Three: The Long War (1936-1945)
There is a particular kind of human foolishness that repeats itself with such regularity that even I, who have had nearly two centuries to grow philosophical about it, find it difficult to observe with complete equanimity. They divide. They always divide. They find the finest possible line between themselves and the person standing next to them and they plant a flag on it and call it a cause.
I watched it happen from the riverbank, the way you watch a storm build on the horizon, in the newspapers that blew along Wickenden Street and in the faces of the neighbourhood men who still had family on the other side of the water. In 1936. In 1938. In 1939. And then all at once in 1941 when the division became, as it always eventually does, a war.
I have opinions about governments. I have had ninety-seven years in this city alone to develop them, and before that another sixty-odd years of watching what governments do when they decide that a people are inconvenient. The government does not need a reason that would satisfy a reasonable person. It needs only a reason that will satisfy itself, and governments are, in my experience, extraordinarily easy to satisfy on that particular point. They satisfied themselves about Innsmouth with a stack of paperwork and some trucks and men with guns and that was the end of a community that had been there for hundreds of years.
So when the humans began their dividing again in the late 1930s, their grand ideological projects of deciding which lives were worth the keeping, I watched with the eyes of someone who knew exactly how that story ended regardless of which flag was flying over the machinery of it. The flags change. The machinery does not.
This is not a popular observation. I have learned to keep it to myself, which has not been difficult as I have been keeping things to myself since before most nations currently on the map existed.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft died on the fifteenth of March, 1937, in the Jane Brown Memorial Hospital on Eddy Street, of intestinal cancer, aged forty-six. I have already written about him in the previous entry and I did not intend to return to him here in great detail, but his death falls within these years and it would feel like a deliberate omission not to mark it.
I attended the funeral at Swan Point Cemetery, from a distance, in a good coat, in the rain. The same coat, more or less, that I had been wearing since Fox Point. It is a good coat.
I have thought about him often in the years since, more than I expected to, more perhaps than he deserves and possibly less than he is owed, and I have arrived at something that is not quite peace with his legacy but is at least an honest accounting of it.
Whatever else Howard Phillips Lovecraft was, and he was many things, not all of them generous, he did something that the government which erased us could not undo. He wrote us down. Badly in places, wrongly in others, with a fear and a revulsion that I will not pretend did not sting, and with a racism toward his fellow humans that I found both repugnant and, given the behaviour of his fellow humans toward us specifically, somewhat difficult to argue with on purely evidential grounds, though I manage it. But he wrote us down. Innsmouth exists in his pages when it exists nowhere else on any official map or record or government document. Our covenant with Lord Dagon, our transformation, our reef, our gold, all of it preserved in the amber of his considerable if deeply peculiar imagination.
The government that came with its trucks in February of 1928 was thorough. I will give them that much, the same way I will give a surgeon who has removed the wrong organ credit for a clean incision. They scrubbed Innsmouth from the maps and the records and the official memory of Massachusetts with a completeness that I can only describe as professional. The name removed. The population disappeared into facilities that have never been fully accounted for. The buildings left to decay or cleared entirely. A town of several hundred people, with a history stretching back to the mid seventeenth century, erased with the administrative efficiency of people who have had practice at this kind of thing and would prefer not to discuss where they got it.
And yet.
We are a people who do not speak up for ourselves, who cannot speak up for ourselves, who were nearly scrubbed from every record and map and living memory by men with paperwork and an institutional appetite for erasure. And yet here we are, in print, in libraries, translated into dozens of languages, in the hands of readers on every continent who think they are reading fiction and are reading, without knowing it, the closest thing to a history our people have.
There is a bitter joke in there somewhere. I have been working out for nearly ninety years whether it is on us or on them. I have not yet reached a conclusion. I suspect I will not.
What I will say is this: the government erased us from the records and a strange, frightened, brilliant, deeply limited man put us back. Not accurately. Not kindly. But indelibly.
I left a stone on his grave the last time I visited. I do not know why. We are not a people who leave stones on graves. But it seemed, on balance, like the appropriate thing to do, and I have learned over nearly a century in this city to trust the gesture that presents itself without explanation.
The war came to Providence the way catastrophes come, announced for years and surprising everyone regardless. Pearl Harbour was a Sunday. I remember because I was in the upper bay that night, which is where I spent most Sunday nights in those years when the weather permitted, and I felt something in the current that I could not name. A disturbance. A wrongness. I did not know until the next morning, when young Benedito Ponte came running down to the waterfront with the radio’s news still on his face, that the world had rearranged itself overnight.
The city changed within weeks. The jewellery factories that had kept Providence’s economy breathing through the worst of the Depression converted to war production with a speed that was genuinely impressive. Brown University filled with naval officers. The harbour, my harbour, bristled with patrol boats and sub-chasers and the general suspicious energy of a coastline that had decided it was a frontier.
This was, for us, a complication.
We had spent thirteen years building our quiet life along the waterfront. The fish markets. The small trades. The careful, unremarkable existence of people who simply wanted to be left alone to live as they were made to live. And now the water, our water, was full of young men in uniforms with very good eyesight and standing orders to report anything unusual.
We are, I will be the first to admit, somewhat unusual.
The older ones among us went deeper and stayed there. I spent more of those years below the surface than above it, which suited my transformation well enough by that point but left me feeling the particular claustrophobia of someone who has been pushed back into hiding just when they had begun, cautiously, to hope that hiding might not be permanent.
The younger ones, those of us still close enough to human in appearance to pass with effort, faced a different problem entirely.
The draft.
I should tell you more about Henryk.
Henryk had been working the fish markets since we arrived in Providence and had made himself, in the way of the Zotykivs, quietly indispensable. When the draft notice came he brought it to me without comment and set it on the stone beside where I was resting and waited.
I looked at it for a long time.
The practical problem was this: a military medical examination would raise questions. The kind of questions that end with trucks and paperwork, as I have mentioned. Henryk’s blood is not the kind of thing you want a military doctor looking at under a lamp in 1942. His gills, which were not yet fully developed but were further along than was comfortable, are not something you explain away with a family history of skin conditions.
The human problem was this: Henryk wanted to go.
This surprised me. It should not have. He had found his place in Providence. He had grown close to the fishermen’s families and the Federal Hill boys and the East Side students. He had friends, human friends, in the way that the young manage before the transformation makes it complicated. He felt, in whatever complicated way a half-changed Deep One can feel such things, that this was his city too and that the thing happening in Europe was a thing worth standing against.
I understood this. I did not agree with it, because I have never agreed with the proposition that the right response to governments sorting people into categories is to put on a government’s uniform to be sorted. But I understood it.
In the end the medical examination made the decision for us. The examining physician, a tired man from Cranston who had seen too many bodies in too many conditions to be easily surprised, looked at Henryk’s file and then looked at Henryk and then looked at his file again and wrote something I could not see and stamped it 4-F and sent him home.
Henryk came back to the waterfront and sat beside me for a long time without speaking.
“What did he write,” I asked finally.
“Severe endocrine disorder,” Henryk said. “Possible thyroid involvement.”
We sat with that for a while.
“The doctor,” I said. “Did he seem frightened?”
Henryk thought about it. “No,” he said. “He seemed tired.”
I have thought about that tired doctor from Cranston many times in the years since. What he saw. What he chose to write instead of what he saw. Whether he went home that night and told his wife about the strangest physical he had ever conducted, or whether he simply added it to whatever pile of inexplicable things a man accumulates in a life and carries quietly until he dies.
I hope he slept well. He earned it.
The war years taught us something that the Depression years had suggested but not confirmed: Providence was very good at not seeing what it did not want to see.
This is not stupidity. I want to be precise about that. The people of this city are not stupid, and the ones who looked at us sideways in those years were not wrong to do so. Something was sideways about us. Something has always been sideways about us. But Providence had been built on the kind of commerce that requires a certain selective attention, slave ships and rum and the other trades that a city does not put on its monuments, and that selective attention had become, over a couple of centuries, a kind of institutional grace. The city knew how to look at the river and not see what was in it.
We benefited from this. I am not proud of benefiting from it. But I am one hundred and sixty-three years old and I have made my peace with the difference between the world as it should be and the world as it is, which is the only peace available at my age.
There is one more thing from these years that I will set down, though not here. The hurricane came in September of 1938 and it deserves its own accounting, more than I can give it as a footnote to a decade that already has too much in it. It changed the water in ways I am still thinking about, and it brought something with it that I have been thinking about even longer, and I find that when I sit down to write about it I need more room than the end of this entry provides.
I will give it that room.
The war ended in 1945 and the city exhaled and the young men came home. The harbour relaxed its bristling vigilance and we were, once again, simply the strange quiet people down by the waterfront who always seemed to know where the fish were.
It was enough. For a while, it was enough.
– S.Z., Providence, April 2025
