J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [75]
When they arrive at Helen’s, Babe’s eyes are bloodshot and weepy, and he sneezes incessantly. Yet it is his state of mind that most needs healing. Babe’s return to New York only amplifies the extent to which he has been altered. Physically, he is home, but his mind is still imprisoned in a place of death. Every common act takes Babe back to the ghosts of dead soldiers, “to the music of the unrecoverable years; the little, unhistorical, pretty good years when all the dead boys in the 12th Regiment had been living and cutting in on other dead boys on lost dance floors: the years when no one who could dance worth a damn had ever heard of Cherbourg or Saint Lo, or Hurtgen Forest or Luxembourg.”51
When Babe first meets Helen, he is struck by her beauty, but his visit is one of obligation. His duty is to recount the specifics of the death of Vincent Caulfield, to omit nothing or embellish any of its details. Vincent was standing with Babe and a handful of other soldiers in the Hürtgen Forest, warming their hands by a fire, when a mortar suddenly exploded in their midst. Vincent was hit. Taken to the medic tent, he died within three minutes of being struck, without last words but with his eyes wide open.*
It may seem improper for Babe to take his twelve-year-old sister on an excursion whose purpose is to describe a death. Ostensibly, Mattie and Babe are on their way to a matinee, but more directly her presence is necessary to keep Babe grounded. At Babe’s side, Mattie is a figure of integrity. Babe needs a physical reminder of her childlike perception in order to stay on target and deliver a complete description of Vincent’s death unmodified by adult embellishments.
After exorcizing the ghosts of his memories, Babe and Mattie are presented walking toward Central Park. Babe’s telling of Vincent’s story has relieved him of a burden, but there remains a gnawing sadness inside him. With the intuition of a child, Mattie asks her brother, “Are you glad to be home?”
“Yes, baby,” Babe answers. “… Why do you ask me that?” Suddenly the small things of life, previously muted, rise into focus, and Babe enters the beauty of the present moment. When Mattie brags that she can eat with chopsticks, Babe gives a simple but significant reply. “Kiddo,” he says, “that’s something I’ll have to see.” The statement is a promise, the first time Babe actually looks forward. Up to this point in the story, all of Babe’s thoughts and words have referred to the past.
At the story’s conclusion, Mattie does something common to children that Babe finds remarkable because he is seeing it as if for the first time.
She skips from street to curb and back again. About this action, Babe addresses the reader for the only time in the story, asking, “Why was it such a beautiful thing to see?” The answer to Babe’s question is the same answer that readers encounter at the end of The Catcher in the Rye. Mattie’s skipping is beautiful for the same reason that Holden cries at the carousel. After all that Babe has been through, he still retains the ability to recognize beauty and to appreciate innocence. His soul is alive.
• • •
During the Second World War, countless soldiers suffered what is now referred to as post-traumatic stress disorder. But the condition was not accepted in 1945, condemning most soldiers to suffer in silence. After the war, these soldiers were discharged and returned home, where they melted into the population and dealt secretly with their demons.
Unlike many such veterans, Salinger was able to do something about the horror he had witnessed and the effect it had upon him. He eventually rediscovered the power to write. He wrote about and for all of the soldiers who could not find the words themselves. Through his writings, he sought answers to the questions that his service experiences had exposed, questions of life and death, of God, of what we are to each other.
The insight that