by Herman Wouk
Willie muttered something affectionate.
“Well, don’t try to come at me when I’m not ready,” said the girl. “I’m fast as a snake at dodging.”
“Sorry,” he said, and shambled back to his chair.
They passed two hours of desultory talk, May alternately gossiping about her life at home and questioning Willie about the Caine, all in the same bright sociable manner. Willie took off his coat and tie and lay on the bed, smoking continually, and keeping up his end of the dialogue, with growing grumpiness. He began to yawn, whereupon May yawned twice as long and hard. “Gosh, Willie, I had no idea how dead I was. I’m going to turn in.”
“Fine,” said Willie, with great relief, not moving from the bed. May looked at him quizzically, then went into the bathroom. She emerged in a few minutes, tying a blue woolen bathrobe around her nightgown. “You still here?”
Willie jumped up and took her in his arms. She kissed him affectionately and said, “Good night, darling.”
“I’m not going,” said Willie.
“Oh, yes you are.” She put her hand on the knob and opened the door. Willie pushed it shut with the flat of his hand, and held her close. “May, what the devil-”
“Look, Willie,” said May, leaning away and regarding him calmly, “you have wrong ideas. I’ve done my share and a little more to welcome the boys home-and never mind how I feel about it, at this moment-but that doesn’t mean you’re moving in with me. I like you, Willie, I’ve made that all too plain, but I haven’t picked up new habits. Don’t, don’t get strong and virile now. You’ll just make an ape of yourself, and anyway I can handle you with one hand tied behind me.”
“I believe you,” said Willie furiously. “I daresay you’ve had plenty of practice. Good night!”
The door slam was loud enough to wake everybody on the floor, and Willie, embarrassed, scuttled up the red-lit emergency stairway instead of ringing for the elevator.
At eight o’clock May’s phone woke her out of a restless doze. She reached for the receiver and said dully, “Yes?”
“This is me,” spoke Willie’s voice, weary and, subdued. “How about breakfast?”
“Okay. Be down in fifteen minutes.”
He was sitting at a table when she came walking through a broad beam of sunshine falling across the doorway. She wore a white sweater and gray skirt, with a little clasp of imitation pearls around her neck; her hair fell in soft rolls about her face; she was at her very prettiest. He stood and pulled a chair out for her, and two thoughts followed each other through his mind: “Do I want to live with this person for the rest of my life?” and “How can I live with anyone else? Where will I find her again?”
“Hello,” he said. “Hungry?”
“Not very.”
They ordered food, but left it uneaten. Their talk was desultory chatter about the scenery. They smoked and drank coffee. “What would you like to do today?” said Willie. “Anything you want.”
“Did you sleep?”
“So-so.”
“I’m sorry about last night,” said Willie suddenly, though he had not had any intention of apologizing.
May smiled at him wanly and answered, “There’s nothing to be sorry about, Willie.”
Willie was seized with a feeling of vertigo, an actual dizziness, as though he were teetering at the edge of a deck, looking into a turbulent sea, and experiencing an impulse to jump overboard. His mouth became dry. He swallowed hard, and jumped. “What would you think of spending the rest of your life with a monster like me?” he said with difficulty.
May looked at him, a little amused, a little saddened. “What’s this, now, dear?”
“I don’t know, it seems to me maybe we ought to start talking about getting married,” Willie said doggedly.
May put her hand on his, and said with a quiet smile, “Do you want to make an honest woman of me, Willie?”
“I don’t know what else we’re going to do with our lives,” Willie said. “If you think I’m crazy, say so.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” said May. “Only I wish you didn’t look as though you were taking a dose of medicine like a man."
Willie laughed. He looked into her face for a long moment. “Well, what do you say?”
May looked away, and glanced around the sunny dining room. Most of the tables were empty. In a corner near a window the honeymooners in the bright ski suits were leaning toward each other, the bride feeding a bit of coffee cake into her husband’s mouth. “What do I say about what, Willie?”
“About our getting married.”
“I haven’t heard you propose.”
“I propose to you that we get married,” said Willie with extreme distinctness.
“I’ll think about it,” said the girl. She took her lip brush and rouge from her purse, then glanced up at Willie demurely. He wore a look of such pained surprise that she burst out laughing. “Oh, look, darling,” she said, putting her cosmetics on the table, and touching his arm, “this is terribly sweet of you. I’m sure it’s the best you can manage. But everything’s all wrong this morning. I can’t jump at your words and hold you to them just because you’re feeling sheepish, and sorry for me. If we’re going to get married, why, I guess maybe we will sometime. I don’t know. Talk about other things.”
Willie, in a fog of bewilderment, watched her skillfully paint her mouth. Every word that they had both spoken seemed printed on his mind, and as he scanned the interview it seemed to him an unbelievable exchange. He had often pictured proposing to May, but nothing he had ever imagined resembled this devious, inconclusive reality. The possibility had never occurred to him that, several minutes after allowing himself to speak the fateful words, he might still be free.
May, for all her apparent calm, for all the steadiness with which she traced the carmine outline of her lips, was as confused and dizzied as Willie. All her reactions and words had come to her unbidden. She had not expected Willie to propose, and even less had anticipated that she could fail to accept. Yet now the scene was done, and nothing had been solved. “I think I’d like to ride a horse,” she said, still looking in the mirror. “A nice gentle one. Would you like that?”
“Sure,” said Willie. “Hurry with that paint job.”
They rode sad old horses through the snow on bulky Western saddles, May clutching the saddle horn and laughing breathlessly whenever her nag gamboled forward in a brief trot. Willie was an experienced rider, and the diversion was tame for him, but he enjoyed the crystal air, and the awesome scenery, and above all the beauty and good humor of his girl. They were hungry at lunch time, and ate huge steaks. In the afternoon they went for a sleigh ride, nestling under horsy-smelling blankets and exchanging mild caresses while the garrulous old driver droned geological facts about the valley. Back at the hotel, they started drinking long before dinner, and wafted through an evening of dancing and chatter in a pleasant haze of affection and good feeling. Willie left May at her door that night, after a short but wholehearted kiss, and went upstairs, glowing with manly virtue and alcoholic exaltation.
The bus ride back to San Francisco next day was long. It was pleasant enough to look out of the window at the snowy thick-frosted peaks and gorges of the Sierras, holding hands and saying nothing. But when the bus rolled out into the San Joaquin Valley and sped quietly along U.S. 99 between endless plum groves and truck gardens, all wintry brown and bare, Willie became more and more aware that the time was at hand for serious talk. Not only San Francisco and the Caine lay at the end of this long straight macadam trail. There was also his mother. “Darling,” he said.
May turned and gave him an affectionate look.
“Have you thought about us?” Willie said.
“Sure, lots.” May sat up in her seat and disengaged her hand to light a cigarette.
“Well-what do you say?”
Between the moment that the match flared and the time she dropped it in the ashtray, May’s mind raced through a long series of thoughts.
The gist of them was a sense of insecurity and dissatisfaction, and a suspicion that she was in a bad corner. “What do you want me to say, Willie?”
“That you’ll marry me.”
May shrugged. This tepid, matter-of-fact courtship was no part of love and marriage as she had vaguely imagined it. But common sense was her strong point, and she thought she had better take what was offered. She wanted Willie. “You know me, Willie-hard to get,” she said, with an abashed, confused smile and a blush. “When? Where? What do you want to do?”
Willie, with a heavy sigh, clasped her hand tightly and said, “Those are the things we have to think about next.”
May sat up straight and shot a glance at him full of her old wariness. “Look dear, let’s get one thing straight. If you’re starting a little home for fallen women, I’m not interested. I don’t want you to marry me because you’re sorry for me, or because you want to do the manly thing by me, or anything like that.”
“I love you, May.”
“You’d better think about the whole thing some more.”
“I don’t want to think about it any more,” said Willie, but his tone lacked conviction. He was confused about his motives, and suspected that misguided chivalry might be at the bottom of his proposal. Willie Keith was steeped in suburban morality, and he was inexperienced, and moreover, he was not the brightest young man on the planet. The night he had spent with May had sunk the girl in his esteem though it had heightened her as an object of desire. He did not really know what he ought to do, and on the whole was as miserable as a young man might be with a beautiful girl like May at his side and within his grasp.
“Are you going to talk to your mother about it?”
“Well, I guess she’d better know, the sooner the better.”
“That’s a conversation I’d like to hear.”
“I’ll repeat it for you tonight, after I talk to her,” said Willie. “Word for word.”
After a long silence Willie said, “There’s the matter of religion. How strongly do you feel about-about yours?” It was a great effort to bring the words out. He was embarrassed by a feeling that he was being stupidly and falsely solemn about something that was totally unreal.
May said, “I’m afraid I’m not a good Catholic by any means, Willie. That won’t be a problem.”
“Well, fine.” The bus turned in to a roadside restaurant and stopped. Willie jumped up with great relief. “Come on, let’s get some coffee or I’ll die.”
An old lady who was unpacking a lunch basket on her lap in one of the forward seats glanced up with sentimental pleasure at the pretty red-haired girl in the camel’s-hair coat, and the young pink-cheeked ensign in his long, gold-buttoned bridge coat, white silk scarf, and white officer’s cap. “Now there,” she said to the old gentleman by her side, whose eyes were on the lunch basket, “there goes a darling couple.”
CHAPTER 17
Two Bottles of Champagne
Maryk was awakened from an uneasy sleep by the sound of a metal drill directly over his face, a few inches from his skull. He threw aside the piled blankets on his bunk and leaped down, shuddering as his naked feet touched the clammy deck. He put on grease-stained khakis by the light of an electric lantern.
He had that most miserable of Navy watches, the twenty-four-hour stretch as duty officer on a cold ship in drydock. The Caine was a corpse of iron. Heat, light, power were gone. Boilers and main engines lay disemboweled. The fuel oil was all pumped out, and the purr of the ventilators, the vessel’s breathing noise, was stilled. A thousand rattles, bangs, screeches, scrapes, and grinding shocks replaced it. Yard workmen were executing yet another rejuvenation by plastic surgery on the scarred old ship. The foggy San Francisco air drifted stagnantly through the passageways, rancid with the smell of mildew, and the staterooms and crew’s quarters were a chaos of scattered books and magazines and dirty linen.
The officers and crew were billeted in nearby barracks. Only the duty officer and a gangway watch remained to connect the defunct shell with its former identity. Captain Queeg had shot off to his home in Arizona a couple of hours after the ship had entered the dock, leaving Gorton in charge. Adams, Carmody, Rabbitt, and Paynter had gone on leave, and the crew seethed unhappily in the barracks, waiting for the fifth day in the States, when their leaves could commence. Their spirits were at such ebb, the atmosphere in their barracks so funereal, that even Maryk, friendly though he was with the sailors, could hardly bear to visit them for a muster.
He went topside, emerging into a gray cloudy morning, and picked his way carefully over and around the litter of pipes, hoses, parts of machines, lumber, tarpaulins, and crates. At the gangway he found the duty petty officer, Meatball, in dirty wrinkled whites, asleep on a coil of manila rope. He roused him without bitterness, and sent the yawning coxswain across the long gray gangplank that spanned the gulf of the dry dock, to buy coffee and doughnuts.
At eight o’clock Ensign Harding staggered aboard, his face bluish-gray. He relieved the first lieutenant, wobbled to the wardroom, and fell asleep on the couch on a prickly pile of knives and forks.
Maryk went to the BOQ and tried to rouse Keefer, but the novelist groaned, “See you St. Francis lunch one o’clock,” and fell obstinately asleep in an instant. The first lieutenant changed into dress blues still rank of camphor despite a cleaning, and caught a bus to the city.
San Francisco was his boyhood home, and he had been full of nostalgia for it from the moment the Caine had steamed under the Golden Gate Bridge. But finding himself on Market Street again, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He killed time in aimless dull wandering until one o’clock.
Keefer was waiting for him in the lobby of the St. Francis, slouched in an armchair, looking pallid and weedy. They went to the ornate dining room and ate an elaborate costly lunch. The novelist insisted on ordering a bottle of champagne to celebrate their temporary freedom from Queeg. He drank most of it himself. Maryk thought it tasted like sweet beer. “What’s the matter, Steve?” said Keefer. “You’re way down in the dumps.”
“I know.”
“Why?”
“Couldn’t tell you. Ever have one of those days, Tom, when you feel something bad is in the air-something bad’s going to happen to you before the day’s out?”
“Sure. That your trouble?”
“Maybe so. Ever since I got up, I don’t know, everything’s seemed so gray and lousy.” He glanced around. “I feel damn funny in this place. Steve Maryk eating in the St. Francis. When I was a kid I thought only millionaires ate here.”
“How does Frisco look to you after-how many years?”
“Ten, I guess-we moved to Pedro in ’33. Lousy. I feel like a goddamn ghost.”
“That’s your trouble, then. Seeing your childhood home will do it to you-the sense of the passing of time. It’s the cold breath of death, Steve, on the back of your neck.”
Maryk grinned wryly. “Cold breath of death. Stick it in your novel.”
Rain began to splatter against the window by which they sat. Maryk said, “There goes the plan to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, if you were still figuring on it.”
“Hell, that was romantic nonsense. I get carried away sometimes. We’re going out to Berkeley. I’ve got something on the fire there.”
“What?”
“I know an English prof there. Phoned him this morning. He invited us out to a literary tea. Main thing is, the literary club is ninety per cent girls.”
“I’ll try anything.”
“You’ll have to listen to me talk on ‘The Novel in World War II,’ God help you.”
“That’s okay.” Maryk lit a cigar.
Both officers felt the queerness of being away from the ship, in a luxurious hotel, in dress blues. They looked like strangers to each other. And, like strangers thrown together, they began to talk of very personal things. They exchanged full accounts of their family backgrounds. In a half hour Maryk found out more about Keefer’s family and love affairs
than he had learned in a year of sailing with him on the Caine. He told the novelist about his fishing experiences, and was flattered by Keefer’s eager probing questions.
“Sounds like a marvelous life, Steve.”
“Well, it isn’t. It boils down to making a dollar the hardest way there is. Break your back, and the market is never right-when you catch shad, nobody wants shad-when you catch mackerel, there’s so much goddamn mackerel you can’t sell it for manure-and that’s how it goes. And the jobbers on the beach scrounging every quarter they can. It’s a business for dumb foreigners, like my father. I’m dumb, too, but I’m not a foreigner. I’ll find something else to do.”
“Meaning the Navy?”
“Okay, I’m stupid. I like the Navy.”
“I don’t understand it, Steve. There’s something so honest and useful about fishing. Not a motion wasted, not a drop of fuel oil burned without a purpose. You break your back, yes, but at the end of a run you’ve got fish. You of all people, to to want the Navy! Paper, paper, paper-nothing but phony kowtowing and gun-decking and idiotic drills, all to no purpose whatever-utter waste-Christ, and the peacetime Navy-Sunday school every day of the week for grown men-”
“Don’t you think the country needs a navy?”
“Sure.”
“Who’s going to man it?”
“The Queegs, of course. Not useful citizens.”
“Sure. Leave it to the Queegs. Then along comes the war, and you get a Queeg over you, and you scream bloody murder.”
