T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

My own crisis came at the end of October, on a day when Prok and I had been in a jubilant mood over the correlations we were discovering between educational levels and number of sexual partners in adolescence (it was predictive, and that was the wonder of it, those who would not go on to college having a much wider and more complete range of sexual activity than those who would), and I remember feeling elated as I came through the door at Mrs. Lorber’s. I was looking forward to dinner with Iris, a picture show and then some mutually productive time spent in the backseat of the Nash, and when I saw the official-looking envelope sitting there atop the pile of circulars on the little table in the vestibule, it didn’t at first register on me. UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT, SELECTIVE SERVICE AGENCY, it read, OFFICIAL BUSINESS. I’m sure you’re familiar with the form of the thing, with the language that sounds so clinical it might have been describing the latest method of relaxing the bowels or the proper way to install a new condenser in your Zenith, and yet manages to rivet your attention all the same:

Greetings:

Having submitted yourself to a local board composed of your neighbors for the purpose of determining your availability for training and service in the land or naval forces of the United States, you are hereby notified that you have been selected …

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go — already the campus was beginning to teem with young men in uniform, already the girls were looking right through anybody in civvies and practically wrapping themselves in red, white and blue, and add to this the fervor that was building in all of us and my honest and true desire to go out and defend my country, to defend freedom and liberty and rescue all those besieged Britons from the terror of the Luftwaffe and the Albanians from the Italians and all the rest — but still, to come through the door on an otherwise tranquil afternoon and find the envelope there on top of the pile where Mrs. Lorber had no doubt left it after examining it from all angles and in every light available, was a shock. I was newly married, just getting started in a career, I had money in my pocket (not a lot, but money nonetheless) and an automobile at my disposal, and now I was going to have to start all over, with nothing. And in a strange place, among strangers. It wasn’t that I was afraid. I was too young and blandly healthy to dream even in my worst imaginings that I could be maimed, injured or even killed; that sort of thing didn’t happen to the individual — to me — but to some faceless member of the generality in the newsreel footage before the main feature came on. The problem was the uncertainty of it — of putting oneself in the hands of such an arbitrary and manifold organization as the United States Army and having to trust for the best.

I must have stood there in the vestibule for a good five minutes before the tramp of feet on the outside steps, closely followed by the violent wrenching open and then slamming of the front door, brought me out of it. Ezra Voorhees had just come in from class. Ezra was a student of business, or business as it applied to agriculture, that is, and his ambition was to improve production on his father’s poultry farm, with an eye to running it on his own someday. He was nineteen and more or less harmless, but he was loud and excitable, he’d chosen not to give up his sex history to the project (though I’d all but gone down on my knees and begged him) and he wasn’t overfussy about washing his clothes — or his person, for that matter. “John!” he cried, giving me a look of surprise, as if I were the last person he’d expected to see there in the vestibule of the house in which we shared a room. And then, snatching the letter from my hand: “What’s this? Oh, Jesus, Jesus. It’s your induction notice.”

I held my hand out stiffly, too numb to be irritated. He handed the letter back.

“You going to enlist?”

“Well, I–I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it.” I had a sudden vision of myself in uniform, erect and proud, my hair a perfect glaze cut crisply over the ears, the stiff-brimmed hat tucked under one arm, saluting. My mother would be proud. Iris would hate it. And Prok — Prok would be apoplectic.

“Enlistment’s the route to take, believe me. I’ve been talking with Dick Martone and some of the other guys — Dave Frears, for one — and we were thinking about the Marine Corps, about enlisting, I mean. To get a jump on everybody.” Ezra was tall — two or three inches taller than I — and thick-bodied, but with a disproportionately small and oddly shaped head, the crown of which he began to scratch now in a leisurely, thoughtful way. “Enlist,” he said, “and you’re right in the thick of things, overseas, in France or Belgium — or Italy, Italy, where the real fighting’s going to be.”

I went to Iris first. We met in the Commons for dinner (beef roasted white, with a puddle of butterscotch-colored gravy, disheartened potatoes and peas that had been harvested and canned before the New Deal went into effect), and I waited till we were seated, till we’d buttered our bread and peppered our meat, before pushing the envelope across the table to her. I watched as she bent her head and absorbed the contents of the letter even before she’d finished ironing it out on the placemat in front of her. Her chin was trembling, and when she raised her head again her eyes had taken on a harrowing look. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “You can’t — isn’t Tommy enough for them?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re not going to go, are you?”

I shrugged. “What choice do I have?”

“But you’re married.”

Another shrug. “Lots of people are married — and how many of them got married in the last six months just to evade the draft? They don’t care about that in Washington. And the way it’s looking — well, Wilkie didn’t win the election, did he?”

She took hold of both my hands then, across the table, interlocked her fingers with mine and squeezed as if she wanted to crush them in her own. “I won’t let you go,” she said. “I won’t. It’s not our war. It has nothing to do with us.”

But of course she was wrong, as the whole country — even the most diehard America Firster — would know in less than two months when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. That night, though, with a cold wind scuttling leaves across campus and her hands locked in mine as students all around us sat gumming their overcooked beef and burying their heads in their textbooks or the funny papers or just laughing aloud in an excess of high spirits, it seemed as if the force of her words was enough: I won’t let you go. I won’t.

The next morning, I took the letter to Prok. He was in the office before me, as usual, head down, engaged with his work. I didn’t want to interrupt him, but he looked up and greeted me with a smile as I came in, and I calculated that this was as good a chance as any to give him the bad news. “Good morning, Prok,” I said, and already his eyes were dropping back to the page, but I forged on, if a bit awkwardly. “Prok,” I repeated, and his gaze lifted again, even as the smile vanished, “there’s something — well, I just wanted you to know, that, that, well, here,” and I handed him the notice.

He gave it a cursory glance, then rose to his feet, folded it carefully and handed it back. “I’ve been afraid of this for some time,” he said. For just a moment he looked defeated, the shadow of resignation flitting over his face, his jowls gone heavy, but then he squared his shoulders and let out a sharp burst of air, as if a teakettle had come on to boil. “Damn it,” he said, and this was as close to cursing as I’ve ever heard him come, before or since, “we’re going to fight this thing, even if we have to take it to the Secretary of War himself.” And then he paused a moment and gave me a questioning look. “Who is the Secretary of War anyway?”