CHAPTER 13

When the drill was finally over, Mowrey ordered Paul to the bridge.

Paul found his captain sitting on his stool, holding a glass which by its color and smell appeared to be full of undiluted whiskey.

“I see you playing poker up at the officers’ club,” Mowrey said. “Did I give you permission to go ashore?”

“No sir, but I assumed I could set watches. Both Mr. Farmer and Mr. Green wanted to stay aboard.”

“You better learn to assume nothing and never set foot off this ship without getting my direct permission,” Mowrey said quietly, looking off in the distance over Paul’s shoulder. “See them ships coming in?”

Two big, gray passenger liners were standing into the harbor, their signal masts aflutter with brightly colored flags and pennants.

“They look like troop carriers,” Paul said.

“What flags are they flying?” Mowrey asked sweetly.

“Sir?”

“Just take the white one there and the blue square in it, or the red one with the white stripe. What letters of the alphabet do they signify?”

“I don’t know, sir. I’ll start studying signal flags right away.”

“You won’t go ashore until you know them, and if you don’t learn them damn soon, that will go in your fitness report.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Have you been practicing blinker light with Greenberg, like I told you to?”

“When we were at sea, sir, I’m afraid we were both too sick for that.”

“That will look good on your fitness report. Practice blinker lights for at least an hour a day with Greenberg—he at least knows Morse code.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“And I want you to teach him navigation for at least an hour a day. He don’t even know the book part of it.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“I want you to take star sights, sun sights and moon sights right here at the wharf and let me see your computations.”

“Do you want us to take actual sights?”

“Well, sweet Jesus, I don’t want you to hold your thumb up to your nose and pretend.”

“I mean, sir, we can’t see any horizon from here. How can we take sights?”

“Is that what you’re going to tell me when we’re in the ice pack? ‘I mean, sir, we can’t see any horizon from here, so how can we take sights?’”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Read up on artificial horizons. Try the bubble sextant. It’s under the chart desk.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

“What’s that planet up there in the sky now?”

Paul looked up and studied the morning sky, in which just one planet glowed.

“Venus, isn’t it, sir?”

“Sweet Jesus Christ! If you don’t know, look it up, don’t guess! It’s Mars. Can’t you see that it glows red?”

“Aye, aye, sir. I’ll read up on identifying planets.”

“If you can’t identify any planet I point to inside of twenty-four hours that will go in your fitness report.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Now get the hell off the bridge. I was in a good mood until I had to look at you. How the hell do they expect me to run a ship with nothing but a farmer, a Yale and a Sheenie?”

“I’m supposed to teach you navigation and we’re supposed to practice blinker lights,” Paul said to Nathan when he returned to the wardroom. “Do you want to try to get some sleep first?”

“I don’t think I can get back to sleep now,” Nathan said, “but let’s have some coffee.”

Cookie had climbed back into his bunk, but he had left a big pot of coffee on the stove and a platter of fresh Danish pastries on the table in the forecastle. To avoid waking the sleeping men in the surrounding bunks, they took their heavy mugs of coffee to the hatch over the well deck and sat on the canvas cover, looking at the big troop ships, which were mooring on the other side of the harbor.

“I suppose they’re going to England,” Nathan said.

“Or Greenland. I hear they’re sending a lot of construction workers up there to build airfields.”

There was a pause before Nathan said, “I wonder how long it will be before this whole goddamn war is over?”

“I always think of four years,” Paul said. “That’s about the length of time most of our wars seem to last.”

“Four years.…” Nathan gave a sigh of profound sorrow.

“Of course we probably will get home way before then,” Paul said. “Have you got a wife waiting for you?”

Slowly Nathan turned his face from the troop ships toward him and Paul was shocked by the look on it.

“I’m married,” Nathan said and seemed about to add more, but took a sip of his coffee instead. “Do you want to start on signaling or navigation?”

They started on the signaling, with Nathan sending Morse code very slowly to Paul, but after only a few minutes Mowrey ordered Paul to his cabin to bring the charts up to date with some Notice to Mariners bulletins he had just discovered. Nathan climbed to the flying bridge, the only place on the ship where he could usually be alone, and stood leaning against the mast. Overhead Mars glowed brightly in a deep blue sky. Nathan knew what planet it was—in his youth astronomy had been one of his passions. When he was about fifteen he had built a three-inch telescope and mounted it on the flat roof of his father’s house in Brooklyn.

Now Nathan could almost smell the tar of that roof on a hot summer evening and hear the pigeons cooing in the nests he had built for them when he had been even younger. Homing pigeons! Becky at the age of fifteen had been even more fascinated by them than by the telescope. He had helped her to carry two pigeons to her apartment in a carefully pierced cardboard box. They had released them in her backyard and how she had marveled when they had flown straight home, a distance of almost four blocks!

“If I raised some, we could send messages back and forth.”

There never had been a time when he had not known Becky. Her parents had been friends of his mother and father, though they were so different that even as a child, Nathan had not been able to understand why. Nathan’s father was a doctor, a poor man’s doctor, and his mother served as his receptionist and nurse, though she had no formal training. The doctor’s office, which occupied almost the entire first floor of their house, was usually full of sick people, and at all hours of the night his father was called to hospitals and to the homes of the dying. Nathan remembered his house as a kind of crisis center. The conversation of his parents, even at the dinner table, was full of tales about the complications of childbirth, the sudden deaths of heart patients and the slow deaths of those with cancer. His parents were usually exhausted, and as a boy he sometimes felt that they were the only two people in the world who were attempting to save a dying city.

But Becky’s household was entirely different. Her father was a professor of the Slavic languages at Brooklyn College, where he apparently had few duties, for he spent most of his time at home reading and writing. His wife also spent most of her time reading, though she found time to cook elaborate meals and keep their apartment spotless. Even Becky at a very early age spent most of her time reading, and they all often read to each other and laughed over funny passages or discussed difficult ones. The house was always quiet, and the people in it moved in a leisurely manner compared to the frantic pace of Nathan’s parents. No one in that household was mad at anybody. The professor and his wife, who were considerably older than Nathan’s parents, had come from Warsaw to Brooklyn fairly recently, and they retained the detached amusement of highly educated foreigners about American political issues and controversies of the day which often made Nathan’s parents argue stridently when they weren’t talking about people being born or dying.

Almost nothing appeared to irritate Becky’s mother and father, and even at sixteen, she was curiously serene and sunny in a world which to Nathan was almost entirely frantic and stormy. She even liked Brian Murphy’s Christmas display.

Brian Murphy’s annual Christmas display always infuriated Nathan’s father and everyone else he knew. Murphy was a successful electrical contractor who owned a new house on a double lot in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood near Nathan’s home in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Starting in early November, Murphy put together such a garish Christmas display of his own making that his house looked like a carnival. At least a dozen Santa Clauses, some life-size, crowded his front lawn and his rooftop. Driven by electric motors, some of these kept raising their hands in greeting or just sat rocking, supposedly with mirth, but they looked to Nathan more like old men in terrible pain. On Murphy’s front porch there was a crèche with eerie life-size plaster people with vacant, staring eyes. Worst of all, the whole double lot blazed with blinking colored lights, and loudspeakers blared Christmas carols interspersed with Santa’s ho-ho-ho’s. During Murphy’s many Christmas parties, the lights and the loud music continued until the early hours of the morning.

Among Murphy’s neighbors was a fierce old friend and patient of Nathan’s father whose wife was chronically ill, and who always had trouble sleeping. After an argument, he sued Murphy for disturbing the peace, and a whole neighborhood war started with all the obvious ugly undertones. Petitions were taken from door to door, and Nathan’s father appeared as a witness in court to say that his patient’s health had suffered. Murphy won the case anyway and celebrated by building a sled with life-size reindeer which rocked and blew steam or smoke from their noses on his rooftop. Spotlights played on this all night.

“Isn’t that awful?” Nathan said when he and Becky were walking past the display, and he was astonished when she laughed and said, “Why? I think it’s sort of marvelous.”

It turned out that Becky actually knew Brian Murphy and liked him, as she knew and liked almost everyone in the neighborhood. Murphy was an electrician who was extremely proud of his creations, and felt that he was defending his religious freedom. Most of all, he was an unappreciated artist, and when Becky introduced Nathan to him he spent an hour explaining the complex mechanisms which produced all the motion and the smoke. Embattled, pugnacious and naively proud, Brian Murphy was nothing like the devil whom Nathan’s father had described. Nathan had suddenly realized that Becky lived in a world that was entirely different from the one in which he had grown up, much less frightening and more hopeful. He loved her world and he loved her.

They were childhood sweethearts, too shy and restrained to make love. They were married while he was still a graduate student, in the spring of 1936, and she supported him by working as a secretary at Brooklyn College. They were both surprised when only a few months after their wedding her parents decided to go back to Poland. Although they had never complained, they apparently had never really been happy in America, and now that their daughter was settled in the new country, they decided to go home again.

Becky startled Nathan by asking if he would like to move to Warsaw, where, she said, her father could get him a good university position. She appeared to understand his refusal, but she was depressed for a long time after her parents left, and talked a lot of visiting them, which their slender budget made almost impossible. In 1938, she began trying to persuade them to come back to New York, and for a year they kept up a running debate by mail. One reason that her father wanted to stay in Poland was that he had an invalid mother and two sisters there. Becky kept trying to devise plans which would make it possible to bring them all over.

Her obsession with her family in Europe hurt Nathan. She tended to subordinate everything else to it, and persuaded him to turn down a good offer from the University of Michigan because she said, “We could never get dad to go up there.” Oddly, Becky did not seem unduly worried by the rise of Hitler, and she went to Warsaw in 1939, not so much to rescue her father from the Germans, as from his mother and sisters, who, she had become convinced, were holding him in Poland almost against his will.

“I think it may be dangerous to go back there now,” Nathan said.

“Come on! You don’t really want me to bring them all back anyway. Admit it!”

He couldn’t bring himself to admit it, but they both knew she was right, if only because he suspected that she would spend most of her time with her family if they settled nearby. They were tense together a lot of the time after that, and argued about almost anything but her family.

“If you love me, you won’t try to stop me,” she said when she decided to go to try to bring her family home, and there was no answer to that. He took her to the boat, and waited on the dock blowing kisses at her as she stood in the crowd on the promenade deck. A lot of people had thrown paper streamers as the tugs started to push the ship away from the wharf. Standing there alone he had suddenly realized that life without her even for a few weeks was going to be awful. Cupping his hands to his mouth he yelled, “Bring them all back, I want them here, bring them back, damn it …”

She gave him a smile of immense gratitude. Then a fat woman who was throwing paper streamers jostled her away from the rail.

He never saw Becky again. He remembered the mournful tooting of the tugboats, the smell of the harbor and the circling gulls as he watched the ship out of sight. In retrospect it seemed that he had a premonition that he would never see her again.…

The gulls were still with him, circling around his head as he stood on the flying bridge of the Arluk in Argentia two and a half years or what seemed like several centuries later. Then he heard Mowrey bawl, “Yale, where’s that goddamn Sheenie? I’ve got some new codes here that have to go in the safe.”

Closing his eyes for a moment to help blot out the past, Nathan climbed down the ladder to the bridge.

“I’m right here, captain,” he said.

For a week the Arluk waited in Argentia while Mowrey drilled his men and indignantly sent messages to every authority he could think of, requesting reasons for the delay. He got no answers, but on the eighth day, the quartermaster on watch reported that “Captain Hansen’s trawler” was steaming into the harbor. Their sister ship, Paul saw as she came to moor alongside, proudly carried a metallic crescent device atop her mast for radar.

“Jesus Christ, that bastard Hansen copped a radar set for himself,” Mowrey exploded. “How come they give one to him but not us? I know they figure the silly bastard can’t find his way without it, but damn it, he’s not headed into more fog than we are.”

Hansen moored his ship alongside the Arluk without any of the daring, flash and risk-taking which Mowrey had displayed. He just came in bucking the fast current very slowly, put out a bow line at leisure, and winched his stern around. The operation fascinated Paul because he thought that he could duplicate it himself.

“Hansen, you handle a ship like a fucking old lady,” Mowrey growled from the wing of his bridge.

“I’d rather do that than handle one like a madman,” Hansen replied with a smile. “How are you, Cliff?”

“How many asses did you have to kiss to get radar?”

“I didn’t even put in for it. Don’t get too envious. The damn thing was great for two days and then quit.”

“They’ll probably be able to fix it here for you,” Nathan said.

“Maybe. I radioed ahead and they didn’t sound too sure. The damn thing is so new they don’t have many technicians, and those they got are all tied up with navy stuff.”

“I’ll look at it if you want,” Nathan said. “I’ve done a little work on radar.”

“You’ll be saving our lives if you can fix it—maybe literally,” Hansen said. “I got an idea they gave us the damn thing for a purpose.”

Paul had always been curious about radar, which then was the newest and most hush-hush of developments, and accepted Hansen’s invitation to come aboard with Nathan. Even Mowrey was curious enough to come along. The radar set was a huge metal box with a round piece of glass in the front of it, much like a porthole. It filled one end of the pilothouse.

“Looks like you got sort of the Adam and Eve of radar,” Nathan said, inspecting the box closely. “I didn’t know they put anything this primitive into production.”

“They were going to give us a smaller one, but the navy grabbed it. The guys in Norfolk said they didn’t know how long this thing would work, but we were lucky to get anything at all. The subs and the aircraft carriers have top priority on this stuff.”

“Can your radioman give me some tools?” Nathan asked. “I’ll have a look at it.”

Paul watched him while he unscrewed metal plates. Aboard the Arluk, Nathan had always struck him as nice, intelligent in some abstract way, but completely incompetent and bumbling when it came to anything nautical. With tools in his long, slender fingers Nathan’s whole manner changed. He moved briskly and with apparent enjoyment as he began examining the complex mechanism inside the box with a flashlight.

“It’s nothing but a damn radio,” Mowrey said and went back to the Arluk.

“Your basic problem is that this set has no real protection against vibration and dampness,” Nathan said. “It was never designed for marine use. Probably there are one or more shorts. I hoped nothing is burned out. Did they give you any spare parts?”

“Not a one,” Hansen said grimly. “We wouldn’t know how to use them anyway.”

Nathan reached for a voltameter and began the tedious job of testing scores of connections.

“You obviously know what you’re doing,” Hansen said. “God, I wish I could get you assigned to this ship!”

Nathan straightened up and for the first time Paul saw a smile erase that look of profound sorrow on his long, narrow face.

“Captain Hansen, if you could arrange that, you would be saving my life,” he said. “I can’t tell you what it’s like to be on a ship where there is no way for me to be useful.”

“I was going to talk to Cliff about Paul here,” Hansen said. “There’s just some small chance that I might be able to make some sort of a deal for both of you.”

The two officers stood watching for perhaps half an hour while Nathan worked on the radar set. Finally he twisted some knobs and the little porthole in the box suddenly glowed with an odd green light around which a pencil line of brighter light turned like a big second hand on a watch.

“You’ve fixed it!” Hansen said.

“Temporarily, I’m afraid.”

Nathan adjusted more knobs. The moving line of bright light began to trace a strangely glowing outline of the surrounding harbor on the glass.

“God, imagine what that thing would mean in a fog or at night if you were chasing someone or being chased,” Hansen said fervently.

“I wish I could promise you that you’d have it for long,” Nathan replied. “I’m afraid this set will be constantly going out and will always need tinkering. I can at least give you a list of spare parts you can order.”

“What the hell good will they do us if we have no one who has any idea what the hell is going on inside that box?” Hansen said. “It’s ridiculous to leave you on a ship which has no radar. I’m going over to see Cliff.”

Hansen found Mowrey in his bunk aboard the Arluk, half sitting with his shoulders against two pillows. He had a glass in his hand and spoke thickly, a fact which did not surprise Hansen at all.

“Do you mind if I come in to talk over some problems of state?” Hansen began.

“Take a load off your ass, Wally,” Mowrey replied, pulling up his legs to make room at the foot of his bunk. “I’ll get you a drink.”

From a drawer under his bunk within reach of his arm he took a bottle and a glass.

“If you want water, you can get it at the head,” he said.

Hansen accepted the glass, went to get water and sat down on the stool near the chart table.

“I want to talk to you about the possibility of trading some officers,” he said. “You’ve got a radar specialist but no radar. My communications officer is a guy who just made ensign after ten years as a quartermaster. Want to swap?”

“So you want my Sheenie,” Mowrey said with his sweet grin. “What else do you want?”

“Well, my exec graduated from the Coast Guard Academy last year. He’s never seen ice, but except for that he could easily run a ship like this himself. To sweeten the deal, I’ll trade him for the guy you call Yale, and you can get some sleep at night.”

“So you want my Sheenie and my Yale. Do you want my cook too?”

“I’d like him, of course, but I know you’ll never let him go. How about it, Cliff? I’m sure we could clear it with Headquarters if we both approved and we’d both be a hell of a lot better off.”

“What happens when I get radar? You’re not the only one who can kiss ass for a thing like that.”

“I think you know, Cliff, why they gave me radar. You better hope you don’t get it.”

“You mean they have more fog on the east coast than on the west coast?”

“I think you know it’s not fog that has me worried.”

“You guess there’s no chance of us getting Germans on the west coast? Everybody thinks they’re on the east coast, so why wouldn’t they come to the west?”

“I think you understand the logistics of the situation. You’re too big a man to be a dog in the manger, Cliff.”

“Now don’t call me no dog. Mad I might be, but the last man who called me a dog still can’t bite apples.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Maybe, but I always say you can’t get a better supply officer than a Sheenie. My Yale ain’t much good, but at least he’s not a smart-ass like all them Academies.”

“I’ll trade you one for one or two for two, any way you want. The guy with the radar should have the radar specialist. Even Headquarters could see that.”

“Headquarters ain’t going to do a damn thing with my officers without my approval. You know that.”

“I think I know you too, Cliff. Crazy like a fox is what I always said. What else do you want to sweeten the deal?”

“Maybe some of your lead ballast if I’m interested at all. We was rolling thirty-five degrees in no sea hardly at all. You got a diesel engine in your motorboat?”

“Yes.”

“They gave me gas. We might do some swapping around. Let me think about it.”

“When will you make up your mind? They’re liable to shove us out of here tomorrow.”

“The first stop for both of us will be Narsarssuak, I’m sure. We’ll see each other there before you go your way and I go mine.”

“The paperwork will take time. Look, Cliff, if they’re going to send me after a German weather ship, I don’t want to go without radar. The Krauts are sure to have it. How else do they have such good fire control?”

“They got other kinds of range finders. Now don’t get your ass in a swivet, Wally. You can’t come on here and buy me out like this was a candy shop.”

“We all will await your pleasure,” Hansen said wryly. “It’s quite conceivable that a good many lives and the success of a whole mission could depend on it.”

“Wally, don’t try to hurry me just because you’re afraid to sail without all the newest gadgets going for you. I told you I’ll let you know. I just want to think on it!”

With a sigh Hansen put the glass of whiskey, which he had hardly touched, on the chart table and left. Mowrey tossed off the scotch, put the unwashed glass back in his drawer and settled down for a nap.

Hansen immediately asked both Paul and Nathan to his cabin. After explaining the situation, he said, “Cliff has always enjoyed the sensation of having power over other men. I think he will toy with us for a few weeks.”

“Do you think he’ll finally let us go?” Nathan asked.

Hansen shrugged. “Ordinarily he gets a kick out of just being contrary,” he said. “This time I may have a trump card. Before I sail I’m going to try to arrange to pick up about a dozen cases of scotch. That ought to sweeten the deal.”

“This all makes me feel that I’m a little like a slave on the block,” Nathan said with a smile, “but it’s the first time that anyone in the service has ever wanted me. I feel like a wallflower who’s being asked to dance.”

“Do you understand that my mission is probably going to be a lot more dangerous than Cliff’s?” Hansen asked.

“I’ve heard a lot of scuttlebut, but I think I get the general trend. To tell the truth, I don’t think anything could be more dangerous for me than the feeling that I’m simply of no use in this war at all, no damned good.”

“Christ, it’s not your fault that they put a radar specialist on a ship without radar. Paul, how do you feel about all this, now that you’ve had a chance to think it over?”

“All I’m ever going to get out of Mowrey is a bad fitness report and the worst assignment he can find for me, no matter how hard I try,” Paul replied. “I’ll be glad to take my chances with you.”

“I hope that Cliff lets us work it out and that you both won’t be sorry.”

Paul still was not sure how he really felt about requesting a transfer. Sure, the idea of an endless tour of duty with Mad Mowrey seemed unbearable, but the thought of chasing some huge German icebreaker with six- or even eight-inch guns wasn’t too attractive either.

And there was also the nagging feeling that there was something wrong in this maneuvering. Mowrey was a tyrant, but that was the luck of the draw. Shouldn’t he shut up and stick it out and get on with it …?