But there was no sign of her father.
The Seward was plowing ahead, heaving through the turbulent seas, and she had to put out both arms to brace herself. Her eyes smarted from the smoke and the salt spray. The ensign who had crossed her earlier ran past, but not before spotting her again and cursing, “Get the hell off the deck!”
She shouted, “Have you seen my father?”
The ensign was already past her, dashing toward the bridge, when the ship suddenly teetered, bow down, on the crest of a massive wave. Simone saw the ensign, flat on his back, sliding headlong down the deck. Letting go of the handrail with one hand, she reached out and grasped one of his flailing arms, arresting his fall — until the ship dropped like a stone into a great gray trough, groaning and creaking and tilting to starboard. A freezing wave swept over the bulwarks. Her arm felt like it was about to pop out of its shoulder socket, but she held on tight, praying all the while that her father was all right, and that the ship would be able to stay afloat long enough to limp into some port.
A second later, the Seward shuddered from the force of something erupting beneath its hull. The entire ship rose up, as if lifted by Neptune himself, into a spume of seawater and a cloud of choking black smoke.
CHAPTER FOUR
Because of the Labor Day holiday, Lucas wasn’t required to report to the university until Tuesday. Leaving the house, he passed Professor Einstein’s place, where the front door was open, letting the breeze in through the screen door, and he could hear the clacking of typewriter keys and a woman’s voice, speaking to someone in German again. Would he ever be able to hear that language without feeling, as he did now, a prickling of his skin?
It was a beautiful day, the end of summer and the start of fall, and as he walked, he had to shield his one good eye from the sun. The route was familiar, and so were most of the storefronts along Nassau Street. Many of them had been built in the faux Tudor style, brown timbers crisscrossing the white walls, and provided the usual array of college-town establishments — newsstands, diners, haberdasheries, a radio repair, an ice cream parlor. The owners who remembered him came rushing out to shake his hand and offer him a free newspaper or breakfast anytime, and Lucas thanked them, but, holding up his briefcase as if to prove it, said he had to get to class.
“The offer’s good any time,” Gus, who owned the luncheonette, assured him. “Now you go teach those kids what we’re fighting for.”
Even in a class on Greek and Roman art, Lucas thought, the point could be made — what the Allies were fighting for was civilization itself. “Sure thing,” he replied.
Quaint and lovely as the town was, it was nothing compared to the splendor of the university campus. Lucas entered under the ornate black iron FitzRandolph Gate, and stopped for a moment at the foot of the gravel path leading to Nassau Hall, where the college had first been housed in 1756. Its walls, fashioned from pale yellow sandstone, bore proud pockmarks where they had been struck by cannonballs during the Revolutionary War, and two bronze tigers, the official mascot, guarded the double doors. The white cupola housed a bell whose clapper the freshmen, in keeping with tradition, were required to steal at the commencement of classes each year. The administration always looked the other way, and the clapper was always dutifully returned.
A student in a seersucker jacket stepped up and handed him a flyer for a bond rally. “If you’ll excuse my saying so, sir, it looks like you’ve already done your part.”
Lucas glanced at the flyer, then slipped it into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. His wasn’t as lightweight, or as nicely tailored, as the student’s, and even Mrs. Caputo hadn’t been able to get all the wrinkles out. As for his shoes, no matter how carefully he’d polished the brown brogues, the scuff marks were still evident, and the heels were worn.
The gravel crunched under his feet as he followed the path around one side of the hall and into the even quieter and more serene precincts of the campus. The lawns were wide and well manicured, the trees were ancient and old, the buildings constructed in the Gothic style, with mullioned casements, cloisters, and archways. Lucas had been told that the model had been Cambridge University in England, and it was easy to imagine oneself there. From a window in Witherspoon Hall, a hulking dormitory named after the Scottish theologian who had presided over the college in the late 1700s, Lucas heard the incongruous sound of a radio blaring the recent Woody Herman hit, “It Must Be Jelly.” The music drifted on the September breeze, over the heads of the young men — and only men were allowed to enroll in the college — hurrying to find their first classes, with their sleeves rolled to the elbow and notebooks under their arms.
Although he was not more than ten or twelve years older than most of them, how impossibly young they looked to Lucas now.
He stopped in first at the departmental office, where he introduced himself to Mrs. Clarke, the middle-aged woman now running things there. She was so harried, she barely had time to look up and say hello before shoving a sheaf of papers into his hand and wishing him luck.
It was only when he got to the main lecture hall in the McCormick Art Museum — a tiered amphitheater, open and airy, where he could easily see all of the students, and they could see him, that he realized how much things had changed. Before the war, the hall would have been full; now only forty or fifty of the two hundred seats were occupied. Most of the students looked like underclassmen, and the upperclassmen, if they were here at all, had probably been awarded 4-F status, for anything from asthma to flat feet. That, or they were in a field of study, such as civil engineering, in which the armed forces needed to cultivate a new crop. Nearly all of them wore glasses, some with lenses as thick as Coke bottles, and most were either scrawny or overweight and out of shape. Lucas could only imagine what his master sergeant, back in boot camp at Fort Dix, would have made of them.
After he had dropped off his box of slides with the projectionist — an elderly man who had been sitting in that tiny booth since the dawn of cinema — he stepped to the podium, introduced himself, and announced, “This is the first session of Art History 101: Classical Art and Architecture. If anyone is in the wrong room, you still have time to make your getaway.”
“Nuts,” he heard a student mutter, then gather up his books and flee up the aisle. There was always at least one on the opening day of the semester.
Besides the makeup of the student body, the other thing that had changed was his attitude. It wasn’t so many years ago that he’d had butterflies in his stomach every time he had to stand in front of the podium for the first time and command the attention of a new class. But no more. Once you had faced aerial bombardments, oncoming tanks, and the ever-present threat of getting shot, any fears of public speaking evaporated pretty quickly.
He passed out the syllabi, still warm from the mimeograph machine, took attendance, and tried to put a face to each name he called out. A fair number of the names were from prominent American families, the East Coast elite that hailed from Park Avenue in New York and the Main Line of Philadelphia, and the Southern aristocracy. Many of the names were emblazoned on the halls and dormitories, stadiums and playing fields of the university. When he was done, one of the students raised a hand, and asked, “If I may ask, sir, where did you serve?”