The Jack Finney Reader

by Jack Finney

  I hadn't thought of that. It simply hadn't occurred to me the week before, in my interest and excitement over the letter I'd found behind the first drawer of the row; and I'd been too busy all week to think of it since. But now I set down my beer, pulled the center drawer all the way out, reached behind it and found the little groove in the smooth wood I touched. Then I brought out the second secret little drawer.

  I'll tell you what I think, what I'm certain of, though I don't claim to be speaking scientifically; I don't think science has a thing to do with it. The night is a strange time; things are different at night, as every human being knows somewhere deep inside him. And I think this: Brooklyn has changed over seven decades; it is no longer the same place at all. But here and there, still, are little islands — isolated remnants of the way things once were. And the Wister postal substation is one of them; it has changed really not at all. And I think that at night — late at night, the world asleep, when the sounds of things as they are now are nearly silent, and the sight of things as they are now is vague in the darkness — the boundary between here and then wavers. At certain moments and places it fades. I think that there in the dimness of the old Wister post office, in the dead of night, lifting my letter to Helen Worley toward the old brass door of the letter drop — I think that I stood on one side of that slot in the year 1959, and that I dropped my letter, properly stamped, written and addressed in the ink and on the very paper of Helen Worley's youth, into the Brooklyn of 1882 on the other side of that worn old slot.

  I believe that — I'm not even interested in proving it — but I believe it. Because now, from that second secret little drawer, I brought out the paper I found in it, opened it, and in rust-black ink on yellowing old paper I read:

  Please, oh, please — who are you? Where can I reach you? Your letter arrived today in the second morning post, and I have wandered the house and garden ever since in an agony of excitement. I cannot conceive how you saw my letter in its secret place, but since you did, perhaps you will see this one too. Oh, tell me your letter is no hoax or cruel joke! Willy, if it is you; if you have discovered my letter and think to deceive your sister with a prank, I pray you to tell me! But if it is not — if I now address someone who has truly responded to my most secret hopes — do not longer keep me ignorant of who and where you are. For I, too — and I confess it willingly — long to see you! And I, too, feel and am most certain of it, that if I could know you, I would love you. It is impossible for me to think otherwise.

  I must hear from you again; I shall not rest until I do.

  I remain, most sincerely, HELEN ELIZABETH WORLEY

  After a long time, I opened the first little drawer of the old desk and took out the pen and ink I'd found there, and a sheet of the note paper.

  For minutes then, the pen in my hand, I sat there in the night staring down at the empty paper on the desk top; finally, then, I dipped the pen into the old ink and wrote:

  Helen, my dear: I don't know how to say this so it will seem even comprehensible to you. But I do exist, here in Brooklyn, less than three blocks from where you now read this — in the year 1959. We are separated not by space, but by the years which lie between us. Now I own the desk which you once had, and at which you wrote the note I found in it. Helen, all I can tell you is that I answered that note, mailed it late at night at the old Wister station, and that somehow it reached you, as I hope this will too. This is no hoax! Can you imagine anyone playing a joke that cruel? I live in a Brooklyn, within sight of your house, that you cannot imagine. It is a city whose streets are now crowded with wheeled vehicles propelled by engines. And it is a city extending far beyond the limits you know, with a population of millions, so crowded there is hardly room any longer for trees. From my window as I write I can see — across Brooklyn Bridge, which is hardly changed from the way you, too, can see it now — Manhattan Island, and rising from it are the lighted silhouettes of stone-and-steel buildings more than one thousand feet high.

  You must believe me. I live, I exist, seventy-seven years after you read this; and with the feeling that I have fallen in love with you.

  I sat for some moments staring at the wall, trying to figure out how to explain something I was certain was true. Then I wrote:

  Helen: there are three secret drawers in our desk. Into the first you put only the letter I found. You cannot now add something to that drawer and hope that it will reach me. For I have already opened that drawer and found only the letter you put there. Nothing else can now come down through the years to me in that drawer, for you cannot now alter what you have already done.

  Into the second drawer, in 1882, you put the note which lies before me, which I found when I opened that drawer a few minutes ago. You put nothing else into it. and now that, too, cannot be changed.

  But I haven't opened the third drawer, Helen. Not yet! It is the last way you can still reach me, and the last time. I will mail this as I did before, then wait. In a week I will open the last drawer.

  JAKE BELKNAP

  It was a long week. I worked, I kept busy daytimes, but at night I thought of hardly anything but the third secret drawer in my desk. I was terribly tempted to open it earlier, telling myself that whatever might lie in it had been put there decades before and must be there now, but I wasn't sure, and I waited.

  Then, late at night, a week to the hour after I'd mailed my second letter at the old Wister post office, I pulled out the third drawer, reached in and brought out the last little secret drawer which lay behind it. My hand was actually shaking, and for a moment I couldn't bear to look directly — something lay in the drawer — and I turned my head away. Then I looked.

  I'd expected a long letter; very long, of many pages, her last communication with me, and full of everything she wanted to say. But there was no letter at all. It was a photograph, about three inches square, a faded sepia in color, mounted on heavy stiff cardboard, and with the photographer's name in tiny gold script down in the corner: Brunner & Holland, Parisian Photography, Brooklyn, N. Y.

  The photograph showed the head and shoulders of a girl in a high-necked dark dress with a cameo brooch at the collar. Her dark hair was swept tightly back, covering the ears, in a style which no longer suits our ideas of beauty. But the stark severity of that dress and hair style couldn't spoil the beauty of the face that smiled out at me from that old photograph. It wasn't beautiful in any classic sense, I suppose. The brows were unplucked and somewhat heavier than we are used to. But it is the soft warm smile of her lips, and her eyes — large and serene as she looks out at me over the years — that make Helen Elizabeth Worley a beautiful woman. Across the bottom of her photograph she had written, I will never forget. And as I sat there at the old desk, staring at what she had written, I understood that, of course, that was all there was to say — what else? — on this, the last time, as she knew, that she'd ever be able to reach me.

  It wasn't the last time, though. There was one final way for Helen Worley to communicate with me over the years, and it took me a long time, as it must have taken her, to realize it. Only a week ago, on my fourth day of searching, I finally found it. It was late in the evening, and the sun was almost gone, when I found the old headstone among all the others stretching off in rows under the quiet trees. And then I read the inscription etched in the weathered old stone: HELEN ELIZABETH WORLEY — 1861-1934. Under this were the words, I NEVER FORGOT.

  And neither will I.

  The Saturday Evening Post, August 1, 1959, 232(5):16-17, 48, 52, 54

  The U-19's Last Kill, Part One

  From the lobby of the little resort hotel on Fire Island, New York, a man in blue swimming trunks walked out onto the big veranda. Under one arm he carried a large, cylindrical metal tank wrapped in a tangle of canvas webbing and rubber tubing; dangling from his fingers by their straps was a pair of green, froglike flippers. In his other hand, held by the heavy cord which bound it, was a bundle of rubber — a small, deflated one-man raft, wrapped around a short paddle. Str
apped to a strong, hairless wrist, beside his watch, was a pressure gauge. For a moment he stood at the head of the brief flight of stairs leading down to the sand, looking out over the wide beach at the green-white Atlantic ahead; then he glanced up at the sun, narrowing his eyes. It was nearly noon, the sun almost overhead in a clear sky, and he welcomed the warmth of it on his untanned white skin. He was a short man in vigorous middle age, his straight brown hair thick and ungrayed; his body thin and paunchless; his calf muscles bulging strong but corded with varicose veins; his feet, on the sand-gritted wooden floor of the porch, were very flat.

  "Nice day for it, Mr. Lauffnauer." Behind him the hotel clerk had appeared in the doorway, and as Frank Lauffnauer turned, the clerk nodded at the diving equipment under his arms.

  "Yes, very good visibility." Lauffnauer smiled, and instantly the clerk's polite friendliness became genuine, for Lauffnauer smiled with his eyes, pleasurably and responsively; all of his life people had liked him for it. Unlike his pale body, his face and neck were tanned, the skin rough and masculine. A forbidding man, people usually thought — until he smiled.

  Now he smiled again, his long white teeth flashing, then he walked down the steps and began to plod through the fine ankle-deep sand toward the beach ahead. The beach was almost deserted now; several hundred yards to Lauffnauer's right a young woman in a yellow bathing suit sat reading, a small child in a sun suit digging in the sand beside her. There was no one else in sight; this was a Monday early in April, all weekend guests having gone late yesterday or early this morning.

  Reaching the water's edge, he turned to look back, studying the shore through several long seconds. Then he walked on beside the water to the north, moving briskly now on the firm-packed sand. Back of the sparsely weeded dunes into which the beach rose stood an irregular line of summer cottages, all more or less alike and typical of Fire Island in their drab, gray-shingled, weathered exteriors. He was counting these as he passed them — all of them, that is, which seemed old. The newer ones, however, he omitted from his count.

  When he had counted twenty-six houses to the north of the hotel he stopped at the water's edge, more than a mile from the hotel now, and lowered to the sand the things he had carried. The water was very placid today, waveless and undisturbed except for a slow, gentle swell which broke in less than foot-high waves into a thin froth running up to his feet. He had expected calm today.

  Kneeling in the sand now, he inflated the little raft from a tube of compressed gas which had been wrapped in it, and it quickly popped into shape; a sausage-sided, flat-bottomed, wedge-nosed little raft just big enough for one man. In addition to the short paddle and the gas bottle, there had been wrapped in it a weight belt, two coils of rope, one of them attached to a ten-pound concrete weight, and a square, white-striped red flag on a thin wooden standard. The flag he fitted into a socket at the nose of the raft; then he loaded in his other gear, dragged the raft out into the surf and began walking through the water, pushing it ahead of him.

  The bottom slanted very shallowly here, and he walked out into the ocean for a considerable distance; several hundred yards out he was only waist-deep. From time to time he glanced over his shoulder at the shore behind him; sometimes, then, moving to the left or right, keeping the twenty-sixth house directly behind him. Finally, the water chest-high, he climbed carefully into the little raft and began to paddle, again glancing regularly back at the shore to the house which was his landmark. Then, finally, a mile out from shore, he lowered the concrete weight and began sounding the bottom.

  He sounded the first time at just over seventy feet — the line was knotted at ten-foot intervals — then snubbed the line to a ring at the prow and paddled ahead. He sounded again at over eighty feet, and the third time at ninety. Once again he glanced back over his shoulder, then shrugged and tied his line, tightly this time, with a double square knot. Anchored now, in just ninety feet of water, he began to put on his diving equipment, kneeling in the raft and working carefully, adjusting the straps to a nicety. He knew it would be cold in the water; it was only April and, not far below the sun-warmed surface, the ocean would retain its winter chill. He would like to have had a rubber suit, but he had rented this equipment, and the expense of this together with the cost of his room at the hotel was all he could afford.

  He was afraid of what he was about to do. He was an experienced diver, but he was going under in a hundred feet of water or more, in the ocean, and alone. His equipment on, the lead-weighted canvas belt around his waist, he lowered his mask over his eyes and gripped the rubber mouthpiece of the breathing apparatus in his teeth. Then he stood, his back to the water, and allowed himself to fall backward into the water, the tank on his back cushioning the fall. Face-down in the water, holding onto the anchor rope, the other coil of rope in his hand, he lay just under the surface and tested his diving lung. For half a dozen slow breaths the chains of bubbles purred smoothly from the valve at the back of his neck, bursting to the surface a few inches above.

  He raised his masked head for a last look at the far-off shore, orienting himself, then began to descend the anchor rope through the sunlit green water toward the blackness below, his hands moving slowly down the thin white line. Eight or ten feet below the surface the water suddenly lost its warmth, and as the chill enveloped him he was afraid again.

  Always, not far below him, was the blackness, but he never reached it; as he descended, his arms moving regularly like slow-moving pistons, clearing his head several times during the descent, the light seemed to move with him. Presently — he had counted the knots and was eighty feet down — the water's color changed to a yellow-green; and then he saw the bottom, of clean sand, six or seven feet below the rubber-encased glass plate strapped to his face, and he grinned. He could see, he estimated, for eighty or a hundred feet in a circle around him, and now he tied the end of the rope coil in his hand to the anchor line. Then, paying out the rope as he moved, he swam just over the bottom until the rope was taut in his hand. Now, guided by the rope, he began to swim in a great circle around the anchor line of his little raft, searching with his eyes as far as he could see, glancing from time to time at his depth gauge.

  For ten minutes he swam, soaring dreamlike and effortlessly over the undersea landscape, the lifelong weight of his body gone. He had seen, so far, only fish of many sizes and kinds; crabs; shells; rotting logs; squat, black, kelplike plants or tall green ones; rusting cans; and he knew that presently he must ascend, taking minutes to do so, through the slowly decreasing pressures above him.

  But now on the opposite side of his circle he moved into deeper water. The circle of his vision had contracted with the greater depth into which he had moved, its edges a dead, black curtain. But still it was large, and the sand bottom just under his mask was still bright with green sun. Then, once again, he thrust out with his flippered feet, eyes never shifting from the far boundary of his vision, and almost instantly he stopped, braking himself hard with his arms. For this time, finally, on the ninth day of his search, a portion of the blackness ahead had failed to retreat with the rest.

  Hanging almost motionless just over the bottom, he stared at it — a narrow swatch of blackness protruding into the yellow-green circle of light of which he was the center. With a thrust of his feet he edged closer, and the section of blackness did not retreat. As always, the remainder of the formless darkness moved ahead as he did, but the narrow black strip remained behind, increasingly solid, taking shape, and protruding, now into the cone of light. And now he was certain; he was staring at a sunken ship.

  Suddenly, recklessly, he thrust himself powerfully forward, dropping his rope. As fast as he could move he flashed over the sand toward the sunken ship, then had to reach out quickly to fend himself off from the sharp prow that shot toward him through the sun-slashed green haze. His hand closed on slimed steel, and through the circle of his mask he saw the ship's bowed side curving off into the blackness beyond. Then he released his hold and began to swim slowl
y and cautiously along the ship's side, keeping a yard or more from it, following its bulge into the darkness ahead. Greenly, but clearly, in the cone of his vision, he saw the ship's side — not rust-reddened, for no reds were visible at this depth, but evenly coated with slime and a whitish moss. He swam clear around the little ship — it was no longer than a hundred feet — inspecting its sides, his excitement and certainty growing. Then he shot his body vertically upward through the green water, his masked face lifted. And now, his mask rising level with the cable-railed deck, he saw it — the tiny moss-crusted conning tower of this sunken submarine.

  He knew he had to be careful. Both hands gripping the slimed deck-rail cable, his body parallel with the ocean floor, Frank Lauffnauer lay motionless in the water, staring at the ghostly conning tower before him.

  With the palm of one hand he began sweeping the tendriled moss from the side of the little tower. An edge of flaked white paint appeared under his hand and, continuing to sweep aside the furry slime, he worked on down, increasing the arc of his swing, until he could read a portion of what had once been painted there. It was a U, followed by a dash, then he cleared the numbers following it and stared at the whole legend. U-19, it read; this ancient ship was, or had been, a German submarine. Frank Lauffnauer closed his eyes, and there, a hundred and ten feet under the surface of the ocean, he had forgotten where he was in remembering the last time he had stood on this deck.

  He pictured it; he remembered it clearly, in a sense; but he could not really recapture it. He could not even picture the face of the boy — the smooth, unlined face of a fifteen-year-old Frank Lauffnauer — who had stepped off this deck more than forty years ago. He saw this ancient submarine, new then, floating on the surface a mile off the coast of America — off Fire Island, though he did not know that then. It was night, and on this deck stood two sailors — one of them himself, wearing a broad, flat cap with long ribbons dangling from its back. They could no longer sail or fight her; there were too few of them now; he and the other man on deck — Biehler, his name was — and a waiting third man in an inflated life raft were the only able-bodied crewmen left. He had climbed with Biehler into the raft, and they paddled a dozen yards off. Sea water gushed into the ballast tanks then, the air vents roaring — he remembered the sound of it — and they sat watching the deck come awash, the water creeping up the sides of the tower.