It begins with a cigarette. A Lucky Strike, filterless, the kind that could burn all the way down to the end. What everyone smoked in those hard-smoking days—as harmless, we thought, as a piece of candy. Though it was not the cigarette that caused anything.
Summer, 1951: We had been out for the evening with friends; Sam was six months old, Hal was not yet born. We were living in Philadelphia, a pair of newlyweds in our first house, an attached brick rowhome on a street of identical brick rowhomes where all day long women and children flowed in and out of one another’s houses in a constant, unyielding river: toys and bikes and strollers all over the sidewalks, always in the background the abundant sounds of family life, everyone young and getting started at last. I was working then for wages, a junior supervisor in a factory that made electric switch-gears. It didn’t matter what it was: aspirin, hubcaps, tomato soup. It could have been anything. I was little more than a clerk, though at the time I felt lucky, even important. We had no money at all; I had never been so happy.
We returned late that night to the house, nearly midnight; the babysitter, an older woman from around the corner whose husband was a greenskeeper at the town-owned golf course, was fast asleep on the sofa, the radio softly playing on the table beside her. A night out, even at the home of friends, was a splurge for us. I awoke her gently and paid her and walked her to the door.
When I returned to the kitchen I found Meredith smoking at the table.
“Sam all right?”
“Sound asleep.” She put her fist to her mouth to yawn and shook her head. “The room was a little warm. I opened a window.”
“We should go to bed, you know. He’ll be up later.”
“I know.” She nodded sleepily. “It’s just nice to sit awhile when everything’s quiet.”
I turned my back to take a bottle of milk from the fridge and pour myself a glass. Things had not been easy with Sam; he got a lot of colds, and ear infections that kept him up all night, and could run a fever so high his little body felt like a burning log. Even when he was healthy, there was always around his nose and upper lip a hardened crust of phlegm. But these were minor complaints; it was polio we feared in those days, especially in summer. The previous August, a little girl two blocks away had come down with it: the fever and backache and then the sudden paralysis, and the nighttime dash to the hospital to learn the news that everybody already knew. She had gotten it, it was said, on a family outing to the Jersey Shore. The little girl, whose name was Marie, had survived, but spent three months on an iron lung. Not a parent on the block had drawn an easy breath until all the leaves were down.
These were my last thoughts before I smelled it: a sour, acrid odor that seemed to come from everywhere in the room. My body clenched with a sudden alertness: something was burning. An aroma faintly electrical, but not quite. I turned from the counter and was about to say something, ask Meredith if she smelled it too, when I saw her eyes were closed; she had fallen asleep in her chair, her cigarette still tucked between her first and second fingers where her hand lay on the tabletop, smoke curling upward from it like a question mark. I heard a little pop, and at that instant a stronger tang was exhaled into the air around me. I realized then what the odor was. I had smelled it before, in the war.
“Christ, M. Wake up, you’ve burned yourself.”
I seized her hand and shook the cigarette from between her fingers. Bits of paper and tobacco had fused with her melted flesh. I took what was left of the cigarette and crushed it out in the ashtray.
“Get up, quickly.”
I pulled her to the sink, where I turned on the tap to run cold water over her hand. But the water that came out of the spigot was tepid. Ice, I thought; ice, to quickly cool the burn. I left her at the sink and rummaged frantically through the refrigerator, broke open a tray, and brought a cube out to hold against her hand. Blisters had formed where the cigarette had rested, tumescent bubbles of skin, filling with dark blood.
“Here, hold this.”
Wedging the ice between her fingers, I wrapped her hand with my own. Through all of this Meredith had spoken not a single word. Around us, the rank odor hung like a veil. A burn bad enough to smell, I thought.
“Good God, M, didn’t you feel it?”
“I guess I didn’t.” Her voice was quiet, almost apologetic. “I must have had too much to drink.”
“You don’t seem that drunk. You don’t seem drunk at all.”
I held the ice against her fingers another minute, then led her upstairs to the bathroom and seated her on the toilet lid. She seemed dazed, more exhausted than alarmed, and yet the pain must have been searing, enough to flood her system with adrenaline. How had she failed to feel it? I carefully washed the wound with a damp cloth, then coated her fingers with thick ointment—diaper cream, though the label said it could be used for burns as well—and wrapped them carefully with gauze.
“A doctor should probably look at this.”
I had turned my back to her, to wash my hands at the sink. In the mirror I watched her examining her wrapped hand with an expression of pure bewilderment.
“I just can’t explain it,” she said finally. “It doesn’t hurt in the least.”
“Just the shock, probably. The body’s defenses.” I turned from the sink and did my best to smile. Down the hall, Sam gave a sharp cry, fighting his way out of sleep; in another moment he would be all open eyes and flailing arms, and my attention would have to turn to him. I dried my hands on a towel and kissed Meredith’s forehead. Her skin was warm and a little damp; perhaps she’d felt it more than she’d realized. But this made no sense either. I think at that moment I had actually convinced myself there was nothing to fear.
“You’re lucky, you know,” I said. “It should have hurt like hell. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have let you fall asleep like that.”
I was not a soldier in the war. Accounts of my life often err optimistically on this point, the operative assumption being that a man of a certain age and station must have done his duty. Nor can I say that I was a brave boy who wanted to serve but was prevented from doing so by some small defect or painful personal circumstance: heart murmur, fallen arches, a widowed mother with a farm to run. I was hale, alert, and conventionally, if not passionately, patriotic: a solidly useful boy who could carry a pack and fire a rifle and die for his country if it came to that.
I was sixteen when the United States entered the war. We were living then, my parents and I—for I was an only child—in a working-class enclave of Scranton, Pennsylvania. We had moved from Des Moines when I was twelve, when my father, a history and civics teacher, had taken a job as vice principal of the local high school. All of my mother’s family was from Scranton (her maiden name was Chernesky), a vast clan of Lithuanian Catholics who, with the exception of my mother, had never moved beyond a five-block radius, and so our relocation had not been so much a step into something new as the inevitable closing of a circle: every summer I’d visited my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, and thought of Pennsylvania, with its downhearted landscape of trashy tangled forests and abandoned pit mines flooded with inky water, as something like a second home—altogether different, and promisingly so, from the open ground and oppressive exposure of the Middle West.
When war was declared, I did what any sixteen-year-old in a provincial city, the son of a respected educator, would do: I waited for my eighteenth birthday—the same day, I believed, that I would enlist. My greatest fear was that the war would end before I had a chance to enter it. But then, in May of ’42, a boy I knew slightly—we had wrestled together at the high school—was killed when his plane, a P-51 Mustang, was shot down in a raid over Berck-sur-Mer on the French coast. More followed, one every couple of months, until the following winter, when three boys from our neighborhood died in quick succession, two at the Battle of the Kasserine Pass in the Tunisian Dorsal Mountains, a third in the naval engagement at Guadalcanal.
The last of these was my second cousin—a sh
y, skinny kid with bad skin who bagged groceries at the corner store and liked to work on an old Ford in the driveway of his parents’ house, which was around the block from my own. Charlie had been two years ahead of me in school; like me, he was an only child. The summer before he’d shipped out, he’d come home on a week’s leave, and in his starched white uniform and jaunty hat had looked to me utterly transformed, confident and cool, a boy who had stepped into the circle of manhood. Even his skin had cleared up. He was an engineer’s mate—all that fooling around with the Ford had taught him a thing or two. I decided on the spot that the navy was what I wanted.
The news of his death reached us on a Saturday afternoon and traveled through the living rooms and kitchens of our neighborhood within hours. His ship had taken a Japanese torpedo broadside, cracked like an egg with the force of the blast and gone down in less than two minutes. No one could say for sure, but it seemed likely that Charlie, like many of his shipmates, had been trapped belowdecks. I thought of the way he had died, what those two minutes must have been like, the chaos and the cold darkness of the rising seawater, and men screaming all around. When the water flooded his compartment, had he tried to swim for it? Had he filled his lungs with all the air he could carry, ducked his head below the surface, and tried to make his way out somehow? Or had he been near the explosion itself and died quickly, all those unlived years of his life blasted away in an instant? I hoped, for Charlie’s sake, that it had happened that way, and then felt guilty for hoping anything at all.
Perhaps my courage failed me because of Charlie; maybe it was the thought of his ruined and sorrowful parents, now childless, as mine would be if I were killed, that made me choose as I did. I had no claim on a deferment and didn’t want one, and with everyone talking by then—this was the spring of ’43—of a European invasion, the infantry was out of the question. The Pacific had become a horror, one blood-spattered island at a time, lunatic Japanese dressed in twigs and leaves carrying knives in their teeth, holed up in caves and fighting till the death. I still wanted the sea, but I also did not wish to die in it like my cousin Charlie, so in June of that year, a week after my high school graduation, my father packed up the car and drove me north to Castine, Maine, where I enrolled in the Maritime Academy. They called us “hurry-ups,” and we were: six months of cramming my head with every kind of fact, and then I was at sea, a junior navigational officer on a tanker hauling one hundred thousand barrels of diesel fuel between the refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, and naval bases up and down the East Coast.
Oddly, after so much frantic maneuvering and worry, the war itself turned out to be one of the most peaceful periods of my life. The work was arduous, punctuated by bursts of frenzied activity whenever we made port; but a ship at sea, especially a large cargo vessel, is one of the dreamiest places on earth, a kind of floating nowhere. I passed those two years in a tranquil haze of unraveled time, my days and nights folded into one another by the rhythms of the watch and the hypnotic thrum of our engines, a basal throbbing that seemed to travel upward from the deck’s steel plates into my very bones. Though we never made it more than five hundred miles from shore—well inside the safety zone—I felt very much as if I had left the wider world behind. My favorite run was a straight shot across the gulf from the depot in Port Arthur to the naval installation at Key West; on those nights when I wasn’t on watch in the wheelhouse, I would stand and smoke on the foredeck, watching the sea and smelling the warm gulf air—always, even so far from land, kissed with a floral sweetness—and feel so alone I didn’t feel alone at all, as if I needed no one and nothing in my life. It was a sensation I loved instinctively; it seemed, like the throb of our engines, to have moved inside me; and although I did not know it at the time, I would spend the rest of my life searching to find it again.
I might have remained in the merchant service were it not for Meredith, whom I met on a night just after the end of the war, when we were docked at the naval yard in Philadelphia and I went ashore with friends, to a restaurant where, at the next table, she was eating with two girls from her office. (She worked as a clerk at the same General Electric plant where I would later work three years.) But that is another story—not a war story, as I mean now to tell. My one true war story is this:
April 30, 1945: We had just made port at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and spent the morning off-loading our tanks into the vast holding pens of diesel fuel that lined the docks. We would lie two days in New York and then set sail again, empty and riding high as we made a long arc south to Port Arthur to start it all again. The war already seemed over, like a long, bad party in its final hour. A few days before, we had learned that a U.S. patrol had converged with a Soviet unit on the Elbe, and rumors were circulating that Hitler was already dead, or gone mad, or both. All that remained was Berlin itself, though Japan was still a question. Roosevelt had been dead three weeks, and nobody trusted Truman yet, this Missouri haberdasher turned president, but these things seemed not to matter; the war would end of its own accord, whoever made the final decisions.
As a navigational officer, even the most junior of one, little was required of me during the off-loading; I spent the afternoon on deck, watching the ships come and go from the harbor, beneath a sky of unseasonable blueness and thick, doughy clouds pushed along by a bracing April wind. A new aircraft carrier, the Coral Sea, had just been launched from its locks, and now she lay at anchor, a huge city of floating gray steel almost a thousand feet long, rising twenty stories above the fouled waters of the harbor. I was enough of a patriot to experience an almost visceral stirring at the sight of her, though something else too: that small, unassailable tweak of shame that I had spent the war so far removed from any actual danger. Whenever we were in port, especially the large naval yards at Norfolk and New York, I often found myself among groups of uniformed men, the sailors on shore leave and infantrymen preparing to ship out. They pressed into the waterfront bars and restaurants and movie houses, making every space seem small with their loud voices and the rich haze of their cigarettes. The feeling that passed among them was positively electrical, like some binding, subatomic force. As merchant mariners, we were widely thought of as members of a kind of ancillary navy—technically, we were classified 2B, worker in an essential industry—and never once did anyone confront me directly with an accusation of cowardice. But I knew the truth; I could feel the truth. In those same waterfront bars, a sailor might bump into me by accident, or I might find myself standing at the rail beside a group of freshly minted PFCs on the town for one last night of fun before they shipped out; and though at such moments we might exchange a courteous word or two, always their eyes would slide past me quickly, as if I weren’t completely visible.
I was watching the Coral Sea from the fantail, feeling these things and despite it all a kind of warm happiness to pass a few empty hours in the spring sun, when I was joined by a shipmate, a man named Mauritz. Mauritz was nobody I knew very well or liked all that much; he was an old mariner, thirty years at sea and brown as the whiskey he drank fiercely, and like all the other lifers, he regarded the hurry-ups as a kind of necessary wartime burden, like gas rationing or bad coffee. The one thing I liked about him was that he played jazz guitar, not just well but expertly—in another life he might have been a professional musician. Sometimes at night he would bring his guitar into the mess or out on deck and play for us, his fingers drawing melodies of such tenderness from his instrument that the very air around him seemed different, lighter. I wondered if he had a family—surely the depth of feeling I heard in his music came from some meaningful human attachment—but I never asked, thinking also that he might be alone. I was wondering about this one night when I asked instead what the names of the songs were.
He scowled as if my question were the stupidest thing he had ever heard, and did something with his fingers to tune the strings. “No names.” I thought the conversation had ended, but then he winked at me and laughed. “You think of some, you tell me.”
Maurit
z had been dockside all morning, one of a dozen hands supervising the transfer of diesel from our tanks into the holding pens. His face and arms were so dirty with oil that the cigarette tucked behind his ear was as startlingly white as a human scalp.
“How’s it going down there?”
He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “A fucking mess. Man’s work, buddy boy. Goddamn gaskets leaked all over.” His eyes, squinting, followed my gaze over the water. “The Coral Sea?”
I nodded. “Yeah, that’s her.”
He settled in against the rail and whistled through his long dark teeth. “Eighteen five-inch guns on that son of a bitch. Like a destroyer welded to an airport. They’re renaming her the Roosevelt, what I hear.” He took the cigarette from behind his ear and tapped it on a thumbnail. “You see the papers?”
I told him I hadn’t.
“Hitler got married.” He barked a pitiless laugh. “Him and that Kraut cunt are holed up somewhere. Some fucking honeymoon!”
We stood another moment at the rail. Mauritz tapped his cigarette again, placed it to his lips, and fished in the pocket of his shirt for his lighter. The air around us was tangy with diesel fuel. It was a smell we lived with day in, day out, omnipresent as oxygen or the constant swaying of the ship’s deck. Usually I thought nothing of it, but standing beside him, the smell was unusually vivid, much stronger than it should have been. I was about to say something sarcastic about the leaking gaskets he had mentioned, when he flicked his Zippo across his pants leg and lit his cigarette.
“Mother . . . fucker.”
Mauritz was looking at his leg; a blue flame had enveloped his right thigh. Time seemed to slow as we both watched the delicately dancing blue flame on his body, a vision of wonder and strangeness—as hypnotic, in a way, as the songs from his guitar.
“Maur—”
And then the rest of him went up—up and out and away, the diesel that had soaked his pants and shirt and even his hair igniting all at once so that he seemed not so much on fire as replaced by fire, a man-size waterfall of flames. The heat and concussion shoved me back across the deck, and when I looked again all I could see were his eyes, white disks of pure amazement, and the incongruous image of his cigarette still clamped, somehow, between his blackening lips. I tried to yell but no sound came; my throat was suddenly closed, sealed tight against the heat and smoke of Mauritz as he burned, and in the instant when I should have done something—taken off my jacket to cover him with it, or pushed him to the deck to roll my body over his—he did something instead: he took one step closer to the rail, bent over it from the waist—a maestro taking his bow—and sent himself pitching into the harbor.
The Summer Guest Page 8