Suddenly the earnest, intense face of Jimmy Baldwin flashed before me, then in quick succession that of William Gardner Smith and the granite-handsome countenance of Richard Wright, all men I liked and deeply admired. “Would you mind…” Jesus! Would this stupid prejudice never end? I had a hard time not laughing, only wishing they could all witness this.
“If it does…” He left the words hanging in air, apparently taking my five-second remembrance as a hesitation.
“Not at all, sir,” I said. I saw a look of relief pass over him, his frown dissolving with the good news.
“Thank you, Seaver. You’re a good man.” The next day I met Carl Burnett, my roommate for two years, who was to become my boon companion and closest friend in the U.S. Navy.
* * *
After four weeks at Guantánamo, in close maneuvers with other elements of the fleet, we steamed back to Boston, where, I was told, we would remain for roughly a month before joining the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. Jeannette arranged to join me in Boston, where I found a well-situated one-room apartment on Commonwealth Avenue. In port, officers were off duty every third day and could spend it ashore, reporting back on deck at 7:00 a.m., an easy routine to live with. I adjusted to navy life better than I expected; my fellow junior officers, most younger than I, were an easygoing bunch, neither aggressively political nor overly serious, from an eclectic mixture of backgrounds and colleges, with whom it was possible to have discussions both profound and frivolous. Being separated for five months, for that was the length of our tour of duty in the Mediterranean, seemed endless. Not a wonderful way to begin a marriage.
Our long embrace on the Boston docks on the day of my departure reminded me of those photographs of World War II navy wives left behind. “Don’t worry,” Jeannette whispered, “I’ll be fine.”
After stopovers at Gibraltar and Barcelona, our third port of call was Marseilles, where I had arranged for a three-day pass to zip up to Paris. I had booked a room at the Hôtel Madison directly across from the St. Germain des Prés church, only a couple of blocks from my old rue du Sabot digs. You can go home again! I prowled the quarter, had a beer at the Royal, sauntered over to the Tournon, where Christopher and Jane were having a drink with George Plimpton, all charm and warm smiles beneath his tiny hat. Merlin was late again; The Paris Review was right on schedule. Earlier predictions that the latter would never survive were rapidly being revised. For while the masthead of The Paris Review listed half a dozen editors, it was George who was wholly dedicated and in charge as the others flitted in and out.
That evening, it seemed strange to be sitting at dinner in Paris with Jeannette’s parents without her.
The second day, I met with several of the Merlinites. Patrick was still thrashing with Molloy but making progress. Christopher had never been in finer fettle: his poems were increasingly being published in London. Austryn was by now the editorial head of Merlin, though he shared the masthead title with Alex, who had clearly crossed some invisible river to another world.
Relationships had changed, too: Jane, to my utter surprise and shock, was no longer with Alex, who, while focusing on one Iris Owens, was spreading his sexual talents to as broad an array of local women as possible. Jane was consoling herself with Baird Bryant, whom she would later marry, but not before Baird had entered the lists, in competition with Alex for Iris’s favors, while Baird’s wife, Denny, had taken up with Austryn, who had left Muffie, or she him, either before or after Muffie embarked on an affair with Maurice, for whom she was now working, presumably by both day and night. The ballet, most of whose pas de deux or pas de trois were reported to me by Patrick, was dizzying.
I returned to Marseilles that Sunday night, delighted to have touched base with my beloved Paris, with Paul and Roszi, and a few friends, as well as with the Merlinites I could find. But I also felt purged of a part of my life now past, for which, I suspected, I would feel only the slightest nostalgia.
* * *
It was February when we touched American shores again at our Boston base, and I quickly entrained for New York on a two-week leave, to find Jeannette awaiting me with a sumptuous dinner next to a dangerously dry and brittle, but still-decorated, Christmas tree, which, sentimental as always, she had refused to dismantle till I got home. Jeannette’s English had improved measurably, but I was concerned when she greeted me in a sumptuous fur coat, one far beyond our means. My mind having been perverted by my years in France, where gentlemen routinely lavish such gifts on their mistresses, I prepared myself for the worst. I refrained from questioning her for several days, until I could hold out no longer. She burst out laughing. “I have a distant ‘relative’ in Riverdale—who has loaned her coat to me. No, Monsieur Jaloux, eet is not a geeft from my lovaire!”
Then it was time to head back to Boston, where I had again rented a small apartment on Commonwealth Avenue to pick up the fragmented honeymoon we had left off. The Columbus was to remain in port for several weeks, for the installation of new equipment, general overhaul, and reassignment. Jeannette had taken a leave of absence from Juilliard. Again, officers had every third night ashore, and on the two days when we had duty on board, we were now allowed, in rotation, to bring our wives to dinner. For my French bride, climbing on board the Columbus, having dinner in the officers’ dining room was very exciting. When she first appeared—looking like a cross between Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida—she caused a major stir among the younger officers, bachelors all, who were instantly charmed by her smiling presence and her oh-so-French accent. Several of my fellow junior officers—though by now I was not so junior, time having once more worked in my favor, so that my shoulder boards now bore two full stripes—begged me to introduce them to Jeannette’s sisters and didn’t believe me when I insisted she was an only child.
Late spring found us ready to redeploy again, this time to the Pacific to join the Seventh Fleet. Citing the Sixth Fleet experience as precedent, I made formal application for Jeannette to come to the Far East and was turned down at the initial level. Jeannette decided to return home to France for a few months while we sailed off to the Far East.
The endless Pacific. I felt as though trapped in some bad dream. But we had arrived in Japan.
Yokosuka was only an hour from Tokyo by fast train, and they all seemed to be fast, crowded but efficient. The Ginza, with its myriad glittering lights, made Broadway look almost dull. People hurried everywhere, nobody paying us any attention, but we did not feel any antipathy there either. Because of the war, and the atrocity stories of Japanese cruelty that had been our daily fare for almost four years, I had arrived with a strong negative preconception, a chip on my shoulder, that vanished very quickly. The few Japanese we met were without exception polite, helpful, amiable. Visiting Japanese department stores, we were charmed by the pretty, kimono-clad elevator operators, who at each floor announced its wares, bowing with each mellifluous utterance. Officers and petty officers who had been here before warned me not to be fooled by the surface cordiality, below which, they claimed, was a thick layer of resentment. Still, as the days went by, I detected none, even when I explored the more remote reaches of the city.
Because my navy record contained the information that I had run a periodical of some sort in Paris, the executive officer called me in a few days later and asked if I would mind being detached from the ship for a couple of months and remain in Tokyo while the ship sailed on to Singapore, Saigon, and Bangkok, the purpose of the shore assignment being to edit a cruise book. I must have looked puzzled, for he quickly explained that each major ship in the fleet—cruiser, battleship, carrier—recorded its experiences in what amounted to a yearbook, given to each crew member at the end of the tour. I would be provided full details, shown earlier cruise books, put in contact with Japanese printers. I accepted, momentarily regretting the loss of other ports farther south but intrigued to explore Japan further. I was assigned to a small but clean hotel in the center of Tokyo. To whom should I report? To myself, I was
on my own, though I was given the name and address of a local naval official in case of any problems. My per diem allowance for food seemed niggardly till I tried one or two local restaurants and found it was munificent. There was also a PX. So, armed with a stack of manuscripts—mostly cursory notes—from all departments of the ship, plus several hundred photographs, I set out to test the professional waters of this new Japanese-American relationship. The Japanese printers were highly professional. No one had more than a smidgen of pidgin, if you’ll pardon the unpardonable juxtaposition, but somehow we managed to communicate over the next few weeks as the book took shape.
With ten days to go before the ship’s return, I gave the entire work a final, careful read and pronounced it ready for press. In fact, I said, pride once again going before a fall, I found it rather handsome, a job well done, and at the compliment the men and women with whom I had been working daily all smiled and bowed, pleased by my praise. I visited the printer as, one by one, the forms rolled off and were collected and stacked, waiting to be bound. No hitch that I could see, though I felt the constant close reading, and rereading, was slowly driving me blind. When, two days later, I was delivered the first bound copy, I breathed a sigh of relief, for the Columbus was due back in Yokosuka in forty-eight hours. I leafed through page by page and saw, gratefully, that all the pictures were in place, resplendent in full color. I began to read, one final time, the text. No problems there, either. Thank God, for as with the Majorcan printer for Merlin, typesetting in Tokyo had been done by hand, each letter picked from a printer’s tray and dropped into place, the page tightly bound by string and readied for the press. And then I reached page 136. Shit! An e missing—no, two—then an l and an m and two t’s! My God, a dozen others! The string doubtless had not been wound tightly enough about the plate. A disaster! The captain would have my head, and rightly so. What the hell were you doing all these weeks, Seaver? Can’t you read! With heavy heart—I know, I know, but the expression is accurate—I carried the book over to the head honcho of the printer and showed him the page. My face must have betrayed my feelings. I expected a demurrer: Seaver-san, these things happen. Look at all the other pages where there is no problem, yes? In other words, tough titty. Instead, he smiled and said: “No problem, we fix.” “Fix?” I said, “How you fix?” having learned by then not to bother with articles or complex verb forms. “Book is printed. All printed. Ship come two days. For me disaster. Captain kill me. Seaver-san dead. Executed.” I ran my forefingers across my throat—no need for translation there … He listened patiently, and to my growing irritation the smile never left his face. “No problem,” he repeated, “we fix.” “How?” I said. “We show you. Go have lunch now. Come back in afternoon.” He looked at his watch. “Come back two clock—uh, no, three clock, okay?”
I had no stomach for lunch, but had a sandwich and beer to kill time, then reappeared sharply at three. At two long tables, twenty-some women in brightly colored kimonos were sitting, our cruise books opened before them, each holding what looked to be a wooden match between thumb and forefinger, poised above the delinquent page, then dropped smartly onto it, at which point the book was passed to the next woman in line, who performed the same ritual. Top Dog–san strode back and forth behind them, his face still wreathed in a broad smile. “See,” he said, “we fixing.” And indeed they were. I found it difficult to believe, but the women, each armed with a single piece of type, which had been inserted into a notched wooden match, the better to aim, were filling in the missing letters one by one. I took one finished copy, checking to see if the missing letters were aligned or askew, and they were perfect. I shook my head. “Problem, Seaver-san?” the Head-san asked, his smile vanishing in a cloud of concern. “No problem,” I said. “Seaver impressed.” “Impressed?” he said. “Happy,” I said. “Very good job, very good,” and seizing him by the shoulders, I gave him a big hug, which doubtless destroyed several centuries of custom and protocol. Three thousand copies of the Columbus cruise book had been repaired in a matter of hours. I had a sudden thought: Given this sort of dedication, would Japan one day—soon?—become a major power again?
Precisely eight hours before the Columbus arrived back in Yokosuka, the repaired copies of the book were delivered on the dock in cartons of twenty, encased in rainproof crates. Hoisted on board, they were greedily seized by the crew and brought to their bunks for a closer look. “Good job, Seaver,” the executive officer said to me, leafing through his. “You know, half the time these books arrive with a dozen or more pictures out of place or with the wrong captions. And believe it or not, with lots of letters dropped from the text. This looks nigh perfect.” “Thank you, sir,” I said, “I did my best,” secretly wishing I hadn’t sweated the previous forty-eight hours, but coming away from the experience with a deep new respect for Japanese ingenuity.
* * *
Before our ship’s return to the States, the entire Seventh Fleet was ordered to practice high-speed night maneuvers without lights, without communication of any sort. We steamed out to the South China Sea, an impressive flotilla of thirty ships from destroyers to carriers and including one massive battleship. Shortly before midnight we set out on the maneuvers, the plans for which were in each captain’s hands. Down in the engine room, I could feel the ship vibrate, doing over thirty knots, straining to its limits, racing through the dark seas. At four o’clock, my four-hour watch over, I went up and hit the sack. I must have fallen asleep immediately, for the next thing I remembered was a loud screech of metal on metal as I was thrown from my bunk and halfway across the stateroom. I struggled to my feet, checking arms and legs to make sure they were intact, crammed on my pants and shoes, and headed topside. It was still dark, but the lights of several of the other ships had snapped on, against orders, so the problem had to be serious. It was. In the course of the nighttime maneuvers, the orders had run that at a precise time the fleet would turn twenty degrees to starboard. One ship, either ours or a close destroyer escort, had turned to port, as a result of which we had sheared off the bow of our sister ship. It was in no danger of sinking, I was told, for the bulkhead had been immediately sealed off; the tragedy was, the missing bow contained the crew’s sleeping quarters, so what was a harsh body blow to the thick-skinned Columbus was fatal to whatever number of sailors had been bunked down in the destroyer. It was still too dark for the fleet’s helicopters to take off, but at dawn several did, to comb the waters for survivors. They found none. We circled funereally for the better part of the morning, all eyes scanning the waters, and when it was certain there was no hope, we were ordered to cut all engines as the fleet’s chaplains—Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish in turn—performed the rites, commending the bodies of those lost to the deep. We and the wounded destroyer were ordered to head for Subic Bay in the Philippines, not too far off, for repairs, we under our own steam, the bowless destroyer towed. We limped into Subic, a sad, sober bunch, for word was filtering down that it was we, not the smaller ship, that had made the wrong turn. A court-martial was being convened to ascertain the truth. A dozen sailors were dead. It took five weeks for our ship to be declared seaworthy, two stout metal strips—which we immediately dubbed the Columbus Railroad Tracks—affixed awkwardly to our starboard bow, ugly and accusing, as we headed out of Subic toward the States. We arrived in Long Beach ten days later, sans captain, who had been detained for the court-martial in the Philippines. What should have been a purely joyous occasion, with families reunited after long months apart, was more than offset by the collision at sea, which still weighed heavily on all of us. We felt, too, for the captain, a career officer of twenty-five years, whose first major sea command the Columbus was, a decent man and dedicated sailor who, we knew, was up for admiral next year. His career was now over. Chief Petty Officer Brandon, a thirty-year veteran of a dozen ships, spoke for most of the career men when he said: “Problem with today’s navy is, these Annapolis graduates spend most of their lives on shore duty, sometimes for decades, and by the time
they get a command, the ship technology is so changed from what they had been taught they can’t deal with it.” In other words, too many senior officers for too few ships. I suppose the only solution to that dilemma would be to declare war on some rogue state, bring dozens of ships out of mothballs, and give all academy grads a fair chance …
* * *
Jeannette, after months back home in France while the Columbus was in the Far East, had returned to the States the week before and flown out to L.A. As the wounded CA-74 edged in—not proudly, for word of our collision had long ago reached the shore—I searched the throng of women and children crowding the dock, and then I spotted her, a bouquet of brilliant orange summer flowers imprinted on a dress of dazzling white. I waved wildly, she spotted me and waved back, all smiles, and suddenly the world was right again.
For the three weeks prior to my discharge, we lived in a small rented house in Long Beach, slowly catching up in a belated honeymoon spirit, then headed east, to start our new life.
The Tender Hour of Twilight Page 29
