On August 6, 1942, the Enterprise entered the area of the Solomon Islands and the next day the Marines hit the beaches, and within days the airfield had been claimed and renamed Henderson Field but the battle around Guadalcanal raged on, and the Japanese maintained a strong grip on all but the airfield. The Marines paid a terrible price in the ensuing weeks, but the Enterprise held her own, even though she was badly damaged. Nick had been aboard when she took some of her worst blows, and he was ordered to stay with her when she went to Hawaii for repairs in early September.
Inwardly he raged to have to stay on the aircraft carrier as she went to Hawaii. He wanted to stay on Guadalcanal with the troops, but he was badly needed aboard the crippled carrier. And in Hawaii he cooled his heels at Hickam Base, aching to go back as he listened to the news. The battle at Guadalcanal was taking a tremendous toll and marines were dying on the beaches. But in the five months since he'd left San Francisco, he had seen nothing but action in the Coral Sea, at Midway, and then Guadalcanal, with scarcely a breather between them. It helped him keep his mind off Liane. This was why he had enlisted—to fight for his country. When Liane's letter had reached him, he had been stunned by what she said. The paroxysms of guilt had apparently only struck her after he left and there had been nothing he could do or say. He had begun a dozen answers to her letter and discarded them all. She had made a choice once again, and once again he had no choice but to respect it. And now he had the war to keep his mind off his pain, but every night in his bunk, he would lie awake for hours, thinking of their days in San Francisco. And it was worse once he reached Hawaii. He had nothing to do but sit on the beach and wait for the Enterprise to be battle ready again. He wrote long letters to his son, and felt as useless as he had in San Francisco. It was a beautiful summer in Hawaii, but the battles in the South Pacific raged on and he was anxious to get back. To help pass the time, he volunteered at the hospital for a while, and would talk to the men and joke with the nurses. He always seemed a good-humored, pleasant man to the nurses, but he asked none of them out.
“Maybe he doesn't like girls,” one of them joked. But they all laughed. He didn't look that type either.
“Maybe he's married,” another suggested. She had talked to him for a long time the day before, and she had had the feeling there was a woman on his mind, but he had said very little. It had just been the way he had said “we” that made her realize he hadn't been alone on the mainland before he sailed, and she sensed a deep pain somewhere in his soul. A pain no one could touch and no one could heal. Because he wouldn't let anyone near him.
The women talked about him a lot on the base. He was unusually attractive and strangely open about some things. He talked about his son a great deal, a little boy named John, who was eleven. Everyone knew about Johnny.
“Do you know who he is?” a nurse's aide whispered to a nurse one day. “I mean in real life.” She was from the hills of Kentucky but she had heard of Burnham Steel. She had put it together from something he had said. And she'd asked around and an officer had told her that she was right. “He's Burnham Steel.” The nurse looked skeptical and then shrugged.
“So what? He's still in this war like the rest of us, and his ship sank underneath him.” The nurse's aide nodded, but she was longing for a date. She made herself obvious whenever she saw him in the wards, but he talked to her no differently than he did to the others.
“Christ, you can't get near the guy,” she complained to a friend.
“Maybe there's someone waiting for him at home.” Not that that stopped the others.
It was not unlike the things they said about Liane at the hospital in Oakland.
“You got a boyfriend in the war?” a boy with a gut full of shrapnel asked her one day. They had operated on him three times, and still hadn't removed all the fragments.
“A husband.” She smiled.
“The one who was in the Coral Sea?” She had talked to him about that when he first came in, and he knew that she knew a lot about the battle. But a strange look came into her eyes as he asked.
“No. He was in France.”
“What's he doing there?” The boy looked confused. It didn't tally up with the rest of what he knew, or what she had said.
“He was fighting the Germans. He was French.”
“Oh.” The boy looked surprised.
“Where is he now?”
“They killed him.”
There was a long silence as he watched her. She was folding a blanket over his legs and she had a gentle touch. But he liked her because she was so pretty. “I'm sorry.”
She turned to him with a sad smile. “So am I.”
“You got kids?”
“Two little girls.”
“Are they as pretty as their mother?” He grinned.
“Much prettier,” she answered with a smile, and moved to the next bed. She worked for hours in the wards, smiling, emptying bed pans, holding hands, holding heads while the men threw up. But she rarely told them much about herself. There was nothing to tell. Her life was over.
It was September when her uncle finally asked her out to dinner. It was time for her to stop mourning. But she shook her head. “I don't think so, Uncle George. I have to be at work early tomorrow, and …” She didn't want to make excuses. She didn't want to go out. There was nothing she wanted to do, except go to work, and come home at night to be with the girls, and then go to bed.
“It would do you good to get a change of scene. You can't just run back and forth to that hospital every day.”
“Why not?” She looked at him with a look that said “Don't touch me.”
“Because you're not an old woman, Liane. You may want to act like one, but you're not.”
“I'm a widow. It's the same thing.”
“The hell it is.” She was beginning to remind him of his brother when Liane's mother had died at her birth. But that was crazy. She was thirty-five years old. And she couldn't bury herself with her husband. “Do you know what you look like these days? You're rail thin, your eyes are sunken into your head, your clothes are falling off your back.” She laughed at the description and shook her head.
“You sure paint a pretty picture.”
“Take a look in the mirror sometime.”
“I do my best not to.”
“See what I mean. Damn it, girl, stop waving that black flag. You're alive. It's a damn shame he's not, but there are a lot of women in the same shoes as you these days, but they're not sitting around with long faces, acting like they're dead.”
“Oh, no?” Her voice had a strange icy ring. “What are they doing, Uncle George? Going to parties?” That's what she had done before. Before Armand had died. And it had been wrong. And she wouldn't do it again. Armand had died. And men were dying all over the world. And she was doing all she could for the ones who lived through it.
“You could go to dinner once in a while. Would that be so bad?”
“I don't want to.”
And then he decided to brave the taboo subject again. “Have you heard from Nick?”
“No.” The walls went up and froze over.
“Have you written to him?”
“No. And I'm not going to. You've asked me before, now don't ask me again.”
“Why not? You could at least tell him Armand died.”
“Why?” Fury began to creep into her voice. “What good would it do? I've sent the man away twice. I'm not going to hurt him again.”
“Twice?” He looked startled and Liane looked annoyed at herself. But what difference did it make now if he knew.
“The same thing happened when we came over on the Deauville together after Paris fell. We fell in love, and I ended it because of Armand.”
“I didn't know.” She was a strange closemouthed woman in many ways and he marveled at her. So they had had an affair before. He had suspected it, but never been sure of it. “That must have made it much worse for you both when he left here.”
She looked into her uncl
e's eyes. “It did. I can't go through that again, Uncle George, or do it to him. Too much has happened. It's better left like this.”
“But you wouldn't have to put him through it again.” He didn't want to add that she was free now.
“I don't know if I could live with the guilt of what we did. I still think Armand knew. And even if he didn't, it was wrong. You can't build a life on two mistakes. So if I write to him now, what good would it do? He'd get his hopes up again and maybe I couldn't live up to what he will expect when he comes home. I just can't put him through that for a third time.”
“But he must have known how you felt, Liane.”
“He did. He always said that he would play by my rules. And my rules were that I was going back to my husband. Some rules.” She looked disgusted at herself. She had tormented herself for months. “I don't want to talk about it anymore.” She looked away into a forgotten time when there had been two men she loved, and now there were none, or none that she would see again.
“I think you're wrong, Liane. I think Nick knows you better than you know yourself. He could help you through it.”
“He'll find someone else. And he has Johnny to come home to.”
“And you?” He worried about her a great deal. One of these days she was going to crack from the strain she put herself under.
“I'm happy as I am.”
“I don't believe that and neither do you.”
“I don't deserve anything else, Uncle George!”
“When are you going to come down off that cross?”
“When I've paid my dues.”
“And you don't think you have?” She shook her head. “You've lost a husband you think you betrayed, but you stuck by him till the end. You even gave up a man you loved, and you kept Armand's secret for all those years even though I badgered you to death, and you were practically run out of Washington, tarred and feathered. Don't you think that's enough? And now you spend your every living breath comforting those men in that surgical ward every day. What else do you want, a hair shirt? Sackcloth and ashes?”
She smiled. “I don't know, Uncle George. Maybe I'll feel better about the world again when the war is over.”
“We all will, Liane. These are damn hard times for us all. It's ugly to think about Jews being dragged out of their homes and put in camps, and children being killed in London, and Nazis shooting men like Armand, and ships being sunk, and … you could go on forever. But you still have to wake up in the morning with a smile and look out the window and thank God you're alive, and hold a hand out to the people you love.” He held a hand out to her and she took it and kissed his fingers.
“I love you, Uncle George.” She looked like a girl and he touched the silky blond hair.
“I love you too, Liane. And to tell you the truth, I love that boy. I'd like to see you with him one day. It would be good for you and the girls, and I'm not going to live forever.”
“Yes, you will.” She smiled again. “You'd better.”
“No, I won't. Think about what I said. You owe it to yourself. And to him.” But she didn't heed his words, she just went back to the hospital in Oakland every day, killing herself in the wards, and then she'd come home to give whatever she had left to him and her daughters.
And on October 15, the Enterprise headed back toward Guadalcanal, with Nick aboard, aching to reenter the battle. The two months in Hawaii had almost driven him crazy.
The Enterprise reached Guadalcanal on October 23, and she joined the Hornet, with Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid in charge now. There were four Japanese aircraft carriers in the area, and they were still attempting to reclaim what was by then Henderson Field, and the Americans were holding their ground.
On October 26, Admiral Halsey, the Naval Commander-in-Chief in the South Pacific, ordered them to attack the Japanese and they did. It was a horrendous fight and the Japanese were stronger than the American troops. They set the Hornet ablaze and crippled her until she sank, with thousands of men killed. But despite brutal blows, the Enterprise survived. She continued the fight, much to everyone's delight, and in the States everyone sat glued to their radios, listening to the news. And George found Liane sitting there, listening to it too, with a look of terror in her eyes.
“You think he's over there, don't you?”
“I don't know.” But her eyes said that she knew it.
He nodded his head grimly. “So do I.”
n the morning of October 27, the Hornet was still ablaze and sinking slowly, and the Enterprise had taken a series of ferocious hits, but she was still in action. Lieutenant Colonel Burnham was on the bridge watching the crew man the guns when the Japanese hit them with full force; a 550-pound bomb hit their flight deck and passed through the port side, spraying fragments in all directions. And suddenly there were fires everywhere and men were lying all over the deck, either dead or wounded.
“Jesus Christ, did you see that bomb!” The man standing next to him was gaping in disbelief, and Nick ran for the stairs in one leap.
“Never mind that, we're on fire. Get the hoses.” Troops from all over the ship were trying to fight the blaze while others manned the guns and continued to spray the Japanese as dive bombers zoomed toward them, dropping bombs. One Japanese pilot crashed on the deck, setting off a ferocious explosion. And then suddenly, as Nick stood holding the hose, he saw two men crawling toward him, and he dragged them out of the fire one by one, spraying water on their clothes to put out the fires that were devouring their flesh. And as he looked down into the face of the second one, there was suddenly an enormous explosion behind him. He had a sensation of sunlight and lightness in his limbs as he flew through the air, watching pieces of bodies. He had the oddest feeling that he was suddenly weightless … and as he thought of Liane he knew he was smiling.
he men continued to pour in from the battle of Guadalcanal all through November. Many of them had been kept at Hickam for a few days first, others had come straight through to Oakland. There were no longer facilities to care for them anywhere else. They had to be kept on ships until they returned to the States, and many of them died on the way. Liane watched them come in day by day, their bodies torn limb from limb, with hideous wounds and burns. And she heard the story of the 550-pound bomb over and over and over.
It was grim work watching them come in, and as she assisted the stretchers coming from the ships, she was once again reminded of the Deauville, but this was much worse than anything she'd ever seen then. The men were returning in pieces.
And once she had thought that someone was talking about Nick. The man had been half delirious and he was talking about his buddy who'd been killed beside him on the deck, but when she asked him about it later, the man's name had been Nick Freed. And he wasn't the Nick she knew. And the man died in her arms two days later.
It was the night of Thanksgiving when her uncle finally turned to her, unable to stand it any longer. “Why don't we call the War Office and find out?”
She shook her head. “If something happens to him, we'll read about it in the papers.” It would be worse to know where he was, she would be tempted to write to him and she was determined not to. And if he was wounded, sooner or later she'd know it. And if the head of Burnham Steel had been killed, the papers all over the country would carry items about it. “Let it go, Uncle George. He's all right.”
“You don't know that.”
“No, I don't.” But she had her hands full enough with the men that she knew weren't. She was working twelve-hour shifts now, right alongside the nurses.
“They ought to give you a goddamn medal when this bloody war is over.”
She bent and kissed his cheek, smiling, and then she stood up and looked at her watch. “I have to go, Uncle George.”
“Now? Where?” They had just finished Thanksgiving dinner and the girls had gone to bed a little while before. It was nine o'clock at night and she hadn't gone out in months.
“We're shorthanded at the base, and I said I'd go back.”
“I don't want you driving out there alone.”
“I'm a big girl, Uncle George.” She patted his arm.
“You're crazy.” Crazier than he knew, crazy with fear and longing and aching. Crazy from wondering if Nick was dead. Day after day she listened to the tales, wondering if the dead man beside the man she tended had been Nick, or if he'd even been there at all. There was a constant look of anguish in her eyes. And on Monday morning George Crockett took matters into his own hands and for the second time in a year he called Brett Williams.
“Look, I've got to know.”
“So do we.” Brett Williams wondered at the old man. He knew who he was or he wouldn't have taken the call. But he wondered why he wanted to know. Maybe he had been a close friend of old man Burnham's. “We haven't heard a thing.”
“But you can find out, for chrissake. Call the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, someone.”
“We have. It's such a mess over there that they have very inaccurate records. Men have drowned, gone down with the Hornet, they're in hospitals all over the place. They say it'll be another month or two before they know much more.”
“Well, I can't wait that long,” the old man growled.
“Why not?” Brett Williams had had enough and they were shouting at each other. For a month now he'd been a nervous wreck not knowing where the hell Nick was. And Johnny had called him too, almost every day. And there was nothing to say to the boy, or this old man on the West Coast. Hillary had even called. She was actually worried that Johnny would lose his father. She was ready to give his son back now. “If we're sitting here, chewing our nails, goddamn it, so can you.”
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