Second Generation

by Howard Fast

  Thus it was three weeks before they were able to set sail. The Noels were marvelous hosts, generous, unobtrusive, placing a car at Dan’s disposal, diverting the Lavettes with dinner parties, luaus, theater evenings, and film showings in Noel’s private viewing room at the house. May Ling guessed that even after all these years, they were haunted with a certain amount of guilt over the part they had played in the downfall of the Levy and Lavette empire. Dan and May Ling made frequent visits to Honolulu, where he was so insistent on buying anything she approved of or admired that it reached a point where she didn’t dare comment on anything she saw in a shop window.

  “Dan,” she said, “you can’t go on spending money like a drunken sailor.” He had just bought her a string of ivory beads, each one a miracle of carving, made in China.

  “I certainly can,” he said. “Do you know how much money we have?”

  “No. I have no idea.”

  “You might as well know. I own the shipyard outright. Aside from the fact that no one stoops to talk about price these days, my lawyers tell me that the facility itself is worth a couple of million. When Sam and I bought it, it wasn’t worth twenty cents.”

  “And if they stop buying ships? What happens then?”

  “That’s up to Hitler and Mussolini. If they stop sinking the ships, the government may stop ordering them. Isn’t it a beautiful, stinking thing, May Ling, to get rich because those bastards in the submarines sink more ships than we can build? A ship is a thing of beauty, the result of two thousand years of planning and testing and modifying, a whole, fine precise world in itself, and we build them to be destroyed and get fat on the blood of the men who sail them. It stinks. The whole damn thing we call civilization stinks to high heaven.”

  “We’re here in the Islands. Can’t you forget about civilization for a few weeks?”

  The day the Noels put the yawl in the water, Dan and May Ling spent shopping in Honolulu, returning with their load of canned goods, smoked meat, beer, and wine. Dan bought everything from canned beans to caviar—to the disgust of Christopher Noel. “We have a larder that can feed an army,” he informed them. Then he led both of them down to the dock to admire the boat.

  “She’s a Concordia,” Noel told Dan. “Built in 1938 by Howland and Hunt. Essentially, she’s a Buzzards Bay boat, built for the Atlantic waters off Massachusetts, which means she can take anything. They don’t build boats like this on our side of the world, and there isn’t another like her in the Islands. She’s almost forty feet and she displaces nine tons, and still she sails like a witch. If worse comes to worst, you can handle her yourself. She has a Gray, four-cycle, thirty-one-horse motor, which won’t send you scampering over the waves but will move you very nicely when you’re becalmed.”

  “If I’m becalmed, I stay becalmed. My only hope of heaven is a small boat.” Dan grinned. “By God, she is a beauty.”

  “She’ll sleep two nicely, or four if need be. When Elii and I take her out, we spread mats in the cockpit. Plenty of room there if you like sleeping under the stars. She has a two-way radio, refrigerator, stove—everything the heart can desire. God damn it, I envy you. Where are you bound?”

  “I thought we’d head southeast, circle the Big Island, and work our way back. Do some beachcombing. Say six or seven weeks.”

  “You’ve sailed a yawl?”

  “I had a cutter that was yawl-rigged.”

  “The way the mast is rigged, she’ll handle like a little catboat And the weather’s pretty good at this time of the year. The chartcase has everything you want for the Islands.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “I owe you,” Noel said. “Just bring that lovely wife of yours back in one piece. We haven’t seen enough of her.”

  Dan and May Ling left the following day, riding away from Oahu on a gentle easterly. They were in no hurry, and Dan left the small mizzen sail furled. May Ling was a good sailor. The wind held, and they picked up the heights of Molokai before dark.

  The next five weeks were a time of peace and happiness and enchantment that Dan would remember and dwell on as long as he lived. They anchored in a tiny cove in Molokai where the sand was white as snow. They swam naked and made love on the sand under the hot sun. Dan let his beard grow. At night, they built fires of driftwood, and May Ling curled up in his arms and watched the colors of the flames. Then they sailed across the Kalohi Channel and found another paradise on the island of Lanai, and May Ling said to him, “Let’s never go back, Danny.”

  “That’s an idea.”

  “We just keep sailing. There’s always another island.”

  “It’s Noel’s boat. Either we bring it back, or he gets the cops after us.”

  On Maui, they put in for supplies and stayed for a night and a day with the Jorgensons, who were friends of the Noels. May Ling trimmed Dan’s beard, but she declared that he still looked like a buccaneer, burned brown by the sun, wearing sandals, a white shirt, and duck sailing trousers. Matching his clothes, her tiny hand in his large paw, May Ling looked like a half-grown boy. Her ivory skin had tanned a deep brown, and there was a spring in her step and a buoyancy in her being that Dan had not seen in years. The Jorgensons were ship’s chandlers, and their house in Lahaina was built of volcanic rock. May Ling thought it was one of the most beautiful houses she had ever seen. She charmed the Jorgensons, and they begged Dan and May Ling to stay with them for at least a week and be shown the wonders of Maui, in particular the great volcanic mountain of Haleakala.

  “I just couldn’t,” May Ling said to Dan as they cast off from the dock at Maui. “You get a hunger for the boat. They’re such nice people, but all I could think of was to get back on the boat.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “Danny, will we come back here one day—I mean, come back and stay?”

  “That could be.”

  But once back on the Kahana, it was hard to leave Maui, and sailing easily, tacking, beating into the wind, they circled the island, camped for two days on a tiny beach, and finally raised sail for the Big Island of Hawaii.

  They lost track of the days, and Dan’s beard grew thicker. They rode out a wild rain squall, which filled May Ling with delicious terror and with admiration for Dan’s handling of the boat. They were becalmed once for almost an entire day. They found a chess set in one of the lockers, and May Ling taught Dan how to play. Once he had mastered the moves, he became enthralled with the game, and they played for hours. They put into Hilo, on the Big Island of Hawaii, and May Ling found a little bookstore and managed to buy a copy of Omoo, by Herman Melville, and a book of Stevenson’s short stories about the Islands. While Dan was at the wheel, May Ling read to him, and for the first time Dan heard the story of the bottle imp.

  “He must have loved these islands,” Dan said.

  “Yes, he loved them,” May Ling agreed. “He died in Samoa and was buried there. You know, Danny, for me, when I come here, I forget that I am Chinese. It’s the only place where no one looks at me strangely and does a double take because my eyes are slanted and my skin is yellow.”

  “Your eyes are not slanted, and your skin is certainly not yellow, and you’re no more Chinese than I’m Italian.”

  “I am, Danny, but not here. You know, we’ve become kids again, and we’re pretending—and I’m so afraid to go back. I want to be with you, Danny.”

  “You are with me.”

  “No. No, you really don’t understand. Do you remember that night when you came to dinner, the very first time I saw you, and Pop invited you and your wife, but the snow lady would not come, and I was so delighted that she didn’t come, because already, before I ever saw you, I was in love with you, and then you came, and you remember how I described the Chinese dishes that Mom prepared, and it was just the most wonderful evening of my whole life?”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, since then
, Danny, I only wanted one thing from life, to be with you—all the time. I’m afraid that no man could truly understand what I mean, because Joe is my son, and I love him with all my heart, but if I know I won’t see him for a month or two months or six months, I can endure it, and it doesn’t break my heart. But it’s different with you. It’s thirty years since you first put your arms around me and kissed me, and that’s a long time, but I never kissed another man or loved another man. Do you know what I’m trying to say to you, Danny?”

  “It’s what Dr. Freud calls a neurotic fixation—and that’s pretty damn fancy, wouldn’t you say? You found yourself a large, hairy, uneducated hoodlum and decided to make a civilized person out of him.”

  “Danny, you’re dumb!”

  “I know.”

  “Dumb, dumb, dumb. You’ll go back to that wretched shipyard and forget that I exist, and I’ll sit in that dreary house in Westwood and wait and wait. Oh, sometimes I wish I were large enough to pound some sense into your head.”

  “Maybe we won’t go back. To hell with Chris Noel. I’ve been reading the charts, and it would be just a lead pipe cinch to take this boat to Samoa. Then New Zealand. How would you like that? I hear it’s one hell of a beautiful place.”

  “Danny, you’re crazy.”

  May Ling would stretch out on the foredeck, her arms hanging over the side. For five days a porpoise had stayed with the boat, swimming on his side, watching May Ling as she watched him. When Dan heard her chattering away in Mandarin, he called out, “Are you talking to yourself, old girl?”

  “To Chu Tu.”

  “Who’s Chu Tu?”

  “This porpoise. He’s been with us five days. We’re old friends. I named him after my grandfather.”

  “And you talk to him in Chinese?”

  “Why not Chinese?”

  “How in hell would a porpoise understand Chinese?”

  She leaped up and ran back to throw her arms around him and kiss him. “Oh, Danny, I adore you.”

  Dan said to her one morning, anchored off Kiholo Bay on the big island, “Well, baby, it’s over. We’re going to make sail and head back before Chris gets nervous and calls the cops.”

  “Danny, do we have to?”

  “It’s his boat, and anyway, by now Admiral Land must be sore enough to eat his own brass. We’ve overstayed, and at this point no one knows where the devil we are. I’ve tried to call in by radio, but either I’m a rotten operator or no one’s listening. We’ve been out a month, and we can figure another five days back to Oahu if the wind holds, longer if it doesn’t.”

  The wind was good, but on the fourth day, they were becalmed at night, and they lay on a glassy sea off the southeastern point of Oahu. Whenever they slept at sea, Dan would awaken frequently. Tonight they slept on mats in the open cockpit. Dan awakened three times, the last time just at the first gray break of dawn. May Ling, curled under a blanket, was sleeping soundly, and Dan rose quietly. There was a touch of wind with the dawn, and he raised the mainsail and locked the rudder on course. Still May Ling slept. He went down into the cabin and began to prepare coffee and toast and bacon.

  He was there when he heard the sound in the distance, a bubbling, raging roar of sound. His first reaction was a picture of a volcano blowing its head; then, as the sound continued, he realized that he was hearing the explosion of bombs punctuated with gunfire.

  He leaped out of the cabin up to the deck. May Ling was on her knees, grasping the rail, and from the direction of Oahu the sound was building, increasing.

  “Danny, what is it?”

  He crouched beside her, putting his arms around her. Now they saw the planes overhead, flying low, wing after wing. Suddenly, one of the planes peeled off and swooped down toward the yawl, a stream of tracer bullets coming from its wings. Dan saw the bullets chop the water, then he heard the impact of them hitting the boat, and May Ling cried out, her body twisting spasmodically. Then the plane was gone, and overhead the planes continued their flight, taking no more notice of the tiny sailboat.

  “Danny,” she whispered. “Danny, I’m hurt.”

  He laid her down on the mat. A dark stain was spreading across her chest.

  “Danny, what happened to me?”

  He knelt over her, his soul rent with the kind of fear he had never known before. “It’s all right, baby, it’s all right, my love.”

  Her eyes were open. He pulled out his handkerchief, thinking only that he had to stop the blood, pressing it to the wound.

  “Baby, baby,” he whispered.

  Then he knew that she was dead. He felt frantically for her pulse. He lifted her in his arms, embracing her, pleading, “No, no, no, don’t. Don’t go away. Don’t leave me, please, please. Don’t go away, May Ling.”

  He knelt in the cockpit, his arms around her, and began to cry, swaying, kissing her cold cheeks and her lips.

  And in the distance, the rumble of obscene sound continued.

  PART SIX

  Return

  For two days, Barbara had tried to buy an alarm clock. There were no alarm clocks for sale in Calcutta. That struck her as reasonable; it was not a place where an alarm clock was a necessity. But what struck her as even stranger was that in all her shopping excursions, she had come across no such thing as a doll or a toy. Eloise had borne Tom a son, whom they called Frederick Thomas Lavette, and it had occurred to Barbara that she ought to try to send some kind of a gift for the child’s second birthday. Calcutta was not a place where they sold toys or alarm clocks.

  Very often of late, for a variety of reasons, Barbara had been unable to fall asleep. A morning appointment became a contest between will and fatigue, and usually fatigue triumphed. Thus the search for the alarm clock, and when the search proved futile, she put her problem to Kamil Shee, who was the custodian of the Press Club.

  “But it is simple, memsahib. I will awaken you.”

  “Good. At four o’clock in the morning.”

  “But four o’clock is not the morning, memsahib. It is still nighttime.”

  “Then can you awaken me at four o’clock at night?”

  “But I am asleep. How can I awaken you if I’m asleep?”

  “That’s reasonable,” Barbara agreed. “Just forget about it. I’ll tie a string around my finger.”

  “You will tie a string around your finger?”

  “Yes. That will do it.”

  By then, in June of 1944, Barbara had been in Calcutta for three weeks, living at the Press Club, which had once been a rajah’s palace and which had been converted into lodgings for correspondents during the war. She had been to many other places—North Africa, Burma, Ceylon—since that day in San Francisco when the foreign editor of the Chronicle had come to her house and interrupted her writing to insist that they needed a woman correspondent in the China-Burma-India theater, and that no one was better suited to the job than she. At first she had flatly refused. She had grown angry. She had shouted at him. She had apologized, and finally she had agreed to think about it. Two months later, she was in a C-54 Air Transport plane, taking off from Newfoundland on the first leg of her flight to the East.

  Now, in Calcutta, she was arranging the mosquito netting around her bed and setting her mind on awakening at four o’clock in the morning. Her appointment with Simil Chatterjee was for half-past four in the morning, when he would be at the Press Club to pick her up to show her the sleeping street at the break of dawn, which was, he insisted, the only time to see it. He felt that this was the biggest story in India and the story that no one was writing. Barbara suspected that he was a communist, although he had never indicated this and she had never asked him directly. He had singled her out and traced her down because he had read her novel, which amazed her, although by now she was becoming used to the way a published book could travel into the most out-of-the-way and unexpected places; and because he had read the book
, he felt that she would lend a sympathetic eye and ear to the situation.

  It was never easy for Barbara to fall asleep, and tonight the pressure of the need to awaken so early made it worse. It was very hot, and her ceiling fan was broken. She had long ago discovered that the most prevailing quality of ceiling fans all over India was that they did not work. She lay in bed under the netting, naked, trying to compose her mind. Calcutta was blacked out, but a fitful moonlight pervaded the room, and Barbara could just barely make out her body. She had lost weight, and she had a feeling, by no means based in reality, that she was becoming gaunt and dry. Actually, her daily intake of Atabrine, a malaria preventive, had given a golden glow to her skin, and the few pounds she had lost made little difference in her appearance. For some days now, she had been ready to leave; she had had enough of the war, enough of distance, enough of boredom, enough of loneliness, enough of soldiers and officers and correspondents laying their own hunger and loneliness on her, enough of being the only woman among a thousand men. Her hatred of war had once been academic and intellectual; now it was very precise and pointed and actual. War was waste and stupidity and barbarism, and it seemed to her now that all of her adult life had been caught up in the ever-widening cesspool of war, and that all she had loved had been taken from her by war—Marcel dead in France, May Ling slain by random bullets from a plane that had attacked Pearl Harbor, and it was a war of sorts that had taken Dominick Salone’s life too, so very long ago.

  She thought of that now, asking herself, Have I lived that long, truly? Or was that another life in another age? I am only thirty years old, unmarried, childless, with a past that makes me feel as ancient as the old temples in this land.

  There was such an ancient temple on the road between Old Delhi and New Delhi, and Barbara, going from New Delhi to Old Delhi in a tonga cart in the burning noonday sun, saw the place with its greenery and its babbling brook, and she stopped there, taking off her shoes to enter. There was one old monk in the temple, covered with a saffron robe and sitting crosslegged, and as she watched him that day, a deep feeling of peace had come over her, the first sense of peace she had experienced in a long time. Now, lying sleepless under the mosquito netting, she tried to remember and to bring back that feeling of peace, to compose herself, not to think of May Ling, not to think of Marcel, not to think of anything at all, not where she was, not where she would be tomorrow, only to sleep.