“So what happened?”
The Professor took a moment to regain himself, clearing his throat, making a little circle with the point of his chin. “I miscalculated.”
“What does that mean?”
“Seniority and reputation cannot solve all problems. Instead, the young man was lionized, whereas I experienced academic exile. Forget thirty-eight years on the faculty. Colleagues snubbed me in the hallway and department meetings. They declined to return my calls. There were no fond farewells, no retirement dinners, no valedictories.”
“What about your book?”
“At the university press, the proposal died of editorial neglect. I sought publication elsewhere, without success. One day I spotted Townsend, a former colleague, at a restaurant here by the lake. I confronted him, and he delivered the truth. No one believed my proposal was true. Oh, they could verify certain details to know it was not complete fabrication. But the rest was less easily confirmed, and my credibility too damaged.” He chopped a hand down. “It was like a guillotine blow.”
“That all sounds so unfair,” I said. “But it only involves your last book. Why take your old ones off the shelf? It’s not like they stopped being true.”
The Professor was calming now, or tiring, and he only shrugged. “It was a scandal. Universities experience them routinely, yet never know what response will be appropriate. I suppose I didn’t either, or my self-defense would not have been as much of a nolo contendere.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Perhaps you will look it up, when next you visit the library.” The Professor pulled his blanket tighter. “Bring me inside, please. I’m feeling chilled.”
NORMALLY MICHAEL WOULD HAVE BEEN HOME by the time I arrived. Somehow I knew without going inside that the house was empty. But I did not panic. He’d had to work out a ride, and that probably meant waiting. I took out my phone, confirmed that there were no messages, and put it away without calling him. Pestering would not help, nor bring him home any sooner.
The day had turned humid, and our home was not air conditioned, so I went through all the rooms, opening windows. I started the fan in the kitchen.
That was when I noticed that Michael had forgotten to turn my computer off. I sat and slipped off my sandals while the screen saver paged between photos of a slideshow I’d assembled years back: Michael in uniform about to ship out, my grad-school commencement in cap and gown, the kite surfers soaring behind our wedding.
As a social work student you find yourself opening all kinds of websites, to observe all sorts of social ills. So I’d been taught to clear the history after every online session. Michael said I was fooling myself, the Internet was designed to be the opposite of privacy. But I’d continued the practice at home, maintaining the hope that my searches, emails, and purchases were somehow not subject to snooping and tracking. Michael might have been right, but it was what I preferred to believe.
At that moment, the screen saver photos showed only one thing to me: temptation. I could spy on Michael’s searches, and he would never know. Or I could honor his privacy, and he would never know. He might be shopping for a truck, checking bus schedules, ogling breasts. None of it was my business, unless I chose to make it so.
No. I was not going to be that kind of wife. Michael deserved an uninvaded life. Besides, I didn’t need to spy. In general terms, I already knew what his issues were. What my husband needed was the tincture of time. That phrase comes from the bereavement part of hospice work, based on a crude but accurate truth: Emotional pain, no matter how severe, does diminish after a while, because time is somehow merciful.
No. His dignity mattered more than my curiosity. I moved the mouse to shut the system down, only to find that he had not even closed the sites he’d visited. One by one they refreshed before me. I was about to see some revelations in spite of myself.
The first one was an update on Iraq, towns secured, offensives under way, who controlled which cities. To my eyes it was chaos, as if Michael and his fellow soldiers had never been there. I clicked to end his session.
But one of the blogs remained up, three screens of it, so I had to close each one separately. There was no way to avoid looking.
It was called “Coming Home.” The first screen was called “Great Expectations” and it offered five steps for convincing friends, family members, and co-workers to lower their expectations of you. When I closed that one, the next was “Guilty Conscience.” It opened by describing a unit that had received incorrect intelligence and killed an innocent family, and how the soldiers were struggling to re-enter home life. That one I wanted to read, because I knew Michael’s conscience was what kept him awake.
The last one bore another headline that hooked me: “Eight Signs Your Mental Health Is in Trouble.” The first sign, in bold: You contemplate acts of violence. I closed that one as fast as I could.
And then the screen was blank. By habit, I went to clear the history, and discovered that I could also review any site visited since the last clearing. I hovered the cursor over that command.
“Hey, Deb.”
I wheeled in my chair, heart in my throat. “God, you startled me.”
Michael leaned against the doorframe. “Sorry. Just got home.”
I took him in, his forehead shiny with sweat, his shirt darkened on the chest and under his arms. “Did you walk the whole way from the shop?”
He took a long draw from the glass of water in his hand. “I guess I did.”
“Aren’t you roasting?”
“Times two. But I liked it. I liked moving slowly.”
“Oh. That’s good, honey.” By then I had collected myself. “Welcome home. Be with you in one second.”
I turned to finish shutting the computer down, then spun the chair back to stand and give him a kiss, but Michael had already put his glass in the sink. He stood at the kitchen door. “I’m going to walk some more, Deborah. It might be good for me.”
“Want some company?” I reached to pull my sandals back on.
But he shook his head. “Don’t hold dinner.”
Just like that he was gone, out into the sweltering evening. The screen door slammed behind him. And I wondered: What are they? Those eight signs that your mental health is in trouble?
IN ADDITION TO JAPANESE CULTURE and military successes, one other ingredient was critical to the I-25 submarine’s Oregon mission: anemic American morale.
The effectiveness of Japan’s warring had given the United States an unprecedented sense of vulnerability. President Roosevelt articulated as much in one of his fireside chats: “The broad oceans which have been heralded in the past as our protection from attack have become endless battlefields on which we are constantly being challenged by our enemies.”
Anxiety found nationwide expression. The day after Pearl Harbor, based on rumors that an attack was imminent, Oakland closed its schools and ordered a blackout. Lieutenant General John DeWitt of the Western Defense Command proclaimed: “Last night there were planes over this community. They were enemy planes. I mean Japanese planes.”
Similar rumors struck the East Coast. Fighter planes scrambled from Mitchel Field on Long Island to intercept enemy aircraft less than two hours away. Schools closed. Stocks on Wall Street plummeted.
There were no planes over Oakland, no bombers approaching Manhattan.
In 1942, only months prior to the I-25 mission, Los Angeles also experienced a panic. Air raid sirens sounded throughout the county. Just after three A.M., the Thirty-seventh Coast Artillery Brigade began firing antiaircraft shells. The shooting lasted an hour, with more than 1,400 shells fired—approximately one every three seconds.
Afterward, no one in a position of command could state with clarity what the troops had been firing at. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox declared the entire incident a false alarm. Knox’s diagnosis: “
war nerves.” After the war ended, Japanese officials said they had no aircraft in the vicinity at the time.
If hearsay could generate panic on that scale, imagine the power of actual fires. Civilians would scatter like ants. Dousing the blaze would require massive resources. Americans, convinced of superior Japanese military organization and ferocity, would lose their stomach for fighting the sons of samurai. Shouri.
Or so went the reasoning within the Imperial Navy. Thus did the admirals dispatch the I-25 to Oregon. It was one of twenty submarines of a new design. At 2,600 tons, these ships were large by the standards of the day: 357 feet long and 30.5 feet across. They were powered by twin diesels, 12,400 horsepower each, plus two 2,000-horsepower electric motors for silent running.
This class of subs was fast. Submerged, they could make 8 knots (9 mph), but their surface top speed was 23.5 knots (27 mph). Thus they could cover some 600 miles in a day. Perhaps their greatest value, however, was range: 25,928 miles—three times the extent of Allied subs. These vessels could sail around the globe without refueling. They were therefore dangerously well suited to conducting offensives all the way across the world’s largest ocean.
The I-25 carried several deck weapons, including a pair of 25-mm machine guns. The main gun fired 5.5-inch shells, the explosive portion of which measured nearly 18 inches and weighed 60 pounds. This gun had a range of nine miles and sat on the stern for two reasons. The first was to leave room for a catapult on the bow, more on which in a moment. The other was to enable the ship to be shelling as it escaped.
Lastly, the I-25 had six torpedo tubes. It had sunk the British Derrymore, as well the Fort Camosun, a Canadian freighter carrying war supplies for England.
Yet in September 1942 the submarine’s primary weapon was its passenger. He sat below while the weather stormed. Imagine the atmosphere: diesel motors chugging, water leaking in one seam or another, sweaty sailors, food odors, smoke from Kinshi cigarettes, and under it all the sharp scent of human fear.
CHAPTER 5
WHEN I OPENED THE PROFESSOR’S FRONT DOOR, I saw that Cheryl had pulled one of the dining chairs into the entry. Rising from the seat, she held a finger to her lips.
“What’s up?” I whispered.
“We had a rough night last night.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
She motioned me into the living room, where she recapped the previous eight hours. “He just got grouchier and grouchier.”
I scanned her notes on his chart. “For this one, that sounds normal.”
“Way worse. Shouting at the television, at me, at his own body. I came in and he was jabbing himself in the side with one of the remotes. Look—” She went to the kitchen counter, bringing back a remote controller. The plastic casing was split. “It was like he was trying to stab his own kidney.”
“Ouch. How much pain medicine did you give him?”
“He declined everything. He said lucidity was his only strength. Also that he did not trust me.”
“Cheryl, he doesn’t trust any of us.” I turned the cracked device over in my hand. Broken pencils, broken remotes, that kind of a morning. “Does he have any notion of what’s ahead?”
Cheryl peered at me over her glasses. “Who would have told him?”
“Someone must have. I mean he has already given explicit orders against more diagnostic testing. He did that in writing when Timmy was here.”
Cheryl took the remote and tapped it against her chin. “We don’t need tests to know what the situation here is, do we?”
“Not really. So what did you do?”
“I tried to reason with him. It was clear he was in tremendous pain. About two hours ago, he finally gave in. Like he’d set a goal of sunrise? It was a miserable haul until then, poor guy. I gave him a good dose, and now he’s getting a deep break. If lucidity is one of his values, though, that’s far from ideal. If we could just convince him to let us get ahead of it . . .”
“I’m with you,” I said. “And there’s my goal for the day.”
“I don’t know.” Cheryl smirked. “With what it took to get that pain under control, I hope you brought something to read. He’ll be out for a while.”
Barclay Reed snoozed till afternoon, waking with a bundle of needs. Because he’d slept with his mouth open, he was desperately thirsty. I refilled his jug and brought a fresh straw. He sucked and gulped, the whole time keeping his eyes trained on me. I suspect the Professor intended to appear intimidating; actually, he looked like a little boy. I offered to wipe his gums with glycerin too, to re-establish decent pH and moisture levels. But once I’d prepared the swab, he snatched it from me and did the job himself.
Although the task was less strenuous than brushing his teeth, it left him depleted. I took the stick from his lax fingers and tossed it in the trash.
The morphine had corked the Professor’s digestion, too. I gave him a mild laxative and heated some apple-onion soup I’d brought earlier. Then I spoon-fed him, his arms flaccid on the bed while he gulped and swallowed and opened his mouth for more. When I set the bowl aside, perhaps to prove he had the strength, he lifted one hand to scratch his chin. Instantly he frowned at me, hard, with his whole face.
“What is it?” I said. “What do you need?”
“Someone here that I can trust.”
I didn’t blink. “To perform what task?”
“Nurse Birch, I am a highly credentialed scholar. I have a PhD, and thirty-one years with tenure. I’ve published nine books, each one recognized for its depth, substance, and historical import.”
“Yes, I know. Very impressive.”
“Yet look at me.”
“I’d say your color is pretty good for the night you just had.”
“Not my color, blast it.” He bugged his eyes at me in disbelief. “My whiskers. I am not some pseudo-scholar, hiding his ignorance behind the costume sagacity of a beard. I am accustomed to impeccability. Today, between my fatigue and that contemptible dullard medicine your night witch forced upon me, I lack the stamina to maintain a proper appearance.”
It was true. He had a white scruff on his neck and face, though to me it didn’t look bad. “Would you like me to shave you?”
“Nurse Birch, would I like to swim in a river filled with crocodiles? Of course not. But if it is the only way to reach the other side?”
“You could wait till someone else comes, someone you place more confidence in.”
“And risk a colleague or former student visiting and finding me like this? Unacceptable.”
I was about to say that he did not seem to have guests of that kind, or visitors at all, when I realized how cruel it would sound. “Professor Reed, here’s what I’d like to suggest. How about if I shave you, and you coach me all the way? Every step, and we’ll do it just the way you like.”
He narrowed his eyes at me.
I smiled. “I suspect you might even enjoy giving me instruction.”
“Bah. You annoy me, Nurse Birch. But what alternative do I have?”
He was fussy, and I loved it. We spent easily five minutes getting the water in the sink to the proper temperature—which I thought was just shy of scalding but he praised as ideal. I locked his wheelchair in front of the mirror and watched him stretch to see his reflection, while I rolled up my sleeves and placed towels on his chest to shield him from the wet.
The Professor used an old-fashioned brush and a bar of bay-scented shaving soap. Fortunately, his razor was normal. He barked at me to shape his sideburns identically; they had to be perfect before I could move on to anywhere else. I did just as he commanded.
Over the next few minutes, though, the atmosphere changed. As I proceeded down his face, and across, he couldn’t speak or I might cut him. And I was bent close, concentrating. Inch by inch down the length of his frame, Barclay Reed began to relax. Maybe i
t was the hot water, the humid room, or maybe the simple experience of allowing someone to care for him.
The feelings were mutual. For me, there was the gratification of providing an intimate service without compromising his dignity. It was not just a bit of hygienic care; it was also a meeting place. By the time he raised his chin so I could shave his throat, the Professor was calm and still.
When I had finished, I razored over everything again, drained the soapy water, and washed his whiskers from the sides of the sink. He remained quiet the whole time. I was in no mood to break the spell. I toweled his face dry and set his shaving kit exactly where it had been beforehand.
“Where did you learn to do that?” he said at last.
“I used to shave my husband. I did it for years.”
“Every day?”
“If we weren’t in a hurry.”
“Your concentration revealed something, however.” Barclay Reed assessed his reflection, turning his face this way and that. “You don’t do it anymore.”
I continued drying my hands. “How do you know that?”
He ignored my question. “What happened?”
I drew back one step. He wanted to walk on personal ground.
It seemed that the Professor had softened the slightest bit, his eyes one degree less pinched. Also he had shown concern for me, which I hadn’t expected. I hesitated. I wanted the moment to last. Then I relaxed the professionalism an inch, almost the way he had lowered the newspaper a day before. “He had to go away for a while. When he came back, he didn’t want me to shave him anymore.”
“Nonsense. It is a great pleasure to be shaved. Where did he go to learn such foolishness?”
“To war,” I said. “He went away to war.”
The Professor moved his chin in a circle, stretching his neck as though he wore a too-tight tie. “A dark place to obtain an education. Nonetheless, I would imagine any husband who survived a war would want his wife to shave him more than ever.”
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