“Men aren’t like that,” her brother protested. “We’ve got a way of knowing good sense when we hear it.”
Anne laughed loud and long. What Tom had said struck her as so ridiculous, she didn’t even bother getting angry. “When you finally get married yourself, I’ll tell your wife you said that,” she remarked. “She won’t believe me—I promise she won’t believe me—but I’ll tell her.”
“Why wouldn’t she believe that about me?” Tom asked with such a tone of aggrieved innocence, Anne laughed harder than ever.
“Because it’d be lying?” she suggested, but that only made her brother angry. Changing the subject seemed like a good idea. She did: “When are you going to get married, anyhow? You were bothering me about it, but turnabout’s fair play.”
Tom shrugged. “When I find a girl who suits me,” he replied. “I’m not in any big hurry. It’s different for a man, you know.”
“I suppose so,” Anne said in a voice that supposed nothing of the sort. “People would talk if I married a twenty-year-old when I was fifty. If you do that, all your friends will be jealous.”
“How you do go on, Sis!” Tom said, turning red. Anne had indeed managed to get him to stop thinking about marrying her off. But the dismal truth was, he had a point. It
was
different for men. They often got more handsome as they aged; women, almost never. And men could go right on siring children even after they went bald and wrinkled and toothless. Anne knew she had only a few childbearing years left. Once they were gone, suitors would want her only for her money, not mostly for it as they did now.
“God must be a man,” she said. “If God were a woman, things would work a lot different, and you can take it to the bank.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Tom said. “If you really reckon it’s fun and jolly to go up out of a trench when the machine guns are hammering, or to hope you’ve got your gas helmet good and snug when the chlorine shells start falling, or to sit in a dugout wondering whether the next eight-inch shell is going to cave it in, then you can go on about what a tough row women have to hoe.”
“I’ve fought,” Anne said. Her brother only looked at her. She knew what she’d been through. So did he. He’d been through some of it with her, cleaning Red remnants out of the swamps by the Congaree after the war against the USA was lost. She had some notion of what Tom had experienced on the Roanoke front, but only some. She hadn’t done that. By everything she knew, she wouldn’t have wanted to do it.
“Never mind,” Tom said. “For now, it’s over. We don’t need to quarrel about it today. Might as well leave that for the generals—all of ’em’ll spend the next twenty, thirty years writing books about how they could have won the war single-handed if only the fellows on their flanks and over ’em hadn’t been a pack of fools.”
He walked over to a cupboard and took out a couple of glasses. Then he yanked the cork from a bottle of whiskey on the counter under the cupboard and poured out two hefty belts. He carried one of them back to Anne and set it on the table by the newspapers. She picked it up. “What shall we drink to?” she asked.
“Drinking to being here and able to drink isn’t the worst toast in the world,” Tom said. He raised his glass. Anne thought about that, nodded, and raised hers in turn. The whiskey was smoke in her mouth, flame in her throat, and a nice warm fire in her belly. Before long, the glass was empty.
Anne went over to the counter and refilled it. While she was pouring, Tom came over with his glass, from which the whiskey had also vanished. She gave him another drink, too. “My turn now,” she said, as if expecting him to deny it.
He didn’t. He bowed instead, as a gentleman would have done before the war. Not so many gentlemen were left these days; machine guns and gas and artillery had put them under the ground by the thousands, along with their ruder countrymen by the tens of thousands.
She raised her glass. “Here’s to freedom from the Freedom Party!”
“Well, you know I’ll drink to that one.” Her brother suited action to word.
Again, the glasses emptied fast. The whiskey hit—Anne understood why the simile was on her mind—like a bursting shell. Everything seemed simple and clear, even things she knew perfectly well weren’t. She weighed Jake Featherston in the balances, as God had weighed Belshazzar in the Bible. And, as God had found Belshazzar wanting, so she found Featherston and the Freedom Party.
“No, I don’t reckon he’ll be back. I don’t reckon he’ll be back at all,” she said, and that called for another drink.
Sam Carsten was using his off-duty time the way he usually did now: he sprawled in his bunk aboard the
Remembrance
, studying hard. His head felt filled to the bursting point. He had the notion that he could have built and outfitted any ship in the Navy and ordered its crew about. He didn’t think the secretary of the navy knew as much as he did. God might have; he supposed he was willing to give God the benefit of the doubt.
George Moerlein, his bunkmate, came by to pull something out of his duffel bag. “Christ, Sam, don’t you ever take a break?” he said. He had to repeat himself before Carsten knew he was there.
At last reminded of Moerlein’s existence, Sam sheepishly shook his head. “Can’t afford to take a break,” he said. “Examinations are only a week away. They don’t make things easy on petty officers who want to kick their way up into real officer country.”
Moerlein had been a petty officer a long time, a lot longer than Carsten. He had no desire to become anything else, and saw no reason anyone else should have such a desire, either. “I’ve known a few mustangs, or more than a few, but I’ll be damned if I ever knew a happy one. Real officers treat ’em like you’d treat a nigger in a fancy suit: the clothes may be right, but the guy inside ’em ain’t.”
“If I don’t pass this examination, it won’t matter one way or the other,” Sam said pointedly. “And besides, officers can’t be any rougher on mustangs than they are on ordinary sailors.”
“Only shows how much you know,” Moerlein answered. “Well, don’t mind me, not that you was.” He went on about his business. Sam returned to his book. He came across a section on engine maintenance he didn’t remember quite so well as he should have. From feeling he knew about as much as God, he fearfully sank to thinking he knew less than a retarded ordinary seaman on his first day at sea.
Mess call was something of a relief. Sam stopped worrying about keeping a warship fueled and running and started thinking about stoking his own boiler. With the
Remembrance
still tied up in the Boston Navy Yard, meals remained tasty and varied—none of the beans and sausage and sauerkraut that would have marked a long cruise at sea.
Somebody sitting not far from Sam said, “I’d sooner spend my days belching and my nights farting, long as that meant I was doing something worthwhile.”
Heads bobbed up and down in agreement, all along the mess table. “We ought to be thankful they ain’t breaking us up for scrap,” another optimist said.
Somebody else added, “God damn Upton Sinclair to hell and gone.”
That brought more nods, Carsten among them, but a sailor snapped, “God damn you to hell and gone, Tad, you big dumb Polack.”
Socialists everywhere,
Carsten thought as Tad surged to his feet. A couple of people caught him and slammed him back down. Sam nodded again, this time in approval. “Knock it off,” he said. “We don’t want any brawls here, not now we don’t. Anything that makes the
Remembrance
look bad is liable to get her taken out of commission and land the lot of us on the beach. Congress isn’t throwing money around like they did during the war.”
“Hell, Congress isn’t throwing money around like they did before the war, neither,” Tad said. “We busted a gut building a Navy that could go out and win, and now we’re flushing it right down the head.”
“Rebs ain’t got a Navy worth anything any more,” said the Socialist sailor who’d called him a Polack. “Limeys ain’t, either. No such thing as the Canadian Navy these days. So who the hell we got to worry about?”
“Goddamn Japs, for one.” Three men said the same thing at the same time, differing only in the adjective with which they modified
Japs
.
“Kaiser Bill’s High Seas Fleet, for two,” Sam added. “Yeah, us and the Germans are pals for now, but how long is that going to last? Best way I can think of to keep the Kaiser friendly is to stay too tough to jump on.”
That produced a thoughtful silence. At last, somebody down at the far end of the mess table said, “You know, Carsten, when I heard you was studying for officer, I figured you was crazy. Maybe you knew what you was doing after all.”
Sam looked around to see who was in earshot. Deciding the coast was clear, he answered, “Maybe you don’t have to be crazy to be an officer, but I never heard tell that it hurts.”
Amidst laughter, people started telling stories about officers they’d known. Sam pitched in with some of his own. Inside, he was smiling. A book about leadership he’d read had suggested that changing the subject was often the best way to defuse a nasty situation. Unlike some of the things he’d read, that really worked.
After supper, he went back to studying, and kept at it till lights-out. George Moerlein shook his head. “Never reckoned you was one of those fellows with spectacles and a high forehead,” he said.
“You want to get anywhere, you got to work for it,” Sam answered, more than a little nettled. “Anybody wants to stay in a rut, that’s his business. But anybody who doesn’t, that’s his business, too, or it damn well ought to be.”
“All right. All right. I’ll shut up,” Moerlein said. “Swear to Jesus, though, I think you’re doing this whole thing ’cause you want I should have to salute you.”
“Oh, no,” Carsten said in a hoarse whisper. “My secret’s out.” For a moment, his bunkmate believed him. Then Moerlein snorted and cursed and rolled over in his bunk and, a couple of minutes later, started to snore.
Sam ran on coffee and cigarettes and very little sleep till the day of the examinations, which were held in a hall not far from the Rope Walk, the long stone building in which the Navy’s great hemp cables were made. Commander Grady slapped Sam on the back as he left the
Remembrance
. “Just remember, you
can
do it,” the gunnery officer said.
“Thank you, sir,” Sam said, “and, if you please, sir, just remember, this was your idea in the first place.” Grady laughed. Sam hurried past him and down the gangplank.
Sitting at a table in the examination hall waiting for the lieutenant commander at the front of the room to pass out the pile of test booklets on his desk, Sam looked around, studying the competition. He saw a roomful of petty officers not a whole lot different from himself. Only a few were younger than he; several grizzled veterans had to be well past fifty. He admired their persistence and hoped he would outscore them in spite of it.
Then he stopped worrying about anything inessential, for the officer started giving out the booklets. “Men, you will have four hours,” he said. “I wish you all the best of luck, and I remind you that, should you not pass, the examination will be offered again in a year’s time. Ready?…Begin.”
How many times had some of those grizzled veterans walked into this hall or others like it? That thought gave Sam a different perspective on persistence. He wondered if he’d keep coming back after failing the examination half a dozen or a dozen times. Hoping he wouldn’t have to find out, he opened the booklet and plunged in.
The examination was as bad as he’d feared it would be, as bad as he’d heard it would be. As he worked, he felt as if his brain were being sucked out of his head and down onto the paper by way of his pencil. He couldn’t imagine a human mind containing all the knowledge the Navy Department evidently expected its officers to have at their fingertips. Panic threatened to overwhelm him when he came upon the first question he couldn’t even begin to answer.
Well, maybe these other bastards can’t answer it, either,
he thought. That steadied him. He couldn’t do anything more than his best.
Sweat soaked his dark uniform long before the examination ended. It had nothing to do with the hall, which was very little warmer than the Boston December outside. But he noticed he was far from the only man wiping his brow.
After what seemed like forever—and, at the same time, like only a few minutes—the lieutenant commander rapped out, “Pencils down! Pass booklets to the left.” Sam had been in the middle of a word. That didn’t matter. Nothing mattered any more. He joined the weary, shambling throng of sailors filing out of the hall.
“There’s always next year,” someone said in doleful tones. Carsten didn’t argue with him. Nobody argued with him. Sam couldn’t imagine anyone being confident he’d passed that brutal examination. He also couldn’t imagine anyone showing confidence without getting lynched.
He didn’t have any leave coming, so he couldn’t even get drunk after the miserable thing was over. He had to return to the
Remembrance
and return to duty. When Commander Grady asked him how he’d done, he rolled his eyes. Grady laughed. Sam didn’t see one thing funny about it.
Day followed day; 1923 gave way to 1924.
Coming up on ten years since the war started,
Sam thought. That seemed unbelievable, but he knew it was true. He wished ten years had gone by since the examination. When results were slow in coming, he did his best to forget he’d ever taken the miserable thing.
There’s always next year,
he thought—except, by now, this was next year.
Then, one day, the yeoman in charge of mail called out “Carsten!” and thrust an envelope at him. He took it with some surprise; he seldom got mail. But, sure enough, the envelope had his name typed on it, and
DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY
in the upper left-hand corner. He stuck his thumb over that return address, not wanting his buddies to know he’d got news he expected to be bad.
He marched off down a corridor and opened the envelope where no one could watch him do it. The letter inside bore his name and pay number on Navy Department stationery. It read,
You are ordered to report to Commissioning Board 17 at 0800 hours on Wednesday, 6 February 1924, for the purpose of determining your fitness to hold a commission in the United States Navy and…