“There is a fine of one dollar per bullet for each bullet that has left a telltale hole larger than two inches.”
“Oh yes.”
“Today, Fearless Will Tyler put thirty-seven such holes in the screen, thereby causing the pilot of the B-26 to have a screaming shit fit. I tell you, sir, Will Tyler is already a flier of renown, even though he has not yet shot down a single enemy plane. He almost got one of ours today, but that doesn’t count. I ask you, Will, I ask you now in the presence of this grieving officer and gentleman...”
“That’s me,” Smythe said.
“I ask you why the hell you did such a dumb fool thing?”
“Because it was fun,” I answered.
June 27, 1944
Dear Will,
Daddy and I will be leaving for Wisconsin on the Fourth to spend a few weeks with Aunt Clara in Freshwater. The address there is:
c/o Edwin Mueller
111 °Congress Street
Freshwater, Wisconsin
If the Air Force has any plans for you, please let us know about them there. We’ll be home again on the sixteenth or seventeenth, it’s not entirely settled yet. Please take care of yourself.
June 29, 1944
Dear Will,
I showed your letter to Freddie and he thinks you’re a pervert. I also showed it to Louise, and she says she never read such filthy language in her entire life. Freddie wanted to send your letter to the Air Force as he thinks you’re unfit to serve this country in the uniform of an officer. I advised him not to bother.
I’m sorry you chose to abuse our friendship.
I certainly will never understand what got into you.
Goodbye, and I hope you have a wonderful summer writing other dirty letters to other girls who did nothing to deserve them.
July
The temperature in Chicago on that Sunday, July 27, had readied ninety-five degrees by four o’clock that afternoon, and there was scant relief from the oppressive mugginess, even on the beach. In Eau Fraiche, on a day like this, we would have packed a picnic lunch and gone down-peninsula where the breeze blowing in off Lake Juneau would smell of pine and the water would be as clear and as icy cold as a cut diamond. Here in Chicago (which Mr. Sandburg three years ago had called “half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher,” and I didn’t know how right he was till now) we sat on a lakeside beach and wondered if we wouldn’t anyway be basted in our own fat.
On days like today, when Chicago seemed out to destroy us personally, when her buildings crowded in too tight, and her people jostled and pushed and talked too loud, the thought would again cross my mind that maybe I’d been shell-shocked over there, otherwise why would I have done a crazy thing like sacrificing the eight-dollar deposit on the Mechanic Street apartment and paying all those freight charges to have our new furniture moved here? Nancy crying and saying she did not wish to go to Chicago, and my telling her there was opportunity for me there, what opportunity? A madman’s dream I had caught in a butterfly net on our honeymoon?
The advertisement had appeared in the Tribune, asking for a man with some knowledge of the paper industry to start as a traineee at Ramsey-Warner Papers, which was opening a new mill on the waterfront at Kedzie and Thirty-first. The waterfront had turned out to be the West Fork of the South Branch of the Chicago River, and the new mill would not be completed until June 1921, but in the meantime they were willing to retrain experienced people in their own production methods, and were willing to pay twenty-two dollars a week besides, which was not exactly alfalfa where I came from. So I had gone to see a Mr. Moreland out at the Joliet mill, and I had told him that whereas I did not have any experience in the paper industry, I did know a considerable lot about timber, having worked in a logging camp from the time I was fifteen until the time I enlisted in the Army—
“Oh, are you a veteran?” Mr. Moreland asked.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“See any combat?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I was with the Third Division at the Marne and later fought in the Meuse-Argonne offensive.”
“We were hoping for somebody with at least some experience, though,” Mr. Moreland said.
“Well, I haven’t any experience, sir,” I said, “but I’m a hard worker. I’ve got a wife to support, you see, and...”
“Oh, are you married, Taylor?”
“Tyler. Yes, sir, I was married just last Sunday. I’m here in Chicago on my honeymoon.”
“You’re applying for a job while you’re on your honeymoon?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, well,” Mr. Moreland said.
“Sir,” I said, “I can’t see any future for me in timber.”
“Can you see one in paper?”
“Yes, sir, I can,” I said.
“When’s your honeymoon over, Taylor?”
“Tyler. On the twenty-first of April.”
“Can you start on May first?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then I guess you’re hired.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, and that was that.
I was always having to break things to Nancy after I’d already gone and done them, it seemed. I told her that night about my taking the job, and she said she thought I was crazy, so I reminded her that not so long ago she had said she’d come with me even to Paris if that’s where I wanted to go, and she said, Pardon? which she said a lot lately when she heard things she didn’t want to hear.
The apartment on Springfield and Twenty-eighth was nice, even Nancy had to admit that, a far sight nicer than the one we’d agreed to rent in Eau Fraiche. But Chicago was overwhelming, and I thought I would never get used to it. In our first several weeks there, I imagined I would choke each time I walked out into the street, the soot and grime were so terrible. Smoke poured from a thousand chimneys, prairie dust billowed up from the sidewalks, filth seemed everywhere in evidence, despite the big iron litter bins on the curbs, two and a half feet long and eighteen inches high, but so positioned that you had to step into the gutter to lift the lid and drop anything into them.
The buildings were another thing, not as big as some I’d seen in New York but enough to make me dizzy anyway whenever I looked up at one of them. In Eau Fraiche, the tallest building had been the Wisconsin Trust over on Carter Street, six stories high and considered huge. Here in Chicago, the City Hall and County Building covered the entire square between La Salle, Randolph, Washington and Clark Streets. Even the post office filled a whole city block, a big slate-gray building with a huge dome in the center and openwork stone balustrades over the pillared wings on each of its four sides. Of all the architecture in Chicago, I think I felt most comfortable with the two lions outside the Art Institute, themselves enormous, but affectionately called “prairie dogs” by the people of the city. I was not yet a Chicagoan. I could not get used to the grime or the size, I could not get used to the lack of open space, and most of all, I could not get used to the noise.
Trolley cars rattled and clanked over countless switch intersections, iron wheels raising a din so loud you could hardly hear yourself speak, whether you were riding in one or walking alongside it on the sidewalk. There were more automobiles in two Chicago city blocks than there were in all of Eau Fraiche (well, maybe I’m exaggerating) and they made more noise with their honking horns and squeaking brakes and squealing tires and broken wheel chains than I had ever heard anywhere else except on the battlefield in France. There were still a lot of horses in Chicago, too, clomping along, pulling coal wagons that tumbled their clattering loads onto chutes into open basement windows, hauling wagons carrying jangling scrap iron and junk, drivers screaming at their teams, policemen blowing whistles, and over it all the elevated trains pounding in from north, south, and west, to add to the resounding cacophony that was the parallelogram of the Loop. I could not stand anything about Chicago.