The taxi swung off the boulevard onto a white gravel drive that formed a small oval in front of a stucco house in vaguely Spanish style. A Mexican maid greeted them with a broad smile. Arthur McKay set their bags down in the center hall and looked up to find his sister-in-law, Lucy Semmes Kemble, descending the stairs. She was wearing a black dinner dress, with a rope of pearls on her slim neck. Her oval face was aglow with a smile so rich in affection, McKay almost winced. "Oh, Rita, Art, it's so good to see you," she said in that sibilant breathy voice that was the opposite of Rita's harsh clang.
She kissed him and he inhaled a perfume Rita only wore when they went to formal dinners. Lucy's waist size had not changed since 1915. Her black hair still had the sheen of youth. "She's pure woman, the purest I've ever seen, except for my mother," Win Kemble had said. Was it this purity that enabled Lucy to ignore the passage of time?
They dutifully admired the house. It did not belong to Win Kemble. It was owned by their ex-classmate Greg "Clinch" Meade, who had resigned his commission in the early 1920s and headed for Wall Street. Greg had made millions by using his wife's money to buy into steel companies and shipyards which did business: with the government, and then deploying his insider's knowledge of Washington — his father had been a congressman — to land lucrative contracts.
Although several congressional investigations had connected Clinch to operations that reeked of payoffs and padded costs, Win continued to nurture the friendship. In return, Clinch made available to Win his houses in various parts of the country, his private railroad car, his racing sloop. To Arthur McKay, Win made no secret of his loathing for Clinch and the kind of businessmen with whom he associated. Their methods, their ethics, had to be tolerated for the Navy's sake. "Make friends with the mammon of iniquity" was one of Win's favorite maxims.
The maid served cocktails. Rita ordered her usual double martini. That could be the beginning of trouble, Arthur McKay thought. But Rita allowed the conversation to cruise in family channels. They discussed the McKay children. Lucy's delicate health had made childbearing out of the question, but she functioned as a kind of alternate mother for Semmes McKay, known as Sammy, and his sister Barbara. Rita reported that Sammy had just become a four-striper — a battalion commander — at Annapolis. Barbara was in her freshman year at Wellesley and, for the twenty-fifth time, no longer speaking or writing to her mother. But she wrote regularly to Lucy, and Rita had to sit there, barely controlling her temper, as Lucy told her Barbara was thinking of joining the WACS.
Rita squawked as if Lucy had stuck a pin in her.
"What's wrong with the WAVES?"
"You know what she thinks of the Navy, Rita."
"I don't call that thinking," Rita said.
Lucy smiled tolerantly at her younger sister. No one, not even Rita, could alter the depth of Lucy's affection for those she called family. "How are you, Art? Has the uncrowned king been working you to death, in his usual cold-blooded way?"
"Not at all. I've gotten at least three hours' sleep a night. That's two more than he gets, I think."
"Art — I've said it before. You're simply too good-natured to be in the Navy. You let people like Ernie King take advantage of you."
Gratitude swelled in Arthur McKay's chest. Every time he saw her, Lucy Semmes Kemble awakened in his soul a yearning Rita could never satisfy. It was not lust. It was a hope, a wish for a love beyond words, beyond touch. A love that satisfied the soul.
"Jesus Christ," Rita said. "I've never heard such horseshit in my life. What's the latest on Mother Kemble?"
"She'll be here tomorrow."
"Oh God," Rita said.
Katherine Schley Kemble had been her lifelong antagonist. For twenty-five years, Rita had tried to match her influence and guile to advance the career of Arthur McKay on a par with the rise of Win Kemble. Not that Katherine Schley, a lady in the grande dame tradition of Douglas MacArthur's mother, ever betrayed the slightest consciousness of a rivalry. For her, Arthur McKay was Win's friend, which qualified him for her assistance, as an afterthought. During their final Annapolis year, she lived only six blocks from the Academy and had Win and his roommate to tea every Sunday. A regular feature of the visit would be a report on lunch or dinner with some admiral or a congressman on the Naval Affairs Committee who had promised to "keep an eye" on Win when he graduated. Invariably she added, "I put in a good word for you too, Arthur."
"She's terribly upset by this battle off Guadalcanal," Lucy said. "What do you make of it, Art?"
"Not much," he said. "It's too early to get a clear picture of what happened. I'm hoping Win will fill us in."
"Yes," Rita said, with a sarcasm only Arthur McKay heard. "We can't wait to hear from him. Has the Jefferson City made port?"
"She's due the day after tomorrow," Lucy said. "She's stopping in Portland to pick up a draft of new recruits."
Lucy sipped her drink. "There can't be anything to worry about, as far as I can see. Win brought his ship back in one piece. That's more than anyone else did."
"Yes," Arthur McKay said.
"The fact that Admiral King chose you to relieve him — that proves there's nothing negative in the reassignment."
Arthur McKay said nothing. Gazing into Lucy Semmes Kemble's lovely face, he found himself incapable of telling her another lie. He had told her so many over the years. She was woman as God or nature intended her to be in another time. Woman unstained by the modern world's ugliness.
"There isn't—is there, Art?"
"No, of course not," he said. "As a matter of fact, the admiral sent you his regards."
Lucy's eyes darkened. "I wish I could return them with sincerity. But he seems to me the absolutely worst choice Roosevelt could have made."
"Good God. You sound like Drew Pearson!" Rita cried.
The two sisters were nothing if not consistent in their differences. Lucy always admired admirals who were gentlemen and scholars, such as genial dignified Harold R. "Molly" Stark, the Navy's top commander when the Japs struck Pearl Harbor.
Rita preferred the SOB's like Ernie King, who clawed their way to the top with minimum attention to the niceties.
Rita launched a diatribe against columnist Drew Pearson, who had attacked King for living on a flagship which was really the former Dodge family yacht, Delphine. McKay thought Pearson had a point, but he nodded and pretended to agree with Rita. Anything was better than discussing the battle of Savo Island.
They got through dinner on reminiscence. Those marvelous days from 1925 to 1928 on the China Station. Trips to Peking and the Great Wall and dinners with Dutch, British, French officers and their wives at the Jockey Club on Shanghai's Bund. They avoided the less lovely memories of a China in revolutionary upheaval, of menacing mobs confronting Marines and gunboats, the denunciations of foreign devils. From China they segued to Win's tour as naval attaché in London, where he and Lucy discovered the moral superiority of the British Empire. Next came the McKays' less hospitable but more intellectually stimulating year among the Japanese in Tokyo. It was the second or third time around for all the stories, but Lucy seemed to enjoy them and Rita drank another martini and chimed in on the same frequency.
After dinner, Rita announced she was exhausted from the trip and retreated to their bedroom. Lucy poured Arthur McKay another cup of coffee and sat down on the couch with him in the living room. She began talking about the war, not as a series of campaigns to be fought but as an experience that was corrupting America's spirit. "When I think of what the last war did to us," she said, "I can't help but wonder what this one will do. I work at the USO and the YMCA. The enlisted men all look so young, so innocent. You think of what they're being exposed to down on the Long Beach Pike.”
It was not the sort of thing anyone worried about on the third deck of the Navy Building in Washington, D.C., where Cominch King reigned.
"We can't change human nature, Lucy."
"How well I know that," Lucy said, staring into the cup of black coffee in her han
ds.
Was she referring to her father? He had had a White Russian mistress in Shanghai and favorites in a half dozen other ports where he had two-blocked his admiral's flag. For a moment, Arthur McKay was certain Lucy was not talking about that irascible old sea wolf. She was talking about her husband. But it was impossible. If there was one thing Win Kemble had succeeded in doing, it was convincing his wife that he was the Navy's Lancelot, and she was the lily maid whom no Guinevere could ever tempt him to betray. He had kept her as innocent of what a sailor was really like as she had been on the day they walked onto Admiral Semmes's porch in Patapsco twenty-seven years ago.
If he was wrong, if Lucy was about to tell him how much she knew about Win Kemble's other women, Arthur McKay did not want to hear it. There was only so much anguish a man could handle at one time. Then he had to reach for the booze. Rita had made him do that more than once. Liquor allowed him to unleash his rage for a little while without feeling guilty, without hearing his father snarling sarcastically at his mother.
This was a different kind of anguish, this pain in Lucy's innocent eyes, this dismay staining her exquisite face. He was afraid of what liquor might do, what it might release in his soul, if he tried to face it. Arthur McKay set down his coffee cup and said something about seizing the opportunity of getting a decent night's sleep.
Lucy nodded sympathetically. "I hope Win doesn't go on King's staff. I'd hate to see him worked to a frazzle for that awful man's greater glory."
"I doubt if he will. But there are plenty of other staffs where I'm sure people will fight to get him."
McKay kissed Lucy on the cheek and trudged upstairs, full of self-reproach for deserting this woman when she obviously needed to talk to someone about the anxiety she was feeling.
"Welcome to Shanghai."
Rita was lying on one of the twin beds without a stitch on. Her belly was a shining globe. Below it the mound of dark hair glistened with drops of water. Her breasts were as massive as the mythic equipment on statues of earth goddesses he had seen on Cyprus on his first midshipman's cruise. He remembered Win Kemble leading them to a bordello in Casablanca where there were real teats almost as big. He also remembered reading about the way worshippers of these ancient earth goddesses, variously named Astarte, Cybele, Demeter, used to castrate themselves as an act of supreme adoration.
Rita fat was sexier than Rita thin. At least she was more ingenious, more outrageous. Maybe she felt she had to compensate for the visual inadequacy. "Come on," Rita said. "It's your last chance for a trip up Bubbling Well Road."
Shanghai and its street names were a private code for sex games from a fuck book Rita had bought in China when she was fourteen. It described everything from cunnilingus to blow jobs in steamy detail.
Arthur McKay wanted her. He wanted her from behind and in the mouth and every other way that Rita let him have her when she was in her Shanghai mood. But he knew what it meant this time around. He was going to help her make Win Kemble writhe. He was going to be Admiral King's investigator-prosecutor.
The admiral's fucker. That was what Rita wanted him to be. "I think I'll take a hot bath instead," Arthur McKay said. "Maybe I'll get to see Shanghai aboard the Jefferson City."
Heavy Weather
The USS Jefferson City rolled and pitched in a rising sea. In his cabin, Lieutenant Junior Grade Montgomery West was reading a letter.
Dear Joey,
By the time you get this I'll be in Dubuque or Paducah helping the stars sell war bonds. It's worse than hand-to-hand combat on Guadalcanal. People tear the earrings out of their ears, the bracelets off their wrists. Rita Hayworth collapsed in the middle of the last tour. Anybody who buys a $25,000 bond gets a big wet kiss. That was Hedy Lamarr's bright idea. Or her agent's, to put it more exactly.
Nobody would do it twice or even once if I hadn't persuaded Louis B. to pass the word that it's sell or else you'll never work for any major studio again.
You won't recognize Tinsel Town when you get back. At midnight Hollywood and Vine is as dark as Main Street in Wappinger Falls. Everybody says glamor is out for the duration. You're not supposed to have servants or give parties. Agents spend more time trying to get their people onto the Hollywood Canteen night shift than they do getting them parts. Patriotism it's wonderful!
I still say you were nuts to join up, after Roosevelt declared the movies an essential industry. The studios are desperate for guys your age with your kind of handsome puss. You could be making five pictures a year and be a hero in every one of them. You could kill more japs on celluloid in thirty days than you'll see if the war lasts ten years. You've probably heard that they froze the salaries, but between you and me and Louis B. we're promising everyone that we'll squirrel away some of the loot and pay up after the bullets stop flying. Maybe you could get a 30-day leave and make a picture. How would you like to have 100 grand to come home to?
What the hell is the Navy doing out there? The Marines on Guadalcanal get all the publicity, as far as I can see. I wish you could tell me something we could stick in a press release. Like maybe doing the tango on a turret with some native beauty? Give it some thought. If you don't get your name in the papers around here at least once a month, you don't exist. How many times do I have to tell you that?
Your favorite uncle,
Mort
Montgomery West sighed and crumpled the letter in his hand. Good old Uncle Mort, still running his life. West found it hard to make up his mind what he thought and felt about his mother's favorite brother. On the one hand, if it wasn't for Mort and his boyhood friendship with Louis B. Mayer, Montgomery West might still be one of the faceless thousands on the studios' extra lists. On the other hand, he might be a star in his own right. He might be playing opposite Norma Shearer instead of her B-picture imitation, Ina Severn. He might be Franchot Tone instead of his B-picture imitation. Uncle Morty got nephew Joey ahead all right—but only so far.
Maybe with this Navy service under his belt he could finally shake off Uncle Mort's controlling hand. Maybe he would no longer feel compelled to do everything Mort and his fellow publicity geniuses at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer suggested. He could stop sleeping with aging silent queens and cease straining his brain trying to make conversation with starlets like Marilyn what's-her-name.
Mort was the closest thing to a father West had ever known. His real father had died in an automobile accident in 1920, when West was seven years old. He had only a vague memory of a big deep-voiced man who owned a magnificent speedboat in which he took West for exciting rides on Long Island Sound. Not until he was in his late teens did he discover (from Uncle Mort) that his father had been a bootlegger and had died in a police chase on a rain-slick Connecticut highway called the Berlin Turnpike.
Punching up his pillow, West began kissing Ina Severn's cool unyielding English mouth. His hands roved up and down and around her slim supple body. He had been kissing Ina Severn in his head this way for the last four months.
"Cut, cut," the Hungarian director yelled. "Ina for d' loaf of God, can't you show entoosiasm?"
"Mr. West isn't kissing me, he's raping me." Ina sniffed.
Maybe she would change her mind now, when he strolled onto the Metro lot with one and a half gold stripes on his sleeves. Hail the conquering hero.
Unfortunately, the USS Jefferson City had not conquered anything. He could not even give an interview about his thoughts and feelings during the battle of Savo Island. The story of that ruinous encounter was top secret. Anyway, if he told the truth about the Jefferson City's performance, Uncle Mort would rend his press releases in despair.
Damning both Ina Severn and Uncle Mort, West flung himself into the single chair that occupied the corner of the narrow stateroom, and resumed reading a recent novel about the old Navy, Delilah. The plot revolved around a decrepit destroyer in the Philippines before World War I. Uncle Mort had sent it to West to see if it was authentic. Metro was considering it for a film. It had so little resemblance to life aboard the Jeff
erson City, West felt unqualified to judge.
Aboard the Delilah, the captain was a humane fallible man with the modest rank of lieutenant commander. He knew intimately his three officers and almost every member of the hundred-man crew. Aboard the Jefferson City, the captain was a genuine captain, a rank only one step below admiral. He was a cold remote figure who personified authority, order, discipline. The idea of anyone being intimate with him was laughable. He barely knew the names of his sixty-five officers, much less anyone in the crew.
Was the Delilah the real Navy? West wondered. Or was reality what he had encountered in the last four months aboard the Shitty City? That unpleasant nickname had recently drifted up from the crew into the wardroom. It signified, if it did not entirely explain, why a dismaying number of officers and enlisted men were leaving the Jefferson City. The damage control officer, the communications officer and the navigator were transferring as soon as they reached Long Beach. Ditto a dozen chief petty officers and warrant officers. West and other division officers had been deluged with requests for transfers from lower-ranking petty officers.
A hand yanked aside the curtain that served for a door on his stateroom. Ensign Richard B. Meade, Annapolis 1940, stuck his head into West's cabin. He had a glass of whiskey in his hand. Meade was trying very hard to overcome his Annapolis nickname, "Babyface." But it was not easy. Although his build was burly, his cherubic dimpled face still looked no more than sixteen.
"Hey, Monty, old chap," he said in a fake British accent that recalled parts West had played in several recent movies. "Care to join us for a swallow?"
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