“It makes you the last of a kind,” said Howard, who, in a vague way, had managed to persuade himself that he had “kept up”—who in a vague way felt that he was asked for endorsement, or asked to accept an apology.
“One of the last. Levere was like that. Chaney. All different now, of course.” Brace rubbed at the two dull gold stripes. “It means, at least, that you always have a command.”
Wet automobiles passed in the street, and along the sidewalks people moved through a haze that promised winter, a rain so light and dull that it was scarcely even rain. Thick mist, perhaps.
“Married,” Brace told Howard. “Nearly fifteen years. The first time didn’t take.”
“I think… another bottle?”
“Can’t think of a single reason why not… I just remembered. Glass has the deck on a Morgenthau class… never made the Mafia… presume that things kept coming up.”
“I certainly remember Glass.”
Young girls huddled in raincoats, walked beneath umbrellas to protect their hair. A gray-haired woman passed, then two young sailors, then a businessman who strode brisk and grayly. In the streets cars glistened, dull hazed with a sheen of water. Brace and Howard talked, measured—from the lofty view of experience—how much the other drank, matched but did not exceed the amount.
“…had to leave,” said Howard. “Figured it all out later. A lot later. When Dane died, I gave out. It was as if I had become unpropped.”
Brace, about to light a cigarette, paused. Even before he spoke, before his voice gave other inflections, his face showed that he had dropped the gossipy conversation. He thumbed a lighter. It flared. He lit the smoke, and he slurped smoke with a sort of gratitude for the momentary pause that smoking grants. His thin, narrow nose, below the heavily wrinkled forehead, beside cheeks that were furrowed, running with seams—his nose made him look hawklike. He did not look like Levere had looked, but he looked like a man emigrated from the boundaries of Levere’s country, the inshore sea.
“I wanted to be a musician once,” said Brace. “Once I was a pretty good musician, for a kid. My father, who was not a musician—” He again drew smoke, this time slowly, and smoke curled around the lines etched above and beneath his eyes— “taught me not to be a musician. Now, I am not exactly certain what that means, but I am willing to talk about Dane.”
“We were spooked,” said Howard. “Conally and I. I tried to get Dane to take me, instead of you. Maybe I didn’t mistrust you. Maybe I just mistrusted everyone but myself.”
Brace sipped at his wine, drank deeply, again sipped. Beyond the window a young couple stood in mild argument about the restaurant. They made a decision, walked on.
“The whole crew was spooked,” Brace said, “but I’ll be double-dog-damn if they weren’t good men.” He sat, staring through the window into the gray, misting rain. “I’ve seen strange things since, even stranger than that. The sea sends strange things.”
“We thought,” said Howard, “that we had received an omen. We believed we understood the omen.” He felt in his pocket, found an empty package. Brace pushed his pack of smokes across the table.
“A lot of that crew saw something,” Brace said, “but I don’t recall that anyone made comparisons. We’ll never know if each of those men saw the same thing.” He leaned across the table to light Howard’s smoke. “I haven’t thought about it in a long time,” said Brace, “but I did think about it for a long time. Years ago—”
“Dane didn’t trust me,” said Howard. “I don’t know how he knew that I was a short timer.”
“—and I thought until I got it figured out,” said Brace. “Dane was not a complicated man. He was trying to teach me something.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I thought he was trying to kill me,” said Brace. “Either that, or I thought we were in some kind of battle.” He touched his worn sleeve. “I was afraid to go with him.”
“Now I really don’t understand.”
“Why should you?” Brace said. “I was young and making wrong guesses. Something was going on that you didn’t know about.”
“You thought he was not a simple man?”
“I hit him,” said Brace. “When I was trapped belowdecks on that yacht. I was a kid. I was so scared. I had one foot propped on something that kept trying to roll away, and the water was on my neck. I can still feel it. I had nothing to lose.”
“Glass never said… no one ever said anything about that.”
“I asked them not to,” said Brace. “Dane smacked me. I had nothing to lose. I smacked him back. Twice. I laid it on. I bruised everything on that ox except his appetite.”
Two nuns walked past the restaurant, women, who, if not vowed to silence, knew at least some of the great meanings of silence.
“Snow and Dane were both down there,” said Brace. “I learned one thing, but I learned both sides of it.”
The world’s oldest lieutenant sat beside a man who had so far done but yeoman service in the cause of history. One man dangled the yarns of a life spent saving occasional sparks from the quenching sea, the other mulled catastrophes which had severed the lives of millions. Strangely, perhaps, and perhaps for only a moment, they understood the grand cynicism that ruled them; the knowledge that in this world’s hopes and dreams and illusions, in its facades and romantic encumbrances, in the seeming pleasures and devotions of easy belief, of national feeling culled from gutters by their betters, of gods most hopelessly cracked, most disgraced and hopelessly cracked, there are few seas.
“You’ll remember,” Brace said after a long pause, “how Lamp used to talk. He was always this and that, never before, never behind, just mostly between.” He brushed at a worn sleeve that carried its worn and tarnished insignia. The small Coast Guard shield was like a golden, unblinking eye.
“I knew him better,” said Howard.
“It is a zoo,” said Brace, “but we were wrong about Jonah. And Lamp, so was he. We only had one ghost.”
“I wonder if I understand.”
“Why should you?” said Brace. “You didn’t have one.” His face momentarily held a touch of young, potato-peeling wisdom, mast-painting wisdom.
“What didn’t I have?”
Brace’s face changed, the furrows deepening, and he seemed to own the wisdom of Reeser Lamp, or Levere. He looked into the darkening gray street where automobile headlights were now beginning to glow as if attempting to burn through the mist. “Our fathers,” Brace said. “No matter what shape it took, we have only ever had that one ghost. I thought and thought about this.”
And Howard, a son only of history, understood with a glad and rushing, sudden opening that there was at least one small history which contained no madness; as Snow had insisted, and which only he, Howard, could tell. Howard asked himself a question, and answered the question while he was asking. When God fails what does Jonah do? Howard finished his drink. He shook hands, made vague promise to meet. He drew on his coat, he backwardly waved, and left.
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS
Small Ships—Hurry Up Jobs—Lousy Weather—Even the Oldtimers Get Green Around the Gills
—by Jack Cady, YN2
A searchlight bounces off a rolling pitching trawler. The white coil of heaving line stretches into her rigging. Towing hawser hisses out. A course is set for Portland, Boston, New York, Norfolk. Another notch is cut into the wheel.
Nearly every Coast Guard vessel passes a line to someone in distress over the period of a year, the major portion of the lifesaving end of the service is borne by small vessels ranging from 64 to 165 feet, including the larger WAT class tug. The duty is good from the liberty standpoint most of the time. The duty underway can be, and usually is, a bitch. Suffice it to say that men coming aboard from weather duty are certain they won’t get sick. They nearly always do. Time and experience are only partial insurance. Men with 18 to 20 years’ service walk around giving phony belches on a bad day.