Honorable Men (16 page)

He suspected that his attitude towards women might bear a relation to that of the ancient Greeks: that the satisfaction which they offered was largely physical. But Alida was obviously not going to be contented with any such limited role in his life. She seemed determined, on the contrary, to explore every aspect of his personality for the possible existence of hidden doors and rooms. The beautiful worldly debutante, who had happily resigned her tiara to be Mrs. Charles Benedict, was showing definite signs of using her leisure time—of which, it seemed, she had decidedly too much—to study her lord and master. Why could she not find a better occupation?

For unlike his Greek predecessors, Chip was not opposed to careers for women, nor did he deem women intellectually inferior to men. He had the greatest respect for his mother's intellectual capacities, and if he recognized that his father's were greater, he did not think that sex was the reason for it. But he did believe, where mere companionship was concerned, that men had more to give men, and women, presumably, more to give women, than either sex had to give to the other. He would not have begrudged Alida a job; he did begrudge her a life hobby of himself.

“Why don't you write a novel?” he would ask her. “These sonnets are all very well, but I think it's time you took on something more challenging.”

It was a pity for her, he supposed, that he had a mind that could take in only one field at a time. At Yale he had been preoccupied with literature, Alida's favorite subject, but now it was law, and there was no way that she could join him in the subtleties of interpreting the commerce clause or in the intricacies of corporate reorganizations. Besides, she wouldn't have liked it even had she understood it. It wasn't her kind of thing. She could never have shared his delight in legal categories or in the relief that his imagination found at the “reasonable” borderlines where legal thinking called a halt to speculation. She would not have admired, as he did, the practical solutions of the common law to the chaotic problems raised by human perversity. Alida's enthusiasm and romanticism, indeed, had begun to seem messy to him.

And yet if she would only stay, so to speak, on her side of the bed, how charming she could be! Chip did not believe in making love except when he was actually so engaged; in fact, he was disgusted by couples who were always exchanging amorous ogles. He had been most attracted to Alida when she had most resisted him; he wondered, wistfully at times, what had happened to the mocking girl who had been so rude to his parents on their first meeting.

His restlessness at her aimlessness, however, turned into something more like disapproval when she at last seemed to have developed a purpose in life: that of bringing about a reconciliation with his parents. It was as if she had scented the renewal of “normalcy” that must inevitably follow his graduation, the return to the “real world” of Benedict that would end the golden fantasy of Charlottesville, and that she wanted to break in her husband to the life that there had never been any serious doubt (except in his own daydreams) that they were going eventually to lead. Was Alida any different, really, from his own mother in her fixed female adherence to the here and now, her refusal to accept any real nobility of concept as aught but a male fantasy? Oh, women could be revolutionaries, yes, and then they threw bombs, but short of that they took their chances, all too happily, with the status quo.

But the worst thing that happened to him in Virginia was not of Alida's making. It was of Chessy's. That Chessy should have shown himself rotten to the core, putrid beyond any chance of redemption, had been a blow from which Chip did not immediately see how he was going to recover. For it had been Chessy with whom he had first allied himself, soul to soul, in the crisis that had shown him his parents for the shallow materialists they were. And if Chessy had to be cast into the outer darkness to which all along Elihu and Matilda Benedict had gladly consigned him, if Alida, the bright and beautiful, was converted to an obsequious daughter-in-law, if all the privileged youth of the Farmington Country Club brayed mockingly like donkeys at the very idea of Chip Benedict ever being anything that they had not taken entirely for granted (did he not subsist on Benedict dividends?), what had become of his resolution to be a free soul? Did he even have a clear idea of what he wanted to do with the shining sword of his new professional capacity?

***

For all of these reasons the advent of war came as an actual relief to Chip. All decisions were now indefinitely or—who knew?—perhaps permanently postponed. Right after graduation he enrolled in midshipmen's school on the USS
Prairie State,
docked in New York, and received his commission as an ensign just before Pearl Harbor.

He was ordered immediately to sea and spent a year on an old destroyer escorting convoys in the Caribbean between Guantanamo and Colon. It was dull duty, punctured by a very occasional submarine attack, for the Germans were more occupied with the supply route to England than with stopping the shipment of cigarettes and magazines to the armed forces in the Canal Zone. To Chip, the long night watches and the never-changing tasks constituted a not altogether unpleasant vacuum, a kind of drugged routine, a suspension of life.

He did not feel so much parted in space from Alida and their baby girl as in time. His wife and child seemed to belong to Charlottesville, to the Blue Ridge, to the golden haze into which his law school days had retreated. He did not really miss them, because in an odd way they had ceased to exist for him. When he thought of them, he thought of them with affection, and his letters to Alida were conscientious and detailed. But he did not think of them very much. And when, during his ship's dry dock period in Colon, he moved into the apartment of a famous stripper, who filled the biggest cabaret in town nightly by a dance in which she simulated her own rape by a gorilla, her torso divided longitudinally between a hairy ape skin and shining nudity, he felt no remorse. The stripper corresponded to war as Alida did to peace.

Alida wrote him long, lonely, nostalgic, uncharacteristic letters from Benedict, where she was living with his parents.

“It seems so wrong that I should be sitting up here with every comfort while you toss about the ocean, a prey to hungry gray Nazi sharks. And yet I would gladly change with you, darling, for the mere bliss of knowing you were safe. Yet imagine you here, with the baby and me on the bridge of a destroyer! How you would loathe me if I were able, by a miracle, to effect such a transfer! War seems to bring out the elementary difference between the sexes. But is it not time that you applied for a little home leave? Might you not even be entitled to a spell of shore duty? Oh, dearest, please! Your mother refuses to join me in this plea, which I have just read aloud to her. She says that a man must make up his own mind in these matters. Didn't you once compare her with Volumnia in
Coriolanus
? You were so right! And yet she and your father have been more loving to me than my parents ever dreamed of being. They are beyond praise.”

Chip did not at all like this rather crawling submission to what he deemed the suffocating affections of Elihu and Matilda. And he certainly had no idea of applying for shore duty. Instead, when his destroyer was scheduled for decommissioning, and the officers were asked to submit their applications for new duty, he put his in for amphibious training.

The skipper raised his eyebrows when he read it. “Here's one application that's sure to be granted. What the hell are you doing this for?”

He was granted two weeks' leave before reporting for duty at an amphibious training camp on the Chesapeake, and he elected to spend it in a suite in the St. Regis in New York. Alida joined him there, with the baby, but he dispatched the little girl and her nurse back to Benedict after only a day that they might not interfere with musicals and night clubs. Chip planned the maximum distraction to help him and Alida with the difficulty that so many couples found in wartime reunions, and he was relieved when it was time to go to Virginia. He hoped that he would be able to cope with this too adoring, rather sticky war wife when peace returned, but in the meantime he could not seem to be both a naval officer and a husband. He was able to do something for the poor girl, at any rate, for, as they soon found out, she was pregnant when he left.

It would have been possible for Alida to stay in a hotel near Camp Crawford, but he would not allow this. He told her, honestly enough, that her presence would distract him, and she meekly assented. He had no wish further to confuse his time zones.

At Camp Crawford, where the long brown barracks descended a long brown bank to the flat gray of the Chesapeake, Chip found himself the designated commanding officer of an LST, or landing ship tanks, a three-hundred-and-thirty-foot amphibious vessel then nearing completion at the Boston Navy Yard. In Virginia, for indoctrination with him on training LSTs in the Chesapeake, were his eleven junior officers. Chip soon realized that his new elevation was a hardly dazzling one. None of his fellow officers had ever been to sea, even in a sailboat; they were fresh out of college and ready enough to take orders from a man who had not only spent a year on a destroyer in a war zone, but had graduated from law school. The courses were easy, and he spent most of his time coaching them.

The only person at Camp Crawford who interested him at all was his future flotilla commander. Gerald Hastings, Commander, USN, thirty-seven years of age, was a stocky man, a bit on the short side, with thick, long blond hair that came down low over his forehead, a hooked nose and eyes of an expressionless white-gray. He looked out of the latter at a world of conscripted civilians as if he were doing all that he could to control his impatience, and before he spoke he would pause, as if to get his natural exasperation under rein. It was obvious that he considered his amphibious command as one totally unfitting an officer trained in the “real” navy. Rumor had it that as navigator of the newly commissioned battleship
Florida,
he had been held responsible for the grazing of the sacred hull against a rock on the Maine coastline during her shakedown cruise. Disgrace had been followed by amphibious assignment. Rumor also had it that the captain of the
Florida
had disregarded his navigator's warning but that a doctored log had covered the true culprit at a board of investigation. This was enough to make Hastings a Byronic hero to Chip, and he forgave his aloofness, his driving discipline, his occasional savage sarcasms. For Hastings was a relentless taskmaster, who never saw fit to praise or even encourage. Reserve officers to him were so many gnomes who had to be drilled; one could not expect excellence, and it would be idle to deplore incompetence.

One autumn afternoon some twenty officers were on board one of the training ships to practice beaching. Under way to the area of operations, Chip watched Hastings standing alone on the starboard wing of the bridge, facing the brisk wind, his eyes watching the old battleship
New York
also on a training cruise, as she approached the slowly moving line of LSTs. He saw the chief quartermaster, sleek, fat, mustachioed, approach the commander with the oily insinuation that some basic understanding had to exist between a regular officer and a regular NCO exiled in a motley mob of reserves. Chip could not hear what the chief was saying, but he could hear the commander's reply.

“I don't have to talk to you, Chief.”

Chip almost laughed aloud. There was no reproach in the commander's tone, no reprimand, hardly even a rebuff. It was the simple statement that he did not choose to speak to anyone to whom he was not duty bound. And the chief took it so! He carried his rejected gossip back to the wheelhouse, where he was soon enough busy taking down a flashed message from the
New York
But when he emerged to show the message to the commander, he would not have been human had he not revealed a glint of malicious satisfaction. Later, Chip learned that the message had read, “Get that junk out of my way.”

So did the commanding officer of a battlewagon deign to address an order to an amphibious flotilla! Chip noted the tightened lips of the commander as he silently handed the message back to the chief. The line of LSTs changed course.

Later, during the beaching exercises, Chip watched the commander's face each time their vessel approached the shore at her flank speed of eleven knots. Just before the impact the commander would abruptly avert his gaze. He could not bear to witness the contact of the bottom of a naval ship to soil! Was it not the nightmare of every regular officer to find himself heading at full speed to an imminent collision? And did that nightmare not have to be a living hell to the former navigator of the
Florida
?

On their way back to the camp after the exercises, Hastings walked suddenly over to Chip and lit a cigarette.

“I understand you served a year on the
Seward,
Benedict. Whatever made you put in for this duty?”

“It's a new kind of warfare, sir.”

“But you might have had a spot on a cruiser.”

“I suppose it seems odd to you, sir. But as this may be the only war I'll ever be in, I wanted to see more than one side of it.”

Hastings grunted. “You sound like a dilettante.”

Chip stiffened. “Will that be all, sir?”

“No. How would you like to be skipper of my flagship?”

Chip was pleased but hardly surprised. He had seen the commander's eye on him; he was obviously better than the others. “Very much, sir.”

“I'd like to talk to you.” It was difficult for Hastings to show even passable manners to a junior. “Shall we go out tonight for a few drinks?”

“I'm at your disposal, sir.”

“I'll pick you up in my jeep at eight. At your BOQ.”

They drove that night to a bar in a town ten miles from the camp. Clearly the commander wanted to get away from everything that suggested the amphibious navy. In their dark little booth he drank Scotch after Scotch. To Chip's surprise, he did not seem to wish to discuss flotilla business. He told him instead about the insulting message from the
New York