Book Review : Meditation on All Those ‘Missing’ Men

The Port of Missing Men by Mary Ann Tirone Smith (William Morrow: $17.95; 216 pages)

Oh, elegance! The year is 1936, the place the S.S. Normandie, crossing the Atlantic from Europe to New York. Lily Neelan, just 14, has been victorious at Hitler’s Olympic Games and is returning home with a couple of gold medals. Lily’s the toast of two continents and moderately happy about the whole thing: She’s a high diver, a craftswoman; she knows what it is to take chances. Socially, Lily sits far, far below the salt: She’s been coached in Miami Beach by two underworld gents fleeing from the law, her mother has supported her these last 10 years or so by working diligently as a hooker.

Now, Gertie, Lily’s mother, sees her daughter’s two gold medals as a way out of squalor and into a life of affluence--Easy Street is where they’re headed.

Traveling first class on the Normandie, Lily swims laps with Zelda Fitzgerald, while her mother keeps busy pursuing (and nabbing) a handsome man-of-the-world and sometimes smuggler, His Excellency Mr. Albert Rexhault.

What have we got so far? A slangy, hip recollection of times past--of dining and dancing on great ocean liners, of lonely outlaws in Miami Beach taking time to coach a kid (showing her the aesthetics of diving by shooting arrows into the water), an evocation, even, of the colors turquoise, flamingo and white: Miami Beach in the ‘30s.

Only in the middle does the real theme become clear. Lily feels “missing.” Her mother, in her headstrong social climb, never wants to see Miami Beach again. Lily has lost her home, and she’ll never know who her father is. Gertie, too, has lost her home, and doesn’t know who her father is. Albert Rexhault, no matter how impeccable his dinner clothes, has lost his home, and doesn’t know who his father is. When Lily meets Gresham Young, the man of her dreams, and diving coach at Yale University, it turns out that he, too, has lost his home, and doesn’t know who his father is. . . .

An elderly professor at Yale recognizes this phenomenon and passes his theory onto Lily, for what it’s worth. “. . . He said this was the greatest drawback of capitalism. If you weren’t worth money, had no means of making it, had no family to shore you up, you’d die or do what my mother did. But only the very strong at heart can will themselves to survive at the expense of their dignity.”

The plot takes some surprising turns. There’s a lot here about Jean Lafitte, the famous privateer, a disputed inheritance, and a floating resort in a Caribbean crafted in the shape of the miniature Normandie. The idea seems to be that if all the outcasts and outlaws of this world really got together and put their minds to it, they might turn out to be in-laws: There’s so many of them, they’re bound to be related.

It’s Lily’s contention and belief that all the “missing men” in the world are not just missing in the sense of “gone,” but missing everything they’ve left: They crave a home and wife and sisters and brothers and friends. Lily aims to provide all that for them.

This is a fictional how-to book, in a sense: sisterly advice on how to comport yourself when the people you love best skid out of your life; a meditation on “Missing.” If you feel grounded and safe, you won’t “get” this one. If you don’t, you will.