Atop an Underwood (29 page)

“Whoo!” cried Bill, taking off his hat. “That was a neat bit of Doug Fairbanks dash!” Wesley swung in beside him and slammed the door to. [...]

“Are you sure about that ship in Boston?”

“Yeah, ... the Westminster, transport-cargo, bound for Greenland; did you bring your birth-certificate, man?”

Everhart slapped his wallet; “Right with me.”

Wesley yawned again, pounding his breast as if to put a stop to his sleepiness. Everhart found himself wishing he were back home in his soft bed, with four hours yet to sleep before Sis's breakfast, while the milkman went by down on Claremont Avenue and a trolley roared past on sleepy Broadway.

A drop of rain shattered on his brow.

“We'd best get a ride right soon!” muttered Wesley turning a gaze down the deserted road.

They took shelter beneath a tree while the rain began to patter softly on the overhead leaves; a wet, steamy aroma rose in a humid wave.

“Rain, rain go away,” Wesley sang softly, “come again another day...”

Ten minutes later, a big red truck picked them up. They smiled enthusiastically at the driver.

“How far you goin', pal?” asked Wesley.

“Boston!” roared the driver, and for the next hundred and twenty miles, while they traveled through wet fields along glistening roads, past steaming pastures and small towns, through a funereal Worcester, down a splashing macadam highway leading directly toward Boston under lowering skies, the truckman said nothing further.

Everhart was startled from a nervous sleep when he heard Wesley's voice ... hours had passed swiftly.

“Boston, man!”

He opened his eyes; they were rolling along a narrow, cobblestoned street, flanked on each side with grim warehouses. It had stopped raining.

“How long have I been sleeping?” grinned Bill, rubbing his eyes while he held the spectacles on his lap.

“Dunno,” answered Wesley, drawing from his perennial cigarette. The truck driver pulled to a lurching halt.

“Okay?” he shouted harshly.

Wesley nodded: “Thanks a million, buddy. We'll be seeing you.”

“So long, boys,” he called. “See you again.”

Everhart jumped down from the high cab and stretched his legs luxuriously, waving his hand at the truck driver. Wesley stretched his arms slowly: “Eeyah! That was a long ride; I slept a bit meself.”

They stood on a narrow sidewalk, which had already begun to dry after the brief morning rain. Heavy trucks piled past in the street, rumbling on the ancestral cobblestones, and it wasn't until a group of them had gone, leaving the street momentarily deserted and clear of exhaust fumes, that Bill detected a clean sea smell in the air. Above, broken clouds scuttled across the luminous silver skies; a ray of warmth had begun to drop from the part of the sky where a vague dazzle hinted the position of the sun.

“I've been to Boston before,” chatted Bill, “but never like this ... this is the real Boston.”

Wesley's face lit in a silent laugh: “I think you're talkin' through your hat again, man! Let's start the day off with a beer in Scollay Square.”

They walked on in high spirits.

Scollay Square was a short five minutes away. Its subway entrances, movie marquees, cut-rate stores, passport photo studios, lunchrooms, cheap jewelry stores, and bars faced the busy traffic of the street with a vapid morning sullenness. Scores of sailors in Navy whites sauntered along the cluttered pavements, stopping to gaze at cheap store fronts and theater signs.

Wesley led Bill to a passport photo studio where an old man charged them a dollar for two small photos.

“They're for your seaman's papers,” explained Wesley. “How much money does that leave you?”

“A quarter,” Everhart grinned sheepishly.

“Two beers and a cigar; let's go,” Wesley said, rubbing his hands. “I'll borrow a fin from a seaman.”

Everhart looked at his pictures: “Don't you think I look like a tough seadog here?”

“Hell, man, yes!” cried Wesley.

In the bar they drank a bracing glass of cold beer and talked about Polly, Day, Ginger, and Eve.

“Nice bunch of kids,” said Wesley slowly.

Everhart gazed thoughtfully at the bartop: “I'm wondering how long Polly waited for us last night. I'll bet this is the first time Madame Butterfly was ever stood up,” he added with a grin. “Polly's quite the belle around Columbia, you know.” It sounded strange to say “Columbia” ... how far away was it now? [...]

“Well! We're in Boston,” beamed Bill when they were back on the street. “What's on the docket?”

“First thing to do,” said Wesley, leading his companion across the street, “is to mosey over to the Union Hall and check up on the Westminster ... we might get a berth right off.”

They walked down Hanover street, with its cheap shoe stores and bauble shops, and turned left at Portland street; a battered door, bearing the inscription “National Maritime Union,” led up a flight of creaking steps into a wide, rambling hall. Grimy windows at each end served to allow a gray light from outside to creep inward, a gloomy, half-hearted illumination which outlined the bare, unfurnished immensity of the room. Only a few benches and folding chairs had been pushed against the walls, and these were now occupied by seamen who sat talking in low tones: they were dressed in various civilian clothing, but Everhart instantly recognized them as seamen ... there, in the dismal gloom of their musty-smelling shipping headquarters, these men sat, each with the patience and passive quiet of men who know they are going back to sea, some smoking pipes, others calmly perusing the “Pilot,” official N.M.U. publication, others dozing on the benches, and all possessed of the serene, waiting wisdom of a Wesley Martin.

“Wait here,” said Wesley, shuffling toward the partitioned office across the broad plank floor. “I'll be right back.” Everhart sat on the suitcase, peering.

“Hey, Martin!” howled a greeting voice from the folding chairs. “Martin you old crum!” A seaman was running across the hall toward Wesley, whooping with delight in his discovery. The echoing cries failed to disturb the peace of the other seamen, though, indeed, they glanced briefly and curiously toward the noisy reunion.

Wesley was astounded.

“Jesus!” he cried. “Nick Meade!”

Meade fairly collapsed into Wesley, almost knocking him over in his zeal to come to grips in a playful, bearish embrace; they pounded each other enthusiastically, and at one point Meade went so far as to push Wesley's chin gently with his fist, calling him as he did so every conceivable name he could think of; Wesley, for his part, manifested his delight by punching his comrade squarely in the stomach and howling a vile epithet as he did so. They whooped it up raucously for at least a half a minute while Everhart grinned appreciatively from his suitcase.

Then Meade asked a question in a low tone, hand on Wesley's shoulder; the latter answered confidentially, to which Meade roared once more and began anew to pummel Wesley, who turned away, his thin frame shaking with soundless laughter. Presently, they made their way toward the office, exchanging news with the breathless rapidity of good friends who meet after a separation of years.

“Shipping out?” raced Meade.

“Yeah.”

“Let's see Harry about a double berth.”

“Make it three, I've got a mate with me.”

“Come on! The Westminster's in port; she's taking on 'most a full crew.

“I know.”

“You old son of a bitch!” cried Meade, unable to control his joy at the chance meeting. “I haven't seen you since forty,” kicking Wesley in the pants, “when we got canned in Trinidad!”

“For startin' that riot!” remembered Wesley, kicking back playfully while Meade dodged aside. “You friggin' communist, don't start kickin' me again ... I remember the time you got drunk aboard ship and went around kickin' everybody till that big Bosun pinned your ears back!”

They howled their way into the inner office where a sour faced Union man looked up blandly from his papers.

“Act like seamen, will you?” he growled.

“Hangover Harry,” informed Meade. “He uses up all the dues money to get drunk. Look at that face will you?”

“All right Meade,” admonished Harry. “What are you looking for, I'm busy ...”

They made arrangements to be on hand and near the office door that afternoon when the official ship calls from the S.S. Westminster would be posted, although Harry warned them those first come would be first served. “Two-thirty sharp,” he grunted. “If you're not here, you don't get the jobs.” [...]

But a half hour later, Wesley rose and told Meade to meet him in the Union Hall at two-thirty; and with this, he and Everhart left the bar and turned their steps toward Atlantic Avenue.

“Now for your seaman's papers,” he said to Bill.

Atlantic Avenue was almost impossible to cross, so heavy with the rush of traffic, but once they had regained the other side and stood near a pier, Billy's breast pounded as he saw, docked not a hundred feet away, a great gray freighter, its slanting hull striped with rust, a thin stream of water arching from the scuppers, and the mighty bow standing high above the roof of the wharf shed.

“Is that it?” he cried.

“No, she's at Pier Six.”

They walked toward the Maritime Commission, the air heavy with the rotting stench of stockpiles, oily waters, fish, and hemp. Dreary marine equipment stores faced the street, show windows cluttered with blue peacoats, dungarees, naval officers uniforms, small compasses, knives, oilers' caps, seamen's wallets, and all manner of paraphernalia for the men of the sea.

The Maritime Commission occupied one floor of a large building that faced the harbor. While a pipe-smoking old man was busy preparing his papers, Everhart could see, beyond the nearby wharves and railroad yards, a bilious stretch of sea spanning toward the narrows, where two lighthouses stood like gate posts to a dim Atlantic. A seagull swerved past the window.

An energetic little man fingerprinted him in the next room, cigarette in mouth almost suffocating him as he pressed Bill's inky fingers on the papers and on a duplicate.

“Now go down to the Post Office building,” panted the little man when he finished, “and get your passport certificate. Then you'll be all set.”

Wesley was leaning against the wall smoking when Bill left the fingerprinting room with papers all intact.

“Passport certificate next I guess,” Bill told Wesley, nodding toward the room.

“Right!”

They went to the Post Office Building on Milk Street where Bill filled out an application for his passport and was handed a certificate for his first foreign voyage; Wesley, who had borrowed five dollars from Nick Meade, paid Bill's fee.

“Now I'm finished I hope?” laughed Bill when they were back in the street.

“That's all.”

“Next thing is to get our berths on the Westminster. Am I correct?”

“Right.”

“Well,” smiled Bill, slapping his papers, “I'm in the merchant marine.”

At two-thirty that afternoon, Wesley, Bill, Nick Meade and seven other seamen landed jobs on the S.S. Westminster. They walked down from the Union hall down to Pier Six in high spirits, passing through the torturous weave of Boston's waterfront streets, crossing Atlantic Avenue and the Mystic river drawbridge, and finally coming to a halt along the Great Northern Avenue docks. Silently they gazed at the S.S. Westminster, looming on their left, her monstrous gray mass squatting broadly in the slip, very much, to Everhart's eyes, like an old bath tub.

[...]

He lay back on the pillow and realized these were his first moments of solitary deliberation since making his rash decision to get away from the thoughtless futility of his past life. It has been a good life, he ruminated, a life possessing at least a minimum of service and security. But he wasn't sorry he had made this decision; it would be a change, as he'd so often repeated to Wesley, a change regardless of everything. And the money was good in the merchant marine, the companies were not reluctant to reward the seamen for their labor and courage; money of that amount would certainly be welcomed at home, especially now with the old man's need for medical care. It would be a relief to pay for his operation and perhaps soften his rancor against a household that had certainly done him little justice. In his absorption for his work and the insistent demands of a highly paced social life, Bill admitted to himself, as he had often done, he had not proved an attentive son; there were such distances between a father and his son, a whole generation of differences in temperament, tastes, views, habits; yet the old man, sitting in that old chair with his pipe, listening to an ancestral radio while the new one boomed its sleek, modern power from the living room, was he not fundamentally the very meaning and core of Bill Everhart, the creator of all that Bill Everhart had been given to work with? And what right, Bill now demanded angrily, had his sister and brother-in-law to neglect him so spiritually? What if he were a lamenting old man?

Slowly, now, Everhart began to realize why life had seemed so senseless, so fraught with folly and lack of real purpose in New York, in the haste and oration of his teaching days—he had never paused to take hold of anything, let alone the lonely heart of an old father, not even the idealisms with which he had begun life as a seventeen-year-old spokesman for the working class movement on Columbus Circle Saturday afternoons. All these he had lost, by virtue of a sensitivity too fragile for everyday disillusionment ... his father's complaints, the jeers of the Red baiters and the living, breathing social apathy that supported their jeers in phlegmatic silence. A few shocks from the erratic fuse box of life, and Everhart had thrown up his hands and turned to a life of academic isolation. Yet, in the realms of this academic isolation, wasn't there sufficient indication that all things pass and turn to dust? What was that sonnet where Shakespeare spoke sonorously of time “rooting out the work of masonry?” Is a man to be timeless and patient, or is he to be a pawn of time? What did it avail a man to plant roots deep into a society by all means foolish and Protean?