If the Air Force had permitted me to go back to Chicago while awaiting redeployment orders, I probably would never have seen Dolores Prine again after that awkward Monday. But at Mitchel Field there was only confusion and procrastination; everyone seemed to know that the war in Europe was rushing to a close, yet no one seemed prepared for its end. The Air Force could hardly allow an experienced combat pilot to go home for even a few days, because nobody knew what was going to happen once Germany surrendered; the Japanese might launch a wholesale Kamikaze attack against San Francisco, in which case we’d all be rushed to the West Coast. Since the Air Force didn’t know what the hell to do with me, all they asked was that I check in for formation each morning. If my orders had not yet arrived (and God only knew where those orders were supposed to be coming from), I was free to leave the field until formation the following day. It was a very sweet setup. Michael, enjoying the same country-club status at Fort Dix would take a bus in to meet me in the city, and together we wandered through those early April days, bright with sunshine, sparkling with just enough of winter’s lingering bite. As far as I was concerned, the war was already over. I did not for a moment believe I would be shipped to the Pacific, and I found myself talking to Michael about plans for the future — should I go into my father’s business, should I go to college, should I try writing — I had written some very good letters while I was overseas. Together, we explored our philosophies and our ideals, our hopes and our ambitions, usually in one or another of New York’s bars. I only mentioned Ace Gibson once, and that was because Michael and I had been talking to a lieutenant-commander in a Third Avenue bar, and the guy started telling us about a Dear John letter he had received, and it called to mind that other bar in Los Angeles, where a drunken captain in Supply had told Ace and me about his wife running off with the local — dentist, had it been?
It was Michael who suggested that we stroll over to McKeon and surprise the little Prine girl. I wasn’t so sure that was a good idea, but we’d been sitting in a bar for close to two hours, and it was so beautiful and bright outside that it seemed a shame to kill the rest of the day that way. So we paid for the drinks, and then walked east toward Madison Avenue, and at three-fifteen were standing before the wide front steps of the school waiting for her to emerge. Michael seemed immediately at ease with her, even though I could not yet shake the thought that I was robbing the cradle. He cracked a few exploratory dirty jokes which caused her to burst into delighted laughter (I remembered all at once the day he told the Confucius Say joke in Lindy’s presence) and then asked her if she was old enough to drink beer, and when she said they wouldn’t allow her inside a bar unless she could show identification, went into a grocery store on Lexington Avenue (I guess it was; I was still unimaginably confused by New York’s simple layout of avenues and streets) and we walked over to Fifth Avenue and took a double-decker bus up to Fifty-ninth (outside the Plaza Hotel?) and walked into the park there and sat on the grass and drank the beer and spent the afternoon together.
It must have been five-thirty, a quarter to six, when we decided to take Dolores home before her mother called out the National Guard. We were coming out of the park when we passed an old man snuffling into his handkerchief (I don’t think we really noticed him at the time, I think he only registered in retrospect) and several yards behind him was a woman, a younger woman obviously in no way connected with the old man, and she was openly weeping. And the next person we passed had a stunned look on his face, and there was an odd ominous buzz on the air as we walked past the fountain outside the hotel, and Dolores suddenly turned to me and said, “Something terrible has happened. We’ve lost the war.”
A sailor was standing alongside the plate glass window of the department store on Fifty-seventh and Fifth, blinking as if trying to hold back tears. I went over to him and said, “What’s the...?” but before I could finish my question, he snapped to attention and threw a salute at me, and I patiently returned the salute, and then said, “What’s the trouble, sailor?” and he said, “The President is dead, sir.”
“What?” I said.
“Roosevelt,” he said.
“Roosevelt?” I said, and felt enormously stupid all at once, as if we were engaged in a baggy-pants vaudeville routine. He had told me the President was dead, hadn’t he? And the President was Roosevelt, wasn’t he? Then why had I repeated his name as though saying it aloud would deny the fact — no, he could not be dead, he had been President for as long as I could remember, he could not now be dead, we would lose the war, oh Jesus, we would lose the war and the world would be enslaved.
Dolores suddenly threw herself into my arms and began weeping against my shoulder.
It was then that I began to think I was falling in love with her.
The war in Europe, which had seemed so close to ending, now seemed fiercely determined to prolong itself. A rattle was sounding on the expectant air, signaling the death of something quite familiar, something almost loved, this war that had been with us for so long a time and which now refused to expire the way a proper invalid should have, coughing itself out in the stillness of the night. Our new President, Harry S. Truman, said, “Our demand has been, and it remains, unconditional surrender,” but Allied Supreme Headquarters in Paris announced that despite persistent rumors to the contrary, there had been no substantial advances toward Berlin, and our closest units to the city were still more than fifty miles away. It was a time of dying, that April, beginning with the death of Roosevelt, the largest death I had known since my mother’s, and then dwindling into a series of anticlimactic smaller deaths as we awaited the ultimate collapse, the end of the European war — the deaths of cities, the deaths of rivers crossed, the deaths of bastions stormed and bunkers demolished, the death of an era. Into this time of dying, into this loud and raucous, constant and endless communique from the front, there was insinuated like a delicate flute refrain, the beginning of Dolores Prine and me, or rather (like the smaller deaths) a series of smaller explorations that were leading, we suspected, to a larger beginning for us both.