The End of Something Hilary Masters (bio) An obituary in the morning paper gives the short biography of a scientist whose genius enabled explorations of the ocean floor several miles down. While this man attended high school in New Jersey, Mussolini and Hitler came to power, Amelia Earhart disappeared, and our dog, Sucre, was stolen from our front yard in Kansas City. The scientist was studying aeronautical engineering at UCLA when F. D. R. died and when Hemingway moved to Cuba to begin writing The Old Man and the Sea. I had left Kansas City by then to finish high school in New Hampshire, where I learned to ski and lost my virginity. So history and memory are joined to become one, and, as I sip a second cup of coffee, my own chronicle becomes tied up with his. One incident recalled pulls out another that in turn snags another, so a skein of happenings, tucked inside a lobe of my brain, have been exposed as in a messy pantry. A line of narrative can sometimes untangle them, order them, and—like the best jokes—these memories are related in the present tense. I am fifteen and at school in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, and it is 1943. I have volunteered to be a plane spotter as part of the nation’s civil defense against the possibility of air raids by the German Luftwaffe. Village carpenters have erected a sturdy blockhouse in an open field near the school where volunteers monitor the sparse air traffic, reporting the occasional civilian or military aircraft via a telephone directly connected to headquarters in Ports-mouth. This outpost is a snug two-story construction with a wood-burning stove that keeps the interior ferociously hot in winter, and large panes of glass are fitted around all four sides of the second floor to give unobstructed views of the fields outside, with Lake Winnipesaukee nearby and the foothills of the White Mountains in the distance. The phone is installed at one end of the built-in settee that has been made comfy by a thick tufted cushion that could have been designed, and probably was, for the cockpit of one of the large yachts that sometimes decorate the lake. It is here I do my homework as I wait to report the infrequent plane to civil-defense headquarters. It is here I wait for Nancy. From the vantage of my elevated shelter, I can see her approach at a great distance. As a slim figure against the background of winter, she is walking resolutely toward my sentry post, hunched against the cold with her school-books clamped under one arm. She is coming from her last class, on her way home, and bringing assignments in trigonometry for us to ponder. She’s better at it than I. How these particular study sessions began I cannot [End Page 147] remember; and, if I attempted to detail the course of their unfolding, the narrative would become chaotic. Nietzsche has cautioned that a life without forgetting is impossible, and it is a problem experienced by historians and storytellers alike—what to leave out and what to put in. So I will simply greet Nancy at the door on the ground floor where we will embrace well below the glassed enclosure of the floor above—out of sight. She is stamping her feet as I warm her plump cheeks with my kisses. She can only stay for a little, for she must get home to fix supper for her younger brothers. Their mother is a nurse at the small clinic in town. Nancy climbs the ladder to the second floor, puts down her books and kicks off her heavy boots. I sometimes rub her feet through the thick socks she wears as she tells me of some prank at school, something a teacher said, something that I have missed as I performed my duty spotting planes. We try a few trig problems but often duck down below the line of vision to kiss. She has pulled the heavy sweater she wears over her head, tousling her long black hair, just as a small plane alerts my attention. I call Portsmouth...