SURVIVAL STORIES by Joan Marcus
The way my mother told the tale, the tuna sandwich saved my father’s life. She’d fixed it that morning – albacore and Bonbelle cheese on Pepperidge Farm white bread – packed it in a brown bag and placed it in his briefcase. Then she’d driven him to the Catholic women’s college where he taught art history. My father started feeling peckish on the way over. By the time they’d pulled up in front of the art building, he’d already unwrapped the sandwich and started eating it. Moving down the walkway toward the front door, he stopped to take a bite and heard a loud, long scraping noise, like a mess of slate shingles sliding off a roof. He froze in place, sandwich lifted to his mouth. A split second later, an enormous oak limb came crashing down not two feet from where he stood. “The size of that thing,” my mother whispered over the phone to her friend Dorothy that evening. “One step more . . . ” She shook her head, speechless with horror. “Don’t tell me that sandwich didn’t save him.”
It was not my father’s first close call. As a Merchant Marine officer in World War II, he’d sailed on the freighter Scappa Flow to the Gulf of Guinea to take on a load of manganese ore, then disembarked stateside and took his shore leave. He learned later that the ship sank on her next trip out, destroyed by torpedo. He’d narrowly escaped a run on a doomed liberty ship to Murmansk by contracting a stomach virus right before the ship set sail. He’d made a trip to West Africa in 1942 on the Zarembo, the only ship of seven in its company to make it back to port. And sailing in a convoy off the coast of Cuba, he’d seen a munitions freighter struck from the air three miles off his starboard side and blasted to bits.
Then in 1947, while working in a Boston department store, my father backed through the open doors of an empty elevator shaft and fell two stories. The metal loading cart he’d been dragging fell on top of him, crushing his hip. Nearly sixty years later, an older relative mentioned in an offhand way that my father should have died from that fall, and I realized with a dull jolt how true this was. The accident happened almost two decades before I was born. All my life I’d taken his survival as a matter of course, perhaps because he seemed to. “They always tell you to wear clean underpants in case you end up in the hospital,” he’d joke. “But when the time comes, believe me, it’s the last thing on your mind.” His survival stories weren’t frightening – they were amusing, a pleasant way to pass the evening. Dad would sit in his armchair stretching his lame leg in front of him – it was stiff and painful for decades after his fall. I’d lie on the floor making noncommittal scratches on my math homework and listening again to the story of torpedo survivors he’d pulled from the drink, men who’d been drifting for days without rations. It made sense to me that my father was the rescuer in this tale and not the victim. The fact of his safety was part of the natural order of things.
My mother had a different perspective. For mom, the world was full of invisible threats – leaking stovepipes and faulty wiring, things sure to cause misery somewhere down the road. I remember striking a forbidden match once, shaking it out fast, then waiting in trepidation as my mother entered the kitchen and paused to sniff the air. “You lit a match in here?” The question was sharp, edged with fear.
“What’s that?” I was ready to deny it.
“A match. Please, Joanie, if you did it just tell me.”
In an instant I understood that it wasn’t my playing with fire that upset her – it was the odor. An unidentified smell in the kitchen was one of the marks of imminent disaster for my mother, along with a rattle in the car engine and a cough that lasted more than five days. A smell meant ruptured gas lines, invisible pockets of poison. It’s a good thing she didn’t know about carbon monoxide; the idea that some deadly gasses can’t be smelled would probably have driven her mad. At least then she had her nose to give her fair warning.
“I lit the match,” I admitted. “I was just, I don’t know . . . ”
“Good.” She let her breath out and smiled at me. She didn’t fuss or scold, just went about fixing dinner on a gas stove that, at least for the moment, did not appear to pose a threat.
The world was in a state of perpetual disintegration for my mother. Buildings settled and machines corroded, things came unglued and unhinged, or burst into flame. Nothing could be relied on. Small wonder, then, that when my father lost his teaching job in 1976 and had to return to sea, my mother worried that his ship would go down like a boulder in the middle of the Atlantic. Over the years my parents had come to see that falling oak limb as an omen. First the college was plagued by financial woes, then it closed its doors for good and Boston College purchased the pretty, suburban campus with its apple trees and woodland trails. My father didn’t have a doctorate and finding full-time teaching work didn’t look likely. His decision to return to the Merchant Marine when I was eleven made all of us miserable. My little brother and I dreaded the long, bleak months in his absence. Dad was anxious about adjusting to a new sleep schedule that included a midnight to 4 AM deck watch. But mom saw a future marred by disaster on a massive scale. It wasn’t inevitable, but it was possible. And if it was possible, it was worth fretting over.
As a child, I had the choice of adopting my mother’s ideas about the risks of ocean travel or my father’s. The decision seemed simple. Mom had always admitted that her anxiety was out of control. She made no secret of her many years of therapy or the vial of blue pills on her dresser. Other mothers let their children walk down the street to their friends’ homes unsupervised. They didn’t worry that a pedophile was lurking in the leaf-blown trolley underpass, or force their families on a tedious train ride to Florida because flying terrified them. I watched my mother pacing the hall of our apartment when my father’s ship was overdue, watched her phone the shipping company and receive the inevitable response. The tanker was currently en route to the port of Alexandria – no saying when it would arrive. No, they could not tell her the exact location. No ma’am, there had been no reports of trouble. I stood beside her and heard the clerk’s indifferent drawl. No one else seemed to take her fears seriously – why should I?
Anyway, it wasn’t in my nature as a child to worry about large-scale disasters. Though I was already showing evidence of my own anxiety disorder in some nascent hypochondria, I still loved being tossed about by things larger than myself. I rode loop coasters and tilt-a-whirls and screaming eagles with abandon, flew fearlessly, even enjoyed the turbulence. Nothing thrilled me more than an express trip sixty flights up to the top of the John Hancock tower. That surge in the core of me as the elevator flew skyward, then the vertigo rush of standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows with the whole world opening out beneath my feet. Ships were impressive in a similar way – their sheer size, the brave show they made docked at Castle Island pier. That one of those giants could go down in a gale at the end of the twentieth century seemed nothing shy of laughable.
The ship my father sailed most often was the Marine Electric, a World War II-era converted tanker that carried coal between Norfolk, Virginia and Somerset, Massachusetts for most of the year. In the summers they’d hose out the hold and fill it with grain, and the ship would head for the port of Haifa instead. My father preferred these trans-Atlantic grain runs. The weather was good, he could avoid coastal traffic, and he got to see Israel again and again – seven times in all. We weren’t practicing Jews, didn’t so much as celebrate Hannukah, but my father felt a strong affinity for the place and took those grain runs every chance he got. In many ways it was the perfect assignment for him. He appreciated the familiarity of the old tanker with its primitive navigation system, and the captain was happy to have him, as he knew how to use a sextant and navigate by the stars, something many younger officers didn’t. Work was scarce for merchant sailors in the early eighties; the union spread the jobs around by requiring a long break after every service period. But when his vacation was up, there was always work for my dad aboard the Marine Electric.
I can’t remember where I was when I learned that the ship had capsized in a storm and sank thirty miles off the coast of Virginia. If my father had been on board, I’m sure I would remember perfectly. Moments of horror tend to seal themselves in our minds that way. I recall with sickening clarity the moment in the twelfth week of my first pregnancy when the midwife told me that she couldn’t find my baby’s heartbeat – her thin face, her cloud of dove-colored hair, the set of her mouth as she placed the stethoscope there and there and there. This, on the other hand, was just another day in mid-February. My father had left the Marine Electric in November and was safe at home. Of course I was shocked and deeply sympathetic – thirty-one men were drowned or frozen in the waters near Chincoteague, men my father knew well. But I didn’t feel the horror viscerally, the way you do when your imagination is sparked and fear has its way with you.
It wasn’t until my mother was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis the following spring that I started thinking about the Marine Electric disaster as a nightmare that could easily have been my own. Mom had been experiencing symptoms for close to a year – slurred speech and limited mobility in her left hand. When the diagnosis came, when we knew that she had five years to live at the most, I considered what our lives would have been like if dad had been aboard that ship in February. The tanker had capsized before they could engage the lifeboats, dumping the crew into thirty-nine degree water. Only three people had survived. One had clung to a life ring for two hours while the five men with him froze and drifted off one by one. There was no doubt in my mind that my father, a sixty-two-year-old diabetic with a hip replacement, would not have been among the survivors.
And then what? I was eighteen years old, a bookish kid in my first year of college five hundred miles from home. I imagined quitting school and coming back to bury my father and take care of my mother. In a few years she’d be gone. Then it would be me and my teen-aged brother, alone, with a settlement from the shipping company and precious little else. I didn’t torture myself with these thoughts very often. Each summer I’d come home to assist my mother, and it would occur to me suddenly – while helping her on with her stockings or blending up cooked chicken to feed through her gastric tube – how much worse things might have been. It was never a comforting thought. A religious person might have felt so – “the good Lord gives us no more to bear than we can handle,” that sort of thing – but for me it was just spooky, a chill that ran through me at odd moments. I’d shiver and let it go.
My father went into semi-retirement when my mother was diagnosed. He’d take care of her for nine months, then ship out as soon as I came home in May. I didn’t worry about his safety on these trips. I had enough to occupy me, what with mom’s paralysis growing worse by the month. Back at school in the fall, I’d start worrying again. Not about my parents, not about ocean travel or anything like that. For whatever reason, because my mother was ill, or because I’d always been a tad obsessive about such things, I worried that my own body was failing me. I’d lie in bed mornings before my alarm went off and consider the cluster of vessels in the white of my right eye. The ophthalmologist had called it a nevus, a type of tumor, and though I was savvy enough to realize that not all tumors are malignant, I also knew that some become that way over time. The doctor had promised it would fade after adolescence, but here I was at nineteen with the damned thing as red as ever. If I concentrated, I could almost feel the vessels on the surface of my eye, a faint irritation, as though rogue cells were swelling and multiplying. I sensed the fear moving in me, the pain of it in my chest and arms, then that nauseating rush of panic. Oh no, I’d think, it’s here already. The nightmare I’ve been waiting for.
It got worse after my mother died. At twenty-five I mistook a racing heart for cardiac arrest; at twenty-eight I thought I had stomach cancer. At thirty-three I convinced myself that I had Sjogren’s Syndrome, a rare auto-immune disease that attacks the exocrine glands, causing a host of unpleasant symptoms, from a raw, tingling tongue and flu-like pains (which I had) to burning eyes and rampant tooth decay (which I expected to have any day now). I forced myself to the doctor’s, though the smell and the harsh light and the pictures of skin malignancies on the informational poster all made me sick to my stomach. Dr. Bruno pushed my tongue around with his wooden stick. “No thrush,” he murmured. “No sores. That’s a healthy tongue.”
I braced myself and asked him about Sjogren’s Syndrome. He grinned despite himself, exchanged an amused glance with Dr. Nygen, the first-year resident who was shadowing him that day. Both men smiled at me indulgently.
“Sjogrens. This is a disease for old women. You know someone with Sjogrens Syndrome?”
I shook my head. Truth is, I’d read about it on my own – picked up a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves and thumbed through until I found a disease that matched a few of my symptoms. I hadn’t meant to scare the living crap out of myself. I’d actually intended to reassure myself somehow, but it hadn’t worked out that way.
“You’re too young for Sjogrens. This is viral, what you’re experiencing. Sometimes viruses hang around for a while. Just go home and give yourself some rest, lots of clear fluids . . . ”
“And if it doesn’t clear up?”
He shrugged. “Come back in a week.”
This didn’t reassure me one bit. For starters, I didn’t believe that Sjogrens struck mainly older women. My book said it was most common in women ages thirty-five to sixty; I was just two years shy of the bottom limit. Bruno’s insistence that my complaint was viral didn’t convince me either. If he was so sure, why had he told me to come back in a week? Why was he sending me down to the lab for blood tests? Perhaps a harmless virus was the most likely explanation, but wasn’t something much more worrisome also a possibility? Of course I wanted to believe Bruno, but I couldn’t. I wanted definitive proof that I wasn’t chronically ill, something no doctor could have given me.
Most medical practitioners are familiar with the aphorism, “When you hear hoof beats behind you, don’t expect to see a zebra.” The most likely explanation for a set of symptoms is probably the correct one: hoof beats tend to mean horses, and a low-grade fever and tongue sensitivity in an otherwise healthy young woman probably indicates a mild virus that, for whatever reason – job stress, anxiety, the pressures of new motherhood – she just can’t shake. It’s wise to run blood tests to make sure that everything looks normal, but it also makes sense not to worry. Unfortunately, the concepts of “likelihood” and “remote possibility” didn’t hold much meaning for me. Remote possibilities seemed likely, even inevitable. You heard about them every day. A friend has a baby with a nasty cold that turns out to be congestive heart failure. A relative’s backache is caused not by muscle strain, but by a malignant tumor in the spine. If it happened to someone else, it could and would happen to me.
At the root of my anxiety lay the certainty that forces were conspiring behind the scenes to mar my life. If tragedy was to be avoided, these forces had to be imagined in frightening detail. Sure, the doctor says I’m perfectly fine, but what isn’t he telling me? What will I find out in a week or a month? If I can live out the terror in my head, anticipate each detail, I’ll have somehow protected myself. I know that doesn’t make sense; magical thinking rarely does. I suppose I didn’t want to be caught off guard. I still don’t. I’m always on the lookout for marks of doom – not the smell of gas in the kitchen, but the purple smear of a bruise on my thigh. Jesus, look at you, I’ll say to myself. Bruising like a pear from the smallest knock. They’ll be discussing your case around the proverbial water cooler, your pals from work, those friends who haven’t seen you in years. Did you hear about Joan? Got a little mark on her thigh, next thing you know she’s hemorrhaging from her left ventricle. And she didn’t catch it soon enough. She didn’t catch it soon enough. What a shame. If only she’d known.
As of this writing, my father is eighty-seven years old. He’s grown shorter and bonier with age, a slip of an old man with a smooth pate and a neat fringe of white hair. He sits in his armchair and tells me about the Marine Electric – things he’d never have said in my youth, back when that ship was his bread and butter. How the hatch covers wore so thin with rust the crew didn’t dare walk on them. How in rough weather the sea would wash over the deck and down through rusted-out holes in the hatch, creating long pipes of rotten grain. There were men who refused to sail on that old tanker, especially in summer, out across the Atlantic where the Coast Guard couldn’t save you if something went wrong.
“But you weren’t worried,” I say.
He shakes his head. “I was on my way to Israel,” he explains. “When it’s some place you love, you figure it’ll be alright.”
But it’s more than that – I know it is. My father was not immune to worry. He worried about changing careers in middle life, and finding jobs when work was scarce. He worried about having money for retirement and for sending his kids to college. These fears must have obviated any concerns he had about the condition of the ship. A person can only worry about so many things at once. Anxiety takes energy – it can be downright exhausting. We pick and choose our fears as a matter of survival.
“And I didn’t know about the Poet,” he adds.
He’s talking about the S.S. Poet, which vanished in 1980 on its way to Port Said, Egypt. Another World War II-era grain carrier, 13,000 tons of corn in its hold, thirty-four crewmembers on board. Like the Marine Electric, the Poet was well past its prime, a colossal rust heap that should have been scrapped years before. The life span of an ocean-going cargo vessel isn’t long, 20 years or so, but few new American ships were built in the 1960s, and the old ones remained a big part of the industry. Instead of being retired, World War II carriers were sent off to foreign shipyards and “jumbo-ized,” new midsections welded in between the old bow and stern. By the early eighties, ships like the Poet and the Marine Electric were positively ancient, pocked with rust and at risk for system failure as well. Even so, the Coast Guard, responding to a complex set of political and economic pressures, allowed them to pass inspection every time.
When an old ship sank, it was typically blamed on human error. Rarely, if ever, was the shipping company held responsible, and the Coast Guard was never really taken to task for rubber-stamping un-seaworthy vessels. When the Poet went down, little effort was made to discover the real reason thirty-four men died. But the Marine Electric was a different story. The chief mate survived the wreck and was willing to testify to the poor condition of the ship. There were cracks in the deck that the crew had circled with spray paint so the inspection team wouldn’t miss them. There were ninety-two separate rust holes in the hatches and deck plates, some of them patched with epoxy and duct tape. The hatches didn’t even fit properly, having been returned after a dry-docking with improper gaskets and support struts. The chief mate himself had been forced to patch a hole in the hull with cement and a coffee can lid. Finally, the drains in the cargo hold didn’t work because metal plates had been placed over them to prevent coal from clogging the pumps. If water got into the cargo hold, there was no way of getting it out.
The ship’s permanent master knew about all of this, the Coast Guard knew, the shipping company knew. And still the ship was made to sail into a storm on February 11, 1983. She’d actually missed a dry-docking in January because they had to get that coal up to Massachusetts. This is what mattered most. Economic forces took precedent over the safety of working people, as they almost always do.
In the wake of the Marine Electric disaster, the Coast Guard finally reformed its inspection process and the old World War II-era ships were retired. Robert Frump, maritime reporter and investigative journalist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, detailed all of this thoroughly in a series of articles and, eventually, in a book-length account of the Marine Electric tragedy. The History Channel even devoted an episode of “Deep Sea Detectives” to the story. But of course no one was talking about this before 1983, back when my mother, with the high-pitched instincts of a woman suffering from a chronic emotional disorder, feared for my father’s life. When a ship went down, it never made news the way airline disasters did, and my father never shared details of the tanker’s condition with her. Was the sinking of the Marine Electric inevitable or a remote possibility? My mother couldn’t have said for sure. She had only her fear to work with – that visceral, gut-level dread so familiar to me. It obliterates sleep and dulls the appetite, makes me jerk like a puppet at every loud sound. It’s no way to live, wound up tight like that, a rubber band of a woman, waiting to snap.
But how should I tame my anxiety in a world where my mother was right after all? Where the grand, corporate conspiracy may indeed be fucking us over even as we sit here surfing channels and knocking back diet Cokes? Last year my husband’s doctor, a young maverick who’d recently made the decision to leave his HMO and start his own preventative practice, advised Roger to stay away from soy, calling soy agri-business one of the greatest threats to American health today. “You won’t hear many people talking about this,” he added. “Archer Daniels Midland has a huge PR campaign going. You won’t even hear this from most doctors.” I’m starting to think that my mother would have fit in well in the twenty-first century. Had she lived, she’d have seen the day when educated people nurture a healthy skepticism about everything from cow’s milk to non-stick frying pans, when it’s wise to fear poison gas in the basement, when most of us refuse to let our children go anywhere unescorted. How do we define our discontent, what shall we name “disorder,” in a world where the reference points keep changing? Am I neurotic or merely prudent? Am I sick or am I smart? Or am I both?
Those who are capable of negotiating risk without tumbling headlong into panic have always impressed me. I ask my father how he managed it, trip after trip across the Atlantic at the height of the war, in 1942, when merchant ships didn’t even have Naval escorts yet. The Merchant Marine lost a greater percentage of men in World War II than any branch of the military. Over 1,600 ships were damaged or sunk between 1940 and 1946, a third of those in ’42 alone. Over 9,000 sailors lost their lives. “Weren’t you scared?” I ask. “Didn’t you feel you were going off to your death every time you shipped out?”
“I didn’t really think about it,” he shrugs. “I thought about what I’d do when I came home. It’s like I was in some kind of fog.”
Of course this makes sense. You’d have to generate a protective mist to keep yourself going day in and day out. Lately it seems as though half the people I know are on beta blockers or anti-depressants. If emotional health means consciously embracing that fog of ignorance, choosing for the moment not to think about dangers that may be devastatingly real after all, then it is the rare person of intelligence who performs that trick without some kind of assistance. What I wouldn’t give for such an organized mind – to exercise doublethink lightly and willingly, without pills or good, strong drink. I’ve never been much of a substance user. But I’ll have to try something – meds or biofeedback, herbal cleansing or insight meditation, the teachings of a wise and compassionate Buddha. Because worry didn’t keep my mother alive, and not worrying hasn’t killed my father. And maybe I could be happy that way, sailing to the Holy Land in my leaky tub.
My father told me something else. He was standing watch in the South Atlantic one day when he looked out over the side of the ship and saw something in the water. It was a bright, calm morning, slight waves of one or two feet lapping the prow. There, just off the port side, poking up through the surface like a tree in a flood, was the long, wooden mast of a torpedoed ship. I think of him there on deck, alone in that pocket of fog with his thoughts of home. All around him, silent markers of ruin are rising from the deep. He gives them a nod of respect, a little shiver of recognition. And then he sails on by.
Joan Marcus’ nonfiction has appeared in Fourth Genre, The Georgia Review, The Sun, Gulf Coast, and Puerto del Sol.