The Sea is My Brother (6 page)

“This is the suit I have to model this morning,” she chattered to all in general. “Twelve ninety-five. Don't you think it's cute?”

“No frills, no flubs!” commented Everhart.

“Could I get one cheap?” demanded Polly from Wesley's arm. “See how much you can get it for; I'll give you the money. I think it's classic!”

They were now in the street. George Day, very tall and shambling, dragged along behind them, not quite capable of maintaining any sort of morning dignity. Polly strode beside Wesley chatting gayly, while Ginger and Everhart
talked through one another about what ever occurred to their minds. Near the 110th Street subway entrance Ginger left them. “Oh look!” cried George, pointing toward a bar across the street. Ginger, ready to cross the street, turned: “You go to your class, Day!” She ran off across the street for her subway, her trim little heels clacking a rapid staccato. “How,” George wanted to know in general, “can a woman with legs like that be so cruel?” Near 114th Street, George left them with a brief “Goodbye kids” and shuffled off toward his class, hands dug reluctantly in his pockets.

“A gentleman and a pseudo-scholar,” Everhart observed. A group of girls in slacks walked by in the warm sunlight, laden with tennis rackets and basketballs, their multi-colored heads of hair radiant in the morning glitter. Wesley appraised them with a frank stare. When one of the girls whistled, Polly whistled back. Near a small cigar store, a tall curly haired youth and another shorter one with glasses, paid their respects to Polly with a rhythmic whistle that kept in time with her long, loose stride. Polly whistled back to them.

They turned down 116th Street toward the Drive.

“I'd better be getting home or my aunt will brain me,” said Polly, laughing on Wesley's lapel.

“Where do you live?” asked Wesley.

“On the Drive, near the Delta Chi house,” she told him. “Look, Wes, where are you going now?”

Wesley turned to Everhart.

“He's coming with me,” said the latter. “I'm going home and breaking the news to the folks. I don't have to ask them, but I want to see if it's all right with them.”

“Bill, are you really joining the Merchant Marine? I thought you were just drunk!” confessed Polly with a laugh.

“Why not?” barked Everhart. “I want to get away from all this for awhile.”

“What about the University?” Polly supplied.

“That's no problem; all I have to do is ask for a vacation. I've been at it for six years without a break; they'll certainly grant me the request.”

Polly returned her attention to Wesley: “Well, Wes, I'm expecting you to call on me at six tonight—no, I make it seven, I have to get a manicure at Mae's. We'll have another wild time. Do you know any good places we could hit tonight?”

“Sure,” smiled Wesley, “I always have a right big time down in Harlem; I got some friends there, some boys I used to ship with.”

“That's swell!” sang Polly. “We can go there; I'd like to see a show before, though; let's go downtown to the Paramount and see Bob Hope.”

Wesley shrugged: “Suits me, but I'm broke just now.”

“Oh the hell with that, I can get some money from my aunt!” cried Polly. “What about you Bill? Want me to call Eve for you? I don't think she's doing anything tonight; Friday today, isn't it?”

“Yes,” mused Bill. “We'll see about tonight; I'll call you up. I have to see Dean Stewart this afternoon about my leave.” Everhart's face, wrinkled in thought and indecision, was turned toward the river. He could see a line of underwear strung along the aft deck of a tanker, and a tiny figure standing motionless beside the four-inch gun on a turret.

“I can see someone on that tanker,” smiled Bill, pointing toward the distant anchored ship. “Why isn't he ashore having a good time?” They all gazed down the street toward the tanker.

“Too much fuss on the beach for him,” affirmed Wesley in a strange, quiet voice. Everhart shot an inquisitive glance toward his companion.

“Wesley!” commanded Polly, “Pick me up at seven sharp; don't forget! I'll be waiting . . .” She backed away with a frown: “Okay?”

“Right,” Wesley answered imperturbably.

“G'bye kids!” sang Polly; moving on down the street.

“So long,” said Everhart, waving briefly.

“Adios,” added Wesley.

Polly turned and shouted: “Seven tonight!”

Bill and Wesley crossed the street, halting while a dairy truck purred past. “I live right up here,” indicated Everhart, pointing up Claremont Avenue. “Christ it's hot today!”

Wesley, hands in pockets, said nothing. A distinguished looking old gentleman walked by, nodding briefly at Everhart.

“Old man Parsons,” revealed the latter.

Wesley smiled: “I'll be damned!”

Everhart smote the other on the back and chuckled goodnaturedly, reposing his hand for a moment on the thin shoulder: “You're a rare duck, Wes!”

CHAPTER THREE

We Are Brothers, Laughing

Everhart's home proved to be a dark, rambling hall leading to various rooms on each side. More books, magazines, and pamphlets than Wesley had ever seen were strewn everywhere in bookcases, on shelves, and on tables.

Bill's sister, a rather unceremonious woman in the midst of her house work, shouted at them over the whining roar of a vacuum cleaner to keep out of the sitting room. They walked down the dim, narrow hall to Bill's own bedroom, where books were evident in even more quantity and confusion than in the rest of the apartment. A spacious window opened on the green lawns and luxuriously leafed trees of the Barnard College campus, where several of the girl students sat chatting away their summer session.

“Here,” said Everhart, handing Wesley a pair of binoculars, “see if you can detect any compromising postures down there.”

Wesley's face lit up with silent mirth; binoculars to his eyes, his open mouth widened as the humor of the situation heightened his delight.

“Fine,” he commented briefly, his silent laughter at length beginning to shake his thin frame.

Bill took the binoculars and peered seriously.

“Hmm,” he admitted.

“That you Billy?” a man's voice called from the next room.

“Yeah!” called Everhart, adding to Wesley: “The old pater . . . wait a second.”

When Bill had gone, Wesley picked up a notebook and glanced briefly through it. On the flyleaf, someone had written: “Give them Tom Wolfe the way he should be given—America's song in the ‘Angel,' one of our best songs, growing from thence to satire—the satire of ‘Hill Beyond,' not simply the bite of a Voltaire but the grandeur and beauty of a Swift; Wolfe, immense gangling freak of a man, striding Swift in our complacent midst!” On another page, figures were inscribed apparently a budget account, subtracting and adding themselves in a confused jumble. Beside the word ‘operation' stood the sum of five hundred dollars.

Wesley picked up another notebook; it was full of references, subreferences, and notations; a photograph fell
out from between the pages. Wesley glanced at it with the minute curiosity of his nature; a man stood before Grant's Tomb holding the hand of a small boy, while a plump woman stood nearby laughing. Underneath, in ink, a hand had scrawled the identities: Father, Billy, Mother—1916. Wesley studied the background, where busy little men strode past in the performance of their afternoon duties and ladies stood transfixed in gestures of enthusiasm, laughter, and curiosity.

Wesley replaced the faded brown picture with a slow, hesitant hand. For a long while, he stared sightlessly at the rug on the floor.

“Funny . . .” he muttered quietly.

From the next room, he could hear the low rumble of men's voices. Down in the street below the open window a baby wailed from its carriage; a girl's voice soothed in the noon stillness: “Geegee, geegee, stop crying.”

Wesley went to the window and glanced down the street; way off in the distance, the clustered pile of New York's Medical Center stood, a grave healer surrounded at its hem by smaller buildings where the healed returned. From Broadway, a steady din of horns, trolley bells, grinding gears, and screeching trolley wheels surmounted the deeper, vaster hum from the high noon thoroughfare. It was very warm by now; a crazy haze danced toward the
sun while a few of the more ambitious birds chattered in sleepy protest from the green. Wesley took off his coat and slouched into an easy chair by the window. When he was almost asleep, Everhart was talking to him: “. . . well, the old man leaves me my choice. All I have to do now is speak to my brother-in-law and to the Dean. You wait here, Wes, I'll call the jerk up . . . he's in his radio repair shop . . .”

Everhart was gone again. Wesley dozed off; once he heard a boy's voice speaking from the door: “Geez! Who's dat!”: Later, Everhart was back, bustling through the confusion of papers and books on his desk.

“Where the hell? . . .”

Wesley preferred to keep his eyes closed; for the first time in two weeks, since he had signed off the last freighter, he felt content and at peace with himself. A fly lit on his nose, but he was too lazy to shoo it off; it left a moist little feeling when he twitched it away.

“Here it is!” muttered Everhart triumphantly, and he was off again.

Wesley felt a thrill of anticipation as he sat there dozing: in a few days, back on a ship, the sleepy thrum of the propeller churning in the water below, the soothing rise and fall of the ship, the sea stretching around the horizon, the rich, clean sound of the bow splitting water . . . and
the long hours lounging on deck in the sun, watching the play of the clouds, ravished by the full, moist breeze. A simple life! A serious life! To make the sea your own, to watch over it, to brood your very soul into it, to accept it and love it as though only it mattered and existed! “A.B. Martin!” they called him. “He's a quiet good enough seaman, good worker,” they would say of him. Hah! Did they know he stood on the bow every morning, noon, and night for an hour; did they suspect this profound duty of his, this prayer of thanks to a God more a God than any to be found in book-bound, altar-bound Religion?

Sea! Sea! Wesley opened his eyes, but closed them rapidly. He wanted to see the ocean as he had often seen it from his foc'sle porthole, a heaving world pitching high above the port, then dropping below to give a glimpse of the seasky—as wild and beautiful as the sea—and then the sea surging up again. Yes, he used to lay there in his bunk with a cigarette and a magazine, and for hours he would gaze at the porthole, and there was the surging sea, the receding sky. But now he could not see it; the image of Everhart's bedroom was etched there, clouding the clean, green sea.

But Wesley had felt the thrill, and it would not leave him: soon now, a spray-lashed day in the gray green North Atlantic, that most rugged and moody of oceans . . .

Wesley reached for a cigarette and opened his eyes; a cloud had come across the face of the sun, the birds had suddenly stopped, the street was gray and humid. An old man was coughing in the next room.

Everhart was back.

“Well!” he said. “Done, I guess . . .”

Wesley passed his hand through the thin black mat of his hair: “What's done?”

Everhart opened a dresser drawer: “You've been sleeping, my beauty. I saw the Dean, and it's all right with him; he thinks I'm going to the country for a vacation.”

Everhart slapped a laundered shirt in his hand meditatively: “The noble brother-in-law whined until I made it clear I'd be back with enough money to pay up all the half-rents and half-boards in this country for a year. At the end, he was fairly enthusiastic . . .”

“What time is it?” yawned Wesley.

“One-thirty.”

“Shuck-all! I've been sleepin' . . . and dreamin' too,” said Wesley, drawing deep from his cigarette.

Everhart approached Wesley's side. “Well, Wes,” he began, “I'm going with you—or that is, I'm shipping out. Do you mind if I follow you along? I'm afraid I'd be lost alone, with all the union hall and papers business . . .”

“Hell no, man!” Wesley smiled. “Ship with me!”

“Let's shake on that!” smiled the other, proffering his hand. Wesley wrung his hand with grave reassurance.

Everhart began to pack with furious energy, laughing and chatting. Wesley told him he knew of a ship in Boston bound for Greenland, and that getting one's Seaman's papers was a process of several hours' duration. They also planned to hitchhike to Boston that very afternoon.

“Look!” cried Everhart, brandishing his binoculars. “These will be more useful from a deck!” He threw them into the suitcase, laughing.

“You don't need much stuff,” observed Wesley. “I'm gonna get me a toothbrush in Boston.”

“Well at least I'm going to bring some good books along,” Everhart cried enthusiastically, hurling dozens of Everyman volumes into his pack. “Greenland!” he cried. “What's it like up there, Wes?”

“I ain't seen it; that's why I want to go.”

“I'll bet it's a God-forsaken place!”

Wesley flipped his cigarette through the open window: “Never saw Greenland, been to Russia and Iceland; Africa in 1936, eleven ports on the Gold coast; China, India, Liverpool, Gibraltar, Marseilles, Trinidad, Japan,
Sidney, hell's shuck-all, I been all the way to hell and gone and back.”

Sonny Everhart, a boy of ten years, entered and stared at Wesley: “Are you the guy what's the sailor Bill's goin' wit?”

“This is my kid brother,” explained Bill, opening the closet door. “Don't pay any attention to him; he's a brat!”