A Tidewater Morning (3 page)

“Shanghai.” I heard the word and I shut Halloran off from my mind as if I had snapped a switch. The eyes of many people, when confronted with a bore, glaze over; one can actually see the glaze as it steals over their vision, a gradual lusterlessness that becomes like that of raw oysters long exposed to air. I, by contrast, have always had the knack of being able to maintain pinpoints of light in my pupils, giving the bore a false impression that I am listening. Thus, as Halloran wound himself up in his reminiscence, and my nostalgia deepened, I sank into a reverie while two interlocking memories flickered in my head like scenes from a home movie. The faraway explosions had made me envision an aircraft carrier in its death convulsion; I had a swift image of oily smoke boiling heavenward, the deck listing, sailors tumbling into the sea like scattered windup toys. This dissolved, gave way to the memory of the launching of the flattop
Ranger,
America’s first aircraft carrier, which, at the age of seven, I believed to be largely the creation of my father—although he was actually only a medium-level draftsman at the shipyard, where he took me (drugged with sleep at three in the morning) to gawk and marvel.

And it
had
been thrilling to watch the mechanics, at once brutish and delicate, of setting loose the behemoth into its natural element—of freeing from its uterine dry dock into the strife-torn seas the “biggest, most complex and costly movable object made by human hands” (my father’s words). It had required nine hours, this monstrous parturition, set into motion long before dawn by gangs of floodlit chanting Negroes swinging oak battering rams that knocked down, at precisely timed intervals, one after another of the scores of telephone pole—sized pilings that for months had held in equipoise thousands of tons of inert steel. “A marvel of technology!” said my father. I was enraptured by this sight: the sweating black figures sang in a rhythmic chorus, wild, scary, African. It was controlled bedlam, and it was also splendidly dangerous. Now and then a pole would split apart nastily, or topple the wrong way, and the Negroes would drop the ram with a thunderous noise and scatter for their lives (unprotected to any degree, I might add, by collective bargaining). Their labor ended at the stroke of noon, when two events took place almost together. First, in an act of godlike finality, Mr. Gresham, an engineer colleague of my father’s , hunched down deep in a pit beneath the hull, pressed a button that detonated a dynamite cap, blowing off the top of the single upright that remained. “Imagine such a delicate balance!” my father whispered, or rather shouted above the crowd’s roar as the mass of gray steel, bunting-bedecked, began to slip ever so gently toward the muddy James. What a sight—this new sweetheart of the seas being birthed, lubricated in its passage down the ways by dirty white masses of tallow as high as snowdrifts. The tallow slithered out from beneath the keel in gigantic curlicues and sent afloat to the festive onlookers a smell of rancid mutton. At nearly the same instant that Mr. Gresham pushed his button, I heard Mrs. Herbert Hoover warble: “I christen thee
Ranger!”
I noticed that her slip was showing, and then she went
clunk
with the bottle,
clunk
again at the prow sliding away from her before she solidly connected, showering the
Ranger
and herself with a purple sacrament of Prohibition grape juice. A week or two later, in one of the newsreels, I actually caught a blurred half-second glimpse of myself, gaping up at my father adoringly.

But there is something else you forgot, I thought, as I sat in Halloran’s cabin and felt the bourbon warming me, making my lips grow numb. You forgot your father’s voice on the ride homeward:
“Someday planes will fly off that ship and bomb the Japanese.”
You believed your father as you believed—then—in God, but did not believe this, believed only that it was a joke he was making about war. War was in the movies, war was not something that ever happened, not to Americans …

“I had this pal in Shanghai then,” I heard Halloran say. “A Marine gunner named Willie Weldon. He was a little older than I was, an old China hand who’d been with Rupertus’s battalion back in the mid-1930s, when the Japs were kicking up their usual shit.” I suddenly realized that I had let my Halloran switch go to the On position, and I nodded and smiled again, half-listening. “Well. Willie Weldon was one of the biggest swordsmen that ever came down the pike. The rank of gunner really fit him. This guy was absolutely crazy for gash. Anyway, I told Willie I’d introduce him to this friend of Svetlana’s . A gal named Ludmilla, a really good-looking stacked White Russian broad who lived in a great flat right off Bubbling Well Road.” He paused and scratched his chin. “No, it was near the Nanking Road, I remember, because Bubbling Well had been blocked off to traffic—”

You’re losing me, Colonel, I thought, ready to drift away again.
Un raconteur de tongues histoires,
I wanted to tell him, must be direct, linear, must not encumber his tales with the distracting names of thoroughfares, above all must be deft and relevant,
relevant:
For God’s sake, keep the ball moving! “I think her name was Ludmilla, or maybe it was the other one, Olga. Fuck! I can’t remember. No, wait a minute—”

Whenever, I thought—switching Halloran off again—whenever I was overtaken by a spasm of metaphysical creepiness, and the sheer unreality of this endless war enfolded me like a damp, mildewed shroud, I thought of my father. How could he have been so prescient? How could he have known those many years ago that I would someday be in a situation like this? How did he ever imagine that his son would grow up to be a killer, not only willing but eager to kill—to anticipate killing with crude, erotic excitement? He didn’t know the last part. But of course it now seemed inevitable that he—a man who helped build huge war machines but who was a peaceable soul with an exquisite sense of history—should have visualized the trajectory of his son’s life, ending here in these remote and unknown archipelagoes before he was old enough to vote. And I recalled, with a luminous, mnemonic clarity that amazed me, a long-ago day when he virtually predicted my presence on a ship like the USS
General Washburn,
making its cumbersome passage to the out landish coast of Okinawa …

The title of the story in
The Saturday Evening Post
was “The Curse of the Rising Sun,” and I was reading it in the back of the family Oldsmobile, broken down with engine trouble beside a peanut field near the VirginiaCarolina line. At eleven I could read
Post
fiction with contemptuous ease, but I was not quite old enough to avoid being troubled by the fantasy—a 1930s version of spy thriller spiced up with a touch of futuristic horror. In the front seat my mother, her leg in a steel brace, gazed stolidly forward through the fading light of an October afternoon while my father labored over the steaming engine. I was the classic only child—snotty, self-absorbed—and I offered neither solace nor help, curled up in the back with my chronicle of the nightmare that engulfed America “in the early 1950s.” It was untethered hell. Colossal submarines the size of ocean liners had disgorged their weasel-faced hordes at a dozen landing sites from Seattle to San Diego. Paralysis had ensued as the nation failed to mobilize its defenses. California had become another Manchuria, prostrate, in thrall. San Francisco lay pillaged, the people destroyed like insects. Feeble resistance had allowed Los Angeles to be overrun; the palaces of the movie moguls were occupied by smirking officers, rattling their samurai swords and defiling starlets. (I remember one captioned line drawing:
“I saw your film in Tokyo,” said Colonel Oishi sneeringly to the cringing Gloria, “A pretty dance. Now you will perform for me another kind of dance.
”) As Part One began to wind down (I peeked ahead and discovered that “The Curse of the Rising Sun” was a serial in three segments), a certain Major Bradshaw of U.S. Army Intelligence, based with the Defense Command in Denver, spoke on the telephone to his wife back east, imparting the news that the Imperial Fifth Army, a legion of fiends specializing in babies and old people, was advancing across the Arizona desert toward Phoenix, where her parents lived. She sobbed; he counseled courage. Troops from Texas were on the way. Continued next week.

There was a thick cloud of rage in and around our stalled car. For good reason, we were not a very happy little family. But we generally kept our tempers and were decent with one another, being well-bred and imbued with many of the more gentle Christian prescriptions. Indeed, our love for one another had a special desperation. But I could almost hear the rage humming in the warm autumn air. My father, a patient man, was enraged because he could not fix the engine; he was a graduate of North Carolina State College, an engineering school, and never could reconcile this with his mechanical incompetence. Essentially he was a poet who had stumbled by error into technology. I heard him whispering his Presbyterian curses: “Blast it! Jeru-sa-
lera!
” My mother was in a quiet, stony rage because the night before at my grandmother’s house in Carolina, whence we were returning, I had misbehaved, and had misbehaved again in the car, making some brattish remarks about all the niggers in that part of the country, which caused her to cry out, in words I had never heard her use before: “Shut your mouth!” I was in a rage because of my guilt over the word I’d said, yet ego-stung and enraged at her rage. By demoralizingly slow and painful degrees she was being killed by cancer, and this too was part of the overall rage we felt. I was supposed to be unaware of her condition, formally, but wondered why, since I was neither stupid nor blind. A minor crisis other people would greet with a show of humor or equanimity made my mother and father, and eventually me, become frazzled and exhausted because of the way it represented in microcosm the oncoming disaster none of us could face or bear.

Sulky, halfhearted, I tried to restore a touch of goodwill. I said: “In about fifteen years the Japanese are going to be in the United States, and we’re going to be fighting them.”

My mother was silent. When she spoke, a soft undertone told me that she had curbed her anger at me; she had always been blunt, though, and now she said what was on her mind. “Paul, you’ve been reading that ridiculous story in the
Post
Your father subscribes to that magazine, though I don’t know why. That story’s simply trash. It’s also dripping with racial prejudice.” My mother was a cum laude Bryn Mawr graduate, high-principled, shrewd, and liberated; a Pennsylvania Yankee, she wore her abolitionism like a badge of honor in this part of the Tidewater, an enclave of ancient counties as fanatically segregated as darkest Alabama. “One of my dearest friends, Annie Wardlaw, whom you never knew—she died—lived for a long time in Japan with her husband, who was a diplomat. She loved the Japanese. They’re not like those—those
beasts
in that magazine. A story like that is
inflammatory.”

I remember asking what “inflammatory” meant. I gazed out at the peanut-field-and-pine-grove monotony of the landscape, the potholed asphalt highway down which, toward us, now came an incredible rattletrap of a truck, swaying and top-heavy with a dozen farm Negroes in overalls and the homemade, patched and repatched Mother Hubbards of those destitute years. It slowly crept past us, the motor stuttering, its human cargo a jumble of rolling eyeballs and flashing teeth and agitated wavings and jumpings. “Does you need any help?” I heard the driver call out. But I could sense that this only added fuel to my father’s fury as he nodded them on their way.

“ ‘Inflammatory,’ ” my mother said, “is an adjective to describe that ugly word you used ten minutes ago about these people you see here in this countryside. A word like that is inflammatory. And disgusting.”

She was unfair. She had already upbraided me violently; now she had recommenced the attack. Her unfairness began to restore my rage. Whatever I was on the verge of saying in protest was cut off by my father, who flung open the door and sank down behind the steering wheel in despair. “I don’t know what’s wrong! The distributor. A short. I don’t know! There’s not a telephone for miles!” His hands were black, greasy, quivering with tension.

“Why didn’t you let those Negroes help you?” my mother said.

“Daddy,” I heard myself saying, “the Japanese are going to invade the United States.” Inside me there was an intense need for retaliation, so I then employed a touch of the magazine story’s straight-shooting vocabulary. “Bunch of slimy butchers.”

“You stop that kind of language!” she exclaimed, stirring to turn around and face me, in a jerky movement that must have caused her pain. “We are not going to war with anyone!” She glanced at my father.

“Why do you read that magazine? Why do you consciously expose an eleven-year-old to such garbage?”

“Listen, Adelaide, they have printed that genius from Mississippi, William Faulkner,” he said, making a fatigued sound. “And one of your favorites, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Also clever escape fiction like the story in question.”

“There’s something profoundly immoral about publishing scare stories about war,” my mother retorted, “especially when they can be read by some children.”

“Scare stories about war!” he echoed her mockingly. “How can you be so idiotic? I hate to say this, but I think you’re an idealistic
fool
You ought to have your head examined!”

I was stupefied. The words had thrust a dagger through my chest. His dignity and forbearance had been such an abiding part of his nature that tones like these seemed—there was no other word—monstrous. Please! I had never once heard him lift his voice to my mother; her affliction had caused him to bestow on her daily an almost reverential tenderness. But now—this fury. It may have been only his aggregate frustrations—the sick engine, his family stranded in a backwoods nowhere, the bickering, my misbehavior, some unfocused anxiety. Whatever, he began to harangue my mother with a bully’s scorn. His manner sickened me. At first she flinched as if he had hit her; then she drew back and stared at him as if he had gone crazy.

“Adelaide, don’t you realize the whole world is aflame with war—has been, is, and ever will be? What do you think I’ve been doing with myself these past years? What do you think I helped build the
Ranger
for? To send airplanes sightseeing over Chesapeake Bay? What do you think we’ve built the
Yorktown
for? And the
Enterprise.
And why do you think we’ll be building the
Hornet?
And so on ad infinitum. Do you think the United States government is spending millions of dollars on these ships just to have a handsome, up-to-date, show-off Navy? No, my dear”—the “dear,” usually so gentle, had a hard, sardonic tone—“they are to make war, and they will make war and you and I and all our friends on the Virginia Peninsula even now are the beneficiaries. Are you so blind that you can’t see the contradiction of this awful poverty over here in Nansemond County, while we ride in an Oldsmobile—a defective Oldsmobile, as we have seen demonstrated, but the kind of car that very few people are privileged to ride in, in the midst of economic collapse. It is simple, my dear. We are the lucky few feeding off profits made from the machinery of warfare.” He paused for an instant, then said: “And what about those Flying Fortresses from Langley Field, Addy, and their racket you complain about nearly every morning? Do you think they’re merely part of some game we’re playing? And the Navy fighter planes from Norfolk? And the minelayers from Yorktown? And those truck convoys rolling down every day from Fort Eustis? Certainly all that has to be put to use! Don’t you see—”