Time and Tide

by Thomas Fleming

  "One more thing. If by some miracle any of you assholes get to the point of makin' out with any broad, put a boot on it, do you hear me? I don't care if she's Agatha Vanderbilt Rockefeller the Fourth or Admiral Tomlinson's wife, any dame who fools around with a sailor is liable to have something that will make you flunk short-arm inspection. If you do, you're on my shitlist. Because it's just stupidity, get me? Stupidity."

  "Jesus Christ, Boats," Jablonsky said. "You'd kill a romance with Shirley Temple."

  "I'm just givin' you some good advice," Homewood said. "If you can't manage to fit a condom in your fuckin' tailor-mades, hit the pro station on the way back. Do you read me?"

  "Yeah, yeah."

  Obviously, the veterans of F Division had heard this lecture before.

  Flanagan was able to translate most of Homewood's harangue. He had already gone through several short-arm inspections at boot camp. You filed past a doctor and dropped your pants and squeezed back the head of your penis. If a telltale drop of fluid oozed out, that meant gonorrhea. A chancre sore on the head could mean syphilis.

  Flanagan also understood the reference to tailor-mades so tight a condom would not fit in the pocket. These were bought on shore by liberty hounds such as Jack Peterson. The tighter the fit the more expensive the tailor — and the more attractive the wearer theoretically was to the opposite sex.

  The pro station reference left Flanagan confused. He did not have the slightest intention of losing his virginity. He had given Father Callow a solemn promise that he would not touch a woman. But he wanted to know how everything in the Navy worked. "What the hell's a pro station?" he asked.

  "Prophylactic station. They got one right on the pier next to the Shore Patrol shack," Peterson said.

  "They make goddamn sure you won't get the clap. They pump you full of iodine and swab your dick with hydrochloric acid."

  "It ain't that bad, but Boats is right. Putting a boot on it is a lot easier," Jablonsky said.

  "Romance, Navy style," Peterson said, spitting on his already gleaming left shoe.

  In the sleeping compartment of Deck Division One, deep in the bow section of the USS Jefferson City, First Class Boatswain's Mate Jerome Wilkinson was also preparing for liberty. He watched Seaman Second Class Harold Semple shine his shoes. "Pretty boy," he said. "Pretty goddamn stupid. I told you to have them shoes ready last night so I could see your ass shine in them. I wanted them in my fuckin' locker this morning.

  Semple pushed aside the red curls that fell down his forehead. The red spots on his cheeks gleamed.

  "Why the fuck didn't you get'm done, Prettyboy?" Wilkinson demanded.

  "I was seasick. I was afraid if I came below I'd throw up in the compartment."

  "If you did that, we really would have beat the shit out of you," Wilkinson said. "Right, men?"

  Four of his followers sat on racks or lounged against stanchions, watching Semple work. "You bet your ass we would have," one said.

  Semple and the half dozen other second class seamen who had landed in Wilkinson's division were beginning to discern the purgatory in store for them. They were immediately converted into house servants. The men assigned to clean the compartment handed them their brooms and mops. They were sent scurrying to the galley for coffee, pie, cake — the bonuses that Wilkinson obtained for those who catered to his whims and moods. They learned to grovel in front of their division's ruler or get kicked and punched across the compartment. If they thought about complaining to someone, they were told stories of men who disappeared over the side during the night.

  Semple swiftly became Wilkinson's favorite victim. His red hair, his shyness, which brought on terrific blushes, had prompted some high school classmates to call him Harriet. His father, a skilled worker at the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn until he got laid off in 1933, never paid much attention to his youngest child. Within a year the Semples had used up their savings and gone on relief. His father drank too much beer and quarreled with his mother. Often there was not enough food or clothes in the house for Semple and his six brothers and sisters. Sometimes he had gone to school with his pajamas pulled down into his shoes as socks.

  "What you gonna do on liberty, Prettyboy?" Wilkinson asked.

  "I have an uncle in Los Angeles," Semple said.

  "He's the minister of a Methodist-Episcopal church. I'm going to see him."

  "Jesus Christ." Wilkinson sneered. "I shoulda known you was one of them chaplain's assistant types. Why'nt you come with us? We're headed for Shanghai Red's in San Pedro. He's an old pal of mine from Asiatic days. He's gonna fix us up with the best broads in the house."

  "My uncle's expecting me," Semple said.

  A punch sent him crashing into the chains of a tier of racks halfway down the aisle. "You're comin' with us," Wilkinson said. "We're gonna make a sailor outa you.”

  Down in the compartment shared by engineering divisions B and E, Marty Roth was having trouble tying his thick, Shiny black neckerchief in the regulation knot. Ties were not a big item in his family. His Uncle Izzy, father of the cousin who had died in Spain, had never worn one, not even to his wedding. Ties were appendages of the upper classes, the oppressors. Marty did not buy Izzy's socialist bullshit, but if he did not get this goddamn tie knotted in five minutes, he might become a revolutionary.

  Maybe his fingers were all thumbs because he did not know exactly why he was going on liberty. Unlike the rest of the sailors in Division B, he did not intend to get laid as often as possible until his money ran out. Marty was in love. He had told only one sailor on the ship about it — Flanagan, on the train ride out to Portland. He was sorry he had told him, because it sounded like he was bragging. It was impossible to explain what Sylvia Morison meant to him.

  She had come to his bar mitzvah when he was fourteen, in a Cadillac long enough to show a movie in. Her mother was his mother's first cousin, but as far as they both were concerned, they were sisters. They had grown up on Hester Street on the Lower East Side in adjoining coldwater flats, the only girls in two families full of loud-mouthed brothers. Sophie Katz had married luck, as his mother used to put it. Sam Morison was an ugly schmuck, but he knew how to make money at everything from hotels to nightclubs to restaurants. He even made money in the Depression, when everyone else was losing his life savings.

  Marty had danced with Sylvia at the bar mitzvah, in the upstairs room of Chasen's Restaurant on Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse. She smelled of flowers and had long eyelashes that seemed to cover half her cheeks when she lowered them and smiled shyly. He had frantically tried to think of jokes the comedians had told when they vacationed in the Catskills the previous summer. But his mind had been a blank.

  He did not see her again for the next four years, although he heard a lot about her. He had always heard a lot about Sylvia — how smart she was in school, how she was always getting promoted two years instead of one while he was barely passing.

  That was why she was in college — some swank place called Radcliffe — while Marty was just getting out of high school.

  When he decided to join the Navy, his mother had taken fifty dollars out of a drawer in her bedroom and said she wanted him to have a good time with it. "Take one of your girlfriends to a show, dinner, the works," she said.

  Roth turned down the idea. He knew she was saving the money for a new winter coat. She had to hide it, because if his father got his hands on it, he invariably lost it in the Thursday night card game at the Harry Kleindienst Political Club. He told her he did not have a girl who was worth spending that kind of money on. His mother had picked up the phone and called her cousin Sophie. Before he knew what was happening, he had a date with Sylvia Morison.

  They went to the Rainbow Room for dinner and danced to Tommy Dorsey. This time Marty's mind was not a blank. Sylvia was tremendously impressed that he had joined the Navy. Pearl Harbor had made the Navy sound dangerous. He gave her a line about wanting to kill Japs and Germans because they were racists as well as no-good fascists
. She moved closer to him and told him how much she admired his courage.

  Much later, on Central Park West, she invited him into her apartment. Her parents were away. They were always away, it seemed, checking out new hotels Sam Morison had bought or was about to sell. Sylvia put on some Fred Astaire records and began telling him how meaningful she thought his decision was, how purposeful, as well as how brave. She had never thought of him, she had never thought of anyone in the Bronx, as having this sort of dedication, this sort of "moral clarity"

  After that, Marty stopped listening closely. He had been trying to get up the nerve to kiss her, and maybe to let his hands stray up under and over those full breasts beneath her white silk blouse. Instead she kissed him, and then his hands were everywhere and so were hers. Soon they were in a pink and white bedroom, and in the living room Marty could hear Fred Astaire singing some love song in which he repeatedly declared he was in heaven.

  Marty stayed in heaven until about 4 A.M. He was a little shocked to find out how much Sylvia liked to screw. It did not seem to fit her delicacy, her intelligence. He could only conclude it was a compliment to his courage, his moral clarity, as well as his equipment, which had heretofore only been tested hastily, furtively, on a few couches in the Bronx.

  Jesus! Once more the goddamn knot had come apart. Maybe he ought to stay on board.

  "Hey, Jewboy," said a big dark voice. "Lemmy help you out."

  Amos Cartwright towered over him. In his dress whites, he seemed to emanate darkness. Cartwright and everything else about his life on the Jefferson City were still unreal to Roth. He still did not like the idea of working in the bowels of the ship. He read the papers and knew that ships had a habit of sinking. He was not a coward. He was willing to take his chances on deck, manning guns, whatever. But he did not want to drown like an accident victim.

  He had been even more dubious when he descended to the forward fire room on the voyage from Portland and found Water-tender First Class Amos Cartwright in charge. What could a nigger possibly know about all this machinery? Roth looked up at miles of pipe and steel overhead and thought of the four decks between him and the sky. Water sloshed menacingly against the hull. There were no portholes. The only way out was the narrow hatch through which he had entered. He stood there, frantically trying to figure out how he could get a transfer.

  "I know what you guys are thinkin'," Amos Cartwright said. "How the fuck am I gonna get outa here when they abandon ship? Hell, it ain't that hard. Let's have a demonstration. You, Jewboy, you look about as scared shitless as any of them. Here's a stopwatch. When I yell abandon ship, you head for that door and keep goin' like electricity till you hit topside."

  Roth scrambled up ladders, darted down passageways, bounded through hatches, rocketed across compartments and up a final ladder to stagger gasping onto the rainswept main deck. He looked at the stopwatch and could not believe it. He had made it in thirty-two seconds.

  Back in the fire room, Cartwright had given them a lecture on the importance of their jobs. He pointed to the looming twenty-foot-high boilers and explained that this was where they produced the superheated steam that traveled at six hundred pounds to the square inch through the maze of pipes to the forward engine room in the next compartment, where it powered the turbines that turned the Jefferson City's four propellers. He had taken them into the engine room and showed them the gleaming brass and steel turbines. He had made them peer through the glass panels at the huge reduction gears, where the energy created by the turbines was transferred to the propeller shafts.

  "What you gonna do on liberty, Jewboy?" Cartwright asked as he knotted Roth's neckerchief. "Goin' to make yourself a Hollywood starlet? Got an uncle at Metro-Golden-Mayer who'll fix you up?"

  "The only uncle I got cuts suits on Seventh Avenue," Roth said. "When are you going to stop calling me Jewboy?"

  "Don't you call me a nigger behind my back, like the rest of them?"

  "No."

  He might think of Cartwright as a nigger, but he had not called him that. One thing, maybe the only thing, Marty Roth bought from his socialist Uncle Izzy was his talk about human rights and all men being equal in the United States of America. He agreed with him that Negroes were getting a lousy deal in the United States, almost as bad as the Jews got in Czarist Russia.

  Cartwright stared skeptically at him. "You know you're the first Jewboy I ever met?" he said.

  "You're the first Negro I ever talked to. If you call me Jewboy once more you'll be the last one."

  Cartwright chuckled. "Okay, sailor. You come on liberty with me. I'll show you what a good time in LA's really like."

  "Now remember," Boats Homewood shouted as the Higgins boat approached the Pico Avenue landing. "Liberty ends on the dock at 0400 hours. That's four A.M. to you greenhorns."

  Nobody seemed to pay much attention to him as the sailors of F Division scrambled up on the dock and headed inland. Flanagan found himself strolling beside Leo Daley. It was not the first time Daley had displayed a penchant for his company. Maybe it was because they were fellow Catholics. Unfortunately, Flanagan did not like him very much. Daley complained about everything in a bitter whiny way that got on Flanagan's nerves.

  "Got any plans?" Daley said.

  Flanagan shook his head. They headed across a long pedestrian bridge that spanned the Los Angeles River and got them to the Long Beach Pike, the West Coast's biggest amusement park. They strolled along the midway past barkers urging them to see some beautiful ladies take it all off, swamis begging to read their palms and predict their fates, wheel-of-fortune spinners offering them a chance to double their money. The Hippodrome merry-go-round blared a military march. A roller coaster called the Cyclone Racer rumbled overhead. The smell of roasting popcorn, cooking hot dogs mingled in the air. It was like the boardwalk at Asbury Park, New Jersey, where Flanagan's father rented a house for a month each year.

  Except for the women. There were no women like these on the Asbury Park boardwalk. All wore atrocious amounts of rouge and the cheapest imaginable skirts and blouses. There was not a decent looker in sight. Bowed legs, lantern jaws, flat noses assailed Flanagan's eyes. Several asked them if they would like to have a good time. If these were the sort of women who tempted sailors, Flanagan thought, Father Callow had nothing to fear. Frank Flanagan was guaranteed for the Jesuits, if the Japs did not get him first.

  "Hey, let's try the Cyclone Racer," Flanagan said.

  Daley demurred. "My stomach still hasn't settled from that ride from Portland."

  Ride. The word grated on Flanagan's ear. Daley did not even talk like a sailor. They settled for a spin on the whip. Ahead of them, a gunner's mate had a redheaded girl who screamed and threw herself against him with every whirl of the car. She was obviously a lady of the Pike but she was not quite as ugly as the ones still soliciting on the midway.

  Daley pronounced the Pike a waste of time and suggested they head for Los Angeles. They boarded one of the Pacific Electric's big red cars and for forty-five cents were whizzed out of Long Beach's tawdry pleasures to the opulence of the city of the angels. The broad boulevards, the handsome mansions, the expensive restaurants were something to see. But all the doors were locked to sailors. The restaurant prices were breathtaking — $3.95 for a steak! One fifth of the twenty-one dollars they got paid each month.

  They found themselves wandering, hot and hungry, along a seemingly endless boulevard. Ahead of them loomed a gleaming white church, with a wealth of exterior carvings and statuary of angels and saints. From one corner soared a tower, at least a hundred feet high, with an inlaid tile dome. It was obviously Catholic, and the name on the sign out front, CHURCH OF ST. SEBASTIAN, confirmed it. "Listen," Daley said, "I got a cousin out here who's a nun."

  "A nun?" Flanagan said. He wondered if the California sun had cooked Daley's brain.

  "I don't know what parish she's in. But if I could find her, I bet we could get a free meal. She'd introduce us to the pastor."

  "Let's try th
e Hollywood Canteen."

  Daley was adamant. He seemed to think the Canteen was full of starlets dying to seduce him. Maybe his cousin's mother superior would introduce them to some nice Catholic girls. "Why don't you make a visit while I try to find someone in the rectory who can help us," Daley said.

  Flanagan strolled into the church and sat down in a rear pew, hoping the pastor would tell Daley to get lost. The interior of St. Sebastian's was even more spectacular than the exterior. Polychrome murals of the Stations of the Cross glowed on the walls. Above the altar was a tabernacle of gilded bronze and behind it a great screen of carved and gilded wood. A pamphlet in the pew informed Flanagan that the church had been built by an oil magnate and his wife at a cost of ten million.

  An immense statue of Jesus writhing on the cross dominated the right side of the nave. Several people were kneeling before it. Intimidated, Flanagan knelt too. He stared at the statue and began thinking of what Father Callow had told him about the gratitude he should feel for Jesus's sacrifice. The Savior had died for him, to save his soul from damnation.

  Jesus was also God, who had come to earth and taken a man's body to suffer and die on behalf of the sinful human race. Why? If God created the world and was omnipotent, why did he allow evil to rampage through His creation? Why did He have to go to the trouble of becoming a Jew in Roman Palestine and get himself crucified to redeem mankind? Father Callow said that was a mystery. More important was faith in Jesus's claim to be the Son of God, the redeemer, the fount of love. Flanagan thought of the title of a book Father Callow had given him about Jesus, This Tremendous Lover. Flanagan responded to that idea. He wanted to be a lover who healed hurts between men and women, maybe between nations. He wanted to make the world a better place before he died.

  Exaltation swirled in Flanagan's chest. He remembered a moment when he had stood on the Fordham campus looking across the flat roofs of the Bronx at twilight and thought about the sorrow, the pain, the disappointment in those modest apartments and houses. He wanted to comfort, to console, to encourage all those whose lives were pinched and battered and broken by the misery of the Great Depression that had filled the newspapers with tragedy and lamentation since he was six years old. How could he hope to do any of these things without the help of Jesus? He was only one individual. Through Jesus he could achieve power to help, heal, comfort millions. That was the beauty, the awesome beauty, of divine love, united with human prayer.