Ice Brothers (16 page)

“What do you want me to do?”

“Read up on artificial horizons. Try the bubble sextant. It's under the chart desk.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

“What's that planet up there in the sky now?”

Paul looked up and studied the morning sky, in which just one planet glowed.

“Venus, isn't it, sir?”

“Sweet Jesus Christ! If you don't know, look it up, don't guess! It's Mars. Can't you see that it glows red?”

“Aye, aye, sir. I'll read up on identifying planets.”

“If you can't identify any planet I point to inside of twenty-four hours
that
will go in your fitness report.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Now get the hell off the bridge. I was in a good mood until I had to look at you. How the hell do they expect me to run a ship with nothing but a farmer, a Yale and a Sheenie?”

“I'm supposed to teach you navigation and we're supposed to practice blinker lights,” Paul said to Nathan when he returned to the wardroom. “Do you want to try to get some sleep first?”

“I don't think I can get back to sleep now,” Nathan said, “but let's have some coffee.”

Cookie had climbed back into his bunk, but he had left a big pot of coffee on the stove and a platter of fresh Danish pastries on the table in the forecastle. To avoid waking the sleeping men in the surrounding bunks, they took their heavy mugs of coffee to the hatch over the well deck and sat on the canvas cover, looking at the big troop ships, which were mooring on the other side of the harbor.

“I suppose they're going to England,” Nathan said.

“Or Greenland. I hear they're sending a lot of construction workers up there to build airfields.”

There was a pause before Nathan said, “I wonder how long it will be before this whole goddamn war is over?”

“I always think of four years,” Paul said. “That's about the length of time most of our wars seem to last.”

“Four years.…” Nathan gave a sigh of profound sorrow.

“Of course we probably will get home way before then,” Paul said. “Have you got a wife waiting for you?”

Slowly Nathan turned his face from the troop ships toward him and Paul was shocked by the look on it.

“I'm married,” Nathan said and seemed about to add more, but took a sip of his coffee instead. “Do you want to start on signaling or navigation?”

They started on the signaling, with Nathan sending Morse code very slowly to Paul, but after only a few minutes Mowrey ordered Paul to his cabin to bring the charts up to date with some Notice to Mariners bulletins he had just discovered. Nathan climbed to the flying bridge, the only place on the ship where he could usually be alone, and stood leaning against the mast. Overhead Mars glowed brightly in a deep blue sky. Nathan knew what planet it was—in his youth astronomy had been one of his passions. When he was about fifteen he had built a three-inch telescope and mounted it on the flat roof of his father's house in Brooklyn.

Now Nathan could almost smell the tar of that roof on a hot summer evening and hear the pigeons cooing in the nests he had built for them when he had been even younger. Homing pigeons! Becky at the age of fifteen had been even more fascinated by them than by the telescope. He had helped her to carry two pigeons to her apartment in a carefully pierced cardboard box. They had released them in her backyard and how she had marveled when they had flown straight home, a distance of almost four blocks!

“If I raised some, we could send messages back and forth.”

There never had been a time when he had not known Becky. Her parents had been friends of his mother and father, though they were so different that even as a child, Nathan had not been able to understand why. Nathan's father was a doctor, a poor man's doctor, and his mother served as his receptionist and nurse, though she had no formal training. The doctor's office, which occupied almost the entire first floor of their house, was usually full of sick people, and at all hours of the night his father was called to hospitals and to the homes of the dying. Nathan remembered his house as a kind of crisis center. The conversation of his parents, even at the dinner table, was full of tales about the complications of childbirth, the sudden deaths of heart patients and the slow deaths of those with cancer. His parents were usually exhausted, and as a boy he sometimes felt that they were the only two people in the world who were attempting to save a dying city.

But Becky's household was entirely different. Her father was a professor of the Slavic languages at Brooklyn College, where he apparently had few duties, for he spent most of his time at home reading and writing. His wife also spent most of her time reading, though she found time to cook elaborate meals and keep their apartment spotless. Even Becky at a very early age spent most of her time reading, and they all often read to each other and laughed over funny passages or discussed difficult ones. The house was always quiet, and the people in it moved in a leisurely manner compared to the frantic pace of Nathan's parents. No one in that household was mad at anybody. The professor and his wife, who were considerably older than Nathan's parents, had come from Warsaw to Brooklyn fairly recently, and they retained the detached amusement of highly educated foreigners about American political issues and controversies of the day which often made Nathan's parents argue stridently when they weren't talking about people being born or dying.

Almost nothing appeared to irritate Becky's mother and father, and even at sixteen, she was curiously serene and sunny in a world which to Nathan was almost entirely frantic and stormy. She even liked Brian Murphy's Christmas display.

Brian Murphy's annual Christmas display always infuriated Nathan's father and everyone else he knew. Murphy was a successful electrical contractor who owned a new house on a double lot in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood near Nathan's home in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Starting in early November, Murphy put together such a garish Christmas display of his own making that his house looked like a carnival. At least a dozen Santa Clauses, some life-size, crowded his front lawn and his rooftop. Driven by electric motors, some of these kept raising their hands in greeting or just sat rocking, supposedly with mirth, but they looked to Nathan more like old men in terrible pain. On Murphy's front porch there was a crèche with eerie life-size plaster people with vacant, staring eyes. Worst of all, the whole double lot blazed with blinking colored lights, and loudspeakers blared Christmas carols interspersed with Santa's ho-ho-ho's. During Murphy's many Christmas parties, the lights and the loud music continued until the early hours of the morning.

Among Murphy's neighbors was a fierce old friend and patient of Nathan's father whose wife was chronically ill, and who always had trouble sleeping. After an argument, he sued Murphy for disturbing the peace, and a whole neighborhood war started with all the obvious ugly undertones. Petitions were taken from door to door, and Nathan's father appeared as a witness in court to say that his patient's health had suffered. Murphy won the case anyway and celebrated by building a sled with life-size reindeer which rocked and blew steam or smoke from their noses on his rooftop. Spotlights played on this all night.

“Isn't that awful?” Nathan said when he and Becky were walking past the display, and he was astonished when she laughed and said, “Why? I think it's sort of marvelous.”

It turned out that Becky actually knew Brian Murphy and liked him, as she knew and liked almost everyone in the neighborhood. Murphy was an electrician who was extremely proud of his creations, and felt that he was defending his religious freedom. Most of all, he was an unappreciated artist, and when Becky introduced Nathan to him he spent an hour explaining the complex mechanisms which produced all the motion and the smoke. Embattled, pugnacious and naively proud, Brian Murphy was nothing like the devil whom Nathan's father had described. Nathan had suddenly realized that Becky lived in a world that was entirely different from the one in which he had grown up, much less frightening and more hopeful. He loved her world and he loved her.

They were childhood sweethearts, too shy and restrained to make love. They were married while he was still a graduate student, in the spring of 1936, and she supported him by working as a secretary at Brooklyn College. They were both surprised when only a few months after their wedding her parents decided to go back to Poland. Although they had never complained, they apparently had never really been happy in America, and now that their daughter was settled in the new country, they decided to go home again.

Becky startled Nathan by asking if he would like to move to Warsaw, where, she said, her father could get him a good university position. She appeared to understand his refusal, but she was depressed for a long time after her parents left, and talked a lot of visiting them, which their slender budget made almost impossible. In 1938, she began trying to persuade them to come back to New York, and for a year they kept up a running debate by mail. One reason that her father wanted to stay in Poland was that he had an invalid mother and two sisters there. Becky kept trying to devise plans which would make it possible to bring them all over.

Her obsession with her family in Europe hurt Nathan. She tended to subordinate everything else to it, and persuaded him to turn down a good offer from the University of Michigan because she said, “We could never get dad to go up there.” Oddly, Becky did not seem unduly worried by the rise of Hitler, and she went to Warsaw in 1939, not so much to rescue her father from the Germans, as from his mother and sisters, who, she had become convinced, were holding him in Poland almost against his will.

“I think it may be dangerous to go back there now,” Nathan said.

“Come on! You don't really want me to bring them all back anyway. Admit it!”

He couldn't bring himself to admit it, but they both knew she was right, if only because he suspected that she would spend most of her time with her family if they settled nearby. They were tense together a lot of the time after that, and argued about almost anything but her family.

“If you love me, you won't try to stop me,” she said when she decided to go to try to bring her family home, and there was no answer to that. He took her to the boat, and waited on the dock blowing kisses at her as she stood in the crowd on the promenade deck. A lot of people had thrown paper streamers as the tugs started to push the ship away from the wharf. Standing there alone he had suddenly realized that life without her even for a few weeks was going to be awful. Cupping his hands to his mouth he yelled, “Bring them all back, I
want
them here, bring them back, damn it …”

She gave him a smile of immense gratitude. Then a fat woman who was throwing paper streamers jostled her away from the rail.

He never saw Becky again. He remembered the mournful tooting of the tugboats, the smell of the harbor and the circling gulls as he watched the ship out of sight. In retrospect it seemed that he had a premonition that he would never see her again.…

The gulls were still with him, circling around his head as he stood on the flying bridge of the
Arluk
in Argentia two and a half years or what seemed like several centuries later. Then he heard Mowrey bawl, “Yale, where's that goddamn Sheenie? I've got some new codes here that have to go in the safe.”

Closing his eyes for a moment to help blot out the past, Nathan climbed down the ladder to the bridge.

“I'm right here, captain,” he said.

For a week the
Arluk
waited in Argentia while Mowrey drilled his men and indignantly sent messages to every authority he could think of, requesting reasons for the delay. He got no answers, but on the eighth day, the quartermaster on watch reported that “Captain Hansen's trawler” was steaming into the harbor. Their sister ship, Paul saw as she came to moor alongside, proudly carried a metallic crescent device atop her mast for radar.

“Jesus Christ, that bastard Hansen copped a radar set for himself,” Mowrey exploded. “How come they give one to him but not us? I know they figure the silly bastard can't find his way without it, but damn it, he's not headed into more fog than we are.”

Hansen moored his ship alongside the
Arluk
without any of the daring, flash and risk-taking which Mowrey had displayed. He just came in bucking the fast current very slowly, put out a bow line at leisure, and winched his stern around. The operation fascinated Paul because he thought that he could duplicate it himself.

“Hansen, you handle a ship like a fucking old lady,” Mowrey growled from the wing of his bridge.

“I'd rather do that than handle one like a madman,” Hansen replied with a smile. “How are you, Cliff?”

“How many asses did you have to kiss to get radar?”

“I didn't even put in for it. Don't get too envious. The damn thing was great for two days and then quit.”

“They'll probably be able to fix it here for you,” Nathan said.

“Maybe. I radioed ahead and they didn't sound too sure. The damn thing is so new they don't have many technicians, and those they got are all tied up with navy stuff.”

“I'll look at it if you want,” Nathan said. “I've done a little work on radar.”

“You'll be saving our lives if you can fix it—maybe literally,” Hansen said. “I got an idea they gave us the damn thing for a purpose.”

Paul had always been curious about radar, which then was the newest and most hush-hush of developments, and accepted Hansen's invitation to come aboard with Nathan. Even Mowrey was curious enough to come along. The radar set was a huge metal box with a round piece of glass in the front of it, much like a porthole. It filled one end of the pilothouse.

“Looks like you got sort of the Adam and Eve of radar,” Nathan said, inspecting the box closely. “I didn't know they put anything this primitive into production.”