Please Enjoy Your Happiness (19 page)

He told me to sit down on one of several swivel chairs. He went out to the wardroom to order coffee and cookies. I glanced at the objects on the chaplain’s desk. There was an assortment of obviously heavily read pulp novels, each one showing white American women – blondes mostly – partially unclothed, sometimes with a leering man in the background. I knew instinctively that these novels were not written by Marxists, but I decided to save that thought for future discussion. Titles included
Hard to Get
,
Red Bone Woman
,
The Night and the Naked
,
The Chiselers
,
Strip for Violence
, and
A Matter of Morals
. Standing vertically between bronze bookends cast in the image of Abraham Lincoln were smut magazines:
Confidential
,
Rave
,
Stare
,
Foto-Rama
,
Hit Annual
,
Whisper
,
Adam
, and
Eyeful
, whose lead story on the cover, which featured a voluptuous brunette some men might call a broad, was ‘Are You Broad Minded?’

There were, in addition, two copies of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
by the British author D. H. Lawrence. That was a novel I had not read. In 1959, in the United States of America, it was a brown-wrapper book, sold from under the counter in shops that specialized in men’s magazines, horse and greyhound racing journals, and stinking cigars rolled in Tampa by Cuban women whose signature finishing touch in the rolling process was rubbing Robustos and Lusitanias against the skin of their inner thighs – or so a tobacconist once told me. Up until 21 July, 1959, two days before my birthday, it had been illegal to even send this book, deemed ‘lustful, lewd, lascivious and prurient’, through the US mail. In other words, the book was obscene, and not ‘art’, until the US Supreme Court ruled that even ‘ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion’ were
protected by the First Amendment. Mr Ito had told me about that at the Mozart coffee shop. I have to confess I sorely wanted to slip one of those copies of
Lady Chatterley
into the pocket of my dungarees, but I figured I was in enough trouble already and that if I was reading something prurient as well as something ‘Communist’, I would be flogged or made a castaway on one of the many small Pacific Ocean islands US Navy vessels used for target practice.

After taking a quick look at the reading material, I sat there, trying to look innocent. I was innocent. I was innocent of, and about, everything. But chaplains, I remembered, do not deal with the innocent. They deal with sinners, the depraved, and the guilty.

Chaplain Peeples re-entered his cabin, whistling merrily. He had a shiny metal hotel tray in his hands upon which sat two pure white mugs of coffee with USN stencilled on the side, a dainty pitcher of milk, a small ceramic bowl of sugar cubes, and two dozen buttery cookies encrusted with sugar particles. I thanked him for the coffee and started sipping. It was not up to Mr Ito’s standards, Yukiko!

‘Well,’ Chaplain Peeples said. He made a motion towards the lurid publications on his desk. ‘Here, you see, is reading material confiscated from frustrated young men who do not understand that this is pornography. Your soul, Rogers, is like a piece of cheese. Obscene publications are like worms that eat holes in that cheese. Masturbation follows. You can imagine what comes next.’

‘No,’ I said, truly shocked. ‘What comes next?’

‘Consorting with loose women . . . prostitutes . . . Japanese girls . . . bar girls.’

‘Oh, I see,’ I said. It was another one of those moments when
an older person – a superior officer – was addressing me as if he thought I understood what he was talking about. But I did not understand at all. So I said, ‘Oh, I see,’ and waited for clues.

‘Yes. We will forget for the moment your relationship with a woman in the White Rose bar. I have heard that it is not a proper relationship. That woman also apparently speaks Russian, and she may have an understanding of Hebraic grammar. Where there are Jews there are Marxists. Are you aware of that? Also, you are clearly violating the rules against entering off-limits areas, although I can’t prove it yet.’

Here we go again, I thought. I was close to panic. I did the Zen thing and let an inner voice inside me say ‘
saaaaaaa
’. I found repose. I stayed silent.

‘You are reading Communist material,’ he continued. ‘You have opened up to brainwash. Clearly, someone has gotten to you . . . upset your balance of mind, and your judgement. That is not good if you are working on the ship’s newspaper. Also, this matter of the photograph of Akiko Kojima. This is not good. We can’t have a photo of a Japanese woman in our newspaper, Rogers. That newspaper is read by our wives and girlfriends back home, not to mention our mothers and all the other wonderful women in the United States.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘I understand.’

But there was no way I was going to allow Chaplain Peeples to prevail.

14

The Tower of Lilies

Mr Ito had urged me in the past, when I looked as if I were on the verge of being overwhelmed by events, to adopt a certain aspect of Taoist thought called
wu wei
. He guessed, I suppose, that
wu wei
might suit my temperament, even though I was young enough, according to Mr Ito, that I ‘still had the memory of a mother’s love’. He said I needed to toughen up and wise up.

Mr Ito’s English was fragmentary. But he said to me soon after my chance meeting with Detective Nazaka, ‘Something good to remember, Mr Anthony Perkins. If you are pushed, do not push back. Action can also be inaction. Sometimes you win by doing nothing.’

This theory from ancient China, he said, maintains that human beings who live in harmony with all surrounding forces should behave naturally, without artifice. If there is a challenge, such a person will instinctively know when to act. He will not make a conscious decision. He will just do it, and sometimes doing nothing – inaction – is action. Action without effort can also, in effect, be a martial art. Remember the samurai who moves his sword down and steps back, relaxed, right at the moment when his opponent decides to raise his sword and attack with a ‘mighty roar’, Mr Ito advised. ‘Who wins? If you know who wins, and why, you understand
wu wei
.’

I had mentally typed up this suggestion from Mr Ito and secreted it away in a cabinet of my brain that was never locked. It was filed in the drawer labelled ‘New and Intriguing Ideas’ and placed under the heading ‘Theories to be Tested in Emergencies’.

The discussion with Chaplain Peeples, which now was irritating me as he struck a supercilious pose, was fast becoming an emergency. After trying to determine whether he had knocked me off balance, he reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a copy of
The Torch of Life: A Key to Sex Harmony
, by Dr Frederick M. Rossiter, BS, MD, Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians, London, published in the year of my birth, 1939. The dust jacket was midnight blue.

‘There is one thing about Communism and premarital sex,’ Chaplain Peeples said, with a blink and a wink. ‘Good instruction in what it takes to be in love defeats Marxist dogma and running after whores, every time.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, in a state of complete relaxation and inaction. ‘Yes, sir. Thank you.’

He smiled. ‘This is a British publication,’ he said, ‘so it is
probably to your liking. I don’t normally give young men this book because it is not American. As you can see, the book starts with poetry, and poetry, even from the Holy Bible, is not something that will grab our attention.’ He had opened it to a passage that went on for seven pages in the front of the book, ‘An Ancient Love Song: The Song of Solomon’. ‘This typeface is much too small for me to read, son,’ he said. It was indeed small. Even I had to squint hard to be able to read:

Because I was furtively employing
wu wei
strategy I did not question the appropriateness of this gift. I left his office walking backwards, and I gave him a small bow as I nudged the door open, just to be polite, like a Japanese. I was also able to grab one of the pulp novels from a second heap of confiscated books by his door while his back was turned;
Morning, Winter, and Night: An Absolutely Frank Novel About the Exquisite Torment of Adolescent Passion
(by John Nairne Michaelson), a subject I knew nothing about. The book cover showed a young white male kissing the neck of an Asian woman whose head leaned back in ecstasy.

Red Downs was on the phone in the
News Horizon
office, desperately trying to convince someone in communications to give us a second photo of Kojima Akiko. Photos in those days
were transmitted by radio-telephone and received, slowly and primitively, by a kind of fax machine. Red asked me where I had been. I told him I had had a ‘session’ with the chaplain, which caused him to state, ‘You are in trouble again.’

It would not help the situation, I thought, to try to explain the skewed world of Lieutenant Commander Peeples and his gift of
The Torch of Life
, so I said, ‘Did you know he has a big collection of confiscated books and magazines?’

‘No kidding,’ Red said. ‘He took them?’

‘I don’t know. He has them. Maybe he put the word out. Something like, “Bring me sex books. They are bad for morale.”’

Red laughed. ‘Bad? I got a few of them myself. Do you want to see?’

‘Oh, no. No. Thank you, and all that. But I have enough problems already. He also gave me this book on “sexual harmony” and I think he wants me to read all of it so I can block my interest in Marxism and Yukiko.’

I showed Red the book. Out popped a small postcard marked ‘Place 1¢ Stamp Here’, and self-addressed to the Eugenics Publishing Company at 317 East 34
^th
Street, New York, NY. On the reverse side of the card, under the wording, ‘I am interested in unusual books dealing with sociology, sex and related subjects and would like to be kept on your mailing list to receive announcements of new publications which you intend bringing out from time to time,’ the chaplain had used a pencil to fill out his name and a street address in the civilian world in a New England state.

‘He must have forgotten to mail it,’ Red said. ‘I’ll put a stamp on it and send it off and alert the guys in the mail room to expect sex books for the chaplain. You know what that means, don’t you? Gossip.’

Then Red said, ‘You have another letter from Yukiko.’ He slid it across his desk. It had been written one month previously. Where it had been all that time was a mystery. I cut the envelope open with a penknife and read.