by John Hersey
“What drove you to leave him? Was it the women?”
“For God’s sake, Hugh,” she said, suddenly sharp. “You were his best friend. Why don’t you let sleeping dogs lie?”
* * *
—
Moose had talked a lot over the years about Vance Talbot, who had served with him on the Hornet, and I’d met Talbot several times; he’s a broker, very rich and very Reaganish now. The two were Ninety-Day Wonders—among the crop of lieutenants (junior grade), mostly just out of Ivy League colleges and mostly from “good families,” as people used to say who thought that they were in them—who’d been given a crash course at Quonset and then been sent out to do non-combat duty of various kinds on carriers. I called Talbot, and he invited me to have a drink with him at the Harvard Club.
There was a hard sheen of newness on his blue pinstripe suit. He told about the crucial day in a bored, singsong voice; it was a memorized tale, almost worn out by retellings. “The second two torpedoes—from torpedo planes, you understand—hit at almost the same time, aft, and put the ship dead in the water….” He must have known I wanted him to get to Moose, and he finally did. Three dive-bombers crashed onto the ship, he said, one on a slant into one side of the signal bridge—Moose’s general-quarters station. “It was fantastic that he wasn’t killed, the other three fellows up there were all ground up like hamburgers.” I was beginning to find Talbot’s narrative offensive. He must have seen me squirm. For my part, I could see that he was now enjoying himself. He dinged the table bell to order seconds on old-fashioneds for both of us.
But suddenly something shifted inside Talbot. He said, “Did Moose ever tell you about his terror?”
“He would never talk about the Hornet.”
“Well, old boy,” he said, “this was very deep in him. I got it out of him that night, on the destroyer that fished us out of the water. I was in awe of the man, because I kept seeing him, all day—he’d attached himself to Gowan, the exec, after the air department had left the ship, and he was toting Gowan’s briefcase under the arm that had a big bloody first-aid bandage on it, and the two of them were all over the ship, you know. Jesus, the slaughter on the ranger deck was unbelievable, and truly scary fires, and the men in the engine room in a daze over their dead machinery—and these two were as cool and quiet as if they were checking in planes on a sunny day at air plot—words of encouragement, commands when they were needed, even bearing a hand on a bucket line or on the cable detail when that cruiser took us in tow. Moose being so big, this meant something. It helped gobs do what was expected of them. I was praising Moose for this stuff that night, and he looked at me like somebody who was on the moon and said that after the plane hit the signal deck, the next thing he knew he was two decks down, trying to open a sealed bulkhead door. He said—I remember he said—fear had struck him blind. So his total control after that, the ice in his veins, when he was tagging around with Gowan—those two chaps were the eye of the hurricane—was spooky.”
All this was pronounced in those off-British north-shore-of-Long Island accents that people in the Social Register used to use. So was Talbot’s reading of the lesson, which was not mine, as I thought later about his story. “It came to me that old Moose was off his rocker, you know. It affected him. For years. How else could you explain that whole Commie involvement? Someone with his background?”
* * *
—
The sybarite betrayed the saint; I suspect the saint prevented the sybarite from having as much fun as he would have liked. I always thought of Moose’s womanizing as a concomitant, paradoxical as it may seem, of his New England decency. Probity was in his genes; he came from a line of citizens who had served at one time or another in two hundred years as preacher and teacher, as selectman, town counsel, village librarian, hayward, fence viewer, town meeting moderator, sheep-mark recorder, trainband ensign. He was deeply programmed with an urge to do the proper thing, and he very often did it, even where women were concerned—he married four of them, after all—but in the belly of the urge, one had to guess, there was something that had come down from Jonathan Edwards: a predisposition to, almost a yearning for, the threat of awful heat, a need to feel that he hung like a spider on a delicate but very strong thread, spun from his own body, over the fires in the pit. I doubt if he ever articulated or even recognized this need, if indeed he had it, but it was the only way I could glue him into one piece in my mind. I went to see Carol, Moose’s third wife—the one Margot dismissed as having strayed a bit too much herself—and she said two things that interested me. “Moose didn’t have an ounce of cruelty in him,” she said, “but he was very attractive to masochistic women.” And when we got on the subject of his unfaithfulness, she said quite coolly that sex with him was fantastic just after she had reason to think he’d cheated on her. Maybe the paradox in Moose was not just a matter of sex but cut all the way through him: the good sport at tennis with a dirty slice. He hated the war that had plucked his eyes out for an hour, yet it seemed that there was a warrior still and always embedded in him, fighting to win at any cost. And I wondered: As an attorney, was he everlastingly drawn to the underdog for good reasons, and perhaps for some not so good?
These thoughts homed in on me about three months later, when the Freedom of Information papers came through. I felt guilty reading them. I had the sneaky feeling of peeking at someone else’s mail. I had to laugh at the number of words and lines and even pages that had been blacked out on the basis of a presumed danger to national security. From our Moose? There were several accounts of interviews in which the men in dark suits had questioned “subject Bradford” over and over again on the associations leading to his defense of the Communists in court, and what fascinated me in them was the way the questioners repeatedly led Moose up to the edge of naming names, and the way Moose, obviously tempted, obviously knowing that had he done so the heat would have been withdrawn, firmly pulled back each time, toward the heat. But there were also passages that troubled me much more, when the men in dark suits would themselves name the names (most of them blotted out with black ink) and ask subject Bradford his opinion of the named, and here, I’m sorry to say, Moose didn’t do so well. And here was where my sensation of peeking, of poking into a neighbor’s garbage in search of some drab sign of his filth to hold against him, really began to bother me. Because I began to wonder whether I secretly wanted to dig up some dirt on my best friend, who was dead.
But I read on. It was all sickening because it was all so absurd. The agents’ grammar was bad. They droned along—insistent unanswerable questions. Now and then Moose got angry, and you could see the prose of the agents’ reports begin to tremble with a fantasy of this gigantic Communist, as they must have thought of him, suddenly charging at them with the chopping motions of martial arts. Mostly, though, the ritual was one of endless repetitions, circlings back, efforts to entrap Moose into fatal contradictions. Then, at last, buried in a long passage of humdrum miscellany, I found what I now realize that in my heart of hearts I may have yearned to find.
The sentence was written in the flat, affectless tone of all the rest. It simply said surveillance of Mildred Deming reported that at 23:15 p.m. on such-and-such date subject Bradford had checked in along with subject Deming at Moontop Motor Inn in Torcottville, Virginia; register showed “Mr. and Mrs. Winthrop Parsons.” I was so riveted by the resonance of this name he had chosen that for some time I didn’t realize the significance of the item. Then—Mildred Deming. Of course. I remembered. One of his possible associations during preparation of the defense of the Communists—one of the “known card carriers,” as the men in dark suits kept calling them—that they had kept drumming at Moose about, over and over, only to meet repeated calm denials from him of ever having met this particular one.
I was deeply shocked by my realization of the importance of this buried item. For all those years I had been praising Moose to everyone for his integrity—for having had
the courage to go to prison for his convictions—only to discover now that what had really put him in the noose with the FBI, and so of course with the Congressmen, was a “guilt by association” of the most sleazy sort, and his barefaced denials of it. A motel quickie. Moose had gone to prison for no better reason than that he had, in Margot’s awful phrase, fooled around—this time (the moth drawn to the candle flame) with a doxy who happened to be a known card carrier.
* * *
—
That repulsive idea pushed me toward thoughts of Moose’s death. The newspaper accounts of it had highlighted its irony. The irony that this famous lawyer, who had spent so much of his time on pro bono publico cases, who could have been far richer had he not defended so many adherents of unpopular causes, but also so many of the poor and so many of the sick, so many druggies and derelicts, so many of those lost in the murk of society’s amnesia—the irony that this man should have been mugged to death on Madison Avenue at three o’clock in the morning by a little gang of those he seemed to have loved so much. The piece in the Times reported that a witness, a certain Morris Venabel, a short-order cook going home from his night shift at the Burgher’s Burger at Madison and Seventy-third, had said that the victim, who was much larger than his three assailants, had first argued with them and then resisted. He had been stabbed just twice—in the back, as if to reinforce the irony. It had taken the witness ages to find a telephone at that hour, and by the time the police and an ambulance arrived, Bradford was dead on the sidewalk. I remember wondering, and then blaming myself for wondering, when I first read the report: Did Margot Bradford know where her husband had been at three o’clock that morning, before he started back to their pied-à-terre?
Walking down Madison on the way home from a dinner party a few nights after I read the FBI report—it was nearly midnight, and there were not many people around—I felt jumpy and out of sorts. There had been some conversation about Moose at dinner, and Fay Callender, who hardly knew him, had gone on and on in a whining voice about what a good man he was. She had got on my nerves, and I had drunk too much red wine. Now, as I walked along, I suddenly found myself drafting in my mind an account of Moose’s death for my piece. I visualized the scene. I would be the witness Venabel.
Here came this tall, well-built man, refreshed by what he’d been up to. Maybe a lone taxi would have gone uptown just then, and in the quick wash of its headlights I would see the gray suit, the arms swinging, the long lope of the pace. Then, as he reached a relatively dim stretch halfway between streetlights, three men jumped out from the recess of the entrance to an antique store. They were ahead of him, they blocked his way. One of them had something black and shiny in his hand, which might have been a water pistol—or a Saturday-night special. I couldn’t hear the words, but all three of these people, who were dwarfed by the man they had stopped, were jabbering at once. The man held up his hand in a stopping signal, said something. In my imagination I now came closer. Was he telling them he was their friend? They hooted and made demands. I imagined that I saw, he must have seen, a new glint of steel.
It was here, as I think back on it, that my reconstruction of the mugging began to go haywire. I thought I heard my best friend Moose lecturing the muggers in a loud voice now, telling them they should be ashamed of themselves, they were a disgrace to their class of people, and to their families. Did he realize, as he tried to save his own life, that he had summoned up for these hooligans the stern voice of all the generations, standing behind him, of upright men? Whether he did or not, that voice, which seemed to come to my ears as if from the pulpit, rattled me. I began to be terribly afraid. At first I had imagined that I was watching, that I was the man Venabel. But now I was horrified to find that I might be, in my imagination, one of the three attackers. He was lecturing me. Perhaps I had a weapon in my hand, I certainly had one in my mind. I imagined that I was shouting along with the other two. I could hear my voice crack as I asked, “When was ‘that time’ with Deb? Come on, Moose, old cock, tell me, you’d better tell me.” I didn’t want to hurt him—Moose, Moose, my best and only friend—but I felt that I might not be able to control what my hand might do. I was seared by the heat of my own anger. He denied and denied. What “time” was I talking about? There was no such “time.” This was all some fiction of Margot’s. I shouted that he was a liar, a liar….
When I got home, I poured myself a drink, and gradually I calmed down. I don’t know what o’clock it was when I went to my desk, gathered all the notes I’d made on the Moose piece and took them into the kitchen and dropped them into the refuse chute, from which there was no possibility of recovery.
The Captain
We were on deck making up gear that morning, tied up to Dutcher’s Duck opposite Poole’s, when the new hand came aboard. Caskie, the skipper, seated on an upended bucket, was stitching some new bait bags, his huge, meaty fingers somehow managing to swoop the sail needle with delicate feminine undulations in and out of the bits of folded net. You could buy bait bags, but would Caskie? He had a closed face, signifying nothing. We knew he must have been hurt by Manuel Cautinho, who had served him as mate nineteen long years and had suddenly walked off on him, but there was no reading Caskie’s face, any more than you could read the meditations of a rock awash at high tide off Gay Head. His was a tight-sealed set of features, immobile and enigmatic in their weather-cracked hide. His eyes were downcast, the hoods of the lids the color of cobwebs, unblinking as he steadily worked. We never knew what he thought; sometimes we wondered if he ever needed to think.
I had been bowled over with the luck of being given a site as shacker on Caskie Gurr’s Gannet. I was an apprentice, I got all the dirty work, I was salting stinking remains of pogies and yellowtail for bait with a foul tub between my feet that morning, but it didn’t matter. (You could buy frozen bait, but…) Caskie had the best reputation of any of the offshore lobstering skippers out of either Menemsha or New Bedford. Everyone said that he cared, more than most, whether his men got decent shares, and that he knew, better than most, the track of the seasonal marches of the lobbies on the seabed of the shelf out there. Gannet was known as a wise boat. Caskie’s regulars had been three senior islanders, who had been with him through a great deal of dusty weather—till Cautinho walked off for no apparent reason.
Pawkie Vincent, the engineer, sat far aft rigging a new trawl flag on a high-flyer—a marker buoy with a radar reflector on it, for one end of a line of pots. Pawkie had only nine fingers, yet he was so deft with them that it sometimes seemed he had three hands. He had lost the index finger of his right hand when it got mashed, one time, while he was shipping the steel-bound doors of a dragging net. Every once in a while as he worked, he would shake his head slightly from side to side, as if some troublesome doubt had occurred to him. Pawkie was tentative; his pauses to think things out in moments of intricate teamwork were sometimes dangerous to the rest of us.
The cook, Drum Jones, was fastening bricks into some new oak pots that had not yet become waterlogged, to hold them in place on the bottom. He had, beneath a railroad engineer’s cap, the gaunt face of someone who has seen a ghost, and he sported an odd little mustache that looked like a misplaced eyebrow and accentuated his habitual look of alarm. This made it all the more surprising that he was always cheerful, always optimistic. When we pulled up a lean trawl of pots, he’d always say the next string would be better. But it seldom had been on recent trips—so Drum’s dogged good humor was often annoying.
No one had much to say that morning. Our shares had been slim of late. Pawkie, who had a cranky wife and three wild sons in high school, had said that except for the shame of it, his family would do a damn sight better on welfare. I was an outsider, but I could see that Cautinho’s departure had suddenly ruptured a brotherhood of these older men, a closeness rich with memories of many years of risks and scrapes and injuries and quarrels, to say nothing of a never-mentioned pride in the way they had handled together their
very hard life under the discipline of their cruel and inscrutable mother, the sea. They were laconic. The only words they used were about tasks. Their tongues could not possibly have given passage to nouns like “trust,” “endurance,” “courage,” “loyalty,” or, God forbid, “love.” What stood in jeopardy now, with Cautinho gone, leaving a gap like that of a pulled tooth, was the sense of the serene and dependable teamwork Gannet’s crew had enjoyed, the delicate meshing of Caskie’s understated but revered and absolute captaincy with the known capacities—and weaknesses, such as Pawkie’s hesitations—of the other three, all working together as parts of an incarnate machine, each one knowing exactly what was expected of him and what the others could and would and wouldn’t do in moments of critical stress. One linchpin was gone now out of that smooth-running machine, and I couldn’t help wondering if it might fly apart under the strain of breaking in a new man. But of course no one could talk about any of that.
There was another thing we couldn’t talk about: The Company. That meant Sandy Persons, the owner of Gannet. Persons, a sharp little creature, only about thirty years old, in a snap-brimmed felt hat and a double-breasted suit and what looked to us like custom-made shoes, was The Company. He reputedly owned six draggers, ours out of Menemsha and the others based in New Bedford. I was aware of the hushed voices with which Pawkie and Drum and Cautinho had always talked about Persons, each time we steamed into New Bedford and tied up and unloaded our catch, after which Caskie walked off with Persons to settle up—our captain shuffling away on the stone pier with a slack pace and a bowed head. The crewmen’s voices were muffled then, I inferred, by their sense of Caskie’s everlasting humiliation that he couldn’t afford to be his own man on his own boat; that he was just another captain on broken-forty shares with a company embodied in this little peewee, who, we suspected, in our conspiratorial sympathy for Caskie, could not really be the owner but must be some kind of mob underling. We had a sense that vast, unfair, and probably crooked forces controlled our lives. You could never read on Caskie’s face, when he returned from those conferences, how he felt about this little muskrat of an owner, and you certainly wouldn’t dare ask him.