“That’s an odd question,” he said, then told her, “It happens that walking is my favorite form of exercise. I don’t enjoy sports,” he added, as if she would want to know about that.
They exited the room through French doors that opened out onto a stone patio that, in daylight, would overlook the golf course. Pops, protecting Mumma from discovering to what uses the soft, grassy greens might even at that moment be being put, kept close to the well-lit clubhouse as he led her around to the front, through the rows of parked cars, and eventually down to the broad Pacific beach.
Stars burned in the black night sky and a three-quarters moon floated in front of them. Its light flowed silver over the surface of the dark water. The scent of flowers blended into the salt air smell on a velvety black breeze that brushed gently against their cheeks. Mumma carried her shoes by their high golden heels, one in each hand; Pops slung his white jacket, with its single gold stripe, over one shoulder. Noticing how the breeze pestered her hair into her face, he offered her his tie. “To keep it out of your eyes,” he said, and held her shoes while she wrapped the tie around her head, never losing a beat in her insistence that he had to have heard “I Won’t Dance,” ignoring his disclaimers, and, either ignoring or ignorant of the fact that these lyrics were by Oscar Hammerstein, explaining to him that it was the cleverness of Cole Porter’s songs that made them less American than Tommy Dorsey’s dance band because not everybody liked cleverness but everybody liked to dance. “Maybe so, but America’s a country that idolizes individuals,” he said. “Which is, by the way, why communism will never present a real danger to our country.”
Mumma had an argument to win. “Everybody dances,” she said. “Dancing is basic to human nature.”
“Although, Americans do like team sports,” Pops pointed out to himself, then cited his proof. “Baseball. Football.”
“In the Middle Ages, too, and even before then,” she argued.
“Perhaps I’m making a false distinction,” he said.
“Although I don’t know much about the Egyptians, but I bet they did, too. Dance,” Mumma added, when she saw his expression in the bright tropical moonlight.
Pops took a breath and shifted conversational course, to follow her. “Nobody actually knows much about the Egyptians,” he said. “You see, most of our information is necrophilic—that is to say, it comes from temples and tombs. Even our knowledge of the language, which has as its text the Book of the Dead. What we know of the society and daily life, architecture too, is derived from tomb paintings.”
They walked on in silence until Mumma thought to remark, “You sound educated.”
“I should. I am.”
“I’ve met some pretty stupid educated people,” Mumma observed.
For some reason—perhaps all the gin and tonics—this made Pops laugh. Again. “So have I. In point of fact, I could well be one of them. Do you mind?”
“If you’re stupid?”
“If I’m educated.”
“How educated are you?”
He spread his jacket on the sand for her to sit on, and they talked, taking drinks from the silver flask his Howland uncles had presented to him as a commissioning gift, with the observation that Dutch courage was better than none. Pops told Mumma this, looking out over the uneasy black Pacific, wondering in the back of his mind if he would—his body, that is—end up rolling around in its lightless depths. Dead. Once he was dead, he reminded himself, his body wouldn’t matter to him, and he took the usual comfort from the familiar thought against the familiar fear.
Terror, really. He swallowed brandy and watched a shadowy wave creep up the sand to reach him where he sat telling this girl the story of his silver flask.
“How many uncles do you have?” she asked.
“On my father’s side, two. And there are three more on my mother’s.”
“Real uncles or are they married to real aunts?”
“You mean by blood,” he told her. “They’re almost all by blood. Why?”
“Do you have lots of aunts, too?”
A pause to count. “Seven. Including by marriage. One of my mother’s brothers isn’t married. I’ve got twenty-one first cousins.”
“That’s a big family.”
“I guess it is,” he said.
“Why is it Dutch courage when you’re drunk? Are Dutch people drunk all the time?” Mumma asked. “Or do you mean they’re cowards? I don’t get it.”
“Not drunk. I’m not drunk.”
“No, you’ve just had too much.” She turned her face to him. “Probably you’ll forget all about tonight.” She didn’t sound worried about that eventuality. “But I won’t forget you.”
“That would be a kindness, because it seems to worry me that I’m not likely to be remembered by anyone for very long.”
“Just for starters, I’ve never met anyone from such a big family before.”
“I’ve accepted it, though. I’ll be gone. Erased. As if I never existed.”
Mumma never had any trouble conversation hopping. “How could that happen with all those people who know you to remember you?”
“If I’m the only one of us who dies, maybe they’ll remember me.”
“Why should you die?” Mumma demanded.
And Pops laughed again, making it at least three times that night, maybe five, which was at least three and maybe five more times that he’d laughed than…Thinking back, he thought he’d had one good laugh in San Diego, but he’d been drunk at the time and the memory was not clear.
He reminded her, “I’m a soldier.”
“A sailor,” she corrected him. “And an officer.”
“Metaphorically, I’m a soldier. Soldiers die.”
“I suppose if your ship goes down,” she granted him. “But until then your odds are much better than if you’re in the Air Force. And much, much better than the trenches in the last war. Everybody says,” she concluded her point. “But in that case, why waste drinking for Dutch courage now, when you’re on land? You should save it up, for when you need it.”
Pops decided he could let himself confide in her. “All I really want—what I’m really afraid of? I mean, other than some horrible wound—although…”
She offered comfort. “If it’s really horrible you’ll probably die.”
He laughed yet again and admitted, “I just want to die well. Bravely. You know? Honorably.”
“If I were you, I’d want to live. You can live those same ways. Why waste them on dying?”
“It’s not up to me,” he reminded her.
“I know that. I may not be educated, but I’m not stupid.”
“I never said—”
“I’m an orphan,” she told him. “A foundling, too. Somebody dropped me off at the hospital. At the door. The emergency room door, because it was night, but it was summer so they knew I wouldn’t freeze or anything. I don’t know how you feel about orphans,” she said. “I mean, foundlings. Because of your big family. Nobody ever adopted me,” she said. “Not even when I was little. I had bright red hair, and lots of people don’t care for red hair. And then there’s my name, which they gave to me because of course I didn’t have one when I was found.”
“It’s a fine name. Rita Hayworth uses it.”
“Not Rita, Rida. It’s not Hayworth either, it’s Smith.”
“Were all of the orphans named Smith?” Pops wondered.
“Or Davis. Or Jones. Or Thomas.” Then Mumma made her own great confession. “It’s not Rida, really. It’s Elfrieda, which I hate.”
“In alphabetical order, one after the other,” Pops guessed, not distracted by her odd name, and maybe that’s when she began to love him. “So if you’d arrived one baby later, you’d have been Rida Thomas. But Rida? Think about it this way: When you’re a foundling, you could have been anybody. You can be anybody. There’s no restriction on who you might be. My family has been around for centuries—since the Mayflower—”
“Only three,” Mumma pointed ou
t. “That’s not exactly centur-ies.”
“I think I might like to be a foundling.”
“I don’t mind,” Mumma told him. “It makes me different, so I stand out.”
“You’d stand out anywhere,” he told her sincerely.
“Thank you,” she said.
It was a fact Pops was stating, not a compliment he was paying, but Mumma didn’t make any distinction between the two. She was satisfied by his admiration and he was satisfied by her practicality. When he walked her back to her quarters, he said, “I’ll see you again.”
“When? Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow we go out on ops. Just training, although even in training ops, accidents happen.”
Mumma wasn’t concerned about the theoretical. “For how long?”
“Four days. Sometimes, even when they’re just out doing exercises, boats go down. Things can always go wrong.” He looked at his watch. He had only four more hours on land.
“That doesn’t usually happen,” she pointed out before returning to her main point. “So you’ll call me Friday?”
“You’ll have forgotten me by then.”
“No I won’t. I told you I wouldn’t, and one thing about me is I mean what I say. You’ll like that about me. And you’ll remember me. Because you said I stand out,” she reminded him, and added her own embellishment, “in any crowd.” He laughed again and forgot for another minute where he was, and why.
• • •
The ship docked early on a bright, hot Friday morning, but it was midday before Pops was allowed ashore. He had quarters on board the ship, but the showers at the Officers’ Club had an abundant supply of water that was not only hot but also fresh, and thick towels, too, hotel-quality terry cloth, so the first thing he did was head off to the club for a cleanup and maybe lunch, a couple of beers. (“He said he’d forgotten all about calling me,” Mumma told us. “But I knew better. He was crazy about me. And if he wasn’t going to call, why did he go right by the phones?”) Since midmorning, she had been standing beside the pay phones at the gates to the dock, waiting, wearing a yellow, green, and blue flowered dress, her bright hair tangled by the wind. You couldn’t miss her, standing there, so Pops didn’t, especially when she called out to him, and waved wildly.
“What’s this, Spence?” commented one of his fellow junior officers. “You never said you had a date.” There were three of them, counting Pops, and they approached her together.
“I thought I’d save you the trouble of making the call,” Mumma said. “Besides, I have to return this.” She reached down into a bright red carryall to pull out his tie. Pops took it and thanked her, and the four of them then stood in an awkward silence. Mumma had settled in her own mind what was happening next, so she didn’t say anything. The two companions were waiting for Pops to speak, so one of them could strike up an acquaintance with her if Pops was going to drop the ball, Spence being an odd duck and known ball-dropper, but an okay guy and tireless out at sea, a good man to stand watch with.
Finally Mumma asked, “Are you going to introduce me to your friends?” and Pops obliged, finding that he did remember her, that he did know her name, and that he was glad to see her.
“Rob, Marty, this is Rida.” After the pleased-to-meetchas, another awkward silence rose up among them. (“They were curious, and they wanted to know me better. They were attracted, you know. But your father had found me first and they had to play fair.”) She said to the three of them, “Every one of you needs a bath and a shave, don’t you? We can all go together to your Officers’ Club, but Spencer plans to take me out afterward. You’ll want me to wait at the bar for you,” she told Pops.
The truth was, Pops was exhausted. When at sea, he barely slept, from anxiety about where he was, and why, and the fear—of a torpedo, an air attack, something unpredictable and unpredicted, even a great white whale with the skeleton of a man still strapped to its side. At sea something terrible could easily happen, with him unconscious on his bunk, his quarters not much bigger than a coffin, a shared coffin at that. Fear and dread and the necessity of sobriety kept him awake. But his exhaustion was as much nervous as physical; he knew from experience that he wouldn’t sleep until he had relaxed—which meant a couple of hours of drinking to stupefy himself, followed by reading a couple of chapters of Aristotle to give his brain something else to chew on. The truth was, the last thing Pops wanted to do was go on a date. But exhaustion made him too slow to elude this unexpected girl. By the time he realized that his usual manner of coming ashore was at risk, it was too late. The four of them were walking along together toward the Officers’ Club, and Rida was attached to his arm.
It wasn’t all bad. For once, he was the one with the girl, and this was not the kind of girl anyone would miss seeing on your arm. Just her hair, to start with. That unruly, untidy, unorganized red mass grabbed attention, and her high-heeled shoes were bright yellow, and nobody could deny that she had a fine figure. She was utterly different from all the girls and women he had ever met. If he was going to die—and he was sure that he was, although probably not for a couple of weeks now that he was safely returned from maneuvers and the ship was in harbor being stocked and fitted for its next tour, a process that would take at least two weeks and maybe three…If he was not going to die immediately, Pops thought that he might enjoy the novelty of this girl, and be diverted by it. This Rida wasn’t educated; she’d said as much. But she had to have some ideas, didn’t she? It was human nature to have ideas. Just as Socrates believed that each one of us desires the good, Pops believed that everyone wanted to have a life of the mind, and as it turned out—granted that her idea of an intellectual life differed in content and approach from his wider, more disciplined one—he was absolutely right about Mumma.
On that day, she held a large carryall, something she’d picked up cheap at the market, the kind of colorful woven straw bag the local women were seen with, from which they would extract food, clothing, changes of diaper for an infant, towels, flowers, newspapers, kerchiefs—just about anything a woman needed to get through a day. This was not the kind of bag to hang off a lady’s gloved wrist as she shopped for a hat, or to set down beside neatly crossed ankles when she took a chair. This bag hung shapeless from the shoulder, and when Pops—showered and shaved and in fresh civilian trousers and shirt—walked out on the beach beside Mumma, she pulled out of it Spam-and-Velveeta sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, a thermos, a blanket to sit on, and a bottle of beer for him. She never drank, she told him, and went to the water’s edge to bury the bottle up to its neck in the wet sand. “To cool it,” she told him. “You don’t want warm beer.”
“Didn’t you have a drink the other night?” he questioned her. The day was warm and only gentle breezes blew, here on this empty beach, only a mild offshore breeze of “under two knots,” he would be able to tell her if she asked his professional opinion. He looked off across the ocean, to the horizon. He preferred the Pacific seen from a blanket on the beach in daylight, no question about that. From a blanket on the beach, he might actually like the old bastard.
“That was an exception.” Mumma poured a thermos cap of pineapple juice for herself, offering to share it with him.
“Never doesn’t admit of exceptions.” He stretched out on his back on the cotton blanket. The afternoon sun—hot even in early spring on that exotic island—poured down over him; the sand was warm under his back and legs. He closed his eyes and heard, instead of the thrum of engines, the equally regular rush of waves on the sand. He closed his eyes and felt the deep earth steady beneath him.
“What’s the best book you ever read?” her voice asked him.
He opened his eyes and sat up in surprise. “Why?”
“You tell me what and I’ll tell you why.”
“You don’t strike me as a bookish girl.”
“I bet you know a lot of those,” she said. “Are they terrible bores?”
He considered this alternative to everything he’d ever thought or be
en told to think. “Only sometimes. Like me.”
“You mean people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”
Unable to follow the leap and parry of her mental processes, “War and Peace,” he told her.
“Is that a book?”
He had her full attention, and he registered for the first time the mahogany color of her eyes and felt the intensity of her gaze, as if the answer to this question mattered deeply to her. Her mouth was not pulled up at the ends by the little flirtatious smile with which the girls he knew, including his cousins and especially his sisters, his sisters being the girls he knew best, masked their intensities. He noticed also how unfashionably dark and definite her eyebrows were, and he’d already, at some unacknowledged level, registered the soft roundnesses of her body, arms and breasts, hips. He gave her his full attention right back.
“A novel by a Russian—”
“Not an American?”
“Most Russians aren’t,” he said, then wished he hadn’t given in to intellectual snideness, then—when she laughed, a sound as round as her thighs—forgave himself. “If you’d asked me my senior year, I’d have said Moby Dick, which is by an American.”
“Anybody can guess the story of War and Peace,” Mumma said. “But what’s Moby Dick?”
“A whale. Everybody hunts him, and dies—well, except for one man, Ishmael, but everybody else…Moby Dick attacks the ship and sinks it. In the Pacific,” he pointed out.
She failed to sympathize. “Can a whale do that?”
“One did, in the last century; it sank the Essex. The story was in the newspapers when Melville was a young man.”
“Who’s Melville?”
“He wrote it.”
“Is it good?”
“It’s—it’s great.” He thought of how to express it to her, so she could grasp the importance of the valuation. “It’s about good versus evil, or maybe good and evil. It’s about man, nature, God, fate, life, everything important. It’s a terrific story and the writing is…Melville uses traditional narrative, and theater, irony, science, descriptive essay, comedy—”