Caroline Cunningham Shurtliff
Born—28 March 1887
Died Age 36—3 April 1923
Beloved wife of Ansel Osborne Shurtliff
Mother of Morgan Cunningham Shurtliff
The text was inscribed on a bronze tablet embedded in a flower-carved slab of white marble. Near-by, there was a spring-fed pool, lily pads afloat on the water’s surface, and at the pool’s southerly rim, a pussy-willow bush.
They stood in a half-circle facing the tombstone, Maud next to Lewis Grant, Letitia with her hand through the bend of his father’s elbow, himself at his father’s right side, completing the arc…. The April day his mother was buried had been bright but chilly, and he remembered that the pussy-willow bush (today in June leaf) had been then in silver bloom and that all the time the coffin was being lowered into the earth he had kept his eyes on the bush, on its thousands of silky catkins shimmering in the cold sunlight and that he was up to a rapid count of over three hundred when he heard the first spill of spaded soil hit the sealed lid of the coffin, at which instant he had burrowed his face in the folds of his father’s dark overcoat and given way to all the perplexities and sufferings of his young grief…. “Do you tend to that pussy-willow bush, Pa?” he now asked.
“Only a bit,” his father answered. “I take out the winter-kill and cull the sterile new growth, but that’s about all. I like it to look wild, not kept.”
“It’s lovely,” Morgan said.
“Determined,” Ansel Shurtliff mused. “It keeps going on, year in and year out. That’s what I like best about it.” He consulted his pocket watch. “We ought to be on our way or we’ll be late for dinner. We’re having roast beef,” he boasted, “and as I used up most of this month’s meat-ration stamps to obtain it, I don’t want Mrs. Cromey laying the blame on us if it’s overcooked.”
But Letitia—never one to be hurried—kept staring at her sister’s tombstone, squinting at it.
“What are you thinking?” Ansel Shurtliff asked her.
Slowly, with a developing, deepening smile, she turned full face to her brother-in-law: “That she did have the most divine figure of any woman I’ve ever known.”
Morgan glanced at his father: to instantly catch his reaction to the remark; to the extraordinary remark.
His father’s richly intemperate, unsacred laughter shattered the cemetery’s quiet: “Didn’t she just!” he trumpeted: “Divine’s the only word!”
(Later, when they were alone, Maud asked him: “That exchange between Letitia and Pip—about your mother’s figure—did it surprise you as much as it did me?”
Morgan threw up his hands: “It absolutely bowled me over.”)
In Ansel Shurtliff’s house, Sunday-noon dinner was still treated as a ceremonial Occasion. A kingly banquet given by the king in his castle. To Morgan, the dining room seemed filled with the radiance of other such feasts, hugely, hugely enjoyed—savored in a bygone time of peace that predicted an aftermath of nothing more or less than an afternoon nap or a long read in a soft, big chair. But today, in the melancholy stimulation of his imminent departure, the protracted meal was an agony. If he could have been the designer of a best farewell, he would have risen from the table and, after a fast embrace of its beloved occupants, fled the scene.
When, finally, the break came between the main course and dessert, he asked his father’s permission to be excused, apologizing to him and the others, touting his supreme sacrifice of passing up dessert. “But if I don’t,” he explained, “we’ll be awfully late getting back to Hatherton.” And then, to Maud: “Don’t hurry, darling. I’ll round up Tessa and the twins and get them going at collecting all their stuff…. None of you should hurry: it’ll take me forever to get them organized.”
The king, reminded, was truer: “The time’s almost come,” he said.
“Almost.”
Maud and Tessa and the twins were in the car; beside it, Letitia and Lewis, maintaining to the end an appearance of cheer, chatting, petting Ralph’s head, stuck out through one rolled-down window, and shaking his repeatedly lifted paw. A bit away, in a sought privacy, Morgan and his father. “Open it when you get home,” Ansel Shurtliff was saying of a package he had just given Morgan. “It’s a companion book to those you bought in Durban. I found it on a dusty shelf in the back room of Tim Buchanen’s establishment. God knows how it found its way there.” He looked distraught. “I’m gabbling,” he said. “Holding you back.” His offered hand trembled.
Morgan couldn’t but wonder how he must look, standing there beside a young holly tree, taller than the tree, but in his distress slack and lanky in comparison to it.
He fumbles up into a loose adieu…. That was Troilus’s quirky line.
“Good-bye, Pa.”
“Good-bye, Morgan. Good-bye, my boy.”
Dawn of Tuesday, June 21, 1943
The sky was just beginning to brighten, just tingeing up into silver. It had been a cool night and over the lawn and meadow there was a lingerence of ground mist.
For his train’s seven A.M. departure from Union Terminal, Dennis was to drive him into Cleveland—breakfast to be eaten somewhere along the way. The evening before, Morgan had parked the Chevy on the street, away from the house. Now, by first light, he looked out their bedroom and saw Dennis leaning against the car. “He’s here.”
They had planned it so, this their farewell, that it be swift and quiet, made while Tessa and the twins were still asleep.
“Don’t come downstairs,” he pleaded. Then he bent and picked up his kit-bag. “I hope Ralph won’t bark.”
“He won’t,” Maud sobbed.
Down the length of the silent upstairs hall; down the stairs, taking from the banister its oaken strength; stealthily, across the dim interior of the downstairs hall; past his study, out the front door, into the impersonal day.
He never looked back. “Hello,” he said to Dennis. “Thank you for being on time.”
Ralph had not barked.
* * *
THE
YEAR BOOK
OF
DAILY RECREATION
AND INFORMATION,
CONCERNING
REMARKABLE MEN AND MANNERS,
TIMES AND SEASONS,
SOLEMNITIES AND MERRY MAKINGS,
ANTIQUITIES AND NOVELTIES
ON THE PLAN OF THE
EVERYDAY BOOK AND TABLE BOOK
or
EVERLASTING CALENDAR OF POPULAR AMUSEMENTS, SPORTS, PASTIMES,
CEREMONIES, CUSTOMS, AND EVENTS, INCIDENT TO EACH OF THE THREE
HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE DAYS IN PAST AND PRESENT TIMES:
FORMING A
COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE YEAR
AND A
PERPETUAL KEY TO THE ALMANAC.
BY WILLIAM HONE.
Old Customs! Oh I love the sound,
However simple they may be:
What e’re with the tune hath sanction found,
is welcome, and is dear to me.
Pride glows above simplicity,
And spurs them from her haughty mind.
And soon the poet’s song will be
the only refuge they can find.
Clare
WITH ONE HUDRED AND FOURTEEN ENGRAVINGS.
LONDON:
PRINTED FOR THOMAS TEGG, 73, CHEAPSIDE;
R. GRIFFIN AND C9., GLASGOW; ALSO J. CUMMING, DUBLIN.
1832
* * *
This is a copy of the title page of the book his father had given him—a volume of 1,643 pages, the text printed in letters small as gnats.
The train was gaining speed.
He opened the book to June 21 (1832). Page 731.
Below the given date there was first a five-stanza poem titled “The Season,” described for the reader’s edification as “a Norman song of summer, written in the 14th or 15th century, taken from the ‘Lays of the Minnesingers.’” It was a fragile lyric of love and nightingales and weather “Mild as the tender lamb / And as the re
d rose bright.”
—Sun rises—3:43 A.M.
—Sun sets—8:17 P.M.
—Foxglove begins to flower under hedges: in gardens there is a white variety.
—Spanish love-in-a-mist blooms.
—Chili strawberry begins to fruit.
—Scarlet strawberries now abound.
—Madock cherries begin to ripen.
—Charlock and Kidlock, terrible weeds to the farmer, cover the fields with their pale yellow.
—Readers of the Everyday Book may remember, in an account of “Cannonbury Tower,” incidental mention of the beautiful marble bust of Mrs. Thomas Gent by Betnes. That lady, distinguished by scientific knowledge and literary ability, is since dead. She was born on this day.
…So much for June 21, 1832.
In Miami the next day, Morgan looked with astonishment at the headlines in the morning paper: of what had happened on June 21, 1943.
RACE RIOTS, (he read). In Detroit. 34 killed. Estimates of injured above 700. In New York’s Harlem, 6 killed.
“My God,” he gasped.
A Navy captain, sitting with him over lunch, said: “It’s unbelievable, isn’t it, a thing like that happening in America? It’s sure as hell’s pushed the war off the front page.” The captain qualified: “Not for long, I guess.”
6 Over and Out
Miami. 1943.
In the off-the-street entry that fronted the SCTB (Submarine Chaser Training Building), marooned behind large panes of protective glass, was a lifeboat. Around it, the SCTC captain gathered the new men. “Look at this boat,” he told them. “Look hard at it. Look at those dark stains on the thwarts and interior sides of the hull and on the floor-boards. Those stains, gentlemen, aren’t the work of a surrealist painter. Those stains are dried blood. The men who briefly occupied this boat were survivors of a daytime torpedoing. Their ship—one of a large convoy on its way to England—developed engine trouble and lost her position in the convoy while repairs were being made. As a consequence, she was trailing behind the convoy. A perfect target. Shortly after the torpedoing, and by ‘shortly after,’ I mean within an hour, one of our escort ships searching for survivors, found this boat. All its occupants were dead. They had been machine-gunned. Murdered.” The captain paused; then: “This lifeboat is here to remind us that toward an enemy who would do such a thing, no mercy can be shown.”
“We’re a mixed lot,” Morgan wrote his father:
For purposes of quick communication I’ll divide our mix into three groups, though of course, no such distinctions officially pertain. The group I fall most naturally into is comprised of older men who have been in the service a goodly while and spent considerable time at sea. The second group is made up of newly commissioned graduates of Navy sponsored V—12 college programs, all of them very “gung ho” about the war. They seem awfully young to me, being mostly in their early twenties. Lastly, there are some Russians whose presence here devolves on the turning over by our navy to their navy (delivery in process) of a fleet of sub-chaser boats (plus new weapons).
We are all comfortably housed in a former sun-worshiper’s hostelry called the Columbus Hotel. By what I can only guess is a fluke of good luck, I’ve been allotted a room to myself. You will appreciate how much the privacy means to me. The Russians live as a unit on the hotel’s top floor. They are a friendly bunch given to inviting the rest of us up to their lodgings for what their commander, in his patois English, calls “the enjoy taking of some vodka.” Their quarters include the hotel’s old ballroom, an eye-shattering, gold-painted arena with huge chandeliers appropriate to my imaginings of how an Italian bordello is likely lit. It’s in this weird salon—perfect setting for an under-budgeted movie about the Tzarist times—that we drink the Russians’ vodka, of which they have a seemingly endless supply, pouring it out as if it were as easily come by as tap water.
If the gods favor me, they will arrange my future so that I’ll never have to return to Miami once I leave it. The summer climate is hot and humid, perfect conditions for mosquitoes and seedy real-estate developers. There are huge tracts of outlying land covered with door-to-door cheaply constructed houses, the odd palm tree supplying scraggly shade against a blistering daytime sun. The native populace transacts its business with a tropical lethargy. Their speech, especially the women’s, is an out-of-tune drawl, twangy as a pawnshop guitar. Hard on the ears, at least on mine. A lot of elderly folk, retired I guess, idle away the hours sitting on benches, talking with each other. One hopes they are contented. It’s their look of stagnation that makes one wonder.
From that wonderful book you gave me, under today’s date (July 12th), I quote the following passage: “Below are listed some popular beliefs and superstitions at which the generation born in the Year of our Lord, 1832, may smile when the now credulous are dead—that pigs can see the wind—that it is unlucky to pare your nails on Sunday—to cure foot-corns, cover them with a slice of beef a dwarf has spit three times upon—a spark in the candle is a sign of a letter coming—seat a toad on your forehead at sunset to stave off nightmares.”
What I like best is the notion that pigs can see the wind. Do you remember a grade-school friend of mine named Junior Snyder? If you remember Junior, you’ll remember Arabella, his pet pig. Arabella was white, with ears the color of pink grapefruit, and she used to stand facing into a breeze, smiling. She was a great smiler. I haven’t thought of Junior or Arabella for years. I’m sure Arabella’s long gone. I wonder what’s happened to Junior Snyder.
More soon, Pa. Morgan.
The daily routine was rigorous; bearable for being so.
They learned everything there was to know about a cunning depth-charge weapon called a Hedgehog, and in the waters off the Florida coast, aboard subchasers, practiced and mastered to a second-nature expertness, the Hedgehog’s uses.
Evenings were free. “Off” was the lingo word.
By way of recreation, Miami offered movies, bars, nightclubs, the sport (if such could be called) of greyhound races; women. For these diversions, there were takers in plenty…. But for some men, in number a sadder plenty, the so-called “free” evenings were gloamings of torment through which drifted desires for pleasures that were far away, in kind sole, and incalculably personal.
Throughout most of July, he spent the evenings in his room, reading and writing letters and attending to the matter of his will, as to which Mr. Selby kept forwarding drafts from his desk in Cleveland: “Dear Morgan, In re Section Four, Clause C, Chapter 1 of my last submission to you, I feel we might better tighten the language to read as follows…” “Dear Morgan, As regards your stated wish to provide for your housekeeper, Teresa Carpenter, I would suggest…” “Dear Morgan, For the reasons as stated below, I recommend that your bequest to the Hatherton Public Library be distributed in three portions, the first…” “Dear Morgan, Further as to your bequest to…”
One could drown in the Solon deeps of Mr. Selby’s counselings.
He formed the habit of taking a walk before going to bed. Which was how, at the beginning of August, he met Lawrence Cuyler and Sidney Aranov, in a late convergence at the front door of the Columbus Hotel, each of them bent on solo perambulations; but, as was normal, they nodded to each other and exchanged a few words that turned willy-nilly into sentences and finally into casual accord: why not work off their boredom by walking together?
At that hap moment their tripod friendship began.
Lawrence was Morgan’s age (thirty-three); a New Yorker; a lawyer; married: “Seven weeks ago yesterday,” he said—the wedding made possible by delayed orders to report to the SCTC. Morgan asked him where he had gone to law school. Answer: Columbia, with an aforeness of Exeter and Yale. “Speaking of Exeter,” Lawrence went on: “I’ve a friend from those days—Hugh Z. Shurtliff. A relation of yours?”
Morgan said: “He’s one of my favorite cousins.”
Lawrence laughed: “Middle name, Zachariah. It wasn’t until our senior year that he divulged what the Z
stood for.”
“My family’s given to saddling its offspring with unusual names.”
Sidney, until then a listener, said: “Zachariah’s a Hebrew name. I’m sure you know what it means.”
Morgan stopped walking, turned to Sidney, and, in the semi-light of the urban street, sought his eyes: “I’m ashamed to say I don’t know. Tell me.”
“Literally translated it comes out ‘Jehovah hath remembered.’ In your terms—Christian ones, I mean—Jehovah, of course, is God.”
Morgan guffawed: “With whom, on occasion, Hugh’s been known to confuse himself. He’s always been a bit pontifical…. But he’s smart. A real brain. He’s a rare bird. He’s stationed in Washington now, busy at interpreting the Jap codings.”
They had recommenced their walk. Sidney said: “That’s a heady assignment. How did he get into that line of work?”
Morgan took a moment: “He majored in Asian studies at Princeton. Started to learn Japanese when he was there. Our maternal grandfather spent his adult life as a missionary in Japan, and it’s likely Hugh’s original interest in Japan was sparked by family stories about him. It’s odd, isn’t it, how you can know someone all your life and then suddenly come to really consider them.” Then, switching the conversation back to Lawrence, he asked: “What did the Navy have you doing before you landed here?”
Lawrence summed that he’d served as a gunnery officer on an old “four stacker” destroyer engaged in convoy escort duty between New York and Plymouth, England. Given that bit of information, it was easy for Morgan to ask him if he’d been torpedoed. “No,” Lawrence answered: “Amazingly, no. We reached a point where we assumed we would be. I mean, why not? On every run but two that we made, we lost as many ships as a drunk drops dollars at a bar. But our ship was spared…. Clue us in about yourself, Sidney.”
Matters of Chance Page 19
