War and Remembrance (9 page)

“Feel that,” he said after a few seconds. “Too hot?”

She dipped in a hand. “No.”

Stripping the writhing infant, she pushed back her purple sleeves and immersed the little body in the tepid water to the chin. “Get some on his head, too.” She obeyed. The stiff arch of Louis’s back soon loosened. Rabinovitz let in more cool water. The spasms weakened, her son went limp in her hands, and she glanced at Rabinovitz with nervous hope.

“When my baby brother went into a convulsion,” he said, “that’s what my mother always did.”

The blue eyes opened, the baby’s gaze focussed on Natalie, and he gave her a tired little smile that wrung her heart. She said to Rabinovitz, “God bless you.”

“Take him back up and keep him warm,” Rabinovitz said. “My brother used to sleep for hours afterward. Let me know if you have more trouble. There’s a clinic on shore we can go to, if we must.”

Later he came and looked into her cabin, which was lit by two candles. His face and hands were black with grease. Aaron was asleep in the upper bunk. Natalie sat by the baby, in a bathrobe, her hair pinned up, one hand resting on the blanketed basket.

“How’s he doing?”

“He’s in a deep sleep, but even so, he keeps rubbing his ear.”

Rabinovitz produced a small flat bottle, and filled a small glass. “Drink this,” he said to Natalie. “Slivovitz, if you know what that is.”

“I’ve drunk slivovitz. Lots of it.” She drained the glass. “Thank you. What’s the matter with the electricity?”

“The dumb generator again. I’m trying to fix it. You have enough candles?”

“Yes. Can you sail if it isn’t working?”

“It will be working, and we will sail. More slivovitz?”

“No. That was fine.”

“See you later.”

When the lamps flickered on about
2
A.M., Natalie began to pack a cardboard suitcase she had bought from a passenger. That took only a few minutes, and she resumed her vigil. It was a long bad night, a sterile churning of regrets and afterthoughts stretching back to her girlhood, interspersed with nightmarish dozes. The baby slept restlessly, turning and turning. She kept feeling his forehead, and to her it seemed cool; yet when the porthole began to pale he broke out in a flooding sweat. She had to change him into dry swaddlings.

Herb Rose met her on the breezy deck as she carried the suitcase to the gangway. The dawn was breaking, a clear pleasant day. The deck was full of jubilant passengers. On one hatch cover some were singing around a concertina player, their arms thrown over each other’s shoulders. The Turkish crewmen were bawling back and forth from the wharf to the deck, and there was much noisy slinging around of tackle.

“Good God,” Rose said. “You’re not really doing it, Natalie? You’re not putting yourself in the hands of that German?”

“My baby’s sick as hell.”

“Listen, honey, babies’ fevers are scary, but it’s amazing how they can recover. Just a few days at sea and you’ll be safe, once for all. Safe, and free!”

“You may be at sea for weeks. You may have to cross mountains.”

“We’ll get there. Your baby will be fine. Look at the weather, it’s a good omen.”

What he said about the weather was true. The harbor had calmed down, the breeze was almost balmy, and Vesuvius seemed inked on the apple-green horizon. Happiness diffused all over the crowded deck like a flower fragrance. But when Natalie had changed Louis he had been trembling, pawing at his ear again, and whimpering. Her memories of the convulsion, the infirmary, the ghastly night, the pestilential air below decks, were overpowering. She set the suitcase down at the gangway. “I don’t suppose anybody will steal this. Still, please keep an eye on it, for a minute.”

“Natalie, you’re doing the wrong thing.”

Soon she returned, bearing the bundled-up baby in his basket, with Jastrow pacing behind her in cloak and hat. Beck’s Mercedes, with its large diplomatic medallion on the radiator — crimson shield, white circle, heavy black swastika — drove up the wharf and stopped. Rabinovitz stood beside Rose at the gangway now, his hands, face, and coveralls black-smeared. He was wiping his hands on a rag.

The jocund chorus of passenger noise on deck cut off with the arrival of the Mercedes. Unmoving, the passengers stared at the car and at the Americans. The raucous cursing of the crewmen, the slosh of water, the cries of sea birds, were the only sounds. Rabinovitz picked up the suitcase, and took the basket from Natalie. “Okay, let me help you.”

“You’re very kind.”

As she set foot on the gangplank, Herb Rose darted at her and clutched her arm.
“Natalie!
For God’s sake, let your uncle get off if he insists. He’s had his life. Not you and your kid.”

Jostling the American aside, Rabinovitz grated at him, “Don’t be a goddamned fool.”

Sporty in a tweed overcoat and corduroy cap, Dr. Werner Beck hopped out of the Mercedes, opened the front and back doors, and bowed and smiled. The scene was swimming around Natalie. Jastrow got in at the front door as Beck loaded the two suitcases in the trunk. Carefully, Avram Rabinovitz bestowed the basket in the back seat. “Well, good-bye, Dr. Jastrow,” he said. “Good-bye, Mrs. Henry.”

Beck got into the driver’s seat.

She choked to Rabinovitz, “Am I doing the right thing?”

“It’s done.” He touched a rough hand to her cheek. “Next year in Jerusalem.”

Tears sprang to her eyes. She kissed his bristly, greasy face, and stumbled into the car. He shut the door on her. “Let’s go!” he called in Italian at the crewmen. “Get the plank in!”

The Mercedes drove down the wharf, with Jastrow and Beck blithely chatting. Natalie bent over the baby’s basket, dry suppressed sobs convulsing her throat. As the car headed north out of Naples on a deserted macadam highway, the sun rose in a white blaze. Its slanted afternoon rays were lighting the Via Veneto when Werner Beck halted his car at the American embassy, and helped Natalie alight. Louis had a high fever.

The Red Cross was handling mail for the internees. Before Natalie left for Siena, she wrote Byron what had happened, summing it up so:

Now that I’m back in civilization — if you call Mussolini’s Italy that — I can see that I did the prudent thing. We’re safe and comfortable, an American doctor’s been treating Louis, and he’s on the mend. That boat was a horror. God knows what will become of those people. Still, I wish I didn’t feel so lousy about it. I’ll not rest easy until I learn what happened to the
Redeemer.

E
XCEPT
for the haunting uncertainty about his wife and baby, Byron Henry was enjoying the new war with Japan. It had freed him for a while from the
Devilfish
and its exacting captain, for salvage duty in the ruins of the Cavité naval base. Under the bombed-out rubble and broken burned timbers lay great mounds of precious supplies in charred boxes or crates — electronic gear, clothing, food, machinery, mines, ammunition, the thousand things needed to keep a fleet going; above all, spare parts now desired above diamonds. With a sizable work gang, Byron was digging out the stuff day by day, and trucking it westward to Bataan.

His feat of retrieving torpedoes under fire during the Cavité raid had brought him this assignment direct from Admiral Hart’s headquarters. He had
carte blanche
in the burned ruins, so long as he produced the goods at the peninsula enclosing the bay to the west, where American forces were digging into the mountains for a possible long siege. This freedom of action enchanted Byron. His contempt for paperwork and regulations, which had gotten him into such hot water aboard the
Devilfish,
was a prime scavenger virtue. To get things moving he signed any paper, told any lie. He commandeered idle men and vehicles as though he were the admiral himself. For overcoming resistance and settling arguments, he used fire-blackened cases of beer and cartons of cigarettes — which worked like gold coin — from a vast cache he had come upon in the ruins. His drivers and loaders got plenty of these, too, and he made sure they were well fed. If he had to, he brought them into officers’ messes, brassily pleading emergency.

Once during an air raid he marched his seventeen men into the grill of the Manila Hotel. The dirty, sweaty crew ate a sumptuous lunch on white napery to string music, while on the waterfront bombs exploded. He paid the enormous check with a Navy voucher full of fine print, adding a five-dollar tip from his own pocket; and he walked out fast, leaving the head waiter staring dubiously at the flimsy blue paper. Thus Byron got his raggle-taggle pickup gang of sailors, longshoremen, marines, and truck drivers — Filipino, American, Chinese, he didn’t care — to drudge cheerily from dawn to nightfall. They stuck to him because he kept them on the move, rewarded them as a trainer throws fish to his seals, and turned a blind eye to their own pilferings in the rubble.

The stinking smashed-up Cavité base reminded him of battered Warsaw, where he had been caught with Natalie by Hitler’s invasion. But this was a different war: sporadic bombings from the azure tropic sky setting ships ablaze and raising pretty bursts of flame among the waterfront palm trees; nothing like the storm of German bombs and shells that had wrecked the Polish capital. Nor was there yet the fear of an enemy closing in. Cavité had been a hot show, a thorough rubbing-out of a military target, but the base was just a smudge on the untouched hundred-mile coast of Manila Bay. The city itself kept its peacetime look: shimmering heat, glaring sunshine, heavy automobile traffic and crawling oxcarts, a few white men and hordes of Filipinos strolling the sidewalks. Sirens, fires, sandbags, tiny Japanese bombers glinting over green palm-feathered hills far above the thudding black AA puffs, made a war of it — a war slightly movie-ish in feel.

Byron knew things would get rougher. Pessimistic rumors abounded: as, that the entire Pacific Fleet had been sunk at Pearl Harbor, carriers and all, but that the guilty President was suppressing the catastrophic news. Or, that MacArthur’s announcements of “small-scale” enemy landings on Luzon were lies; that the Japs were already ashore in force, thundering toward Manila with thousands of tanks. And so forth. Most people believed what General MacArthur told them: that the Jap landings in the north were light feints, well-contained, and that massive help was on the way. There were also optimistic rumors of a huge relief convoy, already en route from San Francisco with a Marine division and three mechanized Army divisions, plus two aircraft carriers crammed with fighters and bombers.

Byron wasn’t much concerned either way. A submarine could leave Luzon at a half hour’s notice. As for his father and brother at Pearl Harbor, Victor Henry seemed indestructible to Byron, and he doubted the
Enterprise
had been sunk. That would have come out. He would have been quite happy, had he only been sure that Natalie and the baby were homeward bound. The work was a godsend. It kept him too busy by day and too worn out by night to worry overmuch.

This pleasant time abruptly ended. Stopping his truck convoy in downtown Manila to report on his progress, he met Branch Hoban coming out of the Marsman building with a thick envelope in hand, blinking in the sunshine.

“Well, well, Briny Henry himself, loose as a goose!” The captain of the
Devilfish
caught at his arm. “This simplifies matters.”

Hoban’s handsome face had a hard set to it; the jaw was thrust far forward; the neat Clark Gable mustache seemed to bristle. He squinted at the four heavily laden trucks, and at Byron’s work gang, all bare-chested or in dirty undershirts, drinking warm beer from cans. “Heading for Mariveles, were you?”

“Yes, sir, after making my report.”

“I’ll ride along. You’re securing from this duty.”

“Sir, Commander Percifield expects me, and —”

“I know all about Commander Percifield. Go ahead in. I’ll wait.”

Percifield told Byron that the admiral wanted to see him, and added, “You’ve done a 4.0 job, Ensign Henry. We’ll miss you. Turn over your men and vehicles to Captain Tully at Mariveles.”

Byron was led by a yeoman into the presence of the Commander-in-Chief of the Asiatic Fleet, a dried-up small old man in whites at an oversize desk, facing out on a spectacular panorama of the blue palm-lined bay.

“You’re Pug Henry’s boy, aren’t you? Warren’s brother?” Hart twanged with no other greeting. His round face, weathered in red-brown streaks and patches, wore a harried embittered look. His neck was all sunburned cords and strings. He held himself straight and stiff in the swivel chair.

“Yes, Admiral.”

“I thought as much. When I was Academy Superintendent, Warren was a battalion commander. A real corner, Warren. And your father’s an outstanding gent. Have a look at this.” He tossed Byron a dispatch.

FROM: THE CHIEF OF PERSONNEL

TO: CAPTAIN VICTOR (NONE) HENRY

DETACHED CO CALIFORNIA (BB-44) X RELIEVE CO

NORTHAMPTON (CA-26)

So the
California
was out of action, and his father had a cruiser instead! This was news. But why was Thomas Hart, who bore naval responsibility for the whole Asian theatre, taking notice of an ensign?

“Thank you, Admiral.”

“Not a bad consolation prize, the
Northampton,”
Hart said in brusque gravelly tones. “The
California’s
sitting on the mud in Pearl, with a hell of a big torpedo hole in her hull. That’s confidential. Now then. You seem to be an original, hey, Ensign?” The admiral picked up two papers clipped together. “Seems you’ve been put up for a letter of commendation, for pulling a quantity of torpedoes out of Cavité under fire. As a submariner, I deeply appreciate that exploit. We’re very low on fish. And you’ve since been recovering other valuable stores, I understand, including mines. Well done! On the other hand, young fellow —” he turned over a sheet, and his face soured, “you’ve gone and applied for transfer to Atlantic duty!” Leaning back, Hart clasped his hands under his chin and glared. “I wanted a look at the Henry boy who would put in such a request at a time like this.”