The Moviegoer

midnight and eat a po-boy. That morning I left him upstairs as usual. I sent Mercer up with his paper and his tray and called Clarence Saunders. Ten minutes later I look up and here he comes down the steps, all dressed up. He sits himself down at the dining room table as if nothing had happened, orders breakfast and eats enough to kill a horse—all the while reading his paper and not even knowing he was eating. I ask him what has happened. What has happened! Why, Germany has invaded Poland, and England and France have declared war! I’m here to tell you that in thirty minutes he had eaten his breakfast, packed a suitcase and gone to New Orleans.”
    â€œWhat for?”
    â€œTo see the Canadian consul.”
    â€œYes, I remember him going to Windsor, Ontario.”
    â€œThat was two months later. He gained thirty pounds in two months.”
    â€œWhat was he so excited about?”
    â€œHe knew what it meant! He told us all at supper: this is it. We’re going to be in it sooner or later. We should be in it now. And I’m not waiting. They were all so proud of him—and especially Miz Cutrer. And when he came home that spring in his blue uniform and the gold wings of a flight surgeon, I swear he was the best looking man I ever saw in my life. And so—cute! We had the best time.”
    Sure he was cute. He had found a way to do both: to please them and please himself. To leave. To do what he wanted to do and save old England doing it. And perhaps even carry off the grandest coup of all: to die. To win the big prize for them and for himself (but not even he dreamed he would succeed not only in dying but in dying in Crete in the wine dark sea).
    â€œThen before that he was lazy too.”
    â€œHe was not!”
    â€œIt is not laziness, Mother. Partly but not all. I’ll tell you a strange thing. During the war a bad thing happened to me. We were retreating from the Chongchon River. We had stopped the Chinese by setting fire to the grass with tracer bullets. What was left of a Ranger company was supposed to be right behind us. Or rather we thought we were retreating, because we got ambushed on the line of retreat and had to back off and head west. I was supposed to go back to the crossroad and tell the Ranger company about the change. I got back there and waited half an hour and got so cold I went to sleep. When I woke up it was daylight.”
    â€œAnd you didn’t know whether the Rangers had come by or not?”
    â€œThat wasn’t it. For a long time I couldn’t remember anything. All I knew was that something was terribly wrong.”
    â€œHad the Rangers gone by during the night?” asks my mother, smiling and confident that I had played a creditable role.
    â€œWell no, but that’s not—”
    â€œWhat happened to them?”
    â€œThey got cut off.”
    â€œYou mean they were all killed?”
    â€œThere wasn’t much left to them in the first place.”
    â€œWhat a terrible thing. We’ll never know what you boys went through. But at least your conscience was clear.”
    â€œIt was not my conscience that bothered me. What I am trying to tell you is that nothing seemed worth doing except something I couldn’t even remember. If somebody had come up to me and said: if you will forget your preoccupation for forty minutes and get to work, I can assure you that you will find the cure of cancer and compose the greatest of all symphonies—I wouldn’t have been interested. Do you know why? Because it wasn’t good enough for me.”
    â€œThat’s selfish.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œI’ll tell you one thing. If they put me up there and said, Anna, you hold your ground and start shooting, you know what I would do?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI’d be long gone for the rear.”
    I summon up the vision of my mother in headlong retreat before the Chinese and I have to laugh.
    â€œWe’ll never know what it was like though,” Mother adds, but she is not paying much attention, to tell the truth. I really have to laugh at her. She kneads a pink cube so the fish can smell it. “You know what, Jack?” Her eyes brim with fondness, a fondness carefully guarded against the personal, the heartfelt, a fondness deliberately rendered trite. “It’s funny you should mention that. Believe it or not, Roy and I were talking the other day and Roy, not me, said you would be wonderful