by Herman Wouk
He spent long night hours on the bridge when there was no need of it. The stars and the sea and the ship were slipping from his life. In a couple of years he would no longer be able to tell time to the quarter hour by the angle of the Big Dipper in the heavens. He would forget the exact number of degrees of offset that held the Caine on course in a cross sea. All the patterns fixed in his muscles, like the ability to find the speed indicator buttons in utter blackness, would fade. This very wheelhouse itself, familiar to him as his own body, would soon cease to exist. It was a little death toward which he was steaming.
When they tied up in Pearl Harbor, the first thing Willie did was to go to the Navy Yard’s telephone exchange and put a call through to the candy store in the Bronx. He waited for two hours, slouching on a battered couch and leafing through several tattered picture magazines (one of them had a detailed forecast of how Japan would be invaded, and predicted that the war would end in the spring of 1948). The operator beckoned him to her desk at last and told him that May Wynn was no longer at that number; and the man on the other end didn’t know where she could be reached.
“I’ll talk to him.”
The candy-store proprietor was spluttering. “You really calling from Pearl Harbor? Pearl Harbor? It isn’t a joke?”
“Look, Mr. Fine, I’m May’s old friend Willie Keith who used to call her all the time. Where is she? Where’s her family?”
“Moved away. Moved away, Mr. Keith. Don’t know where. Five-six months ago. Long time- Shaddup, you kids, I’m talking to Pearl Harbor-”
“Didn’t she leave a number?”
“No number. Nothing, Mr. Keith. Moved away.”
“Thanks. Good-by.” Willie hung up, and paid the operator eleven dollars.
Back at the ship his desk was piled with mail that had accumulated at Pearl Harbor, most of it official. He turned the envelopes over eagerly one by one, but there was nothing from May. An odd-sized bulky brown envelope from the Bureau of Personnel caught his eye and he opened it. In it was a letter and a little flat maroon box. The box contained a ribbon and a medal-the Bronze Star. The letter was a citation signed by the Secretary of the Navy, praising him for putting out the fire after the suicide attack, and concluding with the formula, Lieutenant Keith’s heroism over and above the call of duty was in the highest traditions of the Naval Service.
He sat and stared at the medal numbly for many minutes. He began to open the official mail. It was the usual mimeographed or printed matter for a while; then he came on a letter which was typed.
From: The Chief of Naval Personnel.
To: Lieutenant Willis Seward Keith, USNR.
Subject: Improper Performance of Duty-
Reprimand for.
Reference: (a) Court-martial Order #7-1945.
Enclosure: (A) Copy of Reference (a).
1. In accordance with reference (a) enclosed, the Bureau finds that you conduct in the matter of the irregular relief of Lieutenant Commander Philip F. Queeg USN of command of the U.S.S. CAINE on 18 December 1944 constituted improper performance of duty.
2. Your attention is directed to the comments of the convening authority, the Bureau, the Judge Advocate General, and the Secretary of the Navy. In accordance with those comments, you are reprimanded.
3. A copy of this letter will be placed in your promotion jacket.
“Well,” thought Willie in a whirl, “a medal and a reprimand. Nice morning’s haul.”
He scanned the close small type of the court-martial order. There was a page and a half of comment by Com Twelve, the convening authority. He judged that it must have been written by Breakstone and signed by the admiral. The acquittal was disapproved. Willie knew this created no danger for Maryk, because he couldn’t be tried again; but it unquestionably meant the end of his naval career.
… The medical board recommended that Lieutenant Commander Queeg be restored to duty. No evidence was found of any mental ailment. It must be concluded that the actions of the accused showed gross ignorance of medical facts, and extreme want of judgment in placing reliance on his uninformed opinions in order to commit an act with the most serious and far-reaching possibilities. ... These comments extend with pertinence if lesser force to the actions of the witness Lieutenant Keith, the officer of the deck. The testimony of Lieutenant Keith leaves no doubt that he did not comply reluctantly, but rather sided wholeheartedly with the accused in his actions.
The convening authority believes the specification proved beyond a reasonable doubt ...
… There is in this case a miscarriage of justice whereby an officer escapes punishment for a serious offense and a dangerous precedent has been established. The fact that the ship was in hazard does not mitigate, but rather intensifies the responsibility of the accused. It is at times of hazard most of all that the line of naval discipline should be held rigidly, especially by senior officers on a ship. ... A ship can have only one commanding officer, appointed by the government, and to remove him in an irregular manner without referring the matter to the highest available authority is an act exceeding the powers of a second-in-command. This doctrine is emphasized, not weakened, by the description in Articles 184, 185, and 186 of the exceedingly rare circumstances in which exception may be made, and the intentions of the Navy Department to this effect are therein expressed with the utmost clarity and vigor.
In the endorsements that followed, the higher authorities all concurred emphatically with Com Twelve’s comments.
“Well, I concur too,” Willie thought. “That makes it unanimous, so far as the case of Lieutenant Keith goes. ... Poor Steve.”
He brought out of a drawer the red cardboard clip folder in which he kept the documents of his naval career. There one on top of the other were his orders to Furnald Hall and to the Caine, his commission, his promotions, and his applications for transfer to submarines, ammunition ships, underwater demolition squads, mine-disposal units, secret extra-hazardous duties, and Russian language school, all of which he had submitted in moments of despair during the Queeg year, and all of which Queeg had disapproved. He carefully inserted the citation and the letter of reprimand side by side, and sealed them in, thinking as he did so that his great-grandchildren could puzzle out the inconsistency at their leisure.
Three weeks later, on the morning of the twenty-seventh of October, Willie sat in the cabin, muffled up in his bridge coat, reading Pascal’s Pensées, a book he had pulled out at random from one of the suitcases piled at his feet. His breath smoked. The air streaming through the open porthole was raw and dank. Outside were the shabby sheds of the supply depot, and beyond them the gray muddy flats of Bayonne knobbed with oil tanks. The Caine had been tied up for three days alongside a dock, stripped of its guns, empty of ammunition and fuel. All the paper work was done. It was the end of the trail. The decommissioning ceremony was half an hour off.
He fumbled inside his clothes, drew out a pen, and underlined in ink the words of the book, “Life is a dream, a little more coherent than most.” In the weeks since leaving Pearl Harbor he had felt more and more that he was living in a dream. It didn’t seem possible that he had himself conned a ship through the great locks and steamy green ditches of the Panama Canal; that he had sailed past the coast of Florida and picked out with binoculars the pink stucco home on the shore of Palm Beach where he had spent seven childhood winters; that he had brought a United States ship of war through the Narrows into the harbor of New York, threading among hooting ferryboats and liners, and had seen the spiky skyline and the Statue of Liberty from the bridge of his own ship, he, Captain Keith of the Caine.
His rise to command had seemed queer enough at Okinawa, but there, at least, his Navy identity had still possessed him. Coming to the East Coast, nearing his home, seeing the landmarks of his old life rising up real and unchanged, he had felt his military personality dissolving, drifting away, into the sea air like vapor, leaving a residue which was only Willie Keith. It was this transition that made the days and nights dreamlike. H
e was no longer a naval officer-but he was no longer Willie Keith, either. The old personality didn’t fit; it seemed as odd as an outdated fashion.
There was a rap at the door. “Come in!”
His exec stood at the threshold and saluted. “Ship’s company is at quarters, Captain.”
He laid aside the book and went out on the forecastle. He returned the crew’s mass salute and stood facing them, on the rusty empty circle where the number-one gun of the Caine had been fastened for thirty years. A stiff wind blew a swampy oily smell over the deck, and flapped the crew’s pea jackets. The sun shone feebly yellow through the gray smoke and mist over the harbor. He had prepared a long, sentimental speech. But he looked around at the faces and his heart became cold. He had nothing to say to these strange ensigns and jg’s. Where were Keefer, Maryk, Harding, Jorgensen, Rabbitt? Where was Ducely? Where was Queeg? The skimpy crew appeared as alien as the officers. All the men released on points were gone. He saw a few familiar faces: Budge, fat and stolid, had ridden all the way; so had Urban and Winston. Most of the others were sullen draftees, married men with children who had been dragged from their homes in the last months of the war.
Willie pulled the decommissioning order out of his pocket and read it aloud in a high, strained voice over the wind. He folded it away and looked around at the ragged thin ranks of the crew. A forlorn end, he thought. A truck rattled past on the dock, and a crane was snorting at a nearby pier. The cold wind stung his eyes. He felt he had to say something.
“Well, most of you are pretty new to the Caine. It’s a broken-down obsolete ship. It steamed through four years of war. It has no unit citation and it achieved nothing spectacular. It was supposed to be a minesweeper, but in the whole war it swept six mines. It did every kind of menial fleet duty, mostly several hundred thousand miles of dull escorting. Now it’s a damaged hulk and will probably be broken up. Every hour spent on the Caine was a great hour in all our lives-if you don’t think so now you will later on, more and more. We were all doing part of what had to be done to keep our country existing, not any better than before, just the same old country that we love. We’re all landlubbers who pitted our lives and brains against the sea and the enemy, and did what we were told to do. The hours we spent on the Caine were hours of glory. They are all over. We’ll scatter into the trains and busses now and most of us will go home. But we will remember the Caine, the old ship in which we helped to win the war. Caine duty is the kind of duty that counts. The high-powered stuff just sets the date and place of the victory won by the Caines.
“Lower the flag.”
The exec brought him the ragged remnant of the commission pennant. Willie rolled up the narrow bunting and stuffed it in his pocket. He said, “I want the jack, too. Have it wrapped for mailing and bring it to my cabin.”
“Aye aye, Captain.”
“Dismiss the men from quarters.”
The chief of the decommissioning detail was waiting at his cabin door. While Willie was handing over the keys and records the yeoman brought him the last logs to sign. Steward’s mates came in and out, taking his bags to the dock. A sailor entered with the wrapped union jack. Willie addressed it to Horrible’s parents, and told the sailor to mail it. At length his chores were done. He went down the abandoned gangplank, not saluting. There were no colors to salute and no officer of the deck. The Caine was junk.
A yard jeep drove him to the gate, where his mother was waiting in a new tan Cadillac. Mrs. Keith had been driving to Bayonne every day since the arrival of the Caine. It was natural and inevitable now that she take him home. But Willie didn’t like it. “She drove me to the Navy’s gates,” he thought. “Now she’s driving me back home. The little boy is through with the sailor game.”
He had been utterly unsuccessful in his efforts to track down May. She seemed to have vanished from the world. He had called Marty Rubin’s office, a dozen times, but the agent was out of town. His mother had uttered not a word about May, and that irritated him, too; he interpreted it as a bland assumption that she had won the fight once for all.
He was quite wrong. Mrs. Keith was avoiding the subject out of fear. Her son made her uneasy. Even since his visit in February he appeared to have aged; the change was in his eyes, his gestures, his bearing, and the very timbre of his voice. From the ruddy careless boy of three years ago he had evolved into a peculiarly gray-toned, nondescript adult. All she wanted was that he come back to live with her in the big empty house. Once he came home, she thought, he might thaw and become more himself again. She was terribly afraid of saying anything that would give him the cue to declare his independence.
“It must be sad to leave your old ship after all these years,” she greeted him.
“Happiest moment of my life,” he growled, aware that he was echoing words of De Vriess spoken two years ago. He slumped glumly beside her, and they drove in silence almost an hour. When they were crossing the Triborough Bridge Willie suddenly said, “I’ve been trying to locate May. She seems to have disappeared. You haven’t heard from her by any chance, have you?”
“No, Willie. I haven’t.”
“I wrote to her in June, asking her to marry me. She never answered.”
“Oh?” Mrs. Keith kept her eyes on the road.
“Does that surprise you?”
“Not very much. You spent your last night with her, you know, in February.”
“It surprised me. I did break with her. I didn’t write for five months after that. Then one day I wrote.” He watched his mother’s face. “Are you very upset?”
“There’s nothing to be upset about, from what you tell me.”
“Will you be upset if I marry her? If she’ll have me, I will. That’s definite.”
Mrs. Keith glanced at him for an instant. She was a timorous gray-headed old woman in that look, and Willie suddenly felt warmly sorry for her. Then she turned to the road again, and her determined strong profile was the same as ever. She waited a long time before answering. “You’ve grown up. You know everything I can tell you. If you’re still seeking out May, she must have qualities I’ve never had a chance to observe. I hope she doesn’t hate me.”
“Of course not, Mother-”
“I wouldn’t want to be shut out of your life, whatever you do. I’m rather short on sons.”
He leaned over and kissed her cheek. She said in an agitated voice, “Why now? You haven’t kissed me since you’ve been back.”
“I’ve been in a fog, Mother. When I find May I’ll be normal again, maybe-”
“Bring her home and let me get to know her. Were you fair to me? Didn’t you hide her away like a cheap liaison? I took her at the value you set on her, Willie. That’s the truth.”
It was a good shot-only partly true, he thought, because his mother’s possessiveness had a violent life of its own-but a fair criticism of himself. He was relieved by his mother’s apparent surrender. “I’ll bring her home, Mother, as soon as I find her.”
He called Rubin’s office as soon as he brought the bags from the car. This time the agent answered. “Willie! It’s about time. I’ve been waiting for a couple of months for you to show up-”
“Where’s May, Marty?”
“What are you doing now? Where are you?”
“Home in Manhasset. Why?”
“Can you come into town? I’d like to talk to you.”
“Where’s May? Is she all right? What are you being so mysterious about? Is she married or something?”
“No, she isn’t married. Look, can’t you come in? It’s kind of important-”
“Of course I can. I’ll be there in an hour. What’s it all about?”
“Come on in. Come to my office. The Brill Building. I’ll wait here for you.”
Rubin’s “office” was a desk in a cluttered room that had four other desks occupied by four other agents. Rubin stood as soon as Willie came in the door, and picked up a loud plaid overcoat draped on the back of his chair. “Hi, Lieutenant. Let’s go where we
can talk.”
He said nothing about May as he led Willie along Forty-seventh Street and turned up Seventh Avenue. He asked eager questions about the Kamikazes and minesweeping. Willie interrupted at last. “Look, Marty, I want to know-”
“I know what you want to know. Here we are.” They went through a revolving door into the crowded ornate lobby of a popular tourist hotel. Willie knew it well. He immediately recognized, even after three years, the deodorant perfume that characterized the place; every hotel in New York has its own unchanging smell. Marty led him to a large glass-covered signboard in mid-lobby, and pointed. “There’s your girl. She’s stopping here.”
NOW NIGHTLY IN THE GORGEOUS AZTEC LOUNGE
THE SHIMMERING MUSIC OF
Walter Feather
AND HIS SAXOPHONE
WITH THE ORCHESTRA
“Heaven in a Horn”
AND SONGS BY
Marie Minotti
“Broadway’s Beloved Bombshell”
There was a picture of a saxophonist and May together at a microphone. “Now you know,” Rubin said.
“What do I know? Why did she change her name?”
“Said the other one didn’t bring her any luck. She’s been with Feather since about two weeks after you left, Willie. She’s-she’s mixed up with him.”
The words and the tone made Willie very sick. He stared at the saxophonist’s picture. He had rimless glasses, a flat thin stage smile, and a long nose. “He doesn’t look like much-”
“He’s a prime no-good. Married and divorced twice-I’ve been fighting it, but-she just gets sore at me-”
“Christ; May has more sense than that-”
“He caught her on the bounce, Willie. You threw her down pretty hard. He’s a fine musician, he has a lot of moola, and he’s as smart as Einstein about women. He’s a little god in his own crowd. May-well, she’s pretty innocent, Willie, for all her wise-guy line-”
