A Commodore of Errors

by John Jacobson

  “But we are not restrictive,” Mrs. Coffee said. “We get a Jewish boy almost every year.”

  “The spotlight will be on each one of us,” Miss Beebee cautioned. “The highly-paid executives of West Virginia Mining came under scrutiny when they tried to cut the wages of the miners. Their country club memberships, their fancy cars. It was all brought out in the papers. The same can happen to us.”

  “Ash didn’t leave me a fancy car,” Mrs. Willowsby said.

  “But how about your country club?” Miss Beebee said. “How many members are Jews?”

  “Well,” the widow Willowsby said, “I’m not sure. Surely we have at least one Jewish family at the club.”

  “Not one,” Miss Beebee said. “Silver Oaks was restrictive when Ash joined. Still is. It’s been in the papers.”

  “Oh my. I had no idea.”

  “The mayor has a hold over us,” the Commodore said, looking at the others. “Our best course of action is to capitulate. For the good of the academy.” The Commodore braced himself and turned to Johnson. “Sir, you have served this academy with distinction. However, the time has come to step down.”

  Johnson put his hands up in surrender. At least he could go gracefully. “Members of the board, I figured the mayor would do something like this. I am prepared to resign. To fall on my sword. For the sake of my alma mater, I have prepared a letter of resignation. I would have brought it with me but I seem to have misplaced it.”

  “We believe it is important to be on record with the photograph,” Miss Beebee said. “We should make it part of the minutes of the meeting. For safekeeping.”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary, Miss Beebee,” Johnson said. “I’ve already tendered my—”

  Miss Beebee slammed her fist on the conference table. “I want that photo!”

  She stood up and faced the Commodore. West Virginia Mining did not hire Miss Beebee for her deliberate language only. Miss Beebee stood six feet tall and was not embarrassed to use her stature when necessary. She had famously stared down a gang of angry miners in the wildcat strike of ‘77. The Commodore was no match for her withering stare. She again held out her hand for the photo. The Commodore complied.

  The widows jumped out of their seats and snatched the photo from Miss Beebee. They all looked at the photo together, each of them holding a corner of it with their fingers. They stared at the photo for a long time. Then they raised their heads and looked at Johnson.

  “That’s it?” the ladies said.

  Blood rushed to Johnson’s face.

  “I did not know Ms. Paultz had a camera in her desk drawer,” Johnson said. “I was caught off guard. That’s not my normal self you see there.” Johnson was stammering. “I’m . . . I’m . . . I’m bigger than that.”

  The ladies studied the picture intently.

  “We were expecting more,” Mrs. Coffee said.

  “Perhaps there’s a magnifying glass?” Mrs. Willowsby asked.

  Johnson jumped up from the table. “A magnifying glass!” Johnson looked to his good friend Cooper.

  Cooper put up his hands. “Hey, buddy, you’ve been telling everybody you’re the biggest all these years. The ladies do not appear to agree with you, big guy.”

  Johnson threw his agenda down on the table. “But I am the biggest. Besides, I’ve already resigned. This isn’t fair.”

  The Commodore reached in to take the photo back from the ladies. The ladies did not try to keep it. The Commodore placed the photo in his breast pocket.

  “What a disappointment,” Mrs. Coffee said.

  Johnson turned again to Cooper. Cooper turned his back on him. Just then the door to the wardroom opened.

  It was the nurse.

  “May I ask what business you have with the board?” Mrs. Coffee asked.

  “Why, I’m here as character witness for the admiral.” The nurse looked at Johnson. “Surprise.”

  Johnson smiled weakly. Could this get any worse?

  “And how do you know the admiral?” Mrs. Coffee asked.

  “I’m his girlfriend.”

  The widows clucked their tongues.

  Johnson didn’t have to take any more of this. He walked over to the bulkhead behind him and yanked his hat off the hook. He pulled the hat low over his eyes and walked past the ladies with his head down.

  “What’s going on?” the nurse said. Johnson said nothing and they left the wardroom.

  “The poor thing,” the widows said.

  Miss Beebee agreed. “All this time he thought he was the biggest.”

  “If I heard it once, I heard it a thousand times,” Cooper said.

  Mrs. Coffee brought them back to business. “Well, we need a formal letter of resignation to make it official.”

  “I have it right here.” The Commodore reached into his pocket, past the “lurid” photo he’d taken of Johnson and Miss Lambright, fully clothed on the Murphy bed, and withdrew the resignation letter Miss Lambright had typed. He laid it on the table. The ladies gathered around the letter and read it aloud:

  Dear Bored Governors:

  I get to reform you I’m here to buy a sign. Being tired with my family is the art of indecision. Just nine remain suspectfully remitted.

  Admiral Johnson

  The ladies looked at one another.

  “The poor thing,” they said again.

  The Commodore spoke up. “In my opinion, the stress of being ‘the biggest’ took a toll on our dear admiral.”

  “Judging from the photograph, I really can’t see what all the fuss was about,” Mrs. Coffee said again.

  The widow Willowsby and Miss Beebee shook their heads, agreeing with their colleague.

  “Be that as it may,” the Commodore said, “judging by the resignation letter, the man has suffered some sort of breakdown. He deserves our pity. Well, enough about him. Back to the business at hand.” The Commodore walked around the conference table to Johnson’s chair. “May I take a seat?”

  The Commodore did not wait for a response. He sat in the chairman’s seat and smoothed his hands over the mahogany table. A shiver went up his spine. How long had he waited for this, and now it was within his grasp.

  “Ladies and gentleman,” the Commodore said, “the mayor wants a Jewish superintendent. I have found just the man. His name is Captain Tannenbaume. He is a respected member of the maritime community. He and his lovely wife, Sylvia, will be available to join our team in time for the unveiling of the Mariners Monument. So you see? The all-important business of the United States Merchant Marine Academy will continue uninterrupted.”

  Miss Beebee was the first to respond. “This Captain Tannenbaume, is he a good talker? I mean, can he verbalize?”

  “Captain Tannenbaume is a superb speaker,” the Commodore said. “Any other questions about the captain’s qualifications?”

  “Is he a good dancer?” Mrs. Willowsby asked.

  “He is a superb dancer,” the Commodore said.

  “Is he tall?” Mrs. Coffee asked.

  “My understanding is that he is above average in height.”

  The ladies nodded their heads.

  “He sounds perfect,” Mrs. Willowsby stated.

  “Yes, indeed,” the Commodore said. “Now, do we have a motion to make Captain Tannenbaume the next superintendent of the United States Merchant Marine Academy?”

  Miss Beebee made the motion. Mrs. Coffee seconded. The motion passed unanimously. The Commodore stood up.

  “I am not a member of the board,” the Commodore said. “Far be for me to interject. However, it has been a trying meeting. Perhaps now would be a good time to adjourn?”

  Miss Beebee made a motion to adjourn. She asked Mrs. Willowsby if she would second the motion. Mrs. Willowsby blushed.

  “Why, I suppose I could,” Mrs. Willowsby said.

  When Mrs. Coffee read the motion to adjourn by Miss Beebee as seconded by Mrs. Willowsby, the ladies could not keep from smiling.

  The Commodore read their minds. �
�My, my, ladies, you are acting like bona fide board members.”

  “We are bona fide board members!” the ladies chanted in unison.

  “And fearless,” the Commodore said. “Quite like myself.”

  “Is that why you are wearing your life jacket?” Captain Cooper asked dryly.

  The ladies looked toward the Commodore at Captain Cooper’s remark. Mrs. Willowsby reached across the table and patted the Commodore’s hand. “Ash was afraid of the water, too.”

  The Commodore was too close to realizing his dream to care that others might be grossly mischaracterizing him.

  “By hiring Captain Tannenbaume,” the Commodore said, “you have gone where no board members have gone before. You have impressed me with your boldness.”

  “Here’s to Captain Tannenbaume!” the ladies cheered.

  Yes indeed, the Commodore thought. Here is to Captain Tannenbaume.

  COFFEEPOTS

  AND PAPERWEIGHTS

  Captain Tannenbaume stood in the doorway to the radio room on the MV God is Able and waited for the radio officer to look up from what he was doing. Captain Tannenbaume shook his head—he just could not understand how Sparks managed to keep his space so tidy. A torrent of paperwork flooded the radio room each day, inbound and outbound, yet there was not a scrap of paper in sight.

  Whenever Captain Tannenbaume asked, Sparks just said he had a system. “Everything in its place,” he said. “That’s the key.” Captain Tannenbaume could have used a system—his own office was a mess. His desk was a mountain of loose papers, and he was constantly working to make a dent in it. “Working on his desk” he called it. He would even skip coffee time, a union-mandated twice-a-day twenty-minute coffee break, to work on his desk. Of course, he made certain to not skip coffee time entirely. The chief engineer, Paul Magnusson, a hefty Midwestern Swede, didn’t like it whenever anyone skipped out on coffee time. So Captain Tannenbaume would show up in the officer’s wardroom at eighteen minutes past ten o’clock, two minutes before coffee time broke up, and pour himself a conspicuous cup of joe. This last-minute arrival never fooled the chief.

  The chief was a union man, like his father and his father before him, and as he noted, “the union was what got ‘em these fine wages they enjoyed, and it’s the union what fought tooth and nail to get ‘em coffee time, too, and to miss coffee time was to slap the union in the face.” The chief did not exactly say all that to captain Tannenbaume. He said it to the others after the captain left, but he might’ve said it. And he might’ve told the man another thing or two if the man did not bug out of there to go work on his desk. When the chief said, “Work on his desk,” he held up both hands and clawed the air twice with his fingers. The chief was fond of his air quotes. He rarely made it through a sentence without using them. The others gave the air quotes right back to the chief, but the chances were good the chief failed to notice that they were making fun of him because the chief, like most engineers, was slow on the uptake with subtleties like that.

  Captain Tannenbaume stepped back into the passageway outside the radio room and looked at his watch. What was so wrong with the GPS that it was taking this long to fix it? If the noon position report didn’t go out soon, the home office would be telexing to find out where it was, but without the GPS, how in the world where they going to fix the noon position? The deck officers on the God is Able hadn’t practiced celestial navigation in years, and Captain Tannenbaume doubted that any of them even knew where the ship’s sextant was stowed. No, his officers needed their GPS and they needed it now.

  Captain Tannenbaume wanted to interrupt Sparks but . . . Sparks became agitated whenever he had to fix stuff. Most radio officers were whizzes at repairing electronics, but Sparks was an “old school” radio officer. Give him a wireless with tubes and filaments and he’d have it repaired in no time. Anything solid-state, however, gave him the willies. When the microchip came out, Sparks predicted it would be a flash in the pan. That microchips powered the personal computer, and hence the entire world, did nothing to dispel Sparks of his conviction that the microchip was en passant.

  “You can’t work on them,” Sparks would say whenever anyone challenged his position on the personal computer. “When people have to throw away their precious PCs because no one can fix them, you’ll see them clamoring again for something with a tube in it.”

  If Captain Tannenbaume heard it once, he heard it a hundred times.

  Captain Tannenbaume peeked in on Sparks again. It was plain that Sparks was becoming frustrated, and when Sparks was frustrated, his stutter, which was normally pretty bad, became intolerable. Captain Tannenbaume did not feel like sitting through one of Sparks’s stuttering explanations so he decided to go to the bridge to see if the ship’s sextant had turned up.

  When Captain Tannenbaume got to the bridge, one deck up from the radio room, he found Swifty, the ship’s third mate, in the chart room with his head over the chart. The chart room wasn’t much of a room—it was really just a big table with large narrow drawers for holding nautical charts separated from the rest of the bridge by a heavy curtain.

  “Afternoon, Swifty,” Captain Tannenbaume said. “Any luck finding that sextant?”

  It was the chief who gave the third mate the moniker Swifty, the very first day the brand-new third mate joined the ship. The young man had decided to make the coffee during coffee time to show the others he was a team player, only he had a heck of a time figuring out how to work the damn coffee machine. The chief was dying for a cup of coffee, but since he knew there was always a fresh pot brewing in the control room down below, he decided to see just how long it would take the young man to make a fresh pot. When coffee time ended, the new third mate was still working on getting the pot brewed.

  Later, in the control room—the air-conditioned space within the furnace-like engine room where the engineers liked to hang out to escape the oppressive heat—the chief held court in front of the second engineer, two oilers, and a wiper. The chief ‘s chair was a swivel chair that had lost its swivel, and to keep from tilting dangerously to one side, he had to sit hunched over with his legs spread wide and with his hands clamped onto his knees. The chief sat like this and told the others he might’ve showed the man how to make a pot of coffee if the man had asked for help. The chief also said that he might’ve known the man could not make a pot of coffee. “One look,” the chief had said, “is all it took to know that this one was no brain surgeon. He’s a real ‘Swifty,’ this one.” When the chief removed his hands from his knees to make his air quotes, the chair heeled over. He caught himself and tried again but the chair would not cooperate and the chief was forced to make the quotation mark sign with one hand. Even with a one-handed quotation mark, the name “Swifty” had stuck for good.

  Captain Tannenbaume looked at the chart over Swifty’s shoulder. The ocean plotting chart was a clean white expanse with a diagonal drawn on it for a course line. There was no noon position on the chart.

  “No luck finding the sextant?” Captain Tannenbaume asked again.

  Before Swifty could answer, the door to the navigation bridge opened and in walked the chief.

  “Good morning, Maggie,” Captain Tannenbaume said. “What can I do for you?”

  Captain Tannenbaume was the only one who called the chief “Maggie.” Captain Tannenbaume knew that it burned the chief ‘s ass, but he didn’t care. The big blowhard ran roughshod over the entire crew, always pontificating about the union this and the union that. The captain was the one guy the chief could not steamroll and captain Tannenbaume let him know it every chance he got. Oh, he would never confront the man, never. The risk was too great—the Swede would be insufferable if he felt he got the best of the captain. No, Captain Tannenbaume just took subtle jabs, like calling the big oaf Maggie.

  “I haven’t received my noon report yet,” the chief said. “I just figured I’d ease on up to the bridge to see what’s up.”

  “Easing on up to the bridge to see what’s up is my job, Ma
ggie. I don’t ease down below to see what’s up down there.”

  The chief acted as if he had not heard a word Captain Tannenbaume had said. He walked over toward the chart table and stood next to Swifty. He didn’t look at Swifty when he spoke to him. The chief rarely looked at the person he was speaking to. Instead, the chief rocked on his heels and looked up at the overhead when he said, “Trouble figuring the noon position, Mr. Mate? I heard the GPS bought the farm.”

  Captain Tannenbaume stepped between the chief and Swifty. “Maggie, that’s enough. Swifty here is plotting the ship’s position as we speak. You’ll get your report.”

  “Oh, is that so?” the chief said. “And just how is the young man going to fix the ship’s position without the GPS?”

  “The old-fashioned way. We’re professional navigators. We don’t need a GPS to know where we are at sea.”

  “Oh, is that so?” the chief said. “Don’t you fellas need a—what’s that thing called again? The thing you use to”—air quotes—“’shoot’ the stars?”

  Captain Tannenbaume sighed. “It’s called a sextant, Maggie. Now if you don’t mind, there are a couple of navigators here who would like to do some navigating.”

  The chief held up his hands. “Don’t let me get in the way.” A broad smile creased the chief ‘s face as he sauntered off toward the coffee machine, poured himself a cup, and walked off the bridge.

  “I told that big Swede not to come up to the bridge to drink our coffee. I don’t go down below to drink their coffee.”

  Swifty shrugged. “The coffee’s old, if that’s any consolation. I haven’t had a chance to make a fresh pot yet.”

  “Serves him right.” Captain Tannenbaume looked at his watch again. “Ah, look at the time. We’ve got to get out a noon position report or the damn office’ll start breathing down our necks.” Captain Tannenbaume looked down at the chart. “Where abouts are we, Swifty?”

  Swifty gazed at the chart. After a minute or so, he said, “Well, I think we’re somewhere on this chart.”