Winds of War (87 page)

“This very morning, eh? Too bad. Where to?”

“I don’t know. The fall of Tobruk has changed the mission - which to tell you the truth, I never exactly knew in the first place. Something about surveying submarine facilities in the Mediterranean.”

“Well. All right. I guess I asked for this. My entire married life - as it may yet turn out - cut short by one-third.”

“Natalie, our married life starts when you get back from Italy.” He put his arm around her and they stood watching the fire brighten. “It’s going to be very long, happy, and fruitful. I plan on six kids.”

This made the young wife laugh through her gloom and put a hand to his face. “Oh lord. Six! I’ll never last the course. Jiminy, that fire feels marvellous. Did we finish the wine before we went to sleep? Look and see.” He brought a glass of wine and lit a cigarette for her. “Briny, one thing you should know. Back in November, Aaron was so sick he thought he might die. I had to take him to a specialist in Rome. It was a kidney stone. He lay in the Excelsior for two weeks, really in torture. Finally it cleared up, but one night, when he was very low, Aaron told me that he’d left everything he has to me. And he told me what it added up to. I was amazed.” She smiled at him, sipping her wine. Byron looked at her with slitted eyes. “I guess he’s sort of a miser, like most bachelors. That’s one reason he moved to Italy. He can live handsomely there on very little. Aaron’s actually kept nearly all the money he made on
A Jew’s Jesus
, and it brings in more every year. The book on Paul earned quite a bit too. And before that he’d saved a lot of his professor’s salary. Living in Italy, he hasn’t even paid taxes. Aside from the value of his house, Aaron’s worth more than a hundred thousand dollars. He lives just on his interest. The money is invested back in New York. I had no idea of any of this. Not the slightest. That he would leave anything to me never crossed my mind. Nevertheless, that’s how things stand.” Natalie took Byron’s chin in her hand and pushed it this way and that. “What are you looking so grim about? I’m telling you you’ve married an heiress.”

Byron poked a fallen red coal back into the fire. “Damn. He’s really cute, cuter than I thought.”

“Are you being fair? Especially with your plan for six kids?”

“Possibly not.” Byron shrugged. “Do you have enough money to get home with? You’re coming home in two months, no matter what.”

“I know. I agreed to that. I have plenty. Whew, that fire’s beginning to scorch.” She reclined on a couch before the blaze. The negligee fell away, and the light played warmly on her smooth legs. “Briny does your family know you intended to get married?”

“No. No sense making trouble when I wasn’t sure it would come off. I did write Warren.”

“Is he still in Hawaii?”

“Yes. He and Janice love it. I think you and I may well land there. The Navy keeps beefing up the Pacific Fleet. Warren thinks we’ll be fighting Japan soon. That’s the feeling all through the Navy.”

“Not Germany?”

“No. It may sound strange to you, sitting here, but our people still don’t get excited about Hitler. A few newspapers and magazines froth around, but that’s about it.”

He sat on the floor at her feet, looking at the fire, resting his head against her soft uncovered thigh. She caressed his hair. “Exactly when do you leave, and how?”

“Lady’s going to come back for me at six.”

“Six? Why, that’s hours and hours. Big big chunk of our marriage left to enjoy. Of course you have to pack.”

“Ten minutes.”

“Can I go with you to the boat?”

“I don’t see why not.”

With a deep sigh, Natalie said, “Why are you sitting on the floor? Come here.”

There was no dawn. The sky turned paler and paler until it was light gray. Mist and drizzle hid the sea. Lieutenant Aster picked them up in a rattling little French car; the back seat was packed with four glum sailors smelling of alcohol and vomit. He drove with one hand, leaning far out to work a broken windshield wiper, keeping the accelerator on the floor. The foggy road along the river was empty, and they reached Lisbon quickly.

The submarine was dwarfed by a very rusty tramp steamer berthed directly ahead, with an enormous Stars and Stripes painted on its side, an American flag flying, and the name
Yankee Belle
stencilled in great drippy white letters on bow and stern. Its grotesquely cut-up shape and crude rivetted plating looked foreign, and thirty or forty years old. It rode so high in the water that much of its propeller and mossy red bottom showed. Jews lined the quay in the drizzle, waiting quietly to go aboard, most of them with cardboard suitcases, cloth bundles, and frayed clothes. The children - there were quite a number - stood silent, clinging to their parents. At a table by the gangway, two uniformed Portuguese officials, under umbrellas held by assistants, were inspecting and stamping papers. Policemen in rubber capes paced up and down the queue. The rail of the ship was black with passengers staring at the quay and the Lisbon hills, as freed prisoners look back at the jail to savor their liberty.

“When did that ocean greyhound show up?” Byron said.

“Yesterday morning. It’s an old Polish bucket, and the crew are mostly Greeks and Turks,” Aster said. “I’ve tried talking to them. The pleasanter ones seem to be professional cutthroats. I gather the Jews will be packed in like sardines in five-decker bunks, for which they’ll pay the price of deluxe suites on the Queen Mary. These fellows laughed like hell about that.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Well, we cast off at O715. Good-bye, Natalie, and good luck. You were a beautiful bride, and now you’re a beautiful Navy wife.”

The exec stepped aboard, smartly returning the salute of the gangway watch. On the dock near the gangway, unmindful of the rain beginning to fall, a sailor was hugging and kissing a dumpy Portuguese trollop dressed in red satin. Byron held out his arms to his wife, with a glance at the sailor and a grin. She embraced him. “You fool. Your trouble is, you went and married the creature.”

“I was drunk,” Byron said. He kissed her again and again.

“A boatswain’s whistle blew on the submarine, and a loudspeaker croaked, “
Now station the special sea details
.”

“Well, I guess this is it,” he said. “So long.”

Natalie was managing not to cry; she even smiled. “Getting married was the right idea, my love. I mean that. It was an inspiration and I adore you for it. I feel very married. I love you and I’m happy.

“I love you.”

Byron went aboard the submarine, saluting as he stepped on deck. In the thickening drizzle, her raincoat pulled close, her breath smoking in the damp frigid air, Natalie stood on the dock, smelling wharfside odors – tar, machinery, fish, the sea – hearing the bleak cry of the gulls, and feeling for the first time what she had gotten herself into. She was a Navy wife all right!

Three men in black trench coats and oversized fedora hats came strolling along the quay, calmly inspecting the refugees, who either tried to ignore them or peered at them in horror. Women pulled their children closer. The men halted near the gangway, one pulled papers from a black portfolio, and they all began talking to the officials at the table. Meanwhile on the submarine sailors in pea coats pulled in the gangplank. The boatswain’s whistle blew; the loudspeaker squawked. Appearing on the narrow little bridge in foul-weather clothes the captain and Lieutenant Aster waved. “Good-bye, Natalie,” Captain Caruso called. She did not see Byron come out on the forecastle, but after a while noticed him standing near the anchor among the sailors, in a khaki uniform and a brown windbreaker, hands in his back pockets, trousers flapping in the breeze. It was the first time she had ever seen Byron in a uniform; it made him seem different, remote, and older. Aster was shouting orders through a megaphone. Colored signal flaps ran up. The sailors hauled in the lines. Byron walked along the forecastle and stood opposite his bride, almost close enough to reach out and clasp hands. She blew him a kiss. His face under the peaked khaki cap was businesslike and calm. A foghorn blasted. The submarine fell away from the dock and black water opened between them.

“You come home, now,” he shouted.

“I will. Oh, I swear I will.”

“I’ll be waiting. Two months!”

He went to his duty station. With a swish of water from the propellers, the low black submarine dimmed away into the drizzle.

Craaa! Craaa! Craaa!
Mournfully screeching, the gulls wheeled and followed the fading wake.

Natalie hurried up the quay, past the Gestapo men, past the line of escaping Jews, whose eyes were all fixed in one direction - the gangway table they still had to pass, where the Portuguese officials and the three Germans were comparing papers and laughing together. Natalie’s hand sweatily clutched the American passport in her pocket.

“Hello, old Slote,” she said, when she found a telephone and managed to make the connection. “This is Mrs. Byron Henry. Are you interested in buying me a breakfast? I seem to be free. Then let’s push on to Italy, dear, and get Aaron out. I have to go home.”

Chapter 39

In Washington Victor Henry was reassigned to War Plans. He did not hear from Roosevelt at all. People said the President was unaccountable, and from firsthand knowledge, the naval captain was beginning to believe it. But he was untroubled by the assignment, though he had craved and expected sea duty.

More than anything else - more than the gray hairs beginning to show at his temples, more than the sharper lines on his forehead and around his mouth, more than his calmer pace on the tennis court - his contentment with still another desk job showed how Victor Henry was changing.

Washington in January 1941, after London and Berlin, struck him as a depressing panorama of arguments, parties, boozing, confusion, lethargy, and luxury, ominously like Paris before the fall. It took him a long time to get used to brilliantly lit streets, rivers of cars, rich overabundant food, and ignorant indifference to the war. The military men and their wives, when Pug talked to them, discussed only the hairline advantages that the distant explosions might bring in their own tiny lives. Navy classmates of his caliber were stepping into the major sea commands that led to flag rank. He knew he was regarded as a hard-luck guy, a comer sunk by bureaucratic mischance. But he had almost stopped caring. He cared about the war; and he cared about the future of the United States, which looked dark to him.

The Navy was as preoccupied as ever by Japan. Every decision of the President to strengthen the Atlantic Fleet caused angry buzzes and knowing headshakes in the Department, and at the Army and Navy Club. When he tried to talk about the Germans, his friends tended to regard him askance; a bypassed crank, their amused glances almost said, trying to inflate his importance by exaggerating minor matters he happened to know about. The roaring debate over Lend-Lease, in Congress and the newspapers, seemed to him a farrago of illogic and irrelevance. It suited Hitler’s book at the moment not to declare war on the United States – that was all. It apparently suited the American people in turn to fake neutrality while commencing a sluggish, grudging effort on the British side, arguing every inch of the way. These two simple facts were being lost in the storm of words.

Pug Henry was content in the War Plans Division because here he worked in another world, a secret, very small world of hard-boiled reality. Early in January, with a few other officers in War Plans, he had begun “conversations” with British military men. In theory, Lord Burne-Wilke and his delegation were in Washington on vague missions of observing or purchase. Supposedly the talks were low-level explorations binding on nobody, and supposedly the President, the Army Chief of Staff, and the Chief of Naval Operations took no cognizance of them. In fact, by the first of March these conferences were finishing up a written war operations plan on a world scale. The assumption was that Japan would sooner or later attack, and the key decision of the agreement lay in two words: “Germany first.” It heartened Victor Henry that the American Army and Air Corps planners concurred in this, and also, to his considerable surprise and pleasure, Admiral Benton and two other naval colleagues who had thought the war through - unlike the rest of the Navy, still rolling along in the greased grooves of the old drills and war games against “Orange,” the code name for Japan.

It was clear to Pug Henry that if Japan entered the war, with her annual steel production of only a few million tons, she could not hold out long if Germany were beaten. But if the Germans knocked out the British and got the fleet, they could go on to conquer whole continents, getting stronger as they went, whatever happened to Japan.

From his conversations at the Army and Navy Club he knew that this “Germany first” decision would, if it came out, create a fearsome howl. He was one of a handful of Americans - perhaps less than twenty, from the President downward - who knew about it. This was a peculiar way to run national affairs, perhaps; but to his amazement, which never quite faded, this was how things were going. To be part of this crucial anonymous work satisfied him.

It was passing strange to arrive in the morning at the drab little offices in a remote wing of the old Navy Building, and sit down with the British for another day of work on global combat plans, after reading in the morning papers, or hearing on the radio, yesterday’s shrill Lend-Lease argument in Congress. Pug could not get over the cool dissembling of the few high officials who knew of the “conversations.” He kept wondering about a form of government which required such deviousness in its chiefs, and such soothing, cajoling fibs to get its legislators to act sensibly. Once the planners, weary after a hammering day, sat in their shirt-sleeves around a radio, listening to General Marshall testify before a Senate committee. They heard this Army Chief of Staff, whose frosty remote uprightness made Henry think of George Washington, assure the senators that no intention existed for America to enter the war, and that at present there was no need for any large buildup of its armed forces. The planners had just been discussing an allocation of troops based on an American army of five million in 1943, a projection of which Marshall was well aware.