The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea

It was just after five when Ryuji came off the ship. The silver chains which would raise the gangplank had already been attached. A gang of longshoremen wearing yellow helmets had filed down the gangplank, piled into a Longshoremen’s Union bus, and left the pier. The eight-ton Port Authority derrick had gone, the hatches had been bolted down. Then, finally, Ryuji appeared.

  Noboru and Fusako chased long shadows toward the sailor. Ryuji squashed Noboru’s straw hat with the palm of his hand and laughed as the boy struggled to pull the brim up over his eyes. The work had exhilarated him.

  “We’ll be leaving any minute now. I’ll be aft when we cast off.” Ryuji gestured toward the distant stern.

  “I decided to wear a kimono. You won’t be seeing any for quite a while now—”

  “I guess not—except maybe on old nisei ladies traveling with American tours.”

  They found surprisingly little to say. Fusako considered mentioning how lonely she was going to be and decided not to. The parting, like the white fruit of an apple discoloring instantly around the bite, had begun three days before when they had met aboard the Rakuyo. Saying goodbye now entailed not a single new emotion.

  Noboru, as he affected childishness, was standing guard over the perfection of the adults, the moment. His was the sentinel’s role. The less time they had, the better. The shorter this meeting was, the less perfection would be marred. For the moment, as a man leaving a woman behind to voyage around the world, as a sailor, and as a Second Mate, Ryuji was perfect. So was his mother. As a woman to be left behind, as a beautiful sailcloth full-blown with happy memories and the grief of parting, she was perfect too. Both had blundered dangerously during the past two days but at the moment their behavior was beyond reproach. If only Ryuji didn’t say something ridiculous and spoil it all before he was safely under way. Peering from beneath the broad brim of his straw hat, Noboru anxiously studied first one face and then the other.

  Ryuji wanted to kiss Fusako but he was intimidated by Noboru. Besides, like a man who knows he is dying, he felt a need to be equally tender to all. At the moment, the memories and feelings of others seemed far more important than his own; yet somewhere beneath the sweet agony of self-denial was a desire to get away as quickly as possible.

  Fusako still couldn’t permit herself to imagine the anxious, exhausting wait to come. She devoured the man with her eyes, testing the sufficiency of that bond. But how self-contained he looked, like a refractory object not even attempting to extend itself beyond its contours. She wished he could be something less defined, like mist. This horrid hulk was too much like rock to fade from memory: the heavy brows, for example, or the too solid shoulders. . . .

  “Don’t forget to write—and use all different kinds of stamps,” Norboru said, perfectly in command of his role.

  “You bet. I’ll send something from every port. And you write too. A sailor looks forward to letters more than anything.”

  He explained that he had to go aboard to help with the final preparations. They all shook hands. Ryuji climbed the silvery gangplank, turned at the top, and waved his cap.

  The sun was just above the warehouse roofs, setting fire to the western sky and searing shadow images of king posts and mushroom ventilators into the dazzling white steel of the bridge. Noboru watched the sea gulls wheeling overhead; their wings were dark, their bellies, when they breasted the light, turned yellow as yokes.

  Trucks and cranes and dollies had withdrawn from the Rakuyo and the dock was empty and still, awash in light. A deckhand dwarfed by distance was still scrubbing a high railing on the Rakuyo’s deck and another, a patch over one eye and a paint can in his hand, painting what might have been a window frame. Noboru hadn’t noticed the blue and white and red signal flags being hoisted up the mast; at the top of the spire, the blue peter fluttered. They walked slowly toward the stern.

  All the louvered, dark-green warehouse doors were lowered; large “No Smoking” signs and the names of major ports scrawled in chalk—Singapore, Hong Kong, Lagos—covered the dismal reach of wall. Tires and trash cans and the dollies parked in neat rows cast their long shadows across the concrete pier.

  The stern high above them was still deserted. There was a quiet sound of water draining, a Japanese flag flapped in the shadow of the anchor davit.

  The first stridulous blast of the horn came at fifteen minutes to six. Noboru, listening, knew that the phantom he had watched two nights before was real, understood that he was present at the spot where all dreams began and ended. Then he saw Ryuji; he was standing next to the Japanese flag.

  “He might hear you if you yell loud enough,” Fusako urged. The shout left his throat just as the horn subsided: he was horrified by the shrillness of his voice. Ryuji peered down at them and waved; he was too far away to see the expression on his face. Then he turned back to his work with the same twist of his shoulders that had faced him toward the moonlit horn, and didn’t look their way again.

  Fusako glanced toward the prow. The gangplank had been raised; the last link between ship and shore was broken. The Rakuyo’s green-and-cream-colored side looked like the blade of a colossal ax fallen out of the heavens to cleave the shore asunder.

  Smoke began to pour from the smokestacks. Utterly black, it billowed into the sky in huge clouds which rose to smudge the pale zenith.

  “Stand by, fore-station—make ready to weigh anchor.”

  “Take up on that slack!” There was another short blast on the horn.

  “That’s good, fore-station.”

  “Right.”

  “Weigh anchor—head line away—shore lines away!”

  The Rakuyo inched away from the pier as the tugboat toiled into the harbor with the stern in tow. The breadth of water sparkling between the ship and the sea wall fanned open, and even as their eyes were pursuing the receding glitter of the gold braid on Ryuji’s cap, the ship had pivoted a full ninety degrees and was perpendicular to the pier.

  The Rakuyo was transformed into an illusory phantom as angles altered from one instant to the next. Gradually, as the stern was towed farther out into the harbor, the long ship folded like a paneled screen while the superstructure on deck overlapped, piled into impacted tiers, and, trapping sunlight in every pocket and dent, soared skyward like a shining pagoda of steel. But the effect was only momentary. Now the tug began to circle back in order to face the prow toward open sea, and the storied tower thrusting up from the deck was dismantled; each object in order from prow to stern resumed its proper shape until finally the stern itself reappeared and a matchstick figure just recognizable as Ryuji swung back into the splendor of the setting sun.

  “Two lines away—” The voice on the loudspeaker was still clear when it reached them on the wind. The tug pulled away.

  Poising motionless on the water, the ship sounded three blasts on her horn. Uneasy silence followed, an interval of quiescence during which it seemed that Ryuji aboard ship and Fusako and Noboru on the pier were trapped in the same viscous moment of time.

  Finally, rocking the whole harbor and carrying to every city window; besetting kitchens with dinner on the stove, and shoddy hotel bedrooms where sheets are never changed, and desks waiting for children to come home, and schools and tennis courts and graveyards; plunging everything into a moment of grief and ruthlessly tearing even the hearts of the uninvolved, the Rakuyo’s horn screamed one last enormous farewell. Trailing white smoke, she sailed straight out to sea. Ryuji was lost from sight.

  PART TWO

  WINTER

  CHAPTER ONE

  AT nine o’clock in the morning on December 30, Ryuji emerged from the customs shed at Center Pier. Fusako was there to meet him.

  Center Pier was a curious abstraction of a neighborhood. The streets were unpeopled and too clean; the plane trees lining them were withered. Down a siding which ran between archaic red-brick warehouses and a pseudo-Renaissance shipping office chugged an ancient steam engine huffing clouds of black smoke. Even the little railroad crossing seemed unauthent
ic, as though it belonged with a set of toy trains. The sea was responsible for the unreality of the place, for it was to her service alone that the streets, the buildings, even the dumb bricks in the wall were pledged. The sea had simplified and abstracted, and the pier in turn had lost its sense of reality and appeared to be dwelling within a dream.

  Besides, it was raining. Rich cinnabar gushed out of the old brick walls and washed into puddles on the street. The masts spiring above the roofs were dripping wet.

  Not wanting to attract attention, Fusako waited in the back seat of the car. Through the rain-streaked window she watched the crew emerge one by one from the weather-beaten wooden shed. Ryuji paused for a minute in the doorway to turn up the collar of his pea coat and pull his cap low over his eyes. Then he hunched into the rain, carrying an old zippered bag. Fusako sent her chauffeur running out to call him.

  He came hurtling into the car like a piece of bulky, rain-soaked baggage. “I knew you’d come—I knew it,” he gasped, seizing the shoulders of Fusako’s mink coat.

  His cheeks were streaked with rain—or were those tears?—and he was more sunburned than before. Fusako had paled: her white face was like a window opened in the dim interior of the car. They kissed, and they were crying. Ryuji slipped his hands under Fusako’s coat and clutched wildly at her body as though searching for life in a corpse he had saved from drowning, locked his arms around her supple waist and replenished his heart and mind with the details of her. It was only a six- or seven-minute ride to the house. Finally, as the car was crossing Yamashita Bridge, they were able to begin a normal conversation.

  “Thanks for all the letters. I read every one a hundred times.”

  “I did yours too. You can stay with us at least through New Year’s, can’t you?”

  “Thanks. . . . How’s Noboru been?”

  “He wanted to come and meet you at the pier but he caught a little cold and had to go to bed. Oh, it’s nothing serious—hardly any fever—”

  The conversation was ordinary, remarks any landsmen might exchange, and it came easily. They had imagined during the months apart that their conversation would be difficult when they met again; restoring the bond between them to what it had been after three summer days had seemed impossible. Why should things proceed as smoothly as an arm slips into the sleeve of a coat unworn for half a year?

  But the tears of joy had washed anxiety away and lifted them to a height where nothing was impossible. Ryuji was as if paralyzed: the sight of familiar places, places they had visited together, failed to move him. That Yamashita Park and Marine Tower should now appear just as he had often pictured them seemed only obvious, inevitable. And the smoking drizzle of rain, by softening the too distinct scenery and making of it something closer to the images in memory, only heightened the reality of it all. Ryuji expected for some time after he disembarked to feel the world tottering precariously beneath his feet, and yet today more than ever before, like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, he felt snugly in place in an anchored, amiable world.

  They turned right off the bridge, drove for a short time along the canal, buried under gray tarpaulined barges, and began climbing the hill past the French Consulate. High in the sky, disheveled clouds brightened and churned apart; the rain was letting up. They were at the top of the hill now, passing the entrance to the park. The car turned left into a lane and stopped in front of the Kuroda house. From the gate to the front door was only a few steps, but the tile walk was soaking wet. The old chauffeur held an umbrella over Fusako as he escorted her to the door and then rang the bell.

  When the housekeeper appeared, Fusako told her to turn on the light in the vestibule. Ryuji stepped over the low sill and entered the dimness.

  In the instant needed to cross the threshold, a subtle doubt assailed him. Presumably, the glittering ring they had re-entered together was just as they had left it. The difference was ineffably slight, but something, somewhere, had changed. Fusako had been careful never to allude to the future, neither when they had said goodbye at the end of the summer nor in any of her many letters, yet their embrace a few minutes before had made clear that it was here to this house, together, that both were longing to return. But Ryuji’s eagerness wouldn’t permit him to pause and consider the discrepancy further. He didn’t even notice that he was entering an altogether different house.

  “It’s been just pouring,” Fusako was saying. “It seems to be letting up a little now, though.” Then the light in the vestibule clicked on and the imported marble floor floated into view.

  A fire was blazing in the living-room fireplace, and installed on the mantel in readiness for New Year’s Day was a small wooden stand laden with oblatory rice-cakes and garlanded in the traditional manner with whitebeam and kelp and bunches of sea grapes. The housekeeper brought them some tea and managed a creditable greeting: “It’s very nice to see you back again. Noboru and Mrs. Kuroda have been excited all week.”

  The only changes in the living room were some new samples of Fusako’s embroidery and a small tennis trophy on display in one corner. She guided Ryuji around the room, explaining each addition as she came to it. The moment he had sailed, her zeal for tennis and embroidery had increased. She had been playing at the club near the Myokoji Temple every weekend, sometimes even stealing away from the shop on weekday afternoons; the evenings she had spent alone in her room, embroidering on silk. Many of her recent patterns had something to do with ships. The new cushions, completed during the autumn, were decorated with old-fashioned wheels and small stylized fleets of Portuguese schooners. The trophy was for women’s doubles; she had won it in the club’s end-of-the-year tournament. For Ryuji, all this was proof of her chastity during his absence.

  “But nothing really wonderful happened,” Fusako said. “Not while you were away. . .”

  She confessed how peeved she had been to discover herself waiting for him despite her determination not to. She had thrown herself into her work confident that he was forgotten, and when the last customer for the day had left and the shop was hushed, she would hear the fountain bubbling in the patio. And listening, be struck with terror. Then she knew that she was waiting. . . .

  This time, Fusako was able to express herself with fluency and candor. The bold letters she had been writing week after week had granted her an unexpected new freedom. And Ryuji was more talkative than before, more animated. The change began one day in Honolulu when he received Fusako’s first letter. He became noticeably more friendly, even began to enjoy the gab sessions in the mess room. It wasn’t long after that before the Rakuyo’s officers knew all the details of his love.

  “Do you feel like going up and saying hello to Noboru? He was so excited about seeing you, I’ll bet he didn’t get a decent night’s sleep either.”

  Ryuji rose from his chair. It was clear now, beyond a doubt: he was the man they had been waiting for, the man they loved.

  Taking a present for Noboru out of his suitcase, Ryuji followed Fusako up the same dark stairs he had climbed on trembling tiptoe that summer night. This time, his steps were the resolute tread of a man who has been included.

  In bed upstairs, Noboru listened to the ascending footsteps. He was tense from waiting, his body under the covers stiff as a board, and yet, somehow, these weren’t quite the footsteps he had expected.

  There was a knock on his door and it swung open. Noboru saw a reddish-brown baby crocodile.

  The beast hovered in the doorway, floating in the watery light which was pouring into the room from the sky outside, clear now and bright, and for an instant the glittering glass-bead eyes, and the gaping mouth, and the stiffened legs paddling the air, seemed to come alive. A question struggled through the muddle of his slightly feverish mind: has anyone ever used something alive for a coat of arms? Once Ryuji had told him about the Coral Sea: the water inside an atoll was as still as the surface of a pond, but in the offing, huge waves thundered to pieces against the outer reef and the crashing crests of white foam looked like hugely dist
ant phantoms. His headache, which, compared with yesterday’s, had receded into the distance, was like a white crest billowing beyond the atoll. And the crocodile was the headache’s coat of arms, the symbol of his own distant authority. It was true that sickness had touched the boy’s face with majesty.

  “Like him? He’s for you.” Ryuji had been standing just outside the door, holding the crocodile at arm’s length. Now he stepped into the room. He was wearing a gray turtleneck sweater; his face was deeply tanned.

  Noboru had prepared for Ryuji’s entrance by resolving not to smile with pleasure. Using illness as a pretext, he succeeded in maintaining a glum face.

  “That’s strange! He was so happy and excited just a little while ago. Do you feel feverish again, dear?” An unwarranted little speech! Never before had his mother seemed such a petty person.

  “A story goes with this,” Ryuji went on, unmindful of the tension in the room. He placed the beast next to Noboru’s pillow. “This crocodile was stuffed by the Indians in Brazil. Those tribesmen are authentic Indians. And when carnival time comes around, the warriors put crocodiles like this one or sometimes stuffed water fowl on their heads, in front of the feathers they wear in their hair. And they strap three little round mirrors to their foreheads. When those mirrors catch the light from the bonfires, they look just like . . . three-eyed devils. They string leopard teeth around their throats, and wrap themselves in leopard skins. And they all have quivers on their backs, and beautiful bows, and different-colored arrows. Anyway, that’s the story on this crocodile. It’s part of the ceremonial dress the Brazilian Indians wear at carnival time.”

  “Thanks,” Noboru said. He ran his hand over the glossy bumps on the crocodile’s back and stroked the shriveled limbs. Then he inspected the dust which had accumulated beneath the red glass-bead eyes while the beast had crouched on a shelf in some Brazilian country store, and thought about what Ryuji had said. The room was too hot; the sheets were feverish, wrinkled, damp. The bits of skin on the pillow had flaked off Noboru’s dried lips. He had been picking at them furtively a few minutes before. Just as he began to worry that his lips might look too red, he glanced involuntarily toward the drawer that concealed the peephole. Now he had done it! He was in agony. What if the adults traced his gaze and leveled suspicious eyes on the wall? But no, it was all right. They were even more insensible than he had suspected: they were cradled in the numbing arms of love.