s face was unshaven, a blond beard gestating; but his head was intact, the heavy bandages beginning only at chest level. His left arm was strapped to his side to accommodate the two needles, one giving him nourishment, the other blood plasma. Danny said nothing, but took Henry’s hand. Henry began to cry. Danny looked around protectively, but in the ambient misery, quiet tears were not noticed. Danny gave him time. Then he said gently, “You got my letter?”

  Henry nodded.

  “Well, I have a proposal. It is really quite simple. It is that we won’t ever discuss what happened at the Arno. And come to think of it, I’m not giving you much of a choice on the question, because that’s the way I want it, and,” Danny pointed to the stripe on his shirtsleeve, “I’m senior over you.” Danny had teased Henry when the order was issued at Camp Wheeler promoting the platoon. Three soldiers had inadvertently been left out of the roster. A correction came in a week later, but it left Danny senior in grade.

  Henry spoke now. He did not attempt a smile. With his free hand he reached for a limp handkerchief. Danny looked away while Henry wiped his eyes. “Okay,” Henry said. “But you can understand I can’t take it out of my mind, and won’t. Not ever. I don’t know if I’m glad to be alive, but I guess I can say I’m glad you are my friend.”

  The tears were once again visible. “Can you go now, Danny? Maybe come back tomorrow, or the next day? I have to sleep.”

  He closed his eyes, and Danny got up.

  He stared down at his companion-at-arms and felt a great rush of pity, though laced with contempt. He would not conceal the truth from himself, never mind what he had written in the letter. It was simply established that Henry’s character was flawed. Danny could never again feel for him quite what he once had. When they met, soon after arriving at Camp Wheeler in Georgia to take infantry training, the base friendship was conventional: He was dealing with another soldier, on whom he could rely as a comrade in action. No more; Henry was different. But a nice guy, he would certainly not take that away from him.

  By the time he reached the door, he had come up with the idea.

  So now he went to the company clerk. He wanted to know, he told the sergeant, how to proceed with the matter at hand.

  He got back from the sergeant a mimeographed form. He completed it and took it, as directed, to company headquarters, where he got the “Recommended for Citation” form. He relished the words as he inked them down on the form, sitting on a wooden stool in the cramped duty office. The sergeant on duty was preoccupied. He blew his cigar smoke into the air while scanning the freshly arrived directive having to do with a new variety of gonorrhea. He pinned it up on the wall, after spotting a space not already covered by other notices.

  I was behind Private Chafee a few yards, Danny wrote, when the enemy fire struck him down. But before collapsing, he managed to fire several rounds into the bunker, and this made it possible for me to approach the enemy gunners and knock them out with the hand grenade.

  Only Danny knew of the great, hilarious imposture over which he was presiding, and it amused him that its beneficiary, Henry, would be infuriated by it.

  But what could Henry do, after all? Danny had taken in hand, at the height of a broad offensive military action, a fellow soldier who might otherwise have been court-martialed for cowardice—cowardice in the face of the enemy, as the war codes put it. Instead, a few weeks later, Private Henry Chafee would be discharged from the hospital and given a citation for gallantry in action plus a Purple Heart.

  Henry would obviously have to play along. Either that or confess his cowardice—and maybe even get Danny court-martialed.

  Henry’s mortification, as the colonel pinned the medal on him, was all-consuming—he had been taken completely by surprise, called out of the ranks that morning at reveille. After the ceremony he had refused to speak to Danny. For several days he had needed to concentrate on Danny’s impulsive generosity the evening of the offensive before resuming the friendship, which had hardened during the closing, uneventful winter before their discharge, after which they headed for the same university and put in to room together.

  Four

  THE IDEA was more popular with her children than with Rachel. She didn’t mind a sail around the harbor or even a day sail to Block Island, a matter of four or five hours. But once Clement had proposed the longer cruise, there was no reversing the landslide of enthusiasm he triggered. Clement had a way of announcing his celebratory ideas without first checking with her. Sometimes he had already hired the orchestra. This time he did the equivalent, getting the children all excited. Danny’s return from freshman year at boarding school was reason enough for maybe a little party for his friends; and yes, Lila had finished the fifth grade at her little school at Newport with the highest grades in the class.

  All of this was good, but hardly grounds for major exertion. When she was a girl, Rachel reflected, nobody made a fuss over what were considered workaday achievements. She remembered the summer in Campobello with her father, stricken by polio. Rachel had been awarded the Canadian equivalent of an Eagle Scout badge for girls. Her reward was a pat on the head from her father in his wheelchair and from her mother a smile, but not very different from the smile she got every day. Most days. On the other hand, true, it was hard to notice such things as children when one’s father was campaigning for Vice President, then serving as governor of New York, all of this preparatory to life in the White House. And then too, her brothers never thought to concelebrate their achievements with those of their younger sister. By contrast—Rachel was pleased by the growing intimacy between the boy and his younger sister—on the day Danny came back from his boarding school at Millbrook, Lila greeted her big brother elatedly at the door, presenting him with a beaded belt on which she had worked at odd moments ever since Easter. The border was red, the background yellow, the Indian symbols green, and his name appeared in tiny brown beads discernible a good ten feet away:

  ◊ ◊ ◊ DANIEL O’HARA ◊ ◊ ◊

  Lila was proud of her artifact and Danny was very pleased by it, and wore it at dinner, drawing Thelma’s attention to it when she came in from the kitchen with the soup. When Clement rapped his table knife on the wineglass, demanding silence around the table, the children knew that their father would come up with a celebration. Last year he had made it a visit to Playland at Rye, an amusement park more than three hours’ drive away, and three years earlier, just before Clement O’Hara had gone off to England as an official involved with the Lend-Lease program, there had been the trip to Niagara Falls.

  “Silence, silence!” The chattering stopped. Mr. O’Hara told them he had accepted an invitation to watch fireworks on the Fourth of July at Nantucket with his old friends the Giffords. He paused.

  Danny knew there was something else to come. Anybody can go to Nantucket, a matter of a couple of ferry rides.

  “And I thought it would be fun to sail to Nantucket on Listless!”

  The reaction was as Clement O’Hara had expected. That of the children, and that of their mother.

  The O’Hara sloop was a quite ancient sailboat, 36 feet long, built during the twenties and neglected during the first years of the Depression. Danny was enchanted by it. The preceding summer, when the Listless was pulled out of storage, he had stood by the whole time the hull was recaulked and repainted. He engaged the sailmaker in inquisitive conversation when it was recanvassed, and attentively looked on when the engine was pulled out and overhauled. He signed up at the Ida Lewis Yacht Club for sailing lessons and was soon racing in a 24-foot Star.

  He egged his father on every weekend to take Listless out. But Clement O’Hara’s enthusiasms were short-lived, and Listless was used for routine triangular outings in Narragansett Bay. The trip to Block Island was an exception, and it had not been comfortable, the wind comi
ng in that August day as usual, hard and from the southwest. It hadn’t helped morale on Listless that his sister and mother both felt queasy. Arrived at Great Salt Pond, Rachel had cooked the steak, served supper to her family, then left on the evening ferry for Newport after tucking her children into bed at the motel. Now in prospect was a sail all the way to Nantucket—a forty-mile run, much of it over open water; battling currents pronounced and eccentric was not a venture Rachel looked forward to. Still, she had to admit that it was a novel, and in a way a glamorous outing. Of course, Danny and Lila responded to their father’s plan with noisy enthusiasm.

  Rachel O’Hara contrived a smile, and rang for dessert.

  In the fortnight before the trip, Danny devoted himself to every detail of Listless’s needs and appearance. He made innumerable checklists, and when he could corral the attention of his father, insisted he go over them. He told Lila to make up a list of everything that would be needed for the galley, and he, Danny, would go over the list and correct it, and then give it to their mother. Were the necessary tools all there? Danny told his father, who was amused, that it was not safe to set out without a big wire cutter. The purchase was authorized. Danny checked the charts, the batteries, the radio direction finder, the radio; he gave the brightwork an additional coat of varnish and on the afternoon he thought of as devoted to the final details—they would set sail two days later—he stowed in his own locker his three or four most essential personal effects, including his flashlight, his Swiss Army knife, and his .22 Colt revolver.

  The weekend before had given them the longest day in the year. Today the wind was sprightly during the afternoon, the sun steady and radiant. Clement left the house late an hour or two before dinner, setting out for one of his meetings in New London with his partners in the oil storage company. He would be spending the night at New London, returning in midmorning.