Winds of War (95 page)

Victor Henry was not surprised; still, the words hurt. “People run true to form, I guess.”

“He’s way behind on his officer qualification book. Now he knows his way round the boat, sir, he know the engines, the compressed air system, the batteries, all that. He stands a good diving watch. He has a knack for trimming the boat and keeping her at the depth the captain wants. But when it comes to writing reports on time, or even logs, keeping track of records and dispatches and the crew’s training books - an officer’s main work – forget it.” Aster looked Byron’s father in the eye. “The skipper sometimes talks of beaching him.”

Victor Henry said sadly, “That bad?”

“In a way he’s kind of nuts, too.”

“How, nuts?”

“Well, like last week, we had this surprise inspector aboard. We fired this dummy torpedo and surfaced to recover it. We hadn’t tried a recovery for a long time. It was a rough sea, raining, cold as hell. The torpedo detail was out there trying to retrieve the thing. It was bobbing up and down, banging and crashing against the hull, and we were rolling like mad, and the sailors were slipping around with lifelines tied to them. It was awful. They messed about for an hour and couldn’t hook that fish. I was sure somebody would get drowned or crushed. The inspector got tired and went below. The skipper was exploding. The deck gang was soaked and frozen and falling all over itself. Well, as you know, a dummy warhead’s hollow, and the fish floats straight up and down. Briny was the officer on that detail. Suddenly he took the hook, stuck it in his lifeline, and by Christ if he didn’t go and jump on that torpedo! He timed it so right, it looked easy. He hung on, with these icy waves breaking over him, riding that yellow steel dummy head like a goddamn bronco. He secured the hook and then got knocked off. Well, we hauled him in half-dead and then we hoisted the fish aboard. The skipper filled him full of medicinal brandy. He slept eighteen hours and was fine.”

Victor Henry said, clearing his throat, “He took a stupid chance.”

“Sir, I’d like to have him on any boat I ever command. But I’d expect to wear out two pairs of heavy shoes, kicking his ass for him.”

“If the occasion arises, let me buy you the brogans, lieutenant,” said Pug.

“She’s pregnant!” Byron catapulted into the little wardroom, arresting himself by grabbing the doorway. “Natalie’s pregnant, Dad.” He brandished torn-open letters.

“How about that? Hey, Lady, how about that? Boy, I feel strange.”

“Fast work,” said Aster. “You better get that gal home for sure, now. Pleasure to meet you, Captain. Excuse me.”

The executive officer slid out from behind the table with his mail basket.

“Any news on her coming home?” Victor Henry asked.

“She says Leslie Slote really built a fire under the consuls this time. She and Jastrow should be on their way by – well, maybe by now! She’d better be, or I’ll desert and go fetch her, Dad. My kid’s going to be born in the United States.”

“That’s great news, Briny. Great.” Victor Henry stood, putting a hand on his son’s shoulder. “I’ve got a plane to catch. You’ll find out about the twenty-sixth, won’t you? And let me know.”

“The what? Oh, yes.” Byron was sitting with his chin on both fists, reading a closely written airmail sheet, his face lit up with happiness. “That dinner. Yes, sir, I’ll telephone you or something.”

“I’m sure you have a load of paperwork, after your maneuvers. Get at it, boy.”

“Oh, sure,” said Byron. “So long, Dad.”

“I’m happy about your wife, Byron.”

Again the veiled glance, again the amiable tone. “Thanks.”

* * *

Rhoda was in bad turmoil. Palmer Kirby had returned from England in April, while Pug was at sea. The cherry blossoms were early that year; and in Virginia and North Carolina, where they went on a four-day drive like a honeymoon, the countryside was flooded with fragrant blossoms. Rhoda came back to Washington committed in the strongest terms to leave her husband and to marry Kirby.

The decision seemed clear, simple, and natural to Rhoda in the bedrooms of wayside hotels, and on long walks amid the peach and plum blossoms of the southland. But when Kirby went happily off to Denver to put the big old house in order for a new life, leaving her in a home full of Henry photographs and mementos, the simplicity of the vision, and some of its charm, started to fade.

Rhoda’s inexperience was misleading her. An investment of more than twenty-five years of love and intimacy - even if it has gone slightly sour - usually should not be liquidated. Its equivalent in romance, in thrills, or even money, can seldom be recovered. So hardheaded bad women tend to decide. Rhoda’s trouble was that, in her own mind, she was still a good woman caught up in a grand passion which consumed all moral law. One misstep during her husband’s long absence in Germany - at an age when many men and women make missteps – had led to another and another. Her desire to keep her good opinion of herself had completed her confusion.

She still liked - perhaps loved - and also feared Pug, but his career was a growing disappointment. For a while she had hoped that his “in” with President Roosevelt might lead to big things, but that was not happening. Some of her friends were preening over their husbands’ new commands: battleships, destroyer flotillas, cruisers. The rivalry of Digger Brown, Paul Munson, and Harry Warendorf was exactly paralleled among their ladies. Rhoda Henry was becoming the wife of a man bogged in twilit shore jobs after more than twenty years of racing along with the front-runners. Evidently Pug didn’t have it. This was bitter medicine for Rhoda. She had always hoped that he would someday become at least a Deputy Chief of Naval Operations. After all, she had preferred him to fellows who had once gone on to careers like bank president, steel executive, army general. (These men had not necessarily proposed; if she had dated and kissed them, she considered them possibilities sacrificed for Pug.) Now it seemed he might not even make rear admiral. Certainly that limited goal was receding with every month he spent in a Navy Department cubicle while his competitors accumulated command time at sea. With such thoughts Rhoda Henry was working herself up to tell Pug that she had fallen in love with another man. But she did not look forward with dewy pleasure to this, and she teetered, ready to be pushed either way.

She missed his return from the convoy trip. He had not telephoned from Norfolk, for he knew that she liked to sleep late. Arriving by airplane in Washington, he found the house empty, cook off, Rhoda out, mail overflowing his desk, no coffee. He couldn’t blame anybody, but it was a cold homecoming

At the War Plans office, by chance, he encountered Pamela Tudsbury. She had not gone back to England with Burne-Wilke. Secretaries cleared for Very Secret were rare, so the British Purchasing Council had requisitioned her for a while. Spry, springy, refreshingly unmilitary in a yellow and green cotton frock, Pamela greeted him with the warmth he had not found at home. He asked her to lunch with him in the Navy cafeteria. During the quarter hour it took to bolt a sandwich, pie and coffee, Pamela spoke of her unhappiness at being left behind by Burne-Wilke. “I want to be there now,” she said, eyes somewhat moist. “Not that I really think the end is at hand, as some do. But in the wee hours, one does begin to picture how one accommodates to German military police and street signs. It’s a nightmare that now and then gets terribly real.” She shook her head and smiled. “Of course it’s darkest before the dawn. You poor man. You’ve got a splendid color. The sea so obviously agrees with you. You look ten years younger. I hope it lasts, or that you get back to sea.”

“Well, I’ve tried to walk a lot and play tennis. It isn’t the same.”

“Of course not.”

He asked her for further news of Ted Gallard, but there was none. They parted with a casual good-bye. All the rest of the day plowing through the mound of accumulated paper, Victor Henry felt much better.

Rhoda was waiting for him at home in a bright red dress, with ice and drink mixes ready, and cheese and crackers out. Her manner and conversation stuck him as strange. She gabbled about houses. She was so eager to talk, so voluble, that he had no chance at first to tell her of the White House invitation. Early that afternoon, finding Pug’s note on her dressing table she had rushed with an agent and visited three. All her suppressed guilt feelings focussed on the house business. If only she could convince Pug that she had been diligently looking at houses, she felt her tracks would be covered. This made no sense. She was planning to break the news to him. She acted on nervous instinct, triggered by the short scrawl in Pug’s handwriting:
He’s back. Man the bar
.

Pug was uninterested in a verbose account of faults in houses he had never seen. But he put up with it. Next, Rhoda chattered on that sore topic, recent promotions: that utter fool, chaser, and drunk, Chipper Pennington, had gotten the
Helena
; and did Pug know that even Bill Foley was now commanding a destroyer squadron at Pearl Harbor? Pug broke in on Rhoda’s flow of words - this was at dinner, over the meat - to tell her of the President’s invitation. Her mouth fell open. “Pug!
Really?
” She asked many questions, worried out loud over what she would wear, and gloated about how Annette Pennington and Tammy would feel when they heard
this
!

It was a bad performance. He was seeing her at her very worst - worse than her worst, for she had never been quite so demoralized, though she looked extremely pretty and her wonderful skin glowed smooth as ever. Pug found himself looking at his wife detachedly, as he judged professional matters. Few wives in their forties can weather such a scrutiny.

That night Victor Henry recognized familiar signals he was not, for the time being, welcome in her bedroom. He did not know why; but he had long ago decided that Rhoda was entitled to these spells, physical or mental, though it seemed too bad after his six weeks at sea. It took him a long time to fall asleep. He kept thinking of the callous happy-go-lucky mood he had found in the capital, the sense that by passing the Lend-Lease Bill, America had done its bit to stamp out Nazism. Nobody appeared to care how much stuff was actually being produced and shipped. The figures at War Plans had appalled him. Conflicting boards and agencies, contradictory directives, overlapping commands by the Air Corps, the Navy, the Army, and the British had overwhelmed the program. Under an amazing welter of meetings, talks, and mimeographed releases, Lend-Lease was paralyzed.

He kept thinking, too, of the contrasts between his wife and the English girl. At last he got up and swallowed a stiff drink of bourbon like a pill.

* * *

Pug cheered up later in the week, as most people did, when Hitler’s deputy Führer, the black-browed fanatic Rudolf Hess, made a solo flight to Scotland, landed by parachute, and demanded to see Winston Churchill. For a day or two it seemed that Germany might be cracking. But the Nazis at once announced that Hess, through heroic overwork, had gone off his head. The British said little publicly. Pug heard from Pamela, who had it from the embassy, that in fact Hess, mad as a hatter, was shut up in a sanatorium, drivelling peace plans.

Certainly in the war news there was no sign of German weakness. They were bagging hordes of British prisoners and mountains of arms in Greece, sinking ships in the Atlantic at a great rate, showering London and Liverpool with fire-bombings worse than any during the 1940 blitz, laying siege to Tobruk, and launching a breathtaking air-borne invasion of Crete, over the heads of the British Mediterranean fleet. This outpouring of military energy to all points of the compass, this lava flow of violence, was awesome. In the face of it, Vichy France was folding up and negotiating a deal with the Nazis that would hand over North Africa to them, and perhaps the strong French fleet too. This was a brutal bloody nose for American diplomats trying to hold France neutral, and keep the Germans out of the African bulge at French Dakar, which dominated the whole south Atlantic.

The Nazis appeared unstoppable. The entrenched, heavily armed British on Crete claimed to be butchering the sky invaders. But floating to earth dead or alive in parachute harnesses, crashing in gliders, on the airborne multitudes came. The confident British communiqués grew vaguer. Somehow, they conceded, the Germans at incredible cost had managed to capture one airfield; then one more. It soon became clear that Hitler as doing a new thing in Crete, taking a strong island from the air without sea power, in fact in the teeth of sea power. This was threatening news for England. Aside from the heavy defeat itself, Crete began to look like a dress rehearsal for the end.

And still the United States did nothing. In the inner War Plans circles, a split was widening between the Army and the Navy. Victor Henry’s section wanted strong fast moves in the North Atlantic to save England: convoys, the occupation of Iceland, shipment of all possible arms. But the Army, which now gave England only three months before collapse, preferred a move into Brazil and the Azores, to fact the expected Nazi thrust in the south Atlantic from Dakar. Between these two plans, the President was stalling and hesitating.

Then came the scarifying news that the
Bismarck
, a new German battleship, had blown up England’s mighty war vessel, the
Hood
, off Greenland, with a single salvo at thirteen miles, and vanished into the north Atlantic mists! This jolted the country out of its Maytime languor. The President announced a major radio address. Speculation about the speech filled the press and radio. Would he proclaim the start of convoying? Would he ask Congress to declare war? The brawny feat of the
Bismarck
seemed to show Hitler achieving mastery of the oceans as well the land and the air. The shift of the power balance in the Atlantic was suddenly self-evident and frightful.

Rhoda’s reaction to all this heavy news was loud frantic fretting that the White House would call off the dinner invitation, after she had told all her friends about it. FDR was probably getting ready to go to war. How could he bother with a social dinner, especially with unimportant people like themselves? Victor Henry, to secure some peace, checked with the President’s naval aide. The invitation to the White House stood.