The Negro gathered about half of the bully's blue shirt in his fist. "Why, I just might be required to rearrange your face, Throttleman. I'd hate to do that to a shipmate."
"Hey, Amos, we was only kiddin'," the bony one said.
"Neither one of you is very good at kiddin'," the Negro said "Maybe it's because your fuckin' brains are pickled in that torpedo juice you're always cookin' in the engine room."
He slapped the top rack. "Spread yourself up here, Jewboy. Don't pay no attention to these two asshole machinists. You're gonna be in the fire room with me, where the stuff really happens. I'm lookin' for a striker with brains."
All Roth could do was gape. "Hey, don't look so surprised," the Negro said. "I'm Amos Cartwright. They keep me around to remind everybody they're in the black gang."
Officers and Gentlemen
"I want to see it," Rita McKay said. "I want to see him squirm." Captain Arthur McKay gazed at his wife with undisguised dismay. There were times when she became almost a stranger to him. The sense of alienation was not helped by the contrast between her lovely face, with its marvelous skin and perfect bone structure, and her bulky body.
"It just isn't done," Captain McKay said as the American Airlines DC-3 began descending to land at Los Angeles. "Women aren't invited to a transfer of command. It's not a goddamn party.”
Muscles bunched above his solid jaw. His gray eyes darkened. He shoved his hand through his thinning sandy hair.
Rita ignored the storm signals. "It'll be the party of the century as far as I'm concerned," she said.
"It's out of the question! Even if it could be done, I wouldn't go along with it. I don't like this whole deal."
Rita checked her lipstick in her compact mirror. She ran a comb through her thick blond hair, still in the same no-nonsense bob she had worn at their wedding. "You've been spooked by every assignment I've gotten you. Each one was going to finish you."
"That isn't what I'm talking about. I mean relieving Win this way.”
"He'd relieve you in ten seconds if the situation was reversed."
"I don't believe that."
"Arthur McKay, may I remind you, not for the first time, that you are a sentimental slob?"
The slipstream whined, the engines strained. The DC-3 was in its final glide, bucking a strong headwind. Los Angeles was a sea of gloom below them in the twilight. Only an occasional light defied the blackout. Beyond the land, the Pacific was a darker, gloomier sea.
"Maybe it will be more fun to see Winfield the Great squirm in private," Rita said. "He's such an actor, he probably won't twitch a muscle in that handsome face aboard ship."
Thump thump thump, they were on the ground and the stewardess was telling them what they already knew, they were in Los Angeles. Palm trees and oil derricks wavered in the fading light. On the tarmac the temperature was at least a hundred. Rita hurried to keep up with her long-legged husband. "How many times do I have to tell you not to walk so damn fast?" she gasped.
"Yeah, yeah," McKay said, slowing down, but not enough to satisfy her. "If you'd lose some weight, a fast walk wouldn't bother you."
"I'm going on a diet the minute you sail," she said.
She would too, Arthur McKay thought glumly. She would lose forty or fifty pounds, and when he came back — if he came back — he would find Rita the lean tigress waiting for him. Being married to Rita was like living with two or three different women. For the first year of shore duty, she was the tigress. She could not get enough of him in the bedroom. Sometimes, lately, he did not have enough to give. The second year, she got fat and their sex life dwindled to zero. The bickering and the drinking began — and the scheming for a new sea duty assignment.
In that department, Rita was a nonpareil. No other Navy wife could come close to her shrewdness. She was a genius at spotting assignments that put her husband in daily contact with higher ranks whose fondness for him — or Rita's father, Vice Admiral Robley Semmes — had accelerated his career. Arthur McKay had to admit that Rita had had a lot to do with the four gold stripes he wore on his sleeves. He had been the second man in the class of 1917 to become a captain. The first had been the man he was about to relieve from command of the USS Jefferson City, Captain Winfield Scott Schley Kemble.
They collected their luggage and found a taxi. The driver was an Okie, one of those people John Steinbeck wrote about so movingly in The Grapes of Wrath. He complained about how many niggers were coming to Los Angeles to get jobs in the shipyards at Long Beach or the aircraft plants out in the valley. Ignoring this civilian chatter, Arthur McKay tried to imagine how the ceremony would go tomorrow when he relieved the man who had been his roommate at Annapolis, his mentor, his closest friend for the past twenty-five years in the Navy.
"Remember the first time we visited your house?" he said.
"No," Rita said.
Arthur McKay was not surprised. Rita had made a fool of herself that afternoon, throwing seductive glances and sexy innuendos at Win Kemble. "You must remember it," he said. "You jumped into the pond with your best white dress on to get Win to notice you."
"That is a goddamned lie," Rita said. "I slipped on some dried pine needles and fell in. I was horribly embarrassed by the whole thing. That dress was just glued to me."
"So I noticed," McKay said. "I damn near proposed on the spot."
A lot of people thought Arthur McKay was stupid, when he was simply quiet. Several generations of farm life on the vast silent plains of Kansas had deepened the reflective habits the McKays had brought from New Hampshire. They watched and thought and watched some more and thought some more. Then they spoke, often with devastating effect.
"It's too far back to think about," Rita said as the taxi climbed into the hills above Los Angeles.
She was telling him that she did not want to think about it — or talk about it. But Arthur McKay was not always an obedient husband. He had turned down more than one assignment because it consisted mostly of ass-kissing the hot admiral of the moment. He had tried to turn down this assignment, even though he risked losing the favor of the hottest admiral of the century, Ernest J. King, Cominch himself, Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, and Chief of Naval Operations, the most powerful naval officer in the history of the United States.
"Twenty-seven years?" McKay said. "That's only a pimple on the ass of time, Rita." Loosening his tie, he sprawled in the corner of the rear seat so he could stretch out his legs. "When I think of how green I was in 1915. I still had corn sprouting out of my ears."
Rita scowled. "I wonder how Lucy is taking it," she said. "She probably doesn't have any idea what it really means."
They had been youngsters, as they called sophomores at Annapolis. It was a heady year. They had gotten through plebe year, a nightmare of abuse and insults from upper classmen, designed to break individuality into fragments and reconstruct it according to Rocks and Shoals, the Navy code of discipline. Arthur McKay would have walked out at the end of the first month, except for Win Kemble. When you have a grandfather who was an admiral, you can take a long view of such idiocy.
Arthur McKay still marveled at the good fortune that had given him, the quintessential Kansas hayseed, a roommate with the sophistication Win Kemble possessed from birth. Although his family's finances were modest (his father had died in a polo accident the year he was born), Win had grown up: in a Philadelphia world of old money and blue blood. Relatives powerful in business and politics flowed through his house. He vacationed with them in Europe and Maine. Very early in his life, Win acquired the conviction that some people were born to command and others to obey — an idea Arthur McKay's Midwest populist instincts found hard to accept — even when Annapolis told him he was being endowed with the mystic authority of the naval officer.
Win had shared his knowledge of this world of inherited wealth and cool indifference to conventional morals with Arthur McKay. He mocked and to some extent overcame his country boy's suspicions and hostilities and, most important, eliminated his awe. It was delightful to
discover that the Eastern power gods had as many warts and inconsistencies, yes, as much personal unhappiness, as ordinary folk. Those revelations, which Win shared with no one else, had become part of a bond of gratitude and affection that nothing in the fortunes of war or the vagaries of peace could ever break.
Winfield Scott Schley Kemble had a long view of a lot of things. After lights out he lay in the darkness and lectured Arthur McKay on the art and science of becoming Chief of Naval Operations. CNO. That was what he was shooting for, the Navy's top job, from the moment he walked into Bancroft Hall. He was not secretive about it. Before they graduated, the whole class mocked his ambition, as only classmates can. In the Lucky Bag, their Annapolis yearbook, he was accused of creating a "noxious gas, C/2N/20/2," which stupefied everyone from professors to plebes into a state of "hysterical admiration."
Only his roommate knew the real reason for the hauteur Win Kemble flaunted in public. Winfield Scott Schley Kemble had come to Annapolis to avenge the insults and obloquy heaped on his grandfather, Commodore Winfield Scott Schley, hero of the great naval clash of the Spanish-American War, the battle of Santiago.
Off the Cuban coast on July 3, 1898, the squadron under Commodore Schley's command sank or captured the entire Spanish Fleet, ending the war in a half hour. But Schley's commander, Admiral William T. Sampson, who had been absent when the battle was fought, refused even to mention Schley's name in his victory report. For the next decade a virtual civil war raged inside the Navy between Schley and Sampson factions. By and large, Schley got the worst of it. He was accused of sailing his flagship, the cruiser Brooklyn, in the wrong direction until he saw it was safe to return to the fray. Win Kemble had come to Annapolis to expunge this lie from the Navy's annals by performing deeds at sea that would win him a place beside Farragut and Dewey in the history books.
It was a large burden to lay on a young man's shoulders. But Win seemed to bear it gladly, even with a swagger. From the day he walked through the main gate, the slim, crisp Philadelphian with the icewater-blue eyes seemed older, wiser than the rest of them. There was not a trace of adolescent rawness in his aristocratic features. Win's clearly defined ambition was an even greater advantage over his classmates, most of whom spent the first four years wondering why they ever went to Annapolis and the next ten trying to decide whether to risk a career in an organization as encrusted with meaningless traditions and regulations as the peacetime U.S. Navy.
"God, I'm sticky," Rita said. "I can't wait to take a shower."
Arthur McKay was back twenty-eight years in the shower room in Bancroft Hall at Annapolis. He was soaping up, and Win Kemble was beside him, his, slim, sinewy, runner's body wet and gleaming. "This," Win said, holding his penis in his hand, "is a very important weapon. You have to know exactly how and when to use it."
Later, in their darkened room, he expanded on this thought. "Anyone in this man's Navy who marries for love needs his brain analyzed for airholes."
This did not strike Arthur McKay as a particularly outrageous thought. Thanks to that McKay habit of watching and thinking and watching some more, he had already concluded that love was a rarity in marriage. His mother had married his father before she decided she hated farm life. His father worshipped it. This fundamental disagreement had cooled things to January temperatures by the time Willa McKay's fourth child and only son, Arthur, was born in 1896.
Win Kemble's opinions about love and marriage had led them to Patapsco, Maryland, in 1915 to call on Vice Admiral Robley Semmes and his two daughters. The introductions had been arranged by Win's mother. Few families had more salt water in their veins. A great-grandfather had captained a privateer in the Revolution. A great-grandfather had fought beside Hull aboard the Constitution, and a grandfather had sailed with Perry to Japan. A cousin had commanded the Confederate raider Alabama. An uncle had conned one of Farragut’s ships when he damned the torpedoes and ran the Confederate forts at Mobile.
One of the crustiest characters who ever stalked a bridge, Admiral Semmes had been a Schley man in the great feud, probably because that guaranteed him a larger number of enemies. He was the author of reports such as "The Crushing Superiority of British Naval Marksmanship," which had won him the admiration of President Theodore Roosevelt and the enmity of his superiors. After a drink or two, he was fond of pointing out that the Navy had fired eight thousand rounds in the battle of Santiago and scored only a hundred and twenty hits.
The admiral's wife never disagreed with him in public. "Of course, dear" was her usual reply to everything he said. His younger daughter, Rita, disagreed with him about everything. His older daughter, Lucy — the sisters were only a year apart — took her mother's approach. Arthur McKay had seldom seen two more dissimilar sisters. Rita was all battle smoke and flame, Lucy spindrift and mist. Whenever Lucy came into the room, the admiral glowed. When Rita appeared, his temper instantly went to General Quarters.
What surprised McKay was Win Kemble's choice of Lucy Semmes as his ideal Navy wife. Why didn't an ambitious midshipman choose Rita, who was fascinated with the Navy and never stopped talking about it? Win had made his preference clear on their first call. "Ram that dreadnought if necessary, McKay," he had whispered as Rita bore down on them. "Get her out of my way."
On that first visit, they sat on the porch, which jutted into a pond, not unlike the prow of a ship. The admiral served them gin slings, a clear violation of Annapolis regulations, which forbade midshipmen to drink. When Rita pointed out this infraction, the admiral's jaw jutted.
"It's a goddamned crime the way the civilians have stuck their noses into the Navy's business. We should still be serving grog to the fighting men in the fleet and drinking whiskey in our wardrooms and letting midshipmen get drunk when they feel like it, as long as they don't disturb the peace or damage Navy property."
The daily ration of liquor to enlisted men had been banned in 1862, ten years before the admiral entered Annapolis. But officers had drunk freely in the wardroom until the previous year, 1914, when Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, a pious populist from North Carolina, stopped it, supposedly because it discriminated against enlisted men. The admiral had been commander of the U.S. Atlantic Squadron at the time. He had sent a bristling statement to the newspapers, which more or less declared that if officers were not treated as gentlemen and enlisted men as something else, Congress might as well beach every ship in the fleet. A week later he retired.
At the moment, Arthur McKay was not remembering the point at issue. He meditated on the sentiment that the civilians should have nothing to do or say about the way the Navy was run. It was the first but by no means the last time McKay would hear it.
The opinion was alive and well in the person of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, on whose staff Arthur McKay had been serving when the battle of Savo Island was fought on August 9, 1942. As duty officer aboard King's flagship, USS Dauntless, moored at the Washington Navy Yard, McKay had brought the bad news of that ruinous night to the admiral early on the morning of August 12.
Once, twice, three times King had read the appalling report from Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, his commander in the Solomon Islands. By the third time, Cominch was out of bed, glaring at Captain McKay.
"They must have decoded it wrong. This couldn't have happened!"
Facing those baleful eyes in that lined, weary face, McKay suddenly understood the story of the ruler who killed messengers who brought him bad news. "I'll have them decode it again, Admiral," he had said.
The decoding was perfectly accurate, of course. The message informed Admiral King that his brainchild, Operation Watchtower, whereby the U.S. Navy and Marines were going to seize the initiative from the Japanese, was in peril. Off Savo Island, a volcanic dot near the tip of Guadalcanal, where the Marines were slugging it out with an enemy garrison, the Japanese had sunk one Australian and three American cruisers and a destroyer, killing 1,170 officers and men and wounding 709, without losing a ship or, as far as the Americans knew, even a
man.
Pearl Harbor had been a disaster, not a defeat. The Navy, the Army, everyone up to and including the President had been caught by surprise, and the damage had been inflicted from the air. Savo Island had been fought ship to ship in a war zone where there was more than reasonable expectation of an enemy attack. There were no excuses available. It was simply the worst defeat in the history of the U.S. Navy.
So far, not a word about this humiliation had been released to the American people. In fact, Arthur McKay strongly suspected that not even the President knew about it. When something went seriously wrong, Admiral King believed that someone had to be accountable. At Savo Island, everything had gone seriously wrong, and the admiral was determined to find the man at fault and make him pay the penalty. When Cominch in his wisdom decided to tell the President and the American people the dolorous truth, he wanted to be able to report that the perpetrator of the debacle had been punished.
That was one of the reasons why Arthur McKay had been selected to relieve Win Kemble. He could find out from him, the only senior officer in the battle who had not lost his ship, what had happened. Rita had pointed this out with almost fiendish delight when Admiral King paid her one of his unannounced visits the day after the bad news arrived. King had served under Rita's father in the Asiatic Fleet and had been a frequent visitor to the Semmes' house in Shanghai. Mrs. Semmes had been the first human being to persuade King to take advice on anything. She had gotten him to moderate his fondness for fast women and alcohol. Now, with the weight of a losing war on his shoulders, he found nostalgic consolation in telling his troubles to another Semmes woman.
In fact, King spent so much time, at the McKay home, while Captain McKay was working double shifts like the rest of the admiral's staff, that McKay found himself wondering if Cominch was doing more than talking. His fondness for the ladies, young, old, and middle-aged, was notorious throughout the Navy.
But that worry was not what made Arthur McKay writhe now as the taxi roared along the crest of a hill overlooking blacked-out Los Angeles. McKay had heard — and ignored — a dozen rumors of Rita's unfaithfulness. What tormented him was the suspicion, growing larger every time he read the by now voluminous after-action reports on Savo Island, that Captain Winfield Scott Schley Kemble might become Ernest King's scapegoat. Relieving Win of command of the USS Jefferson City was difficult enough. But to play the secret investigator-cum-prosecutor was intolerable. Win was still his best friend.
Time and Tide Page 3