He returned to the bar and drank a whiskey neat, then another. Denny was there, and David had seen him hanging around uneasily on the edge of things too, but he could not take Denny into his sympathies. No, Denny was on the outside for the wrong reasons. He would follow and leer at the Spanish dancing girls—or rather, at Pastora—but none of them would have him. They had found him out. He would not buy them drinks, he would not come to any terms with them—he wanted his pleasures for nothing, the kind of man who should be whipped with scorpions and made to pay well for it. He honed and hankered, that was obvious, but not to the extent of a five-dollar bar bill, which might lead to nothing, or to more expense in the long run, and nothing gained either. The girls had got in the way of snapping their eyes at him in contempt as they passed; a little more and they would be flipping their petticoats from the back at him, they had so low an opinion of him. They also fully intended that one of them, no matter which one, should certainly pick his pockets clean before the voyage ended.
Denny was drinking steadily with a firm purpose. “I aim to be stinkin’ before this here night is done,” he promised solemnly. “Come on and get in the game.”
“It’s as good as any,” said David; and for a fact, Denny was just the one to get drunk with. No pretensions, no fooling around, no chatter, just a slow deliberate premeditated wallow to the finish. Fine, that would be just fine. David downed his third whiskey, and the small nagging dig of uneasiness, not quite pain, in that blank hungry spot just between his forward ribs, began to ease up a little. He intended to drink until no matter what happened he shouldn’t be able to remember one thing tomorrow morning.
Arne Hansen and Amparo ended their dance, a rather monotonous swing-around accommodated to Hansen’s awkwardness, within arm’s reach of Elsa, and Elsa gazed from under puzzled eyebrows at Amparo, trying to find the secret. There was no secret that Elsa could see, or admit: Amparo was beautiful in a slatternly too-dark sort of way, but she made no smallest attempt to be agreeable; she had a sulky, unsmiling face, she hardly spoke, she seemed even a little bored and out of temper. Hansen, Elsa observed with satisfaction, danced like a bear. He kept his attention set upon Amparo as if she might disappear if he looked aside for a moment. Amparo carried and waved freely a black lace fan with a red cotton rose pinned over a torn place. Anybody with eyes in his head could see why the rose was there—anybody could see! Amparo, her hips rocking, walked over and said something to Pastora, who left the deck and went in the bar to take a message to Pepe. Then Amparo walked away slowly without looking back, and Hansen took off after her with long steps. Frau Rittersdorf, who had just danced with the purser, a hugely fat, fatherly-looking fellow with a dumpling face and walrus mustaches, found herself standing near Mrs. Treadwell. She nodded, her mouth prim, towards the retreating figures. Hansen had overtaken Amparo, had seized her arm, they were hurrying away together.
“I don’t think that is a very pretty sight,” she observed. Mrs. Treadwell turned a too-innocent face upon her and asked, “Why not? I think they look very well together!”
Pepe sat late alone, over a half bottle of red wine. Ric and Rac, Tito, Pancho, Manolo, Pastora, Concha, and Lola had finally deserted him. The band stopped playing, the dancers dispersed, lights were dimmed in the salon and on deck; sailors came out with their buckets and brushes; the man at the bar was obviously closing up for the night. Cigarette ends were stacked high in the tray before him, though the waiter had emptied it twice. Swallowing his last drop of wine, Pepe lighted another cigarette and strolled outside once around, and then, cautiously as a cat, descended into the depths of the ship. Lingering there, patrolling the corridor, at last he saw Arne Hansen come out looking as if he had dressed in a hurry, enter the passage almost at a run and disappear around the far corner as if the police were after him.
Pepe advanced then softly, opened the cabin door, and found Amparo as he expected, in her black lace nightgown, counting her money, in substantial-looking American banknotes, and a sizable lot of them. He put out his right hand palm up, rubbing thumb and forefinger together humorously as if this were an old joke between them. Instead of giving them to him as she usually did, she tossed them into the washbasin, where he had to pick them out for himself.
David Scott and William Denny woke from drunkenness with shattering headaches, eyes that would not focus properly, and sunken stomachs. Herr Glocken in a trembling voice was asking for his morning medicine and water as if he had been asking at intervals for a good while. Denny groaned loudly and thrashed about in the upper berth. David rolled off the couch and ministered to Herr Glocken, whose hand shook as it closed round the tumbler. Instantly his medicine was down, he gave David a proud, lopsided smile. “I drank too much,” he said, and dropped back behind the curtain.
David, brushing his hair, noted with sickening anxiety the thin line of glossy skin at the top of his forehead where, at twenty-six years, his hairline was slowly but fatally, visibly receding. Years might pass before it happened once for all, but there would come a day, an unspeakable day, when he would be bald, as his father and his grand-fathers and his great-grandfathers were before him. No earthly power could avert it. He knew because he had tried everything. He had been guilty of buying every kind of hair tonic and salve and fancy shampoo and massage device any barber wished to sell him. At great damage to his Pennsylvania Quaker conscience, he had committed methodically the two greatest sins possible (or so he had understood it as a child, from precept and example): he had spent on frivolities money meant for better purposes, and he had pampered his bodily vanity. Not that he gave a damn, as he was fond of assuring himself; but those tight-mouthed, tight-handed, tight-souled old gaffers had left some kind of poison in his blood that kept him from ever really enjoying his life, and besides, he was going to be bald. Still he blushed at having been such a dupe as to think, for example, that a hairbrush operated by electricity was going to destroy the genes of all those bald-headed ancestors. His inevitable baldness, then, he jotted down as one more grudge against his mother, who had never shown any judgment as a mother, certainly, and least of all in her choice of the father of her children. His father had not only been prematurely bald, he was flighty, irresponsible, unfaithful openly in low ways, incapable of even the lowest form of loyalty to anything or anybody. He had the Quaker tendency to count his pennies, but that was all. He had finally looped out with a girl half his age, and nobody ever caught up with him, or even ever heard of him, again.
He left his wife a letter, though, saying that this new love was not based on mere physical attraction, as his marriage and many affairs had been, but was a matter of deep spiritual and intellectual interest as well, something too high and beautiful for his wife to understand. He did not expect her to understand it, and was not going to try to explain any further. It was Good-by, and Good Luck!
David was nine years old at the time, and had already thought often how pleasant life could be if it were not for his father being around all the time. Now his disappearance seemed to David no less than a wonderful stroke of divine Providence, the source from which he had been informed all blessings arrived. His mother had taken the whole thing quite differently. “Spiritual!” she had said violently, as if it were an unclean word. Then she said to David, “Here is the kind of father you’ve got,” and read the letter in a high strained voice to him; standing in the middle of the floor with her chin thrown back and her eyes closed with the tears streaming, she had nearly laughed her head off. Then she sat down and almost embarrassed him to death by seizing him, a big bony lank boy, and dragging him onto her lap, where she cradled him as if he were a little baby, rocking back and forth sobbing as if she would never stop. It had all made him so sick he threw up his supper, and afterward he got very sleepy; but woke in the night with the most terrifying feeling of pure desolation. Quietly, secretly, he cried bitterly too, cried himself to sleep again in his dampened pillow smelling of old feathers.
In the midst of brushing his hair, David vomit
ed suddenly into the washbasin. Furtively with shame he scrubbed the bowl, thinking that his hair tonic was as bad as Denny’s patent medicines and laxatives and sleeping pills. He turned away from the sight of his hangdog face in the mirror, and the dreadful muddled feeling of moral self-reprobation which Jenny called a Methodist hangover clutched him, not for the first time, in the vitals.
He had done something ridiculous last night, what was it? He remembered Jenny’s face somewhere along the evening, her eyes very brightly cold; she was closing a door in his face—what door, and where, and why? A great thunderous gap of darkness existed in his mind between a last series of drinks with Denny at the bar, and Jenny’s glittering eyes at the closing door. But she would remember, she would be glad to give him a full account. He had only to wait until they met at breakfast or on deck. She would tell him a story to please herself, half invention, half true, he would never know which was which, and she would be certain to add something like: “Don’t feel badly about it, darling. I’m probably making it all sound much sillier than it really was. I wasn’t quite sober myself, remember,” she would say with purest hypocrisy: for Jenny was a sober little creature who didn’t depend upon alcohol for anything. The thought of Jenny’s mere existence at that moment was a fresh accusation against him. He should marry Jenny, or offer to marry her, anyway: they should have got married before they left Mexico—this way everything was plainly going to be a mess. But Jenny was not the wife he wanted if he wanted a wife, which he certainly did not want now: in fact, he faced it coldly, he would never in the world marry Jenny, he did not intend to marry at all; marriage was a bad business, a mug’s game. On reaching this candid conclusion, his spirits improved somewhat: he felt able to face Jenny on her own terms.
Herr Professor and Frau Hutten opened their eyes, moved their heads experimentally and asked in duet, “How do you feel, my dear?” Comparing notes, they decided their seasickness was past, they must rise and face the day. Bébé, seeing them stirring, took heart and walked about confidently, and when Frau Hutten kissed him on the nose, he responded with a hearty lap on her chin.
The Indian nurse waked Señora Ortega gently and tucked the baby to her breast for the morning nursing. The mother drowsed and waked deliciously to the steady warm mumbling of the ravenous mouth, the long forward rolling surge of the ship, the sleepy beat of the engines. Her pains and fatigues were gone at last. Folded together, mother and baby slept as one in soft animal ease, breathing off sweet animal odors, cradled both like unborn things in their long dark dream. The Indian woman, who slept in her white chemise and full white petticoat, filled her palms with cold water, washed her eyes and smoothed her hair, slipped into her embroidered wool skirt, put on her earrings and necklaces, and lay down again, her meek bare feet, pointed and delicate, close together; and dozed. Now and then she twitched a little, and opened one eye. A voice she did not recognize, but believed to be her dead mother’s, often called her name in a tone of warning as she slept. “Nicolasa,” the voice said very tenderly as if she were a child again. But it meant to tell her the sad news that she was needed, she must break her night’s rest, she must all day long be silently ready to do whatever was required of her. She often wept in her sleep because she lived her whole life among strangers who knew only her christened name, not a word of her language, and who never once asked her how she felt. “Nicolasa,” said the soft voice, urgently. She sighed and sat up; saw that her poor little baby was still asleep and the poor mother also, but perhaps they would be quieter, sleep longer and more deeply, if she kept watch over them. She drooped on the edge of her bed, smiling vaguely at mother and child; then dropped to her knees and took her rosary out of her pocket. A charm of dried herbs in a cheesecloth bag was attached to the rosary, and she kissed this charm before she kissed the crucifix.
Wilhelm Freytag woke feeling a fresher, cooler wind blowing upon his face. The round bit of horizon shone through the porthole, not clear but a thick cloudy blue. They were six days out, yes, this was Sunday and the ship had settled to her speed such as it was in a beeline across the waters, already, he noticed, putting out his head, a little troubled. It was real sea air, dense yet sweet and mild, with long sooty streamers of cloud trailing from deep blue thunder banks to the east. It seemed late; perhaps he had missed breakfast. The ship’s bell clanged. Eight o’clock; time enough if he speeded up a little. Hansen would miss it, though. The breathing of deepest slumber stirred behind the curtain, and Hansen’s huge feet, with smooth glossy soles and assertive great toes standing apart from the others, stuck out of the upper bunk as usual. Freytag wondered how he managed in cold weather, and remembered being half wakened by the noise of Hansen scrambling into bed at what must have been a very late hour.… Probably up to no good with that Spanish woman he had been dogging from the first.
While he shaved he riffled through his ties and selected one, thinking that people on voyage mostly went on behaving as if they were on dry land, and there is simply not room for it on a ship. Every smallest act shows up more clearly and looks worse, because it has lost its background. The train of events leading up to and explaining it is not there; you can’t refer it back and set it in its proper size and place. You might learn something about one or two persons, if you took time and trouble, but there was not time enough and it was not worth the trouble; not even that American girl Jenny Brown was interesting enough to try to know better. By herself, a nice enough person, he believed; good dancer and full of lively talk and odd random humor that amused you at the moment, though you could not remember a word of it afterwards. But that strange young man she was traveling with gave her own personality a dubious cast: such as that odd behavior of his last night, when he came between them abruptly during a waltz, seized Jenny Brown by the elbow and snatched her away, and had performed a few steps with her of a kind usually seen only in the lowest dance halls. Jenny Brown had tried to fight her way out of his clutches, and she succeeded for a moment; turned to wave good night to Freytag, and then David Scott had seized her arm and she had given up and walked away with him. It was all pretty cheap and stupid, from Freytag’s viewpoint, and it illustrated the danger of getting involved with strangers and their messy situations.
What he, Freytag, preferred from strangers was a friendly indifference, a superficial pleasantness. This was quite enough for any voyage, any evening at all among strangers, but it is just these things that too many persons know nothing about, he said, now beginning to carry on a silent, internal conversation with his absent wife Mary. People on a boat, Mary, can’t seem to find any middle ground between stiffness, distrust, total rejection, or a kind of invasive, gnawing curiosity. Sometimes it’s a friendly enough curiosity, sometimes sly and malicious, but you feel as if you were being eaten alive by fishes. I’ve never been on a boat, remember, said Mary in his mind. Ah, but you will be soon, you will be. You’ll see for yourself then. Would you believe, I danced with a girl, her name was Jenny something-or-other, had a drink with her, and a young man she was traveling with, rather a common sort of chap I think he must be, made the oddest scene about it. Traveling with? He realized at once that such an episode was not the kind of thing he could tell Mary. It had no meaning, no importance, it was outside of their lives altogether, he would have forgotten it by the time he saw her again. And then too, if Mary heard such a story, she might say slyly, as she had said before when he told her of his travel adventures, often rather charming, he thought: “More Goyim, I expect?” And he always had to say, “Yes.” And she would remark, “It’s so strange that you never meet any Jews when you travel alone!” Once when he had tried to show her why he felt that this was an outrageous thing for her to say, they had almost quarreled; she would not at these times accept a fact she knew well: that it was the Jews who drew the line and refused associations and friendship. But the subject was dangerous ground between them, and he had learned to avoid it. He felt his own life within him thriving safe and sound, something intact with a smooth surface very hard for
the fishes to get their teeth in. He would keep away from that Jenny Brown and her private affairs, whatever they were. She was evidently at loose ends, ready for a little excitement. Her way of talking was too intimate, too personal; she asked questions; she wished to confide and explain about herself. She was not so interesting as her vanity led her to suppose.
There was nothing he wished to confide or explain to anyone but Mary. He was very simply transporting himself, like something inanimate sent by freight, stored in the hold, until, from the house he had taken and begun to prepare for Mary in Mexico City, he should set himself down in the house where Mary was waiting for him in Mannheim. In that interval nothing concerned him, he had no business with strangers. When they returned together, the ship and the passengers would still not matter, for it would be the voyage of their lives. They would never see Germany again, except for a miracle. Mary must be his native land and he must be hers, and they would have to carry their own climate with them wherever they went; they must call that climate home and try not to remember its real name—exile. A vision of Mary playing and singing at the piano formed in his memory, and he whistled along with her the song she was singing: “Kein Haus, keine Heimat.…”