Stage Door Canteen (31 page)

In the past, when he faced another voyage, David Griffiths told himself that when it was over, and providing he was still among the living, he would go home to Gwyneth and the girls for a months’ leave. Home was in Cardiff, a roomy two story brick residence with all the amenities including a piano, a den, and a modern bath, surrounded by a very decent English garden.

The house was still there. But home was not.

He knew the truth. His conscious mind was fully aware of it. But lately he had taken to telling himself that he would go home and they would be there, as though it were a fact.

That is, he kept telling himself that in order not only to endure but to survive the next convoy when the hell and the U-boats and death and sinking ships were at last finished, he could go home to Gwyneth and ten year-old Susan and Audrey, who had just turned four. They would go off on holiday. The quietest and safest place these days was, probably, a holiday camp in Wales. The girls would like that, and it would give Gwyneth a bit of a rest.

What was increasingly strange, he could admit to himself, was that he thought of it as not a fantasy, not an illusion, but reality. He was going home. After this voyage he was going to do that which held him together, made it possible for him to return to the sea, the damnable war, and the Esher. Spend a leave at home. Enjoy his loving wife and irreplaceable family.

Then he told himself, Christ, he was losing his sodding mind. He had to be careful. Gwyneth was not there, and neither were the girls. No one was there. There was no home to go to, only the house. And he did not want to go back to the Cardiff place. When he was ashore now in Britain he lived in hotels. He’d sell the house as soon as he could get around to making arrangements. He wished he’d done it months ago. A year ago.

He heard the footsteps coming down from the deck, then the hallway. Someone entered the saloon.

“Captain?” It was the voice of the second mate. “We have a weather advisory, sir. The pilot, Mr. Harkin’s, been notified.”

He didn’t take his hands away. The pain in his stomach had subsided somewhat, waiting for the milk. He said, “Inform the bridge I’ll be up shortly.”

It was next to impossible to get a cab at Rockefeller Center because of the crowds of moviegoers coming out of the Radio City Music Hall, and the snow, which had been falling all the time they were in the restaurant and now covered the sidewalks to a depth of about half an inch. Dina and Eugene Struhbeck decided to walk down Fifth Avenue.

It was too far to walk all way to the Waldorf Astoria. Dina said that after a while if they got too cold, and still couldn’t catch a cab, they could always give up and take the subway. It was fun, though, walking in the swirling snowflakes. At Fiftieth Street, Deboret Freres Jewelers piped recorded Christmas carols out into the air, making it seem even more festive.

They’d had dinner at a place Dina had always wanted to go to, the Café de Paris in the Prometheus Fountain courtyard. There diners could watch the ice skaters in the Rockefeller Center rink just outside. It was probably, she’d told Gene, the most Christmassy place in New York. Above the skating rink rose the giant, dark Christmas tree that had been cut especially for Rockefeller Center somewhere in the upper Midwest, several stories high, with swaying, lightless red and blue and yellow plastic ornaments the size of giant balloons.

She put her arm through Gene’s, and he steadied her when they encountered an occasional slippery patch in the snow. Dina had on a black cloth coat with a hood, pulled up against the snowfall, that was trimmed with a strip of fake yellow and black leopard fur. With her long, curling black hair and dark eyes and bright red lipstick she was beautiful and very sophisticated-looking, even though Gene knew she’d just turned nineteen in October. He was very aware of her soft breast pressing against his arm when she leaned against him stepping off the icy curbs in her high heels.

Fifth Avenue was dim in the brownout, but an early full moon rose in the strip of sky above the buildings. The snow that coated the streets and parked cars and the tops of buses reflected the moon’s luminous light. The inevitable Santa Clauses were on street corners. Pushcarts sold hot, doughy pretzels, and roasted chestnuts. In an open doorway a man stamped his feet against the cold beside a big cardboard box full of bunches of brilliantly purple violets. Gene steered Dina over to the flower seller and bought four bunches of violets. “They’re the color of your eyes,” he told her.

Dina gave him a small, mock-protesting shove. “My eyes are brown—brown—silly.” She held the violets up against her cheek and bent forward, her face right in his. “Here, take a good look, Eugene. You’re not colorblind, are you? Look, I’ve got black Italian eyes, not purple.”

He was enchanted. “Whatever they are, they’re beautiful,” he told her huskily. “You’re the most beautiful, wonderful girl I’ve ever known, Dina, you know that. I can’t figure out why you’re doing this. I mean, I can’t believe it’s really happening.”

She put the violets up to her nose. “These don’t have any perfume, do they? Look, I’m here because you have a twenty-four hour leave, that’s what you told me. Then you go overseas.” She let go of his arm and walked ahead. “You’re spending a lot of money. I feel sort of bad about that because I know you don’t have a lot.”

“I have money, don’t worry about it.” He caught up with her. “Hey, I co-sponsored a poker game in Honolulu, Dina. I made a lot of money, I just haven’t spent any of it so far.”

“In the Air Force?” Her eyes widened. “You had a poker game in the Air Force? Wasn’t that against the rules?”

“Crap, everything’s against the rules. I learned that a long time ago, before the Air Force.” They waited on the curb for the light to change. “This time I want to follow the rules. I don’t want this to be just another GI taking his girl to a hotel room, you know that, Dina. We don’t have to make love, I just want to talk to you, be with you. That’s all I want.”

She looked away. “Yes, I know.”

“At least you could let me kiss you.”

She pushed at him, breathless. “No, don’t do that, not here. Wait ‘til we get in the taxicab.”

“There are no taxicabs, I think they’ve disappeared from the face of the earth.” He pulled her back against him. People jostled them, turning to look, but he didn’t let her go. “You’ve had a couple of drinks, those Tom Collinses before dinner. It isn’t that, is it?”

“No, no. Gene, let go of me, people are looking at us. I want to do this, I told you,” she said, taking his arm again, “I really do. I don’t want you to go back to the war—well, you know. I realize how important it is to you, to both of us. Besides, I know what I’m doing. My whole life is changing. I’m in a show on Broadway now, and I have what I want, my dream I’ve worked for nearly all my life.” She turned her face up to him, smiling. “I want you,” she said softly, “to have what you want, too.”

“Dina,” he said, “do you love me as much as I love you? Sometimes, I know you’re just a kid, really, in spite of—”

“Oh my God, there’s a cab,” she cried. “He’s got his light on! Go catch it!”

He let go of her and ran out into the street and flagged it down.

There was a good bit of ice in Long Island Sound, beginning at New Haven harbor. Several miles east, off the north shore of Long Island, the pilot selected a spot to do speed trials that would bring the Esher up to her maximum within a specified time, over a measured mile. After the speed trials had been completed the company’s Compass Adjuster would begin his time-consuming, meticulous tests.

Standing just above the wheelhouse, the ComAdj would take bearings with the standard compass, calling down to the helmsman the course to steer. From time to time he would slip magnets below the compass to adjust it and compensate for the innate magnetism of the freighter. When all this was finished he would order the deguassing to be switched on, this being a process to neutralize the ship’s magnetism in order to foil magnetic mines. Then the compass bearings would be checked again. It was a finicky job and, in bad weather, could stretch out for hours, trying everyone’s patience. The final result, presented to the captain, was a Deviation Card, which showed the ship’s compass error at various readings. And with all the fuss, indispensable, after all.

As they reached the area for the sea trials the pilot dropped a position buoy. The Esher was running a little late. The pilot, the shipyard people, and the ComAdj had homes and families to get back to that evening. The snow had thinned, driven by a gusty northwest wind, and the Esher’s lookouts could see, for the first time, the dim gray-black outline of the Long Island shore. The Lloyds agent, the second officer whose watch it now was, the two shipyard representatives and the Compass Adjuster joined the captain in the wheelhouse. The wind had whipped up the whitecaps. The Esher met the chop with an ungainly motion, as the senior man from the shipyard braced himself against the bulkhead and got out his stop watch. The pilot pushed the engine room telegraph to Full Speed Ahead.

All went well for the first few minutes. The Esher answered with a respectable show of power, her stern squatting as her screw bit into the gray waters of Long Island Sound, sending a foaming white wake astern. In spite of the cold some of the crew gathered at the rail to watch. A fishing trawler from Montauk sighted the freighter and her “A” flag flying from the bridge, and veered off to the north to give her a wide berth. A flock of seagulls, squawking for galley castoffs, circled overhead.

David Griffiths had his stop watch in hand when he felt something, a small deviation underfoot that made him look up. The helmsman, apparently unsure, still stared ahead through the window at the gray sea and the long bulk of the Esher picking her way over the wintry whitecaps. The ship did it again, slipping almost imperceptibly to port.

The helmsman said to Harkin, the pilot, “She’s not answering the helm, sir.”

The ship fell off again, almost slyly. The shipyard supervisor clicked his stop watch to ‘off,’ eyebrows raised.

“Oh, hell,” the pilot said. He looked annoyed. “What do you mean, rudder’s not answering?”

David stepped forward. “Stop engines,” he ordered. To the second mate he said, “Check the helm, Mr. MacNamara, and notify the chief officer to stand by the anchor and inform him we have a steering problem. Where’s the current here Mr. Harkin?” he wanted to know.

It was strong, and would carry them westward. When they calculated the drift, David gave orders for the helmsman to call the engine room and inform the chief engineer of trouble. He could hear the chief now. Not her precious boilers this time, but the damned rudder.

The Esher, slowly turning broadside to the current and down wind, continued to thrum along, going nowhere in spite of new boilers and busy engines. The ship developed a lackadaisical, almost insouciant roll. It was cold, it was still snowing, the Esher seemed to say, and to hell with it.

“Fetch the carpenter.” An AB had appeared at the wheelhouse door with a question from the engine room. He knew he didn’t need to order the chief and the second engineer aft to the rudder engine. The chief was undoubtedly on his way.

The Esher rolled sluggishly off the north coast of Long Island, losing headway, letting the currents take her slowly but inexorably into the main ship channel.

“We have company,” the pilot noted.

David peered through the wheelhouse window at a small gust of snow partly obscuring what appeared to be a United States destroyer making a fair nineteen to twenty knots in the eastbound lane, a pair of tenders trailing. He stepped forward to take the wheel from the helmsman. He’d been at the Esher’s wheel before, the last time with the ill-fated PQ17, threading a way through icebergs and U-boats. Come on, he found himself thinking, don’t drag your bloody, rusty, ten thousand-ton ass in front of the United States Navy.

“Captain,” the pilot said.

“In a moment, Mr. Harkin.” The chief was calling the bridge to advise that the telemotor, the hydraulic system that controlled the rudder engine from the steering wheel, was malfunctioning. The helmsman waited for orders.

“Get going,” he told him.

The destroyer gave them an inquiring whoop.

Emergency steering was on the Esher’s poop deck, connected to the steam engine mounted directly underneath. The drifting ship could be steered from there. The helmsman left at a run.

In the sea lane, the oncoming destroyer whooped again, acknowledging the Esher’s “A” flag. But if the Esher was doing sea trials, the warship seemed to want to know, why was she lolling around in the middle of the road?

“Captain, may I suggest—” the pilot began.

Damn. “In a moment, Mr. Harkin.”

He saw, beyond the wheelhouse window, the Third Officer with the NUC spheres in his arms on his way to Monkey’s Island, the roof over the wheelhouse. If the Third was lucky, he’d get the black-painted, two-foot metal balls attached to the signal halyards and hoisted in record time. The message the NUC spheres sent was: SHIP NOT UNDER COMMAND. We’re adrift. Get the hell out of our way.

At that moment the Esher turned her bow sharply. The helmsman at the emergency steering aft had taken control of the freighter. Luck in the nick of time. David pushed the engine room telegraph from Stop to Full Speed Ahead. The Esher, engines responding with a jarring kick, slowly moved away from the US warships, the ship channel, and toward the Long Island shore.