Goodbye, Darkness Page 3

  But — there are always buts when you deal with the Irish — there was another side to her. Today she would be a radical feminist, an executive in a large firm. Caged in the Victorian concept of what a wife should be, she expressed her hostility in attacks on her husband and in what my father described as the worst cooking in New England. He never complained about Marine Corps chow. It was the best he had ever had. Moreover, though she rejected her sisters' religion, Mary didn't reject them; after his graduation from high school in 1914 she hadn't permitted my father to work his way through Brown because every cent he made was sent to the other Logan girls. He was heartbroken. Brown wanted him, if only because he had been a second baseman at Attleboro High and had won an “A” as a star halfback. Instead, he became a costume jewelry salesman for the Watson Company. On his return home in 1919 his former employers took one look at his arm and suggested that he try another line of work. He did: taking advantage of veterans' preference for civil servants, he became a state social worker, and, ultimately, one of Massachusetts' leading advocates of birth control. That may have been his mother's influence. Possibly it may also be traced to the Knight of Columbus in that ghastly tent. At all events, his name was frequently denounced at Catholic masses across the state. Both his sons became enthusiastic users of contraceptives and are vigorous advocates of Planned Parenthood today.

  My father's attitude toward the Marine Corps was highly ambivalent. He was sensitive about his handicap — God help the stranger who tried to give him a hand with his overcoat — and though he rarely discussed what had happened in France, he saw through the Corps scam. He didn't want me to join up if another war broke out. At the same time, he was proud to have been a leatherneck himself. My earliest memories are of Memorial Day parades, with him in his dress blues leading the procession. (I didn't notice that they always marched through the cemetery.) He taught me the “Marines' Hymn,” the idiom — scuttlebutt, pogey bait, slopchute, skivvies — and the discipline: each week I stood at attention while he gave my bedroom a white-gloves inspection. But my admiration for the military mystique had another strong root. Just as Jesus was Jewish only on his mother's side, I was Yankee only on my father's. As a boy I frequently played the “Marines' Hymn” on my harmonica, but I played another tune more often. It was “Dixie.”

  During his hospitalization in Norfolk, my father and other wounded men from France were visited by young women whose paths they would never have crossed under other circumstances. These were the heavily chaperoned daughters of the Virginia aristocracy. Among them was Sallie Elizabeth Rombough Thompson, a shy, beautiful twenty-year-old girl whose father, a Norfolk cotton broker, was a nephew of Stonewall Jackson, and whose mother was a Wilkinson, one of the Wilkinsons, who, on May 11, 1862, as a three-week-old infant, had been moved out of her home on Duke Street because a Union major on the staff of General George B. McClellan wanted to use it as his headquarters. The location of the mansion was a strategic asset; two months earlier the babe's Great Aunt Phoebe had watched from her bedroom window as the C.S.S. Virginia, née Merrimack, steamed out to battle the U.S.S. Monitor eleven miles northwest of the residence, in Hampton Roads, off Fort Monroe. It was the highlight of Phoebe's life. The family and everyone they knew were totally engrossed in the war, and later legions of Confederate widows would pass along their fervor, and their bitterness, to their children, their children's children, and, in my case, to their children's children's children's children. A half-century after Appomattox my mother would wear black on Confederate Memorial Day, study Washburn's incredibly biased History of Virginia in class, and stand while her headmistress led the school's singing of the stirring “Sword of Lee” (“Forth from its scabbard, pure and bright, flashed the sword of Lee …”). J. E. B. Stuart had died at Yellow Tavern in 1864, but his young widow lived into the twentieth century and taught my mother at Sunday school, not confining herself to the Scriptures; she loved to describe her husband's spectacular raid around the entire Union army in the fall of 1861. She and the rest of the Virginia Establishment regarded McClellan's occupation of Norfolk as particularly scurrilous and “ungentlemanly” — the ultimate transgression — because he had, they told one another, taken advantage of the absence of Norfolk's men. Every Wilkinson, every Jackson, every cousin, including some in their fifties, were away fighting under Lee in three Virginia regiments and the Dinwiddie Grays. Their ranks were decimated, and their women plunged into lifelong grief, when Pickett's heroic charge failed. On the night of July 3, 1863, that last terrible day at Gettysburg, my grandmother's Aunt Margaret Wilkinson, accompanied by a slave holding a lamp aloft, combed the battlefield, turning over corpses, searching for her husband, John. She found him alive, but he died after the amputation of his arm. His comrades were stricken; they had left him for dead. Respice, adspice, prospice. It happened at Gettysburg, it happened in the Argonne, and it would happen again, to Aunt Margaret's great-great-nephew, first in childhood and then on a remote Pacific beachhead of which he, and his parents, for that matter, had never heard.

  Like Douglas MacArthur, whose grandfather, father, brother, and son were all christened Arthur MacArthur, my family's Christian names are somewhat confusing. My brother, Robert, practices law with another attorney who is named Robert Manchester. Until my father's death I was “Billa,” or, more formally, “William Manchester, Jr.” I hated that — I have always regarded “Jr.” as a sly boast of legitimacy — and throughout my early life I was mortified by people telephoning our house who had to be asked whether they wanted “Big Bill” or “Little Bill.” Similarly, both my mother and her mother (who, once the hated Yankees had left, returned to her Duke Street home and matured into a stately woman, always dressed like Queen Mary, toque hat and all) were called Sallie. The daughter was “Baby Sallie,” but after her marriage that became absurd, and introductions were often awkward. I called my grandmother “Nanny,” which increased the confusion when we were in Virginia because there I was turned over to a real nanny.

  The Union officer who had liberated the first Sallie's birthplace felt remorseful later and appeared at the threshold of a nearby family mansion to which the Wilkinson women had moved, bringing with him a bowl of fresh strawberries. A maid consulted her mistress and returned to tell him what he could do with his strawberries. His anxiety to make amends was more expedient than generous, for he had found that he had offended a family whose power reached north of the Mason-Dixon line, and who, had they deigned to use it, could have given him problems. Unlike most of the South's great families, they were not left destitute when their Cause was Lost. They had forfeited a lot, especially blood, but a great deal was left. My grandmother Sallie attended a finishing school where only French was spoken, and she spent each year's social season in Manhattan with her Aunt Mattie, whose husband had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. After her wedding the Thompsons and their children occupied a front-row pew in Saint Andrew's, Norfolk's fashionable Episcopalian church, with a polished brass plaque on the little swinging door to remind others that Thompsons, and nobody else, were entitled to pray this close to God. Given the sad estate into which the Manchesters had fallen, and the fact that Baby Sallie's fiancé was a Yankee, she would obviously be marrying Down. She didn't look at it that way, however; neither did he; and neither, once they had met the prospective groom, did her relatives. Whatever the Watson Company thought, to Southerners a wound was a badge of honor. And my father was handsome, tactful, and charming. He was an instant success in Norfolk society. On Flag Day, June 14, 1921, he and my mother were wedded in the bride's family's summer home on Willoughby Beach, Virginia, by two Episcopalian priests, from Saint Andrew's Church and the Church of the Advent in Ocean View. Their marriage became the happiest I have ever known.

  I may have startled them. For once in my life I was prompt, arriving nine months, two weeks, and four days after they left the altar. True to the tradition of both families, I held my first deathbed scene just eleven months later. On the bleakest day of February 192
3, in a cold Attleboro flat, I came within a breath of death from double pneumonia. The doctor — they all made house calls in those days — departed under the impression that I was gone, and my mother, in whose arms I lay, saw my eyes capsize until only the whites were visible. My throat actually began to rattle. Then I shuddered, stifling the rattle, and my eyes rolled back. The resummoned physician darted back into the room and reexamined me. No doubt about it, he said with astonishment; I was still on this side of the river. But little Bill remained a feeble Bill. A more hospitable climate was necessary, so each winter we boarded the Norfolk boat in Providence, Rhode Island, returning to Massachusetts in the spring.

  Thus I grew to be a mild, fragile boy. “He's like Ed,” said Grandma Manchester, referring to an ectomorphic uncle. As a Christian Scientist Grandma frowned on the doctors in my life. When I was prostrate with whooping cough, she kept telling me, “It's all in your mind, Billa.” Then she caught it from me and I hung over her bed, saying, “It's all in your mind, Grandma,” until, with a sickly smile, she agreed and struggled to her feet. But despite her disapproval of physicians, I was too delicate to forgo them. And this had powerful implications for my emerging character. My physical problems led to social problems. Recently an old friend of the family wrote one of my aunts: “What an unusual childhood Bill had. I remember Billa going to Farmers School. … Sallie brought Billa up very, very polite, real Southern — not blunt like the Yankees of the north. The big boys of Feather-ville” — a tough neighborhood — “just did not mean to give Billa any peace.”

  My incapacity for violence became a family issue. Both my father and my grandfather had spent their grammar-school years in the three-room Farmers School. In addition, I was the son of a Marine; it was inconceivable that I should be a sissy. Yet I was. “Hit back,” my father sternly told me. “Never forget that you are a Manchester.” But my mother said, “Always remember that you are a gentleman,” and I couldn't reconcile the two, thereby failing Scott Fitzgerald's test of a first-rate intelligence: “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Civility triumphed. Swapping punches made no sense to me. I simply couldn't see the point of inflicting pain on another boy. Word of my vulnerability circulated swiftly, and was passed around just as quickly when we moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, in my eighth year. My father's pension was small; he was becoming a pioneer in social work and, like most pioneers, he was poorly paid; in the late 1920s and early 1930s we lived in some tough neighborhoods. The Springfield equivalents of Featherville were the Columbus Avenue gang, the Acushnet School gang, and the Plumtree Road gang. Any member of any of them who had lost face knew he could regain it by giving me a bloody nose.

  It would be good to report that I accepted this punishment stoically, but I didn't. Somebody was always “after” me; I was in a state of more or less continual terror, a fugitive from punishments I did not understand. What I couldn't grasp was that it was my refusal to hit back which enraged them, not my physical frailty. I was a milksop, but other milksops escaped unscarred. My difficulty was that my tormentors knew that, despite my fear, I was too proud to solicit their good opinion. Yet they never gave up. Two of them I remember vividly. The first bore the Dickensian name of Art Loosemore; he was the first to knee me in the groin. The other persecutor also evokes pelvic memories, though of a very different nature. To inflict the ultimate humiliation upon me, one gang decided to let a girl beat me up. Her name was Betty Zimmerman. At eleven she already had the build of a bull dike. Flattening me with a single blow, she straddled me in what Masters and Johnson call the female-superior position, swatting away until she had given me two shiners. I recall with amazement that I felt aroused. I was glad when she stopped pummeling me, but I missed her toiling loins. It wasn't masochism. Already I had the libido of a flaming heterosexual and not, as one might expect, given my temperament, the other.

  But I knew that I was different from other boys: skinny, lacking coordination or small-muscle skills, inept with marbles, easily found in relievo, and a flop on sandlots — after the captains of two teams had picked the rest of the players, they had to choose up all over again, to determine which side would be burdened with me. During luncheon recess we would all sit on the school steps, and the others would vie in identifying the makers or models of passing cars. I couldn't tell a Packard from a Ford; I still can't. I simply didn't fit. I didn't even like popular songs, because I felt that the lyrics insulted my intelligence. Later, as an adult, my strong sense of individuality would be an advantage, but in my early years it was a heavy cross to bear. The chasm between me and my peers was revealed one day when I asked a boy if he knew the last words of Stonewall Jackson. “He didn't say nothing,” the boy replied. “It was some kid who said, ‘Say it ain't so, Joe.’” He thought Stonewall Jackson had played center field for the 1919 Chicago White Sox.

  By the time I reached my teens, I had found a way to thwart bullies, striking up a friendship with a strong boy who shared my curiosity about the world beyond Springfield. Meanwhile, however, I had retreated from the playground to the library, from camaraderie to introspection and the written language. My mother has doggerel I scribbled at the age of seven. At eleven I was typing short stories, derivative of Poe, on the Underwood my father used for case reports, and I cannot remember a time in my life, excepting combat, when I was not deep in a book. In our bookcases at home, brought from Virginia, and in the Forest Park branch of the Springfield Public Library, I was introduced to writers rarely known to young boys: Ruskin, Macaulay, Thomas Huxley, Matthew Arnold, and those touchstones of every intellectual son of New England, Thoreau on civil disobedience and Emerson on forbearance and self-reliance. Of course, their concepts were beyond me, as, later, I would founder over Joyce and Pound. These writers attracted me, and delighted me, by the skill with which they used the language. Their reasoning eluded me, but I learned style from them long before the public school system apprenticed me to Howells and Hawthorne.

  The Ruskins and the Macaulays were the cream of an odd crop. I also devoured Wyss's Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, The Little Colonel, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, Swift on Gulliver, Lamb on roast pig, Tom, the Water Baby, a translation of Malory's Morte d' Arthur, and, on a descending scale, William Ernest Henley, Sir Henry Newbolt, G. A. Henty, Franklin W. Dixon, Burt L. Standish, Edward Stratemeyer, and Horatio Alger, Jr. My appetite for juvenile junk was enormous. One summer on Cape Cod I read twenty Frank and Dick Merriwells in less than a week. But a pattern was forming; I was being drawn to Victorian authors and those who followed the Victorian mode. (I was a throwback in other ways; I scorned saddle shoes and reversible raincoats and loathed Swing.) This slanting toward the last century was most striking, and most significant, in books about war. Here I passed Scott Fitzgerald's test. My vision of martial splendor, both ours and that of our allies, could withstand all threats of disillusionment; I was transported by dreams of leathernecks sweeping all before them, and the glint of moonlight on the sabers of French cavalry, and British squares standing firm with the Gatling jammed and the colonel dead. It wasn't difficult. Millions had done it before me. Their equivocal view of battle can be summed up in a single word. At Waterloo Pierre Cambronne commanded Napoleon's Imperial Guard. When all was lost, a British officer asked him to lay down his arms. Generations of schoolboys have been taught that he replied: “The Guard dies, but never surrenders.” Actually he said: “Merde!” (“Shit!”) The French know this; a euphemism for merde is called “the word of Cambronne.” Yet children are still told that he said what they know he did not say. So it was with me. I read Kipling, not Hemingway; Rupert Brooke, not Wilfred Owen; Gone with the Wind, not Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane.

  The pacifism of the 1930s maddened me. I yearned for valor; I wanted the likes of Lee and the Little Colonel to be proud of me. To show my contempt for the Yankees, I fashioned a homemade Stars and Bars from a sheet and watercolors, and sneeringly flaunted
it at school recess. My classmates were confused; they didn't know what it was. Once my mother had screwed up her courage and told her father-in-law that she supposed his father had fought her grandfathers. Grandpa sat in confused silence for a while; when drunk, he always looked extremely puzzled. Then he realized that he had been insulted. He raised his chin and gave her a stare of hauteur. “Manchesters,” he said, “sent substitutes.” My mother didn't know what he was talking about. Luckily for my hide, I was experiencing a similar failure of communications. It was ludicrous. Here was a ninety-eight-pound weakling, an unsuccessful Charles Atlas client whom even Betty Zimmerman could beat the shit out of, dreaming of glory under banners furled long ago in dusty attics. Most of the rest of my generation believed in appeasement, at least when it came to war, but I was an out-and-out warmonger, a chauvinist dying for the chance to die. As it happened, my daydreams were translated into reality by the emergence of a wicked genius bearing a black Swastika, a Teutonic monster unmatched in all the books I read, who could be destroyed only on the battlefield. Long afterward I flattered myself that I had been prescient, that like Churchill I had seen the gathering storm. It is true that I wept over Nanking and Munich, and that, once I had learned a little German, I rose early to rage at Hitler's wild speeches. But the fact is that I was really an eager Saint George looking for a dragon. I'm not sure that, or something like that, wasn't true of Churchill, too.

  Henry V was naturally my idol, and here we skirt one of the central events of my life: my discovery of Shakespeare. I was now fifteen. For years I had been plagued by a vocabulary of words I could understand but not pronounce because I had never heard them spoken. “Anchor” had come out “an-chore,” “colonel” as “ko-low-nall,” and I had put the accent on the third syllable of “diáspora.” But I could no longer ignore diacritical marks in dictionaries; Shakespeare cried to be read aloud. And as I did so I was stunned by his absolute mastery. In Johnson's secondhand bookstore in Springfield I found a forty-volume set of his works, with only Macbeth missing, for four dollars. I knew where I could get a Macbeth for a dime, so I paid a dollar to hold the set, and returned with the rest two months later. I have it yet, tattered and yellowing. It was the best bargain of my life.