by Sloan Wilson
“I think you’re as scared as I am,” she said.
“There’s nothing to be scared of.”
“I keep telling myself that.”
For a few moments they sat like a serious old couple sipping their tea in silence. The yellow lamplight flickered on her face. Getting up, she took his cup and carried it with her own to the galley sink. When she came back, she put her arms around his neck.
“I want to learn to be good at this,” she said. “I haven’t been very good at it, have I?”
“Good enough for me. You’ve just been scared.”
“You promise you won’t make me pregnant?”
“I’ll do everything I can.”
“Let me see you put the damn thing on.”
On the few occasions they had made love before this, she had always averted her eyes, pretending that she did not know what was happening. At first he was embarrassed to have her watch him, but then he found that her open interest excited him. When she started to help him pull the contrivance all the way on, he had to beg her to stop, for fear that the game would be over before it started. The fact that she was still fully dressed while he was almost nude made him feel pleasurably perverse. He pulled her to him and she held up her hands in a gesture of surrender while he took her sweater off, and then the rest of her clothes. In the flickering yellow lamplight her full breasts and narrow waist looked like a scene from a blue movie.
“You lie down first,” she said. “This time I want to try different things.”
She was, he realized, more curious than passionate—she was allowing herself to satisfy her young lifetime of questions. She was, perhaps, not as confused as he was, not as bewildered by conflicting currents of desire, “true love” as he imagined it should be, honest lust and honest poetry. That night she was simply like a child with a new toy, and though in some sense that shocked him, it also delighted him.
“I want to try it every which way,” she said. “Now don’t hurry.”
He lasted through perhaps fifteen minutes of experimentation, but when she knelt over him with her magnificent breasts wagging only a few inches in front of his eyes while she eased herself down on him, that was the end of the first round. She laughed like a child winning a wrestling game. “I knew you couldn’t hold out for long,” she said.
At the time he had been hurt and perhaps a little scared by the realization that she certainly was having fun, but that this was not exactly the grand passion he hoped to inspire and which she inspired in him. In his lonely bunk aboard the trawler in Newfoundland, he now forgot that reservation, and remembered only how beautiful and eager she had been.
She was like a child—a beautiful woman with the face and spirit of a child, and maybe that was why he loved her so much. On that last night together when almost everything had gone wrong, he should have realized that she had never grown up. In the middle of dinner she had announced that she wanted to buy a house and fix it all up while he was gone.
“Where will we get the money?” he had said.
“Daddy will lend it to us. He says a house would be a good investment.”
“But we can’t be sure we’ll want to live anywhere near here when the war is over. I might get a job anywhere.”
“I wouldn’t think of living anywhere else but Wellesley,” she said. “Paul, don’t you understand that I need a house to keep me busy when you’re gone? I don’t want just to live at home like daddy’s little girl again. I want my own place. If we’re going to have a baby, we’re going to have to have a house, and I might already be pregnant.”
He tried to understand and felt guilty for thinking that she was silly and self-indulgent. On his last night with her she wanted to discuss colors for walls and fabrics for rugs. Her mind was so intent on all this that any other conversation was impossible. For her his ship and the ordeal ahead of him simply did not exist, and she obviously did not want to hear about it. Her own immediate future was all that interested her. Despite all her passionate talk, and her interest in sexual experimentation, he began to suspect that she had not yet grown up enough to love anybody or to think much of anyone else. Which was when he started to get drunk—
But all this was nothing to think about now when memories of the good parts of his life were necessary to get him through the bad ones. Dismissing the memories of that last night with her, he went back to that evening aboard the Valkyrie, when after winning the first wrestling match, she had decided to see just how many times she could make him perform. That had been a childish game perhaps, but he dearly wished he could play it with her again. With startling recall, he could almost smell the sweetness of her sweat in the dark cabin of the Arluk, and hear her little cries.
Lying in his narrow bunk aboard the ship, Paul hardly had to touch himself to spend his solitary passion. At almost exactly that instant the general alarm began to clang, and he heard the boatswain’s pipes shrill call, followed by Boats’s hoarse voice yelling, “General quarters drill! Man and train all guns, and bring ammunition to the breech, but do not load.”
“Oh, my!” Seth exploded as he always did at such times, and Nathan mumbled beneath his breath as he pulled on his pants. Usually Paul was the first from the wardroom during surprise drills, but under the circumstances he waited until the others had gone before changing his underwear and putting on his uniform. It was only a quarter to four in the morning, but when he scrambled to the deck, he found that the Newfoundland dawn was already bright. Mowrey was standing on the gun deck, a glass in his hand and his voice thick when he shouted, “Hurry it up, girls, or we’ll be sunk before you ever get to your guns. Where the hell have you been, Yale, down there jerking off in your bunk?”
CHAPTER 13
When the drill was finally over, Mowrey ordered Paul to the bridge.
Paul found his captain sitting on his stool, holding a glass which by its color and smell appeared to be full of undiluted whiskey.
“I see you playing poker up at the officers’ club,” Mowrey said. “Did I give you permission to go ashore?”
“No sir, but I assumed I could set watches. Both Mr. Farmer and Mr. Green wanted to stay aboard.”
“You better learn to assume nothing and never set foot off this ship without getting my direct permission,” Mowrey said quietly, looking off in the distance over Paul’s shoulder. “See them ships coming in?”
Two big, gray passenger liners were standing into the harbor, their signal masts aflutter with brightly colored flags and pennants.
“They look like troop carriers,” Paul said.
“What flags are they flying?” Mowrey asked sweetly.
“Sir?”
“Just take the white one there and the blue square in it, or the red one with the white stripe. What letters of the alphabet do they signify?”
“I don’t know, sir. I’ll start studying signal flags right away.”
“You won’t go ashore until you know them, and if you don’t learn them damn soon, that will go in your fitness report.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Have you been practicing blinker light with Greenberg, like I told you to?”
“When we were at sea, sir, I’m afraid we were both too sick for that.”
“That will look good on your fitness report. Practice blinker lights for at least an hour a day with Greenberg—he at least knows Morse code.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“And I want you to teach him navigation for at least an hour a day. He don’t even know the book part of it.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“I want you to take star sights, sun sights and moon sights right here at the wharf and let me see your computations.”
“Do you want us to take actual sights?”
“Well, sweet Jesus, I don’t want you to hold your thumb up to your nose and pretend.”
“I mean, sir, we can’t see any horizon from here. How can we take sights?”
“Is that what you’re going to tell me when we’re i
n the ice pack? ‘I mean, sir, we can’t see any horizon from here, so how can we take sights?’”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Read up on artificial horizons. Try the bubble sextant. It’s under the chart desk.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
“What’s that planet up there in the sky now?”
Paul looked up and studied the morning sky, in which just one planet glowed.
“Venus, isn’t it, sir?”
“Sweet Jesus Christ! If you don’t know, look it up, don’t guess! It’s Mars. Can’t you see that it glows red?”
“Aye, aye, sir. I’ll read up on identifying planets.”
“If you can’t identify any planet I point to inside of twenty-four hours that will go in your fitness report.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Now get the hell off the bridge. I was in a good mood until I had to look at you. How the hell do they expect me to run a ship with nothing but a farmer, a Yale and a Sheenie?”
“I’m supposed to teach you navigation and we’re supposed to practice blinker lights,” Paul said to Nathan when he returned to the wardroom. “Do you want to try to get some sleep first?”
“I don’t think I can get back to sleep now,” Nathan said, “but let’s have some coffee.”
Cookie had climbed back into his bunk, but he had left a big pot of coffee on the stove and a platter of fresh Danish pastries on the table in the forecastle. To avoid waking the sleeping men in the surrounding bunks, they took their heavy mugs of coffee to the hatch over the well deck and sat on the canvas cover, looking at the big troop ships, which were mooring on the other side of the harbor.
“I suppose they’re going to England,” Nathan said.
“Or Greenland. I hear they’re sending a lot of construction workers up there to build airfields.”
There was a pause before Nathan said, “I wonder how long it will be before this whole goddamn war is over?”
“I always think of four years,” Paul said. “That’s about the length of time most of our wars seem to last.”
“Four years.…” Nathan gave a sigh of profound sorrow.
“Of course we probably will get home way before then,” Paul said. “Have you got a wife waiting for you?”
Slowly Nathan turned his face from the troop ships toward him and Paul was shocked by the look on it.
“I’m married,” Nathan said and seemed about to add more, but took a sip of his coffee instead. “Do you want to start on signaling or navigation?”
They started on the signaling, with Nathan sending Morse code very slowly to Paul, but after only a few minutes Mowrey ordered Paul to his cabin to bring the charts up to date with some Notice to Mariners bulletins he had just discovered. Nathan climbed to the flying bridge, the only place on the ship where he could usually be alone, and stood leaning against the mast. Overhead Mars glowed brightly in a deep blue sky. Nathan knew what planet it was—in his youth astronomy had been one of his passions. When he was about fifteen he had built a three-inch telescope and mounted it on the flat roof of his father’s house in Brooklyn.
Now Nathan could almost smell the tar of that roof on a hot summer evening and hear the pigeons cooing in the nests he had built for them when he had been even younger. Homing pigeons! Becky at the age of fifteen had been even more fascinated by them than by the telescope. He had helped her to carry two pigeons to her apartment in a carefully pierced cardboard box. They had released them in her backyard and how she had marveled when they had flown straight home, a distance of almost four blocks!
“If I raised some, we could send messages back and forth.”
There never had been a time when he had not known Becky. Her parents had been friends of his mother and father, though they were so different that even as a child, Nathan had not been able to understand why. Nathan’s father was a doctor, a poor man’s doctor, and his mother served as his receptionist and nurse, though she had no formal training. The doctor’s office, which occupied almost the entire first floor of their house, was usually full of sick people, and at all hours of the night his father was called to hospitals and to the homes of the dying. Nathan remembered his house as a kind of crisis center. The conversation of his parents, even at the dinner table, was full of tales about the complications of childbirth, the sudden deaths of heart patients and the slow deaths of those with cancer. His parents were usually exhausted, and as a boy he sometimes felt that they were the only two people in the world who were attempting to save a dying city.
But Becky’s household was entirely different. Her father was a professor of the Slavic languages at Brooklyn College, where he apparently had few duties, for he spent most of his time at home reading and writing. His wife also spent most of her time reading, though she found time to cook elaborate meals and keep their apartment spotless. Even Becky at a very early age spent most of her time reading, and they all often read to each other and laughed over funny passages or discussed difficult ones. The house was always quiet, and the people in it moved in a leisurely manner compared to the frantic pace of Nathan’s parents. No one in that household was mad at anybody. The professor and his wife, who were considerably older than Nathan’s parents, had come from Warsaw to Brooklyn fairly recently, and they retained the detached amusement of highly educated foreigners about American political issues and controversies of the day which often made Nathan’s parents argue stridently when they weren’t talking about people being born or dying.
Almost nothing appeared to irritate Becky’s mother and father, and even at sixteen, she was curiously serene and sunny in a world which to Nathan was almost entirely frantic and stormy. She even liked Brian Murphy’s Christmas display.
Brian Murphy’s annual Christmas display always infuriated Nathan’s father and everyone else he knew. Murphy was a successful electrical contractor who owned a new house on a double lot in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood near Nathan’s home in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Starting in early November, Murphy put together such a garish Christmas display of his own making that his house looked like a carnival. At least a dozen Santa Clauses, some life-size, crowded his front lawn and his rooftop. Driven by electric motors, some of these kept raising their hands in greeting or just sat rocking, supposedly with mirth, but they looked to Nathan more like old men in terrible pain. On Murphy’s front porch there was a crèche with eerie life-size plaster people with vacant, staring eyes. Worst of all, the whole double lot blazed with blinking colored lights, and loudspeakers blared Christmas carols interspersed with Santa’s ho-ho-ho’s. During Murphy’s many Christmas parties, the lights and the loud music continued until the early hours of the morning.
Among Murphy’s neighbors was a fierce old friend and patient of Nathan’s father whose wife was chronically ill, and who always had trouble sleeping. After an argument, he sued Murphy for disturbing the peace, and a whole neighborhood war started with all the obvious ugly undertones. Petitions were taken from door to door, and Nathan’s father appeared as a witness in court to say that his patient’s health had suffered. Murphy won the case anyway and celebrated by building a sled with life-size reindeer which rocked and blew steam or smoke from their noses on his rooftop. Spotlights played on this all night.
“Isn’t that awful?” Nathan said when he and Becky were walking past the display, and he was astonished when she laughed and said, “Why? I think it’s sort of marvelous.”
It turned out that Becky actually knew Brian Murphy and liked him, as she knew and liked almost everyone in the neighborhood. Murphy was an electrician who was extremely proud of his creations, and felt that he was defending his religious freedom. Most of all, he was an unappreciated artist, and when Becky introduced Nathan to him he spent an hour explaining the complex mechanisms which produced all the motion and the smoke. Embattled, pugnacious and naively proud, Brian Murphy was nothing like the devil whom Nathan’s father had described. Nathan had suddenly realized that Becky lived in a world that wa
s entirely different from the one in which he had grown up, much less frightening and more hopeful. He loved her world and he loved her.
They were childhood sweethearts, too shy and restrained to make love. They were married while he was still a graduate student, in the spring of 1936, and she supported him by working as a secretary at Brooklyn College. They were both surprised when only a few months after their wedding her parents decided to go back to Poland. Although they had never complained, they apparently had never really been happy in America, and now that their daughter was settled in the new country, they decided to go home again.
Becky startled Nathan by asking if he would like to move to Warsaw, where, she said, her father could get him a good university position. She appeared to understand his refusal, but she was depressed for a long time after her parents left, and talked a lot of visiting them, which their slender budget made almost impossible. In 1938, she began trying to persuade them to come back to New York, and for a year they kept up a running debate by mail. One reason that her father wanted to stay in Poland was that he had an invalid mother and two sisters there. Becky kept trying to devise plans which would make it possible to bring them all over.
Her obsession with her family in Europe hurt Nathan. She tended to subordinate everything else to it, and persuaded him to turn down a good offer from the University of Michigan because she said, “We could never get dad to go up there.” Oddly, Becky did not seem unduly worried by the rise of Hitler, and she went to Warsaw in 1939, not so much to rescue her father from the Germans, as from his mother and sisters, who, she had become convinced, were holding him in Poland almost against his will.
“I think it may be dangerous to go back there now,” Nathan said.
“Come on! You don’t really want me to bring them all back anyway. Admit it!”
He couldn’t bring himself to admit it, but they both knew she was right, if only because he suspected that she would spend most of her time with her family if they settled nearby. They were tense together a lot of the time after that, and argued about almost anything but her family.