by Herman Wouk
The loudspeakers bellowed above the chatter on the lawn, and the radio reception tonight was better than in some years. This game still had its old ritual fascination for Pug; he was following it tensely, smoking a cigar. Once his nostalgia had been keen for the tough youthful combat on the grass, the slamming of bodies, the tricky well-drilled plays, above all for the rare moments of breaking free and sprinting down the field, dodging one man and another with the stands around him a roaring sea of voices. Nothing in his life had since been quite like it. But long ago that nostalgia had departed; those grooves of memory had worn out. To think that lads much younger than his own two sons were out on that chilly field in Philadelphia now, made Victor Henry feel that he had led a very long, multilayered existence, and was now almost a living mummy.
“Pug! I heard you were here.” A hand lightly struck his shoulder. His classmate Walter Tully, bald as an egg and deeply tanned, smiled down at him; Tully had left the submarine school to take command of the undersea squadron at Manila. He gestured at a crowded table near the display board. “Come and sit with us.”
“Maybe at the half, Red.” It was decidedly an anachronism, but everybody still used the nickname. “It’s more like the old days, sitting on the grass.”
“You’re dead right. Well, I’ll join you.”
“Now you’re talking. Sit you down.”
Tully had played Academy football too, and he listened to the broadcast as intently as Pug. After a while the white football slid all the way for an Army run to a touchdown. Amid yells, cheers, and groans, a young lieutenant unloosed the mule, jumped on its back, and galloped around the lawn.
“Oh, hell,” Pug exclaimed.
Tully shook his head. “We’re going to lose this one, old buddy. They’ve got a fine backfield. We could use Pug Henry in there.”
“Ha! Fifteen-yard penalty for illegal use of wheelchairs. Say, Red, you’re the original Simon Legree, aren’t you?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean sending the Devilfish out on exercises the night of the Army-Navy game. What’s the matter, you think there’s a war threatening or something?”
Tully grinned at the heavily ironic tone. “It was Branch Hoban’s idea. They’re going alongside for two weeks starting today—they’re due in at noon—and he wanted to get in some drills. You’ll see plenty of Byron.”
“I’ll only be here till the Clipper leaves.”
“Yes, I hear tell you’ve got the California. That’s just great, Pug.”
The game resumed. After some dull skirmishing the white ball-shape shot far across the board; Navy had intercepted a pass and run it deep into Army territory. Pug and Tully got to their feet and joined in the Navy yells of “Beat Army! Goal! Goal!” while an ensign happily paraded the goat around. The half ended right after the touchdown. Cheerily Red Tully ordered drinks from a passing steward. “Let’s stay here on the grass, Pug. Tell me about Rooshia.”
His happy grin changed to a tough sober look as Victor Henry described the tank battle he had observed and the October 16 panic in Moscow. “Jesus, you’ve really been in there! I envy you. And here we sit, fat, dumb, and happy. They told me you flew here via Tokyo.”
“That’s right.”
“What’s the straight dope, Pug? Are those bastards really going to fight? We’re getting some scary alerts here, but at this point we’re kind of numb.”
“Well, our people there are worried. The ambassador talked to me at length about Japanese psychology. They’re a very strange nation, he said, and hara-kiri is a way of life to them. The odds don’t matter much. They’re capable of executing a suicidal plan suddenly, and he fears they will.”
Tully glanced around at the nearby couples on the grass or on folding chairs, and dropped his voice. “That checks out. Admiral Hart received a straight war warning today, Pug. But we’ve been hearing nervous chatter from Washington, on and off, all summer and fall. In July when they landed in Indo-China and Roosevelt shut off their oil, we all thought, here goes! The squadron ran dawn and dusk GQ’s for a week, till it got kind of silly. Should I start that up again?”
Pug gestured his puzzlement with turned-up palms. “Look, I talked to some businessmen one night at a dinner party in the embassy, Americans, British, and one Jap, a big-time shipbuilder. The Jap said the straight word, right from the Imperial Court, is that war with the USA is unthinkable. Everybody there agreed. So—you pays your money and you takes your choice.”
“Well, all I know is, if they do go, we’re in trouble. The state of readiness in the Philippines is appalling. The people themselves don’t want to fight the Japs. That’s my opinion. The submarine force is so short of everything—torpedoes, spare parts, watch officers, what have you—that it’s simply pitiful. Speaking of which, when did you see Byron last?”
“I guess about six months ago. Why?”
“Well, he has more damn brass! He walked into my office the other day and asked for a transfer to the Atlantic command. His own skipper had turned him down and Byron was trying to go over his head. I sure ate him out about that. I told him, Pug—I said this, word for word—that if he weren’t your son I’d have kicked his ass out of my office.”
Victor Henry said with forced calm, “His wife and baby are in Italy. He’s worried about them.”
“We’re all separated from our kinfolk, Pug. It just isn’t in the cards to transfer him. I’m trying to comb submarine officers out of tenders and destroyers. I’d do anything within reason for a son of yours, but—”
“Don’t put it that way. Byron’s just another officer. If you can’t do it, you can’t.”
“Okay. I’m glad you said that.”
“Still, his family problem is serious. If it’s possible, transfer him.”
“There’s this little problem of the Japs, too.”
“No argument.” Victor Henry was taking some pains to keep his tone light and friendly. A crowd roar poured from the loudspeakers, and he said with relief, “Okay! Second half.”
When the game ended, many people were stretched out asleep on the grass, under a paling sky streaked with red. White-coated boys were still passing drinks and huddled Navy officers were bawling “Anchors Aweigh,” for their team had won. Pug declined Captain Tully’s invitation to breakfast and went up to his room for a nap.
He had stayed in a room like it—perhaps in this very one—on first reporting to Manila, before Rhoda had arrived with the children to set up housekeeping. High-ceilinged, dingy, dusty, with featureless old club furniture and a big perpetually turning and droning fan, the room hit Pug again with a strong sense of lost time and vanished days. He turned the fan up high, stripped to undershorts, opened the french windows looking out over the bay, and sat smoking cigarette after cigarette, watching the day brighten over the broad blue harbor and the busy traffic of ships. He was not sleepy. He sat so for more than an hour, scarcely moving, while gathering sweat trickled down his naked skin.
Thinking of what?
Seeing pictures generated by his return to Manila. Pictures of himself and Byron under a poinciana tree at the white house on Harrison Boulevard, working on French verbs; the boy’s thin face wrinkling, silent tears falling at his father’s roared exasperation. Of Warren winning a history medal, an English medal, and a baseball award at the high school; of Madeline, fairylike in a gossamer white frock, wearing a gold paper crown at her eighth birthday party.
Pictures of Rhoda crabbing about the heat and the boredom, getting drunk night after night in this club, falling on her face at the Christmas dance; of the quarrel that put an end to her drinking, when he coldly talked divorce. The smell of the club’s lawns and halls, and of the spicy Manila air, gave him the illusion that all this was going on now, instead of belonging to a past more than a dozen years dead.
Pictures of Pamela Tudsbury in Red Square. Of the dreary mud streets of Kuibyshev, the all-night poker games, the visits to farm communes, the stagnant slow passing of time while he waited fo
r train tickets; then the two-week rail ride across Siberia; the beautiful Siberian girls selling fruits, flat circular bread, sausage, and hot chickpeas at tiny wooden stations; the single track of the railroad stretching backward from the last car, a dark straight line through a pink snow desert, pointing straight at a setting sun that flattened like a football as it sank to the horizon; the long stops, the wooden benches in the “hard” coach, the onion breaths and body smells of the local travellers, some white, some Mongol, in queer fur hats; the awesome three-day forest stretches; the ugly miles on miles of huts in Tokyo; the wretchedness of the Japanese, the hate you could feel in the back of your neck on the street, the war weariness and poverty so much worse even than Berlin; the half-dozen letters to Pamela Tudsbury he had drafted and torn up.
Through all these strange scenes Victor Henry had preserved a happy sense that he was moving toward a new life, a fulfilled life he had almost despaired of, a life delayed, postponed, almost lost, but now within grasp. When he thought of Rhoda it was usually as the effervescent Washington girl he had courted. He could understand falling in love with that girl and marrying her. The present-day Rhoda he pictured with detachment, almost as though she were somebody else’s wife, with all her faults and all her charms seen clear. To divorce her would be cruel and shocking. How had she offended? She had been giving him an arid, half-empty existence—he now knew that—but she had been doing her best. Yet the decision evidently lay between being kind to Rhoda and seizing this new life.
He had written the letters to Pamela as he had written the one about the Minsk massacre—to get a problem on paper for a clear look at it. By the time he arrived in Tokyo, he had decided that letters were too wordy and too slow-travelling. He had to send one of two cables—COME, or DON’T COME. Pamela needed no more than that. And he had concluded that Pamela was wiser than he, that the first step should indeed be a love affair in which they could test out this passion or infatuation before wounding Rhoda; for it might never come to that. In bald fact the prescription was a shackup. Victor Henry had to face the novel notion—for him—that in some circumstances a shackup might be the best of several difficult courses.
In Tokyo he had actually hesitated outside a cable office, on the point of cabling: COME. But he had walked away. Even if it were the best course, he could not yet picture himself bringing it off; could not imagine conducting a hole-in-corner affair, even if with Pamela it did not seem a squalid or immoral idea. It was not his style. He would botch it, he felt, and weaken or tarnish his work as the new captain of the California. So he had arrived still undecided in Manila.
And in Manila, for the first time since his talk with Pamela Tudsbury in Red Square, an awareness of his wife Rhoda began to overtake him and the reality of Pamela to fade. Manila was saturated with Rhoda, the good memories and the bad memories alike, and with his own hardened identity. Red Tully, his classmate, a bald commander of all the submarines of the Asiatic Fleet; the Army-Navy game, in which he had last played twenty-eight years ago, when Pamela had been an infant a few months old; the dozens of young Navy lieutenants on the club lawn, with girlfriends Pamela’s age—these were the realities now. The wild Siberian scenery was a fading patchwork of mental snapshots. So was the incandescent half hour on Red Square.
Was it really in the cards for him to start over, to have new babies learning to talk, little boys playing on grass, a little girl twining arms around his neck? Manila above all recalled to Pug the pleasure he had taken in his children. Those days he looked back on as the sweetest and best in his life. To do it all once again with Pamela would be a resurrection, a true second life. But could a rigid, crusty man like himself do it? He had been hard enough on his kids in his thirties.
He was very tired, and sleep at last overtook him in the chair, as it had in the Tudsburys’ suite in the Hotel National. But this time no cold caressing fingers woke him. His inner clock, which seldom failed, snapped him awake in time to drive out to Cavite and watch the Devilfish arrive.
Byron was standing on the forecastle with the anchor detail, in khakis and a lifejacket, but Pug failed to recognize him. Byron sang out, as the Devilfish nosed alongside the pier, “Holy smoke, it’s my father. You Dad! Dad!” Then Pug perceived that the slim figure with both hands in his back pockets had a familiar stance, and that his son’s voice was issuing from the lean face with the curly red beard. Byron leaped to the dock while the vessel was still warping in, threw his arms around Victor Henry, and hugged him hard. Kissing that scratchy hairy face was a bizarre sensation for Pug.
“Hi, Briny. Why the foliage?”
“Captain Hoban can’t stand beards. I plan to grow one to my knees. God, this is a monumental surprise, Dad.” From the bridge an officer shouted impatiently through a megaphone. Jumping back on the moving forecastle like a goat, Byron called to his father, “I’ll spend the day with you. Hey, Mom wrote me you’re going to command the California! That’s fabulous!”
When the vessel was secured alongside, the Devilfish officers warmly invited Victor Henry to lunch at a house in the suburbs which they had rented. Pug caught a discouraging look from Byron, and declined.
“I live aboard the submarine,” Byron said. They were driving back to Manila in the gray Navy car Pug had drawn from the pool. “I’m not in that setup.”
“Why not? Sounds like a good thing.”
“Oh, neat. Cook, butler, two houseboys, gardener, five acres, a swimming pool, and all for peanuts when they split up the cost. I’ve been there for dinner. They have these girls come in, you know, and stay overnight—different ones, secretaries, nurses, and whatnot—and whoop it up and all that.”
“Well? Just the deal for a young stud, I should think.”
“What did you do, Dad, when you were away from Mom?”
“Think I’d tell you?” Pug glanced at Byron. The bearded face was serious. “Well, I did a lot of agonized looking, Briny. But don’t act holier-than-thou, whatever you do.”
“I don’t feel holier than thou. My wife’s in Italy. That’s that. They can do as they please.”
“What’s the latest word on her?”
“She’s flying to Lisbon on the fifteenth. I’ve got a picture of the kid. Wait till you see him! It’s incredible how much he looks like my baby pictures.”
Pug had been poring over the snapshot in his wallet for two months, but he decided not to mention it. The inscription to Slote was an awkward detail.
“God, it’s rotten, being this far apart,” Byron exclaimed. “Can you picture it, Dad? Your wife with a baby you’ve never even seen, on the other side of the earth—no telephone, a letter now and then getting through by luck? It’s hell. And the worst of it is, she almost got out through Switzerland. She panicked at taking a German airplane. She was sick, and alone, and I can’t blame her. But she’d be home by now, if there’d been any other way to go. The Germans! The goddamned Germans.” After a silence he said with self-conscious chattiness, “Hot here, isn’t it?”
“I’d forgotten how hot, Briny.”
“I guess it was pretty cold in Russia.”
“Well, it’s freezing in Tokyo, too.”
“Say, what’s Tokyo like? Quaint and pretty, and all that?”
“Ugliest city in the world,” Pug said, glad for a distracting subject. “Pathetic. A flat shantytown stretching as far as the eye can see. Downtown a few tall modern buildings and electric signs, and crowds of little Japanese running around. Most of the people wear Western clothes, but the cloth looks to be made of old blotters. You see a few women dressed Japanese doll—style, and some temples and pagodas, sort of like in San Francisco’s Chinatown. It’s not especially Oriental, it’s poor and shabby, and it smells from end to end of sewage and bad fish. Biggest disappointment of all my travelling years, Tokyo. Moreover, the hostility to white men is thick enough to cut with a knife.”
“D’you think they’ll start a war?”
“Well, that’s the big question.” Victor Henry’s fingers dru
mmed the steering wheel. “I have a book on their Shinto religion you’d better read. It’s an eye-opener. The ambassador gave it to me. Here are people, Briny, who in the twentieth century believe—at least some do—that their king’s descended from a sun god, and that their empire goes straight back two thousand six hundred years. Before the continents broke apart, the story goes, Japan was the highest point on earth. So she’s the center of the world, the divine nation, and her mission is to bring world peace by conquering everybody else—you’re smiling, but you’d better read this book, boy. Under the religious gibberish it’s exactly like Nazi or Communist propaganda, this idea of one crowd destined to take over the world by force. God knows why this idea has broken out in different forms and keeps spreading. It’s like a mental leprosy. Say, how hungry are you? Let’s look at the old house before lunch.”
Byron’s smile, framed in the neatly trimmed red beard, looked odd but no less charming. “Why, sure, Dad. I’ve never done that. I don’t know why.”
As they drove along Harrison Boulevard and approached the house, Byron exclaimed, “Ye gods, is that it? Someone went and painted it yellow.”
“That’s it.” Pug parked the car across the street and they got out. The unpleasant mustardy color surprised him too. It was all over the low stone wall and the wrought-iron fence, as well as the house—a sun-faded old paint job, already peeling. On the lawn lay a tumbled-over tricycle, a big red ball, a baby carriage, and plastic toys.
“But the trees are so much taller and thicker,” Byron said, peering through the fence, “yet the house seems to have shrunk. See, here’s where Warren threw the can of red paint at me. How about that? There’s still a mark.” Byron rubbed his shoe over the dim red splash on the paving stone. “I had a bad time here, all in all. Warren laying my head open, and then the jaundice—”
“Yes, and that truck hitting you on your bicycle. I wouldn’t think you’d remember it pleasantly.”
