Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (9 page)

Still blinking, he looked from McHale to me and back with dark eyes that were hurt and angry, almost like some frustrated coyote’s. And puzzled more than anything else.

“You really had it in for me, didn’t you?” he said. “You really wanted to just stick it to me.”

“Aw, fuck that, Nick,” McHale said, “it wasn’t like that. We-”

But now Nick was looking past us. Just as his darting eyes shifted, we heard another PT’s engines out on the water, and heard something else too. The something else seemed so out of whack with this particular moment that for a second I honestly couldn’t have placed it to save my life. But it was human voices, singing.

“Jesus loves me, this I know
“For the Bible tells me so…”

It was the crew of the 109. As O’Reilly’s boat came up the channel, we could see them all sprawled around every which way in its bow, half naked, sunburned, and dead tired. But they had plenty of water, at least now, and they were singing and swigging from their canteens. Farther
back, near the depth-charge canisters, an improvised canopy had been rigged up. That was where, I heard later, they were keeping McMahon, the crewman who’d been so badly burned that Jack had had to tow him as they swam by a life-belt strap held in his teeth.

The boat wasn’t putting in at this dock, which was full anyway. It was going on up the channel, where there was a field hospital. But Bobby O’Reilly had brought it in close to shore so everyone there could see the men who had been saved, and wave if any of us felt like it.

I didn’t spot Jack right away, because he wasn’t in the bow with his crew. He was sitting in the cockpit, bare-chested, leaning back with one leg hooked over the casing and his face tilted up to the sky. He wasn’t singing, but he was sort of idly tapping time with one hand on the outside of the bridge.

He was wearing sunglasses.

Next to me, McHale had started laughing. “Look at him! Six days on a rock out in the middle of the blue nothing, and he looks like a damn movie star! Where the
fuck
did he
get
those
shadesl
Damn!”

He turned to me. “Big buddy, you know how come I’d like to be rich—really, really rich?”

“The money?” I said.

“Nah. You’d know
everything
McHale said. Then he started waving one hand over his head, and cupping his mouth with the other, and yelling. “Hey
Jackl OVER HERE, JACK!”

Jack heard McHale even over his own crew’s singing, which wasn’t all that powerful, and hiked his neck up to look our way. I’m not even sure he recognized us, but the arm that had been tapping time came up for a second or two. The hand at the end of it waved. Then the boat slid on out of sight up the channel, and when I turned, Nick was standing there in the sand with his black shoes and his, clipboard, staring after it.

You probably know the look on Nick’s face, because the whole God damn country saw it plenty enough times afterward. It was that expression he got that said that no matter how hard he tried, and how good he was at anything, and whichever way he applied himself, and how hard he tried, someone else was going to get all the candy.

And he didn’t know why.

Noticing that I was watching, he smiled anxiously. Then, remembering that I had turned out to be one more of the people who spent their whole lives trying to figure out how to stick it to him, he frowned.

A lot of people have asked me about it since, but I don’t think they ever met or spoke back then. If Nick had just felt some kind of inkling even so, all I can say is I sure hadn’t. You could have knocked me over with a coconut when the two of them ran against each other for president. I’d have put my money on McHale.

Since he believed in nothing, he’s the one who might’ve convinced me there wasn’t a black dot in our wake.

III

Alger and Dean and My Son and I and Whatnot

IT DID PAIN ME TO SEE MY ONETIME PROTÉGÉ LED OFF LIKE A COM
mon criminal, when at the least—between us, be it said!—Alger was an uncommon one. Whatever confusions of Soviet personnel with Western Union may have blotted his copybook in a youth whose icy fervor nonetheless left me with fedora doffed, the man I still rejoice in calling my former chum had far more merit than the shifty-eyed, unpleasant junior Congressman from California who was to boast for decades, in an idiom that struck me as curiously sexual, of having “nailed” Alger Hiss, the spy. Perhaps it wasn’t said until much later, but it was true from the start: that other fellow was pure cancer.

In the usual way of such things, my family knew the Hisses without quite knowing why, although my mother had been a Boo and I often thought this might have some bearing on the matter. Once I inherited, which couldn’t have come at a worse time—my father had just died—I removed my backgammon board and second-place trophy in the Groton javelin toss from the Fifth Avenue pile of my now suspended childhood’s parodie treasure hunts and solo games of hide-and-seek. These mementos of a youth as rich in confusion as everything else soon rested in my dear pater’s splendidly appointed suite at the center of our family’s business headquarters, now eddying like newspapers over several floors of the magnificent Woolworth Building down on good old lower Broadway.

Early on, it did sometimes trouble me that I had no conception, be it worthy or woolly, of where our money came from. On my first visit to our offices in the role of overlord, only a buoyant predisposition against moodiness of any sort, the hale Howell strain having firmly gotten the upper hand over the neurasthenic Boo blood in my genetic makeup, held my ignorance back from making a terrorized leap, over an abatis of accusing abacuses, into the chasm of self-doubt. However, the various people I encountered telephoning and carrying papers to and fro on my fascinated daily strolls through the premises all seemed to have a reasonably sure grip on what they were about. It would have seemed disloyal to pater Walter’s memory had I boldly climbed atop a nearby desk or switchboard, firing a pistol ceilingward like Herr Hitler in his Bavarian
beer cellar (I had always wondered why he hadn’t vanished in a shower of plaster), to announce that what had been good enough for him just wasn’t good enough for me.

Alger was then a young associate in the progressive law firm of Crimson, Cerise, Ruby and Vermilion. Aside from a shared passion for ornithology, our paths had intersected very little. But then, one perfectly enchanting Manhattan afternoon (wild flocks of birds wafting through a windy Central Park down below, tumbling bursts of prothonotary warblers stunned to find themselves hurled up here from the Chesapeake marshes by an unexpected storm; home from the office at my usual one
P.M
., I delightedly placed an antique Royal Navy spyglass to watch the grand, mad scene through a plate-glass window), his secretary Rosa rang up with the message that her employer hoped I would consent to meet him in an hour at a restaurant on Carmine Street. This held a tang of adventure, as I was none too well posted on what lay between upper Fifth’s bulky comforts and the Gothic origami of lower Broadway and Wall. However, my chauffeur had never let me down yet. Clapping on the figurative pith helmet of my second-best bowler as my fingers seized the nonce machete of my brolly, I gaily set off for Gothamite Bohemia.

Nonetheless, I must have been tardy. By the time my smoke-gray Rolls gave passersby a brief glimpse of its chamois innards outside a transposed Left Bank boîte by the quaint name of Le Perroquet de Moscou, impatience at my non-arrival had driven Alger, who normally retained a glacial reserve, to amuse himself by idly drawing a chalk mark on a trash receptacle. Tossing the chalk aside, he greeted me with an animation unique in my experience of him, and we exchanged hearty if, on his part, rather hectic witticisms about the unlikelihood of two experienced bird-watchers like ourselves taking an interest in the common pigeons and canaries waddling hereabouts. Despite an enjoyment of this sort of chaffing that has always been close to unslakable in my case, I had frankly begun to wonder why we weren’t going inside when an explanation turned up in the form of a startling individual with whom, doubling my astonishment, Alger appeared to conclude he was acquainted almost on the spur of the moment.

Bearded like a lion’s den and seemingly equipped with a dozen small facial variations on smiling and screwing up his eyes, the newcomer was rebuking our rather mild version of October with an overcoat of what I took to be poodle fur worn over square-toed but otherwise shapeless leather boots. Within, the poodle’s owner puffed like a bellows on a black and silver paper tube that I only gradually came to realize the poor fellow had mistaken for a cigarette. Its exotic reek took my breath away, leaving my dungeoned lungs to imagine as best they could what the fumes must be doing for his. Apparently even less close than my own eager but clumsy mental hounds to treeing Greenwich Village’s elusive sartorial
comme il faut,
he was also wearing a straw boater and nervously clutching a tennis racket by the neck and backwards.

“Why, that’s no grip at all, old fellow!” I couldn’t stop myself exclaiming. “It’s not
a, gun, you
know. Here, let me show you,” as I helpfully reached for the racket.

Twin trails of that dreadful smoke marking his cranium’s retrogressive jerk, he flinched back as if I’d lunged for his throat. What made him think I could have even estimated its probable location amid the mongrel merrymaking of poodle fur and human hirsutiae that hid his face from nostrils to tonsils and beyond, I can’t say. With a look of hatred and terror that I knew jolly well no action of mine since the day of my birth could possibly warrant, he jerked the racket-—still rather gauchely held, I noted with regret—aloft as if to strike, which was when Alger intervened.

“Thurston,” he said, placing a restraining hand on the other fellow’s forearm, “this is an old friend of my mother’s family, Mr. Gulag Ivanovich Gliaglin. Of the, er, Baltimore Gliaglins. We were at Hopkins together. On behalf of the steering committee, he and I have been asked to invite you to consider a membership in the, ah, Explorers’ Club.”

“A perfect pleasure, Gliaglin,” I cried. “And a fine institution. Do you know-”

“No, no,” Gliaglin interrupted. “Explorers’ Club very strict rules has,” he explained to me. “Against many enemies we must protect—the Friars, Hasty Pudding. Password first,” he hissed at Alger.

"‘I knew him, Horatio,’ “Alger hissed back.

Visibly, or rather semi-visibly (his facial hair did take some getting
used to, Wall Street and my other environs in 1933 being so universally clean-shaven that one often felt surrounded by thousands of mobile and talkative eggs), Gliaglin relaxed. “Good. We now go inside,” he said, ushering me through the door. “My God, who does not exist, I could devour prostitutes.”

While I bow to no man in admiring candor, that did startle me. But after some sort of rushed conference with a whispering Alger at my back, I heard Gliaglin clear his throat and say, “Horse. I could eat horse.”

Unluckily, none was on offer, so poor Gliaglin had to content himself with tomato soup followed by a simple blood pudding. Prohibition having been repealed scant months before, Alger asked for a pink gin, a steak he wanted even pinker, and a side plate of beets. As for the third man at the table, having scanned the menu and always happy to try an unexpected dish, I ordered a soon delighted self a plate of moose-and-squirrel hash.

As we ate, we talked of trivial things—the Russian Revolution, the plight of the working classes in industrial societies, the historical imperative our era faced of bringing forth a whole new type of man from a corrupt world’s charred guts (this last rather put me off requesting a wheel-by of the dessert cart, I must say!), and so on in the vein of amiable banter by which men of a certain standing like to demonstrate that they do scan the odd newspaper now and then. But I had a hunch we’d get down to brass tacks as soon as the plates were cleared, and right I was too.

“Thurston,” said Alger abruptly, looking at the napkin wound up in his hands, “you told me once that your favorite birds were cardinals and robins, because of their beautiful coloring.”

“So I did, by Jove,” I agreed, delighted that he remembered. “Hues seldom otherwise found in the animal kingdom, and all the more glorious for the contrast.”

“Well,” Alger said, “I took that as a hint, to be candid.”

“Only a hint? I’d have thought it was a fairly blunt statement, old fellow. Or did I err in thinking we two bird lovers spoke each other’s language, my dear chap?” I said, mystified.

“Well, it
was
several years ago,” Alger said casually, tossing aside the
napkin and closing his eyes as if in thought. “Why, let me see—yes, it was just after Herbert Hoover became President.”

He opened his eyes, which looked directly at me with an intensity I found disconcerting. Had I been a rare variety of thrush, or perhaps the last dodo, his gaze would have made more sense. “Hoover had no use for birds,” Alger informed me. “But Roosevelt does—although he prefers a blue eagle to either cardinals or robins. And you? Do you still make the same choice?”

“Of course I do,” I said. “When it comes to what matters most to him, a man doesn’t change his opinions simply because of a headline or two,” although I felt rather sorry to have missed the one about the new President’s ornithological interests. I had never even heard of the blue eagle, but then my pater Walter’s friend Franklin had always been whimsical. Not having seen him in many years, I wondered if he still leapt about while playing badminton as I remembered him doing in one flower-fleecy upstate summer of my boyhood, while fat bumblebees slowly ferried bits of sunlight to a meadow and L., my earliest and only love without feathers, began to wave her arms gravely as if to conduct their flight, in a broad-brimmed hat and a white dress with a sailor collar. Gradually, as an Abelard-ish young Thurston’s springy steps across a variety of local flora—all made of air, all air!—brought me bounding nearer my hintless Heloise, I became aware that she was in a rowboat which had begun to sink, fortunately in a pond not more than two feet deep at its most menacing.