by Sloan Wilson
Paul could not get anywhere near the district office of the Coast Guard. For half an hour he stood in a line that stretched over the top of a hill, seemingly to infinity. Gray-haired men with the collars of old pea jackets turned up around their ears stood in that line, middle-aged men, some of whom were kept company during the long wait by their wives, and many boys who looked too young to be out of high school. They were almost all unusually cheerful and joked about the possibility of the war being over before they got a chance to enlist. Their breath frosted in the cold December air, and some of them danced little jigs to keep warm. A good many carried bottles and were quick to offer a swig to strangers. When a pretty girl walked by on her way to a nearby office, a few of the men whistled. A tall thin man in a trench coat which looked much too thin for that weather called, “Come join up with me, baby!” Instead of sticking her nose in the air and hurrying away, she gave him a brilliant smile and blew him a kiss. The long line of men applauded, clapping their mittened hands together as loudly as possible. To this she responded with a pretty curtsy just before disappearing into a doorway and the crowd cheered.
The long line appeared to move hardly at all. Halfway up the block a stout man dressed in a Chesterfield coat and wearing a homburg hat tried to cut into it and was jovially rebuffed by a short man in a brown leather jacket.
“You push ahead of me, Jack, and you won’t have to wait for no war. You’ll have one right here!”
The crowd laughed, and with hasty apologies the well-dressed man hurried to the end of the line.
All this was interesting, but Paul soon grew both cold and bored. Reasoning that he might do better with telephone calls, he ducked into a bar. Long lines stood there, too, both in front of the two telephone booths and at the bar itself, but here it was at least warm. A jukebox blared in the corner: “Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar.” At the crowded tables men and women sat drinking and talking intently to each other. They leaned against each other, touched a lot and held hands—the atmosphere was certainly a lot sexier than it ordinarily was in a Boston pub at ten o’clock on a Monday morning. When three chief petty officers, resplendent with gold hash marks, walked in, a place was immediately made for them at the bar. Many people offered to buy them drinks and asked them if they knew what damage had actually been done by the Japs at Pearl Harbor.
It took Paul only about twenty minutes to get to a telephone booth. He was not surprised to find that he got a busy signal when he called the Coast Guard office, and settled down to a routine of repeating the call about every two minutes. He was surprised when his fourth call got through. Figuring that he would get nowhere if he asked to speak to the busy recruiting officer, he told the harried girl who answered the telephone that he wanted to speak to the district Coast Guard officer. After a series of buzzes, a weary male voice said, “Lt. Christiansen speaking …”
“Are you the district Coast Guard officer?”
“I’m one of his assistants. Who is this?”
“My name is Paul Schuman. I’m the master of a charter boat and I’ve got three and a half years of college, two in the Navy ROTC. Can I get a commission in the Coast Guard?”
“You should be talking to the recruiting officer.”
“I know, but nobody can get through to him. I just thought you could tell me if I have a chance, and maybe you can mail me some forms or something.”
Lt. Christiansen laughed. “You sure know how to expedite,” he said. “I bet you’d make a good supply officer.”
“I want to go to sea. I’m good with small ships.”
“You are, are you? Give me your name and address. I’ll send you the forms.”
“Paul Schuman, Two-oh-nine Fieldstone Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts.”
“Well, you’re lucky,” Christiansen said. “At least you live around here. We’ve got people from all over sleeping in men’s rooms and railroad stations.”
“I guess that must be quite a problem.”
“You said it, boy. I got my own wife and kid in a hotel that costs more in a week than I make in a month.”
An idea hit Paul then. He didn’t know whether it sprang from the milk of human kindness, from the practiced opportunism of his older brother, or from a lesson he had learned in some odd, reverse way from his father. Instead of simply sympathizing with Christiansen, he said, “If you want an apartment, I can find one for you out in Wellesley.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“Like you said, I’m an expediter.”
Christiansen’s voice suddenly turned sharp. “Look, I can’t do anything for you because of this except send you some forms. But if you can find me an apartment near this crazy city, I’d sure appreciate it.”
“It will only take me a few minutes,” Paul said. “Do you have a telephone number it won’t take me half the day to reach?”
In a clipped voice Christiansen gave him a number and abruptly hung up, perhaps in confusion. Putting another nickel in the telephone, Paul called Lucy Kettel, his mother-in-law.
“Mother,” he said, using the appellation she wanted, though it never seemed natural to him, “I just met a young Coast Guard officer who can’t find an apartment around here for his wife and child. You must know plenty of people with big houses.…”
“Well, I don’t know anybody who wants to rent …”
“There’s a war on. Isn’t it our patriotic duty to help servicemen?”
“I know, but I don’t know anyone who wants to take a stranger into her home.”
“Let’s face it, it would do me some good if we can do this guy a favor,” Paul continued. “He’s an assistant to the district Coast Guard officer and I’m trying to get a commission. As an officer I’ll get maybe five times the pay I’d get if I enlisted.”
There was a pause before she said, “The Hendersons have an apartment over their garage. It’s been empty since their chauffeur quit. They’re not planning on hiring another.”
“Please call them right away,” Paul said. “I’ll call you back in five minutes.”
“How much rent will these people pay?”
“The guy’s a serviceman. Tell the Hendersons that this is a matter of patriotism. Maybe the guy can pay fifty a month, not much more. Call right away. There’s a crowd trying to get into this phone booth.”
Actually, the people waiting in line did not seem restless. They all had drinks in their hands and were watching with appreciative interest a sailor who was giving his girl such a hearty and prolonged embrace that he would have been evicted from the bar in peacetime.
While he waited five minutes Paul sat with the receiver to his ear to show he had a right to remain in the telephone booth. Finding that he had no more nickels, he conquered a feeling of waste and inserted a dime. His mother-in-law answered immediately.
“The Hendersons say they’ll take him if you’ll absolutely vouch for his character.”
“I vouch for it. How much rent do they want?”
“They’ll need sixty a month if they’re going to pay for the heat.”
“It’s a deal. Give me their name, their address and their number.”
This time Paul had to put a quarter into the telephone, an extravagance that hurt him deeply. Christiansen answered immediately.
“This is your expediter,” Paul said. “I got you a garage apartment in Wellesley. Nice section. Sixty bucks a month, heated. Do you want it?”
“God, do I want it! I was going to send my wife and baby back to New London. I can’t thank you enough!”
“Just send me the forms and answer me one question,” Paul said. “If I have all the qualifications, what happens? What’s the timetable?”
“You’ll take a twelve-hour examination in navigation and seamanship at M.I.T. on February second. If you pass that, you’ll be wearing an ensign’s uniform by April. What’s the address of this apartment?”
Paul gave it to him and added, “It’s only about a block from where I live. If you have any trouble give me a
call.”
“Is the place furnished?”
“Yes,” Paul replied, though he wasn’t dead sure. “Anyway, it will be easy to get everything together. The Hendersons are nice people.”
He didn’t really know the Hendersons, but he figured they must be nice people if they were friends of Lucy and Erich.
“That’s great,” Christiansen said. “Look, everything’s so jammed up around here that it would be days before we got your forms in the mail. I’ll stick them in my pocket and bring them to the Henderson house tonight. Drop in maybe at about seven and we can have a drink.”
And so that was the way Paul got a commission in the Coast Guard as quickly as he did. There were a few people who said he used pull and political pressure, but all he did was to get a guy an apartment and study like hell for six weeks to pass the twelve-hour examination.
The speed with which Paul made all these arrangements bewildered Sylvia. All her classmates, after all, were planning to finish their college year before entering the service. “You’d think you just can’t wait to leave me,” she said reproachfully in their bedroom one night after they had made strangely unsatisfactory love.
“You know that isn’t it at all.”
“Well, what is it then?”
He found it difficult to give an answer except to cite patriotism, which he knew would be mostly a lie. He wanted to help defend his country, all right, but he wasn’t really in such a great rush to get out there where the shells were flying and the hurricanes were blowing. No, the truth was that naive though it might sound, there was a lot of joy involved in getting a commission. For one thing, he found that temporarily, at least, he would outrank his condescending older brother. While training to be an army air force pilot, Bill would be an enlisted man, while as an ensign Paul would be the equivalent of a second lieutenant. If they ever met in uniform, which Bill’s assignment to flight instruction would probably make unlikely, tall Harvardman Bill would have to salute his miserable little Boston University brother. It was obviously wrong to feel glee about that, but Paul did anyway.
It was also true that the war, whatever horrors it might hold for him, was getting him away from a lot of things he hated. Most of all, his own confusion about his marriage, his career and everything else. This confusion, he realized, was by no means entirely Sylvia’s fault. It had started, so far as he could understand, when he was fifteen years old and his family had moved from the big house in Boston to the cottage in Milton. The old yawl on which he had spent the happiest summers of his life had been left under cover in the shipyard and had not been sold only because his father was insulted by the only kind of price she could bring during those Depression years. Right before his eyes, his father changed from a big exuberant stockbroker and yachtsman to a hesitant old man who sat all day in his “studio” puttering with paint brushes or whittling chains out of wood. His business failure was never discussed by the family, and this silence increased its terror.
Paul and his brother, who was three years older, reacted to this debacle in different ways. Bill got a football scholarship at Harvard, earned his degree in only three years, and got a scholarship at the business school. Big, brash and self-confident, Bill never even gave the appearance of working hard to win his victories.
What Paul did at the age of fifteen was quite different. He hated athletics and his studies at Milton Academy and, when he could not get a scholarship, was the first to suggest that he go to the local high school. The only thing he really loved was boats, and he spent a lot of time helping his father to paint and varnish the old yawl to prepare her for a customer who would appreciate her already antique grace. He also loved girls—hopelessly. Almost as far back as he could remember he had been secretly infatuated with one or another of the girls at his school or at the Boston Yacht Club.
When he was sixteen Paul discovered something else he liked: money. Money was such a tortuous subject in his home that like failure and sex, it could never be discussed openly. The discovery that he could actually make money himself instead of asking his mother for quarters came to Paul as a revelation and a liberation.
He made his first dollar, ten dollars in fact, when he varnished the combing of a Wee Scot at the yacht club. He had simply been trying to make himself valuable as a crew, and he was astonished when the owner gave him a ten-dollar bill. The first thing he did after that was to put a notice up on the club bulletin board offering his services. During the summer he had all the work he could do, and that fall he got the idea of taking spars, oars, and rudders back to his garage and cellar for refinishing.
Soon he found that he could sell magazine subscriptions, wash cars, and sell magic tricks at school for more than he paid for them. Later he discovered that he could sell clothes from a local tailor to his classmates. There was no mystery about money—there was an infinite number of ways in which it could be made. He started a savings account.
“You take after my father,” his mother said proudly. “He was always a wonderful businessman.”
The trouble was that Paul wanted to make money without becoming a businessman, which seemed to him to be a very boring fate. When he was sixteen he came across a book by Warwick Tompkins, who took college boys on long ocean cruises aboard the Wanderbird, a stately old pilot boat, and at the Boston Yacht Club, he actually met Irving Johnson, who was doing the same thing with the clipper-bowed schooner Yankee. Here were men who were sailing the world and getting their crew to pay the expenses! They were adventurers who found ways to make money by doing exactly what they wanted during their best years instead of spending a lifetime at dull jobs with the hope of escape during their old age.
Because of these men Paul began to dream and his dreams seemed to him to be practical. Somehow he would earn enough money to fix up his father’s old yawl, and would find college students to serve as a paying crew during short summer cruises. After he graduated from college, he would take such a crew around the world, just like Warwick Tompkins and Irving Johnson.
When Paul’s older brother realized that it actually might be possible to make a little money running cruises to Gloucester, Nantucket, and Provincetown, and that the old yawl was a wonderful place for parties, he helped, and their father was also delighted to find a way to avoid selling the Valkyrie. They made the first stage of Paul’s dream a family project, and he rarely discussed the later stages he had in mind with anyone.
Except Sylvia. When he first met her, she was sixteen and he was seventeen, and he had the old yawl moored off the end of the yacht club pier while he and his brother were readying her for their first cruise to Nantucket.
“Is that your boat out there?” she asked when he rowed the dinghy to the float.
“Yes,” he said with the deep pride which the old yawl always gave him. At sixteen, Sylvia was already a vividly pretty young woman who usually danced with the older boys and she never before had paid any attention to him. She was wearing a green bathing suit and he was afraid to look at her for more than a moment.
“Could that boat cross an ocean?”
“You bet. I’m going to sail her around the world.”
Tossing up her chin, she laughed. “When?”
“As soon as I get out of college,” he said, although he had not yet graduated from high school.
She grinned, and there was that wildness in her eyes which seemed to make anything possible. “Will you take me with you?”
“It’s a date,” he said. “Would you like to go out and take a look at her first?”
He was aware from the beginning that Sylvia did not know anything about boats and scorned the discomforts of the sea, but he sensed that she was an adventurer, a rebel like him. The first hour she was aboard the Valkyrie, she went scampering up the rigging and stood poised on the crosstrees, balancing with one hand on a shroud.
“Be careful!” he shouted.
“Come on up! I can see the whole harbor.”
Much as he loved boats, he had always been afraid of heig
hts, but he mustered the courage to climb the rigging and stand on the other side of the crosstrees. The view was indeed grand up there fifty feet above the deck if he didn’t look down.
“Have you ever dived from here?” she asked.
“No!”
“The top board on the club tower is almost this high.”
“But here you might fall before you got clear.”
She smiled and there was that look in her eyes again when she said, “I dare you!”
“Don’t, I—”
Before he could say more she launched herself into the air and swooped toward the metallic surface of the water, her arms outstretched. His mixture of anger and admiration turned to fear when he realized that she was not really a very good diver. She hit much too flat, and when the explosion of foam fell around her, he saw her come slowly to the surface, looking wounded, out of breath and scared. Forgetting his own safety, he jumped, pushing himself off the rigging more effectively than he could in a dive. Plummeting into the water a dozen feet from her, he swam rapidly toward her. She had recovered her breath and was laughing.
“You looked so funny,” she said. “All the time you were falling, your arms and legs were moving as though you were trying to climb up!”
He had been angry at her and totally unable to resist her. That’s the way he had stayed, year after year.
One of the confusing things about Sylvia was that despite her wild ways, she was in certain matters very conventional.
In public she played a teasing game, but in private she was scared and angry when he tried to go beyond a kiss. When at the age of seventeen he couldn’t stop himself from telling her that he loved her, she said she loved him too, but her family would be furious if she paid too much attention to any one boy. They were, she pointed out with perfect logic, much too young even to dream about getting engaged. If he had any idea of getting married even in the distant future, he should start thinking of doing something more substantial with his life than sailing an old yawl around the world.