The Town and the City: A Novel

  “They got the sub!” someone howled somewhere.

  “Hey! Hear that?!! They got the sub! Chief says the corvettes got the sub!—”

  “They sank all the subs! They sank all the subs!—”

  The red glow had faded and the Latham had expired out of sight while they milled around talking and shouting. Men were strewn and lost a mile away on the ungodly waters, it was too much to fathom, too much to believe, no one knew what to think at all. Even after the all-clear was sounded they stayed on deck peering anxiously over the waters, and talked and paced up and down and waited. Some of them were silent thinking of the men on the Latham, of their familiar faces gazed at and understood for months, months of loneliness, deprivation, meaningless fond conversations, those selfsame faces gone down now to drown in black waters of unbelievable night. It was too much to believe.

  And then dawn came and the remaining ships in the convoy, two Canadian corvettes, a destroyer, the freighter, and the Westminster appeared to each other in the gales, busily fuming black smoke, driving on relentlessly, a congregation of barks and phantom friends emerging to each other in the grayness. It was all over now, the Latham was gone.

  In the waste-waters, the homeless waters of the world, they stood on deck gripped with loneliness and terror as never before, and between them and the deep was just the poor ship’s hull. Now they knew that the land was their home, as all men realize for the first real time only on the sea.

  A light beamed across the bleak waves, a blink-light warm and soft from one of the corvettes sending an all-secure message to the Westminster, and the warmth and beauty, the benevolent intelligence of that little light—why had it not prevailed for the Latham?

  Peter could not understand it. He leaned wearily on the rail, on his elbows, gazing down at the ship’s side where it rushed through the foaming waters, and he could not understand it at all.

  The world was mad with war and history. It made great steel ships that could plow the sea, and then made greater torpedoes to sink the selfsame struggling ship. He suddenly believed in God somehow, in goodness and loneliness.

  He thought what he would do if the ship was torpedoed like the Latham. At first he could only think of easy survival. His shipmates perished and drowned because it was possible; he survived because it was impossible to perish, he clung to some poor support in the sea and was found and rescued by men. But each day-dream successively grew more difficult, he was less fortunate, and finally he was helpless, eventually he was sucked down in the wake-whirl of the sinking ship and blinded in the world of water. No amount of day-dreaming could dispel the single choking horror of this one irredeemable thought: to look about him within the bowl of a water’s cosmic dreary night, to be falling within it forever, to smother and roll beseeching, to open his mouth to yell where there is no sound.

  When he thought this final unthinkable thought, Peter resolved to take a razor blade and put it in his watch pocket, wrapped carefully in cloth, and keep it there—for the time, the night, when he should find himself floating alone in these Arctic sea-immensities. Better than to drown, to sink downward with a water-logged life jacket, or to roll over numb and lean his face softly in the waters, or to hang suspended by a kapok on top of the ocean-valleys—better than that would be to slash his wrists and expire dizzily and dreamily in his own pool of blood. He began to examine his wrists, the blue veins that throbbed on them, the tiny capillary tracings, the cords that pulsed, the smooth, delicate, and infinitesimal vitalities that conducted his own poor warmth—which he would spill at one stroke among immensity.

  He lay in his bunk thinking thoughts like these and then, towards morning, he would hear the homely slambang and clatter of ovendoors and pots in the galley, he would begin to smell the aroma of bacon frying on the range, and oatmeal steaming, and eggs boiling, all the quaint manly preparation of food on the dawn’s salty ocean—and he was restored to his better understanding.

  One night in the highest fury of an Icelandic storm Peter was with his chum, Kenny, a young dishwasher of lonely charm who bore himself with a beautiful and aristocratic air among the sordid hipsters at the sink and was, as Peter came to learn, the near-alcoholic son of an old and wealthy family in New York. They stood on the bow of the Westminster shouting and yelling and singing, huddled in their coats in the blasts of wind, ducking the wild sheets of spray that palmed over them vastly, full of wild glees and sudden homecoming joy. Kenny was yelling, “Ain’t fit night for man nor beast! What think ye, Pegleg?”—and he limped around the deck, and spat, and squinted.

  And Peter, “Aye, One-Eye, Aye! Man never spoke truer word than ye speak this night!”

  They limped about and staggered afterdecks to the emergency steering wheel (an obsolete piece of equipment on that voyage) and gripped it desperately and pretended to wrestle furiously, at bay with the tempest.

  “Full fathom five my father lies!” called Peter in the gale. “Pearls be his eyes, his bones of coral made!”

  “Aye, Pegleg, such be the fate of all men of the sea, ye true seadogs!”

  About ten minutes later, a terrific pillow fight had begun in the empty dormitories topsides, organized by Kenny in whose melancholy there was a disposition to craziness. Peter and Kenny and a half-dozen others creeped about in the dark, they crawled on hands and knees ravenous with suspense, crazy with joy, laughed savagely, hurled and smashed with pillows until the feathers flew, hid behind bunks and pounced on one another, wrestled and rolled and hurled whole mattresses across the ship’s-darkness, chased each other all over the ship—all upon the thunderous waters of stormy night, in the middle of a grievous sea war, not seven days after the disaster of the Latham and the death of hundreds of themselves.

  The ship neared home waters around Christmas. Everyone had grown a bushy beard and anticipated the long-awaited thousand dollar payoff and made lists of expenditures and argued and felt better than they had in months. Peter stalked the decks, scanning the horizon for signs of land, any land. Now he wanted no one to believe that he would die and never return, he wanted to hurt no one ever again in any way, he was in love with life and never wanted to leave it again. He thought ecstatically of towns and cities, of streets with houses in them, of windows in the houses and the lights in the windows, of people going down the empty streets, of the sweet things of the land. He thought of things he had not seen for six months in the rocky wastelands of Greenland and on the sea—“women’s legs,” and doorways, and neon lights—the things of the land and of men’s life there. He dreaded the day he would have to go to sea again. He wanted to see his family again, his mother’s house, his father’s face.

  One gray morning as Atlantic clouds scudded in the ragged skies, suddenly they were putting in to the coasts of some gray, solemn little country. Peter leaned on a rail gazing avidly at the rocky headlands, the lighthouse, the brown winter meadows beyond, roads, trees, and windswept little cottages facing the sea, and church steeples, and a little man absurdly riding down a road on a bicycle—a little port all true with human presence. It was Sidney, Nova Scotia. To Peter it was the earth again, the land which was their home, the actual sweet sad place of life again. The crew feasted their eyes and felt some deep comfortable joy returning.

  A launch came pitching furiously in wild sprays to the Westminster with an absurd little man, bowler-hatted and briefcased like a burgher of the world’s morning, clinging precariously to a stanchion and hailing the ship with pathetic eagerness. Everyone stared at him. It had been so long since they had seen a man like that, it was good to see him, so solemnly funny. Weary and bearded they watched him gravely as he leaped furiously from the launch to the Jacob’s ladder over five feet of tossing water, without a hitch, quite cheerfully risking his neck and his neat black suit for the sake of the morning’s affairs. He came clambering up the ladder with all the agility of some one enthused and busily concerned with commerce in the little port-town beyond.

  The Westminster’s captain was at the ladder. The li
ttle man suddenly presented him with his card.

  “MacDonald Company, sir, Ship’s Chandlers, at your service, sir!” he piped briskly.

  “Ship’s chandlers?” growled the old man. “I don’t want no damn ship’s chandlers. Where’s the pilot around here?”

  “Here comes another one,” said the Chief Mate, staring with disbelief at another absurd little launch that came pitching and flying to the ship.

  “And who is that?” demanded the captain. “I suppose that’s Angus Mahoney and Company coming to polish the brass? Get off my ship, goddamit, and next time wait until a man’s got himself cleared away before you come scampering up. Get off!” he roared. “What kind of a place is this anyway? I can’t even get my pilot and put in before some pencil-peddler comes.… Who is that coming alongside now? Get off my ship, you!” he yelled, turning again to MacDonald and Company, who promptly bowed, grinned around at everyone with toothy friendliness, seeming to say “Ah, well, all in a day’s work,” and went scampering down the ladder again, card, briefcase and all, full of cheerful enthusiasm, not at all insulted or hurt, and made another spectacular leap across the bay upon the bobbing little launch, waved briskly, and went pitching and jiggling back to land with one hand gripping the stanchion and the other holding down his bowler hat in the scuddy Atlantic winds.

  It was something so funny, so pathetic, so human. Peter was filled with an absurd desire to go scampering over the ladder himself and rush off into “these things”—whatever they were, the land, and ports, the crazy streets of life, men and the pitiful things they did, their furious meaningless strivings, scampering for their bed-and-soup, wearing bowler hats.

  They made it home for Christmas. In Boston, in the snowy mysterious streets, they straggled off—bearded, fierce-looking, carrying harpoons and furs, and wallets full of money. They straggled off into the world again, back to the streets of life again without so much as a howdy-do or good-bye, each to his own fierce and secret pleasure, each wrapped in his own dream of hopeful joy.

  At home in Galloway things had changed in Peter’s family. Ruth was gone in the Women’s Army Corps and Rosey had transferred to an Army hospital way out in Seattle. And with Joe in the air force, Liz gone off, and Peter bound to the articles of the merchant marine and regular war voyages—and the father still forced to work away from home—the Martin parents had decided to try to reunite the home in some way. The old man was able to secure a linotype job in New York if he wanted it, and the mother was certain she herself could get a job in the shoe factories there. So they planned to move to New York and bring the children, Mickey and Charley, with them.

  “My!” exclaimed the mother when they sat around the sad little table-tree that Christmas. “I was born on a farm in New Hampshire and now I’m going to live in New York! It’s going to be easier for all of you to come home on furloughs and visit me—won’t it? New York is right near everything, isn’t it, Petey? Maybe even Liz can come and visit me now.”

  “Well,” scowled the old man, “it might be worth a try. By God, it might be the thing at that!” he cried, shaking his head. “We’ll see, we’ll see, we’ll have to do something. There’s no sense the way it is now!”

  And Alexander Panos was gone from Galloway. He had joined the Army in October. Peter visited his family and they told him that he had turned down a chance for a commission, saying: “I want to be among the humble ranks.”

  Peter walked the streets of Galloway at night for the last times, the empty snowy streets, his friends all gone, something gloomy and finished at home, and the war sighing far off. Everything was coming to a close in Galloway and something else was approaching. He was ready for new things and sick of soul with the old haunted vanished ghosts of life.

  Judie Smith was living in New York now, in an apartment of her own, waiting for Peter to come and join her there. They had written long letters and something like love throbbed in Peter’s mind when he thought of her—his dear, wild, glad-eyed Judie of the college days. He yearned for her after all the watery bleakness of the world.

  The Westminster was sunk that winter. Peter was sailing on a freighter to England when he heard about it. The Westminster was sunk in the dead of night, in February, somewhere in the North Atlantic, with a loss of over seven hundred lives, including scores of crewmen who had sailed with Peter to Greenland. And the great galley, Glory’s galley, and Glory himself, and the mess-hall where they had eaten and gambled, the foc’sles where they had talked and played cards, the bunks where they had slept and sweetly dreamed, and the dormitory where they had romped gleefully with crazy joy—the old creaky melancholy ship itself was down in the bottom of the sea now, sea-sunk forever in foundered night. Fish were wandering in the pantry; old Glory was aglow in coral balconies.

  Yes, the summer before, on the Boston waterfront, Alexander had seen death-flowers in the eyes of Peter’s shipmates.

  [11]

  Francis, completing his courses at Harvard in the Spring of 1943, was more amused than anything else when he took the mechanical aptitude test for officers’ training in the Navy and miserably failed it. At first he didn’t understand what this would mean. He had passed everything else with flying colors, the physical examination, the intelligence test, and even the chatty, almost social interviews with a board of polite and witty officers. One of these officers came over to Francis, as he sat awaiting his fate in an anteroom.

  “Well, Martin, I’m sorry, and surprised! I thought you’d pass everything without effort, at least it certainly seemed so to me.”

  “Well,” smiled Francis lightly, “what does this mean? Is the Navy rejecting me?”

  “Oh, no. It only means that you’ll be transferred to V-6—”

  “And what’s that?”

  “You’ll be an enlisted man training at one of the centers, probably Newport or Great Lakes. Your chances of getting a commission now depend on how well you make out as an enlisted man. First there’ll be boot camp—”

  “Boot camp?” Francis now realized what had happened, and he was suddenly infuriated. “I’m a college graduate and I can’t get a commission?”

  “Not if you can’t pass a mechanical aptitude test,” said the young Ensign with an air more distant than a moment before. “A lot of fellows are like that … they have high intelligence quotients but like you they don’t know a bolt from a screw, and that’s usually something they can’t help either, from long habit. But I was really surprised!” he grinned.

  “Yes,” said Francis coolly, “I suppose I’m cut out for lesser things.”

  He was told to wait a couple of weeks before he was to be called for induction.

  Everything had happened so swiftly, the abrupt end of his studies in college, this sudden rebuff from the Navy, that Francis was stunned. In a matter of days his whole life had been changed from the leisurely, absorbed life of the campus with his fairly eminent scholarly and social position in those surroundings, to the situation of a Navy “boot” waiting to go to one of the raw windswept camps of the war with hundreds of other raucous sailors-to-be. It was too much for Francis; he was alternately amused and angry and disgusted.

  He went to New York and spent his remaining two weeks of freedom living in Greenwich Village with the motherly little intellectual girl he had met at college, Dora Zelnick, in her apartment on Eighth Street. He saw a lot of Wilfred Engels and went to countless parties where everybody got drunk and got mad and argued all night, and then his time was up and he had to go back to Boston to report for active duty. He was never angrier in all his life. Ironically, he was put on a train that went back to New York that very same day, and onwards to Chicago, to the Great Lakes training base.

  It was a windswept plain, blue-gray wooden barracks everywhere, and dust swirling between the buildings in wind blowing from the lake. Francis, huddled miserably in a blue peacoat, with tan leggings around his legs and a blue peacap drawn over his brow, wandering around alone at dusk, dejected and lost, not knowing what to do wit
h himself. There was a library in one of the wooden buildings at the end of the camp: he often wandered there.

  It was the cold floor of the barracks at night and the raucous boys putting up their hammocks and writing letters home on top of seabags, and the Chief bawling them out in a booming raspy voice, and finally the lights going out and everybody chattering and snickering. Then someone turned over in his hammock, howled with fear, struggled desperately, and fell on the floor, as everybody laughed and yelled. Then it was someone poking Francis in the ribs at two o’clock in the morning, and saying, “Your turn for night watch, Martin,” and Francis getting down from the hammock, putting on all his clothes again, winding on the leggings again in darkness, and wandering to and fro among the sleeping “sailors” for two hours with a club and flashlight. Then it was four o’clock, he was relieved from duty, he took off all his intricate leggings and jumpers again in darkness, struggled to climb into the hammock six feet off the floor, and swung there madly trying to sleep. Then it was morning, windswept and bitter and gray, and Francis jumping down again with all the others and winding on the leggings again and wrestling through his jumper, rolling up his hammock and airing out his blankets, and hurrying off as the Chief roared and clapped his hands. Then it was the long lineup before the messhall, the impatient crunching of shoes in the gravel, and some kid saying to Francis—“Geez, I wish they’d let us smoke before breakfast, stand still a minute while I stoop and sneak a butt!”

  Then it was the marching and the cadenced singing “Hi-a-loop! Hi-a-loop!” as they swung and swaggered in formation over the frozen earth in the parade field, someone yelling hysterically at them between confused criss-crossing companies swaggering, and the whip of flags, and smoke, and dust in the wind.

  On the third day, Francis realized in a sudden flash that he could not bear any more of this. He realized this with all the single concentrated force of a profound and incalculable aversion. So tremendous was his hatred of his new position in the world that he was literally blind, he bumped into people, sometimes he found himself staggering with rage, and once when he looked at himself in the mirror and saw the absurd haircut they had given him (there was no hair left, just the heavy furze of a really close clipping, with one tuft sticking up from the top of his head) he flew into a rage and kicked the board wall and almost broke his toe.