Ice Brothers (15 page)

Paul did not have to walk far before he found the officers' club. It was a big Quonset hut and so crowded that there was small chance of his running into Mowrey, he was glad to discover. A triple line of officers at the bar was keeping a half-dozen Filipino bartenders busy and perhaps a hundred more officers were drinking at small tables. At the back of the room were several long, rectangular tables at which officers were playing cards. Tobacco smoke swirled up to the domed ceiling of the Quonset hut and a jukebox blared, “Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me.”

For a few moments Paul stood staring at the men at the cardtables. The green felt tablecloths were littered with poker chips. Paul strolled toward the bar. His cigar was making him feel slightly dizzy and he left it in a large can full of smoking cigarette butts. After buying a glass of ginger ale, he walked toward the cardtables. At two of them men were playing with coins as well as chips, but at a third many of the officers had stacks of bills as well as chips in front of them. Paul waited silently until a lieutenant commander lost a big pile and left the table in disgust. Moving forward, he put his hand on the empty chair and said, “Can you use new blood in this game?”

Naval officers, Paul soon discovered, do not ordinarily play poker much better than fraternity boys do, and most of them made the same ridiculous mistake of drinking while they gambled for fairly high stakes. At the end of two and a half hours Paul had made almost three hundred dollars and was wishing he had arranged for a telephone call to summon him from the game. After deliberately losing twenty-three dollars, he glanced at his watch and said he had to get back to his ship before midnight. There was some grumbling but no real objection as he cashed in his chips, pocketed a profit of slightly more than two hundred fifty dollars and quickly left the table.

At the bar Paul paused to order a double scotch. In the sea of men around him
he saw two young navy nurses sitting surrounded by commanders and captains. They were nowhere near as pretty as his wife, but one of them had a figure plump enough to fill out even her stiff navy uniform attractively and their high excited laughter sounded beautiful. It had been only about five days since he had seen Sylvia, but somehow it seemed a century, and he was suddenly aware that it would be months, maybe years before he again saw his wife, or any woman at all, probably, except the Eskimo women, who really would not interest him, he was sure, even if he had not really meant his vows to be faithful to Sylvia forever, as he most surely had. He was not going to have a woman for years, maybe never again if he got killed, he thought with a sudden flood of anger and self-pity. The plump nurse's throat looked so good as she tossed up her chin and laughed! Even if a man were not bound by a vow to remain faithful to his wife, what chance would he have as an eternal transient in places where there were at least a thousand men to each woman? War, despite its adventurous aspects, meant no sex, no sex for years and years. Like Sherman said, “War is hell.”

When he had won at gambling in Boston, Paul often had bought a new dress or a little bracelet to surprise Sylvia with, and such presents had often put her into a delightful mood. Now he had no idea what to do with the money except mail it home to her or hide it under his mattress aboard ship, neither of which seemed to make gambling even worthwhile.

When he arrived back aboard his ship, Paul found that both Nathan and Seth had gone to sleep. Stripping to his underwear, he crawled into his bunk. Seth's soft but irregular snoring irritated him and he was too tense to sleep. The memory of the young nurse's throat and bosom as she laughed plagued him and to get his mind off it, he began to let himself think of his wife. His last night with Sylvia in Boston was still too painful and complex to contemplate directly, but he had many other memories of her which still brought pleasure. Lying sleepless during the brief hours of an April night in Newfoundland, Paul thought about the good days with his wife.

They were at a football game on a cold October afternoon. She was wearing a muskrat coat which her father had just given her, “fake mink,” she called it, but it was glossy and warm and when she turned the collar up, it came above her ears, framing her delicate chin. Their side was losing badly, and the crowd all around them kept booing and cheering and jeering.

“Get me out of here,” she said suddenly. “Let's go to the boat.”

A lot of other people were leaving early. They had to walk through a jostling crowd, and when they finally got to the car, they were caught in a traffic jam for almost an hour. A boisterous party was making the yacht club even noisier than the streets. All this was good, because when they finally rowed out to the yawl and climbed up on her decks, the almost complete silence was like a blessing.

“Maybe we should stay here forever,” she said.

It was cold below decks. The crumpled newspapers which he put into the galley range were so damp that he had to blow into the stove to start a fire, but the kindling wood blazed up fast, and there was that sharp smell of burning pine. The little cabin heated up quickly. She took off her fur coat and tossed it on a bunk. She was wearing a moss-green cashmere sweater and a brown tweed skirt.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” he asked.

“No,” she said, “I think I want to make love.”

Never before had she been so open with him. He rushed to embrace her.

“Only not so fast,” she said. “Maybe we ought to have that tea.”

He put the kettle on after adding more wood to build up the flames. She stood by a porthole looking out.

“Come see,” she said.

The sun was turning the still waters all around them to burnished copper, which slowly turned to gray. He lit a brass lamp over the cabin table. When the water boiled he made a pot of tea and she laughed because his hand trembled when he handed her a cup.

“I think you're as scared as I am,” she said.

“There's nothing to be scared of.”

“I keep telling myself that.”

For a few moments they sat like a serious old couple sipping their tea in silence. The yellow lamplight flickered on her face. Getting up, she took his cup and carried it with her own to the galley sink. When she came back, she put her arms around his neck.

“I want to learn to be good at this,” she said. “I haven't been very good at it, have I?”

“Good enough for me. You've just been scared.”

“You promise you won't make me pregnant?”

“I'll do everything I can.”

“Let me see you put the damn thing on.”

On the few occasions they had made love before this, she had always averted her eyes, pretending that she did not know what was happening. At first he was embarrassed to have her watch him, but then he found that her open interest excited him. When she started to help him pull the contrivance all the way on, he had to beg her to stop, for fear that the game would be over before it started. The fact that she was still fully dressed while he was almost nude made him feel pleasurably perverse. He pulled her to him and she held up her hands in a gesture of surrender while he took her sweater off, and then the rest of her clothes. In the flickering yellow lamplight her full breasts and narrow waist looked like a scene from a blue movie.

“You lie down first,” she said. “This time I want to try different things.”

She was, he realized, more curious than passionate—she was allowing herself to satisfy her young lifetime of questions. She was, perhaps, not as confused as he was, not as bewildered by conflicting currents of desire, “true love” as he imagined it should be, honest lust and honest poetry. That night she was simply like a child with a new toy, and though in some sense that shocked him, it also delighted him.

“I want to try it every which way,” she said. “Now don't hurry.”

He lasted through perhaps fifteen minutes of experimentation, but when she knelt over him with her magnificent breasts wagging only a few inches in front of his eyes while she eased herself down on him, that was the end of the first round. She laughed like a child winning a wrestling game. “I knew you couldn't hold out for long,” she said.

At the time he had been hurt and perhaps a little scared by the realization that she certainly was having fun, but that this was not exactly the grand passion he hoped to inspire and which she inspired in him. In his lonely bunk aboard the trawler in Newfoundland, he now forgot that reservation, and remembered only how beautiful and eager she had been.

She was like a child—a beautiful woman with the face and spirit of a child, and maybe that was why he loved her so much. On that last night together when almost everything had gone wrong, he should have realized that she had never grown up. In the middle of dinner she had announced that she wanted to buy a house and fix it all up while he was gone.

“Where will we get the money?” he had said.

“Daddy will lend it to us. He says a house would be a good investment.”

“But we can't be sure we'll want to live anywhere near here when the war is over. I might get a job anywhere.”

“I wouldn't think of living anywhere else but Wellesley,” she said. “Paul, don't you understand that I need a house to keep me busy when you're gone? I don't want just to live at home like daddy's little girl again. I want my own place. If we're going to have a baby, we're going to have to have a house, and I might already be pregnant.”

He tried to understand and felt guilty for thinking that she was silly and self-indulgent. On his last night with her she wanted to discuss colors for walls and fabrics for rugs. Her mind was so intent on all this that any other conversation was impossible. For her his ship and the ordeal ahead of him simply did not exist, and she obviously did not want to hear about it. Her own immediate future was all that interested her. Despite all her passionate talk, and her interest in sexual experimentation, he began to suspect that she had not yet grown up enough to love anybody or to think much of anyone else. Which was when he started to get drunk—

But all this was nothing to think about now when memories of the good parts of his life were necessary to get him through the bad ones. Dismissing the memories of that last night with her, he went back to that evening aboard the
Valkyrie
, when after winning the first wrestling match, she had decided to see just how many times she could make him perform. That had been a childish game perhaps, but he dearly wished he could play it with her again. With startling recall, he could almost smell the sweetness of her sweat in the dark cabin of the
Arluk
, and hear her little cries.

Lying in his narrow bunk aboard the ship, Paul hardly had to touch himself to spend his solitary passion. At almost exactly that instant the general alarm began to clang, and he heard the boatswain's pipes shrill call, followed by Boats's hoarse voice yelling, “General quarters drill! Man and train all guns, and bring ammunition to the breech, but do not load.”

“Oh,
my
!” Seth exploded as he always did at such times, and Nathan mumbled beneath his breath as he pulled on his pants. Usually Paul was the first from the wardroom during surprise drills, but under the circumstances he waited until the others had gone before changing his underwear and putting on his uniform. It was only a quarter to four in the morning, but when he scrambled to the deck, he found that the Newfoundland dawn was already bright. Mowrey was standing on the gun deck, a glass in his hand and his voice thick when he shouted, “Hurry it up, girls, or we'll be sunk before you ever get to your guns. Where the hell have you been, Yale, down there jerking off in your bunk?”

CHAPTER 13

When the drill was finally over, Mowrey ordered Paul to the bridge.

Paul found his captain sitting on his stool, holding a glass which by its color and smell appeared to be full of undiluted whiskey.

“I see you playing poker up at the officers' club,” Mowrey said. “Did I give you permission to go ashore?”

“No sir, but I assumed I could set watches. Both Mr. Farmer and Mr. Green wanted to stay aboard.”

“You better learn to assume nothing and never set foot off this ship without getting my direct permission,” Mowrey said quietly, looking off in the distance over Paul's shoulder. “See them ships coming in?”

Two big, gray passenger liners were standing into the harbor, their signal masts aflutter with brightly colored flags and pennants.

“They look like troop carriers,” Paul said.

“What flags are they flying?” Mowrey asked sweetly.

“Sir?”

“Just take the white one there and the blue square in it, or the red one with the white stripe. What letters of the alphabet do they signify?”

“I don't know, sir. I'll start studying signal flags right away.”

“You won't go ashore until you know them, and if you don't learn them damn soon, that will go in your fitness report.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Have you been practicing blinker light with Greenberg, like I told you to?”

“When we were at sea, sir, I'm afraid we were both too sick for that.”

“
That
will look good on your fitness report. Practice blinker lights for at least an hour a day with Greenberg—he at least knows Morse code.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“And I want you to teach him navigation for at least an hour a day. He don't even know the book part of it.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“I want you to take star sights, sun sights and moon sights right here at the wharf and let me see your computations.”

“Do you want us to take actual sights?”

“Well, sweet Jesus, I don't want you to hold your thumb up to your nose and pretend.”

“I mean, sir, we can't see any horizon from here. How can we take sights?”

“Is that what you're going to tell me when we're in the ice pack? ‘I mean, sir, we can't see any horizon from here, so how can we take sights?'”