by H. L. Humes
Sulgrave sat crosslegged on the foot of the bed, naked, watching her as she lay back against the stacked pillows and reached for a cigarette. The match flame trembled very slightly as she lit it; she blew it out sharply, glanced at him.
“My hand betrays me,” she said, sighing smoke.
“What happened to him?”
“Ah, the typical male question—what happened to him. Well, he was very young, not very experienced himself. He did what all young males do, talked very bravely about marriage until the panic had a few days to take root. I was certain my belly would swell any day. He left for Boston to be discharged—full of promises and resolves, which I'm perfectly sure he meant at the time. He wrote me. Several times. When finally I knew I wasn't pregnant—it took me a whole afternoon in the library with the Encyclopaedia Britannica to find out how you could tell—I wrote him and told him. Six months later I got a letter from England, where he had gone to resume his studies. Two years later he wrote me a letter that started out, I hope you will remember me from our meeting at the theater some years ago … He said he'd never forgotten me, as he was sure I had him, and that he was writing to tell me he was getting married to an English girl, an actress. It was a marriage that should have been mine, I felt, and I was beside myself with rage and heartbreak. I was even glad when I found out that she cuckolded him and wrecked his career in England. Got herself involved in a horrid scandal with a cabinet minister's son. Later he divorced her and came back here to forget. Instead of joining the foreign legion, he joined the Regular Navy, which in the twenties amounted to nearly the same thing I suppose. Unfortunately he loved her, never did forget her. He wasn't able.”
“Did you ever see him again?”
“I wrote him when I got married.”
“Then you never saw him after he left you?
“ Vanna was silent a long moment. She sat reclined against the pillows and gazed at her outstretched legs as though unseeing of her own naked flesh, one hand limply halted in mid-gesture toward the ash tray on her belly. A ribbon of blue smoke twined up out of the spill of light from the bed lamp. Then she stubbed out the hardly consumed cigarette and put the ash tray aside.
She hesitated again, this time drawing her legs up to her chest and hugging them, smoothing her cheeks against her knees. She rocked slightly back and forth a moment, then stopped, still hugging her knees, and looked directly into his eyes.
“You know who it is, don't you? ”
He nodded, wondering; then was sure.
“You guessed, didn't you,” she said. “I didn't tell you, did I?”
Sulgrave was silent a moment, thinking.
“So Dolf us took an interest in the boy because he was your son?”
She caught at a deep breath, looked away from him as though flinching from a slap; gripped tightly in her own embrace, she huddled from some chilling blast of sudden feeling, nodded a quick, bitter nod.
He said nothing, reached out and touched her bare foot.
She looked up, the tremor past. “Mother was very ill,” she said, as though making a small plea. “And Ben was very young then.” She abruptly looked away again, whispered brokenly, “… just a little younger than you …” and covered her face with her hands and cried. She cried like a woman who had forgotten how, sobbing as though she were choking. And when he pulled away her hands and lifted her chin, her face was horrible to look at; enclosed with pain, her ugliness was astonishing: he loved her.
The main load, the largest shipment to date, came in the middle of the week. With the docking of the large ship, the glass began to fall; the radio shack picked up a gale warning. Using a full shift of men, they unloaded all afternoon and halfway into the night. Then, with the sea kicking up, a torpedo swung gently against the side of the hold and killed a man. He died of a fractured skull.
In rising wind and rain, under artificial lights, unloading became difficult. After the accident, very simply, the men refused to unload further. Dolfus was remonstrating with them when, like Moses descending from the mountain, the Commander appeared out of the black-flying rain. He threatened everyone refusing to unload with court-martial for mutiny; half the men had already gone to barracks.
In the barracks was where the real mutiny threatened to erupt, for Hake alternated between cajolery and insult on the theory that anger was the only antidote to fear and fatigue. In the end all went back but six; then Big Randy literally kicked his younger brother out of the barracks and that made five. Randy himself hardly even refused; he just sat down on his bunk and shook his head silently. Orval Blue-Eyes made the error of sticking his head in to see what was going on: Hake said, “You, too, Steward. Even house darkies work during harvest.” And Orval, who for all his shuffling disguises was from Detroit, caught by surprise, told Hake, “I ain't your slave, whitef oiks,” splashed Hake with the pure acid of unconcealed cynicism. Hake called him to attention; Orval ignored him, went to his bunk and sat down. “I'll salute your flag and polish your buttons, but I won't kiss you' white ass.” Dolfus walked out on the Commander in disgust, after calling him a damn fool to his face. It fell to Sulgrave to arrest the six; his embarrassment was enough apology, and they gathered up their things quietly and went with him to the empty ammunition bunker that was designated their prison.
As it turned out, their gesture of rebellion was wasted. In the time they'd been off the pier, the skipper of the ammunition vessel had decided to stand out to sea till the blow was over, preferring the open fury of deep water to the shallow confinement of the bay. The seven-ton topping-lift booms were already secured when Sulgrave returned to the dock, and Hake himself was assisting on the dock as the skipper stood on the wing of the bridge with a megaphone directing the casting off of lines. He didn't cast off his breast spring until last, letting the wind turn the ship clear of the dock before ringing for full astern and completing his turn toward open water. Hake watched the full maneuver critically, nodded his approval, and retired from the dock. Sulgrave worked with the men until dawn, securing the pier. The rising wind and rain made words less effective than gestures. Dolfus was nowhere to be seen; on returning, Sulgrave saw the lighted chow hall, learned that Dolfus had roused the cooks an hour early to have coffee ready for the men.
The wind blew for three days before the ship returned and unloading recommenced. Sulgrave had slipped into the role of self-appointed warder to the men in the bunker. He did what he could to help them make themselves comfortable, brought them a bucket of whitewash to brighten the interior of the rock, supervised their thrice-daily exercise period under guard outside. For the noontime meal, he carried the hot canisters up himself. It was planned that the men would leave with the ship at the end of the week, and it seemed the least he could do temporarily to ease the discomfort of their incarceration. To Sulgrave, for reasons of conscience which he didn't stop to examine, it was a way of atonement.
“You don't think I grieve him?” she asked absently. “You don't think I have a hole inside me because he's gone? He's always been away from me, been away so long that it's hard to realize that this time it's different, that he's never coming back to me.”
“Was it the same after… after your son…”
“It was the same.”
“With Dolfus, then?”
“It was with Ben, yes. Severn couldn't stand it. He went away after it, back to duty. Ben was all I had. He was a friend to the boy, and I loved him for that too. Perhaps that's why, I don't know.”
“Did he know, your husband?”
“I don't know. I told you—he was jealous of any junior officer who was even polite to me. And yet he was always throwing them in my path. Almost as though …”
“To test you?”
“… as though he wanted me to. I can't explain it. I tried to tell you before. He always seemed to be the entrepreneur, inviting them to stay weekends and then being called away —that happened once with his exec, the one that was with him when the destroyer …”
“The one who
was adjudged responsible for not keeping his charts up to date?”
“That was the navigation officer. He stayed at the house once too.”
“Yet only with Skully …”
“I wish you wouldn't call him that. That's a hateful nickname.”
“The men gave it to him. I think he liked it. Old Skully.”
“His name is Benjamin. Was …”
He reached across the pillow and smoothed her forehead. “Don't frown. I'm sorry. It's just that I want to know everything there is to know about you.”
She turned toward him like a cat, lightly beating her fists on his shoulders, then gripped him strongly, her ear to his chest as though listening. “I can't help it,” she said. “Right now I love you. You're such a beautiful young man. So alive. So alive.”
Gently he stroked her hair, stared at the whiteness of the ceiling. “I love you too, old Vanna. I've never needed to love a woman so much before. I'm not sure I even knew what it was.”
After a while he said, “I have your letters. I found them after the …”
She didn't stir.
“I read them.”
She said nothing, gave no sign.
“I also found his sword, the cutlass he said belonged to your father. The blade's broken. Perhaps it can be fixed.”
After a long time, so long that, drowsing himself, he thought she'd fallen asleep, she said, “My father hated him. I had to make him go to his bachelor's dinner and promise to give a toast. Do you know what his toast was?”