Saul Steinberg: A Biography Part 3

After telling him that Civita had rounded up an Italian refugee to meet his plane and help him on his way, and that the New Yorker editors were also enlisting their own connections to help him, Miss Einstein ended her letter sweetly: "Don't you think you should have sweet dreams now and stop worrying about self-made spectres?" But this wasn't soothing enough for Steinberg, and she had to write again: "There is not the slightest danger that the events of Lisbon will again take place. I repeat what I said in previous letters: stop worrying, take the plane whenever Pan American Airlines will have a seat for you and come. You will see that everything is very easy with a regular immigration visa in your pocket."

AND SO, ONCE HIS TICKET WAS in hand, he spent the month of June going to the airport every day and returning to his furnished room every night. He was utterly frustrated: "I'm wasting my time here, I cannot even work, my baggages are made, ready to leave every day. I cannot say how much [longer] I'll have to stay here waiting."

Every day he chatted with others who were standing in line and sweating in the summer heat. More people were leaving every day, but on flights to Haiti or to Maracaibo and other South American cities, where they hoped to find easier connections for Miami. Steinberg was being advised by them and by some of his American contacts to take his chances and go to Port-au-Prince, but he was afraid to do it for fear that by leaving the comparative safety of the Dominican Republic, he could land in a country where untold new troubles might arise to impede him. He apologized for complaining, but every day seemed to be forty-eight hours long: "Now I cannot do nothing but wait and smoke bad cigarettes."

Finally, on June 28, 1942, the long wait ended and his turn came to board a Pan American Airlines flight to Miami. Vittorio Nahum, the Italian refugee enlisted by Civita, met him at the airport and took him to the Emba.s.sy Hotel in Miami Beach. Steinberg spent one night in the hotel and the next morning went to the Greyhound bus station, where he bought a one-way ticket to New York.

"Traveling by bus, if you manage to sit in the first row, you enjoy the ideal view, the rarest and most n.o.ble one," he later said. And that was how he got his first view of the American Dream as the bus wended its way up the Atlantic seacoast.

CHAPTER 8.

IN A STATE OF UTTER DELIGHT.

Who the h.e.l.l knows where my home is ... I didn't have the time to know New York and love it.

The first thing Steinberg noticed about New York was its architecture, particularly the impact of cubism. He trained his European eye on the urban landscape and decided that the dominant influences were "Constructivism," "Cubism," and "Fernandlegerism." Despite wartime rationing, restrictions, and blackouts, everything he saw or experienced left him "in a state of utter delight." The "Cubist elements" that became his lifelong totems a.s.saulted his eye everywhere he looked, and everything he saw became grist for his artistic mill, from the gleaming Chrysler Building, where "Art Deco was merely ... Cubism turned decorative," to the sensuous plastic curves and neon-bright colors of larger-than-life jukeboxes, to women's dresses (short, to conserve fabric), shoes (usually high, with platforms and stilettos for heels), hairdos (upswept into elaborate rolls and curls), to men's neckties (large and bright, splashed on colorful zoot suits in rebellion against drab khaki uniforms). Taxis provided fascinating bursts of color in s.h.i.+ny enamel, particularly the sleek flowing lines of the Pontiac sedans, which sported a hood ornament that he thought resembled "a flying Indian that derived directly from Brancusi and his flying birds." He marveled particularly at "the sort of red that is obtained only on metal, many coats & laquer, the illuminated taxi sign on top rendered even more clearly the jukebox origin of the car." Billboards were a revelation in text and type. English as spoken by "Noo Yawkahs" was a foreign language. The noise, dirt, traffic, confusion-everything that jumped out at his senses in the New York of 1942 was part of "a very American world," and in his opinion, one that was so "very optimistic" that he had trouble a.s.similating it. In later years, he regretted that he had only sketched and not made "large paintings" of all that he saw then, of "diners, girls, cars, an America I believe myself the first to have discovered, or at least to have sketched." To him, America was "disarming," always looking for "gimmicks," and with "amus.e.m.e.nt park qualities" defining its skysc.r.a.pers."

He went about the business of observing daily life in New York with what others thought was quiet reserve and dignity but in reality was the shy silence of someone whose English was not very good and who preferred not to expose himself to embarra.s.sment or ridicule by trying to speak it: "Speaking primitive English was not my style." It was also a coverup for the depression caused by feelings of confusion and displacement, an ambivalence inspired by the city he had yearned to live in for so long. "Who the h.e.l.l knows where my home is?" Steinberg wrote a year later as he reflected on his earliest days in the city and "the empty stupid life" he led there. "I hated New York. I didn't have anything to do with that place, and I still hate to think of Times Square like a Luna Park, and Sixth Avenue busy and strange."

The Steinbergs, Dansons, and Civitas (via Miss Einstein) eased his entry into city life by having a room waiting for him in a Greenwich Village hotel, the Adams, on the corner of 11th Street and Sixth Avenue (now the Avenue of the Americas), the first street he knew in the United States. "Sixth Avenue was very luminous then," he recalled years later: "mostly brownstones, cheap jewelry, army & navy stores, used books, loans for guitars and cameras. Joke stores (rubber fried eggs, etc)...In summer Sixth Avenue had the looks of a Ca.n.a.letto, the pink gold brown the even light of the houses bordering the Gran Ca.n.a.l." He was captivated by "the great American aroma in summer-a combination of Cuban tropical and drugstore, chewing gum spearmint, Soap, the new and rare smell of air conditioning, healthy and clean sweat." It was a relief after the "Dominican street smell [of] sweat, starched suits, waxed tiles, carrots, Cremas [strong Dominican cigarettes]."

His neighbors were Ruth and Constantino Nivola, who had also escaped from Italy and were living in a one-room sixth-floor walkup on Fifth Avenue between 14th and 15th Streets. He had known them in Milan before they fled, first to Paris, because Ruth was Jewish, and they were the first people he looked up in New York. Tino was filled with a zest for life, and when he suggested on the spur of the moment that he and Steinberg should go to see Niagara Falls, off they went. Tino was the art director for Interiors magazine and therefore high on the list of exiled artists and writers, who went to him in search of work as well as friends.h.i.+p. Through him Steinberg was introduced to other Italian refugees who spoke the same polyglot he did and who gave him the same sort of companions.h.i.+p and camaraderie he had enjoyed in Milan. It was an insular little group, whose members were as unsettled and disoriented as he was. There was no particular bar or cafe to gather in, as Il Grillo had been, but rather, in the New York way of the young and poor, they socialized over potluck dinners or drinks, usually in the Nivola apartment. Ruth Nivola remembered how "everybody brought something, food, drink, because no one had money enough to entertain a group."

Many of the Italians were anarchists who congregated around Carlo Tresca, the socialist who was later a.s.sa.s.sinated in front of the building where the Nivolas lived. All were intellectuals and avid collectors of every rumor and sc.r.a.p of information about what was happening in Italy, for they thought of their time in New York as "a brief exile" and had "no curiosity about the USA." They stayed late, talking into the night as they exchanged news and rumors and compared the horrors they had gone through, with everyone expressing "such a feeling of wanting to create a better world." To the Nivolas, Steinberg "was then the way he was even later, quietly observant and saying little but very troubled by the persecution of the Jews."

Steinberg made many friends among artists, musicians, actors, and writers, initially through the Nivolas. Among those he cherished were the artists Alexander Calder and Philip Guston, the journalist Ugo Stille, the author and ill.u.s.trator Leo Lionni, the violinist Alexander Schneider, and the critics Bernard Rudofsky and Harold Rosenberg. Despite such lasting friends.h.i.+ps, he still believed that "true friends.h.i.+p, which is a provincial art, doesn't exist in New York. It's more a matter of seeing each other at parties and other daily, dissolute, alcoholic festivities." He may have disparaged such socializing, but he gave good value to his hosts and became a sought-after dinner guest who dined out almost every night for the rest of his life. As his English became fluent, he preferred his own witticisms and entertained with monologues instead of engaging in actual conversations with other guests and for the most part held his audiences enraptured. He was quick to perceive what was missing in a host's house or apartment and made something artistic to fill the s.p.a.ce. In the Nivola flat, for example, he painted a mural on a wall that expanded their "one beautiful room with big windows but no kitchen and bath down the hall [into] an apartment with many rooms and much beautiful furniture."

WHILE STEINBERG WAS STILL IN SANTO DOMINGO, Cesar Civita, as his "attorney or agent," paved the way for the start of his financial security by negotiating a contract with The New Yorker. It was signed by Ik Schuman, the managing editor, who became Steinberg's friend and benefactor, and it gave the magazine the right of first refusal of all his drawings. As soon as Steinberg was safely in the city, Civita prepared another doc.u.ment that spelled out the terms of their agent-client agreement, giving him "exclusive right to place and sell, in all countries of the world," any drawing that Steinberg made on his own "initiative and idea" or on Civita's "special order." The agreement unfairly gave Civita an unusually high 30 percent of all monies received, leaving 70 percent for Steinberg. It was valid for two years, beginning on July 1, 1942, and would be automatically renewed for another year on July 1, 1944. Civita also prepared a complementary doc.u.ment that named Victor and Charles Civita (his brother and father, respectively) as Steinberg's "true and lawful attorneys." It gave them power of attorney to make all decisions relating to Steinberg's work, because of the likelihood that he would be drafted into the army as soon as he became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

More work soon followed, including an invitation from the Office of War Information for Steinberg to join other artists who were interested in contributing whatever work the government required "to help win the war," despite the fact that he was still a man without a country. By November he was a consultant to the OWI's Graphics Division and was being paid up to $10 a day by the Overseas Operations Bureau. He also responded to The New Yorker's memo to its artists about the "important and immediate need for vacation art" that would ease "wartime vacations in the darkened city" for people "swelter[ing] in dim apartments or sunny penthouses." The magazine was especially interested in cartoons pertaining to gas rationing and travel restrictions, which contributed to the "shortage of men [for] young women from Manhattan." Several weeks later a second memo arrived, asking artists to disregard the August heat wave and start thinking about the Christmas issues, and Steinberg responded to that request as well.

Now that work and a steady stream of income appeared to be a.s.sured, his immediate concern was to become an American citizen, although he knew he might be drafted as soon as he was naturalized, if not before. Thanks to Civita, he had been able to repay most of the money that had helped him leave Italy, and now that he was safely settled in New York, he wanted to see the Pacific Ocean. He took advances against future earnings from Civita and The New Yorker and prepared to set off by train for the West Coast. He was especially eager to get to California and see Hollywood, and here he was helped by Harold Ross, who told him that the first person to see was Joe Reddy, the publicity director of the Disney Studios, who would give him useful introductions. Even more important, Ross insisted, was to go to Chasen's restaurant and introduce himself to the fabled owner, Dave Chasen. Another New Yorker editor, Ted Cook, also wrote to Reddy to ask him to show Steinberg "the works," but especially to have him meet Walt Disney in person. Steinberg was already "famous in Europe," Cook added, and was now "on a swing around the U.S." Ross showed the high regard in which he held Steinberg when he sent four copies of a letter of introduction to him in care of general delivery at the main Los Angeles post office. Each carried the personal notation that Ross didn't know Steinberg was really going to make the trip until the last minute or he would have done even more to try to help him.

Steinberg took the southern route to Los Angeles and the northern route back to New York through Chicago. He went in style, in a one-bedroom roomette, "one wall a window speeding night and day. 4 days!" When he woke up in Gallup, New Mexico, and raised the shade, he saw "a large redskin face looking at me. Paradise!" The desert scenes he knew only from black-and-white movies were brilliant "red, orange, and j.a.panese sunsets." The dining car was "splendid," filled with old-fas.h.i.+oned Americans who looked like Herbert Hoover. He saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time at Santa Monica and thought, "Now I could die happy. I saw the two oceans."

This was the beginning of Steinberg's inveterate traveling, which he had dreamed about since boyhood. From his earliest days as a schoolboy, no one was more aware of geography or more fascinated by maps than he was, even though geography was a subject poorly taught and badly explained in Romanian schools. In later years, after he had taken to drawing his own maps, he created mythical depictions of what he thought landscapes should reveal and what the people who lived there should represent. They became one of the most beloved categories within his artistic expression, bringing fan mail to The New Yorker in record number whenever one appeared.

Before he owned a car, in order to experience the climate and culture of a place as directly as possible, he preferred to take buses, always heading for the front seat; he took trains only if there were no buses, because trains traveled through "the back side of cities" and he didn't like what he saw there. Time was limited on this trip, so he had to take the train, and once he arrived at his destination, he could not stay for long. He did not use most of the letters of introduction or take any exceptional memories away except for one: Mickey Mouse as a cultural icon.

The talking rodent had intrigued him since his student days in Milan, when he decided that it represented something special about American society, although at the time he did not know what. When he got to Santo Domingo, he was struck by what he saw as the Mickey Mouse proclivities of a country with lush, overblown, blowsy feminine characteristics superimposed on a macho culture. As he was crossing the United States, he thought a lot about Mickey Mouse and decided that he was a negative "character ... with a lot of influence on the street." Steinberg, who was brought up in a country where Jews had no rights and were not even considered citizens until he was five, believed that Walt Disney had created Mickey Mouse out of his own prejudice.

Steinberg was quick to recognize the situation of African-Americans in a segregated culture and to sympathize with the indignities society inflicted on them. He was convinced that "in Walt Disney's head, Mickey Mouse was black ... half-human, comic, even in the physical way he was represented with big white eyes ... Comic and moving, but only human in some aspects." In his own drawings, whenever Mickey Mouse appears, the figure is threatening, negative, or at the very least unsettling.

ONCE BACK IN NEW YORK, STEINBERG was waiting for something to happen as the year ended. "d.a.m.n!" he wrote. "The New Year begins on a Friday," always a bad sign. Nor was he pleased about spending "the stupid New Year's Eve [at a Spanish restaurant] with Spaniards, Nivola, Calder." Despite the companions.h.i.+p of cheerful good friends who always made him laugh, he insisted that he was "sad and alone as always since I left Adina." He was despondent that the cross-country trip had been so rushed that it was unsatisfying and so depressed that he did not honor the Romanian custom of paying a New Year's Day visit to his relatives at Harry Steinberg's apartment. As always, work was his solace, and as there was nothing he could do to hurry events along, he got back to it and focused on pa.s.sing his citizens.h.i.+p exam, which he fully expected he would have to take.

He was still thinking of himself as alone, lonely, and pining for Ada when he received an invitation that literally changed his life. On the first Sunday in February, the Romanian painter Hedda Sterne "invited him to lunch and he stayed six weeks."

All she knew about him was that he too was a Romanian Jew in exile. She had no interest in him personally, as she was trying to put the earlier years of her life behind her and had little interest in anything or anyone Romanian. She was "familiar here and there" with Steinberg's work in magazines, and she simply wanted to see more of it. He, on the other hand, was smitten from the moment she opened the door to let him into her apartment. The first time he saw her, he knew he wanted to marry her.

She was born Hedwig Lindenberg and came to New York from Bucharest in 1941, after barely escaping a n.a.z.i roundup of the Jews in her apartment building. She was a breathtakingly beautiful woman, with honey-blond hair piled high on her head, prominent cheekbones, and disarming periwinkle-blue eyes. There was only one impediment to Saul's courts.h.i.+p of Hedda: half an hour into his first visit, she told him in her honest and forthright manner that she had been married since 1932 to a childhood friend, Frederick Stern, a wealthy Romanian businessman and financier. Hedda explained that hers was an "unorthodox union," and told Saul how they had lived apart since 1938, when she chose to remain in their Paris apartment while Fred went to live in London for business purposes. She explained how she knew from the beginning that it would always be "an open marriage, a marriage blanc, because Fred Stern had a Madonna/Wh.o.r.e att.i.tude toward women and could not distinguish between them." Hedda was his wife and he treated her "with adoration and reverence" while he openly consorted with other women for s.e.x. At the end of 1938, Fred recognized that war was inevitable and moved to New York to begin the process of bringing Hedda and his extended family to the United States.

Frederick Stern changed his name to Fred Stafford when he moved to New York. He was one of six brothers who were "all energetic [over]achievers." After graduating from the University of Bucharest, he had taken a law degree at the Sorbonne, then stayed in Paris long enough to ama.s.s a respected collection of cla.s.sical and impressionist paintings and objects of ancient and Oriental art. Hedda married him when he returned to Bucharest, during the years when he was "a reader, an intellectual." This changed shortly after the marriage, when he went to work for a financier and "learned how to deal with money, and became very, very successful." He rose quickly to become head of the Romanian textile industry at Buhusi and a major stockholder in the company. At the end of 1938, when he knew the time had come to relocate his family and his art collection to New York, Hedda chose to stay in Bucharest with her mother and brother. Fred a.s.sembled the necessary doc.u.ments anyway, and like Saul before her, Hedda had her own adventure stories to tell about how she had made her way to Lisbon, luckily missing her confirmed pa.s.sage on a boat that was torpedoed shortly after it left the harbor, and how she had to bide her time and wait for s.p.a.ce on another one before finally sailing. When she arrived in October 1941, Fred and his family were on the dock to greet her.

Fred had great respect for Hedda's talent and agreed to let her live separately in New York. Her ostensible reason was to concentrate on her painting, but she had already asked for a divorce when they first lived separately in Europe. Because of his "old world background," Fred insisted that "there could never be a divorce," and Hedda contented herself with this "limbo." She asked again when she arrived in New York, and again he said no. She did not protest that time either, because her marital status was irrelevant to her; the only thing that mattered was the thrill of having the freedom to paint all day long. In the years of their separation, she had taken the occasional lover, but she was one of those rare (for that time) women who could form genuine friends.h.i.+ps with men without the specter of s.e.x rearing between them, and she much preferred friends.h.i.+p to love. As one example among many, when she met the writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery through another refugee who had sailed on the same boat, he and Hedda established an "instant friends.h.i.+p" that she described as "entirely private, out of the ordinary world, soul-to-soul" and he as one of "spiritual a.s.sistance."

Hedda rented an apartment on the fifth floor of a walkup building at 410 East 50th Street and settled down to work. To enhance her feeling of independence, she changed her first name from Hedwig to Hedda and added an e to Stern to make it entirely her own name and not Fred's. Still, she could not make up her mind about how she wanted to be known, so the name on her doorbell when Saul Steinberg came to call read "Hedwig Stafford," a combination of her legal first name and the new name Fred Stern took to make himself seem more American. For the next several years she caused confusion for herself and Saul by using Hedwig Stafford interchangeably with Hedda Sterne and Hedda Stafford.

Despite their separate residences and separate lives, Fred was a loving and generous benefactor. To Hedda, he was always "an extraordinary, true, loyal friend," and throughout her long life, he made sure she never had to worry about financial security. She always described herself without irony or embarra.s.sment as a "kept woman" who never had to concern herself with money because Fred gave her every form of support she needed or wanted. Such economic well-being allowed her to live free of the pressures faced by other artists and to say of her career, "I was what I became before I knew it was something to be."

By the time she extended her invitation to Saul Steinberg, she had become an unorthodox independent woman with a huge network of friends and (some would say) several intriguing lovers. She took no part in the fractious political maneuvering that went along with selling or exhibiting her work and was content to paint for ten to twelve hours every day, keeping quietly aloof from what then const.i.tuted the places in the art world to see and be seen. When she invited Saul to visit, it was because of genuine interest in his work and not in his person.

Saul had never met a woman like Hedda, and the memory of their first meeting was so deeply etched in his mind that for years afterward the first Sunday in February was a sacred day in his personal calendar. A year after their first meeting, in one of the daily letters he wrote during his military service, he re-created the day in what Hedda called "those charming letters that boyfriends write to girlfriends."

He began at the beginning: "You explained me by phone how to arrive there by two buses so I said yes and took a taxi." He told how the taxi let him off at the wrong end of 50th Street and how he walked the length of it to the East River before finding her building. When he read the name Hedwig Stafford on the mailbox, he decided that she must have a roommate. He had such trouble opening the door that he "ringed twice the buzzer." Before he had gone to see her, he knew that she was a successful painter in Europe who was fast building a reputation in New York, but what he saw of her work was not what he expected: "I thought your paintings are around flowers and landscapes and groups of children. Maybe that's the kind of art I was expecting from a girl from my native town. Instead it was different and it was confusing."

Hedda greeted her guest casually and asked him to entertain himself while she went to her studio to finish a painting. It gave Saul "time to look around and see the happiest room in the world, light and warm and strange objects on the wall and strange paintings (I felt inferior always because I didn't understand some of your stuff and I still feel that way)." When he recollected the emotions that swirled in his mind, he described himself as "a good friend of yours before I saw you just in the few minutes I spent looking around with you drawing in the other room." When she finished and came in to be with him, he realized that he may have been looking at her work, but he had really not seen it and certainly had not a.s.similated it. However, instead of talking about her work or his, which was the reason Hedda invited him, Saul asked question after question about her life, as he wanted to know everything there was to know about her.

She told him she had been born in Bucharest in 1910, which made her four years older than he, but for the rest of his life he never allowed her to admit her true age; he made her tell people she was born in 1916 and was therefore two years younger. From their first meeting, he insisted they speak only in English, because he still thought the Romanian language should be spoken only by "beggars and policemen." Hedda recalled that "he had school English, the kind Eastern Europeans learn in school. He really didn't know the language to speak it, he couldn't properly order a dinner in a restaurant and if we walked down the street and people greeted him, he could not answer because he didn't understand what they said." Nevertheless, even when his command of the language failed him, he insisted that they must speak English, and Hedda complied, as she did with everything Saul wanted.

Saul tried to say it offhandedly when he told people that Hedda came from a family "socially on a higher level" than his, but he said it with pride rather than resentment. It pleased him that the "son of shopkeepers could be desired by such a sophisticated and cultured woman." Her father, Simon Lindenberg, had been a high school teacher of languages before he inherited the pharmaceutical fortune of a brother who died at an early age. When Simon first took over, money poured in from the commercial laboratories, where cosmetics and drugs were invented and researched, but unfortunately he did not have his brother's business ac.u.men, and before long there was "a great family show over his lack of success." Shortly after World War I began, Simon also died young, and his widow, Eugenie Wexler Lindenberg, took over the business. She ran it with Leonida Cioara, who had been Simon's partner and became her second husband, and under their direction it prospered and they became wealthy.

Hedda had a brother almost three years older, Edouard Lindenberg, who graduated from Bucharest University, took his doctorate in Berlin, and became a prominent conductor throughout Europe. Hedda and Edouard grew up in luxury in "a big house, a happy home, dogs in the back yard, and travels to Paris and Vienna." Because "with the Romanian language, you couldn't go anywhere in the world," both were taught French, German, and English and were fluent from childhood. Edouard was sent to private schools, but Hedda was homeschooled until she was eleven, after which she attended the Inst.i.tute Francaise-Romanienne, the best school for wealthy young Jewish girls whose families did not want them exposed to public education. She enrolled in the University of Bucharest to study philosophy and art history but soon realized the limitations of the curriculum and dropped out after two years, preferring to study and read on her own, which she did all her life. Many of her friends thought she was better informed in philosophy and art history than their professors, and her views were respectfully considered by the Bucharest intelligentsia.

The Lindenberg home was filled with music because Edouard played the violin and the widowed aunt who lived with them was a gifted singer. Hedda was a.s.signed to take piano lessons in the hope that the family would have its own trio, but as a "small but rather articulate child" she rebelled and demanded that her mother let her study what she really loved, drawing and painting. Several days later she was presented with an easel and paper and vividly remembered that "to this day, it was and is the happiest moment of my life." By the time she was in high school she was taking cla.s.ses in Marcel Janco's atelier and had become the protegee of a family friend, the distinguished surrealist painter Victor Brauner. She was a teenager when she formed her first close friends.h.i.+p with men, Victor Brauner and his younger brother, Theodore.

Victor Brauner was the first to recognize Hedda's talent, and when she was just fourteen, he honored her by making a linocut portrait, Hedei (To Hedda), which was used in the single issue of 75HP, the avant-garde magazine he cofounded. Later that year he used the linocut on the poster announcing a major exhibition of his work. Brauner's linocut was done in a style "advocating a synthesis between literature and the visual arts ... a hybrid of Constructivist, Cubist, and Futurist styles with rebellious Dada overtones." He pa.s.sed along all his knowledge of these subjects to Hedda Sterne, and their influence was present in the early work that so baffled and intimidated Saul Steinberg, who came from the "world of the comic press, a world all its own"-comic/satiric journalism that was grounded in the immediate social and political reality. His art education was based on commerce and utility and was totally unlike hers, which was based on a solid knowledge of the history of painting, literature, and philosophy.

During her teen years, Hedda spent the summers in Vienna with an aunt who lived there, taking art cla.s.ses at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where she concentrated on ceramics in the mornings and visited other museums to look at paintings every afternoon. She made trips to England, where the Chelsea Flower Show left her imbued with a desire for color in her work, and she accompanied her mother and brother to Greece, where she was mesmerized with the fluid lines of cla.s.sical sculpture and the forms of architecture. When she was seventeen, her parents sent her alone to Paris to enroll in Fernand Leger's cla.s.ses and attend Andre Lhote's as a visitor in his Montparna.s.se atelier.

It was highly unusual for a girl from Hedda's background to be allowed to live on her own, but her mother recognized her maturity and dedication to art and honored her independence. Hedda lived in a student hotel in Montparna.s.se, the section of Paris she liked best because "it was the place of strangers, and I was a stranger." She did not, however, become a part of the bohemian influx that filled the quarter between the two world wars: "I was like a real good little Jewish girl. I could have been as free as possible, but I behaved all the time exactly as if my mother and my father, my aunt, all my relatives were right around there watching me." It was as "a good little Jewish girl" that she married Fred Stern in 1932 and then returned without him to Bucharest in 1938, because she "could not think of anything else to do."

She was just in time to see Romania becoming "super-primitive and anti-Semitic, like Poland but without the pogroms." By the late 1930s, the entire country was "contaminated by Germany with a fascist contour to the whole of society." Like Saul, Hedda always felt that "being Jewish was being an outsider, and an outsider was the normal thing to be." The difference between her att.i.tude's and Saul's was that she considered herself "an outsider by circ.u.mstances [of birth]," whereas he thought of himself as "an outsider by att.i.tude [of an artist]." She believed that he was "a 100% original because of his approach to humor, which his audience did not know they needed it until he came along." She marveled at his ability to make ideas concrete with a symbol, whereas she saw herself as merely the repository of a long tradition of art and ideas that she could only hope to express as intelligently as possible.

Everything about the two of them was different, even though there were so many similarities in their backgrounds, interests, and the facts and events of their lives. She was as entranced by him as he was with her, and later that first afternoon, when he kissed her for the first time, she asked why he had done it. He told her it was because he liked her "as a girl, a woman, a lover, and a very decent person." A year later, when he wrote the "boy friend-girl friend" letter, he tried to explain it better: "I'm not like you. You are friendly and cooperative with people you barely know and you say open what you think. I'm different, new people are strangers for me and I have to spend a long time before I lose my self conscience [sic], the idea of hearing myself talking or seeing myself acting ... I don't know why I'm this way, maybe I didn't have always around the right people, and making silly conversation for the h.e.l.l of being normal when I feel myself losing vitamins in the effort I have to make." He knew that none of this was news to her, but he wanted to tell her anyway because "I like much to write you and I'm much in love with you."

Saul Steinberg pursued Hedda Sterne for the next eighteen months before he convinced her to accept his many and repeated marriage proposals. Throughout that time, theirs was a relations.h.i.+p dominated on his part by pa.s.sion and on hers by the desire to make physical pa.s.sion coexist with a deep and important friends.h.i.+p that would not result in marriage. She was afraid that he was confusing pa.s.sion and friends.h.i.+p with love because he and she were both "the products of refusals. We both refused what Romania had to offer. We didn't want it, but we had no other comparison." Despite the fact that they had both lived for more than a decade outside their native country, Hedda was convinced they were still "insular, provincial. How did we know to refuse what we had when we didn't really know what else was out there?" She believed they had to find out what else was "out there" before they could begin to be serious about marriage. Other men before Saul had been infatuated with her, and she expected that his interest would wane over time, as theirs had. Hedda was always the sensible one where pa.s.sion was involved, so she stalled. She told Saul they should enjoy whatever time they might have together because the moment he became an American citizen, he would surely be drafted. And, who knew what would happen after that?

CHAPTER 9.

GOING OFF TO THE OSS.

This applicant has about everything disqualifying that could exist. However an officer went from here [D.C.] to get him. He is physically disqualified and not a citizen. Is urgently wanted by VCNO for special duty in conjunction with activities of a schizophrenist, and being the pick of New York, is eminently qualified for duties for which wanted.

Very nice fellow. Quiet and shy in appearance. Looks older than age ... The man will never be a leader and is rated satisfactory only because his services are apparently urgently needed by the Navy Department.

William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan, the head of the OSS, confided to his close friend the New Yorker editor Harold Ross that the military had an urgent need for skilled artists and cartoonists who could perform a variety of services. The most basic need was for artists who could draw simple pictures that explained various aspects of military life for soldiers who could not read or understand simple texts. The services also needed pamphlets, booklets, and flyers that could be used to communicate with the native population in countries where no Americans could speak the language. The OSS itself wanted to make propaganda to distribute behind enemy lines and needed natives of other languages and cultures to create it. Steinberg fit Donovan's requisites on all fronts: he spoke Romanian and Italian fluently, French and Spanish decently, and English haltingly. He had lived in Italy and knew it well, and he could do his work with a few ordinary materials: all he needed to make simple and expressive drawings was a pencil or a bottle of India ink and a pen and whatever paper was at hand. Steinberg also filled a need for the canny Harold Ross: he could send drawings back from the front so that the folks at home would have a bird's-eye view of what their boys faced every day.

Several weeks before that momentous first Sunday in February 1943 when Saul Steinberg met Hedda Sterne, paperwork of all kinds was zooming through bureaucratic channels on his behalf. Efforts were under way either to make him a naturalized American citizen or to waive the requirement so that he could be sworn directly into the navy as a commissioned officer as swiftly as possible. Other requirements, such as graduation from Officer Candidate School and fluency in English, were also waived so that he could be rushed into an a.s.signment under the aegis of Naval Intelligence. He found all this activity slightly puzzling, because he had spent the last months of 1942 and the beginning of 1943 waiting to be drafted by the army as an "acceptable alien"; watching as his Selective Service cla.s.sification changed from 4F (unsuitable) to 1A when his local draft board decided that even though he was a resident alien whose command of English was poor, he was "otherwise qualified for service in the Armed Forces." He thought his destiny was to be a foot soldier in the infantry, and he had been waiting every day for his call-up, but once again influential friends were working on his behalf.

Everything in his prior life made him a prime candidate for the OSS Morale Operations (MO) Branch, the organization's propaganda arm in the European theater. However, in its unfathomable bureaucratic omniscience, someone in Was.h.i.+ngton decided that Saul Steinberg was better suited to the navy than the army and that his talents could best be put to use with a landlocked naval unit in western China. He was a.s.signed to the Sino-American Cooperative Organization, a group known by the acronym SACO, ostensibly a division of the OSS but one that worked mostly independently of it. As Steinberg knew nothing about SACO, he told Hedda Sterne that he was "going off to the OSS, to teach Chinese people, explaining things with drawing." He was as bewildered by the a.s.signment as she was.

Donovan wanted Steinberg so badly that he began the complicated vetting process that would lead to his commission by carefully looking for an evaluating officer with significant clout who would be willing to overlook Steinberg's only dubious qualification: his complete ignorance of anything connected with the navy, from leaders.h.i.+p to seamans.h.i.+p. Donovan made a highly unusual arrangement for the a.s.sistant chief of staff for readiness, on the staff of Admiral Ernest J. King, the CNO (chief of naval personnel), to send an officer to New York for the sole purpose of testing Steinberg. The officer gave Donovan the report he wanted, writing that "Mr. Saul Steinberg of New York city" was the "artist and cartoonist needed for a special project ... the most suitable available individual." The officer also agreed that Steinberg's "completion of naturalization be waived," as should the need for fluency in spoken and written English.

Despite the officer's positive report, Steinberg's appointment appeared to be jeopardized because he spent the next several weeks undergoing a series of mental and physical examinations by various navy doctors who found "everything disqualifying that could exist." Mentally, they diagnosed him as having, in navy parlance, "PSN-mild-ND," a mild psychoneurosis that had never before been diagnosed. Physically, the first doctors who examined him found "valvular [sic] heart disease, mitral systolic murmur," and "visual defects" (he wore gla.s.ses for nearsightedness). These were disqualifications and obviously would not do; when Donovan read the report, he told the doctors to schedule a second exam. Several weeks later a new group of physicians p.r.o.nounced Steinberg's heart normal and his eyesight within accepted parameters. There was no mention of any mental disorder, and the original diagnosis was dismissed as nervousness over the exam and frustration at his inability to express himself in English. After all this, there was another hurdle: the director of naval officer procurement in New York, well aware of "the special circ.u.mstances surrounding the case," ruled that Steinberg was not qualified to become a naval officer and therefore "prefer[red] to make no recommendation."

Much debate and discussion followed between the New York procurement office and the several offices in the Was.h.i.+ngton Navy Department who were vetting Steinberg's case, until everyone agreed to override the evidence and induct him. The rush was on to have all doc.u.mentation finalized by the week of February 18, 1943. Everything was crammed into the same day, February 19, and in one swearing-in ceremony after another, Saul Steinberg took the oath to become a U.S. citizen, was commissioned as an ensign in the Naval Reserve, was a.s.signed to the Morale Operations Branch of the OSS, and received orders to report for duty at the landlocked naval base in Chungking, China. Everyone was astounded but James Geraghty, the art director at The New Yorker, who expressed what they all thought: "G.o.d knows how your knowledge of the Italian people will benefit you in China, but perhaps the Navy knows best."

Not knowing how to transport its new recruit to China, the navy covered all possibilities by requesting a special pa.s.sport from the State Department, which included visas for Trinidad, Venezuela, Brazil, the continent of Africa, Egypt, the Sinai, Trans-Jordan, Arabia, Iraq, Iran, India, and his ultimate destination, China. He was in a frenzy to put his life and work in order, starting with updating the life insurance policy he had prudently bought several months earlier when he had registered for the draft. He was working in his steady and methodical manner to finish all his outstanding commitments to magazines when an entirely new set of orders arrived: the navy was not sending him to China immediately, but to Was.h.i.+ngton for "temporary active duty under instruction." He thought he was going to Officer Candidate School after all, to become a "ninety-day wonder," but first he was ordered to outfit himself with uniforms and wear them in public.

All his life, Steinberg was meticulous about the quality of his clothes and how they were tailored, and his uniforms were no exception. He had them fitted to his slim figure and was careful to keep the bra.s.s b.u.t.tons polished and the shoes spit-s.h.i.+ned. The first time he felt ready to be seen in public, he dressed nervously at Hedda's apartment and together they took a walk through midtown Manhattan. Whenever they pa.s.sed sailors on one of the avenues, Saul noted that they were raising their hands to their caps, but he was not sure what, if anything, he was supposed to do. Hedda stopped the next sailor they saw to ask him, and he explained how enlisted men were required to salute officers, who were supposed to return it. She asked him to go around the corner onto a quiet street with her and Saul, where he instructed the brand-new Ensign Steinberg, USNR, in the proper way to receive and return a salute. After a short practice session, Steinberg shook the puzzled sailor's hand. He and Hedda continued on their walk, but they were disappointed not to pa.s.s another person in uniform he could salute for the rest of the afternoon.

THERE WAS A LOT OF WORK to finish before he went to Was.h.i.+ngton, and he concentrated on getting it all done. He also concentrated on teaching Hedda as much as he could about his personal relations.h.i.+ps and business affairs so that she could intercede for him whenever it became necessary. He introduced her to Victor Civita, who had landed a prestigious and remunerative commission for Steinberg to design the jacket and create the ill.u.s.trations for Chucklebait: Funny Stories for Everyone, a children's book by the noted author Margaret C. Scoggin. Steinberg had commissions to fulfill for PM and The New Yorker, and he made a list for Hedda of the portfolio of cartoons he had ama.s.sed for them and other publications to draw on while he was away. Their editors liked the way he ridiculed bombast and gave a comic twist to the seriousness of war, as in his cartoon of an easily recognizable Hermann Goring, festooned in full n.a.z.i regalia and covered with glitz that included flas.h.i.+ng rhinestone swastikas on each epaulette. He was also preparing for the first American exhibition of his work, in April at the Wakefield Gallery on 55th Street in New York, where a young woman named Betty Parsons had taken an interest in his work.

Steinberg and Sterne before he was sent to China. (ill.u.s.tration credit 9.1) As with so many other introductions to people with whom Steinberg formed meaningful friends.h.i.+ps, the one with Betty Parsons came through Constantino Nivola. Steinberg was so close to the Nivolas that they were the first friends to whom he introduced Hedda Sterne, taking her to their apartment four days after he met her and urging her to value their friends.h.i.+p as much as he did. Hedda took to them at once and they became friends for life. Tino was the art director of Interiors, and through their welcoming hospitality at home, he and his artist wife, Ruth, were responsible for what would in later years be called networking: artists dropped in informally, as did gallery owners, museum curators, magazine editors, art historians, and book publishers. The New York art scene during World War II and the decade that followed was small enough that everyone knew everyone else, and the Nivolas could always be counted on to make something happen. Betty Parsons championed Steinberg and Nivola by giving them a dual show, and the reviews for "Drawings in Color by Steinberg, Paintings by Nivola" were favorable. Hedda was miffed that Betty took Saul's work "more seriously" than her own, but not for long, because she recognized why: "Each week he was in The New Yorker brought him more fame. His rise was extraordinary."

Steinberg and Betty Parsons with two unidentified guests at the opening of his first gallery exhibition. (ill.u.s.tration credit 9.2) Saul introduced Hedda to Betty, and when Betty opened her own gallery, they both became her devoted clients. Through her they formed individual friends.h.i.+ps with the glittering litany of painters whose work defined postwar American art, particularly Robert Motherwell, James Brooks, Jimmy Ernst, Ad Reinhardt, William Baziotes, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Adolph Gottlieb, Theodore Stamos, Wilfred Zogbaum, and John Graham. John Graham introduced them to Elaine and Willem de Kooning, but Hedda and Saul soon had to limit their socializing: "Bill and Elaine lived at night and we lived in the daytime, so we had to stop seeing them. We didn't have the stamina." As for the other artists, they saw them on their own terms but "never at the Cedar Tavern. They were all changing partners down there and we never went in for that."

Hedda already had her own friends.h.i.+ps among artists and took care to share them with Saul before he went overseas. She had known Peggy Guggenheim since the late 1930s, when Hans Arp saw her work in Paris and urged Victor Brauner to send it to Galerie Guggenheim Jeune in London. The war forced Peggy Guggenheim to relocate to New York, where she renamed the gallery Art of This Century. When Hedda arrived, she reintroduced herself, and Peggy became her "first friend" and included her in several important group shows. Like all the other "recent Americans, refugees all," Hedda found herself swept into the whirl of parties that Peggy held every night in her large house on Beekman Place. There she formed friends.h.i.+ps with other emigre artists, among them Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp, and Andre Breton. By the time she took Steinberg to meet them, "all these male artists were calling me 'one of us.' " She made the mistake of taking him to the kind of party he detested, one of Peggy's bashes, where at least "four hundred to five hundred people, all the European intelligentsia, wandered through the house during the night." Saul went with her to several more before he refused to go again. He disliked the large drunken crowds and particularly the French refugees, who he thought had no interest in anything American and were only in the United States until the war was safely over and they could go back to France. He, who had no real sense of himself as belonging to any patria, found that "back home for me is not very clear [because] I have many backhomes." He was keen to understand his adopted country, particularly now that he was about to fight and perhaps die for it.

AS SAUL'S RUSH TO TIE UP loose ends before leaving New York intensified, Hedda played an increasingly important role in his life. Remembering Saul at that time, she reflected that he always required someone to look after him, and "there was always someone, always lots of people who took care of Saul, helped him out, made things easy for him." She listed all those in Italy who had helped him escape, all the Romanian refugees in Santo Domingo whom he had known from childhood and who made him part of their families, all the relatives who pooled their money and influence to get him to New York, and all the professional contacts who kept him out of the army infantry and saw to it that he was a commissioned naval officer in the fortunate position of being able to continue to practice his civilian profession while serving in the military. She was impatient whenever she listed this huge collection of people who loved and cared for Saul only to have him reject it and insist that he had no one to catch him when he fell through the cracks, as he was sure he would do at any given moment. He became angry when Hedda pa.s.sed this off as his "Jewish fatalism, Romanian superst.i.tion," and he refused to accept her rational dismissal of feelings that were deeply imbued in him.

He needed someone to provide a buffer and support, and he decided that Hedda was the one to do it. He reflected upon his relations.h.i.+p with Ada, who had done all sorts of favors and services for him despite her mysterious comings and goings, especially in helping him to leave Italy, but he insisted that she had never been "truly there" in the sense of devoting her life to fulfilling his needs and wants. Saul believed that Hedda could do this, and that her most important quality was to make him feel solidly grounded for the first time in his life. It was something she found both puzzling and amusing for the rest of hers.

"I was always overly protected," Hedda remembered. "Someone always took care of me. I never did a tax return, paid a bill. I suppose I was able to take care of Saul because Fred [Fritz Stern] Stafford took care of me." The security that her marriage to Fritz provided allowed her to keep "Saul's neurotic needs" in perspective, but more important, permitted her to keep an emotional distance from him and from them: "When he was in the navy and before we were married, there were no promises between us. I was still married. We were not engaged. And I had a big affair while he was away."

Despite Hedda's extremely independent lifestyle, which she never tried to modulate or hide, Saul convinced himself that she was as besotted with him as he was with her and that she would give up her independence in a minute to take care of him. Without asking, he put her in charge of everything he wanted or needed, from shopping trips to buy more India ink and drawing tablets to preparing herself to take over all his dealings with Victor Civita and various magazine publishers. There was also a new possibility in the works when the publisher Duell, Sloan and Pearce wanted to collect all Steinberg's drawings and cartoons for a book because of the success it had just had in publis.h.i.+ng a work by another New Yorker cartoonist, William Steig's The Lonely Ones. Steinberg had never heard of the publisher, but in early March he told Civita to proceed with negotiations but to confer with Hedda in every instance. He prepared to leave for Was.h.i.+ngton, thinking that the contract would be settled before he finished Officer Candidate School and pleased that everything was in Hedda's capable hands. This led to their first major quarrel, during which they sat in silence over c.o.c.ktails at the Beekman Tower Terrace on a dreary Sunday afternoon. She objected to the way he was using her, and he agreed that she was right to blame him, but as usual he had an excuse: it was the beginning of springtime and he was always unhappy at that time of year, and besides, he "was leaving and didn't know how to take it, things were happening too fast."

IN WAs.h.i.+NGTON, HE DID NOT GO through OCS as he had expected, because the length of time it would take for "such training would hamper and restrict the war effort." He remained as uninformed about and unfamiliar with naval practices and procedures as he was in New York when he had to ask the sailor to teach him to salute. He was a.s.signed instead to a "specialized billet" at the Interior Control Board, where he was supposed to use his "specialized skill or knowledge" to "prepare equipment needed for artwork on psychological warfare." He was billeted in a hotel apartment, where the other residents were as closemouthed as he was about what they were doing, so he made no friends and was often lonely. Every day he reported for duty at Morale Operations, much as if he were going to work in a nine-to-five civilian business office. His training consisted of learning about different kinds of propaganda and different kinds and qualities of paper and ink, and listening to general lectures on the psychology of the native populations and occupying armies in the different theaters of war. Mostly he learned about the kinds of printing facilities he could expect to find, supply links for products he needed, and how his group was to communicate and cooperate with other MO facilities.

Much of the time he spent sitting in the corridor outside the office of Kay Halle, who worked in Morale Operations and thought Donovan must have forgotten all about Steinberg moments after he recruited him. "What are you doing?" she asked him one day. "Nothing," he replied, so she put him to work creating cartoons that were subsequently distributed in Germany and Italy. When he drew a uniformed n.a.z.i, it was with the head of an animal with a pointed snout and lizardlike tongue, and his j.a.panese soldier's head was a crocodile with vicious teeth who wore a baseball cap and little round eyegla.s.ses. It was one of his earliest drawings of what became a totemic animal.

On weekends he took the train to New York, pa.s.sing the time by reading magazines and making his own drawings on top of articles and pictures in Life, Time, or the Sat.u.r.day Evening Post, his favorite because of its many ill.u.s.trations. Sometimes Hedda went to Was.h.i.+ngton to spend a week. During the day, while he went to the office, she went to museums or spent rainy afternoons tucked up in bed drawing or reading. When he came home, there was always "scotch & wine & apple pie," foods he remembered while he was overseas and which for the rest of his life always made him think of her.

The spring pa.s.sed pleasantly enough, and the work he was doing made the war seem far away and distant. One of his most enjoyable a.s.signments was ill.u.s.trating a pamphlet the OSS distributed to all new recruits. The pamphlet covered everything from how candidates were chosen to what they should take with them to foreign lands, how they should expect to live while there, and, most of all, how they should keep their mouths shut about the work they did and where they did it. Steinberg created an homage to Hedda with his ill.u.s.trations. For the first one, "You Are Chosen," he drew easily recognizable cartoons of the two of them preparing to throw objects at maps of Germany and j.a.pan, he a book t.i.tled Background and Research and she a larger-than-life fountain pen with a wickedly sharp point. Under "Packing and s.h.i.+pping," he has them up to their necks in boxes festooned with s.h.i.+pping labels, and under "Learning to Live with Next to Nothing," he drew their heads emerging from thimbles.

Saul thought of Hedda always, and it gave him pleasure to insert something of her into his work. Having her in his life, the routine of his weekday work, and the weekend train trips back to his old life in New York all lulled him into a false sense of complacency. If this was war, it was not so bad. Thus on April 18, he was completely unprepared for the change-of-duty orders that fatally disrupted his easy life. He was given eight days to prepare to fly to San Francisco, where he would board a s.h.i.+p that would not be identified until the proper time came for him to depart for the long, roundabout journey to China.

The pamphlet he ill.u.s.trated with drawings of him and Hedda took on fresh new meaning, not just to remind him of her but also to help him get through the bureaucratic rigmarole that was about to begin. The pamphlet advised: Let this be your stock answer to any leading questions: I haven't any idea where I will be stationed.

I am going to be doing some background and research work for the war effort. I understand, but I don't know anything about the details.

I haven't the faintest idea where I am going.

CHAPTER 10.

MY HAND IS ITCHING FOR DRAWINGS.

Lt. Steinberg states that MO personnel were completely misunderstood and misemployed by commanding officers who could see no direct use for their work. Therefore they were a.s.signed all sorts of tasks for which they were not particularly suited, and in fact some of the Colonels seemed to think that Lt. Steinberg's function was merely to draw dirty pictures which they could put up in the villas.

Steinberg flew to San Francisco on May 1, 1943, and reported directly to the Twelfth Naval District headquarters, where he was told that the Dutch ocean liner Nieuw Amsterdam, commandeered as a troop s.h.i.+p, was leaving the next day and he would be one of the seven thousand men on it. He thought himself fortunate to share a cabin with only five roommates, especially during the first few days, when he was felled by "a very unromantic sickness." The Nieuw Amsterdam was big and slow and lumbered across the equator twice without encountering the enemy. Some of the officers pa.s.sed the time by creating a s.h.i.+pboard newspaper, for which Steinberg drew the "funnies on Sundays." They stopped in Wellington, New Zealand, long enough to parade "with music and people cheering and old ladies crying" and then did the same in Perth and Freemantle, Western Australia. By the time Steinberg left the s.h.i.+p on June 4 at Colombo, Ceylon, he had lost all his money playing cards and gambling. He partied there for several days and thought it was a paradise compared to his next stop, Calcutta, India, which he reached on June 11 after five days on a small and dirty train; he was distressed by the poverty and filth he saw at first hand. By the eighteenth he was moving from one base to another toward his eventual destination, Chungking, but he was still in India on the twenty-ninth. He compared being stuck there to being in a doctor's waiting room, pa.s.sing the time reading old, bedraggled magazines and hoping his turn would soon come.

Ostensibly he was to show other MO divisions how to set up and operate printing equipment, but in reality he did next to nothing because equipment was either hard to come by or lacking, and no one seemed to have any clear idea of what MO officers were expected to do even if the presses were up and running. The weather was hotter and more humid than in Santo Domingo, and left him too enervated to pa.s.s the time by making his own drawings. He thought Calcutta was "not a good place to live in, really too hot and too many people around." He did have a private room in the officers' quarters, but a continuous procession of cleaners, barbers, and salesmen invaded it, clamoring for attention, and there was no respite when he left because more vendors besieged him. In haste to elude them, he often stumbled and fell over sleeping bodies on the street. He did get to see several temples and was intrigued by the many monkeys and the overwhelming number of sacred cows, all of which he drew.

A monthlong circuitous train journey finally ended at the air base in Chabua, north a.s.sam, when he boarded a cargo plane on July 16 for the three-hour flight over the Hump to Kunming, China, not minding the extreme cold because of the clear sight of the Himalayas. He went directly to his base camp on the northeastern outskirts of Chungking, dubbed "Happy Valley" by those stationed there. It took him four days to adjust to the heat, which sometimes reached 106 degrees and left him "perspiring like a waterfall" and gobbling salt pills and vitamins as if they were candy.

Happy Valley was a small village surrounded by even smaller ones clinging to the hillsides that cradled it. All about the place there was "heat, dirt, discomfort, and discouragement," but he liked China better than the "chic and comfort" of Calcutta.

He was billeted in quarters that were more like Chinese houses than navy barracks. The furniture was primitive, but food was plentiful, even though there were only chopsticks with which to eat it. Water had to be boiled and drunk when still hot and tasted "like the rice paddy from which it comes." Not surprisingly, all the sailors were felled from time to time by "the extraordinary Chinese diarrhea, a national malady that is cured with a medicine called 'the cement.' " Malaria was rampant, and the mosquitoes were "like dive bombers asking for blood." He was glad that he brought the extra netting Hedda had insisted on, even though the navy routinely equipped every bed with it. He was also grateful for her many gifts, for he would have been lost without the big black portfolio for drawings and the mirrored shaving kit that enabled him to be the only officer with a decent shave.

Steinberg in China at his first wartime duty station. (ill.u.s.tration credit 10.1) He was among "some very nice fellows" who were billeted two or three to a room, and he drew his for Hedda, showing the mosquito netting enclosing the bed he had learned to make with navy-style square corners. He drew his desk, which held his framed photo of her and some of the decorative ivories and other small objects he had begun to buy on trips into town. One afternoon his roommate returned after an hour away and was surprised to find that Steinberg had covered one full wall with a mural of Manhattan featuring "a table, two chairs, a bottle of whiskey and two gla.s.ses, [positioned] near a window which looked down upon Times Square." He also drew his commanding officer as he walked back to his quarters from the shower hut in his underwear, returning the salute of a Chinese soldier in full uniform. He made many more drawings of his fellow officers, but the one they liked best and remembered more than forty years later showed them relaxing in deck chairs all in a row, with their feet on the porch railing in front of them. They all stared off into the distance at the hillside villages with undulating rice paddies above and below them, while the little English bulldog one of them brought from Australia snored contentedly on the floor behind them. There was even a library of sorts, where Steinberg found and reread one of his favorites, Voltaire's Candide. He told He