Rally Round the Flag, Boys!

A Novel

Max Shulman

For

Carel Dan Bud Pete Martha

1

Here begins a tale of action and passion, a guts-and-glory story of men with untamed hearts, of women with raging juices. There is violence, and torment, and raw, rampant power. But, withal, there is beauty—gentleness—occasional lulls in the storm—glades in the jungle—lambent moments to pause and reflect, to smile a bit, and—who can tell?—perhaps to blink back a tear.

At the vortex of this whirling drama, at the heart, so to speak, of the juggernaut, is one man. His name is Guido di Maggio. He is a tall young man, lithe as a willow wand and fair as the morn. He is by nature mild and merry, fond of lasagna, girls, and community singing. But unwarlike as he is, he wears the uniform of a second lieutenant in the United States Anti-Aircraft Artillery.

Our story begins, quietly enough, in the office of the post adjutant at Fort Totten, Long Island, on a gray winter day not so long ago. Second Lieutenant Guido di Maggio sat that day on a chair, straight, birch or maple frame, slot back, without arms, Type MIL-F-10091. In front of him was a desk, flat top, office, wood, oak color, Type B-1-FED-AA-D-201. Behind the desk in a chair, swivel, with casters, artificial leather upholstered, oak, with arms, Type 1-D-FED-AA-C-311A, sat Major Albert R. McEstway, post adjutant.

“Fairbanks,” said Major McEstway.

“Fairbanks?” said Guido.

“Fairbanks, Alaska,” said Major McEstway.

“Oh, no!” shrieked Guido, clutching his cheeks.

“The exec up there got frostbitten, and they’ve asked for a replacement,” said the Major. “You’ll fly out in the first available aircraft, which ought to be at Mitchel Field in a—What is the matter with you, Lieutenant?”

Guido seemed to be foaming somewhat at the mouth. “I can’t go, Major!” he shouted. “I just can’t!”

“I beg your pardon?” said the Major.

Guido reached across the desk and clasped the Major’s hand in both of his. “Listen, Major,” he pleaded, “you’ve got to get me an assignment in the States. In fact, it has to be right around New York.”

The Major disengaged his hand gently. “May one ask why?” he inquired.

“I’ve got a girl,” said Guido. “Wonderful girl. Pretty. Sweet. Educated. Plumpish. Not fat, you understand. About 120 pounds, I’d guess.”

“How tall?”

“Five-four.”

“Not a bit fat,” agreed the Major.

“Plumpish,” repeated Guido. “Toothsome, you might say.”

“You might at that,” allowed the Major.

“But stubborn. Mamma mia, talk about stubborn! A mule. A rock-head. You know how they get.”

“Oh, do I not!” said the Major, rolling his eyes.

“Two weeks ago we had this little rumble, and I still haven’t been able to square it. You ship me out of here now, and I’ll lose her sure as hell.”

“I see,” said the Major.

“I knew you’d understand,” said Guido.

“I do,” said the Major. “Do you?”

“Understand what?”

“That you will leave from Mitchel Field on the first available military aircraft and report to the 998th Anti-Aircraft Battery in Fairbanks, Alaska. And don’t go off the post. We never know for certain when a plane gets into Mitchel.”

“But—”

“That’s all, Lieutenant.”

Guido groaned, rose, mumbled “Yes, sir,” raised a limp salute, shambled out, shambled to the Officers Club, found the bar not yet open, shambled out, shambled to the BOQ, oozed down on his bed, and reflected glumly on the vicissitudes of life.

Actually, Guido’s life, until recently, had been singularly free of vicissitudes. He had been born and raised in the second vertical social stratum of Putnam’s Landing, Connecticut. (As any journeyman sociologist can tell you, the commuting villages of Connecticut’s Fairfield County—Westport, Darien, Stamford, Putnam’s Landing, etc.—show three distinct social categories, vertically divided. First, there are the Yankees, descendants of the original settlers and still the wielders of power. Second, there are the Italians—like Guido’s family—who initially came into Fairfield County as track layers for the New Haven Railroad and remained to become the storekeepers, artisans, mechanics, gardeners, police and fire departments. Third there are the New York commuters, also called the lambs, or the pigeons, or the patsies.)

Guido’s father, Vittorio di Maggio, owned a small but highly successful grocery store. On one side of Vittorio’s store was an A & P, on the other a Grand Union, and down the block a First National. They all undersold him by a wide margin, but Vittorio’s business continued excellent nonetheless. He carried one important item that his competitors did not—namely, charge accounts. Vittorio had made a study of commuters and had sagely concluded that a man who requires a four bedroom house, a full time maid, a part time gardener, a second car, a power mower, riding lessons for his daughters, sailing lessons for his sons, a mink stole for his wife, and ten ounces of alcohol per day for himself is a man who must be chronically out of money. At the same time, having house, wife, children, maid, cars, mower, etc., he is not likely to decamp quietly on some moonless night. Skewered thus on the two horns of fixedness and cashlessness, could there be a better victim for a high priced credit grocer?

So Vittorio prospered and—being prosperous, Catholic, and good buddies with his wife—proliferated. There were seven di Maggio children, of whom Guido was the last. They were all raised according to two simple precepts, one promulgated by the mother, one by the father. The mother said of child rearing, “Don’t hit the kids unless you gotta—but when you gotta, hit ’em good.” To this, the father added the unarguable dictum, “God never told nobody to be stupid.”

Under these sensible rubrics, Guido, like his brothers and sisters, grew up to be smart, sunny, and obedient. He worked in the store, he sang in the choir at St. Thomas the Apostle, he fished and swam and clammed in Long Island Sound, he maintained a respectable B-minus average at school, he shot a passable game of snooker, and he left his virginity with a lady in Bridgeport.

He also played a lot of baseball—but not because he wanted to. Since his name was di Maggio, everybody naturally assumed he loved baseball and they automatically called for him whenever there was a game. Actually, he would have been much happier to stay home, but he hated to disappoint people so he always went along. Constant exposure made him, willy-nilly, a first rate ball player. In his last year of high school, he captained the team and hit a gaudy 375.

After high school, he thought he might give college a whirl. He was the first di Maggio ever to entertain such an exotic notion, and Vittorio was quite taken aback when Guido broached the subject. “College?” he exclaimed, startled.

“Why not?” said Guido.

“Atsa right,” replied Vittorio after some thought. “Why not?”

So Guido went off to the University of Connecticut. Why, indeed, not? He was a bright boy, his family could afford to send him, and they did not really need his help in the store. Besides, college would keep him out of the Army for a while. Guido, let it be emphasized, had no wish to shirk doing his bit, but neither was he in any tearing hurry.

College and Guido were friends from the outset. His respectable B-minus average stuck with him. He learned a smattering of literature, a smidgen of language, a dash of history. And, while trailing his fingers in the main currents of American thought, he also picked up some necessary graces: he joined a fraternity; he got a jacket with two vents in the back; he took up the bongos; he bought a half interest in a Chrysler Airflow. And, of course, he played baseball. When Coach saw the name di Maggio on the enrollment list, he came pounding on Guido’s door, and Guido, who wanted to play baseball like he wanted a third nostril, was, as always, obliging.

To keep the Army safely at bay, Guido joined the R.O.T.C. This took five hours out of his week—two of drill and three of classwork—but Guido considered the time well spent. It meant, in the first place, that he could count on four uninterrupted years of college, and, second, that when he was finally called, he would go in as a second lieutenant.

His romantic activities on campus were lively, but non-specific. There was a series of assorted gropes, some moderately successful, some shutouts. Once or twice, moonstruck or randy, he spoke careless words, but not too careless. God, he always remembered in time, never told nobody to be stupid. His SAE pin stayed firmly anchored to his baseball sweater.

Then, midway through his senior year, he met Maggie Larkin at a campus dance. Her hair was honey blond and her eyes were Lake Louise blue. Her throat arched, her breasts billowed, her waist tapered, and her flanks were round and cunningly articulated. She was five feet four inches tall and weighed 120 pounds. Plumpish. Not fat, you understand. Plumpish.

Guido asked her to dance. Steering her around the floor, looking at her level eyes and excellent head, feeling her honest weight, Guido fell suddenly in love. It was about as pleasant as a judo chop. He felt weak and addled. His ears rang, his salivary ducts sludged up, his kneecaps vibrated like tuning forks. Smiling inanely, unable to speak, he danced with her again and again, and when the evening was over he hustled her into the Airflow.

Here, on home grounds, a measure of confidence returned to him. He drove to a moonswept hill, cut the motor, sidled skillfully toward her.

“No,” she said.

“Aw,” he said.

“Look,” she said, “I am a normal girl with normal instincts, and you are a very attractive boy.”

“Well then!” cried Guido, closing in.

She fended him off. “No.”

“Maggie,” he said truthfully, “if you’re thinking this is just a pass, you’re wrong. I don’t know exactly what’s happening, but you unsettle the hell out of me.”

“I like you too, Guido,” she replied, “but I have my work.”

“What work is that?”

“Children.”

“I’ll be damned!” said Guido. “How many you got?”

She laughed, and Guido’s heart leapt with every tinkle. “None of my own,” she said. “I’m a teacher … That is, I’ll be one in June when I get my degree. Right now I’m doing some practice teaching over in Willimantic—the second grade.”

“I see,” said Guido, then corrected himself. “No, I don’t see. What’s your teaching got to do with me?”

“I just don’t have time for you, that’s all. I mean I need every minute to prepare my lecture notes.”

“For the second grade?” said Guido, looking at her askance.

“Guido, do you know what a teacher’s job is?”

“Teaching?” he hazarded.

“Not the way you mean. Not just filling their little heads full of the three Rs. A teacher’s job—no, a teacher’s sacred obligation—is to repair the trauma that children incur at home!”

Guido regarded her shining eyes, her upraised fists, with some astonishment. Here, obviously, was a girl of passion and fire. Now it remained to find out just what it was she was passionate and fiery about. “I’m not quite sure I follow you,” he said.

“Do you love children?”

“What’s not to love?”

“Exactly. How can you help loving those sweet, innocent little things, so full of trust and affection, so capable of perfect happiness? Now, why can’t they have perfect happiness?”

“Well, it’s a pretty tough world.”

“Yes, it is. But why?”

“Wars, famines, H-bombs—”

“No, Guido, that’s not it. The basic trouble in the world today is emotional insecurity. How can we ever hope to solve our political and economic problems when all our children are growing up with deep psychic disturbances?”

“They are?”

“Certainly they are! Didn’t I? Didn’t you?”

“Well, I—”

“Of course we did. Everybody does. And why?”

“Well, I—”

“Do you think insecurity is natural?”

“Well, I—”

“It’s not! It’s the most unnatural thing in the world. When you and I were born, we had no fears, no insecurities. Where, then, did we get them?”

“Well, I—”

“From our parents!” she said, ramming her forefinger into Guido’s ribs with every word. “From the ignorance and malice of our parents!”

“Oh, no!” said Guido stoutly. “No, sir! I don’t know what kinds of folks you got, but mine are a couple of living dolls.”

“Yes, yes,” she said with a weary smile. “And, I suppose according to ordinary standards, mine are fine parents too. They fed me, they clothed me, they sent me to college.”

“So what are you rapping ’em for?”

“Because they filled me full of insecurities.”

“You don’t look very insecure to me,” said Guido honestly.

“No? Then why do I still have nightmares? Why am I afraid of snakes? Why can’t I swim? Why won’t I ever have an enema?”

“Please!” gasped Guido, going crimson.

“Don’t you see, Guido? I’ve got all these fears—fears I was not born with.”

“You’ve also got teeth you were not born with,” he observed.

“You miss the point. My teeth came naturally. My fears were forced on me by my parents. Out of their deep, buried destructive impulses, they had to make me insecure too.”

“Maggie, listen,” he said earnestly, “try not to knock your folks any more, will you? It isn’t nice. Really.”

“Nice?” she cried. “The time for niceties is over. Action is what we need—and right now! A massive reeducation program! Mental health for parents! Clinics on every corner in America!”

“Fine,” said Guido. “Now how about we go someplace for ribs?”

“But it will take years to get a mental health program started,” continued Maggie, unheeding. “Meanwhile somebody has to try to repair the damage that parents are doing to their children at home. And that’s where we come in—we, the teachers.”

“This is all you talk about?” asked Guido with genuine concern. “Parents and kids and like that?”

“Could anything be more important? Why, do you know that in the United States—in this so-called enlightened democracy—there are still parents—today, mind you, in the twentieth century!—there are still parents who actually physically strike their children?”

“The hell you say!”

“Can you give me any reason at all why a grown-up adult should actually physically strike a child?”

“I’ll give you several,” said Guido with a reminiscent chuckle. “A) for busting a window; B) for jumping on the cat; C) for shoplifting at Woolworth’s; D) for burning the curtains; E) for drinking up the Communion wine.”

Maggie shook her yellow hair vehemently. “Those aren’t reasons; those are excuses. There’s only one reason why a parent strikes a child—only one—and that is because the parent subconsciously harbors a homicidal hatred for the child!”

“That does it,” sighed Guido and started the Airflow.

“You taking me home?” she asked.

“As fast as I can.”

She nodded philosophically. “Yes, this is what usually happens. But it doesn’t matter. I’ve got no time for boys anyhow. I need all my time for teaching the second grade children of Willimantic that there is love in the world—not just fears and threats. Love! Patience! Kindness! Understanding!”

“Lots of luck,” said Guido politely.

He dropped her at the Chi Omega house and went home and curled up in bed with a good book. “Boy!” he said to himself. “I am well rid of that one!”

“Too bad she’s loony,” he said to himself a little later, “because she sure is pretty. Those eyes! Those blue, blue eyes! And the teeth! Did you ever in your whole life see such teeth? Gorgeous! A woman like that wouldn’t cost you a dime for dentist bills.”

Still later he said to himself, “And what about the built? You think a built like that comes walking down the street every day in the week? In a pig’s valise, buddy! A built like that comes along once in a lifetime—if you’re lucky, that is. Mamma mia, what a built!”

Toward morning he said to himself, “So she’s a little overboard on the subject of kids. So what? She’s been studying too much psychology and it went to her head. She’ll get over it … And, anyhow, the whole thing does her credit. I mean this girl really loves kids. So nuts about ’em she can’t think straight. What a fine, big heart she must have! What a whale of a heart! There, now, is a parlay for you—those eyes, those teeth, that built, and a great big heart into the bargain! Am I going to let a package like that slip through my fingers?”

He did not. He courted her with skill and persistence, and he prevailed.

Naturally he had to do a bit of lying. He had to tell her with a perfectly straight face that he had reconsidered her views on child psychology and come to the conclusion she was absolutely right. Once she was persuaded of this, the rest came easy.

They went steady for the remainder of their senior year, and Guido was the happiest of men. There were, of course, occasional dead spots—usually on the days when Maggie received the latest psychopediatric bulletin and learned that asthma was nothing but interior crying or that Lepke Buchalter’s conduct was directly traceable to toilet training. On these occasions Maggie, her eyes bright with excitement, would run on for hours about permissive-behavior and ego-function and organ-language and birth-trauma, while Guido nodded and made intelligent grimaces and swallowed yawns.

But these seminars were fairly rare. Most of the time Guido and Maggie did just what any other lovers do: they danced and skied and swam and went to movies and picnicked and clutched each other in moist, happy embraces.

In June of the year there accrued to each of them some parchment and some shiny, inexpensive metal. They both got their diplomas, Maggie got an engagement ring, and Guido got second lieutenant’s bars.

There followed an exchange of visits to meet the folks. Guido travelled to Jessup Falls, a hamlet in the northwest corner of the state, to see Mr. and Mrs. Larkin. Mr. Larkin was a jolly fat man in the grain and feed game. Mrs. Larkin was a motherly type who baked her own bread. Mrs. Larkin cried and kissed Guido, and Mr. Larkin cried a little too and took Guido out in the garage and gave him a belt from a pint bottle of Schenley hidden behind the skid chains. “If these people have deep, buried destructive impulses toward Maggie,” thought Guido, “then I am Rex, the Wonder Horse.”

After two jolly days at the Larkins, Guido took Maggie to Putnam’s Landing to meet the di Maggios: Vittorio, the father; Serafina, the mother; Anna and Teresa, the sisters; and Pete, Bruno, Dominic, and Carmen, the brothers. The father cast an experienced Neapolitan eye on the lavish contours of his daughter-in-law-to-be and pronounced himself well pleased. The sisters pressed gifts of lace upon her. The brothers were amiably obscene. The mother made enough pasta fazool to feed the retreat from Caporetto. Everybody cried like crazy.

Three days later there were more tears; Guido got his induction orders. Guido and Maggie traded salty kisses and clung desperately and declared they would love one another for ever and ever. Then Maggie went home to dry her eyes and look over the numerous offers of teaching jobs for the following fall, and Guido marched off to defend his homeland.

Guido had been graduated from college with a major in marketing and a minor in Spanish, so, naturally, the Army assigned him to a guided missile school. He reported to Fort Bliss, a parched and baleful post outside El Paso, Texas. Here he had thirteen weeks of OBC (for Officers Basic Course) in SAM (for Surface to Air Missile). This meant, of course, electronics, which was pure Choctaw to Guido. But it did not seem any more intelligible to any of his classmates, so he just sat and listened and, to his vast amazement, he found after a couple of weeks that he was able to tell an ohm from an oscillator. He was also able to do one hundred deep knee bends, shave in thirty seconds, and stay awake through a three hour lecture on armature winding while the classroom temperature stood at 104 degrees.

After two weeks of lectures in mathematics and electronic theory, the class was introduced to the SAM—a liquid-fueled missile with a solid-fueled booster, the whole thing approximately twenty feet in length and one foot in diameter, needle-nosed, supersonic in speed, painted white, containing three warheads and many thousand electronic components, and officially designated as Nike.

Guido gasped when he saw the sleek and lethal Nike, and that was the last time at Fort Bliss he had time for a gasp. He was far too busy trying to master enough of radar and rocketry to fire a Nike if the occasion should ever arise. That’s all the Army wanted of him. They did not expect him to repair a Nike or build a Nike or adapt a Nike or alter a Nike. All they hoped for was that he could learn what buttons to push and who to yell for if nothing happened. And that, when you are dealing with millions of parts, all frangible, and miles of wire, every inch of it whimsical, and radar, which is a training camp for poltergeists, is quite enough to learn in thirteen weeks.

His skull bulging and his eyeballs eroded, Guido finished the course and went off with his battery to the dismal hills of Red Canyon, New Mexico, to see if he had indeed learned what buttons to push. Here Guido actually fired the Nike. He took a long breath and banged the button and the Nike zoomed up and found the target plane in four seconds and filled the sky with kindling. “Mamma mia!” whispered Guido. “Carissima mamma mia!”

There was a happy letter waiting for Guido at Red Canyon. Maggie wrote that she had chosen her teaching job for the fall, and guess what it was? It was the second grade in the Nathan Hale Elementary School in Putnam’s Landing! So she would be right in Guido’s home town, and wasn’t that wonderful?

It was indeed—and doubly wonderful when Guido got his next piece of news: his battery had been assigned to Upper Marlboro, Maryland, which was just outside Washington, which was only five hours by train from Putnam’s Landing or an hour and a half by air, which meant that Guido could be in Maggie’s arms every single time he had a day off!

On his last day in Red Canyon, while Guido was sacked out in his bunk thinking jolly thoughts about all the pleasing prospects ahead, the fly entered the ointment. One Clyde Greenhut, an officer in Guido’s battery, a large young man with unsightly lumps of muscle all over him and a morbid addiction to athletics, came up to Guido, gave him a jolly whack, and cried, “Hey, di Maggio, let’s play some ball!”

“No, thanks, Clyde,” said Guido pleasantly. “It’s too hot out there.”

“What? A hundred and ten is hot? Come on!”

“No, thanks, Clyde. I really don’t feel like it.”

“Ah, come on! Who ever heard of anybody named di Maggio who didn’t feel like playing ball?”

So, responding to the familiar call, Guido went out to the ball field. In the top of the fourth inning, with Guido playing shortstop, the batter hit a sharp ground ball to the second baseman. There was a runner on first, so Guido dashed over to second to get the double play. The second baseman whipped the ball to Guido. The runner came charging in to break up the throw to first. The runner was Clyde Greenhut. He barreled into Guido, knocked him into short left field, and divided his ankle into two unmatched pieces.

So Guido went into traction instead of Upper Marlboro. For weeks he lay in his hospital bed and cursed steadily, cheered only slightly by the bubbly letter which arrived every three days from Maggie. She was now in Putnam’s Landing, which she loved, and had found a darling apartment, which she adored, and was busy teaching the second grade at Nathan Hale Elementary School, which was composed of the most fetching and cuddlesome little organisms ever begotten.

Glum tidings were awaiting Guido when, all healed, he finally got out of the hospital; his lovely assignment to upper Marlboro was no longer available. Another officer had replaced him during his confinement. Guido was told to report to area headquarters at Fort Totten, Long Island, where he would receive a new assignment. He took some consolation, however, from the fact that he was allowed to go home for a week’s leave before reporting to Fort Totten.

Guido’s family was gathered on the station platform when he arrived in Putnam’s Landing. It was a raucous reunion, full of wet kisses and shrill endearments. Then Guido asked about Maggie, and a strange thing happened. The festive mood vanished abruptly. Dead silence descended on the clan. They all avoided Guido’s eyes with great care.

Guido looked at his family with perplexity. “Didn’t you hear me?” he said. “I asked how Maggie was.”

The silence deepened.

Guido turned to his father. “What is it, Pa? What happened to her?”

“I don’t know,” muttered Vittorio. “Don’t aska me.”

“Ma—” said Guido.

“I don’t wanna talk about her,” said his mother.

Guido turned frantically to his brothers and sisters. “For God’s sake, what is it? Is she sick or what?”

For a moment nobody answered. Then Bruno spoke. “She ain’t sick,” he said curtly.

Dominic gave a short nasty laugh. “Don’t be so sure,” he mumbled.

There was a cab stand at the station platform. Guido wheeled abruptly from his family, raced to the stand, got in a cab and gave the driver Maggie’s address. He was there in five minutes. He ran into the building, rang Maggie’s bell, pounded on her door, threw it open, and burst into a tiny two-room flat.

Maggie was in the kitchenette washing dishes. She uttered a cry of delight, gave her hands a quick wipe, and ran to Guido. “Oh, darling, you’ve come!” she said exultantly. “I knew you’d stick by me!”

“What?” said Guido, blinking in bewilderment. “Stick by you? What have you done?”

“Only my duty, dear,” she replied and kissed him soundly. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here to help me fight this thing!”

Guido took her shoulders and gently disentangled himself. “Maggie baby, I’ve been on a train from New Mexico for the last four days. Would you mind filling me in?”

“That’s right. You couldn’t know about it.”

“About what?”

“I’ve been fired from my job.”

“Fired? From the school? For what?”

“For trying to let a little light into the darkness!” declared Maggie, lifting a fist. “For trying to clean out the ignorance and sickness of centuries!”

“Could you be a little more specific?”

“I gave,” said Maggie, “a talk on sex.”

Guido’s jaw plopped open. “To the second grade?” he whispered in horror.

“Of course.”

“ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR GODDAM MIND?” shrieked Guido.

Maggie jumped back in alarm.

“Have you gone completely off your rocker?” he roared bearing down on her. “What the hell do second grade kids know about sex?”

“But that’s just the point, darling. They don’t know anything. Somebody has to tell them. Do you want them to grow up repressed? Traumatized?”

“So you had to go and tell them?”

“Well, they asked me to. One day they came back from recess and asked me where babies came from. I decided the best thing to do was give them a simple, truthful, straightforward explanation.”

“I don’t suppose you left out anything?”

“Certainly not.”

“All the details, huh?”

“Everything.”

Guido clapped a hand to his forehead. “Oh, my back!” he moaned. “Oh, my aching, breaking, cruddy, bloody back!”

“Guido, I don’t understand you at all.” There was an edge of anger in her tone. “Whose side are you on?”

“Oh, yours, of course!” said Guido with a low bow. “What right-thinking American wouldn’t be?”

“Well, I’m glad to hear that anyhow.”

“What are you going to do now—go back home?”

“Certainly not!” she said ringingly. “I’m going to stay here and fight for reinstatement.”

“That’s what I figured,” he said morosely.

“Do you think I’m going to let Mr. Vandenberg get away with this?”

“Who?”

“Mr. Vandenberg—the principal. He’s the one who found out about my sex lecture.”

“Oh, grand! What’d he do—walk in while you were talking?”

“No. As a matter of fact, he didn’t come in till after the class. But, of course, the pictures were still on the board.”

“YOU DREW PICTURES?” screamed Guido.

“How else do you explain anything to seven year old children?” answered Maggie hotly. “And don’t you raise your voice to me. I’m beginning to think you’re not on my side at all.”

“And I’m beginning to think that you’re a public menace!” Guido shot back. “Good God! Dirty pictures in the second grade! What’s your next project—reefers?”

“Guido di Maggio,” said Maggie, trembling with fury, “you get out of here and never come back again. Never! You’re just as ignorant and benighted as the rest of them. Out! Out!”

Guido, seeing his love going glimmering, was suddenly drained of anger. “Now, Maggie honey,” he said placatingly.

But she wasn’t having any. “Out! Out!” she repeated. “You’re not on my side. You never have been, have you?”

“Now, Maggie, let’s not be hasty—”

“Of course you haven’t. You lied to me. Lied from the beginning! I can see that now. Oh, get out of here, you vile, awful man—and take this with you!”

By “this” she meant her engagement ring, which she now yanked off and slapped into his startled hand.

“Maggie, this is ridiculous—”

“Out! Out!” she screeched, hammering him randomly on the head and shoulders with both fists.

“I’ll come back when you’re calmer,” he said and fled.

He came back, but she got no calmer. Not toward him, at any rate. He was outside her door every day for the seven days of his leave, but not once did she speak to him. She did, however, kick him three times.

Then, lorn and sick at heart, he had to report to Fort Totten, where, as we have seen, the coup de grâce was administered by Major Albert R. McEstway, post adjutant, who unmoved by Guido’s tragic circumstances, put him on a shipping list to Fairbanks, Alaska.

And now, a broken man, Guido lay on his sack in the BOQ and contemplated his frigid future. For hours he lay, a lifeless hulk, a mound of anguish. At last he stirred.

“Che sarà,” he said, forcing a ghastly smile, “sarà.”

2

Harry Bannerman stood at the bar in the club car of the 5:29. In his hand was a bourbon and water, his second since leaving Grand Central Station twenty minutes earlier. Harry was not ordinarily a bourbon drinker—scotch was his usual tipple—but he had discovered that bourbon made him more drunk more quickly. That, in recent months, had become an important consideration.

Harry was a typical commuter of Putnam’s Landing, Connecticut, which is to say that he was between 35 and 40 in age, married, the father of three children, the owner of a house, a first mortgage, a second mortgage, a gray flannel suit, a bald spot, and a vague feeling of discontent.

Though he loved his wife and children, though he enjoyed his house and had hopes of reforesting his bald spot, though he was, all in all, not dissatisfied with his lot, just the same, from time to time, a sort of helpless feeling took hold of him—a feeling that he had no control over the forces that shaped his life—that he was merely a puppet in the hands of some dimly understood power. Namely, his wife.

Make no mistake: he loved her. Grace was handsome, fair, supple, and bright, and he had wanted to marry her the minute he had clapped eyes on her. It had been right after World War II. Harry had just been mustered out of the Navy and had returned to New York where he found a job on the “Talk of the Town” section of The New Yorker. Grace was an assistant in the same department. When she saw Harry walk in wearing his prewar civvies, his wrists and ankles sticking out like Huck Finn’s, she promptly burst into laughter. But it was warm, friendly laughter, and Harry did not mind a bit. He told her that if she really wanted some laughs, she should see him in his tuxedo. So they went to dinner that night, and then they had a lot more dinners and rode in hansom cabs and listened to jazz at Condon’s and took trips on the Hudson River Day Line and pressed their noses against Cartier’s window and got married.

Harry’s idea of married life was simple: you rented an apartment in Greenwich Village and sat on a pouf and listened to Rodgers and Hart records and drank wine from wicker covered bottles and held each other very tight.

Which is just how it was for the better part of a year. They lived in a high-ceilinged two-room apartment on Bank Street with a mattress, a box spring, a corduroy throw, a red and blue pouf, an electric percolator, a hot plate, and a phonograph without a changer. That was the only thing Harry lacked to make his happiness complete—a changer for the phonograph.

Grace’s ambitions were rather larger. “Darling,” she said to Harry one night, “don’t you think people ought to start their families when they’re young so they can grow up with their children?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” he replied casually, and the next thing he remembered, his son Dan was upon him.

(That was Grace’s idea of a conference. She was always coming up to Harry and saying something like “Wouldn’t it be nice to have panelling in the basement?” or “Don’t you wish we had more closet space?” and he would answer absently “Yeah,” or “Uh-huh,” and the next time he came home from work, the house was teeming with carpenters.)

So now they had their son Dan. He did not do much for the first six months except cry and spill things, including a bottle of cod liver oil on Harry’s bed, and if you have never slept on a mattress reeking of cod liver oil, you have never known anguish. But Harry got a new mattress and eventually the boy turned fat and pink and no trouble to anyone.

One night after this satisfactory child had been put to bed and Harry and Grace were curled up on the red and blue pouf, she said to him, “You know, it must be terribly lonely to be an only child. Don’t you think so?”

“I guess it is,” he replied absently, and before you could say twilight sleep, he was the father of another boy.

After Bud (for that was his name) joined the family, there were no longer enough poufs to go around, so, of course, they had to move to a bigger place. “Why not buy a house in the country?” suggested Grace. “It’s just as cheap as paying rent, and it’ll be so wonderful for the children.”

“Well—” said Harry, and while he was scratching his head, he became the owner of a house on a hill in Putnam’s Landing, Connecticut.

For Grace and Putnam’s Landing, it was love at first sight. Almost before she was unpacked, she had had another baby, bought a large brown dog, joined the PTA, the League of Women Voters, the Women’s Club, the Red Cross, the Nurses Aids, the Mental Health Society, and the Town Planning Commission. “How wonderful,” she would cry, slinging Dan on one hip and Bud on the other, tucking young Peter under her arm, putting the dog beneath on a leash, and rushing out on errands of mercy, “to live in a town with real community spirit!”

Harry’s enthusiasm for Putnam’s Landing was kept under somewhat tighter control. He liked the place, mind you. It did have, as Grace said, real community spirit, and the people were interesting—writers, artists, actors, ad men, TV executives, and other such animated types—and there was a pleasant patina of New England upon the winding lanes and rolling land. But living in Putnam’s Landing was a blessing not entirely unmixed. For one thing, it cost more money than Harry was making. For another, it required more hours than there were in a day.

Once, on a dullish afternoon at the office, Harry set down a time-table of a typical day in his life. It looked like this: