He shook his head. “He was on one of the jeep carriers, the Madison Bay. She was sunk that day off Samar, but I’ve heard they got all their planes off before she went down. The sky was full of planes from all over, so I’m guessing they found other decks. There were twelve more escort carriers farther out to sea, so there were places for the orphans to go.”
“So he’s still down in the Philippines somewhere?”
“I suppose so,” he said. “There’s so much scuttlebutt floating around here, who knows. Anyway, I guess it’s no longer my concern.”
“What? What are you saying?”
“I’m all done, Sally, dear,” he said, squeezing her hand. “I’ll be medically retired as soon as someone gets around to declaring me ‘healed.’ One-armed, one-legged lieutenant commanders are not in high demand.”
“Gosh,” she said. “I never thought of that.”
“Me, neither,” he said. “I was looking for orders. Now I’ve got to figure out where to go and what to do.”
“I can’t believe they’ll just, what’s the word, discard you like that. The Navy’s been your whole adult life.”
“I can’t complain,” he said. “I’d rather be a discard growing a victory garden somewhere than a drifting cloud of shark poop.”
“Marsh!” she scolded.
“Those are the choices, my dear, when you lose a sea-fight.” He took a deep breath. “Every time I feel sorry for myself, I think of the guys who’re still out there. They may park me on a shore staff somewhere in Pearl. God knows there are plenty of staffs back there. How long will you be assigned here?”
She shrugged. “For the duration, I guess, or until we build another hospital even closer to the action.”
“So,” he said. “Back to letters again, hunh?”
“If you’d like,” she said, looking away.
“If I’d like?” he said. “Where’d that come from?”
“You’re going back to Pearl, back to her,” she blurted.
He let go of her hand and sank back into the wheelchair.
“Back to her,” he said quietly. “Oh, my, Sally. You’ve got that all wrong. I’ll admit to having been besotted with Glory Lewis for many years, but that was all in my head. She made that very clear, even when I said some really juvenile things to her after Tommy was killed. I’ll even bet it was Glory who suggested that you and I start up a correspondence.”
She colored when he said that, then nodded.
“See? I’ve been a bachelor for a long time. Glory was a placeholder, a beautiful woman I could dream about, but I think that even before December seventh, I knew it was just that—a pipe dream, and a safe one to boot. There’s probably a dozen men out there who’ve had the same dream, and they—we, I guess—all secretly knew it was just a figment of our imaginations. There are some teeth behind that gorgeous facade, too. Remember what she did to poor Stembridge?”
“I do,” she said. “So where does all this leave us?”
“Right where we left off on New Year’s Day of 1944,” he said. “We court, that’s all. By mail if we have to, but you’re in my heart, Ensign, and that’s no pipe dream. Although you may prefer a guy with all his parts.”
She whirled on him and then saw that shy grin. “You better not turn into some kind of whiner,” she said. “I’m bigger than you are now, and I’ll hide your wooden leg if you’re not good.”
“What wooden leg?” he asked.
“The one I’m going to beat you with, Marshall Vincent.”
“Can we hold hands until then?” he asked.
“I’ll think about it,” she said, as they reached for each other in the twilight.
EIGHTEEN
After a long and bumpy flight from Guam to Honolulu via Wake Island, Marsh was assigned to a rehab center on the naval base at Pearl Harbor. There he spent a day learning how to use a wheelchair by himself and was measured for some temporary prosthetic devices. These would be produced back in the States and sent out to Pearl, after which he would come back to the rehab center for more training. The next day he had to go through the sadly familiar routine of reacquiring personal effects, beginning with clothes that could accommodate his injuries. That meant long-sleeved khaki shirts to hide the arm stump and some khaki trousers altered to cover up the leg stump. The ships-service sales store was kind enough to sell him a couple of left shoes. Apparently that wasn’t a unique request.
Once again he had to reconstitute his service, pay, and medical records. These all existed in permanent form back in Washington somewhere, but he needed local records to get things like a new ID card, a BOQ room, and a ration book. Naturally there was no single office on the base that could do all these things, so he spent a lot of time on shuttle buses, being helped on and off by willing sailors.
He was acutely aware of the fact that he had avoided calling Glory. If asked, he could have provided several excuses: He was very busy. He was in rehab. He’d lost enough parts to make him feel like less of a man. More importantly, if he went to see Glory, he’d have to tell Sally, and that would break her heart. Breaking Sally’s heart was not an option.
Each night, however, he thought about it. Then he thought about how the light in Sally’s eyes could be dimmed by just the suggestion that he was still interested in how Glory was doing. Sally was his future. Glory was, well, what? Tommy’s widow, Beast’s one-night stand?
No, that was too harsh. Glory was an intelligent and gorgeous woman. Just not in his league, at all. A future with her was a figment of his imagination, if he was to be truthful to himself. He wasn’t in Sally’s league, either, but she loved him and he loved her. That’s all that mattered. The war would end some day, and he wanted to both survive it and spend the future with Sally.
So: Don’t call. It was as simple as that.
Right.
On his third day back at Pearl he received a call to report to the admin officer at base headquarters. He wheeled himself with his one good arm down the main hallway in a series of interrupted right turns and into the administrative office, where he was asked to wait. By then he was fully qualified to wait. His brand-new khakis felt stiff and itchy, and his missing right foot ached, as usual. Then he was surprised when the admin officer’s batwing doors bumped open to reveal a commander in his own wheelchair. He saw Marsh and rolled his way over in his direction.
“Welcome aboard, Mister Vincent,” he said. “In case they didn’t tell you, you’re my new assistant admin-O. I’m Hugo Oxerhaus.”
“Commander, pleased to meet you, and, no, they didn’t tell me.”
“For what it’s worth, you are now officially part of ‘they,’” he said. Then he grinned. “And you’re out of uniform, by the way.”
“I am?” Marsh said. He immediately felt his shirt collars to see if he’d forgotten to put on his gold oak leaves.
“You definitely are,” he replied. “Come with me, please, and we’ll rectify that.”
He spun his chair around with more ease than Marsh could manage—he still had both hands. He had two legs, too, but they didn’t seem to move at all. It took Marsh a minute to get his own chair turned around, and one of the yeomen asked if he needed a hand.
“I need an arm if you’ve got one lying around,” he said. “Otherwise, I’ve got to learn how to manage this. Thanks anyway.”
He followed Oxerhaus down the hallway toward the front of the building, where they entered the naval base commander’s office suite. Two pretty female yeomen stood up when they wheeled in. One went into the admiral’s office through yet another set of batwing doors. A moment later she reappeared and ushered them in to meet the base commander, a rear admiral. He welcomed Marsh aboard and then picked up a piece of paper from his desk.
“Got something for you, Commander,” he said. Marsh thought he was talking to Oxerhaus, but the admiral was looking at him. Then he read out a promotion order that apparently had Marsh’s name on it. Oxerhaus produced a small box of silver oak leaves, and the admiral pinned t
hem onto Marsh’s shirt collar.
“Congratulations, Commander Vincent,” he said.
“I don’t know what to say, sir,” Marsh said. “I thought the next official letter I’d get would be from a Court of Inquiry.”
The admiral smiled. “That’s been concluded, at least for the moment,” he said. “You’re a surviving commanding officer of one of the destroyers who went up against Jap battlewagons off Samar. If anything, you’re something of a celebrity up at PacFleet. One of these days you’re going to get to meet Admiral Nimitz.”
“I’d be honored to meet Admiral Nimitz,” Marsh said.
“Most people are,” the admiral replied. “He’s quite something in person. Anyway, you’ll be assigned here for a while until the Navy decides what to do with you.”
“I assumed medical retirement.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “Do you have somewhere to go urgently?”
“No, sir, unless you’ve got a seagoing XO job that needs filling.”
He smiled. “I suspect the Bureau of Navigation will come up with something useful for you to do. In the meantime, this war is far from over.”
“Don’t I know it,” Marsh said, not meaning to be funny. Oxerhaus and the admiral both laughed, and finally he did, too.
Oxerhaus rolled back to his office with Marsh in tow. He described Marsh’s duties, which didn’t sound a whole lot different from when he’d been an XO aboard ship. The whole idea of being promoted to full commander hadn’t sunk in yet. He was still looking over his shoulder for some grim-faced captain to summon him in front of a board or a court of some kind for “losing” Evans. Commander Oxerhaus assured him that he would not be stuck doing make-work. The naval base at Pearl had become the collecting point for most of the Pacific Navy’s wounded, creating a veritable mountain of paperwork, Marsh’s included.
“At least I won’t make you push my chair around like I did to one of your predecessors, that McCarty fella.”
“Mick McCarty?” Marsh asked. “He’s a classmate. In fact, he was at Leyte in one of the jeeps.”
“Really,” Oxerhaus said, frowning. “Every class has its share of jerks. I’ve had an informal query in to the Bureau of Personnel now for a month trying to locate him. Which ship?”
“Madison Bay. Actually, she was sunk, but I believe they got all their aircraft off before she went down. There’s a possibility that he was shot down that day, but he’s probably on one of the Taffys out there.”
“What’s a Taffy?” he asked, and Marsh explained the call signs of the escort carrier task groups. Then he asked why Oxerhaus needed to get hold of Beast.
“It involves one of the Navy nurses over at Hospital Point,” he said.
It was Marsh’s turn to take a breath. “Which nurse?” he asked. “Is her name Lewis?”
That surprised Oxerhaus. “Yes, it is. You know her?”
“Very well,” Marsh said. “What’s happened?”
Oxerhaus blew out a long breath and then suggested they go for a roll. It took Marsh a minute to figure that out, but then he did, and they went outside the building and into the morning sunlight. Marsh was a little surprised that two commanders in wheelchairs didn’t seem to attract any special attention, but Pearl was full of wounded men.
“Ensign Lewis disappeared one night about three weeks ago,” he said. “Nobody saw her go, and she didn’t talk to anyone about going anywhere. She simply disappeared.”
Marsh’s blood ran cold. “Was there an investigation?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” Oxerhaus said. “We got the CID branch of the HASP into it right away; she was supposedly a beautiful woman, and everyone was thinking some kind of assault. Plus, there were special circumstances.”
“Her recent pregnancy.”
Again Marsh had surprised his new boss. He explained how he knew about that.
“Okay,” Oxerhaus said. “I personally spoke to her supervisor at the hospital, a Lieutenant Somebody. She said she’d seen some signs of postpartum depression but nothing she would call out of the ordinary. Apparently all women go through it after having a baby.”
Marsh had never heard of postpartum anything, but he accepted the conventional wisdom. “Her best buddy at the hospital was Ensign Adkins,” Marsh said. “She was sent out to Guam to stand up the new hospital out there. That’s where I ended up after Leyte, and she told me she hadn’t heard from Ensign Lewis for some time.”
“Well, the HASP came up empty-handed. They coordinated with the Honolulu police, but they usually don’t get involved in military cases. Said they’d check their informants, see if anyone had heard about a haole being abducted or anything, but nothing came back.”
“My God,” Marsh said. “This is such a small place. How could she simply disappear?”
“Was she a swimmer, do you know?”
“She was not,” Marsh said. “Avoided deep water entirely.”
“We lose a surprising number of people to the sea around here,” Oxerhaus said. “People forget that Oahu’s a volcanic mountain, sticking up out of twelve thousand feet of water. Some of the beaches are superfine black volcanic sand. Underwater it acts like quicksand. Your feet get stuck, then your legs, then a big wave comes in and you can’t move, so you drown. We warn everybody, put signs on the beach, but many don’t pay any attention. All they want to do is go to the beach, drink beer, and meet women.”
“She would not have gone into any kind of surf.”
“Was she involved with anyone, romantically?”
Marsh elected to keep Glory’s connection to Mick out of the conversation. If he even mentioned Mick, Oxerhaus would make him suspect number one. He also knew that there was no way Mick could have been involved in Glory’s disappearance. Besides, he was pretty sure now that had been Mick’s Dauntless diving into that Jap cruiser. “Must have been, at least once” was all he could manage.
“Yeah, right,” Oxerhaus nodded. “At least once. The other nurses mentioned McCarty as a possible, but he’d left Pearl long before this happened. Which was too bad, because he’d make a great suspect.”
Suspicions confirmed, Marsh thought. “Why?”
“Your classmate, McCarty, was a big-time drunk. Started a fight with the HASP, with predictable results. He was miraculously the sole survivor off a med flight that ditched near Guadalcanal, and, speaking from personal experience, he pulled some seriously dangerous stunts back when I was air boss in Yorktown. I had him in hack at the BOQ after the HASP incident, and, frankly, I was looking for a way to yank his wings. Found out that, these days, anyway, a bar brawl with the shore patrol won’t get you kicked out of naval aviation.”
Marsh just shook his head and didn’t say anything. They went back into the office, where Oxerhaus had a yeoman show Marsh to his first in-box.
That night Marsh had dinner at the O-club for the first time since his last visit to Pearl. It hadn’t changed much, except to become if anything even more crowded. The new hostess, a gorgeous young thing arrayed in Hawaiian costume, took Marsh back to a corner of the main dining room that he later learned was called Crip’s Corner. The tables had been modified for wheelchairs, and there were four other officers in chairs already there. They’d been drinking awhile, based on the elevated noise level at their end of the table.
As a waiter rolled Marsh into an empty slot, he realized he was the senior officer there; the rest of them were lieutenants. The one seated next to him had lost his entire right leg at the hip, which might or might not have accounted for his unsteady condition. He was staring at Marsh’s shiny new silver oak leaves and shaking his head. Marsh obviously looked too young to him to be a three-striper.
“A commander?” he began, slurring his syllables just a bit. The man next to him nudged him in the ribs, and the guy blinked, burped, and then closed his eyes.
“Sorry, sir,” the other lieutenant said. “Harry’s got kind of a load on.”
“No problem,” Marsh said. “Where you guys from?”
The
y were all aviators, including Sleeping Beauty. They told Marsh that Harry had brought his fighter back aboard his carrier, caught a wire, stopped, slid back his canopy, ducked down into the cockpit, and then thrown the remains of his leg onto the flight deck and asked for a medic before passing out. Harry was now, of course, rapidly passing into naval aviation legend.
The waiter brought Marsh a Scotch and a menu. One of the lieutenants worked up the nerve to ask what had happened to him. Marsh told them he’d lost an expensive sea-fight against a Jap battleship. “Expensive?” the young man asked. “Cost me an arm and a leg, didn’t it?” Marsh replied. They laughed and promptly went back to drinking, probably thinking that Marsh was lying, nuts, or both. Harry continued his nap, which Marsh thought was probably a good thing.
As Marsh sipped his Scotch, he tried to get his mind around the idea of Glory disappearing. He simply couldn’t comprehend it. He kept running through scenarios that could explain it. She’d been abducted, raped, strangled, and thrown into the sea. She’d gone into the city and stolen back her baby and was hiding out in the countryside somewhere with a Hawaiian family. She’d become fed up with all the backbiting about her unwed-mother status and stowed away on a troop transport or hospital ship headed stateside.
None of his theories seemed likely. As a commissioned officer who’d gotten herself knocked up, to put it in the vernacular, she must have been pretty humiliated. On the other hand, she’d had the personal courage to see the thing through. As an experienced operating room nurse, getting rid of her “problem” would not have been that difficult. Instead, according to Sally, she’d put her head down, ignored all the smug looks and snippy comments, and gone back to work. That was not the course of someone who would run away from Pearl.
Could she have committed suicide? That was always possible, but usually there was a note and a body. She’d been pining for her husband ever since December 1941, with her loss compounded by the fact that Tommy was entombed in a burned-out hulk no more than a half mile from where she worked and walked, every single day. If she could handle that, plus the enormous strains of a frontline wartime hospital, she was not a likely candidate for suicide.
Pacific Glory Page 37
