Herman Wouk - The Caine Mutiny

by The Caine Mutiny(Lit)

  "The accused stands convicted by the facts. In his defense not one mitigating fact has been established. The court will re-ject, I am certain, the cynical, insulting attempt of the defense counsel to sway its emotions. The court will find the speci-fication proved by the facts."

  The contrast between Challee's manner and Greenwald's could not have been sharper. The pilot was soft, apologetic, hesitant after the judge advocate's passionate shouting. He kept looking from Blakely to Challee. He started by mentioning that he had undertaken Maryk's defense reluctantly at the judge advocate's request. "I was reluctant," he said, "because I knew that the only possible defense of the accused was to show in court the mental incompetence of an officer of the Navy. It has been the most unpleasant duty I've ever had to perform. Let me make one thing clear. It is not and never has been the contention of the defense that Commander Queeg is a coward. The entire case of the defense rests on the opposite assumption: that no man who rises to command of a United States naval ship can possibly be a coward. And that therefore if he commits questionable acts under fire the explanation must lie elsewhere."

  Proceeding in the same calm, diffident tone, Greenwald re-viewed all the damaging evidence against Queeg, laying especial stress on the points that had seemed to impress Blakely. He emphasized that both psychiatrists had admitted, in one form of words or another, that Queeg was sick. And he repeated over and over that it was up to the court, who knew the sea, to decide whether or not the sickness of Queeg was bad enough to incapacitate him. He referred briefly and apologeti-cally to Queeg's behavior in court-his evasiveness, incoherence, changing stories, and inability to stop speaking-as further un-fortunate evidence of his mental illness. He said very little about Maryk. It was all Queeg, Queeg, Queeg.

  The court debated for an hour and ten minutes. Maryk was acquitted.

  Maryk and Greenwald were surrounded on the sidewalk out-side the court-martial building by a small jubilant knot of peo-ple. The exec's mother clung to him, weeping and laughing: a fat little woman in a green hat, with a round seamed face like a wrinkled photograph of her son's. Beside her stood the father, a heavy quiet shabby man, patting her shoulder. All the officers of the Caine were there. Willie Keith capered and shouted, slapping everyone on the back. All was noise and con-gratulation and joy. Greenwald was jostled by eager hand-shaking. "All right now listen, listen everybody," yelled Keefer. "Listen to me. We're going to celebrate!"

  "Sure! Sure! Celebrate! Let's celebrate! Let's all get stiff! Fried! Boiled!"-a ribald chorus.

  "No, will you listen? It's all arranged. Dinner at the Fair-mont! I've hired a room. I'm paying. I'm rich!" shouted Keefer. "It's a double celebration! I got the contract on my novel in the mail this morning, and a check for a thousand bucks! It's all on Chapman House!"

  Sailors a block away from the building turned to stare in amazement at the frantic little group of officers yelping and dancing in the hot sunshine. "I will get monumentally drunk," cried Harding. "I will wake up in the alcoholic ward. And I'll love it." Jorgensen hugged and kissed the trunk of a eucalyptus tree in excess of joy. His glasses fell off and shattered. He peered around, giggling wildly. "Nothing but champagne will be served," yelled the novelist. "Champagne to toast the Fifth Freedom. Freedom from Old Yellowstain!"

  Maryk blinked confusedly. "Greenwald's invited, isn't he?"

  "Invited! Hell, he's the guest of honor," Keefer bawled. "A Daniel! A Daniel come to judgment! Momma and Poppa, too! Wire your brothers! Tell 'em to fly down! Bring anyone you want!"

  Greenwald said, "You guys have a fine time. Leave me out of it-"

  The mother said through sobs, "You're a good boy, Steve. You never did anything wrong-"

  "The hell with that," Maryk said to Greenwald, wriggling in his mother's embrace. "If you don't come I don't. It's all off."

  "Man, don't ruin it," said Keefer, throwing his arm over Greenwald's shoulder. "What'll the party be like without the hero of the occasion?"

  "You're the hero-a thousand bucks-" said the lawyer, disengaging himself.

  Keefer cried, "I'll send a limousine and chauffeur for you-"

  "That won't be necessary. Fairmont? Okay. I'll be there." Greenwald turned and started up the steps.

  "Where you going, Barney?" Maryk said anxiously.

  "Got to clean up the debris with Challee. You go along, Steve. See you tonight."

  Keefer shouted after him, "Give Challee a crying towel, with the compliments of the Caine!" Howls of joyous laughter went up from the officers.

  A huge green-iced cake baked in the shape of a book was the most prominent decoration of the table.

  MULTITUDES, MULTITUDES

  A NOVEL BY

  Thomas Keefer

  was written on it in flourishing letters of thick yellow sugar. It was surrounded by a bank of ferns and roses. The table was crowded with flowers, and candles, and silver, and bottles of champagne. Shreds of gold and silver foil from the wine bottles were scattered on the white cloth. It was seven o'clock, the chair at the head of the table was still vacant, and no food had yet been served. The officers were already boisterously drunk. Mr. and Mrs. Maryk smiled uncomfortably at the roistering jokes all around them, and laughed aloud whenever their son did. The exec sat at the right of Greenwald's empty chair, with his parents beside him. Opposite them were Keefer and Keith, side by side, sparking the merriment with a running fire of shouted jokes about Old Yellowstain. It was an inex-haustible topic. Jorgensen, at the foot of the table, was dis-solved in howling giggles; tears ran down from his squinting bloodshot eyes. Several new officers who had reported aboard since the ship's return, and who had never seen Queeg, listened in wide-eyed wonder, and laughed uneasily at the jokes, and drank vast quantities of Keefer's champagne.

  Willie was having a wonderful time. Though he suspected that Keefer had not been especially manly in the court-martial, he had no way of knowing the truth of the matter. Witnesses were not permitted to hear each other testify; and Maryk had never spoken a word against Keefer throughout the affair. All qualms had been forgotten in the grand wonder of the exec's acquittal, and Willie's release from fear. He drank as much of the novelist's champagne as anybody, excepting perhaps Hard-ing. His old roommate of the clipping shack was in an alcoholic nirvana. From time to time Harding would get up and stagger to hug somebody, Keefer, or Maryk, or Paynter, it didn't mat-ter who. He kissed Willie, maundering, "He gave me his hat to puke in. One of nature's noblemen, Willie Keith-"

  Keefer said, "He'll probably have to do it again before the night's out." Willie thereupon seized a silver bowl of celery and held it under Harding's mouth, and Harding pretended to throw up, and it was a joke which made everybody roar except the two puzzled old folks. In this happy vein the party was proceeding when Keefer jumped up, yelling, "Here he comes! Fill your glasses! A toast to the conquering hero! Greenwald the Magnificent!"

  The lawyer's blues were rumpled and baggy, and his walk was not of the steadiest, but nobody at the table was in a con-dition to notice. He came to the head of the table and stood stupidly, resting a hand on the empty chair, looking around slack-mouthed. "Party's pretty far along, hey?" he said, as wine splashed in a dozen glasses and all the officers shouted greetings. Keefer made his glass ring with a knife.

  "All right, quiet, you drunken mutineers- A toast, I say!" He lifted his glass high. "To Lieutenant Barney Greenwald-a Cicero with two stripes-a Darrow with wings-the terror of judge advocates-the rescuer of the oppressed and the down-trodden-the forensic St. George who slew with his redoubtable tongue that most horrible of dragons-Old Yellowstain!"

  They all cheered; they all drank; they sang For He's a Jolly Good Fellow in bellowing discords. The lawyer stood, pallid and skinny, his mouth foolishly twitching in momentary grins. "Speech! Speech!" said Keefer, clapping his hands and drop-ping into his chair, and everybody took up the cry and the ap-plause.

  "No, no," Greenwald mumbled, but in a moment he was standing alone, and all the faces at the table were t
urned to him. The party settled into expectant quiet. "I'm drunker'n any of you," he said. "I've been out drinking with the judge advo-cate-trying to get him to take back some of the dirty names he called me-finally got him to shake hands on the ninth whisky sour-maybe the tenth-"

  "That's good," Maryk said. "Challee's a decent guy-"

  "Had to talk loud `n' fast, Steve-I played pretty dirty pool, you know, in court-poor Jack, he made a wonderful argu-ment- Multitudes, Multitudes, hey?" He peered blearily at the cake. "Well, I guess I ought to return the celebrated au-thor's toast, at that." He fumbled at a bottle and sloshed wine into a glass and all over his hands. "Biblical title of course. Can't do better for a war book. I assume you give the Navy a good pasting?"

  "I don't think Public Relations would clear it, at any rate," the novelist said, grinning.

  "Fine. Someone should show up these stodgy, stupid Prus-sians." Greenwald weaved and grabbed at the chair. "I told you I'm pretty far along- I'll get to my speech yet, don't worry- Wanna know about the book first. Who's the hero, you?"

  "Well, any resemblance, you know, is purely accidental-"

  "Course I'm warped," said Greenwald, "and I'm drunk, but it suddenly seems to me that if I wrote a war novel I'd try to make a hero out of Old Yellowstain." Jorgensen whooped loudly, but nobody else laughed, and the ensign subsided, gog-gling around. "No, I'm serious, I would. Tell you why. Tell you how I'm warped. I'm a Jew, guess most of you know that. Name's Greenwald, kind of look like one, and I sure am one, from way back. Jack Challee said I used smart Jew-lawyer tactics-course he took it back, apologized, after I told him a few things he didn't know- Well, anyway... The reason I'd make Old Yellowstain a hero is on account of my mother, little gray-headed Jewish lady, fat, looks a lot like Mrs. Maryk here, meaning no offense."

  He actually said "offensh." His speech was halting and blurry. He was gripping the spilling glass tightly. The scars on his hand made red rims around the bluish grafted skin.

  "Well, sure, you guys all have mothers, but they wouldn't be in the same bad shape mine would if we'd of lost this war, which of course we aren't, we've won the damn thing by now. See, the Germans aren't kidding about the Jews. They're cook-ing us down to soap over there. They think we're vermin and should be `sterminated and our corpses turned into something useful. Granting the premise-being warped, I don't, but grant-ing the premise, soap is as good an idea as any. But I just can't cotton to the idea of my mom melted down into a bar of soap. I had an uncle and an aunt in Cracow, who are soap now, but that's different, I never saw my uncle and aunt, just saw letters in Jewish from them, ever since I was a kid, but never could read them. Jew, but I can't read Jewish."

  The faces looking up at him were becoming sober and puz-zled.

  "I'm coming to Old Yellowstain. Coming to him. See, while I was studying law `n' old Keefer here was writing his play for the Theatre Guild, and Willie here was on the playing fields of Prinshton, all that time these birds we call regulars--these stuffy, stupid Prussians, in the Navy and the Army-were manning guns. Course they weren't doing it to save my mom from Hitler, they were doing it for dough, like everybody else does what they do. Question is, in the last analysis-last analysis-what do you do for dough? Old Yellowstain, for dough, was standing guard on this fat dumb and happy country of ours. Meantime me, I was advancing my little free non-Prussian life for dough. Of course, we figured in those days, only fools go into armed service. Bad pay, no millionaire future, and you can't call your mind or body your own. Not for sensitive in-tellectuals. So when all hell broke loose and the Germans started running out of soap and figured, well it's time to come over and melt down old Mrs. Greenwald-who's gonna stop them? Not her boy Barney. Can't stop a Nazi with a lawbook. So I dropped the lawbooks and ran to learn how to fly. Stout fellow. Meantime, and it took a year and a half before I was any good, who was keeping Mama out of the soap dish? Cap-tain Queeg.

  "Yes, even Queeg, poor sad guy, yes, and most of them not sad at all, fellows, a lot of them sharper boys than any of us, don't kid yourself, best men I've aver seen, you can't be good in the Army or Navy unless you're goddamn good. Though maybe not up on Proust `n' Finnegan's Wake and all."

  Greenwald stopped, and looked from side to side. "Seem to be losing the thread here. Supposed to be toasting the Caine's favorite author. Well, here goes, I'll try not to maunder too much. Somebody flap a napkin at me if I get incoherent. Can't stay for dinner so I'm glad you called on me to make a toast so I can get it over with. I can't stay because I'm not hungry. Not for this dinner. It would in fact undoubtedly disagree with me."

  He turned to Maryk.

  "Steve, the thing is, this dinner is a phony. You're guilty. I told you at the start that you were. Course you're only half guilty. F' that matter, you've only been half acquitted. You're a dead duck. You have no more chance now of transferring to the regular Navy than of running for President. The review-ing authorities'll call it a miscarriage of justice, which it is, and a nice fat letter of reprimand will show up in your promotion jacket-and maybe in mine-and it's back to the fishing business for Steve Maryk. I got you off by phony legal tricks-by making clowns out of Queeg and a Freudian psychiatrist-which was like shooting two tuna fish in a barrel-and by 'pealing very unethically and irrelevantly to the pride of the Navy. Did ev-erything but whistle Anchors Aweigh. Only time it looked tough was when the Caine's favorite author testified. Nearly sunk you, boy. I don't quite understand him, since of course he was the author of the Caine mutiny among his other works. Seems to me he'd of gotten up on the line with you and Willie, and said straight out that he always insisted Queeg was a dan-gerous paranoiac. See, it would only have made things worse to drag Keefer in-you know all about that, so as long as he wanted to run out on you all I could do was let him run-"

  "Just a minute-" Keefer made a move to get up.

  " 'Scuse me, I'm all finished, Mr. Keefer. I'm up to the toast. Here's to you. You bowled a perfect score. You went after Queeg and got him. You kept your own skirts all white and starchy. Steve is finished for good, but you'll be the next cap-tain of the Caine. You'll retire old and full of fat fitness reports. You'll publish your novel proving that the Navy stinks, and you'll make a million dollars and marry Hedy Lamarr. No let-ter of reprimand for you, just royalties on your novel. So you won't mind a li'l verbal reprimand from me, what does it mean? I defended Steve because I found out the wrong guy was on trial. Only way I could defend him was to sink Queeg for you. I'm sore that I was pushed into that spot, and ashamed of what I did, and thass why I'm drunk. Queeg deserved better at my hands. I owed him a favor, don't you see? He stopped Hermann Goering from washing his fat behind with my mother.

  "So I'm not going to eat your dinner, Mr. Keefer, or drink your wine, but simply make my toast and go. Here's to you, Mr. Caine's favorite author, and here's to your book."

  He threw the yellow wine in Keefer's face.

  A little splashed on Willie. It happened so fast that the offi-cers at the other end of the table didn't know what he had done. Maryk started to get up. "For Christ's sake, Barney-"

  The lawyer shoved him back into his chair with a shaking hand. Keefer automatically pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at his face, staring dumfounded at Greenwald. Green-wald said, "If you want to do anything about it, Keefer, I'll wait in the lobby for you. We can go someplace quiet. We're both drunk, so it's a fair fight. You'll probably lick me. I'm a lousy fighter."

  The other officers were beginning to mutter to each other agitatedly, glancing sidewise at Keefer. Greenwald strode out of the room, stumbling a little near the door. The novelist stood up. There was a thick, ugly silence, as though someone had just shouted a lot of dirty words. Keefer glanced around and uttered a laugh. No eye met his. He dropped back in his chair. "The hell with it. Poor guy is just crazy drunk. I'm hungry. He'll be around to apologize in the morning. Willie, tell them to bring on the chow."

  "Okay, Tom."

  The meal was eaten rapidly in a clinking quiet, broken by
an infrequent low remark. When Keefer cut the cake there was a brief dismal scattering of handclaps. The party broke up immediately after the coffee. There were five unopened bottles of champagne still standing on the littered table.

  Willie curiously scanned the lobby when he came out of the private dining room, but the pilot was gone.

  PART SEVEN

  THE LAST CAPTAIN OF THE CAINE

  38

  The Kamikaze

  Of all the people Willie encountered during the war Captain Queeg loomed largest in his memory, forever after. But there was another man who had an even greater influence on his life and character; a man whose face he never saw and whose name he never knew. The day after he encountered this man-it was late in June 1945-Willie Keith wrote an eight-page letter to May Wynn, begging her to marry him.