Keefer regarded him appraisingly, with a sullen smile. "I wonder if you realize how much you've changed in two years on the Caine?"
"I guess we all have, sir-"
"Not like you. Remember when you left that action despatch in your discarded pants for three days?" Willie grinned. "I never told you, but De Vriess and I had quite a talk about you that night. Curiously enough, it was I who said you were a hopeless case. De Vriess said you would be an outstanding officer eventually. I'll never know how he could tell. You've got yourself a medal, Willie, if my recommendation means anything-well. Thanks for letting me weep into your brandy glass. I feel a lot better for it." He reached for his trousers. "Can I help you dress, Captain?"
"No, thanks, Willie-I'm not helpless-not physically. What are they calling me in the wardroom, Old Swandive?" His eyes glinted, and Willie couldn't help laughing a little.
"Sir, everyone will have forgotten this thing in a week-in-cluding yourself-"
"I'll remember it on my deathbed, if I die in a bed, or wherever I die. Everybody's life pivots on one or maybe two moments. I had my moment this morning. Well- My mother didn't raise her boy to be a soldier. I'm still a hell of a good writer, which is something. Whatever Barney Greenwald thought. He probably would have predicted I'd jump. Guess I jumped in the court-martial, too, though I still think I couldn't have helped Steve any by- Well. Believe I'll have a last shot if you won't." He closed his belt dexterously with one hand, poured, and drank. "It is a very curious feeling for me," he said, "to be in a situation at last where words can change nothing. First time in my life, or I'm very much mis-taken. Better shave, Willie."
"Aye aye, Captain."
"Hell, I guess you've earned the right to call me Tom again. Even Long Tom-I mean Lord Tom-I believe I am slightly fuzzy as of the moment. Nothing that a little fresh air in the gig won't fix. Or do we still have a gig? I forget."
"It looks pretty awful, Captain, but the motor still turns over-"
"Fine." As Willie put his hand on the doorknob Keefer said, "By the way-" He fumbled in the bookshelf over the desk and pulled out a fat black binder. "Here's the first twenty chapters of Multitudes. The rest of it is somewhat dampish. Like to look at it while you're relaxing tonight?"
Willie was astonished. "Why-thanks, sir-I'd love to. I was beginning to think I'd have to buy it to get a look at it-"
"Well, hang you, Willie, I still expect you to buy it, don't go gypping me on my royalties. Like to know what you think of it, though."
"I'm sure I'll like it very much, sir-"
"Well, bring that old comparative-lit mind to bear. And don't spare my feelings out of military deference."
"Aye aye, sir." Willie went out with the binder under his arm, feeling as though he had lain hands on a top-secret docu-ment.
Late that night he wrote to May.
39
A Love Letter
It was long after midnight when Willie closed Keefer's man-uscript, put it aside, and went to the ship's office. Snapping on the yellow desk lamp, he bolted the door and uncovered the typewriter. There was dead silence in the airless room ex-cept for the muffled creaking of fenders between the hull and the side of the Pluto. (The Caine was alongside the tender for repairs.) In the drawer for paper he found some of the yeo-man's tattered pornography, and was amused by the fact that he didn't feel like stopping to read it. He rolled paper into the machine and wrote in a steady rattle, never pausing.
DEAREST MAY,
If there's one experience that's been typical of my life on this ship, one memory I'll always retain, it's of being shaken out of my sleep. I guess I've been shaken out of my sleep a thousand times in the last two years. Well, I've been shaken out of my sleep regarding you, too, at last, and I only hope to God it's not too late.
I know this letter is going to come as a bombshell to you. Read it, darling, and then decide whether it's worth answering. For all I know, I mean no more to you now than any one of the dumb gawking customers at the Grotto. But I must write it.
There's no point at this late date in apologizing for not writing for five months. You know why I didn't write. I came to what I then thought was the highly noble conclusion that if I were going to break with you I ought to break clean and not torture you with any more double-talk correspondence. And since I had decided to duck out on you once for all be-cause you weren't good enough for me-God help me-I didn't write.
I want you to be my wife. That's why I'm writing again. I know this beyond any question, it's the truth forever. I love you. I have never loved anyone, not even my parents, as I do you. I have loved you since the moment you took off your coat in Luigi's, if you remember, at which instant you were revealed as the most desirable woman-in my eyes, and that's all that counts for me-on the face of the earth. I subsequently found out that you were brighter than me and also had more character, but these were merely lucky accidents. I would have loved you I think if you had turned out to be a fool. So I guess physical attraction is at the bottom of it, and always will be. Maybe you don't like that, since you so easily attract droves of morons, but it's the truth.
The fact is, my sweet darling, that this sex attraction has almost ruined our lives, because in my idiotic, immature, snob-bish mind it came to seem a trap. After Yosemite my mother fairly talked me out of marrying you by hitting and hammer-ing the idea that I was in the toils of sex. If you want to know what has changed I can't tell you. A lot of things have happened to me in the last five months, and the sum total of every-thing is that I have grown up five years in that time, and can now safely say that I am out of my adolescent fog, however far I am from being a man. I see this much clearly, that you and I are a once-in-a-lifetime miracle. I can't understand how or why you came to care for me, being stronger, wiser, prettier, possessed of more earning power, and in every way better than I am. Maybe my Princeton chatter helped, in which case thank God for Princeton. I know that the snob idea of marrying into a quote good family-large crimson unquote-can mean nothing to you. Whatever it is, your loving me is fantastic luck.
Sweetheart, this is like the breaking of a dam, I don't know what to write down first. The main thing is this, will you marry me the next time I come home? Whether the war is still on or whether it's over? I somehow think it will be over in a few months. If it is, here's what I want to do. I want to go back to school and get an M.A. and maybe a Ph.D. if the money holds out and then get a college instructor's job, I don't care where, but preferably in a small town. About money: it won't be my mother's money. Dad, God rest his soul, left me an insurance policy which can see me through two or three years of schooling; and I can work on the side, tutoring or some-thing; and maybe the government will help veterans the way they did in the last war. Anyway, that part can work out. By the way, my dad several times told me I ought to marry you, in an indirect way. He sensed that I'd found something wonderful.
I know I want to teach. As in everything else, you under-stood me perfectly in this regard. I've been exec now on the Caine for a couple of months (Christ, there's a lot of news I have to tell you-wait a while) and I've been running an education program with these Armed Forces Institute courses among the sailors. I can't describe to you the pleasure I get out of helping the men get started on subjects that interest them, and counseling them in their work, and watching them improve and learn. It feels like the work I'm cut out for. As for the piano playing, how far could I ever get? I have no talent, I can simply play the piano and invent slightly off-color rhymes, a nice parlor trick for Saturday nights. The whole night-club life, those damned customers with their dead floury faces and the stinking air and the same thing night after night after night-the whole stale gummy mess of pseudo-sex, pseudo-music, pseudo-wit-not for me. Not for you. You're like a diamond on a garbage pile, in those night clubs.
About religion. (First things first-there's so much to say!) I never have been religious, but I have seen too much of the stars and the sun and people's lives working out, out here at sea, to go on ignoring God. I attend s
ervices when I can. I'm a sort of pale Christian. Catholicism has always scared me, and I don't understand it. We can talk about it. If you want to bring up the children as Catholics, well, I guess a Christian is a Christian. I would prefer not to be married in a ritual I don't understand-I'm being as frank with you as is necessary, because the chips are down-but I will do that, too, if that's what you want. All these things we can talk about, and they will work out, if only you still love me as you did.
A fill-in on news (though I can't tell you where I am or anything like that, of course). You can see already that I'm not in the brig serving time for mutiny. Maryk was acquitted, mainly by legal trickery, and so my case was dropped. That poor sailor Stilwell went crazy-driven crazy, I guess, by Queeg, whom I now feel as sorry for as I do for Stilwell, they're both a couple of victims of war, no more and no less. Last I heard Stilwell had pretty well gotten over it after some shock therapy and was on the beach doing some kind of limited duty. Queeg was relieved by a marvelous Academy man who straightened out the ship in four months and then handed it over to Keefer. So we have a novelist for a captain now, quite a privilege.
I now see pretty clearly that the "mutiny" was mostly Keefer's doing-though I have to take a lot of the blame and so does Maryk-and I see that we were in the wrong. We transferred to Queeg the hatred we should have felt for Hitler and the Japs who tore us off the beach and imprisoned us on a wallowing old ship for years. Our disloyalty made things twice as tough for Queeg and for ourselves; drove him to his worst outrages and made him a complete psychological mess. And then Keefer put the idea of Article 184 into Steve's head, and the rest of the horror followed. Queeg conned the Caine for fifteen months, which somebody had to do, and none of us could have done. As to the typhoon, I don't know whether it was best to go north or south, and I never will know. But I don't think Maryk had to relieve the captain. Either Queeg would have come north by himself when things got bad enough, or Maryk would have done it and Queeg would have strung along after some beefing and there would have been no damned court-martial. And the Caine would have stayed in action in-stead of holing up in San Francisco during the biggest actions of the war. The idea is, once you get an incompetent ass of a skipper-and it's a chance of war-there's nothing to do but serve him as though he were the wisest and the best, cover his mistakes, keep the ship going, and bear up. So I have gone all the way around Robin Hood's barn to arrive at the old plati-tudes, which I guess is the process of growing up. I don't think Keefer feels this way and I don't know if he ever will. He's too clever to be wise, if that makes any sense. Very little of what I'm saying is original, I got it from Maryk's defense counsel, an amazing Jew named Greenwald, a fighter pilot, probably the queerest duck I've ever known.
Keefer broke down and showed me some of his novel, finally. I guess you don't know that he sold the incomplete manu-script to Chapman House and they gave him a thousand dol-lars' advance. We had a dinner to celebrate, which turned into quite a horror for reasons which I'll tell you another time. Anyway, I read some chapters tonight, and I regret to say it looks awfully good to me. It doesn't seem very original in thought or style-sort of a jumble of Dos Passos and Joyce and Hemingway and Faulkner-but it's smooth, and some of the scenes are brilliant. It takes place on a carrier, but there are a lot of flashbacks to the beach, with some of the most hair-raising sex scenes I've ever read. It'll sell like hotcakes, I'm sure. The name is Multitudes, Multitudes.
Though what you care about all this I'm sure I don't know. I just read back over what I've written and I guess it's the most idiotic and disjointed marriage proposal that's ever been composed. I guess I'm writing a little faster than I can think, but what does that matter? The thinking's all over so far as my wanting to marry you goes. There's nothing left but the suspense, and it will be considerable suspense, of waiting to hear from you. Darling, don't think I'm drunk, or writing on a crazy impulse. This is it. If I live to be 107 years old, and whether you come back to me or not, I will never feel any differently about you. You are the wife that God sent me, and I was simply too fat-brained and childish to recognize you for three years. But I have I hope fifty years to make it up to you, and I just want the chance to do it. What more can I say? Maybe in love letters you're supposed to rave about the fair lady's eyes and lips and hair and swear eternal fealty and so forth. Darling, I love you, I love you, I love you, that's all. You're all I want, for the rest of my life.
It occurs to me, of course, that life as the wife of a drudge on a college faculty may not appeal to you. There's nothing I can say to that except that if you love me you'll come anyway and give it a try. I think you will like it. You don't know any-thing but New York and Broadway. There is another world of green grass and quiet and sunshine and pleasant, cultivated people, and I think after a while you will love it. Also you will be a spark of life in that environment-It's somewhat soporific and unreal, that's its main drawback-and maybe you will spur me on to do some worth-while work instead of just droning the same drone from year to year. Anyway all this is around the edges. It all comes back to whether you still feel, as I now do, that we belong to each other.
For God's sake write as soon as you can. Forgive all my stupidity; don't revenge yourself by taking your time. Are you well? Still wowing the customers and causing pop eyes under all the crew haircuts lined up at the bar? The last time I was in the Grotto I wanted to fight ten guys for the way they were looking at you. Why I didn't recognize my feelings for what they were I will never know. As for Mother, May, don't think about her, or if you do, don't be bitter. I suspect she'll come around. If she doesn't she will simply deprive herself of whatever pleasure she might have in seeing us happy together. Nothing she says or does will make any difference. Mother hasn't had much of a life, despite her money. At this point I'm sorry for her but not sorry enough to give up my wife for her. That's that.
Well, it's now a quarter past two in the morning, and I could easily write into the dawn and not be tired. I wish, my sweet, that I might have proposed to you in the most beautiful place in the world with music and perfume all around instead of pounding out an incoherent letter in a dismal ship's office, which you will receive all crumpled and dirty. But if this letter can make you half as happy as your answer saying yes would me, then no trappings could make it any better.
I love you, May. Write quickly, quickly.
WILLIE
He read this letter over perhaps twenty times, cutting a phrase here, inserting a sentence there. He finally became numb to its meaning. Then he copied it all over on the typewriter, dropped the papers in his room, and made himself a cup of coffee. It was four o'clock when he picked up the smooth draft and read it for the last time. He got a very clear picture of how it would strike May: astounding, somewhat groveling, wild, and babbling-but still, the truth. There were a dozen more places where he wanted to correct it, but he decided to let it go. It was impossible to make it a good, dignified letter; he was in a bad, undignified position. He was crawling back to a girl he had jilted. No words could change that. If she still loved him-and he was fairly sure she did, judging by their last kiss-then she would swallow his foolishness and her pride and accept him. That was all he wanted, and this proposal sufficed for it, if any would. He sealed the letter up, dropped it in the ship's mailbox, and went to sleep, feeling that life from now on, failing another Kamikaze, would be an empty wait while his letter went halfway around the world and the answer returned the same long way.
Not only Willie was becalmed; the Caine was, too. The resourceful repair men of the Pluto quickly patched up the damage on the deckhouse; but they grubbed around in the smashed fireroom for two weeks, and concluded that mending the boiler was not a job for them. It could be done, they said, only by diverting an excessive amount of the tender's time and resources. There were more useful Kamikaze victims to be mended-new destroyers and destroyer escorts. So the hole in the deck was plated over, and the Caine was ordered away from the tender's side to an anchor berth far up the harbor.
There it sat, while the Okinawa campaign ended and the opera-tions officer of ComMinePac tried to make up his mind, among a thousand other preoccupations, what to do with it.
The ship still had two boilers in the undamaged fireroom with which it could make twenty knots or so. Early in July the operations officer, Captain Ramsbeck, came aboard and they went out to sea for a run, stirring up the barnacles for the first time in weeks. Ramsbeck explained to Keefer and Willie that MinePac was reluctant to send the old ship back home for overhaul while there was any life in it. Once out of the forward area it would probably not return in time to be of any help in the massive sweeping duty which lay ahead. The Caine steamed smoothly on the trial run, and Keefer said he was willing and anxious to take part in the next operation. Willie pointed out that some four-pipers which had been con-verted to seaplane tenders ran perfectly well on two boilers. Ramsbeck seemed favorably impressed, as much by the atti-tudes of the captain and exec as by the Caine's performance. Next day he sent them the operation order for a sweep in the China Sea, with the Caine penciled in.
One morning a couple of days before the sortie for the sweep, Willie was in his room writing the war diary for June, and taking long pauses to wonder why he hadn't yet heard from May. The gangway messenger knocked at the open door-way and said, "Pardon me, sir. The Moulton is coming along-side." Willie ran up to the main deck. The bow of the other DMS was swinging in beside the forecastle, and he could see his old friend Keggs on the bridge, sunburned and salty-looking, leaning over the bulwark and shouting orders. Willie jumped across the gap as soon as the lines were secured and met Keggs coming down the bridge ladder.
Herman Wouk - The Caine Mutiny Page 66
