by Mark Dunn
“Don’t think about it. Let’s try to think about something else.”
“What time do you think it is?”
“I don’t know. Three, four in the afternoon.”
“Oh.”
“You ever seen him? Sinatra? You ever seen him sing?”
“Went with my sister. He was performing at the Waldorf. Show was in the Wedgewood Room, I think.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I got a big sore in my throat. Hurts a little to talk.”
“Ask me if I care. Tell me about Sinatra. How does a string-bean kid like that get every thirteen-year-old girl in America to wet her pants just to look at him?”
“He does have a good voice.”
“Good as Crosby?”
“How should I know? I grew up in a house full of Rudy Vallee records.”
“Couple of weeks ago, they bring out this picture, Anchors Aweigh. Two sailors on leave in Hollywood: Sinatra and I forget the name of the other actor. I’m thinking: I never got shore leave in Hollywood. Did you ever get leave in Hollywood?”
“I didn’t even get leave in Guam. I was sick in bed with stomach flu.”
“How are you feeling now, Tork?”
“Oh, I’m over the flu. I’ve just got this little problem with being half out of my mind from thirst. Oh, and there’s this other little thing with the upper half of my legs—you know, where they got scalded in the explosion. They still feel like they’re on fire sometimes.”
“At least you can still feel your legs. I lost all feeling below the waist several hours ago. Anyway, they say salt water’s good for skin shit. Good for a lot of things, I hear. Just don’t fucking drink it.”
“I’m afraid I’m gonna flip my wig and start to hallucinate like some of the other guys.”
“What other guys?”
“Heard Boyd and DeMornay a couple of hours ago—when they floated by. They were talking about going down to the Geedunk and getting themselves a big drink of water out of the fountain. Talking like they were still on the Indianapolis.”
“Maybe they were just kidding around.”
“Uh-uh. Dead serious. Rory, sometimes I think we’re dead. I think we died already and we’re in some kind of purgatory because I can’t believe I deserve to be in hell.”
“Here’s how I know we aren’t dead, Tork: because hell can’t be half as bad as this.”
“Makes no fucking sense.”
“No fucking sense, you got that right.”
“Two days we been out here. It just doesn’t add up. They were expecting us in Leyte. You know there had to have been distress calls. How come nobody’s shown up?”
“I don’t know. I’ve thought about it and thought about it and I just can’t figure it.”
“What time do you think it is?”
“You asked me that already. What am I, a floating grandfather clock?”
“I was just wondering because—”
“What did Sinatra sing? I mean, at the Waldorf?”
“I don’t remember. And it didn’t matter anyway. Where my sister and me was sitting, you couldn’t even hear him.”
“Why’s that?”
“Huh?”
“Why couldn’t you hear him?”
“Did you hear that?”
“It was nothing.”
“It was something. You heard it. Don’t say you didn’t.”
“Some fellow napping—woke up yelling from a bad dream.”
“You know that wasn’t it. It’s late afternoon, Hillard. They get hungry in the late afternoon. Then they feed through the night.”
“Why couldn’t you hear what Sinatra was singing? Was there a problem with the microphone?”
“No. The microphone was working fine.”
“Look at me. Turn around and look at me. Talk to me about Sinatra.”
“He’s a singer. Now he’s a big movie star—movie-star sailor. Movie-star sailor-crooners don’t get torn to bits by sharks, so don’t look for him out here. He makes a million dollars a year. That’s what I read. A million dollars a year, and you can’t even hear what he’s singing because all the bobby-soxers are yelling so fucking loud. Yelling right in your ear. Like you aren’t even there. Why don’t they know we’re here, Hillard? For Chrissakes, why isn’t anybody coming to get us? The ship had nearly twelve hundred men on board. How can you totally forget about a ship with twelve hundred men on board?”
“You rest your voice now, Tork.”
“Yeah, I’ll need it for when the shark pulls me under—the shark out there with my name on his fin.”
“They’ll be here. They’ve realized their error. They’re on their way.”
“We don’t deserve to win this war—a navy this incompetent.”
“Don’t talk that way.”
“I’ll talk any way I fucking want to. We’re all going to die—we’re dying one by one already. Couple more days there won’t be any of us left.”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“The sun’s killing me. I’m going to the Geedunk. Gonna get me a cool drink of water. Then I’m gonna get me a big vanilla ice cream cone. Sound good, Rory? You wanna join me?”
“No. I wanna stay right here. And you’re gonna stay right here with me.”
“Why?”
“You saved my life. I owe it to you to—to look after you.”
“Save your life? All I did was push this potato crate over to you. What’s the big deal?”
“I want us both to live, Tork. I want us both to get out of here and get married and have kids and tell the story to our kids and our grandkids about how we survived.”
“How did we survive, Rory? You tell me. What did we do so special? We just hung on and waited.”
“And kept our wits by talking. I don’t care if your throat hurts. You keep talking. If you start to sound a little screwy like all that hooey about going down to the commissary, I’ll pull you out of it. You do the same for me. Okay?”
“I don’t—”
“Okay? You tell me it’s okay, Tork—what I’m proposing. You say it’s okay or I bean you with this potato.”
“It’s okay or I bean you with this potato.”
“First-class comedian we got here.”
“How that elephant got into my pajamas, I’ll never know.”
“You wanna lick a potato?”
“Throat.”
“Just lick it. Think of it as an ice cream cone.”
“Sure.”
“Good.”
“It’s hot as hell out here.”
“Try not to think about it.”
“Did you hear that?”
“I didn’t hear nothing. Who was it liked Rudy Vallee so much—your mother or your father? Tork, are you listening to me?”
“Yeah. I’m listening. It was Ma. Ma was crazy for Rudy Vallee.”
“Your mother—now where were her folks from?”
“Uh. Kansas. Little town in west Kansas.”
“Born there?”
1946
ENNEADIC IN IOWA
Barend Kleerekoper taught mathematics at Coe College, a small college in Cedar Rapids. He was a good teacher and a favorite among his students, though he kept largely to himself and had no close friends. Dr. Kleerekoper had immigrated to the U.S. in 1934 from the Netherlands. When he lost his job teaching at the University of Groningen after the school experienced a severe drop in enrollment during the Dutch economic depression, the faculty of Coe’s mathematics department worked to bring him to their campus. The professors had long been admirers of his renowned achievements in irrational and transcendental number theory. They were happy to welcome him to their friendly town of solid, common-sense Iowa values, leavened by the kind of gentle, self-deprecating humor emblematized by native son Grant Wood’s popular and iconic American Gothic.
When Kleerekoper moved to the U.S., he left his whole family behind: his mother, father, and younger brother in Amsterdam, and his older brother and sister and
their respective families in Rotterdam. A confirmed bachelor, Barend had never married.
The fate of the professor’s extended family was tragically sealed when the Netherlands fell to the Nazis in 1940. His sister and her husband died in the bombing of Rotterdam. The rest of the family was rounded up and sent to the death camps of Sobibor, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz. None survived.
By the end of the war, well-kept Dutch civil records confirmed exactly what had happened to each of Kleerekoper’s loved ones back in Europe. In the wake of this news, the professor was rarely seen outside his classroom. During the winter break between ’45 and ’46 he holed up in his tiny apartment near the college, only emerging to buy groceries once a week and on one occasion to visit a doctor. His eyes hurt him. The physician diagnosed eye strain and prescribed more rest. More shut-eye, the doctor said. Kleerekoper didn’t crack a smile; some American idioms still eluded him.
Kleerekoper’s fellow faculty members reached out to him during those long, dark months of mourning. He rejected their attempts to envelope him in the warmth of their holiday collegiality and cheer. Kleerekoper had always been a semi-solitary man. Now, his solitude seemed to have become permanent.
For this reason, Nancy Fairfax had hesitated going to him. It was her brother, Eli—who’d taken a couple of classes from the professor before the war—who talked her into it. Dr. Kleerekoper was the perfect candidate, said Eli, to tutor Nancy’s son in junior high math. It was the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and Nancy’s husband was still needed in Europe. Nancy operated a granulator at the city’s Quaker Oats factory (which made Cedar Rapids smell, on blustery days, like cooked oatmeal). Her son, Jim, wanted a career in military intelligence like his father, but first he had to pass eighth-grade algebra. Nancy wanted only the best for her son.
The best was Barend Kleerekoper.
She didn’t phone. Instead, she showed up at his door on the morning of December 26, 1945.
Still dressed in his pajamas and a tatty house robe, he at first tried to ignore the repeated sequence of knocks. He hoped that whoever it was would simply give up and go away. It was early. He hadn’t even opened the Gazette. Kleerekoper had been closely following the news coverage of the Nuremberg trials and was especially invested in learning the fate of the Netherlands’ murderous Reichskommissar, Arthur Seyss-Inquart (who several months later would be found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to hang).
His visitor didn’t go away. When Kleerekoper finally opened the door, he found a woman several years younger than his forty-seven years standing with chattering teeth in the unheated hallway.
“Hello,” she said, holding something round and flat upon the palm of her hand in the manner of a waitress. “My name is Nancy Fairfax. You taught my brother Eli several years ago. He’s spoken very highly of you ever since. Here’s a pie. It’s a Christmas pie. I know you’re Jewish and you don’t have to eat it, but I brought it anyway.”
“Why?”
“May I come in?”
“No, you may not come in. Why did you bring me a pie? Because I taught your brother several years ago? That isn’t logical.”
“If you want the truth, Dr. Kleerekoper, my son, Jim—he’s in the eighth grade. He needs a tutor. He’s going to fail math if he doesn’t get help.”
Barend Kleerekoper slammed the door shut, although he wasn’t entirely impolite about it. As the door was closing, Nancy heard the “Happy” part of “Happy holidays.”
He didn’t take the pie.
The pie did, however, find its way into his apartment later that day, when he stepped out to put his garbage into the chute and found the pie, reposed within a twined baker’s cake box, waiting for him on the thin square of footworn carpet that served as his welcome mat. He ate two slices that night. It was the first American Christmas pie he’d ever had—strawberry-rhubarb—and every bit as good as the eierkoekens and kruimelkoekjes he’d enjoyed as a boy in the Netherlands.
The professor discovered a box of homemade raisin and oat cookies in front of his door the next morning. Everyone ate raisin and oat cookies here in Oat Town, but these were especially good. “You can send me all the sweets you like,” he said to the baker in absentia, “but I have better things to do with my time than tutor a fourteen-year-old mathematical illiterate.” He put a forkful of the half-finished strawberry-rhubarb pie into his mouth and almost smiled. Pie. Pi. If only Mrs. Fairfax knew the unintended appropriateness of that first culinary bribe.
No one knew, in fact, how Professor Kleerekoper spent his solitary hours, because he saw no reason to share details of his private masterwork with his colleagues. Perhaps some might find merit in it, but he also risked exposing himself to ridicule from others.
Pi. A mathematical constant whose value is the ratio of any Euclidean plane circle’s circumference to its diameter. Arguably the most fascinating and most celebrated of irrational numbers—that is, numbers whose value can’t be expressed as a fraction m/n, where m and n are integers—its representation in decimal positional notation never ending and never repeating as a whole. Despite the fact that pi need only be taken to the tenth decimal point to give the circumference of the Earth to within a fraction of an inch (that point reached by Madhava of Sangamagrama late in the fourteenth century), mathematicians (both those of the professional stripe and rank pi-loving amateurs) have throughout the ages been calculating pi to as many decimal places as their abilities and the technological sophistication of their calculating hardware permitted.
Kleerekoper, in joining (though hermetically) this longstanding cerebral pastime (one that in only three short years would be removed to the realm of eye-popping supra-achievement through application of the electronic computer), found in his efforts both the solace-granting satisfaction and the calculative sanity necessary to combat his deep depression. Working with his mechanical desk calculator, he permitted the numbers to order themselves in that lackadaisical way that affirmed his belief that the universe was randomness writ large. That the guiding hand of God was the stuff of fairy tale. That loved ones were put to death by madmen only because good and evil were cards played out of the same deck of chance, and in a chaotic universe everything is possible, even the unimaginable.
Dr. Kleerekoper had heard Christians speak of God’s will. What God, the professor would have liked to have asked them, would ever countenance the genocide of millions? But he would not ask it, nor could he even allow himself to think it—to allow such musings to crowd his calculating brain cells. Only the day before—the day that Nancy Fairfax had come to his door to distract him with an errand of advocacy for her son—he had reached the 761st decimal place in the infinite number pi. He was certain that it was a world record, far surpassing the previous publicized record set in 1873 by an amateur mathematician in England by the name of William Shanks: 707 decimal places. And Shanks’ wasn’t even a valid record: both Kleerekoper and a fellow mathematician by the name of Ferguson, using similar mechanical calculators in 1944, had discovered that Shanks had erred at the 528th decimal place. Every digit thereafter was wrong and had to be corrected before his record could be bested.
It was all hard work. It required time. Time was something that Kleerekoper had in great abundance. This is what pi looks like taken to the 761st decimal place:
3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971
6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899
8628034825 3421170679 8214808651 3282306647
0938446095 5058223172 5359408128 4811174502
8410270193 8521105559 6446229489 5493038196
4428810975 6659334461 2847564823 3786783165
2712019091 4564856692 3460348610 4543266482
1339360726 0249141273 7245870066 0631558817
4881520920 9628292540 9171536436 7892590360
0113305305 4882046652 1384146951 9415116094
3305727036 5759591953 0921861173 8193261179
3105118548 0744623799 6274956735 1885752724
8912279
381 8301194912 9833673362 4406566430
8602139494 6395224737 1907021798 6094370277
0539217176 2931767523 8467481846 7669405132
0005681271 4526356082 7785771342 7577896091
7363717872 1468440901 2249534301 4654958537
1050792279 6892589235 4201995611 2129021960
8640344181 5981362977 4771309960 51870721134
Kleerekoper planned to reach the 800th decimal place by the end of summer. He would celebrate his accomplishment with a dish of creamy Dutch Advocaat. He wondered if Mrs. Fairfax had ever tried it.
He was thinking of her.
He was thinking of her because she was at that moment on this third morning getting out of her car, which was parked right in front of his apartment building. Her son was with her. The woman was like a Dutch Shepherd Dog with a bone. He was the bone. It rankled him. He was curious about what tasty dessert she’d brought along this time, but still, it rankled him.
It was cake, as it turned out. A sweet, citrus-smelling, frosting-drizzled lemon pound cake.
His resistance was shattered.
Within minutes of Mrs. Fairfax’s arrival Kleerekoper had agreed to tutor the boy twice a week. He had wanted, in spite of the cake, to tell the woman and her son to leave him alone now and forevermore, but there was an earnestness about the boy that touched him. Jim seemed willing to really apply himself. He didn’t have a head for numbers, but that wasn’t his fault. Kleerekoper’s own head was too filled with numbers, he sometimes thought. Because they were his refuge. Pi was his refuge. He wondered how he should go on living if he didn’t have something to occupy his empty hours. Only so much of his time could be given to his undergraduates. And during the long winter break, there weren’t even any of them around.
“Twice a week,” Kleerekoper repeated. “Ninety minutes a session. Make note that I plan to work you hard.”
Jim nodded.
The first two tutoring sessions went well. Jim learned things. He retained important mathematical concepts imparted to him by an excellent teacher. Kleerekoper had never had a child, had spent very little time around children or adolescents. This was something new for him—working with the boy, guiding him, helping him to understand the simple things that Barend had mastered in early childhood.
