The Lieutenant

by Andre Dubus

  In the passageway outside the dispensary there was a long line of sailors dressed in dungarees. On the first couple of days after an in-port period there was always a crowd: men who woke in the morning and noticed an ailment they had had for days. Dan opened the Medical Officer’s door and looked in at Doc Butler sitting at his desk.

  “Morning, Major. You’ve got all the sick bay commandos here, so who’s making the ship go?”

  “Just you and me, Dan. I see you’ve already locked one up.”

  “Right, Major. Iron hand.”

  “Good: they know you’re the Skipper now.”

  “Captain Howard recommended a pat on the wrist.”

  Doc Butler smiled.

  “A pilot, Dan. They don’t worry about discipline and such.”

  He nodded toward the percolator.

  “It’s fresh,” he said.

  “No thanks, Major. I just dropped in to make sure you didn’t stay on the beach.”

  “They wouldn’t leave without me, Skipper.”

  “Semper Fi,” Dan said, and left. He walked briskly now, and when he reached the barracks he was whistling “Scotland the Brave.”

  That night after dinner he was in Alex Price’s room when the bosun’s pipe sounded over the loudspeaker and the bosun’s mate announced mail call; Dan got up and said “About time” and hurried from the room, leaving Alex grinning and stroking his moustache. It had been ten days since he had heard from Khristy and he went quickly down the passageway, trying to recall if he had ever gone longer without a letter and it seemed that he had but he couldn’t be sure and he wanted to believe he hadn’t, that somehow numbers were important and if there had never been ten days without a letter, then surely there would never be eleven. He wrote to her every night at sea because he was lonely and there was nothing to do at night except watch a movie in the wardroom or write to Khristy. His letters were usually four or five pages long. Sometimes he wrote about marriage, although when they had made love for the first and last time, he had immediately asked her to marry him and she had said with a rational voice that—coming from her naked body next to his—had chilled him: Let’s don’t even talk about it till you get back from sea duty. I want time to check out my psyche.

  The word psyche had also disturbed him.

  When the Vanguard was in port he wrote to her every third day, on his duty day when he had to stay aboard ship. On the other two days liberty call was at noon and he left the ship then, often choosing as his companions married men who wanted to remain faithful to their wives. They went to bars where the Japanese hostesses did not sit with customers until they were asked, and Dan and his friends rarely asked; when they did, it was because they wanted something soft and responsive and perfume-scented in their booth. They would buy her drinks and tell her in pidgin English that her kimono was very pretty, her face beautiful. By late evening they would have eaten sukiyaki or teriyaki steak or fried rice or sopa, they would be happily drunk, and they would sing; the young officers from eastern schools led them in ribald limericks or sentimental college songs; Dan taught them “Waltzing Mathilda” and usually sang solos of “Danny Boy” and “Irish Soldier Boy.” They would return late to the Vanguard, oblivious long before they slept.

  When Dan wrote to Khristy on those hungover in-port days, he told where he had gone the past two nights and always ended by assuring her that he had only been out with the boys and had slept aboard ship. Khristy had never—either in California or her letters—asked him to be faithful; he respected her strength, and gave her the continual assurance she had not asked for but certainly needed.

  Khristy wrote only once a week, but Dan knew the reason: as a senior at UCLA she had little time. But that wasn’t exactly right. She had time, but didn’t know it, because she was one of those women who have no concept of time, who apparently believe it is to be recorded by facial wrinkles and increasing dress sizes but not by a clock, so she was harassed by its sudden passing in the course of a mere day. Her letters were written on that day which gratuitously stopped and gave her several hours of what she often called another vacuous Sunday afternoon. In her letters (which spoke of love but never marriage) she wondered where her time had gone, then she answered her question by telling him of classes and nights of studying during the week and dates on Friday and Saturday. Before leaving Camp Pendleton to report to the Vanguard, Dan had said he expected her to date. He had assumed that checking out her psyche involved being with other men. He was rarely jealous. She wrote of several different escorts (naming them, saying briefly where they had taken her) and Dan considered them all boys who lacked the maturity he had earned by being a man among men, boys who bought her drinks and took her to football games and parties but who shared neither her background nor her body.

  Her background was the Marine Corps. Her father was a colonel at Camp Pendleton. When Dan first met Colonel VandeBerg, the Colonel had said: How old are you, Lieutenant? Dan had told him he was twenty-four and the Colonel had chuckled and said: I’ve been in the Marine Corps all your life. Dan had smiled, blushing; but he was realizing that Khristy had been in the Marine Corps all her life too: she had already—though secondhand—experienced most of his future. If she married him, she would leave a colonel’s house to live in a lieutenant’s.

  He felt that her father’s profession and her mother’s commitment to it were the causes of Khristy’s subtle abeyance, her resistance which was more than physical, and their differences which they rarely quarreled about but usually touched on, even on their last night together before Dan drove north to join the Vanguard. They had begun that evening at a restaurant in Oceanside (she did not like the officers’ clubs on the base); Khristy was drinking martinis, saying she was determined to get happy and fuzzy like a child falling asleep. He drank them too. After his second, he was telling her of almost getting lost in the field with his entire platoon because he had been in new terrain and for some reason he could find none of its contours on the map. So he had marched the platoon up a hill and given an impromptu lecture, showing them how you could find your position by doing a two-point resection with a map and compass, and they sat on the ground watching him, the platoon sergeant standing behind them looking interested too, and then Dan had known the sergeant was also lost. He had squatted on the ground and done the resection and it had worked: he had been able to stand up and say: So you see we’re on this hill, right here—Then Khristy had said:

  “You should get out of the Marine Corps.”

  His first thought was that she was disgusted by his incompetence, and looking at her with his mouth open but quiet, he thought her father—whom he only saw at his quarters—had somehow judged him and told Khristy he didn’t pack the gear. She reached a hand across the table and laid it on his.

  “I hate to see you get old,” she said. “They get so old. They go to a couple of wars and after twenty, twenty-five years, they retire and they’re lost. Did you ever notice how many of them simply fall apart when they retire? Old wounds start bothering them and they look restless or confused or even scared, some of them. My God, how many times have I heard my father say: ‘When I go I want to catch one right between the horns—’”

  She withdrew her hand and touched her forehead.

  “And you,” she said. “You’re on fire with it: you’ll be yelling gung-ho on beaches and someday if you’re still around you’ll retire and they’ll give you a regimental parade and you’ll cry when they march past playing the Hymn—unless you’ve changed a lot.”

  Then she looked away from him, toward the piano bar, and said:

  “And for what.”

  He started to reach for her hand again but, pretending not to notice, she moved the hand away, to her cigarettes. When he gave her a light she settled back in her chair, out of his reach, and said:

  “I’m fuzzy but that’s all. Let’s have another.”

  Her voice then had been sad, resigned, and her letters which began the following week, shortly after he had reported t
o the Vanguard, had the same tone. That tone had never changed. He grew accustomed to it and the weekly letter, accepting his allotted time in the flow of her life. Still, every day when mail call was announced, he faced the distribution of letters with the anxiety of a waiting lover.

  When he reached the barracks, mail had been passed out; there were six letters stacked on his desk. He spread them out like a hand of cards and in one glance saw that each was addressed by a feminine hand and each was for a prisoner in the brig. There was no letter for him.

  Though he was alone in the office, he assumed a calm expression, then sat at his desk and slowly looked at each letter. One of his functions as the man in charge of the ship’s brig was to read all outgoing and incoming mail. At times it was boring, but often he enjoyed it. In September there had been witty letters from a girl in Alameda and, for her sailor’s two weeks of confinement, Dan had looked forward to reading them. Last month a Negro sailor had served thirty days in the brig and his mistress in Oakland had written him daily: her love passages sounded like a combination of popular songs and romance magazines, but Dan believed her anyway; what he liked most was her anecdotes of Oakland night life which, she wrote, she enjoyed with a girl friend. She told him of a world of music and gin and violence which he had never known.

  Tonight there was a letter from Freeman’s girl and Dan saved it for last.

  When he pulled out the four sheets of thin folded stationery, a small colored photograph fell on his desk: the girl, standing on a blanket in a small lawn with a low green fence behind her and, beyond that, tall apartment buildings. She wore a two-piece aqua bathing suit and stood profiled to the camera, and her hair was indeed bright red, as Tolleson had told her. Her belly was flat and white and her face, turned to the camera, was smiling. She held a can of beer. On the back of the photograph was written:

  All my love,

  Jan

  (I don’t remember the date.

  Do you?)

  Then he studied her face, as if to intercept that look in her eyes before Freeman saw it. And he was thinking they were not at a beach and apparently there was no one else there, they were sunbathing together on a bright California day and they would leave the blanket and go into her apartment—wherever that was, probably behind the camera—and they would make love and lie in bed drinking beer, maybe three dollars worth of beer, three dollars and a sunny afternoon and a young red-haired girl, and then they would—oh Khrìsty oh Goddammit—

  Then he read the letter.

  Ted Baby,

  I finally used up the rest of that roll. The others didn’t come out so good but I’m glad this one did. I wanted you to have it so you could remember what I looked like. Believe me, next time you see me you’ll notice the difference! But don’t worry, next summer I’ll get in that same bathing suit. I wonder if that was the day it happened. I hope it was, because it was such a good day.

  Dan read faster, sensing—as if she sat talking in his office—her voice changing from nostalgia and love to desperate practicality:

  —have to go by the regulations but Baby I’m going on four months and I can’t cover it up much longer. If we wait til the ship comes home in March I’ll be seven months! Please Baby can’t you talk to your Captain, you told me he was a good man—

  Dan got up and opened the door. Across the room, the Corporal of the Guard was sitting at his desk, reading a letter. Dan told him to have Freeman sent up from the brig and he waited at the door until the corporal was dialing the number. Then he finished reading the letter.

  While he waited for Freeman he looked up the order that had been issued by the Commander of the Seventh Fleet before the Vanguard had left the States. He did not really have to see it again, for he knew what it said: that during the Western Pacific deployment, members of the Seventh Fleet would be granted emergency leave only under the following circumstances: father or mother dying, wife dead or dying, child dead or dying, or father or mother dead provided the serviceman was necessary for settling the estate.

  Then he left his office and knocked on the door of Tolleson’s stateroom and went in. Tolleson rose from the leather chair where he had been reading a letter. He wore khaki tropical trousers, a T-shirt, and shower shoes. On his left bicep, above the dark hair, was a tattoo of a Marine emblem. Dan sat down, then Tolleson did.

  “Freeman’s girl is knocked up.”

  “Well, sir,” Tolleson said after a moment, “it’s kinda tough when these little girls take serious what you poke at ’em in fun.”

  “She’ll be seven months when we get back to the States.”

  “Goddamn, sir, you know what I think? The Commandant of this man’s Marine Corps ought to issue a general order that all Marines will be schooled in the function of the birds and the bees. I swear to God, sir, half of ’em don’t know how they got here.”

  Dan was looking at the bulkhead and scratching his jaw, waiting for Tolleson to subside, and he was thinking that for four or five years now he had needed to shave again in the evening, with a blade, if he were going out; Freeman would be married soon and his electric razor would disturb the apartment’s morning quiet only three or four times a week.

  “How well do you know that chief in charge of passenger lists?”

  “Sir, I hope the Lieutenant’s not thinking about sending Freeman home, because if I remember correctly—”

  “I know. I just read the order again.”

  “From ComSeventhFleet, I believe, sir.”

  “It is. But it occurs to me that this is an aircraft carrier and it has a mail plane that takes people to Japan and if Freeman can get to Japan he can catch a hop to California.”

  “Yes, sir. However—”

  “And I know this, First Sergeant, and you know it too: a lot of things get done, whether admirals authorize them or not.”

  “Yessir, that’s true.”

  “So why don’t you give that chief a call. We’ll just look into it and see what it’d take to get Freeman home.”

  “Aye sir, I’ll give it a try.”

  Dan went back to his office where Freeman was waiting, just outside the door, standing at parade rest with a prisoner chaser behind him. Dan told him to come in and shut the door and stand at ease.

  “Why didn’t you tell me your girl was pregnant?”

  “Sir, Prisoner Freeman didn’t think it’d do any good, sir.”

  This time Freeman was not afraid; he stood at rigid parade rest and stared with pain and defiance at the bulkhead behind Dan, who felt that defiance, retreated from it and all it represented—his past and future days of working with men whose enslavement to his rank enslaved them even further, so they were not free to look at him as a man, stripped of his uniform and its accouterments of rank which were, to them, his name: The Lieutenant. As gently as he could, he said:

  “Look—we’ve got a lot of talking to do, and it’ll save time if you knock off that prisoner talk.”

  Freeman’s face did not change.

  “Aye aye, sir,” he said.

  “Now: maybe there is something we can do. You can’t tell until you ask.”

  Looking at Freeman’s face, he was imagining it suddenly changing: saw the jaws and lips softening, the eyes focusing gratefully downward toward his own. He saw Jan in the apartment doorway, her hair somehow brilliant even without sunlight, and Freeman, uniformed, dropping his seabag to the corridor floor: Lieutenant Tierney sent me home!—clasping her—he took care of ΈVΈRYthing.

  “Do you love this girl, Freeman?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you plan to marry her?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Pregnant or not? You’re sure?”

  “Yes, sir: we were getting married after the cruise.”

  “Where do her parents live?”

  “In Stockton, sir.”

  “Do they know she’s pregnant?”

  “No, sir.”

  “But they see her often enough so they’ll find out?”

  �
��Yes, sir. I suppose they will.”

  “What about your folks? Do they know?”

  “No, sir.”

  “They’re in California too, aren’t they?”

  “No, sir. Bellingham, Washingíon, sir.”

  Know your men, he had been told at Basic School, keep a platoon commander’s notebook; and he faithfully had: a small pocket notebook with a red leather cover that bore the Marine emblem. Inside, there was a page for each man with blanks for essential information; the process of knowing a man began with your filling these blanks. As you copied the information from his service record book, you felt that you were taking possession of a part of him: as if you were watching him sleep, and sharing the privacy of his slack jaws, his snores, his mutterings. Then you memorized the information and the process was complete. If your commanding officer asked, you could tell him where a man was from, his age, his approximate height and weight, whether he was married or single, and whether he was a marksman, sharpshooter, or expert with the rifle. And now Dan had blundered: had forgotten and then let Freeman know it. He would study his notebook before going to bed tonight.

  “Well, Freeman, there’s a chance—just a chance, understand—that we can get you off this bird farm and fly you back to the States. If the First Sergeant can—” he paused “—swing something.”

  Now Freeman was looking down at him, not grateful yet but anxious, dependent—and surprised.

  “Tell me, Freeman: what made you say that to Corporal McKittrick this morning?”

  “Personal reasons, sir.”

  It was what they always said when they wanted to see the chaplain or the company commander or battalion commander or the inspector general, and you were not supposed to pry; you had to let them go, and you did—with the sense of alienation of a man watching his wife enter a confessional.