'Hidden glade. I like it! Very good. Gargotta!' Captain Noda says. 'Your work is proceeding very well, Lieutenant Goto.'
'I am only striving to live up to the high standard that was set by Lieutenant Ninomiya,' says Goto Dengo.
'He was an excellent worker,' Noda says evenly.
'Perhaps when I am finished here, I can follow him to-wherever he was sent.'
Noda grins. 'Your work is only beginning. But I can say with confidence that when you are finished you will be reunited with your friend.'
Chapter 72 SEATTLE
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse's widow and five children agree that Dad did something in the war, and that's about all. Each of them seems to have a different 1950s B-movie, or 1940s Movietone newsreel, in his or her head, portraying a rather different set of events. There is not even agreement on whether he was in the Army or the Navy, which seems like a pretty fundamental plot point to Randy. Was he in Europe or Asia? Opinions differ. Grandma grew up on an Outback sheep farm. One might therefore think that, at some point in her life, she might have been an earthy cuss-the type of woman who would not only remember which service her late husband had been in but would be able to take down his rifle from the attic and field-strip it blindfolded. But she had evidently spent something like seventy-five percent of her waking hours in church (where she not only worshipped but went to school and transacted essentially all of her social life), or in transit thereto or therefrom, and her own parents quite explicitly did not want her to wind up living on a farm, ramming her arm up livestock vaginas and slapping raw steaks over the black eyes dished out by some husband. Farming might have been an adequate sort of booby prize for one or at most two of their sons, sort of a fallback for any offspring who happened to suffer major head injuries or fall into chronic alcoholism. But the real purpose of the cCmndhd kids was to restore the past and lost glories of the family, who allegedly had been major wool brokers around the time of Shakespeare and well on their way to living in Kensington and spelling their name Smith before some combination of scrapie, long-term climatic change, nefarious conduct by jealous Outer Qwghlmians, and a worldwide shift in fashions away from funny-smelling thirty- pound sweaters with small arthropods living in them had driven them all into honest poverty and then not-so-honest poverty and led to their forcible transportation to Australia.
The point here being that Grandma was incarnated, indoctrinated, and groomed by her Ma to wear stockings and lipstick and gloves in a big city somewhere. The experiment had succeeded to the point where Mary cCmndhd could, at any point in her post-adolescent life, have prepared and served high tea to the Queen of England on ten minutes' notice, flawlessly, without having to even glance in a mirror, straighten up her dwelling, polish any silver, or bone up on any etiquette. It had been a standing joke among her male offspring that Mom could walk unescorted into any biker bar in the world and simply by her bearing and appearance cause all ongoing fistfights to be instantly suspended, all grubby elbows to be removed from the bar, postures to straighten, salty language to be choked off. The bikers would climb over one another's backs to take her coat, pull her chair back, address her as ma'am, etc. Though it had never been performed, this biker bar scene was like a whole sort of virtual or notional comedy sketch that was a famous moment in entertainment for the Waterhouse family, like the Beatles on
The bottom line was that the ability to run a house in the way Grandma was legendary or infamous for doing, to keep the personal grooming up to that standard, to send out a few hundred Christmas cards every year, each written in flawless fountain-pen longhand, etc., etc., that all of these things taken together took up as much space in her brain as, say mathematics might take up in a theoretical physicist's.
And so when it came to anything of a practical nature she was perfectly helpless, and probably always had been. Until she had gotten too old to drive, she had continued to tool around Whitman in the 1965 Lincoln Continental, which was the last vehicle her husband had purchased, from Whitman's Patterson Lincoln-Mercury, before his untimely death. The vehicle weighed something like six thousand pounds and had more moving parts than a silo full of Swiss watches. Whenever any of her offspring came to visit, someone would discreetly slip out to the garage to yank the dipstick, which would always be mysteriously topped up with clear amber-colored 10W40. It eventually turned out that her late husband had summoned the entire living male lineage of the Patterson family- four generations of them-into his hospital room and gathered them around his deathbed and wrought some kind of unspecified pact with them along the general lines of that, if at any point in the future, the tire pressure in the Lincoln dropped below spec or the maintenance in any other way lapsed, all of the Pattersons would not merely sacrifice their immortal souls, but literally be pulled out of meetings or lavatories and dragged off to hell on the spot, like Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. He knew that his wife had only the vaguest idea of what a tire was, other than something that from time to time a man would heroically jump out of the car and change while she sat inside the car admiring him. The world of physical objects seemed to have been made solely for the purpose of giving the men around Grandma something to do with their hands; and not, mind you, for any practical reason, but purely so that Grandma could twiddle those men's emotional knobs by reacting to how well or poorly they did it. Which was a fine setup as long as men were actually around, but not so good after Grandpa died. So guerilla mechanic teams had been surveilling Randy's grandmother ever since and occasionally swiping her Lincoln from the church parking lot on Sunday mornings and taking it down to Patterson's for sub rosa oil changes. The ability of the Lincoln to run flawlessly for a quarter of a century without maintenance-without even putting gasoline in the tank-had only confirmed Grandmother's opinions about the amusing superfluity of male pursuits.
In any event, what it all came down to was that Grandma, whose grasp of practical matters had only declined (if that was even possible) with advanced age, was not the sort of person you would go to for information about her late husband's war record. Defeating the Nazis was in the same category as changing a flat tire: an untidy business that men were expected to know how to do. And not just the men of yore, the supermen of her generation; Randy was expected to know about these things too. If the Axis reconstituted itself tomorrow, Grandma would expect Randy to be suited up behind the controls of a supersonic fighter plane the day after that. And Randy would sooner spiral into the ground at Mach 2 than bear her tidings that he wasn't up to the job.
Luckily for Randy, who has recently become intensely curious about Grandpa, an old suitcase has been unearthed. It's a rattan-and-leather thing, sort of a snappy Roaring Twenties number complete with some badly abraded hotel stickers plotting Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse's migration from the Midwest to Princeton and back-which is completely filled with small black-and-white photographs. Randy's father dumps the contents out on a ping-pong table that inexplicably sits in the center of the rec room at Grandma's managed care facility, whose residents are about as likely to play ping-pong as they are to get their nipples pierced. The photos are messed out into several discrete piles which are in turn sorted through by Randy and his father and his aunts and uncles. Most of them are photos of the Waterhouse kids, so everyone's fascinated until they have found pictures of themselves at a couple of different ages. Then the pile of photos begins to look depressingly large. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse was evidently a shutterbug of sorts and now his offspring are paying the price.
Randy has a different set of motives, and so he stays there late, going through pictures by himself. Ninety- nine out of a hundred are snapshots of Waterhouse brats from the 1950s. But some are older. He finds a photo of Grandpa in a place with palm trees, in a military uniform, with a big white disk-shaped officer's cap on his head. Three hours later he comes across a picture of a very young Grandpa, really just a turkey-necked adolescent costumed in grownup clothes, standing in front of a gothic building with two other men: a grinning dark-haired chap who looks vaguely familiar, and an aquiline blond fellow in rimless glasses. All three men have bicycles; Grandpa is straddling his, and the other two, perhaps considering this to be not so dignified, are supporting theirs with their hands. Another hour goes by, and then there's Grandpa in a khaki uniform with more palm trees in the background.
The next morning he sits down next to his grandmother, after she has finished her daily hourlong getting- out-of-bed ritual. 'Grandmother, I found these two old photographs.' He deals them out on the table in front of her and gives her a few moments to switch contexts. Grandma doesn't turn on a dime conversationally, and besides, those stiff old-lady corneas take a little while to shift focus.
