Catch As Catch Can Read online

  “Is anything wrong?”

  “Please come with us,” the stout man instructed curtly.

  “But what is it? Where is Mr. Simpson?”

  “We’ll explain everything,” said the man with the sharp, red face.

  “But where is he?”

  “He’s in jail.”

  The Captain reeled with amazement. “In jail?” he cried.

  “Yes, in jail. He was arrested for smuggling.”

  The Captain gasped. The light in the room grew dim, the room began to sway, he felt he was slowly falling. One part of his intelligence remained clear and alertly inquired why none of these strange people observed that he was falling and reached out to catch him. It seemed very odd, almost comical, and he thought he might even have laughed were it not for the fact, the indisputable fact, that he was about to fall.

  “You’ll have to answer some questions,” a voice said from a distance.

  “Yes, of course,” said the Captain, as his vision began to clear. “But—you must forgive me. I’m not well, not well at all. May I—may I sit down? Thank you. Thank you. I will try to answer your questions,” he promised weakly. “But you must be patient with me. I’m—I’m really not very well.”

  The questions came, and he answered as best he could, sinking deeper and deeper into shame as he bared his most personal secrets. He told them everything in a dull, wavering voice that cracked away often into a dry whisper, interrupting his bleak odyssey frequently with appeals for them not to contact his family. He gave references. The man with the sharp, red face wrote them down and left the cabin. The Captain omitted nothing, propelled by the conviction that only by presenting the complete picture could he properly vindicate himself. The others were no longer questioning him, but had fallen silent to listen with motionless attention.

  He was still speaking when the man with the sharp, red face returned. There was a whispered conference, and then the Captain was free to go. They were very nice to him now, and the officer with the flowering opulence of gold braid seemed genuinely regretful when he said:

  “You mustn’t come aboard again unless you are visiting someone who is sailing or you yourself really are. I’m very sorry, but those are regulations.”

  The Captain nodded rapidly, scarcely understanding. The man with the sharp face accompanied him out into the street and offered to drop him at the station.

  “Thank you. Thank you. But I believe I will take a taxi home.”

  The man hailed a cab for him and held the door open and helped him inside. “Good luck, Captain,” he said, and slowly closed the door.

  The ride to the house took over an hour. There was time to think, and it was in the cab going home that the Captain reached a decision and began planning his last voyage.

  He was normally the earliest in the house to awake, and it was he generally who stepped out to the porch at the beginning of each day and carried the mail inside. That evening he made peace with Neil and Cynthia. He let a full week go by to allay suspicion, and then one morning delivered his solemn announcement.

  “I received a letter,” he began in a firm voice, when the entire family had assembled for breakfast. “From my sister in Scotland. She has fallen ill.”

  LOVE, DAD*

  Second Lieutenant Edward J. Nately III was really a good kid. He was a slender, shy, rather handsome young man with fine brown hair, delicate cheekbones, large, intent eyes and a sharp pain in the small of his back when he woke up alone on a couch in the parlor of a whorehouse in Rome one morning and began wondering who and where he was and how in the world he had ever got there. He had no real difficulty remembering who he was. He was Second Lieutenant Edward J. Nately III, a bomber pilot in Italy in World War Two, and he would be twenty years old in January, if he lived.

  Nately had always been a good kid from a Philadelphia family that was even better. He was always pleasant, considerate, trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, not always so thrifty or wise but invariably brave, clean and reverent. He was without envy, malice, anger, hatred or resentment, which puzzled his good friend Yossarian and kept him aware of how eccentric and naïve Nately really was and how much in need of protection by Yossarian against the wicked ways of the world.

  Why, Nately had actually enjoyed his childhood—and was not even ashamed to admit it! Nately liked all his brothers and sisters and always had, and he did not mind going home for vacations and furloughs. He got on well with his uncles and his aunts and with all his first, second and third cousins, whom, of course, he numbered by the dozens, with all the friends of the family and with just about everyone else he ever met, except, possibly, the incredibly and unashamedly depraved old man who was always in the whorehouse when Nately and Yossarian arrived and seemed to have spent his entire life living comfortably and happily there. Nately was well bred, well groomed, well mannered and well off. He was, in fact, immensely wealthy, but no one in his squadron on the island of Pianosa held his good nature or his good family background against him.

  Nately had been taught by both parents all through childhood, preadolescence and adolescence to shun and disdain “climbers,” “pushers,” “ nouveaux” and “parvenus,” but he had never been able to, since no climbers, pushers, nouveaux or par-venus had ever been allowed near any of the family homes in Philadelphia, Fifth Avenue, Palm Beach, Bar Harbor, Southampton, Mayfair and Belgravia, the 16th arrondissement, the north of France, the south of France and all of the good Greek islands. To the best of his knowledge, the guest lists at all these places had always been composed exclusively of ladies and gentlemen and children of faultless dress and manners and great dignity and aplomb. There were always many bankers, brokers, judges, ambassadors and former ambassadors among them, many sportsmen, cabinet officials, fortune hunters and dividend-collecting widows, divorcées, orphans and spinsters. There were no labor leaders among them and no laborers, and there were never any self-made men. There was one unmarried social worker who toiled among the underprivileged for fun, and several retired generals and admirals who were dedicating the remaining years of their lives to preserving the American Constitution by destroying it and perpetuating the American way of life by bringing it to an end.

  The only one in the entire group who worked hard was Nately’s mother; but since she did not work hard at anything constructive, her reputation remained good. Nately’s mother worked very hard at opening and closing the family homes in Philadelphia, Fifth Avenue, Palm Beach, Bar Harbor, Southampton, Mayfair and Belgravia, the 16th arrondissement, the north of France, the south of France and all of the good Greek islands, and at safeguarding the family traditions, of which she had appointed herself austere custodian.

  “You must never forget who and what you are”; Nately’s mother had begun drumming it into Nately’s head about Natelys long before Nately had any idea what a Nately was. “You are not a Guggenheim, who mined copper for a living, nor a Vanderbilt, whose fortune is descended from a common tug-boat captain, nor an Armour, whose ancestors peddled putrefying meat to the gallant Union Army during the heroic War between the States, nor a Harriman, who made his money playing with choo-choo trains. Our family,” she always declared with pride, “does nothing for our money.”

  “What your mater means, my boy,” interjected his father with the genial, rococo wit Nately found so impressive, “is that people who make new fortunes are not nearly as good as the families who’ve lost old ones. Ha, ha, ha! Isn’t that good, my dear?”

  “I wish you would mind your own business when I’m talking to the boy,” Nately’s mother replied sharply to Nately’s father.

  “Yes, my dear.”

  Nately’s mother was a stiff-necked, straight-backed, autocratic descendant of the old New England Thorntons. The family tree of the New England Thorntons, as she often remarked, extended back far past the Mayflower, almost to Adam himself. It was a matter of historical record that the Thorntons were lineal descendants of the union of John Alden, a climber
, to Priscilla Mullins, a pusher. The genealogy of the Natelys was no less impressive, since one of Nately’s father’s forebears had distinguished himself conspicuously at the battle of Bosworth Field, on the losing side.

  “Mother, what is a regano?” Nately inquired innocently one day while on holiday from Andover after an illicit tour through the Italian section of Philadelphia, before reporting to his home for duty. “Is it anything like a Nately?”

  “Oregano,” replied his mother with matriarchal distaste, “is a revolting vice indulged in by untitled foreigners in Italy. Don’t ever mention it again.”

  Nately’s father chuckled superiorly when Nately’s mother had gone. “You mustn’t take everything your mother says too literally, son,” he advised with a wink. “Your mother is a remarkable woman, as you probably know, but when she deals with such matters as oregano, she’s usually full of shit. Now, I’ve eaten oregano many times, if you know what I mean, and I expect that you will, too, before you marry and settle down. The important thing to remember about eating oregano is never to do it with a girl from your own social station. Do it with salesgirls and waitresses, if you can, or with any of our maids, except Lili, of course, who, as you may have noticed, is something of a favorite of mine. I’m not sending you to women of lower social station out of snobbishness, but simply because they’re so much better at it than the daughters and wives of our friends. Nurses and schoolteachers enjoy excellent reputations in this respect. Not a word about this to your mother, of course.”

  Nately’s father overflowed with sanguine advice of that kind. He was a dapper, affable man of great polish and experience whom everybody but Nately’s mother respected. Nately was proud of his father’s wisdom and sophistication; and the eloquent, brilliant letters he received when away at school were treasured compensation for those bleak and painful separations from his parents. Nately’s father, on the other hand, welcomed these separations from his son with ceremonious zeal, for they gave him opportunity to fashion the graceful, aesthetic, metaphysical letters in which he took such epicurean satisfaction.

  Dear Son (he wrote when Nately was away at Andover):

  Don’t be the first person by whom new things are tried and don’t be the last one to set old ones aside. If our family were ever to adopt for itself a brief motto, I would want it to be precisely those words, and not merely because I wrote them myself. (Ha, ha, ha!) I would select them for the wisdom they contain. They urge restraint, and restraint is the quintessence of dignity and taste. It is incumbent upon you as a Nately that dignity and taste are always what you show.

  Today you are at Andover. Tomorrow you will be elsewhere. There will be times in later life when you will find yourself with people who attended Exeter, Choate,Hotchkiss, Groton and other institutions of like ilk. These people will address you as equals and speak to you familiarly, as though you share with them a common fund of experience. Do not be deceived. Andover is Andover, and Exeter is not, and neither are any of the others anything that they are not.

  Throughout life, you must always choose your friends as discriminately as you choose your clothing, and you must bear in mind constantly that all that glitters is not gold.

  Love,

  Dad

  Nately had hoarded these letters from his father loyally and was often tempted to fling their elevated contents into the jaded face of the hedonistic old man who seemed to be in charge of the whorehouse in Rome, in lordly refutation of his pernicious, unkempt immorality and as a triumphant illustration of what a cultivated, charming, intelligent and distinguished man of character such as his father was really like. What restrained Nately was a confused and intimidating suspicion that the old man would succeed in degrading his father with the same noxious and convincing trickery with which he had succeeded in degrading everything else Nately deemed holy. Nately had a large number of his father’s letters to save. Following Andover, he had moved, of course, to Harvard, and his father had proved equal to the occasion.

  Dear Son (his father wrote):

  Don’t be the first person by whom new things are tried and don’t be the last person to set the old things aside. This pregnant couplet came to me right out of the blue only a few moments ago, while I was out on the patio listening to your mother and a Mozart clarinet concerto and spreading Crosse & Blackwell marmalade on my Melba toast, and I am interrupting my breakfast to communicate it to you while it is still fresh in my mind. Write it down on your brain, inscribe it on your heart, engrave it for all time on your memory centers, for the advice it contains is as sound as any I have ever told you.

  Today you are at Harvard, the oldest educational institution in the United States of America, and I am not certain if you are as properly impressed with your situation as you should be. Harvard is more than just a good school; Harvard is also a good place at which to get an education, should you decide that you do want an education. Columbia University, New York University and the City College of New York in the city of New York are other good places at which to get an education, but they are not good schools. Universities such as Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth and bungalows in the Amherst-Williams complex are, ofcourse, neither good schools nor good places at which to get an education and are never to be compared with Harvard. I hope that you are being as choosy in your choice of acquaintances there as you know your mother and I would like you to be.

  Love,

  Dad

  P.S. Avoid associating familiarly with Roman Catholics, colored people and Jews, regardless of how accomplished, rich or influential their parents may be, although Chinese, Japanese,Spaniards of royal blood and Moslems of foreign nationality are perfectly all right.

  P.P.S. Are you getting much oregano up there? (Ha, ha, ha!)

  Nately sampled oregano dutifully his freshman year with a salesgirl, a waitress, a nurse and a schoolteacher, and with three girls in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on two separate occasions, but his appetite for the spice was not hoggish and exposure did not immunize him against falling so unrealistically in love the first moment he laid eyes on the dense, sluggish, yawning, ill-kempt whore lounging stark naked in a room full of enlisted men ignoring her. Apart from these several formal and rather unexciting excursions into sexuality, Nately’s first year at Harvard was empty and dull. He made few close friends, restricted, as he was, to associating only with wealthy Episcopalian and Church of England graduates of Andover whose ancestors had either descended lineally from the union of John Alden with Priscilla Mullins or been conspicuous at Bosworth Field, on the losing side. He spent many solitary hours fondling the expensive vellum bindings of the five books sent to him by his father as the indispensable basis of a sound personal library: Forges and Furnaces of Pennsylvania; The Catalog of the Porcellian Club of

  Harvard University, 1941; Burke’s Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage; Lord Chester-field’s Letters Written to His Son;and the Francis Palgrave Golden Treasury of English verse. The pages themselves did not hold his interest, but the bindings were fascinating. He was often lonely and nagged by vague, incipient longings. He contemplated his sophomore year at Harvard without enthusiasm, without joy. Fortunately, the War broke out in time to save him.

  Dear Son (his father wrote, after Nately had volunteered for the Air Corps, to escape being drafted into the Infantry):

  You are now embarked upon the highest calling thatProvidence ever bestows upon man, the privilege to fight for his country. Play up, play up and play the game! I have every confidence that you will not fail your country, your family and yourself in the execution of your most noble responsibility, which is to play up, play up and play the game—and to come out ahead.

  The news at home is all good. The market is buoyant and the cost-plus-six-percent type of contract now in vogue is the most salutary invention since the international cartel and provides us with an excellent buffer against the excess-profits tax and the outrageous personal income tax. I have it on excellent authority that Russia cannot possibl
y hold out for more than a week or two and that after communism has been destroyed, Hitler, Roosevelt, Mussolini, Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi and theEmperor of Japan will make peace and operate the world forever on a sound businesslike basis. However, it remains to be seen whether the wish is just being father to the thought. (Ha, ha, ha!)

  My spirit is soaring and my optimism knows no bounds. Hitler has provided precisely the right stimulus needed to restore the American economy to that splendidcondition of good health it was enjoying on that glorious Thursday just before Black Friday. War, as you undoubtedly appreciate, presents civilization with a great opportunity and a great challenge. It is in time of war that great fortunes are often made. It is between wars that economic conditions tend to deteriorate. If mankind can just discover some means of increasing the duration of wars and decreasing the intervals between wars, we will have found a permanent solution to this most fundamental of all human ills, the business cycle.

  What better advice can a devoted parent give you in this grave period of national crisis than to oppose government interference with all the vigor at your command and to fight to the death to preserve free enterprise— provided, of course, that the enterprise in question is one in which you own a considerable number of shares. (Ha, ha, ha!)

  Above all this, to your own self be true. Never be a borrower or a lender of money: Never borrow money at more than two percent and never lend money at less than nine percent.

  Love,

  Dad

  P.S. Your mother and I will not go to Cannes this year.

  There had been no caviling in the family over Nately’s course once war was declared; it was simply taken for granted that he would continue the splendid family tradition of military service that dated all the way back to the battle of Bosworth Field, on the losing side, particularly since Nately’s father had it from the most reliable sources in Washington that Russia could not possibly hold out for more than two or three more weeks and that the War would come to an end before Nately could be sent overseas.