The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (39 page)

In the last freezing hours he may have thought he had seen Jonah, or had been Jonah, or was that the face of Christ hovering just beyond the lights streaking his closed eyelids? There was a clang on the hull, the bell, and so he would not find out this time. Instead he had to pull himself back and join the others. When the hatch opened to let them into the bell he would hesitate only a second before going, blinking, into an uncertain birth.

Inside the bell he heard himself saying, “Yeah, I’ll be glad to get back to the wife and kid.”

When they were all safe in sick bay, President Roosevelt talked to them; his voice was full of static but sad, expressing national relief. Everybody was going right back into submarines, they told the president; Larkin wanted to get back on duty as soon as possible but he knew it wouldn’t make any difference; it was too late. He could see in Marylee’s eyes that it was too late.

“Oh Alvah,” she said. “Those poor men.”

Janny hugged him hard. “Daddy, you were gone too long.”

He buried his face in her. “But I came back.”

Marylee said firmly, “Daddy always comes back.”

So he put Janny down and kissed his wife, understanding as she shrank for a split second that he was surrounded by the dead of the
Squalus
, he would walk with the twenty-six drowned men at his back for the rest of his life; even as Marylee threw herself on him in all her warmth, murmuring and pretending nothing had changed, he knew how cold his touch must seem to her, cold as the touch of Lazarus; he had been to death and back and it separated them. Without ever talking about it he had been preparing Marylee for years; he had chosen the Navy, he was no better than anybody else and so one day he would probably be lost at sea. She’d never admitted she understood what he was trying to tell her; after all, submarines were safer than surface ships, there was no war, he was Alvah, not just anybody. She had changed in the hours he was entombed in the
Squalus
. Comprehending, she had accepted; she may even have known that it would be easier for both of them if he hadn’t come back up. She could stop pretending she wasn’t afraid for him. She would never have to lose him again; instead she could grow old with the memory of a husband
perpetually in his early thirties, always smiling and sure; returned, he saw all this in her eyes.

In the car going home from the base he said, “Do you still want your new baby?” Marylee kept her eyes on the road but he thought she said “Yes” and he said with urgency, “Then let’s have your baby.”

It didn’t keep the drowned ship out of their bed. She had to know why he was always cold and anxious and couldn’t sleep. He put his face close and tried to tell her everything: how the skipper had kept them quiet and organized after they closed the last watertight door; how they were put on watches, keeping order in the timeless chaos of the dark; why the skipper could not let anybody mention their shipmates, trapped a few inches away, any more than he could let them contemplate the ocean, separated from them only by the metal hull. His dead shipmates. He was trembling in the dark bedroom. “But they were there.”

“You heard them pounding and calling.”

“Nobody heard them. They were all dead.”

She tried to comfort him. “Then there was nothing you could do. There was nothing anybody could do.”

He turned away from her.
But I knew they were there
. How could he explain?

Marylee filled the house with friends, trying to crowd out the dead. She was pregnant again; she would fill the house with his children, sending them clattering into his silence to diffuse his memories. But he knew they were still there, and the knowledge marked him. Even after the boat was raised and the bodies were taken out and returned to their families, they were still in the
Squalus
for Larkin; even after the salvaged boat was renamed and recommissioned, the twenty-six men were in the
Squalus
and the
Squalus
lay in the dark waters off Portsmouth, so that whenever Larkin met another of the survivors they got too drunk and talked too much, neither listening to the other but talking because they had to; together they had to shut them out.

It was important that he stay in subs. After Pearl Harbor he would take command of his own S-boat; immuring himself in the close air and the smell of heavily oiled machinery, he would dive and look for them. During the war he managed each patrol by the book, performing perfectly; he was aggressive and cautious in appropriate measure, never jeopardizing his crew. Nobody aboard could know that once he was alone in his cubicle he would sit on the edge of his bunk, pale and sweating in his khakis, and drop his head into his two hands and draw within himself and listen, offering his own life and theirs too, if necessary, for the lives of those who were already lost. Toward the end
of the war he would begin to drink too much, beginning another kind of immersion.

At home the summer after the bell brought him to the surface, he would take Janny down on the rocks by the water and sit while she played. Because he knew she wasn’t listening, he talked about all of it, and when she said nothing in response he was able to imagine that she understood everything he told her.

“I had to come back.”

“Daddy, look at the bird.”

“I had to come back for you and Mommy, I had to keep faith. Does that make any sense to you?”

He imagined that she turned to him, saying,
Daddy, you had to come back for us. Otherwise we would have died.

That’s what I thought.

We were waiting and waiting.

I knew you were. That’s why I had to come.

There was nothing else you could have done.

He said, “It was for you.”

“What, Daddy?” She had disorderly curls and her freckled skin was so white that he could see the blue veins running underneath; she was too beautiful to have come from him and Marylee, she was their hope.

“I said, come here and let me tuck in your shirt.”

As it turned out it was she who was faithless; Janny fell through the ice and drowned on the longest night of the winter. Larkin went out to look for her in the deep midnight pitch of five p.m., and in the swirl of dank air knew he had never left the
Squalus
. Marylee was with him, already sobbing; when she stumbled he grabbed her arm and caught her up but his gloves were thick and his fingers cold and even though he saw them closed around her arm, he felt nothing. After a while the police found them and took them home; somebody had located Janny finally by the book bag frozen to the ice next to the black hole she had made, plunging through. Now they would break the news to the Larkins, setting them down in the midst of arrangements, the first sympathy calls, visitors leaving them each with a firm push that meant:
continue
. If Larkin had known, trapped in the
Squalus
, that this would happen, he would have offered his life for her, but when he thought about it he would always wonder if instead, in some occult foreknowledge, he had offered her life for his, whether he had in some way sent the child down to look for the others, if not to redeem them then to join them in some pledge of his own faith and ceaseless grief.

When the rituals were over and her tears were finished at last Marylee put
her head against him, saying, “She told me she would be at Dorothy’s. If only I had checked.”

“She
was
there, right up to the last minute,” he said, and then he went on with the formula which would make it possible for her to keep on living; he went on even though he was not convinced of it. “There was nothing anybody could have done.”

It will be enough for her
, he thought.
She has the baby
. He was ready to let go but Marylee saw him drifting and reached out.

“Alvah.” She had him by the hand and she was looking sharply into his face. “Alvah, I’m going to need you.”

He answered automatically. “I’m right here.” He could feel the increasing pressure; he had a choice; he would not look at her.

She let go. “I’ll always love you anyway.”

He said, without answering, “I’ll be right here.”

The baby was to be born in March, and Marylee would pin her life to it. Larkin would give her three more children to replace the dead one, leaving her almost satisfied, but the new ones were nothing of his; they would swirl around him without realizing how remote their father had become because they had never known anything else. Only the dead child was really his, and he would spend most of his life with her and the others; he had been there once and he belonged with them; he would go down in dive after dive to look for them. When he was no longer in submarines he would swim, going fierce, dogged, unremitting lengths in the base pool.

He kept a picture of Janny on his desk wherever he went but never looked at it; instead he would withdraw into himself and rehearse the afternoons they’d spent together on the rocks. He would feel her in his arms, angular and smelling a little, because all living children smell; he’d imagine her on the dock, flinging herself on him again and again. He belonged with Janny and the others; he belonged with all his classmates who had died at Pearl or in the Coral Sea and he imagined that eventually he would join the child and all the others would surround them: tableau. He could not think beyond that moment, but imagined peace. All this seemed more real to him than his wife or his living children, whom he would kiss abstractedly, so that he remained a solitary in the busy house Marylee kept in an attempt to lure him back to life.

By the end of the war Larkin was drinking too much and his men knew it; eventually his superiors became aware of it. They put him on shore duty so they could keep an eye on him; they sent him to sea where he wouldn’t have so many opportunities; they put him in a Navy hospital in an attempt to dry him
out; eventually they had to survey him, so that in his forties he was retired for medical reasons, living in New London because he couldn’t leave the water or the rocks or any of the rest of it; he used to take his tackle and go fishing off a point where he could watch the base. Once in that first winter of his retirement he took his tackle and walked to the middle of the bridge that spanned the Thames, looking for a long time at the black surface of the water. If he jumped it would be over in a minute, but first he would have to go through the awkward business of getting rid of his tackle box and making it over the guardrail, or if he hung on to the box because it would make it quicker, then he would have a hard time getting over the rail at all. The problem could have been solved, but he was held back not so much by the weight of his clothes, his boots, his accoutrements as by the fact of Marylee; he owed her something, if only freedom from another vigil by the water, another funeral. Instead he went to his usual place and fished, finishing the fifth of rye from his tackle box, so blurring the days that it was months before he thought about what he had almost done. Looking over at Marylee at dinner one night, he could not be sure whether he was grateful or resented her because he was still here. He went out to a bar and was gone overnight. Marylee greeted him late the next day; she was pale and taut but she didn’t say anything. He was still working at part-time jobs in this period, trying to stave off his desperate boredom, but none of them lasted for long. After a while there weren’t any more jobs; he and Marylee both marked it, but neither of them would say anything.

As he moved into his fifties, Larkin would go off for days at a time, disappearing on desperate binges. He would always mark the first time, not because of any place he went or any thing he did but because of Marylee, who came for him and found him. There were two policemen with her, they made him understand they had been looking for him for a week, they’d been about to drag the river, but the words had no particular meaning; the only meaning he saw was in Marylee’s face. For the first time he was aware of all the accumulated pain and fatigue of several years; he saw with regret how much he had aged her. He reached out, longing to make everything all right for her and his living children, but he was appalled by the changes life had made in them all. Only Janny remained unchanged, with her face forever bright.

After that he was able to trace the progress of his life by the lines in his wife’s face, by the looks of reproach in the faces of his growing children; he marked it by the aches in his own bones and his compounded boredom and loneliness, the pain which would not be drowned in rye, and in his periodic attempts to stop drinking he would thank God that he was getting older, knowing that
eventually time would put an end to this—it was the best he could hope for. For the first time he thought with resentment of the dead, who would remain unchanged.

After the first few absences Marylee stopped calling the police; she knew it wouldn’t do any good to ask his friends to look for him. It wasn’t really necessary. Eventually somebody would telephone—he was passed out sick in the back of a waterfront bar, would she please come and take him home; he had gotten involved in a six-day poker game and gentle as he was when he was sober, he was raging now; if she didn’t come get him, he was going to hurt himself or somebody else; he was in the hospital, he’d stepped in front of a slow-moving car. The last time he was gone for three weeks. He came to himself in the hospital, God knew what had happened in the time which had dropped out of his memory; there had been a fight, something worse had happened, he’d been hurt and he seemed to recall being stuck to the pavement, sleeping in a freezing rain. Marylee was by the bed, looking older than he could have imagined, and he could read his own death in her face. They didn’t know yet that he had come back, so the doctor continued to talk to Marylee: Heart failure, among other things. His lungs are filled with fluid, it’s so far along I don’t know how much we can do for him. Larkin knew that he couldn’t get his breath; it was almost like drowning and he thought,
God, how appropriate.