It was under Red Hodson’s command that Morgan served for the rest of the war, performing what Hodson called “necessary, unglamorous tasks”: searching constantly for enemy subs in the North Atlantic’s near and remote waters; escorting ships (“mothering them”) to their rendezvous positions in amassed convoys headed for Europe; in a general way “standing by” throughout the span of time that commenced in the first brutally cold days of 1944, through that year’s spring and summer and autumn, into the start of yet another winter, further, into the New Year of 1945, on into another spring, and beyond—into the sunset days of the war’s end in the late summer of 1945.
Letters remained the chief means of communication—sporadically received, those written in answer mailed at haphazard intervals from ports put in to for refueling or for the taking on of fresh supplies. As the months passed, Maud wrote more and more about her mother: “Her black moods last longer than ever….” “She stares out the window for hours on end….” “Yesterday, when I went to see her, she never said a word to me. She’s lost to me, Morgan. It breaks my heart….” In a letter received in October 1944, Maud reported that a psychiatric nurse was now employed (“a starchy woman in her fifties”) who came each evening to the Leighs’ house and spent the night in the dressing room adjacent to Mrs. Leigh’s bedroom; that widowed Mrs. Corcoran (“pleased to have the extra income”) came at noon each day and “companioned” Mrs. Leigh until the night-nurse arrived—the new arrangement put into force “because Lillie Ruth can’t cope anymore with Mother’s withdrawals.” For Morgan, the latter sentence was the most revealing of just how far Mrs. Leigh’s derangement must have advanced, that Lillie Ruth, by her patient, sweet persuasions of words and reassuring touch of hand, could no longer disabuse Mrs. Leigh of her secret devils.
…“My dear Son—”
…Geoff wrote often, his letters received in batches, sorted out by date and read in sequence. None was long and all of them, in their stoicism, strangely gentle.
Received too, at wide intervals, letters from Sidney and Lawrence.
…“Dear Mr. Shurtliff…Yours ever, Zenobia Sly.” Her pithy, staminal notes were as heartening as lark song.
No word from the captain, the lack thereof a source of increasing anxiety. After months of silence, he appealed to Red Hodson: “How can I find out about Rupert Wilkins?” As a survivor of two torpedoings, Hodson understood the nature of the tie that bound Morgan to the captain. Not that he said so. Communion of interior feelings wasn’t his style, but taking charge, was. “Leave it to me,” he said. “I have a source of info I can tap into.” About three weeks went by. And then, on the first day of May, 1944, Red Hodson told him: “I received news this morning about your old captain. His ship was hit—my source doesn’t say when—off Formosa, all hands lost. I’m sorry, Shurtliff.”
From among those with whom he served on this, his last ship, he formed no lasting friendships. There were three or four men he genuinely liked, but only in daily ways, on daily terms, no one of them ever to be thought of as vital spokes in the wheel of his life.
He had no other great adventures—only existed, confined on the ship with his fellows, ever alert to danger, wearying under the deity lash of Duty and Routine, growing older, feeling Time slipping away, drawing him with it, behind.
(Of this prolonged period, some few years later, he told Sylvia Phelps—a key, future figure as yet unmet in the narrative of his life—that had he known back in June of 1943 that there would be two and a half more years of war to be gotten through—in pure contemplation of the prospect, out of sheer gloom—he might easily have gone mad.)
There were of course the occurring, great, historic junctures, learned about at sea via the ship’s radio and deeply imagined (written accounts to be read about days later from, by then, old newspapers):
—on June 6, 1944, the long awaited Allied forces’ D-Day invasion of Europe: beach-head, Normandy—
—on August 25, 1944, the liberation of Paris—
—on October 20, 1944, the landing of U.S. forces on Leyte, the Philippines; General MacArthur’s promised “return”—
—on February 3–11, 1945, the Yalta Conference (lethal in consequence), during which it was agreed between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin that Russia would enter the war against Japan—
—on February 19, 1945, the landing of U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima—
—on April 1, 1945, the invasion of Okinawa—
—on April 12, 1945, the stunning blow of President Roosevelt’s death; and three days later (they were just inside Monhegan Island, off Pemaquid Point, the seas kicking up under the force of a squall) they stood, as many as could in the close space near the radio shack to hear Arthur Godfrey—his rube voice at moments breaking—tell of the funeral procession moving down Pennsylvania Avenue on its way to the White House: “The drums are wrapped in black crepe. They are muffled, as you can hear. And the pace of the musicians—so—slow. And behind them…those are Navy boys. And now, just coming past the Treasury, I can see the horses drawing the caisson…and behind it—the car bearing the man on whose shoulders now falls the terrific burdens and responsibilities that were handled so well by the man whose body we’re paying our last respects to now—God bless him, President Truman…. We return you now to the studio.” Among the closely gathered listeners, there was a wordless, dazed shuffling of dispersement, of, by hand, the brushing away of tears—
—on May 7, the surrender of Germany. V-E Day. End of the war in Europe. That night, up off Port Clyde, they rode for a while under the stars close enough to land to see the flames of the victory bonfires and to hear, straining to, the mingled pealings of church-bells rung in celebration. But distance, and the wash of the sea so muted the sound that some men said they couldn’t hear the tollings at all; others said they perfectly well could. One man, his hands cupped to his ears, turned to Morgan and uttered the single word: “Beautiful.”
—For three months longer—Boredom—vastened after V-E Day by the Atlantic’s safeness and the limbo of the half-achieved end to the war, the half-win not yet somehow experienced: at the same time, in the Pacific, battles kept occurring, each one reported with an emphatic kind of importance which, when added up, amounted to a series of nerve-wracking, penultimate amens—until—
—Hiroshima. On August 6.
For the rest of his life, using the given clue of a current crossword puzzle, he would pencil in ENOLA GAY—the name of the B-29 plane that carried, hazardous (seven tons overweight), and dropped on that unheard-of city, the atom bomb, code-named (as history later taught) LITTLE BOY. At the time, the world was told of a ball of fire that became a cloud, “mushroom” in shape, that attained in the sky a height of forty thousand feet: that the crew of the Enola Gay, fleeing back to the airbase on Tinian in the Marianas, could still see the cloud three hundred and sixty miles away.
—And three days later, August 9, a second bomb (this one code-named FAT MAN) dropped on another unheard-of city: Nagasaki.
—And then, on August 14, as the world was told his people wept, the emperor of Japan surrendered his nation into Allied hands.
V-J Day.
The war over. Finished. All.
…There on their ship, the vast open sea all around them, the limitless sky overhead—beyond shouting—none of them seemed to know quite what to do. Quite how, after the shouting ceased, to conduct themselves. Some sought solitude. Others stood about in small groups, talking, being in their struck, awed ways comradely, yet the look on their individual faces remarkably blank, their eyes like shining windows, but curtained to interior view.
…That night, in the empty silence of his stateroom, he tried for sleep, and failing, fell back on Miss Sly’s old incantation: “One good hen, two ducks, three cackling geese, four…”—saying the words by rote, but in the end giving up, accepting that sleep would not come. Resigned, becalmed in darkness, he lay then quiet in his berth, thinking about the future: reinventing his life.
Demobil
ization (at least as rumor understood its arcane workings) operated on a “point” system: of age, marital status, number of children, length of service, ETC.—on which terms and degrees of qualification, Red Hodson told him: “You’re a sure bet for early discharge. I’ll lay you a ten-dollar wager you’ll be mustered out in no more than three months’ time.”
It was a snail-slow, frittering wait that ended just hours this side of Hodson’s prediction.
On Friday, November 12, 1945, in New York, he boarded the same early morning train he had taken at the start of his leave in May of 1943. Two and a half years ago (he thought) as he hesitated at the head of the coach, looking down its length for an unoccupied seat, affronted by the smells associated with confined soldierdom: sweat, cigarette smoke, Wrigley’s chewing gum. As before, he was markedly thin, though at that instant of hesitation, he felt oddly heavy. “The tired ox,” Saint Jerome said, “treads with a firmer step.” As he did then, commencing a slow walk down the aisle to the coach’s end, where he sat down next to a middle-aged army NCO whose eyes were closed. “Sorry to disturb you.” The man never opened his eyes, just moved his torso, shucked of its overcoat (used as a pillow), closer to the window.
Throughout the journey, mood of spirit, already humbled by war’s residuum effects, was further chastened by evidence, visible on all sides, of drabness and dilapidation caused by war’s neglect: houses in sore need of paint; uncleaned soot-encrusted facades of public buildings; unreplaced, cracked and broken windows; unrepaired or fallen fences; rusted bridges with rusted railings; an immense, grotesque piece of corroded equipment, looking like a huge praying mantis, abandoned on the rough site of a limestone quarry; and foremost depressing, the coach in which he rode, its floor-covering abraded and gummy, upholstery torn and filthy and stinking, pocked by cigarette burns, the seats’ undercoilings sprung, making for the tired traveler a back-breaking ride.
Peals of victory bells having been by now for some time silent, the soldier faces of the car’s occupants showed little beyond a classic weariness tinged additionally by the alarms attendant to reversion to civilian status: myriad adjustments to be made: reclamation of personal identity: the reforming of severed relationships with family, spouses, children, lovers, friends, bosses….
…Later that afternoon, in the Cleveland Terminal’s immense rotunda (again, just as he had before) he stood in place, tall, looking for Maud. They saw each other at the same sudden instant, and as suddenly were in each other’s arms, their embrace vehement; swiftly completed. When they separated from it, their eyes were moist, but not raining. Between them, wordlessly reasoned as the ability of their external strength, was sheer relief (relief, of all human passions, being the least ambiguous)—that out of the wreckage of war, Fate—upon them—had conferred the miraculous gift of a second chance.
For this meeting, she had come alone into Cleveland, her chariot the Harold Teen (showing too its greater age). In it, in the gathering November dusk, they sat in close presence—Morgan driving—skirting the urban shoreline of Lake Erie’s gray sea, on, into the country with its remains of harvest: remnant stalks of corn bent earthward in fallow fields, shriveled pumpkins (a few) and shriveled crab apples still clinging to their parent trees; and other yields of autumn, wild: stands of burrs in the wayside ditches, and silvery, feathery tufts of swamp reeds, and bright orange bittersweet, strung like thousands of tiny lanterns through the leafless branches of byroad bushes. By the dashboard lights—glancing whenever he could—he saw Maud’s face, its proud beauty uncharacteristically susceptible, only occasionally showing an ascendant vestige of what he always thought of as her style: her style of certitude: and in a part of his mind he pondered the fact that her life, like his, had been for a long time one of self-abnegation, individual Will, at least on personal terms, not easily assertible during the years of war.
They must have talked during the drive—must have—but of what they might have said, he retained no memory, the vivid stead of later recall being the sexual tension between them, at moments extreme—thoroughly suppressed by the foremost mission of “getting home.”
HATHERTON. The sign’s lettering, gold paint on black wood, showed in the headlights.
Soon, he turned off the highway onto a lesser road, and from it, onto a quiet street arched over by bare-branched elms; at last into their driveway. And for the first time they laughed: Tessa had made of the house an electric celebration: lights blazed from every window. He turned to Maud, his desire to mark the moment with a kiss. Impossible: the front door was so instantly opened, Tessa standing in its frame, waving, two children in white robes slipping past her, shouted at immediately by her to stay right where they were, not, in their bedroom slippers, to dare set foot on the damp ground, but Ralph had already bounded down the porch steps, barking, careering toward the car, the marking kiss nipped in the bud.
Out of the car then: long strides over the lawn, shortcutting the flagstone path. “Tessa.”
She held him. “You’re back. Home to stay.”
The night’s cold air drove them all shivering, immediately indoors: children, dog, Maud, Tessa, himself the last to enter.
The twins were taller. So much taller! As of course they naturally would be, now, at age five and a half. But the photographs of them had failed to prepare him for such a leap of growth, or for their older, judging eyes (it always remained in his mind a moot question how much, really if at all, they remembered him) fastened on him in the living room’s bright luminance in so fathomless and unforthcoming a way as to cause him to wonder if they were disappointed by what of him they saw: whether, in their afore idea of him, he was meant to be (at least in look) somehow more—magical. More storybook-like. Instead of which, a thin, regular man in a dark, wrinkled uniform, seeming a bit to stagger—strange, strange he must have seemed to them—lips trembling with emotion and quandary of what name to call each by—Maud to the rescue, seeing him so shaken, whispering in his ear: “Darling…Caroline, red slippers—” (the twin in the blue pair, then, Julia).
“Caroline.” He stooped and kissed her and ran a smoothing thumb over her forehead’s slight frown. Then: “Julia—”
—who smiled at him, a sudden, including radiance: “We go to school,” she began.
“Kindeegarden,” Caroline muled out the mis-said word.
Still looking at Julia, he mustered up the question: “Do you like it?”
Julia nodded. “There’s a boy at school, Edward—” she said the name urgently.
“The Tates’ youngest,” Maud informed in a quick aside.
“What about Edward, Julia?”
Her answer came in a rush: “He can stand on his head. He’s so good at it he could be in a circus if he wanted to.”
Maud explained: “Edward’s very much admired as a head-stander.”
“Ah,” he murmured…. Edward’s was his great boyhood accomplishment…. (Do it, the Lord commanded: Show them.)
“Watch.” He heard back the vaunted tone of his spoken imperative, and, sans façon, got down on his knees, put his hands flat on the floor, planted his head between them, rocked his body several times forward onto his arms, testing their strength, then gradually, gradually—coins spilling out of his pockets—raised his legs ceilingward—from which achieved, superbly maintained upside-down vantage point, he viewed the twins’ amazed faces and heard Maud’s sexy gasp of “Morgan—I never knew you could!” The deed done (Thank you, Lord), he collapsed his body into a ball and rolled over—twice!—then sprang with a lithe upward bounce onto his feet and stood, elegantly, calmly erect, gazing at his audience.
Julia pleaded: “Will you do it for Edward? Will you?” Her voice was wild. “Will you?”
“Anytime,” he told her. “Any old time.”
Now he could exit. He said to Maud: “I’m going to wash up a bit—”
“You’re fabulous,” she replied. “I’ll bring you a drink.”
In the hall, at the foot of the stairs, he recalled his dawn dep
arture of two and a half years ago: of how, as a named warrior he had descended the staircase step by step into an absence of unforetellable outcome. Now he ascended the stairs, a returned, private man of domestic heart, hungry to “wife his wife”—beyond which Chaucerian craving, as of the moment and in all the world, for him, no other want existed.
He heard his name spoken.
From where he was standing in the middle of their bedroom he turned and saw her in the doorway, his promised drink in her hand. And for a long moment, they looked at each other.
Maud broke the silence. “You’re real,” she said, exultant. “It won’t be more than two hours,” she went on, tacitly conspiring: “A little time with the children; a bit of food; then… No. Don’t come near me. Not yet.” She put his drink on the table, looked at her watch, then back at him. “It’s nearly seven. The two hours start now. So hurry down.”
What left him speechless was what in her matchless way she had so firmly conveyed to him: that he was to her what she was to him, and that the supremest part of desire resided in the glory of being desired.
A footnote: years later he was in bed, drugged up, recovering from an operation on his left knee, Julia visiting him in his hospital room, sitting beside him, waking him after a while by a touch to his hand.
He opened his eyes: took in that she was there. “Julia. What a surprise! How lovely to see you. I hope I don’t look as awful as I feel.”
“You’ll be up and around in no time.”
“God.”
She smiled. “You’ll never guess what I was thinking just now, sitting here.”
“What.”
“That I’m probably the only woman on earth whose first really clear memory of her father is of him standing on his head.”
A second footnote: the years of the Second World War remain as a separate epoch in the lives of all who lived through them. Nowadays, once in a while, a gray-haired man or woman will be heard to speak aloud from the soul of those years, and nine times out of ten, what the listener hears, sounds civilized. A slayer of millions was loose in the world (the speaker says) and the slayer had to be slain. And was.
Matters of Chance Page 21
