“Went down?” I asked stupidly. “Sunk?”
“Yes,” Andressen said. “Sunk. What did you think?”
It would have been hard to say exactly what I thought, but what I felt was clear enough. It was the first time I had been this close to a ship’s disaster, and while it may not have been much of a ship—a harbor tug like the Karen Voorhees is a boat and not a ship, as Jacob Voorhees himself once informed me with great severity—the sinking was still unquestionably a disaster. And the news of it was enough to bring everyone else there to attention—MacPherson and the Noonans, Big and Little, and Skoglund and Jorgensen, the soccer enthusiasts. It was noticeable that the soccer ball which they booted back and forth for ten minutes after their dinner every night, performing miraculous feats with it among the crane tracks and hoses and lines all around, even the soccer ball was forgotten for once.
“The Karen,” MacPherson said. “That’s Wheelock’s boat. Nothing happened to him, did it?”
“No, he is all right. It was the engineer and oiler went down with her. Cusick and a new feller, Pereira. They were in the engine room when she was hit and they never had a chance. She went down in five minutes.”
“Hit by what?” I asked.
“A tanker. Fine weather and all, and she was just rounding Hallets Point and this tanker gets her signals mixed and hits her. A crazy thing. Wheelock’s been on the job for the old man all his life, every kind of weather, and it happens like that. Bang, just like that. Right into the engine room like a knife. Five minutes later she goes down, and that’s all there is to it.”
“What do you mean?” said Big Noonan. “Can’t she be put back into shape again?”
“Well now, that we don’t know until she’s in drydock. They already called the divers, and they got Merritt-Chapman to stand by for the salvage job, but it can take a little time. It’s bad water to work in down there with that current. One thing I know, it is not just a few rivets popped.”
“Cusick,” said MacPherson. “I knew him some. And his wife. A pity. A pity,” and he clicked his tongue over it.
Of us all only Joe could not afford to be a sentimentalist. “Even so,” he said to Andressen, “how the hell can we get that plate set on the Centrale, and half the night gone already? If the day shift ever got moving for once—”
“You do it anyhow,” Andressen cut in, and then he slowly shook his head. “Day shift, night shift,” he said. “Foolishness.” He nodded at the collection of Thermos bottles on the ground. “Is there hot tea in one of those things? For hot weather a hot drink to cool off.”
“I got plenty,” MacPherson said. “I wouldn’t drink the kind of coffee you get nowadays.” He filled a cup from his Thermos, and although I could see the steam rising from it, Andressen drank it down without blinking an eye, his Adam’s apple bobbing with each swallow. He handed the cup to MacPherson and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Foolishness,” he said. “This day shift, night shift thing is like children. Only next year it don’t make any difference. They don’t run a night shift at Slade.”
I think I understood him ahead of anyone else there. I was long familiar with the story of the man who broke the news of his wife’s death by starting with the way the cat singed itself knocking over a funeral candle.
I said: “You mean the old man finally sold out to Slade?”
“Well,” Andressen said, “the lawyers don’t call it that, but maybe lawyers never want to call a thing by the right name. What difference? Slade gets the whole thing next year—the yard, the barges, everything. That’s why the barges have been brought up from the Gulf. Slade wants to set up a harbor-towing division. And for the yard—well, they got big ideas. Aptheker, the engineer upstairs, he tells me they could turn out a hundred-and-twenty-foot shell like ours for twenty percent less. He says with prefabrication and new equipment and such they will make a real saving.”
“And what does that mean for us?” Joe said. “A twenty percent layoff?”
Andressen shrugged. “Twenty would be good. When it’s all over maybe fifty would be good.”
“And no night shift for sure,” said Joe.
“For sure,” Andressen said. He looked around at us, and what he saw in our faces seemed to stir his anger. “You think I did it?” he demanded. “You think it’s my fault?”
“Nobody thinks it’s your fault,” Joe said. “You don’t have to work up a sweat about it.”
“That’s what you tell me to the face,” said Andressen. “But maybe when I’m not here it’s different talk. Sure, everybody knows how it’s always my fault. I get it from the old man, I get it from the union, I even get it from you because you don’t like the day shift. But now I say something, Indian. I say the hell with it. All along I could see what was coming. I could see times change, the big fish always eats the little fish, and when the old man goes, the yard goes with him. So I got my house and car paid for, I got a little money in the bank, whatever happens I can sit and not worry. You mean I’m the only one here got that much sense? So I say, good, let everybody else worry now.”
He left us like that to our worries, and we watched him go in bleak silence. It was Skoglund who finally broke the silence. He picked up his precious soccer ball, hefted it, and looked at Jorgensen. “You want to practice some?” he asked.
“No,” Jorgensen said. “I don’t feel like.”
That seemed to sum up everybody’s feelings as well as they could be summed up. It took me the rest of the night on the job, and some sleepless hours in bed after that to realize that I had good reasons for not feeling the same as everyone else about the future. They would drag themselves toward it day by day, working out their time at Voorhees to the bitter end, but when I put together the jigsaw puzzle of my own problems it began to make an intriguing picture. The glimpse of the half-forgotten world I had seen at the reunion, Barbara’s delight with her brief entrance into that world, the menace of Avery, the eventual layoff at the yard—everything spelled out word that I had come to the time when I must move, and move fast. I must do what Napoleon hadn’t done when he found himself in the middle of a Russian winter and delayed facing the facts under his frostbitten nose until it was too late.
It was a strange analogy to think of that sweltering night while I struggled for sleep that wouldn’t come. Yet, considering everything, it would have been even stranger if I hadn’t thought of it.
THREE
And what about the cause of it all? What about the lovely Nausicaa, my seashore girl, who unwittingly presented me with such problems and solutions, all in one handy package?
I sat on the windowsill of my room, my back against the windowframe, my feet braced against the opposite frame, and I smoked and watched the night depart from Brooklyn while I considered her. Now there was a dawn freshness in the air, the faintest stirring of breeze, and if I was not properly grateful for it, it was because I was an old hand at the game and not to be fooled. When I went into the yard in the late afternoon it would be murderously hot again, and my gratitude was reserved for the knowledge that the 181 was finished, that there would be no jobs in the holes below where airblowers drew out smoke but where only reeking heat rushed in to replace it.
Meanwhile the night departed. The blackness around me became less black. The patches of gray in the garden below became gray flower beds, then flowers colored red, yellow, and blue. The factory wall at the end of the garden became a factory wall, then a dim panorama of countryside, then a blue river flowing through green countryside under a blue sky with marshmallow clouds in it. Inside the room objects took form. A closet door behind which were lacy dresses and high-heeled shoes. A dresser on which stood an economy-sized jar of cold cream, no larger than a hogshead but not much smaller. And surrounding the jar a litter of lipstick cases, a dozen or more of them, and tiny tubes and jars of eye makeup and brushes to go with them, and a sprinkling of hairpins, heavier than any others I had ever seen. And most important of all there was a large comb
and a stiff hairbrush, the twins to the set in her room. She combed and brushed her hair endlessly, undoing it and letting it spill, coal black, an ebony waterfall, to her waist, combing it through and then brushing it in a sort of trance, each stroke lifting the roundness of a breast and pressing it tight against the bodice of her dress so that the nipple was sharply outlined there, a delicious sight to see.
And on the floor beside the dresser was her stack of movie magazines, all of them except the newest one on top limp and shabby from reading and rereading, all of them making it clear that you can give three cheers for Hamlet, but what the public wants is Him and Her and what they happen to be doing off screen while the fireworks burst in Technicolor over the Mediterranean.
So I lived in her presence yet not in it, wived but not wed, empty with the need for her but aware that there was no way of fulfilling that need save by mounting one trophy on the wall, the yellow-tusked head of Avery. And who was she to do this to me? And what was she, this sole entelechy of my own private universe, its meaning and function?
When Oxley Wesson, one memorable night in the Village, popped that who are you, what are you at her, she had said politely, “I’m Barbara-Jean. I’m a friend of Egan’s,” and when he had said, “Is that all?” she had smiled at him, stunning him with the smile, and had said, “Well, it’s enough to start with, isn’t it?”
Fair enough. To start with, she had a name, and, as it happened, not even one I found pleasing. It was the hyphen did it. There is something too magnolia-scented about hyphenated names like that, something about them of the crinolined miss with corkscrew curls jumping up and down and clapping her hands gaily as the ole massuh rides up to the plantation. The name Barbara alone was not bad; Varvara would have come much closer to the actuality, if, as I liked to imagine, Circassian beauties were sometimes named Varvara. Not that I had ever seen a Circassian beauty or ever expected to. All I knew was that Barbara looked like one.
Her age in proportion to mine had long ago been ordained as perfect by no less authorities than the brothers in Iobacchoi. In solemn bull session convened, they sat before the fireplace and discussed women. “You know, the French have a formula. They say the right age for the woman you marry is half yours plus seven. It sounds logical, doesn’t it? I mean, when you think it over.”
Crop-headed men gravely smoking pipes under the crossed initiation paddles, and oh, how gently those paddles had dealt with Ben Gennaro when he was made a brother. “Wait a second, let me figure it out—say, it does make sense. What do you think, Ingle?” “Well, the French always seem to know what they’re talking about in that area. What do you think, Egan?” I voted for it, we all voted for it, we all knew damn well that when it came to that area the French knew what they were talking about. Maybe they did. Barbara was not quite of age to vote yet, but she was half my age plus seven, and I had no complaints to make.
Name, age, and what comes next on any document? A document, say, like a wedding license? Address, of course. Ordinarily there’s no question about it, but there was one here. If Egan didn’t make the right moves, the address was likely to be Voorhees Number 7 somewhere out on Long Island Sound. If, however, he did what had to be done, the address would be of his own choosing. Meanwhile it was three doors away from his in Ethel Waterhouse’s palace of wonders and didn’t matter too much, because here it was the landlady that mattered. Her orange hair was more orange than ever, she had added another chin to the original series, her cigarette holder seemed to grow a little longer and more wobbly each year, but she ran a free and easy place, did Ethel. She had no room in her heart for young marrieds, but young lovers she understood, especially if she was paid a fair price for her understanding. She was as merrily venal as a politician, cackled loudly as an old hen when she took what I paid her to mother my mistress and to be like the three wise monkeys in all regards. She knew her value, and she collected to the last penny for it.
So much for the address, so much for the vital statistics which are, in truth, the least vital part of any woman. She is, when it comes to statistics, a changeable creature. She marries and changes her name and address. She grows older and changes her age. Daily she changes the shape and color of her eyes and lips. Occasionally she changes the color of her hair. She changes her clothing, not like a man who emerges in the new clothing the same man, but like someone possessed of magic so that there is always a different woman in the different clothing, a woman for every occasion, a woman for every hour if needs be. So, of course, her statistics at any given time are as meaningless as the stage sets they carted out of the theater yesterday when the play closed.
Then what of the immutable Barbara, the inward Barbara, the Barbara I wanted?
For one thing, she was an inveterate liar—no, call it romancer—but was so transparent about it, so inept at it, that it was always easy to separate the romance from the reality. We made an Othello and Desdemona in reverse. I loved her for the dangers she had passed, and she loved me that I did pity them. Wide-eyed, I marveled at her castles in the air, passionate lovers rebuffed, adventures on the high seas, and all the stuff of Hollywood dreams. All her dreams were written, directed, and produced by Hollywood, and yet, I sometimes wondered, what did Helen dream about while old Menelaus snored by her side during the long Spartan nights? And what, in the end, did she happily do about it?
But my own Helen must be the subject here; she started wars as well as any, and Noel Claiborne could testify to that. And apart from warmongering and lying, she was, among other things, a conscienceless beggar, a charming panhandler of small change. Fine ladies practice that vice with less aplomb than she. They say: “Do you have some change for the cigarette machine?” and they blush and lower their eyelids, ashamed, not of begging, but of the smallness of the gratuity they demand. They are used to getting a great deal. They lose poise when asking for a pittance.
Barbara did not. She had gotten nothing before; she was delighted with very little now. And when she discovered that this was one slot machine that always came up with a winner she played it steadily. “I need a dime,” she would say hopefully; or sometimes daringly, “I need fifty cents,” naming any amount that came into her head but never more than fifty cents which must have seemed like the far limits of wealth to her. Only once did she thank me for giving, and that in her own way. She languorously draped her arms over my shoulders, and rubbed the edge of the coin along the nape of my neck, and sighed, “I wish Avery was just like you. Oh, I wish he was,” bringing me close and holding me off at the same time, a trick she worked on me with uncanny skill again and again.
It took me a while to discover what she was doing with that small, steady trickle of silver, and when I did, it hurt like a bad comedy. Part of it went, I already knew, for ice cream, plain chocolate ice cream which she could eat with rapture any hour of the day or night, and of such vices are dreamers made. But another part of it was being hoarded, and that was what hurt. I was waiting alone in her room one day when I decided to inspect the mink coat hanging there in a plastic sheath, and see what telltale label might make Avery a liar and possibly a thief. There was no such label, but in running my hand over the coat I discovered the hoard in its pocket. Nickels, dimes, a few quarters, enough possibly to buy ten dishes of ice cream or ten movie magazines, stored there against the coming years. And, with a certain cruel justice, stored in the same useless, imbecilic item of conspicuous consumption that had bought and paid for her in the first place, and by the most direct route brought her to beggary.
I was angry about that, but when I tried to make her understand how I felt about the coat she refused to listen. Or, one stormy session, was suddenly caught up in a tearful rage. It was the only topic that could goad her to such a rage. Not even my cruelest teasing about her movie magazines could do it, and there were times when even I knew that the teasing had gotten out of hand.
Yet, on reflection, it was not hard to see why she should draw the distinction she did, why the coat should be meaningful to
her where the movie magazines, despite her devotion to them, were really not. And it had nothing to do with comparative cash values. What it had to do with was her perception of reality. The coat was hers, she owned it, so it was real. Beyond that reality were the unrealities she read about and saw pictured in her magazines, the glossy one-dimensional people themselves and the glossy possessions they were surrounded with. Those things were all in the big showcase. They were to be looked at, talked about, admired, but, after all, they weren’t yours so they weren’t real. It is a sort of hard peasant-minded adaptability to a hard life which shapes that kind of thinking, and she was as much the peasant as any girl behind an ox-drawn plow in some forgotten country of Europe. What is yours is yours, they know, to be spent, used, or hoarded as you will. To Barbara the coat was real, the pittance of money hidden in it was real, Avery was real, and I was real. It made a small, well-defined island surrounded by a sea of dreams. And you could swim in that sea now and then, but you could never live in it.
The more I thought about it the more I came to see that here and only here was the key to understanding who she was and what she was. She was the eternal peasant. Awkwardly devious, a grasper at small things whose value she could comprehend, sexually strait-laced, ignorant, innocent, totally herself and natural, her horizon only as far away as she could stretch her hand, she was the peasant as the Mia Gennaro I had once known, daughter of peasants, had never been and could never be. She was, in fact, the complete antithesis to that Mia Gennaro, the answer to her.
What did someone like this have to offer you? Herself. Only herself, entirely herself. Not to say I love you while studying her own image in the mirror over your shoulder, but, while lying on the bed beside you at midday, modestly garbed, talking of this and that, to suddenly roll over on you in wild impulse, her body sprawled on yours in a shuddering, feverish ecstasy, her mouth on yours, sucking, biting, devouring the moment. Not to make every occasion when you went out together a test of your ability to amuse her, but an experience to be tasted, savored, drunk to the bottom. Wherever we went, whatever company we shared, she did that.
The Winter After This Summer Page 37