Mitla Pass, page 41
One night he heard his mother speaking in Yiddish to Bubba and confiding that she had sent the dog to the pound.
"He was filled with fleas. Gideon was terribly allergic. I only did what I thought best. I didn't know he would carry on like this."
I don't know if he ever fully forgave his mother for that, but it was as though a part of him had died, and what came back in its place was anger.
A few weeks after Gideon learned Dinky had been put to sleep, Danny Shapiro was hit by a truck and hospitalized for an indefinite period, with a fractured skull and several broken bones. Molly was a poorly paid secretary and her salary couldn't cover the medical bills, much less support herself, her husband, her mother, and her brother. Dom and I dug into our pockets again.
But, thank God for small favors, there was one less mouth to feed because Leah was soon gone again. This time it was to Washington, where she married a little shoe clerk who worked in Sears, Roebuck and did nice things with women's feet and got to steal a quick glimpse up the leg sometimes, when offered. It actually appeared that she would settle down with this guy for a while.
Then came the third blow, the terrible blow, the death of Bubba Hannah, God rest her soul. She went in her sleep, thank God, from a heart attack. The impact on the family was shattering, the most terrible event of our lives. Gideon, already weakened from blow after blow, seemed to be the one hurt the most.
Bubba always loved him a little extra-special. For
years she had taken pennies and nickels from the food money and put it away, so when she died each of her grandchildren received . . . eighteen dollars. For Gideon, she left fifty dollars. "That boy is a genius," she always said. "Someday he will make us proud."
Dom and I had to clean up Hannah's affairs and had no choice but to sell the Monroe Street house to pay off a large accumulation of debts. Who should take in Zayde Moses but Al and Fanny.
Gideon passed his sixteenth birthday, but his heart was not in high school. He always managed to be pleasant as a member of my family and sometimes he'd put on a hilarious skit with one of my daughters. But mostly the boy was very sad and depressed. To read his stories had once been a joy, but now the pages were filled with an overwhelming sense of despair. Sometimes I got a terrible feeling that he was searching for death. Simone and Molly also picked up on this.
Gideon was in Forest Park High School, a co-educational institution. There were lots of pretty girls—this was the time of life when tight little blooms opened into flowers. There was a nice Jewish center for the kids in the neighborhood and dances every weekend after the Sabbath. It seemed that every girl Gideon met, who liked him, became the object of a fantasy.
He was desperately, desperately seeking someone of his own. Someone who could love him more than an uncle or a sister. And he pretended that every new little romance was a matter of life and death. He was a charmer and got all of the girls he wanted, but many became frightened of him. He was far too serious, far too soon.
Danny Shapiro was finally released from the hospital, but he had to find work where he could sit at a bench. The accident had left him with one very weak leg and he had terrible headaches from the fractured skull. I took him in as an apprentice pharmacist and let
him and Molly fix up a little room in the rear of the drugstore to live.
It wasn't exactly paradise, but I had three children in college and was sending support money for Zayde Moses, as well as taking care of Gideon, Molly, and Danny. I was stretched and it would be a year or two of real hard work for Danny to get certified. So, we made do. Nobody starved.
It went like this for a year. Danny improved steadily and worked like a horse. Gideon ... he raged inside and failed in school and had the drudgery of summer school. Can you imagine that boy flunking English. No reason for it, except he just didn't care.
A letter came from Lean in Washington. We always dreaded that envelope. She wrote that she was coming to get Gideon and take him to live with her and her Sears shoe salesman.
"Lazar! Lazar!" Simone screamed.
I tore down to the basement, where Gideon had his "office." He was face down on the floor, unconscious, an empty pill bottle in his hand. I pried it loose and read the label. Oh God, God, God! Phenobarbital . . . one-grain tablets. It appeared to be a new bottle he had taken from the store ... oh God . . . one hundred pills were in him. I put my head to his chest. He was breathing, but his breath was becoming labored.
"I want an emergency police ambulance!" I shouted. "Tell them to bring a doctor and a tube. They'll have to flush him on the way to the hospital."
Simone responded instantly, without panic. My daughter Priscilla came in and I screamed to her, "Get the ipecac out of my medicine cabinet and put on coffee! Go!"
She returned with the ipecac and I grabbed him by the hair while Priscilla held his mouth open and I poured the medicine into him, pulling him to his feet. "Give me a bucket!" We held his head while he vomited.
"Let me die . . ."he mumbled with slobber and puke running down his chin.
"Come on, buddy, keep walking. Here! Take some more of this ipecac. Come on, buddy, keep walking! Quick with that coffee!"
The siren of an ambulance was heard.
"Let me . . . ! Let me die!"
The Lord smiled on us that day. If we hadn't found him that moment, he would have done himself in. We all broke down and wept when the doctor told us later that he would pull through without permanent damage.
"I'm sorry for all the trouble I caused. I'm sorry," Gideon said.
We were deeply, deeply troubled and knew the lad had to stay under our wing. Neither Molly nor Danny could apply for legal guardianship because of their financial situation.
With a little inside help from Dominick, Gideon's case was placed in the hands of a sympathetic judge, Paul Sklar. Dom and I had to confide in Paul that the boy's father had tried to force him into the Young Communist League and Leah had legally deserted him. Gideon was called into the judge's office to confirm this.
The case against Leah was open and shut. Tears fell down Gideon's cheek as he confirmed her many absences.
"And your father tried to coerce you into becoming a Communist?" the judge asked. "Is that true?"
Gideon's mouth clamped shut.
"It's all right, son. It won't go any further than this office."
He refused to speak.
"You want to stay with your Uncle Lazar, don't
you?"
"Yes, sir." "Well?"
"Nobody's going to make me rat on my dad," Gideon answered.
"Wait outside," the judge ordered. He turned to Dom and me and we nodded that it was true. The judge shook his head and signed the decree for me to be his guardian, but God alone knows what damage had been done to Gideon in those two minutes.
December 7, 1941
WAR! WAR! WAR! WAR! WAR!
JAPANESE ATTACK PEARL HARBOR! FOR ASKS CONGRESS FOR A STATE OF WAR. SNEAK ATTACK CAUSES MASSIVE DAMAGE. CASUALTIES HIGH. BATTLESHIP ARIZONA SUNK.
I turned off the radio, but could not stop looking at the newspaper. Awful! Awful! Simone's eyes were rimmed with red as she patted my back and stroked my hair. The woman had been so badly damaged by war, and now, so soon again. I reached back and touched her hand.
"Pierre called from Boston," she said. "He's talking about enlisting."
"I'll get back to him right away. Pierre has always listened," I said. "They don't want college boys. It's just not his time to go. I assure you, darling, he will finish his postgraduate work."
"God, the madness. I'll cut Pierre's finger off before I let him go."
No use talking to her when she got like that. I poked through the icebox. The hell with it. I needed a drink.
"Here, I'll fix it for you," she said.
Molly entered the kitchen with Danny limping behind her. She looked the color of a corpse.
"Gideon has enlisted in the Marines," she blurted.
I banged on the table. "That's crazy! He's just turned seventeen!"
"He's up in his room packing," Molly said shakily. "He says that if you don't sign his papers, he's going to run away and enlist somewhere where he can pass for twenty-one."
"He's got to prove his age and he only started shaving last year."
"He's got an altered birth certificate and they aren't checking ages too closely."
Oh boy, oh boy, Gideon was going to be one tough customer.
"You want me?" Molly and Danny said together.
"Let me see what I can do," I answered. I went up to the room he used when Pierre was away, knocked, and entered. He was filling up a suitcase on the bed.
"Going someplace?"
"Did Molly tell you?"
"She mentioned some chozzerai about you trying to enlist in the Marines."
"I have enlisted. There's a consent form on the desk. If you sign it, I can leave from Baltimore tomorrow. Otherwise, I'll just keep going from city to city until one of the recruiting stations takes me."
"An ultimatum? You are talking to your Uncle Lazar, young man. You don't give me ultimatums."
Gideon sighed and relaxed a bit, but those blue eyes of his were penetrating. They said, "Don't stop me."
"Uncle Lazar, I love you. I don't want you to have to get mixed up with this. It's better if I just go."
"What's going on? I'm no longer your guardian? I'm a bum off the streets?"
"Gripes. Look, you and Aunt Simone have been wonderful to me, better than anybody in my life, except Molly. I know if you sign for me, my dad and mom are going to raise blue hell. Why don't you let me make it easy for you by just slipping out?"
"From Nathan Zadok and Leah, I don't exactly tremble with fear. Can we talk, son?"
His eyes flitted about, now avoiding mine. He was very jumpy and jittery. He wanted out, to hit the road. His mind was closed. "You owe me twenty minutes' conversation, for God's sake," I said.
Gideon jumped on the bed, rested his shoulders against the headboard, and nodded to me, daring me to talk him out of it.
"Why the Marines?" I asked.
"That's funny coming from you."
"I joined the Navy, they attached me to the Marines. I was also a grown man. I have my reasons. They're not the same as yours."
"I've always wanted to go into the Marines when I could get rid of that Communist crap. I've seen them at the Fireman-Quantico Marine game, walking out of the stadium in their dress blues with a girl on each arm. I'd look at your picture with the fourragère around your left shoulder. I don't really know, Uncle Lazar."
"Then think of reasons."
"I'm not happy here. It's not you. It's not Molly. I'm flunking in school again. I'm not doing what's right with my life. I've got to get out there and find out about it. Maybe the war just makes it a good excuse, I don't know."
"Come on, you can do better than that," I said.
"My Uncle Matti was a hero during the Arab riots in Palestine. You were a hero at Belleau Wood. Miss Abigail was a heroine."
"So you need a war of your own, is that it?"
"I want to be wanted," the boy cried. "I know how much you and Molly love me, but you have your own people to love. I want to belong. I want to be needed. I have to be a writer and I have nothing to write about but sadness and despair."
"So go down to the burlesque show and copy their jokes."
"All right," he cried, "I have to go! I've got to fill my coffers with whores and buddies and feel good about living. I want to look sharp in a uniform. I want to be tough and drink like Hemingway and have mates like
the Mexicans in Tortilla Flat. With my mom and dad, it's all hate. It's hate. We've all got our time, Uncle Lazar. My time is here. I have to answer."
"That's quite a mouthful, son." I brought the hardback chair up close to the bed, so we were very near to one another.
"I want to fight my own Belleau Wood," he whispered. "I want to be a man, a writer. Every day in the Marine Corps will be a new chapter."
"You know how many would-be writers are under the ground in France?"
"Do you know how many writers were born in war?" he answered.
I sighed because it hurt. All I went through was in vain. Look at his eager face. He couldn't wait to get at the world. There would be no stopping him now. What was that goddam tattoo some of the guys wore on their arm . . . "victory or death" or some shit like that.
"I never spoke much about Belleau Wood," I said. "I never talked about it to Aunt Simone. Writers make this shit glamorous, high adventure, spellbinding romance. So, let's talk about Belleau Wood. Yes, son, it is true I went into the Navy to free myself from Moses Balaban, a father I hated. I wanted to be free of the rednecked bigotry that took my brother, Saul, may his soul rest in peace. I wanted freedom from the Balaban women. ... I'll tell you about Belleau Wood. . . .
When America entered the war in 1917, a brigade was made up of the Fifth and Sixth Marines and rushed to France to show the flag in the vanguard of the American Expeditionary Force. I was made a Chief Pharmacist's Mate because my special skills were badly needed. My unit, a naval unit, was assigned to the Marine Corps as their medical support group. That's how I got to wear a Marine uniform and won my decorations.
By mid-1917 we had crossed on the troop ship Henderson and landed at St. -Nazaire filled with hatred of the Hun, looking for French poon and to make the world safe for democracy . . . that was the big slogan.
They always have to sell you some kind of shit, so we were convinced the Krauts ate little babies for breakfast. We landed and the French pelted us with flowers as we marched through the villages.
There were so many stars in our eyes, we didn't see Europe was soaked with the blood of millions of casualties, ravaged landscapes, hunger, disease, mud . . . always mud . . . mud is part of the uniform.
On the Western Front, the British and French faced the Germans on a static line. No one had been able to really dislodge the other for three brutal years. It was a stagnant, filthy line of trenches, a line of horror, set in eternal palls of smoke, poison gas, and barbed wire, and the forests and fields were destroyed with deep craters and muck. Men lived in corrugated tin and sandbag underground cities sharing their lot with millions of rats and billions of lice.
The battles were ferocious. Take one day at the Somme. The British had sixty thousand casualties. Twenty thousand of these men were killed . . . in one day. By the time the Yanks had gotten there, the toll was over ten million dead on both sides and twice that number wounded.
Well, the German staff and their commander, Ludendorff, didn't evaluate the Yanks too highly. When they were able to transfer divisions away from the Eastern Front after Russia sued for a separate peace, they massed a decisive edge in guns and troops. Their aim was to first knock the British out of the war, then break through to Paris.
To punch a hole in the French lines, they organized forty-two divisions of infantry and ten thousand pieces of artillery. No man who has ever been through a bombardment ever forgot it. Well . . . Ludendorff got his hole against the French Sixth Army at a place called Chateau-Thierry, a little town on the Marne River.
The French Sixth had been torn to shreds and was in full retreat. This opened the gates to Paris. German patrols could actually see the Eiffel Tower through their field glasses.
In order to avoid crossing the Marne River, the Germans decided to bypass it west of Chdteau-Thierry where it took a big bend.
After three days of confusion and conflicting orders, the Marine Brigade drove part of the way and marched part of the way and we reached our destination without having slept for almost three days. It seemed like all of France was fleeing in the opposite direction, women hitched up to carts, old people, cattle filling the road. And the fucking mud.
We reached the line on May 30, 1918, and let the French Sixth Army pass through us and continue their retreat. It was a lovely spring day. The Marne Valley was magnificent. Rolling fields of wheat swayed like sensual women, dancing in rhythm to the kisses of the winds. The wheat was young and still green and the fields were speckled with thousands of blood-red poppies.
The countryside was interspersed by a number of small woods of silver-barked birch and second-growth scrub and thickets. One of these stands of trees was Belleau Wood. It lay on a hillock west of Chdteau-Thierry. The wood was about a mile in length and several hundred yards deep, flanked by five lovely little farming villages. Before the war, Belleau Wood had been the private hunting preserve of a wealthy Frenchman.
The German offensive had swept forward so rapidly it had outrun its artillery and supplies and had to stop to consolidate in Belleau Wood.
To outflank the Marne River, the Germans had to strike right through the middle of a thin line held by the 5th and 6th Marines. We were green, untested troops, but we had been trained well and we were not war-weary as the French were.
My unit set up in afield hospital in the cellar of the church of one of the villages, Lucy de Bocage, just a few hundred yards to the rear of the front lines.
When the artillery fire opened, we had never experienced anything like it and the rest of the battle
seemed like a surrealistic play, seen through a gauze . . . a haze . . . exhaustion . . . smoke . . . and we listened to voices and gunfire like they were distant echoes. We were there and functioning, but we were not there, if you know what I mean.
During the course of the war, the snipers from all of the armies had eventually been killed or crippled. The emphasis was now on massive fire, mostly by machine gun. The Germans did not realize that the Marines were the best rifle shots in the world. When they came out of Belleau Wood, our men started picking them off at distances of six hundred yards. We shot them down, accurately, as fast as we could load and fire. Hell, the Krauts never knew what hit them, but on they came, pouring out of the wood into the wheat field. They came all day long and continued through the night. We kept chopping them down, our rifles so hot we could hardly work the bolts. By the end of the second day, they had still not been able to reach our lines. On the third day, they threw everything at us—maybe five or six hundred artillery pieces. They threw out a solid curtain of machine-gun fire and they came again in droves, in hordes. By night, they had to leave the wheat field and retreat into the wood, leaving hundreds, maybe thousands, of their dead on the field.
