Reinhart in Love by Thomas Berger | eBook

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Reinhart in Love

By Thomas Berger

Dzanc Books

CHAPTER 1

In a shed of unpainted boards, a kind of swollen privy, on a compound of like structures in a field of dirty snow somewhere in Indiana, an anonymous major after an eleventh-hour pitch for the Regular Army or at least the Reserve, bade goodbye to thirty-odd soldiers— among whom was Corporal Carlo Reinhart, 15302320, the oddest of the lot, take it as you would: clinically: his last six months' service had been as patient in the neuropsychiatric wards of sundry military hospitals abroad and at home; emotionally: as near as he could tell, he was the only man ever released from the U.S. Army who was sorry to go; legally: the official typist had printed an error on his discharge certificate. Instead of having been born in 1924 as he had always assumed, he was but four years old; according to the War Department he had been sprung from that first imprisonment in 1942, and there were all manner of officers' signatures to prove it and perhaps even to confine him in Leavenworth if two months hence he applied for some deserved privilege in his authentic person of twenty-one.

So, although now a civilian, he reported his problem to the major with nostalgic military courtesy, and got for these pains a rather wry direction to the typing building. The other jokers all rushed out towards the camp gate and the waiting bus, not having a minute to lose in getting back to brown-nose their civilian bosses. Reinhart was unfair because he didn't know any of them; the shitty thing about a separation center was that you were there for only three days of signing papers (which were sometimes faulty!), and everybody arrived slightly hostile to one another, already halfway back to civil society.

In the typing building a skinny T/4 looked as if he would spit in one's face.

"What's eating you?" Reinhart asked forcefully, using his new technique of the direct approach, learned from Europeans though perhaps ruder than theirs. But when challenged in a genial yet tough manner, your average man sheathes his fangs.

So did the T/4, who was suffering a bad case of dandruff, which allowed him some leeway in Reinhart's judgment. With a none too careful eraser—one that looked like a pencil, with rubber where the lead should be; Reinhart at first thought the jerk clerk was sabotaging him by merely blacking out the offending entry—he obliterated the wrong date and asked the right one. The finished job looked very fishy.

"Don't I need an officer to initial this, or something? Aren't you going to make a memorandum about it? Isn't there a duplicate that will read otherwise?"

The T/4 scratched his head, causing a minor blizzard. "You're out. What do you care?"

"Oh," said Reinhart. "That's what's eating you!" He prided himself on his understanding of people.

Of course by then the Indianapolis bus had left, and the paper schedule pasted on the board that marked the stop was illegible, having been defaced by the elements and the kind of malefactor who delights in dirty deeds towards the world at large. The ground was flecked with cigarette butts and frozen sputum. Two girls from the PX waited five minutes alongside him for the local. Naturally the fan-toothed one had a friendly mien and the pretty one not, though he haughtily turned away from both, preserving the exaggerated dignity by means of which he had at last got free of the nut ward. Actually, he was sane enough and had been so all the while except for a few weeks at the beginning of the therapy, when furthermore the temporary goofiness owed rather to a head wound sustained in a fight than to any natural predilection for mania—that is, any more than average. Which was no more than to say he knew right and wrong or anyway the theory of it subscribed to by civilized people in the Western Hemisphere: everyone who exalts himself shall be abased, while he who abases himself will be exalted.

At the moment he was sane with a vengeance: lonely, bereft, cold—because he was twice as large as your typical Homo sapiens, there was more to freeze—hungry, and utterly hopeless. It was just sheer luck he had remembered to pee before leaving the discharge building, or in addition to everything else he would have been shifting from one foot to the other like a schoolboy: you had to join a club to find a public toilet in America.

He waited forty-seven and a half minutes. A peculiarity of the Army overcoat was that it weighed like chain mail while deflecting the wind like gauze. Two civilian cars stopped and offered him rides: the first, a maroon Grotesque, apparently new though automobile production had been halted in 1942, was driven by a dark man who grinned like a dog rubbing its ass on the carpet. Reinhart had been warned by the Army against confidence men who lay in wait for veterans wadded with mustering-out money. The driver of the second, a chattering old heap that burned oil, was a fat, morose queer who had no real hopes that Reinhart would accept his offer, some stricken 4-F traveling salesman with his own irony on the myth. A sergeant, alone in his jeep, spun onto the highway without a look. On the other hand, a paternal colonel in his chauffeur-driven staff car did stop, but he was going the wrong way.

At last the bus arrived, slaying every living thing for a hundred yards with its mustard-gas exhaust. Reinhart paid the outrageous fare and went down the aisle to the back, where he could find room for his yards of leg; over his shoulder was the barracks bag of free clothing from Supply. He inadvertently clobbered the hat of some middle-aged woman and there ensued a demonstration from which he retreated. No unaccompanied girls, no other GI's—but through the window he saw the newest wave of dischargees hurtling down the camp road like hyenas who have sighted a cadaver. And so did the driver, and made haste to pull away before they could reach him.

Reinhart attempted to put into action his device for surviving civil life, cynicism, but it was especially difficult in the rear of a bus, where, he now remembered, he was as liable to car sickness as a Girl Scout. Not even his great strength sufficed to open the window sealed years ago by some Detroit assembly-line sadist. So he went to sleep.

He went to sleep again on the train going towards Ohio, having an entire seat to himself after the girl, who had gathered tightly against the window so that it was impossible to play sneaky leg with her, got off at a place called Rushville without a backward glance. He snoozed fitfully. Leaving the Army! He was still twenty-one and had never had another profession; he feared America, people, and life—not really but poetically, which was worse.

He awoke as a rat-faced vendor swayed through the car hawking sandwiches, and tried to see himself in the window montage of moonlit corny cornfield and fat-faced ex-corporal: for so he had become in six hospital months, unfortunately not enough of them on the light diet. Neither had he shaved that morning; however, his beard did not reproduce well upon the glass. But he had spilled coffee on his suntan shirt and that did, so long as the ETO jacket hung open; which, too bad, was necessary because one jacket button was broken and wouldn't hold and another had disappeared.

Vanity. It was clear to Reinhart that Reinhart had none. His unkempt ghost, imposed on the passing countryside, grinned back peevishly. Some rain began to slobber the window. Masochistically he bought for twice the standard rate—at least it was in a paper envelope, for the vendor's fingernails were in severe mourning—a sandwich of gristle, vaseline, and unidentified vegetable garbage. He drank a leaking cup of tepid water from the tap at the end of the car; the overflow served to wash his hand, which he wiped dry on his rump. His cigarettes had been crushed; the one he lighted looked like a twist of crepe paper and tasted ill in his mouth, which had been open while he slept.

Reinhart saw half his rumpled self, clear, in the toilet mirror; unseen beneath the Army shirt was the life preserver of useless flesh about his waist. The last time he had bathed, now a dim memory, he had soaped arms the color and consistency of uncooked bratwurst, and his pectorals had sagged like a woman's.

The figure he cut nowadays was unusual for a man who until six months before had been blond and pink and muscled as Hitler's prescription for the Herrenmensch. Reinhart was no longer even blond; what sprang from an untended crewcut grew snot-mottled and here and there dark with grease. To get away from the psychiatrists he had been forced to replace one kind of pride with another; thus his honorable discharge, which breathed no hint of how his service had ended; and thus his will, which was nonexistent. For example, if he had not been able to get a seat, he had just as soon have rolled up on the washroom floor between sink and W.C. Or if someone had encountered him and said: "Stay on the train till Newport, Kentucky, I'll get you a job there making beds in a cat house," why, Reinhart would have answered O.K. He cared as little about women, or money, or esteem as he cared about—his fingernails, which he noticed would give the sandwich seller's a run for the Filth Cup.

On the other hand, he could be a bright man again almost instantly: bath, shave, clean clothes, haircut being a matter of hours; and regular work with the dumbbells would sculpture the old Reinhart from the flab in a mere month. If he so chose. For his will had not really been destroyed but just lay dormant. He delighted in his capacity for alternation, believing that it made him more human than your ordinary homme moyen sensual who stayed the same from cradle to grave. Not to mention that it gave some point to freedom of choice: he knew the differences between options, had experienced being a fop, then a slob. He had also been exposed to a host of other things in the British Isles and occupation Germany, and was certain he had at least dreamt of most philosophies. In his time he had been both sane and mad. The only trouble at the moment was in what he wanted to be. But he might decide that as early as the morrow.

With an open mind and the everpresent barracks bag, he detrained at the grandiose station in the Ohio city nearest his town, and wandered about under the mosaic murals of heroic pioneers and workingmen, in search of his father, whom he had requested by wire to appear with transportation. At the central newsstand leaned an elegant old person in gray homburg with cane. A great bald vulgar man and a small gracious woman annexed a skinny son at the gate of Track 3, and Reinhart was shocked and then touched to see that Dad kiss his PFC on the cheek, and the soldier wearing the Indian Head patch and Purple Heart, no pansy he. A swarthy gangster type swaggered at the side of a larger replica of himself home from the paratroops, where he had no doubt got invaluable experience in mayhem. One attractive lady—seeing whom stand alone Reinhart had to admit he considered moving in on: she was a touch old but had conniving green eyes and make-up laid on with a trowel; and lucky he didn't make his move, for out of the men's room shining from a shave stalked a young lieutenant and kissed her like a lover. A May-November liaison in the French style? The horny aunt of legend? Reinhart the rubberneck lurked behind their linkage and heard the officer murmur into her hennaed hair: "Momma! There's nobody like you." In retreat Reinhart struck and floored a man shorter but fatter than he; anyway, knocked off the old fellow's hat, picked it up, ran its nap along his arm like a haberdashery huckster, gave it back, and voided the area.

I have scanned the rotunda with my telescope but no father did I see, Reinhart said ironically to himself over his whiskey in the bar. Since in a handful of civilian hours no other suggestion had been offered, he supposed he would return to college, which anyhow was free to veterans—he had a premonition that every civil possibility was in lieu of the real, i.e., the imaginary thing—and no sooner had he submitted to that supposition than he began to perceive events through the filter of various old quotations: "I have scanned the heavens with my telescope but no God did I see," to which the devout had made some rejoinder which naturally he had forgotten; "the white-faced onanists of cities," who seemed to be as numerous as ever; "put out the light and then put out the light"; etc., the detritus of a year and a half of university, three years before.

Lieutenant Oedipus and Jocasta were also in the bar, at a little round table, drinking from squat glasses clogged with fruit. Reinhart passed them on the way to the cigarette machine, where he applied for king-sized Whelps; he got Blackguards with a cork tip and no matchbook at all. He bruised the machine's multicolored facade until the manager threatened litigation.

When Reinhart returned to the bar stool he had a new neighbor: the distinguished gray-haired gentleman he had last seen at the newsstand, a New York or London type, very friendly, who offered to fire his cigarette with an expensive lighter of the kind called "engine-turned," whatever that was, and advertised in the low-pressure manner with the price spelled out, for example, Eighteen dollars and fifty cents, in snotty magazines— Reinhart concentrated on the lighter to avoid the gentleman's lean face, for such elegance conjoined with such geniality, in America, could only mean much inversion. He decently accepted the light, though, but having got it looked very vague and, collecting his coat, drifted to and waited for the unspinning of the revolving door, which was stuffed with a heavy, dark-clothed man in a crushed hat.

Again in the great marble hall, a kind of Reichstag as yet not burned or bombed, Reinhart lurched toward the main portal and soon found himself outside taking night air and a vista of the automobile approaches to the terminal, between which lay a lighted concrete esplanade leading to the slums and, above, dead fountains on several levels. "Where every prospect pleases and only man is vile." From his point of view every car, in the line like cartridges in a bandoleer, looked to be a 1938 Chevrolet, and driving it in or out was his father, who had missed or would miss him; and he, Reinhart fils, was alone in the great world. He suddenly wearied of the inevitable childishness of his fancies and decided to take a streetcar—home? Anyhow, in lieu of. So far as he knew, since his parents seldom wrote and he returned the favor in kind, a defense worker, spawned in some estaminet of Kentucky, still occupied his old room.

To take the trolley meant he must walk some incredible distance—somehow with each inch of modern progress came another mile of inconvenience: in the good old days everything you needed was in sight of your cave—and he started down the middle of the ramp, prepared to bluff automobiles: if a car hits a moose, the animal is killed, but so is the vehicle. Notwithstanding that he now weighed 221, and was sensitive, authoritative, sanguine, and would receive a pleasant surprise in the near future—all this assured by a little ticket, stamped in violet, ejected from the men's-room scale in answer to his penny, while an Uncle Tom dressed like a physician waited behind with obsequious towel— notwithstanding this full cargo, Reinhart felt almost light and very wieldy as he sauntered along, and his spirit kept pace, a certain sign something was missing. Opposite one of the dry fountains, now a big candy dish of cigarette ends, Kleenex balls, and dog turds, he was conscious that his barracks bag was no longer a constant companion. Probably the old fairy in the bar retained it as hostage.

He had got back as far as the station entrance when he saw coming through the door the fat nameless type who infests public places—except that this fellow he was seeing for the third time: hat knocked off, coming into bar, and now; and now the man was carrying his, Reinhart's, bag: and furthermore had a kind of license to do so, having become increasingly familiar to him. Indeed, Reinhart literally could not have got started without this person and as much as acknowledged it in his greeting.

"Dad!"

Immediately his father disappeared into the collar of his heavy coat; like a turtle, his reappearing hinged on how badly he had been scared. His voice issued feebly from under the carapace.

"I recognized your sack before I recognized you—because it has your name on it." His cucumber nose inched over the collar. Pretending distant acquaintance, Reinhart quietly searched for the cigar he had purchased for the occasion, and found it in the right breast pocket, of course busted like a little whiskbroom. Which was no more than just, for he remembered his father did not smoke.

But, ah!, by this time his old man had partially emerged.

Taking care, Reinhart said wanly: "I'm sorry, Dad, I didn't know you at first. I—" He flipped the cigar fragments into the icy wind, which reversed itself at once and blew them like ape hair across the front of his ETO jacket.

Dad hastened to claim the onus: "Well I didn't know you, either, uh, Corporal—"

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Reinhart in Love by Thomas Berger. Copyright © 1962 Thomas Berger. Excerpted by permission of Dzanc Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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