Was there ever a more bitterly ironic drama, not in a play on a stage or in words on paper, but in life? And to think, the Enola Gay had been waiting in the wings.
After he'd won a brisk but polite skirmish about paying Yuko Miyataka's share of the bill, Alma said brightly, "Let's finish our last supper by having coffee and tea in the lounge."
Given that Yuko Miyataka taught in a Christian college, he thought it possible she might catch Alma's allusion.
"Afraid I must ask you to excuse me. Something I've eaten seems not to be agreeing with me." Hearing still another improbable pretext issue from her husband's lips within six hours would let Alma know he wasn't expecting her to believe it. "But don't let me break up the party. You two have your after-dinner coffee and tea together."
Alma, who, he suddenly noticed, had not drunk a measurable amount of her third martini, raised her eyebrows and shook her head just enough to be sure he saw it Actually, however, not the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but a metaphorical truth was embedded in what she took for total falsification. Although the full force of three martinis and more than a third of a bottle of wine wouldn't hit him until he'd be lying awake in the small hours of the morning, he was experiencing an ache, an ache of sorrow. And afflicting him still more fiercely than his mythical headache earlier in the day or his supposed present indigestion was the pain of rage. Neither the sorrow nor rage was located only in his head or stomach. Commingled, they surged through every part of him~~flesh, bone, blood, brain, heart, lungs, stomach, bowels, liver, balls, prick, all of which as one we call the self. Had he also a soul to add to the catalog?
Nor were the ache and pain brought on by the constriction of arteries, a reflux of acid, inflammation, or a pinched nerve. The pathology, rather, was anguish, the anguish of discovering what he'd brought himself to believe was Yuko Miyataka's history, as well as of unwriting, then rewriting history, his history and, he was convinced, while it never would be acknowledged in his lifetime, the true history of the final phase of the war against Japan. In the document he possessed, compiled and distributed by the Department of the Navy, as well as what he himself had seen and done, these interwoven histories had their sanction. What had provided the impetus for his sorrow and fueled the rage that had driven his search and anguished rewriting was that, even while the pain and slaughter and destruction on a massive scale were being perpetrated again, a history that was a fraud was being written and believed. He wouldn't be here to rewrite that.
"So sorry the gentleman is having the disagreeable digestion," said Yuko Miyataka, as they paused in the hallway outside the lounge.
"I suppose you will be leaving on the early bus to York. On your way to pay your respect to the Brontes. I am certain you must know that their father was also a rectum." He used the malapropism not for the fun of it, but to cement the unbreakable though unacknowledged bond that would join him to Yuko Miyataka for life.
"Oh yes. The revered Patrick Bronte. Bus will come at seven o'clock. Sharp." The last word demonstrated her growing proficiency in / 'usage du monde.
"You two must say your good-byes," Alma put in.
"Well, I thank you too much... Dan." The sweetest of smiles appeared on Yuko Miyataka's homely face. He was no longer "the gentleman."
Only half realizing what he was about, he took a step forward, threw his arms around her, and pressed her to him. Her head was on his chest, ear to his heart, as if she were listening to its beat. Yet he could feel her body stiffen.
As he freed her, she stepped back. Dismissing her resistance, he leaned toward her, bowing, and kissed her forehead. Even had her skin been parchment, his lips been coated with ink that was not subject to the fading of time, it wouldn't have been enough, would have been far far from enough.
Before any of the three could utter another word, he turned and went slouching toward the staircase. He hadn't let his eyes meet Yuko's.
THE NOVICE
As that Christmas season approached, I was still struggling to climb out of the black hole I’d been in since I’d been discharged from the Navy and had returned home. My parents had no idea why I didn’t go on to college and why I declined to pal around with my old friends. My mother, though, I was quite sure, wasn’t sorry I was unable to strike up a conver- sation with one of the two sisters whose family had moved into a house just beyond ours while I was in the Pacific, finishing off Japan. In their late teens or early twenties, both were appealingly pretty.
I knew I wanted to go to college, which, thanks to the G. I. Bill of Rights, I’d be able to do without taking money from my father. I knew I wanted to get together with the boys, now young men—all but two of us had survived the war— with whom I’d played baseball, football and basketball and gone on double dates. I knew I wanted to make a move on either of the two pretty sisters. In short, I knew I wanted to repair the broken line of my life and with it, pull myself out of the pit I was in.
But I couldn’t. Instead, I kept to my father’s house as though I were a Trappist in a monastery. I read, not books about the war I’d recently been a part of, which I couldn’t face, but exclusively fiction, especially Russian novels, the longer the better. In between I listened to old 78 RPM Baklelite records on the wind-up rosewood Victrola that still stood in our parlor. And to help consume more of the empty time in which I skulked, paralyzed, I read the daily and Sunday newspapers front to back. Fully aware I was regressing to the preadolescent boy I’d been before going into the Navy, I couldn’t help it.
I did know why I was unable to do what I wanted to, why Iwas incapacitated, why I was hiding out at home like someone on the lam, to shift the simile from the severely religious to the guilt-ridden criminal. You’ll come to understand too, if you go on reading this piece.
It wasn’t the urging of my parents that I make something of myself by going to college that finally ended my self-imprisonment. This I assented to without acting on. Nor was it telephone calls from old friends proposing that we get together. About this I expressed a feigned enthusiasm, without having any intention of reuniting. Nor was it the sidelong but not-to-be-doubted smiles from the prettier of the two sisters
I would occasionally pass when she returned, from work, I assumed, as I was walking to the nearby trolley line, out of boredom and for a bit of exercise. I’d wait for my father‘s arrival at the stop two blocks from the street our houses stood on. He’d be returning from the arsenal, where he was still working, even though the war was over. Complying with gas rationing and his own necessary thrift, my father never drove our old Studebaker to work. He’d be carrying the daily newspaper, rolled up and tucked in his armpit like a giant thermometer taking his temperature. None of these served to get me moving back into the larger world.
Rather it was a squib on the last page of the newspaper that caught my eye one evening. It announced that the U. S. Postal Service would be hiring returned veterans to serve as temporary deliverers during the holi- day season. With hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors and marines back home, celebrating victory, as well as Christmas, the amount of dom- estic mail would be record-breaking. My motivation for signing on was in no way festive. It was purely pecuniary. I forced myself to face the fact that the twenty dollars a week which, without my father’s knowing it, I was slipping to my mother, who quietly accepted it, would soon exhaust the fund I’d accumulated from what I’d saved of the scant pay I’d received for my service in the Navy. What I’d earn during three weeks of December, I calculated, would allow me to continue providing the small amount I thought of as covering my room and board for another six months. And all I’d have to do would be put mail in slots or boxes, I told myself.
On the afternoon of the thirtieth of November, I was hired to begin delivering mail from our local post office on Monday, December 1. Each veteran was assigned to a regular mailman. “Call me Mitch,” was the way my carrier introduced himself to me that morning as he squeezed the hand I offered in response to the extension
of his. He had a bone-crushing grip. What his given name was I never learned. Mitch, I as- sumed, was clipped from the surname Mitchell. The voice in which he communicated whatever instruction, advice, greeting, or good-bye he offered had the texture of the foghorn on the battleship I’d been aboard. But what he had to say was always punctuated with a hearty laugh. Even in the ear-and-nose-nipping wind and bone-chilling cold of gray December mornings, he exuded cheer.
Mitch had been around for quite a while. Even physically he was quite a contrast to my gentle and reserved father, whose long narrow face was shaped like and smooth as a crescent moon. Although my father’s thinning hair had turned silver during my absence, his eyebrows were still blond. Under a lumpy bald head, with a ragged fringe of gray hair, Mitch’s face was blubbery round, with purple cheeks. Also purple, his knob of a nose was covered with tiny holes that made it look as if it had been used as a target on a dart board. Beneath shaggy black eyebrows, behind lenses the thickness of those of the binoculars I’d used to spot planes for our gunners to shoot down, the pupils of his eyes looked like agate marbles. The irses were red-veined. Without appearing athletic, because of a potato-sack belly that lapped over the belt on his gray postal service trousers, Mitch looked to be strong as a Clydesdale.
On a street map tacked to the wall behind the swivel chair at the kneehole of his battered desk, Mitch’s route was marked in faded purple ink. “Nothin to it, kid,” he assured me after tracing the part of the route he was assigning to me. The stubby forefinger of his right hand was so short and plump it looked as if a joint had been chopped off and the end sewn up. “Yuh jus stash the packets the boys here ready in order inside the pouches of yur bag. The house numbers’ll be scrawled on a slip of paper under the rubber band. If thur’s anything people hand yuh to be mailed or thur’s anything in thur box to mail, see that yuh stick it in outgoin when yuh get back here. Some a the dames might hear yuh comin and show up in thur nightgown, so don’t act surprised or take it as somethin that’s special juss fur you.” As he growled a laugh, he jabbed me in the ribs with his elbow.
Winking his right eye at me, he clapped me on the back, so hard I staggered forward, weighed down by the leather bag I’d hoisted onto my left shoulder. Not once in the weeks I was assisting Mitch was he any- thing but jolly and helpful to the “kid.” After the Navy, in which I, as a petty officer, was taking curt commands from chiefs, ensigns, lieutenants, and occasionally commanders, once even an admiral, and was having to give orders to seamen old enough to be my father, who understandably expressed their resentment by ornamenting their responses to me with such epithets as “son of a bitch,” “bastard,” and a certain male body part, I found Mitch to be a genial guardian angel. So warm was he under his rough exterior that daily contact with him kept me from minding the freezing weather outside and the load of the leather bag I had to lug.
Our branch post office was situated in a section of the city that had once been the home of the relatively well-off white-collar middle class. Now the rows of brick houses were occupied by working class people. I had been born in one of these houses, as had my father. Our family for- tunes had declined since my grandfather’s time. My father had been “contributing to the war effort,” while earning a barely sufficient wage to keep my mother and himself modestly comfortable, by working on the other side of the city in an arsenal, where shell casings were being manu- factured. As I’d seen our guns spewing out twenty and forty millimeter shells at Japanese fighters, torpedo planes, bombers, and kamikazes, and from five-inch guns at military installations, ships, and fishing craft, and from our sixteen-inch batteries at cities the Japanese could no longer protect, I often wondered whether the casings holding the deadly powder had passed under my father’s certifying eye. “You and your father are in this war together,” my mother once proudly wrote to me when, unknown to her, we were in the throes of the battle for Iwo Jima.
Just as Mitch and I were to go our separate ways on that first morn- ing I was on the job, he thumped me on the back and growled, “If thur’s anybody there waitin for thur mail, give em a big smile and sing out ‘good mornin,’” for which two words he changed his range and tone to a surprisingly sweet tenor. He accented the ‘good’ hard. “Make ‘um feel yur not bringin um bills to pay or bad reports from thur doctor, but Christmas cards from old friends or a piece a good news thur not ex- pectin. And somethin else I should uv told yuh, kid. When yuh come to St. Maggie’s, don’t stuff the mail in the big box they got out on the stoop. Ring the bell and one of the novices’ll come to the door and take the bundle from yuh. The holy sisters like to get a little touch of the outside world, I guess, even if it’s juss us bringin um a Christmas card from thur dentist.”
“ St. Maggie’s?” “novice?” “holy sister?” “touch of the outside world?” Although I knew the meanings of these words, I hadn’t the least idea they could possibly have to do with my delivering mail.
As I started on my assigned round, wearing my pea jacket and watch cap, parting gifts from the Navy, and a pair of ugly yellow gloves, with elastic cuffs that covered my wrists, pressed on me by my mother, I was dressed against the cold of the sunless morning. For the first time since I’d got home I felt glad to be outside the house, doing something, even if it was just delivering mail. Mitch’s good will, I realized, had injected me with a shot of confidence that was beginning to heal the psychic wound that had been open and festering. He made me believe there was some good will in the world after all.
In the middle of the second block of my route, I pulled out an extra thick packet of envelopes along with a few small packages of the size that were carried on foot. Large packages were delivered by truck. The address on the slip of paper under the rubber band was “St. Margaret’s,” without a street and number.
Sure enough, in the transom above the marble lintel of the arched doors at the top of the brownstone steps of the house at which I stood looking up were Gothic gilt letters on ebony, which read “St. Margaret’s Convent.” On the stoop in front of the right-hand door was the large metal mailbox, which was not to be used.
As Mitch had instructed me, I pushed the button of the door-bell. Within seconds the door on the left-hand side opened inward. I found myself looking into a pair of deep-set eyes, green gems embedded in creamy white ovals beneath crescent-shaped black brows. Before I could smile or get out a “good morning,” I heard a liltingly sweet voice sing a little tune.
The postman, the postman,
We always welcome the postman,
The postman, the postman,
The postman is bringing us mail.
The melody sounded familiar, but on the instant I couldn’t identify it, coming as it did so suddenly from such an unexpected source. Just inside the closed back door of the vestibule stood a bucket of water and a scrub brush with its gray-yellow bristles up. Ah ha, I said to myself, a novice performing a menial duty.
The face in which those eyes were set was oval. Her skin, the color of a ripe peach, tawny, with a flush of pink on the cheeks, looked to be stretched so vulnerably tight a pinprick might cause a hemorrhage. Full-fleshed, her lips were the color of not quite ripe cherries. Her nose would have been a perfect little triangle except that it was saucily turned up at the very end. What was she, I asked myself, doing in a convent? I was stunned by her beauty.
We stared at each other for countable seconds, she with her head slightly cocked, before I was able to reply, “Good morning,” as Mitch had advised me. What came out was a husky whisper, with the accent falling on the “morn,” rather than on the ‘good’ I’d heard in Mitch’s advice. To my ear it sounded as if I were recommending that she give herself up to mourning rather than celebrate what was good.
“Come in, mister postman, and warm yourself for a spell. The morning air carries such a chill.” Her speaking voice had a resonance suggesting that simple statement was a poem set to music. My ear imagined the sweetness of her sayi
ng a prayer or chanting the litany. Reaching behind me, I pulled the heavy door closed as quietly as I could. There we were, alone in the vestibule, a space scarcely larger than a tele- phone booth. When she smiled, I spotted a dimple in her chin.
Extraordinary as was the beauty of her features, I sensed a quality beyond that. Perhaps it was the harmony of the fleshly shapes and di- mensions. Yet, absolute materialist that I am now and was by the time I’d come back from the war, I recall that at that moment I believed that she had a soul and that somehow it glowed.
Spiritual as she might be, at the same time she radiated a vib- rancy, an overflow of life, despite the drab brown apron over the gray garment that reached to her ankles, allowing me barely to make out the worsted black stockings between the hem of her dress and the high tops of the battered brogans she was wearing. Exposed by rolled-up sleeves were slender forearms and wrists, dripping wet, as were her hands. Struggle against it as I might, at that instant I couldn’t help wondering about the breasts, the waist, the thighs beneath the concealment of her flowing clothing. As a kid I’d heard that nuns shaved their heads bald. Still I imagined that, were I to snatch off the slate-gray hood the novice was wearing, locks of shining black hair would come cascading down over her shoulders.
Jolted as by the firing of a 16” gun, suddenly I felt that, despite those somber-colored work clothes, which covered her from chin to toes, and declared her renunciation of the flesh, I was enclosed with the most feminine, yes, the most sexual woman I had ever been in the presence of, or had ever seen. Yet even while my sexual inclinations were asserting themselves, her self-evident purity deflated them, in fact, made me wish I could undo the dissatisfactions of the always brief, quite passionless en- counters I had experienced during my years in the Navy. In these, my partners had been a scattering of romantic girls, a few patriotic and lonely women and a couple of prostitutes. These had first occurred before I’d been shipped to the seas and skies and lands of slaughter and then, killing accomplished, had been resumed after my return to the States, in the interval before receiving the honorable discharge I’d been presented with as a reward, and my return home, innocence lost. Yet even while this novice provoked a powerful arousal in me, I could no more have touched her flesh than I could have my mother’s.