“Sir,” I said, “I wish I could see justice done for you.”
“I carry on. I write at an epic narrative in verse, Bill. About the Holy Land. About certain men whom I have known. It’s something of a summing-up.”
“The Holy Land’s an epic subject,” I said, although I’d no idea what it was I had said.
“A bitter place,” he said.
And I said, “Sir? Are you truly not bitter?”
“I can tell you,” he said, drinking his brandy off, “that I am not sweet.”
And then he was climbing the stairs in his house on East Twenty-sixth Street. And then he was inside the shadows of the lamp he carried up — inside of the shadows: his description. Stroking his beard, laughing his soundless laugh and meaning no laughter, squinting because he could not see so very far with any strength, and telling me of his evenings and his Sabbath afternoons in the little room upstairs that looked out upon a waste ground, a little backyard in which not even grass grew, and over the hard-packed, barren earth of which an accumulation of newspaper sheets and bits of rag and blown grit became a substitute, in his failing sight and in his inner vision, for the earth itself. He thought it the Manhattan aspect of the Dead Sea. In the harsh vinegar smell of Lizzie’s preserving of vegetables and fruit, and in the heavy, bland steam of her cookery, and in the sooty shadows of his lamp, and in the last silent room left to his claim, and to his lock, he wrote of the Holy Land, he corresponded intermittently with family and an occasional literary friend, though he knew that several had remarked to one another on the matter of his early death. A dead man needn’t hurry his long poem. Nor need an abortion to concern himself with matters of life. And since, as Mr. Charles Eliot Norton had remarked, his Battle-Pieces on the War were anything but poetry, his obligations to verse in general, and the literary world in particular, had disappeared. He drank at times, he wrote, he wrote and drank a bit, and Lizzie brought his meal to his door of an afternoon or evening. And he strolled down through the city to the docks, or rode the new horse-drawn streetcars to Union Square, where he could ride down further on an omnibus, or walk at a healthy pace. And then he was the deputy inspector, of the night or of the day, and he saw to the legal unloading of cargoes, the legal entrance by travelers to the crowded parlor of the United States — as he saw Manhattan — and he bore the badge of national service on the left-hand collar of his greasy suit.
“I do lead a life,” he said. “I am the man I was. I am my own secret now, however. I am my darkest, best-held secret. Do I wish to be? I would prefer not to. Do I choose? I do not. Shipmate: Like the nation, I was divided from myself; like the nation, I was wounded; riven, like the nation, I healed; like you now, Bill, I am healthy; we are whole.”
We are untruthful, I thought. But for the first time in a day and night, I felt the profoundest attraction of sleep. I had been fatigued, of course. But now, in the gently rocking barge, under the hissing of the lamp and the clinking of his glass on his decanter, under the pouring stream of his throaty voice, its rise and fall, the deft articulation of his syllables like water over rock and log and streambed, and in the absoluteness of his despair, and the charm of his denying it, I felt — there is no other description — quite at home. I had him, or would have him soon. And his possession of me, or his attraction to me, his wish to know me because I mattered to his artist’s demand for darkness, and his need to know what lay behind the apparent, and my sense of my advantage over him — the comfort of gain, which I felt with my sound flesh and through the deep ache inside my jaw and nose and neck — closed my eyes and set me, sprawling in my chair and loose-jointed, asleep.
“Ho!” he called, and I was up, blinking, my hand inside my coat and on the butt of the Colt. “A ship lies to,” he said from the door that went up the short flight of stairs to the deck of the barge. “Are you in the mood for a bit of rowing, shipmate?”
I was too stupid with sleep, too weak with ease, to answer.
“Shake a leg,” he called, seizing a heavy oilskin coat from a peg beside the door and holding it out for me. He was wearing another such coat, and a sailor’s knit cap, and he looked, for the first time, like the man who had written of sailing on small, wooden craft to the other side of the world.
I put on the coat and tied a kerchief over my head so that it hung upon the mask — the less salt of the sea, the better for its paint and varnish. I set an oilskin cap he gave me over the kerchief, and thus I protected my face — from the elements, and from men’s scrutiny — the more. Then we were out and up and down again, to a dinghy tied to the barge. M took the oars and at his direction I cast off. A lantern on a hook behind him swung in the wind and chop of the channel, and he peered above it out toward a looming, lit vessel, its outlines blurred by fog and mist, that rocked at her chains.
He worked at the oars like a boy, demonstrating great strength in his wrists and hands, and showing a fine eye as he subtly corrected his course. I did not enjoy feeling like a lump of supercargo, a leather pouch of mail, say, heaped into the back of the boat. When he did not look over his shoulder, he seemed to stare at me, leaning in and digging with the oars, then leaning back to propel us. Perhaps he looked over my shoulder to navigate according to a light onshore. I could not tell. But it seemed to me that he addressed my face, my mask upon my face, as he rowed backward into the mist.
A thumping combination of whistle and drum rolled in toward us and seemed to shatter against the mist and wind before it might strike. Several bursts of sound came tinnily in again, and he said, “Pilot’s gone for the night. Cargo to be cursorily examined — we’ll note there is one, and what its contents are. Inspection in the morning. I’ll make for the larboard in hopes of a bit less motion when we tie to the ladderway.”
I could not imagine a bit more motion, nor could I see myself, white signboard of a face lit beneath the ship’s lights, coming up a ladder without terrorizing a man on watch, or falling into the black, oily waters of the harbor to drown. But we bumped rather more gently than I thought we might into the timbers at the side of the ship. And M made us fast quite expertly. Salt and mist and the reek of rotting vegetables, the stink of rat ordure and the corruption by the sea of wood itself, blew over us. Under it all, I could smell skin, and the vomitous musk of fear on my breath as it rose and was trapped beneath the mask. M set my hands and then feet aright, and as I climbed he followed close. No one greeted us, so he put his hands on my shoulders to steer me out of his way, and then led us to the gallery outside the captain’s cabin.
The master, named Borofsky, shook our hands. I made him uneasy, and he backed toward his broad desk, which was covered with charts held down by books. He took a manifest from the drawer and showed it to M, who moved closer to the light and who accepted a glass of Polish spirits distilled from potatoes. Small and trim, careful in his motions, Borofsky poured a full one, and I knew that they had drunk together before. He lifted his own full glass before me, raising his eyebrows and averting his eyes, and I shook my head. He and M clinked glasses and drank the liquor down. Each smacked his lips and cleared his throat and made soft roaring sounds. M rubbed his full, bluntly trimmed beard, while Borofsky tugged at each end of his mustache and adjusted the buttons on his trim blue coat worn over dirty brown-red trousers.
“Ça va?” he said to M.
M answered, “Je ne sait pas cet mot ci — ah: moment! Je comprends. Vous portez, donc, le cognac en barils, et quelque fromage de France. Hein?”