There’d been a time, long before my arrival in the world, when Grandpa wasn’t yet a bitter and lonely recluse; when he wasn’t a bottle-a-day drinker of Irish whiskey; when he was, in fact, a charming and pleasant young man, the apple of his mother’s eye and Mannville’s brightest star. This was before the Second World War. I heard much about the war growing up; we’d had many wars, we Americans, but to hear Grandpa tell it there was really only one war that mattered, and that was his war. All the others, from the Revolution to World War One, had been practice wars, a sort of warm-up for the real thing, and all the wars afterward, such as Vietnam and Korea, merely weak imitations of it. The Second World War, I learned from Grandpa, grabbed hold of millions of lives like a leprous and inescapable fist. If it didn’t snuff them out, it changed them forever. That was what wars did, of course. But few of them did it on the scale this particular war managed to achieve. That was what it did to Grandpa, more or less, and even almost forty years later it still occupied the greater part of his attention. I heard this story over and over again until I had it memorized, and I can tell it almost without thinking, as though it had happened not to him but to me.
In 1943, when Grandpa was nineteen, he joined the Army and became a regular infantryman. He did this over the protests of his mother, Lily, who thought he ought to go to college instead. College, however, held no interest for Grandpa. He was more interested in the war. Most of the young men his age in Mannville had either already gone to war or were about to go. The town was full of soldiers and sailors strutting about in their fine new dress uniforms. In fact, it was becoming impossible to get noticed by girls unless one was in uniform, and getting noticed by girls, Grandpa admitted to me later, was his only real concern at the time. The war was a fever that had swept unchecked through the hearts and minds of Mannvillians, and nobody had any time for those who weren’t caught up in the same frenzy. Grandpa burned to fight and to distinguish himself; perhaps, he thought, if he was lucky, he would get wounded just badly enough to develop an interesting limp, and he would be sent home to live out his days in glory, like his grandfather Willie. Willie limped because there was a Confederate musket ball in his leg. Everyone, from the Mayor on down, worshipped him.
Lily Mann despaired. The infantry, she believed, was below the station of the Manns, who were millionaires thrice over and whose landholdings were of locally legendary proportions. She thought Grandpa at least ought to have become a cavalryman; she hadn’t yet grasped the concept of mechanized warfare, which had already swept over much of Europe and the Pacific like the shadow of a bloodthirsty hawk. To ride, she pointed out, was much more dignified than walking. When Grandpa—who, of course, was not called Grandpa yet, but Thomas Junior—explained to her that horses were useless against tanks and fighter planes, she relented. But, Lily said, at least he could go fight in the European Theatre, so he could imbibe some of the culture there.
“Ma,” said the young Thomas Junior, “when they say European Theatre, they’re not talking about a fancy opera house. They’re not going to let me just wander around looking at museums all the time.” He was being sarcastic, of course. Lily knew very well what the phrase European Theatre meant, and to remind her son of it she swatted him on the top of his head, which, though he was only nineteen, was already balding.
“You might at least learn to speak a little French,” she said. “French comes across so well in social circles.”
“Nobody around here speaks French,” said Thomas Junior. “Who would I speak it with?”
“You could speak it when you returned home and went to Harvard,” said Lily icily.
Thomas Junior dropped the subject. Her mind was made up. He knew better than to argue directly with his mother. She was the toughest person he’d ever met, man or woman. In fact, he thought, sometimes she got her way so much because she was a woman. If a man spoke to people the way she did, he would have to back himself up with his fists. But women didn’t have to fist-fight. A shame, really, Thomas Junior thought. If his mother could fight as well as she could talk, she would have ended the war herself within the year.
Lily had been only sixteen when she married Thomas Junior’s father, Thomas Senior. She was widowed a year later, when her husband died attempting to prove that it was possible to drive an automobile across Lake Erie, when frozen, all the way to Long Point, Ontario, Canada, a distance of roughly twenty miles. Theoretically this feat is possible, but Thomas Senior—my great-grandfather, Grandpa’s father—picked the wrong night to do it. There was a raging snowstorm, which limited visibility to less than twenty yards. Also, he was drunk. Also, the Lake hadn’t yet completely frozen over. But none of these factors seemed to deter him. We are daredevils, we Manns, every last one of us, and unconcerned with the laws of physics, which strictly prohibit the driving of automobiles on water. The inebriated Thomas Senior got in his brand-new Pierce-Arrow convertible, waved good-bye to a party of equally drunken friends on shore, and drove off gaily into the blizzard, never to be seen again.
Lily was pregnant with Thomas Junior at the time. She absorbed the news of her husband’s death with characteristic stoicism; she was not seen to cry, either when she learned of his death or at his funeral. And as soon as her son was born and her lying-in period was over, she single-handedly took control of the Mann estate with a firmness and sense of purpose her frivolous husband had never possessed.
“Everything,” Lily used to tell her son, “is a matter of life or death. So live.”
Lily herself was born to a poor but fanatically respectable farming family in nearby Springville. She’d married Thomas Senior not because he was rich but because he was irresistible. He had charm, wit, good looks, and smiled all the time; parties generally didn’t pick up speed until he arrived, and after he left they began to wind down. Lily had married him for love, not money, but she knew nevertheless that she was lucky to have married into such a fortune, and she was determined to keep her husband’s farms and orchards and vineyards profitable or die in the process.
Thomas Senior’s father, Willie, had retreated into his bedroom in a sort of self-imposed exile. He was old now, nearing death, or so he claimed, and he spent most of his time with his wounded leg propped up on a footstool, scribbling in his journal. Willie showed no interest in taking over operations again after his foolhardy son drove his Pierce-Arrow to the bottom of Lake Erie, an action that, incidentally, gave him no surprise. He’d always known his son was too giddy to be a businessman and perhaps even too foolish to live very long. Willie himself had announced his retirement from business affairs some years earlier, and in the same breath had politely requested that everyone leave him alone. Lily could, he said, run the whole show if she was so inclined. It made no difference to him whether she succeeded or went bankrupt. All he wanted to do was write in his journal, and he could do that in the poorhouse just as well as in his mansion.
Lily, being Lily, chose to take Willie at his word. She was barely eighteen years old, but her will was inexorable, her planning impeccable, her business instincts deadly accurate. In short, she was a success, and under Lily’s strong hand the Manns became wealthier than they’d ever been since Willie Mann made them rich after his return from the Civil War. By the time Lily was only twenty, she was the reigning queen of Erie County, in social, economic, and even political circles. Sheriffs and council members found it difficult to maintain their office if they didn’t have Lily Mann on their side. It was this strength of will that her son, Thomas, found himself confronted with now, and he followed the course of action he’d learned years ago to adopt when dealing with his mother: obey her.
The U.S. Army, however, had never heard of Lily Mann. After Thomas enlisted, he received orders to go to Buffalo, where he would board a bus for New York, a plane to San Francisco, and a transport to the Philippines, where he would do battle against the Japanese.
Lily was outraged. Much to Thomas’s embarrassment, she placed a phone call to a certain senator’s office in Albany. It was useless to fight, however. Although the senator was apologetic, he had the gall to suggest that there was nothing Lily could do; he compounded the insult by requesting a campaign contribution in the same breath. As an interesting footnote to history, and not entirely by coincidence, the senator’s campaign for reelection was unsuccessful.
“The Japanese indeed!” Lily raged. “Who are the Japanese, anyway? Nobody I know has ever even met a Japanese!”
“They’re small and yellow and they eat their own children,” said Thomas, which was the popular perception of the Japanese at the time. “They’re not really even human. Not like us. That’s why we need to fight them. They’re trying to take over the world.”
Lily shuddered. Thomas was delighted. Over the next few days he filled her head with as much anti-Japanese propaganda as he could make up. Thomas himself was terrified of the Japanese, and his terror was worsened by his own lies, but he wanted his mother to think he was doing something magnificent. He would, of course, have preferred going to Europe. But he knew there was nothing he could do about it, and he was determined to make the best of a bad situation. Gradually Lily’s attitude shifted, and then she was not only in favor of his going to the Pacific but actually bragged about it to her friends at parties and Red Cross fund-raisers. “My son is off to destroy the Yellow Menace,” she said proudly. “The Mann family simply will not tolerate Japanese aggression, no matter where it takes place.”
As rich as Lily became from selling food supplies to the Army, she gave almost all of her war profits back again in the form of donations to the Red Cross, her favorite charity, and also set up a fund for local women whose husbands had been killed in action and who had children to raise. She became even more of a celebrity than she had been before, and she became so proud of her son, off to the Philippines in just a few short weeks now, that she could barely speak of it in public without tears of joy. Thomas, though secretly afraid of being blown to bits by the Japanese, was proud of his mother too; she gave him the sort of courage to go on that he might otherwise have gotten from his daredevil father, had he still been alive. So it was with this mutual admiration in their hearts that Thomas kissed his mother farewell at the train station and boarded the seven-seventeen for Buffalo, an hour and a half away.
Thomas Junior was the second Mann to travel to Buffalo to be inducted into the Army. Eighty-two years earlier, his grandfather, William Amos Mann III, had walked barefoot from Mannville—which was then called Clare Town, after the Irish county that was the birthplace of most of its citizens—to join the Army of the Union and go down South to “whup Rebs,” as he put it. Thomas had known his grandfather well. He was a stooped old man with a tremendous white beard. He’d walked with a polished stick of hickory topped with gold and engraved with his monogram—W.A.M. III. He’d died only a few years earlier, at the remarkable age of ninety-five, still limping from a wound he’d received at the battle of Antietam. Willie had finally finished writing his diary, which everyone took to be an autobiography of sorts, and he gave it to Thomas in a ceremony utterly devoid of portent or majesty a short time before his death. He’d simply called him into his room one day, dug the diary out of an old trunk, and handed it to him, saying, in his gentle and diluted brogue, “Most of what I learnt in my life, lad, I tried to write down, so’s the next fella could maybe make some sense out of things. Bein’ as your father is gone to his reward, you’re the next fella. This is for you.”
Thomas had been only sixteen, the same age his grandfather had been when he marched down the road barefoot to go fight his own war, and he hadn’t thought much of the incident at the time. He put the diary in a safe place and promptly forgot about it. But when he was packing his personal effects before going off to the Philippines, he suddenly remembered the diary, and dug it out again. It was a gift from one warrior to another, he thought grandiosely. He would read it on the train. No doubt it contained stirring accounts of hand-to-hand combat that would give him courage to face the enemy.
Thomas reached into his duffel bag now on the train and took out the diary. It was bound in cracked leather, the covers plain and unadorned. He opened it to the first page. The paper had aged surprisingly well; it was only slightly yellowed and still supple. On the inside of the front cover, in an unpracticed hand, his grandfather had written the following:
1866
This Is Willie Mann’s book!
The first entry read:
May 21, 1866
My Naym is Willie Amos Mann I Learnt to Write from a Feller in the Army of the Union and I be Twenty One Yeres old the feller who learnt me to Write and Reed was a Scoolmaster. To-day tis hot and We half been Working at the Corn all day Hoing Wedes.
Thomas put the diary away again. This was not glamorous war history. This was boring farmer talk. Besides, the churning in his stomach made it impossible for him to concentrate. Though he hadn’t mentioned it to his mother, or to anyone else, he was desperately afraid, and though home was barely behind him, he was already lonely. More than anything he wished the war would end before he arrived in Buffalo. But he knew the chances of that were slim. So he sat on the train with his head against the window and his eyes shut, remembering home, until the train arrived in Buffalo and he disembarked, trembling, along with several other young men his age from various towns along the Mannville-Buffalo line. There a waiting sergeant lined them up on the platform and marched them off single file down the street to the induction center; and my grandfather walked into the open maw of the U.S. Army, never to return in quite the same form.
The real reason Thomas Junior had joined the Army—as opposed to the other branches of the military—was not one of which he was proud. He’d never flown in his life, and had no wish to do so, so anything to do with airplanes was out of the question. He’d grown up on Lake Erie, and so was familiar enough with water to know that drowning also terrified him; therefore, the Navy was also out. The Marines were too crazy—he didn’t want to be among the first in any attack. He assumed that in the Army he would spend his time on the ground, a medium with which he was thoroughly familiar, with lots of other homesick and scared young men, and as long as he had at least one foot on the earth at all times, he thought being shot at was something he could tolerate with a modicum of manliness.
However, after being inducted in Buffalo, Thomas was placed in a large cargo plane, along with forty-nine of his fellow soldiers, and flown to San Francisco. He spent his first flight vomiting quietly behind a bulkhead. After basic training, which he handled well enough, he thought, because it took place on solid land, he was placed on a troop ship and sent to the Philippines. There was more vomiting. When he arrived in the Philippines, it appeared that there’d been a mistake; he hadn’t been wanted in the Philippines after all, but in the Marianas. He was placed in another cargo plane and flown there.
By this time Thomas realized he was in the hands of dangerous idiots. He imagined a room full of generals somewhere, gleefully poring over charts and maps and plotting where to send him next. When he arrived in the Marianas, he reported for duty and was told that there’d been another mistake; he was supposed to be in the Philippines after all, and so he simply did an about-face on the runway and got back on the plane.
Not only was Thomas now airborne again, but he was flying high over an ocean that afforded plenty of opportunities for drowning, should they be shot down. When Thomas realized this, he resigned himself to death. He sat on his helmet, as he’d seen other soldiers do, to prevent any wayward shards of metal from doing damage to his nether parts in the event of an attack. Willie Mann’s diary was wrapped in several layers of oilcloth and secured to his stomach by means of packing tape.
He was the only passenger on this particular flight. There was a pilot, a copilot, and a navigator, with whom he chatted from time to time. The navigator was a twenty-three-year-old engineering student from Kansas City who’d abandoned graduate school to join the Army Air Force. He hunched over his charts, shouting above the roar of the plane’s engines, reading coordinates aloud to Thomas to pass the time. They made no sense to him, but he was grateful for anything that would take his mind off the fact that he was flying, and over an ocean, no less.
Incredibly, the next thing that happened was precisely what Thomas had been fearing since he boarded the first plane in Buffalo: an attack by a Japanese fighter plane, the dreaded Zero. It came as a complete surprise to everyone. They were not in an area of heavy Japanese presence and no trouble had been expected. He noticed first that the pilot was shouting loudly enough to be heard in the back of the plane. Then the plane reared upward on its tail and began a straining, creaking climb upward. Thomas was sent tumbling into the tail. The copilot came scrambling back into the cargo area. He and the navigator shouted at each other for a moment, with much pointing at charts and gesticulating heavenward. It occurred to Thomas that if they were lost, it was because the navigator had been too busy talking to him, and therefore it was at least partly his fault.
The copilot went back to the cockpit. The plane completed its climb and promptly dove almost straight down, so that Thomas was sent flying into the tail again, this time floating weirdly, buoyed by G-forces. The navigator threw open a porthole near his table and unstrapped the machine gun that was fixed there. He pulled the trigger and swiveled his upper body back and forth. Shell casings spewed rapidly from the breech of the gun and littered the floor, and the reek of cordite filled the thin air. Through the porthole Thomas caught a glimpse of the underbelly of another plane, a small one with a gray body, as it zoomed past. It seemed ridiculously close. When they leveled out, the copilot came back into the cargo area.
“Put on your damn parachute!” he screamed. He helped Thomas struggle into the bulky backpack that contained his parachute.
“I’ve never used one of these before!” Thomas shouted.
“Hopefully you won’t have to!” yelled the copilot. “But if we ditch, jump out that door”—he pointed to the great sliding cargo door, which Thomas doubted he could move by himself—“and pull this cord here!” He showed Thomas the rip cord and went back into the cockpit.
That was the last Thomas ever saw of him. There was a tremendous rattling just then, as though the plane was being showered with baseballs, and several ragged holes appeared in one wall of the plane and then in the wall opposite as Japanese bullets passed through with the velocity of tiny meteorites. At the same moment, smoke began issuing from the cockpit. Thomas felt a sickening lurch as the plane keeled over to one side and began heading downward again.
The navigator fired one last burst of the machine gun and ran to the cargo door. Together he and Thomas managed to push it open.
“Wait here!” shouted the navigator. He ran into the cockpit and came out again immediately, his face the color of milk.
“What about those guys?” my grandfather shouted.
“They’re dead,” said the navigator. He said it quietly—Thomas saw his lips move, but he didn’t hear the words. He turned and looked out the cargo door, squinting against the fierce wind. Then he felt the navigator’s hands on his back. Suddenly he was tumbling out the door and through open space. He felt frantically for the rip cord as he flipped over and over, occasionally catching a glimpse of the navigator falling above him. Finally he found it. His parachute opened with a tremendous yank, as though the hand of God had reached down and pulled on his underwear. He stopped tumbling. He looked up again to see if he could spot the navigator, but all that was visible was the underside of his own parachute. The bright Pacific sun shone through it, lighting up the silk exactly like a lampshade that Thomas remembered from one of the parlors at home.
He looked down. He was, he guessed, about a mile above the sea, which from this height looked like a wrinkled blue bedsheet. Not so very far off were a smattering of tiny islands; he tried to steer toward them but only succeeded in spilling air out of his parachute, making himself fall faster.
“I’m going to fucking die,” he said.
Far below him he saw a minuscule splash as the cargo plane crashed into the sea. A sick feeling pervaded his body and he stifled the urge to vomit. Then from the corner of his eye he saw the navigator float past. He’d spotted the islands too, and was more adept at controlling his parachute than Thomas was, so that he was falling closer to them. There was about a quarter-mile of space between the two men. Thomas began to shout.
“Hey! HEY! Hey YOU!”
The navigator looked over. Ridiculously, he and Thomas waved at each other. Then the navigator realized Thomas’s predicament and showed him, pantomiming furiously, how to control his fall. The ocean was growing alarmingly closer, but so were the islands. He wouldn’t quite land on them, but he hoped fervently that he would fall close enough to swim for it. Thomas was a very good swimmer, perhaps because his fear of drowning was so keen; he’d never swum in very deep water, but he didn’t think it would be different from swimming in shallow water, provided he could get his clothes off before they dragged him down. He began shedding as many articles of clothing as he could reach. His boots would be the hardest to lose once he was submerged, so after much straining and contorting, he managed to loosen them enough to kick them off. Next he pulled off his socks with his toes. He removed his belt from under the straps of his parachute harness; once he was in the ocean, he would have to struggle out of the straps themselves. It would be very difficult. Thomas took a deep breath and closed his eyes.
Calm down, he told himself. The only way out of this is to remain calm. He rehearsed in his mind the steps he would go through: unbuckle the chest straps, pull his arms out of the harness, and then his legs. He would have to hold his breath for a long time, but he thought he could do it if only he could avoid the panic trying to beat its way up through him. Then would come his clothes. If he could get out of his pants underwater, he thought he could make it.
He was only a thousand feet or so above the water now. The islands were still a good swim away, perhaps a mile. But he had swum that far many times before. He could do it. He was sure of it. He looked at the navigator again. He’d drifted closer to Thomas, and he was shouting something at him, something about “parks” or “barks,” but Thomas ignored him. He had to focus. Concentration was of the utmost importance now.
When he hit the water, he pulled himself up into a ball. Then he went through the steps he had rehearsed in his mind. His parachute was designed to come off quickly, and he shed it exactly as planned. His pants, however, gave him a good deal of trouble. He sank several feet below the surface while he was trying to kick them off, and the panic came again, surging up from his belly through his throat. But he fought it off again. Finally he succeeded in getting out of them, and he pushed his way to the surface, where he took a deep gasping breath, removed his shirt, and began to tread water.
Immediately he saw the navigator’s chute. He’d landed closer to the islands than Thomas, but not by much; in fact, the islands now looked impossibly far away. It was going to be a hell of a swim. Thomas struck out for the navigator. There was a slight swell, which bobbed him up and down like a cork; Thomas was grateful the waves weren’t larger. For the first time in his life he tasted salt water. It tasted like blood, he thought. He swam slowly, pacing himself, forcing his breath to come regularly.
“Dear Mother,” he said aloud. “I’m sorry to inform you that I died while swimming for my life in the ocean, where I landed due to Army incompetence. I have discovered that the U.S. Army is a far more dangerous enemy to me than the Japanese.”
It took him forever to reach the navigator. When he got there, he found the man floating, his head protruding from the hole in the center of the parachute, which billowed around him like a massive baptismal gown.
“Get me the fuck out of this goddamn fucking thing,” said the navigator. He was crying like a child. “I can barely move.”
“Right,” said Thomas. He began rolling up one side of the parachute until he reached the man’s head. He slipped it over him and saw that the man was wearing a flotation jacket.
“They make us wear them,” said the navigator, “thank God. I’d share it with you but I’d drown. I can’t swim.”
“I’ll be fine,” said Thomas. “I’m a good swimmer. Let’s unstrap you.”
“I can’t swim,” said the navigator again.
“Don’t worry,” said Thomas. “We’ll leave the jacket on.”
“You can swim,” said the navigator. “Do you know how much money I’d give to be able to swim right now?”
“I’m guessing quite a lot,” said Thomas. “Get out of that thing.”
The navigator began to struggle with the straps of his harness. After several minutes he was free. He was still crying, ashamedly trying to stifle his sobs.
“Don’t panic,” said Thomas. “Hear me? Stop crying. If we panic we’re done for. We have to make it to those islands.”
“What’s that on your stomach?” asked the navigator.
Thomas had forgotten about his grandfather’s diary. He looked down. It was still there, safely secured around his middle.
“It’s a book,” he said.
There was a moment of awkward silence. Thomas thought of explaining why he had a waterproofed book taped to his stomach, but decided that could wait.
“I’m from Kansas City,” said the navigator. “There’s no damn water there. I should have joined the fucking infantry and gone to fucking Europe. Instead I’m in the fucking Air Force and I’m sitting in the water and we’re going to be fucking eaten by fucking sharks!”
“No we’re not,” said Thomas. “Start swimming.”
“Yes we are,” said the navigator. “I saw them when I was falling. Big ones. Back there.” He pointed over his shoulder out to the open sea.
A cold chill swept through Thomas. “Oh my Lord,” he said. “Are you serious?” So that was what he’d been shouting as they fell.
“Yes,” the navigator said simply. Then he looked up, holding one hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun. “Look,” he said. “There’s another parachute.”
Thomas followed his gaze. There was indeed another parachute drifting gently above the islands, a falling cloudlet dislodged accidentally from its nest high above the world.
“Is it Tony? Is it Blake?” asked the navigator.
“It can’t be,” said Thomas, guessing he was talking about the pilot and copilot. “They’re dead. You told me so.”
“Oh my God,” said the navigator. “It’s the Jap. I must of got him! I shot his plane down!”
“Start swimming,” said Thomas. “I’m going to go ahead of you. You’ll be much slower than me but you won’t sink. Just keep your breathing regular.”
“Okay,” said the navigator. He was smiling now. “I shot down a Jap plane!”
“I’ll see you over there,” said Thomas. “Just head for the closest one.”
He began swimming with strong, even strokes.
“I’m Phillip Neuberg from Kansas City,” the navigator called after him. “If I don’t make it, will you write to my family?”
Thomas didn’t answer, but he made a mental note of it. Phillip Neuberg of Kansas City requests a letter home in the event of his demise. Right. Got it. He couldn’t waste any more time talking. He focused on his movements: kick, stroke, turn, breathe in, kick, stroke, exhale downward. He didn’t look any more to see how far the islands were. He just swam. He heard the navigator’s splashes grow farther and farther away behind him. He had been swimming for about fifteen minutes when the first shark hit.
The navigator let out a scream that pierced Thomas through to his soul. He forced himself to keep going. He couldn’t afford to let himself turn and look; there was nothing he could do anyway. He swam faster, as fast as he could without spending himself too soon. There came another scream, then another, and then the screaming abruptly stopped.
Thomas swam as he had never swum before. I will not by eaten by sharks, he repeated in his head. I refuse. I’m going to make it. They won’t come after me. They don’t like me. They like Phillip Neuberg from Kansas City. I am the fastest swimmer in the world. I’m the human torpedo. I’m going to make it to the island and I’m going to kill that fucking Jap who shot us down and put me in this mess and I’m going to get rescued and go home to Mannville and sit in the front parlor with the lampshade that looks like a parachute with the sun streaming through it, and I’m never going to leave it again except to get another beer or to go to the bathroom. Swim. Swim. Swim.
And in his head, he composed another letter, this one beginning “Dear Mrs. Neuberg, My name is Thomas Mann—no relation to the writer—and I’m sorry to inform you that I was with your son Phillip when he…”
Thomas was flopped up on the beach by the surf like a sodden rag doll. He lay there for several minutes, just breathing. He thanked God that he’d been born on Lake Erie and not in Kansas. He had the feeling, at that moment, that his entire life had been spent in preparation for being shot down over the South Pacific and swimming to this island. He forgot about returning to Mannville. He forgot about the war. He forgot everything he knew except that he was alive, and that somehow he’d escaped the horrible fate of Phillip Neuberg of Kansas City, consumed by sharks.
Thomas took stock of himself. He was nineteen years old and completely naked, except for the diary wrapped in oilcloth and strapped with packing tape to his stomach. He was half-full of seawater, and he was lying on a beautiful white beach several thousand miles from Mannville. Somewhere on the island was a Japanese pilot, a sword-wielding, idol-worshipping, baby-eating lunatic. Thomas had no food and no gun. It might be that there was no fresh water on the island. It might be that there was nothing to eat either. The situation, to put it mildly, was grim.
His first thought, however, was for his penis. It was two or three o’clock in the afternoon, and the full brunt of the southern sun was blasting down on him like a thousand bonfires. The rest of him was tanned a deep nut brown from his last summer on the Lake, but from his waist to the tops of his thighs Thomas Junior was as pale as a missionary. His penis was completely unprepared for a frontal solar assault. He was afraid it would get sunburned. It was that thought, and no other, which motivated him to get up and look for shade. If not for that, he might have lain there forever, just breathing.
When he stood up, Grandpa told me later, he puked seawater. He must have swallowed gallons of it during his mad rush through the ocean. He took a few steps and puked seawater again.
“Sometimes I think I spent the whole damn war just throwing up,” Grandpa told me later.
He decided it would be wiser to crawl from that point on, so he moved like a baby on his hands and knees, away from the gently rolling surf and into the line of bushes and palm trees. Once his manhood was safely shaded, he made himself a nest of leaves—huge leaves, bigger than any leaves he’d ever seen in his life—and went to sleep.
When he woke up, there was a small, dark-skinned man standing above him. The sun was almost down, and there was barely enough light to see by. The little man was silhouetted against the surf, which glowed a deep dark blue in the sunset, and the horizon, which was orange. Thomas shot to his feet. He and the little man stood there looking at each other. Neither of them moved.
“Japs are just like rattlesnakes,” Grandpa said later. “They’re just as afraid of you as you are of them.”
Technically, Thomas knew, he was supposed to kill any Japanese he met. That was what war was about. Failing that, he was to take them prisoner. He’d spent the two years since the attack on Pearl Harbor working himself into a frenzy of hatred against the Japanese. There had been a time when he was quite capable of killing one. But standing here in front of this little man, Thomas realized that he didn’t want to kill anybody, and he didn’t know how to take someone prisoner. Besides, he had no weapon to threaten him with, and it seemed ridiculous to say, “You’re my prisoner. Come with me.” What was he to do with him? So they stood there looking at each other, until the sun went down and blue faded to bruise-purple and then soft black. A chill sea breeze began to blow across the island. Grandpa and the Japanese soldier began to shiver in unison.
Seeing this, realizing Japs got cold too, Thomas decided then and there to resign from the U.S. Army. The war was over for him. He was exhausted and nauseated and hungry, and when you came right down to it, the only reason he’d really wanted to go to the war was so girls would pay attention to him when he got back. Right at that moment, that seemed like the stupidest reason in the world.
There is an entry in Willie Mann’s diary that addresses this very issue. I know about it because the diary is back in possession of the Manns again, after an absence of several decades, and I have it with me now. Like many of Willie’s later entries, made when he was an old man reflecting on his long and strange life, it’s concise, well written, and philosophical in nature—and by that time his grammar and spelling had greatly improved. Wrote Willie:
Men are fond of blaming their wars on women. Poor Helen suffers the blame for the siege of Troy, as if she asked to be kidnapped and then rescued. But it’s not the fault of women that men go to war against each other. It’s the fault of men for being warlike in the first place.
“We need a fire,” said Thomas. He pantomimed the rubbing together of two sticks. The Japanese pilot nodded, his Asian eyes—the first Thomas had ever seen—guarded but enthusiastic.
“That’s a fine idea,” said the pilot. “It’s getting a little cold.”
Thomas was flabbergasted. He stared openmouthed at the pilot.
The pilot cleared his throat uncomfortably after several moments. “I said, ‘That’s a fine idea,’” he repeated. He was wondering if my grandfather perhaps had a hearing problem.
“You’re speaking English,” said Thomas.
“Do you speak Japanese?” inquired the man.
Thomas shook his head. The pilot smiled. His white teeth glistened in the dusk.
“I didn’t think so,” he said triumphantly. “Therefore, I’m speaking English.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Thomas.
“I am Enzo Fujimora,” said the pilot. “Harvard class of thirty-five.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Thomas again. “A Jap Harvard man.”
“Exactly,” said Enzo Fujimora, and he bowed slightly from the waist.
“My mother wanted me to go to Harvard,” said Thomas. It sounded ridiculous, but that was all he could think of to say.
“Your mother has high aspirations for you,” said Enzo Fujimora. “I hope someday you are able to attend. I liked it there very much. Shall we make a fire?”
That’s the story of how my grandfather met the man who was to change the course of his life forever, as told to me by himself more times than I can remember, enough times so that I can recite it as I have here almost as if it really happened to me.
Enzo Fujimora was thirty years old. He was a schoolteacher, the son of a well-to-do family in Nagasaki, and he had a wife and two children—a boy aged three and another aged seven. When the atomic bomb was dropped on his hometown two years later, all three of them were wiped out in an instant. Enzo could not have known this ahead of time, of course, but Grandpa said later that he wouldn’t have behaved a bit differently if he had. He was a devout Buddhist, and up to that point he was the most profound person Thomas had ever met. He believed people should live every moment as if it were to be the last.
“That,” said Enzo, “is the best way to avoid wasting time.”
It was three long weeks before they were discovered. In that time, Enzo Fujimora and my grandfather became fast friends. They were both naturally amiable and outgoing, and they shared a distaste for war and in fact for violence in general. During their time together on that tiny South Pacific island, they told each other every detail they could remember of their lives, right up to the point where they had met in midair in their respective airplanes. Enzo had been separated from his squadron when he spotted the American cargo plane, and he had thought to cover himself in glory by shooting it down to avoid the disgrace of getting lost.
“It was a selfish action,” he told Thomas. “I deeply apologize.” And he bowed again. Thomas, who was a fast learner, bowed back.
There was a tiny pool of fresh water on the island, but it was not spring-fed and it was covered with a floating blanket of green scum. There was also very little food. Enzo had a pistol with six rounds of ammunition, and with it they managed to shoot two parrots. Other than those birds, which were musky in flavor and tough to chew, the only things they had to eat were some sort of tiny fruit, which gave them diarrhea, and a few herbs that grew near the spring.
Enzo recognized the herbs right away. As he told Grandpa, he was an herbalist as well as a pilot; the knowledge of herbs was a tradition in his family that went back several generations. What he really wanted more than anything was to return to Massachusetts someday and practice herbal medicine. He taught Grandpa the Japanese names for the plants they found. Perhaps because there was little else to do, Grandpa found himself interested. He rapidly mastered the names and various uses of wormwood, fennel, and henbane. Enzo, finding a willing student in my grandfather, went on to teach him everything he could remember in the three weeks they were together.
In return, Grandpa read aloud to him from the diary of Willie Mann. They were both hearing it for the first time, and far from being the monotonous account of farm life Grandpa had expected, it was fascinating. It got easier to read, too, as they progressed further, for Willie had gradually and on his own mastered the mechanics of spelling and grammar, until by the time he was forty or so his entries read with the smoothness and ease of Dickens or Proust—both of whose works Enzo had read. The slight Japanese pilot sat and listened, enthralled, for as long as Grandpa cared to read to him. When Thomas’s voice grew tired, Enzo read it himself, silently, pondering over the truths contained therein like a Talmudic scholar.
One day their longed-for rescue took place. A single-engine American fighter plane flew overhead, attracted by the smoke from the signal fire they kept burning day and night on the beach. The next morning the silhouette of a ship appeared on the horizon; it rapidly grew closer. Thomas and Enzo watched in silent apprehension as it approached. Enzo, they both knew, was about to become a prisoner of war, and my grandfather was probably going to have to return to active duty. Neither of them were thrilled with the prospects their immediate futures seemed to hold, but it was better for both of them than being found by the Japanese. Grandpa had heard horror stories about how they treated American prisoners—although doubtless Enzo had heard the same stories about American treatment of Japanese prisoners—and Enzo certainly would have been in disgrace for having been lost and then shot down. Too, the pair were emaciated, dehydrated, sunburned, and so starved they were no longer hungry, and so rescue by either side was better than the certain death that otherwise would have been their lot.
“That Robinson Crusoe business is all a bunch of hooey,” said Grandpa to me later. “We probably would have been dead within the week if they hadn’t found us.”
A flare went up from the ship as it anchored offshore. As a landing party made its way toward the island in a small skiff, Grandpa turned to Enzo impulsively.
“Here,” he said, handing him the diary. “I want you to take this.”
Enzo looked at him in bewilderment. “I cannot,” he said. “This is the property of your ancestors.”
“You can give it back someday,” said Thomas. “I don’t want you to keep it forever. But you seemed to get a lot more out of it than I did.” He was thinking that Enzo would need something to keep his mind occupied while he was a prisoner. And the truth was that Thomas didn’t want it. The diary contained many stories, fascinating stories, about his family. But it had also informed him of something he would rather not have known. In fact, he realized with a shudder, he was the only Mann to know the true story of his grandfather’s Civil War experiences, the only Mann to know that Willie Mann was not a hero at all. That he had never been in battle. That it was not a Confederate musket ball that wounded him. That, in short, Willie did not deserve all the recognition and admiration that had been his all his adult life. Willie had given him the diary with the full knowledge that Thomas would find out the truth about him when he read it; Thomas thought this was an incredibly reckless act, and was wishing now that the old man hadn’t given it to him at all.
Enzo, however, was touched by the gift. He knew nothing of Thomas’s reaction to the diary; to him it was a wonderful story, one that inspired him and made him think. Thomas had said he must give it back “someday.” In those days, someday was a brave and optimistic word to be using. One didn’t know, in wartime, how many more days lay ahead. There was absolutely no guarantee that either of them would make it through the war alive.
“I will return it, if I live,” said Enzo. “I swear it.”
“I believe you,” said Thomas.
The landing party made shore. Thomas, naked, saluted and reported Enzo, also naked, as his prisoner. Enzo was placed under guard and, once on board the ship, manacled and locked in the brig.
“That was the last I ever saw of him,” said Grandpa to me, some thirty-five years later. “But he still has the diary. I made them let him keep it. And he’s going to bring it back—I know he will. He was the most trustworthy fellow I ever knew, American or Jap or otherwise.”
I first heard this story when I was about six years old, or rather that’s the first time I remember hearing it. I’m sure I must have heard it before then. The first time Grandpa told it to me, I already knew the ending, so perhaps I’d been hearing it from the time I was born or even before, as if in my sleep. Grandpa used to talk me to sleep when I was little, his cracked bass voice soothing and lulling me as it rose and fell like those Pacific waves he’d swum through to reach safety. This was one of my favorite bedtime stories. I always felt the same thrill of security when he landed on the beach, just ahead of the sharks that had already consumed poor Phillip Neuberg of Kansas City. I could feel them nipping at my toes as I raced through the salt water, which felt to me in my imagination as warm and salty as blood, not cold and tasting of pond water like Lake Erie. I would shiver with excitement and pull my feet well clear of the end of the bed, so nothing could reach up from underneath it and grab me in the darkness.
One might think a story about Japanese fighter planes and sharks would give a young boy nightmares. I had nightmares aplenty, but they weren’t about that. They were entirely different. It was only one nightmare, really, repeated over and over. In it, I’m not me. I’m a girl. I’m running through the woods, frightened beyond words, holding up my dress so I won’t trip over it. There are men in uniform chasing me, soldiers, not from this country. They speak a different language and their uniforms are bright green with red trim. The woods are familiar to me. They’re these woods, here, the woods of Mannville, but long before there were subdivisions and trailer parks. The forest is deep and menacing, with scarcely a shaft of sunlight penetrating the trees. I run like a wildcat, always just ahead of them. I can hear their puffing and blowing and their strange guttural shouts, the jangling of the equipment on their belts. And just when I think I’ve lost them, I trip over a root and fall flat on my face. The soldiers are upon me in an instant. They surround me in a circle. One of them draws his sword, holds it up high, and in one swoop, he cuts off my head.
The picture goes dark.
I always awake from this dream screaming. Grandpa comes when he hears me, more often than not. When he does he lies down next to me in my bed and throws one arm over me.
“Easy,” he whispers. “Easy now, lad.”
“They were chasing me,” I whimper.
“I know,” said Grandpa. “They chase me too. And you were her, weren’t you? Not yourself, but a girl?”
I nod. I’m far too young to find it odd that Grandpa should know what my nightmare is about before I tell him. He’s Grandpa; he knows everything.
“I have that dream too,” said Grandpa. “We all had it, all of us Manns. We’re supposed to.”
“I hate it!”
“It’s the price we pay,” says Grandpa, “for our greatness.” And he sighs, not a sigh of apprehension but one of deep contentment, because my having this dream is the final proof that I really am a Mann, more conclusive evidence than any DNA test ever would have been, and also it shows that we are not yet completely fallen. For as long as we pay the price, there must be something to be obtained from it, and we are not doomed after all. Perhaps, Grandpa is thinking, our greatness has only just begun.
When Grandpa returned to Mannville at the end of the war, he was given the elaborate sort of welcome that people have always reserved for their greatest heroes. His mother, Lily, had already spread the story of how he was shot down and survived on a desert island by his wits, omitting for the sake of Mann honor his friendship with Enzo Fujimora, and perhaps embellishing other details here and there. When he disembarked from the train, there was a crowd of four hundred people there to welcome him, many of whom were convinced that Thomas was an ace fighter pilot who had taken over the island himself by single-handedly slaughtering the hundreds of Japanese who occupied it. Several of them carried signs, saying WELCOME HOME, TOMMY BOY! and MANNVILLE SALUTES ITS HERO. It was December of 1945. Thomas had left as a nineteen-year-old boy and returned a grizzled twenty-two-year-old veteran. He’d finished out the war at a desk job, as he’d requested after his rescue, but nobody seemed to know that. He carried with him only his duffel bag and his memories of the screams of Phillip Neuberg, and he jumped down to the platform, kissed his mother (who was briefly and regally hysterical), shyly greeted the crowd, and went home to the family seat, the huge farmhouse on the north side of town.
Thomas himself had no delusions about his role in the war. He’d only done what he had to do to survive, as had everyone else who’d made it home, and he didn’t consider himself any more of a hero than the other boys from Mannville. Some of them had come home missing an arm or a leg, or with holes blown through their sanity, and some of them hadn’t come home at all. Thomas felt no pride, no heroism when he thought of himself in comparison to these other wartime victims. But he found his mother greatly changed toward him. She worshipped his presence like a devoted servant. Lily had grown terribly lonely during his absence, Thomas discovered, and she’d aged a good deal more than the three chronological years he’d been gone; her hair was mostly gray, though she was just over forty, and her heart was beginning to fail. She’d barely managed to maintain her queenly facade through the war. She’d been waiting for Thomas to come home so that she could begin the gradual process of turning over the farm and its various side industries to him, her only son; and that huge trust, combined with the wide-eyed awe with which he was treated in town, began to swell inside him, until he walked with a strut and affected a fancy mustache, and didn’t correct people when they accidentally called him “Lieutenant.” He never mentioned what he’d discovered about his grandfather in his diary, of course; there was no reason to upset his mother, and it had all happened so long ago that it didn’t matter anyway. He put those nagging doubts to rest by ignoring them. And the diary was safe in Japan, where nobody in Mannville would ever find it. That was the other reason he’d given the diary to Enzo. He couldn’t quite bring himself to destroy it. Better to send it far away.
Lily died of a heart attack in the early spring of 1946. Thomas, married now to the young and lovely Ellen Hurley of Buffalo, was suddenly free to do whatever he wished with his money. His tastes, though grand by Mannville standards, were not extravagant, and he was not the type to waste money on useless luxuries. Instead, he acted upon a plan that had been brewing in the back of his mind for some time. Farming corn and vegetables had always seemed boring to him. He was therefore going to liquidate his assets, import ostriches from Australia, and begin an ostrich ranch. It couldn’t fail, he told himself. He was just the sort of far-thinking man who could pull it off. He was, after all, a millionaire and a war hero, and nobody would dare contradict him. In fact, he envisioned it as the start of a growing trend in America. He’d eaten ostrich meat once while visiting Australia on leave and found it delicious. Mannvillians would soon follow his example, simply because he was who he was, and then he would have a hold on the ostrich market that would be unshakable. And he wouldn’t do this on a small scale, either. All his land would be converted to ostrich ranching; all his attention would be focused on it.
Straightaway Thomas imported two thousand ostriches from Australia at phenomenal cost and hired seventy-five workmen to fence in the entire farm. Thomas and the rest of Mannville waited expectantly for the arrival of the birds. A week went by, then two weeks, then a month, then three. Then came a telegram; nearly half of the ostriches had died aboard ship en route to America. Of those that survived the trip, another half died promptly after their arrival, victims of various New World diseases to which they had no immunity.
The rest of the ostriches milled about disconsolately after their arrival in the huge area Thomas had ordered fenced. There they remained until they discovered the fences, which they promptly jumped over, never to be seen again. Thomas had told the workmen of his plan, but none of them had ever seen an ostrich before, and they had no idea of the true size or strength of one. Most of them had the vague impression that an ostrich was a very tall chicken. The fences were built accordingly, and the ostriches found them no serious obstacle to their freedom.
That was the end of that. After only three months, Thomas found himself almost bankrupt, and with not a single ostrich to show for it. What was worse, however, was that his reputation among the people of Mannville had plummeted. People in town laughed in his face. Outraged farmers barraged him with phone calls—rampaging ostriches were ruining their corn crops, and they shot them on sight. Ostrich sightings began to be reported in the neighboring towns of Springville, Angola, and Hamburg, and one even came from as far away as the tiny mountain town of Ashford Hollow, nearly sixty miles distant. The Mannville Megaphone carried weekly articles on the subject for the next year, with such headlines as MANNVILLE’S MANIACAL MILLIONAIRE MISSES MARK and GIANT CHICKENS INVADE NEW YORK! Finally, however, the whole affair came to be known as the Great Ostrich Fiasco of 1946. It is, I believe, still mentioned in history classes at Mannville High School as an interesting and colorful piece of local legend.
Broke, depressed, and suddenly friendless, Thomas retired permanently to his farmhouse. My father, Eddie, was born in late 1947; soon after, Ellen Hurley, whose name I know only from reading the wedding announcement on microfilm in the Mannville Public Library, returned alone and forever to Buffalo, having discovered belatedly that her love had been for the Mann fortune and not for Thomas Mann himself. My grandfather never mentioned her name to me, and Eddie barely knew of her. All of Thomas’s energy was focused on his son. It was only through Eddie, Grandpa knew, that the Mann name could begin its long and gradual ascension from the muck into which he had accidentally plunged it.
Everything had to be sold to pay off his debts. The three main Mann farms, including land and equipment, were publicly auctioned. The land was mostly purchased by developers eager to participate in the postwar frenzy of prosperity. Everywhere across the country, servicemen were returning home and reproducing at a fantastic rate. It was as if they were making up for lost time, time wasted in France and England and the Pacific and everywhere else the long and miserable war had been fought, time wasted in fighting when they should have been carousing in the sack with their wives. These servicemen had money now, and good jobs, and they demanded homes. Within four years, by 1950, the three thousand acres had been subdivided, parceled, built upon, and sold, and where once fruitful fields of wheat and corn and grapes had stretched impressively across the landscape, there were driveways with shiny new cars parked in them, women hanging laundry in backyards, and quiet streets filled with children on bicycles and scooters. A new town existed, and all because of a lousy idea my grandfather had that never came to fruition.
“This is all my goddamn fault,” he told me, as he had told my father, waving at the same neighborhoods. “If I’d been born with a brain, none of these suburban dipshits would be here. Better yet, I should have been eaten by sharks instead of that poor Phillip Neuberg. I bet he would never have been so stupid as to invest in ostriches. He was an engineer. Engineers are smart.”
My father entered kindergarten in 1952. His academic career from that moment on was brilliant, according to my grandfather. Like me, he could read phenomenally well at an early age, and as a result he skipped the first grade and was promoted to the second. In middle school he began playing football and baseball, as well as working a part-time job at Gruber’s Grocery. “He was never home after he turned thirteen,” said Grandpa, and he did not add that he didn’t blame him. Who would want to stick around the dying remains of a once-great empire, as its once-great emperor sat glumly amid the ruins, sipping straight Irish whiskey, shunning all human contact?
Eddie also learned to fight: “Kids used to tease him, on account of his old man was the laughingstock of the town,” Grandpa said. “So they would say things to him and he’d pound on ’em till they took it back. That business didn’t last long. He was one of the strongest kids around, and after someone got a taste of him once, they usually didn’t come back for more. Then he started getting noticed on the field. By the time he was in high school, everybody forgot who he came from. He was just Ready Eddie. His name was in the paper every week or so. Girls used to call here all the damn time and lose their nerve before they could say anything. God, he was something.”
He was more than something; he was a Mann. His natural tendency toward greatness could hardly be suppressed by a mere lack of money. If anything, it made him shine more.
“We don’t have any money,” Grandpa would tell me. “We don’t have any friends. We just have this house, and you have me. And I have you. But by God we still have more than any other family in this town, because we have Mann blood. And don’t you ever forget it.”
“I won’t,” I promised.
And I haven’t, because it’s my story too. Even though it didn’t happen to me. If I am to tell my own account, the story of who I am, how I came to be, and where I’m going, then the other stories need to be told too. Not necessarily in order, of course, but where they fit. Time is a river, but sometimes rivers run in circles. They eddy, they create backwaters, little forgotten pockets of shoreline where things persist in an unchanged state, far removed from the frantic pace of the deeper middle. It’s a good idea sometimes to allow yourself to drift into these spots, just floating and spinning, and forget about things for a while.