Morgan was engaged in reconnecting his drooped and wrinkled socks to the knee-band of his corduroy knickers. He said, “Yes, Pa,” then, looking up, appealed: “Can I tell David Hicks? I’ll swear him to secrecy.”
“All right,” his father consented. “You can tell David, but no one else.”
Some two weeks later though, Crosby, in Morgan’s presence, reported to his father that he’d just seen the snake again: “Sunning itself on top of the mulch pile, sir. I tried at it with my hoe, but it got away under the tool-shed.”
“So we have to suppose it’ll turn up again. I feel I must tell Mrs. Shurtliff and Maggie to watch where they step.”
“I guess you should.”
Morgan was told not to play near the tool-shed.
A few more days passed before, twice, in rapid succession, the snake showed itself, first, in the morning when it slithered away in front of Ansel Shurtliff as he was measuring off the wicket-points on the clipped grass of the old croquet court. (When Morgan was told of this sighting, he thought instantly of the old, large, elegantly framed photograph of his dead grandmother, clad in croquet-bloomers, mallet in hand, bending over a ball, gauging her shot)…. On the afternoon of that same day, his mother saw the snake “coiled like a rope” she said, in the shallow water of the big, tri-pedestaled bird-bath. “A peril,” his father said, disturbed to a palpable degree: “A peril.”
But again, a few lulling days passed before it reappeared, this time virtually on their door-step. Morgan spotted it…. He had been excused from the luncheon table and had gone for no particular reason into his mother’s small sitting room—an alcove off the front hall—not on his usual beat when he was at loose ends, trying to figure out how he would pass the rest of the day…. The wide French doors that led onto the terrace were closed against the outdoor heat (it was June by now), and he wandered over and looked out through them, thinking he might jog up a friend for some afternoon fishing on the pond. Would the perch bite with the sun still so high? Wondering, he settled his eyes on the closer scene—on the inviting look of the double-seater go-go swing: he might take a new National Geographic magazine out to it and, for a while, look at the pictures: just until the sun lowered itself a bit…. And then he saw it, the dark, sluggish, mordantly patterned length of it stretched out on the warmth of the terrace stones, its jeweled eyes agleam in its wide head, the thin end of its tail, slack…. He moved back from the door into the center of the room; then, still on tiptoe, with his heart atrip, he crossed the hall and at the entrance to the dining room, in a dusky voice, announced to his parents: “The snake’s on the terrace.”
His mother breathed the single word: “Gracious” his father did not waste an instant.
Morgan clung to his mother as, through the sitting room window, they watched his father, shot-gun in hand, round the ell of the house and, with steady, determined steps, move toward the snake. For the longest-seeming time, it remained still, as if blind to his approach. But then, quite suddenly, it livened: lifted its head in a wary, wicked way, flicked its tongue, and, by now thoroughly informed, gathered its strength and made to thrust itself forward. It had difficulty though, gaining traction on the smooth terrace stones, yet by means of a series of persistently performed sinuous twistings, it managed a sure, if slow, advance in the direction of the terrace’s boundering grass. Ansel Shurtliff placed the butt of the gun to his shoulder and took a following aim. In a hot whisper, Morgan asked his mother, “What’s he waiting for?” She tightened her hold on his arm. “He can’t shoot against stone,” she whispered back: “The shell pellets would ricochet.” Her hushed explanation ended just as the snake’s head touched the grass, and with that win of its element, summoned its power of speed. The instantaneous shot came like a world-ending crack of thunder. Vitally wounded, the snake writhed. With the second shot, its flailing weakened. The third settled it into death.
Awed, Morgan croaked: “He did it! Pa did it.” But as seen through the glass of the terrace door, there was no look of triumph on his father’s face: it was gray and fallen, and as Morgan understood years later, creased by sorrow.
…Now, Ansel Shurtliff said to his son: “I’m very curious to know why you’ve brought up the episode of the snake.”
“Because it applies to my current feeling about the war,” Morgan answered.
“The continuing threat of it, you mean,” his father interposed.
“Yes. That, and my need to decide what I’ll do when and if we get into it.”
His father frowned: “Not if, Morgan, only when. I have no idea what the deciding provocation will be, but whatever form it takes, I think it won’t be long in coming.” He sat straighter: “I can hardly bear the thought of your involvement.” Then, in a stronger voice: “It’s wise of you to be considering the role you’ll play in it.”
The waiter, plates in hand, was beside them. “The trout looks delicious, Frank. Thank you. How are you keeping these days?”
“All right, Mr. Shurtliff, thank you, sir.”
“Your arthritis?”
“It’s off and on,” Frank replied.
“You’re due to retire soon, aren’t you?”
“The end of the year.”
“The place won’t be the same without you. How long have you been here?”
“Forty-four years next month.” Then, with a grin: “Mr. Flagler—he’s going to do a write-up about me in the club newsletter.”
“I look forward to reading it…. Thank you very much, Frank.”
Genuine interest and unfailing courtesy, Morgan thought as he listened to this exchange: his father’s engaging way.
And, as they were alone again, Ansel Shurtliff picked up with: “I hope our trout’s as good as it looks.” Morgan had no chance to reply before: “In my judgment, you’d be better off to volunteer before the fact of our entry in the war than to wait and be drafted. That way, you can choose your service.”
“Ah—” Morgan began: “You’ve stated my thoughts precisely.” He put down his fork: “The problem is Maud,” he went on: “She’s appalled by the idea of my volunteering.”
“She feels as I do,” his father cut in with a helpless gesture: “Would that our feelings could alter the facts.”
They ate in silence for a moment. His father again took the lead: “What branch of service are you considering?”
“The Navy.”
“That would be my choice for you. Shipboard life is cleaner than foot-soldiering. I guess of all the services, the Air Force is the chanciest.”
“Speaking of which, Geoff Barrows writes that he’s being sent to England soon. He wangled it through some Royal Canadian Air Force channel. He’s very pleased; very excited. Very sure of himself.”
Ansel Shurtliff received Morgan’s last words with an ironic, impatient look: “A bravura attitude,” he said. “A cover-up of fear.” He paused; then, after considering: “I take that back. In Geoffrey, such an attitude is more likely the muscle of courage…. I guess the time has come to add his name to the growing number on my prayer-wheel.”
This final comment, spoken gently, with masculine grief, lay between them like a stone. Morgan, though, eager to continue the discourse of his own cause, thrust it aside with the abrupt question: “How can I convince Maud that the best thing I can do is to volunteer?”
“By not trying,” his father instantly replied. “Credit her, Morgan. She’s no fool. She knows there’s no escape. It’ll break her heart, but she’ll yield soon enough.”
“I’ve given myself until the middle of June.”
“That’s a reasonable dead-line.” Then, in quite another tone: “I’d like to plan a visit to you and Maud sometime in May…. Maud and I can commiserate together.” The remark held no conspiratorial hint, no intimation that he intended to posture himself as an exerting abettor to his son’s plan: its only thrust was that of resignation. He touched his lips with his napkin, then squared his shoulders: “I recommend the brandied peaches for dessert.”
A light rain was falling when they finished lunch. Beneath a raised umbrella, Morgan walked his father to his car. “Thank you, Pa. I’ll be in touch about your visit in May.”
Ansel Shurtliff nodded: “Love to Maud,” he said. “Embraces for Caroline and Julia.”
On Tuesday, May 27, President Roosevelt addressed the nation in what was called “a National Emergency Broadcast.”
The event took place in the concluding hours of Ansel Shurtliff’s four-day visit with Morgan and Maud. The three of them listened together to the broadcast, their eyes fixed on the radio as if it were a person: the king’s messenger in the disguise of a box. The living room windows were open to a breeze that stirred the curtains and let in the pastoral scent of freshly mown grass. Tessa was upstairs with Caroline and Julia.
“The war,” President Roosevelt was saying, “is approaching the brink of Western civilization itself. It is coming very close to home. The Battle of the Atlantic now extends from the icy waters of the North Pole to the frozen continent of the Antarctic.” He went on, citing the number of merchant vessels already destroyed by Axis planes and submarines “within the waters of the Western Hemisphere.” “We have,” he said, “accordingly, extended our patrol in North and South Atlantic waters. We are steadily adding more and more ships and planes to that patrol.” The president concluded the broadcast by declaring, as of the day, “an Unlimited National Emergency.”
Morgan rose from his chair and switched off the radio. His father roused himself as from a dream and in a detached voice suggested that they might all have a drink—“a pony of brandy for each,” was the way he put it. Morgan left the room to get a tray…. When he returned, his father was sitting as before, but Maud was at the window, gazing out, her head up, her back rigid. She looked as she had that long-ago evening when he paid his first formal call on her: slightly aloof, even a bit arrogant; intense, yet presciently vulnerable. In the prevailing silence, Morgan poured the brandy and carried a glass to her. He touched her arm. She looked at him briefly, her eyes immense; she took the glass from him, then turned away, and more to the walls of the room than to anyone in it, she said: “It’s no use to hope anymore.”
On Friday, June 16, he signed up as a volunteer in the United States Naval Reserve.
The chief petty-officer on duty at the recruiting headquarters in Cleveland handed him a set of papers to fill out and pointed him toward a table at which two youths, writing implements in hand, were already seated. As he joined them, one raised a naked forearm and said a bored, “Hi—” the other, also with rolled-up shirt-sleeves and markedly grubbier hands, set his eyes on Morgan in a curious and candid study of his combed hair, his shaved face, his necktie and vested suit, his age—(that, above all, Morgan felt), the hunch affirmed by the youth’s following, deferential remark: “Nice day, sir.”
Morgan nodded: “I guess it’s one we’ll always remember.”
He settled himself then on the iron chair, uncapped his fountain pen, and with a clear brow began the tedious task of filling out the blank spaces on the pages redundantly referred to by the petty-officer as “the official government documents.”
4 Giving Rise to…
Nor would we have all the stories of Atlas holding up the sky and Prometheus nailed down on the Caucasian range and Cepheus elevated among the stars in the company of his wife and daughter and her husband, if there had not been men who, in their mortal days, achieved some genuine, marvelous discoveries of supra-terrestrial truths, capable of giving rise to these fictitious fairy tales.
—CICERO, DISCUSSIONS AT TUSCULUM
She was a Liberty ship: the SS John T. Stubbins.
At Tacoma, Washington, on a windy, overcast day in early November of 1942, the lieutenant who would command her Navy gun crew when next she put to sea, boarded her, dockside, for the first time. A merchant seaman conducted him to the pilot-house: there, bent over a table in close scrutiny of a chart, was the Stubbins’s master.
“Sir—” the lieutenant addressed the captain’s posterior.
At once, though in a peculiarly mechanical way, the captain’s spine began to straighten and the body slowly to turn around (the process reminiscent of a life-size Bavarian clock-figure regulated to show itself on the stroke of the hour) until, at full face, it solemnly stopped and, fixed so, met with its own eyes those of the waiting lieutenant’s. After a seemingly faulty moment, the figure came further to life: lifted its right hand to its braided cap in acknowledgment of the lieutenant’s held salute, and then, though still wordless, it made the gesture—suddenly fluid—of extending a hand to be shaken.
Visibly relieved, the lieutenant began anew: “Sir, I’m—”
“Morgan Shurtliff,” the figure, now vocally human, cut in: “I have your papers; I’ve been expecting you…. Names interest me. Morgan.” As spoken this time by the captain, the two syllables sounded solid, like dice thrown onto the baize of a gaming table. “It’s not an everyday handle. Almost as unlikely as my own: Rupert. Rupert Wilkins in full.” He pronounced his surname formally, precisely, as would (Morgan thought) a good butler. In quality of sound, the captain’s voice was temperate—at odds with his physical appearance, which, in bearing, suggested truculence—the body stocky—(not quite as tall as Morgan felt he would have liked it to be); legs the slightly bowed ones that men of the saddle and the sea seem often, strangely, to have in common; grizzled, wiry hair; a wide intelligent brow over a rather thin, acute face; very blue, alert, steady eyes: but the voice, for all its agreeableness of timbre had a thrust to it that conveyed of authority. “As I said, I have your papers,” the captain now went on, still looking at Morgan: “I don’t mind telling you how glad I am you’re not green at your job.”
Morgan considered, then said: “If by not being green at my job you mean that I know all I should about a ship’s weaponry, you’re right. But I’ve never seen action, so in that sense I’m as green as they come.”
At this piece of information the captain gave a concurring smile. “As to not seeing action,” he said, “I can match you green for green. But you’re a full-grown man, not an inexperienced Navy princeling” (the last two words said with an abrasive twist). “Given the run before us, it’s that I’m glad for…. You know, of course, where we’re headed.”
“Yes, sir, I do,” Morgan answered. (All too well: when he’d received his orders to report to the Stubbins, the officer at Naval Headquarters in Tacoma had told him: “You’ll be going to the Red Sea,” then added: “Good luck,” in a tone of such grave sincerity as to cause Morgan’s heart to sink)…But what now was most racing through his mind was the captain’s phrase “Navy princeling,” spoken as it had been in a way that suggested the ugly possibility that Rupert Wilkins might be one of those separate-minded merchant mariners who hold grudges against Navy men (especially of junior rank and in the Naval Reserve)—which possibility of attitude, if in fact it did exist on the captain’s part—Morgan was determined not to aggravate by word or deed—a determination put to immediate test by the captain’s next question: “How do you view the assignment?”
Unsure of the question’s exact meaning, Morgan asked: “In what sense, sir?”
“Your feelings, Shurtliff,” the captain said a bit impatiently, with a look away: “How do you feel about it?”
The question seemed to Morgan both unprofessional and feckless: unprofessional because testingly intimate, and feckless for reasons so obvious as to merit little more than a hollow laugh. But he answered without hesitation, and with deep honesty: “I dread it,” then forwarded with: “And you, sir? How do
you feel about it?”
The captain’s eyes tore back to him. “Turnabout is fair play,” he said. Then: “I dread it too. I’d be a fool if I didn’t. I expect to apply my skills and to pray a lot. In this case, dread’s a spur to survival, wouldn’t you say?”
Put that way, Morgan’s affirmative reply came easily.
“What do you do in civilian life?” the captain next asked.
He’s summing me, Morgan thought. “I’m a lawyer.”
“A lawyer,” the captain repeated, mulling; and: “That takes a lot of training. Where did you get yours?”
“I went to Harvard Law School.”
“Harvard’s an expensive place…. Did you work your way through? Support yourself?”
Morgan could not tell which the captain was: a petty niggler or just possessed of a goat’s haphazard curiosity. “No,” he answered.
“You don’t look as if you would have had to…. Are you married?”
“Yes.”
“Children?”
“Twin daughters.”
“How old are they?”
“Two and a bit.”
“When did you last see your family?”
“Eighteen months ago.”
“That’s a considerable time.” The blue of the captain’s eyes had a way of changing intensity, and over his last comment the irises darkened—into sympathy, Morgan thought at first—but the virility of the lingering gaze caused him to reconsider: a kind of wrath coupled with resolve was behind the brush-stroke of the deeper hue. “War,” the captain muttered. To the single word, spoken with vehemence, Morgan remained silent. The captain, though, kept considering it, astare—perhaps at the concreteness of his private view of it—until, rather wildly—he made a gesture, an agitated kind of ridding toss, as of an object thrown into a waste-basket, after which, in the most usual of voices, he said: “We’ll be carrying lumber in the cargo holds and as many tanks as can be fitted on the deck. The loading starts this afternoon.”
Matters of Chance Page 6
