The Caine Mutiny (4 page)

Except for these sessions with Rubin, May’s time between shows was monopolized by Willie. Usually they sat in the dressing room, smoking and talking-Willie, the educated authority, May half respectful and half satiric as the ignoramus. After a few evenings of this, Willie persuaded her to meet him by day. He took her to the Museum of Modern Art, but that was a failure. She stared in horror at the masterpieces of Dali, Chagall, and Tchelitchew, and burst out laughing. At the Metropolitan Museum they did better. She found an immediate deep pleasure in Renoir and El Greco. She made Willie take her there again. He was a good guide. “Ye gods,” she exclaimed once, as he sketched the career of Whistler for her, “do you really get all that stuff in four years of college?”

“Not quite. Mother’s been taking me to museums since I was six. She’s a patron here.”

“Oh.” The girl was a little disappointed.

Willie soon obtained the telephone number of the Bronx candy store, and they continued seeing each other after May’s engagement at the club was finished. It was April. Their relationship advanced to include long walks in the blossoming new-green park, and dinners at expensive restaurants, and kisses in taxis, and sentimental presents like ivory cats and fuzzy black bears and a great many flowers. Willie wrote some bad sonnets, too, and May took them home, read them again and again, and shed warm tears over them. Nobody had ever written poetry to her before.

Late in April Willie received a postcard from his draft board, inviting him for a physical examination. Upon the sounding of this tocsin he remembered the war, and forthwith went to a Navy officer-procurement station. He was accepted for the December class of the Reserve Midshipmen School. This put him beyond the clutches of the Army, and gave him a long reprieve from service.

Mrs. Keith, however, took his enlistment as a tragedy. She was outraged at the fumblers in Washington who had permitted the war to drag on so long. She still believed that it would end before Willie put on a uniform but she had an occasional chill at heart to think that he might actually be taken away. Discreetly inquiring among influential friends, she found a peculiar stoniness everywhere to the idea of getting Willie some safe duty in the United States. So she determined to make his last free months beautiful. May Wynn was doing a pretty good job of that, but of course Mrs. Keith didn’t know it. She was unaware of the girl’s existence. She compelled Willie to quit his job, and carted him off, with the unresisting doctor, on a trip to Mexico. Willie, quite bored with sombreros, brilliant sunlight, and feathered serpents carved on decaying pyramids, spent all his money on surreptitious long-distance calls to the candy store. May invariably scolded him for his extravagance, but the radiant tones in which she did so were quite enough consolation for Willie. When they returned in July Mrs. Keith with undimmed force dragged him to a “last wonderful summer” in Rhode Island. He managed half a dozen trips to New York on thin excuses; and lived for these excursions. In the fall May was booked by Marty Rubin for a tour of clubs in Chicago and St. Louis. She came back in November, in time for three happy weeks with Willie. He performed prodigies of invention, enough for the creation of a book of short stories, to explain his absences from home to his mother.

He and May had never talked about marriage. He sometimes wondered why she didn’t mention the subject, but he was very glad that she was content to leave their relationship in the realm of wild kisses. His idea was that the sweetness would last to be enjoyed during the four months of midshipmen school; then he would go to sea, and that would be the convenient and painless end. He was quite pleased with himself for having worked the romance out for maximum fun and minimum entanglement. It indicated to him that he was a mature man of pleasure. He prided himself on not having attempted to sleep with May. The correct policy, he had decided, was to enjoy the sparkle and stimulation of the girl’s company without becoming involved in a mess. It was a wise enough policy; but he deserved less credit for it than he gave himself, because it was based on a cool subconscious estimate that he probably wouldn’t succeed if he tried.

CHAPTER 3

Midshipman Keith

Willie Keith’s second day in the Navy came close to being his last in the service or on earth.

Riding on the subway that morning to the Brooklyn Navy Yard in his blue apprentice seaman raincoat, he felt conspicuously military. The fact that he was going for a check on his pulse rate and lordosis did not spoil his enjoyment of the glances of stenographers and high-school girls. Willie was collecting the homage earned by men otherwise occupied in the Solomons. In peacetime it had not been his habit to envy sailors their costume, but now suddenly these bell-bottom trousers seemed as correct and dashing as beer jackets had been on the Princeton campus.

Outside the gates of the Navy Yard Willie stopped, exposed his wrist to the raw cutting wind, and counted his pulse. It was tripping at eighty-six. He was enraged to think that his new naval aura might be stripped from him by a mere arithmetical failure of his body. He waited a few minutes, trying to relax, and took another count. Ninety-four. The marine sentinel at the gate was staring at him. Willie looked up and down the street and began walking toward a dingy drugstore at the corner, thinking, “I had a dozen physicals at college, and one at the receiving station several months ago. My pulse was always seventy-two. Now I’m worried. What the devil is an admiral’s pulse rate when he sees the enemy fleet-seventy-two? I’ve got to take something to cancel the worry. and give a normal result.”

He swallowed this argument, and a double bromide; the one for his conscience, the other for his pulse. Both sedatives worked. When he hesitated for a moment outside Captain Grimm’s office for a last check, his blood thumped tranquilly past his fingers at seventy-five, and he felt buoyant and relaxed. He pushed open the door.

The first object that caught his eye in the room was a blue sleeve with four gold stripes on it. The sleeve was gesticulating at a fat Navy nurse seated at a desk. Captain Grimm, gray and very tired-looking, was waving a sheaf of papers and complaining bitterly about slipshod accounting of morphine. He turned on Willie. “What is it, boy?”

Willie handed him the envelope. Captain Grimm glanced at the papers. “Oh, Lord. Miss Norris, when am I due at the operating room?”

“In twenty minutes, sir.”

“All right, Keith, go into that dressing room. I’ll be with you in two minutes.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Willie went through the white-painted door and closed it. The little room was stuffily hot, but he was afraid to tamper with the windows. He wandered around in a narrow circle, reading labels on bottles, looking out the window at the sad gray jumble of the Brooklyn waterfront, and yawning. He waited two minutes, five, ten. The bromide and the warmth took stronger hold. He stretched out on the examining table, assuring himself that a little relaxation would be good for him.

When he woke his watch read half-past five. He had slept, forgotten by the Navy, for eight hours. He washed his face in a basin, straightened his hair, and emerged from the dressing room with a look of martyrdom. The fat nurse’s jaws fell open when she saw him.

“Holy Christmas! Are
you
still here?”

“Nobody ever told me to come out.”

“But my God!” She jumped out of the swivel chair. “You’ve been here since- Why didn’t you say something? Wait!” She went into an inner office, and came out in a moment with the captain, who said, “Blazes, boy, I’m sorry. I’ve had operations, meetings- Step into my office.”

In the book-lined room he told Willie to strip to the waist, and inspected his back. “Touch your toes.”

Willie did it-not without a loud grunt. The captain smiled doubtfully, and felt his wrist. Willie sensed hammering again. “Doctor,” he exclaimed, “I’m okay.”

“We have standards,” said the captain. He picked up his pen. It hovered over Willie’s record. “You know,” he added, “Navy casualties are worse than Army in this war, so far.”

“I want to be a Navy man,” said Willie, and only when the words were out of his mouth did he realize that they were quite true.

The doctor looked at him, with a flicker of good will in his eye. He wrote decisively on the record:
Mild lordosis well compensated. Pulse normal-J. Grimm, Chief Med. Bklyn.
He crumpled up and threw away the red-lettered memo, and returned the other papers to Willie. “Don’t suffer in silence in this outfit, boy. Speak up when something damn silly is happening to you.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

The captain turned his attention to a spread of papers on his desk, and Willie left. It occurred to him that his naval career had probably been saved by a doctor’s shame at keeping a patient waiting eight hours, but he rejoiced at the outcome, anyway. Back at Furnald Hall he returned his medical record to the pharmacist’s mate of the red pencil in the dispensary. Warner put aside a bowl of purple antiseptic to glance eagerly at the papers. His face fell, but he managed a baleful grin. “Hm, you made it. Fine.”

“See you in Tokyo, Doctor,” said Willie.

In his room he found Keggs and Keefer fussing with guns. A big battered rifle, with a custody card, lay on Willie’s cot. “Rifles in the Navy?” he said mildly.

“Bet your behind,” said Keefer. The pieces of his firing lock lay on the desk beside him. Keggs was clanking the rotating bolt back and forth with an air of futility. “We have to learn how to take one apart and assemble it in two minutes,” he moaned, “by tomorrow morning. I bilge, for sure.”

“Don’t strain your milk,” said Keefer. “Lemme get this baby together, and I’ll show you. Damn this mainspring.”

The Southerner gave his two roommates a patient thorough lesson in the mysteries of the Springfield rifle. Keggs got the hang of it quickly. His long bony fingers caught the critical trick, which was to force the tough mainspring back into the bolt on reassembly. He beamed at his weapon, and ran through the process several times. Willie wrestled vainly with the bolt for a while and panted, “They should have bilged me on lordosis. It would have been more dignified. I’ll be out of this Navy tomorrow-
Get
in there, lousy damn spring-” He had never touched a gun before. The potential deadliness of it meant nothing to him. It was simply a troublesome assignment: a knotty page of Beethoven, an overdue book report on
Clarissa Harlowe.

“Jam the butt of that bolt in your stomach, see?” said Keefer. “Then press the spring down with both hands.”

Willie obeyed. The spring yielded slowly. The end of it sank at last into the rim. “It works! Thanks, Rollo-” At that moment the spring, still unsecured, escaped between his fingers and leaped from the bolt. It soared across the room. The window was conveniently open. The spring sailed out into the night.

His roommates stared at him in horror. “That’s bad, isn’t it?” quavered Willie.

“Anything happens to your rifle, boy-that does it,” said the Southerner, walking to the window.

“I’ll run downstairs,” Willie said.

“What, during study hour? Twelve demerits!” Keggs said.

“Come here, fella.” Keefer pointed out through the window. The spring lay in a rain gutter at the edge of a steeply slanting copper-covered roof projection beneath the window. The tenth floor was set slightly back from the rest of the building.

“I can’t get that,” said Willie.

“You better, fella.”

Keggs peered out. “You’d never make it. You’d fall off.”

“That’s what I think,” said Willie. He was not at all a daredevil. His mountain climbing had been done in plenty of stout company, and with much gulping horror. He hated high places and poor footing.

“Look, fella, you want to stay in the Navy? Climb out there. Or d’you want me to do it?”

Willie climbed out, clinging to the window frame. The wind moaned in the darkness. Broadway twinkled far, far below. The ledge seemed to drop away beneath his trembling legs. He stretched a hand vainly toward the spring, and gasped, “Need another couple of feet-”

“If we only had a rope,” said Keefer. “Look man. One of us gets out with you, see, and hangs onto the window. And you hang onto him. That does it.”

“Let’s get it over with,” said Keggs anxiously. “If he gets caught out there we all bilge.” He sprang through the window, stood beside Willie, and gripped his hand. “Now get it.” Willie let go of the window, and inched downward, clinging to Keggs’s powerful grip. He teetered at the edge of the roof, the wind whipping his clothes. The spring was in easy reach. He grasped it and thrust it into a pocket.

Ensign Acres might have picked a less awkward moment to make his study-hour round of the tenth floor, but he chose this one. He walked past the room, peeped in, stopped short, and roared, “Attention on deck! What the hell is going on here?”

Keggs neighed in terror and let go of Willie’s hand. Willie lunged and clutched him around the knees. The two midshipmen swayed back and forth on the ledge, not far from death. But Keggs’s urge to live was slightly stronger than his fear of ensigns. He reared backward and fell into the room on his head, hauling Willie through the window on top of him. Ensign Acres glared. His chin jutted. Willie stood up and produced the spring, stammering, “I-this was out on the roof-”

“What the hell was it doing out there?” bellowed Acres.

“It flew out,” said Willie.

The blood rushed into Acres’ face as though he had been called a dirty name. “
Flew
out? See here, you-”

“While I was assembling my gun. It got away,” Willie added in hurried, plaintive tones.

Acres looked around at the roommates. Keggs’s shuddering fear, Willie’s fright, Keefer’s rigid attention were genuine. Two months ago he had himself been a midshipman. “You should each get fifteen demerits,” he growled, by way of descending from his rage. “I have my eye on you- Carry on.” He stalked out.

“Do you suppose,” Willie said in the numb pause that followed, “that some higher power doesn’t want me in the Navy? I seem to be the Jonah in this room.”

“Forget it, fella. You just getting the hard luck out of your system,” Keefer said.

They studied fiercely as Bilging Day drew nearer. A nice balance of forces became evident in Room 1013. Keggs was strong on the paper work of navigation and engineering. His plotting charts and sketches of boilers were handsome art, and he lent his talents to the others readily. He was slow to grasp facts and theories, so he set his alarm clock two hours before reveille to give himself extra study time. His face elongated daily, and his melancholy eyes burned in deepening sockets like dim candles, but he never failed a quiz.

Keefer failed often. He calculated averages to a hair and managed to stay above the estimated expulsion level in all courses. His strong point was military wisdom. Willie never could decide whether this gift was natural or acquired, but Keefer, with the body and air of a sloven, was the most polished seaman in the school. He kept himself, his bed, and his books with the neatness of a cat. On parade his fresh-looking uniform, glittering shoes, and erect bearing quickly caught the eye of the executive officer. He was ordained a battalion commander.

Willie Keith became the oracle of the tenth floor in matters of naval ordnance. Actually he was a blockhead on the subject. Reputations are made queerly and swiftly in wartime. It happened that in the first week a terrible examination was scheduled in Ordnance, with the announced purpose of causing weaklings to go down. Everybody crammed feverishly, of course. Willie was as earnest as the rest, but one page of the book, composed in the worst Navy jargon, baffled him; a description of a thing called a Frictionless Bearing. Keefer and Keggs had given it up. Willie read the page over seventeen times, then twice more aloud, and was on the point of quitting when he noticed that whole sentences had become embedded in his memory. He worked another half hour and memorized the entire page, word for word. The chief essay question on the examination, as luck would have it, was
Explain the Frictionless Bearing.
Willie happily disgorged the words, which meant no more to him than a Hindu chant. When the results of the test were announced he stood first in the school. “Apprentice Seaman Keith,” shouted Ensign Acres, squinting in the sunlight at noon assembly, “is officially commended for a brilliant Ordnance paper. He was the only man in the school to give an intelligent explanation of the Frictionless Bearing.”

With a reputation to uphold, and dozens of questions to answer in every study period, Willie thereafter drove himself to a meaningless verbal mastery of all the details of naval cannons.

This lesson in Navy pedagogy was driven home shortly before Bilging Day. One night Willie came upon the following statement in his tattered green-bound manual,
Submarine Doctrine, 1935:
“Submarines, because of their small cruising range, are chiefly suitable for coastal defense.” At that time Nazis were torpedoing several American ships each week around Cape Hatteras, four thousand miles from Germany’s coast. Willie pointed this out with chuckles to his roommates. The sinking of a few dozen of our own ships seemed a small price for the pleasure of catching the Navy in an absurdity. Next day in Tactics class the instructor, one Ensign Brain, called on him.

“Keith.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“What is the submarine chiefly suitable for, and why?” The educator held an open copy of
Submarine Doctrine, 1935
in his hand. Ensign Brain was a prematurely baldish, prematurely wrinkled, prematurely ferocious martinet of twenty-five. He was a drillmaster. About this subject he knew nothing. But he had once learned to read.