THE PHOTOGRAPH

The Hill took the surrender the way it took everything, and then began to come apart. Discharge lists went up; men forbidden for two years to say where they were could now talk of nothing else; and the local men we had hired up from the pueblos and the mud farms carried the atomic age out to the flatbeds for a dollar a day — patient, cheap, and incurious, a people who had watched three centuries of other men's urgent business cross that valley and expected to watch three more, and never once asked what this was. And in the middle of the dismantling, before my own name reached any list, the United States Army decorated me.

The medal came on a dry morning in the third week of September, on the packed dirt before the Tech Area, the flag up and a colonel down from Albuquerque to read the words. Lieutenant Deems had written them; Deems believed them; a citation is composed by a man who was not present, for the benefit of men who will never check. He stood at my shoulder pink with pride while the colonel read out how, under conditions of extreme hazard and with the device firing at his back, Corporal Klipspringer had placed his own body between the blast and the recording detachment's irreplaceable scientific returns, and had held that position until the all-clear.

"Fine piece of work, Corporal," the colonel said, pinning it on, a man with a train to catch. "Not every man keeps his head with his back to a thing like that."

"I hardly thought about it, sir," I said, which was the one entirely true sentence I spoke that summer.

Cobb was in the second rank and caught my eye once over the colonel's shoulder and said nothing, having said all he had to say to me on a wet night in July when he told me my ground was behind me. The reader of an earlier number knows what the shape in that photograph actually was, and I will not spoil a good ceremony by repeating it; I stood in the sun and made not the smallest motion to correct it. That photograph went further than the medal, or than I ever did; it hangs, at this writing, in three museums, and I have stood before it in two, a decorated old man in a good coat, agreeing with strangers about how brave the boy in it had been.¹

A week after the colonel caught his train, a civilian came up the mountain to see me. He waited in a borrowed office — a soft grey man of fifty in a soft grey suit cut somewhere east of Chicago, with a card that gave a name, Sennett, and an office in Washington that did not print on its stationery what it did. He had the citation before him, the photograph clipped to it, and turned it to face me as though I might not have seen it.

"Sit down, Corporal. A man who'll cover the records with his own body. That is a rare article. It does not grow on trees."

I said I had only done what wanted doing, and watched to learn how much of that he required me to keep up. Not much. He was not buying the boy in the picture; he was buying the man who would let the picture be believed, and he knew the difference at sight. There was to be a great tidying-up in Europe, he said — a deal of value lying loose in the ruins, men who had built remarkable things for the wrong people, and the drawings and engines and whole apparatus of it, and it would be a waste to let the Russians walk off with it while we filled out forms. His office meant to gather it up. It did not need scientists; it would shortly have more than it knew what to do with. It needed a man to go among them — one who could sit in a bombed laboratory across from a defeated fellow who had lately been Somebody, talk his language, and make him feel gathered rather than caught: a man easy in the room, who left nothing on paper.

"You keep a very clean record, I'm told." He smiled; he had plainly spoken to somebody who had looked in my cabinet. "We prize that. Paper is what the other side reads."

He spoke of these Germans the way a man speaks of a good secondhand car — remarkable engineering, previous owner regrettable, runs like a watch once the politics are out of it. It struck me as a rich joke: we had built the gadget with a mesa full of clever Jews the Reich had shown the door, and meant now to spend the peace fetching over the very Germans who had shown it to them, and hope the two breeds built rockets instead of trouble. Nobody asked my opinion. What I did was the sum I always did, and it came out that a nameless office had reached three thousand miles up a mountain to lay its finger on me because there was something in me the ordinary run had not got. That is how it read from my chair; I have never been able to see the hook for the bait. He gave me a week to think — a courtesy, the thinking having been done for me before ever he climbed the mountain, though I did not yet know by whom.²

I went down to the east gate in the last week of September to see the Caltech men off, which is to say to see Fisk off, the rest being scenery. Fisk came down with one bag and the current notebook buttoned into his shirt pocket, exactly as he had come, and we stood a minute in the noise of half the mesa going home. I had rehearsed nothing, which for me is the rarest confession in this book. He had both my crimes in his numbered books, had covered the worse of them once and never told me why, had drunk my cold coffee on more Sundays than I can count, and was now getting on a bus, and whatever stood in the ledger was getting on it with him.

"Well, Fisk," I said.

"Klipspringer." He put out his hand.

I took it, and here is the thing I set down and cannot gloss. I could read every man on that mountain to the width of a hair, and I could not read that handshake. It was not warm and not cold, not a threat and not a pardon; it was a man closing a book he did not mean to burn, watching my face while he closed it, so that I should know it was shut and that it was kept. He said nothing further, and got on the bus. He has never told me why he covered for me, and when at last I came to write these pages his was the one name in them I could not set down as it truly was, for reasons I have promised elsewhere and am not yet ready to keep.

The Saturday following, I drew a pass to Santa Fe, and the trap I had walked round all summer without seeing it shut on me over lunch at the La Fonda. He waited in the cool of the dining room — a spare, dry man of sixty with a Loop lawyer's face, all discretion and good barbering — with a card that said he was of a firm on LaSalle Street and had the honor to act for Mr. Halsted. Mr. Halsted did not travel to sell a corporal his daughter; Mr. Halsted sent a lawyer, which is how that shore of that lake had bought and sold everything within memory, including, I was shortly to learn, its sons-in-law. He apologized for the intrusion on my leave, and opened a folder on the cloth between the coffee and the ashtray.

There were two papers in it. The first was a notice of engagement, already composed and handsome, announcing the coming marriage of Miss Barbara Halsted, of Lake Forest, to Corporal Klipspringer, to run in the Chicago society pages the following month, subject only to the corporal's agreement. Beneath it lay the second, a letter on the stationery of a Halsted subsidiary I had never heard of, offering the same corporal, upon discharge, a position: government-liaison work, a good salary, an office in Washington, and — I read it twice — a great deal of travel in Europe.

I am not a quick man, but I watched the two ends of that rope come together on the cloth. Sennett's office wanted a ruined continent's machinery carried home; the largest maker of such machinery in the American middle — the dull, vast river of money that stamped out the tools that stamped out everything else — was Halsted Tool & Die. I was not handed a bride by one providence and a career by another inside a fortnight because I was irresistible. I was sold one thing twice. The firm was the outfit's biggest contractor, and it wanted a presentable, decorated, discreet young man to stand in the front rooms of Europe with the Halsted name on him — the very article Sennett had climbed the mountain to buy, sold to him by the man now selling it to me.

"Miss Halsted," said the lawyer, watching me read with the patience of a man who had closed a thousand of these, "speaks warmly of you. The family has of course made its inquiries." He said it without weight, the way that class says the thing that matters, and I understood, a year and a career too late, why the needles had never once moved when I ran them over Bunny Halsted across four hundred miles of Kansas. I had been reading a locked door and calling it an empty room. The reading had run the other way the whole time: her letters that said nothing — the weather, the horse, three pages of Lake Forest sunshine the censors waved through beaming — had been the family's man on the ground, reporting on me while I answered every one and thought myself the collector.

And here is the joke on which this bundle closes: even with the rope lying in two plain pieces on the cloth, I signed both papers before the coffee was cold, and walked out into the Santa Fe sun a made man, and told myself so for fifty years. The wedding was set for that autumn, in Lake Forest, in a stone church the machine-tool money had built, and that wedding opens the next of these bundles, so I will leave myself at the church door, decorated and delighted and thoroughly acquired.³

I found the last of it on the train out of Lamy. I left New Mexico as I had come to it, with a duffel and two stripes, only now with a medal, a marriage, and a career folded in beside them. Somewhere in the second hour I dug for my cigarettes and met a card that had no business being in my bag. It was plain, good stock, and carried no name. On one face was an address in Berlin: a street, a number, a city then mostly rubble, in a country I had agreed four days before to go and rummage through, though I had breathed a word of it to no one and the papers arranging it were still warm in Chicago. On the other face, in a small, tidy, patient hand I knew better than my mother's, five words: Until the next war, then.

He had wanted nothing. He never wanted much. He had only reached into a sealed duffel on a guarded mountain to remind me that whatever the Army and the Halsteds believed they had bought between them, I was still, and would remain, entered on his books. There was no stove on the Santa Fe Chief, and by the time there was one I had put the card away instead of burning it. I have it yet.⁴