Lizard Brancussi—Maisie

Lizard Brancussi—Maisie describes an attachment sustained across wartime separation by a small portrait, even as Lizard’s actual memories of his wife grow indistinct. The drawing gives him an image to carry through captivity and catastrophic loss, but his eventual attempt to contact home brings no reunion: after a man answers the phone, Lizard disappears from the ship taking him onward. The relationship is therefore defined by both fidelity and distance, with the portrait enduring where certainty about Maisie, home, and Lizard’s own fate does not.

The portrait and the remembered Maisie

Lizard’s connection to Maisie is most concretely embodied in the pencil sketch made by Rabbit Hendricks. He looks at it lovingly every day. Yet looking at the drawing and remembering Maisie are not the same act: when Lizard tries to see beyond the fixed image and recall her as she was, his memory becomes hazy. The portrait remains clear enough to revisit, while the person it represents becomes harder for him to recover inwardly.

That divide widens over time. Lizard’s fantasy of Mae West grows stronger as the remembered Maisie grows weaker. The contrast does not mean that his affection has simply ended; the daily attention he gives the sketch points the other way. Rather, the concrete image keeps his attachment active while his unaided memory loses its hold. The portrait is both a trace of a particular woman and a fragile means of resisting the present circumstances that have separated them.

Attachment under captivity

As the beating continues, Lizard keeps trying to see Maisie. His effort is not described as a practical plan to reach her, but as a way of maintaining belief in something beyond what is happening around him. The novel makes this inward act central to the relationship: while he cannot change his immediate situation, he can continue to turn toward the image of his wife. His capacity to believe in her, or in anything beyond the present, becomes a measure of his remaining life.

The sketch follows him through the camps and aboard the ship that carries him to Japan’s Home Islands. Lizard holds on to it while enslaved at the Mitsubishi shipworks in Nagasaki, which is destroyed by the atomic bombing. He survives and reaches safety in the hills. The narrative places his effort to retain Maisie’s likeness amid the wider devastation he encounters after the bombing; his private attachment does not remove him from that history, but gives him an image to carry through it. He continues trying to see her as Rabbit Hendricks drew her in a Syrian village, preserving a moment from before the long passage through captivity and destruction.

The journey home and the failed call

After making his way out of the devastation, Lizard travels toward Manila aboard a United States aircraft carrier. He shows the postcard to American sailors, who tell him that he is lucky. The sketch has become something he can share with strangers: a visible sign of the wife he hopes to return to, and a connection to a life beyond his immediate wartime experience. Their response recognizes the image and his good fortune, but it cannot establish what awaits him at home.

Lizard eventually reaches Fremantle on a ship continuing to Melbourne, and from there he telephones home. A man answers the phone shared by Dave and Maisie and identifies himself as Dave. The evidence establishes the brief exchange, but not who Dave is in relation to Maisie or what Lizard understands from the answer. Lizard hangs up. The scene ends his attempt at contact without confirming that he speaks to Maisie or learns anything about her circumstances. After the long journey sustained by her image, the call offers no reunion and no explanation.

Disappearance and narrative significance

When the ship leaves Fremantle, Lizard is seen slipping over the side on its first night. He is never found. The account gives no further explanation of his decision and does not establish his precise fate; his disappearance follows the failed call, but the text does not state a motive. The distinction matters: the relationship reaches a point of apparent return, yet the narrative withholds the knowledge that would turn return into reunion.

Lizard’s story is later recalled among the dead and lost companions remembered by the survivors. Sheephead Morton says that Lizard’s story was too sad to repeat, and Lizard is included in a wider recollection of men who remain present in memory. This later remembrance extends the pattern that has shaped his bond with Maisie: a person may be absent, unreachable, or impossible to recall in full, while an image or story keeps that person from vanishing entirely. For Lizard, the sketch preserves Maisie through the war; after his own disappearance, the surviving men preserve Lizard in turn.