by Howard Fast
The men swarmed around them, welders, carpenters, liftmen, laborers, steamfìtters, painters. “Over thirty thousand just in this yard,” Dan told him. “Over two hundred just in the office. We put them two at a desk. It’s easier to get steel plate than desks or typewriters. They work and they eat, and we make a good ship because the only purpose I have in life is to run this lousy shipyard. That’s my problem, not yours. But don’t ask me to cheer for a system that requires an Adolf Hitler to give men jobs.”
“That is one hell of a way to put it.”
“That’s the way I put it.”
“I guess it is. You’re the only millionaire I know who sounds like a damn anarchist, but I guess you’re the best shipbuilder we have. I wish I had twenty like you.”
“God forbid.”
“Yes, it would be hard to take, but it would end this rotten war a lot quicker.”
They had come to a set of pile drivers, and Land paused to watch the huge hammers drive the wooden piles down into the mud. Shouting to make himself heard, Dan said, “Your boys in Washington wanted three more sets of ways. When we’re complete, we’ll have driven fifty-nine thousand piles, give or take a few, into this mud.”
“I want to talk about that,” Land said.
In Dan’s office, where the littered, crowded disarray resembled an on-site construction shack more than the head office of one of the largest enterprises on the Coast, Land accepted a whiskey and soda. Dan lit a cigar and said, “You look tired, old man.”
“One thing about being an admiral,” Land observed, “is that it gives you the right to relegate arrogance and nastiness to yourself. That doesn’t work with you, Lavette. How old do you think I am?”
“Seventy?”
“Sixty-five. I’m ten years older than you, and I’ll ask you to respect that. All right, let’s get down to business, The boys think we’re over the hump—at least enough up the hump to begin to build something that we won’t have to dump on the scrapheap once the war is over. That means a new class of ship we call the Victory. You’ll have the plans no later than tomorrow. Meanwhile, here’s a rough rundown. She’ll have a displacement of ten thousand tons, overall length of four hundred feet, midship deck housing, and a forecastle deck, which will give her a fine graceful swoop up to the bow.”
“That makes problems.”
“I know. We won’t mass-produce it. If you can get out a dozen in the next twelve months, I’ll be satisfied. We’re giving her good striking power, two gun tubs, fore and aft, platforms sheathed in half-inch steel plate, and that means high-quality steel. The forward gun will be a seventy-millimeter, surface and antiaircraft, and the gun aft will be a five-incher, which means one hell of a big gun and a new concept of mounting and bracing. She’ll also carry six smaller tubs mounted with twenty-millimeter multiple machine guns, but that offers no problems. Your power plant will be oil-fired boilers and steam turbines. It’s going to cost, but your profits go up at the same time.”
Dan nodded without enthusiasm.
“I appreciate a joyful reception when we move forward. We’re sending two specialists with the plans. I warned them what to expect. You don’t have to be kind to them.”
“Kindness doesn’t build ships, Admiral. I hate these damn technical reps. Do I need them?”
“I’m afraid you do, Dan. It’s a new project. Now listen to me and get off your high horse for a minute or two. We’re having a ceremony in San Francisco in August, and the President’s going to give you a citation.”
“What in hell for?”
“For building the damn ships. What else?”
Dan shrugged.
“You can’t refuse. By the way, I ran into your son the other day. Thomas.”
Dan nodded.
“Fine-looking boy. You ought to see more of him. Bewails the fact that he’s locked into a shoreside job with Whittier’s ships.”
Dan nodded again.
“And about the citation?”
“I suppose so.”
***
Tom had purchased a house on Pacific Heights, taking advantage of the depressed wartime prices. He and John Whittier had worked out, with the legal aid of Seever, Lang and Murphy, a holding company that combined part of the assets of the Seldon Bank and Whittier’s shipping company. The profits of the Whittier fleet could only be described as astronomical. With an entire army to be supplied in the Pacific, with the Hawaiian Islands as a rear supply base that was separated from the American mainland by thousands of miles, the hunger for cargo was insatiable. There were simply not enough ships, and the practice of adding and adding to deck cargo advanced to a point where the danger was exceeded only by the profits.
Tom would have denied that he loved money, pointing out, as he not infrequently did,that a person who grows to adulthood with all the money he requires never truly cultivates a love of money as money. There was a good deal of sophistry in this. Money meant power, and Tom loved power, and with this he enjoyed the feeling that any price, however preposterous, was within his capabilities. The house on Pacific Heights cost four hundred and eighty thousand dollars and would have cost a million to duplicate in 1944—had it been possible to build such a house at that time. It had more rooms, more floor space, and more gray granite than the Whittier mansion, and when Whittier raised an eyebrow at his junior partner’s aspirations, Tom was not at all abashed. “I think it fits into my future,” he said.
By now, Tom had made his peace with Eloise, and he had begun to believe that in spite of her headaches and certain other inadequacies, she was very much the ideal mate for him. For one thing, she never offered an opinion in company and rarely when the two of them were alone, and at such times, if their opinions differed, she quickly deferred to him. Mostly, she said very little, and days would pass without any conversation between husband and wife except concerning the points where the schedule of one intersected with that of the other. His advance within the navy had been steady if unspectacular, and at this point he held the rank of commander. In all truth, his job was by no means a sinecure, and as liaison between the United States Navy and the Whittier shipping interests, he checked and supervised thousands of tons of vital war cargo. In other times, it might have occurred to someone that as one of the owners of the Whittier line, he had a conflict of interest, but in those years no one bothered to dwell on such niceties. Tom was bright, charming, and wealthy; that in combination with his naval rank took him over all obstacles.
By June of 1944, the new house had been bought and furnished, and Tom decided that even in wartime the occasion called for a reception that would be both a housewarming and a celebration of his third wedding anniversary. He took a reasonable amount of pride in all his possessions, and while he considered Eloise wanting in certain areas, he felt that, dressed and groomed, she was as ornamental as any woman in San Francisco.
“Nothing very big,” he told her, informing her of the occasion. “We’ll have about sixty people. Do you think you can manage to put it all together?”
“Yes, if you will give me the list of the people you want. Jean will help me.”
“I’d rather Mother didn’t help you.”
“Why? She loves to help me.”
“I’m not sure I want her to be here. John will come, and that will be embarrassing for both of them. We don’t have to have my mother on every occasion.”
Eloise took a deep breath. “This isn’t every occasion,” she managed to say. “This is the first large party we are giving in our new house.”
“There will be others.”
“No,” Eloise whispered.
“No? What does that mean?”
“I don’t care if John Whittier comes,” she said recklessly. “I know he must come. But I won’t give this kind of a party without inviting Jean.”
“I’m giving the party.”
“It’s my home as we
ll as yours.”
“By virtue of what?” Tom asked coldly.
“By virtue of the fact that I am your wife,” Eloise said desperately.
“I don’t intend to argue this. We’ll give the party, and Mother will understand why she’s not here.”
“I won’t be here either.”
“What?”
“I’ll stay in my room,” Eloise cried, tears in her eyes now.
“You’ll do as I say!”
“I will not.”
He had not intended to hit her, just as he bad not anticipated the wave of burning anger that overtook him. As he lashed out and struck her across the face with the palm of his hand, he was almost as surprised as she. She staggered back, stared at him with her hand pressed to her face, and burst into tears and fled from the room.
He followed her upstairs a few minutes later. She lay on her bed, a damp cloth across her brow.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I lost my temper. That’s what you do to me. You make me so damn angry.”
“I know,” she whispered, squeezing the words out through the pain.
“What is it, one of those damn migraines?”
She didn’t reply.
“I just look at you wrong, and you get one of those damn headaches of yours. You’re doing it to yourself. You know that. Up the guilts. Show Tom what a sonofabitch he is.”
“I don’t mean to,” she managed to say, each word exploding a torrent of pain in her head.
“All right. We’ll talk about it when you feel better.”
The next day, her head still throbbing, Eloise went to the gallery and poured out her heart to Jean, omitting only the part when Tom had struck her. This she could not bear to communicate to anyone else.
“But my dear,” Jean said, “you have invited me, and I shall not come. You must not be too hard on Tom. I can’t bear to see John Whittier, and to spend a whole evening in the same house with him would be punishment most cruel and unusual.”
“Jean?”
“Yes, dear?”
“May I ask you something very personal?”
“Yes.”
“How could you marry a man and not know how hateful he would be to you?”
Jean laughed. “Oh, my dear Eloise. There must be ten million women in America to whom you could legitimately put that question, and I don’t know what any of them would answer you. It comes down to the fact of being a woman—and the male of the species being what he is, God help him. Marriage is probably the most difficult, delicate undertaking any human being attempts, and we don’t have an iota of preparation or training, only the idiotic presumption that marriages are made in heaven and that one lives happily ever after.” She paused and studied Eloise. “That frightens you, doesn’t it?”
“A little.”
“And you’re not very happy, are you?”
“I have Freddie. He’s darling. He’s good and beautiful. I would have brought him over today, but you know he listens to everything, and I don’t like to talk in front of him about things like this. People imagine that a two-year-old understands no more than a puppy, but they’re wrong.”
“Of course they are. But you haven’t answered my question.”
“No, I haven’t. No, I’m not very happy.”
“Well, what shall I say? You’re a lovely, sensitive young woman. I remember myself at your age. I had a shell of ice, and I didn’t hurt too easily. But I was luckier than you. I married a man who was quite remarkable, but he had his own shell. I suppose we were both as hard as nails, or perhaps so soft that we had to pretend to be. It’s so difficult to know anything about yourself, and to learn something about another is almost impossible. But we were both of us very tough. You’re not. You’re gentle, and you hurt too easily. If Tom hurts too much—don’t destroy yourself, and don’t let him destroy you.”
“I couldn’t leave Tom,” she said plaintively. “I know what his plans are. A divorce would wreck his career.”
“I suppose it would,” Jean agreed.
***
For thirty-eight hours with no sleep, stimulated by Benzedrine, Joe Lavette had been operating in the base hospital hastily thrown together at Guam. He had amputated arms, legs, hands; separated bits of metal of every shape from intestines, kidneys, lungs, liver, and stomach; probed, dissected, sutured; found himself soaked with blood; changed, scrubbed, operated again; become blood-soaked again—and was finally relieved. Walking blindly, dumbly, he was handed a letter that had just arrived. He went to his tent, sat down on his cot, and stared at the letter, his eyes closing with fatigue. He lay back on the cot, and in a moment he was asleep, the letter clutched in his hand. When he awakened, nine hours later, the letter was still there. He sat up and stared at it, unable to remember how it had come to be there. It was from Sally Levy, and as he straightened the envelope, smoothing it where he had crushed it, he smiled for the first time in days.
He placed the unopened letter tenderly on his pillow, and he washed and shaved. It was two o’clock on a hot and damp afternoon. He was ravenously hungry, and he took the letter with him to the mess tent, putting off the pleasure of reading it. There had been no mail for weeks. He filled his stomach with plasticlike scrambled eggs, soggy bacon, sliced white bread, and three cups of black, sour coffee; then, carefully and gently, he opened the letter and began to read:
“My dear, beloved Joe,” she wrote. “This is an unhappy letter. Our beautiful, darling Joshua is dead. I write these words and look at them, and they have no meaning. How can it be? He was only twenty years old. He hadn’t even begun to live. And he was so gentle and sensitive and kind. I don’t think he ever hurt anyone in his life. I thought that I was through with tears, because it is four days since we received the news, but now I had to stop and weep again. I live with my own guilts. I was so vile to him. I used to push him around unmercifully, and when I would lose my temper, I would turn on him and hit him, and he would just stand and grin at me and take it, and I’m writing this because I can’t say it to anyone else, but you will understand because you know how horrible I can be.
“The thing is, you have two big brothers and you just accept them. You don’t think about it, because there they are and they will always be there. And then the letter came, and Mother opened it, and she just sat there staring at it. How does it feel to be a mother, and then you get a letter telling you that your son has been killed in a kamikaze attack and that he has been buried at sea, so you will never look at his lace again or see his grave? I know what it feels like to be his sister, but I think that if I were Mother, I would have died there. Right there. And she didn’t say anything. She didn’t even cry at first. She just handed the letter to Pop, and he read it, and then he put his head down on the table and began to cry. I had never seen him cry before. I guess I had never seen any grown man cry, and I didn’t even know what had happened, but I could guess. And then mom went over and put her arms around him. I think women are maybe stronger than men, or maybe some women, because Pop just went to pieces. He was in the fìrst war, so I suppose he felt this terribly, I mean with terrible pain. He hasn’t spoken to me since it happened, except he puts his arms around me, and when he does that, the tears start again. Mom won’t let me see her cry, but I walked into her room, and she was sitting there, crying as if her heart was completely broken, which I guess it is.
“What makes it worse is that we haven’t heard from Adam in two weeks. We believe that he was in the D-day landing on Normandy, and that would account for him not being able to write. He is always very thoughtful about writing. Then we read in the papers that there were heavy casualties among company commanders, and he’s a company commander, which just makes everything more terrible. I know that this isn’t a pleasant letter, but I can’t go on if I don’t share everything with you, and the thought that you are out there somewhere in that crazy war in the Pacific just makes me half
insane with worry. If anything happened to you, I would die, Joe. That’s it. I would just die. I wouldn’t want to live anymore. And almost everyone I love is gone now, with Barbara away somewhere in Asia or India or someplace. I tell myself that I have to remain calm and composed. Now Mom and Pop look at me, and I know what they are thinking. They are thinking that I’m all they have left.
“Dear, good Joe, please, please be careful and take care of yourself, I love you so much. I love you more than I can say or put down on paper. Please come back to me just the way you are.”
***
Barbara sent her editor a short cable, very much to the point: “I think I’ve had enough. Returning. Cable me at the USA PR in Karachi.” But it was a week before she could be cleared for a flight to Karachi, the first stop on the Air Transport route back to the States, a week of boredom and misery in the wet heat of Calcutta. A few days before she left, there was news of the Normandy invasion, and Barbara could only reflect with gratitude that soon, perhaps, the war would come to its finish. The flight to Karachi, across the whole great subcontinent of India, was without incident, but at the public relations office in Karachi, there was no answer to her cable. This was provoking but not too disturbing, for she had known cables to take ten days between India and the States. She left word to be notified the moment a cable arrived for her, and she checked into the press hostel.
Once in her room, she discovered with relief that she had her own shower. It had been hot and wet in Calcutta; here it was a hundred and ten degrees in the shade when her plane landed, and dry. She had often wondered which was worse. Showered and with a change of clothes, she went down to the lobby and ran into Mike Kendell, a correspondent for the Washington Post whom she had met briefly in North Africa. Kendell was in his mid-forties, fleshy and scarlet-faced from a consistent consumption of alcohol, a city desk reporter who had gotten his first chance overseas during the war. Barbara would not have remembered him, but he fell upon her with joy.