Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [69]
“Our sergeant is a strange and interesting man,” Cheever wrote Mary. “He comes I think from the back-woods of Tennessee or Mississippi, from an unsocial, hard-working people. He has no friends and his one idea is to make his platoon the best in the company. He has an hysterical temper.” This sergeant, a young man named Durham, had let his men know from the start that he wasn't afraid of them and didn't give a damn what they'd done in civilian life. In the blazing heat he drove them through “five poisonous gases without [their] masks” and over an obstacle course, again and again, then again after dinner if he wasn't satisfied. “I don't care if you faint,” he shouted, after a man fainted, “but if you're going to faint, tell me about it! You might die of sunstroke and I'd get the blame.” It didn't help that Durham was drunk much of the time, nights especially, when he'd roust the men out of bed and make them bump into one another as they tried frantically to make sense of his incoherent commands.
Cheever's fellow soldiers were a diverse group. As he wrote Cummings, there was “an ex-smoke eater named Smoko, a clerk from the Chase National Bank, a waiter from the Hotel Westbury, two night club MCs, the wine steward from the Pierre, and a dozen or so longshoremen, steam-fitters, elevator operators.” On payday (fifty dollars a month), most of them went to Greenville, where the more cretinous were given Mickeys, robbed, and put in jail for the weekend. Cheever and a few weary older men decided, after that first paycheck, to share a taxi to the more distant town of Hendersonville, where they sat around the veranda of a shabby-genteel hotel drinking bourbon and chatting with friendly civilians. As they began to leave, “an old ex-prostitute or ex-actress” accosted them: “Goodbye, boys, and God bless you,” she said, weeping. “Remember, this is what you are fighting for.”
“[M]ail call is the high point in my busy life,” he wrote Lobrano. It was odd reading letters amid the dusty bleakness of Spartanburg and learning that, somewhere, life went on much as before. Morrie Werner was still drinking at Bleeck's as his wife Hazel lay on a beach in Provincetown; The New Yorker was making do with a higher number of female and homosexual employees; Cummings was spreading himself as sunnily as ever around the Village, while sympathizing with his younger friend's predicament. “I too have slept with someone else's boot in the corner of my smile,” he wrote Cheever, enclosing an autumn leaf and a five-dollar bill. There was also a flurry of antic correspondence from old Frederick, who let his son know he was writing letters to his daughter-in-law, too (“Don't bother to answer them,” John advised her, “and don't bother to open them unless they interest you”). Frederick's letters began with the usual lyric evocations of the weather (“Another grand morning … the breeze ‘up and down the mast’—'wouldn't blow a butterfly off the mainsail’ “) and proceeded with a lot of folksy advice about soldiering, such as using castor oil to polish one's boots and always peeking into same “to make sure that no practical joker [has] put an egg in the toe.” A great fan of Soviet pluck, Frederick had also favored Stalin with a letter (“an old time Yank's appreciation of himself, his people and his country”) and bet his son a Coca-Cola that the Soviet leader would respond with a personal note. (“No word in reply from Premier Stalin,” he reported two weeks later. “Give me 30 days.”) As for Fred Jr., he was color-blind and hence disqualified from active service; instead he worked as an “employee relations” consultant to the War Department in Washington, to which he traveled each month with an air of great secrecy. To John he confided that they were “having a lot of trouble with negros.”
After six weeks of boot