Authors: Howard Fast
Alone in her room, she said to herself, "I must get out of here, or I will surely lose my mind." It surprised her that she had not wept all day, but then she realized that she had not shed tears in over a year. She had lost that habit.
Dan Lavette did not sell the house in Westwood until three years after May Ling's death. He slept there only .intermittently, having constructed an apartment for himself with the few facilities he required in the old office building on Terminal Island. But since he knew that Chinese lore had it that the spirit of the deceased remained in the dwelling of the deceased for three years, he held on to the little house. Not that he believed in Chinese superstition, not that May Ling had believed in it, but she had held to the practice, so he would too. At first he told himself that it was Joe's home, which was a reason to hold it, but ® June 1942, Joe was shipped out to a base hospital in
Honolulu.
He tried to explain to Joe why he wanted to get nd of the house, and he thought Joe understood. In any
c
ase, Joe tried to understand the grim-faced man who would not let go of his grief. When the three years were over, Dan sold the house and put the money in a bank account for his son. His years there with May Ling had been good years, the best in his life, but to be constantly reminded of them was more than he could endure. When
he finally sold the house, he felt the first break in his
depression.
He made his life on Terminal Island. Curiously enough, he had no hatred for the Japanese. He could not personalize the thing that came out of the sky and murdered his wife, and his dedication to the shipyard had nothing to do with any complex chain of revenge. He went back to the shipyard because he had nowhere else to go, and he went back to work because otherwise he would have gone mad. At that point he had no future, no dream, no ambition, and in his mind he characterized life as a filthy, senseless, and aimless fraud. While she was alive, he had never actually contemplated May Ling's death. In a society where most women outlived their husbands, he had simply taken for granted that he would die before she did. She had been more than a part of his life; she had shaped his life. With gentle patience and with infinite tact, she had educated him, been his teacher and guide, lived for him, adored him without reproach for anything he had done. He had never dwelled on how much he loved her, yet he had always known that life without her would be untenable.
In June 1944, Dan Lavette still owned the house in Westwood, but he had not been there for seven weeks. As a matter of fact, he had not left Terminal Island during those seven weeks, and when Admiral Land came there to see him, he finally found him, in blue workshirt and Levi's, prowling across the deck of an almost completed Liberty ship. "Lavette," he shouted at him, "will you stand still for one damn moment!"
Dan stood still and waited for Land without enthusiasm, and Land, regarding the heavyset, gray-haired man who stood scowling at him, said almost tentatively, "We have to talk."
"I'm busy."
"You are the most ill-natured sonofabitch I ever knew."
"Thank you. I happen to be inspecting this hunk of tin."
"You've got more damn inspectors than you know what to do with."
"When a ship leaves this yard, I look at it. That's my responsibility. What in hell is yours? To come here and bug my ass off?"
"Sort of," Land said calmly. "What number is this?"
"Two hundred and eighty-one, in the Liberty class." He condescended to shake hands with the admiral.
"I will be damned," Land said slowly and with respect. «I knew it was high. Two hundred and eighty-one. You are one strange, ill-tempered, incredible sonofabitch."
Dan unbent to a slight smile, a mere twitch of his lips, the most he had permitted himself in a long time. He nodded at the ship on which they stood. "How do you like it?"
"It appears all right."
"What in hell does that mean—it appears all right? I don't hold any brief for the Liberty ships. They are a lousy design to begin with, but given the design, we build the best ships in the world."
"Why?" Land wondered.
"Why?"
"You don't give a damn about the war or the country or anything else, as far as I can see. The accounting office tells me that as of now you've grossed six hundred million. You're a millionaire many times over, but you never leave this place. Do you own a suit, or do you sleep in those jeans of yours?"
"I sleep in the raw," Dan said. "Come on over to the office. I'll buy you a drink. We're launching a tanker this afternoon—number twenty-three. I've altered the design, and I'd like you to look at it before we have a congressional investigation."
"You haven't answered my question."
Dan led the way over the side of the ship. "Watch your step, Admiral." They made their way through a jungle of scaffolding, power lifts, cranes, steel plates, beams, and skeletal hulls of ships. "You don't want an answer," Dan said to the admiral. "You want to convert me to this mound of horseshit you call patriotism. Now I'll tell you something, mister. Fourteen years ago, I was sitting over there on the dock at San Pedro. I hadn't eaten in three days. Neither had anyone else within sight of me. I would have worked for a dollar a day—damnit, for fifty cents a day. Now look around you. How many men do you think
1
got working here right now?"
The men swarmed around them, welders, carpenters, "ftmen, laborers, steamfitters, painters. "Over thirty thousand just in this yard," Dan told him. "Over two hundred just in the office. We put them two at a desk. It's
e
asier to get steel plate than desks or typewriters. They
w
°rk and they eat, and we make a good ship because the
only purpose I have in life is to run this lousy shipyard.
That's my problem, not yours. But don't ask me to cheer
for a system that requires an Adolf Hitler to give men
jobs."
"That is one hell of a way to put it."
"That's the way I put it."
"I guess it is. You're the only millionaire I know who sounds like a damn anarchist, but I guess you're the best shipbuilder we have. I wish I had twenty like you."
"God forbid."
"Yes, it would be hard to take, but it would end this rotten war a lot quicker."
They had come to a set of pile drivers, and Land paused to watch the huge hammers drive the wooden piles down into the mud. Shouting to make himself heard, Dan said, "Your boys in Washington wanted three more sets of ways. When we're complete, we'll have driven fifty-nine thousand piles, give or take a few, into this mud."
"I want to talk about that," Land said.
In Dan's office, where the littered, crowded disarray resembled an on-site construction shack more than the head office of one of the largest enterprises on the Coast, Land accepted a whiskey and soda. Dan lit a cigar and said, "You look tired, old man."
"One thing about being an admiral," Land observed, "is that it gives you the right to relegate arrogance and nastiness to yourself. That doesn't work with you, Lavette. How old do you think I am?"
"Seventy?"
"Sixty-five. I'm ten years older than you, and I'll ask you to respect that. All right, let's get down to business. The boys think we're over the hump—at least enough up the hump to begin to build something that we won't have to dump on the scrapheap once the war is over. That means a new class of ship we call the Victory. You'll have the plans no later than tomorrow. Meanwhile, here's a rough rundown. She'll have a displacement of ten thousand tons, overall length of four hundred feet, midship deck housing and a forecastle deck, which will give her a fine graceful swoop up to the bow."
"That makes problems."
"I know. We won't mass-produce it. If you can get out a dozen in the next twelve months, I'll be satisfied. We're giving her good striking power, two gun tubs, fore and
a
ft, platforms sheathed in half-inch steel plate, and that means high-quality steel. The forward gun will be a
seventy
-millimeter, surface and antiaircraft, and the gun aft will be a five-incher, which means one hell of a big gun and a new concept of mounting and bracing. She'll also carry six smaller tubs mounted with twenty-millimeter multiple machine guns, but that offers no problems. Your power plant will be oil-fired boilers and steam turbines. It's going to cost, but your profits go up at the same time."
Dan nodded without enthusiasm.
"I appreciate a joyful reception when we move forward. We're sending two specialists with the plans. I warned them what to expect. You don't have to be kind to them."
"Kindness doesn't build ships, Admiral. I hate these damn technical reps. Do I need them?"
"I'm afraid you do, Dan. It's a new project. Now listen to me and get off your high horse for a minute or two. We're having a ceremony in San Francisco in August, and the President's going to give you a citation."
"What in hell for?"
"For building the damn ships. What else?"
Dan shrugged.
"You can't refuse. By the way, I ran into your son the other day. Thomas."
Dan nodded.
"Fine-looking boy. You ought to see more of him. Bewails the fact that he's locked into a shoreside job with Whittier's ships."
Dan nodded again.
"And about the citation?"
"I suppose so."
Tom had purchased a house on Pacific Heights, taking advantage of the depressed wartime prices. He and John Whittier had worked out, with the legal aid of Seever, Lang and Murphy, a holding company that combined part of (he assets of the Seldon Bank and Whittier's shipping company. The profits of the Whittier fleet could only be described as astronomical. With an entire army to be supplied in the Pacific, with the Hawaiian Islands, as a
re
ar supply base that was separated from the American Mainland by thousands of miles, the hunger for cargo was '"satiable. There were simply not enough ships, and the Practice of adding and adding to deck cargo advanced to a
point where the danger was exceeded only by the profits.
Tom would have denied that he loved money, pointing out, as he not infrequently did, that a person who grows to adulthood with all the money he requires never truly cultivates a love of money as money. There was a good deal of sophistry in this. Money meant power, and Tom loved power, and with this he enjoyed the feeling that any price, however preposterous, was within his capabilities. The house on Pacific Heights cost four hundred and eighty thousand dollars and would have cost a million to duplicate in 1944—had it been possible to build such a house at that time. It had more rooms, more floor space, and more gray granite than the Whittier mansion, and when Whittier raised an eyebrow at his junior partner's aspirations, Tom was not at all abashed. "I think it fits into my future," he said.
By now, Tom had made his peace with Eloise, and he had begun to believe that in spite of her headaches and certain other inadequacies, she was very much the ideal mate for him. For one thing, she never offered an opinion in company and rarely when thctwo of them were alone, and at such times, if their opinions differed, she quickly deferred to him. Mostly, she said very little, and days would pass without any conversation between husband and wife except concerning the points where the schedule of one intersected with that of the other. His advance within the navy had been steady if unspectacular, and at this point he held the rank of commander. In all truth, his job was by no means a sinecure, and as liaison between the United States Navy and the Whittier shipping interests, he checked and supervised thousands of tons of vital war cargo. In other times, it might have occurred to someone that as one of the owners of the Whittier line, he had a conflict of interest; but in those years no one bothered to dwell on such niceties. Tom was bright, charming, and wealthy; that in combination with his naval rank took him over all obstacles.
By June of 1944, the new house had been bought and furnished, and Tom decided that even in wartime the occasion called for a reception that would be both a housewarming and a celebration of his third wedding anniversary. He took a reasonable amount of pride in all his possessions, and while he considered Eloise wanting in certain areas, he felt that, dressed and groomed, she was as ornamental as any woman in San Francisco.
"Nothing very big," he told her, informing her of the occasion. "We'll have about sixty people. Do you think you can manage to put it all together?"
"Yes, if you will give me the list of the people you want. Jean will help me."
"I'd rather mother didn't help you."
"Why? She loves to help me."
"I'm not sure I want her to be here. John will come, and that will be embarrassing for both of them. We don't have to have my mother on every occasion."
Eloise took a deep breath. "This isn't every occasion," she managed to say. "This is the first large party we are giving in our new house."