The Town and the City: A Novel

  It was like this, and it was more than that, and no one could fathom it and see it all at the same time. It was carried on night and day around the terrific cycloramas of the land and spread-eagling far overseas incredibly. No one could see it, yet everyone was in it, and it was like the incomprehensible mystery of life in the world itself, grown fantastic and homeless in war, and strangely haunted now.

  Elizabeth and Buddy Fredericks got on a train and went voyaging across the lonely darkness and by pin-points of light to Detroit, Michigan, to get jobs there in the vast war plants. And they rode the train together, big dreamy Buddy sprawled in the seat, dozing, then waking up and slowly grinning at Liz, who sat knitting and scowling through the night.

  “Long trip, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “But we’ll get there all right, Liz.”

  “Yes. And my baby’ll be born in Detroit.”

  “I should hope so.”

  “Go back to sleep, honey. Get some sleep.”

  They went to Detroit simply because there was more pay there, and because they wanted to travel around and see the country.

  In Detroit Buddy got a job in a tank factory, and Liz got a job in a ball-bearing plant as piecework-checker, they rented a little room in a friend’s home in Grosse Pointe Park, and they settled down to saving money and dreaming and eating and sleeping and loving. Then when the baby was coming, Elizabeth stayed home knitting small things and brooding joyously and writing letters to her mother at home.

  These were the happiest days of her life.

  One Saturday morning that winter, big Buddy came home jubilantly from the night-shift, humming in the trolley. He strode home happily, another week’s work done and another paycheck collected, his thoughts filled with music. Then he saw a bar, and it looked wonderful, opening up at eight o’clock in the morning, swept fresh and clean for a new day, with the bartender raising the shades, and a truckman rolling in a barrel of beer from the street.

  Buddy breezed in, ordered a glass of beer, and went to the jukebox and played Coleman Hawkins’ “Body and Soul.” He suddenly loved Liz more than he ever had—as a true wife, after all. He rushed out of the bar and literally ran up the street, and went dashing across the yard, and up the stairs.

  And there was Liz sleeping in his big blue pajamas. He turned on the radio to Happy Joe’s morning show. He shot up the shades to let in the snowy light, and threw himself on the bed beside her. He felt fine.

  “Wake up, wake up, Liz, you little thing!” he cried, beaming with happiness, muzzling her hair and seizing her body and shaking it, and finally drawing her to himself.

  She was half asleep, crying, “What?” and burying her face in his neck. “What?” she cried sleepily.

  “Come on, come on!” Buddy whispered gleefully. “Get out of bed and let’s go! Don’t you hear the radio program? I put it on for you. I found a place where they have Hawk’s ‘Body and Soul’ and it’s terrific. Liz, last night on my way to work I passed under a window over the drugstore on the corner and what do I hear but a guy blowing some fine trumpet accompanying a Tatum record! I was stoned! I backed up and looked in and I saw a bunch of musicians sitting around drinking and playing records, I even saw a clothes closet full of mad suits and ties! I tell you, Detroit jumps, Liz! But no kidding, come on, let’s go out!”

  “You’re crazy! It’s not even morning yet.”

  “Of course it’s morning, look outside. ‘Oh, what a beautiful morning,’” he sang. “There’s snow all over Michigan, all over Ontario, it snowed some more last night, it’s great!”

  “Okay.”

  “I know what you need, a cigarette—something else too. Feel your face and your lips, all hot and dry, you’ve been sleeping. I’ll kiss your lips till they get cool again and wet again.”

  “Oh, no!” cried Liz, turning over and flushing furiously with the excruciating embarrassed modesty of a young wife.

  Buddy lit a cigarette and leaned over her and placed it against her lips with a pleased grin, and suddenly Liz was wide awake. “Oh!” she cried. She sat up in the bed rigidly. “You wanted to kiss me!”

  “Sure!” said Buddy proudly. “Let’s go out and drink some beer.”

  “Hm. Kiss me,” said Liz, and he kissed her.

  Happy Joe was screaming on the radio in their favorite radio program. It seemed that in the course of an advertisement of “Ontario Furs” a train was thundering into town bearing a load of furs, and Happy Joe and his assistant were enacting a little drama in which they were supposed to be unloading the furs on the freight platform. “Hand me that crowbar!” “Okay, Joe!” yelled the assistant, and there were great noises of grunting and gasping, and groaning boards over the air, and then: “We almost got it now—almost!—keep pushing down! Okay! Here it comes!”—and then there was a great sound of cracking wood and final tumultuous completion and the two men rapturously breathing joyous “Oooohs!” and “Aaaahs!” and swooning deliriously over the contents. “Will you look at this! this wonderful Persian paw coat, and only three hundred dollars, mind you!”—“Oh! and will you look at this one, Joe, isn’t it just divine! A sable-dyed muskrat with flaring sleeves and all for three hundred and ninety-two dollars, can you imagine, can you just imagine!”—“Oh, Joe, I think I’m going to feel faint! Yes, I think so now, I definitely feel it coming!”—“Water! Water! Help! Charley is passing out! He has just seen the new shipment of superb Ontario Furs at new all-time All-American low prices!”—“Water! in the name of mercy, water!”

  Liz and Buddy were crazy about this madcap program, they always listened to it and it always represented morning and a new wonderful day to them.

  “Okay! I’m going to get up!” cried Liz, and she jumped out of bed in the flopping pajamas that Buddy had worn on their wedding night, and she ran barefooted to the bath.

  Liz took a shower and went back in the bedroom to put on lipstick. And there lay Buddy sprawled on the bed snoring, dead to the world. Liz rolled him over, undressed him dettly, pushed him under the covers, and patted everything in place. Then she went to the window, looked out at the beautiful snow awhile, lowered the shade that he had just raised so jubilantly, turned off the radio, hung up his clothes, and got into bed with him.

  And she leaned on one elbow, completely awake and beaming now, unable to sleep any more, with Buddy embarked on a whole day’s sleep at last. There was nothing else she wanted to do that morning: just look at Buddy asleep, just think and plan, just be there with him in their new sweet strange life together—that was enough for her.

  But ten weeks later her baby died stillborn in a Detroit hospital. It would have been a boy.

  For this poor girl, only nineteen years old and horror-stricken by the sudden grievous sharkish thrusts of death and agony, lying in the pain and suffering darkness of a hospital—the loss of a little life, her young husband’s grief and anxiety, the nights in the dreary hospital, and even the sheer agonized womb of her womanliness—became the sign of everything that was harsh, cold, ugly, dreary, dark and hopeless in life. She never saw the baby and she preferred to think that it had not been a baby after all but some growth that had to be taken out of her, some disease that she had to have before regaining her health. She bit her fingernails and considered all this desperately. She was disgusted.

  She vowed darkly that from now on her life would be smooth as silk, luxurious, easeful, warm and bright and gorgeous. She grew sick and tired of the sympathetic young nurses who fussed around her and wondered how they could spend the rest of their lives working in these “smelly horrible hospitals.”

  She grew irritated with Buddy, snapping at him. “Oh, stop coming around here to look at me like that! Why don’t you go out and make some money? Real money, for God’s sake!”

  “Maybe I can get a car next month. That would be good, Liz, we could take trips and—”

  “Well, get it! And when I get out of here I’m going to buy all the clothes I want with that damn money I saved.”

/>   Buddy was crumbling within from grief and boyish despair. “Gosh, Liz, take it easy; everything’ll be swell from now on. I wrote to your folks and your mother’s coming out to see you—”

  “I don’t want to see her! I don’t want to see anybody!” she cried fiercely. “I want no sympathy from my family. They never knew how to live anyway and they think a thing like this is just routine, it happens to everybody, ‘It’s life!’ they say. I can hear the old biddies in Galloway gossiping about it, ‘Oh, isn’t it just too sad!’ They’re all fools and bores, and from now on you and I are going to live, live, understand?” she cried, clenching her fists.

  “Sure we will, Liz—”

  “We’ll leave this lousy town and go to California, do you understand?”

  “Certainly, baby,” said Buddy, taking her hand and holding it against his cheek mournfully.

  And then the sickened demonic Liz cried in his arms, kissed him tearfully, held him close, trembled miserably, asked him to promise never to stop loving her, gazed desperately, sadly into his eyes, and wiped his poor tears broodingly. But when he left Liz was silent and meditative in her bed, dark with vows and torn with horrible fury.

  [10]

  For Peter an incomprehensible, misty, guilt-stricken, haunted kind of time had begun. He was bewildered by some unnamable guilt that weighed on him because Tommy Campbell was gone, and lost on Bataan, the pale memory of him like a face in dreamlike darkness. Others—Mike Bernardi, who had played football with him, and wild Ernest Berlot, and bitter sad Danny, and his brother Joe and Paul Hathaway—were dispersed and gone in the war. There were a lot of the boys still in Galloway waiting to be called, but the thought of the first few who had gone and joined up was like a moan, a whisper, something stricken and done forever, so manly and pitiful.

  Of course he and some others sometimes scoffed at the idea of making suckers of themselves and rushing off to get shot up. But at night Peter walked the Galloway streets that seemed empty now, and it was as though he heard the distant solemn voices of these youths adjuring him, phantom-like, calling him because he was not with them. Lost, haunted, almost forgotten, where were they all? They were scattered all over the U.S.A. and in England, and Australia, and India, and Pearl Harbor—but where were they in the actual night of time and things, what was it that was so ghostly and lost across the skies of the night? His very life itself had become haunted. He had grown guilty and old. Boys who had admired him because he was a football hero were now gone away, truer heroes than he could ever be. In some way, he had deceived them all. He was twenty and that was the way he felt.

  One July morning in 1942 he left home with a seabag full of workclothes, walking in the cool shade along the little white fences behind the tenement. He hitch-hiked to Boston and wandered around Scollay Square buying a seaman’s wallet and a knife and cap. He waited around in the maritime union hall all afternoon for a job on a ship, and finally, late in the day, he was boarding a big cargo-transport ship in Boston harbor, on the Great Northern Avenue docks.

  He stepped upon a quivering gangplank for the first time in his life, with a feeling of the most tremendous joy—just as the dusky afternoon was darkening over solemn harbor waters, and strange dark light was bending over wharves and the ships and by dockpiles on the waterfront. No one was in sight, on all the piers, and ships, and railyards, nothing moved, all was haunted, it was like being alone in all the world, amid docks and edifices and warlike projects. He had never felt so ghostly alone in all his life.

  The ship was a looming gray mass “just back from Iceland” they had told him in the hall. She sat there amidst her smoke-wreaths and swooping seagulls squarely and flatly in the waters of the slip, so much like an immense gray bathtub somehow, with unfathomable superstructures, her slanting hull streaked with rust, a thin stream of water arching from the scuppers and splashing below, and the mighty bow standing high above the roof of the wharf-shed all huge and prescient with battering storms and strange northern seas. It was the first time that he ever saw a ship with the incredible knowledge that he was going to sail on it.

  When he walked across the sagging boards of the gangway in the silence of destiny he felt a strange stirring in the pit of his stomach, a wondrous, lonely, half-frightened joy warning him that he was walking directly into the portals and maws of the awful sea itself. At twenty he was going on a ship, a great proud bark back from homeless seas and Icelands, bound for other and perhaps stranger and darker lands and seas than any ever wandered before. So it seemed to him in the mystifying solitude of deserted afternoon, in that moment of haunted gloom before lights come on in the world.

  But suddenly the lights did come on, the galley portholes glowed and made pale mysterious reflections in the oily waters below. A guard suddenly appeared at the head of the gangway, checked Peter’s papers, and inexplicably vanished. Peter hurried inside the shambling old vessel, as something unspeakably exciting gripped at his throat.

  In there, in deserted dim alleyways, it was even more awesome: the stewish smell of a galley for the first time, and the smells of paint and cable and oil and rust, and all the steel bulkheads and portholes, the strange melancholy insides of a ship. Two men moved past him suddenly and casually in the alleyway, going up a ladder, silent, with the dreamy impassivity and old routine of seamen. Perhaps he had arrived among the lost men of the war, two of them had just brushed past him.

  He found himself in the big galley, the kitchens of the ship, and there, standing in the midst of great aluminum cauldrons, huge pots and pans, and a cook-range big enough to boil a hundred ordinary kettles of water, was a mighty Negro cook, six-foot-five, peering into steaming soups. With a corncob pipe clamped in his teeth, he ruminated over whole vatfuls of brothy soup, humming in a deep basso some strange and mournful melody that Peter had never heard, as darkness pressed in at the portholes and the world outside receded.

  “Well, boa! so you done laid down a hipe!” moaned out the cook in a deep and massive voice as Peter walked by with his seabag.

  “A hipe?”

  “Yeah, boa, you done stole the chickens, ain’t you? You reckon you can run, and run, and run down that road till the day you dah?” The big man peered down at Peter squinting and twinkling. “Well, thass allright, ’cause old Glory’s on yo side, cause HE’S done laid down a hipe a LONG time ago!”

  “Glory?”

  “Thass ME, son! Ain’t nobody else! Thass ME!” He stared sideways down at Peter.

  “Where was that?”

  “Boa, you mean where Ah stole my chickens? Umm!” he moaned tremendously, turning great dolorous brown eyes overhead, puffing on his pipe, going “tsk! tsk! tsk!” “He wants to know wheah was dat! BOA!—that was in Savannah, Jawgia!”

  “Savannah?”

  “Ain’t dat what Ah said?”—hoarsely. “You lookin’ fo de purser to sign on? Is dat what you layin’ down right now?”

  “Yes! Where can I find him?”

  “You find him right now drinkin’ up de likkah ashoh! You ain’t goin’ find him right now, son! You jist find you a bunk. Go oan now, you only a chile. Glory ain’t got no time to waste wid you.” He looked earnestly at Peter. “Go oan, boa! Go lay down yo hipe! And den you come back heah, in dis galley, and eat yo denner! Heah me?”

  And big Glory moaned and hummed, and could be heard all over the ship, like the great voice of grieving doom.

  In the large messhall, a withered skinny little man without teeth and a little witch jaw sat dolefully at a mess table talking to a sleepy disconsolate listener who wore an apron. They were all alone there in the sea of tables.

  “You understand,” the little seaman was saying as Peter passed, “I don’t like the idea of sailing the Westminster this run. You understand my point! They got our number now. [Cough! cough!] They almost got us the last time near the straits.… You understand the way it is, they track you just so long, they get their bearings, they lay for you. [Cough! cough!] Then boom! It’s to be expected, you understand. They
got our number now, I tell you.” And the little man wiped his eyes with a blue handkerchief, and stared after Peter with polite curiosity, while the man in the apron just sat looking down at his feet.

  It felt stranger and stranger. Peter wandered down the grimy alleyways until he found a room with several empty bunks. He threw his seabag in an empty locker, thinking suddenly of home. He got out a pad and wrote a long letter to Judie Smith in Philadelphia, and sat down again on the bunk with his head in his hands.

  He went up on deck after a while. It was dark now—and yonder, over the mystical water Boston blazed her diadem of lights. Standing on deck in the darkness, it occurred to Peter that nothing in the world could be so chaste as a ship moored at a city’s dark dockside while all the world brawled and reeled in the lights beyond. All the lonely ship-lights in the bay showed where the patient hulls were berthed and anchored, where they loomed, in enfolding shadows, like the kneeling nuns of the sea—while young sailors on watch wished they were brawling around Boston’s bars with the rest of the crew, but were bounden, like adolescent monks, to the monasterial harbor-night of duty and truth.