Ice Brothers (79 page)

“Damn it, I'm not ready yet to take the
Arluk
on a long voyage alone,” he said. “Anyway, GreenPat will think you're ice-happy if you tell him you don't want to go home. He'd probably be afraid to give you another command. You're liable to end up as exec under some other crazy bastard like Mowrey …”

So Paul stayed aboard the
Arluk
and helped to get her ready for the long voyage home. The winter weather on the North Atlantic was even worse than usual that year, but by this time Paul had enormous confidence in the old trawler, her men and in himself as a sailor. He spent hours on the flying bridge as the ship drove before a full gale, and there were moments when he felt a kind of serenity not like anything he'd known before. At such times he felt himself freed from anger at Sylvia, his brother and even himself. He realized that he didn't really know what had happened, what Sylvia and Bill had done or not done. Probably he never would know for sure and he wasn't at all certain he wanted to find out. He had no desire to ask a lot of questions and play detective. Sylvia was Sylvia—he had rarely been able to be sure she was telling the truth, and maybe that was why he could no longer love her. Maybe lying was the worst part of infidelity. Brit at least had never gone in for that. Maybe his love for Sylvia had always been a little crazy, as everyone in his family had kept telling him. Maybe the Arctic seas, Greenland, Brit and Nathan had helped him become sane, to grow up, and he would finally escape Sylvia, but there was no reason to do it with a lot of fireworks. Ashore or at sea, dramatic—melodramatic—action was usually a mistake, and when things were worst it was most important to stay almost casual, as though nothing was happening at all. There was no
reason
to attack Sylvia for being whatever she was. He would visit her in the hospital, if that's where she still was, try not to increase her pain and leave as soon as possible. If he had to see his brother, he would say little, listen for as short a time as possible and get out. Soon he would be given another assignment, a much bigger ship, perhaps, and that was good to think about. The war would go on, God knew how many years, and when it was over, if he was still alive, he could make up his mind whether to go back to Sylvia. As Nathan had said, sometimes it's wise not to make decisions … he'd let events make them for him. For now, anyway.

Unfortunately these moments of calm were often swept away by gusts of rage. Why did all this have to be happening to him? Why couldn't he come home, a conquering hero, like he'd often imagined, and be met by his faithful admiring wife with sighs of love? Certainly that sort of thing must be happening often to men no more deserving than he. At least half the men in the forecastle were waiting for it to happen to them, and not all of them would be disappointed.

Well … if I'd picked a saner wife and had been saner myself I could expect better rewards, he lectured himself, but in some ways I'm a damn lucky man … For one thing I'm alive and unhurt. Hansen, Sparks, Seth, Blake, Cookie, the living pincushion—if he thought about them it was hard to feel sorry for himself.…

As they neared Boston a heavy blizzard enclosed them in the now familiar curtains of snow, but with the help of the radar Paul found his way into the harbor without difficulty. Just before dark he nosed the
Arluk
alongside a wharf in the same shipyard where they had first boarded her less than a year ago. It seemed a lifetime. There was no one ashore to catch their heaving lines, but Guns jumped from the forecastle head, and the ship was quickly moored.

“Finished with engines,” Paul said, and Nathan rang up the signal.

“Liberty party requests permission to go ashore!” Boats called from the well deck.

“Permission granted,” Paul said, and the men, who had been wearing their dress blues for hours, scrambled over the rail.

“I've given Mr. Williams the duty aboard tonight,” Nathan said. “I'll be around tomorrow. There's no reason why you can't take off.”

“You got any plans?” Paul asked.

“I'm going to have a drink at the Ritz bar.”

“I'll join you before I make my telephone calls.”

They both put on rumpled khaki uniforms because they had no clean blue ones, and they felt out of place at the Ritz bar with beautiful women and sleek-looking men laughing all around them. They said very little as they downed two drinks, and then Paul, with a rising sense of dread, walked to a telephone booth. He decided to call his parents first to see where Sylvia was. His mother answered.

“Paul! Where are you?”

“Home.”

“I'm so glad! I've been so worried about you. I'm so sorry everything happened the way it did. You've heard about it, haven't you? Bill is just furious at Sylvia. He told me before he left that he hopes none of us ever have to see her again.”

“Where did he go?”

“Didn't you get our letters? They sent him to England, and now I'm so worried about him. He volunteered to go even though he could have stayed as an instructor here.”

Well, Paul thought—at least I won't have to see him … “Is Sylvia still in the hospital?”

“Yes … she's really in very bad shape, I hear. Bill says she's mental. She's got more than broken bones. I'm so sorry. It's such a terrible thing for you.”

“I'm all right,” Paul said, got the name of the hospital, promised to visit his parents as soon as possible, quickly hung up and walked slowly back to the bar.

“One more drink,” he said to Nathan. “I've got to visit a hospital.”

“Want to come back here afterward? We could have a late dinner.”

“That would be good,” Paul said. “I shouldn't be long.”

He took a taxi to the Massachusetts General Hospital. A receptionist gave him the number of Sylvia's room. He walked through endless corridors, all of which seemed to him to be full of the smells and sounds of sickness and death. As he approached the open door of Sylvia's room he heard her laughing exactly as she used to do at parties. She was sitting in bed with one leg propped up in a plaster cast, and she was talking to two white-coated young interns who were drinking from paper cups. Vases of flowers filled every level surface in the room.

Aware that his sudden arrival might come as a shock to her, Paul hesitated by the door.

“You're just saying that!” Sylvia said. “You're just trying to cheer up a poor cripple.”

“No, I mean it,” the taller intern said.

Sylvia's glossy dark blonde hair had been brushed over the shoulders of her pink bed jacket. She was wearing, as usual, a little too much makeup, but in her face there was that familiar vitality, the same old excitement, and her eyes sparkled as she laughed with the interns. Paul walked slowly toward her. From the doorway, he said, “Hello, Sylvia.”

She jerked her head to face him, and went so pale that her lipstick and rouge seemed to brighten.

“Paul! My God! You're
back!
”

She held out her arms and the interns hastily brushed by Paul on their way out. Leaning over the bed, he kissed her on the forehead and gave her a quick hug before stepping back.

“What kind of a greeting is that? Oh Paul! Are you mad at me?”

“No.”

“I wish I wasn't like this. I wish I could ask you to jump right into this bed with me.”

He smiled.

“Oh, Paul, sit here on the edge of the bed and hold my hand. I have so much to tell you about. I want to explain the whole thing, so you don't have any reason to be mad at me at all …”

She talked very fast, often contradicting herself and her letter, making him almost embarrassed for her as she strained to explain why she was driving around the city at three o'clock on the morning after New Year's Eve with an air force captain and why she had been charged with drunken driving, but she managed to give a certain plausibility to her protestations of innocence, except for the fact that she now had the air force captain a terrible man who had practically kidnapped her.

“It all must have been very hard on you,” he said.

“It wouldn't really have been more than a stupid accident if it hadn't been for Bill. I haven't wanted to tell you this about your own brother but …”

According to her, Bill had been pursuing her for years and had almost raped her only a week after Paul had gone to Greenland. Paul was sure that she exaggerated this, but also suspected there was some substance to it. He was very glad that Bill was three thousand miles away.

“I'm sorry about all this too,” he said, “but there's not much we can do about it now, is there?”

“No, but I just want to be sure you believe me. I haven't done one single thing wrong.”

“I'm not judging you, Sylvia. I'm not in very good shape for judging anybody … but I can't stay long. I have to go—”

“Where? Why? Chris said you'd get a thirty-day leave when you came home.”

He thought of confessing his sins and asking her honestly to confess hers, but the thought appalled him, and he was sure that after the whole messy scene was over he would still want to get away from her. There was no point in putting her or himself through all that.

“I have to go,” he repeated. “Sylvia, you and I need time to figure things out. Let's just do as best we can until after the war is over. Then we'll see where we stand.”

“You are mad at me then, aren't you? You don't believe me!”

“I think we both need time to see where we are and what we are.”

She looked scared. “You're not going to cut off my allotment, are you? Bill said you would.”

“I won't do anything like that. Get better and don't worry. We both have to sort things out …”

He kissed her on the lips this time and quickly turned to go. She broke into tears, and, damn it, he was strongly tempted to go back. He was also pretty sure that that would turn out to be the worst decision in his life, and by now he was something of an expert in the mistake line. He went out of the room so fast that he jostled a cart full of trays in the hall, spilled one, and was shouted at by an angry nurse. “Why don't you look where you're going?”

Some way to talk to a hero …

By the time he got back to the Ritz bar, his calm had deserted him, and he realized that he was almost in shock. His hand trembled as he reached for a drink.

“You're not as terrible a man as you think,” Nathan said with his crooked smile.

“I don't know. She's sick and I just walked out on her. She was crying. Maybe she really was telling the truth.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“No. But maybe that shouldn't matter.”

“Maybe.”

“But in the long run it would. Damn it, I want to get out of this town. I don't want to see her again and I don't want to see my parents. They'll just keep telling me how terrible she is.”

“Why don't you go up to the district office tomorrow and see what orders they're cooking up for you? I met a commander here at the bar a few minutes ago, and he said they're sending practically everybody to some kind of school in Florida between assignments.”

“You mean
now
they're going to send us to school?”

Nathan laughed. “That figures, doesn't it?”

The next day Paul found that he was indeed slated to go to Advanced Officers' Training School in St. Augustine, Florida, for six weeks. After that he would be given command of one of many small ships which were being built for service in the southwest Pacific. The thought of palm-fringed islands pleased him. Until then he had not realized how much he dreaded going back to the Arctic. The personnel officer told him that there was no reason why he could not go to Florida right away and take his leave there before reporting to the school. A month of lying on the beaches in a place where no one would expect anything of him seemed to Paul to be just what he needed. No matter how much sleep he got, he still felt exhausted.…

When Paul was detached from the
Arluk
Nathan was given orders making him commanding officer of the trawler. Paul was packing his clothes when Nathan came to his cabin to show him the mimeographed papers.

“Aren't you going to get any leave?” Paul asked.

“Later maybe. I want to be here to make sure that the refitting goes right, and I've got to train practically a whole new crew.”

“I bet you turn out to be worse than Mowrey,” Paul said with a straight face.

“I can't really believe I'm skipper,” Nathan said. “When we first came aboard here, who in the world could have imagined that?”

“In war everything changes fast, including us.”

“You mean the Coast Guard has made men out of us?” He smiled.

Paul closed his footlocker and strapped it to Brit's big narwhale tusk in its sealskin case. “Maybe you'll see Brit again,” he said.

“I doubt if we get over to the east coast again, but maybe.”

“Give her my best.”

“I will. Do you want me to have some of the men carry your gear out to the street?”

“I'd appreciate it. You better read your orders to the men as soon as I've gone. They should know who their skipper is.”

The petty officers who appeared to take Paul's footlocker were new hands. All the men Paul knew were on liberty or had been transferred. There was no one to say good-by to, but before leaving he walked through the wardroom and up to the forecastle, which was strangely deserted. Nathan followed him. They stood by the gangway for a few moments, oddly embarrassed about saying good-by.

“Take care of yourself,” Paul said, taking Nathan's hand.

“Let's get together after the war.”

Paul clapped him hard on the shoulder, turned and walked ashore.

A few moments later he turned to take a last look at the
Arluk
. Nathan had hurried to the signal halyards and as Paul watched, the third repeater fluttered toward the top of the mast to signify that the commanding officer was not aboard. Standing by the foot of the mast, Nathan made the halyard fast, turned and raised his hand in a salute that ended in a wave. Paul waved back, and then, acting on impulse, gave the ship a formal salute before turning and hurrying toward the street, another ship and another war.