Annette said, “I just want to know is it good or bad,” and giggled.
Ignoring her, Al said to me, “‘O thou hast done much harm upon me; before I knew thee, I knew nothing, and now am I, if a man should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked.’ It’s in Sicily.”
He hadn’t overlooked Annette’s queer spark, and it seemed he hadn’t figured out if he was showing Gail off to Crazy Annette or letting his farflung sister Gail share his seaport life even if the port wasn’t Boston.
Gail was asking Annette if she’d miss Portland next year when she went to the State University in Orono, while I said to Al I ceded to his superior knowledge and stood corrected and he said it was the story of his life but interrupted himself—and Annette — to say to Gail (whose high-teased hair seemed too grown-up) that Annette really had it upstairs and would do well at college, the guys on the ship had her all wrong and called her crazy you know just because she had so many smarts and didn’t know what she was going to say next to those rebs fresh out of high school.
But Al heard a wheedling “Anne-ette” and it was a second Hawaiian Coast Guardsman who’d sat down with the first. She said, “Hi, Earl,” and Al said quietly to Gail, “Ward-room stewards, I got no use for them.” The two stewards giggled at something and ordered without looking at the menu the waitress held out to them.
As clearly as I see you, Dom, I hear my step-son Ted patiently say, “But you had an idea in keeping these friends apart, didn’t you? It wasn’t just that you thought they wouldn’t get along. And if they took patronizing views of each other, so what?” So it’s lucky I never told him about Al and Bob.
But you, Dom, would not interrupt with two such questions, Ted’s second derived of course from a set of coördinates other than mine. You cannot; but you would not. Any more than your cased screen above its tripod would interrupt me — or your library — or your phone off the hook, or your list of excuses above it, including the haphazard addition EARTH = SPACECRAFT. You see what I’m trying to do. Because you see the gap between Al and Bob and the kinship system between you and me.
But your forbearance deserves an answer. No, I wasn’t in that provincial city with the main street of a town merely to cheer up one of Our Boys, however remote his stake in Korea. And if I say, with due mildness, that I study Friendship, don’t think my weekend lacked a prudential point. I was just as glad Al was still seeing Annette, because in her rambling reading and her real and wrong sense of her absurdity she was independent.
Or was until faced by me my first visit six weeks before. That Saturday noon for an hour or so Al excused himself. The librarian was lending him a Latin grammar. Annette and I ended down by the Station and my hotel having spaghetti. “You’re the one who told him about the encyclopedia, what an encyclopedia! what a friend! you should be ashamed of yourself, if I had an encyclopedia like his I’d turn it into a pill and swallow it but I wouldn’t swallow you. The way he talks, you’re his best friend. Is that right?”
But what she’d settled down to say afterward was what had made me mosey back now for this October weekend, and Gail had come unexpectedly. When the four of us left the High Asia at seven-thirty it was too early to go to the librarian’s, where Al had gotten us invited, so we went to a bar and sat in a corner in a semi-circular seat, and I wondered how to talk to Annette.
For during that lunch in August just before Al’s little white ship pulled out for Argentia, she’d shown me something. Her voice rose playfully, “Well now what about that crazy encyclopedia?” She said Al kept it in sick bay because he didn’t have room in his footlocker. He read it in sick bay and he and the Corpsman would smoke their pipes. But “you used to be his best friend,” she said, “you must know why he’s so crazy on the subject.”
I knew his father tried to make him take the encyclopedia back where he bought it and I knew a lot more about those twelve abridged volumes. But from Annette I learned that his father had been so mad at Al for spending twenty-two dollars that, bad leg and all, he’d got out of his chair and in two trips carried all but the last two volumes out to his pickup, he was going to take the encyclopedia back to Caesar Bemis at the Old Blacksmith Shop. Listening to Annette I forgot and with my fork in my soup spoon I wound too much spaghetti to get into my mouth. “But when his father was coming back for the last two — which Al always says were One and Two — Al couldn’t stand any more drama and ran out and unloaded six volumes and started back into the house, and they bumped shoulder-to-shoulder and his father claimed to have wrenched his leg. Al told me this three, four times, and it’s a scream till the end but then he’s different.”
What the hell. So he brooded over his defense; we all do. It was his money, and if, granted, I was the one who told him I’d seen the encyclopedia at Bemis’s and that it was a fair encyclopedia and a fair price — though I didn’t know then what the price would be — nobody made Al pay twenty-two bucks for it. No one made his father buy a bottle of whiskey at the Heatsburg Pharmacy that night and get drunk in his chair and say things Al swore he’d never forget. No, what stuck in my mind was something else he’d told Annette, and it didn’t come out till I was paying the cashier (while Annette palmed a pack of spearmint lifesavers), and then Annette said, “Written inside the cover of Volume One was something like—‘Happy Birthday from Uncle Cooley, August 1942.’ Al says he always wondered about — who it was, who was it? someone else’s life, whose life? what kind of people? — and then there’s something in a different hand in the last volume he’s been trying to make out; he made an educated guess, but…”
I told the Italian woman to take out a nickel, and then Annette and I walked back up Congress, through Longfellow Square to the Public Library right by the State, and you know, Dom, that if I chose I could tell you what was playing that night at the State, just as I could tell you the color of Annette’s beret and the exact length of the exciting run up her stocking—“my hose!”—that she discovered entering the main reading room.
From the High Asia you approach the library not from Union Station but the other way; but when Annette, Gail, Al, and I came down to the street we turned not left toward the library but right, in the general direction of the docks if we’d gone far enough. We took the fork at the lower square and as fast as it takes to think it, found ourselves in a bar around the corner from Sears, Roebuck.
A fat boatswain’s mate off the buoy tender called from the bar and Al asked why they’d been out the middle of last night—“not losin’ ya buoys, ah ya?”—and the boatswain’s mate said a dragger had radioed in for a tow. Al said lucky it wasn’t the herring steamer, and Boats said Oh we pulled more than her. He wanted to come over and see Gail and Annette but when the introduction to that “Oh My Papa” trumpet solo blared out and three of Al’s very young shipmates came away from the juke box, their uniform cuffs folded back to show the green and orange dragons sewn inside, Al terminated his exchange with the older man at the bar and put his arm around Gail.
“I never saw the sea till I enlisted.”
“Yes you did,” I said, “once going to Fenway.”
“Oh yes.” He raised a hand off the table and dropped it in acquiescence. Suddenly he seemed not really glad to see anyone tonight — polite but sad.
“Only coming in. Because on the way out you and I had a fierce argument. Tex Hughson won his thirteenth that day, shut out the A’s on three hits.”