Read Online Lies My Mother Never Told Me by Kaylie Jones - Free Book Online Page A

on the day you die. When you lay there in the bed and sweat it out, and know that all the doctors and nurses and weeping friends dont mean a thing and cant help you any, cant save you one small bitter taste of it, because you are the one that’s dying and not them.”
    Was that how he ’d felt, lying in the hospital those last few days?
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    A few weeks after my father’s memorial service at the Bridgehampton Community House, I received a phone call from Leo Bookman, an agent at the William Morris Agency. He’d seen my picture in the New York Times , taken with Lauren Bacall when wewere coming out of the service. He told me he’d discovered Candice Bergen and thought I had “that look.” Would I come to New York to meet him?
    I look attractive in that picture. I’d lost twenty pounds over the preceding two months and weighed less than a hundred pounds. Being too thin is usually a good thing for photographs.
    I took the train into the City by myself and went to the William Morris offices on Sixth Avenue. Leo Bookman had a corner office with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the New York skyline. He asked if I’d give up my plans to go to Wesleyan if I got a part, say, on a soap opera—I could perhaps take a couple of night courses at NYU if it meant that much to me. Without even thinking about it, I balked. I told him I’d promised my father I’d go to college and that was what I was going to do.
    â€œToo bad,” he said with a rueful smile. “I could have made you a star.”
    On the train going home, I put From Here to Eternity down on the seat beside me as the conductor, an aging man in a blue uniform, probably a veteran, came over to punch my ticket.
    â€œGreat book,” he said, handing me back my ticket and nodding toward my book on the seat. “Best book I ever read.”
    He moved away, down the corridor between the seats, punching tickets, talking to passengers, his hips bouncing against the backrests. I was so stunned I couldn’t find the words to tell him my father had written it.
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    Next I read The Thin Red Line .
    Private Bell, missing his wife, wanting to survive, after his first combat experience on Guadalcanal, reflects, “Nothing had been decided, nobody had learned anything. But most important of all, nothing had ended.” He suddenly understands with soul-shattering clarity that there is no way in hell he can survive. He is only a number, a statistic, and his individual life counts not at all.
    And yet—every one of them, the common foot soldiers, including Bell, soldier on. They know, they understand now, that the individual does not count, and has not counted since rich men figured out how to send their minions into battle to gain more riches. The buck-ass privates, as James Jones called them, were not fooled into believing for a second that what they were doing was fighting for Freedom, or Liberty, or The Pursuit of the American Dream. Their pointless pride, their self-annihilating loyalty, is not for their superior officers but for their companions.
    Bell and his buddies throw themselves in front of bullets to protect one another, and to prove to themselves that they are not cowards. And the truly best fighting machines, the fearless ones, are the sociopaths, the ones who see the whole thing as a child’s game of cowboys and Indians, who’ve never had so much fun or been given so much power in their lives. They try to one-up one another, for a stripe, for a promotion, for a medal—some of them even collecting enemy trophies, like ears—and their commanding officers stare at them with distaste, and a certain begrudging admiration.
    Jamie had asked our father once, “How come you never show us your medals, Daddy?” He went up to his office and dug them out. He had two medals. A Purple Heart, for the head wound he received on Guadalcanal; and a Bronze Star. He explained, in a strange,