Time and Tide

by Thomas Fleming

"Clara. After Clara Bow. My God, look at that hair. Those cheeks. He doesn't need a speck of makeup. Except maybe a little eye shadow."

  "Who's Clara Bow?" Harold asked.

  "Oh, dear, he is young, isn't he," the older man said.

  "This is Charles Benbow, a famous English actor, dear," Edna said.

  "Would you like to get out of that monkey suit?"

  Benbow led them up winding stairs to a bedroom. On a rack in the closet were at least a hundred silk and muslin dresses in every imaginable style. The feel of their fabrics against his skin, as Edna held up one and then another, made Harold tremble. Finally Edna and Benbow decided on a vermilion crepe with a huge bow at the waist. They buttoned and zipped him into it and spun him around to gaze into the mirror.

  He was gone. Harold had vanished. Seaman Second Class Semple had ceased to exist. The woman who faced him in this spectacular gown was someone new. A creature as different from Harold Semple as Harold was different from Fay Wray when he played her in the arms of King Kong Wilkinson. This woman had more verve, more style. She was not pathetic. She did not have to plead for mercy or love.

  "The 'It' girl if I ever saw her," Charles Benbow said. "That's what they called Clara Bow. She was a sensation in 1925," McKenzie said.

  "The year I was born." Harold giggled.

  "Now let me get into my gown," Edna McKenzie said. "And we can begin to enjoy, ourselves."

  On his first liberty, Marty Roth had joined the rest of the black gang in Woolloomooloo. They had taken over a small hotel and recruited females of all ages and sizes to join them there for an ongoing orgy. Roth had used booze and a half dozen women whose names he barely remembered to obliterate Sylvia Morison from his memory. Except that she refused to disappear. Even while he was balling away, he imagined Sylvia wide-eyed beside the bed begging, Oh, Marty, do that to me, please. He heard himself using a famous Navy phrase for the first time with scientific exactness: Go fuck yourself.

  Amos Cartwright had been in the middle of the madness, downing gallons of Aussie beer, cheerfully entertaining as many as three women in his bed at the same time. The next morning, reveille, complete with the bugle which was blown only in port, was an agonizing experience. Everyone had a head the size of a dirigible. Roth, who had never had a hangover before, felt particularly miserable. Noxious gases rose from his bowels into his brain. Dying in superheated steam could not be any worse. It was Sylvia's revenger She stood beside his rack in her pink silk panties, whispering, Better you than me, sucker.

  Roth noticed the old salts liked their hangovers. They discussed them with pride, almost with affection. The hangover proved you were a real sailor. Even Amos Cartwright chimed in with picturesque descriptions of his torments. It was the first time Roth saw Cartwright achieve some camaraderie with his fellow petty officers. Roth felt too exquisitely horrible to buy it. There had to be a better way to escape Sylvia.

  The following day, sections one and three returned with drunken assurances that the steam was still up at the Hard on Hotel. "You want to do that again, or look for somethin' interestin'?" Cartwright asked.

  "What've you got in mind?" Roth asked.

  "I hear they got some original niggers in this country. Aborigines, they call 'em. I got a mind to locate a few. Always wanted to meet me some original niggers. Never been on a ship that got to Africa."

  "Why not?" Roth said.

  Several hours later, with the help of directions from an assistant curator at the Museum of Natural History and a hitch on a U.S. Army truck, they found themselves on the bank of a river about a dozen miles from Sydney. Ahead of them in the twilight loomed a collection of shanties with slanted tin roofs perched precariously on walls ripped from packing cases. Roth remembered similar shacks in the meadows around Newark airport. He had asked his father who lived in them; he had stared ahead down the highway to Bradley Beach and said, "Bums."

  A half dozen small black men with woolly hair were crouched around a fire cooking a fish. They wore cheap dungarees and shirts. Their feet were bare. Cartwright held up his hand, palm out, the way white scouts greeted Indians in the movies, and said, "Howdy, brothers."

  No one even bothered to look up. A half dozen tiny brown kids were playing in front of the shacks, naked. Roth could not figure out why they were a different color from the men, whose skin was sooty black. Then a woman came to the door of the but carrying a baby. She was sooty black too. But the baby was white.

  Without looking up, one of the men around the fire said,

  "Go away. Our women are not for sale."

  "We didn't come here for that. I'm interested in how black people live around the world. I'm a black American. This fellow here's a Jew. He's a friend of black people."

  "A woman Jew brings us food sometimes. Do you have anything for us?"

  "Not me," Roth said. "I'm broke."

  "How come you live out here this way?" Cartwright asked.

  "Our people die in the city. They can't breathe in those houses. When the white men get drunk they beat us up and take our women."

  A car stopped on the highway above them. A young woman in a tan suit came down the hill toward them. She had a sharply defined nose and prim pursed lips. Nervously adjusting a pair of steel rimmed glasses, she said, "What are you seamen doing here?" Her accent was strange, definitely not Australian.

  Cartwright tried to explain. She did not believe him. Meanwhile, the men around the fire and a dozen women and children from the shacks streamed up the hill to the car. They lugged cartons from the back seat down to the shacks. They talked excitedly in their own language, looking and sounding like pleased children at a birthday party.

  "Are you the Jew lady that brings them food?" Cartwright asked.

  "I bring them food, yes. What does being Jewish have to do with it?"

  "Not a thing. 'Cept this sailor's Jewish. Meet Fireman First Class Marty Roth from the Bronx, New York."

  "How do you do," she said, holding out her hand. "My name is Anna Elias. I am from Vienna."

  "That's a long way from here. Why'd you come to Australia?" Cartwright asked.

  She gave him a puzzled, somewhat angry look. "To stay alive. Don't you know Hitler is killing the Jews in Europe?"

  "We don't get newspapers on a ship. I heard he was givin' them a lot of grief, sort of like whites give blacks in the U.S. Now he's killin' them?" Cartwright said.

  "Yes. Soon they'll be like these people. A pathetic remnant everyone despises. Don't you in America see this?" She aimed the question at Roth.

  "I don't know. I mean — I guess so," Roth said. "But we're pretty busy trying to earn a living. I don't know what we can do about it. Except join the Army and Navy and try to win the war."

  "Yes," Anna Elias said, in the saddest voice he had ever heard. "Yes of course you're right. I can't understand why the world doesn't cry out. But who has wept over these people?"

  "Are they really being exterminated?" Roth asked.

  "They have been exterminated. They exist now in little groups like this one. Their life force, their sense of existing as a people, even a tribe, is gone. Once this whole continent was their country. Now it belongs to another race. They are ghosts in their own country. They live mostly in the dreamtime."

  "What's that?" Cartwright asked.

  "It's where they believe we all come from. The eternal soul of the world. It's amazingly similar to the insights of Jung."

  Marty Roth could only look blank. He had never heard of Carl Jung. He had also never met a woman with the kind of fierce intelligence Anna Elias emanated. Amos Cartwright had convinced him that he had a brain. Maybe this woman could help him put something in it besides the thermodynamics of the Jefferson City's fire room.

  “The dreamtime," Amos Cartwright said. “Now I know I want to get acquainted with these dudes."

  Immaculate in their dress whites, the officers of the Jefferson City swarmed on the quarterdeck on their way to a dinner dance in their honor at the Vaucluse Yacht Club. Vaucluse w
as one of the most elegant suburbs of Sydney, and they got a lecture from Captain McKay, warning them to conduct themselves like gentlemen. "These are not the sort of women you'll meet in Woolloomooloo," he said.

  The junior officers exchanged furtive grins. The captain was practically in his dotage. He had no idea what supposedly upper class women were willing to do for a man in a uniform, fresh from risking mutilation and death on the high seas. They had made that marvelous discovery in California. With Lieutenant Robert Mullenoe, the fabled swordsman of the class of '31 at their head, these connoisseurs of female frailty headed for Vaucluse aboard a chartered harbor ferry, all but panting in anticipation.

  For the first hour, nothing seemed to suggest they were wrong. The women were spectacular in white muslin or silk. The punch was swiftly spiked to lethal proportions with brandy and champagne. They danced beneath a ceiling festooned with Australian and American flags and made relentless progress in their pursuit of happiness. Still depressed by his brother's death aboard the Hornet, Mullenoe was determined to enjoy himself. He was fox-trotting with a pert stacked redhead named Ellen McKinley, who seemed incredibly interested in his analysis of American dance bands. As the number ended, he suggested a stroll on the beach. She cheerfully agreed, but as they emerged on the terrace she stopped and murmured an exclamation of concern.

  "Christine?" she said, and walked toward a woman who was standing alone looking out at the water.

  "Oh Ellen."

  "You promised me you'd dance."

  "Oh, I will. It was just... rather warm in there. I needed a breath of air."

  "Leftenant Mullenoe, I'd like you to meet my sister, Mrs. Wallace."

  She was taller and older than Ellen — closer to his own. age, Mullenoe guessed. Her pageboy-cut hair was a deep russet. Her delicate features, particularly her sensitive mouth, suggested a refinement her sister lacked. It was the sort of woman Mullenoe usually fled. He was dismayed when Ellen McKinley said, "Why don't you two chat while I go get us some punch?"

  An old hand at avoiding such traps, Mullenoe protested that he would get the punch. But Ellen McKinley tossed her red head and said, "You're in Australia, Leftenant. The men don't wait on the women like Americans. We're used to doing for ourselves, thank you."

  Catastrophe. He was certain Ellen McKinley would never return with the punch. At least four of his wolfish shipmates had been eyeing her. He was stuck with conversing with her married sister while the crux of the evening escaped him. Unquestionably, he was born under a dark star. First an assignment to the Jefferson City, with Edwin Moss for a gunnery officer, now this.

  "Is your husband in the service?" he said, deciding to be as brutal as possible about the main point.

  "Yes. I mean ... he was."

  "Wounded in action."

  "He was killed at Savo Island."

  "I'm ...I'm sorry," he floundered. "What was his rank?"

  "Leftenant. He was air defense officer on the Canberra." Mullenoe had the distinct sensation of being struck on the back of the head by a heavy instrument. "I'm air defense officer of the Jefferson City."

  "How remarkable. You were in the battle, I take it."

  "Yes, we ... were very lucky."

  He was back six months, back in that black murderous night, hearing the boom of guns, seeing the Canberra reel under a rain of six- and eight-inch shells, watching the flames engulf her.

  "Thank God someone was lucky. I gather it was an almost total defeat."

  "About as total as defeats can get. Was your husband a career officer?"

  "Yes. His father was an admiral in World War One." "So was mine."

  Mullenoe heard a hollow bewilderment in his voice. The band struck up "The White Cliffs of Dover." "Would you like to dance?" he said.

  Beneath the ballroom's chandeliers, he found a mysterious woman in his arms. The mystery was in her voice, a soft contralto with an extraordinary number of tones. It suggested a spiritual world Mullenoe had never explored. So did her dark blue eyes, full of sadness and something else, a word, an idea at which Mullenoe would have scoffed ten minutes ago: nobility. Christine Wallace reminded him of a poem that Selvagee MacComber used to quote by the yard, "The Blessed Damozel." Something about a woman of impossible purity reaching down to bestow her blessing from the bar of heaven.

  On the bandstand a tenor sang:

  "There'll be bluebirds over

  The white cliffs of Dover

  Tomorrow, when the world is free."

  Air defense officer of the Canberra. The words resounded in Mullenoe's mind. He began telling Christine Wallace about his brother's death aboard the Hornet, trying to explain how it had changed his feelings not only about the Navy but about himself "It may sound crazy to you, but before I didn't care whether I got killed or not. Now I'd like to live. I'd like to see how far I can go in the service. It probably won't be very far, considering my unvarying mediocrity—"

  "I refuse to believe in your mediocrity, Leftenant."

  "I'll send you a few of my fitness reports. They usually begin with something like this: 'Lieutenant Mullenoe has the ability to do a better job. But he seems lacking in motivation, indeed there are times when he positively seems to take pleasure in failing to measure up to his superiors' expectations.”

  "But they all know what's wrong — your superiors, I mean. Nap — my husband Napier — was exactly the same way. They have much more patience than you ever suspect."

  "Who's they?"

  "Your superiors. I'm sure you've heard all this from your wife."

  "I don't have a wife."

  A shadow of grief, of pain, descended on her face.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  "It's entirely my fault. I shouldn't have come. I am — what do you call it in America? — a wet blanket at any party these days. Ellen insisted I should pretend that I'm perfectly fine. She and my mother maintain that if you pretend hard enough you can actually convince yourself—"

  "Sounds like some of the advice I used to get from my father."

  "I fear you're incorrigible, Leftenant."

  "I hope so."

  She threatened something fundamental in his mind, a basic part of his idea of himself. Yet he could not stop dancing and talking with her. He did not even glance at another woman for the rest of the evening. By midnight, the punch had taken its toll. Christine said she was incapable of driving home, and he volunteered to pilot her Aston Martin, even though it was the first time he had driven on the English side of the road since he had visited Jamaica as a midshipman.

  Following her directions, they soon left Sydney for the countryside. He let the roadster out, and they raced down narrow roads past orchards and fields redolent with fresh grass and blossoming fruit. "I could swear I'm back in Maryland," Mullenoe said. He could not understand why he felt so cheerful.

  "With your favorite girl?"

  "Never had one."

  Large gates loomed on the left. "That's it," she said. In second gear they purred up a winding gravel road to a gray stone house that looked as big as Bancroft Hall. It straddled the top of the ridge, huge wings vanishing into the darkness on both sides of the porticoed entrance.

  "Welcome to Fairy Hill," she said.

  "You live here — alone?" Mullenoe said.

  "Oh, no. There are servants. Too many, I'm afraid."

  Now was the moment, in the unwritten but nonetheless classic textbook on seduction by Mullenoe the swordsman of '31. With any other woman, he would have invited himself for a drink, then suggested at a strategic moment there might be a better way to say good night. Instead, for reasons incomprehensible to him, he said, "I'd like to see you again."

  "You'll have to bring back the car. Stay for dinner."

  "The car? Right. I can't walk back to Cockatoo Island, can I?"

  They both found this uproarious, even though in the back of Mullenoe's head a voice was growling, Idiot. He was acting like a plebe at his first hop.

  "I have the duty tomorrow." His voice was
so mournful, it sounded as if it was a suicide mission.

  "The day after?"

  "Great."

  He wanted to kiss her, but he was paralyzed by something. It was not fear. It was more complicated than fear. She solved it by kissing him softly, firmly on the lips. "Thank you very much for a lovely evening, Leftenant," she said.

  It was a good thing he was in Australia, where the women did for themselves.

  Desire Under The Coolabahs

  Marty Roth strolled through the Taronga Zoo, enjoying the sunshine, the view of Sydney across the harbor — and Anna Elias's company. He had spent every liberty with her for the past two weeks.

  Anna pointed to a small striped-tail kangaroo sitting on a fence, eating a piece of fruit. "The tree kangaroo is a fascinating example of the reversal of an evolutionary trend,” she said.

  "The whole design of the kangaroo's body is for hopping over the ground. But this branch of the species began climbing trees and in a million years or so reduced the size of their hind legs and increased their forelegs. Australia is really a marvelous country. I'm glad I came here. It stimulates the mind."

  "Are you going to live here after the war?"

  "Of course not. We'll go back to Vienna."

  "Why not try New York?"

  "I cannot imagine living happily anywhere but Vienna."

  "Bunk."

  "Martin. We've discussed very seriously the many grave differences between us."

  "So what. I'm still nuts about you."

  "I can't stand American slang! It's so undignified!"

  "The feeling isn't undignified."

  "You live too much in your feelings."

  "I'm an example of reverse evolution. You live too much in your head."

  "I thought you appreciated my head."

  "I do. Haven't I read every book you've given me? Now I want to appreciate all of you."

  "You make me glad I'm from Austria, which doesn't have a navy."

  "If what you think is happening over there is true, if they're murdering Jews on a mass scale, you'll never be able to go back. You'll have to settle for some brainless ocker, or an American schmuck like me."

  "You're not a schmuck. You have a fine intelligence. But it will take time to develop it. I wonder if it can be done in America, where piling up money is all anyone cares about."