by H. L. Humes
“She's very beautiful.”
Dolfus shot Sulgrave a glance. “Leave her alone,” he said. “And keep in mind she's privileged here.”
She lay for a long time. Naked. Pillow over her face in quiet exhaustion. No longer crying, she yet continued in the long helpless dream, recurring more and more often in recent years, which, since his death, had almost assumed the proportions of obsession. Always remember, young woman, that you will be punished for being beautiful. Why should that phrase keep coming back now, of all times? The old man had hated Bonuso Hake from the moment he set eyes on him, Annapolis man or not, hated him as only one rival can hate another; it was at the wedding—she didn't know until an hour before the ceremony if the old man would consent to give her away, so she had an uncle in the wings just in case—it was at the wedding when it all became clear and the old man, her father, half-drunk, half in tears, had said it. Always remember … you will be punished …
And so she had, as though the prophecy were self-fulfilling. The marriage lived with a curse on it, a father's curse; even though now they both were dead, they both still contended for memorial passion. At a level of thought she never would have noticed save for repetition, she knew that her father was still entangled in her most private and erotic thoughts and desires of and for her husband. When making love, either in reality in the past or in the present in the imagination, the image of her father obtruded itself and spoiled love, smothered it in guilt and unbearable shame. Somewhere in the corner of the room, more frequently now than in the past, was her father. He never watched her, but he was there.
The scene was always the same, only backwards. In real life he had searched her dresser and purses first, then, afterward, having found nothing incriminating, made her take down her tomboy pants and submit to being beaten—it was that much more than a spanking. And then, in absolute confusion and shame, as though coming to himself suddenly, he dropped her on the bed and withdrew from her room. She was left alone, utterly astounded at the emotions that coursed through her body like manic blood—she didn't hate him; she loved him. She knew she should be punished and so was ashamed of what she felt, and understood, therefore, why he had left her so suddenly. It was as though—no! not as though —it was: he had caught himself in the commission of an act of pure lust, was ashamed also. But in the fantasy, the sequence was reversed. First the beating, then the image of him standing furiously in the corner of the room searching her purses. Dumping things out, rooting hog-snouted through her private belongings, searching for one small lipstick which she'd hidden under her pillow. It was like a rape the way he invaded her privacy, and yet he was her father after all. He loved her and was trying to make her live up to something—it all had to do, she understood even at sixteen, with her mother, who had died quietly and without to-do a month before. Her father was lonely, and he had loved her.
It was the only time in his whole upright life that he laid a violent hand on her, and so strong was that scene printed in her mind that even now, at thirty-eight, and widowed, she could conjure it up in her memory and shiver with—with what? Fear? Delight? Shame? Yet she never knew clearly enough what it meant. She never told her husband, and to his dying hour he was ignorant of why she could forgive so gracefully his rages, or why, to his even greater bafflement, she could so skillfully provoke them.
Vanna Hake hardly knew herself, so close to reflex instinct were her most intimate actions. And yet she knew finally. And it was in her letters.
Against mounting irritation that was almost hysterical, Sul-grave had searched the wreckage for some sign of life, but there was none. Something inside him revolted against the colossal insult of death—he'd never seen a dead man beforehand evoked a rage that had no palpable object. It seemed crucially important that something be alive. But the men had been gathered for noon chow. There had been no place to hide.
Leaving Big Randy in charge of the other prisoners, he half-ran, half-walked to the eastern end of the island. The flat-bottomed scow was gone, but Skully's spare jeep was still there, parked in the lee of the rock behind the narrow strip of sand where the boat usually nuzzled. He hailed across the narrow cut, got no answer. Silence. Someone must have taken the scow. The only shacks he could see on Little Misery were wrecked, half-flattened by the shock wave that must have found its way around the eastern hump of the protecting rock. The trees across the cut were stripped of leaves in places, but they weren't charred and blackened as they were around the operations area on the Rock itself. Then to the southeast he saw a sail, a native sloop—that was why it was so quiet: they were gone, all of them. They had evacuated themselves. They would have used the scow to pile their belongings into, the sloop probably towing it.
Slowly, with infinite regret, he came to the conclusion that he was alone. It was Dolfus he'd really been looking for, oti the slim chance that he had been with Arielle. But no, Dolfus was dead; Arielle was gone. In the wink of an eye, a whole intricate world had vanished. All the vanities, the involuted sorrows, the petty quarrels; of merchants, laundresses, lovers—all these had been wiped off the slate with a single turn of the wrist. For the first time since emerging from the providential tomb with the six other survivors, he wondered what small slip had caused the blast.
One other thing he wanted to do that afternoon, but didn't do, was to climb up and see if Dolfus' “Laughing Boy,” the immense stone sculpture he had made, was still intact. Instead, he returned to the operations area with the spare undamaged jeep.
“We found most all of the Commander, Mister Sulgrave,” Lace said. “Randy's lookin' for some dress whites to put him in. He was covered with dirt and blood, so we thought we'd wash him up a little.”
“No sign of Lieutenant Dolfus?”
“Naw suh, Skully gone clean. Old Skully once tole me that when he gone he don't plan to leave no mess, and, man, he gone clean.”
“He was a man of his word, wasn't he.” Sulgrave knew he couldn't hide the edginess in his voice or the tears in his eyes, so he didn't try.
Lace turned his lean face skyward, shook his head ever so slighdy. “He was a man, that for sure.”
“The civilians seem to have left Little Misery.”
“That's all right, too, now,” Lace said. “They had their share.”
Sulgrave knew that Lace wanted to ask about Arielle, but couldn't bring himself to break the taboo—all along, the men had carried on as though they knew nothing of Dolfus and the girl, out of respect for his privacy, Sulgrave suspected.
Sulgrave said simply, “The girl must be all right. The sloop's gone off. There was no fire over there.” Lace nodded without a word, went to join the others.
It was from the same ruptured sea chest where Randy rummaged up the dress whites that Sulgrave took the red leather box marked LETTERS FROM VANNA. In the lid was a picture of the dead Commander's wife; she lived up to Dolfus' exaggerations of her beauty. Even in a photograph she was clearly a striking woman. Without a thought of what he was doing, Sulgrave made a space in the wreckage of the Commander's little house and sat down cross-legged in what had been the bedroom, and began to read.
She wrote in a fine, controlled hand that utterly belied the eye-jolting references to her carnal fantasies. Letter after letter was salted down with loving and erotically explicit threats of betrayal; these were counterpointed with detailed four-lettered descriptions of her fantasy plans for her husband when he next arrived home. Guiltily he picked up the leather box and went to supervise the closing of the Commander's makeshift coffin. To Sulgrave, the sudden thought that she, of course, was still alive came like a flash of embarrassment.
She turned and looked at Sulgrave in profile. He was looking straight ahead, unconcerned for anyone but himself, she thought. It was an attractive fault in a young man. There was something odd in his manner, something not altogether proper to the occasion.
Closed car at four. Only it's not four.
At naval funerals the last come first I remember. Symbolizes equality i
n death, but I'll hold on to this boy. Where I go he goes.
“It is difficult for me to realize that I'm a widow,” she said.
Sulgrave looked at her, uncertain.
“It's exactly as though I were on my way to my wedding,” she said. “I remember I felt the same way. Edgy. It's really very good of you to be our best man. Death and I both thank you.”
The edge of hysteria in her voice genuinely alarmed Sulgrave. Very sharply he said, “Stop it, Vanna,” calculating that the abrupt use of her first name would act on her like a slap to bring her back to reality. It was the most he dared do.
He was right. She turned and gazed at him in something between amazement and bemusement. “How did you know that I was called Vanna?”
“I hope you are not offended at my use of your first name.”
“Oh, but not my first name. My nickname.” Some urge to keep the upper hand caused her to say, “And if you really wish to call me something other than Mrs. Hake, Mr. Sulgrave, I suggest you use Vannessa, which is my given name.”
He had a choice: apologize for impudence or brazen it out. “My given name is Everett, which I have not liked since I was a child. I go by my middle name, which as you already know is Turner.”
But she kept the advantage: “Yes,” she said. “Lieutenant Dolfus mentioned you in one of his letters.”
Silenced, Sulgrave smiled politely and gazed out of the window, remembered suddenly SkuUy's extravagant praise of her beauty; but never had he given the slightest clue that he had ever written her. Sulgrave digested the incomprehensible. It was possible: Dolfus and her. It suddenly made her more desirable, he realized, unable to think further for the shifting movement of his thoughts.
There was more beneath the cold-mannered beauty of this woman than Sulgrave wanted to know; her letters to her husband had come too close to overt expression of an explosive soul, and he knew that she must be lost in the flood of an immense change in her life—as though the bitterness of having kept herself secret all the years with and without her husband was just now coming to a head, like a blister that appears only after the long walk is over.
Irrelevantly, Sulgrave thought, she said, “I am sick of being cheated out of my life.”
Sulgrave is thinking ahead, of the coffin, running over in his mind what Orval had told him. There is certainly no sense in making an embarrassment of the situation now. For one thing, he knows he has no choice.
I'll never know why. I'll never know why. Except that his being dead made his possessions also dead—Fve expressed it badly, but that was it. Her letters were merely a part of him, at least that's how I felt then. If I had had a space of time or distance to think it over, I would have undoubtedly seen it differently, but as it was there was no time and I was marooned—I fully expected to starve to death on that island Was I to know that the blast had broken windows a hundred miles away?
I'm lying, of course. I knew full well that his wife was living. I knew when I read the letters that I would someday meet her. I knew this both ways, spiritually and carnally. I read those letters because Dolfus had told me she was beautiful. I like beautiful women.
Why then should I submit to this self-examination? There is no reason for it, since no one will ever know unless I tell them. I won't tell them.
Like Ahab's boat crew, they showed up for the funeral. Even Ishmael couldn't have been more startled by their presence. They were under armed guard, of course, and very proud of their status. Being black, they stood out.
Big Randy looked much older, and who was to argue that he hadn't been through hell?
Vannessa Lee Lynch Hake, misunderstanding, thinking that the coffin contained only her husband, said, “They must have loved him.”
Why argue?
There is something about the imminence of death that makes a man seek life in its most elemental and compelling forms; Benjamin Dolfus lived in what to him was the quiet foreknowledge of doom, and lived therefore like a being quietly enraged, afraid of nothing mortal. To a man less attuned to the dead certainties of mortal error, to a man like Sulgrave, younger in years and in experience, the risks of life were statistical; but to Dolfus, a man living with life, they were absolute, certain. He was a man cursed with the crippling gift toward prophecy. Yet crippled as he was, he got around.
Sulgrave's first meeting with Dolfus had been confusing and uncertain. He sensed in the older man a kind of intensity that he had never associated with a career naval officer; Dolfus was more like the pedestrian image of the brooding poet, except that there was nothing delicate in his person or appearance to support the hackneyed image. It took longer than an afternoon of drinking beer to know the man, the being beneath the image. When Dolfus left Sulgrave before the Commander's quarters that first afternoon, Dolfus left with his secrets intact. Sulgrave was unnerved.
In all the time he knew him, Sulgrave never heard Dolfus make any really essential reference to his prior life—he learned little of his prior service experience, of his life before joining the navy, almost nothing. Dolfus had had a wife, whom he referred to only once and then in the past tense— whether she was divorced from him or separated, Sulgrave never learned. Once the Commander in a fit of irritation referred to him as “that academic bastard Dolfus.” That was a clue. But Dolfus, when questioned, amusedly admitted his birth, would go no further in discussion of the past. He seemed like a man without a past, or rather a man who addressed himself not to the past or future but simply to the present; he would often halt in mid-stride to gaze at some tree or stone or play of light that would have eluded Sulgrave had not Dolfus then shown it to him.
The relationship between Dolfus and Sulgrave cautiously o settled into something like a tutelage or apprenticeship; Dolfus often asked him to join him for a walk or a “sit,” as he called the long silent periods when together they would sit with beer cans warming in their hands and watch the sun squat into the purple sea. He always would ask Sulgrave to join him as though he were granting a junior officer a favor, or more exactly, a privilege; Sulgrave felt this order in their relationship; yet despite youth and vanity, both of which Etolfus made him sensible of, was always flattered when the casual invitation was proffered.
Moreover, in some obscure but important way, Dolfus seemed conscious of being a teacher. That was when things were going well. When things were going badly, Dolfus walked about the operations area silent and uncommunicative, as though burdened under the knowledge of his fragile and passionate mortality. At such times he wore his pessimism like a hair shirt but treated his men with extra love and respect, and indeed seemed to have some blind dedication to their special peace and contentment. They worked for him like slaves, a fact which only seemed to irritate Dolfus in a way so obscure that Sulgrave could never fathom it.
Dolfus' relation to his men was crucial to him. He fretted over them, goaded them when they were slow, listened to their troubles when they had them, settled their disputes, punished them, pardoned them, and called every one of themr not only by their first names or last, but by the curious and colorful symbolic names that they evolved among themselves.
He never let himself forget for an instant that his men were black; Sulgrave remembered when the Commander once jokingly called Dolfus a “nigger lover,” Dolfus' head had jerked back for an instant, as though struck. Then he paused, cooled it, looked out to sea, and said, “Yes, I am a nigger lover.” He nodded to himself. “Yes.” That sudden ugly turn had taken Sulgrave by surprise, since the Commander's prior mood had been one of relaxed banter after a hard day's work.
Sulgrave later asked Dolfus what was behind it.
Dolfus looked at him. “The only way to learn to love yourself is to learn to love the whole world.” He paused, evasive, looked down at the beer can in his hand, rubbing it with his thumb. “The meek shall inherit the earth.” Then he laughed, turned his head away. The laugh was hollow, full of self-reproach and melancholy. Sulgrave had learned that this laugh signaled the end of a conversation, and said n
othing more on the subject. Together they watched the sun go down. Not much later, the moon rose red out of the sea behind them.
Bonuso Hake was a violent man who didn't know it, and that made his difference. What there was of him to know was difficult for a subordinate to appraise, what lay hidden below impossible to guess. Indeed, were it not for one small thing, an appetite too awkward to conceal, he would have passed for the coolest man on the Rock. But Bonuso Hake, Commander Meander as the signifying Negroes called him, Admiral God as Dolfus called him—Bonuso Hake liked alcohol. He liked it only on occasion, but in large and un-stoppered quantities. When he drank, he drank alone, or thought he did.
Three men besides Sulgrave came to know the full extent of the secret; Dolfus, who knew all along; Orval BlueEyes, who knew because he cooked and cleaned up; Fireman First Class Randolph Handy—Big Randy—because he knew everything and was big enough to handle anything. The rest of the men knew that the Commander got drunk—that much of the word got out—but none of them knew of the rages and the smashing of furniture, sounds which they took merely for aggravated revelry, since the phonograph played dance music at full volume during these eruptions. Also, the Commander could clearly be heard laughing from time to time, loudly and at length. Of course, they weren't seeing his face.
The Commander's quarters were austere, a simple frame bungalow, painted white against the sun, that nested slightly up the slope from the other buildings. The cleavage that made the operations area the only habitable part of the Rock sloped down to the water in a small open bight that made a natural deepwater anchorage; the whole effect was of a huge green amphitheater with a sparkling blue stage. The Commander's house was fifth-row center, with the rest of the operations buildings, barracks, workshops, mess hall, chapel, all crowding the orchestra pit. Since the audience faced west, mornings were cool until ten o'clock, afternoons blazing hot till six. And though the Trades blew unceasingly up the back of the Rock and spilled over the top out to sea, the waters of the anchorage under the wind's spillway were by day ruffled only by vagrant catspaws; from noon the men on the base worked in nearly still air beneath the overriding torrent of the Trades, men parched behind a waterfall, until nightfall when the Trades slowed and descended and cleaved once more to the leeward profile of Manacle Shoal Rock. Sometimes at night, or in the dark hours of the morning, the wind would carry the sound of Dolfus' solitary jackhammer from the far side of the island, and the men on dog watch would shake their heads. “OP Skully's makin' it again,”—or, “That man sure a rock choppin' mother,”— or again, “Don't the Lieutenant get enough of that rock ax during daylight, that he gotta go out whangin' away at night?” There were a thousand remarks, a thousand jokes, and in the beginning no one on the Rock knew why he was doing it. All he would say was, “I'm giving them something to wonder at, something to think about, ponder.” Then he'd laugh and slide out of the subject, and in truth no one cared. It was something to provide comic relief, and when the night wind brought news of the distant puttering rock drill, the men, envisioning Skully wrestling with the drill and the awkward hissing air hose, would joke among themselves in the dark and, for some unaccountable reason, feel good.