When he introduced Stephen to Double, he thought with a smile at the time that they were very much alike. They seemed to recognize it, too, and the three young people found themselves spending most of the boys’ leave together, along with Janice Covey, a friend of Double’s who had grown up with her. Almost ever since he could remember, Janice had been in and out of the house. He supposed that if he had had to limit himself to one word to describe her, “wholesome” would have been the word. Her hero worship of him was flattering, for she had become a handsome girl in an outdoor kind of way, and he was rather fond of her.
They might never have been more to each other than that, except that when he brought Stephen home again the following year, something strange happened between Stephen and Double. They looked at each other as if they had never met before, and worse, as if they were absolutely alone in the room. Gone was their easygoing nature; they were visibly drowning in each other’s eyes. The agonizing stab of pain he felt then took him by surprise, and he nearly groaned aloud. Afterward he wondered if it was jealousy of either Stephen, the first close friend he had ever had, or of his sister, who always seemed to get the best of everything. What never occurred to him was the real cause: a consuming envy of the love that his sister and friend had found and that he was instinctively convinced he would never know.
That was the day he looked closely at Janice for the first time. The tomboy who had ridden recklessly, climbed trees, swum, sailed, taken any dare, and even sworn on occasion had somehow been transformed into this handsome blond young woman with a spatter of freckles across her nose and a trace still of coltish awkwardness. David had always envisioned a gracious, elegant lady for his wife, a woman who could preside with charm and ease over the social events that would help to take him to the rank of admiral. His need not to be left behind now, however, obliterated the vision, or rather led him to fit Janice into it, whether she would or no.
Even before their leave was over, he had proposed. “Janice, I wonder if you would marry me,” he said one day as they were out riding alone. Stephen and Double had gone sailing instead and made it clear that they would not welcome company.
Janice looked at him with dismay. This wasn’t at all the romantic occasion she had pictured a proposal to be. “David, I — I don’t know what to say. I never imagined you had any interest in me.” She had been hopelessly in love with him for years, but she was perceptive enough to know that to him she was a longtime companion and nothing more.
“Well, I do. I want you to be my wife.” They stood there talking without even dismounting from their horses. “Of course, I can’t marry until we graduate next year,” he added hastily, “but I wanted you to know my intention so that you could consider the matter.”
She still didn’t know what to say. Just as David had always envisioned an elegant, graceful woman, so while Janice had always envisioned David, it was a very different David from this proper, even prim young man who wouldn’t even get off his horse to take her in his arms. She looked at him, at the reddish-gold hair that tumbled gracefully over his finely shaped head, the darker level eyebrows, the single frown mark between his blue eyes, the classically straight nose, the beautiful mouth, the cleft chin, she looked and she knew that however wrong she felt his proposal to be, she would accept it. She thought that time and her love would change him.
Thus it was that among the number of weddings occurring at graduation, among the various couples ducking and laughing their way beneath the arch of swords, Stephen and Double, David and Janice crossed the Rubicon of matrimony and placed their lives in each other’s hands. The first coupling of Stephen and Double had occurred some time before the wedding, so they did not have the artificial barrier of awkwardness that all too often wedding nights represent, and they returned from Sarasota Springs honeyed with physical desire for each other, truly wedded in body, mind, and heart.
Much to David’s dismay, Stephen was sent to join the Atlantic Fleet while he himself was transferred to a shore position at the naval base in San Diego, clear across the country. What a godforsaken assignment that was going to be, stuck in a little mud town while his classmates were all gaining promotions at sea. And worst of all, he had been put ignominiously in supply, where he would likely be stuck for the rest of his naval career. How typical of the military mind at work that he, who had been the head of his class in tactics, should be shunted off to a shore job.
For the short period between their honeymoon and entraining for the west coast, David and Janice stayed with his parents in their large house on the outskirts of Boston. Not knowing that he had stayed in the dining room and could hear her, Janice said to Katharine one day as they were drying the dinner dishes, “I’m worried about David. He’s taking this assignment in San Diego so hard.”
“Christian tried to tell him that military life was either being bored to death or scared to death, with no in between,” Katharine pointed out.
“Well, I don’t think it was fair to stick him with supply when nearly everyone else got to go to sea,” Janice protested hotly.
“You have to understand, Janice, that not everybody is as enthusiastic about David as you are,” Katharine observed dryly. “He is my son and there are many things about him that I am proud of, but as I’ve told him to his face, he is too proud and too defensive, which make him appear cold and stand-offish. People will forgive nearly anything except someone seeming to feel superior to them. My guess is that his superiors hope to take him down a peg. What they don’t seem to understand is that putting him down will only make him worse, and they’ll end by losing him entirely. Of course, that would hardly break his father’s heart, as you know.”
David did not wait to hear more. He was incensed that Janice would discuss him with his mother in the first place, and even more incensed at his mother’s assessment of the situation. So they thought — and hoped — he would quit, did they? Never. But somehow, some way, he was going to see to it that he got to sea. That night he turned his back on a bewildered Janice and refused to speak to her.
The next three years were disastrous for both of them. Not allowed by David to entertain in the informal way that was more natural for her and more appropriate for an ensign as well, at first she had to suffer his treating suppers for his equals in rank and their wives as training for a later time when his higher rank would require formal dinner parties. Janice tried hard, but there was always something she forgot, something she would say at dinner, with which he would find fault.
“You forgot to order flowers for the drawing room,” he accused her one night.
“Oh, David, why should we spend money we haven’t got for flowers for that little sitting room? Drawing room indeed! Anyway, it’s only the Blairs and Pat and Bill Hollister — they won’t care.”
“But I care! How many times do I have to tell you that you’ve got to practice if you’re ever going to learn? And I’ll thank you this time not to encourage Sally Blair again in those imitations of our superior officers.”
“But she’s so funny.”
“Yes, and it will be even funnier, won’t it, when word gets back to those officers and they see to it that I’m an ensign in supply for the next hundred years! Dammit, Janice, just once do as I say without arguing!”
On another occasion, “Jesus Christ, Janice, you’re not going to wear that dress to the commander’s reception, are you?”
“Why, what’s wrong with it? I think it looks nice.”
“Because you look like a frump in it, that’s why. For God’s sake make yourself some decent clothes.”
Their sex life had leveled off to his taking her from behind early in the morning once every week or so. For some reason she never discovered, he found it impossible to face her while making love to her, if you could call those quick penetrations from behind making love. Making love or no, however, they proved just as effective as more conventional means, for they hadn’t been in San Diego a month before she discovered that she was pregnant, and only a year af
ter the birth of Francis — after Sir Francis Drake, conqueror of the Spanish Armada, because Janice wouldn’t allow him to be called Horatio for Nelson — Elisabeth, named for his dead grandmother, came along.
Meanwhile David had determined to make the best of his situation at work. He discovered almost immediately that the supply situation was a shambles. Ship’s stores was run by a bald chief yeoman’s mate with a big beer belly and an avarice to go with it. The officers involved did little or nothing, allowing the entire operation to be run by the enlisted men. David spent a month setting up a complete reorganization on paper, which he then forwarded through channels, using the simple expedient of bypassing the clerks who ordinarily initiated the mechanics of routine paperwork and himself placing the multiple copies in the piles of paper waiting for signature on the various officers’ desks; they never read what they signed. By the time he saw to it that the report went off duly signed by every officer in charge of the affected sections, he knew that not even God could stop it from going to the top, whether or not it was approved.
It wasn’t until shortly before January of 1895 that he saw the reorganization recommendation again, a thick bundle endorsed finally by a Captain George Dewey as head of the U.S. Navy Bureau of Equipment in Washington, D.C., including a commendation by Admiral Emerson of Ensign Hand and also of his commanding officer for such foresighted encouragement of initiative on the part of his subordinate.
“You got away with it this time,” Commander Lerk told him, “but don’t ever try a trick like that again … Since we’re now stuck with your goddam plan, Hand, you can be the one to do the work. Dismissed.”
Work he did, twelve and fourteen hours a day, first rearranging the warehouses entirely and then training the men in a whole new scheme of paperwork to keep track of materials coming in and being issued. After less than a month his system pinpointed shortages of equipment and supplies that led to the arrest of a ring of clerical thieves, among them, David was grimly amused to discover, the beer-bellied chief yeoman to whom he had taken such a dislike.
In April, Francis was born, a lanky, red-faced, ill-tempered little brute with an unbecoming thatch of bright-red hair that reminded David of an illustration he had once seen of an orangutan. Even as a baby, when crossed he would hold his breath until he turned blue, and he suffered from eczema and asthma both. The house smelled of urine and reverberated with the child’s screams.
“Are you sure there’s nothing wrong with him? All babies can’t be like that or they’d never have been allowed to live to become adults.”
“Dr. Connors says he’s perfectly normal, that the asthma and eczema shouldn’t be bothering him all that much anymore,” Janice said wearily. “He says some babies are born colicky and some not, and no one knows why. He says that after a while he’ll grow out of it.”
David took to working late hours again, and they stopped entertaining entirely. Janice looked drawn and worn, with dark smudges under her eyes. While she didn’t nag him, her many silences were like a verbal reproach for his rages against the little shrieking monster who made their lives such a misery. For six months before the baby was born and three months afterward David didn’t touch his wife. In her turn she was so tired she didn’t care, especially since for her their back-to-front intercourse did nothing.
One night when the baby was three months old, David came dragging home at ten-thirty to find the house clean and sweet-smelling and strangely quiet, a dinner of stuffed roast chicken with walnut dressing, and Janice dressed in a green gown he had always liked on her. Her hair was washed and shining, and she looked as well as he had ever seen her.
“What happened?”
“I gave him some laudanum.” She laughed, and he realized that she had already had something to drink.
“You what?” He was horrified.
“I gave him some laudanum. I took him to Connors again yesterday and told him that either he was going to have to give me something to quiet him or I was going to kill the child in self-defense. I can see perfectly well now why some parents beat their children. I was naive to think that it was an unnatural act. So he gave me a bottle of weak tincture of opium for children. I tried it on Francis last night and had the first good night’s sleep since he was born. Didn’t you notice the quiet?” She laughed, the laugh a little too high. “No, you wouldn’t have, would you — you never get up in the night with him. Anyway, I’ve had a perfectly splendid day, and I’ve waited hours for you to get home. Isn’t this a delightful surprise?”
“You, er, didn’t give him too much, did you?” he asked cautiously. He wouldn’t, in honesty, have minded seeing the little brute’s demise, but he knew that such an occurrence would put paid to his naval career.
“Oh, David, let’s not talk about him any more tonight. We have the night off and I feel like celebrating.” She went over and started the cylinder turning on the phonograph that David was so proud of. She held out her arms. “Dance with me, David. Here, have some of my brandy.” She handed him the glass. “Now dance with me, please. It’s my birthday, you know.”
Oh my god, he thought, I forgot her birthday entirely. This inexcusable omission led him to fall in with her gaiety, which he would never have done otherwise. They waltzed around the small sitting room clumsily, each carrying in one hand a glass from which they sipped frequently. When they finally sat down to eat, the salad was wilted and the stringbeans cooked gray, but the chicken was fine. For dessert there was an apple pie with cheese.
Somehow as the evening wore on they were dancing again, only now he had a hand on her breast and she was nuzzling his neck. He turned off the phonograph and, leaving the lights burning, half-carried her upstairs. They looked in on the baby, who appeared to be sleeping peacefully, and made their way to the extra bedroom that would be a nursery later on when the child no longer slept in their room. He undressed her, kissing first her mouth and then her breasts. When they were both naked on the bed, he kissed her again while she stroked his back and his belly and finally between his legs. With a groan he mounted her and entered, and they both climaxed with a cry.
“Oh, David darling, I’m so happy!” she said drowsily later, and they fell asleep in each other’s arms.
But the next morning it was all as if it had never been. The baby cried, David overslept and blamed her for it, she felt weak and queasy herself, and there was an incredible mess to clean up, making her wonder how two people could possibly have dirtied so many dishes and pots and pans. After that night they resumed a desultory sex life back to front again, but even that stopped when she announced she was pregnant once more.
They dreaded the new child’s birth, for Francis had only just stopped yelling constantly and now contented himself with an occasional tantrum. However, this time everything was miraculously different. Elisabeth was a perfect baby, rosy, golden-haired, good-natured, fun. She cooed and gurgled and won everyone’s heart. David’s mother came all the way across the country by train to help out, and a great help she was, for she took over the housework and Francis, too, who inexplicably took to his Grandmother Kate as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.
“He’s so like David,” Katharine said and laughed. “He was ugly and spiky as a baby, too — you’d never have recognized him.”
His looks had certainly changed then, Janice thought, but not his spikiness. For the first time she feared for Francis, toward whom she felt suddenly very protective.
David had incomprehensibly begun to take Spanish lessons from an old man who was the last of an impoverished landowning Spanish family that was part of San Diego’s history.
“Whatever for?” Janice asked him incredulously.
“Because we are going to go to war with Spain,” he answered impatiently, as if it were a foregone conclusion.
“You must be mad! Surely all of this breast-beating that’s going on in the newspapers is mainly talk.”
“I can’t say when a war will be declared, but declared it will be, and I have no intent
ion of sitting it out in San Diego. You’ll see, there will be precious few officers who will be able to speak any Spanish, and the few who can will be in demand.”
For a time it looked as if he might be wrong, that close to two years of Spanish lessons might have been wasted, but by 1897, William Randolph Hearst and his chain of powerful newspapers were in full cry against the Spaniards, and war seemed inevitable. An indiscreet letter from the Spanish minister in Washington to a Cuban friend expressing contempt for President McKinley, and in addition the later sinking of the Maine at Havana, ensured the speedy outbreak of hostilities. David was exuberant.
“They’ll have to send me to sea now,” he exulted.
Indeed it was not long afterward that his orders came through to proceed via San Francisco for embarkation aboard the Trevelyan, destination the Asiatic Fleet now readying for war in Hong Kong. He was delighted to find among a contingent of other naval officers transferred to the Pacific Stephen Nye, also now a lieutenant j.g.
“I had no idea you’d be on the Trevelyan,” Stephen said. “If I’d only known, I could have seen you and Janice both before we left. She came up to see you off, didn’t she?”
“Er, no. Little Francis was sick and she couldn’t make the trip.”
“Oh, too bad! You lucky dog, you’ve had years with Janice, and all I’ve had is a week here and a few days there. My God, how I miss Double!”
There was such open honest longing in his voice for Double that David regarded him curiously. He found it all but impossible to imagine missing Janice like that. If anything, he was more than a bit relieved to be on his own again. Well, Stephen obviously hadn’t had enough time with Double to calm down, that was all. None of them was an avid correspondent, and the mail had settled down to several duty letters a year between David and Double, and Double had said little of how she felt about Stephen’s being at sea so much, possibly to save David’s feelings, since she knew he was so keen on going to sea himself.
Kings of the Sea Page 39