At Porter’s request, the captain of the Eisenhower provided a launch in which Rensselaer and Frearson sped down the Elizabeth River on its west side so as to avoid the delays of passing honors, for now a blue flag with two stars was flown, a tremendous shock to Rensselaer after his imprisonment in the brig. Where the river divides, they veered to starboard into a vast forest of gray ships, dry-docks, skyscraper-tall cranes, and giant blocks of scaffolding, and the prow of the launch now and then knocked against small pieces of floating ice.
Most of the ships at the BAE yard were far bigger than Athena, and it took a while to find her, tucked in between two destroyers at the yard’s west end. Despite having done so much, she was of such low priority that—unlike the other, larger ships the launch had passed, which were singing with the sounds of cutting and grinding, and illuminated by rivers of golden sparks and blue acetylene—she was alone and quiet, her wounds open and beginning to rust, her sides stained by black smoke, the tip of her topmast broken, the starboard bridge window that had killed Josephson still sadly covered with plywood, her weapons shrouded in canvas, her steel pockmarked by gunfire, and, of course, her decks and superstructure laden with snow.
“How tough she looks,” Rensselaer said, “as if she’s seen everything in the world and is so wounded and broken she needs to be buried.”
“How bad is it?” Frearson asked.
“Don’t let it fool you,” Rensselaer said, “she’s ninety-five percent ready, just a little rough on the outside. A part of me wants to take her to sea again.”
“That’s over,” Frearson stated.
“I know. But I’ve never loved a ship as much. I hope that somehow she knows that. This was my last look, and now she’s on her own. She’ll be fine. There’s something about her. She’ll have no descendants, so her story alone will have to do. If there’s a god of ships, or if God grants souls to them, then she’ll live on, just like us.”
*
When the launch returned to base, Frearson asked if Rensselaer wanted to stop at the Naval Exchange to buy new insignia: two stars now, for some the ambition of lifetime, and for Rensselaer, even with the aid of a deus ex machina, well-earned. No, he did not. If he had had civilian clothes he would have changed into them, he said, but he didn’t, and being in uniform might help him get on a flight he hadn’t booked.
“I can take you to Richmond International, Reagan, or Dulles,” Frearson offered.
“No, Norfolk.”
“There’s hardly any traffic out of Norfolk.”
“The big airports will be all tangled up with cancellations and pre-booked flights. Norfolk might be faster. It’s a gamble.”
“Where’re you going anyway?” Frearson said, as if he didn’t know.
“New Orleans,” Rensselaer answered, for the pleasure of saying it.
The runway was empty and veils of snow sometimes blew across it. “This is crazy,” Frearson said. “Planes are allergic to this place.”
“You saw what happened today?” Rensselaer asked. Frearson nodded. “The air is still charged with it.”
As they walked into the empty terminal, Rensselaer seemed perfectly confident. No one was at the counters. Of a man mopping the floor, they asked who was in charge. He pointed to a door. “You see?” Rensselaer said.
Frearson returned, “See what?”
They knocked. A woman appeared. “When’s the next flight out?” Rensselaer asked.
“Not until this evening,” she said.
“That’s too late,” Rensselaer told her.
“Oh is it?” she asked rhetorically.
“There must be something,” Rensselaer insisted. “You’ve got that nice big runway. What the hell is it for?”
The woman looked at Frearson as if to ask, Is he mad? Frearson just shrugged his shoulders. Then she said, “Why don’t you go to the base; they’re ten times busier than we are.”
“They usually don’t go to civilian airports. I’ve got to get to New Orleans.”
“You want to fly from this airport to New Orleans?”
“To wherever I can make a connection.”
“The only flight out is this evening to New York. Except a United charter coming in from Bermuda.”
“When?”
“Nine ten.”
“Then where’s it going?”
“Atlanta. But it doesn’t take passengers.”
“We’ll see,” Rensselaer said.
The woman was astonished. “Who are you,” she asked, “Admiral Dewey?”
“No ma’am, I’m Admiral Rensselaer,” he said—for the first time.
“That’s not what I see,” she insisted, looking at his insignia. It was a Navy town, and she knew.
“He was just promoted this morning,” Frearson told her, almost like a child.
“All right. Ask if you want. They won’t take you.”
As it happened . . . the captain of the United flight had been a Navy P-3 pilot, and his co-pilot had been the captain of an E2-C. One of the stewardesses welcomed Rensselaer aboard. “We’ve been in Brazil and Bermuda, so we missed the storm. As we flew in, it was amazing to see everything covered in such deep snow. You must have had such a hard time getting here.”
On the way to his seat, Rensselaer stopped, turned back to her, and smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I did.”
Sometimes, when music accompanies ordinary things, it brings out the music that is already within them. For example, a plane rising confirms—not just by the act of lifting into the air, but also—in the ratios and balances between its altitude, speed, and forward travel—relations that are musical in essence.
Frearson stood outside the terminal, in bright sun, the wind whipping the cuffs of his trousers, and as if in salute he shielded his eyes from the glare as he watched the plane race down the runway, increasing its speed until it gave itself to the air, rose up, and began a steady climb against a sky so deep and blue it pulsed against the eyes. The course of its travel and the line of its rise conformed like music to those underlying ratios of the heart that, though unseen, determine everything. And though unseen they leave their evidence in the fragile, quickly vanishing traces of friction when the world’s heartbreak is met with love and courage. Rensselaer’s flight rose upon the cold air as smoothly and steadily as a gull on the wind.
*
Anyone who thinks New Orleans is like the other parts of the United States has a lot to learn. Its elemental rules are very different from those it pretends to accept as they are imposed upon it from without. They may be suppressed from time to time, but like the Mississippi and the tides, they rise and they abide.
At Katy’s firm—born of the arrogant impositions and pressures of the “human resources” department, fear of lawsuits, and work/life columns in the newspapers—every woman had to answer one question, even were she unaware of it: to what will you look in determining the course of your life? Sudden fashions that invade relations between the sexes, or the impulse as old as life itself to court, to love, and to unite? What will you risk, what will you flout, and what will you endure to do so?
Perhaps the answer would have been different in New York or Los Angeles, but this was New Orleans, where logic and intoxication were often indistinguishable. Oblivious of all the bright and current lines, Katy’s suitors never ceased. They saw in her what Stephen had seen, and it was irresistible. All she had to do was speak, or turn and look at you, or change her expression, and it was endlessly electrifying, made even more so because she often doubted herself. When she did, her efforts at correction led to a mixture of magnificent daring and charming modesty, as if through mackerel clouds the sun were flashing light and shade.
She had rejected one suitor after another, but because she was so interesting, so alive, and so desirable, they persisted. Some came to resent and even hate her. But then they resumed. For her part, she was confused. Being honest, she couldn’t deny their virtues and good qualities—when they had them. And yet they were as exasperating as mosquitoes or oversexed adolescent boys. She wished they would leave her alone, but had they left her alone she would have thought that maybe she had crossed a line of age that, despite strenuous effort and subterfuges so often marshaled in vain, cannot be re-crossed.
She had no idea that on this cool and very dark day in January, Stephen was on the way to her. A low ceiling of almost black cloud hovered over the city as if supported by the unusually dry air beneath it. Strangely, at noon, offices and restaurants turned on their lights.
Every day, she looked at Navy Times on the internet, but Navy Times had withdrawn its stringer from the trial, and there was nothing. No news was comforting in that it announced yet another day when the hammer had yet to fall. Normally she checked just before she went home, so that in case of bad news she would not have to be in the office, and with no news she could sleep well that night. But today, for whatever reason, perhaps the cool and the dark, or because she was spurred from within, she called up Navy Times on her screen at two, just after she returned from lunch. Perhaps it was because she found the brief she was writing, on behalf of a video game company, profoundly distasteful.
At first she skipped right over the headline near the bottom of the page, but then she returned to it. Though she had rapidly passed by the story, she’d seen enough in a second or less to know what it said. Absent its stringer at the trial, Navy Times reported from the day before: conviction on two counts. It was as if, internally, she had fallen twenty storeys.
At that very instant, one of her bow-tied, Brooks-Brothered suitors appeared beyond the glass. Though it was on business, she savagely waved him away. For a moment, she stared at her desk, out of focus, and then she remembered that Stephen Rensselaer was a sailor, a soldier, that he went into battle not knowing if he would come out. So, with tightened jaw and narrowed eyes, her breathing deep, she disciplined herself. She would wait to hear from him, or, the next day, read the news. The two counts were capital offenses. This was now very much her battle as much as his, the age-old task of women who without recourse to action must wait and bear the news.
Paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, she continued with a brief. Her courage was as beautiful as she was. And somehow, though Stephen wasn’t aware of it, in the magic of things unseen it would serve to weld them together even more than before.
*
At six o’clock, waiting for the light on the southeast corner of Poydras and St. Charles, Stephen worried that he had missed her. Perhaps she had already gone home, or to swim, or to a client meeting. The streetcar stop on the northwest corner was crowded, and she wasn’t there. Usually, willing to pay the price of not getting a seat, she stood back on the steps that rose from the sidewalk to the elevated plaza, because she didn’t like being hemmed in by groups of people.
The traffic light was long, and when he wasn’t scanning north up St. Charles to see her approaching, he stared at the trees across the street. Their trunks were thick and dark, the ground around them dense with fern-like palms. He had yearned so much for this place, a symbol of what he wanted and what he loved, that in his memory the fence that cordoned off the trees and small palms from the sidewalk had been constructed of black, nineteenth-century wrought iron. He had seen it in his dreams and in the confused, effulgent darkness of nights at sea, when it is impossible to see, and the eyes create inchoate movement and texture out of nothing. He had pictured it so intensely that he even saw the rust where paint had become too old and worn to cling.
But the fence, though some kind of metal, was neither black nor spear-tipped but light-colored and of an unattractive, modernist design. He refused disappointment, and went with his memory, defiantly replacing what was there with what was better—to match the beauty of the trees beyond, of what he remembered, and of what could be. He wondered if he had done the same with his memory of Katy. He wondered if that of which he had dreamed so hard had been an illusion unfair to her and eventually heartbreaking for him. Then he crossed St. Charles, and waited, his eyes on the stop across Poydras.
He knew how hard she worked, that this was not ordinarily a swimming day, that she loved quiet and routine. Imagining again and again how she was when he had first seen her, he wanted now to be blessed to see her again in the same way—after so much, across oceans and seas, at such risk in far deserts under a different sun. And although he yearned for her such that he could hardly breathe, he hesitated for a moment, pondering if ever again he would be so close to the oceans and the stars that life and death seemed one and the same: lovely and exciting and easy to bear, full of light and silence in the eternal rhythm of waves in the oceans and in the air. The thing was, you couldn’t grasp them in their immensity and abstraction, but only by hints and in longing. They were always alluring and always out of reach. But in a woman these disparate and ineffable qualities were made real sufficiently to create life. It had taken him this long, but with the help of Athena he had understood that Katy herself, and Katy alone, was worth all the blue oceans and all the bright stars.
Then he saw the yellowish light of a streetcar jerking left and right as it headed south. The group of people waiting re-formed itself in expectation. Suddenly, a crowd of children and their teachers came racing down the steps of the elevated plaza to join the office workers. He hadn’t seen the school trip assembled there like a herd of gazelles. The streetcar would be packed, as it would already have passengers aboard when it arrived.
When it did arrive and opened its doors, no one got out. But among the first to get in was a figure unmistakable for her slim grace and elegance. She had been there all the time. Aware of the children, she knew that she wouldn’t have been able to get on if she waited apart and on the steps as usual. She was in a crisp, white, form-fitting dress shirt. The sun was now occasionally breaking through the clouds, and just before she got on, her hair caught the sunlight.
At first, Stephen was going to dash across Poydras, but he understood that too many people were waiting. She disappeared inside. Three long blocks south at Julia Street, some people always got out. If he boarded there, he would be able to find a place to stand even if next to the driver.
He had no luggage, only, under his left arm, his greatcoat. Hoping that the traffic light was as long as it had been before, he began to run south toward Julia Street. Though it was cool and dark for New Orleans even for late January, it was hot every time the low sun cracked the clouds, he had been wounded, he was out of shape, and he was in his dress blues. Running was difficult and taxing. A block down, he took off his hat and held it in his right hand. Behind him, he heard the sound of the steel wheels on the track, so he picked up speed.
He was in no condition to run. The doctors had said that at his age it would take six months to a year to recover fully, and that he had to be especially careful about sudden, peak exertion. But there was no question in his mind, even though he could have let the streetcar pass and then walked to Katy’s house, that he had to see her now.
He was thinking, Oh God, when she alights I want to hold her forever, but how long can we stand in the street? It didn’t matter that people might stare at them, because all was left behind, there was only the present, which as if with an explosion of light took the place of past and future and had become everything for the first time in his life, which had all led up to this.
His vision began to blur, and his heart pounded unsteadily as if in protest. But he kept up and even increased his pace. Long before, he had made peace with the fluid and timeless sea, where comfort is unneeded and unknown. Long before, he had understood that even in a ship full of men, at sea one is alone; that only a heart that has been broken can be full; and that even in every kind of unforgiving desert there is nonetheless infinite love always speaking, always apparent, always appealing. So he kept on running, and would not give up.
Katy was in the seat next to the window on the right side of the car. On her left was an extremely large man who, without intending to, made it such that she was pressed next to the wall of the streetcar so as not to be pressed against him. She tried to read a law review article about video game cases, but her heart was hardly in it. Nonetheless, she took refuge in looking down.
Halfway to Julia Street, something caught her eye. A man was running along the sidewalk. Automatically, she looked down again, but then quickly turned her head to look out. He was in naval dress blues, and in his right hand was an officer’s white cap. As if she were someone who has lost a love to death and imagines the sight of the lost one back from the dead, her heart leapt. But she caught herself, to avoid the pain of disappointment. This couldn’t be. It simply could not be. Still, she turned to look back as the streetcar passed him. Unable to see him, she was left only bewildered, her pulse rapid.
When the streetcar stopped at Julia Street, and people squeezed down the aisle, with many Excuse me’s, she was hardly breathing, and she didn’t dare take her eyes from the front. Then Stephen, flushed and expectant, rose on the steps.
No one quite understood why this woman, trapped in her seat, was crying, or why the naval officer, a rare sight in New Orleans and breathing as if he had just run a race, kept on saying, quietly, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” as she cried.
When the streetcar named St. Charles reached their stop, he went down, and waited. People filed past. She appeared near the driver, no longer in tears but so buoyant that she wondered if she would be able to descend the steps.
When she reached the second step from the bottom, he moved toward her, she took his hand, and she jumped down—like a young girl.