Consider the broken hearts of Charles and Frances Robertson (County of Ross) by the deaths of their far-roved sons:
Hugh, a planter in Jamaica, “died of the yellow fever”
Archibald, a planter in Demerara, “died of the yellow fever”
Robert, in the East India Company’s medical service, “died of locked jaw, occasioned by the bite of a snake”
Duncan, a merchant in New Orleans, “died of the yellow fever.”
Think of the women who “died in childbed”: Sarah, Genesia, Joanna-Law, Selina, Fright-Marie, Lilia, Emma-Admonition….
Some named men “rose from a lowly birth to high and influential situation.” Some, of mighty birth, “fell afoul in adulthood to the habits of gaming, the juice of the grape, and the charms of the fair.” And some “died by the swords of conceit”—like William Gower—“unfairly killed in a duel at a tavern in Drury-Lane, February, 1725, by Major Oneby, who was tried at the Old Bailey, found guilty of murder, and ordered for execution, but during the night he cut his throat in prison.”
Twins: Nicholas and Andrew Tremayne: “Yea! such a consideration of inbred power and sympathy was in their natures, that if Nicholas was sick and grieved, Andrew felt the like pain, though they were distant and remote from each other; this too without any intelligence given unto either party…. Yea! so they lived and so they died. In the year 1564 they both served in the wars at Havre de Grace. Being both to the last degree brave, they put themselves into posts of greatest hazard. At length one of the brothers was slain, and the other instantly stepped into his place, and there in the midst of danger, no persuasion being able to remove him, he was also slain.”
THRWITT, Richard—(alive and flourishing at the time the volumes were printed in 1837) acquired his surname in A.D. 1109 from one Sir Hercules: “This Sir Hercules—severely wounded in defending a bridge, single handed, against numerous assailants, at the moment he succeeded in forcing them to retire, he fell exhausted amongst the flags and rushes of an adjoining swamp, while the attention of his party, who in the interim had rallied, was fortunately directed to the spot where he lay by a flock of lapwings (or as called in some counties tyrwhits) screaming and hovering above, as is customary with those birds when disturbed in the vicinity of their nest.”
…In 1185 Philip, (nephew of Giraldus Cambrensis) “was the first man wounded in the conquest of Ireland, and was also the first who ever manned a hawk in the island.”
Trestram and Hannah Bennerstom: husband and wife. Writ on Trestram’s tombstone: “He Died of Contagion of the Moon’s Lunacy.” On Hannah’s tombstone: “Devoured by Time at Age of 106 Years.”
And of such droll names as Pexall Brocas, Grills-Vivyan Pendarvis, Gamaliel Milner, Slyde Peregrine Walmestit, Marmaduke Slingsby, Bulstrode Peachy (by linear entanglement a forebear of Jane Austen)—it pleasured him in his great idleness to conjure for each name, feature and mien: which one given to a Hell-all raffishness? which to a dour piety? which to ordinariness?
For a mute in limbo, the two volumes were perfect companions.
Sarkis had once told him that as they approach their home waters, sailors often get “the Channels” (or “Channel Fever”)—a malady, he explained, which manifests itself by an inability to sleep and a lack of interest in food. Sarkis said he had never suffered from the Channels himself, but that over the years he had seen many a strong man brought low by it or turned by it “to conduct of an awful queerness.”
Was it then the Channels that Morgan fell victim to three or four days out from Buenos Aires? Buenos Aires being, in his mind, a kind of foot-in-the-door entrance to his home waters—still far away, but by airplane speedily reached. Quite suddenly, he ailed of an exhausting nervousness. Time—at sea always slow in passing—ceased to pass at all…. Through the last nights he thrashed in his berth and in the morning’s mirror viewed himself swollen-eyed and blank-faced, the new day a shroud on his spirit. He could not read with concentration; could not track a single thought to its conclusion. His mind was a circus of conflicting tensions. The smell of food repelled him.
In short, all the symptoms—magnified and multiplied to maddening pitch—of Channel Fever as described by Sarkis.
He was on deck, pacing back and forth with the crazed fatigue of a caged beast, when they let down the anchor in Buenos Aires. Before him the sprawled city: blurred sound of distant traffic, trails of smoke rising skyward, a Catholic dome, a Protestant steeple, the carrying barks of dogs….
Captain Tjeenk appeared at his side. He pointed to a harbor launch coming toward the ship, then made a gesture that linked Morgan to the launch.
“Ah!” Morgan breathed.
He went to his stateroom and from his berth grabbed his packed duffel bag. He was back in no time, buttoning up his coat at the captain’s side.
Incredibly, a mere twelve hours later, he boarded the plane for the flight to Miami, (the intervening hours another story for another time).
Unbelievable—the fact that he was strapping himself in: that, already, the plane’s outside starboard propeller was turning over, its sound augmented in staged degrees as, in succession, the three other propellers whirled into action, the engines revved to a high, testing wail sustained at peak before being cut back, diminuendo, to a honed thrum…. A slow crawl forward to the run-way. A ninety-degree turn into the spectral wind. A pause, equivalent to the taking of a deep breath…Go! Over a ribbon of tarmac a charged, gradual gathering of terrific speed and then—oh God!—the Icarus ascent, up and up, higher and higher, closer and closer to the stars.
He felt a mystical elation that the flight was by night.
Aloft, lost in wonder, he fell asleep.
5 The Dominions of Memory and Expectation
Toward the end of May, 1943
He would read one or two paragraphs, then look up from his book out the window of the speeding train to the surprise of a different scene: the crow-inhabited woodland of a moment ago replaced by a pasture with a stream running through it; the pasture replaced by a waterfall cascading down a wall of shale; next, a poor rural church in need of paint, but the burial plots in its adjacent cemetery well tended. To view the world thus, in occurrences of separate display, reminded him of rainy boyhood afternoons spent with his grandfather’s old-fashioned stereoscope. From a set of leather-covered boxes he would draw out, one at a time, a tinted photograph, insert it into the holding-slots of the wooden-handled “viewer,” then raise the viewer to his eyes and be amazed by the pulling depth of the three-dimensioned image that sprang before him (“As in real life”—to quote the fulfilled promise printed in tarnished silver paint on the shank of the viewer). Now, on a pond, a great blue heron arrested near a stand of reeds.
The train—a long one—rounded a curve. From his seat in its next-to-last car, he caught a fleeting glimpse of the engine before it disappeared behind an embankment, the signature of its on-going transit a trail of smoke visible over the rim of the verge.
He stole a glance at his watch: in an hour and twenty-eight minutes, the train was scheduled to arrive in Cleveland.
All in all, as regards this overland journey, he had been lucky: had had the break yesterday afternoon of obtaining a place on a Navy cargo-plane making a routine flight from Miami (via Washington, D.C.) to a military air base in New Jersey from whence, by hook and by crook, he had gotten himself into New York where, from Grand Central Station, at this day’s dawn, he had caught this train—caught it with only a few seconds to spare—for he had taken time before boarding it to telephone Maud, waking her from sleep, his voice jubilant: “I’m in New York. If I hang up right now, I’ll be able to make a train that’ll put me in Union Terminal this afternoon.”
Over her gasp, he stated the time of the train’s scheduled arrival. “Don’t drive into Cleveland alone, will you…. I’ll get out to Hatherton somehow—bum a car from Aunt Letitia maybe. I’ll call you when the train gets in. Soon. We’ll be together soon…. I must go.”
In the past he had traveled many
times over this same stretch of track, homeward bound for vacations from his schools in the East. Those long-ago journeys had been overnight ones, immensely anticipated, made frequently enough for him to know and be known by a troop of genial, white-coated Pullman car porters (“Regulars,” they called themselves) who remembered his name from trip to trip and greeted him by it as they waved him aboard and saw to him throughout the journey in a way that made him feel, in his gray-flanneled, tweed-jacketed youth, Important. Of those earlier journeys, his most affectionate recollection was of waking at dawn in a lower berth: of raising the window-shade and turning his head on the pillow and briefly scanning the fleeing terrain; briefly, for he would not be able to stay awake very long, what with that mesmerizing sound going on and on, so lulling: that rhythmic clickety-clack, clickety-clack made by the train’s wheels as they passed over the evenly spaced rail-joinings (the sound harmonized once in a while by the romantic drear of its whistle, let at road crossings). The porter would wake him in plenty of time to wash and dress for breakfast, which marvelous meal was taken in a carpeted dining-car agleam in the morning light with mirrors and tinkling glasses and silver-plated knives and forks and spoons engraved with the letters NYC (the trinity of initials known in an almost folkloric way as standing for “New York Central”), and, at nearby tables, faces lit too in anticipation of the journey’s end, always, for him, marked by his father’s waiting presence and unrestrained embrace (modified, when he turned eighteen, to an intensely rendered handshake). Back then, the journey had always been perfectly predictable.
This one, to the nth degree, was different.
This was wartime travel. No luxury of Pullman and dining-cars: instead, coaches, all similar, with fixed, upright seats filled to capacity with servicemen (beside him, a Marine captain; in the two seats in front of him, a Navy CPO and a paratrooper; directly across the aisle, an Army lieutenant and a Medical Corps corporal); and against hunger, coffee and cellophane-wrapped sandwiches and cookies dispensed at canteens set up at the front of every third or fourth coach. There was a low babble of talk around him and, at the end of the car, a noisy crap-game in progress. Some men (like his seatmate) slept, their neckties loosened, chins inclined onto chests, or heads loped over onto a shoulder, legs akimbo. A few though, like himself, were sitting in an alert, private way that suggested interior anxiety. Toward these few he felt a kinship, it being his guess that they too were freshly on leave, with, after long absence, the terrors of reunion still before them.
Distinct from today’s dawn telephone call to Maud was the first one he had made to her after his arrival in Miami: after he had been “cleared” (for reasons of security), and “checked out” by two doctors (one medical, the other, a psychiatrist), and after that, put through the tedium of filling out a myriad of forms, each a different kind of attestation of his bodily and martial resurrection, the entire process infinitely more intricate and prolonged than the vaguely similar, brief interrogation undergone at the hands of the British back in Durban. But eventually, an officer told him: “Go down the hall. Second room on your right. You can use the phone to make two calls.”
He could almost smile, now, as he thought back on that first call. Then, though, it had been a desperate affair. The room was windowless and stale-smelling and very small, its only furnishings a desk and a collapsible iron chair and a large poster tacked on one wall: LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS. He had picked up the telephone and given to a male military operator the code-number assigned to him for the allowed two calls (the second would be to his father). At the sound of the first ring his heart had begun to swell inside his chest in a way never before experienced. After two rings, the sensation of ballooning increase caused him to fear it might burst; by the third ring he was fighting for breath. The fourth ring was interrupted mid-point of its trill by Maud’s instantly recognized, unique “Hello?”—followed by the operator’s voiced need to be sure that the number reached was the correct one, after which, satisfied that it was: “Go ahead, Lieutenant.” But before he could—
“Morgan”—called out through space in the wild, convulsive way the mad shout at clouds; then repeated: “Morgan,” low, this time, and directed, as if at an arm’s length away, she suddenly saw him.
“Maud.”
There are stories of amateur mountain climbers who unwittingly dislodge a pebble crucial to the mountain’s stability, causing thereby an avalanche. Such was the effect of his saying her name; the words came so, then, between them, tumbling, one atop the other, each one a precious assurer that all which had pertained between them in the past, pertained still. It was from the memory of that call that now, in the great grip of expectation, he felt safe in his imaginings of their being together again: how it would be—be like—instead of the other way around, the other way around having been for so long an unpresumptive one.
In about twenty-five minutes…
He stood up. The action roused the Marine captain who drew his sprawled legs into line, looked at his watch, and said, “God, we’re almost there!” “Almost,” Morgan replied. He stepped over the captain’s sizable feet and, swaying in accord with the train’s movement, made his way down the aisle to the toilet at the end of the car, in which rank cubicle he did the best he could to make himself, in his mother’s remembered word, “presentable”: washed his face and hands, combed his hair, reknotted his tie, gazed in the cracked mirror at the shoulder-fit of his new uniform. (“What you do next is you go and get yourself totally reoutfitted,” had been the loonily phrased order given him on his second morning in Miami, which order, duly acted on, resulted in the motley clothes he had obtained in Durban being relegated to a trash bin—except for the loose gray linen jacket he had regularly worn at meals in the officer’s mess aboard the Dutch freighter, and which, for reasons he then did not try to understand, he chose to keep.)
With a shudder, the train came to a stop.
In a rush of movement they were all on their feet then, collecting and shouldering their gear, yawning with impatience, shuffling their way down the aisle and out the car’s doors into the dank, murky, underground world of tracks and idle locomotives and ghostly, drifting steam and the choking, immingled smells of coal and hot pistons and oil. On a grime-encrusted platform he moved apace with the hurrying others, the march a lengthy one from the train’s end forward, past all its now emptied-out cars, past, at last, its huge resting engine, on, up the rise of a ramp to a set of open iron gates beyond which lay the teeming immensity of the station’s lobby.
If she were there, would he ever find her?
He had the advantage of being tall, but so, at that bewildering moment of entry into bedlam, everyone else seemed too to be. Deafened by the noise, stunned by the sheer number of people, he stood still, embarrassed almost, by his despair that she was nowhere visible. He forced himself to order his thoughts and recalled his words spoken to her in such haste that morning: that he would telephone her on arrival; that he had urged her not to drive to Cleveland alone; that there was perhaps the problem of gas-rationing; that, all things considered, and imagining as she might have the untidy chance of missing him in the station’s throng, she had decided to remain in Hatherton; to await him there.
He must find a telephone.
The touch to his arm came from behind. He turned. Having herself found him, she stood, wordless, exploring his astounded face, her heart in her eyes. Afterwards, and for as long as he lived, he remained awed by the easy, tranquil way, then, they claimed each other, like two long-parted, never-doubting souls met in the allegories of a promised Beyond.
When they did speak, it was to say in his voice and with appeal: “I must sit down for a moment.”
And so they did, on a newly-quit near-by bench. At the marvelous first sight of her, he had uncharacteristically kissed her with his cap on. He made the formal gesture now of removing it and of looking fully at her. And she at him. “Are you all right?” she asked, and before he could muster an answer: “You’re very thin,” her eyes c
ast over with tears, a hand laid to his cheek: “Very handsome, but very thin.” Those were her first barely audible but lighting words.
“Very much in need of a shave,” was the ridiculous response he made, thankful for being able to speak at all, the while gazing at her, seeing how her beauty had deepened: that it was now fully mature, established, like a fine sculptor’s achievement.
“You are all right?” she asked again.
“Oh, yes,” he answered at once. “Only overwhelmed.”
His assurance, made so readily and positively, cleared her brow and she smiled with something like audacity, with that high look which in the past had always, always sexually stirred him, and which now, as he met it, caused him for a wild moment to read it as the harbinger of some plan she had made and arranged for and was about to verbally disclose: an intimate plot—the dreamt of, longed for very thing—whereby for a day or two they were to be alone somewhere where they weren’t known, somewhere terribly quiet, or that desire, sated, would make so. But he was wrong: wrong, that is, to the degree that what he had taken from her smile was a wrong inference, though that she did have a plan, he had no doubt; no doubt, too (as was affirmed by the sudden rush of color to her cheeks) that her plan was far other in kind than the one he had fleetingly imagined, and further, that it was a plan already irreversibly in force, beyond her power to change, the happy outcome of which (his intuition instantly informed him) meant everything to her. The crisis of her blush quickly faded, and in its place her face took on the cloaked look of a high-stakes gambler who holds a set of cards filled with risk: “Dennis drove me in,” she began mundanely, clearly with the greater thing to follow.
“Dennis,” he murmured…. He had not thought of Dennis for a long time. Dennis: a mainstay in the Leigh household, proudly self-described as “Mrs. Leigh’s driver” responsible for taking her around and about Hatherton and, once in a while, into Cleveland for a day’s shopping or an afternoon symphony concert at Severance Hall, the latter excursions undertaken when, by her own say-so, she “felt equal to the occasion.”
Matters of Chance Page 13
