The Deep Purple Falls: Chapter One

December 18, 1942

9:45 p.m.

In that city of the plains:

It was a full house at Brunelli’s. A capacity crowd of the city’s upper crust, decked in tuxedos and furs, diamonds and pearls, high polish and gleaming frills. A Cole Porter tune come to robust life. And having come to life it feasted — ravenously. Sirloins, porterhouses, lamb chops, pork chops, braised chicken breasts and battered veals: a vast anatomy of meats, cooked, fried, seared, and steeped in nine types of gravy. And then the cheeses: fifteen varieties. And the wines: past numbering. And the dainties and the mousses and the pies, and more (far more) running on through several pages of a red leather menu that read like a glutton’s hymnal. The mingling aromas of each richly seasoned entree wafted through the rooms — a small weather system, tinged with bluish plumes of tobacco smoke. Meanwhile, the diners bent to their work. The best people knifing and forking their way through the best food in the city. Between mouthfuls they chatted — they gossiped, they plotted, they laughed. But beneath it all, like a throbbing minor chord amidst the chatter and chuckles and flatulence, came the idiot click-clack of silverware and china plate. That steady rhythmic sound… as of some remorseless machine. The grinding gearworks of appetite.

And there was music. How could there not be? Louie Lornsky and the Blue Devil Orchestra performing all the popular numbers: Five O’Clock Jump, Woodchoppers Ball, Begin the Beguine, Moonlight Serenade… and on, and on. A set list as long and varied as a Brunelli’s menu. Shout your requests, they were happy to oblige. The Devils (tuxedoed in their electric blue) could play anything, infusing every note with an odd champagne glamor. The dance floor acquired a magnetic draw, and those who did not succumb to it found themselves (at the very least) tapping their toes.

Ten thousand miles away in either direction, men were dying in large numbers. Our boys, as they were known.

Our boys, our precious boys: our sons, our fathers, our brothers — falling, falling, falling… like the snowflakes of December… falling, falling, falling… in ever rising drifts. That mournful wall of carcasses fortressing the homefront; those legions of the slaughtered keeping tyranny at bay. May they always be remembered. May their sacrifice endure. They, our sacred butchered boys. They, the honored dead. They, the bayoneted and the machine-gunned, the eviscerated and the blown apart, the gassed and the incinerated. Yes they, them, those very ones… raise a glass to the poor dead bastards. Here, here! Now let’s have another round of martinis. And hey waiter, chop-chop on the clam dip.

After all, this was what our boys were defending: the life of a free people. And a free people drank and smoked and sang and swatted cocktail waitresses on the ass. Why shouldn’t they? The good life, the high life, Kentucky bourbon and filet mignons wrapped in bacon — if our boys weren’t dying for these, then their sacrifice was in vain. Uncle Sam may as well dig a grave and climb in… and so forth, and so on. The rationale had endless variations, occasionally blurted out, but generally left to float unspoken through the cigar-marbled air. Eat, drink, and be merry. Then eat and drink some more. You owe it to the dead.

Outside, ragged shapes shuffled in the streets. Stragglers from a bygone purgatory. The Thirties: why, it sounded like a chapter title now. That part of the story where a whole people were left in the cold. Locked out there to huddle and trudge on tired feet. The Depression: how aptly named. The very earth exhaled despair back then, like poison vapor. Though not a fatal vapor — that might have been a mercy. Rather, a miasma of bad dreams. Dreams…

of Hooverville’s awkward tin-walled shanties…

of dead factories in dying towns…

of barefoot children on desolate streets…

of frayed curtains in windblown shacks…

of roadside mothers nursing withered infants…

of endless herds of hope-starved men

riding rails, hitching rides

looking, looking, looking

and not finding…

of tired eyes squinting at dust-eaten fields

while somewhere a father is muttering:

jesus christ, jesus christ…

Then the War came (thank God) and swept the bad dreams away. Jobs returned, factories belched their smoke anew. The nation rose from its sick bed, hitched up its drawers, and went out to whip the world into shape.

War = Work = Prosperity

There was the equation, and few seemed troubled by it. There was even a certain pleasure in its frank avowal. But the deeper truths went unstated. How would one state them… and why? Like old sins, they were best left unconfessed and (if possible) forgotten. Yet, like old sins, they never quite departed. They lay too close to the bone, too entangled with the nerve endings. Indeed, they were the truths primeval:

that life needs death

that blood must spill for the tribe to endure

that Murder (immense and ongoing) is the mother of…

Ah, but let them remain unsaid. Hidden — like a man’s liver, like his kidneys. These things belong to the dark.

Not Brunelli’s, though. Not on this night. Only light within those velveted walls — chandeliered and candle-cast, in a floor-to-ceiling flood as if old Brunelli had uncorked some vast solar cask for the occasion.

The occasion: hard to say just what it was. There’d been an Allied victory in North Africa: Ala… Alaba… Ali-baba… or some such name. A patch of foreign sand liberated from Rommel and his panzers. Good news worthy of a bourbon shot, but not much more. No, it was something else tonight. Something felt but not quite shaped to thought. A vague sense of an un-calendared feast, as for a forgotten saint… or a lost soul.

Outside the chill dark kept its vigil, full awake to what Brunelli’s revelers could not name. And in the street old ghosts spoke their warning, whispered voices joined to the wind:

he returns… he returns… he returns…