NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (13 page)

THE LETTERS

T
he first week out of Brisbane was a throbbing nightmare. The tanker rode easily enough in the long slow swells of the South Pacific, but Philip Stolz, the radio operator, was slow in recovering from a prolonged bout of alcohol and sex in which he had indulged at Lennons Hotel.

The ship had sailed somewhat early. They were already casting off, the first mate hanging over the bow and the old man standing on the bridge cursing at him, when Philip arrived at the pier in a taxi. His armpits were not yet dry, his uniform was wrinkled, stained, and ill-smelling, his hair was matted under the no longer clean summer white hat, and his parched lips, on which he could feel some flakes of the girl’s cosmetics, still tasted of her sleep-and brandy-swollen kisses. But as soon as he had stripped off his soiled blue jacket and rolled up the grimy cuffs of his white shirt he had to mount to the bridge, sore, damp, and sleepy, and see that the antennas were properly rigged, with the sun beating down mercilessly on his strained eyeballs; and then, covered with grease and his head ringing like a gong, he had to go into the radio shack and test the equipment. When he finally finished he tore off his clothes, fell on his bunk, and slept through dinner and the slow journey out of Brisbane harbor, awaking only in the middle of the night, the ship already at sea, and time for him to go on watch.

It was like that for the first week. The physical effects of the thirty-six hours he had spent locked in the hotel room with the tart wore off after a few cold showers and a few glasses of orange juice, except for a trembling at the knees when he made the long walk aft along the catwalk to the saloon at mealtime, and a
dead sensation in the pit of his stomach when he raised his head from his plate and looked at the greasy mouths of the intent diners in the saloon. But the other effects of Philip’s private little orgy were far more persistent. Over and over he reviewed the details of the wild hours he had passed with the abandoned girl: at the most inopportune moments—when he was busy trying to raise Honolulu by short wave, when he stood under a cold shower with the tropical sun beating in through the open porthole, when he lay on his bunk slimed with sweat trying to read a paper-bound book of short stories—he smelled the girl’s fevered flesh, or recalled her breasts swinging frantically above his face as she crouched over his recumbent frame, or felt the bedsheets grating under his fingertips, or saw the brandy bottles rolling about, tangled in her torn stockings, on the speckled carpet.

Probably his most painful memory was the shameful recollection of the way he had whipped up his flagging appetites with the aid of the brandy and the violent and cunning connivance of the fantastically insatiable girl. He had regarded the episode at first as a duty he owed to his body, and then, while the febrile hours slid by in the half-darkened room, as something that had to run its predestined course, like a long and useless life. How his wife (when he wanted to be funny, he occasionally referred to her as “my current wife”) would have wrinkled her nose in disgust! It was not the idea that he had been unfaithful to her that galled Phil—he had been going to sea too long for that—but the certainty of the scorn with which she would greet his depraved conduct, seated at her metal desk in the insurance company offices in Hartford. Phil recognized the fact that he was no longer very fond of his wife, and that his prolonged absences had made her less interesting to him, but he was as vulnerable as ever to her intimations of superiority, made on the basis of her regular attendance at concerts, her regular reading of advanced periodicals, and her association with what she liked to call “thoughtful” people. It was difficult to justify his mode of existence when his wife asserted that he enjoyed living with seamen because they were his intellectual inferiors, or that he continued to go to sea because it gave him an excuse to keep from “really doing anything.” And now this …

The sun and the sea did their marvelous recuperative work. Sitting on the boat deck with his desk chair tilted against a bulkhead, full in the sun, Phil gazed through his dark glasses at the dully shining endless water stretching monotonously through space to the horizon. After a few days, he could step from the dark sweaty loneliness of the radio shack directly into the tropical sun, feeling with a hard delight the burning heat of the deck plates on his thin sneakers; easing himself slowly into the chair, his bare flesh crying out against the white sun, he could really open
Tour to the Hebrides
and give himself over to it and to the sun, without having to stare fixedly, like an angry victim of tuberculosis, at the impersonal spectacle of nature surrounding him on all sides. And eventually, he could even begin to look about the ship itself and note the little changes that had taken place around him.

There were, for example, several men aboard the tanker who had not been there on the trip out from Panama. Two of these passengers who had boarded the ship in Brisbane ate in the saloon, although Phil did not see them there very often, since he usually got there almost at the end of the serving period, ate quickly, and left without stopping for a cigarette. One of them, who was obviously not a seafaring man, was a genuine puzzle: what was this fat middle-aged man, self-consciously dressed in creased khakis, doing on a slow-moving tanker that rarely carried passengers? But when he finally accosted Phil one morning by the Number Two lifeboat, he turned out to be such an uninteresting fat man that Phil could not even bring himself to find out what he was doing aboard ship.

“You’re the radio operator, aren’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“How do you keep from going nuts? Always the same, day in and day out, week in and week out. You can’t even see a movie. No variety, not a bit of variety.”

“I like it.” It was of course impossible to explain to the passenger that he had named precisely the things about sailing on the flat Pacific that Phil liked best. He picked up his book and began to read rudely, dismissing the man with the lowering of his eyelids.

The other passenger was something else. The first time that
Phil really saw him he was jumping up and down on the catwalk. Phil felt the vibrations, perhaps; at any rate, he looked up, blinking away from Boswell, and saw a tall, excessively thin young man, wearing only (like himself) shorts and sneakers, skipping rope along the catwalk, his thin hairy arms flashing through the sunny air as he vaulted up and down, moving erratically astern along the steel walk like some great eccentric spider. Despite these unusual actions he looked as though he was somehow at home on a ship; but Phil took an immediate dislike to him. This leaping about with a piece of clothesline seemed an overly familiar action for one who was aboard on sufferance, so to speak, and was not integrally concerned with the movement of the vessel on which he jumped. The passenger’s skin was extraordinarily white, gleaming flatly like the belly of a leaping fish suddenly exposed to the sun; if he was a seafaring man, it was strange that here in the South Seas there should be no trace of sun on his long thin body.

If there was anything mystical about this swift dislike, it was strengthened early that evening when Henson, the third mate, and the only man aboard ship whose company Phil enjoyed, said to him, “Come into my stable, Phil. Eight days out and you haven’t even shown your face yet.”

“All right,” Phil said. “In a few minutes.”

There were three men in Henson’s cabin when Phil walked in: Henson himself, Caputo, the steward, and the tall passenger who had been skipping rope along the catwalk during the afternoon. Although the door was open wide and the porthole glass was hooked back against the overhead, there was little air in the room. All three men were smoking, and each one held a bottle of Panamanian beer; and since Henson slouched in his armchair, Caputo lay across the bunk, and the stranger sat on the settee, the room appeared unpleasantly crowded. Phil began to regret the sociable impulse that had drawn him down here, especially when he observed that all of the men were dressed only in shorts and slippers. Their skin was slick with a fine film of tropic sweat, and the cabin seemed to be filled with their heavy naked legs.

Henson handed Phil a bottle of beer and said, “I don’t think you’ve met Bradley Holliday, Phil. Holliday, this is our radio man, Phil Stolz.”

They shook hands.

“Holliday’s an engineer.” Henson’s round old face smiled blandly, his eyes roving, joke-making, behind old-fashioned steel-rimmed glasses. “But we let him up forward because he’s got some new records. We’re a very democratic ship.”

Phil seated himself next to Holliday, who smiled pleasantly at him and offered a cigarette. “Smoke, Sparks?”

“Thanks.”

Holliday was losing his hair. His face was long, smiling, and polite; the balding skull gave his head just the needed touch of elegance, like a boutonniere. For without the gently receding hairline that made him look properly twenty-eight or thirty, there would have been something vulgar, something falsely genteel and cultivated, in his young American college man’s expression. He gets away with it, Phil thought, looking down at the Rachmaninoff album that Holliday held across his bony knees.

He in his turn glanced down at the bright yellow dust jacket of Phil’s book and murmured, “I see you’re a lover of fine books.”

“I like to read.” Philip hated the man, he was sure of it now, but he could not get up and leave, if only because Henson would be embarrassed.

“I don’t care much for travel books,” Holliday said. “I prefer poetry, like Carl Sandburg.” He smiled around the cabin. “I’m a West Coast sailor myself, but Sandburg made me
feel
just what Chicago is like.”

One poem, Phil said to himself, one poem in a stray anthology has made him an intellectual. The man’s very name was an affront; Bradley Holliday indeed… it sounded like the hero in one of the
American Boy
stories that Phil had read every month in an agony of excitement and envy when he was thirteen: Brad Holliday, madcap leader of Dormitory B, Brad Holliday, ace goalie of Percival Prep, Bradley Holliday, bronzed lifeguard at Bide-A-While Summer Camp …

Watching Holliday as he slipped the first record out of the album with long graceful fingers and placed it on the hand-winding victrola, Phil realized, in one of those sudden painful bursts of insight that bring one face to face with the condition of one’s life, that if the man’s name only betrayed a Jewish or a European
origin one would feel compelled by one’s sense of fairness not to condemn him without searching for the neurotic roots of his slippery and false manner; but a Bradley Holliday had to be held accountable for every overt expression of his essential vulgarity. Philip felt his spirit withdrawing from the room, leaving only his gross body seated next to Holliday, as the passenger tested the needle with his forefinger and said, “I hope you men enjoy this. I prefer Victor Herbert myself, but my girl is very fond of Rachmaninoff, so I bought her this album in Calcutta. After all, if you only have a limited number of records, this will be a change.” He finished his beer and chuckled, “It’s a long voyage home, as Eugene O’Neill once said.”

Phil sat quietly through the recording, which happened to be excellent; the beer was not cold but cool, the ship pulsated quietly beneath the scratching needle, and when a touch of a breeze slipped in through the open porthole he could smell Holliday’s pungent shaving lotion. At one point—Holliday was changing a record and saying something about the value of great music as a solace for lonely seamen—Henson’s round and wrinkled eyelid drooped slowly behind the steel-rimmed eyeglasses in an exaggerated wink. The gesture was almost enough to establish a community of dislike, and Phil relaxed a little on the settee.

The final notes of the Rachmaninoff concerto were still floating heedlessly out to sea on the tropical evening air as Henson heaved himself out of his chair and pulled on a pair of khaki trousers. “Almost eight,” he said. “I’m due on the bridge. But stay,” he gestured hospitably, “stay right where you are. I never lock my valuables.”

Philip arose. “I want to get a few hours’ sleep before I go on watch.”

Holliday glanced at him curiously. “Don’t you keep a day watch?”

“I prefer to split the hours. I enjoy the quiet at night, and the reception is usually better.”

“I wonder…” Holliday looked down uncertainly at the book that Phil held in his hand, apparently unable to formulate a transitional statement that would smoothly bridge the gap between his feelings and his expectations. “Do you think it would be all
right…” Once again he hesitated, and at that instant, that moment of honest uncertainty, his real charm, natural and unforced, shone through his false exterior. It seemed to Philip that whereas all too many people were cloying and overconfidential when their guard was down, men like Holliday could only be more likeable in their moments of revelatory weakness. He smiled encouragingly, and Holliday destroyed everything by saying, “I don’t often get the chance to talk with a man who enjoys good reading. You’re college graduate, aren’t you?”

How false he rang after his little moment of sincerity! Philip replied coldly, “I had two years at Tufts once.”

“Would it be all right if I came up to the shack some time, just to shoot the breeze for a while?”

“The old man doesn’t want visitors in the shack, especially during watchkeeping hours. The best time to stop in is during my night watch, when he’s asleep.” Why didn’t he lie? He could have insisted that no one ever entered the radio shack. Holliday’s very irresoluteness, his sudden uncertainty, had wrung from him this grudging invitation.

Holliday was once again in command of the situation. “That’s very white of you, Sparks. I’ll drop up real soon, and we’ll have a good long talk. I’m sure we’ll find that we have a lot in common.”

Thus dismissed, Phil retreated in some confusion, tripping over the mat in Henson’s doorway as he stepped out to the passageway.

Shortly after Philip went on watch that evening the third mate stepped into the shack on his way down from the wheelhouse. “I’m going to examine the night lunch,” he said. “Can I bring you a sandwich?”