Sidney was a New Yorker, too. “Well,” he qualified, laughing, “in a manner of speaking. Not Manhattan. The Bronx.” Bronx-born: graduated from public high school, worked his way through Fordham University, after which he’d clerked in a bank by day and gone to Brooklyn Law School at night; “pocketed” his LL.M. degree in June of 1941, immediately took and passed the state bar exam, and: “That being done, I succeeded in convincing my rabbi’s daughter I couldn’t live without her, and right after we were married—just as we’d agreed I would—I enlisted. For me, until three months ago, it’s been the Pacific on a light cruiser operating out of Pearl Harbor.” Then, to Morgan: “Now it’s your turn.”
Morgan gave a vignette account of his schooling and peacetime life, concluding with a brief account of his wartime history to date.
They were near an intersection when he finished, and in the brightness of two powerful street lights, they stopped walking and peered candidly at each other, as if, out of what they had told about themselves, the time had come to add portrait to biography. And then, in a way that irreversibly joined them, somehow they laughed.
…It must be told about Sidney that he was a short man, barely of regulation height. “A Sephardic pygmy,” he said of himself. But his torso was imposing, a wine vat whose half-sphere frontal measure was wider than his shoulder span. The fit of his shirts was a sartorial nightmare, fine at the shoulders, but across the greater expanse of his chest the cut was too tight, the fabric stretched in a way that put each button under perpetual strain. With the cloth of the shirt pulled like that, so tautly, one could actually see the impulsions of his beating heart, like soft knockings: chung, chung, chung. When he was calm, the chungs happened erratically, occurring in visually uneven spasms, and then the buttons of his shirt danced, wildly: a jig of sorts. (At one such time, Sidney, aware and laughing, said it was his lawyerly ambition to be monetarily successful—“enough”—to one day afford having his shirts made to order.)
“Archival” was the way Morgan came to describe Sidney’s mind—an extraordinarily retentive one filled with incidental information he would give voice to at odd moments of kinky relation, and usually in the form of a question. Example: the time he and Morgan were studying a drawing of the Hedgehog’s detonating system (“It’s a single-track brain”) and, without looking up from the drawing, Sidney asked: “Do you know, Morgan, that Hitler was educated by the Jesuits?”
Or, as on one Saturday night when they were drinking together in a bar, they saw a man, a tragic sinister, who had an abnormally large, hairless head an enameller had painted over with red and black and yellow snakes whose tails and bodies encoiled his thick neck and looped around his ill-formed, strutted out ears, up onto the smooth top of his broad pate where their faces were exaggeratedly depicted, orange-eyed, open mouthed, fangs showing; and Sidney, clearly sickened by the sight, said: “Poor bastard.” And, looking away: “Aeschylus,” he murmured. “Do you know how Aeschylus died?”
The leap made Lawrence laugh. “No.”
Morgan said: “Educate us, Sidney.”
So there in the bar with its dreary bamboo South Seas motif of mock-Gauguin murals and naked-breasted women, Sidney told how legend has it that an eagle, carrying a tortoise in its claws, mistook Aeschylus’s bald head for a rock, and dropped the tortoise onto it, killing instantly, the great Athenian poet. “In 466 B.C.,” he concluded in his complete way.
And, another time, at sight of an abundantly dark-haired, pallid-faced beauty with immense imploring eyes, Sidney said: “She’s my idea of what Lola Montez must have looked like. You can just see her, can’t you? in another era, vamping Austro-Hungarian royals and Muslim agas…. When I was fourteen—fifteen maybe—for about a month, I had a real thing about Lola Montez. Read everything I could lay my hands on about her. But my interest began to wane when I found out she was Irish by birth, real name Marie Gilbert. It was the exotic luster of her assumed name that most attracted me. She was only forty-three when she died, God knows of what combination of causes. But she must really have been something to have achieved in her time the reputation of being Europe’s ‘Great Adventuress,’ its ‘Unholy Siren.’”
“What were her dates?”
“1818 to 1861,” Sidney easily answered. As shown by the way his shirt buttons were dancing, he was wound up: “Mata Hari’s another case in point. Of a name overwhelming the imagination, I mean. She was German, born Gertrud Zelle. Not exactly a cock-rousing appellation, would you say? But Mata Hari. Right away, there’s an associative overtone of heterodox sexuality. That she assumed that name as an alias to Gertrud Zelle is the answer to why she was such a talented spy. Which she was. Very smart. Very well rehearsed. And she was well along in years—in her late thirties—when she was busy extracting all that info from French officers back in 1915, 1917. Obtained usually on the mattress, in ecstasy’s full tide. Or maybe just afterwards, by means of somnolent strokings.”
You never knew with Sidney what would next be dispensed from the storage-bin of his mind, the endless surprises a part of his charm, part of his worldly melancholy, part of what made him, in lawyerly argument, so persuasive.
In the cramped space of a telephone booth, Morgan had the occasional poignant pleasure of hearing Maud’s voice; of listening to her alto accounts of life at home.
Sometimes, he spoke with the twins. Theirs was the awed stutter-and-spate relationship little children have with the phone. Once, he had to appeal to Julia not to shout (she was deafening him) and to his distress she burst into distant tears, asking, through sobs, how, if she didn’t shout, would he be able to hear her? “And,” she wailed, “I have something important to tell you.”
“But I will hear you, sweetheart. Truly I will.”
In the background, Maud was helping. (“Softly, Julia. And talk more slowly. Daddy’ll hear you, I promise.”) So Julia, minding and modulated, though still unsuppressingly excited, moused out her news that yesterday, in the bottom of a Cracker Jack box, she had found a magic ring.
“Julia! How wonderful! Is it beautiful?” He had thought she might try to describe it.
“Yes, it is,” was the extent of her reply. Then: silence.
“Julia?”
The laughter that came was Maud’s. “She’s gone, darling. Probably to the hall closet. She’s spent most of the day inside it.”
“Why?”
“The ring, Morgan. The magic ring. It shines in the dark.”
“Ah.”
All over the world battles were begetting battles.
On September 10, they woke to the news that on the previous day, the Allies had invaded Italy, penetrating her boot at the heel.
In his new atlas, he turned to the map of Italy—something he would do again and again for twenty months still to come, that being the cruel length of time the campaign would last—tracking on the map the Allies’ painful, northerly advance; peering, with the aid of a magnifying glass, at Alps crossed by Hannibal’s elephants, recrossed now by caterpillar-footed tanks; tracing the beds of rivers on whose banks opposing soldiers were at that moment dying—rivers with ancient, mellifluous names: the Volturno, the Sangro, the Liri, the Gargliano, the Tiber, the Po, the Arno; locating the domed pietà cities and towns under current siege: Naples, Florence, Pisa, Rimini, Bologna, Spezia, Genoa, Mantua, Milan, Verona, Monfalcone…. (“O! that a man might know / the end of this day’s business, ere it come.”)
On England bombs fell like rain. On Germany bombs fell like rain.
In Russia: an hourly slaughter of soldiers, civilians, children, creatures.
In the Pacific, the fighting was island to island. Some atolls, named in the newspapers, were unshown on the atlas. And still in the enemy’s grip, the great land-masses of Burma, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines.
In the Atlantic, with persistent kills of enemy U-boats, the convoy sea-lanes between North America and Europe were becoming safer. (“Not yet secure, gentlemen. But yes, steady on, safer.”)
&
nbsp; In Miami, the hibiscus flowers kept blooming in never-ending abundance.
Morgan. Sidney. Lawrence.
They were each other’s entertainment; in gloomy Miami, each other’s light; each other’s solace, for in the fullness of their friendship they sounded in their rambling talks the names of their wives—Maud, Linda, Pamela—not to be talked about, but spoken of, in Iliad ways, as distant inspirations. And by means of shared photographs, each came to know the face of the others’ spouses, and to the degree projected, her force of attraction…. Someday, they told each other—someday they would all really meet.
Each late afternoon, at the moment the boats’ prows were turned landward, his spirits would begin to rise. Returned to the wharf, the boats moored and all his duties completed, he would set off nearly at a run to cover the ten-block distance between the wharf and the Columbus Hotel, greedy to collect his waiting mail.
Maud’s letters came as regularly as dawn; his father’s often. Miss Sly sent many notes (“Here is a Peter Arno cartoon I think will amuse you….” “Today I adopted a male kitten, the marmalade runt of a giveaway litter. I’ve never had a cat before….” “The motor of my refrigerator has ‘given out,’ to quote my repairman, himself a tired specimen verging on a similar fate. Impossible to obtain a new one in these wartime days, so Mr. Ward is busy collecting parts from various junkyard sources. I should hate to have to go back to using the old ice-box, resident in the basement of my house. My refrigerator’s problem, emblematic of the times, has unreasonably depressed me. It’s silly, I know. So minor a thing.”) Each note was similarly concluded: “Yours ever, Zenobia Sly.”…Letters came from relatives; from Judge Malcolm; from Lillie Ruth and Tessa (cards purchased through their church, the enfolded tidings, prayers); from Doctor Leigh (a now-and-again line scribbled on the run). From Lucy, messages conveyed by a liberated pen: accounts of London under siege from the air, of witnessed deeds performed by ordinary people on behalf of ordinary others, by any standard heroic; and Lucy’s own confession “of self-satisfaction that in some small way I’m finally doing something useful with my life.”
And almost unbelievably, at last, a short letter (forwarded by Maud) from the captain—his words inked onto the page in his precise, literal, sincere voice: “Dear Shurtliff, I hope this finds you in good health. I have a new ship, another Liberty…./back in the Pacific/” (here deletions by a censor’s scissors). “No end in sight to the war in this region…./I’ve no news to pass on to you from our old group. I most miss the company of yourself and Sarkis. It would do me good to hear from you. Cordially, Rupert Wilkins.” With an inexplicably strong sense of urgency, Morgan wrote the captain that night, hesitating only briefly over the salutation: “Sir, dear Rupert…It’s grand to have your letter in hand. You ask for a rundown of what I’ve been up to since Durban, so here goes, as best I can….” It was a fairly long letter sent the next day to the given address in San Francisco. As he was writing it, Morgan felt he was speaking to the captain on his ship at sea, a bobbling vessel whose position on an endless spread of ocean was findable only if you were aboard her, and only after making a navigational dusk or dawn shoot of stars, or a noon-time shot of the sun…. “I’ll write again soon. Sincerely, Morgan Shurtliff.”
Equally stirring, and again, at last, a letter from Geoffrey in a deliberately small script that filled every inch of the allotted one-page, Red Cross-distributed POW stationery, its tidings selective, ironically cheerful: that he was all right; that he and his fellows were being “well enough” treated; that: “From your father, via mother Red Cross, I’ve received two books, Chekhov’s Short Stories, and A Century of English Essays from Caxton to Belloc, and from lovely Maud a buffet of tinned foods, greatly appreciated, like the books, by all. I’ve become a serious chess player. We hold classes: I discourse on the common law; a music theorist instructs us in harmony (I’ve learned all the key signatures, the intervalic make-up of chords, etc.); a botanist fascinates with lectures on plant life. Under the direction of a would-be actor in our midst, we recently staged a performance of The Man Who Came to Dinner, script provided by the R.C. I played a lead role (Maggie Cutler, if you know the play) and we didn’t just read our lines, we memorized them. I created something of a sensation in my tail-hugging towel skirt and low-cleavage blouse (a cut-down shirt), my boobs, à la Lana Turner, fulsome enticements of rolled-up pairs of socks. Got all kinds of randy compliments. From your father’s letter, I gather you’ve had your own ample share of adventure. He abstained from specifics, but given your branch of service, my Einstein mind can guess of what sort. It’s all just a matter of moonlight and roses, isn’t it.” There was a bit more, a shift in tone, as of a reluctance to close. And then the vivid, validatory ending: “Love to you, Morgie. Geoff.” It pierced him through. Years, since Geoff had called him “Morgie,” and never before with such ability: “Love to you….”
On Thursday, October 21, the SCTC captain sought him out and handed him an envelope, official seal embossed on its left-hand corner. Morgan withdrew the enclosed page and read its contents as the captain stood by.
“Congratulations,” said the captain.
Morgan shook his extended hand, then saluted: “Thank you, sir.”
In such way, he learned he had been promoted, that he was now a full lieutenant; an iota obeyer of a higher rank.
“What next?” they asked themselves and each other as November approached, the ending days of the SCTC stint upon them.
Their orders came through on Friday, October 29: Sidney to go to the West Coast, there to board a Buckley class DE, (on which ship, as part of a far-ranging Pacific anti-submarine task force, he would serve for the duration of the war); Lawrence to report forthwith to the gunnery school in Washington, D.C., rumored as being a high-speed, super-tier training course preparatory to battleship duty. (By February 1944, he was in the Pacific, member of a battleship task force that bombarded Kwajalein Atoll at the outset of the invasion of the Marshall Islands; and in 1945, in the last days of the war, in the bombardment of Japan’s mainland.)
Morgan’s orders: to Boston, to the Boston Navy Yard. Duty: gunnery officer on a spanking new DE, imminently to be launched.
On the evening of the day they received their orders, they went to their customary bar. They were feeling strung—caught between what was nearly over and what was about to begin. They had their own table. It was a windy, rainy night and there was a roof-leak at one end of the bar sufficient to require a crowding at the dry end, more brightly lit than usual on this wet occasion, the greater brightness perhaps the reason for a greater than usual bray of raised voices, tonight entirely male: uniformed men in out of the weather, comfortable with themselves in ways slack, even a bit disreputable. Louche, one would have said of the crowd, had they been women. Morgan, searching for cigarettes in a deep pocket of his raincoat, put down on the table his penknife, some small change, the stub of a pencil, and a yellow envelope, producing at last matches and a fresh pack of Camels. He patted the envelope, and Lawrence, guessing, asked: “New pictures?”
“Arrived today.”
“Give us a look.”
Opulently pleased to oblige, Morgan handed them over, one at a time: a blurred snap of Caroline (Maud had written on the back); chasing Ralph over the lawn (Ralph too a blur, hairy-yellow); Julia, swinging, hair on end, caught mid-swoop of an earthward drop; the third, last one a clear semblance of the two of them sitting together on the terrace, quiet, their faces beautifully thoughtful, showing that future look he loved so much.
It was this picture Sidney held and looked at for the longest time. Then, relinquishing it, he said: “I dream of becoming a father.”
On the day before he left Miami for Boston, he received from Maud a letter that told of “Ralph’s amorous, night-long howlings of desire for Suzy, the Tolbin’s pretty young Airedale, just come into her first heat—of Suzy’s returned laments of longing for Ralph. We’ve agreed, the Tolbins and I, to keep Suzy and Ralph leashed until Suzy is
, in Mrs. Tolbin’s words, back to normal. Being kept apart like that is the way it is for us now, as hard for me as for you. Right now, thinking of you, I could weep, imagining what if you were here….” Never before had she written with such erotic boldness. It was the single one of her many letters he destroyed, just as he knew she would never add to her ribboned collection of his wartime letters his active, unequivocal reply—no amazed eyes, chance-voyeurs to their written passion, ever later, to see.
Newly commissioned, she was a sophisticated, lethal beauty, her bow sheer as an arrow-shaft, her hull sleek but well hipped. Her skipper’s name was Stanley Hodson, “Red” to his officer-familiars, the reason obvious: his hair. He was an Annapolis graduate, the survivor of two torpedoings he didn’t at all mind talking about, and with the same panoramic enthusiasm he brought to his descriptions of past sporting events—Davis Cup challenge matches, World Series baseball games, Joe Louis’s knockout of Max Schmeling (“that Kraut”) back in 1938 (he had been there, ringside, cheering for Joe) ETC. He was amusing in a careless, hard-textured, flung kind of way. Narrowly educated, but the narrow lessons well learned: he was a brilliant officer.
Late December, under an overcast sky, they sailed out of Boston into Massachusetts Bay, commence of a “shakedown cruise” that took them up the coast, bowing well out to sea around Gloucester and Cape Ann, northeast past Portsmouth, turning north past Cape Elizabeth, bypassing Portland, into Hussey Sound, keeping in that skinny passage Peaks Island and Great Diamond Island to port, Long Island to starboard, emerging at last into the sheltered waters of Casco Bay. There, pleased with their ship’s performance, they let down first anchor.
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