by Herman Wouk
He swallowed this argument, and a double bromide; the one for his conscience, the other for his pulse. Both sedatives worked. When he hesitated for a moment outside Captain Grimm’s office for a last check, his blood thumped tranquilly past his fingers at seventy-five, and he felt buoyant and relaxed. He pushed open the door.
The first object that caught his eye in the room was a blue sleeve with four gold stripes on it. The sleeve was gesticulating at a fat Navy nurse seated at a desk. Captain Grimm, gray and very tired-looking, was waving a sheaf of papers and complaining bitterly about slipshod accounting of morphine. He turned on Willie. “What is it, boy?”
Willie handed him the envelope. Captain Grimm glanced at the papers. “Oh, Lord. Miss Norris, when am I due at the operating room?”
“In twenty minutes, sir.”
“All right, Keith, go into that dressing room. I’ll be with you in two minutes.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Willie went through the white-painted door and closed it. The little room was stuffily hot, but he was afraid to tamper with the windows. He wandered around in a narrow circle, reading labels on bottles, looking out the window at the sad gray jumble of the Brooklyn waterfront, and yawning. He waited two minutes, five, ten. The bromide and the warmth took stronger hold. He stretched out on the examining table, assuring himself that a little relaxation would be good for him.
When he woke his watch read half-past five. He had slept, forgotten by the Navy, for eight hours. He washed his face in a basin, straightened his hair, and emerged from the dressing room with a look of martyrdom. The fat nurse’s jaws fell open when she saw him.
“Holy Christmas! Are you still here?”
“Nobody ever told me to come out.”
“But my God!” She jumped out of the swivel chair. “You’ve been here since- Why didn’t you say something? Wait!” She went into an inner office, and came out in a moment with the captain, who said, “Blazes, boy, I’m sorry. I’ve had operations, meetings- Step into my office.”
In the book-lined room he told Willie to strip to the waist, and inspected his back. “Touch your toes.”
Willie did it-not without a loud grunt. The captain smiled doubtfully, and felt his wrist. Willie sensed hammering again. “Doctor,” he exclaimed, “I’m okay.”
“We have standards,” said the captain. He picked up his pen. It hovered over Willie’s record. “You know,” he added, “Navy casualties are worse than Army in this war, so far.”
“I want to be a Navy man,” said Willie, and only when the words were out of his mouth did he realize that they were quite true.
The doctor looked at him, with a flicker of good will in his eye. He wrote decisively on the record: Mild lordosis well compensated. Pulse normal-J. Grimm, Chief Med. Bklyn. He crumpled up and threw away the red-lettered memo, and returned the other papers to Willie. “Don’t suffer in silence in this outfit, boy. Speak up when something damn silly is happening to you.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The captain turned his attention to a spread of papers on his desk, and Willie left. It occurred to him that his naval career had probably been saved by a doctor’s shame at keeping a patient waiting eight hours, but he rejoiced at the outcome, anyway. Back at Furnald Hall he returned his medical record to the pharmacist’s mate of the red pencil in the dispensary. Warner put aside a bowl of purple antiseptic to glance eagerly at the papers. His face fell, but he managed a baleful grin. “Hm, you made it. Fine.”
“See you in Tokyo, Doctor,” said Willie.
In his room he found Keggs and Keefer fussing with guns. A big battered rifle, with a custody card, lay on Willie’s cot. “Rifles in the Navy?” he said mildly.
“Bet your behind,” said Keefer. The pieces of his firing lock lay on the desk beside him. Keggs was clanking the rotating bolt back and forth with an air of futility. “We have to learn how to take one apart and assemble it in two minutes,” he moaned, “by tomorrow morning. I bilge, for sure.”
“Don’t strain your milk,” said Keefer. “Lemme get this baby together, and I’ll show you. Damn this mainspring.”
The Southerner gave his two roommates a patient thorough lesson in the mysteries of the Springfield rifle. Keggs got the hang of it quickly. His long bony fingers caught the critical trick, which was to force the tough mainspring back into the bolt on reassembly. He beamed at his weapon, and ran through the process several times. Willie wrestled vainly with the bolt for a while and panted, “They should have bilged me on lordosis. It would have been more dignified. I’ll be out of this Navy tomorrow- Get in there, lousy damn spring-” He had never touched a gun before. The potential deadliness of it meant nothing to him. It was simply a troublesome assignment: a knotty page of Beethoven, an overdue book report on Clarissa Harlowe.
“Jam the butt of that bolt in your stomach, see?” said Keefer. “Then press the spring down with both hands.”
Willie obeyed. The spring yielded slowly. The end of it sank at last into the rim. “It works! Thanks, Rollo-” At that moment the spring, still unsecured, escaped between his fingers and leaped from the bolt. It soared across the room. The window was conveniently open. The spring sailed out into the night.
His roommates stared at him in horror. “That’s bad, isn’t it?” quavered Willie.
“Anything happens to your rifle, boy-that does it,” said the Southerner, walking to the window.
“I’ll run downstairs,” Willie said.
“What, during study hour? Twelve demerits!” Keggs said.
“Come here, fella.” Keefer pointed out through the window. The spring lay in a rain gutter at the edge of a steeply slanting copper-covered roof projection beneath the window. The tenth floor was set slightly back from the rest of the building.
“I can’t get that,” said Willie.
“You better, fella.”
Keggs peered out. “You’d never make it. You’d fall off.”
“That’s what I think,” said Willie. He was not at all a daredevil. His mountain climbing had been done in plenty of stout company, and with much gulping horror. He hated high places and poor footing.
“Look, fella, you want to stay in the Navy? Climb out there. Or d’you want me to do it?”
Willie climbed out, clinging to the window frame. The wind moaned in the darkness. Broadway twinkled far, far below. The ledge seemed to drop away beneath his trembling legs. He stretched a hand vainly toward the spring, and gasped, “Need another couple of feet-”
“If we only had a rope,” said Keefer. “Look man. One of us gets out with you, see, and hangs onto the window. And you hang onto him. That does it.”
“Let’s get it over with,” said Keggs anxiously. “If he gets caught out there we all bilge.” He sprang through the window, stood beside Willie, and gripped his hand. “Now get it.” Willie let go of the window, and inched downward, clinging to Keggs’s powerful grip. He teetered at the edge of the roof, the wind whipping his clothes. The spring was in easy reach. He grasped it and thrust it into a pocket.
Ensign Acres might have picked a less awkward moment to make his study-hour round of the tenth floor, but he chose this one. He walked past the room, peeped in, stopped short, and roared, “Attention on deck! What the hell is going on here?”
Keggs neighed in terror and let go of Willie’s hand. Willie lunged and clutched him around the knees. The two midshipmen swayed back and forth on the ledge, not far from death. But Keggs’s urge to live was slightly stronger than his fear of ensigns. He reared backward and fell into the room on his head, hauling Willie through the window on top of him. Ensign Acres glared. His chin jutted. Willie stood up and produced the spring, stammering, “I-this was out on the roof-”
“What the hell was it doing out there?” bellowed Acres.
“It flew out,” said Willie.
The blood rushed into Acres’ face as though he had been called a dirty name. “Flew out? See here, you-”
“While I was assembling my gun. It got away,�
�� Willie added in hurried, plaintive tones.
Acres looked around at the roommates. Keggs’s shuddering fear, Willie’s fright, Keefer’s rigid attention were genuine. Two months ago he had himself been a midshipman. “You should each get fifteen demerits,” he growled, by way of descending from his rage. “I have my eye on you- Carry on.” He stalked out.
“Do you suppose,” Willie said in the numb pause that followed, “that some higher power doesn’t want me in the Navy? I seem to be the Jonah in this room.”
“Forget it, fella. You just getting the hard luck out of your system,” Keefer said.
They studied fiercely as Bilging Day drew nearer. A nice balance of forces became evident in Room 1013. Keggs was strong on the paper work of navigation and engineering. His plotting charts and sketches of boilers were handsome art, and he lent his talents to the others readily. He was slow to grasp facts and theories, so he set his alarm clock two hours before reveille to give himself extra study time. His face elongated daily, and his melancholy eyes burned in deepening sockets like dim candles, but he never failed a quiz.
Keefer failed often. He calculated averages to a hair and managed to stay above the estimated expulsion level in all courses. His strong point was military wisdom. Willie never could decide whether this gift was natural or acquired, but Keefer, with the body and air of a sloven, was the most polished seaman in the school. He kept himself, his bed, and his books with the neatness of a cat. On parade his fresh-looking uniform, glittering shoes, and erect bearing quickly caught the eye of the executive officer. He was ordained a battalion commander.
Willie Keith became the oracle of the tenth floor in matters of naval ordnance. Actually he was a blockhead on the subject. Reputations are made queerly and swiftly in wartime. It happened that in the first week a terrible examination was scheduled in Ordnance, with the announced purpose of causing weaklings to go down. Everybody crammed feverishly, of course. Willie was as earnest as the rest, but one page of the book, composed in the worst Navy jargon, baffled him; a description of a thing called a Frictionless Bearing. Keefer and Keggs had given it up. Willie read the page over seventeen times, then twice more aloud, and was on the point of quitting when he noticed that whole sentences had become embedded in his memory. He worked another half hour and memorized the entire page, word for word. The chief essay question on the examination, as luck would have it, was Explain the Frictionless Bearing. Willie happily disgorged the words, which meant no more to him than a Hindu chant. When the results of the test were announced he stood first in the school. “Apprentice Seaman Keith,” shouted Ensign Acres, squinting in the sunlight at noon assembly, “is officially commended for a brilliant Ordnance paper. He was the only man in the school to give an intelligent explanation of the Frictionless Bearing.”
With a reputation to uphold, and dozens of questions to answer in every study period, Willie thereafter drove himself to a meaningless verbal mastery of all the details of naval cannons.
This lesson in Navy pedagogy was driven home shortly before Bilging Day. One night Willie came upon the following statement in his tattered green-bound manual, Submarine Doctrine, 1935: “Submarines, because of their small cruising range, are chiefly suitable for coastal defense.” At that time Nazis were torpedoing several American ships each week around Cape Hatteras, four thousand miles from Germany’s coast. Willie pointed this out with chuckles to his roommates. The sinking of a few dozen of our own ships seemed a small price for the pleasure of catching the Navy in an absurdity. Next day in Tactics class the instructor, one Ensign Brain, called on him.
“Keith.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“What is the submarine chiefly suitable for, and why?” The educator held an open copy of Submarine Doctrine, 1935 in his hand. Ensign Brain was a prematurely baldish, prematurely wrinkled, prematurely ferocious martinet of twenty-five. He was a drillmaster. About this subject he knew nothing. But he had once learned to read.
Willie hesitated.
“Well, Keith?”
“Do you mean as of now, sir, or as of 1935?”
“I asked the question now, not in 1935.”
“The Germans are sinking a lot of ships off Hatteras,” said Willie tentatively.
“I am aware of that. This is not a class in current events but in tactics. Have you prepared the lesson?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Answer the question.”
Willie estimated the situation swiftly. This was his last chance to recite in Tactics before the bilge. “Submarines, because of their small cruising range,” he declared, “are chiefly suitable for coastal defense.”
“Correct,” said Ensign Brain, writing down a perfect mark. “Why all the stalling?”
So Willie gave himself over to the bondage of brute memory. Doomsday came; and none of the three in Room 1013 bilged. Kalten in Room 1012 and Koster in Room 1014 were delivered into the jaws of their draft boards. Kalten, the son of a powerful Washington attorney, had flouted rules and done no studying. Willie felt much sorrier for Koster, a good-humored, effete boy brought up by maiden aunts. That evening when Willie visited Room 1014, the sight of the empty cot upset him. Years later he learned that Koster had died in the first attack wave at Salerno.
Now they were midshipmen, firmly rooted in the Navy, with blue dress uniforms, white officers’ caps, and most important, freedom on Saturdays from noon to midnight. This was Friday. They had been imprisoned incommunicado for three weeks. Willie telephoned May Wynn joyously and told her to meet him outside the school at one minute past twelve next day. She was there in a taxi; and she looked so beautiful stretching her arms eagerly to him that Willie momentarily pictured a wedding and all its consequences as he hugged her. He was still kissing her when he regretfully decided against it, for all the old reasons. They went to Luigi’s, and Willie was so stimulated by the beauty of his girl and the first taste of wine in three weeks that he ate a couple of pizzas. He slowed down, puffing, on the last bites, and glanced at his wrist watch.
“May,” he said reluctantly, “I’ve got to leave you now.”
“Oh? Aren’t you free till midnight?”
“I ought to drop in on my family.”
“Of course,” said May. The glad light began to die out of her eyes.
“Just for a while-a half hour, maybe an hour. You take in a matinee. I can meet you again at”-he glanced at his watch-“half-past five.”
May nodded.
“Look,” he said, taking money out of his pocket and flourishing it, “a hundred and twenty dollars. We’ll do the town.”
“Navy pay?”
“Twenty of it, yes.”
“Where’d you get the hundred?”
Willie choked a little over the word, but brought it out. “Mother.”
“I doubt she’d approve of your spending it on me.” May looked into his eyes. “Does she know I’m alive, Willie?”
Willie shook his head.
“You’re very wise. That innocent face hides plenty of cunning.” She reached across the table and touched his cheek affectionately.
“Where will we meet?” said Willie, feeling, as he rose, heavily freighted with dough, cheese, tomatoes, and wine.
“Anywhere.”
“Stork Club?” he said. She gave him a wistful smile. They parted at the restaurant door. Willie slept, snoring, on the train to Manhasset. Commuter’s instinct woke him up just before his station.
CHAPTER 4
Midshipman Keith in Trouble
The Keith home in Manhasset was a twelve-room Dutch colonial house with heavy white pillars, high-arching black wood-shingled roof, and multitudes of large windows. It stood on a knoll in the middle of two acres of lawns set with soaring old beech, maple, and oak trees and bordered by flower beds and a thick high hedge. Mrs. Keith’s family had presented it to her. Her income from Rhode Island bank securities still went to keep it up. Willie believed such surroundings were normal.
He walked up the avenue
of maples to the front door and entered upon a prepared triumph. His mother hugged him. Relatives and neighbors, flourishing cocktails, greeted the war hero. The best china and the best silver were set out on the dining-room table, reflecting yellow beams from flaming logs in the marble-paneled fireplace. “All right, Martina,” cried Mrs. Keith, “put on the steaks! ... We have a feast for you, Willie. Everything you love-oysters, onion soup, steak-double sirloin for you, dear-with soufflé potatoes, and Bavarian cream. You’re starved, aren’t you?”
“I could eat a horse, Mom,” said Willie. There are heroisms in small acts. Willie sat down to his dinner, and ate.
“I thought you’d be hungrier,” said his mother, watching him poke without enthusiasm at the steak.
“I’m enjoying it too much to rush it,” answered Willie. He downed the steak. But when the Bavarian cream was set before him, rich, brown, and trembling, nature rebelled. Willie grew pale, turned away, and quickly lit a cigarette. “Mom, I’m through.”
“Come, you don’t have to be bashful, dear. We all know how sailors eat. Finish up.”
Willie’s father had been watching him quietly. “Maybe you had a little something before coming home, Willie.”
“Just a snack, Dad, to keep me going.”
Mrs. Keith permitted him to stagger off to the living room, where another fire crackled. Here the midshipman wheezily held court, describing the secrets of the Navy and analyzing the conduct of the war in all theaters. He hadn’t read a newspaper in three weeks, so it was not easy to do; but he improvised, and his words were eagerly listened to.
