In addition to my own observations as to these matters I had another source in a position to know to the most precise degree the actual state of affairs: Lieutenant Girard, the leader of the women. In our regular weekly session on supply and morale matters, the subject assuredly falling in the latter category, she reported to me in general terms developments in this area. (We had learned, I should add, in fact did so instinctively, to treat the subject with the calm, seamanlike matter-of-factness with which we dealt with all others, this impulse springing from her particularly in this instance, than for which approach there was nothing I could have been more grateful.) Such as after the Arrangement had been in operation about a month:
“There have been only those two transfers of men from one woman to another,” she said one day. This was under the “incompatibility” clause of the Arrangement. “Frankly, I would have expected more.”
As before, I was careful to stay out of all this in any detail. I would not have dreamed of asking for names. I left everything concerned with it to her and through her to the women. She had now become absolute commander of the women, their loyalty insofar as they were women transferred to her in a sovereignty as total as my own general sovereignty; perhaps, given that added instinctual women’s loyalty to one another that I believe I noted at one point . . . given this to start with and build on, perhaps even more so. In fact, I wished to hear about it as little as possible, though there was no way as ship’s captain I could allow myself to be closed off completely from so urgent a matter. I believe she knew this, and accordingly kept the references brief, simply the usual reports as to how matters were progressing. I did interject a word now and then, even the glancing question.
“The morale?”
“It has never been better, sir.”
The subject never overtly mentioned now, nonetheless that sense of expectancy hung in the air—it would have been impossible for it not to do so. It would have been unthinkable to broach the matter, to pose specific inquiries; still one waited; knew furthermore that everyone in ship’s company, every participant, man and woman, equally waited. Even Bixby making a point of reporting to me as a supposedly unrelated matter the fact that our goats, now doubled to four from their original two and both of them nannies, were in thriving health. One could not ask questions about it. One did not need to do so. The moment it happened Girard would tell me. Nor would she wait for our weekly meeting. She would come to me at once.
As to that inerrable sense of sexual fulfillment all about, manifest as the tall trees, that makes men so different, I must reemphasize the Jesuit’s role. What he had done was effectively to remove the monster guilt, which otherwise at the least would have tainted many of those relationships in the twenty-four cottages, indeed made many impossible. It was ship’s company coming around to his own view, as I have earlier suggested, that expelled whatever hesitations there may have been about the arrangements (save for the abstaining seven)—and there had been many of these, and probably more in the men even than in the women. (I would be the last to deny that some of our people were quite ready to be converted, some even not requiring such in the least, but many more still at first holding back, uncertain as to the proposed methods, and from what have always been considered the highest of motives.) It was a remarkable personal triumph. He had infused the settlement with his belief, constituting an absolute sanctioning, that not only was there nothing wrong with these procedures but that they embodied the most upright and essential conduct, amounting to nothing less than a clear obligation. Having become persuaded as to that, they could put it out of their minds and have fun. Few fulfillments in life are so rewarding as knowing that the act you are performing is not only one of the highest satisfaction but is also in the glory of a cause and one’s duty in the bargain. Not that I believe the Navy men and women, being the quite down-to-earth human beings they were, dwelt on these matters as they went about their pleasures in the cottages. It was rather that what might have been an inhibiting factor was obliterated from their minds so that they could proceed to do what women and men like to do when left alone. I recalled the doc’s term employed by him sometime before the activation of the Arrangement: the “intermittent neuroses” with which he described many of ship’s company as being from time to time affected. These to all appearances had entirely disappeared, the doc himself so informing me in his wry, somewhat cynical manner: “Now I wonder why?”
And so the weeks went by. With all the beneficences, I am obliged to report that one event occurred to jar us for a time out of them. One woman—Susan Dillon—disappeared from the settlement. The most thorough search of the island, all hands turned out to reconnoiter it inch by inch, turned up nothing. I think all of us in our secret souls presumed—no one, at least insofar as I knew, ever once mentioning this speculation—that she had found herself unable to cope with the Arrangement.
Another thought entered my mind, troubling me. She was an operations specialist, one of the air trackers who monitored our Tomahawks to touchdown at Orel. Like anyone who made it in that job she was a very smart sailor. It occurred to me that she was the second of those, and the only other woman who did that piece of work, to disappear; the other one, Emily Austin, having done so some months back, not long after we came to the island. I pondered. I had another passing thought: Dillon’s lovers included Silva, the doc, Selmon, Delaney, Preston.
* * *
We were well into the third month of the Arrangement when Lieutenant Girard informed me almost routinely that the women had decided upon and put into effect a change in one of the terms, a kind of codicil added to the original list. Article 2, I believe it was, this stating that no man would be moved from his assigned woman to another more than once, and this for reasons only of incompatibility, and then only at the women’s discretion. That day she put the matter to me thus:
“Captain, the women have decided to shift the men around more. From one woman to another. In effect, a rather complete changing about in that respect.”
She did not give me the reason. She had no need to do so. I felt pass through from her to me the first distant intimation of concern since the Arrangement commenced. She continued in those emotionless briefing tones.
“Actually, rather simply done. One woman’s group moving to another woman; that woman receiving another’s; and so on.”
“I get the picture,” I said, noncommittally, having no desire to hear further details.
“With this new procedure, within a certain time every woman will have been with every man.”
“The women want that?”
I had made a dreadful mistake in asking that, and knew it instantly; a stupid and terrible mistake. It had just popped out. I saw something like anger flash from her eyes. Then she waited, not wanting to speak out of that; considerate of myself. When she said it, did so in the most matter-of-fact if quite brisk way.
“All the women want is babies, sir.”
“Of course. Forgive my lapse in perception.”
Her eyes rested on me in what I felt actually to be a kindly expression.
“I remain very hopeful,” she said.
So it was that meantime all hands, men and women both, continued so, rather immensely better for the availability of one another that was by now so fully established as to have become an entirely normal part of the functioning of our community. As I said at the outset, all this came as no surprise. Ship’s captains know about these things. There was only one person in the settlement who was not better. The ship’s captain.
* * *
Inevitably there would drift to me emanations of the most erotic goings-on in those cottages set among the trees. At first enjoying a kind of vicarious happiness in the fact that my ship’s company were at last accommodated with the one important thing that had been missing in their increasingly fulfilled lives on the island, this feeling began after a while to transmute itself, by the slowest of degrees and only over a period of time, into something quite different. Like all the me
n around me I had been able to block out the idea of that emollience with considerable success over the many months of our adversities: besides, we were intensely occupied with matters of survival, which is perhaps the one force that can turn the focus of men away from such a fundamental drive. But now no perils pressed us, no enemies loomed on the horizon, hunger had fled into the distance, we were home free on what was turning more and more into quite a rewarding island, and all these thoughts that normally occupy the mind of an unfulfilled man returned. In my instance, to have these matters proceeding but a few steps away . . . it became difficult. Very difficult. Something intolerable about it. And there was not a thing in the world I could do about it.
To no Navy man will this need explaining. It would simply not have worked for the ship’s captain to participate exactly as the other men participated: as one of five or six men—I sometimes lost track of the exact figure—assigned to a given woman. Nothing in it would have worked. There is no law of the sea more ancient, more unforgiving, than the one that proclaims that “fraternization” between a captain and those whom he commands is among the deadliest of traps the life of a ship presents him, however noble the intent, leading ineluctably to a slow diminution of the ship’s captain’s authority and sovereignty, and thereby eventually to the gravest of consequences, not excepting the putting of the ship herself at hazard. Lonely as he is, even in normal circumstances, a ship’s captain is sometimes sorely beset by the temptation to step across that rigid line the sea, knowing all, in its wisdom long ago drew. To do so is folly; the captain who succumbs to it certain to reap, not respect and friendship, but their opposites. It simply does not work with a ship’s company, a canon so absolute that no intelligent ship’s captain questions it. And this—this ultimate fraternization as it were: It simply could not be. And so it was that I increasingly found myself living in a kind of erotic hell: envisionings, increasing in the particularities of their persecuting vividness, as to all the things going on in the cottages; quite explicit, almost photographic images of the women of my ship’s company . . . yes, of Meyer, of Talley, of Garber, of Alice Bixby. At first hard to objectify them as being women as opposed to sailors . . . Then, realizing they were now the former in every sense and to a degree consummate . . . A torment seized me. The names paraded incessantly through my mind . . . the names of the women I had known only as sailors under my command. Then one day the name Lieutenant Girard. And I stopped.
I had almost forgotten: She was the sole woman, save for Meyer, not participating in the Arrangement, just as I was the sole man (except for the seven voluntary abstainers). It was a decision that half-surprised me and half-seemed almost as logical as my own: that as leader of the women, she could not participate, any more than could I as captain of the ship. For exactly the same reason that I could not be one of several men assigned to a woman, she could not be one of the women to whom several men were assigned. For she, too, now held something like a sovereign power, as to the women, and thereby to a large degree over the men. We never discussed it. But each of us feeling I am certain that these roles of ours—commanders—were indispensable to the continued well-being of the settlement, and each knowing that our respective positions of leadership, of authority, of power, of command, would be unacceptably jeopardized by participation.
Girard. Lieutenant Girard. Never using her first name. I had almost forgotten what it was.
At first the very having of the idea profoundly shocked me, and I dropped it instantly. The complications such a relationship would unloose, both as between ourselves and between each of us and ship’s company, were so obvious and so almost unlimited in nature that they scarcely need listing. After a while the idea returned. Again, I immediately put it away. It was only to return again, with more force; to be rejected again. This cycle continued, the periods between when I was not thinking of it shortened, the consciousness of the proceedings in the cottages pressing me to the point of agony. I forced my mind to calm, to reason things out; thereby in time reaching a rationale and a conviction that ran somewhat as follows.
I myself needed this to survive, at least survive with all my faculties intact; if I did not survive, the settlement, the island, the ship’s company, all that we had accomplished: All this would at the very least find itself at risk. This vanity of a ship’s captain, and most particularly of myself, to which I have made occasional reference, may or may not have been based in reality. There may well have been others who could have stepped forward and taken my place and matters to have continued as propitiously as they now were. But that is not the point. The point is that I did not at all know—and there was no way to know—that this desirable thing would have eventuated. What I did know was that under my command, we had come through the most testing of events; that under it, the island was functioning as well as does a good ship properly commanded; more, that we were beginning to make not just an acceptable home for ourselves but rather—yes, a good home in which one could sense a growing well-being, seeming ever more to approach a feeling of love for this place. I felt I had had a great deal to do with these achievements. But I was human. Above all I came to feel not just that I had to have a woman but that I had to have this particular one; partly because of what she was, partly because of the fact that the above-delineated strictures concerning fraternization would not be breached in so doing, she being no other man’s woman. I was taking no woman from anyone, for if Girard were not to be with me she could be with nobody.
These cogent reasons for taking the fateful step amplified with no difficulty, and began pressing my mind in almost constant iteration. I had to have a woman and no one else to have her. And it had to be one woman, Girard. I had to have Girard and have her alone. By the exact same token, she had to have me, and me alone: There was no one else she could have. The logic seemed impeccable: I took another step in the desired direction. I came to feel that that was owed me, that it was not an excessive reward for having led ship’s company through all our terrible hardships from the Barents to this tiny particle sticking up in the great ocean-sea of the Pacific. After all, every other man had a woman. Why was I, who had brought us all to safe harbor, to be the only one denied this solace? By the end of these reasoned processes, proceeding step by step in orderly fashion, I had convinced myself that it would actually be wrong for this thing not to happen.
Having reached this impregnable position, even armed with this library of rationality, I yet knew this: I could not announce my decision to my own ship’s company. They might understand and they might not; themselves having to share the other women, why should anyone have a woman all to himself: It was not at all implausible that such a question should arise. Being unalterably determined now to proceed, I had no intention of testing these waters. There was only one problem remaining as to these matters, which I had come, the question itself already decided, to consider almost logistical in nature: It would have to be done clandestinely, somewhere on this tiny island. Precisely where I had not the slightest idea.
Having worked all of this out, having given myself all these wonderfully logical, even lofty reasons to proceed, something else abruptly occurred to me. My God, I thought, all along I had just been assuming things on her part—assuming compliance. Vanity indeed! She might not be in the slightest interested. Especially in myself. For all her being a superb, astute officer, absolutely cool under fire, and professionally congenial, there had always been something withheld, guarded, even forbidding, about Lieutenant Girard, as I have earlier related; something that seemed intentionally to communicate to whomsoever that her personal, inner life was her exclusive possession, strictly off-limits: keep away. It was not inconceivable that she might not even like it at all. I had heard of such women. How stupid I had been to make all these assumptions, almost to take for granted her own willingness! Surely the last woman with whom one should make such a mistake. Nevertheless I would try, at least tentatively explore, with prudence, with infinite caution, ready to draw back instantly if my fingers
were so much as singed. There was no one else to try with. I would wait for the appropriate opportunity to make my move; thinking, how calculating, how transcendency devious, I was becoming; nothing in life, my thought was, furthering that quality more than that particular enterprise of supreme self-interest I was about to set my course on.
* * *
It happened then; their absence not being noticed until two days after the deed was accomplished, we had been able to calculate, the reason being that the off-days worked out under the watch system we had instituted fell in his case at that time, so that there was another watch on the Lookout Tower, himself not missed. Indeed they must have picked that time to do it, to give them that head start lest we decide to try to overtake them. As for her, her coxswain duties kept her moving about. No one noticed at first. Then Lieutenant Girard brought me the news. Missing also—Number 2 boat. Our boats now all rigged with sails, all coxswains having become adept at sail-powered boating. None more so than these two. We sat in my cabin overlooking the sea they must have hoped would be their highway to somewhere. God knew where.
“The little fools,” Girard said; holding everything back.
“Your conscience should be clear, Lieutenant.” I was making words. “The system—the Arrangement—would never have worked once any exception was made. You said that yourself. And it was true. It is true.”
“Oh, my conscience is clear all right,” she said. “But for them to take it to the point of . . . doing what they did.”
“Poets and others built their stories around love of that kind—that would test it to that degree.”
Her tone was brutal. “To the point of madness, you mean, Captain?”
“Yes, I suppose I do. Not literally. But they say that kind of love makes you do things other people might call crazy. I wouldn’t know. Outside my experience. I wonder which suggested it.”
The Last Ship: A Novel Page 63
