Islands in the Stream (25 page)

Eddy came out. He had heard about it from Joseph who had heard about it from one of the boys at the radio shack.

Eddy sat down by him and said, “Shit, Tom, how can such things happen?”

“I don’t know,” said Thomas Hudson. “I guess they hit something or something ran into them.”

“I’ll bet Davy wasn’t driving,” Eddy said.

“I’ll bet so too. But it doesn’t matter any more.”

Thomas Hudson looked out at the flatness of the blue sea and the darker blue of the Gulf. The sun was low and soon it would be behind the clouds.

“Do you think their mother was driving?”

“Probably. Maybe they had a chauffeur. What difference does it make?”

“Do you think it could have been Andy?”

“Could be. His mother might let him.”

“He’s conceited enough,” Eddy said.

“He was,” said Thomas Hudson. “I don’t think he’s conceited now.”

The sun was going down and there were clouds in front of it.

“We’ll get a wire to Wilkinson on their next radio schedule to come over early and for him to call up and save me space on a plane to New York.”

“What do you want me to do while you’re away?”

“Just look after things. I’ll leave you some checks for each month. If there are any blows, get plenty of good help with the boat and the house.”

“I’ll do everything,” Eddy said. “But I don’t give a shit about anything any more.”

“I don’t either,” said Thomas Hudson.

“We’ve got young Tom.”

“For the time being,” Thomas Hudson said and for the first time he looked straight down the long and perfect perspective of the blankness ahead.

“You’ll make it all right,” Eddy said.

“Sure. When didn’t I ever make it?”

“You can stay in Paris a while and then go to the Cuba house and young Tom can keep you company. You can paint good over there and it will be like a change.”

“Sure,” said Thomas Hudson.

“You can travel and that’ll be good. Go on those big boats like I always wanted to go on. Travel on all of them. Let them take you anywhere they go.”

“Sure.”

“Shit,” said Eddy. “What the fuck they kill that Davy for?”

“Let’s leave it alone, Eddy,” Thomas Hudson said. “It’s way past things we know about.”

“Fuck everything,” Eddy said and pushed his hat back on his head.

“We’ll play it out the way we can,” Thomas Hudson told him. But now he knew he did not have much interest in the game.

On the eastward crossing
on the
Ile de France
Thomas Hudson learned that hell was not necessarily as it was described by Dante or any other of the great hell-describers, but could be a comfortable, pleasant, and well-loved ship taking you toward a country that you had always sailed for with anticipation. It had many circles and they were not fixed as in those of the great Florentine egotist. He had gone aboard the ship early, thinking of it, he now knew, as a refuge from the city where he had feared meeting people who would speak to him about what had happened. He thought that on the ship he could come to some terms with his sorrow, not knowing, yet, that there are no terms to be made with sorrow. It can be cured by death and it can be blunted or anesthetized by various things. Time is supposed to cure it, too. But if it is cured by anything less than death, the chances are that it was not true sorrow.

One of the things that blunts it temporarily through blunting everything else is drinking and another thing that can keep the mind away from it is work. Thomas Hudson knew about both these remedies. But he also knew the drinking would destroy the capacity for producing satisfying work and he had built his life on work for so long now that he kept that as the one thing that he must not lose.

But since he knew he could not work now for some time he planned to drink and read and exercise until he was tired enough to sleep. He had slept on the plane. But he had not slept in New York.

Now he was in his stateroom, which had a sitting room connected with it, and the porters had left his bags and the big package of magazines and newspapers he had bought. He had thought they would be the easiest thing to start with. He gave his ticket to the room steward and asked him for a bottle of Perrier water and some ice. When they came, he took out a fifth of good Scotch from one of his bags and opened it and made himself a drink. Then he cut the string around the big bundle of magazines and papers and spread them on the table. The magazines looked fresh and virginal compared with the way they looked when they arrived at the island. He took up
The New Yorker.
At the island he had always saved it for the evenings and it had been a long time since he had seen a
New Yorker
of the week of publication or one that had not been folded. He sat in the deep comfortable chair and drank his drink and learned that you cannot read
The New Yorker
when people that you love have just died. He tried
Time
and he could read it all right, including “Milestones,” where the two boys were dead complete with their ages; their mother’s age, not quite accurate; her marital status, and the statement that she had divorced him in 1933.

Newsweek
had the same facts. But reading the short item Thomas Hudson had the odd sensation that the man who wrote it was sorry that the boys were dead.

He made himself another drink and thought how much better the Perrier was than anything else you could put in whisky and then he read both
Time
and
Newsweek
through. What the hell do you suppose she was doing at Biarritz? he thought. At least she could have gone to St. Jean-de-Luz.

From that he knew that the whisky was doing some good.

Give them up now, he told himself. Just remember how they were and write them off. You have to do it sooner or later. Do it now.

Read some more, he said. Just then the ship started to move. It was moving very slowly and he did not look out of the window of the sitting room. He sat in the comfortable chair and read through the pile of papers and magazines and drank the Scotch and Perrier.

You haven’t any problem at all, he told himself. You’ve given them up and they’re gone. You should not have loved them so damn much in the first place. You shouldn’t have loved them and you shouldn’t have loved their mother. Listen to the whisky talking, he said to himself. What a solvent of our problems.
The solvent alchemist that in a trice our leaden gold into shit transmutes
. That doesn’t even scan.
Our leaden gold to shit transmutes
is better.

I wonder where Roger is with that girl, he thought. The bank will know where Tommy is. I know where I am. I’m in here with a bottle of Old Parr. Tomorrow I’ll sweat this all out in the gym. I’ll use the heat box. I’ll ride on one of those bicycles that goes nowhere and on a mechanical horse. That’s what I need. A good ride on a mechanical horse. Then I’ll get a good rubdown. Then I’ll meet somebody in the bar and I’ll talk about other things. It’s only six days. Six days is easy.

He went to sleep that night and when he woke in the night he heard the movement of the ship through the sea and at first, smelling the sea, he thought that he was at home in the house on the island and that he had wakened from a bad dream. Then he knew it was not a bad dream and he smelled the heavy grease on the edges of the open window. He switched the light on and drank some of the Perrier water. He was very thirsty.

There was a tray with some sandwiches and fruit on the table where the steward had left them the night before and there was still ice in the bucket that held the Perrier.

He knew he should eat something and he looked at the clock on the wall. It was three-twenty in the morning. The sea air was cool and he ate a sandwich and two apples and then took some ice out of the bucket and made himself a drink. The Old Parr was about gone but he had another bottle and now, in the cool of the early morning, he sat in the comfortable chair and drank and read
The New Yorker.
He found that he could read it now and he found that he enjoyed drinking in the night.

For years he had kept an absolute rule about not drinking in the night and never drinking before he had done his work except on non-working days. But now, as he woke in the night, he felt the simple happiness of breaking training. It was the first return of any purely animal happiness or capacity for happiness that he had experienced since the cable had come.

The New Yorker
was very good, he thought. And it’s evidently a magazine you can read on the fourth day after something happens. Not on the first or the second or the third. But on the fourth. That was useful to know. After
The New Yorker
he read
The Ring
and then he read everything that was readable in
The Atlantic Monthly
and some that was not. Then he made his third drink and read
Harper’s.
You see, he said to himself, there’s nothing to it.

After they were all gone
he lay on the fiber matting on the floor and listened to the wind. It was blowing a gale from the northwest and he spread blankets on the floor, piled pillows to brace against the stuffed chairback he placed against the leg of the living-room table, and wearing a long, peaked cap to shade his eyes, read his mail in the good light from the big reading lamp that stood on the table. His cat lay on his chest and he pulled a light blanket over them both and opened and read the letters and drank from a glass of whisky and water that he replaced on the floor between sips. His hand found the glass when he wanted it.

The cat was purring, but he could not hear him because he had a silent purr, and he would hold a letter in one hand and touch the cat’s throat with the finger of his other hand.

“You have a throat mike, Boise,” he said. “Do you love me?”

The cat kneaded his chest softly with the claws just catching in the wool of the man’s heavy blue jersey and he felt the cat’s long, lovingly spread weight and the purring under his fingers.

“She’s a bitch, Boise,” he told the cat and opened another letter.

The cat put his head under the man’s chin and rubbed it there.

“They’ll scratch the hell out of you, Boise,” the man said and stroked the cat’s head with the stubble of his chin. “Womens don’t like them. It’s a shame you don’t drink, Boy. You do damned near everything else.”

The cat had originally been named after the cruiser
Boise
but now, for a long time, the man had called him Boy for short.

He read the second letter through without comment and reached out and took a drink of the whisky and water.

“Well,” he said. “We aren’t getting anywhere. I’ll tell you, Boy. You read the letters and I’ll lie on your chest and purr. How would you like that?”

The cat put his head up to rub against the man’s chin and the man rubbed against it pushing his beard stubble down between the cat’s ears and along the back of his head and between his shoulder blades while he opened the third letter.

“Did you worry about us, Boise, when the blow came up?” he asked. “I wish you could have seen us come into the mouth of the harbor with the sea breaking over the Morro. You’d have been spooked, Boy. We came in in a bloody, huge, breaking sea like a damn surfboard.”

The cat lay, contentedly, breathing in rhythm with the man. He was a big cat, long and loving, the man thought, and poor from much night hunting.

“Did you do any good while I was away, Boy?” He had laid the letter down and was stroking the cat under the blanket. “Did you get many?” The cat rolled on his side and offered his stomach to be caressed the way he had done when he was a kitten, in the time when he had been happy. The man put his arms around him and held him tight against his chest, the big cat on his side, his head under the man’s chin. Under the pressure of the man’s arms he turned suddenly and lay flat against the man, his claws dug into the sweater, his body pressed tight. He was not purring now.

“I’m sorry, Boy,” the man said. “I’m awfully sorry. Let me read this other damned letter. There’s nothing we can do. You don’t know anything to do—do you?”

The cat lay against him, heavy and unpurring and desperate. The man stroked him and read the letter. “Just take it easy, Boy,” he said. “There isn’t any solution. If I ever find any solution I’ll tell you.”

By the time he had finished the third and longest letter the big black and white cat was asleep. He was asleep in the position of the Sphinx, but with his head lowered in the man’s chest.

I’m awfully glad, the man thought. I ought to undress and take a bath and go to bed properly but there will be no hot water and I wouldn’t sleep in a bed tonight. Too much movement. The bed would throw me. Probably won’t sleep here either with that old beast on me.

“Boy,” he said. “I’m going to lift you off so I can lie on my side.”

He lifted the heavy limp weight of the cat, that came alive suddenly in his hands, and then was limp again, and laid him by his side, then turned over to rest on his right elbow. The cat lay along his back. He had resented it while he was being moved but now he was asleep again, curled up against the man. The man took the three letters and read them through for the second time. He decided not to read the papers and reached up and put the light out and lay on his side, feeling the touch of the cat’s body against his buttocks. He lay with his two arms around a pillow and his head on another pillow. Outside the wind was blowing hard and the floor of the room still had some of the motion of the flying bridge. He had been on the bridge nineteen hours before they had come in.

He lay there and tried to sleep, but he could not. His eyes were very tired and he did not want the light on, nor to read, so he lay there and waited for morning. Through the blankets he could feel the matting, made to the measure of the big room, that had been brought from Samoa on a cruiser six months before Pearl. It covered all the tiled floor of the room, but where the French doors opened onto the patio it had been bent back and buckled by the movement of the doors and he could feel the wind get under it and billow it as the wind came in under the gap below the door frames. He thought this wind would blow from the northwest at least another day, then go into the north and finally blow itself out from the northeast. That was the way it moved in winter but it might stay in the northeast for several days, blowing hard, before it settled into the
brisa
which was the local name for the northeast trade wind. Blowing at gale force out of the northeast against the Gulf Stream it made a very heavy sea, one of the heaviest he had ever seen anywhere, and he knew no Kraut would surface in it. So, he thought, we will be ashore at least four days. Then they will be up for sure.