War and Remembrance

  “So Aster’s got command now?”

  “Yes, it’s Captain Aster, no more Lady.”

  “I don’t like him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, God’s gift to women, isn’t he? And he grins like the phantom of the opera.”

  That made Byron laugh. “Phantom of the opera! Not bad.”

  He helped her carry food and wine out to a table of wrought iron and glass on the lanai. She lit candles, though the sunset still glowed beyond the trees. They drank California burgundy with the meat loaf she had hastily prepared. Byron emptied glass after glass as he talked about Aster’s first patrol. They had sunk two ships before the summons back to base, and Byron thought Carter Aster was going to be one of the great skippers of the war. His eyes began to gleam. “Say, Jan, can you keep a secret?”

  “Indeed I can.”

  “We sank a hospital ship.”

  “My God, Byron!” She stared and gasped. “Why, that’s an atrocity, it’s — ”

  “Just let me tell this, will you? It was the goddamnedest experience of my life. I spotted the ship myself when I had the deck, about midnight. Unescorted, floodlights on a white hull, brilliant running lights, huge red cross painted on her side. This was in the Makassar Strait off Java. Aster came topside, took one look, and ordered a dive and an approach. Well, I figured it was a practice run. But when he said, ’Open the outer doors’ I cracked. ‘Captain,’ I said, ‘is this an attack?’ He ignored me, just kept boring in. I was on the computer. At about fifteen hundred yards I had a perfect solution, but I felt guilty as hell, and the exec was just scratching his head and keeping his mouth shut. ‘Captain,’ I said, ‘this target is a hospital ship. If there’s a general court martial I’ll have to say so.’ ‘Yes, you do that, Briny. I’m going to shoot him now,’ he says, cool as a popsicle, chewing on his cigar. ‘Stand by! Up periscope. Final bearing and shoot!’ And off went four fish.”

  “Byron, he’s a maniac!”

  “Janice, will you listen? That baby blew up in a fireball you could see for a hundred miles! It was a disguised ammunition ship. Nothing else could have blown like that. We surfaced and watched it burn. It kept whizzing and popping and spraying fire. It took forever to sink. The fireworks just went on and on. And once it did go down, why, the sea was full of strange dark floating shapes. We hove to till dawn, and they turned out to be huge balls of crude rubber, ten or fifteen feet across. Those things were bobbing all the way to the horizon. That ship was transporting rubber from Java, honey, with a big load of ammo. Probably captured Dutch stuff.”

  “How could he know that? He might have drowned two thousand wounded men.”

  “He guessed right. Don’t ever repeat that story, Jan.”

  “Horrors, no.”

  The doorbell rang. She left the table and soon reappeared. “Speak of the devil.” Carter Aster followed her in dress whites, clean-shaven, slim and straight, cap under his arm.

  “Briny, the base pool ran out of jeeps. Will you give me a lift down the hill about ten? The cabs won’t come up at curfew time.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “I’ll turn up here again.” Aster directed his strange grin — curled corners on a hard mouth — at Janice. “If that’s okay with you.”

  Janice said to Byron, “Won’t you be sleeping over?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it. A hot bath, a real bed? Thanks, I sure will.”

  “We’re on twenty-four hours’ notice, Byron,” Aster said.

  “I’ll be back at 0800, Captain.”

  “Made up your mind yet about staying aboard?”

  “Let you know in the morning.”

  Janice could guess why Byron was saying nothing about Natalie. The news would only intensify Aster’s pressure on him to remain with the Devilfish.

  “The latest poop is that they’re coming in force to invade Alaska,” Aster said to Janice. “Heard anything like that at Cincpac?”

  She shook her head, unsmiling. He grinned at her and left.

  “Which lucky lady is he visiting up here?” Janice asked.

  Byron’s answer was an evasive shrug.

  “Now that’s mean, Briny. I’ll suspect every wife on the hill.”

  “Can’t help your evil mind, Jan.”

  As they chatted into the evening about the family and the war, moving inside and drawing the blackout curtains, Byron’s manner began to strike Janice as odd. He was wandering in his talk, and giving her awkward, sombre glances. Too much wine? Sexual stirrings? In her brother-in-law that seemed inconceivable. Still, he was a young sailor back from the sea. When he went off for a bath she decided to stay dressed, to keep the lights turned up, and to put away the liquor.

  “God, that was marvelous.” He emerged in Warren’s pajamas and robe, towelling his head. “I haven’t had a bath since Albany.”

  “Albany?”

  “Albany, Australia.” He flopped loose-limbed on the rattan couch. “Lovely tiny town, as far away as you can go on God’s green earth. Wonderful people. Our tender was berthed there. Got any bourbon, Jan?” His manner was quite matter-of-fact.

  Janice felt ashamed of her imaginings. She brought two drinks. Stretching out on the couch, he took a swig, and morosely shook his head. “God, to think of seeing Natalie again! And the baby. Incredible.”

  “You don’t sound all that happy.”

  “There was a girl in Albany. Maybe I’m feeling guilty.”

  “Wow.” She made a small drama of falling in an armchair.

  “I met her in church. She sang in the choir, a small choir, everything’s small in Albany. Just three other singers and this girl. She played the organ, too. It’s a tiny little toy seaport, Albany — just three streets and a church and a town hall. Clean, charming, lots of lawns, flowerbeds, old nice houses, old oaks, totally British and nineteenth-century. It’s another world.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Her name’s Ursula Cotton. Her father owns the little town bank. Very sweet, very proper. Her guy is a tank corps officer in North Africa. Our sub had two overhauls, two months apart. Both times we were inseparable, every minute I could get ashore.”

  “And —?”

  Byron made a despairing gesture with both hands. “And? And we sailed, and here I am.”

  “Byron, I’m not clear on one point. Did anything happen?”

  “Did anything happen?” He angrily frowned. “You mean did I get into her pants?”

  “Well, you put it rather horridly.”

  “Christ! You, too? Carter Aster, every time I’d come back to the sub, he’d say, Well, did you get into her pants?’ I finally said if he’d come ashore, and forget about being captain, I’d straighten him out about Ursula once and for all. That ended that.”

  “Dear, it makes a difference —”

  “Look, I said her guy was fighting in North Africa. What do you take me for? That was a torment, but still it was beautiful. It made life endurable. I’ll never write her. It’s no use. But by God, I’ll never forget Ursula.”

  Janice got out of her chair, and placed both hands on his shoulders. Leaning over him so that her scented yellow hair cascaded on him, she kissed his lips. With a businesslike rub of a thumb on his mouth she said, “Natalie’s lucky. Brothers can sure be different. What Warren has put me through!”

  “Well, you married a hell-raiser, you knew that.”

  “I did, indeed.”

  Byron yawned and shook his head. “Strangely, I only got crazier about Natalie all that time. I kept thinking of her. Ursula was lovely, but compared to Natalie! Natalie’s a powerhouse. There’s nobody in the world like her.”

  “Well, I envy Natalie. I envy Little Miss Ursula, too. Natalie would forgive you and her both. That’s my guess.” A bitter wrinkling smile. “Even if you had gotten into her pants, as Lady Aster would say. It’s war, you know. Good-night, Byron. Vic gets me up at five.”

  Next morning she was feeding the baby in the kitchen when she heard the dyin
g cough of a jeep. In came Warren in fresh khakis. She had not seen him in almost a month. He was strikingly bigger and heavier than Byron, and very tanned and bright-eyed. “Janice, what’s another jeep doing out here? Got some guy in a closet, with thirty seconds to live?”

  As he swept her into a crushing hug, she put a finger on his mouth. “Byron’s asleep in the guest room.”

  “What, Briny’s back? Great!”

  Janice stammered, her mouth against his, “Darling, Vic’s in his high chair —”

  Warren strode to the kitchen. The baby turned an egg-smeared face and large solemn eyes on him, then smiled from ear to ear. Warren kissed him. “He smells good. Grows half a foot every time I go out. Come along, feller.”

  “Where are you taking him?”

  The aviator wiped his son’s face, carried him to a crib in the nursery, and handed him his teddy bear.

  “Darling, listen,” Janice protested in low tones, following him, “Byron will come stumbling out any second, looking for eggs and coffee —”

  He circled her waist in a powerful arm, took her into the bedroom, and quietly locked the door.

  Prone and naked, half-stuporous, she heard the scratch of a match, opened her eyes, and gave her husband a sad, heavy, mischievous look. He was sitting up in the bed. “Honestly,” she said, in an unexpected baritone voice that made them both laugh. The sun fell in golden bars on Warren’s bronzed chest, and the smoke from his cigarette made blue coils in the sunlight.

  “Well, you’re a sailor’s wife.”

  “Jesus. Not one of Magellan’s sailors.”

  “Jan, I hear Byron stirring about.”

  “Oh dear. Well, the coffee’s on. I guess he’ll find it.”

  He said a shade gruffly, “I love you.” She reared up on an elbow to look at him. He dragged on the cigarette, and blew out a gray cloud. “Quite an exercise, this last one. In futility, that is. A two-carrier task force, roaring thirty-five hundred miles to the Coral Sea and back, and missing the battle by three days. If we’d got there in time we’d have smashed the Japs, instead of losing the Lex. The Yorktowns kaput, too. Seven thousand miles for nothing. Halsey’s lucky he doesn’t have to pay his oil bill.”

  Janice said, “What’s this thing cooking up now? Do you know?”

  “Oh, you hear scuttlebutt. Something big, that’s for sure. We sortie again in two days.”

  “Two days!”

  “Yep. Working parties replenishing ship around the clock.” Yawning, he put a brown arm around her. “Action will be a novelty. All we did on those seven thousand miles was patrol, baby. Patrol, patrol! Two hundred miles out, two hundred miles back, grinding along over clouds, water, hours on end, days on end. I never saw anything except whales. There was lots of leisure to think. I figured out that time’s getting precious, and that I should stop screwing around and hurting you. I’ve done too much of it. I’m sorry. No more. Okay? Guess I’ll shower up and talk to Briny. How does he look?”

  “Why, why, sort of haggard and scrawny.” Stunned with delight at his contrition, Janice tried to sound just as casual. “Thick red beard, like Dad told us.” She touched his face. “I wonder how you’d look in a beard.”

  “Negative! It comes in half-gray. Balls to that. Well, Dad will sure be glad to see Briny, beard and all. The Northampton was following us in.”

  “Byron says the Devilfish got two Jap ships.”

  “Hey, won’t that give Dad a charge!”

  On the sunny wing of the Northampton’s bridge, maneuvering to buoys in a strong ebb tide, Pug Henry could see Spruance pacing the main deck far below. The barge lay to, waiting to take them to the Enterprise, where the admiral would pay his respects to Halsey Then they would walk the five miles to Warren’s house. That was their routine. As the drenched sailors down on the pitching buoys wrestled with the shackles of the massive anchor chains, Pug and Commander Grigg were talking about urgent yard repairs that they might get done before going back to sea. The magazines were still loaded from the vain Coral Sea dash, but food and fuel were low. Forty-eight hours for turnabout, after seven thousand miles of high-speed steaming! All hell must be about to break loose in the Pacific; but what it was all about, Pug Henry had no idea.

  The Enterprise was usually bleak and quiet in port; an abandoned nest, the birds having flown off before dawn from a hundred miles out. But this time the utter lack of life was eerie: no pipings at the approach of Spruance’s barge, no loudspeaker calls for sideboys and ceremonies; the gangway deserted, not even the OOD in sight. In the cavernous hangar deck there was a cold, ghost-ship feeling. The flag secretary came toward them on the run, his tread thumping and echoing down the empty steel cavern. Unceremoniously he took Raymond Spruance aside by the elbow, turning a pale unshaven face over his shoulder. “Excuse me, Captain Henry. Had coffee with your son at 0300, incidentally, before he took off.”

  Pug nodded, showing none of the relief he felt. Off the New Hebrides he had seen a Dauntless dive-bomber cartwheel from the Enterprise into the sea; probably not Warren, on the odds, but until this moment he had wondered and worried.

  “Okay, Henry. Let’s go,” said Spruance, after a muttered colloquy. The barge rocked and clanged its way to the sub base. Spruance volunteered nothing, Pug asked no questions. The admiral’s face looked almost wooden in its calm. He broke his silence as they stepped ashore. “Henry, I have a little business at Cincpac. I suppose you want to join your family right away?” Plainly, from his tone, he hated to give up the walk.

  “I’m at your pleasure, Admiral.”

  “Come with me. It shouldn’t take too long.”

  In a hard chair outside Nimitz’s gold-starred doors, twisting his cap round and round, Pug waited, noting the extraordinary bustle all around him; typewriter clatter, telephones ringing, hurrying foot traffic this way and that of yeomen and junior officers. The Cincpac building was as stirred up as the Enterprise was dead. Momentous business was in the air, and no mistake. Pug hoped that it was not another Doolittle-type raid. He was a conservative military thinker, and he had been skeptical of that Doolittle show since the task force had first sailed.

  With an irrepressible spine tingle he had read over the Northampton’s loudspeakers Halsey’s message. “This force is bound for Tokyo.” But how could two carriers, he had thought at once, venture within range of the land-based Japanese air force? Through the crew’s cheers and rebel yells, he had skeptically shaken his head at Spruance. Next day, when the Hornet had joined up, its deckload of Army B-25 bombers had of course solved the mystery. Watching the oncoming carrier, Spruance had remarked, “Well, Captain?”

  “My hat’s off to those Army fliers, Admiral.”

  “Mine too. They’ve been training for months. They’ll have to go on to China, you realize. That deck can’t take them back aboard.”

  “I know. Brave souls.”

  “Is this good war-making, Captain?”

  “Sir, my inferior understanding prevents my grasping the unquestionable soundness of the mission.”

  For the first time since Pug had met him, Raymond Spruance had laughed heartily. They had not discussed the raid again until a few days ago. At dinner in Spruance’s quarters, Spruance had been bemoaning the way they had missed the Coral Sea battle, the first in history in which the opposed warships had never sighted each other; an all-air duel at ranges of seventy-five miles or more. “That’s something new in sea warfare, Henry. A lot of War College thinking goes overboard. Possibly you were right about that Tokyo raid. Maybe we should have been down south all that time, instead of roaring back and forth over the Pacific to make headlines. Still, we don’t know to what extent Doolittle upset the Japanese war plans.”

  Spruance remained in Cincpac’s sanctum for about half an hour. He emerged with a strange look on his face. “We’re on our way, Henry.” When they were out of the Navy Yard, and plugging uphill through weedy dusty sugarcane fields on a tarred road, he abruptly remarked, “Well, I’m leaving the Northampton.“ br />
  “Oh? I’m genuinely sorry, sir.”

  “I am, too, since I’ll be going on the beach. I’m to become Admiral Nimitz’s chief of staff.”

  “Why, that’s splendid. Congratulations, Admiral.”

  “Thanks,” Spruance said coldly, “but I don’t recall your leaping at staff duty when offered.”

  That closed the topic. They trudged around a bend. The base came in sight, sprawled out far below, beyond flowering trees and terraced green truck gardens; the wharves, drydocks and anchorages crowded with warships, the channels full of small craft moving about; on the wrecked battleships, workmen swarming over the temporary repair structures, and — the most striking sight — along the capsized hull of the Oklahoma, the long row of righting cables stretched to winches on Ford Island.

  “Henry, you’ve read the Yorktown’s damage report dispatches. How long would you say repairs will take?”

  “Three to five months, sir.”

  “Captain Harry Warendorf is your classmate, isn’t he? The Captain of the Yard?”

  “Yes, I know Harry well.”

  “Can he put her back to sea in seventy-two hours? Because he’s going to have to. Admiral Nimitz has ordered it.”

  “Harry will do it, if any man can,” Pug answered, astounded. “It’s bound to be a patch job.”

  “Yes, but three carriers instead of two is a fifty percent increase in striking power. Which we’ll soon need.”

  Over steak and eggs on the back porch, Byron was telling Warren about the torpedoes he had salvaged from Cavite. The brothers, both barefoot, both in shorts and beach-boy shirts, had been talking at a great rate for an hour.

  “Twenty-six torpedoes!” Warren exclaimed. “No wonder you got your transfer to the Atlantic.”

  Byron was enjoying, in fact revelling in, this conversation. Eternal months ago in peacetime, Warren had warned him to kowtow to Branch Hoban if he wanted his dolphins. Now Warren knew of Hoban’s cave-in, and dolphins were pinned to the sweaty khaki shirt hanging in the guest room. “Warren, Aster’s pressuring me to stay aboard the Devilfish”