January 2011

More than any other features, our faces are what mark us as unique individuals. Superficially our faces are who we are. Together with names they identify us with the lives we have lived; they are our perpetual calling cards. Our interest in and curiosity about faces is a natural phenomenon, and if we are to feel a kinship with our national heritage, it matters that we recognize the faces of our American icons.

From the start, I resented computers even more than most people who have been bushwhacked by them in middle age. This is because a good friend was so wholly in their thrall that, whenever we spoke, I would hear about some new piece of hard- or software he had acquired, the information always imparted with an awful, self-aggrandizing gravity. “Interface,” he’d say in a tone that would have been appropriate to one charged with making some final modifications in the Manhattan Project. “Modem.”

I would respond with all the righteous purity of total ignorance. The horrible new vocabulary he’d developed was proof enough that computers were corrupting the language, I told him; and, indeed, they would likely end by destroying literacy altogether. (This prediction sprang from the sight of my ten-year-old son transfixed for hours before the screen playing various games in which people run forever through post-apocalyptic landscapes dodging fireballs and thrown hatchets to the accompaniment of chirps and plonks.)

All the new lady brakemen on the Pennsylvania Railroad were put to work on what was officially known as the Jersey Coast Extra List. The crew dispatchers referred to it as the Women’s List, and the male brakemen, who had been consigned to it before the women were hired, called it the Garbage Run. It was also known as the meat—as opposed to the gravy, the cushy sit-down jobs on the main line Washington Express, which paid three times as much for about one-tenth the work. There were thirty-two stops on the Jersey Coast run, and it took three hours to make it, often in old cattle cars converted for commuter use. But in the beginning the women, not knowing better, loved it.

At approximately 2:30 P.M. on October 30, 1992, two maintenance men lowered a white fiberglass child’s coffin into a shallow grave in the Fourth Street Cemetery in Dover, Ohio. The coffin contained the skull of a Confederate guerrilla named William Clarke Quantrill. As a drizzling, cold rain fell, they filled in the grave, tamped down the dirt, covered it with sod, and then threw their shovels into the back of their truck and drove away. Their departure signaled an end to more than a century of shenanigans with regard to Quantrill’s bones, which have been stolen, bartered, put up for sale, used in fraternity rituals, and displayed in glass museum cases and have come to be buried in three graves in three different states.

The distinguished lawyer could not restrain himself. Even in the somber pages of the American Bar Association’s Tort & Insurance Law Journal late last year, his rage blazed and fulminated. Juries, he thundered, were more and more willing to accept scanty, insufficient evidence en route to awarding unmerited damages to undeserving plaintiffs.

This regrettable trend he attributed to “a decline in personal responsibility or accountability” and “the apparent inability of jurors in general to separate their feelings of sympathy for an injured person from the facts of the case.”

My brush with history involved Queen Elizabeth and the nightgown she wore on her wedding night. I think.

When her engagement to Prince Philip was announced, I was working in San Antonio in a large department store—Joske’s, the “largest store in the largest state.” I wrote their radio commercials. One day the door of my office flew open, and Mary Louise’s head appeared. Mary Louise was my closest friend. She also was head of the Gift Wrap Department, and all the local lights brought pieces by for her special treatment. Her face was ashen, and she sort of gasped, “Come down to the shop. Hurry!”

The head disappeared, and I followed, almost running to her tiny, jumbled workshop. “Look!” She waved wildly at her desk.

It was 1974. As your average twelve-year-old, my world was one of mischievous after-school activities, mixed with the usual sandlot sports, awkward encounters with girls, and homework. With the exception of the trendy peace-sign belt buckle and fingers-gesturing peace-sign T-shirt that I owned, I had only a faint familiarity with the politics of peace and war in faraway Vietnam. In fact, my only real exposure to those events came from those television voices that came between “Gilligan’s Island” and “Adam 12,” who spoke of the specter of nuclear holocaust that losing to communism in Asia might invite. All that changed one winter with a brief but profound encounter with the inner workings and realities of the Cold War.

The gray stone mansion that housed the Swiss Legation in Washington was a virtual Tower of Babel in the week after the atomic bombs exploded over Japan. Everyone knew that war’s end was imminent and the official surrender note from Emperor Hirohito would come through our mission at any hour. French, German, Italian, and English dialogues rattled the eardrums.

As Minister Charles Bruggmann’s private secretary for English correspondence, I had high hopes that the honor of typing the final message would rest with me. But I wasn’t sure. The minister himself was in Bern for conference, and his chargé d’affaires, Max Grassli, had an efficient Swiss secretary with long seniority in their foreign service.

We thought the mission would be a long one. Our targets in Japan were now farther and farther from our fighter base on Iwo Jima, where we were flying our P-51 Mustangs to the empire. At first, these missions were escort for the B-29 Superfortresses on their bombing runs, but as the war wound down, escort was no longer needed, and our job was to fly up to the Japanese mainland and strafe airfields, destroying what remained of the Japanese Air Force on the ground. This would make the coming invasion a bit easier.

We were right about the length of our mission. When the cover was removed from the large briefing chart at the front of the tent, a low moan went up from the fighter pilots. The red cord on the map, indicating the course to the target and its location, stretched from Iwo Jima to an airfield considerably north of Tokyo—the longest mission to date, and mostly over water.

Foursquare and substantial, the Connecticut chest is instantly recognizable as a product of the seventeenth century. Among the earliest furniture produced in America, it combined simplicity and versatility, for like the sprawling continent itself, the chest’s uses were limited only by the imagination; it might serve as linen closet, trunk, table, and even, on occasion, bed. With its unpretentious charm the Connecticut chest on the opposite page could have come from any one of the nation’s first households. But this one didn’t. It was made in the twentieth century.