THE TRAIN PULLED INTO the Eighth Street station, a short walk from Broadway to the Washington Square branch of New York University.
I stopped at a doughnut and coffee shop across from the entrance to the Main Building, and saw a friend at the counter. He waved me to an empty stool beside him. We had been at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn together but had little to do with each other. He was over six feet tall. I was five-feet-five.
It was only after we discovered we were both premed and found each other in the same biology course at NYU that we became friends. We studied together, testing each other to prepare for exams. Because of the difference in our height, people who saw us called us "Mutt and Jeff" like the characters in a comic strip popular at the time. I called him "Stretch."
I was dunking my doughnut when Stretch said, "Hey, you see the notice? If you volunteer for the military you get exempt from finals."
"You're kidding."
"In Fridays paper," he said. "Any student signing up for duty at least three months before he turns eighteen can enter the service of his choice. After that, it's the Infantry. I'm gonna join the Navy."
"I'll be eighteen on August 9th," I said, "just three months from now. But with my bad eyes, I don't think the Army will draft me."
"You want to take the chance? Lots of guys have been killed. They'll take anyone who breathes."
We paid our checks and headed across the street to the main entrance of NYU.
I knew Stretch would be accepted into the Navy, and I envied him. I loved the sea, or at least the idea of the seafaring life. At sixteen, during my last year in high school, I'd joined the Sea Scouts of America. Our scout ship, the'S. S. S. Flying Dutchman III, was an old liberty boat converted into a cabin cruiser. During the spring break, we scraped and primed and painted her hull, and the following summer we cruised up and down the East River.
At meetings during which new sea scouts were sworn in, the captain would tell the story of the legendary vessel after whom we were named. The'S. S. S. Flying Dutchman had carried a cargo of gold, and there had been a brutal murder aboard. After that, a plague broke out among the crew, and no port would allow the ship to enter. According to seamen's stories, the spectral ship still drifts sea-tossed, its men never to return home. It is said that, to this day, the ship can be seen in stormy weather off the Cape of Good Hope, an eternal omen of bad luck.
The captain embellished the story each time he told it, and I'd become curious and looked it up on my own. What he didn't tell us were some of the other legends, like the one that says the curse can be lifted if the captain finds a woman willing to sacrifice everything for his sake.
I told that version to some of the other sea scouts, and it became our quest when we cruised for girls in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. We were looking for what were then called "Victory Girls," young women willing to sacrifice everything for young men going off" to war.
We pretended to be sailors. There were only two differences between our uniforms and the Navy's: the anchors on the back corners of our collars instead of stars, and over the front left pocket the letters B.S.A. to identify us as Boy Scouts of America. When some of the girls questioned our lack of height, we explained that we were sub-mariners, and when they asked what B.S.A. referred to, we told them, "Battle Squadron A."
None of them ever questioned the anchors.
We picked up lots of patriotic V-Girls in Prospect Park, but unlike some of the more experienced and handsome sea scouts, I couldn't find one willing to sacrifice everything for my sake.
"I wish I could join the Navy too," I said to Stretch, as we took the elevator up to our lockers that morning at NYU, "but with my bad vision, I guess it's the infantry for me."
"You can always join the Maritime Service. They don't have high physical requirements, and Merchant Marine duty would exempt you from the draft."
"I guess that way I'd still be serving my country."
"Sure. Considering the mines and torpedoes, it's hazardous duty. I read somewhere that more merchant seamen were killed on the Murmansk run than Navy sailors."
We took our lab coats from our lockers and headed for class. "My folks would never sign the papers."
"They would if you explained the alternative."
As we entered the biology lab, and each moved to our different sections, I was surprised at the smell of formaldehyde. On the marble worktable in front of each student's station lay a covered tray. I reached out to uncover it, but the props voice called out: "Do not touch the tray in front of you!"
His lab assistant was moving from student to student dropping off a rolled-up dissection kit and a pair of rubber gloves in front of each tray. When he was done, the prof called out, "Put on the gloves and then uncover the trays."
I peeled back the cover, startled to see a dead white mouse on its side.
"Today," he announced, "you will dissect a real specimen."
I knew the bio lab required dissection, but I'd expected a warning. Obviously, the professor enjoyed springing this as a surprise on his students. Not that it bothered me. I was taking bio as a premed requirement because I was going to be a surgeon.
In the Boy Scouts I had taken the Advanced First Aid Merit Badge, and in the Sea Scouts during cruises, I was considered "ship's doctor." I treated wounds, boils, and abrasions and had become used to the sight and smell of blood. I had hardened myself.
On one Dutchman weekend trip up the East River, the crew nearly mutinied over the terrible meals. Since I'd held part-time jobs as a sandwich man in a luncheonette, I was drafted into being ship's cook as well. The joke on that voyage was that if I didn't kill them as doctor I'd poison them as cook.
Dissecting a mouse would be no problem.
"Open your dissection kits." He pulled down a chart in front of the blackboard. It showed a mouse's internal organs. "Now, with the scalpel, make an incision in your specimen from the neck through the abdomen to the tail, then pull the skin back with the forceps."
I followed his instructions. The incision was quick and neat and revealed that my specimen was female.
"Proceed to remove the organs, placing them into the petri dishes, and labeling each one."
My specimens uterus was distended. I cut it open, stared in disbelief, and backed away from the table. It contained a cluster of tiny fetuses curled up, eyes shut.
"You look pale," my neighbor across the table said. "What's the matter?"
What had startled me at first now saddened me. Several tiny lives had been snuffed out so that I could have a hands-on dissection experience.
A young woman on my left leaned forward to look. Before I could catch her she fainted, knocking over her stool with a loud crash. The lab assistant rushed to revive her with smelling salts, and the prof told us to continue dissections on our own as he and his assistant took her to the infirmary.
But I, great surgeon-to-be, was paralyzed. The thought of removing the fetuses sickened me. I dashed out of the lab into the lavatory, washed my face and hands, and stared at myself in the mirror. I had to go back and finish what I'd started.
After a few minutes, I returned to the lab.
Embarrassed at having fled, I covered up my overreaction by blurting out, "As the proud godfather of a litter, I'm handing out cigarettes in lieu of cigars."
Laughter, pats on the back, and mock congratulations steadied me, but as I finished the dissection a jingle went through my mind:
Three blind mice, see how they run.
They all run after the farmer's wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife.
You never saw such a sight in your life,
As three blind mice.
"Good job," the prof said, as he examined my work. "I'm giving you an A."
On the way out, Stretch punched me playfully. "Lucky guy, getting the pregnant one."
That night, as I opened my English Lit anthology for the next day's quiz on British poets, I scanned the table of contents and saw Algernon Charles Swinburne. I thought, What an unusual first name.