Time and Tide

by Thomas Fleming

  "Come out to the cottage my buddy Flanagan's got on Maroubra Beach. Get to know some Americans. Some Australians."

  "No. You just want to seduce me."

  "I just want you to practice a little reverse evolution. I want you to evolve back from one hundred and three to nineteen."

  Anna was attending the University of New South Wales in Sydney. But she had made very few friends. She regarded the Australians as frivolous children. She spent most of her time in the small circle of refugees her parents' age. After a night of listening to them discuss Freud and Jung and Heidegger, Roth had decided he was never going to be an intellectual.

  "Okay. Let's go home. I'll call you for another lecture appointment next week."

  "Where will you go for the rest of your liberty?"

  "Woolloomooloo."

  "Martin! You'll catch a social disease."

  "Better that than an intellectual hernia."

  "You Americans have no manners! No tact, no nobility of soul! You don't know how to address a woman's feelings!"

  "You Viennese are so busy lecturing you won't give us a chance!"

  "Oh, look."

  Anna pointed to the koala cage. One of the toy-sized bears was climbing the tree inside the cage, with a baby clinging to her back. Another koala, perhaps the father, watched anxiously from a nearby branch.

  "You may think it's foolish," Anna said, "but I've made a vow not to rejoice, not to enjoy my life, while so many of our people are dying."

  "I know that," Roth said, taking her hand. "I admire you for it. If it would help, I'd do the same thing. But we can't change what's happening six thousand miles away."

  "I know," Anna said, staring at the koalas. "I know it makes no sense, but I can't stop it."

  "Anna, you've made me proud to be Jewish. Just knowing there are people like you and your parents makes me proud. You've changed me, Anna. Now I want to change you. Doesn't the Bible have something about there being a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance?"

  "Ecclesiastes."

  "This is my time — this couple of weeks here — to try to laugh, to dance. When we go back to the Solomons, there'll be plenty of time to weep — maybe to mourn."

  "Where is this cottage?"

  "Maroubra Beach."

  "That's only half an hour away"

  "All 'round my hat, I will wear the green willow, All 'round my hat, for a twelve month and a day.

  If anyone should ask me the reason why I'm wearin' it—It's all for my true love, who's far far away."

  Dark-haired, green-eyed Annie Flood thrummed her guitar and sang these words to Frank Flanagan with a deliciously defiant smile on her freckled face. Flanagan sprawled on the sand meditating on the madness of his life. Four weeks ago, he had been crawling down a smoke-filled passageway with flames roaring out hatches to port and starboard. Three weeks ago, he had been clutching his life preserver while fifty-foot waves tried to smash the Jefferson City to pieces. Two weeks ago, he had stood on the empty sidewalk in Woolloomooloo bemoaning Sunday in Sydney. Now he was lying on a beach with Pacific cornbers breaking behind him, listening to a passionate young woman tell him that she loved him and yet could never love him and nevertheless loved him in spite of — or perhaps because of — sin and war and death.

  Jack Peterson lay a few feet away, his arm around curvacious Sally Lundin. Nearby was Leo Daley, the pious prude himself, holding hands with a creature who looked like Betty Grable's kid sister. The Radical, the man who worshipped revolution, was gazing into the eyes of a redhead who had convinced him even Communists could fall in love.

  Jack rolled over and whispered in Flanagan's ear. "Go for it, kid. All you got to do is ask.”

  Flanagan shook his head. He wanted and did not want to fuck Annie Flood in almost exactly the same intense proportions as she wanted and did not want to fuck him.

  At first these amorous women seemed to have been conjured out of the thinnest imaginable air by Jack Peterson. For a while, Flanagan's admiration for Jack rose to hero worship. Now Flanagan was not sure Jack deserved accolades. He was still glad Peterson had gotten them out of the dives and brothels of Woolloomooloo with his magnificent church maneuver. It was amazing the way Jack's goddess, Lady Luck, had matched them up. Each seemed to have found a woman that perfectly suited his idiosyncrasies.

  Daley had dined with towering Mrs. Monaghan, whose luscious daughter Stella was the most devout girl in Paddington. She was supposed to be going in the convent next month. They spent their time discussing whether she could become a nun if she was no longer a virgin. No one was sure whether this discussion was based on theory or fact. Daley turned the color of a catsup bottle every time Flanagan asked him about it.

  The Radical landed in the house of the most militant labor leader in Australia. His red-haired daughter Hilary told him harrowing stories of Sydney during the Depression, when the city was ringed with soup kitchens and grown men begged money on the street. The Radical's lonely crusade aboard the Jefferson City was heroism to her. A sexual conflagration was inevitable.

  Jack accepted the whole thing as a gift from his deity. "Enjoy it while it lasts, Flan," he said.

  Jack was still enjoying it. But Sally Lundin wept every time she thought of him sailing away. She was lending him money, begging him to promise her that he would come back to Sydney after the war. As usual, Jack was promising nothing. He was advertising himself as the original sailor, doomed to wander the world like that mythical Jew. Jack simply refused to think about the heartbreak he was adding to Sally's already burdened life. Her father was a crippled veteran of World War I. Two months ago her fiancé had been killed flying a bomber over Germany.

  That was the trouble with Jack's approach to women. He kept insisting you could keep everything simple. But it was impossible. Women were not just bundles of curving flesh and kissable mouths that said yes Jack, yes Frank. They were individuals with stories to tell, and you had to listen to them. You had to start caring about them. Flanagan wondered if he would ever master Jack's ability to care and not to care simultaneously. To want a woman as honest and loving as Martha Johnson or Sally Lundin and say no to their love the moment they confessed it, without giving a damn how much you were hurting them.

  On sang Annie Flood, telling them how her true love had bought her a diamond ring. Then he had promptly tried to deprive her of "a far finer thing."

  "Very Australian, that," sighed Sally, snuggling up to Jack.

  Flanagan knew that for Annie the song had a personal meaning. She really had a true love far, far away. She was engaged to an Australian soldier named Frank Clancy, who was fighting in Egypt. He was her older brother's best friend. She was not sure she loved Clancy any more. She was not sure she even wanted to see him again, since her brother had been killed at Tobruk.

  It was staggering, the way the war in Europe reached half-way around the world to inflict wounds on the Australians. It was even more unnerving to see people so much like Americans riven by the fear of being overrun by the Japanese Army that had raped Nanking and Singapore. For the first time Flanagan appreciated the American strategy of fighting the Japanese in the western Pacific instead of waiting for them to attack closer to home. He would not want his mother or his sisters to feel the fear rampaging through Australia. Maybe the admirals and generals knew what they were doing, after all.

  Once more Annie struck the defiant chord of the refrain and reiterated her determination to wear the green willow around her hat.

  "And if anyone should ask me,

  The reason why I'm wearin' it—It's my own damned hat!"

  "Is that an Irish song?" Flanagan asked.

  "You wouldn't recognize an Irish song or an Irish poem if it bit you, poor Americanized clod that you are," Annie said.

  "Hey, what's wrong with being Americanized?" Jack Peterson demanded.

  "There's nothing wrong with it for most people. Except for making them awfully self-satisfied. But for the Irish it's a crim
e. They have a heritage of song and story the British have spent four hundred years trying to destroy."

  "We got song and story in America too," Jack said. "My old man sang real good in the shower. He was always tellin' my mother stories. But she never believed him."

  Jack and Annie were constantly crossing swords. Unlike plaintive, clinging Sally, Annie resisted the presumption that every woman in Australia wanted to leap into bed with an American soldier, sailor or airman. She took her Catholicism seriously. She was also the granddaughter of an Irish rebel who had fled to Australia in the 1890s, and she still had a large streak of his defiance in her makeup.

  "Don't waste your breath arguing with the lug," Flanagan said. "Let's go for a walk." He took Annie's hand and they strolled down the curving beach together.

  "Supper's at eight," Sally called.

  "Yeah. You can't live on love, Flanagan," Jack said. "Not that you've had a chance to try. Too bad you drew the frigid one. But I guess you're used to takin' orders from the Pope."

  "Bastard," Annie said.

  Jack insisted he knew exactly what he was doing. He guaranteed Flanagan satisfaction before they sailed.

  "Imelda?"

  The name leaped from Captain Arthur McKay's lips as he strode up posh. Macquarie Street in downtown Sydney. The woman walking toward the silver Rolls Royce with the Chinese chauffeur at the door stopped. A smile blending disbelief, joy and desire played across her delicate, foxy face. McKay instantly regretted opening his mouth. The last thing he wanted or needed in his life at the moment was Imelda Cruz.

  "Arthur. Arthur McKay."

  A kiss, expensive perfume, a huge diamond glittering on the third finger of her left hand. "What in the world are you doing in Sydney?" she asked.

  "I'm fighting a war. What are you doing?"

  "Fleeing one," she said, the smile slipping from her red lips, to be replaced by a tremor of sadness.

  "It looks like you're doing it in style."

  "Of course. As my husband says, wars are never catastrophes to those who look ahead."

  The smile flickered for a moment and vanished again.

  "How is Win? What glorious deeds has he performed?"

  "Oh — we'd be here all day if I started reciting them."

  "And you, Arthur?"

  "I'm commanding a cruiser The Jefferson City."

  She looked bewildered. "Isn't that Win's ship? I saw him in Manila just before the war started. It was talking with him that made up my husband's mind to get out."

  "Is your husband here in Australia with you?"

  "I suppose you could say that, in the most literal sense."

  Arthur McKay knew what was coming next. He did not want to hear it. He did not want to know the story of Imelda's unhappy marriage. Twenty years ago, walking the beach at Cavite, he had listened to Imelda lament her fate. She had been auctioned off by her family to Manuel Ortiz, one of the slimier specimens in the sewers of Philippine politics. McKay had declined to divorce his wife and rescue her, although he knew Imelda offered him a blind, absolute devotion he would never receive from Rita.

  Imelda had not really expected him to say yes. Like most Filipino women, she was resigned to the infidelity of American lovers, which was a prelude to the infidelity of a husband. McKay had sensed the strange Spanish-inherited fondness for suffering that the Philippines' Catholicism bred in its women, the secret willingness with which they let men abuse them, thereby enabling them, to identify with the sorrowful Virgin Mother and ultimately with the sad fate of Mater Filipinas herself, their unfortunate country.

  Arthur McKay did not want to hear Imelda's story. He was not sure he could cope with any more problems in his life at the moment. His executive officer had been drunk since they arrived in Sydney. His chaplain had taken to his bed in a funk that Dr. Cadwallader called a depression. McKay had been forced to ask First Lieutenant George Tombs to take over the responsibility for writing letters to the fiancées, parents, wives of the dead. George accepted the chore without a murmur. Maybe he was glad to have an excuse to stay on the ship and avoid the temptations of Sydney. He was happily married to a cheerful redhead whose admiration for him seemed impervious to the lousy way the Navy treated him.

  In spite of — or perhaps because of — these doleful thoughts, Imelda tempted Captain McKay. She was an escape from the dismal present. She was part of his sailor's youth, before it ebbed into responsibility and ambition. McKay could hear Win Kemble whispering at the dance in the residence of the High Commissioner to the Philippines. "That's the one. Imelda Cruz. Incredibly willing. She'll do anything you suggest. Just don't listen to the complaints afterward."

  Win had already broken her heart, of course. But that was not necessarily a defect, as McKay had discovered in other ports. Broken hearts made women more willing, often more passionate, if you arrived on the scene immediately after the fracture. The consoler could become more beloved than the heartless villain, as long as he did not mind an occasional sigh of longing for the lost predecessor. That was how things had gone with Imelda.

  "Come to me tonight. For dinner. My husband is in Melbourne bribing American politicians, as usual."

  "Imelda, I have a shot-up ship to worry about. A thousand sailors running wild.”

  "It's only one night, Arthur. Are you afraid to remember?" Was he? Women were uncanny in their ability to penetrate a man's defenses. Maybe they should be the admirals.

  "Of course not. What's the address?"

  "The car will pick you up at seven. Oh, Arthur, I knew you were here. I saw your name in the paper. I wanted to call you, but—"

  "Tonight," he said and fled to the relative safety of a conference with Australian police and Navy officers. They were trying to head off the riot that was about to erupt between American soldiers and sailors and local males enraged by the mass seduction of their women.

  Frank Flanagan trudged along Maroubra Beach, his arm around Annie Flood's waist. Jack Peterson could not understand why Flanagan had yet to score with Annie. From his lofty years of experience as a seducer, he had pronounced her ready and secretly willing. The guerrilla attacks he had made against her virtue had done their job. All Flanagan needed now was a little aggression. "One hot kiss," Jack had told him last night "She'll be on her back groaning for it. She's nuts about you.”

  Unfortunately, Flanagan did not want Annie that way. He understood all too well her complicated feelings about sin and desire. The knowledge immobilized him.

  The sun was sinking somewhere in the vast empty interior of Australia. Flanagan stared out at the twilit Pacific. There was nothing in sight — not an island, a ship. The emptiness seemed to underscore Australia's isolation here at the bottom of the world. The ocean's utter blankness was somehow menacing, almost a synonym for death. Flanagan suddenly remembered the grisly outline of Savo Island — the giant corpse floating on its back at the entrance to Ironbottom Sound.

  "What's wrong?" Annie said, sensing his mood change.

  "I heard today that we'll be sailing in two weeks. Your yard guys have been working overtime."

  "Why don't you throw me down and take me here and now? Isn't that why you told me? So my heart would break and I'd say yes at last?"

  "I don't know why I told you."

  "Yes you do."

  "I'm not asking you to feel sorry for me. I'll make it without you. I've made it this far."

  "I've told you. You're too American for me. I grew up hearing my grandfather and his friends damn the Americans. You hung back in the last war until everyone was bled to extinction and then rushed in to claim the victory. You were doing the same thing in this war until the Japs kicked you in the teeth."

  "Annie," Flanagan said, "you've given me a lot. If you don't want to give me this last thing, I'll try to understand."

  Oh, you bastard, he thought. He only meant about fifty percent of that noble sentiment. The other fifty percent was designed to break down this passionate woman's resistance. Maybe he was fifty percent true-blue
Frank Flanagan but the other fifty percent was mostly Jack Peterson.

  He was grateful for the honesty with which they had talked about themselves, love, the war, the. Catholic Church. He was even more grateful for the poems she had chanted to him, the way she had awakened him to the special nature of his Irish heritage, the Celtic fascination with the power of the word. She made him realize his American Catholic education had traduced him in more ways than one. The only poets he knew were second-rate Americans like Longfellow and third-rate English Catholics such as G. K. Chesterton and Alice Meynell. No wonder he thought poetry was strictly for girls and four-eyed limp-wristed grinds.

  He had taken one of Annie's books, In the Seven Woods by William Butler Yeats, back to the ship and read it five times, ignoring acid comments from Jack Peterson about joining the Jefferson City's daisy chain.

  "Maybe Yeats has the answer for us," he said. While the surf crashed behind them in the twilight, he recited:

  "Never give all the heart, for love

  Will hardly seem worth thinking of

  To passionate women if it seem

  Certain and they never dream

  That it fades out from kiss to kiss."

  "You really are the devil, damn you. Quoting poetry instead of scripture."

  "Maybe he's right. Maybe you can only love someone for a little while."

  Did he believe that? Or was he a hundred percent Jack Peterson now? Was he seducing this woman just to prove his manhood to Jack? No. It was deeper than his ego. It was need, a need deeper than sex, although sex, desire, had never been more acute. It was a kind of love. It was also a kind of defiance to the death that might be awaiting him in Ironbottom Sound. Death both created the deeper need and permitted its fulfillment.

  "Oh, Frank, don't die on me. I know you're never coming back to Australia. But I want to believe in your life, in its going on to happiness. I love you. I love your American wish to free your mind and soul of all restraints, I even love your defiance of the Church, maybe of God, though I can't follow it."