The Night Ocean

by Paul La Farge

  I had thirty-five dollars in my pocket. It wasn’t enough for Europe, but surely it would have bought us two bus tickets to someplace interesting. I wonder what my life, what our lives, would have become, if I had asked Doris to run away with me; but I didn’t ask. “I have to go,” I said. “My bus leaves in an hour.” “Then you should go,” Doris agreed. She looked at me sadly. “Here,” she said, “I brought you something to read.” She gave me a paperback copy of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. I paid the check and we went outside. The haze had turned to drizzle, which had a lustering effect on the Broadway asphalt. Across the avenue, an electric billboard made of thousands of lightbulbs blinked an animated cartoon, in which a humanoid blob swung a hammer at a catlike blob. We watched in wonder as the cat got out of the way. “Lo,” I said, “the future is upon us.” “Not yet it isn’t,” Doris said. She took hold of the lapels of my jacket, pulled herself onto her toes, and kissed me. Her mouth tasted of coffee. Then she hurried to the subway. I stood there for a while longer, watching the cat dodge the hammer, then I walked to the Greyhound terminal on Fiftieth Street and began the book Doris had given me. It took me a long time to figure out that it had not been written by Alice B. Toklas, and an even longer time, a vastly longer time, to understand why.

  The next afternoon I was in Parry Sound. Clear, wholesome water washed the pebbled shore. Sailboats strained at their moorings—I had been in the city so long, I’d forgotten there was such a thing as a sailboat. Even the sky looked verdant after New York. And in the house on Waubeek Street, Walter was all right. It hadn’t been a heart attack after all: just heartburn. I was furious. “How could she say . . . ?” “It’s the business of doctors to imagine the worst,” Walter said, gently. “Now tell me about New York. Did you see the World’s Fair?” I hadn’t. “The Empire State Building?” Only from a distance. “What did you do?” I began to tell the story of how I’d nearly hip-checked Sam Moskowitz at the World Science Fiction Convention, but Walter looked puzzled and closed his eyes. “I’ll rest now,” he said. “Go down and see if your mother needs help.” Charlotte had taken most of the pans out of the kitchen cabinets, in preparation to make one of several dinners, none of which she ended up making. “Oh, chéri,” she said, without turning to look at me, “you can’t imagine how frightened I was. They said your father could die if he picks up one paper clip.” “But it was heartburn,” I said. “They said maybe,” Charlotte said. “He has to go to Toronto for more tests.” She didn’t ask me about New York. “Hug me, Leo,” she said. “I couldn’t live if I lost both of you.”

  The next day Walter was up and about, with Charlotte standing by him, making frightened inhalations every time he picked something up, which couldn’t have helped. In two days we were all sitting at the dining room table, eating Charlotte’s roast chicken with the windows open and a sweet breeze coming in from the bay. “Now, Leonard,” Charlotte said, “you’re going to have to help your father in the shop. You’ll be in charge of the inventory, and he’ll be in charge of the . . . of the books. Am I right? Inventory and books?” As if she hadn’t been married to Walter for nearly twenty years. I couldn’t tell her that I’d only come for a visit. Weeks passed. Poland fell. In the middle of October, I heard from Wollheim that he and Michel had moved into the house Pohl had rented, and so had Doc Lowndes. Kornbluth joined them in December. In June, France fell to the Germans, but in New York City, everything went on the way it had before, more or less. I thought, I really thought, I could go back whenever I liked. Then, in August 1940, Pohl married Doris Baumgardt, and I enlisted in the Canadian Army.

  6.

  Excuse me,” Spinks said. “Plumbing.” He was gone so long that I started to worry about him; then he came back, settled into his chair, tugged at the creases of his pants. On September 4, he said, I was ordered to report to the Parry Sound high school. It was a muggy late-summer day, and I wore a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of tan slacks which I hoped would look military. I took extra care polishing my shoes. When I got to the school, I found two dozen recruits idling on the football field. We stood there for half an hour, joking around, then a furniture-moving truck pulled up to the edge of the field, and Roy O’Halloran from the dairy came out of the school building in a sergeant’s uniform and ordered us to get on. The truck drove us to Huntsville, about forty miles away, and deposited us at the sports arena. O’Halloran informed us that we’d be there for a few days. “Where are we going to sleep?” asked a weaselly kid named Horace Tudhope, whom I knew from Parry Sound. He had nine brothers and sisters, and he used to run away from them periodically and get drunk and pick fights. O’Halloran pointed at the bleachers. “What the fuck, Roy? Can’t the army put us in a hotel?” O’Halloran took a step toward Tudhope and raised his hand, then he let it drop. “Private,” he said, “you don’t know anything about the army.” That was true. None of us knew anything about it.

  The army didn’t know much about us, either; nor did it care. We drilled in the rain until the wet grass wore out our shoes; we marched with wooden rifles and garden spades. We didn’t have blankets, and the nights were already cold; we lay on the bleachers in our civvies and froze. After a couple of days of that, we boarded a train for Camp Borden, outside of Barrie, Ontario, where I learned that I had joined “A” Company of the Algonquin Regiment. I was given a uniform and a pair of boots. Otherwise, Borden wasn’t much better than the sports arena. The huts where we slept had no beds, and the whole camp reeked of bleach. I quickly grew tired of parades and inspections, the fanatically pointless rehearsal of activities which had nothing to do with any war I could imagine. I drowsed through lectures on gas-mask maintenance and venereal disease, and wrote cynical letters to Wollheim about my instructors, who were a bunch of fascists if I’d ever seen one. But I also learned to shoot, and I was surprisingly good at it. Before long, I was the second-best marksman in “A” Company. The best was a phlegmatic ogre named Kip Drummond, who’d worked in lumber camps in the North Bay before the war and enlisted only because the army looked like easier work. We became friends, and I dizzied him with my ideas for science fiction stories, and enlightened him about the coming revolution of the proletariat. Unlike the Futurians, Drummond thought I was very smart.

  At the beginning of October, our regiment moved to Port Arthur, at the western end of Lake Superior. We stayed there for nine months. I joined the regimental hockey team, which had an undefeated winter on the Lakehead circuit. Drummond and I trained as scouts, and when the snow fell, we took a winter-fighting course. Gliding around on skis with a rifle slung across my back, shooting the occasional squirrel or fox, I felt very Canadian. So it was with real surprise that I received a letter from Charlotte with another letter inside it, heavy with foreign stamps. Charlotte told me that it had come from the agency in London, that I shouldn’t feel obliged to read it, and that she loved me very much no matter what. The enclosed letter was postmarked from Budapest and addressed to someone I had never met: Mr. Levente Rozen, care of the Jewish Children’s Aid Society, London, England. “Dear Cousin,” the letter began,

  Warmest salutations! You will perhaps remember me from your fourth birthday party—I was the tall fellow whose neck you found so amusing. Very much time has passed since then, and I think you must be grown up. I wonder, what profession do you practice? I am a physician, specializing in stomach complaints. As you must know, however, the laws here forbid Jews to practice medicine, so I am working in a sawmill! Dear cousin, I need your help. Will you go to the Emigration Office in London, and inform the officials there that you desire me to come live with you? Tell them that you have work for me, it doesn’t matter what, and ask them please to send this information to the English Consulate in Budapest, so that I may obtain a visa. Keep receipts for any fees you may incur, and I will repay you, when I am settled in your country.

  I hope that we will be reunited soon. You will have the pleasure of meeting my wife, Sara, and our two lovely children, Lili and Sandor,
whose name remembers that of your late father.

  Your affectionate cousin,

  Mihaly Rozen.

  It took me a remarkably long time to figure out that I was Levente Rozen. I’d never asked Walter or Charlotte the name of the child who arrived in the Toronto station fourteen years previously; nor did the name Levente, which they had kindly naturalized, summon up any former selves, at first. When I read the letter, I was merely annoyed. Why was this stranger asking me for help? A little later, I thought: Where was Mihaly Rozen when my parents were killed? Surely I could have used his help. I put his letter in my trunk and tried not to think about it, but the letter had its own ideas about what it would do. Night after night, it flew from the trunk into my dreams: I was walking up a steep street at sunset, when my father said to look, the river below us was coral red. Or else it was summer, and my beloved brother was sailing on the lake. I was playing in the grass; I was holding someone’s hand, whose hand? Levente was struggling to make himself known, but still I did nothing.

  It was around that time, too, that I learned something more about Robert Barlow. I’d been corresponding not only with Wollheim, but with other Lovecraft collectors whom I knew through Pickman’s Vault, and from one of them I heard that Robert Barlow had moved to California and set himself up as a publisher. He was going to put out an edition of Lovecraft’s essays. He’d also written a book of poems, but according to my correspondent, they were very abstruse and not Lovecraftian at all. Still, I felt a pang of envy. If only I’d been born in a different place, in a different tongue! I, too, could have been living a romantic life of letters. So I was pulled in two directions, toward Mihaly Rozen and toward Robert Barlow, the family of my blood and the family of my imagination. But for the time being, Barlow’s influence on me was faint.

  The winter ended. The snow melted; the ground turned to sticky mud. In the woods, blackflies swarmed. In April, Kip Drummond married a Port Arthur girl, and he asked me to be his best man. I gave a toast and afterward he told me how grateful he was for my friendship, while his new wife looked coolly on. “Leo’s going to be famous,” Drummond said. It was embarrassing. But the wife wasn’t bad looking, I thought. It was amazing how beautiful women found their way to these homely men. I thought of Pohl and Doris. I hadn’t dared write to her since I left New York; all I knew was what I’d heard from Wollheim, that she was living with Pohl in Greenwich Village: in a very bourgeois apartment, Wollheim said. Meanwhile, Drummond’s admiration had stirred my conscience. I got a day pass from the company C.O., Captain Kennedy, and went to the Port Arthur town hall, where I mazed from office to office, until finally a clerk in the Lands Agent’s office explained that what I wanted was impossible. Only farmworkers could immigrate to Canada, and for Jewish farmers a special permit was required. Did I own a farm? Well, then. I was far more disappointed than I’d expected to be. I went back to camp and told my story to Drummond, who had a low opinion of foreigners and Jews, but received my confession solemnly. “What should I do?” I asked. Drummond sucked his yellow teeth. “Tell your cousin to sit tight,” he said. “We’ll be there soon enough.” He was wrong. In June, we went west to Manitoba, and in the fall of 1941, we came east again to guard the Welland Canal. Then we shipped out to Newfoundland. We landed at St. John’s in February, and a month later we moved to Botwood, a village at the north end of the island, with one gravel street. We patrolled the harbor and took part in endless emergency drills: rushing off in the middle of the night to secure bridges and roads against an invasion that never came. Or mostly never came.

  One warm afternoon in March, I was on patrol with a corporal named Bob Ellenwood, beating the brush up by the Bay of Exploits, when we heard distant voices. We belly-crawled over a ridge of granite and scrub pine, and there, incredibly, was a U-boat, riding at anchor. On its narrow salt-streaked deck, two sailors in white shirts were doing something to the deck gun. I shouldered my rifle, took careful aim, and fired. The sailors were at most two hundred yards away, and I could hit the bull’s-eye at a thousand, but my shot went wide: probably I’d failed to account for the rise and fall of the submarine. The Germans vanished belowdecks. “What the fuck?” Ellenwood hissed. The two of us ran up the ridge, and we kept running, five and a half miles back to camp, where Ellenwood breathlessly informed Roy O’Halloran that we’d spotted a U-boat and I had fired on it. “He did, did he? Spinks, wait in barracks. Corporal, come with me.” I heard shouting and the rumble of vehicles rushing out of the camp. I knew I’d made a mistake, but I had no idea how serious it was. Weren’t the Germans the enemy? I was sure O’Halloran would forgive me after I’d had a chance to explain myself.

  It wasn’t O’Halloran who asked for an explanation, however, but Lieutenant Colonel Hay, our battalion C.O. Hay’s office was in a Quonset hut at the western end of the camp. The sound of typing came through the partition. “Very serious offense,” the colonel said, “breach not only of procedure, but really of discipline. And, just, stupendously bad judgment. We might have captured that U-boat yesterday, if it hadn’t been for your stupidity. Do you want to explain yourself?” “Yes, sir. I thought . . .” I felt like I was being strangled. “It was my intention to engage with the enemy . . .” “Don’t be ridiculous, Spinks. You were on patrol. What could you have been thinking?” I was asking myself the same question. What would I have accomplished if I’d hit the German? What had I hoped to accomplish? When I looked in my heart, all I found was a violent calm, like a wave of perfectly clear water. All my useless waiting had fed it. And underneath it, somewhere, was Mihaly Rozen, and his wife and two children. No, I couldn’t bring myself to regret shooting at the German. I did regret having missed. “I failed to appreciate the situation,” I said. “Sir, I regret my error deeply. Please let me have a chance to make up for it.” The colonel shook his head. It did seem, however, as if my words had convinced him of something. “Did you really think you could sink a U-boat with your rifle?” he asked. “No, sir,” I said. “Then why did you shoot?” “I’m very sorry, sir,” I said. “I don’t know.” “The riddle of the Spinks,” the colonel said. He looked down at the papers on his desk. “Well. It looks like we ought to court-martial you. There’s a chance you’ll be shot. More likely you’ll spend the rest of the war in the digger. What do you think of that?” “Sir, it’s not for me to say.” “Sergeant O’Halloran says you’re a defenseman. Is that right?” “Yes, sir.” “Hate to shoot a good defenseman. I think what we’ll do is discharge you from the service.” “Sir?” “You’re going to be a civilian again,” the colonel said. “I’m sure your mother will be pleased.”

  7.

  Two weeks later, I was back in Parry Sound. And the terrible thing was, Charlotte was pleased. “Oh, Leo, how could you?” she asked. “We’ll have to keep you out of trouble, now we know how dangerous you are. But, really, it’s just as well that you’re here. Walter hired Kevin Prince to help out in the shop, and he’s stealing us blind. I’ve told your father he has to fire him, but you know how he is. And with his heart”—she put her hand to her own—“I don’t dare to insist.” I emptied my duffel onto the floor of the attic room and lay on the too-soft mattress. My mind was numb with disappointment, and meanwhile, my body was ready to jump up and run to a waiting Jeep, to cover in the brush by a bridge and wait for the all-clear. My arms wanted to lift a box of ammunition. All that first night, I listened for footsteps on Waubeek Street, as if I’d been posted there, as part of the defense of Parry Sound, but there was nothing. Then the Canadian Pacific freight crossed the viaduct at the end of the street and my body froze in terror. After the train was gone, I fell asleep, but I was up again at four thirty, awakened by a bugle no one had blown. I went downstairs and made coffee on the stove. For the first time in my second life, I felt entirely alone.

  Such was my war: sitting in the living room, with Walter, my poor Quaker father, listening to the news. I cried with rage at the report of the Dieppe raid, where the Canadian Second Divisio
n was slaughtered on the beach, unable, with thousands of men, and tanks, and bombers roaring overhead, to get as far inland as a child with a pail of sand could toddle in a minute and a half. Why hadn’t it occurred to anyone that tanks couldn’t climb the seawall? In my mind, Pohl said, What if you equipped the tanks with a kind of ramp? You could carry it on top of the turret, and it would double as a shield . . . But I had no idea where Pohl was now. And where was Mihaly Rozen? The English-language newspapers said next to nothing about Europe’s Jews, but Charlotte had Le Devoir sent from Montreal, and they reported that Jews in Poland were being rounded up and sent to ghettos. I read with incredulity about the Nazis’ plan to ship them off to Madagascar. It was the kind of thing the Futurians would have dreamed up, but evil.