The Romance Reader's Guide to Life

It did less than that and more than that to Arnold Strato. Before he shipped out he got a diamond on Susie Brink’s finger. Neave and Snyder went with his family and Susie the new fiancée to stand on the train platform and see him off. Neave was there because of the crush she didn’t know she had. Snyder was there for his Monsters in the Movies colleague. Arnold gave Susie a deep, long movie kiss. She waved a handkerchief and looked mournful and poetic.

We kept going to school, even though it didn’t seem important anymore. All the younger male teachers had enlisted the week after Pearl Harbor except for one, a history teacher we called Mr. Quaker. He told Neave’s class that war was just a struggle for limited resources, like land and women—part of an ongoing battle that the male of a species wins by expanding the size of his holdings, both geographical and genetic. Not so different, he said, from what dragonflies or wild horses do. That night at dinner Neave delivered almost the whole lecture, right down to imitating the teacher’s habit of clearing his throat every three or four words. He was, she reported, a conscientious objector.

I listened but I just did what I do, which was to let Neave step in it while I stepped aside. She had to know how Daddy would react to talk like that. It was like he was a hornet’s nest and she’d whacked it. He said he was going to call the school superintendent and have that cowardly, godless commie homo asshole fired. “We are not monkeys or bugs! Man is made in God’s own image! What kind of man uses a lot of big words to back down from a fight?”

“He said horse. Not monkey,” Neave corrected. Stupid girl. To which Daddy slapped his hand down on the table again, hard, and very close to her plate.

Mom whispered, “So many young men,” and you could hear the concertina wire in her voice. She wasn’t thinking about species survival or monkeys or bugs. She was thinking about the flags in neighbors’ windows. She was thinking about where Snyder might have ended up if that ear had been in working order.

“Exactly what do you think is the making of those young men?” Daddy was talking low but sharp. “You go to war a boy and you come back a man. Every man understands that. Women don’t understand because women never face it.”

It took Daddy only about three weeks to get the Quaker teacher fired. Still conscientiously objecting, the guy drove an ambulance in France, where he ran over a mine and exploded himself the first week he was there. At school they held an assembly to honor his brave service.

Arnold Strato got himself posted onto a submarine when he found out that sub assignments paid better than topside service, and sent his money home to his parents along with letters to Susie Brink about their wedding, which would happen the moment he got home from war. Susie’s love and the promise of his life with her, he wrote—these were what got a man from day to day. Eight months later arcing battery charges on Arnold Strato’s submarine blew the engine room into flames. The navy sent a letter saying he was getting great care. It said Arnold was a hero, and they were discharging him. Fiancée Susie was with the family when they went to collect him at the train station, little tears seeping prettily as she clutched a lace handkerchief. Neave was there, still with the crush on Arnold, still unaware of the fact that she had a crush. She described Susie in particular detail when she gave me the blow-by-blow later that afternoon. We hated Susie.

Arnold’s family walked right past him, sweeping the crowd for something that looked familiar. Everybody was met, the platform was empty, and Arnold was still waiting for them to recognize him. When I went to visit him at home I got a close-up view of what his family saw. Half of Arnold’s face had melted away. What was left of his right hand looked like the business end of a club. The way that hand hung threw his whole body into a crouchy twist.

Susie Brink didn’t last out the month. When she told Arnold that she could not love him anymore, when nobody in town could think of a job for him to do where he wouldn’t scare away customers or other employees, he went home and sat on his parents’ back porch. Neave, being Neave, started bringing him comic books, Supermans at first, but Superman was spending all his time nowadays fighting Japs and Jerrys, so they switched to comic book westerns for peace of mind. Daddy went to the Stratos’ once to pay his respects to the returning decorated hero, then came home and sat in the living room for a week without talking to anybody.

Mom said that the church told us to visit the sick and that it was my duty to visit Arnold Strato, so I walked on over one Saturday morning and knocked. Mrs. Strato looked surprised to see me but said that she thought Arnold would be happy to get the copy of Laredo Law I’d brought. Neave had told me that Arnold hardly ever spoke, that they just sat side by side and read comics until she left. Sometimes, she said, he didn’t even say hello or goodbye. I figured I could deal with that.

But he wasn’t silent with me. The second I stepped onto the porch, he started talking and he didn’t stop. “Lilly. Lilly, Lilly, Lilly,” he said. Half his mouth smiled, his lips all puppety and a line of drool on his chin. “I’m so glad you’re here.” No chitchat, no preamble. He launched in like he was just continuing a conversation that’d gotten interrupted for a second. He said, “You know what my CO’s favorite expression was?” I shook my head. “‘Faint heart never fucked a pig,’” he said. “He was a piece of scum.”

I knew that inside this person was the Arnold Strato who’d kissed me behind the gym, the Arnold who’d come to Snyder’s dumb club meetings and been nice to Neave. But that Arnold had been replaced by this monster boy who sat on the Strato porch and scared people. Maybe the two Arnolds had always been there inside him and we just hadn’t seen the dark, shadow Arnold inside the light, sweet Arnold. “The fucking boat’s going down and he stands there and watches us hanging on to the rail in sixteen-foot waves, half of us burned and out of our minds with pain, and he says, ‘Hang on! Faint heart never fucked a pig, boys,’ and then, thank God, he gets washed over the side himself. We couldn’t get to him through the waves.” Arnold’s lips twisted up into the closest thing he had to a smile. “The son of a bitch finally drowned. And you know what I thought when they hooked his body and dragged it aboard? I thought, Tough shit, man. Faint heart never fucked a pig.”

I didn’t go back to visit Arnold Strato again. Neave did, and I’d ask her what they talked about and she always said the same thing: nothing. Did you talk about anything when you brought him Laredo Law? she asked me. Nope, I said. Not a thing.

Arnold died of a heart attack at the end of that autumn. They said it was stress from respiratory problems—nothing to be surprised about in a man who’d breathed the fumes in a submarine fire. But that’s not true. Arnold Strato died of a broken heart. Love killed Arnold Strato, love and the desire to pass his own genes down to the next generation, like a monkey or a bug. You don’t think of it as something that can kill you, but I tell you, it can. If anybody knows that, it’s me.





NEAVE

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