A boatswain's whistle blew on the submarine, and a loudspeaker croaked, "Now station the special sea details." "Well, I guess this is it," he said. 'So long."
Natalie was managing not to cry; she even smiled. 'Getting married was the right idea, my love. I mean that. It was an inspiration, and I adore you for it. I feel very married. I love you and I'm happy."
"I love you."
Byron went aboard the submarine, saluting as he stepped on deck.
In the thickening drizzle, her raincoat pulled close, her breath smoking in the damp frigid air, Natalie stood on the dock, smelling wharfside odorstar, machinery, fish, the sea-hearing the bleak cry of the gulls, and feeling for the first time what she had gotten herself into. She was a Navy wife all right! Three men in black trench coats and oversized fedora hats came strolling along the quay, cy inspecting the refugees, who either tried to ignore them or peered at them in horror. Women pulled their children closer. The men halted near the gangway; one pulled papers from a black portfolio, and they all began talking to the officials at the table. Meanwhile on the submarine sailors in pea coats pulled in the gangplank. The boatswain's whistle blew; the loudspeaker squawked. Appearing on the narrow little bridge in foul-weather clothes, the captain and Lieutenant Aster waved.
"Good-bye, Natalie," Captain Caruso called. She did not see Byron rome out on the forecastle, but after a while noticed Men standing near the anchor among the sailors, in a khaki uniform and a brown windbreaker, hands in his back pockets, trousers flapping in the breeze. it was the first time she had ever seen Byron in a uniform; it made him seem different, remote, and older. Aster was shouting orders through a megaphone. Colored signal flags ran up. The sailors hauled in the lines. Byron walked along the forecastle and stood opposite his bride, almost close enough to reach out and clasp hands. She blew him a kiss. His face under the peaked khaki cap was businesslike and calm.
A foghorn blasted. The submarine fell away from the dock and black water opened between them.
"You come home, now," he shouted.
"I will. Oh, I swear I will."
"I'll be waiting. Two months!"
He went to His duty station. With a swish of water from the propellers, the low black submarine dimmed away into the drizzle.
Craaal Craaal Craaal Mournfully screeching, the gulls wheeled and followed the fading wake.
Natalie hurried up the quay, past the Gestapo men, past the line of escaping Jews, whose eyes were all fixed in one direction-the gangway table they still had to pass, where the Portuguese officials and the three Germans were comparing papers and laughing together.
Natalie's hand sweatily clutched the American passport in her pocket.
"Hello, old Slote," she said, when she found a telephone and managed to make the connection. "This is Mrs. Byron Henry. Are you interested in buying me a breakfast? I seem to be free. Then let's push on to Italy, dear, and get Aaron out. I have to go home."
In Washington Victor Henry was reassigned to War Plans. He did not hear from Roosevelt at all. People said the President was unaccountable, and from firsthand knowledge, the naval captain was beginning to believe it. But he was untroubled by the assignment, though he had craved and expected sea duty.
More than anything else-more than the gray hairs beginning to show at his temples, more than the sharper lines on his forehead and around his mouth, more than his calmer pace on the tennis court-his contentment with still another desk job showed how Victor Henry was changing.
Washington in January 1941, after London and Berlin, struck him as a depressing panorama of arguments, parties, boozing, confusion, lethargy, and luxury, ominously like Paris before the fall. It took him a long time to get used to brilliantly lit streets, rivers of cars, rich overabundant food, and ignorant indifference to the war. The military men and their wives, when Pug talked to them, discussed only the hairline advantages that the distant explosions might bring in their own tiny lives. Navy classmates of his calibre were stepping into the major sea commands that led to flag rank. He knew he was regarded as a hard-luck guy, a corner sunk by bureaucratic mischance.
But he had almost stopped caring. He cared about the war; and he cared about the future of the United States, which looked dark to him.
The Navy was as preoccupied as ever by japan. Every decision of the President to strengthen the Atlantic Fleet caused angry buzzes and knowing headshakes in the Department, and at the Army and Navy Club.
When he tried to talk about the Germans, his friends tended to regard him askance; a bypassed crank, their amused glances almost said, trying to inflate his importance by exaggerating minor matters he happened to know about. The roaring debate over Lend-Lease, in Congress and the newspapers, seemed to him a farrago of illogic and irrelevance. It suited Hitler's book at the moment not to declare war on the United States-that was all. It apparently suited the American people in Turn to fake neutrality while commencing a sluggish, grudging effort on the British side, arguing every inch of the way. These two simple facts were being lost in the storm of words.
Pug Henry was content in the War Plans Division because here he worked in another world, a secret, very small world of hard-boiled reality.
Early in January, with a few other officers in War Plans, he had begun conversations" with British military men. In theory, Lord Burne-Wilke and his delegation were in Washington on vague missions of observing or purchase. Supposedly the talks were low-level explorations binding on nobody, and supposedly the President, the Army Chief of Staff, and the Chief of Naval Operations took no cognizance of them. In fact, by the first of March these conferences were finishing up a written war operations plan on a world scale. The assumption was that japan would sooner or later attack, and the key decision of the agreement lay in two words: "Germany first." It heartened Victor Henry that the American Army and Air Corps planners concurred in this, and ajso, to his considerable surprise and pleasure, Admiral Benton and two other naval colleagues who had thought the war through-unlike the rest of the Navy, still rolling along in the greased grooves of the old drills and war games against "Orange," the code name for japan.
It was clear to Pug Henry that if japan entered the war, with her annual steel production of only a few million tons, she could not hold out long if Germany were beaten. But if the Germans knocked out the British and got the fleet, they could go on to conquer whole continents, getting stronger as they went, whatever happened to japan.
From his conversations at the Army and Navy Club he knew that this "Germany first" decision would, if it came out, create a fearsome howl.
He was one of a handful of Americans-perhaps less than twenty, from the President downward-who knew about it. This was a peculiar way to run national affairs, perhaps; but to his amazement, which never quite faded, this was how things were going. To be part of this crucial anonymous work satisfied him.
It was passing strange to arrive in the morning at the drab little ofices in a remote wing of the old Navy Building, and sit down with the British for another day of work on global combat plans, after reading in the morning papers, or hearing on the radio, yesterday's shrill LendLease argument in Congress. Pug could not get over the cool dissembling of the few high officials who knew of the "conversations."
He kept wondering about a form of government which required such deviousness in its chiefs, and such soothing, cajoling fibs to get its legislators to act sensibly.
Once the planners, weary after a hammering day, sat in their shirt-sleeves around a radio, listening to General Marshall testify before a Senate committee. They heard this Army Chief of Staff, whose frosty remote uprightness made Henry think of George Washington, assure the senators that no intention existed for America to enter the war, and that at present there was no need for any large buildup of its armed forces. The planners had just been discus an allocation of troops based on an American army of five million in 1943, a projection of which Marshall was well aware.
'I don't know," Pug remarked to Burne-Wilke, "maybe
the only thing you can say for democracy is that all other forms of government are even worse." "Worse for what?" was the air commodore's acid reply.
"If other forms are better for winning wars, no other virtue counts."
Pug got along well with Burne-Wilke, who had fully grasped the landing craft problem. Among the planners, a labored joke was spreading about Captain Henry's girlfriend, 'Elsie'; this was in fact a play on L.c.
(landing craft), which he kept stressing as the limiting factor of operations in all theatres. Pug had worked up formulas converting any troop movement across water into this and quantities of landing craft, and these formulas threw cold water on many an ambitious and plausible plan.
Somebody would usually say, 'Pug's girl Elsie acting up again"; and Burne-Wilke always supported his insistence on this bottleneck.
Henry seldom encountered Pamela Tudsbury, whom the air commodore had brought along as his typist-aide. Tucked in an office in the British Purchasing Nhssion, she evidently worked like a dog, for her face was always haggard. A glad shock had coursed through him when he first saw Pamela, standing at Burne-Wilkes elbow, regarding him with glowing eyes. She had not written that she was coming. They met for a drink just once. Pug amplified all he could on his letter about the meeting with Ted Gallard. She looked extremely young to him; and his gust of infatuation with this girl after the bombing miwon seemed, in the bustling Willard bar in Washington, a distant and hardly believable episode. Yet the hour with her was warmly pleasurable. Any day thereafter when he saw her was a good day for him. He left these encounters to chance. He did not telephone her, nor ask her to meet him again; and while she always acted glad to see him, she made no move to do so more often.
As a college boy thinks about fame, and an exile about going home, this Navy captain of forty-nine once in a while mused on what a romance with the young Englishwoman might be like; but it was the merest daydreaming. He remained devoted to his wife, in his fashion. Rhoda had received her husband back with a puzzling mixture of moods-demonstrative affection, and even lust, alternating with spells of heavy gloom, coldness, and loud irascibility over her move back to Washington from New York She levelled off to a low-temperature detachment, busying herself with Bundles for Britain and her old-time music committees, and making numerous trips to New York for one reason or another. She sometimes mentioned Palmer Kirby, now one of the chairmen of Bundles for Britain, in a most casual way. Rhoda went to church with Pug, and sang the hymns, and relayed gossip about unfaithful Navy wives, all exactly as before. She was plainly disappointed when Pug went back to War Plans instead of getting a command at sea. But they settled back into their old routines, and Pug soon was too preoccupied to worry much about Rhoda's moods, which had always been jagged.
News about their children intermittently drew them together.
Byron's offhand letter about his hasty marriage in Lisbon was a shock.
They talked for days about it, worrying, agonizing, comforting each other, before resigning themselves to live with the fact. Warren as usual sent the good news. His wife was returning to Washington to have her baby, and he had been promoted to lieutenant.
Pug turned fifty on a Sunday early in March. He sat in church beside his wife, trying, as he listened to the choir sing "Holy, Holy, Holy," to shake off a sense that he had not-dssed all the right turns in life. He counted his blessings. His wife was still beautiful, still capable of love; if she had failings, what woman didn't? His two sons were naval officers, his daughter was self-supporting and clever.
Perhaps his career had gone off the rails, but he was serving in a post where he was doing some good.
He could not really complain.
Rhoda, as she sat there beside him, was thinking mainly about the fact that her husband, for the first time since his return from abroad, would soon be meeting Palmer Kirby face to face.
Asnowstorm clogged the capital on the night of Rhoda's dinner party. By quarter past seven her guests, including Kirby, had straggled in, brushing and stamping off snow, but the dinner was still stalled. Pug was mussing.
In the cramped hot kitchen of an elegant little furnished house on Tracy Place, rented from a millionaire bachelor who was now the ambassador to Brazil, Rhoda made a last-minute check of the dinner and found all in order: soup hot, ducks tender, vegetables on the boil, cook snarling over the delay. She sailed out to her guests after a scowl in the hallway mirror and a touch at her hairdo. Rhoda wore a silvery dress molded to her figure; her color was high, her eyes bright with nervous excitement. In the living room, Kirby and Pamela Tudsbury were talking on the big couch, Madeline and Janice had their heads together in a corner, and on facing settees before a log fire, Alistair Tudsbury and Lord Burne-Wilke were chatting with the recently elected Senator Lacouture and his wife. It was a hodgepodge company, but since it was only for a hurried dinner before a Bundles for Britain concert, she was not too concerned. Pug's meeting with Kirby was the chief thing on her mind.
"We'll wait ten more minutes." Rhoda sat herself beside the scientist. "Then we'll have to eat. I'm on the committee."
"Where is Captain Henry?" Pamela said calmly. Her mauve dress came to a halter around her neck, leaving her slim shoulders naked; her tawny hair was piled high on her head. Rhoda remembered Pamela Tudsbury as a mousy girl, but this was no mouse, Rhoda recognized Kirby's expression of lazy genial appetite.
'I'm blessed if I can say. Military secrecy covers a multitude of sins, doesn't it?" Rhoda laughed. "Let's hope he's working on defense, and not a blonde."
"I very much doubt that it's a blonde," said Pamela. "Not Captain Henry." "Oh, these goody-goody ones are the wors my dear.
That's a dinine dress."
"Do you like it? Thank you." Pamela adjusted the skirt. "I feel all got up for a pantomime, almost. I've been in uniform day and night for weeks."
"Does Lord Burne-Wilke drive you that hard?"
"Oh no, Mrs. Henry. There really are masses of things to do. I feel so lucky at being in Washington, that I guess I work off my guilt with the late hours."
"The Waring Hotel then would be the best bet, Pamela?" Kirby's tone took up the conversation Rhoda had broken into.
"If they've repaired the bomb.damage. By now, they should have.
The Germans went after Buckingham Palace very hard, and the whole neighborhood took quite a beating, but that was back in October."
I'll shoot a cable to the Waring tomorrow."
"Why, Palmer, are you going to London?" said Rhoda.
Kirby turned to her, crossing his long legs. "It appears so."
"Isn't that something new?"
"It's been in the works for a while."
"London! How adventurous." Rhoda laughed, covering her surprise.
Mrs. Lacouture's voice rose above the talk. "Janice, should you be drinking all those martinis?"
"Oh, Mother," said Janice, as the white-coated old Filipino, a retired Navy steward hired by Rhoda for the evening, shakily filled the glass in her outstretched hand.
'That baby wig be born with an olive in its mouth," remarked the senator. The two Englishmen laughed heartily, and couture's pink face wrinkled up with self-satisfaction.
" So, you did see Byron," Janice said to Madeline. "When was this?"
'A couple of weeks ago. His submarine put in at the Brooklyn Navy Yard overnight. He took me to dinner." "How was he?" "He's-I don't know-more distant. Almost chilly. I don't think he likes the Navy much."
'Maybe he doesn't like being married much," Janice said. 'I never heard of anything so peculiar! A couple of days of whoop-de-do in Ilsbon, and back she goes to Italy, and off he chugs in his little S-boat. y on earth did they bother to get married?"
"Well, possibly a Jewish girl would insist," Madeline said in arch tones.
Janice laughed shortly. "That may well be. I'll say this, she's a mighty bright and pretty one." She grimaced, moving her large stomach under her flowing green gown, trying to get more comfortable.
"Ugh,
what a bloated cow I am. This is what it all leads to, honey.
Never forget it. And how's your love life?" 'Oh dear. Well-" Madeline glanced toward her mother. "You remember that trombone player? With the big sad eyes, the one who dressed all in brown?"
"That Communist? Oh, Madeline, don't tell me-"
"Oh, no, no.
Bozey was an utter drip. But I went with him to this peace rally at Madison Square garden. It was really something, Jan!
Packed, and this gigantic red, white, and blue sign stretching clear across the garden-nm Ys men NoT comiNG'-Madeline waved her hands far apart-"and all these Loyalist Spain songs, and these mass chants they do, and novelists and poets and college professors making red-hot antiwar speeches and whatnot. Well, there was this other fellow in our box. He writes horror programs. He's very successful, he makes about five hundred dollars a week, and he's handsome, but he's another Communist." Madeline sneezed, blew her nose, and looked slyly at Janice. "What do you think would jolt my family more, Byron's Jewish girl or a Communist? Bob comes from Nhnnesota, he's a Swede at least.
Herman Wouk - The Winds Of War Page 73
