The Art of Keeping Cool

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  “A big passenger ship was hit. The S. S. Cherokee, coming from England to New York City. She took two torpedoes early this morning.”

  “Where?” we gasped. Grandma, who was in the kitchen too, rolled her hands up suddenly inside her apron and turned away to the window.

  “Just up the coast off Cape Cod. German subs did it. She went down real fast; nothing anyone could do. So far, they’re counting more than eighty lost, about half those on board.”

  “Eighty!” We were all shocked.

  “The Coast Guard was out there pretty fast picking up survivors. Not fast enough, though. A lot of servicemen, army officers, went down. The fort’s in a scramble. Everybody’s shaken up.”

  Grandma turned back around and said she’d go and tell Grandpa. He was out seeing patients in his office.

  “I guess now he won’t grouse any more about me pulling the curtains at night,” she said, sounding almost snappish for her.

  Coast houses had been under orders from the fort since April to black out their lighted windows after nightfall. This was so the German subs couldn’t see our big convoy ships passing against the lights on land. For some reason, Grandpa Saunders thought it was a dumb idea and he refused to do it. Every night there’d be a kind of tussle going on with Grandma running around pulling the shades and curtains and Grandpa getting too warm and yelling and yanking them open again.

  I looked over at Elliot. He was staring at his hand as if he might start gnawing on it any time. I didn’t ask if he wanted to go down to the fort. I didn’t feel like going myself.

  We went up to his room and sat around until supper, not saying much. Elliot worked over some drawings he was doing of different kinds of planes. He wasn’t using sheet paper anymore. It was getting too scarce and expensive with the war on. He’d gotten hold of a whole roll of butcher’s wrap, the light brown paper they use to wrap up meat in the store. Whenever he needed something to draw on, he’d put his ruler down for a tearing edge and take a piece off the roll. Maybe because of this new, unlimited source of paper, he’d recently gone into series drawing. First he’d drawn German submarines attacking ships at sea, then different armored vehicles he’d seen around town, then soldiers from the fort. Most recently he’d started on war planes.

  Planes were always flying over Sachem’s Head on coast patrol from Quonset, the navy air base on the other side of Newport. Some days, formations of B-24s would practice dropping incendiary bombs in the bay. Other times, there’d be a group of fighter planes staging dogfights in the sky right over our heads. We could spend a couple of hours easy just lying on our backs in some field, watching.

  One day, a plane crashed in a field in Eavesville, the next town over from Sachem’s Head. Elliot and I hitched a ride to go and see the wreck. When we got back, Elliot drew some good pictures. That seemed to get him going on planes. He drew fighters, bombers, reconnaissance and sea planes, all different kinds. That night, when I looked over and saw him drawing a B-I7 Flying Fortress, I said:

  “That’s what my father’s flying out of England. They’re the biggest and go higher than the other bombers. My dad has to wear an oxygen mask or he can’t breathe, and his flight suit is heated. It can go to sixty below up there.”

  “Aren’t you scared he’ll get shot down?” Elliot asked.

  “No,” I said, though I was sometimes if I stopped and thought about it.

  I told Elliot about the dream I kept having, the one where a silver plane comes toward me in the air, and I see the shape of the pilot at the controls but can’t ever see his face.

  Elliot was interested. “Do you think it’s your dad trying to get through to you?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” I said, though I didn’t really believe it. I never put much faith in mystical stuff like that. “The thing is, I’m not even sure it’s him. I try and try to recognize him but the pilot never turns his head. Then, I wake up without knowing for sure.”

  “Next time call to him,” Elliot advised. “Maybe he’s waiting to hear back from you before he shows himself.”

  “I wrote him three letters before we came here and he never answered them.”

  “Well, this is different. Call out. Tell him you’ve got to see him.”

  I said I’d do it if I could remember. Dreams don’t always let you do what you want.

  The delicious smell of Grandma’s cornbread rolls drifted up to us. Just before we went downstairs for supper, a thought came into my mind.

  “Do you think Abel Hoffman could have anything to do with the ships that are getting torpedoed off here?” I asked.

  “How could he?” Elliot said. “Those hits were miles away.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he hears things and sends messages. He could have a secret radio transmitter. He has binoculars. I saw them around his neck when he went past on the beach. Maybe he watches for ships.”

  Elliot frowned and shook his head. “You’re only thinking that because he’s German. If it had been anybody else we saw down there, you never would have thought anything.”

  I had to agree that this was probably true.

  • • •

  The sinking of the S. S. Cherokee upset everyone even more than they’d been before. It was another step toward realizing that the war might be coming to our side of the ocean, and faster than we thought. Even Grandpa got worried. Up to then, he’d been against the forts and the guns, against everything that had to do with the army being in Sachem’s Head. He thought having artillery on the point was ridiculous, a waste of taxpayers’ money, and he looked down on Uncle Jake for working over there. The night of the Cherokee’s sinking, he was quiet about all that.

  “U. S. Army officers on board, coming home, I hear. Went down with the crew, some of them,” he said out of the blue.

  The rest of us jumped on the subject. We talked about the rescue efforts, and what the fort was doing to beef up surveillance. Uncle Jake knew the details but with Grandpa staring down his gullet, he was too nervous to tell us very much. Grandma brought up her point about the black-out curtains again, which made Grandpa glare at her. You could see his heart wasn’t in it though. After a pause, my mother asked:

  “What were our officers doing coming back on that boat? They’re supposed to be going over to fight, not coming back, aren’t they?”

  She looked and sounded tired out. She and Aunt Nan got a half day off from the torpedo station on Saturdays, but they’d spent that afternoon digging in Grandma’s vegetable garden. They wanted to set up for a strong harvest in the fall. There were going to be more food shortages, they said. We’d already been on meat ration books for two months and were getting used to a lot more bread and potatoes. That night, besides Grandma’s rolls, the main thing on the menu was leek and ham bone soup—not anybody’s favorite but, in the spirit of patriotism, no one complained. Even Carolyn had figured out that the way things were, complainers occupied a category hardly better than traitors.

  “They were officers being sent back to train new recruits,” Grandpa said, in answer to my mother’s question. “They’d had a taste of the fight so they’d know a thing or two.

  I looked at my mother and I knew what she wanted to ask next. She was thinking about my dad, curious to know if army airmen were among those being sent back. Not that my father would have been among the victims on the S. S. Cherokee. If he had been, she would already have heard. My mother wanted to know if it was possible that an American pilot might be reassigned back home to teach, if there was any chance my father might come back, away from the danger of his bombing raids over France.

  My mother wouldn’t ask this, though. She knew the rules. Nothing about my dad was ever mentioned in that house. Grandma might talk in a general way about “a bomb raid over France the newspaper reported yesterday.” I might even catch her reading one of my mother’s letters from Dad. But not with Grandpa around. He’d have to be out of the house, back in his office, before she or Aunt Nan could show any interest.

  That night at sup
per, my mother kept respectfully silent again. Suddenly, it made me so mad I just went ahead and asked what she wanted to know for her.

  “Were there any American pilots on that boat?” I said to Grandpa. “My father’s an officer over there and he’d be a good one to send back to teach people. He used to be a test pilot and knows everything about B-I7s.”

  The room went completely silent. Everyone stopped eating and looked at Grandpa. Elliot’s mouth dropped open a little, as if he might be having trouble breathing.

  Grandpa had set his water glass down just before I’d asked my qestion. When I finished, he snatched it up and got to his feet. His arm drew back and he looked ready to throw the glass down the table at me when his hand stopped and froze in mid-air. Rocking back on his heels, he roared out in a terrible voice:

  “THERE WERE NO DAMN FOOL PILOTS ON THAT BOAT, OFFICER OR OTHERWISE!”

  He shoved his chair aside and walked out of the room, the water glass still clenched in his hand. The way he was holding it, kind of high up and away from himself, it might have been a bomb with a hair trigger set to go off.

  For a second after he left, everyone sat paralyzed. Then the spell broke, and Grandma cried out in a disapproving voice:

  “Oh, Harvey! Language, language! Children are present!”

  Just as she would have swept up the pieces of the water glass if he had thrown it, or wiped up a spill of gravy, she began the job of bringing the table back to order.

  Carolyn was sent for more warm rolls in the kitchen. The water pitcher went around again, whether anyone wanted it or not. Talk started in fits. The new garden was brought up and summer squash came in for close examination.

  “Now, crook neck,” Grandma said. “I’m not sure what to do about crook neck squash. It won’t can. Say what you will, it’s not a canning vegetable.”

  “But it makes good pudding,” Aunt Nan said. “We could do up a good batch of crook neck pudding. Also, there’s crook neck soup.”

  “What do you think, Helen?” Grandma said, turning to my mother. “Shall we plant crook neck squash this summer, or try something with more cannability?”

  “Oh, plant it, surely,” my mother answered.

  Something about her voice caught my ear. I looked up and saw two nearly invisible tears drop down the side of her face. She raised her napkin and smoothed them off with an impatient flick before even Grandma could see.

  “I like crook neck squash!” Carolyn said. She was sitting next to my mother.

  “We all love crook neck, don’t we?” my mother said. She gave me a little smile, as if this were a family joke between the three of us. Then she reached out and put her hand protectively over the top of Carolyn’s head, and said, “There’s no need to can it or even make it into soup. Let’s just plant it to have fresh whenever it comes up.”

  Whatever it was that needed fixing, that did it. Everyone started nodding and taking up their forks. Elliot’s eyes stopped blinking crazily around. He really worried me sometimes, the way he looked. Aunt Nan went on a search for Uncle Jake’s napkin under the table. Five minutes later, Grandma slipped away in the direction of the front parlor. She came back followed by Grandpa, who sat down and pulled up his chair as if he hadn’t done a thing but go to take a telephone call in the hall.

  That made me mad. It made me furious. I didn’t say anything, though. Everybody else was so determined to pretend that nothing had happened. Somehow they’d all decided, without even talking to each other, to forget the whole thing. A scared feeling came into me when I saw that. I had the idea there might be something really bad going on that I didn’t know about.

  After supper, Elliot went straight to his room while I stayed behind to help with the dishes. When I went up later to find him, he was sitting at his table, working on a drawing.

  “Did you get it?” I asked.

  He knew what I meant, but he just shrugged. He looked pretty worn out.

  I came over and took a peek, and the picture was great. It was fantastic! It showed the whole dining room, everyone and everything just as it had been.

  At the end of the table was Grandpa with the water glass raised and his mouth open in a shout.

  “There were no damn fool pilots on that boat, officer or otherwise,” Elliot had written in block letters underneath. Everyone was cringing in their seats. I saw myself cringing, too.

  “Did I really look that scared?”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “I thought he was going to throw the glass at me.”

  “I thought so, too, and so did Grandma. He’s thrown things before.”

  “He has?”

  “He threw the fire tongs at my father one time and hit him in the arm.”

  “The fire tongs! Why?”

  “He doesn’t like my father.”

  “But why?”

  Elliot bit the end his pencil. He hated talking about personal things. Whatever he thought of his family, he kept it to himself. Mostly, I wouldn’t even ask him.

  “It’s all right. You don’t have to tell.”

  “Oh well,” Elliot said, “I guess I can talk about it if I want. My father had a plumbing business. But he took a loan out from the bank and couldn’t pay it back, so they took the business away, and also our house. That’s why we had to move in here.”

  “Where was your house?”

  “It’s yours”

  “You used to live in our cottage?”

  “We used to own it. Until two years ago. Now the bank owns it. That’s why it was up for rent.”

  Elliot tapped his pencil on the drawing. “We would have lost the truck, too, but Grandpa paid to buy it back.”

  “Then why did he throw the fire tongs?”

  “He gets mad when he thinks people aren’t doing the right thing. He threw a loaf of bread at my mother because she took the job at the torpedo station. He said it’s not a woman’s job, but she only did it to make money so we could move someplace else.”

  “Don’t you hate him?” I asked. “I hate him. I know he’s the reason no one can talk about my dad around here. I think they had a fight way back when he was young.”

  Elliot glanced up at me. For a moment, I thought he was going to tell me something, then he looked down at his drawing.

  “Grandma was afraid,” he said. “She thought he was going to throw the glass at you. She knows he would do it if you made him mad enough.”

  I looked at Grandma in the picture. Her hand was over her mouth. It seemed to me she was getting ready to say, “Harvey! Language, language! Children are present!”—a silly thing to even bring up considering what was going on. Carolyn was the only real child there. You could just barely see her eyes over the table. She was trying to hide. She probably didn’t even hear Grandpa swear. She was staring at the water glass in his hand, frightened to death.

  I looked at my mother in the picture next, and I could hardly believe it. Elliot had seen my mom’s tears. He’d seen them before I had, because he’d drawn them just coming up in her eyes, not big enough yet to roll out onto her face.

  “Elliot, you are amazing.”

  “It’s not finished yet.”

  He drew in some other details that must have been there but only he had seen. He put Aunt Nan’s wedding ring on her knotted-up hand and drew Carolyn’s bunny barrette in her hair. He made a greasy drip of soup on Grandma’s big soup tureen and, leaning way over—by now his pencil was down to a stub—he shaded water into the glass Grandpa had in his hand. The glass was half-full.

  “Was the glass that way?”

  “Yes.”

  “How can you remember?”

  “I just can.”

  Only one thing was ever left out of Elliot’s drawings— Elliot himself. For some reason, I’d never thought of this before. Now it struck me, maybe because this picture seemed unfinished without him. After all, everyone else was there.

  “Why don’t you ever put yourself in?” I asked when he put the pencil down. “You never do, not in a
ny of your drawings.”

  “Because I’m not in them,” Elliot said. “I’m looking at them.”

  “But you’re in them, too. You were sitting right here.” I pointed to a spot off the drawing where his chair would have been if he’d left room for it on the paper.

  “That would be true if I wasn’t drawing it,” Elliot said. “When you’re drawing something, you can’t see yourself because you’re the one who’s doing it. You’re just drawing whatever’s around you.”

  “Couldn’t you imagine what you look like and put yourself in? Everyone knows what they look like, more or less.”

  Elliot frowned.

  “I know what I look like, I just don’t want to be in it,” he said, sounding angry. I knew I’d better drop the subject.

  Some other drawings were lying on the table. I walked around to have a look at them.

  “What are these?”

  “They’re of the fort, from when we sneaked in.”

  He stood up and spread them out. There must have been eight or ten of them. I saw the big gun as we’d first seen it that afternoon, aiming over our heads out to sea.

  “This is good. You got it perfect.”

  The cement farmhouse was there with its fake windows. There were the soldiers running back and forth in front of the man-made hill. He’d made a sketch of the big gun in profile, too. You could see the gray barrel sticking out from the bunker.

  One drawing was not of the fort, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. It was of a flat, field-like place with a lot of wavy lines and swirls running through it.

  “What’s this?”

  Elliot gave a kind of embarrassed laugh.

  “It’s the ocean,” he said, “but it didn’t come out too well.”

  Before I could say anything else, he gathered up all the drawings and stuffed them away in the box under his bed.

  6

  ON JUNE 15TH, ten days after the sinking of the Cherokee, enemy torpedoes hit an eight-thousand-ton British freighter sixty miles east of Provincetown.