Published by Malachite Publishing
Copyright 2011 by TK Kenyon
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T.K. Kenyon
Past the boardwalk and the weathered wooden pier, out in the gray Atlantic under the brilliant sky, a merchant marine ship exploded into bright fire.
Grandmother and I had been strolling along the boardwalk with the other well-to-do to take in the sea air. We walked out on most afternoons, to get out of the house. The wind flapped my skirt against my knobby legs.
Out on the ocean, fire spiked from the ship’s deck. Things like fleas jumped away from the flames into the dark water.
“Oh,” I gasped and covered my open mouth. Too-big teeth touched my palm. “No. Oh, no!” The wind wrapped my skirt around my legs, and I stumbled.
Smoke poured up. Fire escaped and then dove back into the ship.
Black smoke balls rolled in the warm air.
Grandmother tugged my arm. “What is it, Eve?”
Describing the burning was horrifying. “I, well, I suppose it’s the Germans, the Nazis, attacking a ship out there. With torpedoes. There must be a U-boat out there. The ship is gray, and big, a merchant marine vessel. It’s burning.”
Earlier that morning, my brother Marshall and I had been sailing close to where the ship was now burning and sinking. Well, he was asleep under the headsail. I sailed our Bermuda-rigged sailboat into the wind back to the marina.
Distant torpedoes boomed. The thuds echoed in the hollow spaces of my chest. More fire wracked the dying ship. More awful smoke. Burning oil stench rode the sea breeze and reached us, there on the boardwalk. It stung my nose.
I wanted the hand of God or some black magic to pluck the men off the burning decks and out of the freezing water, but they flailed, swimming. My heart yearned to help. Everyone on the dock pointed and gasped, but no one could do anything. The ship was too far to swim out to help: perhaps three miles. The marina and our boat was fifteen miles away, and I did not drive.
Flames rolled across the decks.
“How awful.” Despite her words. Grandmother’s British accent was stiff-upper-lip. She squeezed my thin arm, disapproving of my skinniness even while the ship out there burned. She had been of strong, impressive girth her whole life. She carried her bulk like a knight’s shining armor but would not carry the white cane that Father had bought for her.
Grandmother cocked her head. “A woman to our right says that she saw a U-boat surface. What is she wearing?”
“Dark dress, red hat.”
“‘Dahk dwess, wed hat.’ Pronounce your R’s, child. You sound like an American. And you should wear a hat, too. Ladies wear hats. Freckles make you look Irish. What kind of hat is she wearing?”
The ship floundered, failing. For an instant, I wanted so much to help those men that I forgot I was on the shore and nothing but a frail girl, and I reached toward the ship. My freckled hand eclipsed the flames and collapsing steel on the gray and blue horizon, and nothing else helped them.
“The ship,” I said, “it’s listing. I think it’s starting to sink.”
A sea monster breached the ocean surface beside the sinking ship. Sea lice on the monster’s back pointed sticks at the bobbing fleas in the ocean.
Drumming gunfire.
“Strafing,” Grandmother said. Her sisters had been killed in the Zeppelin bombing raids during the World War, the previous one, in 1916. After Grandfather had been killed in the Blitz last year, she had finally allowed herself to be moved to the States.
I closed my eyes and shut out the gray box on the dull water under the bright blue sky, so I only saw the dark. “Those ships are supposed to be in convoys.”
During lunch, a few hours ago, a Southern boy had jumped up on a table and spoken stirringly about stopping the U-boats that were hunting the merchant marine ships off the Eastern Seaboard. He had sounded glorious.
This dying ship filled with burning men was ghastly.
The gunfire stopped.
The bow of the ship angled up, like a fighting horse, and slipped into the water.
“It’s sinking,” I said.
The ship crashed sideways onto the waves.
Grandmother pressed my arm. “Yes, the bomber will always get through. We Londoners know that. Come, Eve. You shouldn’t see this, dear. Let’s go home.”
I should have stayed. I should have witnessed those men in their last, desperate minutes, but my grandmother was pulling my arm, so I helplessly walked away like they were nothing to me.
*
Earlier that morning, before Grandmother and I went walking on the pier and saw the ship attacked, my older brother Marshall, home from Harvard for the summer, had wanted to go sailing.
Mother was reading the fashion section to Grandmother in the parlor and counting our ration coupons. I wheedled until Mother let me go with him, though she insisted that I wear a hat. “You are so spotty,” she said, eyeing me with one azure eye over the war-thinned Boston Globe. “With your mousy hair and your beige eyes, and wearing that brown outfit, you are mottled monochromatic taupe.”
My brother had Mother’s glorious Nordic looks, while I looked like my aunts: gangly and dun brown. I found a wide-brimmed hat.
I tied on the hat as we drove in Marshall’s car to the marina. Marshall smirked. Everything about him was the proper, even color: brown skin, white teeth, blue eyes, white-gold hair.
He didn’t freckle so much that even the blind complained. He didn’t get called senseless names like The Greater Spotted Stork of Wingaersheek.
Once on our boat—a forty-foot, two-mast Bermuda-rigged cruiser called The Golden Girl—we pulled in the ropes, hoisted the sails, and set out. My brown skirt whipped against my gawky legs, and I nearly tripped over a coiled rope because my skirt billowed.
When we were halfway across the bay, Marshall fell asleep on the bow of the sailboat, in the shade of the headsail. He had been out at a nightclub the night before and had promised to tell me about it, but he hadn’t. I trimmed the sails and kept us running before the wind and tacked back in time for lunch.
It was a beautiful morning for sailing. The wind was just stiff enough that The Golden Girl responded to my sailing like a high-spirited horse, wheeling and bucking in the turns. I loved it.
Marshall woke as I was tying the boat to the dock. He yawned, scratched his stomach, and said, “You’re sunburned.”
“So are you,” I said, “but only the left half of your face.”
He touched his cheek. It would take him an hour to figure out I was kidding.
He inspected the knot I tied to the dock, found it respectable. We went to the marina restaurant, The Canteen, for lunch.
He ordered Slap-the-Jap chili, which last summer had been Joe DiMaggio’s Grand Slam chili. I ordered Victory Garden vegetable soup.
Marshall finally said, “At the nightclub, we drank vodka and listened to a band.”
“What were the women wearing?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Blue?”
That would not satisfy Grandmother at all. Not that I could tell Grandmother that Marshall had been at a night club, anyway. She would rat him out to my parents, who would have apoplexy at such impropriety. “Anyone wearing zoot suits?”
“Only draft dodgers wear those. They waste cloth.”
Marshall had been on a reclamation committee at Harvard. Mother had lowered her voice just a few days ago and told him, “Marshall, if I want to buy new tires rather than retreads, I will, and you will stop provoking me right now.”
A white man, hardly more than a boy, stood on a table in the Canteen and waved his arms. “Hello! May I speak?”
His accent was Southern and he was unfamiliar. I knew all the families that summered around the bay.
The Southern boy said, “I’m here today to talk to you about the Auxiliary Coast Guard.”
The Southern boy wore white pants, sailor-like, but they weren’t a government-issued uniform. They fit, tailored.
“We need men to join the Auxiliary Coast Guard to defend our shores from the Nazi’s U-boat menace.”
“What’s he talking about?” I asked Marshall.
“Shh,” Marshall said.
“Why, only yesterday,” the Southern boy said, “a U-boat was sighted patrolling off the coast here. That U-boat was part of Operation Drumbeat, which the Nazis have sent to terrorize our coasts. They are invading our sovereign waters, an aggression that we shall not tolerate. We need men who have their own boats to patrol these waters and scout for U-boats with the Coastal Picket Patrol.”
Marshall sat forward in his chair. His fists were clenched.
“I know I can count on you to volunteer,” the young man said and stepped off the table, landing jauntily on the floor.
“Well,” I said. “That was, um, stirring.”
Marshall stood. “I’ll be back.”
“But, wait. It’s that, well, Mother is expecting us home before one o’clock. We should leave, Marshall. Mother will worry.”
He leaned on the table, ardent with patriotism. “Mother can wait.” He walked over to the Southern boy.
I folded my napkin into a swan, then a flower, then worried the frayed hems, while Marshall talked to the Southerner.
*
Later that afternoon, when Grandmother and I got home from walking on the boardwalk and witnessing the torpedoing of the merchant marine ship, my hands shook.
Upstairs, in her room, Grandmother wanted to look at photo albums, which meant she wanted to tell stories. I couldn’t think and I couldn’t feel anything. I wanted to lie down. I wanted to run back to the boardwalk to save those men.
Marshall would be home soon, all inducted into the Coastal Picket Patrol.
We sat in Grandmother’s parlor, a small room attached to her bedroom that was reserved for her use. A brown leather photo album fell open in my slight hands. “It’s a photo of a young woman, in late 1880’s or early 1890’s dress, riding an elephant,” I said. The elephant’s trunk curled back to its forehead. The woman, riding sidesaddle on the rococo blanket, smiled. A dark, young Indian man dressed in white pajamas stood at the elephant’s head.
“That’s me,” she said.
“Where did you ride an elephant?” I asked.
“India, on that trip with your Aunt Gladys.”
When Grandmother was twenty-four, she hadn’t married yet, had no proper suitors, so her father sent her on a trip around the world with her maiden sister who was thirty-two, both to encourage her interest in languages and to warn her that unmarried women are at the charity of their relations. When Grandmother arrived home, she allowed herself to be introduced to suitable men and married.
If creamy, pretty Grandmother had had trouble marrying, I was a hopeless case, just like her spotty sister Gladys. A convent might mollify my parents, but it would have to be an Episcopalian convent.
“I shouldn’t tell you this,” Grandmother laid her plump, white hand on my skinny, spotty arm.
I picked at the split corner of the photo. “They were, ah, asking for volunteers at lunch today to, oh, patrol and spot U-boats,” I said.
“Your mother would disapprove,” she said.
Of course Mother would be angry. When Marshall got home, the fight would swell and spill over. They would be silent and angry for days. “I think Marshall may be talking to them.”
“Because she doesn’t know about India,” Grandmother said.
I stopped. She wasn’t talking about U-boats. “Mother doesn’t know you went to India?”
“I hate elephants,” she said. Grandmother did not hate. She avoided, she disdained, or she did not appreciate. “They sicken me,” she said.
“Elephants?” In the picture, the elephant wore an embroidered, fringed cloth over its head and curlicues of paint on its face. I imagined orange and pink dyes in the fringe and blanket and red paint on the elephant’s face, though the photograph was black and white. “Who could hate an elephant?”
Sometimes, my mouth got ahead of my head, and I said hurtful things. “I’m sorry, Grandmother.”
She sat back in her chair. “Elephants are terrible beasts.”
She was being cryptic, which meant she was gathering herself.
Her mother, my great-grandmother, had written epic Victorian devotional poetry. My grandmother, born when widowed Queen Victoria had ruled England for forty years, Grandmother was not earnest, like her Victorian mother had been. When she was a girl, she said, everyone was earnest, busy and bustling and terribly preoccupied with ruling the world. And then it had all fallen apart, and now Germany was rising, and the Americans, you Americans, are so earnest to defeat them that you expanded the war.
Downstairs, the heavy front door creaked and closed firmly.
“You said you hate elephants?” I asked.
“I had been studying Hinduism,” she said. “The Gita said to ‘be without desire,’ but that’s wrong,” she said. “I realized that when it was far too late.”
From downstairs, Mother screeched, “You what?”
“Just one minute,” I said to Grandmother.
I ran to the banister and almost slipped and went over, an ignominious way for a fool to die. Down into the foyer, sunlight glimmered on the golden crest inlaid into the marble floor at the bottom of the curved, grand staircase.
Marshall was standing in the foyer with Father and Mother.
“You did what?” Mother shrieked. She clutched her chest.
Marshall spoke quietly, with dignity and maturity, which meant he had done something stupid that he thought was noble. He must have joined the Auxiliary Navy, or whatever they called it.
My father grabbed Marshall’s collar. Marshall stumbled off balance. “This war is going to last longer than you think,” Father said.
“It’s only for three months,” Marshall said, his voice shrilling, breaking.
“It will be longer than that.” Father began climbing up the stairs.
If Father found me on the landing, he would take out his anger on me by once again wanting to know why I had not brought an eligible young Harvard man home to visit the family during the summer or whether he was wasting his tuition monies at Radcliffe. I retreated to my bedroom because it was closer and stood behind the white, wood door to listen.
“The war will be longer than that!” Father yelled from the top of the stairs, down on Mother and Marshall and the flower arrangement in the foyer that the housekeeper did every morning.
Footsteps pounded the wood floor outside the door. Marshall stomped past, but his footsteps changed directions, and he turned left. A door shut. He had gone to Grandmother’s room.
Downstairs, Mother banged on the piano, playing Chopin, filling the house with dissonance. I peeked out. The hallway was deserted, so I went back to Grandmother’s room.
In Grandmother’s room. Marshall paced.
Grandmother said, “You’re swept up in this war. Perhaps a bit of envy that your friends lay in the arms of patriotic young American ladies before they left to join up in England, and now are lying in the arms of grateful British women.”
“No! Hitler must be stopped. If he isn’t stopped, he’ll destroy our way of life.”
“My, they have brainwashed you,” she said, oh-so-Britishly-superior.
“Grandmother, stop.” I said. “He’s not going to war. He’s just sailing The Golden Girl around the bay.”
“Well, then,” Grandmother said. “If it’s just a lark.”
“It’s not a lark,” Marshall said.
“‘Lahk,’” Grandmother mimicked him. “Say it right. Larrrrrk.”
“Those darn U-boats are killing people.”
“‘Dahn’ U-boats. Your accent is worse than your sister’s.”
“The Nazis are sinking ships right off our coast.”
“And driving up the price of sugar,” Grandmother said. “I’m surprised your mother doesn’t approve of you guarding the sugar supply.”
There was no backing out, even from three months with the civilian adjunct of the Coastal Picket Patrol under the auspices of the Auxiliary Coast Guard. Father was angry because he had called in favors to keep Marshall out of harm’s way. Mother was worried and now had reason to hate the war. Grandmother had been a pacifist even before Grandfather had died. I was caught in the middle with everyone wanting me to tip the scales. Everyone was mad at me because I sat at the table during lunch, folding napkins, while Marshall was recruited and didn’t stop him but just strolled on the pier with Grandmother.
And if they hadn’t figured that out yet, they would.
“It’s not like it’s, ah, the real Navy,” I said. “Marshall, say it isn’t like the real Navy.”
Marshall said, “This isn’t any of your business.”
He couldn’t see what a mess he was making of this. “Grandmother, you were telling me about India?”
“Your brother joins the Navy, and this is what you think about?” she asked.
“I’m hunting U-boats, and you ask her about ancient history?”
“Now, wait a minute,” Grandmother said, “it’s every bit as important as you sailing around the bay hunting Germans.”
And they went at it again.
I went back to my room and knitted a scarf for our brave boys in France.
*
The next morning, I heard Marshall’s alarm ring at five o’clock in the morning, so I got up, dressed, sneaked down to the kitchen to make some sandwiches, and was standing in my doorway when he walked by. “Where are you going?”
“Have to patrol,” he said. “I was talking to some of the guys last night,” because he had stomped out after arguing with Grandmother and come in after two in the morning, “and they said that Ernest Hemmingway is in the Patrol off of Cuba. And they said that we’re called the Hooligan Navy or the Corsair Fleet, like privateers.” His eyes were bloodshot.
“You haven’t slept, have you?”
“I have to patrol,” he insisted.
“I’m coming, too,” I said. I had dressed in white slacks that seemed naval. They made my skinny legs look more pathetic.
“You can’t,” he retorted. “You’re not Patrol.”
When I get mad at my older brother, but only with my brother, my anxious stammer recedes. “It’s our family’s sailboat. I can sail on it whenever I want to.”
“I’ll tell Mother,” he said.
“Go right in and wake her up.”
He punched the wall, quietly.
I left a note for Mother, telling her that I was sailing with Marshall. I was so upset that even the note was hesitant and I wrote the word “um” eight times.
Marshall drove us to the dock. The sky was just starting to glow, reddening the houses’ east walls. There were no streetlights, and we couldn’t use headlights. During the first few months of the war, when the U-boats began hunting, the East coast was a glittering smear of lights, and the U-boats had picked off the black hulks of ships silhouetted against the twinkling coast.
“Did they give you weapons?” I asked Marshall.
He scowled. “No.”
“Depth charges?”
“No.”
“A gun?”
“No.” The sky turned scarlet, and the houses glowed hotter. “They gave me a radio. And a first mate.”
“What do we do if we see a U-boat?” I asked.
“Stay with it. Try to keep it from surfacing. Radio the Coast Guard.”
“What if it torpedoes us?”
“They’re not going to waste their torpedoes on a forty-foot sloop.”
“But what if they do?”
Marshall frowned. “Then they’ll have to go back to Germany to get more torpedoes.”
I had imagined the marina bustling with young men, all eager to save America and milling, shouting, and jumping onto ships as they cast off.
The marina was still and silent. The rippling sea turned gray-orange, like fire licking gunmetal gray paint, around the sailboats moored at the wooden docks.
All the other Picket Patrol boats must have gone out already.
A man, wizened by sea salt, leaned on The Golden Girl at the dock. In the dusk, he looked like a brown, hairy coconut pressed into the shape of a man.
Marshall clapped the man on the back. “Eve, this is Vern, my first mate.”
“Nice to meet you, miss.” Mr. Vern smelled of liquor and had few teeth.
“How do you do, sir,” I said.
The contrast between Mr. Vern and the glorious youth of Marshall was startling. In fifty years, would Marshall wither so? Surely not.
I hadn’t worked out what we would tell Mother yet. I just didn’t want to be home that first, long day, while Mother banged on the piano, Father snapped at everyone before he slammed the door on the way to the office, and Grandmother told pointless stories.
If we found a U-boat and harried it until it chased us, and if we led it up to the shoals where it beached and all the Germans were captured, then Mother would lock us in our rooms and we would have to climb out the windows tomorrow morning.
But we didn’t see a U-boat the whole, calm day on the Atlantic. At noon, we ate lunch from the picnic hamper that I had packed. Mr. Vern ate his chicken sandwich quickly, very quickly. I ate only one of my halves, for I nibbled like a skinny brown mouse, and so I offered him the other half, which he also wolfed down. In the afternoon I stayed on the stern, behind the mizzen mast in the shade, while Marshall and Mr. Vern shouted nautical things to each other and fussed with the sails until I thought we would never get back.
When we tied up the boat at dusk, Marshall kicked the hull as we disembarked.
Mr. Vern grinned. “I’ve been in the Hooligan Navy for two months, now. I’ve never seen a U-boat. Don’t get your hopes up there, young master.”
If we told Mother we didn’t see a U-boat, she would calm down, and we could sail the rest of the summer. Best plan yet.
The three of us went to the Victory Tavern because Mr. Vern wanted a drink, and Marshall wanted to go with him, and I didn’t want to see Mother yet. Marshall didn’t want me to go to a bar, but he didn’t want to go home or let me sit in the car alone either, so he was stuck with me.
In the Victory Tavern, the poor yellow lights could hardly brighten the smoke-grimed walls. If the windows were as filthy, the blackout curtains were probably a waste of cloth. It smelled like beer piss and mouse piss.
Mr. Vern and Marshall ordered at the bar. Marshall bought himself a beer, but nothing for me, which suited me just fine.
Mr. Vern drank two vodkas, crystal-clear alcohol. Some of the girls at Radcliffe drank alcohol in secret. I was afraid of being caught by the house mother.
Mr. Vern’s face flushed as he drank, and he smiled more. “This is smooth,” he said. “I was a bootlegger during Prohibition. Moonshine’s not clean like this. You want something to drink, Miss Eve?”
“No, thank you, sir.”
Marshall said, “I drank moonshine during Prohibition.”
Marshall had been thirteen when Prohibition ended, but I didn’t mention that. Surely a sister should support her brother’s wild, self-serving fantasies.
Mr. Vern said, “Yeah, I’ll bet you paid the five hundred percent markup for that terrible liquor.”
I whispered to Marshall, “Is this a nightclub?”
“No,” he whispered, “this is a dive.”
I had heard about dives. I crossed my ankles and folded my hands in my lap.
The Southern boy from the marina restaurant was drinking at the bar. He looked older in the dim light from the candles. The dark wood and blackout curtains diffused the little light and mixed it with the smoke. I asked, “Who is he?”
“Joseph Rush,” Marshall said. Wush. After three years at Hahvahd, Marshall couldn’t pronounce his R’s at all.
“I know, well, but who is he?” I asked Mr. Vern, surprised at my own pluck for addressing Mr. Vern directly and about that boy.
“Joe’s a good egg, generally,” Mr. Vern said. “Bit of a snot.”
“Old southern money,” Marshall said. “He was attending the Naval Academy at Annapolis but dropped out to organize the Patrol.”
Mr. Vern snickered. “Organized. You’re the only one who goes out before ten in the morning.”
“I’m doing my part,” Marshall said.
“What about, um, Mr. Rush?” I asked.
“A stout lad. He made a go at drinking me under the table a few weeks back,” Mr. Vern said, “and did respectable.”
Joseph Rush, leaning on the bar with one devil-may-care foot on the bar rail, lit a cigarette. He looked glamorous, extravagant, like no one at Harvard. Such Southern-ness was exotic.
Father might be consider him suitable if he was from the Naval Academy. If I brought home someone suitable at some point this summer, they might forget all about Marshall’s Auxiliary Navy.
I stood.
Marshall grabbed my arm. “Where are you going?”
“To, well, ask that young Southern gentleman about the, um, Picket Patrol.” My stomach felt sick and giddy, a sure warning that I was doing something impetuous and stupid.
“Sit down.” He tugged, nearly upending me.
“Let go of me. Don’t make a scene,” I said.
Marshall released my arm and I walked over to the bar.
The bartender behind the bar frowned but continued to pour a beer.
I leaned on the bar next to the Southerner. “Hello,” I said and was pleased I found the fortitude to speak.
“Hi, yourself,” he said.
“You, um, spoke in the Canteen yesterday.”
“Yep.”
The bar was dark maple. I traced a knothole. “You were, um, persuasive.”
“Yep.” He sipped his drink. It was dark brown, not like the vodka.
“I sail,” I said.
“Sure.”
“I’ve been considering, um, joining the Coastal Picket Patrol,” I said. “My brother, well, Marshall, is a member.” I said Mahshall and felt like a stuck-up Bostonian beside the charming Southerner. My lack of R’s that Grandmother harped on seemed stupid.
He said, “Ladies aren’t allowed in the Picket Patrol, miss.”
“Oh? Well? Why not?” I wasn’t defending suffrage here. I was just speaking to young man. “Why shouldn’t girls watch for, um, U-boats?”
He sipped his drink. “Go plant a Victory Garden. Knit a scarf.”
I left the bar and sat down next to Marshall, humiliated. Talking to Joseph Rush had been a stupid thing for a dun-brown mouse like myself to even attempt. I was a stupid, common, stammering house mouse with a quivering heart.
But even so, Joseph Rush shouldn’t treat me like a pretty idiot who couldn’t sail a boat. I was a better sailor than Marshall, probably. I certainly stayed awake better. If Marshall was alone on a sailboat, he’d go to sleep and end up drifting up to Nova Scotia. “I think we should go home.”
Marshall frowned. “You wanted to come along.”
“Yes, but we should go home now.”
“Wait,” Marshall said. Mr. Vern continued telling a story about running rum during Prohibition.
That Joseph Rush stood with his back to me, pointedly ignoring me. The men around him laughed, like he had told them that a mere girl wanted to join his Hooligan Navy. “Mother will be worried.”
“Mother can wait.” He was irritated that I had mentioned Mother. He wanted to fit in with Mr. Vern and Mr. Rush and Mr. Hemingway and all these others dangerous men who hunted U-boats.
Smoke clung to me, evidence that I had been in a dive. I would have to hang these pants outside to air the smoke out before the laundry lady came, or people would talk.
People would talk. People always talked when nice, little Radcliffe girls didn’t behave. After they talked, my mother would yell and my father would slam things and then stay out all night. “Marshall, we need to leave now.”
Marshall slammed his hand on the table.
“I’m done talking, here, son, miss,” Mr. Vern said. “I’d like to drink alone, now, for a bit.”
Marshall mumbled apologies for having brought his sister to a bar, and we left. I hoped that the ride home would blow the smoke out of my clothes.
*
Simone was serving dinner when we arrived home at nine-thirty. The house smelled like Yankee pot roast. Silverware clattered against dishes in the dining room. They must have heard us when the front door groaned, but we sneaked upstairs. Simone watched us through the open dining room door and ladled gravy.
In my room, the note I had left for Mother lay on the floor, torn into shrapnel.
I changed into a dress and flat shoes and opened my door a crack.
Radio whispered in Grandmother’s room. I knocked. “It’s Eve,” I said.
“Come in.” She sat in a chair with a dinner tray on her lap. “Have you eaten?”
“I’m, well, not really hungry.”
“Simone put a great deal of food on this tray. Why don’t you nibble a bit?”
Grandmother was usually on my side when I had a fight with Mother. It was her way of getting back at Father for insisting that she come to this heathen land.
I picked up an unused spoon and ate a piece of potato. Everything was cut bite-sized, and Grandmother’s plate was arranged with the meat at four o’clock, the potato at eight o’clock, and the soft-cooked carrots at noon.
“How was U-boat hunting?” she asked.
Embarrassment at being caught out of bed heated my cheeks. “Didn’t, ah, find any.”
“Then your Mother has been worried over nothing. You smell smoky.”
Of course I did. I smelled like a stinky, smoky mouse. “We went to, um, a bar, afterward.” The pot roast that I chewed was tender and spiced with clove. “I met a young man, and I thought I, well, liked him, but he made fun of me because I wanted to join the his Coastal Picket Patrol.” My eyes burned, as if from smoke.
“Now, now, Eve. What did he say?”
“That girls didn’t join the Picket Patrol, that I should, um, plant a Victory Garden.”
“Did you join the Picket Patrol?”
“No.” The bite of meat pushed down my constricted throat.
“Do you want to join it?”
“Not really, I guess.” Yes, I did. I was a better sailor than Marshall, who fussed and tussled with the sails and hardly caught any wind.
“Why ever not?”
A woman sang on the radio, something low and sweet, homesick, probably about men who wanted to stop fighting and come home, but stayed for honor and duty. “I don’t know.”
“Do you want to be an actress in Hollywood?”
It must be so much work to be that beautiful. “Well, no.”
“Do you want to be a teacher or a secretary?”
“I don’t know.”
“Work in a factory?”
“I wouldn’t know how.”
Grandmother sighed, set the tray aside, and leaned over to me. “Life should not be endured.”
Why didn’t I have a grandmother like everyone else? Gladys, at school, read her grandmother’s letter aloud in the parlor at night. Her grandmother told her to be modest and demure so the boys would like her and to read the Bible every night.
I asked Grandmother, “Why did the elephant hate you?”
Grandmother sighed. “Because I was in love with her mahout, a Brahmin priest, and made love to him in the temple. She could smell me on him. When his family found out, they sent him to a monastery rather than allow him to marry an Englishwoman. The elephant saw me on my last day in Madras when I was walking by the temple. She went mad, rearing and smashing her pen. She killed two men that day.”
“You had relations with him?” I blurted. “Grandmother!”
“Don’t be such an American prude, Eve.”
I wasn’t sure whether I should be scandalized that my grandmother wasn’t a virgin when she was married or had been in love with an Indian or whatever the rest of it. We had discussed motives for suicide at Radcliffe, and forbidden love was acceptable. Proper and British Grandmother probably would have considered suicide melodramatic.
We were rich, vain, silly girls who had been raised to be silly and vain and rich. The Depression had not touched us or our families in any significant way. Some of our families lost some money, but there was still plenty to send girls to Radcliffe for finishing, where they could meet Harvard boys and so continue to be silly, vain, and rich all our lives.
And scared and worried, like mother, so that everyone must kow-tow to the worry and vanity and silliness of the scared little mice.
“I don’t know what to say, Grandmother.”
“Yes, well, such well-cultured women such as yourself usually don’t. I don’t tell many nice young ladies about that part of my life. No one wants a matron to have a scandalous past. It seems so far away, anyway.”
Still scandalized, I went back to my room to rinse the smoke out of my hair and clothes, so people wouldn’t talk.
That night, I prayed for guidance.
I hoped that prayers took a while to fly up to God, or that He heard them later or took a while to consider them before He replied, because I didn’t feel anything at all, kneeling by my bed with my stringy hair dampening the back of my nightgown.
My white-painted room was just as quiet as the sea around the burning ship.
*
Marshall’s clock rang at five the next morning. The ringing was muffled even through our bedroom wall, as if he had smothered it with a pillow.
I had been up for an hour. I might be a plain brown mouse, but I am an organized, plain brown mouse.
Marshall sneaked out of his room, tiptoed down the stairs, and tsk’ed his tongue when he found me in the dark foyer, dressed and waiting, holding the lunch hamper. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“With you,” I said. Moonlight sneaked in around the black curtains over the windows. Only a silver outline of his circular head atop the inverted triangle of his torso was visible in the darkness.
“Joe said that girls aren’t allowed in the Hooligan Navy,” he said.
He tried to take the basket from me. I resisted and won. He certainly wasn’t going to take the lunch that I had packed and then leave me at home. “I’m not in your precious Hooligan Navy. I’m going sailing on my family’s sailboat at five-thirty in the morning.”
“You’re a loon.”
“Perhaps.” Loons aren’t frightened of everything. They’re even pretty, in a skinny, leggy, knobbly way.
He sighed. Liquor on his breath from last night soured the dark air. “Aren’t you taking a hat?”
It was a ploy to get me to go back upstairs so he could leave without me. “I have one.”
He sighed and walked toward the front door.
The front door was locked with a key, so we left through the kitchen door, which did not have such a contraption, and drove through the dark, navigating the moonlight-lined sketches of streets.
Mr. Vern was lying on the dock beside The Golden Girl, under a blanket. I feared he had spent the night there but did not want to offend him by asking. “Sir,” I said, touching his shoulder.
He roused and blinked in the gloom at us.
“I put together a hamper and some thermoses of coffee for all of us. Have you eaten breakfast, Mr. Vern?”
He cracked a grin. “No, miss. I would mightily appreciate some breakfast.”
I handed him an egg sandwich, wrapped in waxed paper. He tore off the wrapper and bit into it like he hadn’t eaten solid food since yesterday’s sandwich at lunch.
We cast off while Mr. Vern munched his sandwich under the headsail and sailed out of the silent, dark marina, again the only boat out so early.
Again, we skidded over the surface of the gray Atlantic all day, and all we saw were long humps and furrows of waves and a few seagulls, eating trash. The charcoal ocean seemed so deep under the keel of our tiny sailboat. U-boats and sea monsters and sharks could be swimming under us. We might never notice.
Once, we thought we saw a periscope jutting between the waves. We all jumped up and surveyed the sea with our binoculars, seeking the black pipe, but it was a trick of the bright sunlight on a pelican with a full beak.
Lunch was roast beef sandwiches and cucumber salad. The seven cucumber vines in the Victory Garden were producing at least fifteen cucumbers every day. We were tired of their watery flesh, but Mr. Vern ate his portion and the rest still in the bowl.
“Mr. Vern,” I asked. “Does the Coastal Picket Patrol, um, employ you?”
“I’d say I’m employed, miss.” He maneuvered the cucumber chunks around to his remaining molars. “I’m certainly out all day with the young captain, there.”
I wanted to know just how much I needed to worry about him. “Do they, um, ah, pay you?”
“No, Miss Eve,” he said. “I work odd jobs, mostly repairing boats. There’s less call for that with so many young men overseas. Every so often I ferry some luxury goods from Canada or the Bahamas.”
So he had some work, then, some means of support. I wasn’t sure how to ask him if he had a place to sleep at night, nor what my parents would allow me to do about it if he hadn’t. Perhaps our church might get involved.
It seemed more polite to not ask just yet.
The burning ball of the sun rose high, passed the main mast, and began to coast downward. Marshall drooped like a sunflower in the heat and fell asleep under the headsail. With him out for his nap, Mr. Vern and I took turns sailing The Golden Girl and scanning the seas for Nazis.
“You said that you’ve, um, never seen a U-boat, Mr. Vern,” I called over the sails clapping in the wind.
“No, Miss Eve. I’d’ve liked to have spotted that one that torpedoed that merchant marine ship on Monday. If we’d’ve had more men and boats in the Picket Patrol, maybe we would’ve spotted it and warned those ships.”
But for a horse, a kingdom was lost, and in this case, but for a few yachts sailing around, so many men were lost on that ship that blossomed with fire. I brought the boat about with a heave on the sail. The bow danced on the waves. We staggered on the bouncing deck. “Do you think, Mr. Vern, if the U-boat is, ah-around here today, that there are, um, now enough men and boats now to spot it?”
“No, Miss Eve. Young Joe is making his stirring speeches in every lunch room and canteen that he can, but most of the men that haven’t joined up to go overseas are lazy or lame.” He kept his gaze fixed firmly on the heaving horizon and held a rope as the boat took a swell.
Marshall grumbled as sun struck his face and moved his hat to cover his eyes.
Mr. Vern said, “Many of the young men who do join our little ragtag fleet don’t manage to cast off before noon because they’re out drinking with their Hooligan Navy buddies all the night long, and that’s not much help. We need more men, earnest men, who can do the job.”
He sounded earnest, certainly, like one of Grandmother’s Victorians. I was used to the ennui and silliness of my school friends.
“Should we roust the young captain, miss, to take his turn at the sail? Your arms are beginning to sunburn.”
“I’m fine, sir. I can sail us in.”
“I can see that, but mayhaps the young captain won’t want to be seen napping by his fellow hooligans in the Hooligan Navy.”
Mr. Vern had a kind heart. “I’m sure he’d, well, appreciate that.”
“Shall we wake ‘im up with a bucket of cold sea water?” He grinned his crooked grin.
I was still Marshall’s sister. “No, Mr. Vern. I’ll wake him.” I shook Marshall’s shoulder, shouting, “U-boat! We’ve found a U-boat! Wake up, Marshall!”
Marshall jumped to his feet and spun around. He nearly fell over the rail, but I grabbed his arm and hauled him back. He glared at me like he wanted to go over the side.
Mr. Vern laughed and clutched his thin stomach.
We sailed into dock without incident: no rough seas, no navigational errors, no Nazis. We may as well have been out for a pleasure sail from dawn until dusk. Squinting against the sun glittering off the waves through the tunnel of the binoculars all afternoon had given me a headache.
Mr. Vern disembarked, saying, “Have a good night, you two.”
“Mr. Vern!” I called. “Wait for a moment. We have, um, these two extra sandwiches, ah, that no one ate today. Would you take them off our hands?”
“Thank you, miss.” Mr. Vern touched his hat and looked away from my eyes.
I would have to do better than that stuttering yammer to salvage his pride tomorrow.
Mr. Vern removed his cap and wiped the sweat off his brown, bald head. “You going to the Victory Tavern tonight, young captain?”
“I would like to go to a nightclub,” Marshall said. “But since my sister is with me, I suppose I can’t.”
Again, the house mouse kept Marshall from having a good time. When we were kids, he couldn’t go to camp because I was sickly. When he wanted to go to the Citadel in South Carolina for college, our parents had already decided that we should stay in New England and he should go to Harvard as a legacy and I, to Radcliffe.
I wished I was a loon. Loons could fly.
“I would like to go to a nightclub, Marshall.” Sometimes, the words just jumped out of my mouth with no stop at my brain. I didn’t even stutter.
Marshall sneered. “You couldn’t go to a nightclub.”
“Why not?” I asked. “I’ve been to a, well, dive. How could a nightclub be worse?”
I blinked and wished to recant, but didn’t. Marshall hadn’t even told me what the nightclub was like, so I supposed that it was his fault that I wanted to see it for myself. I could rationalize it to myself that way. How would I explain it to Mother and Father?
Considering that they evidently weren’t speaking to me, perhaps I wouldn’t have to explain it. They were just locking us in and refusing to talk. Fine. I could refuse to talk back.
Such bravado would not withstand Mother’s fury, and then I would grovel and apologize, mouse-like. Father would threaten to not send me back to college, but then where would I meet a young man to marry? So he would.
“Let’s go,” I said to Marshall.
He frowned, doubtlessly considering Father’s wrath and Mother’s histrionics.
House mice see everything in the house from their chewed little holes. They watch all the people and the reasons they do things.
I said, “Surely you can look out for me, Marshall.”
He puffed up.
I said, “We were out until nine-thirty last night, and Mother and Father didn’t say a word.”
He nodded but didn’t move toward the car.
I said, “Don’t let me keep you from having a good time, again.”
And he nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Just for a little while.”
I bade Mr. Vern good night. He headed toward the Victory Tavern, a dark block against the pale sunset sky.
Marshall drove quickly to the nightclub as if he wanted get there before he thought better of it or to frighten me into chickening out, but I didn’t. I wanted to see what the nightclub looked like, even if I had firm plans to be a wallflower.
From the outside, it was dark, of course. Such frivolity as a nightclub wouldn’t break the light ban. Marshall paid for us to get in.
Inside, I was severely underdressed in sailing pants and a navy blue shirt. All the other women were wearing lovely dresses, not as nice as for a dance at Radcliffe but better than for a dance in the basement of the Episcopal church. I wasn’t there to dance with any of the young men—so many young men!—and so Marshall installed me in a round, stained velvet booth and went to get us some nickel bottles of Coke. At least this nightclub smelled like candle smoke and fresh sweat, which was better than the Victory Tavern.
Out on the wood dance floor, couples looped around each other, swing dancing. Behind them, the trumpet section blasted boogie, their trumpets swaying like brass lilies bending in the wind.
No one ever danced like this at Radcliffe or in the church basement. Wow. I had heard about air stepping, but the way that the women orbited around the men was just fantastic.
The seat of the booth wobbled, and I felt Marshall slide into the booth beside me. I didn’t even look over but just reached for my bottle of soda while still watching the dancers trip the light fantastic, when I fell backward and had been grabbed and a wet, foul mouth was all over my mouth. He smelled like ass and whiskey piss. Beard stubble hurt my face.
Mice are small, but mice are nimble. And mice bite.
The meat of his lip was between my buck teeth and I bit his lip hard and when he reared back, I gathered up my skinny legs and kicked him with both feet. He fell out of the booth on his back, legs waving.
“Masher!” I yelled, but I could hardly hear my own voice above the trumpets.
Marshall, tall and golden Marshall, was there and kicked the masher hard in his ribs without spilling any of the two bottles of Coke he held.
The man crawled toward the exit, slithered up the side of a booth, and staggered out the door into the night.
Marshall handed me a bottle of Coke. “Do you want the one with the bourbon in it after all that?”
My hands rattled. “Um, no, I’m, um, fine.”
“Nice kick,” Marshall said. “I almost hated to intervene. Looked like you were handling that jerk fine.”
I had not been handling that jerk fine. “Marshall, I think we should go home. We should go home right now. Mother will be worried and we don’t want Mother to worry and we should go home right now.”
“You okay, miss?” a man’s voice said behind me. I looked over my shoulder and the top of the booth. A dark-haired man peered over the edge at me. “I was getting out of the booth to haul him off you, but you beat me to it. Nice kick.”
A red-headed woman peered over the booth back beside him. Her lipstick matched her cherry hair. She echoed, “Nice kick.”
The man asked, “Can you teach Pearl here that kick?”
I drank the soda pop. The fizz burned my throat. “I’m not sure.”
“Well, nice kick,” he said. He slid down behind the stained violet velvet.
Marshall said, “I saw him sit down from across the room and ran back, but you’d already kicked his sorry ass out of the booth. And it was a nice kick.”
Nice kick. Okay. I drank some more burning soda. “What was wrong with him?”
Marshall shrugged. “Just a drunk dick.”
I nodded. “Okay. Um, I think we should go home.”
“Come on.” He grabbed my hand and tugged. “Let’s show these jitterbugs how we Lindy at Harvard and Radcliffe.”
“I, well, okay.”
I danced, and I felt better when I danced, and then I realized, after dancing with my brother for three songs, that I didn’t care about that masher at all.
*
The next morning, when my alarm clanged at five, I woke and dressed. My bedroom door was locked from the outside, but in slacks it was easy to crawl out the window into the complete darkness, hang from the sill, and drop eight feet to the ground. I had left another note for Mother on my pillow, telling her we would be home earlier tonight.
The moon had already set, but gunmetal blue starlight traced the edges of black houses and trees. I would never have noticed starlight if there hadn’t been a blackout, if we hadn’t been afraid of U-boats and bombers.
I sneaked into the kitchen through the unlocked door to make sandwiches, but I found five sandwiches in the icebox, neatly wrapped in waxed paper. Simone must have approved of our Nazi-hunting.
I waited by the side of the house, so I could see both Marshall’s window and the path from the front door to the garage.
Half an hour later, I threw pebbles at his window. The fourth one hit him on his blond head as he slid open the sash. “Are you crazy?” he whispered.
“Are you patrolling today or not?”
“We just got home four hours ago!”
“Come on!”
“No one else goes out before ten in the morning. Sometimes noon.”
“Do you think the Germans aren’t going to attack until brunch? Is Mr. Vern waiting for us at the dock?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Vern is probably hung over.”
“I’m going.”
“You can’t drive,” he said.
“I can so. Gladys had a car at school, and she taught me.” Her father had brought a car up for a weekend in autumn. That was before Pearl Harbor, when we were hurriedly relaxing because it was obvious that we would once again be in a European war against Germany.
“Fine,” he said and tossed the key down. “Don’t sink too many U-boats.”
In the garage, I started the car. I tried to figure out how Gladys had worked the clutch, the brake, and the accelerator with only two feet because she had not taught me how to drive because I had been too timid, but I had watched Marshall drive a lot. Marshall’s car, a 1938 Cadillac, had the gear shift on the steering column, and I could not settle in the gears as I swung that lever back and forth over the steering wheel.
I killed the engine twice backing out of the garage. Even the car stuttered when I drove it. I managed to accelerate from the last two intersections slowly, with hesitations, but without having to restart.
Dawn pinkened the houses and the streets.
At the marina, Mr. Vern’s cigarette tip glowed orange in the dusk.
“Hello, sir,” I said.
“Hullo, and where’s young master Marshall this morning?”
“You told him, um, no one goes out before, well, ten,” I said.
“So he isn’t going?”
“Even so. Would you care for a sandwich, sir?”
The sea was fuchsia-striped in the sun and black in the shadows from other sailboats and the docks. We set about readying the boat for launch.
The sun turned the water rose-pink and the sky, salmon and gold, then the waters and the sky blued. The air smelled like the clean, fishy ocean. It was beautiful, but I didn’t feel inspired to paint the scene or write it down. Still no vocation. Still no plan.
I unbound the sails. Enough wind blew to make for good sailing that morning. “What do we do if we, ah, see a U-boat, Mr. Vern?”
“Report it as soon as we can by the radio, stay with it, keep it down.”
Exactly what Marshall had said. “So we annoy them?”
Mr. Vern smiled his rickety grin. “Is there something you’d rather do?”
I coiled the rope. “Well, they’re Germans. We’re at war. Aren’t we supposed to,” I thought for a moment, “take them prisoner?”
In his grin, his teeth looked like a crumbling stone wall. “And do you think the Germans, who have guns and torpedoes and can go underwater, would let us take them prisoner?”
“I don’t know. Well, how did the police, ah, catch you when you were running rum?”
“They didn’t catch me. We disguised ourselves as fisherman. We were more worried about pirates than the G-men.”
“Couldn’t we, I don’t know, scare the Germans somehow?”
“Well, there was a trick that we used against the pirates because they were better armed than we were. We could get the machine gun from my boat.”
Mr. Vern’s boat was a thirty-six foot double cabin picket, probably decommissioned from the Coast Guard after the first world war. I could see a tightly made bunk inside through a porthole, and thus I worried slightly less about him.
The machine gun was ancient and brined with rust and salt. He patted the grimy gun. “Got this in the Spanish Civil War, what, five years ago.”
The encrusted gun looked a lot older than that. “Which side did you fight for, sir?” I hoped it wasn’t the fascists.
“I ran guns, Miss Eve.”
We carried the gun back to our sailboat and bolted it to the deck at the stern. Father would be furious about the holes in the teak deck, but I didn’t want to tell Mr. Vern that my Daddy would be mad if we made owies on the boat in the process of defending the country from the Nazis. We threw a tarp over the gun. It looked exactly like a sheet of white canvas draped over a big, pointy machine gun.
“If we see a U-boat surface, you crawl under the tarp,” Mr. Vern said, “and I’ll make like I’m trying to run away but I’ll cut across their bow and run in front of them,” his hands swam in the air, “and they’ll pull up beside us, and I’ll make like I think we’re being taken prisoner.” He raised his hard, ropey hands in the air, and his squinty eyes widened in mock fear. “Then, when the U-boat is alongside and the men are on the deck, you throw back the tarp and shoot them. Don’t shoot low, cause I’ll duck. Shoot high.”
“This worked against pirates?” I asked.
He guffawed. He actually guffawed. “We outran the pirates. Never used the gun.”
I tried to drape the tarp so the machine gun was less obvious, but the canvas was heavy and the wind flapped it. “Have any of the Picket Patrols seen a U-boat?”
“Oh, yes, Miss Eve. Three months ago Captain Harry Harrison saw one off of North Carolina. Said that it rode up to the surface, took a look around, and dove. Probably got within five hundred yards.”
The Atlantic was flat. I had always thought that sailing was like ice skating, all surface, but now the Atlantic looked deep.
We patrolled off the coast. I sat on deck in the shade of the sail, because my mother would have a fit if I were sunburned again. Mr. Vern wrestled the sails. We talked about the wind and waves. He read the sky and taught me how to tell if a squall was coming or, worse, a lull that might leave you becalmed.
He didn’t ask me about my life. I was just as glad he didn’t.
Grandmother may have sided with my parents during the day because I’d sneaked out of the house, driven the car, and sailed off with a rum-running gun smuggler. Even she would only stand for so much mutiny.
But sailing was glorious. The boat lifting over the waves made me forget all about the hurricane brewing at home. Mr. Vern and I hardened up the sails and dove into the wind like great eagles soaring.
I sat under the headsail for a while, to rest a bit, and to admire the clear, blue sky. I could have gone below, to the bunks and tiny galley under the deck, but I liked being up on the deck. Being below wasn’t proper sailing. My father had always sent me below whenever I was too silly as a child.
A light touch on my arm. I jumped. Water sprayed my face and arms, for we had turned back into the wind. Mr. Vern said, “We’ve turned around. Didn’t want you to get burnt.”
The sailboat bucked in the surf. The hull slapped the waves as we slid into the troughs. “Thank you, sir.” The sun was overhead. I had fallen asleep. Good Lord, what would become of me? Falling asleep like that! “What time is it?”
“Around noon,” he said.
I leaned against the mast and watched the main sail billow.
On the shore, sand clung around the rocks in one of the few low spots in this shoreline of cliffs. The surf was gentler, there. Summer houses behind the trees belonged to friends. At a summer tea at the Bellingtons’ house last summer, while my mother pushed me toward eligible young men, I had slipped away to talk with Eunice, Kate’s sister, because Eunice had been at Radcliffe two years then and I wanted to know how hard the classes were and if there were nuns at Radcliffe.
I’d seen the coastline and these houses on these cliffs nearly every day when Marshall and I sailed last summer, though I had usually been holding a straw sunhat clamped firmly to my head while the brim flopped in the wind and struggling with my whipping, long skirt.
So I knew, when I saw two men rowing a black rubber life raft and heading toward the very small strip of beach near the Bellingtons’ house, that something was wrong.
“Mr. Vern? Sir?”
“Yes, miss?” He touched ropes which slanted up to the top of the mast as he walked over to where I stood.
“There’s something wrong.”
“And what’s that, Miss Eve?”
“Those two men in the raft shouldn’t be there.”
“Why not?”
I told him about the Bellingtons’ house and about who else lived back there—the Metcalfs, the Choates, the Crowninshields, the Tudors, the Eliots, the Winthrops, all very old money—pointing to where trees hid their houses. “People like that would never have a rubber liferaft, and they wouldn’t row it.”
“How deep is the water, here?” he asked.
“Too deep and too cold to swim. It is deep enough for us to get between them and the beach. Maybe a U-boat sank another ship, and those men need to be rescued. Maybe they’re from that ship three days ago, the merchant marine that was hit.”
Mr. Vern rubbed his hoary hand up and down a rope that slanted over him. “Yeah, could be that. Awful long time, though. The Navy came in and picked up survivors after the U-boat left.”
“Maybe the Germans got another ship during the night.”
“Could be. Why don’t you go below decks? It wouldn’t do to let them see there’s only an old man guarding a fetching young girl. Sometimes even our brave merchant seamen can be at sea too long.”
When I realized what he meant, my stomach under my breastbone trembled. I was out in the middle of the sea with only Mr. Vern, and if he were a lunatic, he could have raped and killed me, thrown my dead body into the deep ocean, and escaped with the sailboat.
Shuddering crawled down my arms and legs.
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