“Yeah, well—fuck what all means, Billy,” Donna would say. “What gets to me is that I don’t know what you like about me, and what it is about me that you don’t like.”
“There’s nothing about you I don’t like, Donna. I like all of you,” I promised her.
“Yeah, well—if you’re going to leave me for a woman, like a straight guy one day would, I get it. Or if you’re going to go back to guys, like a gay guy one day would—well, I get that, too,” Donna said. “But the thing about you, Billy—and I don’t get this at all—is that I don’t know who or what you’re going to leave me for.”
“I don’t know, either,” I would tell her, truthfully.
“Yeah, well—that’s why I’m leaving you, Billy,” Donna said.
“I’m going to miss you like crazy,” I told her. (This was also true.)
“I’m already getting over you, Billy,” was all she said. But until that night in Hamburg, I believed that Donna and I had a chance together.
I USED TO BELIEVE my mom and I had a chance together, too. I mean more than the “chance” of staying friends; I mean that I used to think nothing could ever drive us apart. My mother once worried about my most minor injuries—she imagined my life was in danger at the first cough or sneeze. There was something childlike about her fears for me; my nightmares gave her nightmares, my mom once said.
My mother told me that, as a child, I had “fever dreams”; if so, they persisted into my teenage years. Whatever they were, they seemed more real than dreams. If there was any reality to the most recurrent of these dreams, it eluded me for the longest time. But one night, when I’d been sick—I was actually recuperating from scarlet fever—it seemed that Richard Abbott was telling me a war story, yet Richard’s only war story was the lawn-mower accident that had disqualified him from military service. This wasn’t Richard Abbott’s story; it was my father’s war story, or one of them, and Richard couldn’t possibly have told it to me.
The story (or the dream) began in Hampton, Virginia—Hampton Roads, Port of Embarkation, was where my code-boy father boarded a transport ship for Italy. The transports were Liberty ships. The ground cadre of the 760th Bomb Squadron left Virginia on a dark and threatening January day; within the sheltered harbor, the soldiers had their first meal at sea—pork chops, I was told (or dreamed). When my dad’s convoy hit the open seas, the Liberty ships encountered an Atlantic winter storm. The enlisted personnel occupied the fore and aft holds; each man had his helmet hung by his bunk—the helmets would soon become vomit basins for seasick soldiers. But the sergeant didn’t get seasick. My mom had told me that he’d grown up on Cape Cod; as a boy, he’d been a sailor—he was immune to seasickness.
Consequently, my code-boy dad did his duty—he emptied the seasick soldiers’ helmets. Amidships, at deck level—a laborious climb from the bunks, below the deck—was a huge head. (Even in the dream, I had to interrupt the story and ask what a “head” was; the person I thought was Richard, but it couldn’t have been Richard, told me that the head was a huge latrine—the toilets stretched across the entire ship.)
During one of many helmet-emptying ordeals, my father stopped to sit down on one of the toilets. There was no point in trying to pee while standing up; the ship was pitching and rolling—you had to sit down. My dad sat on the toilet with both his hands gripping the seat. Seawater sloshed around his ankles, soaking his shoes and pants. At the farthest end of the long row of toilets, another soldier sat holding the seat, but this soldier’s grip was precarious. My dad saw that the other soldier was also immune to seasickness; he was actually reading, holding on to the toilet seat with only one hand. When the ship suddenly pitched more steeply, the bookworm lost his grip. He came skipping over the toilet seats—his ass made a slapping sound—until he collided with my father at the opposite end of the row of toilets.
“Sorry—I just had to keep reading!” he said. Then the ship rolled in the other direction, and the soldier sallied forth, skipping over the seats again. When he’d slid all the way to the last toilet, he either lost control of the book or he let it go, gripping the toilet seat with both hands. The book floated away in the seawater.
“What were you reading?” the code-boy called.
“Madame Bovary!” the soldier shouted in the storm.
“I can tell you what happens,” the sergeant said.
“Please don’t!” the bookworm answered. “I want to read it for myself!”
In the dream, or in the story someone (who was not Richard Abbott) was telling me, my father never saw this soldier for the rest of the voyage. “Past a barely visible Gibraltar,” I remember the dream (or someone) saying, “the convoy slipped into the Mediterranean.”
One night, off the coast of Sicily, the soldiers belowdecks were awakened by crashing noises and the sounds of cannon fire; the convoy was under aerial attack by the Luftwaffe. Subsequently, my dad heard that an adjacent Liberty ship had been hit and sunk with all hands. As for the soldier who’d been reading Madame Bovary in the storm, he failed to introduce himself to my dad before the convoy made landfall at Taranto. The code-boy’s war story would continue and conclude without my disappearing dad ever encountering the toilet-traveling man.
“Years later,” said the dream (or the storyteller), my father was “finishing up” at Harvard. He was riding on the Boston subway, the MTA; he’d got on at the Charles Street station, and was on his way back to Harvard Square.
A man who got on at Kendall Square began to stare at him. The sergeant was “discomfited” by the strange man’s interest in him; “it felt like an unnatural interest—a foreboding of something violent, or at least unpleasant.” (It was the language of the story that made this recurrent dream seem more real to me than other dreams. It was a dream with a first-person narrator—a dream with a voice.)
The man on the subway started changing seats; he kept moving closer to my dad. When they were almost in physical contact with each other, and the subway was slowing down for the next stop, the stranger turned to my father and said, “Hi. I’m Bovary. Remember me?” Then the subway stopped at Central Square, where the bookworm got off, and the sergeant was once more on his way to Harvard Square.
I WAS TOLD THAT the fever part of scarlet fever abates within a week—usually within three to five days. I’m pretty sure that I was over the fever part when I asked Richard Abbott if he’d ever told me this story—perhaps at the onset of the rash, or during the sore-throat part, which began a couple of days before the rash. My tongue had been the color of a strawberry, but when I first spoke to Richard about this most vivid and recurrent dream, my tongue was a beefy dark red—more of a raspberry color—and the rash was starting to go away.
“I don’t know this story, Bill,” Richard told me. “This is the first time I’ve heard it.”
“Oh.”
“It sounds like a Grandpa Harry story to me,” Richard said.
But when I asked my grandfather if he’d told me the Madame Bovary story, Grandpa Harry started his “Ah, well” routine, hemming and hawing his way in circles around the question. No, he “definitely didn’t” tell me the story, my grandfather said. Yes, Harry had heard the story—“a secondhand version, if I recall correctly”—but he conveniently couldn’t remember who’d told him. “It was Uncle Bob, maybe—perhaps it was Bob who told you, Bill.” Then my grandfather felt my forehead, and mumbled words to the effect that my fever seemed to be gone. When he peered into my mouth, he announced: “That’s still a pretty ugly-lookin’ tongue, though I would say the rash is disappearin’ a bit.”