From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [114]
yourself, one soldier who really had a family, there they are, the whole fifteen of them; the fat, round faced, obviously too lenient, plainly too undignified, grinning Mr Maggio, trying hard not to grin but to look dignified, and not succeeding; and the even fatter, stern long faced, very hard bargain driving, policy dictating, family dominating, not grinning Mrs Maggio, trying hard to grin and to not look dignified, and not succeeding; both trying very hard to deceive the camera, as everybody tried to deceive the camera, into showing only what they wanted it to show; together with all thirteen of their slicked up grinning offspring, all grinning at the camera with that temporarily donned, fake, denying-anything-but-happiness, happiness that all camera subjects but the most caught-unawares camera subjects (and us artists, he thought grimly remembering how he had to put into a Taps his secrets he could not talk about, us artists who are under a compulsion to be ashamed in public) always grinned at the camera with; each dressed in his own full length snapshot little Angelo could always carry with him; (and the sounds and smells of a grocery store in Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn with quarters upstairs came back to me who had never been there or seen it and probably never would, but that I knew now just as well as if I had always known them). And then the last two-thirds of it devoted to Hawaii, the Army, and the tourists photographs of Hawaii and the Army, two entirely different things, tourist photographs of Honolulu, the Mormon Temple, Waikiki Beach, the big Hotels (Halekulani, Royal Hawaiian, Moana; that none of us had ever seen the insides of), Diamond Head, a tourist picture of Schofield that looked lovely enough to make you want to enlist for this happy land, pictures of quaint Wahiawa without the smells, all the places the tourists saw from the outside and thought were lovely and whose attitude these photographs reflected, but that we always saw from the inside (excepting of course: Halekulani, Royal Hawaiian, Moana; Lau Yee Chai’s, Ala Wai Inn) with an entirely different perspective, a perspective not recorded in any photographs since our photographs of the inside were always jokes; clean jokes: a guy with his helmet on grinning in the Company Street, or a guy in full field grinning at the bayonet on the rifle he was holding in the Long Guard Position, or even two or three guys holding beer bottles and their arms around each other’s necks and elaborately crossed legs and grinning in front of a palm tree or the Chapel or the Bowling Bowl; or dirty jokes: like the series of the French-Hawaiian beauty from Big Sue’s in Wahiawa, first in her dress, then in her undies, then in her pants, then in nothing, then in an embarrassing position, a strip tease five in all, one buck for the series or two bits apiece; or perhaps the biggest, grandest joke of all: the Company photograph, with the fond smiling Captain and all his grinning men; but always, always jokes, because all of us always grinned reflexively, instinctively, a joke, if a camera (or even a reporter) popped up anywhere within shouting distance, Prewitt thought, which is why nobody ever knows our inside perspective unless they’ve been there but always see us as Our Simple Boys, and that even if they have they tend to forget because there is nothing anywhere to remind them; and which is why I’m goddamned if I’ll collect recorded jokes about things I do not feel like laughing at. But if I had a bugle and could make recordings I’d remind them, he thought. And, but God, how I’d like to be the one.
“You and your goddam tourist photographs,” he said to Angelo, bitterly, for perhaps the hundredth time.
“Aw dont start that,” Angelo said. “You know thems ony for showing to my folks when I get back home. You know they’ll want to see what Wahoo’s like.”
“But Wahoo aint like that.”
“Sure it aint. But they wont know it. This is what they want to see, not what its like. Here, look at this one,” he said, pointing out a new one, a beautiful Chinese girl in a flowered dress and a beret looking lovingly back over her shoulder, obviously at her lover, and with that blankness, absolutely nothingness, of a beautiful Chinese girl simulating lovingness; a picture every soldier on the post had at least two prints of because they were two-for-a-nickel-in every PX on the Island.
“It kills me,” Prew said. “It kn