The Edge of Honor (84 page)

“Well,” she said, sitting down abruptly in the leather chair, “my instincts were correct. The ship’s been in some kind of incident. That was Capt. Tom Farwell, the local headquarters chief of staff. And that’s all they know. He’ll call back.”

Maddy felt an icy finger touch a nerve somewhere in her stomach. “That’s all they know?” she asked, her voice unnaturally loud. “They call you in the middle of the god damned night and say something’s happened and we’ll get back to you?”

“Now, Maddy, don’t get all excited. Tom said that this was literally all the information they had at headquarters.

That’s the Navy system—when something happens, the ship is supposed to get a message out immediately, even if it only says something’s happened. That alerts the rest of the Navy and gets things moving—you know, other ships, helicopters, whatever.

This is standard procedure.”

“Standard procedure. My God. So what do we do now?”

Mrs. Huntington smiled sympathetically. “We wait for the next call. When I actually know something and can answer the same kinds of questions you’re asking, then you and I will make some phone calls to the other wives.

If it’s serious, I suspect those who can will gather over here in the morning until we find out the extent of it.”

“But did he say it was a collision, or a—”

“They don’t know, Maddy. They’ve received an initial report that Hood has been involved in some kind of incident, with amplifying information to follow. That’s literally all they have.”

Maddy sat back, suddenly ashamed of herself—and afraid. Ten minutes ago, she had been confidently calculating how she was going to put her marriage back on track. With one phone call, she had become, once again, a chip in the maelstrom, at the mercy of whatever news might be winging its way back across the dark Pacific.

Mrs. Huntington was speaking.

“It might be hours before they call again, Maddy. Let me show you to the guest room. You can try to get some sleep. I know you have to work in the morning.”

“Well, all right, but I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep. I mean, this is almost cruel, calling the wives like that and then leaving us all hanging.”

“Better that we hear it from the Navy than see it on the TV in the morning. The Navy tries very hard to protect its dependents. Come, the room’s right down here. \fes, bring that.”

Maddy took her snifter of cognac along with her to the guest room. Mrs. Huntington showed her where the bathroom was and then suggested she just turn out the lights and nap until the next phone call. “It literally might be tomorrow morning,” she said.

Maddy stood in the bedroom doorway. “Thanks for hearing me out tonight,”

she said. “I really needed to talk to a friendly face. I think I already knew what I was going to do, but it helps to be able to check it out.”

“Of course, dear. Now try to get some sleep. This will probably take a while.”

But it didn’t. The next phone call came in two hours, after Maddy had finally managed to drift off to sleep for about thirty minutes. Her senses must have been listening, because she sat bolt upright on the bed, still dressed.

She waited in the darkened bedroom and then heard Mrs. Huntingdon coming toward the back of the house. She got up and went to the door; her left foot was asleep. Mrs. Huntington was silhouetted at the end of the hallway.

“What did they say this time?” Maddy asked.

Mrs. Huntington spoke slowly, as if the words hurt.

“They said that the ship had been attacked by North Vietnamese aircraft and that there has apparently been some serious damage. There’s no word on personnel casualties, and it’ll be another hour or so before the nearest ship can get to her. All this came from one of the carrier aircraft when it was still dark out there. Tom says the initial reports are pretty—fragmentary, that was the word.”

Mrs. Huntington turned on the hall light. She suddenly looked much older, her normally bright face sagging just a bit around the edges in the harsh light. Maddy’s heart went out to her. So close, she thought, so close to capping off a thirty-year career with a big ship command, and now this, this unknown “incident.” She took two steps and reached out to touch the older woman’s arm.

“It’ll be all right,” she said, projecting a confidence she did not feel. “Hood’s a big ship, and Brian says the Gulf of Tonkin is full of Navy ships and aircraft. Hadn’t we better call some of the other wives now? And will the Navy have more information for us pretty soon?”

“Yes, we probably should, and no, I don’t think there’ll be anything more until the first ship gets there. Apparently Hoods not communicating. And actually, let’s not call anyone right now. It’s one-thirty in the morning, and we’d just frighten everyone we called for no good reason at this time of the night. The ferries don’t even start running until five-thirty. Go back to bed. I’ll call you at six and we can let the others know then.”

They got back up at six. Mrs. Huntington made the first call to Barbara Mains, the exec’s wife, which would bring her to the Huntington’s house at eight. Maddy reheated some coffee and tried to sort out her thoughts as Mrs. Huntington delivered the grim news. The rest of the wives straggled over throughout the morning, after dispatching kids to school.

Some with infants or preschoolers checked in by phone. Maddy remembered to call the bank, then helped to organize coffee when Mrs. Mains showed up. If the exec’s wife wondered why Maddy was already there, she did not ask and Maddy did not volunteer. By midmorning, there were a dozen worried women at the Huntingtons’, not including two next-door neighbors who had come over when they had seen all the cars. Both were retired Navy wives and had recognized the symptoms of a crisis. Tizzy Hudson had arrived last, coming from work. She had expressed to Maddy her total impatience with the lack of information.

“Damn Navy, all they do is play these games. Everything’s always hush-hush, big deal, big secret. I am so sick of this crap!”

The chief of staff called again at nine with no further news. He called again at eleven o’clock. Maddy answered the phone and handed it over to Mrs. Huntington. The captain’s wife listened in silence for a few minutes while the rest of the wives sat around the living room in chairs or on the floor and tried not to stare at her. Mrs. Huntington said thank you in a soft voice and then hung up. When she turned to face the women, her face was gray.

“Well,” she announced, “that was Capt. Tom Farwell, the chief of staff.

They’ve confirmed that the ship was attacked by several North Vietnamese jets in the middle of the night, sometime yesterday. Or perhaps it’s tomorrow —the time zones confuse me. Anyway, they apparently managed to shoot down all of them except one, which crashed aboard the ship.

There’s been a serious fire and one of the boiler rooms is flooded. The ship has been taken under tow by USS Preble to get her out of range of enemy aircraft. They’re going to go back to Subic. He said they had more details on the damage but that they felt we didn’t need to know them right now.

They have to figure out what they’re going to tell the press. And he warned me that the press might try to get information from us. He asked us to be discreet.”

“And what about … injuries?” asked Mrs. Grafton, not wanting to use the dreaded word casualties. Mrs. Huntington bowed her head. She spoke in a small voice.

“Everyone in the boiler room—and I think he said there were four enlisted men there—was killed when a steam line ruptured. There may have been two or three other enlisted killed in the CIC when a part of the jet came through the superstructure; they’re still not sure how many.”

“So all the casualties were enlisted?” asked Mrs. Mains, posing the question that was on everyone’s mind.

Mrs. Huntington stared at the floor. “No,” she said finally. “There was one officer who died. The headquarters chaplain is on his way over here right now.”

There was a general intake of breath in the room. “You mean he wouldn’t tell you who?” Tizzy cried, an edge of hysteria showing in her voice.

Mrs. Huntington gave her a severe look.

“They never do that over the phone, Tizzy. They’re on their way right now. I think … I think we all just have to be patient and quiet, and not get all hysterical. I know … I know this is very hard, for you, for me, for all of us. It’s rather like waiting for a jury, isn’t it? I think I’ll just go make some more coffee,” she said as she turned away from the ring of stunned faces in her living room.

Maddy sat down hard on a cushion on the floor and hugged her knees. She could not bear to look at any of the other women’s faces, afraid that she would start crying as two of them already had done. She saw Tizzy staring at the floor and biting her nails. A storm of thoughts whirled through her own mind. It was as if an executioner was coming, an executioner who would pull into the driveway in a half hour in a black sedan, who would get out, knock on the door, and then ask, a piece of paper in his hand, which one of them was Mrs.—who?

Everyone in the room was silent, allowing the sounds of a fall morning on Coronado to intrude: birds in the garden singing, the occasional car going by out front, the muted thunder of jets over on the air station heading out for the day’s training sessions, the blat of the ferry’s horn and an answering whistle from a destroyer standing down the channel. Another great Navy day, as Brian would sometimes quip as he headed out to the base in the morning. Jesus Christ, could it be him?

She searched her intuition and found nothing. No anticipatory dread, no unbidden certain knowledge, no fatal hunches. Brian was alive. Brian had survived. How could she know that?

Was she just indulging in blind optimism, whistling past the graveyard, her subconscious lying to her to protect her from such a calamity? Wives always know when something’s happened. Faithful, loving wives always know, that is. Unfaithful, selfish, “it’s me or the Navy”

wives, they may not know. For the first time, the import of what might be coming and the possible connection, the consequence of her infidelity, began to loom over her like an approaching thundercloud. She hugged herself tighter, her mind squeezing out the images even as her eyes squeezed back the tears.

The sounds of the official car’s arrival outside in the street penetrated the silence in the living room like a glass breaking. They could hear every sound—the brakes, the idling engine shutting down, the chunk of doors. Maddy couldn’t stand it. She got up and headed for the front door. Mrs. Huntington had come back into the living room and was standing in the middle of the room, her hands worrying a dish towel.

Maddy saw her face out of the corner of her eye, saw her expression, and then the cold flash of intuition came. She knew just from looking at the older woman’s face. She knew. She whipped her face around to look through the window in the door, and when she saw the tall four-striper coming up the walk with the young chaplain, his face grim, the piece of paper in his hands, she remembered what Brian had said about these things. If a lieutenant commander dies, they send a lieutenant commander to make the notification. They had sent a captain.

Her mouth dry, her eyes stinging, she opened the door. The two officers stopped outside, out of Mrs. Huntingdon’s line of vision. Maddy stared at them until she realized she was blocking the doorway. She stepped back, unconsciously trying to put distance between herself and them. The captain stepped through the doorway and looked across the room directly at Mrs. Huntington.

She looked back into his eyes for a few seconds and then visibly wilted, dropping the towel and putting both hands to her mouth and making a small sound of despair. While the rest of the wives looked on uncomprehendingly at first, Maddy moved quickly across the room to hold her, to put her arms around her and to pull her in, and, to her sudden surprise, to hold her upright. Out of the corner of her eye, Maddy saw a gray-faced Tizzy Hudson put her hand over her mouth as if she was going to be sick. Mrs. Huntington had been taller than Maddy, but now she seemed to have shrunk with the blow. There was a chorus of

“Oh no,”

“My God,” all uttered from the heart and propelled by a marrow-deep sense of relief among them that the blow had fallen on someone else.

Captain Farwell and the chaplain helped Maddy to shepherd Mrs. Huntington into the study, where she collapsed into one of the leather chairs. Maddy stepped back as Mrs. Mains led the rest of the wives into the study. She joined in the chorus of condolences, torn as they all were between the emotions of sympathy and grief for the captain and his wife and her secret urge to shout with joy that it was not her husband, followed in turn by a small wave of guilt for being selfish at a time like this.

Maddy edged out of the room when she could, suddenly needing to be alone, away from this storm of raw emotions and away from the one person in the house who had been touched by death. Besides, she was not one of them; her good intentions had come a little late. She slipped out the door to the garden.

It was a typically bright and beautiful San Diego day outside. She suddenly hated this city with its postcard setting by the sea, its idyllic weather, its perpetually blue skies and balmy temperatures that seemed to be indifferent to the fate of ordinary mortals. She could visualize a massive earthquake, the “big one,” as they called it out here, with the city in ruins and thousands perished in the rubble, and the skies would still be blue and the temperature lovely, despite the calamity on the ground. A Navy jet arced slowly over the neighborhood, turning on final for North Island. San Diego had been a Navy town for a long time. She wondered how many times over the decades this scene had been replayed, somber men in uniforms coming in black cars to tell yet another terrified woman that her world had ended on the sea.

Standing in the garden, listening to the sounds of grief, consolation, and anxiety within, she found all of her resolve and resolution dissolving, in the past week, she had learned that Brian and her marriage meant much more to her than she had ever imagined. She realized now that to “do your own thing” with human relationships was a snare and a delusion: It implicitly meant that you were going to go through life forever alone. But now this. Good God, was this how it would end? Last night, she had been ready to muster all of her strength, her powers of manipulation, and her determination to go forward with their Navy career. But now she was afraid again, afraid and very much alone.