"You lack poetry," Norman said. "This is the city of gold, and here all around you are the fiery lights of the billion-footed manswarm."
Henny said a dirty word.
They found Hazel humming about the apartment; Sheldon was taking her to dinner and then to an off-Broadway show. "Who's Bob Cohn?" she said. "He called twice and wants you to phone him. I wrote his number down."
Norman had to think for a moment. "Oh. That frogman. Is he up here?" He went to the telephone.
"The frogman? The man who pulled you out of the water, that Israeli?" said Hazel. "He sounds like Brooklyn, and real fresh."
First, Paperman telephoned Atlas's office, but Lester was still in Montana. Then he called Cohn. Cohn said he had come to New York on his citizenship problem. He was returning to Amerigo in the morning, and he had just called to say hello.
Henny said, "Ask him to dinner. I'd like to meet him."
Norman nodded. "God, he jumped at it," he said, hanging up. "I think that's why he called. I'll bet he's broke and hungry. He gambles."
"How old is he?" the daughter said.
"Well, he was in the Israeli war in 1948. He must be at least thirty."
"Oh." Hazel went into her room. Half an hour later she emerged panoplied for a midweek date, and poignantly pretty, despite a ridiculous explosion of hair straight up from her head. Her neckline exposed more unsteady white bosom than Norman thought seemly, but he was tired of losing that fight. She was putting on her fur-collared coat when the doorbell rang, and she answered it. Cohn stood in the doorway, hatless, in an old tan raincoat, tightly belted. He was not much taller than Hazel in her high heels. He had gotten a close navy haircut which did not fit with his big nose and sharp brown face.
"Hello. You must be the girl with the funny voice. Hi, Norm."
Norman introduced the frogman to his wife and daughter. Hazel said, buttoning her coat, "I don't mean to be rude, but I have an appointment. I'm glad to meet the man who saved my father."
Cohn shrugged, flicked off his raincoat, and dropped it on a bench. He wore an out-of-date gray city suit, the jacket too long and the lapels too wide and flaring. "Your dad wasn't in any trouble. Not like I was, the next day." He turned a white-toothed grin at Norman. "I almost drowned, out at Little Dog. They had to work me over."
"What do you mean, I have a funny voice? What's wrong with my voice?" Hazel's eyes were getting wider.
"You sounded like you'd just run up eight flights of stairs, and also had a sore throat. You sound better now."
Norman and Henny both laughed out loud. Hazel's breathless, hoarse, presumably torrid telephone voice was a household joke.
Norman said, "What happened to you at Little Dog?"
"What's Little Dog?" said Hazel pettishly. She leaned in the doorway of the living room.
"It's this small island about six miles off Amerigo," Cohn said to her. "It has a coral shelf all around it about sixty-five, seventy feet down. That's good for submarine exercises, see, because periscope depth is sixty feet, more or less, and that's the depth at which we do all lock ins and lock outs." Hazel was listening with the eyes of a gazelle about to have its throat cut, staring at the knife. Cohn went on, talking now to Norman, "Locking out and in when the sub rests on the bottom is routine. But in combat the sub will have way on, of course-it can't keep stability otherwise, subs don't hover-and that's what our exercise was this time, escaping from a moving sub at sixty feet, and then later climbing down a line and locking back in while under way. That's where I fouled up. What happened-"
"You came here for a drink," said Henny. "What'll it be?"
"Scotch and water is great."
"Can I have the same?" said Hazel, glancing at her watch. "What do you mean by locking in and locking out?" She perched on the arm of the chair nearest the door of the living room, unbuttoning her coat, and crossing her beautiful legs.
Cohn described the air lock, the small chamber that opened into the submarine and also to the sea, and the valving and pumping scheme by which men went into the lock, stood and waited while water filled the tiny room, and then swam out. He could hardly make them believe that in the new escape method they left the submarine without air apparatus, and just blew their breaths out continually till they got to the surface.
"But don't you run out of breath?" Hazel said. "You can't exhale for more than a few seconds." She puffed her cheeks and blew.
Cohn laughed. "The only problem is exhaling fast and hard enough. That air in your lungs is under pressure, Hazel. It keeps expanding as you rise. You'd explode if you didn't get rid of it on the way up. Your mouth is your safety valve. You open wide and blow and blow for your life. It's hairy, the first few times you do it in the practice tower, but you get used to it."
"It sounds frightful," Hazel said.
"The really bad part is getting back into a submarine that's making three or four knots, sixty feet down," Cohn said. "That's work. I don't care what anybody says. A man doesn't swim that fast, you see. The buoy drifts by going like a train. You have to grab'tor you've missed it. Then down you go hand over hand on this moving line. All this is at night. You can't see anything, it's all by feel. So you grope your way back into that lock, still on that last breath you took at the surface, and-"
Norman said, "Henny, to hell with the Gull Reef Club. I've just discovered my line of work."
Henny and Cohn laughed, but Hazel remained solemn-faced, staring at the frogman. Cohn said, "Well, that was the point at which I goofed, the first time. I don't know yet what went wrong, but I had to be pulled inside the lock by the safety man and sort of emptied out. It was okay the second time, and now I can do it like the others. It was one of those things."
Hazel said to her father, "Where are you going to dinner?"
"I don't know. I guess Sardi's."
"Would you mind if Sheldon and I joined you"?" She added to Cohn, "My friend is a writer. I'm sure he'd like to meet a frogman. It's so interesting."
Cohn looked to Paperman, shrugging. "If he's a writer, he'll feel shortchanged. He'll expect a pale-eyed killer with no lips."
Henny said, "By all means, call Shel. Have him meet us, dear."
Hazel went to the telephone. Norman followed his wife into the kitchen, where she replenished the ice bucket. "For Christ's sake," he said, closing the door, "why do we need that depressing creep at dinner? He'll ruin my appetite and he'll eat twenty dollars' worth of food."
"This frogman is a contrast to the Sending. I thought maybe we ought to lean on it."
"Henny, he's nothing but a different kind of cuckoo." His wife shot him a look of contemptuous irony. He added, "I mean it's all very admirable, very admirable indeed, what he does, but normal guys, you know, don't go in for swimming in and out of submarines a hundred feet down, or whatever."
"No, you're quite right. Normal guys spend their lives sucking up to columnists to get little jokes printed." She thrust the ice bucket in his hands. "Give the cuckoo another drink while I dress."
Hazel had her coat off and was sitting on the couch beside Cohn, hands clasped on crossed knees, head atilt, and eyes huge. Cohn was talking about Israel. This was a subject which bored Paperman acutely. His parents had always been Zionists; his mother was still president of her Hadassah chapter. In escaping from home at fifteen, Norman had left all that behind, as well as his father's strict religious observances, with great relief. He had felt some pride in the unexpected victories of the Israelis, and had even made contributions to Zionist drives when the battles were at red glow. The wars had also served for wonderful joking at his Broadway tables about jet pilot communications in Yiddish, and the like. Beyond that, Israel meant not much more to him than Afghanistan.
It surprised him that Hazel seemed interested, but this he ascribed to the glamour of the frogman. Hazel had not met a man of action before. There were not many of them in middle-class New York circles.
Some of the lads who pursued her were getting reserve officer training, and they were p
retty fellows in their new uniforms, but they did not lock in and out of moving submarines. Hazel wanted to know what Jerusalem was like, and how the Israeli girls dressed. She was astonished when Cohn told her that most Israelis weren't religious; her idea had been that they were all as fussy as old Mr. Paperman. What surprised Norman more was Cohn's praise of the scenery, for he had pictured Israel as more or less like Miami, flat and sandy and hot, and too cluttered with old Jews. Cohn, calmly sipping at his scotch and water, spoke of the stony mountains of the north, the red gorges around Sodom, and the dusty plains of the Negev, turned to dark green wherever the water came. In his dry way, he became rather eloquent. "You should have worked in their tourist bureau," Paperman said. "Well, you could do worse than go there sometime, Norm." Paperman made a deprecating face. "We thought of squeezing it in between France and Italy two years ago. Time got short."
5
The Sending was waiting at Sardi's, and Paperman wondered at his wife's folly in allowing Hazel to invite him. He was almost a head taller than Cohn, and broader in the shoulder. The frogman's wirt muscles were hidden by his floppy old suit. Klug's attire was straight out of Esquire, all skimpy and narrow, and errorless to the arrow-thin dark blue tie. Cohn's heavy broad red tie, badly knotted, had a frayed edge. Klug was handsome, and had rich long chestnut hair; Cohn was ugly and had almost a prison clip. The confrontation was pointless anyway, for Hazel greeted Klug with blatantly undimmed love light in her eyes. Quite as Norman had feared, the Sending ordered oysters and a filet mignon, and several side dishes, none of them of the cheapest, such as fresh asparagus hollandaise and eggplant parmigiana. Dropping the menu with a contented sigh, he said to Cohn, "Hazel tells me you're a navy frogman. I think that's fascinating." Cohn nodded, and said nothing. "Can you tell me, I wonder, what the motivation of the men in your outfit is? That's what's truly interesting. The motivation. Why do they do it?"
"Motivation? It depends on the guy, I guess."
"Of course. But speaking generally."
"Speaking generally, there are two motives. Poverty and fright."
"Fright?" Klug arched one brow in skeptical amusement.
"And poverty. It's double hazardous-duty pay, you see, and that extra dough looks big. Most of the fellows are married."
"But fright, you say?"
"Why, sure. I guess most of us are cowards who have to keep proving to ourselves how brave we are."
Klug laughed. "You're being ironic. But there may be something in that."
Henny said, "I think you're heroes."
Cohn said earnestly, "No, ma'am. Heroes don't go for this duty. They like the parachuting, locking in and out of subs, and the rest. But there's too much drilling. It never stops, even after you qualify. You go on running three miles every morning and swimming ten miles a week, and that's most of what you do, and heroes get disgusted and quit. No, the ideal frogman is an unimaginative coward with a lot of unpaid bills."
Hazel said, "Parachute jumping? You do that too?"
"We have to qualify. Demolition is our job but it shades over into reconnaissance. You can't always swim to an objective."
"Gosh, they do everything," Hazel said to Klug. She turned back to Cohn, bright-eyed. "And do you learn karate, and all that? Can you kill a man by hitting him once on the neck?" Cohn chuckled. "Well, can you? What's so funny?"
"See, I can't tell you whether I can do it, Hazel, because they don't give us live men to practice on."
Norman said, "It's that stupid old Congress again, and their peacetime economizing. Damned shortsighted."
Cohn's eyes gleamed at him. "Right. It's Congress's fault for sure."
"But you're thirty years old," Hazel said. "Isn't that too old for such strenuous stuff?"
Cohn coughed over his drink. "It sure is, Hazel. I've told my CO. that, many times, and offered to quit. He just orders me to run three extra miles, to prove I'm wrong."
The arrival of the food put an instant stop to the talk, at least for
Klug; he fell to madly on the oysters. Hazel, picking at a melon, began to press Cohn for stories of his war experiences in Israel. He tried to dodge her questions, saying that the Israeli armed forces were the most fouled-up on earth, and nothing ever happened but a lot of low comedy. To prove this he told a story of a frogman group swimming from a fishing boat into the port of Alexandria to attach limpet mines to Egyptian warships. As he narrated it, the expedition was a series of silly mishaps, culminating in the fact that of the six old Italian limpet mines which they did manage to affix to the Egyptian ships-in one case with the aid of an Egyptian sailor, who readily obeyed orders barked at him in Arabic-five had failed to go off. However, the one that did go off had sunk the largest destroyer in the Egyptian navy.
"Was that one you set?" Henny asked.
"God, no. The man who set that one is the commodore of the Israeli navy now. I couldn't get mine to stick to the ship. The magnets had rusted out or something. I thought of staying there and holding it against the side till it went off. But as I told you, this duty attracts cowards. So I missed my chance to have a street in Tel Aviv named after me. Rehov Robert Cohn."
"Let's go to Israel one day, dear," Hazel said to Klug. "I'd love to see it."
"Sociologically it's an interesting place," Klug said. He had polished off his steak and the side dishes, while Cohn talked and merely nibbled at a slice of cold salmon. Klug lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. "Of course, there's a lot of nonsense written about it. There's been development capital of about a thousand dollars per head put into Israel by the Jews. You put that much money into any other country and you'd see results just as remarkable. In India development capital figures out at about twenty-one cents a head."
"Well, you'd be right except for one thing," Cohn said. "The way Israelis do things, a thousand dollars goes about as far there as twenty-one cents does in India."
Klug smiled tolerantly. "Then how do you explain the amazing progress?"
Cohn shrugged. "I hate to say this, but I think it's a Jewish plot." Hazel stared at him, then broke into peals of laughter. "You know, he's just plain crazy," she said to Klug. "This man is crazy."
Klug looked at his watch. "Much to my regret I think we re going to have to skip dessert, dear. It won't be easy to get down to Sheridan Square."
When Hazel and Klug had gone, Cohn exchanged a quizzical glance with each of the girl's parents. "I like him," he said.
Henny said, "He's a horror."
"A mess," said Norman.
"A nothing," said Henny.
Cohn said, "What does he do? Is he really a writer?"
"He teaches English," said Henny. "He's writing a thesis about how Balzac was a fairy."
"Balzac, eh?" said Cohn. "I have a brother who teaches comparative lit at Brandeis. He wrote a dissertation about how Homer was a fairy. Is Hazel going to marry this fellow?"
Henny said, "Well, the only thing is, he has a wife."
"And a kid," Norman added.
"I see. You're in great shape with your daughter."
"Peachy," Henny said. She went off to the ladies' room.
Norman said, "How about coming home and having a brandy with us?"
"No thanks. Say, Norm, if this isn't an imposition, can you lend me a hundred dollars?"
The abrupt demand startled Paperman into making an unpleasant face. Cohn laughed. "All right, forget it. You don't know me from Joe Zilch. It's nice of you to give me a feed."
"Why, no, I'll lend you the hundred. It's just that-well, I don't have a hundred on me. I guess the restaurant will cash my check-"
"You'd be a real pal. I'll send you the dough from Kinja tomorrow. One of the guys owes me two hundred."
Norman's opinion of Cohn was taking a sharp drop, but he signaled for a waiter and wrote out a check. Cohn rattled on cheerily, "I ran into these officers off the Jerusalem, you see. I knew them in the Israeli navy. Working an ocean liner sure puts an edge on your card game."
Henny returned
as Norman was taking the hundred dollars from the waiter and handing it to Cohn.
"What on earth?"
Cohn said, thrusting the loose bills into a pocket, "Norm's staking me to the fare back to Amerigo. The fact is, I have to sort of step on it to make the plane." He grinned. "Do you mind if I barrel off?"
"Why, of course not. But-"
"Well, then, see you in Kinja." Cohn stood. "Bring Hazel along. The youngsters in the team will give her a big rush. Thanks for everything, Norm. You too, Henny."
He made off, and they watched him get the old raincoat from the checkroom girl and go out.
"I'll be goddamned," said Henny.
Herman Wouk - Don't Stop The Carnival Page 11
