Willie Keith was on his way to New York in a plane. Captain Breakstone had advised the new commanding officer of the Caine to let him go. “He can have ten days, anyway, before the court starts,” the legal officer had told Lieutenant White over the phone. “Send the poor beggar off while the sending is good. God knows when he’ll ever be in the clear again.” Willie had asked for the leave for only one reason. He was going home to break with May.
In the last turbulent months he had advanced in his thinking about her to the point of realizing that his conduct toward her, even in their correspondence, was abominable. He still yearned for her. If the word “love” meant anything, and if the descriptions in novels and poetry of the emotion were accurate, he supposed he loved her. But he had a deep-seated, unshakable intuition that he would never depart from his up-bringing enough to marry her. It was a familiar old conflict in literature; and it was dreary and sad to find himself trapped in it in real life. But he understood now that the real victim of the situation was May, and he was determined to free her before the court-martial brought an unguessable new turn in his life. It no longer seemed possible to cut her off with a letter or with silence. He had to confront her, and take whatever pain and punishment she could inflict on him. It was a miserable errand on which he was embarked. He could hardly bear to think about it.
He tried to distract himself by talking to the bald fat literary agent beside him. His neighbor, however, was of the sleeping-pill school of air travel. For a while he cross-examined Willie to find out whether he had killed any Japs personally or earned any medals or been wounded; but he had already lost interest, and was pulling papers out of his portfolio, when the plane began to jolt and flutter in the air over the Rockies. Thereupon he produced a bottle of yellow capsules, swallowed three, and slumped unconscious. Willie wished he had brought along his phenobarbital. In the end he drew the curtains, pushed back his chair, closed his eyes, and lost himself in sickly revolving thoughts of the Caine.
There were a few dreams of childhood which Willie could never forget, one in particular, in which he had seen God as an enormous jack-in-the-box popping up over the trees on the lawn of his home and leaning over to stare down at him. The scene in the anteroom of the Com Twelve legal office, in his memory, had the same quality of unreal and painful vividness. There, before his shut eyes, were the green close walls; the bookcase full of fat regular legal volumes bound in brown and red; the single fluorescent light overhead, throwing a bluish glare; the ashtray full of butts beside him on the desk, sending up a stale smell; the “board of investigation,” a surly, thin little captain, his voice dry and sneering, his face the face of a nasty post-office clerk refusing a badly wrapped package.
How different it had all been from Willie’s picturings, how unfair, how quickly over; above all, how small-scale and dreary! He had seen himself as an actor in a grand drama. In the privacy of his room, in his dark bunk, he had whispered to himself, “the Caine mutiny, the Caine mutiny,” savoring the ring of the phrase, and imagining a long article in Time underneath that heading, greatly favorable to the heroic Maryk and Keith. He had even tried to envision Maryk’s face on the cover of the news magazine. He had anticipated confronting an array of admirals across a green-covered table, justifying his act with quiet poise, with irrefutable facts. The memory of one daydream made him writhe. He had seen himself, the true key figure of the mutiny, summoned to Washington by President Roosevelt for a private chat in his office, convincing the President that the Caine affair was exceptional, that it was no indication of low morale in the Navy. He had even planned, in answer to Roosevelt’s generous offer of restoration to any duty he chose, the simple reply, “Mr. President, I should like to return to my ship.”
This tangle of technicolor folly had possessed his mind all during the Lingayen campaign and the return trip to Pearl Harbor. The suicide attack had happened so quickly, and caused so little damage (he had not even seen the Japanese plane before it struck) that it had merely served to enhance his picture of Maryk, and himself, and all the officers of the Caine, as cool-headed heroes.
The magic had begun to dim in Pearl Harbor with the arrival of Captain White, a good-looking, bright lieutenant of the regular Navy, obviously a trouble-shooter. Maryk had shrunk in a day to a subservient dull exec. The adventurous excitement in the wardroom had subsided. All the officers had begun walking humbly again, and guarding their words. White was arid, cool, and efficient. He acted as though the relief of Queeg had never occurred. He handled the ship as well as Maryk from the first, and he attracted the immediate loyalty of the crew. Willie’s vision of the mutiny as a triumph of Reserve heroism over neurotic Academy stupidity languished; the Academy was back in charge, and master of the situation.
But Willie was still unprepared for the developments in San Francisco. He had never foreseen that the great Caine mutiny would be treated by the authorities as an irksome and not very pressing legal problem; that it would apparently mean little more to the legal office of Com Twelve than the pilfering of a truckload of lard. Days went by, while the ship rested in drydock, without any reaction to Captain White’s report. And when the investigation at last began, there were no admirals, no green table, no summons from the President. There was only a cross-examination by a little man in a little office.
Was it this distortion in scale, Willie wondered, that had turned his irrefutable facts into slippery, badly described anecdotes which discredited himself, not Queeg, more and more as he told them? Was it the hostility of the investigating officer? Stories which he had counted on to damn Queeg seemed to tell themselves as descriptions of his own disloyalty or ineptness. Even the water famine, one of Queeg’s grand crimes, sounded in his own ears like a prudent measure, and the crew’s water-bootlegging in the engine room a rebellious act abetted by incompetent officers. What he could not convey to the investigator was the terrible distress everybody had undergone. The captain regarded him fishily when he spoke of the heat and the stack gas, and finally said, “I’m sure you suffered unendurable hardships, Mr. Keith. Why didn’t you report the bootlegging to your commanding officer?” He knew he should have replied, “Because I considered him a coward and a lunatic—” but the answer that came out of his mouth was, “Well, er, nobody else did, so I didn’t see why I should.”
He remembered how he emerged from the interview with a terrible presentiment that he had hanged himself; a feeling which proved quite accurate. After the passing of five uneasy days he was summoned to the office of Captain Breakstone. The investigation report was placed in his hand. The cold blue-lined sheets felt horrible in his fingers before he began to read. He came to the words about himself with a sense of struggling in a nightmare; it was like reading a doctor’s report that he was dying:
Recommendation (3)
That Lieutenant (junior grade) Willis Seward Keith USNR be brought to trial by a general court-martial on the charge of making a mutiny.
Willie accepted the brutal prospect of a court-martial with his mind, but his heart was that of a frightened rabbit, looking about for succor with wide shining eyes. He knew that he was still Willie Keith, just the innocent, good-humored Willie whom everybody liked, Willie, who could delight people by sitting at a piano and playing If You Knew What the Gnu Knew. Impaled by a terrible accident on the spike of military justice, his virtue seemed to be leaking from him like air from a punctured tire; he felt himself flattening slowly to his old self of Princeton and the Club Tahiti. A thought which had not passed through his mind for years was murmuring up from his subconscious: “Mother will get me out of it.”
Supine in his tilted chair, his stomach straining against the tight safety belt each time the plane jounced, he spun a long morbid fantasy wherein his mother hired the country’s greatest lawyers to defend him, and the long-faced officers of the court-martial were confounded by the brilliant legal minds arrayed at his table. He invented lengthy sequences of testimony, and saw Queeg wriggling under the lash of cross-examination by a defense counsel who resembled Thomas E. Dewey. The dismal dream became queerer and less coherent; May Wynn came into it somehow, looking old and hard, her skin hideously blotchy. Willie fell asleep.
But the plane flew over the spiky buildings of Manhattan in a violet-and-pearl dawn, and Willie woke and his heart revived as he peered through the round little window. New York was the most beautiful place on earth. It was more than that. It was the Garden of Eden, it was the lost island of sweet golden springtime, it was the place where he had loved May Wynn. The plane tilted, and glided downward. The gold-white sun appeared above the eastern clouds, brightening the air with slant rays. As the plane wheeled Willie saw Manhattan again, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, Radio City, their lean shafts suddenly rosy above the purple haze which still veiled the city. There came into his mind’s eye the beach of Kwajalein, the wide blue vacancy of the South Pacific, the orange puffs of shore batteries on the green hills of Saipan, and the pitching drenched wheelhouse of the Caine in the shrieking typhoon. In that instant, Willie understood the war.
“Half an hour late,” grumbled the literary agent beside him, rasping shut the zipper of his portfolio.
When Willie stepped out of the plane to the gangway he was astounded by the feel of the frigid wind, cutting on his face, cutting in his lungs when he breathed it. He had forgotten what winter air was; and New York from the plane had looked deceptively springlike. He shivered inside his heavy bridge coat and pulled his white silk muffler closer around his throat. Coming down the steps, his breath smoking, he saw his mother waving gaily to him from behind a window of a waiting room. He ran across the strip of windy airfield. In a moment he was being violently kissed and hugged in the steam-heated room. “Willie, Willie, Willie! Oh, my dear, it’s so good to feel you close again!”
Willie’s first thought was, “How gray she is!” He was not sure whether it had happened in his absence, or imperceptibly before the war, and he was only now able to see it. Her red hair had dimmed to a nondescript grayish brown. “You look wonderful, Mother.”
“Thank you, darling! Let me take a good look at you—” Holding his arms, she leaned back and scrutinized him, her face alight with joy. She was both disturbed and pleased at what she saw. Her son had suffered a sea change. This sunburned face, with its flat cheeks, prominent nose, and heavy jaw, was half alien. It was Willie of course, her Willie, and the boyish bow of the mouth she thought was the same; but—“You’ve become a man, Willie.”
“Not quite, Mother,” said her son with a weary smile.
“You look so trim! How long can you stay?”
“I’m flying back Sunday morning.”
She hugged him again. “Five days! Never mind. I’ll enjoy it more than any five years I’ve ever lived.”
Willie told her very little during the drive homeward. He found himself minimizing the dangers of war and exaggerating the boredom, like all good tight-mouthed Americans in the movies. The more his mother pressed him for details the vaguer were his answers. He saw she wanted to be told that he had been snatched from the jaws of death innumerable times, and perversely he insisted that he had never been close to any real action. He was, in truth, a little disappointed at the absence of hair-raising escapes, or killings, or woundings, in his war record, now that he was back in the civilian world. It irritated him to be cross-examined. His natural impulse was to play up the true moments of danger, but an obscure shame prevented him from doing so. Taciturnity was a subtler and quite respectable form of boasting, and he made good use of it.
He had expected to enjoy real fireworks of nostalgia when he caught the first glimpse of his home; but the car turned into the driveway and rattled on the gravel up to the front door, and he merely stared stupidly at the brown lawn and bare trees. Inside the house was unchanged, but it seemed empty and still, and the pleasant aroma of frying bacon did not hide a pervading odor of camphor. The place smelled quite different than it had in the old days. He realized why almost immediately; there was no trace of cigar smoke. It had all aired out of the curtains and rugs and upholstery, long ago.
“I’ll shower before we eat, Mother.”
“Go ahead, Willie. I have plenty to do.”
He picked up a newspaper in the hallway and glanced at the headlines as he trotted upstairs; MacArthur Advances on Manila. He came into his room, and tossed aside the newspaper. A gear seemed to shift in his mind, and his old identity began to operate smoothly. He felt no strangeness, no sense of contrast or of vanished time, no particular gladness at seeing his old books and phonograph. He undressed, hanging his uniform among his suits. Only the heavy gush of water from the shower head surprised him. He was used to the jagged sparse spray of the Caine’s wardroom shower. The wonderful thick flow, the ease with which he could adjust the mixture hot and cold, seemed more luxurious to him than anything else in his home. On the Caine hot water was achieved by letting live steam into a half-clogged cold-water pipe. A small error in adjustment could boil one alive like seafood in a matter of seconds. More than once Willie had issued howling from a cloud of billowy steam.
On a whim, he took out his best tweeds, a beautiful soft tan suit which had cost two hundred dollars at Abercrombie and Fitch, and selected with fussy care a powder-blue wool tie, Argyle socks, and a white shirt with a buttoned-down collar. The trousers were too loose; the jacket struck him as overpadded and oversized. The tie seemed strangest of all when he knotted it, loud and effeminate, after two years of black ties. He looked at himself in the full-length mirror on the inside of his closet door. For an instant, his own face surprised him. He partly perceived the changes his mother had seen. He was concerned by a thinness of his hair at the forehead line. But the effect blurred even as he stared at himself; and it was just Willie again, looking tired and not very happy in loud clothes. He came downstairs, feeling clumsy and self-conscious, aware of the heavy pads on his shoulders.
He was hungry; and while his mother chattered happily about his handsome appearance he ate up a large platter of eggs and bacon, with several rolls. “You never drank coffee like this before,” said Mrs. Keith, filling his cup for the fourth time, and watching him with mixed anxiety and respect.
“I’m a fiend now.”
“You sailors are terrible.”
“Let’s go into the library, Mother,” he said, draining his cup.
A ghost was in the brown book-lined room, but Willie fought down his feelings of awe and sadness. He dropped into his father’s red leather armchair, selecting the sacred spot deliberately, disregarding his mother’s wan sorrowful loving look. He told her the story of the mutiny. She fell silent after a few shocked exclamations, and allowed him to talk for a long time. The light in the room dimmed as heavy gray clouds rolled over the morning sky, blotting out the sunshine on the empty flower beds outside. When Willie finished and looked at her face she regarded him steadily and puffed a cigarette.
“Well, what do you think, Mother?”
Mrs. Keith hesitated, and said, “What does—have you told May about it?”
“May doesn’t even know I’m in New York,” he said irritably.
“Aren’t you going to see her?”
“I guess I’ll see her.”
The mother sighed. “Well, all I can say is, Willie, this Old Yellowstain sounds like an abominable monster. You and the executive officer are perfectly innocent. You did the right thing.”
“The doctors say different.”
“You wait and see. The court will acquit your executive officer. They won’t even try you.”
His mother’s blind optimism did not comfort Willie. On the contrary, it annoyed him exceedingly. “Well, Mother, not that I blame you, but you don’t know much about the Navy, that’s obvious.”
“Maybe not. Have you decided anything about May, Willie?”
Willie didn’t want to answer, but he was cross, and nervous; and telling the mutiny story had shaken his self-control. “Well, this will probably please you very much. I decided that it wouldn’t work. I’ve given it up.”
The mother nodded slightly, and looked down at her lap, appearing to suppress a smile. “In that case, Willie, why are you going to see her? Wouldn’t it be kinder not to?”
“I can’t just ignore her, Mother, like a whore I once spent a night with.”
“You’ve picked up a little Navy language, Willie.”
“You don’t know Navy language.”
“It’s just that you’ll be letting yourself in for a pointless, agonizing scene—”
“May’s entitled to her scene.”
“When are you going to see her?”
“Tonight, if I can. I thought I’d call her now—”
Mrs. Keith said, with doleful amusement, “You see, I’m not so dumb. I’m having the family over tomorrow night. I imagined tonight would be taken.”
“It’ll be the only night. You’ll be all clear on the next four.”
“Darling, if you think I’m happy about this you’re mistaken. I share all your pain—”
“Okay, Mother—”
“Someday, Willie, I’ll tell you all about a man I didn’t marry, a very handsome and attractive and worthless man, who’s still alive.” And Mrs. Keith blushed a little, and looked out of the window.
Willie stood. “I’ll make my call, I guess.”
The mother came, put her arm around him, and leaned her head on his shoulder. Willie submitted. Outside a few thick flakes of snow drifted down through the black branches of the trees. “Darling, don’t worry about your court-martial. I’ll talk to Uncle Lloyd. He’ll know what to do. Believe me, nobody’s going to punish you for doing such a fine, daring thing.”
Willie went to his mother’s bedroom, took the extension telephone from the bedside table, and plugged it into the jackbox in his own room. He called the candy store in the Bronx. While he was waiting for an answer, he shoved the door shut with his foot. “May Wynn’s not home,” said a flat, vulgar voice, a woman with a foreign accent. “Try Circle 6-3475.”
He called the other number. “Hotel Woodley, good morning,” said the operator.
Willie knew the Woodley well: a shabby theatrical hotel on Forty-seventh Street. “May Wynn, please.”
“Miss Wynn? One moment.” There followed several repeated buzzes, and at last, “Hello?” But it was not May’s voice. The voice was masculine.
“I’m trying to get Miss May Wynn’s room,” Willie said, with a horrid qualm.
“This is May’s room. Who’s calling?”
“My name is Willie Keith.”
“Willie! Well, for Christ sake! This is Marty Rubin, Willie, how the hell are you? Where are you?”
“I’m home.”
“Home? Where? San Francisco?”
“I’m out on Long Island. Where’s May?”
“She’s here. This is terrific. Listen, Willie, did she know you were coming? She never said a word—Just a second, I’ll get her up—”
The pause was a long one. “Hello! Willie!”
“Hello, May. Sorry I woke you up—”
“Honey, don’t be silly. I—I can’t believe it! When did you get in?”
Willie had always disliked the threadbare “honey” of show-business chatter, and it grated on him especially when May used it, and more especially at this moment. Her voice was muffled and high, as it usually was when she had just awakened. “Flew in about an hour ago.”
“Why didn’t you let me know, honey? Gosh—”
“I thought I’d surprise you.”
“I am surprised. I’m flabbergasted.” There was a silence which was very dreadful to Willie. “Well, honey, when am I going to see you?” she said.
“Any time you want to.”
“Oh, dear. Darling, you couldn’t have picked a worse day. I have the grippe or some damn thing, and—we might have lunch—no, wait, there’s something else—Marty, when are we cutting that damned audition record? When can I get away?… Not till then?… Oh, Willie, it’s such a mess! There’s this radio show I have to cut a record for—it has to be today—I’ve been doping myself to try to get in some kind of shape—Marty, honey can’t we call it off?… Oh, Willie, you should have let me know—”
“Forget the whole thing. Don’t get upset,” Willie said, glaring at himself in the mirror of the closet door. “See you tomorrow, maybe.”
“No, no! Honey, I’ll be through around three—when, Marty?—three-thirty, Willie—meet me in the Brill Building, can you do that?”
“What and where is the Brill Building?”
“Oh, Willie. The Brill Building. Hell, I keep forgetting you’re not a song plugger. Well, you know, across the street from the Rivoli—the big gray building—listen, it’s the Sono-phono Studios, can you remember that? Sono-phono.”
“Okay. Three-thirty. I’ll be there. Don’t you go to school any more?”
“Oh.” May’s voice became apologetic. “That. I’m afraid I’ve been playing hooky. I’ll tell you all about it.”
“See you later.”
“Yes, honey.”
Willie slammed the receiver so hard that the telephone went clattering off the table to the floor. He took off his civilian clothes, leaving them in a rumpled heap on a chair, and dressed in his uniform. He had two caps, a fairly new one, and the cap he always wore at sea, the gold trim of which was tarnished dull green. He selected the old cap and put a fresh cover on it, which set off more strikingly the tarnish of the ornaments.
The glory of Manhattan which Willie had seen from the airplane was nowhere visible at Broadway and Fiftieth Street when he came up out of the subway. It was the same old dirty crowded corner: here a cigar store, there an orange-drink stand, yonder a flickering movie marquee, everywhere people with ugly tired faces hurrying in a bitter wind that whirled flapping newspapers and little spirals of dry snow along the gutters. It was all as familiar to Willie as his hand.
The reception room of the Sono-phono Studios, some seven feet square, consisted of plasterboard walls, a plasterboard door in back, a green metal desk, and a very ugly receptionist with a plasterboard complexion, chewing a large was of pink gum. “Yeah? What can I do for you?”
“I’m meeting May Wynn here.”
“She ain’t through. You can’t go in, they’re on mike.”
Willie sat in the single yellow chair, opening his muffler and bridge coat. The receptionist glanced at his ribbons, counted the stars, and threw him an unsettling flirtatious leer. From behind the plasterboard he heard a man’s voice, “Okay. Let’s make this the master now.” A small orchestra struck up, and then Willie heard her voice:
“Don’t throw
Bo—kays at me—”
At once the heat and shabbiness of the Caine wardroom, and the hopeless hatred of Queeg, rushed into his mind, most incongruously mingled with sweet stirrings of his early love for May. An immense black sadness overcame him as the song went on. When it ended Marty Rubin opened the door and said, “Hi, Willie! Great to see you! Come on in!”
He was fatter than ever. His green suit was ill-chosen for his yellowish skin, and his tinted glasses were so thick that his eyes were distorted behind them to dots. He shook the lieutenant’s hand. “You look marvelous, kid!”
May stood at the microphone, talking to two men in shirt sleeves. The musicians were packing their instruments. The studio was a bare room cluttered with cables and recording machines. Willie halted uncertainly inside the door. “He’s here, May!” the agent called. She turned, ran to Willie, put an arm around his neck, and kissed him on the cheek.
“We’ll get out of here in a few seconds, darling,” she whispered. Willie stood with his back to the doorway, getting hotter in his heavy coat, while the girl talked for ten minutes with the agent and the men in shirt sleeves.
“I want a drink,” May said, when they were alone at a table in the deserted upstairs room of Lindy’s, “and then I want some breakfast.”
“You’re keeping queer hours—What’s that?” he said as May popped a white pill into her mouth.
“Aspirin. Feel my forehead.” Her skin was hot. Willie looked at her with concern. She was haggard, her hair was carelessly pinned up on her head, and there were blue shadows under her eyes. She grinned sadly and a little defiantly. “I’m a mess, I know. You picked a great time to fall out of the sky, dear.”
“You ought to be in bed, May.”
“Bed is for those who can afford it—Well, tell me all about the war.”
Instead Willie questioned her about herself. She was singing at a Fifty-second Street club, her first job in several weeks. Her father had been ill for half a year, and the fruit store, managed by her mother alone, was earning nothing. May was supporting the family. She had taken a room in a downtown hotel because she feared the long subway rides at night would give her pneumonia. “I’m kind of run down, Willie. School and night-club singing don’t mix too well, after all. Sleep generally gets lost in the shuffle. I pass out on subways, in classes—it’s awful.”
“Are you giving up school?”
“No, no. I cut a lot of classes, that’s all. I don’t care. I don’t want to be a Phi Bete. I just want to pick up some information. Let’s talk French. I can talk French. Avez-vous le crayon de ma tante?”
She laughed. Her eyes seemed wild to Willie, and her expression was opaque. May drank off her coffee. “I’ve found out two things about my singing, Willie. First of all I haven’t much talent—I really know that now—and secondly most of the other girl singers have even less. I can always scratch a living—until I become a hag, that is. Which, at the rate I’m going, will be next Tuesday. I’ll tell you what. Let’s go up to my room. I can lie down while we talk. I still have to sing tonight. Did I tell you that you are three times as good-looking as you used to be? You look more like a wolf than a bunny, now.”
“You seemed to like the bunny—”
“Well, a wolf-like bunny is more nearly right. I think I’m a little loopy, dear. A martini before the first meal of the day is not a good idea. I must remember that. Let’s go.”
In the taxicab she suddenly kissed him on the mouth. He smelled the gin. “Do I utterly disgust you?” she said.
“What kind of question—”
“Sick, tacky—look at this dress, of all dresses I had to put on this thing—mixed up with crummy musicians in a crummy studio—we are star-crossed lovers, Willie. See, I told you I’d learn to read and write. Star-crossed lovers. Come, gentle night, give me my Willie. And when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night. Did you think I was living with Marty Rubin, dear, by any chance?”
Willie’s face flushed. “All this on one martini?”
“And a temperature of, I would say, 101.8. We’ll take it when we get home, just to check. Really, though, I don’t call that very good luck. You telephone me after coming halfway round the world and a man answers. Star-crossed wires. If Shakespeare answers, hang up.”
The taxi swerved sharply around a corner and she leaned against him. The smell of her hair was the same; sweet, exciting. His arm tightened around her. Her body was thinner than he remembered. She said, “Darling, tell all the little lieutenants on the Caine never to surprise their girls. Tell them to give their girls plenty, plenty of warning, so that they can get the men out of their apartments, and rest up for a week, and go to a beauty parlor, and work over all their little stupid bags of tricks. I am terribly impressed by your battle stars, Willie. You were never hurt, were you, sweet?”
“Not even close—”
“Do you know something? I have a slave. Real slave. Name of Marty Rubin. He has never heard of the Emancipation Proclamation. See the advantage of a college education! Promise me you won’t tell him that Lincoln freed the slaves. Uncle Tom Rubin. I think I’d be dead if not for him, or have a couple of parents in the poorhouse, anyway. Wow! Home so soon?”
Her apartment was a wretched little room on a dark areaway. The bedcover, the rug, the chairs were worn to the gray threads, and paint hung in patches on the ceiling. She closed the door and kissed him passionately. “You’re as big as a bear in that coat. Not bad for three dollars, this room, is it? Special favor to Marty that they let me have it. Sorry, there’s no bathroom. Down the hall. Well, first of all, let’s see about the good old temperature. Maybe I don’t have to get into bed. Here, read my book of fame.”
She watched him drolly, the thermometer pressed between her lips, while he turned over the leaves of the scrapbook. It was full of one-paragraph clippings. Featured on a page by itself, with an arc of gold stars pasted over it, was a long fulsome write-up, including a picture of May, from the New York Daily News. May Wynn Latest Threat to Dinah Shore, it was headed.
“I’d hate to tell you what I had to do to get that,” May said through her teeth, biting the thermometer. She added, “Not what you’re thinking, however, from your expression.” Willie hastily changed his expression with an effort of his face muscles. “Well, now, let’s see.” May held up the thermometer toward the window. “Why, not bad at all. Mere 101.2. Let’s go horseback riding in Central Park.”
“You get into bed. I’m going to call a doctor—”
“Now, dear, don’t go rushing around making kettles of hot water and bathing your arms to the elbows. I’ve seen a doctor. I’m supposed to rest and take aspirin. The question is, what’s the schedule? When do you have to go home to your mother?”
“The night is ours.” Willie sounded insulted.
“Oh? That’s wonderful.” She came to him and put her arms around his neck. “Is it all right if I lie down, then? We can have a nice old chat—and I’ll be all bright and beautiful for the evening.”
“Of course.”
“Well, then, you look out of the window for a minute. It’s a gorgeous view.” Willie obeyed. On the window sill across the air shaft, three feet away, were two bottles of milk, a tomato, and a package of butter, surrounded by little ridges of snow. The brick wall was black with grime. Behind him he heard quick feminine rustlings.
“All right, dear. Come and sit by me.” May’s dress and stockings were draped on a chair, and she was propped up on the bed, under the covers, in a gray rough bathrobe. She smiled wanly. “Hedy Lamarr, all set up for the seduction scene.”
“Darling,” Willie said, sitting and taking her cold hand, “I’m sorry I came at such a bad time—sorry I didn’t let you know—”
“Willie, you’re not half as sorry as I am. Only it’s done, and there’s no help for it.” She clasped his hand between hers. “Dearest, I know you must have pictured me in a warm pink vacuum at home, writing you letters, and reading yours over a thousand times, and otherwise in a state of suspended animation. But that isn’t what happens. Fathers get pleurisy, and stockings get holes in them, and I have to scratch for cash, and fellows make passes at me—which I can’t even get too mad about because it proves I still have a stock in trade—but I’ve really been a pretty good girl.” She looked up at him with shy weary eyes. “I even pulled a B-minus average on the mid-years. Got an A in Lit.”
“Look, why don’t you sleep? You knocked yourself out at that audition—”
“Which was a bust—I couldn’t even see straight, waiting for you to show up—”
“Do you have to work tonight?”
“Yes, dear. Every night except Monday, the contract says—if Mama and Papa and May are going to eat—a lot of girls are just dying to substitute—”
“Why didn’t you let me know you were in trouble? I have money—”
A look of fear came over May’s face. She pressed his palm. “Willie, I’m no charity case—maybe I’m overplaying the scene, trying to cover up for looking so ratty. I’m in fine shape financially and every other way—I just have a lousy cold, see—haven’t you ever had a cold?” She began to cry, pressing his hand against her eyes. Warm drops trickled down his fingers. He held her close, and kissed her hair. “Maybe I’d better sleep. I am really shot,” she said, in a low dry voice, her eyes hidden against his hand, “if I stoop to turning on the tears.” She looked up at him and smiled. “What would you like to read? Troilus and Cressida? The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard in French? Trevelyan’s History of England? They’re in that pile on the table—”
“I’ll take care of myself. You turn in.”
“Why don’t you go out and catch a movie? Better than sitting around in this mousehole, listening to me snore—”
“I’ll stay here.” He kissed her.
She said, “This is wrong. You’ll catch God knows what plagues.”
“Go to sleep.”
“Some home-coming. A weepy, drunken, jabbering sweetheart, passing out on you in a roach trap—” May slid down into the bed, and closed her eyes, murmuring, “I have amazing powers of recuperation. Wake me at seven-thirty. You may have to dump over the bed, but get me up. I’ll surprise you—just pretend we’re meeting for the first time at seven-thirty—” She was asleep in a minute, her hair tumbled loosely, dark red on the white pillow. Willie looked for a long time at the pallid face smudged with lipstick. Then he took up Troilus and Cressida, opened it at random, and began to read. But as soon as he struck a speech about love, halfway down the page, his mind wandered off.
He was quite fixed now in his decision to break with May. Seeing her again had confirmed it. He was certain it was right. He estimated himself, as truthfully as he could and with no great pride in the result, as a rather mediocre middle-class intellectual. His ambition went no further than the life of a gentleman-professor at a gentlemanly university. He wanted a life upholstered with the good things that money bought, and that meant his mother’s or his wife’s money, not university money. He wanted a wife, in the dim future, of his own kind, smooth, sweet, pretty, and educated, with all the small graces of good background and a moneyed family. May Wynn was bright, yes, unbearably attractive, maybe, though not at this moment. She was also vulgar, brassy, and overperfumed in the show-business way, and she had allowed him all sorts of liberties from the first, and had slept with him. She seemed a little soiled to him, a little cheap; and in every way jagged and wrong for his planned future. And she was a Catholic. May’s disclaimer of any devotion to her faith had not convinced Willie. He was inclined to believe the general notion that Catholics never wholly abandon their religion and are capable of sudden great plunges back into it. He was very unwilling to complicate his life and the lives of his children with such a disturbing possibility.
Whether all this might have been swept away had he come back to a girl triumphant and gorgeous, the star of a hit musical comedy, it is impossible to say. He was at her bedside now in a shabby room in a dirty hotel, and she was sick and messy and broke. The schoolbooks made her seem more pathetic, not more desirable. She had made a bid to reform herself nearer to his tastes, and it had been a feeble failure. It was all finished.
She was sleeping with her mouth open, and her breath came quick, irregular, and noisy. The gray bathrobe had pulled open, uncovering her bosom. The sight made Willie uncomfortable. He pulled the blanket to her chin, and slumped in the armchair, and dozed.
“Am I seeing things?” said Willie, when the cab pulled up in front of the Grotto Club. “Where’s the Tahiti? Where’s the Yellow Door? Isn’t this where—”
“This place used to be the Yellow Door,” said May. “The Tahiti is gone. That Chinese restaurant used to be the Tahiti. Nothing lasts long on this godforsaken street.”
“What happened to Mr. Dennis?”
“Died,” May said, stepping out into the bitter dusty night wind.
She had been subdued and listless through dinner; and listlessly she waved at Willie as she vanished from his sight through the dressing-room curtain. He was amazed when she came out to sing half an hour later. She was fresh-faced and radiant. The customers, crowded in the smoky cellar between narrow walls of papier-mâché rocks interspersed with tanks of gloomy gray fish, listened in silence, and applauded loudly after each number. She acknowledged the applause with gleaming eyes and a genuine girlish smile, and sang on. She performed five numbers with undimming verve, gathered her full green skirt, and swept off the little stage as bouncily as a gymnast. “How does she do it?” he said to Rubin, who had arrived midway in the act, and was pressed beside him on the wall seat behind an infinitesimal table.
“Well, you ought to know, Willie, the show must go on. She’s a pro. The customers aren’t paying any less for their beer because May has a cold.”
May came to their table with a yellow gauzy shawl around her throat and a black velvet jacket over her shoulders. Rubin rose and kissed her cheek. “Honey, maybe you ought to have colds more often. You’re really putting out tonight.”
“I feel fine—Think I’m any better, Willie?”
“You’re wonderful, May—”
“Don’t lay it on, I’ll know you’re lying—Where are you sneaking off to, Marty?”
“I have other clients. Get her to bed after the two o’clock show, Willie.”
Willie sat on the little hard seat for five hours, talking to May or listening to her sing. Customers came and went, but it almost seemed that the departing ones handed their faces to the newcomers at the door to wear, so much alike did they all look. The air grew staler and the crowd noisier, and the fish in the tanks sank to the bottom and lay motionless, gaping and goggling in the slime. All charm had departed out of night-club surroundings for Willie. To earn a living amid such fusty make-believe struck him as a worse fate, even, than perpetual steaming on the Caine.
He told May nothing of the mutiny, though he took pleasure in making her laugh and gasp at stories of Queeg. She had recuperated startlingly. Her manner was bright and lively, and in the cellar gloom, with her make-up, she seemed rosily healthy. But Willie had been too scared in the afternoon by her appearance to feel free with her. The evening went by in restrained, good-humored, evasive chatter. May accepted his tone and followed it.
When they came into her squalid room back at the hotel, it was a quarter to three. Willie was suppressing yawns, and his eyes smarted. Without a word they took off their coats, lay on the bed, and kissed hungrily and wildly for a few minutes. Her forehead, her hands, felt hot to Willie’s lips, but he went on kissing her anyway. At last with a common impulse, they slowed and stopped. She looked him full in the face, her eyes shining in the dim light of the floor lamp.
“Willie, we’re all washed up, aren’t we?”
It is the worst question in the world. Willie didn’t have to answer. The answer was on his miserable face. May said, “Then why are we doing this?”
“You’re right, as usual. I am a swine. Let’s stop.”
“No. I still love to kiss you, unfortunately.” And she kissed him again, several times. But the spoken words had snapped the sweetness. They sat up, and Willie went to the armchair. “If only I hadn’t had a cold,” May said dolefully.
“May! May! This afternoon made no difference—it’s just the kind of guy I am—”
“Darling, you don’t know. It might have made all the difference in the world. Nobody loves a sick cat. However, it’s all past history. It was an uphill struggle. Your letters were bad—”
“What can I say, May? You’re the most wonderful girl I’ll ever know—”
“Strangely enough, that’s the truth. For you, I am. Only you’re too young, or you love your mother too much, or something.” She rose, and opened the zipper of her dress in an absent-minded way; went to her closet and changed into her bathrobe, not troubling to hide herself. The glimpse of her young body in the clinging slip was very painful to Willie. He wanted to gather her in his arms as he wanted to breathe, and he knew that it was absolutely impossible now. She faced him, her hands deep in the pockets of her robe. There was a tremor of uncertainty and pain about her eyes and mouth. “It’s all quite definite, I suppose?”
“Yes, May.”
“You don’t love me?”
“It’s all mixed up and lousy, May. Talking won’t help it—”
“Maybe, but I’d like to tie up the bundle all neat and proper before I throw it into the cellar. If you don’t love me, that does it, of course. You kiss as though you love me. Explain that.”
Willie was unable to say that he loved May’s mouth, but not enough to drag her through life with him—though that would have been putting it in the simplest terms. “I don’t know what love is, May. It’s a word. You’ll always be the image of desire for me. That’s a fact, but there’s more to life than that. I don’t think we’d be happy together. Not because of any lack in you. Call me a snobbish prig and let it go at that. Everything that’s wrong between us is wrong with me—”
“Is it because I’m poor, or dumb, or Catholic, or what? Can’t you put it in words, so I’ll know?”
There is only one way to get off this particular kind of griddle. Willie looked at the floor and said nothing, while long seconds of silence ticked off. Every second brought another stab of hot shame and embarrassment, and his self-respect gushed out of the wounds. May managed to say at last, in an unembittered tone, though a shaky one, “Well, all right, Willie. It must be a load off your mind, anyway.” She opened a drawer in a peeling, dirty bureau, and took out a bottle and a pillbox. “I’m going down the hall to doctor myself. I won’t be long. Want to wait?”
“May—”
“Dear, don’t look so tragic. It’s not world-shaking. We’re both going to live.”
Willie, hardly aware of what he was doing, picked up Troilus and Cressida and read a couple of pages. He started guiltily when May came in, and put the book aside. Her eyes were red, and with her make-up removed, she was very pale. She smiled slightly. “Go right on reading, dear. Give me a cigarette though. I haven’t dared to smoke all day, thought my throat would close up.” She took an ashtray to the bed and lay back against the cushions with a sigh. “Ah, that tastes wonderful. Temperature, by the way, is down. Just a little over a hundred. Nothing like night-club air for what ails you…. What are you going to do after the war, Willie? Going back to piano playing?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You shouldn’t. I think you should teach.”
“ ‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach’—eh?”
“The world couldn’t exist without teachers. It just seems right for you. I can see you in a university town, leading a nice quiet life, plugging Dickens faithfully as the years slip by—”
“Sounds heroic, doesn’t it?”
“Willie dear, everyone does what he can do best. You talked me into wanting to read. It was quite an achievement.”
“Well, I’ve thought of it, May. It would mean going back to school for a year—”
“Your mama will certainly see you through, won’t she?… Especially now.” May yawned like an animal. “Sorry, dear—”
Willie stood. “I don’t blame you for being bored with me—and you must be dead—”
“Oh, sit down. I’m not bored with you, and I’m not angry at you.” She yawned again, covered her mouth, and laughed. “Isn’t it silly? I ought to be wailing and tearing my hair. My energy must be all out. Willie, I’ve gotten pretty used to this idea, really. I had a little hope at San Francisco—at Yosemite, I mean—but not after you talked to your mother and sent me home. However, it’s done me no harm to have someone to be true to—”
“May—I know what Yosemite meant to you—to me—”
“Now, dear, I didn’t bring it up to torture your conscience. We both meant well. I was trying to trap you, I guess. I don’t know. I’ll have to take some psychology courses to figure myself out—”
“My mother doesn’t hate you, May—it isn’t her doing—”
“Willie sweetheart,” said May, with a little tired sharpness. “I know exactly, but exactly, how your mother feels about me. Stay off that ground.”
They talked some more, not much. She came to the door with him and kissed him affectionately. “You’re very, very good-looking, all the same,” she whispered.
“I’ll call you tomorrow, May. Keep well.” He rang for the elevator. She stood in the doorway, looking at him. When the elevator door was opened by a Negro in shirt sleeves, she suddenly said, “Will I see you any more?”
“Sure. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Good night.”
“Good-by, Willie.”
He did not call her the next day, nor the day after that, nor the day after that. He went to matinees with his mother, to dinner with his mother, to shows at night with his mother; he visited the family with his mother. When Mrs. Keith urged him to go out by himself he glumly declined. One afternoon he went to Columbia and took a solitary walk through Furnald Hall. The incessant salutes of baby-faced midshipmen in khaki at first flattered, then depressed him. Nothing had changed in the lobby. Here was the leather couch on which he had told his father of his forty-eight demerits; there was the phone booth where he had talked to May a hundred times—and there was the knot of impatient midshipmen outside it as always, and inside was the youngster with a crew haircut crooning and giggling into the telephone. Dead lost time hung in the air. Willie hurried out of the building—it was midafternoon, gray and windy, and his mother would not be at the restaurant for a couple of hours—and so he went into a dim, shabby, empty bar on Broadway, and rapidly drank four scotch and sodas, which only seemed to make him a little dizzy.
His Uncle Lloyd joined them for dinner at Twenty-one. A banker in civilian life, he was now a colonel in Army public information, and he liked to talk about his experiences in the artillery in World War I. He was very grave about the mutiny. He told Willie long stories to prove how in the artillery he had had much worse commanding officers than Queeg, and had always conducted himself with true martial forbearance and loyalty. It was clear that he disapproved of Willie and thought he was in serious trouble. Mrs. Keith pressed him for a promise to help her son, but Uncle Lloyd only said he would talk to some of his Navy friends and see what the best procedure would be.
“Maybe they won’t court-martial you after all, Willie,” he said. “If this other fellow, this Maryk fellow, gets himself acquitted I guess that’ll be the end of it. I hope you’ve learned your lesson by this time. War isn’t a pink tea. Unless you can learn to take the rough with the smooth, why, you’re just not worth a damn to your country in an emergency.” So saying he departed for Washington, where he maintained a suite at the Shoreham.
Saturday night Willie was in his room, dressing to go to the opera. His eye fell on his wrist watch, and he realized that in twelve hours he would be on an airplane, returning to the Caine and the court-martial. His arm reached around stiffly, like a lever in an automatic phonograph, and picked up the telephone. He called the Woodley.
“May? How are you? It’s Willie.”
“Hello, dear! I’d given you up—”
“Is your cold better?”
“All gone. I’m in fine shape.”
“I’m going back tomorrow morning. I’d like to talk to you.”
“I’m working tonight, Willie—”
“May I come to the club?”
“Sure.”
“It’ll be around midnight.”
“All right.”
It had never seemed possible to Willie that Don Giovanni could be tedious. The opera had always been a wonderland of sound in which time stopped and the world dissolved in pure beauty. On this night he thought Leporello was a coarse clown, the baritone a scratchy-throated old man, Zerlina a screechy amateur, and the whole plot a bore. He strained his eyes at his watch in the middle of his favorite arias. At last it was done. “Mother,” he said as they came out of the lobby to the slushy street, “do you mind if I go on the town by myself for a while? I’ll see you back home.”
Her face showed how well she understood, and how worried she was. “Willie—our last night?”
“I won’t be late, Mother.” He felt able to stuff her bodily into a taxicab if she argued. She must have known, because she signaled for a cab herself.
“Have a wonderful time, dear.”
May was singing when he came into the crowded Grotto. He stood at the bar, looking around at the admiring male faces turned at the singer, his soul full of bitterness. There was no place to sit when the show was over. She took him by the hand and led him to her dressing room. The glare of light in the hot, closetlike room made him blink. He leaned against the make-up table. May sat in the chair and looked up at him, glowing with an unfathomable sweet inner attraction, all different from her outside of rouge and white shoulders and round bosom half exposed by her tight singer’s dress.
“I didn’t tell you about something last time,” Willie said. “I want to know what you think.” He described the mutiny and the investigation to her in long detail. It felt like confessing; his spirit brightened as he talked. May listened calmly. “What do you want me to say, Willie?” she said when he was finished.
“I don’t know, May. What do you think of it? What shall I do? What’s going to happen?”
She heaved a long sigh. “Is that why you came tonight? To tell me about that?”
“I wanted you to know about it.”
“Willie, I don’t know much about the Navy. But it doesn’t seem to me you have to do anything. The Navy is a pretty smart outfit. They won’t condemn any of you for trying to save your ship. At worst, you made a well-meaning mistake of judgment. That isn’t a crime—”
“It was mutiny, May—”
“Oh, hell. What do you think you are, Fletcher Christian? Did you chain Queeg up and set him adrift in a boat? Did you pull knives and guns on him? I think he was crazy, whatever the doctors say—nutty as a fruitcake. Willie dear, you couldn’t mutiny—not even against your mother, let alone a ship’s captain—”
They both laughed a little. Though May’s verdict was the same as his mother’s, it filled Willie with hope and good cheer, whereas Mrs. Keith’s opinion had seemed emotional and stupid. “Okay, May. I don’t know why I had to load you down with my miseries—Thanks.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Seven o’clock in the morning.”
May rose, and slipped the bolt on her door. “Noisiest musicians in the world work here.” She came to Willie and put her arms around him. They exchanged a fearfully long, blind wild kiss. “That’s all,” May said, pushing herself out of his arms. “Remember it the rest of your life. You’ll have to go. I find it hurts to have you around.” She opened the door; Willie walked out and threaded through the jostling dancers to the street.
He still had not the slightest understanding of why he had really come; he blamed himself for a late flare of desire crudely masked as a need for advice. He had no way of recognizing the very common impulse of a husband to talk things over with his wife.
Next day his plane left on schedule, in a sunny morning. His mother waved bravely from the sight-seer’s boardwalk as the plane took to the air. Willie stared down at the buildings of Manhattan, trying to find the Hotel Woodley; but it was lost among the dingy piles of midtown.