Kings of the Sea

by Van Every Frost, Joan

  “Why did you never write me about what you were doing?” David asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said wearily. “I suppose I thought you might not approve. I expect there was quite a bit you didn’t write about, either.”

  He looked as if he had been struck. “What do you mean by that?” he demanded.

  “Oh, David,” she replied impatiently, “do you really want me to show you the pitiful little packet of letters that represent three years’ correspondence on your part? And there isn’t a letter there that says anything of how you felt or even if you missed us. I didn’t even know until Colonel Burns wrote me this May that you too had your doubts about the war.”

  David looked uncomfortable. “The censors wouldn’t have allowed it through if I had tried to tell you.”

  “You know the last letter I had from you? she persisted. “Last September! The better part of a year! I know you’ve been through a lot, but —”

  “You don’t know anything about it,” he broke in. “If you weren’t in it, if you weren’t there, you couldn’t know.”

  “David, I’ve been working with people who are crippled and will be crippled for the rest of their lives. I do know something about pain and hopelessness even if you think I don’t. I know perfectly well that no one can know entirely what another’s pain is, but I am willing to try as far as you’ll allow me. Just don’t try on your side to take my work from me, because I’ll fight you for it, that I promise you. Without it, by the time you’d returned I would hardly have been sane. That’s my pain that you will never understand.”

  David looked at her again in that curious way he had, as if she were someone he had just met. “You’ve changed, Janice. You never used to be like this.”

  “Circumstances change all of us,” she replied. “No, I’m not dependent anymore, and I don’t automatically accept your judgment or anyone else’s. It’s a good thing you aren’t in the navy still or you’d have to make admiral without those dreadful dinners, because I wouldn’t put on another of them, I’ll tell you that.”

  He smiled wanly. “Some homecoming. I’ve fought with you and fought with Double and I haven’t been here a day!”

  “David, I’m sorry,” she said, and she knelt in front of him and took his hands. “I’ll do what I can to be a good wife, I promise you, it’s just that I refuse to destroy myself anymore. We can build a new life, you and I, a far better one than we had before.”

  He looked at her almost tenderly then. “I hope so, my dear. I really do hope so.”

  As the weeks passed Janice found herself clinging grimly to each day’s routines. She saw Rob frequently in the course of treating his patients, and each time was hard. Without ever putting it into words, as they had come to so many of their decisions in the past, they agreed to go out of their way never to touch each other, but occasionally it happened anyway, and they were both always shocked at the force of their reaction.

  One day Rob walked with her from Jimmy Thompson’s house out to the gate where she had propped her bicycle when she had arrived. “I’ve decided to leave San Diego,” he said. “I can’t stand it anymore.”

  “Rob, you can’t! You’ve got hospital privileges and a full patient load, and by next year you won’t have to go on doing obstetrics and can get a full night’s sleep once in a while. If it will help, I’ll stop doing what I’m doing with your patients and you won’t have to see me. I would have to stop anyway if you left.”

  He was almost amused. “No you wouldn’t. After the Bartoli case there were three other doctors who asked if you would be free to work on their patients. I looked over their cases but decided selfishly that the two children you’re doing now would benefit the most. Melanie is just about as far along as she’ll ever get, and Dick Peters is treating a little girl who fell out of a tree and really smashed her elbow. Melanie can do fine on her own, and you can see to it that a girl can write and comb her hair and eat with her right hand instead of having a frozen arm. What do you say?”

  “You know perfectly well what I say, but you’re changing the subject. Really, Rob, you mustn’t leave. I know it’s difficult for you, but it’s hard for me, too. And in case you’re thinking that at least I’m not alone, I may say that I might as well be. He isn’t cold and impatient the way he used to be — now he simply isn’t there. The only one who seems really to reach him is Francis. They’ve been inseparable ever since David came home.”

  “How is David’s physical condition now?”

  “Really quite good. You know, he always had a tremendous amount of self-discipline, and every day he goes to the beach and runs. He is really coming to look quite fit. He takes Francis with him and leaves him to build sand castles while he himself runs. Only according to him they aren’t sand castles anymore, they’re fantastic birds and elephants and giraffes and horses and deer. He says Francis has an amazing sculptural vision for such a young child — he’s quite excited about it.”

  “Well, all of that sounds pretty encouraging, wouldn’t you say?”

  “If he would only treat me the way he treats Francis, I could be content enough. But Rob, it’s as if I weren’t even there sometimes. At night we sleep in the same bed, but it’s as if I were still sleeping alone. We haven’t even resumed conjugal relations — isn’t that what it’s called — and I begin to wonder if we ever will. He’s plenty fit enough now; it isn’t that.”

  “Anyone who would go to bed with you and not resume conjugal relations is out of his mind. My God, I wish it were me in that bed, I’ll tell you.”

  “Hush, Rob. I don’t even want to think about it. The way he is now I could and would leave him, but I could never take Francis from him. The boy is everything to him, as he is to Francis. It’s so strange, too, because he never cared about the children before he went away.”

  Rob looked at her with all of his hurt and aloneness openly on his face. “Very well, Jan, I’ll go on trying for a while longer, but I meant it when I told you I don’t know how long I can stand being near you and yet never with you. And all the time imagining you in another man’s arms. Sometimes I wake in the night and I’m wild.”

  She held his look. “I never told you that you should be faithful to me. I’m not as selfish as all that.”

  He made an impatient gesture with his hand. “Do you think in desperation I haven’t tried? Without love it doesn’t mean a damned thing.”

  “Rob, this is a terrible thing I’m going to say. You are strong and sure and steady, that’s what I love about you. If I were to take the children, especially Francis, from David, I think he would break into pieces. To lose his son would destroy him. If I went to you without the children — and I’ll admit that David would never lift a finger to stop me — I would never get over the feeling that I had abandoned them, and I’d never be any good to you then or myself either. Time will make it all more bearable, Rob — it’s got to.”

  “Strong, sure, steady as a rock … good Christ, Jan, if you only knew —” He broke off and climbed into the buggy, flicking Hippocrates into a trot.

  As Janice watched him out of sight, she thought she could feel her heart crack.

  In October, David slipped out of the house one morning when Francis wasn’t looking and didn’t come back until after lunch. Francis sulked and wept and refused to eat.

  “Heavens, David where have you been? Francis was wild. I’d have sent him off to Esperanza’s if I’d known you were going to be gone.”

  David shook his head. “Well, he’ll just have to get used to it, because beginning next week I’ll be gone every day. I’ve got a job.”

  “A job! Are you sure you feel well enough? I don’t want you to have another relapse.”

  He looked at her, amused. “Don’t you think I’ve been living off you long enough?” he asked quietly. “It’s time I went to work and you took a rest.”

  “But I don’t want to take a rest, David. I like what I’m doing. It’s the first time in my life I’ve ever felt necessary. I ha
ve to do what I can for those children.”

  “Your own children need you Janice.” He hesitated. “I need you.”

  “Do you, David?” she couldn’t help asking. “Do you really?”

  He was silent and made no attempt to meet her stare.

  “Well,” she went on brightly, “what are you going to be doing? Are you going into business with Double after all?”

  “No,” he replied in a low voice. “I’m going to work in a shipyard.”

  “Doing what?”

  “As a common laborer, my dear.” His tone was ironic.

  “But that’s hard physical work! Are you sure you’re up to it? And why a shipyard? I thought you wanted nothing to do with merchant ships — that was why you went into the navy.”

  “Perhaps I was wrong. What do you think of that?”

  “I don’t understand you, David, but then I suppose I never did.”

  The first day that David left for work, Francis had a screaming tantrum and had to be pried off his father’s legs.

  “He’s afraid you’ll go away again, the way you did to the Philippines,” Janice said. “I’ve tried to explain to him that you’ll be coming home every night, but as you see, he doesn’t believe me.”

  “Listen to me, Francis,” David said as he knelt down on a level with the boy. “It’s a man’s job to work and earn money for food for his family. All the men you know work. Your grandfather works building and sailing ships, your Uncle Rob is a doctor. The iceman works bringing ice to people all day, and the vegetable man grows and sells his vegetables. When you grow up, you’ll be working, too. Now that I’m well, I work in a shipyard. But every night I’ll be coming home, and on Sundays we’ll go to the beach, you and I, the way we always did.”

  “You promise?” Francis demanded tearfully at last.

  “I promise. Cross my heart.”

  The tantrums stopped, but the asthma attacks began again. Many nights David, dead tired from a long day at the yard, would hitch up Nefertiti and take the boy for a ride. Somehow the fresh night air seemed to help him, and he would stop gasping for breath finally and fall asleep in his father’s arms. When they came home again, his father would carry the boy in and lay him still sleeping in his bed.

  Where did this tenderness of David’s come from? Janice wondered. He certainly had felt none of it before he left. Perhaps all of the horrors Burns had spoken of had softened him somehow. Surprisingly, he had very few nightmares after he came home. Occasionally he groaned, cried out softly, and ground his teeth, but only once did he jolt her awake, yelling, “They’re black! Dear God, they’re all black!” Yet he never spoke of that dream or any other. For all that he talked of the war, it might never have happened.

  However, he must have talked about it to some extent to Francis, for one day as she and the boy stood at the gate and watched a heavily laden grain wagon pass by on its way to John Sheldon’s place, the big sweating draft horses digging into the dusty road with their great feathered feet, Francis said out of the blue, “Papa says that when the heat got too bad, even the teams of water buffalo couldn’t stand it. They had to use Chinese men to pull the big guns. He said there was nobody tougher anywhere than a Chinese coolie.” The scene Francis’s words evoked made her shiver. The heat, the brutality, and the long lines of sweating coolies pulling a cannon into position to blow up small brown men armed with old Spanish rifles and their bolos …

  She sent Francis to a kindergarten run by Catholic nuns, thinking it would take his mind off David’s absences. The sister who taught him said that he was a brilliant child but very unsocial, that he stayed to himself. Well, why wouldn’t he, brought up as he was entirely with adults? Even his speech was oddly adult, with none of the childish mispronunciations and inarticulateness you would expect to find in a child of five. She hoped that gradually he would become accustomed to being around children his own age.

  In the middle of December she hesitantly broached the subject of the Christmas tree and where they would get one.

  “Christmas tree?” David seemed almost confused. “We didn’t use to have one, did we?”

  “I know, David, but the children were so small then they wouldn’t have cared. Now they really look forward to it. Kate and Christian always had a tree, I remember that.”

  “They did, didn’t they,” he murmured thoughtfully. “All right, where do you get one?”

  “Up in the hills. About a two-or three-hour drive.”

  “You got it yourself last year?”

  “No, Rob came along to do the cutting and carrying.” She carefully didn’t mention that the children hadn’t been along.

  “Would you like to go next Sunday, then? We can make an outing of it.” He became more enthusiastic as they talked about it.

  Of course it rained that Sunday, but they had no choice, since it was too close to Christmas to wait another week. Both children had the sniffles, so it was out of the question to take them, and in the end they were sent over to Esperanza’s to help her make tortillas. They both thoroughly enjoyed patting out the corn masa and plopping the thin cakes on the hot griddle, and Francis would amuse himself pressing out the dough into the shapes of stars and rabbits and little men.

  The seldom-used roof of the old buggy was full of holes the mice had gnawed, and David had to wind a tarpaulin around it like a bandage to keep out the rain. Though damp, it was curiously comforting to trot along all snugged up in lap robes while the rain tapped persistently on the patched roof. Janice realized that she hadn’t been alone with David for this long except when they were asleep since he had come home. He was looking extraordinarily well these days, for the shipyard had added muscling to his hard leanness and he must have gained twenty pounds since his return in July. Because of his experience in his grandfather’s yard as a boy, he had already been made a foreman.

  “It’s strange how it all comes back to you,” he was saying now. “I seem to know ways of doing things that they’ve never heard of here. Old Gridley is ready to learn, I’ll give him that, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t put me in charge of the next ship. A lot of the men don’t like it, though — they want to go on doing the same things in the same way all their lives.”

  Janice smiled to herself. Let him go on; it was the most he had ever talked to her about his job.

  By the time they arrived at the trees, the rain was falling in earnest. Looking around, they spotted a large outcropping of rock that jutted out like a roof, forming a partial cave that was still too open to encourage any wild creature to make it his home. However, the slant of the rain now was such that it was dry beneath, and they brought Nefertiti in with them. They spread one lap robe on the ground and put the other across their laps, for the air was chill. They were hoping that the rain would let up enough for them to cut the tree without becoming soaked, a miserable condition to be in for the long ride home.

  He brought the lunch basket over to where she was sitting. “We might as well have lunch while we’re waiting. Where’s the corkscrew?”

  “In the basket. I packed a bottle of red and a bottle of white, because I didn’t know which you’d want.”

  “What are we having?”

  “Chicken and some leftover spareribs from last night. That’s why I didn’t know which wine.”

  “My, I guess I should have gone on more picnics with you.”

  “We haven’t been on one since we were married. I thought you didn’t like such frivolities.”

  “I was a grind, wasn’t I?” He opened the bottle of red. “Here, we’ll eat the spareribs first.”

  By the time they had finished that bottle along with the ribs, they were both feeling a little tiddly. “Now for the white,” he said, laughing. “Have a drumstick, madame.” Suddenly everything was hilarious. They jested and clowned through the stuffed eggs, bread-and-butter pickles, and the oranges. Nefertiti’s curious liking for orange peels sent them into gales of laughter.

  “They say that if you peel an orange
all in one piece and throw it over your left shoulder on Halloween, it will form the initial of your true love’s name.” Janice began to peel her orange carefully.

  He put a hand over hers and deliberately made her break the peel. “It’s better not to know,” he said, the laughter gone now. His hand slid up to her shoulder, and he turned her toward him. “You’ve been very patient with me — I’m grateful to you.”

  She smiled, dazed by the wine. “Not so patient. I’ve insisted upon going on working, scolded you for not writing, told you I didn’t understand you.”

  He shook his head, smiling himself, and pulling her to him kissed her. As their tongues touched and clung, she thought wildly that this couldn’t be David. Before long, she stopped worrying about it and gave herself up to a mounting wave of desire as he took off her shirtwaist and pulled her shift down off her shoulders. He bent his head and took her stiffened nipple into his mouth, biting it gently and stroking and teasing the other one with knowing fingers. Her response was like an electric shock, and she felt her breath come fast. With practiced hands he undressed her the rest of the way and lay her down as he knelt over her kissing the other breast while he felt briefly between her legs, found what he was looking for, and proceeded to tease her until she was so wild that when he used his mouth instead she was beyond being shocked.

  He took her first slowly and then faster and faster over the outer limits of desire until she was sailing out among the stars, a strange dark place of exploding worlds, screaming meteors bearing long flaming plumes of tails, and the luminous swirls of the graceful encompassing nebulae. When at last he entered her, fire flashed across the inside of her closed lids, her breath came in gasping sobs, and she rose to meet his every thrust until they were both hurled into the sun and melted into a million molten drops that scattered like stars and slowly extinguished themselves into a profound quiescence in which even their bones were liquid.

  Her first coherent thought was that she had experienced the impossible. What had he done to her to take her beyond herself like that into pleasure so exquisite that it was on the edge of being pain? Could this be the same man who had so furtively entered her from behind? What she had just experienced was as far beyond anything she had ever felt physically with Rob as Rob’s lovemaking had been beyond David’s earlier awkward gropings. Immediately she felt ashamed that she should have compared them, and especially compared them to Rob’s detriment. How could she be so heartless? And yet her body still throbbed faintly in a pulse of satiated desire.