1
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
JUNE 15, 1942
 
Lieutenant Commander Edwin H. Bitter returned to the United States aboard the Swedish passenger liner Kungsholm. The Kungsholm was then engaged in returning diplomatic and civilian personnel of the various belligerent powers to their homelands. Its last voyage in this capacity had been to Japan, carrying among others a hundred Japanese of American citizenship who preferred Japan to detention in the camps established for them in Arizona and elsewhere.
The Swedish ambassador to the Empire of Japan then received Japanese permission to charter the vessel to the United States for service as a hospital ship. On instructions from Berlin, the German ambassador supported the Swedish request. The German Foreign Ministry believed that Germany might require similar services at some time in the future. The German request overcame reluctance from some quarters in the Japanese Foreign Ministry.
The Kungsholm—floodlights illuminating the huge red crosses painted on its white hull—steamed under the Golden Gate Bridge and docked at the Treasure Island Naval Base in San Francisco Bay. Most of the Navy and Marine Corps personnel aboard were transferred immediately to a hospital train for transportation to the Navy hospital in San Diego. But since Lieutenant Commander Bitter was ambulatory—he required a cane—he was driven to the Alameda Naval Air Station in a Navy station wagon.
After a complete physical examination he was given an interim classification of “convalescent” and a partial pay, then ordered to report to the Great Lakes Naval Station. He was told he would be given a fourteen-day convalescent leave to his home of record, and that a reservation priority had been authorized for a roomette aboard a train to Chicago the next day.
Bitter arrived in the United States wearing Army-issue khakis with an Army major’s golden oak leaf on each collar point. There had been no Navy-size (smaller) rank insignia available in Calcutta.
As soon as he could, he went to the officers’ sales store and outfitted himself with uniforms off the rack. These would do for the time being. When he left for the Orient a year before, he had sent most of his Navy uniforms from Pensacola Naval Air Station, where he had been stationed with Dick Canidy, to his parents’ home in Chicago.
He bought two sets of khaki tunics, trousers, and shirts; two sets of khaki shoulder boards (two white, two blue); and the appropriate metal insignia of rank. He purchased golden Naval Aviator’s wings to replace the set he had taken to China. They had been either misplaced or stolen.
The clerk had never heard of the Order of the Cloud Banner, so he could not buy a ribbon to represent that. And he was further disappointed when he realized that since he’d gotten his wound while he was in Chinese service, it did not qualify him for the Purple Heart medal. The clerk told him, however, that anybody with ninety days’ service in the Pacific was entitled to a Pacific Theater ribbon, but Bitter decided he wasn’t entitled to that either, since he did not have ninety days’ U.S. Navy service in the Far East. He also did not choose to wear the single ribbon everyone in the service was entitled to, the American Defense Service Medal. Finally, he pinned his American Volunteer Group wings above the right breast pocket and his Navy wings above the left, where regulations prescribed they should be worn.
When he examined himself in the mirror, he was pleased with what he saw. It was good to be back in a Navy uniform, and he thought that the AVG wings would more than make up to anyone who knew what they were—and he didn’t really care about anyone who didn’t—for the lack of campaign ribbons on his left breast.
In the men’s room of the officers’ club that night, he ran into a nonflying rear admiral who did not know what the AVG wings were and was drunk enough to inquire.
“Commander,” the admiral asked, “what the hell is that pinned to your jacket?”
“They’re AVG wings, Sir,” Ed replied, properly modest.
“What say?”
“AVG wings, Sir,” Ed repeated, and when there was no glint of understanding in the admiral’s eyes, he explained: “The American Volunteer Group, Sir. In China.”
“Chinaman’s wings?”
“Americans flying for China, Sir.”
“I would suggest, Commander,” the admiral said nastily, “that you remove those immediately from the uniform of the U.S. Navy. Chinaman’s wings! Good Christ! On a naval officer!”
The admiral stormed out of the head.
Fuck the old fart! Bitter thought angrily. Dumb chair-warming shore sailor didn’t even know what the AVG is! I earned those wings, and I’ll goddamned well wear them!
In ninety seconds he was calmed down enough to realize that he was reacting like Dick Canidy, who questioned every order he was ever given, and not like an Annapolis graduate and lieutenant commander in the Regular Navy. He wondered again what had become of Canidy. He had thought often of writing to him after Canidy had been sent home in disgrace, but had never done so. He really hadn’t known what to say. It was uncomfortable to say anything at all to a man who had shown the white feather in combat, even though he himself now understood with insight born of his own combat experiences how close anyone could come to that.
But as he stepped to the men’s room mirror to comply with the admiral’s order, he realized that his feelings really had nothing to do with Canidy. He had earned the wings as a Flying Tiger, and so far as he was concerned, AVG wings lent distinction to the Navy uniform rather than shaming it. He didn’t take the wings off, then, and he was wearing them the next morning when he went by the transportation office and picked up his tickets for the trip to Chicago.
The first couple of days at home were a euphoric emotional bath. Although he professed to be embarrassed, he was really pleased to see the letters from the Chinese Embassy attesting to his all-around heroism expensively framed and hanging on the dining-room wall.
When he went with his father to the Commercial Club for lunch, a half-dozen of his father’s friends came by the table to warmly shake his hand and to tell him how proud his father—and for that matter, everybody who knew him—was of him.
The same thing happened when he went with both his parents to the Lake Shore Club for dinner, and there, if it hadn’t been for his mother hovering around him, he felt sure that he could have made a date with at least one—and probably two—of the young women who followed their parents to the Bitter table.
On the third day, there was a telephone call for him. One of the maids came out on the patio. She was carrying a telephone on a long extension cord, and wordlessly she handed it to him.
“Hello,” he said.
“Commander Bitter, please,” a crisp military voice demanded.
“This is Commander Bitter,” Ed said. He was still not used to his new rank, and rather liked the way that phrase sounded.
“Hold on, Commander, please, for Admiral Hawley,” the crisp voice said.
Faintly he heard, “I have Commander Bitter for you, Admiral,” and then another voice came on the line, deeper, older.
“Commander Bitter?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Admiral Hawley, Commander,” the admiral said. “I’m Chief, Aviation Allocation, BUAIR.”6
“Yes, Sir?”
“First, let me welcome you home, both to the States and the Navy.”
“Thank you very much, Sir.”
Who the hell is he? I know the name from someplace. What does he want with me?
“Commander, I need an aide-de-camp, preferably someone like yourself, Annapolis, who has been in harm’s way, and one who is not at the moment on flight status. What he’ll be doing, rather than passing hors d’oeuvres, is helping me distribute our assets where they will do the most good. Unless you have objections to the assignment, BUPERS7 says I can have you. Interested?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Now, I don’t want you rushing down here to Washing- ton, Son. You take your leave. From what I hear, you damned well have earned it. The reason I called now is so that we can get the paperwork moving.”
“I’m on a fourteen-day leave, Sir.”
“Well, you take the full fourteen days, and however much longer you feel you need. I don’t want you returning to duty before you feel up to it.”
“Fourteen days will be enough, Sir.”
“Welcome aboard, Commander,” Admiral Hawley said, and hung up.
Ed Bitter was pleased at this development. It would be some time before he could get back on flight status, if ever. Thus, he had been a little afraid that when he reported for duty, he would find himself officer in charge of enlisted recreation, or in some other “essential” occupation that could be handled by a grounded aviator.
This was different. Not only would he be on the staff of a BUAIR flag officer, but that flag officer wanted him because he was Annapolis, and had been in harm’s way, not just because he was an available body. Duty as an aide-de-camp was considered an essential part to the advancement of an officer’s career, and he was now getting that chance. He was no longer the shallow junior officer who had gone to China. He was an ace, nearly a double ace, and he was quite sure that Admiral Hawley would not object to his wearing his AVG wings. Admiral Hawley obviously knew what they represented.
By the end of the week, however, the euphoria had palled, and his mother and the procession of friends she marched to hover over her son the wounded hero now made him more than a little uncomfortable. By the weekend, he knew he had to get away.
“I’m sorry, Mother,” he said when she told him she’d planned a cocktail party in his honor on Sunday, “I should have said something sooner. But I won’t be here over the weekend.”
“But the invitations have already gone out—”
“I’m going to Memphis tomorrow,” he said firmly. “For a couple of days. Navy business. I called the airfield. They have planes running to the Memphis NAS, and I can catch a ride on one.”
“Whatever do you want to go to Memphis for?” his mother asked.
The reason he wanted to go to Memphis was to see if the little girl who had been so passionate in bed at the Chambers’ vacation home in Alabama would give him the same kind of welcome she had given him before he went away, but he could hardly say that to his mother.
“Navy business,” he said again. “The Navy has a large air station at Memphis. I thought you knew.”
“No,” she said unhappily. “And I don’t see why the Navy’s making you go all the way to Memphis,” his mother said. “With your knee in the shape it is.”
Having me as a naval hero, he thought, a little unkindly, works both ways.
“Mother,” Bitter said. “I’m a naval officer. The country is at war.”
She swallowed that whole.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “Your duty comes first. I was only thinking of your well-being.”
 
At Glenview Naval Air Station, he was given space aboard a Navy R4-D bound for the Memphis NAS.
At Memphis, when he asked in base operations where he could find a cab, the aerodrome officer took a quick look at the cane and the AVG wings and announced: “We have cars for people like you, Commander. Welcome home, Sir!”
It probably is unfitting and childish of me, Ed Bitter thought, but under circumstances like these, there is much to be said for being a hero returned from the wars.
He had the driver take him to the Peabody Hotel rather than to the newspaper. He didn’t really want to see Ann Chambers. He wanted to see Sarah Child and get her off somewhere before Ann could guess his intentions and throw up obstacles. With a little bit of luck, Sarah Child would be alone at the Peabody.
He drew a blank with the hotel operator when he asked for Miss Child, but when he asked for Miss Chambers, she said, “Oh, you meant Mrs. Schild. I’ll ring.”
Who the hell is Mrs. Schild?
“Hello?”
He recognized Sarah’s voice, and his heart jumped.
“Hello yourself, pen pal,” he said. There was silence on the line for a long moment. “Sarah? That is you, isn’t it?”
“Where are you, Ed?” Sarah asked, calmly, distantly.
“In the lobby.”
My return, he thought, has not sent the lady into paroxysms of ecstasy.
“Give me fifteen minutes, Ed,” Sarah said. “Make it twenty.”
“And then what?”
“And then come up.”
“Caught you in the shower, did I?”
Maybe I am getting lucky!
“Twenty minutes,” she replied, and hung up.
He went into the bar and had a Scotch, and then another. There were a number of possibilities. She could have been in the shower, or had her face covered with mud, or any of the other things that females did to achieve beauty. Or she could have some guy up there. If she had a guy up there, a likely prospect considering her hot pants, she would either have to get rid of him or explain me to him.
It was a dumb idea coming here in the first place. I should have left things as they were. Pen pals, nothing more.
He waited precisely twenty minutes from the time he had spoken with her on the house phone and then walked across the lobby to the elevators.
He had just given the floor to the operator when he heard a familiar female voice shout, “Hold that car!”
It was Ann Chambers.
That’s why Sarah had needed twenty minutes. To summon Ann. Sarah was afraid that I would open the door, carry her to the bedroom, tear off her clothes, and rape her.
“If you say ‘Hello, Ann,’” Ann said, “I will say, ‘Hi, there, Cousin Edwin. How’s tricks?’”
“She called you, right?” Ed Bitter snapped.
“Right.”
“What the hell for?”
“I don’t really know,” Ann said. “Did Dick Canidy get home yet?”
A year before, when both Ed Bitter and Dick Canidy were flying instructors—and roommates—at the Navy base in Pensacola, Florida, Ed had brought Dick to The Plantation in Alabama. The Plantation was an antebellum mansion and several hundred thousand acres of pine trees her father, Ed’s uncle, hoped one day to turn into newsprint.
Dick Canidy looked like the answer to a maiden’s prayer in his white Navy uniform with the gold wings of a Naval Aviator pinned to his manly breast, and she would have cheerfully given him her pearl of great price right there on the carpet in the library of The Plantation had he asked for it. Or shown a slight interest in it.
But he hadn’t. He had made it perfectly clear that he regarded her as a college girl, beneath his consideration, and a relative of Eddie to boot. But an hour after Ann Chambers had first set eyes on Dick Canidy, she had decided that didn’t matter. She was going to marry him.
His disinterest in her hadn’t changed that decision, only made her realize that the way to capture this man was not to stare soulfully at him and wiggle her tail. She would have been perfectly willing to do that, too, but that wasn’t going to work. The way to catch this man was, she knew, to become his pal, his friend, a buddy in skirts. The birds-and-the-bees business would come later. She barely managed to start this, by talking flying with him—she had her commercial single-engine license, an Instrument rating, and 520 hours in her father’s stagger-wing Beechcraft—asking intelligent questions, putting him at ease, when Dick and Ed set off for China to save the world for democracy.
That had reduced her campaign to letter writing. Funny letters, the envelopes containing more clippings she thought would interest him than text. But she did just happen to mention that she had quit college and was working for the Memphis Advocate and hoped to get overseas as a correspondent. He had responded as a pal. Without even mentioning what he was doing in the war, he wrote about China and about the problems of navigation where there were no navigation aids and about how difficult it had been to reassemble crated airplanes with a Chinese workforce.
And then the letters had stopped. She had no idea why, but there was a chance that Ed Bitter knew something she didn’t.
“Why do you ask about him?” Ed Bitter replied as the elevator doors closed. And then he remembered that Ann had had a schoolgirl crush on Dick Canidy.
“Yes or no,” she said. “Simple question, simple answer.”
“He’s been home for some time,” he said.
The way he said that alarmed her. It was evident in her voice. “He’s been hurt?”
“No,” he said. “He has not been hurt.”
“Then what?”
“He was sent home months ago,” Ed said.
“Why?”
“Is that important?”
“It wouldn’t be if you weren’t reluctant to tell me.”
“If you have to know,” Ed said, “he was relieved.”
“What does that mean?” Ann asked.
“He was—discharged—from the AVG,” Bitter said. “Under not quite honorable circumstances.”
“What, exactly, were those ‘not quite honorable circumstances’?” Ann demanded.
“It was alleged that he refused to engage the enemy.”
She looked at him intently and saw that he was telling her the truth.
“He must have had his reasons,” she said loyally. “Where is he?”
“I have no idea,” Ed said. “Under the circumstances, I don’t think he wants to see me. Or, for that matter, you.”
“I would like to hear his side,” Ann said.
“I really don’t know where he is, Ann,” Ed Bitter said.
“My advice is to leave it that way.”
The elevator was by then at the eighth floor. The operator opened the door and they stepped into a corridor. He followed Ann down the corridor. She stopped before a door, took a key from her pocket and unlocked it, and stepped inside.
She waved for him to follow her inside. There was a sitting room, with doors opening off either side.
“Sarah!” Ann called.
A door opened. And Sarah stood framed in it—with an infant in her arms. She looked at Ed Bitter and then away. Ann went to her and took the child.
What the hell is all this?
“Don’t tell me that’s yours,” he said to Ann.
“Okay. I won’t tell you it’s mine,” Ann said agreeably. “It’s not mine. It’s yours.”
She walked to him and abruptly handed him the infant.
“He’s mine,” Sarah said. “You’re the father, but you don’t have to think of him as yours unless you want to.”
“I don’t believe this,” Ed Bitter said.
“Scout’s honor, Cousin Edwin,” Ann said. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“I’m glad you’re home safe, Ed,” Sarah said.
“Goddamn it, don’t get off the subject!” he said. “Why wasn’t I told?”
“Theoretically,” Ann said, “because you were off saving the world for democracy, and she didn’t want to trouble you. Actually, because she was afraid of what you would do when you found out.”
“Ann!” Sarah said.
“Jesus Christ!” Bitter said.
“So now that you know, Ed,” Ann pursued, “what are you going to do about him?”
“Ann!” Sarah said again.
Ed Bitter looked down at the child in his arms. He felt no emotion whatsoever.
This boy is unquestionably my child, if for no other reason than that a practical joke of this magnitude is beyond even Ann. And if it is my child, I certainly will have to do the decent thing: Recognize it, legitimatize it, marry the mother, give it and her my name.
He looked at Sarah. She was staring out a window.
He looked down at the child again. He had no sense of recognition, he thought, no animal sensing that this was the fruit of his loins. It was simply a baby, indistinguishable from dozens he had held as reluctantly as he held this one.
“If I seem somewhat stunned by all this,” he said, “I am. I came here with the intention of rushing Sarah into becoming engaged before my leave was up.”
“You took your sweet time getting to Memphis, Romeo,” Ann said.
“And now,” he said, ignoring the remark, “it would seem that it is not a question of whether she’ll marry me, but how soon.”
“You don’t have to marry me,” Sarah said, not meaning it.
“I love you, Sarah,” he said, surprised at how easy the words, the lie, came to his lips. “And we owe it to Whatsisname here, don’t you think?”
Ann laughed. “Give me Whatsisname,” she said. “And I’ll take him for a walk.”
“No,” Bitter said. “You take a walk, Ann. But leave him here. I want to get to know him.”
Ann looked at the two of them and left, saying nothing.
Sarah finally turned to him.
He looked gaunt, she thought, but even more handsome than the first time she had seen him. She was reacting to him now as she had reacted to him then. Except now she understood what that reaction was. He was more than the most handsome man she had ever seen, he was the sexiest. Perhaps that was really what handsome meant.
She wanted very much to rush to him, to put her arms around him, to feel his body against hers. But that, she sensed, was not what she should do right now. There had been shock in his eyes when he looked at her, maybe even fear. Certainly not lust.
“How’s your friend Canidy?” Sarah asked. “Ann hasn’t heard from him in a long time, months.”
“To hell with Canidy,” he snapped. “Let’s talk about this.” He raised the baby in his arms.
“He’s very healthy,” Sarah said. “And most of the time very happy.”
“He looks like you,” Bitter said.
“Too early to tell,” she said. “You like him?”
“I like him,” he said, and looked at her and smiled happily.
I’ll be damned if that isn’t true!
“I’m glad,” she said. She smiled back. It was the first time she had smiled since he had arrived.
“Me, too,” he said. “Glad, I mean. Happy. Stunned, but happy and glad.”
“It wasn’t what you expected, was it?”
“I came with evil designs on your body,” he said.
Sarah met his eyes.
He means that. He came hoping for a quick piece of ass, and was instead presented with his child. But that is not important. I am not offended, or hurt. He didn’t know, and he came. That is enough.
“He’s usually sound asleep at half past five,” she said. “And he sleeps like a log until it’s time to feed him again.”
He was strangely excited. He recognized it as sexual excitement.
What the hell. What’s wrong with that?
“We’ll have to get rid of Ann,” he said.
“If she can’t hear the baby cry, she couldn’t hear us,” Sarah said.
She saw the surprise on his face and added: “I’ve been thinking about you that way, too. Does that shock you?”
“I don’t think anything will ever shock me again,” Bitter said.
 
Lieutenant Commander Edwin H. Bitter, USN, and Miss Sarah Child were united in matrimony seventy-two hours after he learned that he was a father.
There were two ceremonies, the first in the chambers of Judge Braxton Fogg of the U.S. Circuit Court for the Tennessee District. Before going on the bench, Judge Fogg had represented the Chandler H. Bitter Company, Commodities Brokers, in Memphis and become a close friend of Chandler H. Bitter.
Judge Fogg was pleased to be able to be of service, and between Judge Fogg and Miss Ann Chambers it was arranged to keep the news of the wedding from being released to—more important, published in—the Memphis Advocate, or any other newspaper.
Both the father of the groom and Joseph Schild, the father of the bride, agreed that the important thing was that Ed had come home alive to assume—if a little late—his role as husband and father. The story, it was agreed between them, to be given out was that Sarah and Ed had been secretly married before Ed had gone off to the Flying Tigers.
It would have been better if Sarah had been willing to divulge the name of the father before now, so that story could have been circulated earlier, but there was nothing that could be done about that now.
Mr. Schild confided in Mr. and Mrs. Bitter the unfortunate reaction his wife had had upon learning that her only daughter was pregnant, and told them that she was again in the Institute of Living in Hartford. He was of course desperate to do anything that might help her.
Could Chandler Bitter and his wife possibly see their way clear to participating in a Hebrew wedding ceremony, photographs of which would be taken and shown to Mrs. Schild? Together with photographs of the married couple with their child?
A second wedding ceremony was performed by Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum in Memphis’s Congregation Beth Sholom. Wearing hastily rented formal clothing, Mr. Schild gave his bride to marriage to Commander Bitter, whose father served as his best man. Miss Ann Chambers served both as bridesmaid and supervisor of wedding photography.
It was the first time Commander Bitter, his parents, or Miss Chambers had ever been in a Hebrew place of worship.