Algren at Sea Read online

  Now, I had once been most comfortably stationed on the drowsing coast of Wales in the dreaming town of Tenby in the sleeping slough of Penally.

  For all the seasons of war.

  And it had been a better country for our knowing, by bulletins tacked to morning reports, that elsewhere bombs were falling.

  Elsewhere sirens told disaster, elsewhere great walls fell. Elsewhere V- 1’s violated the sheltering sky.

  But that was only upon a location, a device, a mythical nation called “South of England.” A make-believe site invented by Winston Churchill permitting the Luftwaffe to unload its bombs harmlessly and hurry back home to Old Heidelberg. Some Luftwaffe.

  This dreaming air, this sleepwalking rain, this land of ancestral mists reminded me so much of Champagne County, Illinois, that I was content to be anywhere up North. For up North was where wars were never fought.

  Surely the proud Federals bivouacked, in equal proportion of homesick hillbillies and Chicago alley-finks of which I was a leading member, had simplified the life-and-death struggle of Western Civilization to a matter of staying in good with our nurses. Again I was a leading member.

  We liked our nurses because their contempt for our officers supported our own agreement that they were jerks to a man. Indeed, our nurses’ disdain for their fellow officers made the EM mind to boggle. We admired the nurses.

  Therefore when they challenged us to a softball contest we accepted with pleasure. We were flattered.

  When they whipped us, 10-8, in the tenth inning, we congratulated one another upon having forced officers into an extra inning to beat us. We were proud of our showing.

  And even more proud of our first baseman, who had been sufficiently gallant to keep his big foot off the bag long enough to let the tying run get on first. However, in letting a grounder go through him to put the winning run on, we felt that he had gone too far.

  As I had not let the grounder through me through gallantry, I protested, claiming honest ineptitude. My claim was accepted so readily I was shocked. For though the TO listed me as a private of no class at all, my real rank was Infielder, Very First Class.

  Subsequently, when the nurses offered the EM another chance, the public humiliation of being busted to right field faced me.

  I had an escape hatch. The Service had been pressing me to accept a pass, in token recognition of the steadfast fashion in which I had held my position on the TO without shooting through the ranks, and now was the time to accept the distinction.

  That the English girls were becoming impatient to see me I was well aware, but my plan was to make their hearts yet gladder by bringing each a tropical goodie. Such as a Sunkist California orange.

  These I stole under cover of KP duty from our mess hall, and boarded the train the following morning with a dozen beauties cleverly concealed in my overcoat.

  “I’m going to the North of England, sir,” I informed the train conductor briskly, realizing it would cheer up the kindly fellow to know he was the one bringing me.

  “No, son,” the surly old bore assured me, “You’re going to the South of England.”

  Well I be dawg. So that was it. I was heading for Sunny Soho, bustling metropolis of sea-washed Piccadilly where they pick bomb fragments instead of cotton and the train was already in motion.

  It was raining in Soho. It was raining in Hampstead. It was raining in Kent. In Piccadilly there weren’t enough doors for the girls on the game. There weren’t enough gaffs for the matter of that. That was the kind of war winter was waging on women in Soho.

  Theirs was the Dunkirk of which no one spoke. Yet they had come by all available craft.

  To walk like sisters, pairing off under parasols of summers past, or a cheap winter umbrella, through the rain.

  They walked like cats that circle and come back. Slowly wheeling, in an encompassing circle, the black taxis of Piccadilly outflanking them.

  That wheeled like little hearses and came back. When evening came the women fell into ranks, for all came from a single nation. Enlistees of the eldest republic, whose citizens live by the sweat of their sex.

  Enlistees who look straight ahead without knowing name, rank, or serial number of the enlistee beside them.

  By the sweat of their sex. By the tools of their trade.

  The woman pressed into prostitution by war is more at ease with herself than the one who has had no more than the complicity of peace. That men are to blame for her hard lot is more plain then. So when she puts the issue straight to the soldier, he has to feel, if he’s any sort at all, that her need is the only real consideration.

  For she comes like a sister in the rain.

  The American GI who carries himself with conscious superiority of the natives is, at the same moment, secretly uneasy because his superiority depends upon access to cheap toothpaste. He carries his PX card wrapped in guilt. Or his guilt wrapped in a PX card, as you will. This makes him a setup for sister. Especially in a rain.

  For what is a big grown man doing toting a box of nut-filled Hershey bars around, whether it comes from the PX or was shipped by Mother? Who does he think he is, in a fish-and-chips country, to be eating chocolate?

  Actually he doesn’t feel like eating the sickening junk himself; yet it’s sweeter than money to the girls of Piccadilly. If he hands it to one and walks off, he’s really a mark. If he trades it off for love, she’s the mark. Then too, what becomes of his promise to Mother, to return to her as pure as the day he was inducted? The soldier is wisest to pay the girl in pounds, and put the candy on her as a fringe benefit. Let Mother be the mark. She always was.

  It was the only fun Mother ever had.

  Candy or oranges, I happened to have no particular problem about Mother. The only promise I’d ever made her was not to give anything of value away without getting something of greater worth for it. She had gotten into this rut through Pa’s uncanny knack for coming off poorer than ever. Had it not been his toil, sweat, blood, and tears that had filled me so early with a determination to be a bum? Now neither God nor Patton was going to interfere with my career.

  Bringing goodies to hungry London made me feel benign. After all, these weren’t those puny Florida growths, all seeds and wrinkled peelings. These were California dandies, paunchy as a producer of B-pictures but not so pale, burned a deep orange streaked with red. (The coloring is applied in the Imperial Valley.)

  The girl fortunate to win me as well as an orange would have to be a nicely sliced mandarin herself, it goes without saying. I wasn’t about to be trapped by somebody’s old blind hair-covered owl of a grand-stepmother.

  Fleeting as fireflies under eaves, tiny flashlights revealed a woman’s shadow in every nook. Click on and click off, now you see her now you don’t. More than one grandmother owl never had it so good, doing better by flash than she would have by day. And blessing the Germans every night that good times were here at last. Praying a bit that they might last longer even if it cost her her son-in-law, a bombardier in the R.A.F.

  “There’s a notion for a shrewd free-lance journalist,” I reminded myself, peering shrewdly, like a free-lance journalist, and consequently seeing nothing at all. “R.A.F. flier on hospital pass picks up a girl in pitch-dark London, goes to her hotel with her where she switches on the light. ‘Turn it off,’ says Bombardier Cathcart, for he recognizes her as his estranged wife, Bess Cathcart. He himself is unrecognizable as he has had plastic surgery after coming down, full of night-fighter pills, in flames over Slough-on-West.

  “He uses her in a fashion sufficiently vile and then declines to pay her a shilling. ‘Not a shilling, Bess my girl,’ he tells her, switching the light on while buttoning himself, ‘for I am the honest lad who married you at Slough-on-West! Heah! Heah!’

  “‘And I am the sensible lass who divorced you at Fugh-the-East,’ she assures him, hooking her bra without his help, ‘and I recognized you on sight because on you plastic surgery isn’t noticeable. Now hand over four pounds tuppence you bloody cheap o
fficer toff or I’ll have Four-F MacHeath, my mighty Bulgarian ponce, dash your head in on the ceiling and then bone you like a fish. Theah! Theah!’”

  This epic of passion in war and peace was interrupted by a girl who bumped into me deliberately, as I had no idea where I was going.

  One who had the grace to throw the light of her flash on her own face instead of upon my own. A heart-shaped face with wide-spaced eyes burning green and a smile that lit up small flashlights all over town.

  She led me into a Mack Sennett, where I sat upright, being correct. She leaned against a corner of the thin upholstery, sniffing. There was a distinct scent of oranges in the air.

  ‘What’s in the sack, Yank?”

  “Oranges.”

  “Air-enjez? Whut the bluidy hell you tottin’ air-en-jez around London for?”

  “I’m very fond of the fruit,” I assured her primly. I peeled one and offered it to her primly to prove it.

  She shook her head. “I haven’t eaten a brute like that in years, Yank. It’d make me deathly ill. Now if you have a bit of chocolate—”

  I pitched the peeling into the dark.

  “Is it much farther to your apartment, Miss—”

  “You’re in my apartment, Yank.”

  “If we have to go about Piccadilly again it’ll cost you another half-crown, Sandy,” the driver helped out.

  On the other hand the meter was clicking like mad. Was he working it with his foot?

  But as we circled Eros we began to pick up speed and were going at a really breakneck rate when we smashed headlong into a shattering bloooo that rocked the town and brought the cab to a wobbling halt with myself on my hunkers on the floor.

  “Sink the Bismarck!” I exclaimed. “What was that?” Either we’d smashed into something in the dark or this was an unusual girl. It had left me feeling curiously weightless where I sat.

  The odor of oranges was blown off by the scent of an ashen debris like the very smell of weightlessness.

  “Just the disgustin’ Germans up to their dirty business,” she assured me from the dark upholstered corner.

  “Less is known about weightlessness,” some scrap of newspaper knowledge blew through my mind, “than any other stress man is likely to encounter.” I sat on the floor of the cab until my weight returned. Then I got up and sat beside the girl. Together we peered out at the dark, lit momently by flashbulbs as before—but with a difference now. Now we were like people who had been blown off the earth and back and would never forget that moment when we did not own our own weight.

  “What was it?” I finally dared to ask.

  “Just a V-2, Yank.”

  I had come to the South of England. A pitch-black nation where paying for love with Sunkist oranges made the Luftwaffe mad as all get-out.

  Later in a dim café called the Café Cypriot, the girl told me that just the scent of the things had made her ill.

  “I’m very sensitive to smells, ever since I was buried, in the time of the V-1’s,” she told me.

  She had come to London from Birmingham and had been caught, on her first date with an American, below a falling wall near Paddington Station.

  “That was all for my poor chap, whoever he was, but all I got was bruises. Frightened? Here I was hearing the diggin’ blokes chattin’ it up and what would Mum say if I were found dead with an Amerikun? Mum wouldn’t minded my bein’ found dead with a British lieutenant, but with an Amerikun and him not even an officer. I’ve never been so frightened since, Yank.

  “I couldn’t bear those nasty screaming V-1’s, where I had to run and hide even though I hadn’t hurt anyone. Why should I be ducking underground when I’ve done nothing wrong? It’s much nicer now with the V-2’s. If you hear it hit you know you’re alright. If you don’t there’s nothing to worry about.”

  Later I kissed Sandy good night and she walked off into the dark. She was hardly out of sight when I started after her, sensing an inner wave of loneliness I wished to fend off. I made a complete circle of Piccadilly, trying to find the Café Cypriot again, thinking the people in there might tell me where to find her. But there was no Café Cypriot.

  I tried all the side streets leading out of Piccadilly Circus, and finally began asking M.P.’s. Nobody had heard of the place.

  I hired a cabman who assured me he was acquainted with the place and knew Sandy.

  “This is it, Yank,” he finally told me.

  The place I got out in the dark was the same place I’d gotten in. Nobody, neither M.P.’s nor British police, had ever heard of the Café Cypriot.

  I searched, by cab and on foot, for her and for the Café Cypriot until I had just time to get back to the vasty train shed.

  The lights on the night train to Wales went out whenever the little train rocked. It was on and off, awake and asleep, the whole rocking night. I felt strangely emptied of love and desire.

  Yet asleep or awake on that cold returning my mind returned again and again to the girl.

  During the week that followed I became the biggest sport in the PX. I bought a woman’s comb-and-brush set, a bracelet, a cigarette lighter, a tiny scissors, and a bottle of Cuir de Russie, purported to be a Paris perfume.

  The EM had beaten the nurses in the return match, and in the playoff game I played errorless ball, handling one flyball in right field without mishap. We lost.

  The bulletins tacked to the morning report continued to report bombings in the South of England. But it was no longer a make-believe land to me.

  Storing Sandy’s gifts in my duffel bag against the day I would get another pass, the South of England became my own country.

  On the last day of the year the Order of Departure was posted. The Channel train left in a misting rain.

  It was raining in Soho. It was raining in Piccadilly. It was raining in Wales.

  In the years that followed my tour of the South of England, in the time of the V-2’s, my life turned purposeful; as though cabled to a diesel-powered destiny.

  Then strangely in dreams I began to walk between small stars; strung on a moment through some pitch-black undismayed town. Stars that lighted human figures, in doorways of lodgings and old cafés, before they flickered out. I would see myself standing before a café with a name that had been painted over. In dreams I sought a place whose name was altered; yet inside nothing would be changed. And in the end, wherever I walked, I would have to go through this remembered door.

  Thus through dreams I came to know that I was still riding a taxi with dimmed foglights, looking for someone I would never find.

  Wherever I got out it would be before the Café Cypriot.

  In the cold light of London of 1960, the South of England was gone for keeps.

  In its place, a city of neon towers climbed. Topped by one in which I was welcomed by one MR. BRANDYWINE. Who greeted me by racing down a line of colored lights to fetch me, then glancing over his shoulder as he raced back to see if I were following. He wished to show me new wonders, I understood.

  I had seen the new wonders. I wanted only to see old Soho.

  The Underground was still an iron hole down which escalators moved to an English Hell. The guardian lions of Eros looked much shrunken. The British were apparently still trying to shake the Irish off their backs, as I judged, by signs saying IRISH GO HOME TO A BOOM IN JOBS.

  SINK THE Bismarck!

  billboards demanded all over Piccadilly.

  What, I thought, do we have to go through all that again?

  A press, an international multitude, moved all day around the guardian lions. When the red night-lights of London fell, I saw the guardian lions stir.

  The evening neon moved their hearts.

  Taxis no longer circled ceaselessly. Instead, they waited, still like so many hearses, in a line down the center of the street. They still looked like they should be horse-drawn.

  I climbed into one and off we went on a four-shilling ride to Half-Moon Street, where I gave the driver a twoshilling tip. He said it was alri
ght but thought I was going it rather strong. Only an English cabbie would resent being overtipped.

  It looked like he was going to make a scene, but I remembered the George Brent movies just in time, where the big scene is when George turns his back on the woman he loves and says, “When I turn around I want you to be gone,” and when he turns around she’s still there.

  “When I turn around I want you to be gone,” I told the driver, and when I turned around he had beat it with my two shillings, the bloody Piccadilly bandit.

  If he’d had a spark of dramatic instinct he would have left one on the curb.

  Or both!

  I was on some little lonesome half-street where low-slung strip-tease caves seemed barely surviving. A Spanish girl came through the pushing gloom and offered me a card—COME TO THE SPIDER’S DEN

  “Who sent you, honey?” I asked her.

  She shrugged and took back her invitation. Whoever had sent her had taught her to shrug in English but never to speak it.

  This Spanish con is as corny as the American hard sell or the Irish blarney. The decoy puts on pressure right away—“You like to stay in my house tonight? Very cozy.”

  When her large boyfriend walks in it gets even cozier.

  The Irish blarney is just as sad—”You’re such a darlin’ man your blood is worth bottlin’.”

  The English con works better because it doesn’t try to con; it merely disarms. The decoy stands in a doorway like a statue of indifference. A neon sign above her says Casino de Paris.

  Wow.

  “What’s going on in there, baby?” you have to ask.

  “Couple gels chattin’ a couple blokes up is all, luv.”

  In the Casino de Paris? Who does she think she’s fooling?

  The stairway behind her begins to look sinister. She barely moves aside to let you pass. At the top of the stairs two janitors with a dustbin between them are coming down.

  And conversation is all that’s going on inside. A bright, metallic-looking girl sitting before a glass with a false bottom is only a make-believe whore. Her payoff depends upon how many glasses she can get you to order before you catch on. Her racket is not sex, but conversation. When nobody from the first-person world is left, and third-person persons are running things, sex may come to just that—conversation.