Pacific Interlude (46 page)

After studying the papers and making a plan he said, “Now what else can I do for you before I leave? How about food?”

“Supplies are always hard to get for the restaurant these days, and I am supporting a lot of people …”

“How many?”

“Seven members of my family work for this restaurant, mostly cousins and aunts. We have five children all together, some of them still very small …”

He suspected that at least one of the children was hers and she didn't want him to know because it was a part of herself she still needed to protect. Well, it was none of his business. She sat looking down at her hands, softly rubbing one against the other, as though reassuring herself.

“What kind of food do you need?” he said. “Make me a list.”

“How can you get it?”

“The
Y-18
has sailed but she can still draw stores.”

“You'll get in trouble—”

“Mary, my ship's”—
his
ship? no more—“is so unimportant, nobody even knows where the hell she is. In the madhouse out here nobody's going to check requisitions against a list of sailings. On paper I'll still be permanent commanding officer of the
Y-18
until I get new orders. I can draw stores.”

“Will this make you feel bad when you think about it?”

“I guess it's stealing, all right … I used to lecture Mr. Buller about that, but those army warehouses are full of stores that will probably rot, now that the fighting is over here. Stores are piled up all over the wharves because they've got no places to put them. If I divert some to your restaurant and your family, I won't lie awake nights, I guarantee you.”

“Thank you,” she said, and touched his face with one of her lovely hands.

He knew she did not want to make love that night. She could not stand more farewells. She poured him a drink. “Would you like to have dinner with me downstairs?”

It was a nice little restaurant, only a few tables in the back of the bar, and there was not much of a menu, but the rice and hot meat sauce were very good. When the kitchen door swung open he saw a middle-aged woman who looked a little like Mary's great-aunt working at a stove, a young girl washing dishes and two small children playing on the floor.

“This isn't the way the restaurant used to be,” she said. “There are four big rooms we haven't fixed up yet.”

“I bet that won't take long. Do you need building materials?”

“White paint, plaster and nails, all kinds of nails …”

He added those items to the list she had given to him.

“I'm pretty tired,” he said. “I've got a big day coming up. If I stay at the BOQ and drop in at the officers club I might even meet some guys who could help me to do business tomorrow.”

“What's a ‘BOQ'?”

“Bachelor Officers' Quarters. They're not much, but I'm so beat that I won't even know where I am tonight.”

“Thank you,” she said, and touched his face again.

His sense of so many kinds of loss had brought him close to a breaking point. The impersonal atmosphere of the barracks was a comfort. After taking a shower he walked to the officers' club and sat at the bar, nursing a Scotch and water.

He was going home, and he still did not quite know what that meant. He had more accumulated leave than he could count, but maybe he would still get to some landing ship being built on the Great Lakes. Somehow, though, he felt in his bones that the war would be over before he had time to get back to the Pacific. No matter how it worked out, he was pretty sure that Buller had at least been right about one thing … Japan couldn't stand against the entire world for long.

So it was all but over. It had been an interlude, like Sally had once said, and now … now what? Would they really just go on for the rest of their lives as though it had never happened? He couldn't believe that, didn't want to … He couldn't imagine a domestic bliss made up of a kind of endless shuttle run between home and office. The worst thing he could do was to return to Sally and breed a few children. But how could he keep a decent woman waiting all through the war and then announce that he was leaving her as soon as he came home? It was a question he hadn't allowed himself to think about during the long months on the
Y-18
. Now he had to face it, but he had no answer for it. Maybe because there
was
no answer. They'd both been trapped into early marriage, there was no way to escape without pain …

At least he should tell her the kind of life he wanted to lead and give her a chance to say yes or no … he had no doubt that her family would be indignant, accuse him of bad faith, and being an impractical dreamer. Who could say they'd be wrong? Of course, surviving the war was also statistically improbable, but here he was, on the eve of going home. And suddenly all his conflicts seemed unimportant. He was alive, and the hand that held his glass was still unburned, his flesh still covered his bones, and as he put down the glass and flexed his fingers he could feel the blood coursing through them. Instead of worrying about the future, he should thank God that he had one.

Tomorrow he would sign vouchers to draw food in the name of a ship that was still in great danger far away and give it to a few people at hand who had suffered more in this war than most soldiers or sailors. He would do his best to cut the red tape preventing Mary's family from picking up the thread of their lives. In some cases, he was sure, from just surviving.

A Pacific interlude … well, he guessed he'd done his bit. He had saved thirty-three men from a burning tanker. He realized that by the grace of God he still could say that no man had ever been killed aboard a ship he commanded—poor Rhinehart had died on another vessel.

He had lived a quarter of a century, about a third of his life, if he was lucky. The precious horde of days given to him at birth was perhaps two-thirds intact, still in his pocket to be spent one penny at a time. The lives of all those men aboard the
Y-18
were still on a gaming table, ready to be tossed into a murderous game at any moment, but there was no longer anything he could do about that. He'd at least tried to join them. His own treasure was still gripped tight in his fist, and he was about to leave the gambling casino. This one, anyway.

In a corner of the officers club a group of lieutenants led by a tall sardonic-looking man with a clear tenor voice actually began to sing “Bless 'Em All.” He listened for a while, reminded of Mostell, then walked to the Bachelor Officers' Quarters. The barracks were empty except for a few men who were sleeping heavily. One man snored fitfully, as Simpson often did after kneeling to say his prayers. Syl felt a strange compulsion to get on
his
knees by his bed, and after glancing around the room he did. He shut his eyes and pressed his forehead against the cool sheet. This time the Lord's Prayer came to his mind, not as a passage he had memorized and recited by rote in his childhood, but as something from the heart.

The next morning he thought for a moment he was still aboard the
Y-18
. When he opened his eyes and saw the sunlight streaming in the barracks window he felt an overwhelming sense of both gratitude, and aching loss …

Before starting out to take care of business for Mary he strolled down to the nearby waterfront. At the fuel docks he was startled to see a Y-tanker that from a short distance alway looked exactly like the
Lucky Eighteen
, but when he hurried closer he saw that she was a new ship that must have only recently arrived from the States. Her crew was disconnecting her cargo hose, and Syl stood watching while she got underway. As she backed into the harbor she gave three short blasts on her air horn, the very voice of the
Y-18
, as was the heavy beat of her Diesel. Her boatswain's mate shouted while the crew coiled up her lines and a young officer climbed to the flying bridge to con her out of the harbor.

Syl stared after her as she sailed past the wrecks of Japanese ships and the breakwaters. The surface of Manila Bay was as still as a mirror that sunny morning, and as she steamed into that blaze of light he had to look away, but even so, for a few minutes, he could still hear the beat of her Diesel like the pounding of his own heart. Then there was silence, broken only by the sounds of the city at his back, and this ship too disappeared as completely as though she had sailed over the edge of the world.

EPILOGUE

Oh, now that the battles are over
,

I'll tell you what we won:

A chance to fight more in some other war
,

And our pride in a job well done
.

The heroes who died aren't remembered
.

The wounded we try to forget
,

And we poor damn sinners who came out as winners

Are blamed for the national debt
.

The Krauts soon got richer than we are
,

The Japs found gold in their sun
,

But this we can say till our last dying day:

They sent us to war and we won
.

So bless 'em all, bless 'em all, bless 'em all
,

The long, the short and the tall
,

There will be no promotion this side of the ocean
,

I still say, my lads, bless 'em all!

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank my wife, Betty, for being my whole life support system.

Mr. John Franklyn Bailey, who served as engineer aboard the small gas tanker which I commanded in the Philippines, helped me to remember many of the details of those ships and those times. I did not base any fictional character on him because he was too good an officer and too fine a man to be believable.

Donald I. Fine's contribution to the writing of this book was far above and beyond the call of editorial duty. He should get some sort of publisher's medal.

S. W
.

About the Author

Sloan Wilson (1920–2003) was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, and graduated from Harvard University. An avid sailor, he joined the US Coast Guard shortly after Pearl Harbor, and during World War II commanded a naval trawler on the Greenland Patrol and an army supply ship in the South Pacific. Wilson earned a battle star for his role in an attack by Japanese aircraft, and based his first novel,
Voyage to Somewhere,
and two of his later books,
Ice Brothers and Pacific Interlude,
on his wartime experiences. In 1955 Wilson published
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,
a classic portrait of suburban ennui heralded by the
Atlantic
as “one of the great artifacts of popular culture in the 50's.” It was adapted into a successful film, as was its bestselling follow-up,
A Summer Place
.

An author of fifteen books, Wilson was living with his wife of forty years, Betty, on a boat in Colonial Beach, Virginia, at the time of his death.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

“Cup and Lip” originally appeared in the March 31, 1945 issue of
The New Yorker
.

Copyright © 1982 by Sloan Wilson

Cover design by Jamie Keenan

ISBN: 978-1-4976-8966-4

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

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EBOOKS BY SLOAN WILSON

FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA