Winds of War (146 page)

Pug raised a hand. “That’s the road to perdition. This coffee’s excellent.”

Pouring himself a cup, Warren said, “You picked a good day to sleep through. Lots of news, none of it good.”

“For instance?”

“Hitler and Mussolini declared war on us.”

“They did? Then the lineup’s complete. They’re fools, making it easier for the President. Is that the worst of it?”

“Before you sacked out, had you heard about the
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
? The Japs got them both off Singapore.”

“What!”

“Air attack. Battleships versus airplanes again, Dad, and they sank ‘em both.”

“God in heaven, Warren, they got the
Prince of Wales?
Did the British confirm that?”

“And the
Repulse
. Churchill admitted it. The Limeys are through in this ocean, right at the start. Australia’s naked. Looks like it’s all up to us out here.”

Victor Henry half buried his face in a hand. That great ship in its splashy camouflage, he thought, that dark elegant wardroom, those tired, gallant officers and sailors, that deck where Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt had sung hymns under the guns - gone, gone, sunk in the far Pacific! He said in a low mournful tone, “The changing of the guard.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Have they hit the Philippines yet?”

Warren took a moment to sip coffee. He knew little about Clark Field; the American command in Luzon was muffling information that might panic the people. Even the official account of the Cavite raid had been skimpy. He had picked up the
Devilfish
news from a secret dispatch, and he was hoping the report might prove wrong; or if not, that a later dispatch would at least show Byron among the survivors.

“Well, they sort of plastered Cavite.”

“Oh, they did?”

“Yes.”

Staring at his son, Pug said, “Any dope?”

“Not much. They apparently went for the shore installations.”

“The
Devilfish
was alongside.”

“So you told me.”

Warren was relieved when Janice called them to the table. Pug picked at the food. It was embarrassing, with son and daughter-in-law eating heartily, but his throat was almost shut, and he had to force down the mouthfuls he ate.

“What’s the plan of the day, Dad?” Warren said, as lack of talk grew awkward.

“Huh? Oh, I thought I might scare up a tennis game at the club.”

“
Tennis?
Are you serious?”

“Why not? Start getting back in some kind of shape.”

“What about going down to Cincpac Personnel?”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Warren, I’ve been wondering about that. At this point a thousand officers are looking for new assignments. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry of the battleship force must be warming chairs down at Personnel. The Navy will find work for me in due course, and maybe at this point I’d just better take what comes.”

“You’re dead wrong.” In his life Warren had never heard his father talk this way, and he reacted immediately and forcibly. “You’ve had a bad break, but you’re not Tom, Dick, or Harry. You’re entitled to the best ship command they’ve got left in this fleet. You’ve already lost a day. The Navy’s not going to come looking for you, Dad. You play tennis for a few days and you’ll end up back in War Plans. Is that what you want?”

Warren’s energetic tone and thinking, so much like his own younger self, drew a smile from Pug. “Jan, hand me the Cincpac roster. It’s there on top of that pile of mail.”

She passed him the mimeographed sheets and he leafed through them. “Hm. Interesting. ‘Personnel Section - Captain Theodore Prentice Larkin, II.’”

“Know him?” Warren asked.

“Jocko Larkin? Biggest boozer in my Academy class. I pulled him out of the Severn once when he fell off a sailboat dead drunk. Quite a wingding - Thanksgiving, I think - and I was the only sober one aboard. I didn’t drink then.”

“Dad, our squadron’s got an officers’ meeting at 0700. I’ll drop you off at Cincpac. Let’s go.”

“Well, okay. Jocko sure won’t throw me out.”

At the overlook point where Janice had watched the Japanese onslaught, Warren halted the car. The sun had not yet risen. In the grayish-pink morning light far down in the harbor, there lay the incredible picture: seven United States battleships in a double row, canted, sunk, or turned turtle. Smoke rising from the wrecks still drifted heavily over the black flat oily water.

Bitterly Victor Henry muttered, looking out through the windshield, “The game board after the game.”

“After the first move,” Warren retorted. “Have you heard what Halsey said when they told him aboard the
Enterprise
about the attack?
‘Before we’re through with them, the Japanese Language will be spoken only in hell!
’’”

With a cynical grunt Pug asked, “Did that impress you?”

“It gave the crew a big charge. Everyone was quoting it.”

“Yes. Good talk for sailors. Beating the Japanese now is a tough battle problem. Especially with a bigger war on our hands in Europe.”

“Dad, we ought to do it handily, with the stuff we’ve got building.”

“Pug said, “Maybe. Meantime we’re in for a rugged couple of years. How much stomach do the people back home have for defeat? Because they’re going to take plenty in this ocean. Maybe they’ll pressure the President to quit and make a deal. They don’t really give a damn about Asia, they never have.”

Warren started the car. His father’s low mood disturbed him. “They won’t quit. Not now. Not after this. Let’s get you down to Cincpac.”

He drove in his usual breakneck fashion. His father appeared to take no notice. Neither spoke. In this lame silence they arrived at the Cincpac building and pulled into a parking space.

“Well!” Pug Henry roused himself from a listless abstraction. “Here we are. Now, what about you? Will I be seeing you again?”

“Why, I hope so. Sometime during this war.”

“I mean tonight.”

“It’s hard to say. We were supposed to sortie yesterday. Maybe we will today. There’s a rather headless feeling in this fleet.”

“I completely understand. I feel sort of headless myself.”

“It’s still there on your shoulders, Dad.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to give an emphatic nod.”

This made Warren laugh. It was more like his father. “Don’t take no from Captain Larkin, now. Better keep these car keys, in case I do leave.”

“Right. And in case you do - good luck and good hunting, Warren.”

The father and son looked each other in the face, and parted without more words. Victor Henry went straight to the Cincpac communications office and looked through the dispatches. In the long garbled battle report of the evening before about Cavite, he saw the
Devilfish
listed as sunk.

He went to Jocko Larkin’s office to wait. It was a quarter to seven, and nobody was there yet, not even the yeoman. Pug unceremoniously took a lounge chair in the inner office; Larkin would have done the same in an office of his. The large wide-windowed room had a panoramic view - the sunny sugarcane slopes, the blue ocean beyond the anchorage, and the hideous black-coated harbor, with its grotesque fringe of defeat and damage.

Victor Henry felt ill: nauseous, chilly, yet greasily perspiring. Consuming a bottle of brandy in a few hours had done this, of course; but after the letters from Rhoda and Madeline, the only safe immediate recourse had been oblivion. The news that the
Devilfish
was lost had struck an almost numb man, scarcely surprising him. As soon as he had heard of the Cavite attack, he had half expected evil tidings about his son. When things went bad, his long experience told him, they went very bad; and he seemed to be falling into a gulf of bad luck without a bottom.

But there was always a bottom to hit; meantime, he groggily thought the main thing was to hold himself together. He did not know, after all, that Byron was really dead or injured. The
Devilfish
might not even be sunk. An excited first report was unreliable. The idea was to brace himself and hang on to hope until the straight word came.

On his wife and his daughter, however, the straight word was in. Rhoda wanted to divorce him and marry Fred Kirby; and his daughter had entangled herself with her employer, had probably been committing adultery, and it all might be in the newspapers any day. These were unchangeable facts, however hard to grasp. He had to absorb them and somehow act on them.

Far from harboring any relieved notion that he might be free for Pamela Tudsbury, Pug now first understood how hopeless his romance with the English girl had been, and what a strong bond tied him to his wife. That Rhoda did not feel this tie too - that she could write and mail such a letter with her usual breezy exclamation marks and underlinings, cheerily blaming herself and her long dislike of a Navy wife’s existence, praising Pug up almost as a saint, yet telling him that after more than twenty-five years she wanted out, to go to another man - this was a stab from which it would be difficult to recover. He felt it in his gut, a throbbing, weakening wound. Rhoda’s letter was coy about the big question: exactly what had been going on between her and Fred Kirby? Here Victor Henry was torn two ways: by his hard good judgment, which told him that of course his wife had been opening naked thighs to the other man, probably for a long time; and by his love for his wife and his own self-love, which protested that such a thing was impossible. He clung to the dim fact - it
was
a fact - that Rhoda hadn’t said it in so many words.

Because what Victor Henry now wanted was to get her back. He felt himself desperately in love with Rhoda. Much of this was injured ego - he well understood that - but not all. She was half of him, for better or worse; the weld was a quarter of a century old; she was irreplaceable in his life, with her arms, her mouth, her eyes, her sweet particular graces and ways; she was beautiful, desirable, and above all capable of surprising him. It had taken a nasty shock to drive these blunt truths home. He would have to court this woman again! He could not greatly blame her for the affair; he had already decided that in a brandy-soaked fog before passing out. How close had he not come to writing exactly the same kind of letter? Nor, strangely, did he have strong feelings about Fred Kirby. The thing had happened to those two people, much as it had to him and Pamela; only Rhoda had gone over the edge. The pictures in his mind made him sick with revulsion; but in cold honesty he had to look at the event in this rational way.

Rage at Madeline’s boss perhaps did him some good. One reason for surmounting this crisis was to seek out and confront Hugh Cleveland. Regret cut at Pug for his softness in letting her stay in New York. At least he could have tried to order her back to Washington; she might have gone. Now this celebrated swine’s wife was threatening to sue him for divorce, naming his twenty-one-year-old assistant - unjustly, Madeline swore in a long vehement paragraph, but that was hard to swallow. Unlike Rhoda’s letter, Madeline’s was no bombshell. What could have been more predictable for a girl adrift alone in New York; if not with Cleveland, then with some other man? Madeline had been shot down like a dove flying over a rifle range.

“Pug! I tried all yesterday afternoon to find you. Where the hell were you hiding!”

Jocko Larkin came striding in, a scarlet-faced freckled fat four-striper indistinguishable from twenty others. He closed his door, tossed his cap on a hook, and said into his squawk box, “No calls, Amory.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Well!” Larkin sat back in his swivel chair, gat hands locked behind his head, surveying his classmate with a penetrating eye. “Good to see you. That’s hell about the
California.
She’d have had a great skipper.”

“Well, Jocko, I’d say my misfortune’s lost in the shuffle.”

“Pug, who gave you my message? I left it at half a dozen places.”

“What message? Nobody. I came here to see you.”

“What about?”

“Orders.”

“That’s what I wanted to see you about.” Larkin looked over his shoulder, though nobody else was in the room, and turned off his intercom. “Pug, Admiral Kimmel is going to be relieved. At his own request.” Jocko almost whispered this, adding with a sarcastic little grin, “Like Louis the Sixteenth had himself shortened by a head, at his own request. His successor will be Admiral Pye – for how long, we don’t know, but Pye wants to start shaking up the staff. Let’s face it, something smells here. Luckily, the personnel section has nothing to do with war alerts. It didn’t happen on
my
watch. But it happened. Admiral Pye wants you for Operations - now hold it, Pug!” Jocko Larkin held up a hand as Victor Henry violently shook his head. “Let me give you my judgment. This is as great a break as a man in our class can have. Just remember there are six Iowa class battleships building now, due for commissioning in twelve to twenty months. The greatest warships in the world. You’ll probably get one after this.”

“Jocko, give me a ship.”

“I’m telling you, you’ll undoubtedly get one.”

“Now. Not in 1943.”

“No can do, Pug. Listen to me.
You don’t say no to Cincpac!
Operations is a marvellous opening for you.”

“Where’s Admiral Pye’s office?” Henry got to his feet.

“Sit down, Pug.” Larkin rose too, and they stood glaring at each other. Larkin said, “You son of a bitch, you never could play football or tennis, and you can’t think straight either.”

“I can swim pretty good.”

Larkin looked nonplussed, then he burst out laughing. “Oh, sit down, Pug.”

“Do I get a ship?”

“
Sit down.
”

Pug sat.

“What’s the matter, Pug? You look green around the gills, and you don’t act right. Is everything okay?”

“I drank too much brandy last night.”

“You did? You?”

“I didn’t like losing the
California
.”

“I see. How’s Rhoda?”

“Just fine.” Victor Henry thought he brought the words out calmly, but Larkin raised his eyebrows. Folding fat fingers over his white-clad paunch, Larkin stared thoughtfully at Henry.