A Dangerous Profession

Part One
Rightly or wrongly all remembrance of things past is fiction.


—Ernest Hemingway
MY FATHER'S WAR
THE MAPS IN the 1945 West Publishing Company pocket diary that my father carried in the war are gathered at the end of the little leather book. My father was very much a man of maps. During World War II, as a sergeant in the Tenth Mountain Division, an elite outfit trained and equipped for combat in snow and ice, on mountainous terrain, he was a scout. Carrying a radio and a carbine, he moved in advance of the infantry and artillery, calling howitzer and mortar fire down onto map coordinates that were often perilously close to his own position. He spoke infrequently of his war, but whenever he did, I asked him if he had been frightened. I found so much to be afraid of in quotidian adventures that I thought of his war as a time of always fighting fearfulness. Each time I asked, he said that he had been entirely certain that he could never be killed. According to him, he volunteered for service in the Tenth. According to him, he lied about his nearsightedness by memorizing the eye chart. According to my mother, he left for the war when he could have stayed with her and me. I had learned of others lying about their eyesight in films starring such men as William Bendix, Lloyd Nolan, and John Wayne; men memorized the eye charts because it was the right and morally true action, and because vision was not only about what a nearsighted man like my father could not see: he, and those heroes, the movies said, could see. I was reminded of my father's volunteering as I labored to keep from serving in Vietnam. I did not want to suffer at the hands of yahoos in the basic training that might kill me before any combat did. I did not want to leave my wife of so few months. I did not, finally, want to kill Asian people, any more than I thought they ought to be killing me; everything about that war was wrong, I thought (and think). And I am not imagining my father's disappointment at my despair over passing my first draftboard physical. I think he wanted me to want to go. I think he thought I might become a man, perhaps something closer to his idea of what men were, if I learned to enjoy, as he apparently had, overcoming the rigors of boot camp and fending off the rednecks who were puzzled or angered by Jews. He had invited them into the boxing ring, he told me, and they willingly went. He was in his thirties then, older than most of the men he called "boys," and, he told me, "After a round or two, when they tasted their own blood, they got more friendly."
When I was a sullen kid, he offered to teach me to box. In the cement-floored basement with its big, noisy oil burner—I had played in the coal bins near the old coal-burning furnace in the forties—he laced us in and offered instruction in the rudiments. He didn't draw blood. But he liked it (I could see that in his clenched teeth, the half smile: a simulated but possibly felt ferocity) as he pawed me with his jab and slapped me again and again with the open glove. I am not certain what the lesson was, but I knew as he nicely enough toyed with me, teaching me technique I would forget, that he was teaching me something else: I am always holding back what you think you almost see. It is in me. It is always almost here. Or maybe I am thinking of what I thought and felt when I was the father of teenaged sons.
He carried the pocket diary with him through his year of combat, 1945. Its publishers offered information one wouldn't need today. There is, in one table, a chart of mail time to foreign places from New York: thirteen days to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and eighteen days to Leningrad, Russia. The price charts are as out-of-date as the maps—ten cents is the surcharge given for special-delivery mail weighing up to two pounds. A couple of pages in the back of the book have been torn away. I wonder when he did that, and what he sought to hide. It was his book, after all, and it was unlikely that anyone in his house or his office in Manhattan would search his wartime diary for clues—although that is precisely what I have done fifty years later. But he might have known more than most of us about hiding information, or about digging it out. And he might have had something to hide.
It seems entirely likely that he tore out the pages when he was preparing to die. I suspect that he did so in the 1970s, given his claim that he had been unfrightened of death. However, I find a note about V-J Day written in his hand. He knew that his outfit was to participate in the invasion of Japan, and he writes, "To be assured of the end of war—the end of the dread of death." He might have felt differently about fighting in Asia. Or maybe he was a secret from himself. He didn't dread death, and he also did, perhaps, and perhaps each secret side of himself did not know the other. He feared to die and knew he wouldn't be killed. But he almost was—he was blown up pretty badly—and it is possible that he was telling a lie he needed to tell and to hear. He lived, I think, in compartments—like the watertight compartments of submarines, like the cells of spy groups or the partisan cells of World War II. If one compartment is flooded by some of the billion tons of water outside, the rest might survive awhile. If you know only five members of your cell, you cannot tell captors or a witch-hunt committee or the FBI the names of anyone else in the underground; the damage, if you name the names, is limited to you and the other four. If you compartmentalize your nights and days—at 956 East Eighteenth Street in Brooklyn, or at the firm of Katz & Sommerich, Attorneys-at-Law, 120 Broadway in Manhattan—then all of your selves can't be caught.
He spent Christmas Eve of 1944, says his spiky, meticulous hand, on the train to Camp Patrick Henry in Norfolk, Virginia. On Wednesday, January third: "Called Home—Spoke to Mom, Freddy and Phyllis." I can see him, slender and balding, with sensuous lips and dreamy blue eyes, a handsome thirty-three-year old man who had been a beautiful boy, traveling in the dim train into a dark southern night in the time of both the festival about families and about the loss of time. Once stationed at Patrick Henry, he enters "Ditto," or sometimes "Do," under the date of each day he spent there. And then, on January fifth, with no reference to Europe (which is unmarked by him in the map section), he writes, "Train to Pier—Embarkation—U.S.S. General Meigs at P.M." The next day, he writes, "Shipboard—sailed at 12:30 PM." There is something likable about the care with which he noted times and tended to his spellings and observed the forms—that "U.S.S." I wonder if the care about details was a stay against panic or whether he had concluded that a soldier kept a journal that was correct about dates and times and places and that left emotions out. I think of Hemingway, and my father's respect for his work, and how his Frederic Henry says, in A Farewell to Arms:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice … . There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

The next nine days say "Ditto." The tenth says that, too, and then "Gibraltar a.m.—African Coast." I think he must have smiled his broad grin, the boy from Brooklyn, to see that shore crawl past the rail.
After much more "Ditto," they anchored off Naples. He notes, "Vesuvius—Pompeii." On Friday, January nineteenth: "Tried Red Cross for cable—n.g." No good: He couldn't cable home to say he'd survived the Atlantic crossing. In LCI 194, a Landing Craft Infantry, they "began journey North—Bad weather—turned back." Then, in entries confined to place names, and with a few verbs—docked and spent—he describes his movements in LCI 194 from Naples to Pozzuoli, north past Elba to Leghorn. Wednesday, January twenty-fourth: "Truck convoy to 3.rd staging area—Rain at night." Then "Ditto," then "Ditto," then "Ditto."
On Sunday, January twenty-eighth, he writes, "On to the Front," then "Lizzano in Belvedere—Billet in Theatre—on floor." In darker ink, perhaps with firmer pressure, he writes, "One year since induction in U.S. Army." And, with two notes about "Mail call," he spends four days of "Ditto," which, on Friday, February second, he changes to "Same," as if to combat the sameness of his experience.
Think of yourself at the front in a war, waiting for combat, for his was a combat outfit. Think of knowing that you will soon, at any dawn or dusk, go into battle. What would you record, should you choose to record anything at all? Here, among the thousands in the Tenth awaiting their first fight and possibly their death, is Benjamin J. Busch. He was given no middle initial by his parents but was renamed Busch, Benjamin J., by the army to distinguish him, alive and dead, from another Busch, Benjamin, on the rolls. There is his life with Phyllis and me and his parents, his sisters Ann and Rose, his brother, Jack, his legal career, and whatever else concerned him in civilian life. There is the matter of climbing rocks while carrying the heavy radio over booby traps into mortar fire. He is in a kind of suspension. It is "Same" to him, and we cannot know, by looking at his pages, whether he bathed, and how or what he ate. I wonder what he dreamed about. He will not tell. He notes his "Ist week at front" with no reference to explosions on the skyline or the condition of his bowels and brains. There is no statement about death or fear; they are all I can imagine myself imagining. Everything is "Same," except when he receives a cable from one of his sisters, then from my mother, though he doesn't report what they say to him, or how he feels.
On Wednesday, February 14, 1945, in his second week at the front, after ten days of "Same": "St. Valentine's Day Corsage & cable should be delivered to Phyllis today." Three days later, he goes on "Patrol up front at Fame." All most of us know about patrols are breathless moments in movies or books. He doesn't confirm or deny what we know.
Sunday, February eighteenth, begins "Same," notes his "3rd Week at Lizzano"; on the nineteenth: "Attack on Ridge near Farne" and "Ridge is taken"; he was one of the takers, but the passive voice separates him from the dangers within which he writes. On the twentieth "Attack continues" and "Air Support" and "Belvedere is Taken." On the twenty-first: "Battle continues" and "We advance up Mt—Shelling around road." He told of that road. He spoke of their having to cross it one at a time because the large German mortars were so accurate and were backed up by heavy machine-gun fire. He spoke of men closing their eyes and running. And when I asked him—what a frightened child I must have been—if he had been scared, he turned the corners of his mouth down happily and told me, "Nah." On the twenty-second: They "Advance past Gaggis" and receive "Shelling of our positions." He "Rec'd letters from home." Next day: "Same Positions—Battle continues.—" On the twenty-fourth: "Same" and, in a shakier, hastier hand, "Rec'd letters from home & pictures of Freddy."
The next week, his handwriting changes from day to day, as does the pressure of the pen. "Attack & Counter attack continues," he writes on February twenty-fifth, and he is proud that news of his division is "flashed to America." He receives mail and pictures, then notes, "We change positions," which seems to be in response to shelling, so, on the twenty-sixth, they change positions again and he notes a "shower bath & change of clothes." The Tenth, he records, is commended by General Hayes, the shelling continues, and, on the twenty-eighth, "Shelling during night with some landing uncomfortably close." That "uncomfortably" is the first acknowledgment of real danger. "Same" follows "Same," and then, on March third: "Push begins at 0700—heavy artillery fire through day and night We prepare to move forward—Infantry gains its objective," the artillery scout notes. On Sunday, March fourth, they advance and "Al Strilecky & I spend night on top of Mt. Terminate—dead & equipment around." He is there the next night and then he notes, "Left flank—400 yds from enemy." The next day they are "raked by mortar fire both crests & drawer from top to halfway down." Howitzer shells land around them: "Heaviest shelling yet during the night—landing very close." In the late afternoon, their "arty [for artillery] fired leaflets & addressed Hun lines by P.A. system": They were that close.
On March eighth, still at Iola, mortar shells land near their dugouts, "ruining equipment 20 ft. from mine." They move out of the range of the mortars on their flank, they are joined by some infantry, and their positions are "straightened & consolidated," which means that their lines of fire are reorganized: They are within small-arms range of the Germans.
After receiving artillery fire early in the next week, they relocate to what he calls a "rest camp." He does not mention the radio, the calling in of the fire on the Germans, the scampering through or sheltering from the incessant deadly mortars and heavier artillery. They make it to Montecantini, the location of the rest camp of the Fifth Army. He rents a private room in a hotel for two dollars. On Friday, March sixteenth, he celebrates: "shower & new clothes—Barbershop & works.—Tour of town—vino & plenty." The next night, another bar crawl, a "tour of town," and movies, and on Sunday, March eighteenth, after staying "up to 1:30," celebrating, he is sent "Back to front."
Their week begins at Brasa with scattered shelling, and then he hikes—his verb—to an observation post "within German observation." The next night, their patrol activity is visible by the light of the phosphorous tracer shells of the German machine-gun fire. They take artillery shelling. The next night, he is carried by jeep to patrol another area; he sees four men in an enemy patrol. There are "Frequent flares" and "Heavy enemy mortar shelling." They are moved to Pietra Colera, then Florence and a rest camp for several days, then back to Pietra Colera. They reconnoiter, they take mortar and artillery fire—sixty German rockets land near their observation post at Gualandi—and he notes, "Some close shelling—farm barn roof 20 yds from billet" and "Terrific barrage for one hour—": the closest he comes to what he won't directly express, the sense of death, the smell of fear, the hugeness of the force of the explosions, and the nakedness of flesh.
The following week is one of patrols, receiving barrages, and more patrols. There is a change of positions, a preparation for an attack. On Friday, April thirteenth, "H hour," he reports, "is delayed." On the fourteenth, with the Second of the Eighty-sixth, at 0830, after preparatory "Planes & arty barrage—Advance with Col. Townsend—Up to Rocco di Roffino."
At home, after the war, he dreamed of himself tied to a tree. Snakes crawled toward him. They wore German helmets. He sought therapy in painting, and he had something of a hand. The two paintings he framed are of mountains. One is seen from below and is wintry, pretty, a convincing-enough, if conventional, peak. I wonder if it is the mountain his division scaled, at night, to engage the German ski troops. The other mountain he painted is seen from above, as a hawk might see; a bit of the hawk's wing frames the view, and the point of view suggests detachment. He read Freud, he told me when I was in college, because he wanted to work his way out of the nightmares. When he spoke of the war, my mother interrupted, always, to tell him that it was harmful for him to discuss what he so clearly needed to discuss. The Freud worked, he managed to convey to me; the dreams, he claimed, went away. There is evidence that the dreams continued, and that he spoke of them, and to someone other than my mother, someone who labored to relieve him of their burden. But he told us that they went away.
That rhythm of suppression and release, the tension between obedience to forms of gravity and the finding of a way to soar, the need to say the story and the requirements of silence—those are the man.
On April fifteenth, he was blown up by a booby trap on a mountain trail. The lieutenant he was with walked ahead of him and stepped on the spring release and was torn to pieces. My father was wounded in the foot, groin, and hand. This is the witness borne by the father to his son, an unusually intimate conversation of the early 1960s, an occasion rarely repeated. The privately public self, in the diary of 1945, has this to report, in a shaky hand that is the pictorial equivalent of gasping. For Sunday, April fifteenth: "After Midnight down to guide up Replacements—Wounded by Mine—15th Evac. Hosp." There is no reference to trauma or pain, to his wounds, to the men who carried him to safety, or to the officer ahead of him who was so terribly dissolved. The next day's entry: "15th Evac Hosp." I am astonished not only by the taciturnity of these entries but also by his ability to force himself to make them. He reports to himself, one bit of him intoning his noninformation to the other. Tuesday, April seventeenth: "70th Genl Hosp near Poistoia," and I cannot tell whether he was stabilized or worse or needed further surgery. There, he is "Given Purple Heart." The next day, he reports his mailing address, as if telling his wife how to find him, and as if it is also he himself who needs to know. He repeats, the total entry for each of the next eleven days, "70th G.H." Within a total of fifteen days, he is discharged and is back with the artillery battery for which he was a scout. On Wednesday, May second: "Armistice announced." By the fifth, he walks to Riva Ridge, gets a big batch of mail that followed him, and was "Given Good Conduct Medal."
They move to Lake Garda, they are on alert, there is mail censorship—which he notes but doesn't complain about—and then they move to a point about five miles from Yugoslavia, where they await the Allied decision on supporting Tito. There is nothing about communism, only that the people are "more Slavic." They camp there for eight days. He goes to Venice, on May twenty-ninth, on a one-day pass. Then he is back with his outfit for a week, and then, for June sixth, this: "To Hospital near Cividole for Therapy—left hand." It is, of course, not preceded by reports from himself to himself about his disabilities or pain. Two days later: "6th Gen. Hosp. near Bologna arrive atr 4:30 PM." and then "Same." The next day: "Therapeutic treatment," and the next says, "Operated on for removal of fragment from scrotum." The entry for June twelfth says, "Same. My 33rd birthday." Twelve days of "Same" later, he "received P.B.'s old wedding ring," which he asked her to send because his had been cut off his hand. He doesn't comment on his need for it, or, in fact, on its removal. He doesn't refer to how his nurses worked his fingers—it was like having the bones broken every day, he told me—against the hardening of calcium deposits after his surgery. That is who he is—these separate, hidden men.
Aboard the Blue Ridge Victory, no "U.S.S." this time, he tastes "first fresh milk," and celebrates lettuce, celery, and olives. He notes my fourth birthday on August first, cites but doesn't complain about the rough seas, and reports on sightings of "flying fish, porpoises, sharks, sea turtles, plovers or petrels"—the kid from Brooklyn among the exotic fauna. He writes, "Land Ho!" on August ninth," is fed "steak and all," and says, "I call Phyll!!" He is given his furlough papers and on August eleventh is at "Penn Station by 11 P.M. Speed! It's wonderful." His version of it is that he is "Home by midnight and I meet Phyll walking toward me on 18th near I." His version of it has her necessarily at home with their child, but each is urged toward the other, and after midnight, by the streetlights, he sights her as she seeks him. Her version has them walking on different sides of the street and his walking past, not recognizing her.
After the war, back with his firm, he traveled by subway to work and then he walked, from the Chambers Street station in lower Manhattan to the building at 120 Broadway in which his firm had its offices. He had been with Katz & Sommerich since he was a law clerk, and he rose to be a senior partner, and, at last, he was the only living remnant of the firm. Katz and Sommerich were Jewish international lawyers in a field that had been notoriously Anglo-Saxon. He never told us that he had changed his name because of his profession, but he and his brother did indeed change the name—Buschlowitz—that Sam and Dorothy brought from Minsk, in Russia, to its present German-seeming form. You can follow him on a subway map or a map of New York from Flatbush, over the East River on the Manhattan Bridge, to Chambers Street, and the neighborhood distinguished by the beauty of Trinity Church and the Treasury, made charming by its narrow streets, made gray by the office buildings that seal away the light of the sky. But then he would vanish, and you would need to know that he had cut away from the marked route and had gone to a restaurant in his building, the Savarin, to be served, apparently, by the same woman who had served him for years, where he ate a second breakfast and read one of the many newspapers he read each day.
Maybe, that is, he ate breakfast and read the papers. My mother joked, not laughing, that he lived a secret life at the office. In his early days, she had dined with him and clients and had jeopardized a relationship by speaking bitterly to a client's wife or girlfriend. Miss MacMullan, an executive secretary of broad experience and great intelligence, on whom he relied with deep trust, and who was always referred to as Mac, had advised him to keep his wife away from clients thereafter, and he had faithfully followed Mac's advice. There was secrecy in where he went and what he did in the mornings, and I have to wonder about his trips to serve Mr. Tsung and Mr. Tsang, clients in the 1960s and 1970s, who were married to relatives of Sun Yat-sen and who had brought fortunes with them from Taiwan; often he went off to Westchester, ostensibly to serve them. He traveled for other clients, the House of 4711, in Cologne, and let's call him Z, an eccentric and wealthy European, and for interests in pre-Castro Cuba. He told us where he had been, and we assumed that the names and the places on the map were true.
No matter where he traveled, no matter where he lived, he also lived in a place that was not on any map. He descended in the morning from his private bathroom on the third floor of our house in Brooklyn, and he ate his peanut butter on toast while sipping coffee. He wore a Brooks Brothers suit of dark gray or brown or blue with a good necktie and a good shirt. He was stylish and dapper within the limits trial lawyers usually set. He left to walk to the subway after kissing us good-bye. He smelled very good and his cheeks were smooth. When he reappeared, at about seven at night, his cheek was bristly, his shirt rumpled, his tie quickly loosened or pulled off. We could call him on his busiest days and be spoken to cordially, patiently, with affection. Mac and his secretary, Miss Bertha Schwab, spoke to us as if we were the boss's kid. It took me years to understand we were. Sometimes he came home with stories of courtroom adventures, of a loss of temper in the office or even before a judge. It was clear that he loved litigation as much as he enjoyed being telephoned by clients on matters unrelated to the case that had brought them to his office; clients would ask for advice on the purchase of a piece of land, or even a car, and though his practice was about foreign law—his book is called The Pleading and Proof of Foreign Law—he was asked to advise his clients on their interior lives, the state of their investments, the progress of their divorce. His voice was rumbly and his mind quick; he was the soul of gallant manners—a Victorian man—whom women were drawn to even in his old age.
He woke before the rest of the house and went from his bed in my parents' large bedroom—they did not sleep in the same bed from the time of my first remembering—and went up the narrow stairs outside their bedroom door to the attic—a third floor divided into two large bedrooms and a bathroom. They kept one room as a spare bedroom, while the other, the size of their own, stored knapsacks and camping equipment and, if I remember correctly, the two army-surplus barracks beds once used by my brother and me. My grandparents lived there for a while in the 1950s, and after my grandmother died and my grandfather went to live with his other son, Jack, my father took to using the attic bathroom as his own. It was to that room, painted a resolutely cheerful yellow, that my father went every day. He had privacy there, and the smells of the 471 cologne that was beginning to earn him a good deal of money. He stopped having a body in the house with the rest of us, choosing to bathe in the tub upstairs rather than shower where the rest of us did.
So, early, he went up. As we were waking, he came down to dress. As we were breakfasting, he left. As we were sitting down to dinner, he returned. He appeared, he disappeared, and then he reappeared. He was easy and affectionate with us, concerned for the life we each had led in his absence, but removed nevertheless, mysterious because of his own, distantfeeling life.
His father was small, strong, and sweet-dispositioned. A master carpenter in Russia, he had come once to the States and then returned to Belorussia because he hadn't liked it here. I don't know why he came back with Dorothy to live at first in Detroit, then raise his family in Brooklyn. Before he had come to the States, he had been his Anarchist cell's pistol keeper. He never married Dorothy, refusing bourgeois convention. When he was with us, he was no Turgenev character, but the gentle, silent man who smiled as we spoke, who let us doodle or do homework with his stubs of carpenter's pencil. He was sectioned off, like his son and like his wife, who despised my mother (and was despised in return) but whose sturdy body and square, solid peasant's face—always smiling for me—were ever at my disposal. She took me to the Midwood Theater on Avenue J to see The Thing, a frightening film of the fifties. Earlier, she had sat with me in our living room, interposing her uncomprehending smile—for she spoke little English—between me and Orson Welles's fearful laughter on the radio when "The Shadow" came on and he asked who knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men.
My father knew. For after a prelude to war that may have been full of feeling and incident, but which he reported as "Ditto" or "Same," and after a wounding that left him dreaming of serpents in German helmets, and which he reported in his diary as essentially a series of locations, he came home dreaming of honey, but he found he was smelling corruption and swallowing bile. His hopes were clear, and emotion finally tugged at his pen: He writes, on August twelfth, "From here on to Sept. 13—it will be home and home with Phyll & Fred." Then he says this:

With all the rest and inactivity we have had since Peace in Europe this is still the first relaxation of mind and body for these comparatively few months that seemed interminable years. How easy it is to spring back to old surroundings when they are peaceful and imbued with all the love and affection that surrounds me in my home. I am like the cat purring before a warm fire, reluctant to move away from the hearth.

He continues—it seems to all be an entry for the twelfth that covers page after little page:

Actually I dread meeting the people and friends and acquaintances that I know. And later events support my feeling. They are of a different world that neither knows nor tries to imagine what has happened. I am hurt to find how they think and act. It seems so useless to talk to them and difficult to find a common ground. I find it easier to dislike people. I find it more difficult to conceive of people with kindness and goodness in their hearts … . [He refers here to a dinner with friends thought to be intellectuals.] The so-called advanced can be so cruel and without understanding. And everything they have done and others shows as a selfish concentration in the war years on objects away from the immediate welfare of war veterans. The old cry of the fate of the soldiers being the same as the fate of the workers is of course true but too palpably uneven—an immediate balancing of the scales to provide for the competitive life is a necessity—to provide for the student, the family man, the person without a reserve but immediate expenses.

And here is a troubled dispatch, then, in this seamless entry, from one side of the man to another—from the purring bourgeois to the detester of the bourgeoisie, complete with a little Marxist baggage—"The old cry … is of course true but"—that he wishes to dump as much as he seems to need to carry it. He is so distraught that his punctuation falters, his syntax slips. But then he stops himself and says:

But everything I have wanted and thought of—I have had on my furlough—the company of Phyll & Fred—the unhurried feel of home—a few movies & dinners out—the simple things that meant so much—the foods & drinks and pleasures that were the oasis of the dryness of time. Once again to be able to speak & think aloud to a person who thinks and feels as I do. And of course how swell it was to have the gift of V.J. day during my furlough. To be assured of the end of war—the end of the dread of death.

He writes of his reassurance that he can avoid "the emptiness of a useless trip to Japan," and says that his division will remain in America "for the balance of my Army career which I want to be as short as possibly can be. Paints become the order of the day will continue to be until that eventful discharge."
His self-administered therapy isn't discussed, although it's referred to again in September, when he is transferred to another unit and must spend time in Colorado awaiting his discharge from the service. Now, in Brooklyn, with paints the order of the day, he is purring of home and peace and dreaming of snakes in German helmets. We would now say that he was suffering from posttraumatic combat stress disorder, I suppose. His bleak sense of human generosity seems to have been formed by that experience—or, perhaps, that experience helped to define what was in him from the start. He was optimistic in ways—believing the best of me and my brother when others didn't, reaching for his pretty, voluptuous wife, working his little garden like a Brooklyn burgher—and in ways, he was closed off and brooding. He wanted more than Brooklyn, the brother, the Yiddish of his parents, the sad beauty of his sisters; he wanted what was elegant, cosmopolitan, rich. He walked the woods on field trips with my mother, but he also walked the lobby of the Georges V in Paris, and he knew, over the years, which he preferred.
It was usually my mother who asked my father to chart their course, since her sense of direction was unreliable. But when they were first married, in the 1930s, my mother told me, it was he who asked her. He had moved into her apartment on Eleventh Street. In the tone of her telling, he had failed by not providing an apartment of his own. On their first morning together as husband and wife, she rose and dressed and walked to the door.
"Where are you going?" he asked her.
"Oh," she said. "I forgot you were here," she proudly said she said.
This is the woman he must leave, he writes in his journal, when he must return, after his furlough at the end of the war, to his outfit in Colorado. It is September nineteenth: "Easy to feel terribly lonesome. I look at my pictures of Phyll & Freddy & fix them & arrange them." On the twenty-first, he is "Lonelier than hell. Must call home. Try but delay in calls is too great." He is interestingly discursive (for him) about his pain. On the next day: "Try to call home again. No answer—try again. Catch Phyll in late afternoon. A swell talk and I feel lots better." On the next day: "After all it won't be very long," and on the next day, with the news that accrued leave will hasten his departure for home: "Whoopee!" He catches a slow train; at home, he and Phyllis buy theater tickets and shop. They celebrate Phyllis's birthday by seeing Katherine Dunham dance—"not so hot." Sunday, October seventh: "Home." For the next thirteen days, "Ditto" is reduced to "do," and it is the sole entry for each day—not the warmth and joy of home, not the conviviality of someone who thinks as he does, and not the personal warmth, if there is any, that proves his wound to the loins is healed: My brother will be born nine months from now. He returns to Colorado, and then he comes home, some weeks later, and he writes, on Thursday, December 6, 1945, "Home Again! But for Good!"
Back to combat, then, in his mind: the dreams of serpents, the German helmets, the being tied to a tree. Walter Bernstein, reporting for The New Yorker of September 1944 on the mountain fighting in Italy, described his experience of being shelled—as my father was shelled five months later, before being wounded by a mine and undergoing two operations at once and two a little while later:

But there is something about heavy artillery that is inhuman and terribly frightening. You never know whether you are running away from it or into it. It is like the finger of God. I felt cowardly and small at the base of this tremendous hill, walking alone on the floor of this enormous valley. I felt like a fly about to be swatted.

Ernie Pyle, a year before my father was in combat, described shelling in the mountains of Italy like this:

The nagging of artillery eventually gets plain aggravating. It's always worse on a cloudy night, for the sounds crash and reverberate against the low ceiling. One gun blast alone can set off a continuous rebounding of sound against clouds and rocky slopes that will keep going for ten seconds and more.
And on cloudy nights you can hear shells tearing above your head more loudly than on a clear night. In fact, that night the rustle was so magnified that when we stopped to rest and tried to talk you couldn't hear what the other fellow said if a shell was passing overhead. And they were passing almost constantly.

To my father, it was "Heavy enemy mortar shelling" and "Terrific barrage for one hour." And then it was "Wounded by mine—15th Evac. Hosp.," and then the next day "15th Evac Hosp.," followed by twelve days described, in their entirety, as "70th Genl Hosp" and then "70th G.H." This was when they operated twice, when he worried about his potency, when he lay in pain, when they broke his hand.
His feelings here must be strong: Witness the serpents, the helmets, the tree. They are sealed away. His prose summons power to the description of his feelings when he is convinced he is no longer lonely; he celebrates his family and home. But among others, even in his home, he is angry and bitter, and his language darkly soars. And after his homecoming—"But for Good!"—after the compartmented diary days, after they have made love once, anyway, after thirty unfilled divisions of days in his diary, he writes this on the bottom of the last page in 1945, under a printed heading of "Memoranda":

"But is a cheap kind of loving that
can't admit the faults"
"Anything Can Happen"
George Papashvilly
& Helen Papashvilly

This small comfort—for what wound?—is buried, sealed away, in a compartment that is distant from his descriptions of his feelings, and which is even more distant from his notations of names, dates, and places. He was several people. He was secret from himself.
His final entry, except for names and addresses, suggests that either his wife brought to his attention in a painful way what she described as a fault—she did this with frequency—or he discovered a flaw, or worse, in her, and reminded himself with this quotation of his own requirement for loyalty to her. He struck me as keen on pain. He refused anesthetic when he underwent dental work. He was sunny with kids, he adored dogs, and he loved the gutsiness of brave athletes, yet he was the darkest, most brooding man I knew. When he didn't know we watched him, sometimes, his face fell into a mask of deep sorrow. He was fond of the bitterest passages in Schopenauer, and he remained convinced that humankind was essentially cruel.
In his diary, he misspelled the Papashvily in whose words he sought comfort. Helen was a Californian who ran bookshops and who, with George, owned one in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She married George, who was born in Soviet Georgia and who, after service in Persia during World War I, lived in Constantinople until he emigrated to the United States. Anything Can Happen, written by Helen in George's dialect and published in 1945, tells George's stories of entering, surviving in, and then thriving in America. They are fragments of adventure or insight, characterized by a charming voice, a brave spirit, and an enterprising imagination. A typical paragraph reads like this:

And now for me began one of the best times in my life, day by day I rode along and watched this wide beautiful country open before me. Day by day I found another new coin to add to my bag of gold that was America.

The stories are instructive, often sentimental. Goodness tends to triumph. Language, often referred to, and apparently a real factor in the life of everyone in the book, is at last seen as beside the point. Decency wins out, or is emphasized, despite the meanings of words. Good souls commune with good souls even though no one understands the other's language well. George lives for a while in Detroit, where Sam Buschlowitz also lived before he raised his family in Brooklyn. At the end, George owns a farm and flourishes. And while my father read this book, Sam and Dorothy were living on a farm in Monticello, New York.
So my father reads a book that suggests some of his father's experiences and that, because it narrates events of the Depression, cites fleeting disappointments in America. "It's a hearttearing sight," George says, "to watch a person sicken and grow thin but oh so worse see a city die before your eyes. Yet that's what happened to Detroit the winter of 1932. First the factories went and then one by one the little shops … empty windows staring like dead eyes into deserted streets." Reflecting upon America's flaws compared with what America offers its citizens, George reflects, "But it's a cheap kind of loving that can't admit the faults." Perhaps, then, my father's use of the observation is to help him consider the nation that fails him, and other veterans. But it is the only quotation in the book. It ends the diary, and then there are addresses and telephone numbers, and then there are the stubs of the two sheets that were removed.
On one of them I can see fragments of the loops and lines of his handwriting. I think there is a story hidden there. Naturally, I think it is the story, the key to the secret. He's the secret to whom I returned again and again in my fiction, writing at least three versions—the latest, "Timberline," was published in Georgia Review in 1995—of the time he and I climbed Mount Washington in New Hampshire when I was a boy. A much earlier reference to the climb is in my story of 1976, in Domestic Particulars, "Trail of Possible Bones." A man named Abe in Manual Labor (1974) echoes my father, and so does a lawyer, described by his lover's daughter, in "Traveling Alone in Dangerous Places," a story in Hardwater Country (1979). He is the figure of darkness and light in "My Father, Cont.," a story from the same collection, and he is at the core of a story called "The Settlement of Mars" in Too Late American Boyhood Blues (1084). I think that he is an aspect of every charming, elusive, sturdy, and vanishing man I have written since my first novel was published in 1971.
You would think I'd have gotten him right by now, achieved some kind of satisfying resolution. But of course a writer cannot be satisfied: There is no satisfaction, because writing does not offer that emotion. The talent that drives a writer, the ambition to publish, the energy to continue—these are why he or she must write. The gift, if it is that, is also the goad. It is an appetite that feeds itself. One writes because of the writing, attempting to create, as John Gardner so perfectly said, "a vivid and continuous dream." One must be thoughtful as the writing proceeds, for the sense of dream should grip the reader more than the writer. Yet the dreaminess seems to be tidal, it washes back upon the writer, and some of the sense of dream seems to enter whoever is creating it. And into that partial unconsciousness come the usual figures, again and again, like words upon which writers rely without realizing they have a basic, favored vocabulary. This is not a bad description of ghosts.
If a writer is honest, if what is at stake for him can seem to matter to his readers, then his work may be read. But a writer will work anyway, as I do, and as I have, in part to explore this terra incognita, this dangerous ground I seem to need to risk. I must want to travel there, but I'm uncertain why. I do it every day. I walk across the wet, cold grass, or the grass when it's withered by summertime heat, or the several feet of snow that lie upon it, and I walk up the barn ramp to the second-floor room, where I sit, a little breathless, and not from the walk, and I begin to work. Though I do not think of him (I think) every day as I start, his presence is powerful. Because in 1958, I had brought home from Muhlenberg a clumsy short story I thought of as good. In our living room in Brooklyn, he read it, then set it aside, saying, "Very nice." He meant to be kind, I'm certain. But he meant, more than that, to go on—and this is what he did—to tell me about his being wounded: how the officer ahead of him had been torn apart, and how he himself had thought at first that he was dead. He spoke of how men carried him down a mountain, setting his stretcher on the ground and covering his body with theirs when the German mortars opened up. During that descent, he reached down to his groin and brought his hand before his eyes. It was covered with blood and he thought at once, he said, of Jake Barnes and his wound. My father realized that he would be required to act with what he described for me as Barnes's "grace" now that he, too, was maimed.
I had never read The Sun Also Rises. My father didn't again read Hemingway except, I think, The Old Man and the Sea and those sad reports on his sentimental journey to Spain that became The Dangerous Summer. He didn't want to read Hemingway or anything else that was what he called "unhappy" or "make-believe"; he saw life as more dangerous than art, and he was sorrowful enough, I suppose. He read history—about the Civil War, the life of Lincoln, the Dead Sea Scrolls—and he read as many newspapers each day as he could. But he carried Hemingway's novel with him, as if it were part of his own life: At the time of his terrible trauma, he thought—according to him—of neither his God nor the Communist party, nor of his wife and his home. He thought of Jakes Barnes as if he were real.
That, of course, was why he rejected "make-believe" and unhappiness in novels. He believed in them. My father had received too much reality: It had tried to explode him. The reality of "make-believe" exploded him in another way, as well. He was very much like Nick Adams, after his experiences (and Hemingway's) in World War I, in "Big Two-Hearted River." Listen to Hemingway describe Nick's prayer: "He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him." The story proves "it" wasn't; "it" was with Nick nearly all of the time. And "it" was with my father.
And he wasn't finished. Folding his large hands, he asked me, my little story now ignored by both of us, whether I was truly serious, as serious as I claimed to be, about becoming a writer. I replied that I was. (How did I know?) And my father told me that I would need to know two facts.
"First," he said, "it's a terribly long, hard haul. People will try to ignore you and they'll try to hurt you if you keep them from ignoring you. What a writer needs most is energy. It's the most important thing you can have if you're really going to be a writer and outlast the bastards who'll try and stop you."
He almost never swore, and the "bastards" stunned me more than the advice itself—the importance of which I cannot overrate.
"And second is," he went on, "you have to write dialogue. Nobody will believe your stories unless they have dialogue in them. People talk," said my father, who so often didn't. "You should read Hemingway. Did you ever read Hemingway? The Sun Also Rises is a beautifully written book. Did you ever read it? There's a lot of dialogue in it that you could look at. You end up believing it—it's very moving."
For a man who sometimes didn't want to talk, or who felt discomfort in talking intimately, it was a pretty long speech. From a practical man, the man who had given up his painting but, like other practical people, was moved to tears by Ezio Pinza's "Some Enchanted Evening," the man who no longer read things "make-believe," such advice was an astonishment. Now it isn't. I know now how very vulnerable and always wounded he was. But then, in 1958, what he said was somehow extraneous to what I'd known of him. Still, and in spite of my ferocious lack of insight, my father's words sounded undeniably true. Every year afterward, they sounded truer. I thought for a while that he was the audience I would need to convince with my fiction, the only reader I needed to sway.
Whether I was reaching for him alone, for no one else, someone more objective than I will have to judge. I do know this: that on an autumn morning in 1997, I sat in the reference area of Colgate's library to check some spellings from the war diary. I was thinking, I thought, only professionally—that these considerations of Benjamin J. Busch would come first in a book of essays on writing and writers, that a copyeditor might well query some spellings and locations, that places in Italy had been renamed by the Fascisti, renamed by the occupying Allies, then possibly named again, and that I'd better get some facts straight. I sat with an atlas from the 1950s and with a sheaf of maps located for me by Colgate's head of reference, David Hughes. He'd been pleased to tell me about them, once I'd described this essay, and it was easy to see why: Some of the maps were based on RAF overflights, some on other sources, but all had been issued to American forces in 1944 by the United States Army. It seemed possible to us that I was holding copies of maps that my father had consulted.
I did not pretend to be the man in combat. I did not pretend to feel what he felt when he looked at his maps. I simply wanted to get the spellings right, and so I checked them in the index of the atlas—then, later, in several atlases—so that I could find the place on a smaller map in the front of the atlas and use that orientation to help me find the place on the larger 1944 maps; they were so large, and so confusing, such a blur of bright, poorly registered colors and spidery topographical whorls, that attempts to navigate with searching forefinger and blinking eye seemed nearly impossible.
I started where he did. From Naples, I traveled, or tried to, up to Puozzoli. He had misspelled it, but there we were: Pozzuoli. From there, past Elba, we had to find Leghorn, and there it was on the coast: Livorno. But, then, where was Lizzano? And which Belvedere had he meant? For there was Belvedere Marittimo, and then, two map pages later in the atlas, there was Belvedere di Spinallo. Conclusion: Make no conclusion; move on. But I was getting nervous. I have an awful sense of direction and my family knows that when I instruct us all to turn right, the proper course is unfailingly left. I have been known to become lost a hundred yards from a rented house in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Copyeditors have complained for years that in my work I conflate and compress and otherwise distort geography. And here I was, growing dry-mouthed because feeling, well, lost, a half an hour into a morning of research that I had looked forward to as tranquil, useful, and easier than writing prose.
I found no Gaggis. I found a Gaggiano and, two map pages later, across the country, a Gagliano de Capo. I shuttled from northern Italy, stalling near Brescia, which often seemed like the place he had fought in, then came to a dazed, flanneltongued stumble fifteen or twenty miles outside of Rome.
He had referred to Iola. I realized, at last, that when he'd come to Livorno, he had sailed past Corsica, which is labeled Iola on the map, for "island." Near Monte Termonillo, which he called "Mt. Terminale," I did find Asola, and what was becoming a slow, silent panic abated. For not only had I begun to feel lost, as if alone and on foot in the vastness of the mapped nation but I also had begun, on drifting between northern and southern Italy, to doubt that he had been there. Was it possible, I remember asking myself, that he had made it up? The fear, the wound, the pain, all screened away from the self I had thought of as writing the diary—had it all been a fiction? But whom would he have sought to dupe? I wondered. Why? Monte Termonillo calmed me down. But I remember that equivalent of a child's hysterical crisis. In the library, during those moments, I spoke to two friends on the staff, and I smiled at a third. I was wailing, though, for a few hundred seconds, inside my skull.
Florence was fine, but what he called Pietra Colera didn't seem to exist. There was a Pierantonio, and I thought to make do with it. But Rocco de Roffino was also nonexistent, and so was Gualandi—I was able to find a Gualdo Tadino—but Riva Ridge was there, at least a Rivamonte, and Lake Garda, of course, and what he called Cividole, which seems to be Cividale del Friuli, near Venice, where he rested up.
Names change; phonetic spellings or spellings influenced by someone's primary foreign language—in my father's case, French—will make for difficulties in relocating the places thus misspelled. But I had not been merely seeking places in a calm professional hunt, I have to say. That panic was about losing more than my way. I was, at least in those bad moments in the troubled couple of hours in the library, searching for him. I am sure of it. Finger unsteady above the green and brown and purple pages that represented the landscape he had battled and finally bled in, my mouth so dry that I clacked when I pretended to my friends that I was having a whale of a time doing research for my clever bit of prose, I was searching for the man: Where are you? I was saying as I worked. Where are you?
When I write, then, when I place my characters in a geography I labor to make actual-feeling, in some way true, perhaps I'm trying to earn my reader's approval. Maybe I have to find him first. Maybe, when I write, I'm mapping him.
A DANGEROUS PROFESSION: A BOOK ABOUT THE WRITING LIFE. Copyright © 1998 by Frederick Busch. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.