Things Invisible to See (18 page)

Oh, she had answered—she had accepted him! If he asked her out—but where could he take her if he asked her out? To dinner and a movie? That would be expensive, and of course she would expect him to pay. He would ask her to the movies but not to dinner.

He checked the newspaper and was delighted to see that
The Chocolate Soldier
was coming to the Michigan Theatre on Saturday. There was plenty of time to write her. He turned to the
Encyclopedia of Etiquette,
only to find that all the examples of written invitations concerned themselves with accepting or postponing dinner parties. He chose one, however, and adapted it to suit his needs.

Dear Miss Deller,

It would give me great pleasure to have you meet with me on Saturday, the sixteenth, at seven o’clock, to see Nelson Eddy in
The Chocolate Soldier,
at the Michigan. Trusting there is no previous engagement to prevent my enjoyment of your company, I am

Most sincerely yours,

Willie Harkissian

Its distance from his own life and its suggestion of good taste and the money to show it pleased him.

But what if she didn’t answer? Or what if his letter got lost in the mail, or arrived too late?

That evening he telephoned her and was glad that the first voice he heard was not Marsha’s.

“Whom shall I say is calling?”

“Ben Harkissian,” he said and realized his error at once, but it was too late. The woman who had picked up the receiver was gone. After a long time, Marsha said “Hello?” and Willie found he had scarcely enough breath to answer.

“Hello?” she repeated.

“This is Willie Harkissian,” said Willie, in faint tones.

“Willie?”
she exclaimed. He could not miss the disappointment in her voice.

“It would give me great pleasure to have you meet me on Saturday the sixteenth at half past three, to see Nelson Eddy in
The Chocolate Soldier.
”

He waited for her to burst out laughing. Her quiet, grave reply surprised him.

“I’d like that very much,” she said. “Thank you for asking me.”

KLINEHART SURRENDERS!

S
ERGEANT KLINEHART INSPECTED THE
two pails of potatoes: first the potatoes peeled by Private Yeager, then the potatoes peeled by Private Harkissian.

“You mean to tell me, Harkissian, that these were perfectly good potatoes when you started?”

“Yes, sir,” said Ben.

“And when you peel them, they turn into faces?”

“Right before our eyes, sir,” said Yeager. “Watch, sir.”

Ben picked up a potato and began to peel.

“No funny business with the knife, Harkissian,” said Klinehart.

“Yes, sir.”

But even as Klinehart warned him, he could see that Ben was paring a potato the way anyone else would pare a potato, letting the thin peelings drop into the slop bucket. A chill gripped the sergeant as he watched the pale flesh of the potato shrivel into sunken sockets, pocked nose, smashed chin.

“There—it’s happening, sir!” cried Yeager.

“Harkissian, you son of a bitch!” shouted Klinehart. “Last week I sent you to clean the latrines.”

“Yes, sir, I cleaned them, sir.”

“How do you explain the sulphuric geyser after every flush?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“And that class on driving a tank?”

“Yes, sir,” said Ben.

“You ran the tank into a tree, Harkissian.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And that tree was not on the field till you ran into it.”

“No, sir.”

Ben tossed the potato into the pail—it really looked ghastly now, like a starved child—and reached for a new one.

“Oh, sir!” exclaimed Yeager.

Behind the thin peel, Ben’s knife exposed the shrunken head of General MacArthur. The Ancestress slipped quietly out of the knife, and Clare slipped quietly out of the potato.

Did you put back the tree?
whispered Clare.

I put back the tree. I don
’
t know why your army and navy call their decoding divisions MAGIC. They don’t know the first thing about it.

STOP WASTE AND WIN THE WAR

“I never thought I’d look forward to an enema,” said the artillery captain in the bed next to Ben’s.

There were three of them in the ward: the captain, Ben, and the tall lieutenant from Nashville. The lieutenant did not talk. He marched up and down the aisle between the empty beds, his hospital gown fluttering: an archangel who had been issued the wrong robe. Up the aisle, about face, down the aisle, about face. Up the aisle.

“What are you in for?” asked the artillery captain.

“I don’t know, sir,” said Ben. “I’ve been tested for everything.”

The captain farted.

“Pardon me,” he said, “top secret,” and discharged a new volley. “Do you notice anything?”

“What, sir?”

“About what you have just heard—do you notice anything?”

“No, sir.”

“Keep your small intestine spotlessly clean,” said the captain, “and you can eliminate the fumes. Listen.”

One long. Two short. Two long. Two short.

“Is it code, sir?” asked Ben, astonished.

“It is,” answered the artillery captain. “To be used by prisoners in separate cells, for communicating with each other.”

“You mean, you can teach someone—”

“The secret is muscle tone,” whispered the captain, “and holding your breath and sending air into the small intestine. Close your mouth, stop your nose, and open the back door. When you get control of those muscles, you can say anything. Listen.”

Ben listened.

“Did you get the message?” asked the captain.

“It sounded like …”

“Like what? You can tell me.”

“Like ‘Remember Pearl Harbor’ in Morse code.”

“You hear the possibilities,” said the captain. “Stripped of every weapon, the body itself is a secret agent.”

“That’s amazing, sir.”

“My discovery can also be used for entertainment. I can do a hound—and a hare—and a machine gun—”

The arrival of Dr. Cohen and Dr. Turner cut short the performance.

“Ben,” said Dr. Cohen, “we’d like to watch you peel this potato.”

Dr. Turner handed Ben a potato and Dr. Cohen handed him a knife, and Ben took them up and began to pare away the skin. Dr. Cohen gathered the peelings in a paper cup, took the potato, and passed it to Dr. Turner, who passed it back.

“It’s still an ordinary potato,” said Dr. Turner.

In Paradise, on the banks of the River of Time, the Lord of the Universe tosses a white ball which breaks into a green ball, and Sergeant Klinehart is awarded the bed next to the artillery captain. In three days he is released, and Ben is sent on active duty to Hewitt Island, 4,200 miles from Chile, 4,300 miles from Australia, and 5,600 miles from Clare.

TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES

Grosse Pointe

March 1, 1942

Dear Helen and Clare and Nell and Davy,

I suppose you have been reading about the riots in the
Free Press
and seen the pictures of burning crosses and the picket lines. About 700 people surrounded the Sojourner Truth homes and kept Negro defense workers from moving into the very space that our government built especially for them. All the families had paid their rent in advance, and seven of them came back to find their old apartments occupied and no place to live. The moving company charged them for storage: five dollars an hour. The Negro driver who took the first van through the picket line was hit in the head with a rock.

We are doing our part for the war effort, of course. Vicky and Fred gave a dinner party for a dozen soldiers, sight unseen. Though they marched up the front walk in strict formation, two by two, they seemed glad to be in a real home. Nice boys, from all over the country. Fred observed that most of them had bad teeth. I wonder how many will be alive at the end of the war?

Vicky’s snowdrops are blooming to beat the band, just as if they hadn’t heard about the shortages. I have made friends with a bumblebee, who woke too early in the season and comes to my window to be petted. He sits very still on my hand and I rub his back.

You shall see me next month, when Grandma and I change places. In the meantime, you are welcome to put my bust of Stillman in the garden. It is not metal, it is not rubber. It is marble, and no one can find such a garden decoration unpatriotic. And no one need know that Stillman is the founder of osteopathy. You can tell your friends he’s a distant ancestor. If we could map the tangled roots of the tree of life, this might even turn out to be true.

Love,

Grandpa

MACHINE MAKES 10,000 STARS AN HOUR!

“They sent me a star for the window,” said Wanda. “A black star.”

“Be glad it isn’t a gold one,” said Mr. Goldberg. “A lady on our street had five sons in the Pacific. She got five stars, five gold stars, for them. How’s Willie?”

People were always careful not to mention his flat feet, as if having flat feet were unpatriotic.

“Same as usual. Such a help to me. Such a steady boy.”

“There ought to be a star for Willie,” said Mr. Goldberg. “A steel one.”

NO MORE WEATHER!

From the air Hewitt Island was a button of sand with five dead koa trees and one shanty, stitched to a sea so blue that it made you think of sapphires, butterflies, the crests of tropical birds.

“Nice little beach, sir,” said Ben. The island looked no wider than two miles in any direction. “I love white sand.”

“That’s not sand,” said the pilot. “That’s guano.”

“What, sir?”

“Bird shit.”

Captain Cooper, the weather patrol, was sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch of the government building, knitting. He was thirty-two, prematurely grey, and he had been a meteorologist at UCLA before he was drafted and assigned to the island of Canton. At Canton he did not like being so close to Honolulu—about a thousand miles—and he asked for an assignment on Baker Island. The weather station on Baker Island was run by six men.

From them he learned that Howard Island had only four men, and he got himself transferred to Howard, which he thought would be more peaceful. On December 8 he realized his mistake, when fourteen twin-engined bombers knocked out the cabin, the weather station, and the four men. Cooper, the sole survivor, moved into a dugout. For fifty-two days he foraged for food in the rubble and played solitaire with a deck of cards that miraculously had survived intact. Not an ace was missing.

After the Navy picked him up, Cooper studied a map and asked to be transferred to Hewitt Island. His second day on Hewitt, a freak lightning storm nearly burned down the government building. Cooper pointed out the charred places to Ben as he showed him around the island.

“Everywhere I go—catastrophe,” said Cooper gloomily.

The sign over the porch read:

THE GOOD TERN

Quiet—Dignified—Cheap

Best Food on the Island

One Good Tern Deserves Another

It reminded Ben of the bars around Catherine Street and Lower Main: the Paradise Bar and Grill … the Chosen Land … the Oasis. Awful things happened in such places. A man stabbed his brother in the Chosen Land. A woman was raped in the alley behind the Oasis. One good tern … Ben hoped he wouldn’t find religious pamphlets on a table inside.

The government building—Cooper never called it a house—had a tiny kitchen, a privy, a living room with two wicker chairs, two cots, and a table. On the table stood an alarm clock. Wanda had one just like it in the kitchen at home, and Ben thought of the kitchen shelf with its musty jars of spices, their tops spattered with grease; Wanda standing at the stove in the morning, her back to him as she heated the water for coffee; Willie drumming his fingers, waiting for the toast to pop up. Gone. Yes. No—not forever.

The focus of Cooper’s living room was a rubber raft packed with provisions. Anything vital to life, explained Cooper, was kept in the raft. Naturally it was a nuisance digging through the gear in the raft every time you wanted a match, but tropical storms gave no warning. You had to be prepared. Every morning he checked that items borrowed from the raft were back in place. He checked the flashlight—did the batteries still work? He checked the log book and the fountain pen—did it have enough ink? He checked the matches, the rations, the life jackets.

“Whatever you take from the raft during the day goes back into the raft at night,” he explained. Then he added, as an afterthought, “The clock and the calendar do not go into the raft unless we have to evacuate the island.”

In his slow, meticulous way, he explained to Ben the importance of winding the clock and marking off the days on the calendar. A busty blond knelt over the month of March and drew her hands over her exquisitely airbrushed breasts.

“The one thing you don’t want to lose on this island,” said Cooper, “is time.”

Sometimes he dropped a stitch. Or a word.

“Catholic?” he inquired one morning.

“Me, sir?”

“You’re wearing a medal.”

Ben smiled. “This isn’t a holy medal, sir. It’s a good-luck charm. My dad brought it back from the war. The First World War.”

Cooper laid aside his knitting, leaned over, and examined the coin.

“I thought it was St. Columba—the wings and all. My mother has St. Columba.”

“I met a kid in the hospital who had St. Anthony, sir,” said Ben, eager to keep the conversation going.

Cooper did not appear interested in the kid who had St. Anthony.

“My mother is a nun,” he observed. “After Dad died and I left home, she took orders.”

“That’s amazing, sir.”

“And I’m not even Catholic.”

“When you go home, do you go to—”

“I don’t go home,” said Cooper. “I don’t have a home to go to. I don’t even have any relatives. I’m an only child.”

“I’m a twin, sir,” said Ben. Not that Cooper would give a hang.

“The heavenly twins,” murmured Cooper. “What I miss on this island are the stars. The stars are different here. No Big Dipper. No Little Dipper. No Orion. No heavenly twins.”

He resumed his knitting, and Ben supposed he had used up his ration of words for the day and was surprised when Cooper said, “Are you identical?”