by Herman Wouk
Pug sat to one side in an armchair while they read through the script. The authoress, passing vinegary judgments on current literature, said that one famous author was obscene, another sloppy, a third superficial. His mind wandered to his meeting yesterday with “that man in the White House.” It seemed to him that he had been summoned on a haphazard impulse; that he had spent a couple of thousand dollars of public money on a round trip from Germany for pointless small talk over scrambled eggs. The morning paper showed that yesterday had been a crowded, portentous day for the President. The leading story, spread over many columns, was Roosevelt Proclaims Limited National Emergency. Three other headlines on the front page began FDR or President; he had reorganized two major government boards; he had lifted the sugar quota; he had met with congressional leaders on revision of the Neutrality Act. All these things had been done by the ruddy man in shirt-sleeves who never moved from behind his desk, but whose manner was so bouncy you forgot he was helpless in his chair. Pug wanted to believe that he himself might have said one thing, made one comment, that by illuminating the President’s mind had justified the whole trip. But he could not. His comments on Germany, like his original report, had rolled off the President, who mainly had sparked at details of Hitler’s oratorical technique and touches of local Berlin color. The President’s request for gossipy letters still struck him as devious, if not pointless. In the first few minutes Victor Henry had been attracted by President Roosevelt’s warmth and good humor, by his remarkable memory and his ready laughter. But thinking back on it all, Commander Henry wasn’t sure the President would have behaved much differently to a man who had come to the office to shine his shoes.
“Fourteen minutes and twenty seconds, Mr. Cleveland.” Madeline’s speaker-distorted voice roused him.
“That’s fine. Ready to record, Miss Pelham?”
“No. All this about Hemingway is far too kind. I’d like about half an hour with this script. And I’d like some strong tea, with lemon.”
“Yes, ma’am. Hear that, Madeline? Get it.”
Cleveland invited the naval officer to his office, where Pug accepted a cigar. The young broadcaster displeased him by hitching a leg over the arm of his chair. Pug had used considerable severity to cure Byron of that habit. “Sir, you can be proud of Madeline. She’s an unusual girl.”
“Unusual in what way?”
“Well, let’s see. She understand things the first time you tell them to her. Or if she doesn’t, she asks questions. If you send her to fetch something or do something, she fetches it or she does it. She never has a long story about it. I haven’t heard her whine yet. She isn’t afraid of people. She can talk straight to anybody without being fresh. She’s reliable. Are reliable people common in the Navy? In this business they’re about as common as giant pandas. Especially girls. I’ve had my share of lemons here. I understand that you want her to go back to school, and that she’ll have to quit next week. I’m very sorry about that.”
“The girl’s nineteen.”
“She’s better than women of twenty-five and thirty who’ve worked for me.” Cleveland smiled. This easy-mannered fellow had an infectious grin and an automatic warmth, Pug thought, that in a trivial way was like the President’s. Some people had it, some didn’t. He himself had none of it. In the Navy the quality was not overly admired. The name for it was “grease.” Men who possessed it had a way of climbing fast; they also had a way of relying upon it, till they got too greasy and slipped.
“I wish she’d show some of these 4.0 qualities at school. I don’t appreciate the idea of a nineteen-year-old girl loose in New York.”
“Well, sir, I don’t mean to argue with you, but Washington’s no convent either. It’s a question of upbringing and character. Madeline is a superior, trustworthy girl.”
Pug uttered a noncommittal grunt.
“Sir, how about coming on our show? We’d be honored to have you.”
“As a guest? You’re kidding. I’m nobody.”
“America’s naval attaché in Nazi Germany is certainly somebody. You could strike a blow for preparedness, or a two-ocean Navy. We just had Admiral Preble on the show.”
“Yes, I know. That’s how I found out what my little girl’s doing these days.”
“Would you consider it, sir?”
“Not on your life.” The sudden frost in Pug’s tone rose not only from the desire to be final, but the suspicion that the praise of Madeline had been a way of greasing him.
“No harm in asking, I hope,” Cleveland grinned, running a hand through his heavy blond hair. He had a pink barbershop sunburn and looked well in a collegiate jacket and slacks, though Victor Henry thought his argyle socks were too much. He did not like Cleveland, but he could see that Madeline would relish working for such a Broadwayish fellow.
Later Madeline showed her father around the studios. Certain corridors were like passageways in the bowels of a ship, all jammed with electronic gear and thousands of bunched colored wires. These interested Pug. He would have enjoyed seeing the controlling diagrams and learning how radio amusement was pumped out of this nerve center all over the country. The performing studios, with their giant cardboard settings of aspirin bottles, toothpaste tubes, and gasoline pumps, their blinking red lights, posturing singers, giggling audiences, grimacing and prancing funny men, not only seemed tawdry and silly in themselves, but doubly so with Poland under attack. Here, at the heart of the American communications machine, the Hitler war seemed to mean little more than a skirmish among Zulus.
“Madeline, what attracts you in all this balderdash?”
They were leaving the rehearsal of a comedy program, where the star, wearing a fireman’s hat, was spraying the bandleader, the girl singer, and the audiences with seltzer bottles.
“That man may not amuse you, Dad, but millions of people are mad for him. He makes fifteen thousand dollars a week.”
“That’s kind of obscene right there. It’s more than a rear admiral makes in a year.”
“Dad, in two weeks I’ve met the most marvellous people. I met Gary Cooper. Just today I spent two hours with Miss Pelham. Do you know that I had lunch with the Chief of Naval Operations? Me?”
“So I heard. What’s this fellow Cleveland like?”
“He’s brilliant.”
“Is he married?”
“He has a wife and three children.”
“When does your school start?”
“Dad, do I have to go back?”
“When did we discuss any other plan?”
“I’ll be so miserable. I feel as though I’ve joined the Navy. I want to stay in.”
He cut her off with a cold look.
They went back to her little partitioned cubicle outside Cleveland’s office. Smoking one cigarette and then another, Pug silently sat in an armchair and watched her work. He noted her neat files, her checkoff lists, her crisp manner on the telephone, her little handmade wall chart of guests invited or scheduled in September, and of celebrities due in New York. He noted how absorbed she was. In their walk around CBS she had asked only perfunctory questions about the family and none on Germany; she hadn’t even asked him what Hitler was really like.
He cleared his throat. “Say, incidentally, Madeline, I’m going out to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to have dinner aboard the Colorado. Digger Brown’s the executive officer. You know, Freddy Brown’s father. Like to come along? What’s the matter? Why the face?”
Madeline sighed. “Oh, I’ll come, Dad. After all, I see you so seldom. I’ll meet you at five or so—”
“Got something else planned?”
“Well, I didn’t know you were about to fall out of the sky. I was going to dinner and the theatre with the kids.”
“What kids?”
“You know. Just kids I’ve met at CBS. A couple of writers, musicians, an actress, some other new girls like me. There are eight of us, sort of a gang.”
“I daresay there’ll be some bright-eyed ensigns in the junior mess.”
“Yes, exactly. Ensigns.”
“Look, I don’t want to drag you anywhere.”
“It’s just that you’ll end up talking to Commander Brown, Dad, and I’ll spend another evening with ensigns. Can’t we have breakfast tomorrow? I’ll come to your hotel.”
“That’ll be fine. These kids of yours, I’d think the young men would be these show business fellows, pretty flimsy characters.”
“Honestly, you’re wrong. They’re serious and intelligent.”
“I think it’s damn peculiar that you’ve fallen into this. It’s the furthest thing from your mother’s interests or mine.”
Madeline looked aslant at him. “Oh? Didn’t Mother ever tell you that she wanted to be an actress? That she spent a whole summer as a dancer in a travelling musical show?”
“Sure. She was seventeen. It was an escapade.”
“Yes? Well, once when we were up in an attic, it must have been at the Nag’s Head house, she came on the parasol she had used in her solo dance. An old crinkled orange paper parasol. Well, right there in that dirty attic Mama kicked off her shoes, opened the parasol, picked up her skirt, and did the whole dance for me. And she sang a song. ‘Ching-ching-challa-wa China Girl.’ I must have been twelve, but I still remember. She kicked clear to the ceiling, Mama did. God, was I ever shocked.”
“Oh, yes, ‘Ching-ching-challa-wa China Girl’!” said Pug. “She did it for me too, long long ago. Before we were married, in fact. Well, I’m off to the Colorado. Tomorrow after breakfast I fly down to Pensacola to see Warren. Next day I return to Berlin, if I can firm up my air tickets.”
She left her desk and put her arms around him. She smelled sweet and alluring, and her face shone with youth, health, and happiness. “Please, Dad. Let me work. Please.”
“I’ll write or cable you from Berlin. I’ll have to discuss it with Ching-ching-challa-wa China Girl.”
The harbor smell in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the destroyers nesting in a row with red truck lights burning, the Colorado lit up from stem to stern, its great main battery guns askew for boresighting —these things gave Victor Henry the sense of peace that other men get by retiring to their dens with a cigar and a drink.
If he had a home in the world, it was a battleship. Put together at different times and places of different steel plates and machines, embodied in many forms under many names, a battleship was always one thing: the strongest kind of warship afloat. This meant a thousand ever-changing specifications of size, design, propulsion, armor, armament, interior communication, interior supply systems; a thousand rituals and disciplines binding the crew, from the captain to the youngest striker, into one dependable corporate will and intelligence. In this sense there had been battleships in the days of Phoenicia and Rome, and there would always be battleships — a living peak of human knowledge and craft, a floating engineering structure dedicated to one aim: the control of the sea. It was the only thing to which Victor Henry had ever given himself whole; more than to his family, much more than to the sprawling abstraction called the Navy. He was a battleship man.
With other top men, he had gone to a battleship straight from the Academy in 1913. He had served time in smaller ships, too. But he was marked battleship, and he had kept coming back to them. His shining service achievement was winning the “meatball pennant,” the fleet gunnery competition, two years in a row as gunnery officer of the West Virginia. His improvised system for speeding sixteen-inch shells from the magazines to the turrets had become standard Navy doctrine. All he wanted in this life was to be executive officer of a battleship, then a captain, then an admiral with a BatDiv flag. He could see no further. He thought a BatDiv flag was as fine a thing as being a president, a king, or a pope. And he reflected, as he followed the erect quick-marching gangway messenger down the spotless white passageway to the senior officers’ mess, that every month he spent in Berlin was cutting the ground from under his hopes.
Digger Brown had been exec of the Colorado only six weeks. Sitting at the head of the table, Digger was making too many jokes, Pug thought, so as to put himself at ease with the ship’s lieutenant commanders and two-stripers. That was all right. Digger was a big fellow and could turn on impressive anger at will. Pug’s style was more of a monotone. His own sense of humor, such as it was, went to jabbing ironies. As an executive officer — if he ever achieved it — he planned to be taciturn and short. They would call him a dull sour son of a bitch. One had plenty of time to warm up and make friends, but the job had to be done right from the hour one reported aboard. It was a sad fact of life that everybody, himself included, jumped to it when the boss was a son of a bitch, especially a knowledgeable son of a bitch. In the West Virginia he had been a hated man until that first meatball pennant had broken out at the yardarm. Thereafter he had been the ship’s most popular officer.
The immediate target of Digger’s raillery was his communications officer, a lean morose-looking Southerner. Recently the Colorado had received a new powerful voice radio transmitter which bounced waves off the Heaviside layer at a shallow angle. If atmospheric conditions were right, one could talk directly to a ship in European waters. Digger had chatted with his brother, the engineering officer in the Marblehead, now anchored off Lisbon. The communications officer had since been romancing an old girlfriend in Barcelona via the Marblehead radio room. Digger had found this out three days ago, and was still milking it for jokes.
Pug said, “Say, how well did this thing work, Digger? Could you understand Tom?”
“Oh, five by five. Amazing.”
“D’you suppose I could talk to Rhoda in Berlin?” It occurred to Pug that this was a chance to tell her about Madeline, and perhaps reach a decision.
The communications officer, glad of an opportunity to stop the baiting, said at once, “Captain, I know we can raise Marblehead tonight. It ought to be simple to patch in the long-distance line from Lisbon to Berlin.”
“It’ll be what — two or three o’clock in the morning there?” Brown said.
“Two, sir.”
“Want to break in on Rhoda’s beauty sleep, Pug?”
“I think so.”
The lieutenant carefully rolled his napkin in a monogrammed ring, and left.
The talk turned to Germany and the war. These battleship officers, like most people, were callowly inclined to admire and overestimate the Nazi war machine. One fresh-faced lieutenant said that he hoped the Navy was doing more work on landing craft than he’d been able to read about. If we got into the war, he said, landing would be almost the whole Navy problem, because Germany would probably control the entire coastline of Europe by then.
Digger Brown brought his guest to the executive officer’s quarters for coffee, ordering around his Filipino steward and lolling on the handsome blue leather couch with casual pride of office. They gossipped about their classmates: a couple of juicy divorces, a premature death, a brilliant leader turned alcoholic. Digger bemoaned his burdens as a battleship exec. His captain had gotten where he was with sheer luck, charm, and a marvellous wife—that was all; his ship-handling was going to give Digger a heart attack. The ship was slack from top to bottom; he had made himself unpopular by instituting a stiff program of drills; and so forth. Pug thought that for an old friend Digger was showing off too much. He mentioned that he had come back from Berlin to talk to the President. Digger’s face changed. “I’m not surprised,” he said. “Remember that phone call you had at the Army and Navy Club? I told the fellows, I bet that’s from the White House. You’re flying high, fella.”
Having taken the wind out of Digger’s sails, Victor Henry was content to say nothing more. Digger waited, stuffed his pipe, lit it, then said, “What’s Roosevelt really like, Pug?”
Henry said something banal about the President’s charm and magnetism.
There was a knock on the door and the communications officer came in. “We raised the Marblehead, no strain, sir. It took all this time to get through to Berlin. What was that number again
?” Pug told him. “Yes, sir, that checks. The number doesn’t answer.”
The eyes of Digger Brown and Victor Henry met for a moment. Brown said, “At two in the morning? Better try again. Sounds like a foul-up.”
“We put it through three times, sir.”
“She might have gone out of town,” Henry said. “Don’t bother anymore. Thanks.”
The lieutenant left. Digger puffed thoughtfully at his pipe.
“Also, she cuts off the phone in the bedroom at night,” Henry said. “I forgot that. She may not hear the ringing in the library if the door’s closed.”
“Oh, I see,” Digger said. He puffed again, and neither said anything for a while.
“Well. Guess I’ll make tracks.” Victor Henry stood up.
The executive officer accompanied him to the gangway, looking proudly around at the vast main deck, the towering guns, the flawlessly uniformed watch. “Shipshape enough topside,” he said. “That’s the least I demand. Well, good luck on the firing line, Pug. Give my love to Rhoda.”
“If she’s still there, I will.”
They both laughed.
“Hello, Dad!” When Paul Munson’s plane landed, Warren was waiting at the Pensacola airfield in a helmet and flying jacket. The son’s handgrip, quick and firm, expressed all Warren’s pride in what he was doing. His deeply tanned face radiated exaltation.
“Say, where do you get this outdoors glow?” Pug said. He deliberately ignored the scar on his son’s forehead. “I thought they’d make you sweat in ground school here. I expected you to look like something from under a rock.”
Warren laughed. “Well, I had a couple of chances to go deep-sea fishing out in the Gulf. I tan fast.”
Driving his father to the BOQ, he never stopped talking. The flight school was in a buzz, he said. The day after Hitler invaded Poland, Washington had ordered the number of students tripled, and the yearlong course cut to six months. The school was “telescoping the syllabus.” In the old course a man qualified in big slow patrol planes, then in scout planes, and then, if he were good enough, went on into Squadron Five for fighter training. Now the pilots would be put on patrol, scout, or fighter tracks at once, and would stay in them. The lists would be posted in the morning. He was dying to make Squadron Five. Warren got all this out before he remembered to ask his father about the family.
