My parents were good. I could ask them almost anything. I didn’t ask about the terrible thing Sue had said, that I’d been a beast all covered with hair at birth and I was still a beast sometimes. My parents didn’t try to divide me, I soon knew I was the only one. One Saturday in June of ’39 or ’40 a moment after I’d been telling Al and Gail that I wasn’t my parents’ real kid because I’d been changed at the hospital, my father came around the house and heard me say that because my head was so big when I was born my mom couldn’t have any more pups. My father took me aside later and could not explain exactly why he hadn’t liked the way I put it, but anyway he didn’t like the “pups” part. Any more than I like transitions. Gail was emphatic: “‘Course she can have more.” But Al loyally said, “Cripes, he oughta know.” May Emma’s dreams always show legged, armed, smiling anatomies, not the linenfold abstracts facing Tracy’s youngest when that tan, listless, suburban child opens her coloring book, while her mother — phoning me for the first time in years — tells me she’s worried about her brother Hugh and can I recommend a psychiatrist. There is time, though no need, for Emma to come someday to her father’s terrible delight in the Force-Field. Its overpopulated commonwealth of distances can be ruled only in the exercise of a rare gift. This consists in that ripe triangle arcing between (a) the polylinked Pons Varolii, (b) the point in the Spinal Bulb where winking is controlled, and (c) a point so perfectly between the cerebral hemispheres as to be of neither. This gift, insofar as it is embodied within the body, I have named the Vectoral Muscle, and I’m beginning to feel that it is not at home with dialectic. “If you mean,” says my father, “just thinking in twos, why not say so?”
“We were getting grass on the picture,” said Al, ending his story and stopping in his skivvies to look out the third-floor window of the room he rented with two other sailors who were generally out on weather patrol when Al’s cutter was in.
“What’s grass?” I asked, still feeling the bear hug I’d given long lost Gail; and Gail answered for Aclass="underline" interference lines on the radar-scope reflecting electronic noise. “Hey,” she said to Hal, “where’d you get that?” a dark blue blazer with gold buttons.
“We can’t change on the ship,” Al said. “In the public library here if you’re in your blues people look at you, and you can’t concentrate.”
He’s begun memorizing poems from a paperback treasury and he reads world almanacs. This small northeast coast city is the same one Bob and Petty will move to the outskirts of a year from now, the living room on the mainland, the island camp a few years later.
“But why not tailor-mades?” said Gail. She rolled her eyes and grinned sweetly. “They’re pretty.”
“You got to if you don’t wear civvies,” said Al. “The regulation blues’r like overalls, and tailor-mades don’t cost so much but they cost enough. We split the rent three ways, it’s only ten bucks a month, so don’t give me a hard time.”
“I’m not saying anything,” said Gail, and asked about linen.
I asked her how she knew about radar. It was late afternoon, October, I hadn’t seen Gail for three years at least, probably not since the start of Al’s hitch.
“I’m the one he writes,” she said. “Besides you.”
“If you’re not saying anything,” Al kept at her, “tell me which of your brothers is paying your hotel room this weekend?”
“I should phone for a room,” I said, but I knew Gail’s hotel would be half empty.
We watched Al tie his big cordovans, putting one foot and then the other up on the straight chair. Then he pulled on pressed khakis tucking in the tails of his white Oxford button-down.
“My only brother, if you must know,” Gail said to Al and got off the bed.
He kissed her on the lips. “Well you know what I mean, Ab.”
Their father’s phlebitis had him in and out of bed, and the leg got so bad he’d been in the hospital but there was nothing to be done for it. Al was out of touch with home; Gail worked in Boston and wasn’t sure if she cared about his not writing home but was sure how she cared about him. He’d been to Boston, but this was her first time here.
“Daddy’s been impossible, and I do know what you mean. Why shouldn’t you enjoy yourself when you’re not putting in five weeks on station. Those other two you share with haven’t got it as good being on the same ship. You got this place all to yourself.”
“The landlady won’t let us have girls up.” Al looked at me and added, “Not with square heels anyhow.”
Gail sat back down. “What about me?”
“I told her my sister was coming this weekend.”
“I can imagine what she thought.” Gail sat very straight on the bed; she was half-turned toward me. She wore a brown tweed suit, her trenchcoat lay over her gray-and-blue plaid suitcase on a chair. She’d done a little too much with her hair.
This is getting out of hand, Dom; to simplify, we’ll leave the plaid case behind.
Well, Crazy Annette was waiting for us in an upstairs Chinese place just a stone’s throw, Al said, from the library. I thought she’d had a few, even allowing for the notorious whimsy that accounted for her uproarious nickname with the Coast Guard. On the other hand, to those boys from Florida and Georgia she wasn’t just another Mainiac, she was oddly, though too oddly, pretty, and she was pretty smart. At seventeen her dark moist eyes seemed to have been enlarged not by Nature but by daydreaming or hypnosis. “She reads Fitzgerald,” Al said the other weekend I’d come up. Her father was a policeman. Gail of course hadn’t met her, and Annette, sitting down opposite Gail, made much of me. When we’d met two months ago we’d expatiated on my astrological sign. Her father subscribed to a six-dollar-a-year horoscope. Now, with a quick little hello to Gail, Annette touching my shoulder and wrist several times gave me a repetitive account of why I was entering a hazardous period. I would not be able to rely on friends — she ticked off my situation, touched my leg with her finger — I’d have to be “circumspect” or I’d lose a position I’d worked hard to reach. Annette was a bit breathless and kept eying Gail and punctuating her nonsense about Leos with little laughs of relief. When the waitress came and was enthusiastically introduced by Al to Gail and me as having gone to Annette’s high school, Al ordered the Number Four Family for us. I didn’t smell alcohol on Annette, but when Al said again that the Number Four was a little bit of everything and this was a good good place and I drily murmured, “This looks like a great place” as I caught the noncommittal eye of a possibly Hawaiian sailor I suspected was a shipmate of Al’s, Annette got the giggles and didn’t stop even when she put her head on my shoulder.
“Why,” said I, “‘a most sweet wench,’ ‘the honey of Hybla’”; in one of my letters a year or two ago I’d told Al we were studying Henry IV. Al smiled at Annette but unconvincingly.
“Where’s Hybla?” asked Gail.
“Who knows?” I said. “Mythical or made up.”
The waitress set down a pink-flowered teapot and Al poured too soon, and the tea was pale and Gail poured the cup back before he could stop her (“No no”). Without looking at me, he said, “It’s in Sicily.”
“Not really,” I said, “not now.x”