Passage

The naval terms — hatches, islands, flight decks — and the gratuitous details — not just a canoe, but a dugout, not just a soda fountain, but one that made cherry phosphates. Surely he couldn’t have made up the Katzenjammer Kids and the neighbor lady two doors down and the newsreel about Pearl Harbor. He had even known the name of the movie that was playing.

But he couldn’t have been on the Yorktown and in his hometown when Pearl Harbor was bombed. And the Norfolk story was full of believable details, too, from the PA system to Woody Pikeman asking, “Who’s the wiseguy?” I have to talk to Richard, she thought.

The phone rang. She picked it up, hoping it was him. It was Mrs. Haighton. “I got your message,” she said. “I’m afraid neither Tuesday nor Thursday will work. I’ve got a hospital board meeting Tuesday, and Thursday’s my afternoon to volunteer at the crisis center.”

We’ve got a crisis right here, Joanna thought. “How would Wednesday afternoon work?” she said. “Two? Four? Or we could do this in the evening.”

“Oh, no, evenings are even worse,” she said and launched into a litany of board and organizing committee meetings.

“Earlier then,” Joanna said doggedly. “I really need to schedule you this week, if possible. It’s important.” But this week was absolutely impossible. Maybe next week. No, that was the Women’s Center fundraiser. The week after.

And by then, we’ll have no volunteers at all, Joanna thought. She printed out the transcripts, and took them and the tapes to the lab to show Richard. “Hiya, Doc,” Mr. Wojakowski said. He was standing outside the door in the exact spot where she’d left him.

“What are you doing here?” Joanna asked, turning hastily away to open the door so he couldn’t see the stricken expression on her face.

“I figured I’d stick around till you got done with your meeting,” he said, following her into the lab. “I remembered what you said about talking about the stuff you saw while it was still fresh in your mind, and I didn’t have anyplace to go, so I thought, I’ll just wait till she comes back, so we can get it all down before my memory gets mixed up.” He sat down in the chair and leaned forward, his ruddy face eager, smiling, waiting for her to begin asking questions, and she thought again, there must be some mistake.

But how could she find out what it was? She couldn’t ask him directly, “Why did you tell me two different stories about where you were when Pearl Harbor was bombed?” or, “Do you have any proof you served on the Yorktown?” Not with him sitting there, his face eager and open.

“I was telling you about the peaceful feeling I had in the tunnel, like something was going to happen,” he said, “so I walked a little ways till I come to a door, and all of a sudden there was this bright light, and I mean bright. The only time I ever saw something that bright was when a bomb from an Aichi-99 went right through the hangar deck and blew up Repair 5. She took three hits that day.”

“Was that at the Battle of the Coral Sea?” Joanna asked, feeling like a traitor, like a Nazi grilling a spy, trying to trap him into a mistake, an inconsistency. And if he told her a different version this time, named a different island, a different kind of canoe, what would it prove? Only that his memory was fuzzy. The Battle of the Coral Sea had happened sixty years ago, and confabulations multiplied over time.

“One of the depth charges hit her in the port-side oil tanks,” Mr. Wojakowski was saying, “and oil was gushing out of her side. She woulda bled to death if we hadn’ta gotten her back to Pearl when we did. Boy, were we glad to see Diamond Head—”

“You went with the Yorktown back to Pearl Harbor?” Joanna blurted.

“Yep,” Mr. Wojakowski said, “and helped patch her up myself. We worked straight through, welding her boilers and patching up her hull. I worked on the crew fixing her watertight doors. We worked seventy-eight hours straight and were still working on ’em when we left Oahu. I tell ya, I was so tired when we got done, I slept all the way back to Midway.”

14

“Mother never reached me. if… anything happens… you must be prepared. Remember the message: Rosabelle, believe. When you hear those words… know it is Houdini speaking…”

—Harry Houdini’s words to his wife on his deathbed, promising to communicate with her from the afterlife

“He made the whole thing up?” Richard said. “Even being on the Yorktown?”

“I don’t know,” Joanna said, pacing back and forth, her hands jammed in her cardigan pockets. “All I know is that he couldn’t have been in Pearl Harbor repairing the Yorktown and adrift at sea thousands of miles away at the same time.”