“Always remember,” his mother had reminded him frequently, “that you are a Nately. You are not a Vanderbilt, whose fortune was made by a vulgar tugboat captain, or a Rockefeller, whose wealth was amassed through unscrupulous speculations in crude petroleum; or a Reynolds or Duke, whose income was derived from the sale to the unsuspecting public of products containing cancer-causing resins and tars; and you are certainly not an Astor, whose family, I believe, still lets rooms. You are a Nately, and the Natelys have never done anything for their money.”
“What your mother means, son,” interjected his father affably one time with that flair for graceful and economical expression Nately admired so much, “is that old money is better than new money and that the newly rich are never to be esteemed as highly as the newly poor. Isn’t that correct, my dear?”
Nately’s father brimmed continually with sage and sophisticated counsel of that kind. He was as ebullient and ruddy as mulled claret, and Nately liked him a great deal, although he did not like mulled claret. When war broke out, Nately’s family decided that he would enlist in the armed forces, since he was too young to be placed in the diplomatic service, and since his father had it on excellent authority that Russia was going to collapse in a matter of weeks or months and that Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Mussolini, Gandhi, Franco, Peron and the Emperor of Japan would then all sign a peace treaty and live together happily ever after. It was Nately’s father’s idea that he join the Air Corps, where he could train safely as a pilot while the Russians capitulated and the details of the armistice were worked out, and where, as an officer, he would associate only with gentlemen.
Instead, he found himself with Yossarian, Dunbar and Hungry Joe in a whore house in Rome, poignantly in love with an indifferent girl there with whom he finally did lie down the morning after the night he slept alone in the sitting room, only to be interrupted almost immediately by her incorrigible kid sister, who came bursting in without warning and hurled herself onto the bed jealously so that Nately could embrace her, too. Nately’s whore sprang up snarling to whack her angrily and jerked her to her feet by her hair. The twelve-year-old girl looked to Nately like a plucked chicken or like a twig with the bark peeled off her sapling body embarrassed everyone in her precocious attempts to imitate her elders, and she was always being chased away to put clothes on and ordered out into the street to play in the fresh air with the other children. The two sisters swore and spat at each other now savagely, raising a fluent, deafening commotion that brought a whole crowd of hilarious spectators swarming into the room. Nately gave up in exasperation. He asked his girl to get dressed and took her downstairs for breakfast. The kid sister tagged along, and Nately felt like the proud head of a family as the three of them ate respectably in a nearby open-air café. But Nately’s whore was already bored by the time they started back, and she decided to go streetwalking with two other girls rather than spend more time with him. Nately and the kid sister followed meekly a block behind, the ambitious youngster to pick up valuable pointers, Nately to eat his liver in mooning frustration, and both were saddened when the girls were stopped by soldiers in a staff car and driven away.
Nately went back to the café and bought the kid sister chocolate ice cream until her spirits improved and then returned with her to the apartment, where Yossarian and Dunbar were flopped out in the sitting room with an exhausted Hungry Joe, who was still wearing on his battered face the blissful, numb, triumphant smile with which he had limped into view from his massive harem that morning like a person with numerous broken bones. The lecherous and depraved old man was delighted with Hungry Joe’s split lips and black-and-blue eyes. He greeted Nately warmly, still wearing the same rumpled clothes of the evening before. Nately was profoundly upset by his seedy and disreputable appearance, and whenever he came to the apartment he wished that the corrupt, immoral old man would put on a clean Brooks Brothers shirt, shave, comb his hair, wear a tweed jacket, and grow a dapper white mustache so that Nately would not have to suffer such confusing shame each time he looked at him and was reminded of his father.
24 MILO
April had been the best month of all for Milo. Lilacs bloomed in April and fruit ripened on the vine. Heartbeats quickened and old appetites were renewed. In April a livelier iris gleamed upon the burnished dove. April was spring, and in the spring Milo Minderbinder’s fancy had lightly turned to thoughts of tangerines.
“Tangerines?”
“Yes, sir.”
“My men would love tangerines,” admitted the colonel in Sardinia who commanded four squadrons of B-26s.
“There’ll be all the tangerines they can eat that you’re able to pay for with money from your mess fund,” Milo assured him.
“Casaba melons?”
“Are going for a song in Damascus.”
“I have a weakness for casaba melons. I’ve always had a weakness for casaba melons.”
“Just lend me one plane from each squadron, just one plane, and you’ll have all the casabas you can eat that you’ve money to pay for.”
“We buy from the syndicate?”
“And everybody has a share.”
“It’s amazing, positively amazing. How can you do it?”
“Mass purchasing power makes the big difference. For example, breaded veal cutlets.”
“I’m not so crazy about breaded veal cutlets,” grumbled the skeptical B-25 commander in the north of Corsica.
“Breaded veal cutlets are very nutritious,” Milo admonished him piously. “They contain egg yolk and bread crumbs. And so are lamb chops.”
“Ah, lamb chops,” echoed the B-25 commander. “Good lamb chops?”
“The best,” said Milo, “that the black market has to offer.”
“Baby lamb chops?”
“In the cutest little pink paper panties you ever saw. Are going for a song in Portugal.”
“I can’t send a plane to Portugal. I haven’t the authority.”
“I can, once you lend the plane to me. With a pilot to fly it. And don’t forget-you’ll get General Dreedle.”
“Will General Dreedle eat in my mess hall again?”
“Like a pig, once you start feeding him my best white fresh eggs fried in my pure creamery butter. There’ll be tangerines too, and casaba melons, honeydews, filet of Dover sole, baked Alaska, and cockles and mussels.”
“And everybody has a share?”
“That,” said Milo, “is the most beautiful part of it.”
“I don’t like it,” growled the unco-operative fighter-plane commander, who didn’t like Milo either.
“There’s an unco-operative fighter-plane commander up north who’s got it in for me,” Milo complained to General Dreedle. “It takes just one person to ruin the whole thing, and then you wouldn’t have your fresh eggs fried in my pure creamery butter any more.”
General Dreedle had the unco-operative fighter-plane commander transferred to the Solomon Islands to dig graves and replaced him with a senile colonel with bursitis and a craving for litchi nuts who introduced Milo to the B-17 general on the mainland with a yearning for Polish sausage.
“Polish sausage is going for peanuts in Cracow,” Milo informed him.
“Polish sausage,” sighed the general nostalgically. “You know, I’d give just about anything for a good hunk of Polish sausage. Just about anything.”
“You don’t have to give anything. Just give me one plane for each mess hall and a pilot who will do what he’s told. And a small down payment on your initial order as a token of good faith.”
“But Cracow is hundreds of miles behind the enemy lines. How will you get to the sausage?”
“There’s an international Polish sausage exchange in Geneva. I’ll just fly the peanuts into Switzerland and exchange them for Polish sausage at the open market rate. They’ll fly the peanuts back to Cracow and I’ll fly the Polish sausage back to you. You buy only as much Polish sausage as you want through the syndicate. There’ll be tangerines too, with only a little artificial coloring added. And eggs from Malta and Scotch from Sicily. You’ll be paying the money to yourself when you buy from the syndicate, since you’ll own a share, so you’ll really be getting everything you buy for nothing. Doesn’t that makes sense?”