The Summer Guest (9 page)

Oddly, after so much frantic maneuvering and worry, the war itself turned out to be one of the most peaceful periods of my life. The work was arduous, punctuated by bursts of frenzied activity whenever we made port; but a ship at sea, especially a large cargo vessel, is one of the dreamiest places on earth, a kind of floating nowhere. I passed those two years in a tranquil haze of unraveled time, my days and nights folded into one another by the rhythms of the watch and the hypnotic thrum of our engines, a basal throbbing that seemed to travel upward from the deck’s steel plates into my very bones. Though we never made it more than five hundred miles from shore-well inside the safety zone-I felt very much as if I had left the wider world behind. My favorite run was a straight shot across the gulf from the depot in Port Arthur to the naval installation at Key West; on those nights when I wasn’t on watch in the wheelhouse, I would stand and smoke on the foredeck, watching the sea and smelling the warm gulf air-always, even so far from land, kissed with a floral sweetness-and feel so alone I didn’t feel alone at all, as if I needed no one and nothing in my life. It was a sensation I loved instinctively; it seemed, like the throb of our engines, to have moved inside me; and although I did not know it at the time, I would spend the rest of my life searching to find it again.

I might have remained in the merchant service were it not for Meredith, whom I met on a night just after the end of the war, when we were docked at the naval yard in Philadelphia and I went ashore with friends, to a restaurant where, at the next table, she was eating with two girls from her office. (She worked as a clerk at the same General Electric plant where I would later work three years.) But that is another story-not a war story, as I mean now to tell. My one true war story is this:

April 30, 1945: We had just made port at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and spent the morning off-loading our tanks into the vast holding pens of diesel fuel that lined the docks. We would lie two days in New York and then set sail again, empty and riding high as we made a long arc south to Port Arthur to start it all again. The war already seemed over, like a long, bad party in its final hour. A few days before, we had learned that a U.S. patrol had converged with a Soviet unit on the Elbe, and rumors were circulating that Hitler was already dead, or gone mad, or both. All that remained was Berlin itself, though Japan was still a question. Roosevelt had been dead three weeks, and nobody trusted Truman yet, this Missouri haberdasher turned president, but these things seemed not to matter; the war would end of its own accord, whoever made the final decisions.

As a navigational officer, even the most junior of one, little was required of me during the off-loading; I spent the afternoon on deck, watching the ships come and go from the harbor, beneath a sky of unseasonable blueness and thick, doughy clouds pushed along by a bracing April wind. A new aircraft carrier, the Coral Sea, had just been launched from its locks, and now she lay at anchor, a huge city of floating gray steel almost a thousand feet long, rising twenty stories above the fouled waters of the harbor. I was enough of a patriot to experience an almost visceral stirring at the sight of her, though something else too: that small, unassailable tweak of shame that I had spent the war so far removed from any actual danger. Whenever we were in port, especially the large naval yards at Norfolk and New York, I often found myself among groups of uniformed men, the sailors on shore leave and infantrymen preparing to ship out. They pressed into the waterfront bars and restaurants and movie houses, making every space seem small with their loud voices and the rich haze of their cigarettes. The feeling that passed among them was positively electrical, like some binding, subatomic force. As merchant mariners, we were widely thought of as members of a kind of ancillary navy-technically, we were classified 2B, worker in an essential industry-and never once did anyone confront me directly with an accusation of cowardice. But I knew the truth; I could feel the truth. In those same waterfront bars, a sailor might bump into me by accident, or I might find myself standing at the rail beside a group of freshly minted PFCs on the town for one last night of fun before they shipped out; and though at such moments we might exchange a courteous word or two, always their eyes would slide past me quickly, as if I weren’t completely visible.

I was watching the Coral Sea from the fantail, feeling these things and despite it all a kind of warm happiness to pass a few empty hours in the spring sun, when I was joined by a shipmate, a man named Mauritz. Mauritz was nobody I knew very well or liked all that much; he was an old mariner, thirty years at sea and brown as the whiskey he drank fiercely, and like all the other lifers, he regarded the hurry-ups as a kind of necessary wartime burden, like gas rationing or bad coffee. The one thing I liked about him was that he played jazz guitar, not just well but expertly-in another life he might have been a professional musician. Sometimes at night he would bring his guitar into the mess or out on deck and play for us, his fingers drawing melodies of such tenderness from his instrument that the very air around him seemed different, lighter. I wondered if he had a family-surely the depth of feeling I heard in his music came from some meaningful human attachment-but I never asked, thinking also that he might be alone. I was wondering about this one night when I asked instead what the names of the songs were.

He scowled as if my question were the stupidest thing he had ever heard, and did something with his fingers to tune the strings. “No names.” I thought the conversation had ended, but then he winked at me and laughed. “You think of some, you tell me.”

Mauritz had been dockside all morning, one of a dozen hands supervising the transfer of diesel from our tanks into the holding pens. His face and arms were so dirty with oil that the cigarette tucked behind his ear was as startlingly white as a human scalp.

“How’s it going down there?”

He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “A fucking mess. Man’s work, buddy boy. Goddamn gaskets leaked all over.” His eyes, squinting, followed my gaze over the water. “The Coral Sea?”

I nodded. “Yeah, that’s her.”

He settled in against the rail and whistled through his long dark teeth. “Eighteen five-inch guns on that son of a bitch. Like a destroyer welded to an airport. They’re renaming her the Roosevelt, what I hear.” He took the cigarette from behind his ear and tapped it on a thumbnail. “You see the papers?”

I told him I hadn’t.

“Hitler got married.” He barked a pitiless laugh. “Him and that Kraut cunt are holed up somewhere. Some fucking honeymoon!”

We stood another moment at the rail. Mauritz tapped his cigarette again, placed it to his lips, and fished in the pocket of his shirt for his lighter. The air around us was tangy with diesel fuel. It was a smell we lived with day in, day out, omnipresent as oxygen or the constant swaying of the ship’s deck. Usually I thought nothing of it, but standing beside him, the smell was unusually vivid, much stronger than it should have been. I was about to say something sarcastic about the leaking gaskets he had mentioned, when he flicked his Zippo across his pants leg and lit his cigarette.

“Mother… fucker.”

Mauritz was looking at his leg; a blue flame had enveloped his right thigh. Time seemed to slow as we both watched the delicately dancing blue flame on his body, a vision of wonder and strangeness-as hypnotic, in a way, as the songs from his guitar.

“Maur-”

And then the rest of him went up-up and out and away, the diesel that had soaked his pants and shirt and even his hair igniting all at once so that he seemed not so much on fire as replaced by fire, a man-size waterfall of flames. The heat and concussion shoved me back across the deck, and when I looked again all I could see were his eyes, white disks of pure amazement, and the incongruous image of his cigarette still clamped, somehow, between his blackening lips. I tried to yell but no sound came; my throat was suddenly closed, sealed tight against the heat and smoke of Mauritz as he burned, and in the instant when I should have done something-taken off my jacket to cover him with it, or pushed him to the deck to roll my body over his-he did something instead: he took one step closer to the rail, bent over it from the waist-a maestro taking his bow-and sent himself pitching into the harbor.

He died, of course, after they had plucked him from the harbor and taken him away; what the flames themselves did not accomplish, the septic harbor waters did. But what I remember most of all from that day is the smell-of oil and diesel fuel and dirty harbor water, and the foul sweetness of a human being on fire. As Mauritz fell he pulled the smoke down with him like a rocket’s contrail, and when I looked over the rail to find his body, yelling my alarm at last, a rank cloud rose to meet me, overwhelming my senses with such nauseating totality that I had to turn my face away and retch. It was the same smell I smelled again, years later in my kitchen, when Meredith, sick already but not yet knowing it, dozed as her cigarette burned away the flesh from her fingers; the same look I saw in her eyes, as she sat on the toilet of our upstairs bathroom and considered her miraculously painless injury: an expression of the purest wonder, as if, even then, she had somehow grasped its meaning.

It is summer now, the days long, indistinguishable. Visitors come and go in the buttery light. I entered the hospital for the last time in April-a touch of pneumonia, the old man’s friend-and now nobody talks as if I will ever leave here. Hal has seen to everything; my room is like something in a hotel. And yet it is the reductions, the final clarities, one takes to heart. I have oxygen to breathe, strong analgesics for comfort, antibiotics to hold infection at bay; I have a nurse to bathe and attend me, orderlies to bring my meals, such as they are, on their rolling metal carts. Chopped beef and leathery breasts of chicken; browning salads and limp green beans paled from the steam; small, tasteless desserts: a wedge of cake or brownie, a bowl of wobbling gelatin, oatmeal cookies hard as poker chips. They arrive compressed under stretched cellophane, or hidden beneath hatlike silver lids that seem to come from an era long past. The orderlies, usually black men but not always-I confess I think of them as one person, a single being-raise these coverings with an encouraging if manufactured pleasure, like a magician lifting a curtain to reveal, behind it, a single cooing dove. “Well now, what have we got for you today, Mr. Wainwright? Salisbury steak, I see. And cherry pie. Not bad, not bad at all.” There was a time when I could not keep even the slightest morsel in my stomach-the months of drugs and radiation and other well-meaning but useless therapies-but now I eat it all, every bite. I am already nostalgic for food.

And Franny did not, after all, fuck me to death. It was the pneumonia that drove her glorious plans into the ditch. We gave it a try or two after that, but in the end held hands, and slept. Like teenagers, I thought, and was glad.

My doctor is named Grosscup. At the onset of my illness I had many-surgeons, oncologists, pulmonary specialists, even a dietician. Now he is all that remains, like a last party guest who cannot find his keys. Under the chairs? On the patio? In the kitchen, put carelessly aside when he went to flirt with one of the caterer’s girls? When he finds them, he, too, will depart. Dick is an internist of the old school, loyal as a Labrador, a man who wears brogans and a suit even in summer and carries his tools in a black leather bag that opens like a mouth. He has a kind, wide face, and eyebrows heavy as wool. Every night he stores his stethoscope in the freezer.

“Not true, Harry. I stir my martini with it.”

It is afternoon, an afternoon in July. Here and there he moves the end of his frigid instrument across my back.

“That goddamn thing’s an ice cube.”

“Never mind that. Now breathe. That’s it.”

A moment passes. He pulls my pajama top back down, instructs me to sit up, and takes gentle hold of my wrist. His thumb where it rests on my skin is rough as sandpaper. A deeper quiet settles over the room; not even the birds are singing. When he is satisfied, he takes my chart from the table and scribbles something in his awful handwriting.

“How’s the pain?”

We do this on a scale of one to ten: standard stuff. “Five.”

“I know you, so I’ll write down seven.” He frowns optimistically as he reads the chart. “It says here you’re eating. Don’t know how, with the goop they serve. Makes airplane food look like the ‘21.’” Dick furrows his ample brow at me. “How’s the breathing?”

“About the same.” I don’t know why I always lie to him. “Maybe a little worse.”

Again he writes. Finally, he puts the chart aside and takes a chair by my bed. Always the problem: the bed is elevated, like an altar. The angle makes talking awkward.

“Here’s the question, Harry. Do you want to go home? Because if you do, there are things that can be done.” He nods me along. “To make you comfortable.”

He is asking me where I want to die, of course. It is not a question one longs to hear. And yet I am glad he has asked it.

“What things?”

He reaches to the floor where his bag, openmouthed, rests. From the interior he produces a pamphlet, tri-folded and glossy, which he stands to give me. Good Shepherd Hospice it reads, and beneath that, Information for the Family. The illustration is a simple line drawing of a tree.

“There are others. But this is the one I recommend.”

I am too tired to read it. A good idea, well-meaning to a fault, but the details, I know, will depress me. “Have you talked to Meredith about this?”

He realizes what I have said before I do. “Meredith, Harry?” Dick shifts in his chair.

“Don’t look at me like that.” I close my eyes and breathe. “Franny, I meant. Have you talked to Franny?”

“We’ve spoken about it. She says it’s up to you. A nurse will come to the house every day, to monitor your comfort. More, as things progress.”

I am suddenly exhausted. More than exhausted-I feel like a cup that somebody has spilled. My eyes refuse to open; the air seems to wander aimlessly in my chest, finding no purchase. To breathe at all seems hardly worth the bother. This is what is meant, I suppose, by things progressing, all of a sudden.