by Saul Bellow
His knee went up and down rapidly while I read this, and his eyes were dark and anxious.
If I dwell on these individual members of the crew it’s in the nature of a memorial. For on the fifteenth day out, when we were off the Canaries, the Sam MacManus was sent down by a torpedo.
It happened while I was hearing one of these unofficial confiteors, in fact. It was night, and we must have been making twelve knots, when suddenly there came a crushing great blow on the side; we were flung down. There were buddings and crashes and then the inside stun of an explosion. We rushed for the outer deck, fast. Already hairs of fire came up through the busted plates, and the superstructure was lighted clear by the flames. Patches of water also burned close by, and the bright water approached. Hungry yells and steam blasts, plunges; the huge rafts swooped over the side, released, and the boats crashed from the davits. We scrambled up to the boats, this guy and I, and started to wind one out. It hung caught and crooked. I shouted to him to jump in and see what was fouling. He didn’t seem to get this, his eyes looking wildly at me. “Get in there!” I yelled, weirdly hoarse with the terror. Then I hopped in myself to free the boat, whereupon, the winch letting go, unbraked, the boat slammed fast and hard on the water, knocking me overboard. My thought when I went under was that the ship would suck me with it as it sank. The fear squeezed and milked the strength out of my arms and legs, but I tried to fight, hearing grunts and Orpheus pulls of string from the deep bottom, and then all the consciousness there was to me seemed a hairlash in the crushing water universe.
I came up wanting to howl but unable to; my jaws tore open only to breathe. And where was the lifeboat? Well, there were boats and rafts here and there in the water-fires. I was spitting, vomiting up sea, weeping, and straining to get distance from the flaming ship from which, in the white of the fire, men were still jumping.
I made for a boat that floated a hundred yards or so off. I labored after it in terror lest it pull away. However, I saw no oars out. I couldn’t have hollered after; my voice seemed to have gone. But it only drifted, and I made it. I grabbed the painter and called to whoever might be lying inside, for I was too beat to get in. But the boat was vacant. Then the MacManus went down. The sudden quench of the white light was how I knew it. Fire still burned all over the surface, but the current was carrying fast. I saw a loaded raft in the torn light of flames. Then I had another go at climbing into the boat. I worked my way to the middle, where the gunwale was lower. From that position I saw a guy who held on to the stern, poor bastard. I yelled to him, thrilled, glad, but his head hung back. I frantically swam behind him to see what was wrong.
“You hurt?” I asked.
“No, bushed,” he muttered.
“Come, I’ll boost you over and then you give me a hand. We’ve got to see if we can pick up any other guys.”
We had to wait until he had the strength to try. Finally I gave him a hand-stirrup, and he made it.
I waited for his assistance but it didn’t come. He let me trail for I don’t know how long. I hollered and cried, cursed, rocked the boat. No soap. At last I threw a leg over the side and toiled and dragged myself astride the gunwale. He was sitting on a thwart, there, hands between his knees. Furious, I drove my fist down on his sodden back. He lurched but otherwise didn’t move, only turned up a pair of animal-in-the-headlights eyes. “Le’ me drown, you sonofabitch? I’ll bash your brains out!” I yelled. He didn’t answer, only covered me with his cold eyes and his face twitched.
“Grab an oar and let’s go pick up survivors,” I said.
But there was only one oar to grab. The rest were gone.
There was nothing to do but sit and drift. I gazed and called over the water in case there should be someone carried out this way. But there wasn’t anybody. The fires were receding and going out. I half expected the sub to surface and take stock, and I half wanted it to. It was around, all right, beating it down in the sea. What did I think—that I’d get a chance to holler and give them a piece of my mind? No, they went away, no doubt, continuing their supper perhaps, or playing cards. And by the time night fell completely there wasn’t the light of boat or raft to be seen anywhere.
I sat and waited for daylight, when I hoped there’d something show on the horizon.
Nothing showed. At dawn we were in a haze like the swelter of an old-fashioned laundry Monday, with the sun a burning copper-bottom, and through this air distortion and diffused color you couldn’t see fifty yards. We sighted some wreckage but no boats. The sea was empty. I was awed by the death of those guys and the disappearance of the survivors, swept away. Down in the engine room they couldn’t have had much of a chance.
Glum and bitter, I started to take stock. There were smudgepots and flares for signaling, and there was no food or water problem for the time being, since there were only two of us. But who was it that fate had billeted on me? This guy sitting on the thwart whom I had beaten last night, as far as my strength permitted, what trouble would I have with him? He was the ship’s carpenter and handyman, and from one point of view I was in luck, having no manual skill or ingenuity myself. He rigged up a kind of sail by stepping up the oar; and he claimed we couldn’t be more than two hundred miles west of the Canaries, and that if we had any luck at all we’d sail right into them. He told me that every day he’d gone and looked at the charts, and so he knew exactly where we were and what the currents were doing. He figured it out with great satisfaction and self-confidence, and he seemed absolutely untroubled. About my beating and cursing him, not a single word.
He was of broad, stocky build, carrying a judicious big ball of a head, cut close. Many of his bristles were white, but not with age; he had a dark mustache that followed the corners of his mouth calmly downward. His eyes were blue and he wore specs. A pair of bleached-at-the-knees overalls dried slowly on his wide calves.
I took a flier of imagination at his past and saw him at age ten reading Popular Mechanics.
Even as I sized him up, he did me, of course.
“You’re Mr. March, the purser,” he said at last. He commanded, when he wanted to, a very cultured deep voice.
“That’s right,” said I, surprised by the sudden viola tone.
“Basteshaw, ship’s carpenter. By the way, aren’t you a Chicagoan too?”
Basteshaw, after all, was a name I had heard before. “Wasn’t your dad in the real-estate business? Around Einhorn’s, back in the twenties, there was a man named Basteshaw.”
“He dabbled in real estate. He was in the produce business. Basteshaw the Soupngreens King.”
“That’s not what Commissioner Einhorn called him.”
“What was that?”
It was too late now to back out, and so I said, “He nicknamed him Butcher-Paper.”
Basteshaw laughed. He had broad teeth. “That’s great!” he said.
Imagine! Over this trouble, solitude, danger, heartbreak of the disaster, there blows suddenly home-town familiarity, and even a faux pas about the nickname.
He didn’t respect his old father. I didn’t approve of that.
Respect? Why, it came out how he downright hated him. He was glad he was dead. I’m willing to believe old Basteshaw was a tyrant, a miser, a terrible man. Nevertheless he was the fellow’s father.
In beauty or doom colors, according to what was in your heart, the sea and skies made their cycles of day and night, the jeweled water gadding universally, the night-glittering fury setting in. The days were sultry. We sat under the crust of the canvas, in the patch of shade. There was scarcely any wind for the first few days, which was lucky.
I tried to master my anxious mind, which kept asking whether I’d ever see Stella again, or my mother, my brothers, Einhorn, Clem. I kept the smudgepot and flares by me, dry. Our chances of being picked up were not bad in these parts. It wasn’t as though we had gone down in the extreme south where there wasn’t much shipping then.
As the heat fanned over you, you sometimes heard the actual salt in the w
ater, like rustling, or like a brittle snow when it starts to melt.
Basteshaw was forever watching me through those goggles. Even during a nap he seemed to watch, his head backed off, studious, vigilant. Cousin Anna Coblin didn’t look more persistently into mirrors. There he sat, with his thick chest interposed, ponderous. He was built like a horse, this Basteshaw. As if hoofs, not hands, were on his knees. If he had hit back at me that first night there’d have been real trouble. But then we were both too weak to fight. And now he seemed to have forgotten all about it. His poise was that of a human fortress, and you could never catch him off balance. He often laughed. But while the sounds of his laughter went out into the spaces of the sea his eyes, blue and small, never lost sight of me through the goggles.
“One thing I’m glad of,” he said, “is that I didn’t meet my end by drowning. Not yet, anyway. I’d rather die of hunger, exposure, anything else. My dad, you see, drowned in the lake.”
“Did he?” Ah, then, farewell Butcher-Paper. This was when I learned of his death.
“At Montrose Beach during his vacation. Busy men often die on their holiday, as if they had no time for it during the business week. Relaxation kills them. He had a heart attack.”
“But I thought he drowned?”
“He fell in the water and was drowned. Early in the morning. He was sitting on the pier, reading the Trib. He always got up before dawn, from years in the market. The coronary was slight and wouldn’t have been fatal. It was the water in his lungs.”
Basteshaw, I discovered, loved medical and all scientific conversation of any sort.
“The guards found him when they came on duty. The afternoon papers carried a story of foul play. There was a wad of money in his pocket, big thick rings on his fingers. That infuriated me. I went down to Brisbane Street to give them a piece of my mind. I thought it was scandalous. Trading on people’s emotions like that. There was poor Ma, horrified. Murder? I forced them to print a retraction.”
I know those small paragraphs of retraction on page thirty, in tiny print.
However, Basteshaw announced it with real pride. He put on his old man’s best Borsalino hat, he told me, and he took the Cadillac out of the garage and smashed it up. He drove it into a wall on purpose. For the old man never would let him have it and kept it like a Swiss watch. The late Butcher-Paper had had a thing about breakage. When he had a violent fit and was about to smash something, Mrs. Basteshaw would cry, “Aaron, Aaron, the drawer!” Old pie tins were kept in a kitchen drawer for him that he could fling and stamp on. No matter how enraged, he always used these pie tins, not good china.
Basteshaw laughed as he told this, but I was sad for the old man.
“The car couldn’t be used in the funeral because it was in smithereens. That made it a Viking funeral, after a fashion. After he was planted my next move”—I flinched in advance—“was to break off with my cousin Lee. The old man made me get engaged to her on the ground that I trifled with her affections. After he mixed in I never intended to marry her.”
“Trifle? What did he mean?”
“That I was in the sack with her. But I swore I’d never give the old man the satisfaction.”
“You might have been in love with her, old man or no old man.”
He gave me a sharp glance. I didn’t know what sort of person I was dealing with.
“She had pulmonary phthisis, and people like that are frequently highly stimulated. Increased temperatures often act on the erogenous zones spectacularly,” said he in his lecturer’s tone.
“But was she in love with you?”
“Birds with their higher temperature also lead a more intense emotional life. I see from the way you speak of love that you don’t know a thing about psychology or biology. She needed me and therefore loved me. If another guy had been around she would have loved him. Suppose I had never been born, does that mean she wouldn’t have loved anyone? If the old man hadn’t interfered I might have married her, but he was pro so I was contra. Besides, she was dying. So I told her I couldn’t possibly marry her. Why string her along?”
Brute!
Pig!
Snake!
Murderer!
He had hastened her death. I couldn’t bear the look of him for a while.
“Within a year she died. Toward the end her face was absolutely mealy, poor girl. She was quite pretty originally.”
“Why don’t you shut up!”
He was surprised at me. “Why, what’s eating you?” he said.
“Listen, drop dead!”
He would have let me drown too, or be eaten by sharks.
Nevertheless the conversation was resumed by and by. Under the circumstances, what else?
So now Basteshaw told me about another relative, an aunt. She slept for fifteen years. And then one day suddenly arose and went about the house as if nothing had happened. “She dropped off when I was ten years old. She woke up when I was twenty-five, and she knew me right as soon as she saw me. She wasn’t even surprised.”
I’ll bet.
“One day my uncle Mort was coming home from work—this was out in Ravenswood. You know how they build the bungalows there? He was going around to the back, between two houses, and as he passed the bedroom he saw her hand reach out to pull the window blind. He recognized the hand by the wedding band, and he came close to filling his pants. He stumbled in, and sure enough, she had cooked supper and it was on the table. She said, ‘Go wash!’”
“Incredible! Could it really happen? Why, it’s a regular sleeping-beauty story. Was it sleeping sickness?”
“If she had been a beauty she wouldn’t have slept so long. My own diagnosis is some form of narcolepsy. Etiology purely mental. It may account for Lazarus. For Miss Usher of the House of Usher and many others. Only my aunt’s case is extremely illuminating. Deep secrets of life. Deeper than this ocean. To hold tight is the wish of every neurotic character. While she slept she ruled. In some part of her mind she knew what was going on, as evidenced by the fact that she could resume life after fifteen years with accuracy. She knew where things were, and she was not surprised by the changes. She had the power achieved by those who lie still.”
I had to think of Einhorn in his wheel chair, lecturing me about strength.
“While battles rage, planes fly, machinery produces, money changes hands, Eskimos hunt, kidnapers sweep the roads—that person is safe who by lying in bed can make the world come to him, or to her. My Aunt Ettl’s whole life was a preparation for this miracle.”
“It’s something, all right,” I said.
“You bet your sweet life. It’s of the utmost significance too. Do you remember how the great Sherlock Holmes doped things out in his room on Baker Street? But compared to his brother Mycroft he was no place. That Mycroft! There was a brain, March! He never budged from his club, and he was a real mastermind and knew everything. So when Sherlock was stumped he came to Mycroft, who gave him the answer. You know the reason? Because Mycroft sat tighter than Sherlock. Sitting tight is power. The king sits on his prat, and the common folks are on their feet. Pascal says people get in trouble because they can’t stay in their rooms. The next poet laureate of England—I figure—prays God to teach us to sit still. You know that famous painting of the gypsy Arab traveler sleeping with his mandolin and the lion gazing on him? That doesn’t mean the lion respects his repose. No, it means the Arab’s immobility controls the lion. This is magic. Passivity plus power. Listen to me, March, that old Rip van Winkle conked out on purpose.”
“Who took care of your aunt all that time?”
“A Polack woman—Wadjka. And let me say that after the miracle was over my uncle was in a hell of a spot. Because he had arranged his life around my sleeping aunt. She slept, and he had his card parties and his honeybunch. After she woke we all pitied him.”
“As far as compassion goes,” I said, “what about some for your aunt? She put in all that time, a chunk of her life like that. Like a long prison term practically.”
A smile began to draw Basteshaw’s mustache.
“I once was bugs on the history of art,” he said. “Instead of being on the hustle in the summer, as my old man wanted, I’d slip away to the Newberry library where I’d be the only lad among eight or ten nuns at a reading table. I picked up a book by Ghiberti once, anyhow, and it made a great impression on me. He told about a German goldsmith of the Duke of Anjou who was the equal of the great sculptors of Greece. At the end of his life he had to stand by and watch his masterpieces melted down for bullion. His labor all in vain. He prayed on his knees, ‘O Lord, creator of all, let me not follow after false gods.’ Then he went into a monastery, this holy man, where he cashed in his chips and checked out for good.”
O blight! That the firm world should give out at the end of life. Blasted! But he had God to fall back on. And what if there had been no God for him? What if the truth should be even more terrible and furious?