by Herman Wouk
Greenwald was twirling a paper clip which he had twisted into the shape of a question mark. He sent it spinning out through the window. “Where’s Queeg now?”
“Down at his home in Phoenix. The doctors here discharged him and said he was fit for duty. He’s on temporary duty attached to Com Twelve, just sitting around waiting for the court-martial.”
“He made a mistake, recommending you for Lingayen-from the viewpoint of hanging you.”
“That’s what I think. Why do you suppose he did it?”
The pilot stood and stretched, baring his streaked, mutilated hands and wrists. The slick scar tissue ran up into his sleeves. “Well, maybe, like the commodore told him, he was thinking of the good of the Navy- I’ll go back to Com Twelve and start beating Jack Challee over the head-”
“What are we going to plead?” The exec looked up at his lanky counsel anxiously.
“Not guilty, of course. You’re really a great naval hero. I’ll be seeing you.”
CHAPTER 32
Willie’s Leave
Willie Keith was on his way to New York in a plane. Captain Breakstone had advised the new commanding officer of the Caine to let him go. “He can have ten days, anyway, before the court starts,” the legal officer had told Lieutenant White over the phone. “Send the poor beggar off while the sending is good. God knows when he’ll ever be in the clear again.” Willie had asked for the leave for only one reason. He was going home to break with May.
In the last turbulent months he had advanced in his thinking about her to the point of realizing that his conduct toward her, even in their correspondence, was abominable. He still yearned for her. If the word “love” meant anything, and if the descriptions in novels and poetry of the emotion were accurate, he supposed he loved her. But he had a deep-seated, unshakable intuition that he would never depart from his upbringing enough to marry her. It was a familiar old conflict in literature; and it was dreary and sad to find himself trapped in it in real life. But he understood now that the real victim of the situation was May, and he was determined to free her before the court-martial brought an unguessable new turn in his life. It no longer seemed possible to cut her off with a letter or with silence. He had to confront her, and take whatever pain and punishment she could inflict on him. It was a miserable errand on which he was embarked. He could hardly bear to think about it.
He tried to distract himself by talking to the bald fat literary agent beside him. His neighbor, however, was of the sleeping-pill school of air travel. For a while he cross-examined Willie to find out whether he had killed any Japs personally or earned any medals or been wounded; but he had already lost interest, and was pulling papers out of his portfolio, when the plane began to jolt and flutter in the air over the Rockies. Thereupon he produced a bottle of yellow capsules, swallowed three, and slumped unconscious. Willie wished he had brought along his Phenobarbital. In the end he drew the curtains, pushed back his chair, closed his eyes, and lost himself in sickly revolving thoughts of the Caine.
There were a few dreams of childhood which Willie could never forget, one in particular, in which he had seen God as an enormous jack-in-the-box popping up over the trees on the lawn of his home and leaning over to stare down at him. The scene in the anteroom of the Com Twelve legal office, in his memory, had the same quality of unreal and painful vividness. There, before his shut eyes, were the green close walls; the bookcase full of fat regular legal volumes bound in brown and red; the single fluorescent light overhead, throwing a bluish glare; the ashtray full of butts beside him on the desk, sending up a stale smell; the “board of investigation,” a surly, thin little captain, his voice dry and sneering, his face the face of a nasty post-office clerk refusing a badly wrapped package.
How different it had all been from Willie’s picturings, how unfair, how quickly over; above all, how small-scale and dreary! He had seen himself as an actor in a grand drama. In the privacy of his room, in his dark bunk, he had whispered to himself “the Caine mutiny, the Caine mutiny,” savoring the ring of the phrase, and imagining a long article in Time underneath that heading, greatly favorable to the heroic Maryk and Keith. He had even tried to envision Maryk’s face on the cover of the news magazine. He had anticipated confronting an array of admirals across a green-covered table, justifying his act with quiet poise, with irrefutable facts. The memory of one daydream made him writhe. He had seen himself, the true key figure of the mutiny, summoned to Washington by President Roosevelt for a private chat in his office, convincing the President that the Caine affair was exceptional, that it was no indication of low morale in the Navy. He had even planned, in answer to Roosevelt’s generous offer of restoration to any duty he chose, the simple reply, “Mr. President, I should like to return to my ship.”
This tangle of Technicolor folly had possessed his mind all during the Lingayen campaign and the return trip to Pearl Harbor. The suicide attack had happened so quickly, and caused so little damage (he had not even seen the Japanese plane before it struck) that it had merely served to enhance his picture of Maryk, and himself, and all the officers of the Caine, as cool-headed heroes.
The magic had begun to dim in Pearl Harbor with the arrival of Captain White, a good-looking, bright lieutenant of the regular Navy, obviously a trouble-shooter. Maryk had shrunk in a day to a subservient dull exec. The adventurous excitement in the wardroom had subsided. All the officers had begun walking humbly again, and guarding their words. White was arid, cool, and efficient. He acted as though the relief of Queeg had never occurred. He handled the ship as well as Maryk from the first, and he attracted the immediate loyalty of the crew. Willie’s vision of the mutiny as a triumph of Reserve heroism over neurotic Academy stupidity languished; the Academy was back in charge, and master of the situation.
But Willie was still unprepared for the developments in San Francisco. He had never foreseen that the great Caine mutiny would be treated by the authorities as an irksome and not very pressing legal problem; that it would apparently mean little more to the legal office of Com Twelve than the pilfering of a truckload of lard. Days went by, while the ship rested in drydock, without any reaction to Captain White’s report. And when the investigation at last began, there were no admirals, no green table, no summons from the President. There was only a cross-examination by a little man in a little office.
Was it this distortion in scale, Willie wondered, that had turned his irrefutable facts into slippery, badly described anecdotes which discredited himself, not Queeg, more and more as he told them? Was it the hostility of the investigating officer? Stories which he had counted on to damn Queeg seemed to tell themselves as descriptions of his own disloyalty or ineptness. Even the water famine, one of Queeg’s grand crimes, sounded in his own ears like a prudent measure, and the crew’s water-bootlegging in the engine room a rebellious act abetted by incompetent officers. What he could not convey to the investigator was the terrible distress everybody had undergone. The captain regarded him fishily when he spoke of the heat and the stack gas, and finally said, “I’m sure you suffered unendurable hardships, Mr. Keith. Why didn’t you report the bootlegging to your commanding officer?” He knew he should have replied, “Because I considered him a coward and a lunatic-” but the answer that came out of his mouth was, “Well, er, nobody else did, so I didn’t see why I should.”
He remembered how he emerged from the interview with a terrible presentiment that he had hanged himself; a feeling which proved quite accurate. After the passing of five uneasy days he was summoned to the office of Captain Breakstone. The investigation report was placed in his hand. The cold blue-lined sheets felt horrible in his fingers before he began to read. He came to the words about himself with a sense of struggling in a nightmare; it was like reading a doctor’s report that he was dying:
Recommendation (3)
That Lieutenant (junior grade) Willis Seward Keith USNR be brought to trial by a general court-martial on the charge of making a mutiny.
Willie a
ccepted the brutal prospect of a court-martial with his mind, but his heart was that of a frightened rabbit, looking about for succor with wide shining eyes. He knew that he was still Willie Keith, just the innocent, good-humored Willie whom everybody liked, Willie, who could delight people by sitting at a piano and playing If You Knew What the Gnu Knew. Impaled by a terrible accident on the spike of military justice, his virtue seemed to be leaking from him like air from a punctured tire; he felt himself flattening slowly to his old self of Princeton and the Club Tahiti. A thought which had not passed through his mind for years was murmuring up from his subconscious: “Mother will get me out of it.”
Supine in his tilted chair, his stomach straining against the tight safety belt each time the plane jounced, he spun a long morbid fantasy wherein his mother hired the country’s greatest lawyers to defend him, and the long-faced officers of the court-martial were confounded by the brilliant legal minds arrayed at his table. He invented lengthy sequences of testimony, and saw Queeg wriggling under the lash of cross-examination by a defense counsel who resembled Thomas E. Dewey. The dismal dream became queerer and less coherent; May Wynn came into it somehow, looking old and hard, her skin hideously blotchy. Willie fell asleep.
But the plane flew over the spiky buildings of Manhattan in a violet-and-pearl dawn, and Willie woke and his heart revived as he-peered through the round little window. New York was the most beautiful place on earth. It was more than that. It was the Garden of Eden, it was the lost island of sweet golden springtime, it was the place where he had loved May Wynn. The plane tilted, and glided downward. The gold-white sun appeared above the eastern clouds, brightening the air with slant rays. As the plane wheeled Willie saw Manhattan again, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, Radio City, their lean shafts suddenly rosy above the purple haze which still veiled the city. There came into his mind’s eye the beach of Kwajalein, the wide blue vacancy of the South Pacific, the orange puffs of shore batteries on the green hills of Saipan, and the pitching drenched wheelhouse of the Caine in the shrieking typhoon. In that instant, Willie understood the war.
“Half an hour late,” grumbled the literary agent beside him, rasping shut the zipper of his portfolio.
When Willie stepped out of the plane to the gangway he was astounded by the feel of the frigid wind, cutting on his face, cutting in his lungs when he breathed it. He had forgotten what winter air was; and New York from the plane had looked deceptively spring-like. He shivered inside his heavy bridge coat and pulled his white silk muffler closer around his throat. Coming down the steps, his breath smoking, he saw his mother waving gaily to him from behind a window of a waiting room. He ran across the strip of windy airfield. In a moment he was being violently kissed and hugged in the steam-heated room. “Willie, Willie, Willie! Oh, my dear, it’s so good to feel you close again!”
Willie’s first thought was, “How gray she is!” He was not sure whether it had happened in his absence, or imperceptibly before the war, and he was only now able to see it. Her red hair had dimmed to a nondescript grayish brown. “You look wonderful, Mother.”
“Thank you, darling! Let me take a good look at you-” Holding his arms, she leaned back and scrutinized him, her face alight with joy. She was both disturbed and pleased at what she saw. Her son had suffered a sea change. The sunburned face, with its flat cheeks, prominent nose, and heavy jaw, was half alien. It was Willie of course, her Willie, and the boyish bow of the mouth she thought was the same; but “You’ve become a man, Willie.”
“Not quite, Mother,” said her son with a weary smile.
“You look so trim! How long can you stay?”
“I’m flying back Sunday morning.”
She hugged him again. “Five days! Never mind. I’ll enjoy it more than any five years I’ve ever lived.”
Willie told her very little during the drive homeward. He found himself minimizing the dangers of war and exaggerating the boredom, like all good tight-mouthed Americans in the movies. The more his mother pressed him for details the vaguer were his answers. He saw she wanted to be told that he had been snatched from the jaws of death innumerable times, and perversely he insisted that he had never been close to any real action. He was, in truth, a little disappointed at the absence of hair-raising escapes, or killings, or woundings, in his war record, now, that he was back in the civilian world. It irritated him to be cross-examined. His natural impulse was to play up the true moments of danger, but an obscure shame prevented him from doing so. Taciturnity was a subtler and quite respectable form of boasting, and he made good use of it.
He had expected to enjoy real fireworks of nostalgia when he caught the first glimpse of his home; but the car turned into the driveway and rattled on the gravel up to the front door, and he merely stared stupidly at the brown lawn and bare trees. Inside the house was unchanged, but it seemed empty and still, and the pleasant aroma of frying bacon did not hide a pervading odor of camphor. The place smelled quite different than it had in the old days. He realized why almost immediately; there was no trace of cigar smoke. It had all aired out of the curtains and rugs and upholstery, long ago. “I’ll shower before we eat, Mother.”
“Go ahead, Willie. I have plenty to do.”
He picked up a newspaper in the hallway and glanced at the headlines as he trotted upstairs; MacArthur Advances on Manila. He came into his room, and tossed aside the newspaper. A gear seemed to shift in his mind, and his old identity began to operate smoothly. He felt no strangeness, no sense of contrast or of vanished time, no particular gladness at seeing his old books and phonograph. He undressed, hanging his uniform among his suits. Only the heavy gush of water from the shower head surprised him. He was used to the jagged sparse spray of the Caine’s wardroom shower. The wonderful thick flow, the ease with which he could adjust the mixture hot and cold, seemed more luxurious to him than anything else in his home. On the Caine hot water was achieved by letting live steam into a half-clogged cold-water pipe. A small error in adjustment could boil one alive like seafood in a matter of seconds. More than once Willie had issued howling from a cloud of billowy steam.
On a whim, he took out his best tweeds, a beautiful soft tan suit which had cost two hundred dollars at Abercrombie and Fitch, and selected with fussy care a powder-blue wool tie, Argyle socks, and a white shirt with a buttoned-down collar. The trousers were too loose; the jacket struck him as overpadded and oversized. The tie seemed strangest of all when he knotted it, loud and effeminate, after two years of black ties. He looked at himself in the full-length mirror on the inside of his closet door. For an instant, his own face surprised him. He partly, perceived the changes his mother had seen. He was concerned by a thinness of his hair at the forehead line. But the effect blurred even as he stared at himself; and it was just Willie again, looking tired and not very happy in loud clothes. He came downstairs, feeling clumsy and self-conscious, aware of the heavy pads on his shoulders.
He was hungry; and while his mother chattered happily about his handsome appearance he ate up a large platter of eggs and bacon, with several rolls. “You never drank coffee like this before,” said Mrs. Keith, filling his cup for the fourth time, and watching him with mixed anxiety and respect.
“I’m a fiend now.”
“You sailors are terrible.”
“Let’s go into the library, Mother,” he said, draining his cup.
A ghost was in the brown book-lined room, but Willie fought down his feelings of awe and sadness. He dropped into his father’s red leather armchair, selecting the sacred spot deliberately; disregarding his mother’s wan sorrowful loving look. He told her the story of the mutiny. She fell silent after a few shocked exclamations, and allowed him to talk for a long time. The light in the room dimmed as heavy gray clouds rolled over the morning sky, blotting out the sunshine on the empty flower beds outside. When Willie finished and looked at her face she regarded him steadily and puffed a cigarette.
“Well, what do you think, Mother?”
&nb
sp; Mrs. Keith hesitated, and said, “What does-have you told May about it?”
“May doesn’t even know I’m in New York,” he said irritably.
“Aren’t you going to see her?”
“I guess I’ll see her.”
The mother sighed. “Well, all I can say is, Willie, this Old Yellowstain sounds like an abominable monster. You and the executive officer are, perfectly innocent. You did the right thing.”
