War and Remembrance (5 page)

“The Northampton,
CA-26, Senator.”

A pause. “What happened to the
California?”

Pug paused too. “I’m commanding the
Northampton.
“

The senator, low and grave: “Pug, can we handle them out there?”

“It’ll be a long pull.”

“Say, I may resign from the Senate and go into uniform. What do you think? The Army’s getting gouged on lumber and paper. I can save the war effort several million a year. They’ve offered me colonel, but I’m holding out for brigadier general.”

“I certainly hope you get it.”

“Well, give my love to the kids. You’ll hear from me about the Jewish girl.”

After twenty-four hours, Victor Henry felt as though he had been aboard the
Northampton
a week. He had visited the ship’s spaces from the bilges to the gun directors, met the officers, watched the crew at work, inspected the engine rooms, fire rooms, magazines, and turrets, and talked at length with the executive officer, Jim Grigg; a laconic bullet-headed commander from Idaho, with the dark-ringed eyes, weary pallor, and faint air of desperation appropriate to a perfectionist exec. Pug saw no reason not to relieve Hickman straight off. Grigg was running the ship. Any fool could take it over; his incompetence would be shielded. Pug didn’t consider himself a fool, only rusty and nervous.

He relieved the next day, in a ceremony pared of peacetime pomp and flourish. The officers and crew, their white sunlit uniforms flapping in a warm breeze, lined up in facing ranks aft of the number three turret. Standing apart with Hickman and Grigg, Victor Henry read at a microphone his orders to assume command. As his eyes lifted from the fluttering dispatch, he could see beyond the ranks of the crew the oil-streaked crimson bottom of the
Utah.

Turning to Hickman, he saluted. “I relieve you, sir.”

“Very well, sir.”

That was all. Victor Henry was captain. “Commander Grigg, all ship’s standing orders remain in force. Dismiss the crew from quarters.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Grigg saluted like a marine sergeant, wheeled, and gave the order. The ranks broke. Pug saw his predecessor piped over the side. Hickman was acting as though it were his birthday. A new letter from his wife, hinting that all might not be lost, had made him impatient as a boy to get back to her. He ran down the ladder to the gig without a backward glance.

All afternoon Pug read dispatches and ship’s documents piled on his desk by Commander Grigg. Alemon served him in lone majesty a dinner of turtle soup, filet mignon, salad, and ice cream. A marine messenger brought him a handwritten note as he was drinking coffee in an armchair. The envelope and the sheet inside were stamped with two blue stars. The handwriting was upright, clear, and plain:

Dec.
19, 1941

Captain Henry,

Glad you’ve taken over. We sortie tomorrow. You’ll have the operation order by midnight. The new Cincpac will be Nimitz. The relief of Wake is looking more dubious. Good luck and good hunting
—

R. A. Spruance

Next morning, in calm sunny weather, the cruiser got under way. The deck force unmoored with veteran ease. On the swing of the tide the bow was pointed down-channel. With assumed calm that seemed to deceive the bridge personnel, Victor Henry said, “All ahead one third.” The quartermaster rang up the order on the engine room telegraph. The deck vibrated — an inexpressibly heartwarming sensation for Pug — and the
Northampton
moved out to war under its new captain. He had not yet heard from Senator Lacouture about Natalie Jastrow Henry.

S
HE
was embarked in a very different vessel, a rusty, patch-painted, roach-ridden Turkish coastal tramp called the
Redeemer,
undergoing repairs alongside a pier in Naples harbor; supposedly bound for Turkey, actually for Palestine. In the stormy week since she had come aboard, the old tub had yet to move. It listed by the stone wharf, straining at its lines with the rise and fall of the tide, wallowing when waves rolled in past the mole.

On the narrow afterdeck, under a flapping crimson flag with badly soiled yellow star and crescent, Natalie sat with her baby. For once the sky had cleared, and she had brought him out into the afternoon sunshine. Bearded men and shawled women gathered around, admiring. There were some thin, sad-eyed children aboard the
Redeemer,
but Louis was the only babe in arms. Perched on her lap, he looked about with lively blue eyes that blinked in the chilly wind.

“Why, it’s the Adoration,” said Aaron Jastrow, his breath smoking. “The Adoration, to the life. And Louis makes an enchanting Christ child.”

Natalie muttered, “I’m one hell of a miscast Madonna.”

“Miscast? Hardly, my dear.” Wrapped in his dark blue travelling cloak, gray hat pulled low on his head, Jastrow calmly stroked his neat beard. “Typecast, I’d say, for face, figure, and racial origin.”

Elsewhere on the slanting deck, Jews crowded the walkways, swarming out of the fetid holds to stroll in the sun. They squeezed past lifeboats, crates, barrels, and deck structures, or they gathered on hatches, talking in a babel of tongues, with Yiddish predominating. Only Jastrow and Natalie sat blanketed in deck chairs. The Palestinian organizer of the voyage, Avram Rabinovitz, had dug the chairs out of the bilges, mildewy and rat-chewed but serviceable. The baby worshippers thinned away, leaving a respectful patch of vacant rusty iron plate around the Americans, though the strollers kept glancing at them. Since arriving aboard, Jastrow, known as
der groiser Amerikaner shriftshteller,
“the great American author,” had scarcely spoken to anyone, which had only magnified his stature.

Natalie waved a hand at the blue double hump of mountain, far across the bay. “Will you look at Vesuvius! So sharp and clear, for the first time!”

“A fine day for visiting Pompeii,” Jastrow said.

“Pompeii!” Natalie pointed at the fat policeman in a green greatcoat
patrolling the wharf. “We’d be scooped up as we stepped off the gangplank.”

“I’m acutely aware of that.”

“Anyway, Pompeii’s so depressing! Don’t you think so? A thousand roofless haunted houses. A city of sudden mass death. Ugh! I can do without Pompeii, obscene frescoes and all.”

Herbert Rose came shouldering along the deck, a head taller than most of the crowd, his California sports jacket bright as a neon sign in the shabby mass. Natalie and Jastrow had been seeing little of him, though it was he who had arranged their flight from Rome and their coming aboard the
Redeemer.
He was berthing below with the refugees. The smart-aleck film distributor, who had booked most American movies in Italy until the declaration of war, was uncovering a Zionist streak, declining to share the organizer’s cabin because — so he said — he was now just one more Jew on the run. Also, he wanted to practice speaking Hebrew.

“Natalie, Avram Rabinovitz wants to talk to you.”

“Just Natalie?” asked Jastrow.

“Just Natalie.”

She tucked Louis into his basket under the thick brown blanket. Rabinovitz had obtained the basket in Naples, together with other baby supplies, and a few things for Natalie and her uncle, who, with Rose, had fled Rome in the clothes in which they stood. The Palestinian had also brought aboard the tinned milk on which Louis was living. In Rome, even at the United States embassy, canned milk had long since run out. To her amazed inquiry, “Where on earth did you get it?” Rabinovitz had winked and changed the subject.

“Aaron, will you watch him? If he cries, shove the pacifier in his face.”

“Is it about our departure?” Jastrow asked Rose as she left.

Dropping into the vacant deck chair, Rose put up his lean long legs. “He’ll tell her what it’s about.” He was smooth-shaven, bald, lean, with a cartoonlike Semitic nose. His air and manner were wholly American, assured, easy, unselfconsciously on top of the world. “Solid comfort,” he said, snuggling in the chair. “You Yankee-Doodles know how to live.”

“Any second thoughts at this point, Herb?”

“About what?”

“About sailing in this wretched scow.”

“I don’t think it’s a wretched scow.”

“It’s not the
Queen Mary.”

“The
Queen Mary
isn’t running Jews to Palestine. Tough! It could run twenty thousand at a crack, and clear a million bucks on every run.”

“Why have we been idle for a week?”

“It took two days to install the armature. Then came this three-day gale. We’ll leave, don’t worry.”

A cold gust flapped the blanket off Louis. Rose tucked it back in.

“Herb, didn’t we simply panic in Rome, the three of us? That mob around the American embassy was just a lot of loafers, I’m sure, hoping for a little excitement after the declaration of war.”

“Look, the police were arresting people who tried to go in, right and left. We both saw that. God knows what happened to them. And at that, they probably weren’t Jews.”

“I’ll bet,” said Jastrow, “that if their passports were in order, Jews or not, they’re now quartered in some pleasant hotel, awaiting exchange for Italians caught in the States.”

Rose snapped, “I wouldn’t go back to Rome if I could. I’m happy.”

Jastrow said in perfect Hebrew, “And how are you progressing with your new language?”

“Jesus Christ!” Rose stared at him. “You could teach it, couldn’t you?”

“There’s no substitute,” Jastrow smiled, stroking his beard and resuming his Bostonian English, “for a Polish yeshiva education.”

“Why the devil did you ever drop it? I wasn’t even bar mitzvahed. I can’t forgive my parents.”

“Ah, the greener grass,” said Jastrow. “I couldn’t wait to escape from the yeshiva. It was like a jail.”

Natalie meantime made her way to Rabinovitz’s cabin under the bridge. She had not visited it before. He offered her his chair at a desk piled with papers, dirty clothes, and oily tools, and sat on an unmade bunk, hunching against the bulkhead adorned with sepia nudes torn from magazines. The single electric bulb was so dim, and the tobacco smoke so thick, that Natalie could just make these out. At her embarrassed grin, Rabinovitz shrugged. He wore bulky grease-streaked coveralls, and his round face was mud-gray with fatigue.

“It’s the chief engineer’s art collection. I took his room. Mrs. Henry, I need three hundred American dollars. Can you and your uncle help out?” Taken aback, she said nothing. He went on, “Herb Rose offered the whole amount, but he’s already shelled out too much. We wouldn’t have gotten this far if not for him. I’m hoping you and your uncle will give a hundred each. That would be fairer. Old men tend to be pikers, so I thought I’d put it to you.” Rabinovitz’s English was clear but heavily accented, and his slang was dated, as though it came from reading old novels.

“What’s the money for?”

“Fetchi-metchi.
“ He slid a thick thumb back and forth over two fingers, and wearily smiled. “Bribery. The harbor master won’t clear us to depart. I don’t know why. He started out friendly, but he changed.”

“You think you can bribe him?”

“Oh, not him. Our captain. You’ve seen him, that drunken bearded old
scalawag in the blue jacket. If we leave illegally, he forfeits his ship’s papers. The harbor master’s office is holding them. I’m sure he’s done it often, he’s a smuggler by trade. But it’s an extra.”

“Won’t that be very dangerous?”

“I don’t think so. If the coast guard stops us, we’ll say we’re test-running our repaired engine, and head back. We’ll be no worse off than we are.”

“If we’re stopped, will he return the money?”

“Good question, and the answer is that he gets paid when we pass the three-mile limit.”

All week long, with too much time to think, Natalie had been imagining calamitous reasons for the failure to depart, and wondering whether she had done the right thing in fleeing from Rome. The prospect of a trip across the Mediterranean in this hulk was growing uglier by the day. Still, she had clung to the thought that it would at least get her baby away from the Germans. But to start by breaking the Fascist law, and trying to outrun the coast guard’s gunboats!

Rabinovitz said in a hard though not hostile tone as she sat silent, “Well, never mind. I’ll get it all from Rose.”

“No, I’ll chip in,” Natalie said. “Aaron will, too, I’m sure. I just don’t like it.”

“Neither do I, Mrs. Henry, but we can’t sit here. We have to try something.”

On a hatch cover near Dr. Jastrow, who was writing in a notebook, two young men were arguing over an open battered Talmud volume. Rose was gone. Jastrow paused in his work to listen to their dispute about a point in
Gittin,
the treatise on divorce. In the Polish yeshiva, Jastrow had earned many a kiss from his teachers for unravelling problems in
Gittin.
The sensation of those damp hairy accolades came to mind, and he smiled. The two arguers saw this and shyly smiled back. One touched his ragged cap, and said in Yiddish,
“Der groiser shriftshteller
understands the little black points?”

Jastrow benignly nodded.

The other young man — gaunt, yellow-faced, with a straggling little beard and bright sunken eyes, a pure yeshiva type — spoke up excitedly. “Would you join us, and perhaps teach us?”