He re-crossed the railroad tracks, following a route that skirted the edges of plowed fields, and so returned to the heart of Hatherton, to its Green—a proud, elm-shaded, carefully tended square with a fine, conciliatory Civil War statue (rendered by McMorrison) of a Union officer supporting in his arms a Confederate soldier; and, the Pioneers Museum, the Atheneum Academy, the Shaker Club, the bank (People’s Trust and Loan), the county courthouse, and the pillared, steepled Presbyterian church (dominant on the Green’s south side), and on its north side, the Van Sinderin Building (designed by Joseph Stoddard at the behest of Clarence Van Sinderin, who caused it to be erected in 1895 after he’d made his first killing in iron-ore). Among other enterprises of the so-called “professional” order, the Van Sinderin Building—as shown by a large, signifying brass plaque given into its granite exterior—housed the offices of:
MALCOLM AND SHURTLIFF
Attorneys-at-Law
He entered the building and crossed its lobby, climbed (two steps at a time) the reach of its exuberantly curved, iron-railed, marble staircase, turned left at the top and strode down the corridor to a massive pair of closed teak-wood doors, opened one, and—like a returned fox at the mouth of its lair—paused, and took a verifying breath: ah: exactly as he remembered: the accordant smells of law books and leather chairs and Judge Malcolm’s Cuban cigars, and floating out into the hallway from the offices of the Misses Dorothy and Ellen Hart (sister secretaries), the workday odors of newly sharpened pencils and rubber erasers and the inks of typewriter ribbons and carbon paper, and now, in the immediate vicinity, face-to, the opposing scent worn by Mrs. Forshay (receptionist) (Yardley’s Lavender).
“Glory be! Mister Shurtliff!”
“Mrs. Forshay.” He was ridiculously pleased to see her.
“Ellen; Dorothy,” she sang out, “look who’s here!…I must tell Judge Malcolm.”
—already in sight, coming down the hall from his office, his advancing steps impressive for their lack of hurry.
Mrs. Forshay drew herself up like a sentry: “It’s Mr. Shurtliff, Judge Malcolm.”
“So I surmised. Morgan.”
“Sir.”
A privy stranger, watching and listening and knowing nothing about the two men (the one venerable and rotund and measured of movement, the other relatively young, intense, tall, lean) might have been stirred to wonder at the seeming lack of connection between the bluntness of their spoken greetings and the ardent, felicitous look of established relationship that passed between them.
Mrs. Forshay and the Misses Hart stood silently by, a tableau vivant trio depicting Interest, or, like the imagined stranger, Wonder; or of their individual sentiments, Sweetness.
He spent a fast hour with Judge Malcolm, the first of several during his leave. At the judge’s urging, he supplied details of his two years away, filling in gaps of information left out in letters written under the constraints of censorship, and ending with a bare-bones account of the torpedoing.
“Such an experience!” Judge Malcolm murmured. “I expect it’ll take you a while to parse out its effects on you. There’s an old proverb—maybe you’ve heard it, I think it’s Russian—‘If you look back at all, you’ll lose the sight of one eye, but if you don’t look back at all, you’ll go blind.’ In my war, nothing happened to me of so scoring a nature; I was never in any personal danger. But the fact is, from whatever perspective it’s viewed, war inevitably alters the viewer. It doesn’t matter a scintilla who you are or what your rank or calling. I see evidence of that truth every day, all around me, written on the faces of all of us here—‘left behind,’ as the saying goes, ‘keeping the home fires burning.’ You know the song: ‘Though your hearts are yearning.’” (He sang the words.) “I fritter away a lot of hours wondering what we’ll all be like when the conflict ends. How we’ll settle down as individuals and as a nation. How the world will settle itself.” Somewhere along the track of this running discourse, he had reached for a cigar and after puncturing its lip-end with a small gold spike attached to his watch-chain, he lit it. “Back in the sixteen hundreds, they jailed John Bunyan for preaching in the fields,” he mused on through a cloud of exhaled smoke: “You’ll plead leniency for me, won’t you, when they take me away for committing the crime of airing in public my overly morbid dreads of things still to come.” And then he laughed: “Clara told me the other day she’d stop dining out with me if I don’t get what she called my ‘jeremiad tongue’ under control.”
Morgan smiled. Coming from so formidable a source as the conjured Mrs. Malcolm, the threat warranted consideration, and he was about to say as much, but lost his chance to a well-remembered diversion: a Vesuvian fall of cigar ash onto the desk, and the judge’s head bent at once over the spillage, blowing at the ashes, scattering them over a residing mass of legal papers referred to now with a broad gesture as “A minefield of impending matters.” And then: “But here! These are for you.” He picked up a batch of bulging file folders: “An accounting of the cases we’ve handled during your absence. Also an accounting of your take in the firm’s profits.”
Morgan received the hefty bundle and rested it on his knees. “God,” he said, “it terrifies me to think of the time I’ve lost, and more to come.” A cry of resentment. He turned back the flap of the top file and looked at the first page: “The Murray case,” he murmured. It was the last case he had worked on before he went away.
“I followed your advice and took it to trial,” the judge said. “The verdict came down in our favor. You might want to see the transcript of the proceedings. There were a couple of amusing moments.” Then, shrewdly: “I’m only going to say this to you once, Morgan. Don’t brood about your professional life—about the time lost, as you put it. The law’s in your blood. You’ll come back to it better equipped than ever to serve it.” He pointed to the files: “Read them. I want your thoughts about the spillover effects some of the cases might have on our future practice. You’ll see what I mean as you read along…. Now tell me, what does the Navy have in store for you next?”
“Miami,” Morgan answered: “SCTC. Submarine Chaser Training Course. I think it’s about a four-month course. Maybe a bit more. I’m not sure. After that, I haven’t the vaguest idea…. When I received my orders, the guy who gave them to me said I’d lucked out—that Miami in the summertime is the Eden of Hell.” He shrugged: “At least I’ll be able to telephone Maud once in a while.”
“Speaking of Maud, she’s put you down for dinner with us next Wednesday evening. Roger Chandler and his wife will be there too.” (Roger Chandler was the head of the stellar Cleveland law firm of Kissel, Chandler, in which Judge Malcolm still retained an “Of Counsel” position). “Roger’s been talking to me about establishing closer ties between our practice and theirs. When the war’s over, of course. He’s got his eye on you, Morgan.”
Morgan said: “Thanks to you, Judge. I’m flattered—”
“No. Not thanks to me. Thanks to your legal merit. Your name keeps cropping up in Cleveland legal circles.”
Morgan’s smile was a dim one: “That’s nice to hear, but it all seems a bit remote to me now. I don’t seem able to think with much clarity beyond just making it through the rest of the war.” It seemed necessary to expand the remark: “What I mean is that for now I have to settle with life on a day-to-day basis. It’s my way of staying sane.” He thought he’d said too much, and in the despised voice of a complainer. He sat straighter: “At the moment, I’m just so damn glad to be home. So glad. I still don’t quite believe that I am.” He didn’t trust himself to say more.
The judge said: “I understand.” His eyes were glistening. “One would have to be a fool not to understand.” This time, carefully, he guided his hand to an ashtray and stamped out his cigar. Then, looking up, he changed gear: “Am I correct in remembering that Maud told Clara, who told me, that your father’s arriving this afternoon?” And to Morgan’s nod: “News does travel.” He smiled. “Your homecoming’s the talk of the town.
There are a lot of people outside your family who want to see you.” Then he laughed: “Popularity is a mixed blessing. By the time your leave is up, I expect you’ll feel you’ve been feted to death. If I were you, I’d take a look at Maud’s date-book.”
Morgan laughed too. “That sounds like good advice.”
“Forewarned; forearmed.” The judge stood up. “I’d like to walk you to your car…. It will improve my image to be seen with you.”
Lunch on the terrace. His first meal as paterfamilias: Maud opposite him; Caroline in a high-chair on his left, Julia in a high-chair on his right; Ralph stretched out at his feet.
Unbelievably beautiful, the tall sun-shielding elm tree. He kept looking at it, up, into it, into the jade of its leaves; into its age. At sea there had been only the sky.
After lunch he read to the twins for the second time. Uncle Wiggily Goes Swimming was their choice (the book a frayed one from Maud’s childhood). On the first page was a large, giggle-inducing picture of Uncle Wiggily in top hat, blue vest, and red trousers, standing by a pond, contemplating a swim; and eight (“Count them”) bandy-legged, pop-eyed, big-mouthed frogs in crazy bathing suits—three of them lazing on the pond’s bank, three others already in the water, two poised on a log, about to dive in; and, on the edge of the action, in a torn shirt and disreputable, patched pants, the lurking, wily Fox; and worse, meaner and hungrier-looking, the Wolf (“Really bad,” Julia said). The scatter-brained narrative was rapturously funny and threaded with pendent halts: “You may read on only IF: if the spoon holder doesn’t go down cellar and take the coal shovel away from the gas stove.” And two pages further: “You may read on only IF: if the rice pudding doesn’t put on roller skates to ride down the hill with the chocolate cake” (wild laughter from the twins). Then a big, new picture: Uncle Wiggily, out of his snazzy clothes, stripped down to his yellow underwear, wavering at the water’s edge, no longer sure that he wants to go swimming, and oh!—the Wolf, grinning his terrible saw-toothed grin, bellying his way out of the bushes, sneaking up on Uncle Wiggily from behind.
Suspense! “You may read on only IF: if the egg beater doesn’t try to catch the automobile and bite it full of holes so that it looks like a lace curtain.”
Maud came into the room. “Nap time,” she said.
“No! No!”
“Yes, yes. Daddy’ll read the rest to you later…. Pip’s coming, remember? You don’t want to be tired for Pip, do you?…Tessa’s waiting for you upstairs. Run along.”
Embraces, as of a great parting.
They had not been alone since early morning. On the couch, he held her in his arms, her head against his chest, his lips on her forehead.
“Tell me about your visit with Mother,” Maud said. “Were you appalled?”
“No. No.”
“Were you able to get her attention?”
“At moments, yes.”
“Was she rational?”
“In her way.”
“Sometimes when I go to see her she hardly seems to know me.”
“Oh, I’m sure she always knows you, darling. She certainly never lost track this morning of who I was. I think it’s more a matter of how she perceives us—as liking life for reasons that don’t interest her anymore.”
“It terrifies me. You won’t ever let me get like that, will you, Morgan? Promise. Kiss me.”
It was like being asleep, holding her so, unaroused, a quiet hand on her breast, as if they were dreaming together an ordinary dream about an ordinary sorrow, their solacing kiss a faith of waking from it. And then, low, still under the mood’s influence, Maud said: “There’s a letter you must read.” She shifted her body, and from the pocket of her shirt removed an envelope addressed to herself. “It came about a month ago. It’s from Geoff’s father.”
It was a handwritten letter of an easily legible period penmanship, a senior lawyer’s brief summary of a large event, elaboration left to the reader: “We want you and Morgan to know that Geoffrey is a prisoner-of-war being held somewhere in Germany. As of this date, April 26th, his prisoner-of-war status has been officially confirmed. In addition to the official verification, we have received a letter from his Squadron Commander giving a few allowable details to the effect that on returning to base in England, but while still over enemy territory, Geoffrey’s plane took a fatal hit, but that prior to parachuting out, Geoffrey radioed that he was not injured, which latter information will hearten you and Morgan as it heartens me and Geoffrey’s mother. You will please forward this news to Morgan.” There was a bit more: closing lines of affection, of…“our continuing prayers for Morgan’s safety. Sincerely—”
“Christ.”
Maud was quick: “I called the Barrows the day I got the letter and spoke to Mr. Barrows. He promised to let us know as soon as he knows how we can write to Geoff. I probably should have showed you the letter yesterday, but—” She let her defense go. Then: “Morgan?”
She had that way of saying his name, of calling him back.
He looked down, onto her face, into her eyes: “Oh, not yesterday,” he said with great feeling. “I wouldn’t have wanted to know yesterday…. I think I’ll take a walk.”
“Would you like me to go with you?”
“No, darling. I’ll work it through faster if I’m alone.”
He headed across the lawn toward the open meadow. At the line where the mowed grass ended and the scrub meadowgreen began, he turned and looked back toward the house and saw Maud standing at a window. She raised a hand and set it on the window’s broad glass whose transparency provided the boon sight of her, and he waved to her, then turned and walked on.
For himself, after the torpedoing, there had been the leap away from the stricken Stubbins into the sea, and almost at once, by compatriot hands, the miracle of deliverance into the lifeboat. For Geoff, a leap out into infinite space from his crippled plane: a wingless free-fall drop, a hand-tug intelligenced by reflex to his parachute’s rip-cord, the ’chute unfolding—billowing out to the sudden instant of its fully ballooned “take,” then the immensely occurring groundward waft lower and lower on wind routes that made of the ’chute a gliding raptor, and earth when attained and touched—the enemy upon him.
In his mind’s eye, he saw it happen.
The meadow creek was running fast and he stayed on the path beside it, walking slowly against its flow. At the bend in its course where it briefly widened and formed a pool, he sat down on the bank, close enough to the water to touch it. Before the torpedoing, when he’d gone to his stateroom to get his emergency kit-bag, this was the place whither, by a trick of mind, he had been transported. The center of the pool was deep; he could not see its bottom…. The fancy seized him that on the pool’s mud floor, invisible to him, there might be the motto remains of a toy boat, treasured yestertime property of a now grown-up man, and that around the jollity of the plaything’s hull, minnows and crayfish and salamanders were celebrating their lives. The notion magnified itself and became the Stubbins, lying distantly on the ocean’s floor, its crew’s quarters now the abode of deep-sea creatures, and in his own stateroom an octopus perhaps, one of its tentacles suctioned onto a page of his drowned atlas. “Morgan.” It was a part of the fantasy, his thinking that he’d heard his name called…. “Mor-gan!” This time the call was not to be doubted as real. He scrambled up the creek-bank and, over the extent of the open view, he saw a man standing on the far edge of the meadow and he began to run toward the man as too the man hastened toward him. They met with a flung clasp, the man breathing hard, uttering through sobs the long message: “I know I’m early, but I couldn’t wait any longer.”
“Pa,” Morgan said, “Pa.”
Two men in a meadow weeping together out of gratitude and awe and innocency at the way fate works.
Their recovery, when it came, was entire, and they set off on a long walk that followed the creek’s course, turning with it at a meander that faced them into the westering sun, going on, farther afield. Straight off, A
nsel Shurtliff asked Morgan if his ship had been torpedoed, and at Morgan’s affirmative reply, he said that the captain’s phone-call to him had “sponsored a suspicion of such a disaster” (which suspicion, he hastened to add, he had kept to himself). “If it won’t distress you too much to talk about it, I’d like to hear about it.”
It was the one time in his life that he ever approached a telling of the experience inclusive of its harshest, most painful particulars. What abetted his emotional control, even during the accounting of the Owl’s death, was the upholding, absolutely silent, mandarin-like way his father listened.
When he finished, Ansel Shurtliff, dry-eyed, told him: “Life’s a web woven of improbabilities. Whenever I feel overwhelmed by events, I visit your mother’s grave. In time, you’ll find a resting place for your sorrows, one you can go to in thought if not in body, and come away from strengthened.” Then, virtually at once: “Where was it in Africa you said the British took you?” His abrupt change of topic bespoke a mutually tacit need.
“Durban,” Morgan replied.
“Tell me about Durban.”
He was surprised at how much he enjoyed picturing for his father the former racetrack and the rows of Army tents, the old grandstand, the clubhouse and the adjacent horsey building—(“The stable-block still fully intact?” Ansel Shurtliff queried; and with a laugh: “Don’t ever tell your Aunt Letitia. She’ll want to buy it.”)—and the outlying harbor and sweeping beach and shoreline and the town-city of Durban itself, and about the myopic antiquarian book-dealer from whom he had purchased the two volumes of Burke’s Landed Gentry (“My kind of reading matter,” Ansel Shurtliff said).
They had long since turned their steps in a homeward direction. Now, nearing the end of their walk, Morgan asked: “Were the twins still napping when you arrived?”
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