NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (14 page)

Phil shook his head. “No. What’s the story on the passenger?”

Henson smiled slowly. “Holliday? You don’t like him, do you?”

“Not much. He’s a phony, Henson.”

“I wouldn’t put it that strongly. There’s some good in the worst—”

“He skips rope.”

Henson laughed. “Christ, Phil, if you’re looking for gossip … He’s been passing himself off on the black gang as a First
Assistant Engineer—he even hinted that he sailed Chief during the war. But I’ve seen his license, you know. The man’s only a Third Assistant.”

“That’s typical.” Phil looked up angrily. “Isn’t it typical, Henson?”

“You’re pretty hard on him. I think Holliday is a likeable fellow, with more on the ball than the average engineer. I’ve seen more of him than you have this past week, and I find him good company. If I had his trouble, I doubt if I’d be so even-tempered and cheerful.”

“What’s his trouble?”

“He’s got syphilis.”

“Are you sure?”

Henson waved his hand tiredly through the hot breathless air. As he reached up to remove his steel-rimmed glasses he blinked; without the glasses he looked old and worn. Philip felt ashamed, looking at him like this.

“You know that fat passenger?”

“Yes.”

“He’s a company doctor going home on leave. He’s been treating Holliday, trying to keep things under control until we dump him at Pearl, or Pedro. That’s why we couldn’t sign Holliday on as a workaway back in Brisbane. He isn’t fit to stand a watch, so the company decided to give him a break and a free ride home. After all, he’s been riding their tankers for a good many years. And Phil…”

“Yes?”

“If the company can afford to be charitable, why can’t you? Sometimes you tend to judge people as though they were on trial. I’m not complaining about that,” he added hastily, warding off Philip’s protestations with his outspread hand. “That’s your privilege. But can’t you take into account the troubles that people have had when you pass judgment on them? Suppose that Holliday talked this way about you—wouldn’t you want him to make an effort to understand you before he shot off his mouth?”

“I don’t—” Phil checked himself. Suddenly he saw Holliday as he had been that afternoon, his thin, sick body clothed only in khaki shorts, cavorting about on the catwalk, trying to
build
himself up
, trying to
soak up sunshine
. “What about his girl? The one he brought the Rack-man-inoff records for?”

“Are you being cruel?”

Phil flushed. “No. I’m curious.”

“And I’m a cynic.” Henson lifted his shoulder wearily. He moved slowly to the door. “For all I know, she gave him the chancre as a going-away present, before he left home …”

Phil sat until four o’clock in the morning in his iron and concrete room, listening to the throbbing heartbeat of the ship, choked and muffled as though it were slowly strangling in the warm Pacific, and listening occasionally to the plaintive chirping of other ships far away, which sounded as though they had settled only momentarily, like some strange and frightened birds, on the bosom of the southern sea. Conscientiously he noted what they had to say in his log, but their weak cries were no different on this white and star-filled night from what they had been or would be on any other such night. The peace and terror of the world, a thousand miles from the nearest thrust of rock, were such that it was almost an impiety to listen to other voices when one floated godlike and alone.

But
What do you do with all your time?
his wife had to ask him when they lay in bed. “Some men paint watercolors of the sea, Joseph Conrad even wrote great novels about it, but you don’t even seem to be able to keep up with your reading.”
Keep up
, indeed. How could one possibly explain that he floated alone, like this, in order that it should not be demanded of him that he keep up? If the noblest human achievements could not compete with the annihilating force of the marine sun and moon on one’s lowered eyelids, why should one even attempt to struggle against a surrender to the timeless bronze days and the white silent nights?

He no longer maintained the pretense of holding a book before him on the desk while he sat half-listening to the little voices of the distant ships. It was in these hours that he knew his own life and its ugliness as no artist could possibly reveal it to him, simply by extending his palm (which had participated in the countless brutalities he had committed in common with all the rest of humanity)
and feeling, along its coarse surface, the velvety breath of this pure and unpeopled night. Shortly before dawn he could rouse himself and type
Off Watch on 500 KC
, leaving the swivel chair and the radio which committed him to the reactionary necessity of facing in the direction from which he had come.

He customarily slept out on deck, on an army cot which he had borrowed from the sick bay. Tonight he lowered himself quietly to the cot, slipped off his sneakers, loosened his shorts, and stretched himself out at full length beneath the white and blue brilliance of the stars. There, on the slowly rocking sliver of cooling metal, his eyes bathed in an effulgence so brilliant that he had finally to blot it from his vision, Phil felt the very essence of his being stirring itself slowly, uncoiling and rising to the very heights for which it had striven unsuccessfully for thirty years …

The next day Holliday did not present himself on deck with his skipping rope, and Philip felt obscurely grateful, as though there had been some unspoken understanding between them in the final moments of their meeting in Henson’s cabin the night before, as though Holliday had agreed: if you won’t hate me any more, Sparks, I won’t exercise in public any more.

They did not, in fact, meet at all during the day, and Phil went about his marvelously monotonous routine: breakfast with the captain and his sullen Swedish jokes about things that had probably not happened aboard a windjammer in 1911; shaving before the unrevealing mirror, the disc of the sun once again driving heat before it like a searing knife through the portholes; inspection of the massive batteries oozing sulphuric acid; the specially cold water of the shower stall dripping continuously behind all the other noises on this deck; the colorless hot iron of the ship itself as he made his way aft once again to the saloon where the engineers and deck officers, their chins sweating, fattened themselves on hot food and loud lying memories of their nights in Noumea and Brisbane.

This same, same routine, hour following hour like the endless plash-plash of blue water slapping the plates of the ship, was as soothing to Phil as a compress laid across his dry burning eyes.
While he sat and baked, Boswell hanging laxly from his sweating hand, he could watch the first mate standing at the clothesline on deck below him, tying up his dripping white socks and shorts; he could watch the arc of the sky, curving like a concave plate-glass window to meet the pale shining body of the sea. The sun, suspended behind the arching sky as though it hung in a clear curved window, sparkled coolly as always on the wetly glistening sea; but against his bare wet brown flesh it felt as though it were being focused through a burning glass. He squirmed about in a slow agony of pleasure, observing his skin browning through the dark glasses while rancor oozed like sweat out of his pores. Yes, while he broiled in the equatorial blaze, shifting now and again to match the slow swing of the day, he grew certain that every mean deed—the rotten fornications, the small hatreds and puny envies, the inconsequential and fruitless marriages—all were being baked out of his interior being; if he were ever again to touch land, he would return to combat renewed and whole.

By evening the recuperative process had advanced so far that Phil could regard even Bradley Holliday with a kind of benevolent neutrality. He awoke from an evening’s slumber in time for a cold shower and a beef sandwich; it was midnight and time for him once again to go on watch.

And once again he sat facing Australia, facing the slate-gray radio panels with their eye-like dials that kept him, literally, in touch with the other little vessels sliding along the surface of the southern sea—an island, two islands, three islands away.
Wiper age 39, cramps lower rt. qdrt., pse adv med…
. The plaintive little calls of the distant ships, flutey and disembodied in the rich velvet-black air, served only to lull him further away from the reality of their thread-connected world.

It was with some surprise, therefore, that Phil looked up from the deep green of his desk, and saw Bradley Holliday standing in the doorway. He must have made some slight gesture in order to attract Phil’s attention, perhaps he merely coughed; in any event, he was carrying a tall bottle of Bols gin with two glasses, a leather case the size of a notebook, and a bulky folder wrapped in manila paper.

“I’m not intruding, am I?” Holliday looked serious, and even—aided
by his impressive paraphernalia—purposeful. “You suggested—”

“Come in. Take my sneakers off the chair and sit down.”

“Thanks.” Holliday did as he was told, then held the gin bottle critically up to the light. “You don’t have any scruples about drinking on watch, do you, Sparks?”

“This is a free and easy ship.”

“So I’ve noticed. I go up on the bridge every afternoon to chew the fat with the second mate, and the old man hasn’t kicked me down below yet. That’s remarkable in itself.”

“I suppose so.”

“You’ve got a good feeding ship too—the steward is an all right guy. As a matter of fact, I persuaded him to give me—” he unbuttoned his khaki shirt and drew forth a bottle of Australian lemon juice, “—a quart of this stuff from the freezer. Makes the gin more palatable, you know. Say when.”

Phil indicated the correct level with his forefinger as Holliday decanted the bottle, then placed it on the desk before the little set of radio manuals and Penguin books and leaned back gingerly in his chair as though he were still unsure of his welcome.

“But no matter how good…” He stopped, moistened his lips, and then said determinedly, “It really doesn’t matter whether you’re on a happy ship or not if you have a serious problem. There’s something about being at sea that cuts you off psychologically from the ordinary solutions. If you come up against something that you can’t find an answer for by yourself, then you’re stuck. You’re really stuck.”

Philip looked at him in surprise.

“It doesn’t make any difference what the size of the crew is either, whether it’s forty-five, or fifty, or a hundred and fifty. The point is that although they’re your shipmates, they’re still not the people you’d voluntarily choose for friends. It’s sheer luck if you find just one person you can talk to. That’s why I’ve come up here tonight.”

The earphones which Phil wore looped around his throat like a primitive necklace seemed to have grown suddenly both heavy and loud; would Holliday feel that it was rude of him to go on wearing them? He lowered their volume and suspended them
from one of the knobs of the short-wave receiver where they swung like a gift offering, squawking faintly. If Holliday wanted to, he could accept the gesture as an invitation to proceed.

“Frankly,” Holliday said warmly, “I felt that you were the kind of person I could talk to. Perhaps it sounds silly, but I believe that college men and people who like good books in general are usually more understanding than uncultured people. I studied engineering at U.C.L.A. for a while, until my dad’s money ran out, and I appreciate the difference between people who are
simpatico
, like yourself, from having really made an effort to appreciate the finer things, and people who simply don’t care.”

Philip was paralyzed into silence by the presumptuousness of this nonsense; it was a marvel how smoothly the passenger seemed to maneuver in this No Man’s Land between sincerity and insincerity. And yet… and yet… Philip was forced to admit to himself that an appeal to his superior sensibility was gratifying, flattering, no matter how or by whom it was uttered. Although he had raised his hand protestingly during Holliday’s brief oration, he dropped it as the statement was brought to a close and Holliday handed him a glass. “Here’s looking at you, Sparks.”

Phil gulped at the concoction, glancing uneasily over the rim of the glass at his drinking companion. Would he begin by being a little reticent, simply because his conception of the cultivated young man included a modicum of reserve as standard equipment? Phil set down his glass as Holliday unwrapped the manila bundle and straightened the leather case.

“I’ve been having a bit of trouble with my girl,” Holliday said, in a more casual tone. “You know how it is when you’re out on one of these Pacific runs. There’s so much time to think things over that you don’t take anything for granted. Are you married, Sparks?”

Phil nodded, but did not volunteer any information. It was one thing for this man to walk into the room with his personal troubles in his pocket, ready to be uncorked and poured like gin; but there was no reason for Phil himself to counter with Natalie, as though the calculated wifely hypocrisy which he suffered from her could somehow cancel out Holliday’s difficulties.

“Then you’ll see my problem that much more clearly.” He
unfolded the leather case and stood it on end, like an open hook, facing Phil. It contained a Kodachrome photograph of a girl who smiled directly out of the picture at him. “This is Phyllis. I thought I’d set the scene for you a little, so to speak, if I brought her picture along so you could see what she looks like. Attractive, isn’t she?”

The picture, embossed with the label of a prominent Hollywood photographer, was of a girl in her twenties, no longer flushed with youth, but still fresh and piquant. Her Norse cheekbones were thrown into relief by her smile, which was not the cajoled grimace of an ordinary portrait. There was a wistfulness in the slight arch of her back-flung neck and in the pouting curve of her full parted lips that was reminiscent of the wholehearted tenderness possessed by a few girls whom Phil had known. Only her hair was uninteresting; it was set in conventional curls as though she dared not make one gesture that would set her apart from all the other girls of her world, as though finally she had to cling, to capitulate in this little way to its demands.