His thick black eyebrows came up like question marks.
“Rather an idea.”
“A bad one,” I said. “I recognized that. First of all, I don’t think the men would stand for it. Not for any outright separation like that. But much worse . . . the women—well, the women could take the ship away . . .”
“What’s that?” he said. “What are you saying, Captain?”
“Don’t we have a tendency to forget that? Well, if I know these women . . . first-class seamen; also smart, and inventive as hell. Left alone on her, they could take the ship. They could navigate her, handle her underway, conn her . . . just barely but they could do it. I don’t think they would—unless things occurred . . .” I waited for the phrasing, wanting to be Navy-careful with words in such a matter; the Navy, like Jesuits, both interstitially Byzantine, nonetheless values the greatest precision of language when it comes to the point . . . “Unacceptable things, demands made of them they could not endure.” Feeling a certain repugnance at my own words, I hurried on from this. “But they have the skills to do it. It is my judgment that they would have the will if it came to that . . . simply to cast off one propitious day. Maroon the men on the island. The last one of us.”
I think it may have been the first time I had ever seen him show anything like actual startlement; certainly the nearest I had seen him display agitation. A kind of revealed wonder, a glimpse into a hitherto unimagined eventuality—yes, horror, as he obviously saw it, took possession of his face. Against the tattooing rain his air of disturbance—it was that rare a thing—seemed of a sudden to inhabit and fill the cabin.
“So they could,” he said slowly. “Yes. One tends to forget. Then under any circumstance, no. Not to separate them. Not with that risk,” he said, with that unflinching tone he reserved for matters unthinkable, not for a moment to be considered. “No.”
He sat a moment in a reflective pause, as if seeking to comprehend the dimensions of such a catastrophe. I waited, amazed at the extremeness of his reaction, at its abruptness. Taken together with his seeming acceptance over what I—obviously he as well—judged clearly was beginning between the women and the men, it seemed enigmatic; leaving me with a feeling strangely troubling in nature, its cause seeming right here, in this cabin. His sudden laugh then startled me.
“You’re right about them, of course. In respect to the ship. They would not hesitate, given the right conditions—something they didn’t like. They are far sturdier than men. They have much more resolve; tenacity. Men are innocents, children, by comparison. If it comes to it—to their own interests—they are far more brutal.”
The word seemed to constitute such an unexpected turn in our dialogue that I simply in my surprise echoed it.
“More brutal?”
He looked at me, as though from ancient eyes, and as if in surprise himself at my innocence. He smiled distantly.
“Oh, indeed. You must know that, Captain. May I say something?”
“Could I stop you?”
“Just this. You regard women too highly.”
Spoken lightly, with that touch he had, light and almost whimsical, yet never without intent. I gave the same back to him.
“You must forgive my clumsy ignorance in these matters, Chaplain. I’m just a poor homeless sailor. I’ve spent nearly all of my life at sea. I haven’t had much opportunity to regard them one way or the other.”
The Jesuit smiled, continued in those tones of rather spiked humor. “My experience has taught me that few things are more dangerous than overidealizing them. It is a mistake to expect from them the properties of angels.”
“I shall try hard not to do so, Chaplain. Actually I don’t expect to see many angels of any kind until we all get to heaven, as the old Protestant hymn goes.”
“I am reassured to hear you say so.”
“Though perhaps it’s true, what we’ve always been told. About women’s endurance. Resilience.”
“I don’t think there’s any question about it,” he said. “I imagine the Lord saw to that.”
“Then He knew what He was doing.”
“He usually does,” he said dryly. “Emotionally—emotionally they can take so far much more than men. Almost as if they were a different species. One would come to envy them, if envy were not a sin. Short of being—well, physically overpowered, their weapons for dealing with life, especially in its hard-going phases, are altogether the superior ones to anything possessed by us. By men. We see that in present circumstances.”
I felt a certain astonishment listening to this. He was saying something on the surface similar to what the doc had delineated, yet here it came out as something both more and different, vaguely suggestive of some imprecise idea, even resolve, in respect to the women; something absent from the doc’s more casual and clinical commentary. At the same time it seemed unwonted coming from the Jesuit; an uncalled-for discursiveness; a detour away from the explicit I sought. Unlike him. Then, as in an illumination, I felt that this sudden outpouring of lightly spoken philosophy, almost homilies, dangerously close to platitudes, was both a cover and a signal. He was not a man to ramble, to speak in wearying and pronounciatory largenesses; unless perhaps to shield the specific, words being quite often used for that purpose. Even the phrase “physically overpowered” jumped out to stab at me.
It was a remarkable conversation to be having, dissecting the nature of women and their imputable variances; there was something almost anthropological about it. We had never had a discussion anything like it. For the very good reason that the basic assumption held the opposite. That was why they were on this ship. Indeed, it had occurred to me, our problem lay exactly there: Operating hereto—all this I have made clear elsewhere—on the canon that there should not be and could not be differences—those of which we spoke or any others; that we were to treat them infallibly, sedulously, the same: that had been the whole idea. And now, the sudden reassertion that there were not only differences but that they were so vast and fundamental as to constitute our chief difficulty. It was not without a kind of wicked irony, a monstrous joke played on us by some miscreant god; or perhaps by simple nature. And, of course, it was precisely those differences which were not supposed to exist that had everything to do with the decision I had reached. It was time to announce it. My week, as I have said, was up. Especially heedful now to keep out of my voice any taint of the mystical or the abstruse; to make it a straightforward thing, altogether pragmatic, a captain seeking only to make things work.
“However that may be, I soon rejected the ship thing; the separation. But I have reached a decision . . .”
I waited, listening to the rain; then began, seeming as much a hearer as a speaker of my own words.
“I don’t wish to make too much of this. It is very natural that all sorts of thoughts should . . . these days. One looks around everywhere . . . for whatever might help. My mind—somehow it keeps fastening on the women. They are here. Well . . . a feeling that they are the key . . . the way through . . . that . . .” I hesitated. “This odd sense that . . .” I hesitated again, trying somewhat desperately, I was now aware, not to make the statement sound hopelessly extravagant, above all not a paean, that being the last thing from my intent . . . “Well, that our fate may be in their hands . . . that the women will—could—save us.”
I could feel not just the entire calmness with which he received this pronouncement but an immediate interest altogether different from our previous talk, and quite distanced from my purpose; this one seeming chiefly of intellectual curiosity, as if I had just set forth an interesting proposition, a perhaps bold theorem, though quite possibly a naïve and certainly excessive one, being so entirely untested and unproved, even unprovable; as though he and I were about to explore together a nonetheless fascinating subject of metaphysical and rather abstract character, residing in the higher philosophy, not meant for practical application, and one to challenge and hone the mind, which is always a pleasure. He said, almost as though cat
chechizing me:
“In what way?”
I could play this, too, simply by coming off of what had been, whatever its other shortcomings, however awkwardly set forth, a serious, even heartfelt, statement. “Perhaps through all those admirable qualities you enumerate, Chaplain.”
“All right, Captain.” Granting me the thinnest of smiles.
Having started, I could not abandon it now—indeed, felt no wish to do so; plunged on.
“Well, this. I do not know. Women heal. They can heal anything. I suppose it starts with that . . . that hypothesis? The simplest of theorems: Men who have women are better than men who don’t.” Instantly I felt I was on dangerous ground with him, the very ground where I judged our eventual conflict would arise. I immediately sheered off from it. “Beyond that . . . just the feeling—and the wondering, yes, just as you say . . . how, in what manner. That if I could find the answer to that, I would have the answer to a great deal of our difficulty. Assuming the thought has any validity to begin with: the women will save us. Then the corollary: Where such power resides, the two must come always together—part and parcel, inseparable. The gift of saving must carry with it also the ability to destroy. Even with God, He has, has to have, both powers. The women will be our salvation . . . or our downfall. The thought . . . that the way in which we handle the fact of their presence will determine everything, one way or the other. They will either save us or tear this ship apart . . . The women . . .”
I stopped a moment and said this: “This sudden power the women have gained over us . . . their awareness of it. Of course, if any of this have the slightest substance, one asks in prudence: What will their price be? I don’t doubt they will have one. Maybe they are waiting for the price to go up. That is usually what happens, one can hardly blame them . . .”
Now I came to a true full stop, shocked that I could have gone so far, fearing that it had come out half apotheosis, half fear of the subject; altogether too grandiose, gone overboard. I sat alarmed at my own prolixity, knowing that I myself had entered, for the second time, whether led by his really rather sinister skill or by the absolute necessity to escape if only for a few moments from my anguished solitude, his confession box; whether I wished to be there or not; aware of the intensity of listening there just by me. And heard only the now-gentle rain, no sound otherwise, only the hush—as though he felt his own absolute silence was at this moment his greatest gift—or perhaps clever tactic. After all, no one could have been more experienced in confessions, in extracting talk from men. I said it then with all abruptness, in rather a softened tone, one that would speak to him of finality.
“The decision I have reached is to let the women decide.”
It was hardly more than a murmur from him. “Of course, Captain. No other way.”
Few things in life are more shocking than complete acceptance where one expected formidable, forceful opposition; one feels a certain sense of collapse within oneself; certainly, hearing that response, I felt the full anticlimax that such a situation brings. (I even half expected a demurral, or at least a considerable surprise, of a naval not a priestly nature—after all he was officer as well as priest—that I, the captain, was prepared to throw over Navy legalities in the matter; there was not the least.) It also brought an abrupt cessation, a weird halt. To, it seemed, everything. We simply waited, mute as ghosts. Though it was not yet noon, the diminishing light through the ports, chattering with rain, left the cabin in shadows. I reached over and switched on the lamp. It made an ungodly noise. I could hear somewhere beyond and above the iterative screeching of rainstorm wind. Then the wind passed in gusts and our concert of the heavens, the fugue developing, once more modulated all around us into that mournful, almost portentous metronome of rain entering the sea. A heavy sense of finality, embracing the decisions both as to the habitations and the women, seemed to reach down and lay hold of us both; of no turning back. At last the priest spoke into that rain-laden silence, and—eerie in its precision of accuracy—into my thoughts.
“Tom . . .” He waited. He was one of the two officers aboard, the other being the doc, who in a matter unwritten anywhere was granted the license, by myself, if he wished so to address me in private. Neither of them often used it. The Jesuit and I, by the way, shared the same first name. And each of us, too, I believe, with our portion of the famous quality ascribed to our apostolic namesake. Doubting Thomases, both . . . “I fear we are headed into heavy seas. Worse, uncharted waters. Heading where men have not been.”
He stopped there, looking at me, and again a silence hung. I could hear returning the quick spasms of rain, drumming the ship:
“And so we have been all along.”
“Not like this. This is something more.”
Yes, looking at him, surely I must have expected something else, adjurations, perhaps, homilies, recourse if not to Navy Regulations—which, after all, were my province and concern, and which I had just announced I stood prepared to sweep aside, at least on this matter, then to divine regulations—which were his. It could only be that he had thought the matter through with the same exhaustiveness, and doubtless wakefulness, too, I had given it myself and reached a conclusion identical in its major premise, the only one that held promise, something that would be a nonnegotiable requirement were it to have his blessing, of combining the two, the moral and the practical: The resignation, almost compliance, on his face as before the one now admitted inevitability in our existence told me that; perhaps, I was not so foolish as to think otherwise, our shared conclusion varying only in its details of execution. Those divine regulations we should of a certainty see presently. But I got none of the other major assaults which he was always prepared to mount at once on any proposition where his heart—his God—so dictated. Again I wondered, almost idly, with a faint gnawing suspicion, why not. The prudent thing was to turn away from that, from any questionings it might suggest, to be grateful for his acceptance so far; knowing how much I would need him; therefore use him to the hilt.
“Father,” I said.
Something in my voice. I could sense him look toward me.
“Yes, Tom? What is it?”
I could hear my voice come hard. “Not a day passes but what I think of something. The mutiny, which cost us one hundred and nine hands, two of them women. That passage through the dark and the cold, which cost us fifteen, including three women. Emily Austin. The following is for your confession box. Do you know, I think more about the loss of the six women than I do of the one hundred and twenty-one men?”
“I can understand that.”
“So I don’t intend to lose one more woman. It may come to the point where I have to bargain certain things, in a manner ship’s captains customarily do not. I am prepared for that; up to a point; to give at least consideration to almost anything, coming from any hand aboard. Except for one thing. Can we agree as one matter nonnegotiable that whatever happens . . . whatever it takes . . . the women must be protected?”
I heard his voice against the murmuring rain; as if he sensed, too, that here must be dispensed with all indirection, all equivocation; all obliquity; with every firmness, in unshakable resolve, cold and hard as stone.
“As an article of faith, Captain,” he said. “They are our most precious possession. Not the slightest harm can be allowed to come to a single one of them.”
Said as a declaration so lapidary as to require no further discussion.
“I think the men know, know why,” I said. “They are good men. I don’t think they would let anything—well, bad, happen to the women . . . if anyone should try . . . They value them as much as do you or I.”
He spoke as though that, in this matter, went for nothing.
“They may come to value them too much. In the wrong way.” He paused. “The Bixby affair.”
“An aberration,” I said, even as that awful memory flashed through me. “Nevertheless . . .” I sat back and looked at him, this time on a level of eyes. I spoke as a ship’s captain.
“The small arms. I put them under lock and key before the trouble. They still are. I retain the key.”
He received that piece of intelligence as if he were being told the most obvious of details of a routine thing, of proper housekeeping, as though any other procedure would have been not only strange but criminally negligent; his acceptance of the measure so immediate as to make me for a moment wonder if he had heard something that he felt made the action imperatively prudent.
I shrugged. “Unnecessary, I’m sure. These are good men.” I wondered why I had said that again. “Another thing. If anything happens, retribution will be swift and hard. Not reprimand. Not captain’s mast. Not a summary or a special. But a general court-martial. You may feel free to make that clear, along with your gentler methods, at your discretion. If at all necessary, I shall myself.”
He said wryly, yet with that same hard inflexibility in his voice, “Added to the Navy’s, I shall remind them of the Lord’s GCMs.”
I then turned away from it. I found such thoughts distasteful at best—at worst, unworthy, undeserved by a ship’s company as steadfast as had been this one, not once failing to do what was asked of them, and in circumstances to try the hardiest of men’s souls. I wanted to finish up. A course had been set. So get on with it; cast off. I felt a hush even within the sounds of wind and rain, a corner of stillness in which we waited, expectant, as though for a last word, a final thought. I wanted to say, to finish off with: “The numbers are what bother me. The mathematics of it.” And then did not, that being the area where above all others I expected difficulty with him—where realistic details of execution were concerned, not for a moment did I judge that the matter had even begun to be settled. Having arrived at a sort of naval-clerical pax, I thought to leave well enough alone, to save for another time that matter of infinite complexity, the one most likely to breed head-on confrontation. Much better not to rush in; to wait, to build on present affinity, however imperfect. I spoke in a voice of accord, of all hope.
The Last Ship: A Novel Page 16