Pacific Interlude (28 page)

Syl returned to his cabin and lay down in his bunk. Despite all the whiskey he had drunk he felt more light-headed than hung over. His mind seemed to be racing like a movie projector gone wild, providing flickering, unconnected images. He thought of his father as he had looked shortly before he died, his face as yellow from illness as his own was now from the atabrine pills.

“In the end, accomplishment is all that matters in life for people like us,” his father had said. “I wish I hadn't wasted so much time. I've forgotten every pleasure I've ever had in life except the joy of my few accomplishments. I wish there were more.”

If he were about to die, what accomplishments would he remember with pleasure? Syl's mind drew a blank. If he knew he had only a few hours to live, he would remember only the women he had loved, and he would wish that there were more, or at least that he had had more good nights with one. It occurred to him for the first time that except for the few women he had known, most of his life had been either terrifying or boring.

He had not—he hoped—made a habit of feeling sorry for himself, but it seemed now that most of his early youth had been a process of learning to jump through flaming hoops like a circus tiger, with his mother or teacher or wife or some superior officer cracking a whip in his face. Stand up straight. Keep your elbows off the table. Learn the multiplication tables. Translate Caesar. Go to church, don't think about girls too much, love is beautiful, don't confuse it with lust … marriage meant above all being a husband who could earn money to support the wife, no matter how suffocating a job he had to take to do it. Commanding a ship was maybe a step up, but like everything else it was a burden … the only exception was love, and it seemed to him now that he had seen only enough of that to know how much of it he had missed.

Mostly for him … on account of his background he'd never quite shaken loose from … love had been something to feel guilty about … He remembered running with Sally in a field of uncut hay back when they were about sixteen years old, not long after he had first met her. Her family had rented a cottage that summer on a farm by Trout Brook in the Adirondacks. They had gone fishing, caught nothing, but on the way home they had run across this field where uncut hay waved in the wind like ocean swells. Sally had tripped in a woodchuck hole and had fallen with a sharp cry, disappearing in the tall grass as though she were sinking in water. He had thrown himself down beside her, and after finding that she was not really hurt, they had lain there, looking up at white clouds sailing overhead. He could still remember the sweet smell of the crushed grass under them and the hum of insects everywhere, the chirping of the katydids, the call of red-winged blackbirds swooping over them. He had kissed her for the first time and, shivering with guilt as much as with desire, had run his hand up under her shirt, feeling the astonishing swell of her breasts under taut cotton. She had even helped him to take her skirt off, releasing her full softness and he had seen her for the first time. That was the first time he had seen any girl, and he had been so awed by her beauty that he had kept thinking he didn't care
what
happened to him,
this
sin was worth any punishment.

That time they had not made love fully but they had gone far enough to make her cry and claim he would never respect her, which seemed to him crazy … he'd have to be blind not to respect those breasts, but she had kept on crying, saying now he would never want to marry her, nobody would marry her because he'd tell and she'd be disgraced. He promised on the spot to marry her as soon as he got out of college, which wouldn't be too long because he was two years ahead of himself and was starting Columbia in the fall. She had stopped crying, and he … with stars and those breasts in his eyes … had been full of gratitude for her beauty and understanding and generosity. It never occurred to him he was making a commitment to live the way she wanted them to for the rest of their lives, and when it finally dawned on him he'd accepted it as somehow fair punishment, and payment for the ultimate joy she gave him. Once a Calvinist, always a Calvinist. Sometimes he wondered if she hadn't deliberately trapped him, but that seemed pretty ridiculous. They'd done it to each other, for each other's needs. They weren't so special, after all … sex had gotten them together, but there had never been a meeting of the minds … He was still grateful for the good days with Sally, in spite of their price, but it was his brief affairs with Angel and Teddy that had opened his eyes … yes, he was a retard in some ways … to the fact that love could be free of guilt and duty and the rest of the things he was taught as gospel. No matter how long he lived, he was sure he would never forget Angel's rippling back as she walked into that stuffy restaurant in her wonderfully outrageous dress or the delicious, uninhibited way they had played footsie while spooning up flaming Cherries Jubilee. And Teddy … her intense, high-cheek-boned face … her ironic mind, her sardonic but joyful spirit … they had been in their fashion as exciting as her lovemaking. She was in his memory like a good book he had lost before finishing. Angel and Teddy … they'd made him realize there was a world out there that was too mysteriously beautiful to leave unexplored—

Syl was jarred from his thoughts by Simpson, who said, “Captain, we've got three men who want to go up to the navy sick bay. They think they got the clap.”

Back to reality. “How did they get the clap out
here?”

“Those native girls who come alongside in canoes have been sneaking into the forecastle. I try to stop 'em, but obviously nobody else does.”

The native girls had seemed so forlorn to Syl that he at least hadn't expected this.

“We getter get 'em up to the sick bay as soon as we can.” Simpson said. “There's a bulletin out that says this local crud is hard to cure. Mr. Buller has just gone up to get the mail. When he comes back I'll tell him to hold the truck and run them up.”

Syl nodded, went back to his cabin and stared at his desk. Painful as it would be, he had to force himself to write to Mostell's widow—he could send the letter to the personnel officer in Washington with a note asking him to forward it. And so he wrote:

Dear Mrs. Mostell:

Frank and I were friends out here, and I thought you might like to know how much his fellow officers respected, admired and, yes, loved him. He had great courage and a kind of cheer we all needed. I saw his ship hit. There was absolutely nothing he could have done about it, and I can assure you that his death was at least mercifully quick. I will remember him for the rest of my life, as will those who served with him. If you and his children knew how well he did a very difficult job out here, and how much he meant to all the people who worked with him, I'm sure you would be even prouder of him than you must already be. I know it does not help much to realize that without such tragedies as Frank's death this war could never be won and our country could not survive. Please accept my condolences. He often showed me your picture and I know how proud of you he was …”

Syl paused. He certainly had liked Mostell, but he had been nowhere near as close to him as the letter implied, and had never seen the picture of his wife—Paul Schuman had told him about that. The letter he had just written was at least in small part a lie, but its purpose was to give comfort, and this was the best he could do. He wondered whether Paul Schuman would write a letter like this one to Sally if the
Y-18
blew up. No doubt, and then Sally would at least have a good cry, forgetting all the arguments they had had. She'd get a Gold Star to paste in the window, ten thousand dollars of GI insurance, and a small pension until she got remarried. Probably that would be the best out for her. Next time around she could pick a man who really wanted to work in her father's insurance agency and settle down in the suburbs instead of a character who was restless ashore and didn't really know, to be truthful, what in hell he wanted.

Feeling sorry for yourself, captain? Sorry, hell … just scared witless and shitless.

CHAPTER 22

A
FTER MAILING THE
letter, he returned to his cabin to find Buller had dropped off a dozen letters from Sally. After reading quickly her praise of the Stamford garden club and a description of a house she wished they could buy, he felt uneasy, guilty even about his earlier thoughts about her. Her attention was damned nice, and a bit surprising. When he was at home she sometimes didn't tell him anything about her thoughts for weeks at a time. Maybe she loved him more when he was away, and maybe she had a point. Maybe
he
was easier to take out of sight than on the premises. The picture of him in uniform she kept on her bedside table did not leave dirty underwear on the bathroom floor and didn't keep trying to lay her every morning before she was half awake.

In reply to her last hundred letters, he had managed to scrawl only a few desperate pages over the last few weeks, but what did one write from the Philippines to a girl in Stamford, Connecticut? He could not tell her that his sister ship had just blown up and that one of his good friends had just been incinerated, not only because the naval censors would disapprove but because there was a terrible necessity for wives and husbands to cheer each other up. Certainly he could not tell her that he was scared, didn't rate his chances high for surviving the war. He could not exactly add that on the bright side he had had two marvelous one-night stands with great women he had met in Australia, memories of whom kept him from going nuts out here. No, such great truths were better kept to himself, in fact
any
truth about the life he was leading should not be allowed to intrude on the presumed everlasting intimacy of marriage.

Should he tell her that he had an ensign aboard who was six feet three, a gorilla of a man who kept asking him to sabotage the ship because the whole war was a bunch of horseshit anyway? He could tell her about Simpson, but she would be sore at him if he seemed to disparage religion by admitting that he couldn't stand the man. If he told her that they had a good old engineer aboard who thought only of leaving his wife in California for a young girl he had met in Australia, she would of course sympathize only with the wife. And Sally definitely would not be amused if he told her that three men in the forecastle had somehow managed to get the clap despite the fact that they never got ashore.

No, truth was not a fit subject for connubial correspondence, but his hand froze when it tried to concoct lies. So finally he wrote her a page about the natives who had sold them a monkey by letting it escape to their ship and then had sold them bananas to feed it. He left out the part about the monkey dying that same night. Sally was tender-hearted about animals. She would cry over the dead monkey more than she would about Mostell.

Syl felt quite virtuous as he sealed two pages into an envelope and rapped it with the naval censor stamp, but even before he got a chance to drop it in the box Buller came in and spilled fifty-three more letters from Sally onto his bunk.

“Boy, your wife is sure the champion letter writer of all time,” he said with a grin.

Syl arranged the letters in the chronological order of their postmarks and determinedly opened the latest one first to make sure everything was all right at home.

“Dearest Syl,” Sally wrote in small, slanting letters. “Last night I went to a movie with mom and dad. We saw “Casablanca,” and although I'd seen it before I really enjoyed it. I think you look a little like Humphrey Bogart, although he's much older and you don't have such a mean face, and mom told me that I look a little like Ingrid Bergman. What were the two of us doing over there in North Africa anyway?

“I felt a little blue when I got home and dad told me a very comforting thing. He said that when he was in the First World War he thought it would last forever and change everything completely, including him, but when he got home he found he hadn't changed at all and neither had anything else. The war was just an interlude, he said, and looking back, it didn't seem long at all.

“At first I wondered how this war could ever seem short to us, but when I look back those two years you spent on the North Atlantic and the Greenland Patrol seem like nothing, even though they felt endless at the time. They were just an interlude too, and I'm sure that as soon as you get home these years you're spending in the Pacific will seem like just another interlude, sort of like your years at college. They'll change nothing and we'll go on, just as though the war never happened …”

Syl stopped there and put the letter down. If this bloody war was just an interlude that would change nothing, why the hell was he in it? Could he really accept that? Get the little house in Connecticut, which meant selling insurance, instead of finishing his doctor's degree. Have children right away. Forget about becoming another Samuel Eliot Morison and sailing in the wakes of great voyagers to write their histories … He hadn't thought of
that
in a long while and was surprised to find that he hadn't seen enough of the sea to be tired of it. Weary of this war, sick of this tanker, he had a sudden image of himself sailing a red-sailed little cutter with a girl as crew who looked like Angel with Teddy's brains in the wake of the Vikings, out from Norway through the Mediterranean and up the Volga clear into Russia. A man needed some vision like that to help him stay alive through the war. Better than the prospect of PTA meetings and Rotary Club lunches. That hybrid perfect coadventurer would be sitting half-naked at the wheel while he stood in the cockpit taking his noon sights, and of course their boat would have a dragon's head on the bow, just like the old Vikings did. Dream on, captain …

Syl forced himself to return to his wife's letter, and he, in his fashion, felt guiltier than ever when she ended it with declarations of undying love and X's for kisses. What the hell, he thought, life's an interlude too. Who could blame him for wanting to make the most of it? Or blame Sally for wanting to do the same, according to
her
dreams—?