The little start she gave as she looked up from the bowl of soup her spoon was going into let him know she hadn't seen him approaching. Spoon in midair, she hesitated, then relaxed into a smile. Her teeth were discolored.
"I am honored to accept the kind invitation," she replied, jerking her head into a nod. But she didn't scoot back her chair and half rise, as he'd expected. On his way to join Alma it occurred to him that he ought to have added "or tea" after"coffee."
#
She did ask for tea. While sitting around a coffee table in the lounge, waiting for her pot and their French press to arrive, they exchanged names. Hers was Yuko Miyataka. Even though he and Alma had engaged in mock battle, primarily over his insistence that she was a schoolteacher, the fact that she was Japanese was of greater significance to him than her profession.
As Alma chatted her up about the loveliness of the village and the attractiveness and comforts of the inn, he studied her face, as if scrutiny might reveal what lay behind it. Her skin, the color of sun-baked mud, was slightly pitted. Narrowed by the plumpness of her cheeks, lumpy, like roughly molded clay, her eye sockets seemed to toe in. Making it appear you were looking at her, or she at you, from a distance, her black pupils were small. The top of her nose was flattened, widening her nostrils. In her upper lip was a deep indentation. She wore no makeup. She didn't exactly fit his picture of a geisha.
After the waiter had served them, Alma made the first thrust.
"I cannot help wondering what has brought you to Yorkshire."
He was pleased that she hadn't used the first person plural.
"Oh, well, the great writers of this place."
He had to check an impulse to shoot a quick smile of triumph at Alma.
"Then I believe you are a teacher." Alma put it bluntly to confirm that she'd lost the bet.
"Oh sure. I teach the literature of English novel."
"Why are you not teaching now?" Given that she was conversing with a non-native speaker of English, Alma obviously found it appropriate to avoid contractions. "Is March not a school month in your country?"
"In March we are having school in Japan. You see, I have been given the leave of absence."
"So, you are engaged in research?"
"Oh no. Not the research. I am only the teacher."
They seemed to have reached a dead end. While they sat sipping in what he felt was a strained silence, he told himself the fact that Yuko Miyataka understood a word like "engaged" indicated that, despite some uncertainties in idiom, she was capable of keeping a conversation in English going. Which suddenly she did.
"You have read the novels of the famous Bronte sisters?" The question was directed to Alma.
"Yes. I have read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Many years ago. When I was a student in college." Alma was making her English sound as if she'd learned it from a book.
"Today I ride the bus to Scarborough. About one hour. I wish to respect the grave of the youngest, named Anne Bronte. But I am not able to find it. Scarborough is a big city with many burial places."
"That must be a disappointment. When you have traveled so far. I have never read anything Anne Bronte has written. Have you, Dan?"
There was no way to escape Alma's ploy to involve him in the conversation. "
Tke Tenant ofWildfellHalL That too was years ago. Anne wrote at least one other novel, it does seem to me." He heard his own idiom as unnatural.
Yoko Miyataka clapped her hands, smiled and nodded. There was a sweetness to her smile that eclipsed her lack of beauty. "The gentleman is very learned. Only one other. It has the title of Agnes Grey. Anne Bronte" not so famous as her sisters."
"Will you pay your respects to them also?" Alma asked, to show her interest.
"Of course I must do that. But before, I must respect the grave of one other great writer. Not many miles from this village."
"Who is that?"
"Laurence Sterne, a fellow of infinite jest."
"A fellow of infinite jest?" Dan echoed before he could stop his tongue. "But that's Shakespeare. Yorick, in 'Hamlet.'" Sensing he was being rude to correct a woman from another culture so bluntly, especially a teacher of English, he wished he could unsay the words the instant they were out.
Again Yuko Miyataka clapped her plump hands, nodded and smiled. "Very good. And there is Yorick also in Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy. Very difficult to read for Japanese people."
Realizing Yuko Miyataka had tried to help him save face, Daniel felt a little flush of humiliation. And hearing her manage the Fs and r's in "Laurence Sterne," "fellow," "Shakespeare," and "Yorick," usually so treacherous for Far Easterners, he had to admire her mastery of spoken English.
"I have never heard of it," Alma confessed. "Have you, Dan?"
"Yes, but I haven't read it. You say Sterne is buried near here?"
"Oh sure. Tomorrow I will ride the taxi to Coxwold village. It is fifteen minutes. That is where Laurence Sterne wrote and where is his grave."
"But the Brontes lived in Haworth," Alma put in. "We have been there. It is quite a distance."
"Then in two days more I will ride the bus to York city. One half hour when I came to here. Then I will ride the train to Leeds city. There I will ride the taxi to Haworth village. I will respect the graves of Charlotte and Emily Bronte and I will see into the museum. It was the home where they did their writings. These are important for me to teach the Japanese students their greatness."
"I have very much admiration for you," Alma said reverently. "For your commitment and your courage."
Daniel wondered whether Yuko Miyataka had understood "commitment." But again she nodded and beamed her sweet smile.
Back in their room neither Daniel nor Alma mentioned their bet. Now that he'd been proved right on both counts, he'd persuade her, when they'd reach London, that his choice was the Indonesian restaurant he didn't care for. To counter the condescension she'd be certain to feel, he'd insist the tab go on her credit card.
#
A chronic insomniac, he awakened in the grip of depression. The red numbers on the face of the digital clock said 1:22. If he'd been dreaming, he couldn't recall what. He knew the martinis were a component of the chemistry that was keeping him from sleep. As he confronted the prospect of hours of restlessness, he heard Alma breathing with a regularity indicative of a state of blessed unconsciousness. He was lying on his right side. After rolling onto his left, dropping onto his back, flipping onto his belly, squirming onto his right side again, stretching full-length, then doubling his knees and hunching over them, he found himself saying to himself the names of the international code of flags at sea
^ble, Baker, Charlie, D..., iiasy, Fox, George, How,item, Jig, King,L..., Mike,Nan, O..., Peter, Queen, Roger, S...t Tare, Uncle, Fictor, W...,X-ray, Toke, Zebra. Five flag names he couldn't remember. When he ran back through, he came up with "Love," "Oboe," and "Sugar." Without succeeding, struggle as he might, in dredging up the words for "D" and "W,n he drowsed off.
Reawakening at a few minutes past four, he flattened himself on his back. When he closed his eyes, the darkness of the room became a blank slate. Gradually it dawned on him that the two letters whose code names he hadn't been able to come up with were the initials of his name.
#
"Have . .. one ... suburb... of... Pittsburgh... in... tow.. . full stop ... awaiting... instructions... end of transmission."
Dean, signalman first class, is reading flashing light from the Hornet, two or three miles off our port bow. I take the words down on a clipboard. The message is addressed to the admiral aboard. It's dated Je 9, '45. We've just ridden out a four-day typhoon off the coast of Kyushu. This morning the sea is smooth enough to deserve its name—Pacific.
"What in Christ's name does that mean?" Dean growls. "I'm going to ask for a repeat. Whitlock, read the son of a bitch with me."
" 'Have one suburb of Pittsburgh in tow.' That's what he's saying, Dean." . "Don't make no Godda
mn sense," Dean grumbles as he carries the message off to the admiral's chief of staff in flag plot.
At chow Dean fills me in. "The fucking storm split the bow off the Pittsburgh and her watertight doors kept it afloat. The Hornet spotted it, pulled alongside, put a man aboard that secured a hawser on a bollard and they took the fucker in tow. Their captain's asking Old Ironsides what the fuck to do with it. Nobody don't know where the hell the rest of the fucking cruiser is."
#
Waiting to see a crack of light between the draperies across the bedroom window, he recalled how welcome the wit of the Hornet's captain had been during a harrowing time and how remarkable the recovery and repair of the Pittsburgh. Both parts were towed back to Pearl Harbor, where, after being welded together, she became seaworthy again. Yet the severity of that typhoon was eclipsed, he remembered, by the destructiveness of the typhoon they'd gone through, literally, the previous December in the South China Sea, off the coast of Luzon in the Philippines.
And the kamikazes. At first our command had construed the planes' plunging into ships as unintentional, the result of the pilot's inability to control his aircraft after it had been hit by antiaircraft fire. Gradually it dawned on those at the top that these were planned suicide missions, not even instantaneous decisions, like that of Captain Colin Kelly, the first U.S. hero in the Pacific theater, where in the early months of the war we were suffering one defeat after another. Rather than bail out, he'd guided his stricken fighter plane into the superstructure of a Japanese battleship. What irony—the first kamikaze was an American.
The admiral aboard his ship, Annapolis '07, appropriately nicknamed Old Ironsides, came up with a counter to the devastating new Japanese tactic. In addition to our twelve-inch signaling lamps, we carried four thirty-six inch carbon-arc searchlights. Their function was to locate enemy aircraft at night and illuminate them as targets for our twenty and forty-millimeter antiaircraft batteries. After Pearl Harbor we'd quickly learned that, logical as the theory was, its use was both futile and self-defeating. Guided by hand, the lights couldn't locate and track fast-moving aircraft in the dark, while they made the ships that were showing them visible targets for high flying bombers and skimming torpedo planes. From that time on, no light aboard ship was permitted to be visible between sunset and sunrise.
Old Ironsides, with enough gold braid on his uniform to change a designated procedure, concluded we could defeat the kamikazes by picking them up visually, after radar had located and fixed on them, with our thirty-six inch lamps' powerful beams, which would confuse and blind the pilots as they made their dive or run. The Japanese rode the streams of light we provided smack into their targets. After two ships were hit in rapid succession, that tactic was abandoned. Old Ironsides remained in command of our task group.
#
Water-borne armadillos, we're prowling the South China Sea for prey— whatever remnants of the battered Japanese fleet might be foolhardy enough to show themselves. Or a freighter, slow and low in the water, her lading meant for lands that the Japs have taken, a sitting duck for the guns of a man-of-war—you might say an albatross if freighters had wings and ships still carried crossbows.
A brilliant sun. On the signal bridge I'm scouring the space just above the horizon, a seam between the paler blue of sky and the darker blue of ocean. In the lens of a long glass my eye picks up a black speck. Its blip on the radar screen, I hear through the earphones of the headset I'm wearing, is too small to identify.
I push the button that brings to life the speaker my lips are almost touching. "Small craft at four o'clock. Distance approximately two miles. Looks dead in the water. Probably fishing boat."
Target confirmed by my eye, I'm blinded for an instant by a flash as the five-inch mount only feet from my right eardrum blasts off. In the glass I see a straddling of water spouts a pod of whales might jet around the speck which has disappeared.
They never knew what hit them. No need to expend main-battery sixteen-inch shells on such small game. In these waters it couldn't possibly have been Japanese, was most likely Vietnamese or Filipino. Still, even the humblest native craft might radio our presence and position. We can't afford to take chances. Or prisoners. Think of it as baptism, of water and fire at once.
#
It came back to him in the dark—the first war crime in which he'd been a participant. Next time there had been less anguish. And the next and the next, diminishing. He closed his eyes and shuddered. In the still darker dark a circle of blue shone brightly enough to make his inner eye want to look away. If only his bodily eyes would open. The lids refused to go up. Within the blue, either sea or sky, he saw the ribbed hull of a scallop-shaped fishing boat. Inside was a cargo of white bones. Above it hovered a host of human shapes—children, wives, parents, he knew they were, heads bowed in submission or prayer, arms flung up in horror or supplication, mouths rounded as if moaning or exclaiming, eyes lowered in grief or despair.
Summoning all his will, he lifted his eyelids and stared into the less dense dark of the room. "Unfortunately we had to," they'd told themselves while doing. "Had to" now was his story, a memory for himself, a record for posterity that provides justifications. What the boy-sailor, a moral virgin until then, had done, his necessity, carrying out the commands of Old Ironsides, he'd buried in his mind as many fathoms deep as the little boat lay in the gulf of oblivion. Sooner or later it had to have happened—some outside force was bound to shatter the concealment of time and distance, the waters of the grave would part, and the boat with its cargo of bones would rise into his consciousness.
Guilt can't be bought off, satisfied by remorse. He knew he harbored no retroactive willingness to swap his billet aboard a man-of-war, fifty-five thousand displacement tons of armor and weapons, for a nameless fisherman's berth on a timbered unarmed boat. What penance then is an unmanned man to do when it's generations too late for reparation?
Ought he pay the New York Times to make public his mea culpa and a plea for forgiveness in a full-page spread, with one photograph of him then in uniform, another of him now in sackcloth and ashes? Would a home-page on the Internet provide greater exposure?
Ought he fly to Vietnam, with an exaction of its own, make a barefoot pilgrimage, stumping the final mile on his knees, to the village of My Lai, first land west of the fishing boat's watery grave, prostrate himself in whatever the burial ground there, and fast until he'd be nothing but skeleton?
Ought he make his way to the leper colony on Culion, Isle of the Living Dead, a dab of arid earth off Palawan in the Philippines, due east of the unmarked sea in which the fishing boat had vanished, and like San Juan de Cruz press lips against the lesions of "the living dead"?
Why shift it off to somewhen somewhere else? What better time and place than here and now, where and when the cover of distance and time have been breached? Come morning he could present himself to the rector of the parish church, hand him a document that would commit him to give all he had to the parish poor, the widowed, the orphaned, and to spend the remainder of his days celibate, praying and fasting.
If only he could love the souls of six—or were there nine or a dozen or more who had been aboard that boat—men he never knew. Oh, the futility of babbling lamentations!
#
Scout planes have radioed that we're steaming directly toward a powerful typhoon. A quartermaster lets it leak that by altering course twenty degrees to the north we can skirt what for us will not be a divine wind.
"Damn the typhoon," I hear Old Ironsides, striking an original heroic phrase, bark at his chief of staff in the passageway between flag plot and the shelter on the signal bridge. "We'll steam between her thighs and break into her cunt at the center, then batter our way out of her arms. Engines to thirty knots."
As surprised as I am that a man I consider scarcely literary can strike a metaphor, I'm shocked to hear an admiral use the word "cunt."
"All hands on deck," blares over the PA system.
&n
bsp; The wind has begun to roar. Water becomes a gargle of sea and rain. Spray, thick and heavy as waves, stings what's exposed of my face, cowled by oilskin gear. On deck we've slung lines between railings and stanchions. Clinging to them, as I make my way hand over hand against gusts, burns the skin on my palms. When I measure the wind's force by leaning full weight against it, it holds me up. At first it's exciting.
From time to time I poke my head into the signal shelter. Eyes bugging, I watch the swinging of the pendulum of the clinometer—27° starboard, 26° port, 28° starboard we're rolling. At thirty, hull over stacks we go, Dean, who's mocked me by saying he's worn out more sea bags than I have socks, has told me. Maybe he's yarning, maybe not. When I check the log, I find the anemometer reads 157m.p.h.
Hearing over TBS that the storm's breath has blown a seaman off the flight deck of the Intrepid, I make out through the swirl of sea and rain a destroyer, the Monaghan, more shark-like than savior-like, prowling the circle that describes his liquid grave. Now sea heaves itself as high as the captain's bridge. Everyone hugs inboard bulkheads. Although even old salts, including Dean, are seasick, it hasn't come nigh me.
Word seeps out from flag plot we're battling the worst blow Old Ironsides has run afoul of since he was a midshipman. When he shows himself on deck, gold-braided cap off so his thinning gray hair is swept back by the wind, as I imagine Ahab's or an Old Testament prophet's would be, it's evident he's relishing the encounter. For the old bastard or the task unit he commands, except the ship I'm on, I wouldn't give a rusty piss. Fear has shriveled my prick to an earthworm. Nobody jokes. I realize I'm a born coward.
During what should be daylight, visibility is less than at dusk. When neither she nor us is dropped in a trough, I can barely make out the ghostly silhouette of the Monaghan. Since Old Ironsides has ordered the formation to tighten up, I judge she can't be more than the length of a football field at two o'clock off our starboard bow, rolling and pitching like a whale in its death throes. We plummet into a deep gorge. Then when we're flung on top of a mountain that would take eons to form on land, I look and wait for the Monaghan to reappear. She never does. Swamped, she's turned into a submarine who's made her final plunge.