The Devil Amongst the Lawyers (15 page)

The week after Henry set sail, the Philadelphia Navy Yard received three hundred seamen, transferred down from Boston. A week later twice that many sailors fell ill to a mysterious sickness with flu-like symptoms that killed young and healthy people in a matter of hours. From the naval base, the disease spread to the city hospitals, where doctors and nurses were the first civilians to succumb. Reports of an epidemic were coming in from other military installations, but it was three weeks before the disease spread to Philadelphia’s civilian population—a day or so after the big War Bond Rally, which drew thousands of citizens into the crowded streets, exposing them to the pestilence. After that, it was too late to stem the tide of infection, and life in the city became a nightmare.

Before his mother’s letters caught up with him in Yokohama, Henry had heard about this new and mysterious plague, which, after all, had begun months before in the Orient. Many had died, although the initial
symptoms did not sound particularly menacing: headache, fever, fatigue, sometimes a cough, sometimes aching muscles. The ague, people used to call it, and it had been around for a long time. You got it. You took to your bed for a week, feeling ghastly and subsisting on milk tea and broth, and then you got well.

But not this time. Not this strain of the malady. This one was new. From those first innocuously familiar symptoms, this influenza made a lethal progression through high fever, blinding headaches, increasing, strangling congestion, and finally a swift and painful death. Fluid accumulated in the lungs, and the patients drowned in their beds, gasping for breaths that would not come.

Henry heard these tales on shipboard from missionaries who were returning to their posts in Asia, but if he gave any thought at all to them, it was only to feel a grudging pity for the poor wretches who lived in overcrowded slums in tropical countries, doomed to contagion by their poor diets, their lack of sanitation, and the haphazard medical care accorded to the poor. It would not have occurred to him that an epidemic could strike closer to home, or that people who were neither poor nor weak could succumb.

Philadelphia was half the world away, and if the thought of danger had ever entered Henry’s mind, it would have centered on himself. Here he was, in a country with a volcano that could awaken at any time: a strange land, where he might be robbed or set upon, where he might be taken ill and be unable to communicate with the doctor. A typhoon might engulf the island; fire could break out in his lodgings. But his elderly parents, drifting through the summer with their roses in their great stone house in the City of Brotherly Love, were surely cushioned by wealth and respectability from any inconvenience, and immune from any disaster. When you’re young, you can go out into the world and have adventures, because you know that your home will always be there, dull and unchanging, and therefore a safety net if you should come to grief in your search for adventure.

There had been three more letters from his mother, and then nothing.
“Your father has died . . . But you must not come home . . .” She had been afraid for him. Even then, with her husband lying in his coffin in the green drawing room, with the city ground to a halt by contagion, and perhaps even when her head began to ache and the coughs punctuated her breaths, when she knew that she, too, would be dying soon—all her fears had been centered on Henry, half a world away. He must not come back on account of his father, nor out of concern for her. The authorities might still prosecute him for his anti-war cartoon. He might succumb to the influenza himself. The Jernigans would manage, as they always did, with dignity and without fuss. They had servants, attorneys, and the best doctors money could buy. There was nothing Henry could do beyond what these paid retainers could effect.

The final missive from Philadelphia arrived in late October, in a thick typewritten envelope with the return address of his father’s bank. With restrained professional regret, the family lawyer informed Henry of his mother’s death from influenza, and of her final wish that he not return on her account. The letter contained information about his parents’ estate, detailing the various investments and properties that comprised the family wealth. The executors would continue to oversee the business affairs in Henry’s absence. They would deposit regular sums into an account that he could draw from to support himself during his travels. Periodically, discreet inquiries would be made in U.S. judicial circles in order to determine if it was safe for Henry to return home. They would let him know.

The first pang of wanting to go home passed in a matter of weeks. His parents were dead and buried, beyond his help. But he discovered that as long as he was on the other side of the world, the finality of his loss could be postponed. From ten thousand miles away, he could tell himself that his parents were at home, as safe and dull as ever in their chintz and mahogany sanctuary, and that only he was out in harm’s way. He pretended that he could write or telegraph them, if only he had the time, and that if he should take a notion to return to Philadelphia, then all would be as it was before.

The allowance continued to come at regular intervals, and he found new excuses to prolong his sojourn in the Far East. He studied woodblock printing, and engaged a tutor to instruct him in Japanese. His accent never progressed beyond absurd, but he found that he could understand the language, if the speaker wanted him to. He collected folktales, and visited shrines, with vague thoughts of writing a book someday about his experiences in Japan.

One day in a Kyoto antique market he found a painted Kutani platter with a gold-leaf picture of a robed man astride a giant turtle. When he asked the significance of the design, earnest but incomprehensible explanations followed. Between the fulsome gestures of the merchant and the carefully phrased Japanese of his companions, Henry pieced together the tale of Urashima Taro, which he recognized as a parable of his own life.

“What is the matter with that turtle?” he had asked the dapper little man who was his guide at the marketplace. Henry pointed to the porcelain picture of the man and the pony-sized turtle with a long feathery tail trailing behind its back legs.

His guide smiled as he sifted through foreign words in his mind. “Magic turtle,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. “Very old. Stories say that when a turtle lives for centuries, he gets long tail as mark of honor.”

The stallholder pointed to the imperious man astride the painted turtle. “Urashima Taro!” he said with a little bow, as if that explained everything.

It took another few minutes and gestures worthy of pantomime to convey the essence of the tale past Henry’s rudimentary language skills in Japanese, but at last he grasped the pattern of the universal story of the man outside time. It echoed through many cultures—Ossian, Rip Van Winkle, Thomas the Rhymer—and when he saw the pattern, comprehension came easily.

Urashima Taro had been a simple village fisherman in ancient times. One day he rescued a sea turtle tormented by children on the beach, and the next day as he was fishing, the turtle appeared next to his boat and
offered to take him to a magic undersea kingdom as a token of thanks for his kindness. Urashima Taro found himself welcomed as a hero by the sea king, and at once he married the sea king’s beautiful daughter. After a few blissful days in the underwater kingdom, though, he began to feel uneasy about his abrupt disappearance from home. He wanted to go back to his village and tell his parents about his good fortune. Reluctantly, the princess allowed him to leave, but she gave him a box to take with him, telling him that he must not open it. When Urashima Taro reached the shore of his fishing village, he found everything greatly changed. He knew no one there, and there were many buildings that he did not recognize. Finally, upon hearing Urashima’s name, someone told him that there was a village legend of a fisherman with that name who had disappeared centuries before, and he realized that a day in the sea kingdom equaled a century among mortals. In his shock and sorrow, Urashima Taro opened the box that the sea princess had given him. It had contained his youth, but now that its essence was released, he aged centuries within seconds, and crumbled to dust.

As he finished the story, the guide smiled up at him. “But you must not worry, Henry-san. Time is the same in America as here. You can go home.”

Henry nodded in agreement, because his Japanese was not equal to explaining that the world of his youth had passed away just as surely as that of Urashima Taro, and he was equally marooned from his home.

Henry stayed in the somnolent exile of a lotus-eater for five years, until September 1923, when circumstances in Japan became more terrible than anything he would have faced in Philadelphia.

ROSE SET HER WRISTWATCH
down on the nightstand. It was too late now to call Danny. She had retired to her room, to rinse out her underwear with the water jug and basin, and to slather her face with night cream. Now, bundled into her brown flannel wrapper and
wooly bed socks, she was nearly ready to turn in, blissfully alone in her shabby night attire. They kept her warm and comfortable, but she had not quite given up all traces of feminine pride: she would have died before she’d have let anyone see her in such unfashionable ruin. If the hotel caught fire, she would probably burn up trying to make herself presentable before seeking an exit.

Rose sat at the writing table under the window, her head bent in the circle of lamplight, composing a letter on the Martha Washington Inn notepaper she found in the drawer. She knew that writing it was more for her benefit than for his. Danny was careless in his affections, not given to flowery declarations or loving gestures.

He loved his plane. Beyond that, the depth of his feelings was anybody’s guess.

Although he was invariably cheerful and seemingly glad to see people, he seldom troubled to seek out anyone. He was content to let weeks or months pass without contacting his friends, yet such lapses never seemed to change his feelings. Rose could not decide if that meant that he cared little about people, or that, if once committed, Danny trusted his friendships so much that he considered their bonds unbreakable. Either way, such a casual attitude was beyond her comprehension. Rose, who didn’t trust anybody, thought that “out of sight, out of mind” was a warning as well as a fact.

She had met Danny in an airplane hangar, because an airfield or a saloon were almost the only places you’d ever find him. Her editor had assigned her a meringue of a story about a girl flyer who wanted to be a pilot for the U.S. mail service—no doubt envisioning a coy headline like:
Flygirl Yearns to Be Mail Pilot
. That afternoon Rose and a photographer headed out to the flying field on Long Island, in hopes of landing a nice feature with a three-column photo, but the flygirl had looked like a buzzard, so Rose gathered enough material for a one-column item, and sent the photographer home.

While she was wandering around the hangars, looking for some
other way to salvage the afternoon, she found Danny leaning into the engine of a plane, and, as an excuse to talk to him, she asked him about flying. His face lit up with a happy smile, and he talked nonstop for ten minutes, but even at the time Rose did not retain a word of it.

If her face was “unfortunate Irish,” his was the countenance of a Celtic saint: blue eyes that shone like stained glass, and the graceful, fine-boned body of a dancer. She caught her breath when she first saw him. Encounters with celebrities left her unmoved, but this jackleg pilot reduced her to stammering idiocy.

Danny was beautiful. He didn’t intend to be, didn’t work at it. It’s just that he had been born with some complex arrangement of lines and planes that converged in his features to make a perfect symmetry, so that to look at him was like viewing a cathedral or a well-designed formal garden. Or perhaps it was just that his particular combination of jawline, eye color, and profile happened to match some ideal from Rose’s childhood: the image of a prince in a child’s storybook, perhaps, or a genetic memory of the ultimate Irish warrior. He embodied the image that artists and moviemakers evoked to personify goodness and honor and trustworthiness. You looked at Danny and you built him a soul.

She thought he could have gone to Hollywood to make it in pictures, but Danny wasn’t interested in posing or in memorizing other people’s words.

Danny wanted to fly. He loved aviation and any person or idea or object that could help him achieve his goal. So, as an excuse to talk to him, she interviewed him, and, because he thought that, being a journalist, maybe she could help him, he talked volubly with his full wattage of charm. The interview continued over beer and plates of corned beef and cabbage at a tavern near the flying field, and they talked until well after dark, mostly about planes and about Danny’s dreams of flying. A couple of days later she went back to the hangar
to take him a couple of copies of the newspaper with her story about him, and he had hugged her with all the abandon of a child.

Before then it might have occurred to Rose that the light in those stained glass eyes was the sun shining through the back of his head, but after that embrace, where Danny was concerned, she was lost to thought at all. She would have died for him.

Ever since then Rose had managed to see him as often as she could, and when her job took her away from the city, she kept in touch, gestures which Danny accepted with an easy grace.

She wrote him clever, funny little letters using her wit to disguise her anxiety and her longing. When she telephoned, she was always ready with an entertaining tale of her latest adventures on the road, so that he would look forward to her calls and the laughter that they brought. There were never any awkward questions from her, nor any pleas for reassurance. Only a bright little chat, as if she only wanted an audience for her clever story, not that she missed him desperately, filtering most of the day’s experiences through thoughts of him. No, certainly not. She would never let anyone see that. There was nothing more ridiculous than a plain woman besotted with love.