Sloan Wilson - Ice Brothers

It’s a very real pleasure to give you this model. If you can ever figure out how this little fishboat took us so far in so many ways, let me know. This model always seems to me to be the real Arluk as seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Be careful. I found that sometimes when I stare at it, she keeps seeming to grow bigger and bigger. Hell, you were aboard her less than a year, and I served aboard her only about two years, a tiny part of our lives, but such a part! I guess it’s true that Greenland preserves the past the way it preserves dead bodies. When I made this model, I found that I hardly had to glance at the blueprints. I wish I understood the rest of the world as well.

As ever,

Nathan

Paul opened the cardboard carton. He found a mahogany base under a glass box which had been elaborately wrapped in padded paper. In it the model of the Arluk rested on a cradle. The blue and white hull was only about twelve inches long, but had been wrought in such infinite detail that when he held it up to the light he almost felt as though he would find Mowrey there, Guns, Sparks, Cookie and all the rest. The ice camouflage glistened in the sun from the window. The five-inch gun barrel they never had fired still rested on the forecastlehead beside the three-inch twenty-three, which finally had sunk the German hunter-killer. The radar antenna was in place above the flying bridge. On the signal mast there was a tiny pennant, a little bigger than scale, but still Paul had to put his glasses on to see it clearly. It was of course the third repeater. The commanding officer was not aboard this ship.

Paul carried the model toward the mantelpiece in his living room. For a moment he had the curious sensation that he had grown to almost godlike size and was holding his ship in the palm of his hand. It was true that the ship seemed to grow larger as he stared at it. Soon he imagined that he could almost hear the rattle of the anchor chain and the voices of the men.

“Yale, Yale, where’s that bastard Yale?” Mowrey shouted. “Where is that son of a bitch?”

The bitter wind was howling over the ice pack, and Paul was young again, young, ignorant, and scared to death, but finally, for a little while at least, victorious.

He put the model on the mantelpiece. It certainly was a nice thing to have.

Sloan Wilson (1920–2003) was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, and graduated from Harvard University. An avid sailor, he joined the US Coast Guard shortly after Pearl Harbor, and during World War II commanded a naval trawler on the Greenland Patrol and an army supply ship in the South Pacific. Wilson earned a battle star for his role in an attack by Japanese aircraft, and based his first novel, Voyage to Somewhere , and two of his later books, Ice Brothers and Pacific Interlude , on his wartime experiences. In 1955 Wilson published The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit , a classic portrait of suburban ennui heralded by the Atlantic as “one of the great artifacts of popular culture in the 50’s.” It was adapted into a successful film, as was its bestselling follow-up, A Summer Place .

An author of fifteen books, Wilson was living with his wife of forty years, Betty, on a boat in Colonial Beach, Virginia, at the time of his death.