Landscape With Traveler Read Online Free Page B

excitement, to me ill-defined. I never questioned things anyway, but, as usual, gathered in the result for its own sake. I sensed what is now called a polarization, a unity in aim, as much of a feeling of “patriotism” as either I or the nation were ever to feel. Everything separated into a series of neatly defined pairs of opposites—good and bad, right and wrong, us and them—which have more or less remained with us ever since. (Perhaps they had always been there unnoticed by me?)
    The rationing coupons made us feel needed and virtuous. Sunday drives were given up. Fudge was rare. There were blackouts and air-raid drills. I wished my father were an airraid warden, but during blackouts we gathered in safety and comfort all together close to the gas heater in the dining room (my bedroom) and listened to the radio, curtains drawn, our favorite programs interrupted at times by news bulletins “from the front.”
    My grandmother sat by the radio, newspaper in hand. My mother crocheted on her afghan (which I still have). My father and grandfather played dominoes. And I dozed or daydreamed on the floor in front of the “fire” with the dog. Often it would be raining hard outside. I seem to remember the war as one long, stormy, cozy night.
    Sometimes on Sundays I was sent out to invite a soldier or two home to dinner. The town was always full of convoys in transit from somewhere to somewhere, both secret. I loved hanging around the soldiers. I always carefully chose the ones to bring home, but my hopes never came to anything. We all assumed, I suppose, that we would win the war, that “the boys” would come home, and that life would go back to the ’ 30 s and be nice again, little dreaming that those selfsame ’ 30 s were to be the last time of true peace any of us would ever know. Jim, for instance, cannot miss them, having been born after the war, and doubtless has a loved time of his own to remember. But I will be looking for those prewar years for the rest of my life.

 
    10
    I
    Would
    Get
    an
    Urge
    to
    Be
    Grown
    Up
    After the war, on hot summer nights (me sixteen or seventeen), one or another of my friends and I would get an urge to be grown up and devilish and would take a Grey-hound bus to New Orleans, which was a two-hour trip. We’d wander around trying to persuade bartenders that we were eighteen, usually unsuccessfully, generally ending up in some soda fountain for a malt and then back home.
    I’m amazed, thinking back on it, that my parents didn’t protest these outings. I even persuaded them to buy me a bottle of wine to have for my very own—California Tokay (ugh!)—and felt very suave indeed offering my friends alcoholic refreshment over our “intellectual” chatterings.
    School went on as usual in winter with nothing about it extraordinary enough for me to remember. It was something I went through with as good grace as anyone, but with no interest. It all came very easily to me, and I was thought a genius by most of my teachers, though my indifference caused persistent predictions that I would come to a bad end. And I guess that, according to the standards behind those predictions, it is true.
    Also at this time, I was caught with a friend robbing a Coke machine—of Cokes, not nickels. My father talked me back into every-one’s good graces and paid for the Cokes. That was my second visit to a police station.
    I wasn’t completely idle during my high-school days, however, I had a paper route early on, which I gave up to work as a soda-jerk in a drugstore. This was fun. I gained weight. Every Sunday morning a German lady, who I later learned taught German at the university, would come in and order the same breakfast—one of those small “individual” boxes of corn flakes (a novelty at the time) and a cup of coffee. She was exceedingly cold, rigid, and nasty, or so it seemed to me (the war was still fresh), and never