Page 49 - WTP Vol. V #2

She stepped past me toward the car. Her face was stone. She got in the car.
in the water on a return trip to the United States. There had not been time before the convoy left port to build walls in the ship’s empty holds that would keep the ballast from sliding to one side. Everybody on that ship knew what was probably going to happen—and it did. The seas did get rougher, and the ballast did slide to one side; the ship heeled so far that most of the propeller and rudder came out of the water, stopping all for- ward motion.
“We were eager to live vicariously
the experiences they would have preferred never to have had.”
“I have a mind to make you walk,” my mother said. I got in the car anyway. Nobody spoke the rest of the way.
Cousin Roland, my dad’s sister’s son, was an artillery officer, fighting his way across France and into Germany. His brother Jack spent the war in the Merchant Marine, surviving a number of Murmansk runs, unlike so many other sailors who went down with, or burned to death on, torpedoed ships, or jumped off to freeze in the thirty-degree water—if they didn’t drown first.
Cousin Warwick, my dad’s brother’s son, was in the intelligence branch, an aide to General Mar- shall. When one of my father’s friends hadn’t heard from his son, who was in the infantry, my father asked Warwick if he could find out why. I came down the hall a few days later and heard my father say into the phone, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this.” Then my father saw me and put up his hand. So I turned and left and didn’t hear the rest, but I didn’t need to, of course.
It is not hard to imagine the sense of abandon- ment my cousin Jack and his shipmates felt watching the convoy continue until it was over the horizon, out of sight. They spent several days exposed to German U-boats, as well as to the po- tential for even rougher seas to tip it the rest of the way over, shoveling ballast uphill until at last the ship was righted. Still an easy target, against the odds, they returned to New York, unharmed. Cousin Jack seemed incredulous that they had made it safely, that he was still alive—unlike two shipmates, who, cracking under the tension, had jumped off the ship into the ocean and drowned.
We didn’t hear our cousins’ stories until after the war, when they were civilians again, and then only incompletely, after much prodding. We were eager to live vicariously the experiences they would have preferred never to have had. I can still hear the halting reluctance with which Cousin Roland admitted that, yes, he had seen lots of dead people, and how, back in civilian life it seemed strange to attend a funeral for only one person, and how once, in order to shelter his men in the winter in a building they had recaptured, they threw the frozen corpses of German soldiers out the windows and then slept on their beds.
I still wonder what my cousins didn’t tell us. And whom were they sparing. Themselves, or us?
Cousin Jack never did describe what it was like to watch ships in his convoys go down, but he did tell the story of his ship’s being totally dead
Davenport is the author of two novels, Saving Miss Oliver and No Ivory Tower. He has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Sunday travel section, in The Saturday Review, among others.
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