Chapter Fourteen #2
She said, “Wasn’t it funny, Tom, the way it landed up there? The way it went for a ride?”
—
Augie was the one who’d given Felix The things that we love tell us what we are. They’d been in the Quonset hut late at night, lying side by side naked on one of the cots, talking in low voices after exhausting themselves.
“What’s that from?”
“You haven’t read Thomas Aquinas?”
“Should I have?”
“My mom was Catholic before she converted. She put together her own philosophy lessons, part of my schooling.”
“She schooled you?”
“Her and my aunt and two of my uncles.”
“Say it again.”
“ ‘The things that we love tell us what we are.’ If I ever get a tattoo, it’s going to be that, right across the top of my chest.”
“I doubt it’ll fit.”
Augie brought Felix’s hand to his chest and placed Felix’s index finger against his skin, just below the protrusion of his right collarbone. “Start here.”
Too long, the last couple of words fell into Augie’s armpit, so Felix, with the tip of his finger, wrote them again and again—in smaller and smaller letters, Augie sometimes laughing and squirming—until the sentence fit.
In the years since the war, Felix had been amazed by the relentless connection of his thoughts—like a convoy that refused to fall out of line.
To think of Augie was to think of the Teague; to think of the Teague was to think of the sinking and the man who, in his panic, had tried to kill him.
The man he, in his panic, had killed. Sometimes, to think of Augie was to think of why he’d married Margaret, and how badly he’d wanted to grow into that version of himself.
How he’d gone off to the war hoping to finish the process of fitting into a mold made out of ideals. How he’d come back with a damaged mold.
—
For six months, he tried shooting. He bought a rifle, took it out to a shooting range on Saturdays, shot up paper targets, and made his ears ring.
For a year, he belonged to a gymnasium, where he put on gloves and head gear and sparred with strangers, punched and got pummeled on a regular basis.
For three consecutive winters, until his shoulder couldn’t take it anymore, he chopped their firewood instead of buying it in ricks.
Nothing pulled him out of himself or made his prospects of doing so seem any more hopeful—not even bowling, where his game began to slip.
At the aluminum plant, he realized there was a kind of club among the executives, and once they figured out Felix wasn’t tackling his duties with the same old gusto, he wasn’t in the club anymore.
Conversations by the water cooler tapered off when he walked by.
If he happened upon laughter in an open office, no one would tell him what the joke had been.
Their expressions shifted just slightly when they spoke to him.
He detected the anticipation of annoyance.
Sensed the lowering of expectations. He couldn’t bring himself to care about it; he could only watch as this guy with a shattered heart and a questionable composure (a barely recognizable version of him) spent his days walking around in the extreme heat, writing down numbers.
When they’d demoted him, in early ’52, they’d used his own progress projections to reduce the scope of his responsibilities.
They’d cut his pay by a fourth and had tried to ease the impact by telling him the demotion wouldn’t be broadcast throughout the company.
No one needed to know, they’d said, and Felix had thought, I don’t care who knows.
He cared about his family, because he wanted it to survive.
He cared about making a happy home for Tom to grow up in, because he’d never known that as a child.
For all his own shortcomings, he cared about what kind of husband he was to Margaret.
But he no longer cared about his rung on the executive ladder.
It was as if that version of him had gone down with the Teague. In fact, it was as if all versions of Felix Salt had gone down with the Teague except for this one, this carapace of a guy with his eye set on nothing.
He tried to get through a day without thinking about all the men he’d sailed with, and couldn’t.
He tried to get through half a day without thinking about Augie, and couldn’t.
He tried to steer his dreams away from the ship, away from frantic searches, slipping down raked passageways as he hollered Augie’s name, wondering where the hell everyone had gone, realizing he’d stayed too long and was trapped, the ship was taking him down.
Less frequently, there were dreams where he found Augie but still couldn’t save him.
And then—sporadically, never often enough—there were dreams that didn’t take place on a ship at all but on Espiritu Santo, and in those dreams, Augie found him first.
More than a couple of times, Felix saw him on the street.
Or thought he saw him. Someone with a lean but strong-looking frame, hair that might have been described as tawny.
He knew it was a trick of the brain, grafting, just for a moment, Augie’s smooth, angular face onto a stranger.
But Felix peeled his eyes desperately anyway. He stopped dead in his tracks.
—
Then January came, and six days into the new year he was fired.
In the meeting were his boss, John Westbrook; Tom Prout from the Akron branch; and on the leather couch against the wall, dressed in an olive suit with his legs crossed, one brown-and-white wingtip shoe floating, none other than bow-tied, bespectacled Lucian Tuck.
The man who’d pulled Felix out of Akron and promoted him to the home office in Columbus.
The man who’d approved his promotion and his transfer to Bonhomie back in ’39.
Lucian Tuck looked on but didn’t say a word as Westbrook and Prout explained the situation to Felix.
They reminded Felix of the reprimands that were in his file (he’d thought those had been stern pep talks), reminded him of the slack they’d cut him after the war—for almost a year—said they’d been glad to see him rally from that, and things had been okay for a while, but the last few years had been filled with errors in his end-of-day sheets and gaps in his reports.
The cost-flow chart they’d requested months ago had never appeared.
His input to the company had been steadily diminishing over time.
Westbrook and Prout spoke in tandem, as if they’d rehearsed who would say what.
As they did, Felix kept glancing at Lucian Tuck.
When they were finished, Lucian Tuck stood, shook Felix’s hand, and thanked him for all the good years he’d given to the company.
He could take a couple of days to “gather” himself if he needed to, Tuck said.
And—not to worry—Felix would stay on the payroll until the end of next month.
—
When he told Margaret that night in the kitchen, after they’d put Tom to bed, she looked at him as if she were waiting for the punch line.
Finally, she said, “How?”
He sat down in one of the chairs at the table. She dragged out the chair across from him. As he recapped the meeting in Westbrook’s office and told her about his severance package, she looked at a spot on the enamel tabletop and scratched at it with her fingernail.
“They’re being very good about the house,” he said. “They’re calling it a ‘forgivement.’ It means they don’t want the money back that they put toward the down payment.”
It had never occurred to her that the foundry could take anything back. “But—that’s it? You can’t go talk to them? Reason with them?”
“Not possible,” Felix said.
He’d been sitting on this all evening? Waiting to mention it before they went to bed? “Are you all right?”
“I’m okay,” he said. “Surprised, but okay.”
She squinted at him. “I mean, is there anything wrong with you?” She was used to his not sounding like his old self.
She was used to his sedate response to pretty much everything in his life besides Tom.
But he seemed completely unfazed by the gravity of this situation. “What are we going to do for money?”
“I’ll get another job, obviously.”
“But you don’t seem bothered at all.”
“I’m bothered.” He was, and he wasn’t. The audacity of it bothered him. The fact that they might have been right about his waning contribution to the company bothered him. So, yes, he was shocked to the core by the firing—but the core was empty.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t understand you.”
How could she? He’d never shown her the full picture. He didn’t understand it himself.
A light snow was starting outside; beyond his shoulder, she saw snowflakes batting the dark windowpane over the sink.
“Felix, can you please tell me, are you ever going to get better? I know what you went through must have been terrifying. But you never speak to me about what happened, so it’s hard to understand.
Everywhere I look, men who were in the war have gotten on with their lives.
Kit Baker’s husband came back from France with only one hand, and his café is always full.
He’s talking about opening up a second location.
With a hook for a hand—it’s remarkable.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“Nothing. I guess that’s my point.” The snowflakes were looping now, drawing circles on the glass.
Suddenly, Tom, in tiger pajamas, ran into the kitchen and circled the table. “Stop fighting! Stop fighting!” he said.
Felix took him by the shoulders and ruffled his head. He told him they weren’t fighting; they were just talking. Margaret told him to go back to bed.
When they were alone again, in something between a whisper and hiss, Felix said, “I’ll get another job, Margaret. I’ll bet some wives hug their husbands when they get fired.”
“I’ll bet some husbands want to be hugged.
” She gave him a chance to respond to that.
When he didn’t, she said, “I’d just like a husband who doesn’t act like his head lives somewhere else all the time.
The other night, four-thirty in the morning, I found you in the den, staring at the wall and holding a cigarette that had burned itself out, ash all over the arm of the chair.
I wish you could be present for me, is all.
Present for yourself. And—yes, both upstairs and down. ”
An unfair curveball. Somehow she felt the need to link such a deeply buried subject to his job status. He wondered why.
“I’m fine, Margaret,” was all he said.
“Then act like it.”
“All I do is act.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He looked to the side, said, “Nothing.”
“You need to see someone, Felix. You need to talk to someone. A doctor. Maybe a psychiatrist.”
“For getting fired?”
“For how you are. Even right now. You’ve been like this forever, and you don’t seem to want to get better.” She picked and picked at the spot on the table, tears coming to her eyes. “That’s what I don’t understand, Felix. You don’t want to get better.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” he said. His face was suddenly burning. “I’m going to bed.”
He got up, headed out of the room. When he turned around to speak again, he was startled to find her right behind him. “You think you’re so easy to live with?” he said. “You’re not happy with anything.”
“That’s not true!”
“Nothing’s ever enough.”
“That’s not true,” she said again—evenly this time, coldly, because she didn’t want it to be. “Could I be happier? Do I want to be happier? Yes. Lock me up, if that’s a crime.”
He groaned and turned away. She followed him upstairs.
Neither of them had any interest in continuing the conversation they’d been having in the kitchen, but the air remained thick. As they undressed in the near dark, Margaret asked softly, “Are you attracted to me?”
Not are you still, which was a different question. Not were you ever, which was the most frightening question of all. No, hers was clearly the most incisive and important question, as well as the simplest. Are you?
The answer was yes, because as much as he’d ever been attracted to any woman, he was attracted to her. And—there was just no predicting these things—his body was suddenly willing to prove it.