McAllister University
In re: Article “Ultra-efficient Decks Using Mechanical-
Structural Linkages Between Steel and Concrete
Components”
I wish to amend my recent article with an attribution unfortunately omitted in the printed text. The concept for the composite structure described in the article was originated by A.H. Atkinson, P.Eng., of A.H. Atkinson & Associates Engineering Consultants, Hamilton, Ontario, who underwrote the test procedures and retains absolute title to the design. The test data and methodology remain as previously given.
Sincerely
Lyle O. Nilson, B.Eng., M.Eng.
Well, says Betty next week, Susannah Nilson won’t speak to me. Snubbed me in front of the whole church group. Cut me dead.
Doesn’t surprise me, Tommy says. Lyle probably told her I’m the villain. Said I martyred him in his own blood.
The gall of the man. I’ll give him a piece of my mind if he asks.
Yes, Tommy says, abstracted. I just wish —
Wish what? Bet’s getting a bad feeling.
I wish I hadn’t given them the royalties.
The feeling deepens. Arch? What do you mean?
I mean I signed over my patent royalties to the university.
Your what? Everything from your invention? All those years of work?
Yes, they’re putting up a new engineering building and they asked —
How much, Bet says, knowing it’s going to be bad.
Tommy shrugs. Last month it was forty thousand.
Forty thousand dollars? Half a million dollars a year? When I serve meatloaf twice a week because the boys are still in school? When the only vacation we’ve had in the last three years is a trip to Toronto?
Tommy says nothing. Gazes out the window. Folds his hands.
Bet’s head sinks to her arms. You don’t need enemies, I don’t need enemies. We both have you.
The years flow, the long years of middle-aged prosperity and adversity. Apart from work, Tommy’s favorite times are Sunday mornings. He buys a console stereo that plays LPs and the new multiplex FM radio stations. Again he listens to the music that soothed and consoled him through the dark years.
He also listens to his wife, and admits that he’s shortchanged her. He can’t face it fully, that would shatter him, but he sees it sufficiently to take her on a real vacation. Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia is sanitized — no yellow fever and cholera, no slaves with lash scars — but the architecture is gracious. There’s a sense of centuries underpinning the present like the joists and trusses of a floor. And not just the present of the United States, but Tommy’s present, too. He realizes with a dull shock that in his fatherland, the place of his birth and education, the republic for which he risked his life, he is a tourist. In a week he and his wife will board a plane and return home to another country. What disturbs him most is not that he’s left America. It’s the sense that America has left him.
One day, Tommy’s phone rings in the office he’s just bought. A voice tells him he’s been nominated for Engineer of the Year. Yes, says Tommy, and forgets the conversation the instant the receiver’s down. He’s had an idea for a dry-storage tank they’re bidding on, something freestanding, with neither external struts that increase ground area nor internal braces that block material throughput. What about a stressed-skin structure, a thin curved shell that distributes strains and stresses equally over every square inch? This is insanely radical and he needs some proof of concept. For half a day he’s stumped; then on his mind’s twentieth orbit he sees what to do. Before they built a cathedral, the medieval masons would construct a twentieth-scale model as a design test. Tommy will do that.
Quick! he asks his receptionist. Where’s the nearest grocery store?
The receptionist stares at him. After ten years she still hasn’t got used to his eccentricities. A mile that way, she says, pointing.
Tommy rips out his wallet, peels off bills. Get me some breakfast cereal. Five, six boxes, the biggest you can find. And heavy tape. Package seal, not the stuff they use for Christmas presents.
Mr. Atkinson? What kind of cereal?
Doesn’t matter. Do we have scissors?
Silently she reaches in a desk drawer. Thank you, he says. And then: Go! Go!
Tommy paces for half an hour till she returns. He snatches her purchases, bolts into his office, and starts to work. Through the glass she sees him snip open boxes and empty the cereal onto the floor. He bends over his desk, measuring and re-measuring and finally using X-acto knives to cut cardboard with surgical accuracy. Three hours later, the junior partner comes in. There in his office stands Tommy: tie off, sleeves rolled, coated with cornflake dust. On his desk is an elegant cardboard model of a storage tank, one foot across by two feet high, shaped like an hourglass.
They draw up plans and do a stress analysis. The numbers work. They pitch it to the client, get it approved, and build it. It looks like a forty-foot minimalist sculpture and it functions without a hitch.
Two months later, Tommy’s named Engineer of the Year. He’s come in lengths ahead of the rest of the field, yet he shows no more interest than he did before.
I don’t understand you, says his junior at the ceremony. This is a lifetime achievement award. You’ve been chosen first among thousands of colleagues and yet you sit here checking your watch. Doesn’t this mean anything to you?
Tommy grins. There was a Brit, a sculptor, who was asked that question. There comes a point, he said, when all the awards in the world matter less than a good morning’s work.
Then why are you here?
Respect for the profession. Respect for you.
Professional prosperity, emotional adversity. Young Tom marries and his wife has Tommy’s grandchild. But a corporate transfer takes them away and Tommy seldom sees them. Bill marries, has a son and daughter, then divorces. It’s a bitter thing: Tommy loves Bill’s ex-wife and is terrified his father’s genes have skipped a generation. He tells Bill he considers the ex-wife to be a daughter and to his horror Bill says, I’m not her brother and I’m not her husband, so if she’s your daughter, then I’m not your son. He and his new family have no contact with Tommy for seven years. Tommy hears that Bill has two more sons.
One day, the phone rings. It’s Bill, from Vancouver. Dad? Can I see you?
Of course, of course you can. They meet. Tommy takes him home to Bet. The reconciliation’s just in time.
June 2, 1998: 2:20 A.M. EDT
Let me sing to you, old fragments, sad and sweet, things to speed and soothe the soul. Soothe you or me, Mom? Both, I guess. You’ve been comatose for days and the resident says you won’t last the night. Surprising how calm I am. Maybe I’ll fold up afterwards. People do that — stay strong through crises and break down later. But not we two, I think. I’ll sing to you. I know there’s a part of you that listens.
What a life you had. Traded wealth for love, then went through war and penury. Took you decades to get back to comfort. Most people couldn’t survive that. But you were tough —
Something’s happening. You’re trying to breathe.
You can’t breathe. Your chest heaves once, then stillness.
And that’s it.
Bye, Mom. Glad you hung on till I got here.
Goodbye.
Now it’s the latter days. Tommy’s always known they might arrive, but hasn’t dared to imagine details. Suddenly they are here. Alone, no company; Bet’s ashes in the lovely churchyard of St John’s; Tommy sole occupant of the house he built half a century ago. He waits for Death the Leveler, the Compassionate, but it does not come. His heart beats, his lungs expand, his blood flows. There’s no reason for it.
Young Tom drives him places: doctor, dentist, lawyer. And Billy — no, just Bill — flies in twice a year without apparent motive. Stays a week, cooks, talks to him.
Asks Tommy about his past. Takes notes.
Which is, Tommy sees, why he visits. Tommy recollects, Bill types, they sip scotch together. Tommy goes to sleep and wakes to find Bill reading. Bill smiles, cracks open his computer, asks another question. They do this all week.
What was it like back then? In the thirties and forties?
Tommy considers. A stilted society. Rules for every situation. You could follow the rules without thinking. As if you weren’t supposed to think.
Maybe you weren’t. But you thought anyway.
Yes, says Tommy. He’s surprised. The concept hasn’t occurred to him.
How was Japan? he asks Bill one evening.
Great technology, great food, terrific people. Can I ask you something?
Tommy nods.
How come you beat the shit out of them and they bounced back? And they beat the shit out of you and you bounced back? What was it all for?
Tommy thinks. Like pruning a tree, he says. Like cutting the grass. The war had built for decades. It had to come and it came.
And individually? What happens when you mow the lawn and every blade of grass thinks and feels?
Long silence. Then: I don’t know . . . I don’t know. It was very sad.
The days go by. Tommy heats soup, perks coffee, makes sandwiches. Listens to music, watches television. Wakes and sleeps.
Mostly he remembers. Years ago, when everybody in America read the same book at the same time, there was a novel called From the Terrace. In it an old man looks beyond his view, its farms and forests, to his past. From the Armchair, Tommy thinks, and smiles.
His amusement fades at a thought. Revisiting the past demands more than nostalgia. As Ibsen said, you must sit in judgment over yourself. Glossing, ducking, lying, this he will not do. Court is in session: all rise.
Useless. The word rises like a mist. All the projects he worked on, all that elegant engineering, might as well never have happened. Hamilton healed the world and the world expressed its thanks by taking Hamilton’s jobs. The city’s mills are locked and empty. Only Asians make steel these days.
My God, he thinks, they won. The weapons just changed from carriers to commerce. All that hurt and misery for nothing.
He wipes his face, shifts in his chair, gulps his drink. Well, no news there. This too shall pass — Lincoln’s phrase when he left for the capitol. Nothing is static. Shape obsidian into perfect arrowheads and some smartass makes better blades using flint. Shoe horses and the world shifts to cars. Everybody wants progress, nobody wants change.
Why did he work so hard? What did he accomplish? Maybe one thing only: he endured, and took his family with him. No, he did more than that. He and his friends faced down the Arch Fear and nudged the world toward peace. Not perfect peace; perfection isn’t the human lot. But while you can never make things perfect, you can usually make them better, and that’s what Tommy and his friends did. Countless lives enriched and empowered when they could have been snuffed or stunted or never been at all. We did that, Tommy thinks. We shouldered the world and staggered on a few steps. We bought a little time.
There’s one last truth to face. His true love wasn’t friends, or kids, or even his wife. It was work. No matter that he made what didn’t last. Work was his call, his curse, and — he sees it now — his pleasure. He traded family for war and work because family was the real toil. War and work were his enjoyment.
Tommy sips his scotch. He realizes he never wanted anything eternal, nothing lasting, nothing permanent. He worked to be working, for the act of it. The fun was in the doing, the process was the goal. Feathers and he were alike after all. For both of them the joy lay in the speed.
So. The verdict. Stunted childhood, brutal poverty, oppression and hard times. But fine times too. The long honeymoon of Ann Arbor, the calm creative suburban years, the honors and awards. Hard times with the boys as well, quarrels and estrangements, yet at last a wary peace. And then something marvelous: genuine friendship, so very late. Fine young men to whom to bequeath the world.
Tommy laughs outright, pours more whiskey. Young? Middle-aged rather. Tom sixty, Bill fifty-seven. Not even middle-aged. No one survives to a hundred and fourteen. Fine men, yes, but neither has been young for thirty years. Tommy’s so ancient that his sons are ancient, too. I grow old . . . I grow old . . . I shall wear the bottoms of my condoms rolled. Tommy laughs at himself a lot these days.
Now and then he wonders what he’d change. The war? He could have sat it out and no one would have said a thing. No whispers behind hands, no lifted eyebrows then or afterward. A happier wife, a better knowledge of young Tom. Nor was he shirking at UMich. His ninety-day wonders had to know their navigation. He knew his subject back to front and was so good a teacher it surprised him. He still gets cards from his former students, those who survived.
But Ann Arbor wasn’t enough, for all its comfort and security. He had no right to tranquil days and cocktail parties when his friends and classmates stood in the hail of Ten-Go. He would have felt ashamed to stay safe.
And he was lucky. A cruiser-size CVL in action for two years, losing thirty-four crew to enemy fire? Hostile casualties of one percent per year? That wasn’t a butcher’s bill, it was nickels and dimes. It was the price of a coffee.
He thought that final Judy had them. He spun the spokes and called for flank speed out of reflex. He thought Franklin would ignite Bataan, or veer starboard and slice her in half. But he came through, his carrier came through. Torched for scrap four decades ago, but no matter. He knew her. He was aboard.
Some days when he dozes he finds himself back in uniform, scrambling up a ladderway with an agility he hasn’t known for years, touching his cap to Captain Schaeffer and gazing out wide bridge windows to a morning of astounding blue. If the Marianas high-pressure dome holds, he’ll do a noon shoot, check his ephemeris, and nail down Bataan’s position to the inch. Operation Iceberg starts tomorrow, and if it’s half as bad as Iwo Jima, things will get hot. Good thing his gunners are well trained.
A tall trim figure near a window turns to smile at him. I know that man, thinks Tommy. That man is my friend. Still sleeping, he returns the smile.
A.H. “Tommy” Atkinson, LCDR USN ret., died June 4, 2006 @ 0400 EDT, aged ninety-five.
WILLIAM ILLSEY ATKINSON was born in Seattle and has been a professional science writer since 1971. His honors include the Dalhousie University Prix d’Excellence in Issues Writing and the Toronto Technology Alliance LEAF Innovation Award. His nonfiction book Prototype was shortlisted for the National Business Book Award. Atkinson was inspired to write Tommy by the life and naval career of his father.
Copyright © William Illsey Atkinson, 2012
Published by ECW Press
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Atkinson, William Illsey, 1946-
Tommy : a World War II novel / William Illsey Atkinson.
Also issued as 978-1-77090-283-1 (PDF) and 978-1-77090-284-8 (EPUB)
1. World War, 1939–1945—Fiction. I. Title.
PS8601.T57T66 2012 C813’.6 C2012-902692-1
Editor for the press: Michael Homes
Cover and text design: Tania Craan
Cover images and interior images courtesy of the author
The publication of Tommy has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, and by the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit. The marketing of this book was made possible with the support of the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
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