Goodbye, Darkness Read online

  I memorized the role of Hamlet, then Marc Anthony in Julius Caesar, and then long soliloquies from Macbeth, Lear, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet. In high school I produced, directed, and starred in Hamlet and, looking like a minstrel-show end man, in Othello. My stage career ended in 1938, when the Smith Club of Springfield brought Orson Welles to the Municipal Auditorium. This was a few weeks after his Martian broadcast. The place was jammed. But after sneaking into countless concerts, I knew every room in the building, including the one where Welles would rest during the intermission between his lecture and his readings. I appeared on the threshold, immaculate in my double-breasted blue-serge suit. “Mr. Welles,” I said in my reedy adolescent voice. He looked up from his text. I piped, “I am the president of the Springfield Classical High School Dramatic Club.” His eyes bulged. His jaw sagged. In a hollow voice he gasped: “No!”

  My father had taken a lively interest in my stage career, though he had vetoed my plan to enter the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. “Actors are bums,” he said, and that was the end of that. He was determined to save me from debauchery. To New Englanders of his stock, the worst blow that could fall on a youth was acquiring “a Record,” that is, a police record; it was as great a stigma as Jean Valjean's yellow passport. (I took a different view. Later, in college, when I was arrested for being drunk and disorderly on the Amherst green and fined ten dollars, I passed the hat at my fraternity and never gave the matter another thought.) One day when I was about fifteen I was one of several boys lolling on a lawn like Restoration rakes with two girls who were notorious for going, as we put it, all the way. We were playing “under the sheet,” adding that phrase to song titles and thus giving them giggly double entendres. A nosey Parker looked out her window, saw our orgy, and called my father, who fetched me home and clouted me. Shortly afterward I heard about masturbation and asked him for the real lowdown on it. He gave me the old malarkey about brain damage and how he had never done it, hadn't even heard about it until a sex hygiene lecture in the Marine Corps. Then he gave me the keeping-yourself-pure spiel and explained the facts of life. I bought it all; I tried hard (and unsuccessfully) to follow his advice and think pure thoughts. He had assumed that I would. Somehow he kept his faith in me, affectionately calling me “Bozo” and always looking for sources of pride there, just as I was trying to please him. His favorite song was “I'm Always Chasing Rainbows.” He was of that generation that believed in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow — my generation knows that if it's there, it belongs to the government — and he believed that if I shaped up I could lick the world.

  Yet I was a discouraging son. He didn't really expect much of me: just that I be a normal American boy, fleet of foot, handy with a mitt and a bat, a tinkerer who could fix things like warped storm doors, defective lawn mowers, light switches, and running toilets. I could do none of these. On one memorable July 4 I dropped a whole bag of “torpedoes,” fireworks which exploded upon impact, on my feet, and had to be rushed to the hospital. The following year I picked up a live sparkler from the wrong end. Given my love of prose, I should have at least been a good student. I wasn't; lessons bored me. I preferred books which teachers didn't assign or, in most cases, hadn't even read. Once I brought home a report card with three D's. Seeing my father's disappointment and then feeling it — he believed in corporal punishment for that, too — I finished the next marking period with straight A's, which, as he rightly pointed out, proved that I could do it. Then I failed shop, which was considered impossible. We were all building little short-legged, hinged tables for people who breakfasted in bed. The instructor turned the legs for me on a lathe. All I had to do was drive the nails straight. I couldn't do it, not once. My father took one look at my efforts and groaned, like the Giant Despair in Pilgrim's Progress.

  My one success in his eyes, and I did it for him, was in Scouting. I became a junior assistant scoutmaster and an eagle scout. In a formal ceremony I pinned a little silver eagle on my mother's dress and my father pinned my badge on me with his one hand. Our picture was in the papers. I have it still, and looking at it I can see only that hand. He could do almost anything with it, even build a cold room and a fruit cellar, and I, with my two hands, could do so little.

  At the dinner table my mother always cut his meat into small pieces. It was his only concession to his handicap. He gardened, painted, and defeated me with effortless ease in Ping-Pong and horseshoe pitching. No one could beat him at anything. He was direct, forceful, incapable of compromise. Once a landlord flirted with my mother and sent her flowers. My father came home, took the flowers back to the landlord, and crammed them down his throat. Later, thanks to a small inheritance from one of his Manchester aunts, he made a down payment on a suburban home. The local Communist party decided to picket it. They wanted to see the public welfare rolls, a likely source of future party members. My father had decided that those unfortunate enough to be on relief should not be embarrassed and exploited; their names would be kept in confidence. Compared with what was to come thirty years later, the Communist demonstration was almost charming. (One placard read: “Mr. Manchester, servant of the people, does not serve the people.”) But on the first — and last — evening, they boasted to reporters and neighbors that we were cowering in our darkened house. As they were about to break up, our Chevy turned in to the driveway. My father had taken us to Sam's Diner and then to a Jeanette MacDonald–Nelson Eddy double feature.

  He was such a beautiful man, with such a beautiful rainbow of a laugh. Later as a newspaperman I came to know many world figures, from Churchill and Eisenhower to Stevenson and the Kennedys. I never met a man with more charisma than my father. He ruled us like a pasha. Yet in retrospect I wish he had been a shade less competent. He was the only member of the family who knew how to drive a car, or write a check, or negotiate a loan. Inexplicably he had permitted half of his national serviceman's insurance to lapse; only five thousand dollars of it, and the shrinking equity in our home, seemed to stand between us and eligibility for those same relief rolls should he die. And he was dying. He suffered from migraines, ulcers, hypertension, and most of all from the wounds of 1918, which had never really healed. One frightening evening he was carried, bleeding internally, out of the house, to an ambulance, and thereafter he was in and out of Springfield Hospital and veterans' hospitals.

  The end approached as World War II approached, but I knew far more about what the Germans were doing than what was happening to the man who supported my mother, my four-year-old brother, and me. I stood by his bed for the last time on Sunday, January 19, 1941. He knew he had only a few days to live, but the possibility that he might cease to exist never entered my mind. Mute and uncomprehending, I kissed him upon the lips, held his good hand while he said that I was a genius (that being a common excuse for daffiness then) and reminded me once more that I was a Manchester (with all that that entailed). But his strongest message was unspoken. His eyes said: Avenge me!

  I was eighteen by the calendar, fourteen or less in knowledge of the world. He hadn't even permitted me to apply for part-time employment, because he said I would be taking jobs from the poor. Somehow I had reached the extraordinary conclusion that we were rich. Actually I knew nothing about money; I had heard, in the course of one conversation between my parents, that our house was worth either eighty-five thousand dollars or eighty-five hundred, I didn't know which; to me the second figure, which was correct, was essentially no different from the other. So, in the autumn of 1940, I had left for Massachusetts State College in Amherst, cocky in my newfound masculinity and increasingly sure of my flair for the language. During the Christmas vacation I had rattled away on my typewriter, aware that my father lay ill in the hospital but kept in ignorance of what the doctors had told my mother: that it was a matter of time, and of very little time, before he left us. I returned to Amherst for the end of my first semester. In the middle of final exams the call came from an uncle: “Your dad has passed away.” He was forty-four years o
ld.

  I remember the funeral. It was savagely cold, an iron cold; the ground had to be jackhammered open to receive the coffin. A little sapling stood at the foot of it. Today it is a beautiful tree, and he lies in its lovely shade, but then it offered pitifully small protection from the weather. We were all shivering, then shaking. The others were weeping, but I just stared down at the grave. I wondered: Where has he gone? Then a curtain falls over my memory. It is all a dark place in my mind. I recall nothing that happened in the next four months. It was my first experience of traumatic amnesia, or fugue. I was in deep shock. My mother later told me how helpful I was in selling the car and house, in moving us to a tenement and taking in a roomer. None of it has ever come back to me. Apparently I returned to college and completed the year. The dean's office has a record of my grades. I have looked at the textbooks I studied that semester. It is as though I were seeing them for the first time.

  When I returned to conscious life I was working as a grease monkey in a machine shop at thirty-five cents an hour, eighty-four hours a week. If I made five hundred dollars between that job and another job in the college store — thirty cents an hour there — I could, with a scholarship, stay in school. My mother told me that whatever happened, I must not think of dropping out. I was dumbfounded. Such a thought had never crossed my mind. Like Chekhov's perennial student, I could imagine no life away from classes and books.

  But the perennial student's cherry orchard came down, and my undergraduate years were abruptly interrupted on December 7, 1941. In the spring of 1942, guided by the compass that had been built into me, I hitchhiked to Springfield and presented myself at the Marine Corps recruiting station, a cramped second-story suite of rooms with a superb view of a Wrigley's billboard and the Paramount Theater parking lot. The first test was weight, and I flunked it. There wasn't enough of me. The sergeant, or “Walking John,” as the Corps called recruiting NCOs, suggested that I go out, eat all the bananas and drink all the milk I could hold, and then come back. I did. I made the weight. Immediately thereafter I was sick. My liver, colon, and lungs — all my interior plumbing — fused into a single hard knot and wedged in my epiglottis. The sergeant held my head over a basin as I threw up banana after banana, and he said, not unkindly, “Just keep puking till you feel something round and hairy-like coming up. Keep that. That's your asshole.” I recovered and continued with the exam. Meanwhile all that milk was working its way through my system. My back teeth were floating. At last the end was in sight. A pharmacist's mate nodded at a rack of twenty-four test tubes and told me to go over in the corner and give him a urine specimen. But once I started, I couldn't stop. I returned and handed him twenty-four test tubes, each filled to the brim with piss. He looked at the rack, looked at me, and then back at the rack again. An expression of utter awe crossed his face. It was the first misunderstanding between me and the Marine Corps. There would be others.

  BAKER

  Arizona, I Remember You

  During the interval between my father's death and the out-break of war in the Pacific, my loss of perception had been matched by American ignorance of the threat in the Far East. The United States was distracted by the war in Europe, with Hitler's hammer blows that year falling on Yugoslavia, Greece, Crete, and — the greatest crucible of suffering — Russia. Virtually all Americans were descended from European immigrants. They had studied Continental geography in school. When commentators told them that Nazi spearheads were knifing here and there, they needed no maps; they all had maps in their minds. Oriental geography, on the other hand, was (and still is) a mystery to most of them. Yet the Japanese had been fighting in China since 1931. In 1937 they had bombed and sunk the U.S. gunboat Panay on the Yangtze and jeered when the administration in Washington, shackled by isolationism, had done nothing. Even among those of us who called ourselves “interventionists,” Hitler was regarded as the real enemy. It was Hitler Roosevelt had been trying to provoke with the Atlantic Charter, the destroyer swap with Britain, Lend-Lease, and shoot-on-sight convoys, each of which drew Washington closer to London. Europe, we thought, was where the danger lay. Indeed, one of my reasons for joining the Marine Corps was that in 1918 the Marines had been among the first U.S. troops to fight the Germans. Certainly I never dreamt I would wind up on the other side of the world, on a wretched island called Guadalcanal.

  Roosevelt never changed his priorities, but when the Führer refused to rise to the bait, the President found another way to lead us into the war — which was absolutely essential, he felt, if the next generation of Americans was to be spared a hopeless confrontation with a hostile, totalitarian world. On September 27, 1940, the Japanese had signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. That opened the possibility of reaching the Axis through Tokyo. And Roosevelt knew how to do it. During the four months before the pact, the fall of France, Holland, and Belgium had wholly altered the strategic picture in Asia. Their colonies there were almost defenseless, but FDR let it be known that he felt avuncular. Even before the Tripartite Pact he had warned the Japanese to leave French Indochina alone. Once the Nipponese tilted toward the Axis, he proclaimed an embargo on scrap iron and steel to all nations outside the Western Hemisphere, Great Britain excepted. He reached the point of no return in the summer of 1941. On July 24 Jap troops formally occupied Indochina, including Vietnam. Two days later the President froze all Japanese credits in the United States, which meant no more oil from America. Britain followed suit. This was serious for the Japanese but not desperate; their chief source of petroleum was the Netherlands East Indies, now Indonesia, which sold them 1.8 million tons a year. Then came the real shock. The Dutch colonial government in Djakarta froze Japanese assets there — and renounced its oil contract with Dai Nippon (“Dai” meaning “Great,” as in Great Britain). For Prince Fumi-maro Konoye, Emperor Hirohito's premier, this was a real crisis. Virtually every drum of gas and oil fueling the army's tanks and planes had to be imported. Worse, the Japanese navy, which until now had counseled patience, but which consumed four hundred tons of oil an hour, joined the army in calling for war. Without Dutch petroleum the country could hold out for a few months, no more.

  Konoye submitted his government's demands to the American ambassador in Tokyo: If the United States would stop arming the Chinese, stop building new fortifications in the Pacific, and help the emperor's search for raw materials and markets, Konoye promised not to use Indochina as a base, to withdraw from china after the situation there had been “settled,” and to “guarantee” the neutrality of the Philippines. Washington sent back an ultimatum: Japan must withdraw all troops from China and Indochina, withdraw from the Tripartite Pact, and sign a nonaggression pact with neighboring countries. On October 16 Konoye, who had not been unreasonable, stepped down and was succeeded by General Hideki Tojo, the fiercest hawk in Asia. The embargoed Japanese believed that they had no choice. They had to go to war unless they left China, a loss of face which to them was unthinkable. They began honing their ceremonial samurai swords.

  All this was known in Pennsylvania Avenue's State, War, and Navy Department Building. The only question was where the Nips would attack. There were so many possibilities — Thailand, Hong Kong, Borneo, the Kra Isthmus, Guam, Wake, and the Philippines. Pearl Harbor had been ruled out because Tojo was known to be massing troops in Saigon, and American officers felt sure that these myopic, bandy-legged little yellow men couldn't mount more than one offensive at a time. Actually they were preparing to attack all these objectives, including Pearl, simultaneously. In fact, the threat to Hawaii became clear, in the last weeks of peace, even to FDR's chiefs of staff. U.S. intelligence, in possession of the Japanese code, could follow every development in Dai Nippon's higher echelons. On November 22 a message from Tokyo to its embassy on Washington's Massachusetts Avenue warned that in a week “things are automatically going to happen.” On November 27, referring to the possibility of war, the emperor's envoy to the United States asked, “Does it seem as if a child will be born?” He was t
old, “Yes, the birth of a child seems imminent. It seems as if it will be a strong, healthy boy.” Finally, on November 29, the U.S. Signal Corps transcribed a message in which a functionary at the Washington embassy asked, “Tell me what Zero hour is?” The voice from Tokyo replied softly: “Zero hour is December 8” — December 7 in the United States — “at Pearl Harbor.”

  The Americans now knew that an attack was coming, when it would come, and where. The danger could hardly have been greater. Japan's fleet was more powerful than the combined fleets of America and Great Britain in Pacific waters. U.S. commanders in Hawaii and the Philippines were told: “This dispatch is to be considered a war warning. … An aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days.” That was followed on December 6 by: “Hostilities may ensue. Subversive activities may be expected.” The ranking general in Honolulu concluded that this was a reference to Nipponese civilians on Oahu. Therefore, he ordered all aircraft lined up in the middle of their airstrips — where they could be instantly destroyed by hostile aircraft. The ranking admiral decided to take no precautions. Put on constant alert, he felt, his men would become exhausted. So officers and men were given their customary Saturday evening liberty on December 6. No special guards were mounted on the United States Fleet in Pearl Harbor — ninety-four ships, including seven commissioned battleships and nine cruisers — the only force-in-being which could prevent new Japanese aggression in Asia. Only 195 of the navy's 780 antiaircraft guns in the harbor, and only 4 of the army's 30 antiaircraft batteries, were manned. And most of them lacked ammunition. It had been returned to storage because it was apt to “get dusty.”