Pacific Standoff, page 13
Mike had seen enough in two years to know that his father was largely right, at least about the career officers—there was a lot of anti-Semitism, not to mention anti-everything that didn’t sound like it had come over on the Mayflower, and an instinctive identification with the privileged classes. As a yeoman he had been thrown into closer contact with officers than most ratings, and he had seen the way some of them treated people, especially junior officers, with the “wrong” background. In fact, that might be a good theme for his novel, the struggle of a brilliant but irritating Jewish officer against the hidebound prejudices of his superiors. It would be true, as far as it went.
What it would leave out was the part he still found baffling. Most of the officers, and practically all of the men, didn’t seem to have any political views at all. Prejudices, of course, and perhaps a vague attachment to the Democrats or Republicans, but nothing beyond that. The speeches of movie characters about a crusade for democracy and the need to destroy fascism had less impact on them than the one in westerns about the decent people of this town getting together and putting a stop to this. The biggest mistake of the Japs was to bomb Pearl Harbor, because it forced the U.S. Navy to take the war personally. It added fervor to what otherwise might have been treated as a boring but required task. Whenever someone was tempted to slack off, he remembered that a thousand ordinary sailors, just like him, were still entombed in the Arizona, struck down with no warning while preparing for Sunday services, and he was strengthened in his resolve to show the Nips that they couldn’t get away with it.
He waved as Pulaski came out onto the terrace with an aluminum tray in his hands. The radioman sat down, looked out at the men on the beach, and made a noise of disgust in his throat. “What the hell’s the use,” he said, waving at the scenery. “We get two weeks of liberty in a fancy joint like this, and all we got to look at is a bunch of gobs. It sure wasn’t like this back in thirty-nine. In those days a uniform meant something.”
“You know Honolulu pretty well?”
“I’ve spent some time here, yeah. First time for you?”
“Uh-huh. What’s the lowdown?”
“If you mean skirts, forget it. Unless you want to go down to Hotel Street for a pro. You saw the movie, same as all of us. I know a couple of good bars, though, and they’ll probably give us tickets for a USO show or two while we’re here. In case you didn’t notice, we’re heroes. Of course the whole fucking town is full of heroes, so I don’t know if that’ll buy us much. Hey, O’Dwyer, over here!”
The big Irishman threaded his way through the tables, followed closely by Fiorentino. “All this sunlight,” he grumbled. “It’s gonna ruin my lily-white complexion. My folks won’t know me when I get back to Philly, they’ll turn me in as an imposter. Now take Fiorentino here, he doesn’t have to worry. If he got any darker, they’d make him sit at another table.” He blocked a punch aimed at his biceps. “Hey, watch it! You’re gonna get gravy on my nice white sailor suit!”
“What the hell,” Fiorentino said, “by the time you finish eating lunch, nobody would notice one more gravy stain anyway. So what do you say, Pulaski, you lined up some cuties for us yet? I’ve got a lawn mower I’ve been wanting to try out on one of those grass skirts.”
“One look at your ugly mug and I wouldn’t be able to keep them in line. They’d be running mauka at top speed.”
“Running where?” asked Mike.
“Mauka. Means to the hills, in Hawaiian. Makai means toward the sea. You can’t always tell east and west, but around here you can always see the mountains and you mostly know which way the ocean is, too.”
Mike made a mental note of this local color for his novel. The conversation died out while the others ate their lunch. As they were finishing, he went back inside and returned with coffee, earning a round of ironic cheers and a “What, no pie?” from O’Dwyer, to which Fiorentino, still smarting from the comment about his complexion, replied, “Much more pie and you’re going to get stuck in the bridge hatch one morning. Did the Navy know when they signed you up that they were getting two sailors for the price of one?”
“Aw, blow it out your ass,” said O’Dwyer, disconcerted by the chuckles of the others and by his own secret concern about his weight. As a teen-ager he’d done okay in Golden Gloves, but he hated to think how he would be in the ring now. Since joining the Sub Force he had been eating more and exercising less than ever in his life, and it was really starting to tell on him. Tomorrow he would start watching his diet and do some calisthenics and roadwork down on the beach. If any of the guys wanted to laugh, let them; he wasn’t going to go to pot just because some jokers didn’t understand about staying fit.
“Come on, you guys, we’re here to have a good time, right? What do you say to a few beers? There’s a hotel down the way that has a real beer garden, with trees and flowers and all.”
“And girls?” Fiorentino looked skeptical.
“Girls! You just wait and see, that’s all. The barmaids are like this”—his hands traced an hourglass in the air—“and when they bend over to give you your beer you can see all the way down the front of their dress.” As he said this, Pulaski glanced over at Mike and winked. Mike had been wondering about the contradiction with Pulaski’s earlier remark to him, before the others showed up; now he knew there was a joke in it somewhere, though he couldn’t make out where.
He found out as soon as they reached the beer garden. The barmaids, as advertised, were shapely and clad in low-cut, revealing dresses of a style traditionally worn by peasant girls ill no country in particular. What Pulaski hadn’t mentioned was that there were five or six of them and about four hundred customers, all of them young, male, in uniform, thirsty, and horny as hell. There were also a couple of bored-looking 250-pound Hawaiians with shaven heads and upper arms that looked like they would split the sleeves of their brightly colored shirts. Mike guessed, quite correctly, that they were on hand to make sure no one bothered the barmaids. No one did; in fact, the place was surprisingly orderly, if noisy. The only thing that was more surprising was the quantity of beer the customers were downing, and the reason for that soon became clear. The only way to get one of those tantalizing glances inside the peasant costumes was to order a stein of beer, and of course it would be too obvious if you ordered another stein before finishing the first.
After four beers in less than an hour Mike thought his kidneys were going to float away. Spurred on by the beginnings of a headache, he was going into one of his “What the hell am I doing here” moods. The guys were okay, but he really didn’t have anything to say to them. All they had in common was submarines and sex, and by unspoken agreement they stayed off the topic of submarines. As for the barmaids, who seemed to be the only draw to this place, he had never been attracted to big, buxom blondes who, he assumed, generally combined the passionate intensity of a department-store mannequin with the sparkling intelligence of a Guernsey cow. Give him a small, dark, intense girl who could discuss the dialectic in one moment and Havelock Ellis the next! But he sadly suspected that they didn’t grow girls like that west of the Hudson, and here he was, as far west of the Hudson as you could go and still be in the U.S.A.
O’Dwyer was proposing to order another round. Mike hiccupped and felt a twinge in his bladder. “Count me out, fellows,” he said. “I’m going to go back to the hotel and get some sack time. I caught the mid watch this morning and I’m beat.” This was strictly true, but he had another reason for wanting to leave. He had slowly come to realize that this place, until a couple of years ago, had been a German beer garden, probably complete with oom-pah band, and he suspected that the diplomatic change was no more than skin deep. He recognized that his reaction was one of pure prejudice, but what the hell, why should he be the only one who didn’t indulge his prejudices? It was his money, and he’d rather spend it somewhere else.
Back at the hotel he nodded to a couple of guys from the Manta and paid a visit to the head. As he returned to the lobby, he noticed a bulletin board crammed with papers and lounged over to take a look. A Star of David caught his eye. The local Reform temple was inviting Jewish servicemen to a lecture and discussion on Zionism and the war, refreshments to follow. Across the bottom of the notice someone had written, SHEENIES GO HOME.
Mike’s fingernails dug into his palms. He did not have any particular religious convictions. His father, like his father before him, was a devoted member of the Jewish Labor Bund, an avowedly, even aggressively, secularist organization. Mike’s mother had had to argue for six months to get Mike a bar mitzvah, and Mike had gone along with it mainly because most of his friends were doing it. As for Zionism, his only connection with that had been occasionally dropping spare change into a collection box to build a hospital or plant a tree in Palestine.
None of that was relevant now. It suddenly seemed to him that lines were being drawn and choices made throughout the world. He did not much want to spend the first evening of his leave at a lecture and discussion, but he had to go. If he stayed away, he would be putting himself on the same side as the shit-faced shegetz who had scrawled that message.
* * * *
“…and that is the situation as best we can find out. The Nazis have long boasted of their aim of destroying Jewish culture, and now that they have conquered almost all of Europe, they are carrying it out ruthlessly. Our coreligionists are being deprived of everything: their homes, their livelihoods, their houses of worship. They are being forcibly transported huge distances to what amount to slave labor camps. It no longer matters if you are French or German, Pole or Czech, Italian or Rumanian, if you are a Jew. When this war ends, as it must and will, in an Allied victory, these unnumbered masses of uprooted people will desperately need a home, a place to go. Europe has cast them out, but with the help of all of us, they will find refuge in Eretz Israel.”
The speaker, a portly balding man whose earnestness made up for an unimpressive voice, sat down and opened the meeting for discussion. An Army pfc grabbed the floor and proclaimed that the only way to defeat fascism was for the U.S. to open a second front now. The war, he said, was being sabotaged by Churchill’s determination to hold the colonial peoples in subjection, whatever the cost. Mike tuned out. From his college days he knew the party line when he heard it. Any minute now the guy would start in on the Epochal Victory at Stalingrad, and talk as if the Russians were the only ones fighting in this war. A couple of years ago Mike would have been on the edge of his seat, waiting for a chance to weigh in and demolish the guy, but now he hadn’t the heart for it. Even if half of what the speaker had said was propaganda, a tragedy of unprecedented proportions was developing in Europe. His own distant relatives, the cousins he knew of only from stories and occasional letters, were being treated like cattle, and here he was on the other side of the world.
When the private finally wound down, Mike raised his hand and asked simply, “What can we do, sir?”
The speaker hesitated, then said, “Anything that will help win the war. Every month, every day that it drags on is that much more suffering for our people. We can also urge our government to put pressure on the British to live up to the Balfour Declaration. We have waited twenty-five years for them to redeem their promise to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and we cannot afford to wait any longer.”
“But why should they?” Mike had spoken without thinking, and now he hurried to catch up with his own ideas. “What I mean is, the British aren’t in business to give things away. I don’t know that much about it, I’m afraid, but I remember, about five years ago, the Arabs in Palestine rioted and raped and raised hell, and the Jews were good citizens. And what happened was that the English gave the Arabs everything they wanted and told the Jews to go jump in the lake. Well, maybe it’s time the Jews raised some hell. The English have always been a little queer for Arabs anyway, with their white robes and camels and everything. Maybe if we show them we’re not all shop clerks and yeshiva bochers, they’ll decide that it’s cheaper to give us what they promised than to put up a fight.”
That put the fat in the fire for sure. In the next few minutes Mike learned that he was ignoring the power of moral justice, that he was proposing to disrupt the Grand Alliance and bring worse disaster down on the Jews, and—this from the pfc—that his remarks had an anti-Semitic and crypto-fascist tinge. Mike struggled to stay cool and wait for his turn to reply, half-wishing he had kept his mouth shut. Finally the chairman turned to him and raised his eyebrows, as if to say, “Do you want to finish what you started?”
“Look,” he said in a reasonable voice, “I’m not saying anything against moral power or justice. As far as I can see, the Jews in Europe and Palestine have as much of that as anybody could want. What they need is the guns to back it up.” He ignored the outcries and continued. “After what happened here at Pearl Harbor, I’d say that the U.S. has justice on its side, but I haven’t noticed anybody going up to the Japs and saying, We’ve got moral power on our side, so will you please pack up and go home? It might be an idea at that—they’d probably laugh themselves to death. All I’m asking is, what makes it different for the Jews? Why can’t we fight for what we’re entitled to? As for that crack about being a crypto-fascist, maybe a certain schmuck would like to step outside and repeat it.”
“Now, now! Let’s have an orderly discussion, not a barroom brawl! I’m sure no one meant to insult anybody, am I right?”
The pfc sullenly agreed that he had been describing the objective consequences of a political position and had not intended his words to be taken personally. Mike shrugged and decided to let it drop.
Afterwards, over coffee and pastry, the chairman came over and introduced himself as Arnold Bookman. Noticing Mike’s dolphins, he added, “A submariner, are you?”
“Yes, sir. Michael Gold, from Brooklyn.”
“Really?” said Bookman, deadpan. “I never would have guessed. Are you stationed here, Michael? You haven’t been to one of our evenings before, I’m sure.”
“No, sir, we’re just here for two weeks relief. Today was my first day in Honolulu. I saw a notice at the hotel and decided to come over.” He didn’t mention the part played by the message scrawled on the notice.
“I’m glad you did.”
“So am I. Your talk—I had no idea things were so bad. I still can’t take it in. I mean, this is the twentieth century!”
“‘In every generation…’” Bookman replied, quoting from the Passover service. “I sometimes think that all we’ve accomplished with civilization is to make destruction more efficient. Think of Coventry and Rotterdam. It is only by the grace of God and the expanse of two oceans that we do not see the same in New York and Boston and San Francisco. Your remarks upset me—I would like to believe that we can gain justice peacefully—but I look at the world today and I find I cannot argue with you.”
Two more sailors, one a fireman off a light cruiser and the other from Supply Corps, joined them and the conversation became general. When Mike decided it was time to leave, Bookman took him by the arm and invited him to his home for dinner the following night. “If you’d rather be with your shipmates having a good time, I’ll understand,” he added, “but if you would like a home-cooked meal, we’d be happy to have you join us. We’ll eat early so you can be back before curfew.” Mike weighed the invitation against the prospect of going out boozing with the guys and accepted gratefully.
The next evening found him at a moderate-sized house in a quiet residential neighborhood. Bookman met him at the door. “We have orders to go to my study and keep out of the way until dinner’s ready,” he confessed. “Would you like a beer or a glass of wine?” Mike agreed to wine and was shown into a comfortable room lined with bookcases and furnished with a desk and a couple of leather chairs of the sort he associated with English men’s clubs. The room had the look of constant use, and so did the books. Before he had a chance to look them over, his host returned with a bottle of wine, two glasses, and a dish of strange-looking nuts. “A local product,” he explained. “I think they’re the best nuts in the world.” Mike cautiously tried one and decided that he just might be right.
Under Bookman’s skillful questioning Mike revealed that his father was a hatter, that he had joined the Navy after two years at City College, and that his ambition was to be a writer. This last information made the older man’s eyes light up, and he confided that he was deeply interested in the modern novel. “With a name like mine,” he said, laughing, “what could I do? It was written in the stars.” As they talked, Mike found that he was thoroughly familiar with twentieth-century authors in French and German as well as English, but that his real passion lay in collecting first editions of their works. Soon he was pulling particularly rare items off the shelves to show him. “This is the Shakespeare and Company Ulysses, first state, before Joyce caught the worst of the typos. The typesetters were French, of course, and made some unbelievable mistakes. And here’s something interesting, Hemingway’s first book, In Our Time. A friend in Hollywood got Fitzgerald to write this dedication for me; I think they were both drunk at the time. Do you know Breton’s Nadja? An interesting experiment, I thought, but finally not convincing.”
