The Hellfire Club(18)
“You have to graduate in May,” his father said.
“Tomorrow, I’m going to register with Selective Service,” Charlie responded. “It’s the law. I’m twenty-one.”
“I know that,” said Winston. The lamp sat to his left, silhouetting his face. “We anticipated this day. Your mother will push you to go to divinity school to escape the draft.”
“Divinity school?” Charlie laughed.
“Yes, divinity students get deferments,” Winston said. “Of course, she already asked me to look into getting you a job at the draft board. Another way to avoid shipping out.”
Charlie was about to protest, but he decided to hold back and hear what else his father had to say. His mother was always after him for rushing-rushing-rushing in speech and not allowing conversation to breathe, not letting decisions and realizations happen naturally.
“I’m not going to do that,” Winston finally said.
“I’m not going to shirk this. I have a duty. I’m enlisting.”
“I know,” said his dad. “But let’s…let’s do this wisely.”
“I don’t want a desk job at the Pentagon,” Charlie said. “I want to do my part, just like everyone else has to, just like all the kids in the Brooklyn neighborhood where you grew up. My life is worth no more than theirs.”
His father looked at him gravely. Charlie didn’t know much about his dad’s time overseas after being drafted to fight the Germans in 1918, just that he had been there and he didn’t talk about it.
“The Battle of the Argonne Forest…” His voice trailed off and he stared at the floor. He scratched his cheek with his right forefinger. Charlie held his breath. “This was before the Battle of Montfaucon, before Corporal York caught all those Krauts. It was a bad time. The Thirty-Fifth Division got shredded.” He took a sip of his drink. “I can’t even begin to describe how awful it was,” he said. “I would never wish it on you. If someone tried to draft you into it, I would do everything I could to prevent it.”
“I know, Dad. But I don’t think I have a choice here. They attacked us.”
His father stood and walked over to the small fireplace. The housekeeper had already prepared the kindling, so all Winston needed to do was light a match, but the box, perched near a small stack of wood, was empty. “Damn,” he said. Charlie got up and handed his father his Zippo lighter. Winston struck the spark wheel six times before a flame appeared.
“Should have got you a new lighter for your twenty-first,” he said with a small smile. “Birthdays seem sort of stupid right now, don’t they?” He ignited the rolled-up newspapers tucked under the stack of wood in the fireplace. The kindling began to crackle.
Charlie leaned his elbows on his knees and stared absently at the flames as they grew higher until at last his father broke the silence.
“Charlie,” his father said, “you need to finish school. Graduate. After that, I know you might enlist. I’ll pull whatever strings you want for you to fight the Axis scum in whatever way you think best.”
Charlie shook his head. “I don’t want special treatment.”
“You’re not just any guy off the street in Brooklyn,” his father said. “You’re smarter. And you’re softer. We’ve been protecting you.”
“Softer?” Charlie asked. “Dad, I’m not—”
“Please, Charlie, I know exactly who you are,” Winston Marder said. “Maybe softer isn’t the right word, but you’re good. And even more than that, you believe in goodness.”
“You don’t?”
“No, I don’t,” Winston said bluntly. And then he gave his son a tender smile. “It’s funny. You and I are motivated by diametrically opposed views of human nature. But we agree on the need to kill as many Nazis and Japs as possible.”
They sat in silence, the fire warming but not comforting them.
“You may prove to be a great soldier,” Winston Marder said. “Not because you’re tough. Because you’re smart. But sacrifices are made in the field of battle, Charlie. Sacrifices will have to be made.”
It was just about three weeks later, on December 27—the day after Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s address to a joint session of Congress—that Charlie met Margaret.
Seeking refuge from all the war news, he was spelunking deep in the stacks of Columbia University’s Butler Library on West 114th Street in Manhattan. What had started as an effort to research a term paper had become, characteristically, a form of free-association scholarship wherein the hunt for one book became the discovery of another, leading to a fascinating trove of rare manuscripts and oddities having nothing to do with the original project.
Margaret Elizabeth Anne McDowell was a freshman at Barnard, routinely referred to by her roommate as a grind in the body of a cover girl. That night, in addition to preparing for calculus and biology exams, she was looking for a container of maps and notebooks from the estate of Benjamin Carroll, a Revolutionary War–era member of the Maryland elite whose family had claimed the isthmus near Susquehannock and Nanticoke Islands. She hoped they might mention the ponies on the islands, Margaret’s lifelong obsession and the topic of a term paper she was writing for zoology.