Matters of Chance

by Jeannette Haien

  You’ve got to AC-cen-tuate the positive,

  E-lim-inate the negative,

  LATCH onto the affirmative…etc.

  But the records whose waxed surfaces showed the most wear were the nostalgic, slow, romantic ones with lyrics and melodies that licensed you to hold the girl you were dancing with a bit closer: “Deep Purple,” “Stars Fell on Alabama,” “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” “The Man I Love,” “As Time Goes By,” “Dancing in the Dark,” “Stardust”…

  Wafted on the late-night sea breeze, the wistful lubricities of such songs would reach Morgan’s ears as he lay awake in the tent shared with a mix of British officers. There were three men whose cots regularly remained empty until the bar closed, which was roughly about the time the dancing stopped. (Not infrequently, these three spent the night elsewhere.) The others, like himself, were mostly married men who tended to turn in early. One such—a tall, reticent infantry officer (decorated) in his early forties—was a fabulous snorer: you could wake at any hour of the night and he would be at it—a hundred-and-fifty-pound cicada thrumming away. The tent smelled of canvas and hemp and the roughly sawn wood plankings that formed its floor. If he balled up his pillow and turned his head just so, Morgan could see through the screen door, a few stars. He would set his eyes on the distant constellations and think of Maud, and with a wired, aching anxiousness, wonder about her. He knew well enough the changes the war had wrought in himself, but of the ways it might have changed her, he had no idea. He supposed it was possible that, bearing the responsibilities of parenting alone, she had settled into a maternal state of daily habits and patterns of mind that his presence, when he returned, would inevitably skew. She was a person of passionate dedication; of passionately held convictions. How would he fit into them? How, and to what degree, might the realities of reunion betray their memories of one another?…Heretofore, he had dwelt only on their love—a love (for him) which time and distance had heightened and idealized to a point perhaps impossible of fulfillment. He must guard against that danger.

  Difficult almost beyond bearing was the lengthy time ashore with its empty leisure and sexually torturing nearness of women. Yesterday, for instance, he had gone for a long walk on the strand at the head of Durban’s harbor: he had seen a leggy, blond girl strolling with a soldier. Over a white blouse she wore a flowered scarf draped across narrow shoulders. When she passed him, her stride in step with the soldier’s, he had looked for an instant directly into her eyes. Brown. The soldier had whispered something to her, his face hidden in her hair. Her throaty laugh had stirred him to the point of pain.

  At the one “dance” he had briefly attended, an RAF pilot had identified to him a girl who was “available. Worth the price. Terrific.” Why not, he asked himself as he walked on—why not seek her out? He recalled the flyer’s cold-eyed, recommending words, the toughness of his voice authenticating the remote nature of such a purchased coupling; that one need not ever know her name; that it would be a fleeting, emotionless act of sexual solace. Nothing more. So why not?…Before him, at his approach, a flock of small, long-billed shore-birds rose up from the sand and flew off…. Walking once with his mother in his father’s orchards (he must have been about six years old) on a gray, windy autumn day, they had similarly startled into flight a scavenging clutch of blackbirds. His hand was in his mother’s. He could still remember the warmth and lightness of her touch. As the birds flew up into the sky, she had counted them:

  One for sorrow

  Two for joy

  Three for a wedding

  Four for a boy

  Five for silver

  Six for gold

  Seven for the story never to be told.

  The verse had captured his imagination (probably, as he thought of it now, for the hint of mystery implicit in its last line), and at his urging, then and there, she had taught it to him.

  On the beach in Durban, he mulled over the verse’s final line and reached the conclusion that there are two kinds of stories “never to be told”: one, the secret that gives birth to a lie, and the second other, a suprapersonal experience whose bold and lingering effects on the soul forever mute the telling of it. On the aboutness of the second, his grasp was firm—a result of a recently realized intuition that, while a bare-boned factual account of the Stubbins’s torpedoing would be easy to relate, the profounder elements of the experience—the Owl’s death and the Hadesian trials in the lifeboat and the strange reality of his survival—comprised a story—his—never to be told: that, even were he to live to be Methuselah’s age, he would never be able to reduce it to an impersonal measure sufficient to make it the listener’s story as equally much as it was his own…. This knowledge brought to mind the vow he had made in the lifeboat: that if survival were granted him, he would never make of his continuance an earthly boast….

  So no: he would not seek out the airman’s “terrific” assuageress.

  On Wednesday of the second week, the captain left Durban (on an armed British trawler for Cape Town where he would next board an American freighter that would eventually land him in Buenos Aires, from whence he would be flown on a military plane to Miami, Florida). “That’s the drill as I understand it,” were the captain’s summing words.

  “I envy you being on your way,” Morgan said.

  They were having a last drink together on the eve of the captain’s departure. “There’s other news, Shurtliff. Not good.” The captain’s eyes raced away from Morgan’s gaze, then back. “I heard yesterday that Anderson’s leg had to be amputated.”

  “God…I wonder if he’d rather have died.”

  “That’s what I keep asking myself. He’s been a merchant mariner since he finished high school. It’s the only life he knows and it’s over for him.”

  Morgan said: “He spoke of his wife. Remember? So he does have that life, love and a home—” He was searching, trying to dredge up something remotely promising.

  But the captain would not have it: “That can’t fill his time,” he cut in with a passion almost of outrage: “I mean, what the hell will he do, Shurtliff? Can you answer me that? What will he do?”

  There was a silence. Then the captain, in that unexpected way he had of shifting moods, asked in his usual voice: “Do you believe in this war, Shurtliff?”

  Morgan was fairly certain he understood what prompted the question, but it surprised him nevertheless. He was quick in his response: “Yes. Yes I do. I think that men with too much power—evil men like Hitler—must be stopped. Have to be: that not to stop them licenses them for greater evil. That was my reason for signing up. I still stand by it.” He paused: “I don’t mean to sound like a bloody Christer,” and, as the captain remained silent, with his eyes still full on him: “All wars become more complex as they go on. God knows this one has. But at its core, I believe it’s a right-minded one.” Then, because he wanted to know for sure: “Why do you ask?”

  The captain opened out his hands: “Because I need confirmation of my own feelings about it as against the cruelty of it.” He looked suddenly frayed: “I’m tired, Shurtliff. I don’t mind telling you that I am. I was awake all night trying to figure out what I can say to Anderson when I see him in Cape Town…. What can I say to him?” he appealed.

  “I don’t know, sir…. Anderson’s a hero of sorts, but if I were Anderson, left without a leg, I don’t know if the idea of a heroic sacrifice would be very comforting. I suppose it’s possible that by the time you see him, he will have figured out a lot for himself and on his own terms.” Then: “Will you remember me to him?”

  “I will.” The captain looked at his watch: “I’m due to report in in a few minutes. There is one other thing, though: if you’d like me to, I’ll telephone your wife when I get to Miami.”

  Morgan’s heart leapt: “Would you? That would be wonderful.”

  “I won’t be able to tell her much, you understand. Nothing, really, except that you’re all right and ought to be headed home fairly soon. Here—” he
took a small notebook out of his suit-pocket. “Write down her telephone number.”

  “In case you can’t reach her, I’ll give you my father’s number too. He’ll pass on your message to her.” Morgan handed the book back to the captain: “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your doing this.”

  The captain stood up, as, immediately, Morgan did. At that final moment and as they looked at one another, all the junctions of their relationship came together. For Morgan, there had been the long-ago partings from Maud and his father: this one, of a third kind, was no less wrenching.

  Quietly, in a manner intimate, yet remarkably open, the captain said: “We have a lot between us worth remembering.” He stood very straight; he held out his hand. “Let’s try to stay in touch.”

  Morgan nodded. “Thank you for everything.”

  “Good-bye, Shurtliff.”

  “Good-bye, sir.”

  Time limped on.

  Toward the end of the third week—result of findings ground out by the interlocking gears of the Allied military machine—he received his orders: on Thursday, April 22, he would depart Durban, berthed on a Dutch freighter bound for Buenos Aires: thence, from Buenos Aires, on an American military plane to Miami, Florida. (It interested him that his passage would virtually be in the captain’s wake.)

  He was jubilant.

  That night he got drunk. It hadn’t been his intent, but, as was later pointed out to him, “It’s what happens after you’ve had five hundred drinks.” The next morning, a hangover: head of a size that eclipsed the risen sun. He never found out who it was that delivered him back to his tent and deposited him on his cot and loosened his tie and took off his shoes and left the scrawled, classic, three-word message tucked between his shirt-buttons: “Sweet dreams, darling.”

  On the deemed day of the next week, he boarded the Dutch ship.

  As a guest-passenger (by alliance) on an armed foreign vessel urgently engaged in the business of war, he was that weirdest of all military anachronisms: a healthy, experienced officer on hold. Everything about him—his appearance (he was dressed in mufti, but always wore a tie); his idleness (empty of all responsibility, he strolled aimlessly on deck or sat on fair days in the sun in the fallow way of a park-bench habitué), and, devoid of a common language with any member of the ship’s company—his gestures (disengaged and made often with a cigarette in hand)—all marked him as the odd man out.

  On his own terms, he defined himself as a mute in limbo.

  …The captain, Hendrik Tjeenk, had a heavy Teutonic brow, a stern mouth, and gray-blue eyes hard as flint. He was bulky in build and tall, and when he walked he bent his torso forward and kept his head down, as if facing into a perpetual gale. He had but one feature that relieved his general look of ferocity: his ears: huge ornaments the color of smoked salmon set close to his head, with richly fleshed pendulum lobes it was his habit to toy with: to pull on or to stroke, sensuously, up and down, or twist between his thumb and forefinger. At meals in the officer’s mess he sat, bear-like, devoting his attention to the endless curries served up by the ship’s Dutch-Indonesian cook. But he regularly prefaced each meal by a gesture of insistence that Morgan occupy the chair at his right, and, ritually, he offered the salt to him before reclaiming it and applying it liberally to his own food. Thus he played the host…. Beyond that he made little effort in Morgan’s direction: early on in the voyage, the two of them had reached an agreement, arrived at by hand-signs signifying futility, that the language barrier was beyond their ability to surmount.

  Sometime during the first week of the voyage to Miami, he wrote to the Owl’s parents…. He had an image of them in his mind, formed by the Owl’s own words spoken under calm conditions on the long watches—on nights when the sky had been open and filled with stars and the seas running quietly, the Stubbins slipping through them, and suddenly the Owl’s soft voice telling something marvelously remote to the circumstance: “My ma’s tall.” And, another time: “My brother Winston” (such an elegant name, Morgan had thought) “—his aim’s as good with a slingshot as it is with a rifle” and, another time: “My daddy helped a fawn get born once. He was walking in the woods and came on the doe. About stepped on her. She was down, near dead, the fawn not coming on like it ought and he did for her the same as you would a cow with a queered calf. Reached in up to his elbow and got a right hold on the fawn and brought it out for her. He stayed by her till she was on her feet. The fawn was fine. Did you ever hear tell of a wild thing letting a man do for her what she couldn’t do for herself? But my daddy’s a wonder in that way.”

  Such was what the Owl told of his people.

  The fact of the Owl’s remembered near illiteracy caused Morgan to suppose that the letter to his parents might need to be read aloud to them, perhaps by the mule-riding, Bible-carrying, sin-cleansing itinerant preacher the Owl had once spoken of; or ironically, perhaps, by the same sheriff who had “sniffed” him out and sent him thereby off to war.

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Malkerson,

  Your son, Henry—(the need to write of the Owl as “Henry” provided for him just enough of a veiled remove to steady the pencil in his hand)—served as a Naval gunner under my command on the SS John T. Stubbins. (He deeply hoped the censor would let stand the reference to the Stubbins.) The sorrow of Henry’s death was shared by our crew who loved him for his goodness of heart and for his faith which sustained us all. He spoke often of both of you and of his brothers.

  (He faltered, then pushed on, writing, crossing out and starting again, wresting from his million thoughts a few; word by word)…steadfast to his duties…ever thoughtful of his shipmates…might be of some small comfort to you to know he did not suffer…died peacefully, surrounded by friends. We said the Lord’s Prayer…buried in the clean sea.

  With deepest sympathy,

  Sincerely,

  The short letter, eternally meant, eternally incomplete, took him hours to write.

  He put it in the zippered side-pocket of his new waterproof duffel bag. In Miami, he would copy it out on decent paper (perhaps revise it), then hand it in for mailing via the proper military channels.

  As on the Stubbins, the specter of fear haunted the ship, and, as on the Stubbins, procedural similarities pertained against possible disaster: at night, navigation lights were blacked out and the ship’s inside lights strictly obscured; lifeboats were permanently swung out ready for lowering; progress was a dog-legged one (never a straight course); life-jackets were always worn.

  Often in the dead of night, he would go up on deck and listen to the foreign whisperings made by the officer of the watch to the man at the wheel, or to the closer exchanges of the hunkered-down gunners, and see the dark figures of the posted lookouts, gazing off, covering the horizon round. The pricks of diamonds on the sea were the reflections of stars…. I am going home. Very, very slowly, I am going home…. In his own language he would say the words to himself, believing them against all odds, taking his assurance from the irresistibly beautiful heavens…. I am going home….

  Back in Durban, he had chanced on a bookstore owned by an antique Englishman who dealt mostly in obscure tomes from a remotely remembered, revered England of a past era. From the dusty, myopic old gentleman, he had purchased (at a steep price) the first two volumes—published in 1837—of what the dealer had called “a history of lives.” (The third and fourth volumes of the set were “regrettably lost.”)

  The title page of the extant volumes read:

  * * *

  A Genealogical and Heraldic

  HISTORY of THE LANDED GENTRY;

  or

  Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland, Enjoying

  Territorial Possessions Or High Official Rank,

  But Uninvested With Heritable Honors

  BY JOHN BURKE, ESQ.

  Author of The “Dictionaries Of The Peerage and Baronetage,”

  of the “Extinct and Dormant Peerage,” Etc.

  IN FOUR VOLUMES

  LONDON: HENR
Y COLBURN, PUBLISHER,

  13, Great Marlborough Street.

  MDCCCXXXVII

  * * *

  Combined, the number of pages of the two volumes totaled 1,388.

  The print of the written text was blindingly small. Each day he read about twenty-five pages. His eyes could stand no more.

  He was often awed by what rose at random from the page to confront his imagination.

  …John Arthur Moore “blown from a porthole of the Ajax, when that ship was destroyed by fire near the island of Tenedos, in the night of the 14th of February, 1807, but was saved by a boat belonging to the Canopus.”

  …Robert Byng “smothered in the black hole of Calcutta, June, 1756.”

  …Sir Robert Drury “killed by the falling of a stack of chimneys, in 1703.”

  …Helen, daughter of Alexander, Lord Abernethy, of Salton, “who had twenty-five sons and eleven daughters, seven of the sons fell at Pinkie, in 1547.”

  …Thomas Waite “killed as a boy in 1743 by a schoolfellow (William Chetwynd) at Clare’s Academy, Soho-square.”