He was beautiful, the dead. Here is a picture in starched dress uniform taken seriously in the shadow of DDay and the ongoing atrocities in the Pacific Theatre. He had a liberal afternoon between graduation from officer training and his next deployment which he spent wandering Manhattan alone: obscure conversations at other tables, loneliness pulling on him like a lost and demanding child, while simultaneously there was the vivacity of the city--the people, the possibility--to sustain him.
Histories he could not know, the lives of others, filled him with the fire to be, to see, to mark, to free his imagination. He was Walt Whitman singing the city, its virtues, the virtues that lay in her vice. It was a pensive (mostly pleasant) oddyssey through the box canyons crowded with a million people all believing tenaciously in tomorrow, tomorrow and the day after that... Meandering through street scenes inhabited by Italians, Jews, or Chinamen, the soldier saw the complexity unearthed by seeing. The world, the country, the little town on the high plains (so familiar) made their way communicating both uncertainty and desire.
There was much on his mind.
"What we are fighting for" was disguised in everything, hiding in the tall grass or in an abstract reflection on the surface of the "lake", a stagnant and expansive puddle on the roof of one of the tenements that served as a mirror for Midtown's ambition. He was taking a break brightened by nicotine. One last drag, and with the smoke the idea enfolded him. He tossed the butt still burning into the pond. It had occurred to him to find a portrait studio to mark the occasion, to send back to his mother in the Dakotas, so she would have a good picture of him--the cloud of morbidity descended--"just in case."
Seventy years nearly and his movie star good looks are here retained. They shrouded him as quickly and as conveniently as possible, in a box, in a fire, underground. The metallic paper with its subtle and suggestive variation is what remains of him, and of that day. Tyrone Powers pearls, the certain uncertainty of his smile, or Randolph Scott's purse, lips dipped in saccharine and a body built of steel or there was Larry Olivier, the poet with a pulse in his breath. Waiting to return to pick up the prints, the young man idled matinees amidst the smoke and light and celluloid of the second balcony.
