Immediately, both men looked up from their plates, tense and expectant.
“All three of us are about to become seagoing officers,” Ash continued, “so all three of us are going to take the afternoon off in order to prepare for sea by squandering our time in trivial, frivolous pursuits. The two of you might want to visit a museum or perhaps read poetry with a spinster somewhere. I’ll leave it up to you, but whatever you do, be sure that you take the waters and refresh yourselves. As you do, be sure that you bear in mind that important naval rule: ‘to hell with the women and children, make way for a naval officer.’”
Unable to keep a straight face, Solly broke out laughing.
“If by ‘taking the waters,’ you mean spending all afternoon in bed, napping and reading the papers,” Hamp said, “I will be most grateful, Sir.”
“Your gratitude will stand you in good stead,” Ash said. “Make the most of it because I expect the Navy’s going to begin pressing us hard, quick.”
7
The following Sunday, after a light lunch at The Jarvis House and contrary to Hamp’s claim that he planned to spend the afternoon in bed, Solly and Hamp followed a majority of the crew up the snow-packed street to see a new Errol Flynn movie entitled They Died with Their Boots On at the Yarmouth Rialto. Before lunch, Ash had overheard a few of their boot sailors talking animatedly about the flick. According to them, the film promised to be more entertaining than a traveling burlesque show. Skeptical, Ash went back up to his room, sat down in the easy chair, and reluctantly turned his attention to the chapters in Knight’s Modern Seamanship that covered mooring and anchoring. After a fashion, he knew that he was about to be tested on both counts and didn’t intend to be found wanting.
Two hours later, having reviewed and committed to memory the most pertinent facts, Ash finally stood up, put down the book, and reached for his blouse. The time had come, he reasoned, to take a break and go for a stroll, even if he had to hug the inside of his greatcoat in order to ward off the freezing weather.
Outside, although the day remained gray and overcast, the wind had died, and Yarmouth, even for a Sunday, seemed strangely silent, almost hushed, its citizens having retired either for afternoon naps or in order to glue themselves to their radios for whatever mid-afternoon entertainment the air waves provided. Setting himself a steady but moderate pace, Ash walked up the street and inland, past the Rialto, past shops and stores still showing a plethora of winter fashions, past The Eiseley Hotel to which the attractive “Miss” from The Jarvis had decamped, and on past a small library and a snow-covered semi-circular park. Looking ahead, his eye settled on a small ornate sign overhanging the sidewalk, the placard’s blue and gold colors presented in the English style so as to announce “Queen Bee’s Tea and Coffee.” When he had set out that afternoon, Ash had entertained the idea of drinking a couple of beers at The Jolly Roger, but the farther he walked, the more the frigid humidity rolling off the Royal River seemed to penetrate. It was Sunday after all; The Jolly Roger might not even be open, and drinking ice-cold beer on an ice-cold day quickly lost its attraction. Instead, by the time Ash spotted the Queen Bee’s, what he most wanted took the form of a strong, hot cup of coffee. Ash opened the door and passed inside.
Much to Ash’s surprise and delight, the interior of the Queen Bee’s resembled that of the English pubs he had seen in photographs. Where he had half expected a white tiled floor and a soda fountain arrangement of wire tables and chairs, he found in their place dark wood paneling, a serving counter with an overhang where the cups and saucers seemed to be stored, small oak tables with cushioned chairs, a row of deep, wooden high-backed booths along the wall across from the counter, and a welcome fire burning in the grate at the room’s end. As far as Ash could see, he was the only customer. Pleased that he could relax in peace, he proceeded to the counter where an elderly woman with a well-arranged blue-gray coiffure appeared from a back room.
“Coffee or tea?” the woman asked him in a voice that carried a strong English accent.
“Coffee, please,” Ash said.
“House blend, or one of our specials?”
“I’ll try the house blend, if you please,” Ash said.
The woman smiled. “Had one of you Navy lads in last week,” she said. “He liked it.”
“I’m sure I will too,” Ash said, thanking the woman as she handed him a mug embossed with twin photos of Roosevelt and Churchill.
“Are you English, by chance?” Ash asked.
“Born English, naturalized American,” the woman said. “Came over in 1926, but it don’t matter much now since we’re all in this together. That Mr. Hitler’s a bad piece of work. Trust you boys and the Royal Navy will cut him down to size.”
“That is certainly the plan,” Ash said, flashing the woman a smile. “Anywhere?” Ash continued, gesturing to the empty tables.
“Please yourself,” the woman said, returning his smile and retiring from the counter.
Ash removed his overcoat and walked to the back of the room. He placed his coffee mug on a table, settled his hat and coat on an adjoining chair, and sat down facing the warmth from the fire. Only after he had comfortably seated himself and taken a first sip of his coffee did Ash happen to glance to his right. In that instant, Ash nearly tipped his coffee straight into his lap—sitting not 6 feet away from him, the auburn-headed Miss that he had first seen at The Jarvis House seemed to be looking straight at him from the booth nearest to the fireplace.
“I beg your pardon,” Ash said, starting to rise. “I didn’t mean to disturb you; I didn’t realize that you were sitting there.”
“Not at all,” the woman said, a touch of amusement evident in her voice.
As Ash stood up and started to reach for his mug and his coat, the woman raised a hand to stop him.
“Please, Mr. Miller,” she said, showing him a smile. “You haven”t disturbed me at all. I’ve been sitting here reading Agatha Christie for lack of anything more profound, and you aren’t in the least in the way. We seem to be the only ones in here today. Mrs. Jarvis gave me your message and told me your name. Why don’t you join me? I’m Claire Morris.”
Ash gathered his wits, then, coffee in hand, slid into the seat across from Claire. “Ashford Miller,” he said, returning a smile. “And once again, I apologize for the way my ship and I have put you out of your lodgings. I hope the inconvenience hasn’t been too great.”
“The inconvenience, as you call it Mr. Miller, has been much more than comfortable. The Eiseley Hotel treats me like something of a queen, and I’m not used to that.”
Ash pondered a response that approached something like “if a woman looks like a queen and has the lips, eyes, and hair of a queen, it is no surprise that she is apt to be treated like a queen,” but stifled the impulse as being miles too forward. Instead, he merely said, “I’m glad to hear they’re giving satisfaction.”
“I think Mrs. Jarvis thought that I might be a threat of some kind to your sailors,” she laughed.
“I rather think that Mrs. Jarvis and I worried that it might be the other way around,” Ash said. “I seem to have a good crew, but before they all arrived, we had no way of knowing.”
“Well,” she said, “you can rest easy on that point because I have been living well, quite beyond my normal means, so the Navy has advanced a notch in my estimation.”
“If so,” Ash said, “I regret to tell you that the good times won’t last much longer. We’ll be putting to sea before long, so I suppose that you will be moving back.”
“I suppose so,” Claire said, “but I won’t lament. Mrs. Jarvis is a dear, and the food at The Jarvis House has always been exceptional and a slight cut above what The Eiseley can offer. There are times at The Jarvis when I find it a strain not to overindulge.”
Claire Morris had avoided overindulgence with about the same degree of attention as a Vogue model, Ash observed, but once again, he kept the thought to himself.
“The Catalonian stew I had on
the day I arrived was excellent,” Ash said, “and anyone who can make a New England boiled dinner palatable—that’s what they served the night the crew arrived—qualifies as a master in my opinion”
“Just so, and I hope they’ll give you lamb or pork loin at least once before you leave. We had them last month, and they melted in the mouth.”
“We had the lamb two nights back,” Ash said. “It was a treat.”
Then Ash changed the subject. “Mrs. Jarvis told me that you teach school here—sixth grade, I believe she said. Do you find the work agreeable?”
Claire flashed Ash a broad smile. “Sixth graders, Mr. Miller, are right on the verge of becoming teenagers. The boys are so filled with energy that they are almost always a handful, and the girls are just discovering how to be saucy. It is sometimes a struggle, but most of them are quick learners, so I endure. I can’t say that I am sold on teaching for life, but when I came out of Middlebury in ’38, jobs were hard to find. This one came up, so I took it, and I have to admit that they’ve been very good to me. Our pay scales are better than a host of other schools around Portland, so I’m more than pleased when I hear about what some of my contemporaries are earning. What about you, Mr. Miller—are you career Navy or merely in for the duration?”
“To tell you the truth,” Ash said, “I don’t know. I’m a reserve officer, of course, but I activated my commission a year before we got into the war, and thus far, I find that I like the life. Before coming here, I was on a destroyer that had the misfortune to be sunk by a mine off the Florida coast. If that hadn’t happened, I’d still be an ensign, but I’ve been given command of the ship that’s being built down at the yard, so the Navy has advanced my rank, apparently in order to increase my chances of being effective. At the moment, owing to nothing more than necessity, I seem to be learning at high speed, but soon I will have to begin paying the bill. My hope is that I’ll be up to it, that—if you don’t mind me inflating the whole idea—I’ll be able to rise to the challenge. Normally, I dislike that expression; ‘rise to the challenge’ seems revoltingly trite, but there it is.”
“My father commanded a torpedo boat during the First World War,” she said, “what the Navy is now calling a ‘small destroyer.’ He was regular navy for 25 years. He died in 1936, but we talked about his command once, and if you don’t mind me saying so, before he went aboard and read himself in, he said that he felt exactly the way you seem to be feeling. My guess, Mr. Miller, is that a considerable degree of apprehension and self-doubt goes with the job. Isn’t that the way you see it?”
“Yes, exactly,” Ash said, “and I suspect that it’s probably the same for every man who accepts a command. Nothing for it but to leap in and give it one’s best, and hope for a corresponding return.”
Claire nodded her agreement. “And before you joined the Navy,” she said, “college, work, anything unusual?”
“Ha,” Ash said, “I popped out of college in 1936 with degrees in English and journalism and didn’t find jobs any easier to come by than they must have been around here, so I spent a year pounding the pavement as a cub reporter on the Bugle in Herrin, Illinois. I also wrote a few short stories for the pulps, but the take was so minimal that when I finally thought that I faced starvation, I gave up both jobs and signed on as a deck hand with the merchant marine. The food and the pay offered immense improvements. Made a trip to Germany, didn’t like what I saw there, came home, and joined the reserves. And then, as soon as regulations would permit, I asked for orders to active duty because I sensed this thing coming.”
“You’ve actually written stories, and published them?”
“For the pulps,” Ash said. “A few detective stories and three or four westerns. Serious literature they were not. I have no pretensions about them. And the pay wasn’t very good either. If a person sat in a room and turned them out one after another, he or she might make a poor living at it, but magazines like Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post eluded me. I did publish a couple of serious stories in reputable literary magazines, but neither of those paid me a penny, and I simply couldn’t afford to keep it up. So, I decided to throw it over and go to sea. I might go back to writing someday, but I have no regrets. For the time being, I’ve had to put anything resembling serious writing—beyond the piles of paperwork that the Navy demands—on hold.”
“My father used to grumble about the amount of paperwork he had to do,” she grinned. “He said that if he generated anything less than a foot-high stack during a given year, he imagined the Navy would consider him a slacker.”
“I can’t be sure,” Ash laughed, “but I think my officers and I have generated at least that much across the past three weeks.”
“With more still to come?”
“With a lot more still to come,” Ash said.
They talked on, Ash and Claire Morris, easily and without restraint for another hour, and then, glancing at a clock on the wall, both recognized that they needed to return to their hotels for the evening seating. Ash helped Claire into her coat, admiring the scent of her hair as he did so, and then walked beside her to the entrance of The Eiseley.
“Am I likely to see you again?” she said, turning and offering Ash her gloved hand at the hotel entrance.
“Probably not,” Ash said, taking the hand held out to him and holding it for a lingering moment. “This has been the most pleasant afternoon I’ve spent in Yarmouth, but I won’t be able to get away like this again. And I’ll regret it,” he said, giving her a look which he hoped conveyed his feelings.
“I’ll regret it as well,” she said. “If you ever come this way again, for an upkeep or something of the kind …”
“Yes,” Ash said. “You can be sure.”
Later that night, as Ash sat down to dinner with Solly and Hamp, he asked, “How was the shoot-em-up? Errol Flynn win the girl and triumph over the forces of evil?”
“No,” Solly said.
“Not exactly,” Hamp said. “That flick was about Custer.”
“Oh,” Ash said, “that explains it, I guess.”
“And what about you, Sir, where did you disappear to this afternoon? We looked for you, but you weren’t here when we came back. Thought you might like a beer up at the Roger.”
“I,” Ash said with restraint, “spent the afternoon taking tea with a spinster.”
“We saw a spinster that I would certainly like to have taken tea with,” Hamp said quickly. “She was just coming out of The Eiseley when Solly and I bought our tickets at the theater. Glorious redhead. A real dish!”
“Mind your manners, George,” Ash quipped.
Immediately, both Solly and Hamp looked up, their mouths dropping slightly open.
“Well, you sly dog … Sir,” Hamp exclaimed.
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ash said, bending over his plate with a smile.
8
At 0800 on the following Thursday morning, according to Ash’s experience, Chaser 3 became the most strangely commissioned ship in the United States Navy. Contrary to tradition which required trials first, assumption of command next, and commissioning last, the certainty which COMDESLANT demonstrated about the ship’s condition and readiness reversed nearly everything having to do with normal procedure. Seconds after the magic moment, in an act assumed to be occurring simultaneously with the vessel being placed on the Navy’s list—with the crew in pea coats but wearing dress blues and standing to attention on the fantail of the little chaser, all of them having moved aboard the day before—Ash read himself in as their commanding officer and saw the ship’s commissioning pennant run up. He then ordered them to prepare for final trials, as though real or normal or regulation trials had already taken place, which they most definitely had not. Curiously, after weeks of snow and heavy gray overcast, the evolution went forward beneath a clear sky, the sea gulls floating on nothing more than crisp, windless air. By 0930, the Special Sea and Anchor Detail was set and the big diesels were finally running. Wi
th Ash on the bridge to con the ship, Solly in the pilot house to keep a check on the helmsman, and Hamp on the fo’c’sle to watch and learn from Samarango’s handling of the deck crew, Chaser 3 was underway, threading between the buoys on the Royal River and making good her course toward the upper reaches of Casco Bay. There, between Merepoint to the northeast and the mine belts laid near the tip of Chebague Island to the south, the ship was to conduct its so-called final trials.
The crew and the ship experienced glitches of course, any number of them. This boot stepped into the bite of a line and had to be jerked to safety before the bite closed and took off his foot at the ankle; that one misidentified a security light on the beach, mistaking a flood light on a lamppost for a lighthouse, and yet another had confused line 3 for line 4 when Ash had ordered the correct line to be taken in when he’d first gotten underway. Another of the green sailors, victim of a traditional prank, had actually gone down to the engine room and, to Chief Stobb’s delight, asked him for a bucket of steam. Polaski in radio had reported a blown tube which was quickly replaced. Stobb had found three small oil leaks, all of them corrected by means of tightening pipe fittings, and when, finally, it came time to lower the sonar dome, Gomez hadn’t been able to do it until he and a workman that Anson had placed aboard had discovered a loose connection in an electrical junction box. As Ash expected, adjustments were made, minor imperfections were dealt with, and final acceptance requirements were gradually checked off. Then, across a long afternoon, running up and down the bay at varying speeds, Ash, Mr. Anson, Chief Stobb, and Solly worked out the ship’s power-to-speed ratios so that whatever speed the bridge ordered could be answered at once by the watch in the engine room.
They kept at it all day, testing the engines in every conceivable way, checking out standard and emergency steering, testing and proving sonar, sound-powered phone communication, signal lights, running lights, depth-charge release mechanisms, distributions systems for water and fuel, and even the portable anchor davit. Thrice, amid the shallower waters north of Cousin’s Island, Ash anchored the ship, Samarango working to train his anchor detail, Hamp mastering some of the complexities as he watched the evolution proceed.
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