The Caine Mutiny (58 page)

“Yes, May.”

“You don’t love me?”

“It’s all mixed up and lousy, May. Talking won’t help it-”

“Maybe, but I’d like to tie up the bundle all neat and proper before I throw it into the cellar. If you don’t love me, that does it, of course. You kiss as though you love me. Explain that.”

Willie was unable to say that he loved May’s mouth, but not enough to drag her through life with him-though that would have been putting it in the simplest terms. “I don’t know what love is, May. It’s a word. You’ll always be the image of desire for me. That’s a fact, but there’s more to life than that. I don’t think we’d be happy together. Not because of any lack in you. Call me a snobbish prig and let it go at that. Everything that’s wrong between us is wrong with me-”

“Is it because I’m poor, or dumb, or Catholic, or what? Can’t you put it in words, so I’ll know?”

There is only one way to get off this particular kind of griddle. Willie looked at the floor and said nothing, while long seconds of silence ticked off. Every second brought another stab of hot shame and embarrassment, and his self-respect gushed out of the wounds. May managed to say at last, in an unembittered tone, though a shaky one, “Well, all right, Willie. It must be a load off your mind, anyway.” She opened a drawer in a peeling, dirty bureau, and took out a bottle and a pillbox. “I’m going down the hall to doctor myself. I won’t be long. Want to wait?”

“May-”

“Dear, don’t look so tragic. It’s not world-shaking. We’re both going to live.”

Willie, hardly aware of what he was doing, picked up
Troilus and Cressida
and read a couple of pages. He started guiltily when May came in, and put the book aside. Her eyes were red, and with her make-up removed, she was very pale. She smiled slightly. “Go right on reading, dear. Give me a cigarette though. I haven’t dared to smoke all day, thought my throat would close up.” She took an ashtray to the bed and lay back against the cushions with a sigh. “Ah, that tastes wonderful. Temperature, by the way, is down. Just a little over a hundred: Nothing like night-club air for what ails you. ... What are you going to do after the war, Willie? Going back to piano playing?„

“I don’t think so.”

“You shouldn’t. I think you should teach.”

“ ‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach’-eh?”

“The world couldn’t exist without teachers. It just seems right for you. I can see you in a university town, leading a nice quiet life, plugging Dickens faithfully as the years slip by-”

“Sounds heroic, doesn’t it?”

“Willie dear, everyone does what he can do best. You talked me into wanting to read. It was quite an achievement.”

“Well, I’ve thought of it, May. It would mean going back to school for a year-”

“Your mama will certainly see you through, won’t she? ... Especially
now
.” May yawned like an animal. “Sorry, dear-” Willie stood. “I don’t blame you for being bored with me-and you must be dead-”

“Oh, sit down. I’m not bored with you, and I’m not angry at you.” She yawned again, covered her mouth, and laughed. “Isn’t it silly? I ought to be wailing and tearing my hair. My energy must be all out. Willie, I’ve gotten pretty used to this idea, really. I had a little hope at San Francisco-at Yosemite, I mean-but not after you talked to your mother and sent me home. However, it’s done me no harm to have someone to be true to-”

“May-I know what Yosemite meant to you-to me-”

“Now, dear, I didn’t bring it up to torture your conscience. We both meant well. I was trying to trap you, I guess. I don’t know. I’ll have to take some psychology courses to figure myself out-”

“My mother doesn’t hate you, May-it isn’t her doing-”

“Willie sweetheart,” said May, with a little tired sharpness. “I know exactly, but exactly, how your mother feels about me. Stay off that ground.”

They talked some more, not much. She came to the door with him and kissed him affectionately. “You’re very, very good-looking, all the same,” she whispered.

“I’ll call you tomorrow, May. Keep well.” He rang for the elevator. She stood in the doorway, looking at him. When the elevator door was opened by a Negro in shirt sleeves, she suddenly said, “Will I see you any more?”

“Sure. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Good night.”

“Good-by, Willie.”

He did not call her the next day, nor the day after that, nor the day after that. He went to matinees with his mother, to dinner with his mother, to shows at night with his mother; he visited the family with his mother. When Mrs. Keith urged him to go out by himself he glumly declined. One afternoon he went to Columbia and took a solitary walk through Furnald Hall. The incessant salutes of baby-faced midshipmen in khaki at first flattered, then depressed him. Nothing had changed in the lobby. Here was the leather couch on which he had told his father of his forty-eight demerits; there was the phone booth where he had talked to May a hundred times-and there was the knot of impatient midshipmen outside it as always, and inside was the youngster with a crew haircut crooning and giggling into the telephone. Dead lost time hung in the air. Willie hurried out of the building-it was midafternoon, gray and windy, and his mother would not be at the restaurant for a couple of hours-and so he went into a dim, shabby, empty bar on Broadway, and rapidly drank four scotch and sodas, which only seemed to make him a little dizzy.

His Uncle Lloyd joined them for dinner at Twenty-one. A banker in civilian life, he was now a colonel in Army public information, and he liked to talk about his experiences in the artillery in World War I. He was very grave about the mutiny. He told Willie long stories to prove how in the artillery he had had much worse commanding officers than Queeg, and. had always conducted himself with true martial forbearance and loyalty. It was clear that he disapproved of Willie and thought he was in serious trouble. Mrs. Keith pressed him for a promise to help her son, but Uncle Lloyd only said he would talk to some of his Navy friends and see what the best procedure would be.

“Maybe they won’t court-martial you after all, Willie,” he said. “If this other fellow, this Maryk fellow, gets himself acquitted I guess that’ll be the end of it. I hope you’ve learned your lesson by this time. War isn’t a pink tea. Unless you can learn to take the rough with the smooth, why, you’re just not worth a damn to your country in an emergency.” So saying he departed for Washington, where he maintained a suite at the Shoreham.

Saturday night Willie was in his room, dressing to go to the opera. His eye fell on his wrist watch, and he realized that in twelve hours he would be on an airplane, returning to the
Caine
and the court-martial. His arm reached around stiffly, like a lever in an automatic phonograph, and picked up the telephone. He called the Woodley.

“May? How are you? It’s Willie.”

“
Hello
, dear! I’d given you up-”

“Is your cold better?”

“All gone. I’m in fine shape.”

“I’m going back tomorrow morning. I’d like to talk to you.”

“I’m working tonight, Willie-”

“May I come to the club?”

“Sure.”

“It’ll be around midnight.”

“All right.”

It had never seemed possible to Willie that
Don Giovanni
could be tedious. The opera had always been a wonderland of sound in which time stopped and the world dissolved in pure beauty. On this night he thought Leporello was a coarse clown, the baritone a scratchy-throated old man, Zerlina a screechy amateur, and the whole plot a bore. He strained his eyes at his watch in the middle of his favorite arias. At last it was done. “Mother,” he said as they came out of the lobby to the slushy street, “do you mind if I go on the town by myself for a while? I’ll see you back home.”

Her face showed how well she understood, and how worried she was. “Willie-our last night?”

“I won’t be late, Mother.” He felt able to stuff her bodily into a taxicab if she argued. She must have known, because she signaled for a cab herself.

“Have a wonderful time, dear.”

May was singing when he came into the crowded Grotto. He stood at the bar, looking around at the admiring male faces turned at the singer, his soul full of bitterness. There was no place to sit when the show was over. She took him by the hand and led him to her dressing room. The glare of light in the hot, closet-like room made him blink. He leaned against the make-up table. May sat in the chair and looked up at him, glowing with an unfathomable sweet inner attraction, all different from her outside of rouge and white shoulders and round bosom half exposed by her tight singer’s dress.

“I didn’t tell you about something last time,” Willie said. “I want to know what you think.” He described the mutiny and the investigation to her in long detail. It felt like confessing; his spirit brightened as he talked. May listened calmly. “What do you want me to say, Willie?” she said when he was finished.

“I don’t know, May. What do you think of it? What shall I do? What’s going to happen?”

She heaved a long sigh. “Is that why you came tonight? To tell me about that?”

“I wanted you to know about it.”

“Willie, I don’t know much about the Navy. But it doesn’t seem to me you have to do anything. The Navy is a pretty smart outfit. They won’t condemn any of you for trying to save your ship. At worst, you made a well-meaning mistake of judgment. That isn’t a crime-”

“It was mutiny, May-”

“Oh, hell. Who do you think you are, Fletcher Christian? Did you chain Queeg up and set him adrift in a boat? Did you pull knives and guns on him?
I
think he was crazy, whatever the doctors say-nutty as a fruitcake. Willie dear,
you
couldn’t mutiny-not even against your mother, let alone a ship’s captain-”

They both laughed a little. Though May’s verdict was the same as his mother’s, it filled Willie with hope and good cheer, whereas Mrs. Keith’s opinion had seemed emotional and stupid. “Okay, May. I don’t know why I had to load you down with my miseries- Thanks.”

“When are you leaving?”

“Seven o’clock in the morning.”

May rose, and slipped the bolt on her door. “Nosiest musicians in the world work here.” She came to Willie and put her arms around him. They exchanged a fearfully long, blind wild kiss. “That’s all,” May said, pushing herself out of his arms. “Remember it the rest of your life. You’ll have to go. I find it hurts to have you around.” She opened the door; Willie walked out and threaded through the jostling dancers to the street.

He still had not the slightest understanding of why he had really come; he blamed himself for a late flare of desire crudely masked as a need for advice. He had no way of recognizing the very common impulse of a husband to talk things over with his wife.

Next day his plane left on schedule, in a sunny morning. His mother waved bravely from the sight-seer’s boardwalk as the plane took to the air. Willie stared down at the buildings of Manhattan, trying to find the Hotel Woodley; but it was lost among the dingy piles of midtown.

CHAPTER 33

The Court-Martial-First Day

Naval
Courts and Boards
opens with a melancholy section entitled “Charges and Specifications.” It is only a hundred twenty-three pages long; not half as long as a twenty-five-cent mystery novel; and within that small compass the Navy has discussed all the worst errors, vices, follies, and crimes into which men may fall. It begins with Making a Mutiny and ends with Unlawful Use of a Distilling Apparatus. In between are such bloody offenses as Adultery, Murder, Rape, and Maiming, and also such nasty peccadilloes as Exhibiting an Obscene Photograph. These are sad, wearying, grisly pages, the more so for their matter-of-fact, systematic tone.

This shopper’s list of crime, however, did not provide a charge or specification for the peculiar offense of Lieutenant Stephen Maryk. Captain Breakstone had quickly perceived that, though the affair was more like a mutiny than anything else, Maryk’s invoking of Article 184 and his subsequent legalistic conduct made a conviction for mutiny unlikely. It was the queerest sort of twilight situation. In the end he fixed on the catch-all charge provided for rare or complicated offenses, “Conduct to the Prejudice of Good Order and Discipline,” and with much care he drew up the following specification:

In that Lieutenant Stephen Maryk, USNR, on or about December 18, 1944, aboard the U.S.S. Caine, willfully, without proper authority, and without justifiable cause, did relieve from his duty as commanding officer Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg, USN, the duly assigned commanding officer of said ship, who was then and there in lawful exercise of his command, the United States then being in a state of war.

The judge advocate, Lieutenant Commander Challee, expected no difficulty at all in proving this specification. He was an earnest, bright young officer, holding his high rank on a temporary war promotion. A slight undercurrent of guilt was running through his days in San Francisco. He had requested the legal duty after several years at sea, because he wanted to spend time with his beautiful wife, a photographer’s model; and he was a little ashamed of having had his request granted. He therefore pursued his duties with exceptional zeal, and he honestly regarded the conviction of Maryk, at the moment, as his personal war aim.

Challee estimated that the prosecution had a prima facie case. A charge of mutiny, he knew, would have been harder to prove. But Captain Breakstone’s mild specification, in his view, was a plain description of the plain facts. The defense could not possibly deny that the event had occurred; Maryk had signed logs describing it. The key words were
without proper authority and without justifiable cause
. To establish their truth, Challee simply had to prove that Queeg was not and had never been a madman. He had the deposition of Captain Weyland in Ulithi, who had interviewed the captain of the
Caine
right after the mutiny. Three Navy psychiatrists of the San Francisco hospital, who had examined Queeg for weeks, were ready to testify in court that he was a sane, normal, intelligent man. At the investigation twenty chiefs and enlisted men of the
Caine
had averred that they had never seen Queeg do anything crazy or questionable. Not one officer or man, except the two parties to the mutiny, Keith and Stilwell, had spoken unfavorably of the captain. Challee had arranged for the appearance of several presentable sailors and chiefs to repeat their testimony.

Against this array there was only Maryk’s so-called medical log. The board of investigation had dismissed it as “a whining collection of trivial gripes,” commenting that all it proved was Maryk’s latent and long-standing disloyalty. Challee was confident that the court would feel the same way. Every officer past the rank of junior-grade lieutenant had served, at one time or another, under an oppressive eccentric. It was simply a hazard of military life. Challee was fond of telling anecdotes which topped anything in Maryk’s log.

The judge advocate knew that Greenwald had only one good point of attack: the question of criminal intent. He anticipated an eloquent harping on the fact that Maryk had acted for the good of the service, however mistaken his diagnosis of Queeg had been. Challee was fully prepared to demolish the specious sophistry which would follow, that Maryk was innocent of any offense.

He reasoned that Maryk, by willfully ignoring the whole weight of military tradition, and summoning up the mutinous effrontery to depose his commanding officer on the basis of such a wild error of judgment, had ipso facto convicted himself of “conduct to the prejudice of good order and discipline.” If this were not true, if the precedent set by Maryk were to go unpunished, the entire Navy chain of command was in jeopardy! Any commanding officer who seemed queer to his exec was in danger of being summarily relieved. Challee was certain that a court of officers, especially a court headed by the austere martinet, Captain Blakely, would see that point. He counted, therefore, on a quick, satisfying victory over Barney Greenwald.

His estimate of the case was a good one. He erred only in his guess of Greenwald’s probable strategy.

Willie Keith returned to the
Chrysanthemum
about eleven o’clock in the morning. He dropped his bags in his room and looked through the other rooms for
Caine
officers, but found only empty rumpled bunks. Then he heard faintly from the shower a bellowing of
“Partez-moi d’amour Rrrrrredites-moi des choses tendres ...”
and he knew that Keefer was back. He found the novelist drying himself before a mirror, standing on wooden clogs. “ ‘Ja vous aim-uh-’ Willie, you old Dickens lover! How are you, my lad?”

They shook hands. Keefer’s tanned body was scrawny, and his face was drawn as though he had not eaten in a week, but he was gay, and his large eyes gleamed oddly.

“Where’s everybody, Tom?”

“Hither and yon. Ship’s leaving drydock today so most of the boys are aboard. Steve’s out with his defense counsel somewhere-”

“Whom did he get?”

“Some lieutenant off a carrier. Used to be a lawyer.”

“Good?”

“Can’t tell. Steve seems to like him. Mumbling, shambling kind of guy- All kinds of hell breaking loose, Willie. Do you know about your pal Stilwell? He’s gone crazy.” Keefer flipped the towel around his shoulders and seesawed it briskly.

“What!”

“Diagnosis is acute melancholia. He’s up at the base hospital. He was getting kind of funny there aboard ship, you know-”

Willie remembered very well Stilwell’s brooding, sallow, pained face. Twice on the homeward voyage the sailor had asked to be relieved of the helm because of a blinding headache. “What happened, Tom?”

“Well, I wasn’t here. The story is that he took to his sack and just stayed there for three days, not answering musters, not going up for meals. Said he had a headache. Finally they had to carry him to the hospital. He was all limp and foul, Bellison says-” Willie wrinkled his face in horror. “Well, it was in the cards, Willie. One look at him and you know he’s one of these tense burning-up-inside ones. And no education, and a year of riding by Queeg, and the mixed-up emotional background, and on top of it all a general court for mutiny hanging over him-it isn’t mutiny, any more, by the way. That’s another thing- Got a cigarette? ... Thanks.”

Keefer wrapped the towel around his middle and clacked out to the saloon, exhaling a gray cloud. Willie followed, saying eagerly, “What’s all this about the mutiny?”

“Steve’s going to be tried on a charge of conduct to prejudice of good order and discipline. I told you that dried-up captain was out of his head, recommending trial for mutiny. I still don’t think you guys have anything to worry about. The legal boys know they have a damn shaky case-”

“What about Stilwell? Is he going to appear, or what?”

“Willie, the guy’s a vegetable. They’re going to give him electric-shock therapy, I hear- How’d you make out on leave? Did you marry the girl?”

“No.”

“I had a pretty good leave,” said the novelist, pulling on white drawers. “I think I’ve sold my novel.”

“Hey, Tom! That’s swell! What publisher?”

“Chapman House. Nothing signed yet, you know. But it looks okay-”

“Gosh, it wasn’t finished yet, was it?”

“They read twenty chapters and an outline. First publishers I showed it to.” The gunnery officer spoke casually, but powerful pride rayed out of his face. Willie regarded him with round eyes. The growing pile of yellow manuscript in Keefer’s desk had been half a joke, after all. Novelists were mythical figures to Willie-dead giants like Thackeray, or impossibly remote, brilliant rich men like Sinclair Lewis and Thomas Mann.

“Will-will they give you a big advance, Tom?”

“Well, as I say, nothing’s definite. If it all works out, five hundred or a thousand dollars.” Willie whistled. “It’s not much,” Keefer said, “but for an incomplete first novel, well-”

“It’s marvelous, Tom, marvelous! I hope it’s a huge best seller! It will be, too. I told you long ago I wanted the millionth copy, autographed. That still goes.”

Keefer’s face relaxed in a foolish rosy smile. “Well, don’t rush things, Willie-nothing’s signed-”

Steve Maryk’s spirit failed him in the very first moments of the court-martial, when the members of the court were sworn. Seven officers stood on a dais in a semicircle behind a polished red-brown bench, their right arms raised, staring with religious gravity at Challee as he intoned the oath from a battered copy of
Courts and Boards
. Behind them on the wall between the wide windows was a large American flag. Outside, green-gray tops of eucalyptus trees stirred in the morning sunlight, and beyond them the blue bay danced with light. It is a cruel unconscious trick of planning that has placed the court-martial room of Com Twelve on Yerba Buena Island, in such fair surroundings, with such a beckoning view. The square gray room seems all the more confining. The flag hangs between the eyes of the accused and the free sunlight and water, and its red and white bars are bars indeed.

Maryk’s eyes were drawn to the face of the president of the court, Captain Blakely, who stood at the center of the bench, squarely in front of the flag. It was an alarming face; a sharp nose, a mouth like a black line, and small far-seeing eyes under heavy eyebrows, with a defiant, distrustful glare. Blakely was quite gray, and he had a sagging dry pouch under his jaw, bloodless lips, and shadowy wrinkles around the eyes. Maryk knew his reputation: a submariner, up from the ranks, beached by a heart condition, the toughest disciplinarian of Com Twelve. Maryk was shaking when he sat down after the oath, and it was the face of Blakely that had made him shake.

One regular lieutenant commander and five lieutenants made up the rest of the board. They had the look of any six naval officers passing at random in a BOQ lobby. Two of the lieutenants were reserve doctors; two of them were regulars of the line; one was a reserve of the line.

The large wall clock over Challee’s desk ticked around from ten o’clock to quarter of eleven while various legal ceremonies, incomprehensible to Maryk, were performed. For his first witness, Challee called Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg.

The orderly went out. Everyone in the room watched the door. The ex-captain of the
Caine
entered, tanned, clear-eyed, in a new blue uniform, the sleeve stripes bright gold. Maryk had not seen him for almost two months. The change was startling. His last vivid recollection was of a little stooped potbellied figure in a gray life jacket and wet khakis, clinging to the engine telegraph, the bristly face green and twisted with fear. The man before him was erect, confident, and good-looking-and youthful, despite the few blond strands over a pink scalp. Maryk’s nerves were jolted.

Queeg took his seat on a raised platform in the center of the room. His manner during the opening questions was courteous and firm. Never once did he glance in Maryk’s direction, though the exec sat to the right of him, only a few feet away, behind the defense desk.

Challee went quickly to the morning of the typhoon, and asked the ex-captain to narrate the events in his own words. The reply of Queeg was a coherent, rapid sketch, in formal language, of the mutiny. Maryk admitted to himself that the facts were presented correctly; the external facts. Slight shadings of what had been said and done, and, of course, a complete omission of any details of how the captain had looked and behaved, sufficed to turn the whole picture inside out. As Queeg told the story, he had simply made every effort to hold fleet course and speed, and in face of worsening weather had managed to do so right up to the moment when his executive officer had unexpectedly run amuck and seized command. Thereafter, by staying on the bridge and judiciously suggesting necessary maneuvers to the frenzied exec, he had brought the ship safely through the storm.

The court members followed the account with sympathetic interest. Once Captain Blakely transferred a long ominous stare to the defendant. Before Queeg was finished Maryk had totally despaired. He looked to his counsel with frightened eyes. Greenwald doodled with a red crayon on a pad, drawing multitudes of little fat pink pigs.

“Commander,” said Challee, “can you account in any way for your executive officer’s act?”