My father sits on the bottom of the ocean against a bone-white mound of coral, the water green around him. He’s in his khaki Navy uniform, without his officer’s plank hat, and his copper-colored hair billows back and forth in the current. He has a half smile on his face, as if to say, “This is what happened. Don’t worry.”
This stops my breath in mid-line. I’m forty-five years old now, speed-reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which I’ve been called in mid-semester to teach for a colleague suddenly taken ill. In the play’s first act, scene 2, Ferdinand, son of the King of Naples, has just dragged himself up onto a deserted beach after the ship he and his father were sailing founders in a vicious storm. Ferdinand finds himself on a lonely island, and he cries over his father, Alonso, whom he last saw struggling in the waves. Ariel, an invisible island sprite, comes upon the grieving Ferdinand and sings him this song:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! Now I hear them - ding-dong bell.
This passage conjured the image of my own father, lost at sea in the fall of 1943. It makes me wonder about him, something I haven’t let myself do most of my life.
